Use of psychiatric drugs has spiked; concerns surface about suicide, other dangers

At least one in six service members is on some form of psychiatric drug.

And many troops are taking more than one kind, mixing several pills in daily "cocktails" - for example, an antidepressant with an antipsychotic to prevent nightmares, plus an anti-epileptic to reduce headaches - despite minimal clinical research testing such combinations.

The drugs come with serious side effects: They can impair motor skills, reduce reaction times and generally make a war fighter less effective. Some double the risk for suicide, prompting doctors - and Congress - to question whether these drugs are connected to the rising rate of military suicides.

"It's really a large-scale experiment. We are experimenting with changing people's cognition and behavior," said Dr. Grace Jackson, a former Navy psychiatrist.

Apparently the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had at least heard about the suicide of Gabriel Myers.

Myers' death by hanging happened in a Florida foster home last year, but that wasn't the main reason it triggered a major reaction at Florida's Department of Children and Families.

The real reason: He was 7 years old.

Whatever else might have helped lead such a young child toward ending his life, one detail was impossible to ignore: The boy was being treated with three different psychotropic medications.

Meditation is an alternative medicine modality prescribed by physicians to help individuals relieve stress and, at times, reduce pain.

However, as Western medicine turns to meditation, doctors are learning that meditation incorporates a variety of techniques including methods that originated from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions.

And, just as the techniques vary in delivery, the clinical effects of meditation may also have a variety of outcomes.

A new paper published in Consciousness and Cognition discusses three categories to organize and better understand meditation:

One of the techniques modern factory farms routinely use to increase weight in livestock is to give all of the animals a dose of antibiotics with every meal. When this is done, the bacteria in the animals' guts that are susceptible to the drugs are killed. When this practice is ongoing, it creates a microbial vacuum in the animals' intestines that gives an extraordinary competitive advantage to any bacteria that develop resistance to the antibiotics. If your goal was to breed bacteria that could not be controlled by antibiotics, you could hardly design a more effective system. It is not entirely an exaggeration to say that as a result, factory farms have become biological weapons factories.

Patients treated at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics will be able to use medical marijuana in the 14 states where it's legal, according to new federal guidelines.

The directive from the Veterans Affairs Department in the coming week is intended to clarify current policy that says veterans can be denied pain medication if they use illegal drugs. Veterans groups have complained for years that this could bar veterans from VA benefits if they were caught using medical marijuana.

The new guidance does not authorize VA doctors to begin prescribing medical marijuana, which is considered an illegal drug under federal law. But it will now make clear that in the 14 states where state and federal law are in conflict, VA clinics generally will allow the use of medical marijuana for veterans already taking it under other clinicians.

In 2008, Dr. Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. "She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died," Dr. Khoruts said.

Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn't give her a piece of someone else's intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband's bacteria.

Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband's stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.

The procedure - known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation - had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant.

The problems began not long after I moved in with my future wife. I was losing weight at an alarming rate, drifting for hours after meals in a confused fog. My acid reflux was so bad I felt like I had a golf ball lodged in my throat. I suffered from otherworldly constipation and had no sex drive. My tongue swelled like a wet sponge. It seemed everything I ate contributed to my misery.

These symptoms weren't the ones familiar to me from my mid-20s, when I'd learned I had celiac disease. People with celiac can't tolerate gluten, a protein in wheat found in many foods and everyday products. When I ate gluten, my sides ached and my small intestines felt as if they had been rubbed raw by sandpaper; I felt tremors throughout my body and deep, deep exhaustion. My mother lived with celiac disease for most of her life, and after overcoming years of willful ignorance of my mother's condition, my health finally improved when I began avoiding wheat and other gluten-containing grains.

London - Perhaps the only consistent thing about Britain's socialized health care system is that it is in a perpetual state of flux, its structure constantly changing as governments search for the elusive formula that will deliver the best care for the cheapest price while costs and demand escalate.

Even as the new coalition government said it would make enormous cuts in the public sector, it initially promised to leave health care alone. But in one of its most surprising moves so far, it has done the opposite, proposing what would be the most radical reorganization of the National Health Service, as the system is called, since its inception in 1948.

Practical details of the plan are still sketchy. But its aim is clear: to shift control of England's $160 billion annual health budget from a centralized bureaucracy to doctors at the local level. Under the plan, $100 billion to $125 billion a year would be meted out to general practitioners, who would use the money to buy services from hospitals and other health care providers.

The plan would also shrink the bureaucratic apparatus, in keeping with the government's goal to effect $30 billion in "efficiency savings" in the health budget by 2014 and to reduce administrative costs by 45 percent. Tens of thousands of jobs would be lost because layers of bureaucracy would be abolished.

Emotions -- particularly those provoked by negative events -- can cause distorted, inaccurate memories, but less often in children than in adults, according to a new Cornell study.

But research at Cornell University found that while negative emotions are very bad for the accuracy of children's memories, they are even worse for adults.

The findings, published online in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, contradict prevailing legal and psychological thinking and have implications for the criminal justice system, report Charles Brainerd and Valerie Reyna, professors of human development and co-authors of the 2005 book, The Science of False Memory.

The researchers previously demonstrated that adults attach far more meaning to events than children do. But leading memory theories embraced by the legal system claim that adults remember negative events better than children and have fewer false memories about them. Brainerd and Reyna's data show these theories are not accurate.

Circumcision is a euphemism for genital reduction surgery or genital mutilation, performed by medically-licensed or unqualified practitioners for various reasons. It is important to define it honestly, for that is how the mind interprets it, with or without superimposed denials, explanations and intellectualisations.

Many circumcisions are performed on children, who, by definition are not able to give informed consent of the kind available to adults. They are vulnerable to coercion and manipulation and generally have little say in what happens to their bodies medically & surgically. They are not usually allowed to say no to medical procedures because it is deemed that parents & doctors "know best". However, it is unlikely that any child, asked if they would like a person with a knife to cut off part of their penis, would agree to such an action. This would be a normal psychological reaction to the threat of attack and is overruled at some psychological cost.

When one's own natural tendency to protect oneself is rendered ineffective, one loses a sense of one's own power over one's destiny & survival, and a feeling of helplessness ensues. This occurs in situations of rape, torture and sexual abuse. In a situation where a person feels he or she cannot escape physical attack, the mind will "escape" by a process of "dissociation" - it is as if the mind leaves the body temporarily, so that the body can endure the attack, but the mind does not have to. On returning to the body, the mind may then be subject to unconscious repetitions of the traumatic memories in flashbacks or nightmares. These recurring images may be triggered by any situation which reminds the sufferer of the original traumatic event; a child who has been subjected to a painful surgical procedure in hospital may develop a phobia of hospitals or doctors or people in white coats. The child, or later the adult he grows into, may sweat, have palpitations, feel breathless, nauseated, panicky or dizzy at the thought of the trauma situation and try to avoid it happening again. This may lead to difficulty when medical attention is genuinely needed for a subsequent illness.