You may not know the term, but you’ve surely heard its claims. Among other things, holistic nutritionists (or HNs, as they call themselves) may teach that fluoride and pesticides are lethal, that most diseases and detrimental behaviors are diet-related and that many people would benefit from taking numerous supplements. I’ve read plenty of articles by HNs in which they assert that they are disparaged by mainstream medicine and warn you not to trust modern medicine.

Gina Kolata for the New York Times: Tests detect Alzheimer’s risks, but should patients be told?

It is a quandary that is emblematic of major changes in the practice of medicine, affecting not just Alzheimer’s patients. Modern medicine has produced new diagnostic tools, from scanners to genetic tests, that can find diseases or predict disease risk decades before people would notice any symptoms.

Kathryn Roethel for the San Francisco Chronicle: Chronic migraines: When pain is all in the head

After Robertson’s headaches began, she started wearing sunglasses to school because the migraines made her sensitive to light. Then she gave up fencing – a sport she’d competed in for seven years. She cut school to half time, then had to quit altogether.

In their Potrero Hill home, Robertson’s family put in skylights because the light bulbs were too bright for her. They stopped cooking with garlic and onions because the scents made her nauseous. On the rare occasions when she is well enough to eat meals at the dinner table, her mother lowers the lights and everyone speaks calmly and softly.

David Sirota at Truthout: Why the “Lazy Jobless” Myth Persists

First, there’s what psychologists call the Just-World Fallacy — the tendency to believe the world is inherently fair. This delusion is embedded in our pervasive up-by-the-bootstraps, everyone-can-be-a-millionaire catechism. The myth of the lazy unemployed can seem to make sense because it connects those ancient fables to current news, effectively alleging that today’s jobless deserve their plight.

Crazy Mermaid at Bipolar: Crazy Mermaid’s Blog: Mental Illness: Brain Function Impairment

Re-branding the current term “mental illness” to the more accurate description “brain functioning impairment”, will go a long way towards solving our stigma problem. We can reposition the impairment term as the politically correct term, and phase out the awful connotations of the old term. At a minimum, rebranding will go a long way toward forcing the general public to change its perception of people with BFI.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

Lynda Barry: This woman is pretty much my hero. Although Barry has a background in art, her work shows that you don’t have to draw comics “realistically” for them to have an impact, or for the artwork to be strikingly beautiful. I probably would have stopped drawing autobiographical cartoons long ago were it not for her work; I do not have much artistic training to speak of, and there seems to be a widespread misconception that only “trained” artists can draw cartoons worth reading! While Barry does not address disability in her cartoons, many of her colorful slice-of-life strips bring readers back to the confusing and bizarre world of childhood and adolescence. If you were — or are — a “weird kid,” you will absolutely connect with Barry’s comics. Her 2008 creativity manual-slash-collage dreamworld What It Is may be particularly useful for the artists (or wannabe-artists), or indeed anyone who needs a push to start writing and creating; a follow-up, The Near-Sighted Monkey Book, was recently released. For those not familiar with her work, I recommend The Greatest of Marlys (a compilation of her long-running alternative comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek) and the autobiographical collection One! Hundred! Demons! to start, followed by What It Is; for those of you who like darker material involving (fictional) teenaged misadventures, drug use, and general weirdness, her illustrated novel Cruddy is a must-read.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006): Known primarily as the writer and illustrator of the alternative comic Dykes to Watch Out For (also worth checking out!), Bechdel really hits her stride with this lengthier autobiographical tale of family drama, the tensions between appearances and reality, destructive secrets, and sexual awakening. I could provide a synopsis, such as “This is a story about the writer’s complex relationship with her father,” but it is so much more than that. This is one of those books that I want to recommend to everyone who enjoys reading; it’s a work that rewards the time put into it tenfold. I get something new out of it every time I re-read it. The way that Bechdel draws facial expressions is nothing short of priceless, and the narrative as a whole is consistently amazing, complex, and intense.

Al Davison, The Spiral Cage (1989): This one can be sort of hard to track down, but: it’s very much worth the effort. Davison has spina bifida, and this graphic novel chronicles his life with both that condition and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/M.E. The result — with its many nods to surrealism, and interesting explorations of masculinity and disability, as well as spirituality — is an honest, beatifully written and illustrated look at life with multiple disabilities.

Rantz Hoseley (editor) et al., Comic Book Tattoo (2008): Do you like (or love) Tori Amos’ music? Do you enjoy comics? If so, this is probably an anthology that you will get lost in for a couple of days. I was way, way into Tori’s music before I discovered comics and graphic novels, and the amazing range of this anthology — a collection of short graphic works and interpretations inspired by the singer’s massive back-catalog — makes it worth a look. For a compendium with such a huge variety of artistic styles and song interpretations, this collection has very few duds, and the overall quality of the stories included makes it worth the $30 price tag. This is not an anthology that you will read only once and then shove it onto the bookshelf to collect dust, in other words.

Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner (with illustrations by Frank Stack), Our Cancer Year (1994): Comics writer Harvey Pekar (he died earlier this year) was known as the cranky protagonist of American Splendor, but this collaboration with his wife, peace activist and journalist Joyce Brabner, brings illness and disability into the mix, and the result is positively great. Although the Pekar-Brabner-Stack team do not gloss over the realities of cancer at all — there are ample panels, and pages, that show the gruesome, life-altering effects of testicular cancer and its harsh treatment protocol — one does not get the sense that showing the worst aspects of this disease is for shock value. As Pekar and Brabner assert at the start of Our Cancer Year, this graphic novel is not just about cancer — it is also about partnership, the everyday (or not-so-everyday), and life.

David Small, Stitches (2009): For a full-length graphic work that doesn’t use much text or dialogue, this is certainly an astonishing piece. Small, who is a children’s book illustrator, utilizes his unique artistic style for this memoir, which tells the affecting tale of his battle against cancer — and near-fatal family secrets — starting when he was 11 years old. Small’s success at creating an overarching mood in this book is difficult to describe; all of the seemingly small choices that he makes as an author and illustrator here add up to a memoir that is both harrowing and ultimately life-affirming. In a review of Stitches for PopMatters, writer Sean Ferrell comments that “[the] book does not exemplify rising above, it exemplifies the continuing, life-long struggle to release the toxic histories we drag around with us.” It is truly to Small’s credit that he has used such painful past experiences to create an unforgettable work.

Commenters, what are some of your favorite comics and graphic works?

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

Cultural criticism can be an agent for change, educating for critical consciousness in liberatory ways, only if we start with a mind-set and a progressive politics that is fundamentally anti-colonialist, that negates cultural imperialism in all its manifestations [...] In many ways progressive cultural revolution can happen only as we learn how to do everything differently.

–From “The Heartbeat of Cultural Revolution,” introduction to Outlaw Culture, 1994

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

Actual, proper terminology was used throughout the show. Chronic pelvic pain conditions were named, but some conditions that overlap were not mentioned at all (interstitial cystitis, for example, was not explored in this episode. This is a shame – interstitial cystitis is another misunderstood condition which would benefit from careful media coverage.) This episode focused on the impact of chronic pelvic pain on the women’s sex lives. And that means that while you could learn a little about life with chronic pelvic pain from this episode, for a clinical discussion and details on specific conditions and available treatments, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Carol at Aspieadvocate: I’m an Embarrassment

Yeah, I know some parents of autistic kids worry about the kids embarrassing the rest of the family in public with their unusual behavior. But for me it’s the other way around. I never shut up about autism, mine or his, and while I have every right to out myself, I’m making decisions about him that should really be his to make. Except even if he’s made different decisions about disclosure than I have, he’s not (yet) verbal enough to tell anyone.

David Gorksi at Science-Based Medicine: Death by “alternative” medicine: Who’s to blame? [trigger warning]

Of course, the implication of “Secret” thinking is that, if you don’t get what you want, it’s your fault, an idea that also resonates with so much “alternative” medicine, where a frequent excuse for failure is that the patient either didn’t follow the regimen closely enough or didn’t want it badly enough. Basically, The Secret is what inspired Kim Tinkham to eschew all conventional therapy for her breast cancer and pursue “alternative” therapies, which is what she has done since 2007. Before I discuss her case in more detail, I’m going to cut to the chase, though.

This weekend, I learned that Kim Tinkham’s cancer has recurred and that she is dying.

Arwyn at Raising My Boychick: How far I’ve come

Eight years ago I was withdrawing from college. Again. I’d started medication, divalproex sodium, and that was going to cure me; we’d packed up our possessions, bought furniture in flat boxes, and drove it most of the way across the country to this town with one redeeming feature: the college from which I had just withdrawn because it was better than flunking out from chronic absences. I did not know who I was, what good I was, if I could not do college, be a student. I could not see a future, and mostly did not believe I had one.

Linsay at Autist’s Corner: Autism-related gene spotlight: CNTNAP2

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

In short, there are a lot of things for which you can take Big Pharma to task without also treating the people who depend on these medications like total shit. One of these things is advertising and direct-to-consumer marketing, at which Big Pharma seems to be really quite good! And by “good,” I mean totally ridiculous. Let’s take a look at five different ad campaigns that should never have left a pitch meeting, much less been made with gargantuan budgets, professional actors, and voice-overs that calmly inform the viewer/listener of possible side effects.

5. Cialis: Yes, the one with the make-out music in the background and the couple sitting side-by-side in the bathtubs out in a meadow or something. Why is it so difficult for these folks to find a tub big enough to fit them both?

4. Uloric: Granted, this one may not be as ridiculous as some of the others on this list, but the visual of a dude carrying around a giant beaker of green liquid (which looks suspiciously like it should be in some sort of fancy alcoholic drink that costs upwards of $7) is pretty bizarre, as is the voice-over that helpfully informs viewers that side-effects may include flare-ups of the very condition that Uloric is used to treat. This might be the entire point of the ad, though; since Uloric is a medication intended to help with Gout symptoms, wouldn’t it be more accurate to have the guy wear shoes to which giant beakers are attached? Perhaps we could see a live-action depiction of the 16th-century drawing included in the Wikipedia article on Gout, instead of a guy with a big beaker of neon-green energy drink? That would be awesome, and might get the Gout-is-horribly-painful-and-this-medication-could-help message across in a way that actually makes sense.

3. Lyrica: Every time I see this one, I want to yell at the TV, particularly when the one featuring the classy middle-aged lady who bakes bread has somehow made its hellish way into my precious rerun of Dirty Jobs or another show that I don’t like to admit to enjoying. The actress in this ad pronounces “Fibromyalgia” like it’s a seasonal root vegetable or something (like “FYE-bro-MY-al-GEE-AH”) and all I can do is give the television my most hateful death glare. Oh, and even better is when she says that “My doctor diagnosed it as FYE-bro-MY-al-GEE-AH muscle pain,” and I want to scream, “Lady, IF YOU KNEW what fibro was actually like, you would not be saying that. You would probably be in too much pain on some days to do very much.” Or baking loaves of crusty bread en masse, for that matter. As someone who’s dealt with fibro for the past few years of my life, I only wish I had enough energy to bake many loaves of bread, like the woman in this commercial. Sweet, delicious carbs might help my pain, or at least give me something to focus on other than constant pain and fatigue.

2. Cymbalta: My personal favorite moment is when a kid runs up to hug the woman (presumably a relative?) and the camera focuses on her face, and she just looks so sad that the explanation just has to be terrible acting (or depression, according to the good folks at Eli Lilly). Depression’s symptoms are much, much more complex than walking around looking like the emoticon for sadface [ ], but you wouldn’t know it by watching this commercial. I think someone should make a parody of ads like this, except that some other person approaches the woman, tells her to “Snap out of it,” and then the woman gives that person the finger–or, more accurately, gives them the face, because that is what certain aspects of depression make you feel like doing. You’re not only sad all of the time, but often you feel too hopeless to respond to people’s asshattery when they feel the need to comment on your depression and/or tell you that you Just Need To Buck Up.

1. Viagra (“Viva Viagra” spot): Truly the stuff of nightmares. The first time I saw this ad, I was awake at 3 or 4 AM due to pain (go figure, right?) and thought I was hallucinating when the opening chords of “Viva Las Vegas” started up in the opening seconds of this ad. I was, at first, confused as to what that particular song had to do with a medication used to treat erectile dysfunction. And then four middle-aged dudes–one playing a guitar–appeared on the screen and started to sing “VIVA VIAGRA!” to the tune of a song that most people associate with Elvis Presley, or any buddy comedy that has some sort of drunken Vegas montage. If you’re sure that this one won’t give you nightmares, I urge you to find it on YouTube, because it must be seen to be believed. Unfortunately, it’s been replaced in recent months with 30 seconds of yet another middle-aged white dude driving a car around in the dark. The penis = car association makes more sense than hanging out with your best buds and singing about Viagra, I suppose, particularly if you know anything about psychoanalysis.

Readers, what are your least favorite Big Pharma ads, and why? Short descriptions (and links to videos, if you have them) can be helpful for people who may have not seen the ads; please include them, if possible, so that we may all share in the unintentional hilarity.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

It was after this that the almost imperceptible freak out occurred. What am I going to do when it snows? How am I going to get food this winter? People / the county just don’t shovel sidewalks very well and it’s too far to roll in the street. At least you could get to the old grocery store by cutting through the mall and you’d barely be outside at all. It’s too cold for me to be outside that long in the winter. Cold hurts. Even in the daylight, in a few weeks it will be too cold. It’s 20-25min each way. I don’t want to take paratransit somewhere I could roll (absent snow). I don’t want to pay a cab to get somewhere I could roll. What a waste of money and time and aggravation.

CCA Captioning: WHY CART in Courts/justice

As I am awaiting a verdict in what would normally be an “average” vehicular manslaughter trial, I wanted to share the many interesting stumbling blocks that arose. The defendant in this five-day trial is profoundly hard of hearing. I was called in and hired by the Superior Court as a “realtime interpreter” to provide accessibility for the defendant during his trial. The official reporter proceeded with her duties, as it would be impossible to have done both, which I will explain later. I was fortunate to have a wonderful courthouse staff to work with in this small town of Cochise County in Bisbee, AZ, about 1.5 hours from my home in Tucson.

Gwen at Sociological Images: Regional variation in adults with diabetes, 2004-2008

Here’s a problem: neither the CDCP nor the Slate article specify. They say “adult diabetes,” meaning individuals over the age of 18 who are diagnosed with diabetes (so not necessarily adult onset diabetes). I think that would mean either Type 1 or Type 2.

Katie Zezima for the New York Times: Mental health cuts put police on the front line of care

Despite increased awareness, many officers, mental health workers and advocates for the mentally ill say that with fewer hospital beds and reduced outpatient services — especially at centers that treat the uninsured — many patients’ family members and friends, and even bystanders, are turning to the police as the first choice for help when a crisis occurs. Many states are feeling the brunt of cuts that started years ago but have gotten worse because of the economy.

Christina Fuoco-Karasinski at Soundspike: Charlotte Martin dances past “Needles” to a happy ending

“One day I remember doing a set of push ups, and something just snapped, and it went from numb to pain [in October 2009]. It was a really confusing, painful journey trying to figure out what exactly it was. You’d be surprised. There are a lot of doctors that didn’t know what it was. They really thought it was muscles or tendons. But I’ve got this burning shooting thing happening. It continued to get worse. It was really awful.”

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

An estimated 3 million American adults have a stutter that didn’t resolve in childhood, according to the nonprofit Stuttering Foundation of America. As kids, many dealt with the giggles of classmates and confusion of teachers; as adults, they often deal with uncertain glances and the impatience of strangers. They’ve long sought comfort from each other, sharing their experiences at conferences and advocacy groups.

Eli Clare at eliclare.com/blog: Disability Pride (from a few months ago, but definitely worth a read!)

Disability Pride calls for celebration, hope, rebellion. We take shame, fear, and isolation, turn them around, and forge wholeness. Pride refuses to let the daily grind of ableism, discrimination, exclusion, violence, and patronizing define who we are. Pride knows our history, joyfully insists upon our present, and stretches into our future.

Wheelchair Dancer at cripwheels: disability is a feminist issue

By using disability as she does, she makes herself smaller, less objectionable to the man; she dismisses herself and undervalues herself. She does her best to dodge what might be a harsh remark
about her intellectual capacities. She does disability in the old way, a way in which the value of our diverse minds and bodies is not acknowledged. Her disability is a weakness that separates her from an actively feminist goal of being an equal partner in the conversation and the game.

Brittany-Ann at A Bookish Beemer: A Glimpse of an Employed Epileptic

I know. I’m saying it’s wrong. I’m saying that the hoops one has to jump through, if neurologically atypical as I am, just to ensure you’re not fired because of being neurologically atypical, is ridiculous. That I should first have to reveal my medical history (which is private) to my managers, then explain to them what epilepsy is, THEN explain how it affects me, to finally say that it might prevent me from coming into work someday in the future, maybe, is ridiculous.

WHEELIE cATHOLIC: Dear Illegal Parker

As I passed the half a dozen handicap spots, I noticed that your car didn’t even have a placard or plate. I wondered why even on Thanksgiving at a senior housing complex, someone would illegally park in an accessible spot. I suppose you didn’t think someone in a wheelchair might really need that spot.

If you’re on Delicious, feel free to tag entries ‘disfem’ or ‘disfeminists,’ or ‘for:feminists’ to bring them to our attention! Link recommendations can also be emailed to recreading at disabledfeminists dot com. Please note if you would like to be credited, and under what name/site.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

Repetitive motion is one of those things that can be the bane of one’s existence if that person happens to have chronic pain issues; while there are people who might say, Oh, typing at a computer can’t be that painful or Just work through the pain or some other ridiculous piece of “advice,” typing can, at times, be enormously painful or draining for some folks with pain issues. No matter how much one may want to complete a piece, post or assignment, sometimes it just will not happen due to pain. When it feels like your hands are encased in cement blocks, there is no “working through the pain.” Having your hands and wrists feel like they have been set on fire by pain when you are on a deadline — like a lot of circumstances surrounding pain flares — can be excruciating. It’s kind of like having your hands and wrists feel like the Human Torch, but without any of the cool superpowers.

With speech-to-text, the additional pain brought on by repetitive typing is significantly reduced, as it takes at least some of the typing (but not editing, as I will address below) out of the equation. There are some additional issues to consider, however: one is “fibro fog,” the name given to some of the cognitive effects of a fibromyalgia flare, which can, for the person experiencing the flare, make it difficult to put thoughts, words and sentences together with anything resembling coherency. This is more of a condition issue than one that has to do with typing, but it’s fairly obvious as to how fibro-fog could impact the use of text-to-speech: if your thoughts are jumbled because of pain and fatigue, it’s likely that they will be just as jumbled regardless of whether you are typing or speaking into a text-to-speech headset. I’m fairly lucky with fibro-fog myself, as it tends to be rather mild unless I am experiencing a pain flare that feels closer to acute pain than chronic, but typing is one of those processes that can seem bizarrely confusing during a massive pain flare-up (and the whole “simple things as confusing” side effect is damn near impossible to truly understand unless you’ve been through it).

Of course, there are some aspects of text-to-speech software that are less than perfect: similar to the iPhone’s auto-correct feature (some of the amazing slip-ups of which have been documented by websites such as Damn You Autocorrect),  speech-to-text software can “read” one spoken word or phrase as something else entirely, sometimes producing hilarious (or irritating) fragments that often make no sense within the context of what you are actually writing. My personal favorite thus far has been my speech-to-text program “translating” Judith Butler as Judas butt lark, which made me wonder if I need to work on my pronunciation skills if only for the convenience of my software program.

There is also the cost issue: many speech-to-text software programs are expensive. In a utopia, everyone who could benefit from text-to-speech programs would have a reliable and fairly-priced one ready for use. I’m one of those weirdos who thinks that accessible technology should not be something available only to those who can afford to pay for it, but that, unfortunately, is most likely a long time coming.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

I often find myself wondering when, exactly, everything started. Have I always been dealing with mental illness? Have I always been, to greater or lesser degrees, disabled? At times the wondering borders on obsession, the inability of my anxious mind to let things go making me turn the thought over and over in my mind. Maybe part of me thinks that if I knew when it started, if I could find some moment and say, “This is when it began,” then maybe I could master it. I could understand it, I could control it, I could fix it. Ridiculous, obviously, but a lot what goes on in my head has fairly little to do with logic.

Shoshie at Catalytic Reactions: Afraid to Fly (trigger warning)

I particularly worry about flying the day before Thanksgiving.  The flights are so full, the airlines are looking for any excuse to boot people.  And now, there’s the added stress of the body scanners/grope searching.  I don’t want to go through the body scanners.  I don’t want someone to see my naked body.  I’m not ashamed, but I haven’t done anything wrong.  They have no right.

Lene Anderson at The Seated View: Everyday Hero

The click in my mind that connected that to the undertone of amazement that a person with a disability would adapt and go on with their life. It’s as if there’s a sense of awe that someone would face difficulty or pain without being curled up in a corner, gibbering in fear and how this bestows upon the person a regard as being a role model. Because it is apparently inconceivable to the able-bodied that it is possible to have a life while not being able to move your body the way the Abs do. Inconceivable to the point that there is this weird sense that disability conveys an alienness, an otherworldly not quite personhood.

BenefitScroungingScum at The Broken of Britain: Clare’s Story

I’ve been exhausted for as long as I can remember. I remember walking along in a kind of dream state when I was 7 or 8. I never went out anywhere as a teenager, I didn’t have the energy. At 19 I went to Germany to be an au-pair and remember the exhaustion of that. When I returned I went straight to University to study German. In a summer job in a museum in Munich I used to imagine making a den in the coaches that were part of the exhibit. I started to forget words. A nightmare for a linguist. That’s when it got worse. In my year out, I developed an allergy and was prescribed a high dose of antihistamines. I just slept through the rest of that year. The next year I developed a flu that didn’t go away and slept through my final year too.

Shari Roan for the Los Angeles Times: Sensory stimulation could prevent brain damage from stroke

Imagine a safe, inexpensive and drug-free way to prevent the long-term brain damage that often follows a stroke. No such treatment exists, but a new study involving rats suggests it might not take much to prime the brain to repair itself in the immediate aftermath of a stroke. For the rats, the simple act of tickling a whisker was enough to allow the animals to regain full cognitive function after a severe stroke — as long as the treatment was given within two hours.

Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine: Chronic pain: A disease in its own right

Herself a victim of chronic pain, [author Melanie Thernstrom] brings a personal perspective to the subject and also includes informative vignettes of doctors and patients she encountered at the many pain clinics she visited in her investigations. She shows that medical treatment of pain is suboptimal because most doctors have not yet incorporated recent scientific discoveries into their thinking, discoveries indicating that chronic pain is a disease in its own right, a state of pathological pain sensitivity.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.

A few weeks ago, I had the fairly weird experience of two different people trying to make the fact that I use a cane a topic of conversation (?) on the same day. Usually, when people feel the need to point out the obvious to me — that I use a cane as a mobility aid due to chronic pain — it happens pretty infrequently, maybe once a month. Twice in the same day, though, just felt strange.

Incident one: As I am waiting for the elevator in a building on my university campus, a young woman approaches me and asks me why I use a cane. She’s curious about it, she mentions, because her mom uses one. I reply that I use it because I have chronic pain, and this seems to satisfy her curiosity. I feel oddly relieved when the conversation stops there.

Incident two: I am walking to a coffee shop, and I pass a row of garbage and recycling containers out on the sidewalk on a busy street. A guy rummaging through one of the containers picks that exact moment to look up; he sees me and yells out, “You’re a YOUNG DISABLED LADY!” I am too confused to respond, and keep walking.

I can hear the refrains now: Those people were just trying to be friendly! They didn’t mean anything by it! They were just trying to start a conversation!

Maybe, but that doesn’t stop having the fact that I move differently from most other people pointed out to me in a very obvious manner (as if I don’t already know that, what with using a cane and all) from being annoying as all get-out.

So, the next time you see a person who uses a mobility aid, service animal, or other assistive technology, please remember: If you have the urge to point it out to them and/or try to use it as a conversational springboard, chances are that you probably do not have to do this. We know that we use assistive devices, and that said devices may look odd to people who are not disabled. It’s cool. We totally get it. And, even if you don’t “mean anything by it” by pointing it out to us or trying to tell us about someone you know who also has a disability, we might read your enthusiasm as something else entirely.

©2012 FWD/Forward. All Rights Reserved.