Tired of giving up on your New Year’s resolutions?

Is fear, low energy or lack of motivation preventing you from achieving goals? If you’re interested in making 2012 different than every other year, consider joining BCCPD’s pilot coaching program.

No, this isn’t another “get rich/successful quick” scheme. It will take commitment and willingness to keep an open mind. We’ll use strategies from positive psychology and narrative/personal storytelling to:

• challenge assumptions that can limit your options and actions
• maximize gain by identifying small but powerful actions
• recognize and access personal strengths and resources
• realize the potential of re-authoring your personal stories

Weekly sessions will include discussion/exploration of:

• techniques and research from positive psychology, including happiness, resilience, gratitude, strengths, goal setting and mindfulness
• life as narrative or story: sharing your short (2 pages maximum) stories on various life themes (Guided Autobiography or GAB). GAB provides new perspectives through the experience of authoring and re-authoring our stories. Stories will be written during the week between sessions.
• ways to adapt and use these tools while living with chronic illness

Dates & Locations:

Groups are forming now and will run through February and March 2012. They are free for people living with HIV. Each group will meet two hours weekly for six weeks.

Face-to-face groups: held at the BCCPD office in Vancouver and at other locations/organizations by special arrangement. Service providers please contact us to discuss hosting a group.

Teleconference groups: teleconference programs will be offered for participants outside of the Lower Mainland. Contact us for dates & details.

Facilitator:

Shelley Hourston is a trained coach with an Appreciative Inquiry/positive psychology focus and a Guided Autobiography Instructor. She is Program Director at the BC Coalition of People with Disabilities’ Wellness & Disability Initiative/AIDS & Disability Action Program. For more information or to register, contact her at wdi@bccpd.bc.ca or phone 604-875-0188 (toll-free 1-877-232-7400). Contact us soon as spaces are limited.

Do you have headaches? If so, do you want to learn more about your headaches? You can now from anywhere in the world with a new iPhone application developed by a research team at the IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The app has a pain diary that allows you to conveniently track your headaches whenever they happen and provides helpful reports to help you to identify your headache patterns.

The study is entirely electronic, so you can participate no matter what country you are from. Follow this link if you would like participate in the research study to test out the application: http://crfh.ca/whi

Participants will be reimbursed with a $20.00 CAD gift card for their time.

Principal investigator:      Dr. Patrick McGrath
Coordinator:                       Dr. Anna Huguet
Contact:                               Wireless.Headache@gmail.com

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have found a new way to block infection from the hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the liver that could lead to new therapies for those affected by this and other infectious diseases.

More than 170 million people worldwide live with hepatitis C, the disease caused by chronic HCV infection. HCV affects the liver and is spread by blood-to-blood contact. There is currently no vaccine to prevent it and treatments are only moderately effective and can cause serious side effects.

“As HCV infects a person, it needs fat droplets in the liver to form new virus particles,” says François Jean, Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Scientific Director of the Facility for Infectious Disease and Epidemic Research (FINDER) at UBC. “In the process, it causes fat to accumulate in the liver and ultimately leads to chronic dysfunction of the organ.”

“HCV is constantly mutating, which makes it difficult to develop antiviral therapies that target the virus itself,” says Jean. “So we decided to take a new approach.”

Jean and his team developed an inhibitor that decreases the size of host fat droplets in liver cells and stops HCV from “taking residence,” multiplying and infecting other cells.

“Our approach would essentially block the lifecycle of the virus so that it cannot spread and cause further damage to the liver,” says Jean. The team’s method is detailed in the journal PLoS Pathogens, published online today.