Health & WellnessS


Butterfly

For Kids with ADHD, Regular 'Green Time' is Linked to Milder Symptoms

Image
© LEAFA new study adds to the evidence that time spent in green outdoor settings benefits children with ADHD.
A study of more than 400 children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has found a link between the children's routine play settings and the severity of their symptoms, researchers report. Those who regularly play in outdoor settings with lots of green (grass and trees, for example) have milder ADHD symptoms than those who play indoors or in built outdoor environments, the researchers found. The association holds even when the researchers controlled for income and other variables.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 9.5 percent of children aged 4-17 had been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2007. Symptoms include severe difficulty concentrating, hyperactivity and poor impulse control.

Although many children with ADHD are medicated, most "would benefit from a low-cost, side-effect-free way of managing their symptoms," wrote University of Illinois crop sciences visiting teaching associate Andrea Faber Taylor and natural resources and environmental sciences professor Frances (Ming) Kuo, the authors of the study.

Health

Heavy Drinking May Leave You Tipsy For Years

Alcohol
© Dreamstime

Wobbly walking and clumsy moves are classic signs that someone's been drinking, and a new study suggests balance problems can afflict heavy drinkers for years after they sober up.

Researchers at Neurobehavioral Research Inc., in Honolulu, compared the balance abilities and gaits of diagnosed alcoholics who had been sober for several weeks, those who had been sober for an average of seven years, and people with no history of alcohol dependence.

Each participant was put through a three-part test "similar to the things that might be done in field sobriety tests," said Dr. George Fein, principal investigator for the study published today (Sept. 15) in the journal in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

The volunteers were first screened for recent drug and alcohol use, then asked to perform a series of balance tests such as standing heel-to-toe with their arms folded across the chest for 60 seconds, standing on one leg, or walking along a line. Each test was repeated with the volunteers' eyes closed.

Of the more than 200 volunteers, the 70 recently sober ones - who had not had alcohol for six to 15 weeks - performed the worst. But in tasks with their eyes closed, the 82 long-sober volunteers also performed noticeably worse than the 52 people who had never been alcoholics. (The researchers controlled for the effect of age on balance.)

"There's an 80 to 90 percent recovery, but there's still some residual effects," said Fein, the senior scientist and lab director at the company.

Syringe

Gardasil HPV vaccines found contaminated with recombinant DNA that persists in human blood

Image

In seeking answers to why adolescent girls are suffering devastating health damage after being injected with HPV vaccines, SANE Vax, Inc decided to have vials of Gardasil tested in a laboratory. There, they found over a dozen Gardasil vaccine vials to be contaminated with rDNA of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). The vials were purchased in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Poland and France, indicating Gardasil contamination is a global phenomenon.

This means that adolescents who are injected with these vials are being contaminated with a biohazard -- the rDNA of HPV. In conducting the tests, Dr. Sin Hang Lee found rDNA from both HPV-11 and HPV-18, which were described as "firmly attached to the aluminum adjuvant."

That aluminum is also found in vaccines should be frightening all by itself, given that aluminum should never be injected into the human body (it's toxic when ingested, and it specifically damages the nervous system). With the added discovery that the aluminum adjuvant also carries rDNA fragments of two different strains of Human Papillomavirus, this now reaches the level of a dangerous biohazard -- something more like a biological weapon rather than anything resembling medicine.

As SANE Vax explains in its announcement, these tests were conducted after an adolescent girl experienced "acute onset Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis within 24 hours" of being injected with an HPV vaccine.

Health

Doctors Use Natural Remedies (But Don't Prescribe Them)

Image
© rodale.com"Enjoy your statins...if you need me, I'll be at my yoga class."
Doctors don't regularly prescribe natural remedies to patients, but a new study finds physicians and nurses are more likely than the general public to use alternative and complementary medicine for their own health ailments. The new study looking at alternative and complementary medicine use in Americans appears in the journal Health Services Research. "Nurses and doctors are reflecting current societal trends being swept up in a grassroots movement that they have resisted for the last three decades," says alternative and complementary medicine expert Guy Riekeman, DC, president of Life University, a chiropractic school in Atlanta. (He was not involved in this study.)

THE DETAILS: For the study, complementary and alternative medicine included things like acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, Pilates, meditation, use of herbs, and a vegetarian diet. Compared to the 63 percent of the general working population that taps these natural healing methods, 76 percent of healthcare workers reported using complementary and alternative medicine. Looking strictly at healthcare workers, doctors and nurses were more than twice as likely to seek treatment from a massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, or other practitioner-based alternative medicine provider compared to other workers in the healthcare industry, such as technicians, assistants, or administrators. Doctors and nurses were more than three times as likely to tap natural remedies for self-treatment (herbs, exercise, yoga, and the like). "As insiders, healthcare workers understand what's missing in our medical system. They're more educated than others about orthodox and alternative medicine," alternative medicine practitioner Joya Lynn-Schoen, MD, said in a statement from the Health Behavior News Service.

"Mainstream medicine will say, 'Here's a pill' or 'Have an operation' or 'There's nothing wrong with you, you're just tired,'" Lynn-Schoen said.

Comment: For more information about why 'Doctors may use natural remedies, but don't prescribe them' the following article states clearly that doctors could face criminal charges of fraud if they recommend a natural treatment purely because it is not conventional.

Can My Doctor Get Into Big Legal Trouble by Offering Natural Health Treatments?
Whether for reasons of conviction or crony capitalism, the government is heavily biased in favor of conventional medicine and against integrative or natural medicine. So laws often trample doctors' natural right and their patients' right to choose the healthcare options they prefer.

...The federal government has also gained more and more control over individual doctors by paying their bills through Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, etc. Federal law makes fraudulent billing a felony that can land a doctor in jail. This sounds fair, until one realizes that the federal government may interpret a natural health treatment as a fraud simply because it is not conventional. In this way, medical care has become criminalized and any doctor who accepts a government payment may be facing a jail sentence.

...The bias against complementary, alternative, or integrative medicine in state governments is strongly reinforced by professional organizations like the American Medical Association.



Info

Dark Chocolate 'As Good As Exercise'

Dark Chocolate
© redOrbit

Scientists from Wayne State University have discovered that a compound found in chocolate, called epicatechin, seems to trigger the same muscle response as vigorous activity such as jogging.

Additionally, when small doses of chocolate are consumed in combination with regular exercise, performance is increased by 50 percent, the study found.

The researchers found that epicatechin seemed to increase the number of mitochondria, tiny powerhouses in cells that generate energy.

"Mitochondria produce energy which is used by the cells in the body. More mitochondria mean more energy is produced the more work can be performed," study leader Dr. Moh Malek at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, told the UK Telegraph.

"Aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling, is known to increase the number of mitochondria in muscle cells. Our study has found that epicatechin seems to bring about the same response - particularly in the heart and skeletal muscles," he added.

Attention

Dirt Eaters and Other Pica Cases Nearly Double in Decade

Edible Clay?
© Sera Young, Columbia University PressWomen around the world have a craving for dirt during their pregnancies.

The number of people hospitalized with pica, the disorder in which people eat non-edible substances including dirt and chalk, has nearly doubled within a decade, a new study finds.

Between 1999 and 2009, yearly hospitalizations in the United States for this disorder increased 93 percent, from 964 to 1,862, said the report from the government's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Pica is most commonly found in children, pregnant women and people with autism and other developmental disabilities. In many cases, the disorder lasts several months and then disappears without treatment, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Little is known about what causes the disorder, and researchers said they can only speculate as to why pica hospitalizations have jumped. But it may be due, at least in part, to the recent rise in the number of diagnosed autism cases.

Stop

Tanzania: Man on ARV Develops Abnormal Breasts

ARV Drugs
© AfricaNews.com

Some Tanzania men on anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs have experienced abnormal breast enlargement similar to that of women. There are even cases where women taking the life prolonging drug against HIV complaining of queer side effects including becoming disabled.

Joseph Mkanda, 43, one of the victims, said he developed strange symptoms plus growing breasts after taking the drugs. Initially, he suspected the cause to be lack of a balanced diet. But he soon realised that the main problem was the type of drugs he was taking.

"I feel very much ashamed to go out of my house, because I have developed breasts like a woman. ...I fear that other people would laugh at me," he said from his Mtwara-base.

"I went to one of the medical doctors in my village, who told me that such signs were normal for people suffering from AIDS who have been taking the drugs for a long time. At the moment, I don't know what to do or where to go," said Mkanda.

Salima Omar, 36, from Mtwara said she developed strange symptoms after taking the drugs. Salima, a mother of seven, said one of her daughters died shortly after birth in 2006 when she had undergone the HIV test.

Comment: The horror of what big pharma is doing in some of these countries is unimaginable!


Info

Why Selling Natural Products is Such a Dangerous Business

Image
© iStockphoto.com
Federal Law for Sellers of Food, Supplements, and Medical Devices

The Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C) gives authority to the FDA to regulate interstate commerce of supplements, drugs, and devices. According to the FD&C, by definition, only drugs can claim to cure, prevent, mitigate, or treat a disease [section 201(g)]. Nothing else may make that claim - certainly not a food or supplement.

To legally market a drug (that is, any substance that can claim to cure, prevent, mitigate, or treat a disease), it must go through the lengthy and expensive FDA drug approval process. Any violation - that is, any sale of a "drug" that is not FDA-approved - can lead to seizure of the product, injunctions against its sale and distribution, and criminal penalties, including imprisonment, for the manufacturer.

And as we have noted many times before, if a substance is natural, it is not patentable, and companies can only recoup their huge investment (as much as a billion on average, although estimates vary) in FDA approval if they can make it up through the high prices that patent protection makes possible. Therefore, natural products in supplement form will never be able to claim to treat disease, including cancer [section 201(ff)].

Beaker

Chemicals Of Concern

Image
© good.is
Government: Senators ask White House to release EPA's proposal to create new list of substances

The White House is under pressure from two democratic senators to release a list of chemicals the Environmental Protection Agency says could endanger human health or the environment. This so-called chemicals of concern list would include eight phthalates, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and bisphenol A.

The chemical industry has attempted to block release of EPA's proposed list over the past year.

Congress granted EPA the authority to create such a list in the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which was signed into law in 1976. But EPA hasn't attempted to use this authority until now.

Now, Sens. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) are calling on the White House Office of Management & Budget (OMB) to finish its regulatory review of the EPA list, which it began in May 2010. The list would not propose controls on the chemicals included, but it is nonetheless considered a regulation. Generally, OMB finishes its review of proposed regulations within three or four months.

Arrow Up

The Blessings of Pastured Pork Lard

Image
© tendergrassfedmeat.comNatural, unhydrogenated, pastured pork lard.
Animal fat is demonized in our society, and this includes pork lard. People are brainwashed into thinking that eating pork lard, or any animal fat, will "clog" their arteries, causing heart attacks and strokes. Animal fat seems to be blamed as the cause of almost every conceivable disease. This is truly ironic, as animal fat, especially pork lard, was the most popular cooking fat for most of humanity, throughout most of history.

The traditional diets of two of the healthiest peoples studied in modern times, the Georgians of the Caucasus, and the Okinawans of the Pacific, were quite different in the actual foods they ate. Yet both of these healthy peoples did share a favorite food - pork lard and fatty pork. Despite the fact that these healthy peoples ate large amounts of pork lard, along with fatty pork, heart disease and strokes were very rare for them. Both of these cultures were known for a very high number of people who lived to be 100 years old, or older, and were healthy at that advanced age.