Dr. Scott Morris from the Church Health Center offered his views on the power of prayer in Monday's Health and Fitness.

Here's some of what he had to say:

"Science simply cannot penetrate certain elements in the mystery of life. Science is about questioning the measurable world, and none of us can physically hold our faith in our hands and measure the power of the spirit. It is silly to try.

As far as I'm concerned, if any of you hear that I'm having bypass surgery, I welcome all of your prayers. It certainly won't do me any harm, and in a world that's filled with people who are increasingly isolated from one another, it might just bring us closer together."

Your thoughts?

http://content.nejm.org/The latest New England Journal of Medicine has research likely to interest millions of women with uterine fibroids.

Scottish researchers compared results of treatment with a procedure known as uterine-artery embolization and surgery, including hysterectomy. The study involved 157 women, including 106 who underwent embolization.

The investigators said the embolization was a more cost-effective treatment than surgery. But they cautioned that each approach involves tradeoffs.

Those are the non-cancerous tumors that affect about 40 percent of women during their child-bearing years. They complicate fertility and

Anyone trying to revive a New Year's pledge to exercise more, eat less or improve overall health will want to check out the Healthy Monday campaign.

For most of us, Monday is when the work week starts or classes resume. With Healthy Monday, the folks at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health hope it also becomes the day to take the first step toward better health. So, pledge to eat more vegetables. Restock medication. Take a walk. "You can make Monday the day all health breaks loose," explained Sid Lerner, the campaign’s co-founder.

To read more, or sign up for a weekly e-mail reminders, visit

One of the hottest threads in quite a while was our discussion a couple of weeks ago about who is responsible for the way kids behave in restaurants. The story in today's Sunday M section in The CA contains some of your comments, plus some insight from restaurateurs and other folks who deal with this issue a lot. (Be sure to check out Dining with Monkeys, Stacey Greenberg's hilarious blog about eating out with her kids, who are WAY better behaved than the monkeys in the picture.) My bottom line -- most people try to teach their kids to behave in restaurants, and we all probably need to cut kids a little more slack.

Did you see the story last week about the family from Boston who got kicked of an airplane because their daughter wouldn't get in her seat? What do you think -- justified, or an overreaction on the airline's part?

They're called tax refund anticipation loans, or RALs, high-interest loans of money that you'd eventually get anyway. In her column today, Wendi C. Thomas meets the guys behind Mo' Money Taxes, and asks: Is this a service, or exploitation of people who can least afford it?

The Bodog Music Battle of the Bands -- with a cool $1 million prize on the line -- rolls into Memphis this weekend as the 17 surviving bands (out of 7,000) fight to the finish, reality TV style.

The final rounds are being filmed for a program that will air on a national music network, and in each stop on a romp around the country, the bands face a challenge in addition to performing. In Memphis, the task is a press conference in front of local and national media -- at 10 a.m. on a Saturday. That's a bit early on a weekend for this particular local media person, but I can see how you can really gauge the relative rock-ness of a band at that hour (extra points for not vomiting or falling asleep!). This takes place in the lobby of the Gibson Beale Street Showcase, so if you're downtown early in the morning for the farmer's market or whatever, check it out.

The performance phase of the Memphis stop takes place Monday night, also at the Gibson.

Jon Sparks has a much more informative post about the whole Bodog thing, especially the coming reality TV extravaganza. Let him explain it all to you, because I'm about to knock off work for the weekend (gotta be up in 12 hours for the Bodog presser, right?).

This is a rare occasion where I get to blog live during a practice. And the main reason is that I'm courtside at FedExForum.

The Tigers don't get to practice much here, but with the Grizzlies on a West Coast trip, the floor was open. Looks like Chris Douglas-Roberts will play tomorrow against Southern Miss. He's definitely practicing as much today as he has since the injury.

On a related note, Gary Parrish of CBS Sportsline showed his face at practice today. I guess he felt guilty about hating on the Tigers so much. I imagine it was healing, kind of like going to Lourdes.