ALT MEDICINE   Picture if you can a man serving a life sentence in prison for a violent crime. Before him and a dozen others like him is a slight woman teaching them to stretch purposefully, breathe mindfully and to practice ahimsa, a tenet of hatha yoga that is Sanskrit for “do no harm.”

“There’s a guard down the hall, but it’s just me. I trust them. We have a rapport,” says Diane Sherman, a volunteer who has taught beginning and advanced yoga classes at the Airway Heights Corrections Center since 2010. “For some of them, the only way to feel a sense of liberation is through this. It’s a possible route to them being OK with their predicament.” Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE   A 6-year-old boy, whom we’ll call Finley, rattles off his nightly demand list: “I’m thirsty. Can I have a glass of water? I’m HON-gry! Can you read me another story? Will you sleep with me?”

It’s 9:30 — an hour and a half past Finley’s bedtime. His exasperated mother retreats to the kitchen, where she smashes half a fivemilligram tablet of melatonin and stirs it into butterscotch pudding.

“Eat this,” says the mom. “It’ll help you sleep.”

Finley snarfs the treat. He’s asleep within a half-hour. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Like death and taxes, gravity is inevitable. Its relentless pull may be taking a toll on your muscles and joints. But what if its effects were reversed and instead of pulling you down, it pulled you up?

That’s the logic behind inversion therapy — or inversion exercise, since it’s not always a therapeutic application. By simply rotating the body from its normal feet-on-the-ground disposition, proponents of inversion equipment say you begin to regain flexibility, reduce spine-related pain such as sciatica and, if you work at it, develop killer abs. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Lose weight, gain muscle and clean out your body. Sounds great, right? Isagenix, an Arizona-based company that claims its products can do all of the above, says its happy customers and over $1 billion in sales prove that their stuff works.

Just don’t call it a diet. Read More>>

Megan Frederick is trying to lose weight, but you wouldn’t be able to tell if you asked her about her meals. “Chicken, steak, whitefish, shrimp, crab, lobster, fruits and vegetables, coffee, tea, water,” recounts Frederick, a 28-year-old Spokane bank employee. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Can you picture the iconic 1970s images of the Marlboro man? Can you picture panoramic views of wide-open prairies, blue skies and a rugged cowboy perched atop his trusty steed?

Well, chances are that horse was coughing in the background. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Who among us doesn’t want to look and feel good? The quest for beauty has been around forever — long before Narcissus did himself in when he couldn’t cease gazing upon his own beauty. The diet industry, according to a recent BusinessWeek article, devours $40 billion a year from Americans who want to lose weight. Some of that is spent on dietary supplements and, according to the Food and Drug Administration, some of those supplements — a relatively small number — are dangerous. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Spring is in the air, flowers are in bloom, baseball is back and so are aqua-titanium necklaces, ion wrist-bands and energyimparting holograms.

You may have noticed — and if you haven’t, you probably will now — that a lot of baseball players and other athletes wear necklaces and bracelets while they’re out there being athletes. The bracelets are nothing fancy: Most look like the simple lanyards used for key cards or reading glasses. Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  “I want to do Gallbladder 34 for the tendons,” Jennifer Gallis tells her patient, Jeanann Eckert.

Wearing a tie-dye T-shirt, Eckert is on an acupuncture table at Gallis’ Spokane clinic, her pant legs rolled up. Gallis moves to the right side of Eckert’s body and feels the outside of her patient’s right leg, just below the knee. She taps on a small plastic tube encasing a thin, silver needle and the needle darts in.

“How’s your Kidney 3?” Gallis asks.

“Well, 7 is probably better,” Eckert responds, “but I always need Liver 3 — you know me.” Read More>>

ALT MEDICINE  Josh Arleth started smoking when he was 16. It was the old peer-pressure story. A few friends were smoking, he joined in.

Soon, Arleth was smoking two packs of cigarettes a day — then, three packs a day. At about $8 a pack, that’s $750 a month. He knew it was an expensive habit. A deadly one, too. He knew he really should quit. Read More>>