Health & WellnessS


Heart

Flashback Empathy: Could It Be What You're Missing?

A Washington Psychotherapist Suggests How to Tell . . . and How to Treat the Symptoms

You may not realize it, but a great number of people suffer from EDD.

No, you're not reading a misprint of ADD or ED. The acronym stands for empathy deficit disorder.

Comment: The article certainly reads like an apology for psychopathy by assuming that all individuals who lack empathy are suffering from EDD. The examples he gives, people in positions of authority or power, sound like psychopaths, not people suffering from a "disorder".

The question that comes to mind, however, is to what extent there could be such a disorder as a result of the control of society by psychopaths. When one is raised in a place such as the US where all the standards are set by deviants, where the idea of individual material success is hammered into everyone from birth, where all the criteria for success have to do with wealth, position, material goods, and where clawing your colleague to get to the top is encouraged, it may well be that many people get what little spark of empathy they might have driven out of them at a young age.


Bandaid

Canada Likely to Label Plastic Ingredient, Bisphenol-A, 'Toxic'

The Canadian government is said to be ready to declare as toxic a chemical widely used in plastics for baby bottles, beverage and food containers as well as linings in food cans.

Syringe

Japan to vaccinate 6,000 health officials for potential bird flu outbreak

Japan's health ministry said Tuesday it plans to inoculate thousands of health officials with a government stockpile of vaccines to prepare for a possible bird flu pandemic in humans.

Under the plan, pending approval Wednesday, about 6,000 quarantine and immigration officials, doctors and other health workers will be vaccinated by the end of this year, Health and Welfare Ministry official Kishiko Yamaguchi said.

Ambulance

Bird Flu Reported In South Korea and Showing Troubling Mutations

The H5N1 virus known as Avian flu or the bird flu is undergoing what experts are calling a troubling pattern of mutations which are allowing the virus to spread from human to human.

South Korea has confirmed their fourth outbreak of this virus, this year, according to Kim Chang-sup, an official for South Korea's Agriculture Ministry.

Attention

The Diarrhea Diet

In lieu of exercise or a healthy diet, Americans now have the option of losing weight with a drug that causes bowel incontinence.

Since GlaxoSmithKline's (GSK) high profile launch of alli last summer, the first FDA-approved diet drug sold over the counter, the only figures that have flattened are sales.

Two million starter packages sold in the first few weeks at $49.99 for 60 pills and $69.99 for 120, thanks to a $150 million populist rollout that included displays in Targets, Wal-Marts and warehouse clubs.

Document

Inherited Cancer Mutation Is Widespread In America

A gene mutation responsible for the most common form of inherited colon cancer is older and more common than formerly believed, according to a recent study.

The findings provide a better understanding of the spread and prevalence of the American Founder Mutation, a common cause in North America of Lynch syndrome, a hereditary cancer syndrome that greatly increases a person's risk for developing cancers of the colon, uterus and ovaries.

The same investigators discovered the mutation in 2003. That research identified nine families with the mutation and concluded that a German immigrant couple brought the mutation to North America in 1727.

Health

"Unlikely" that key genes cause schizophrenia

The genes most widely believed to cause schizophrenia are, in fact, unlikely to play a role in the condition, according to the most comprehensive genetic study of its kind.

Health

How Big Is Your Brain? Its Size May Protect You From Memory Loss

From autopsies, researchers have long known that some people die with sharp minds and perfect memories, but their brains riddled with the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's disease. New research shows that those people have a larger part of the brain called the hippocampus.

Cow Skull

Sickened U.S. pork workers have new nerve disorder

Eighteen pork plant workers in Minnesota, at least five in Indiana and one in Nebraska have come down with a mysterious neurological condition they appear to have contracted while removing brains from slaughtered pigs, U.S. researchers and health officials said on Wednesday.

Pills

Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation



Antidepressant Pills
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Author Charles Barber discusses Americans' unrealistic notions about happiness. We've medicalized a lot of life issues that aren't mental illnesses.

While we've now become accustomed to the barrage of prescription drug commercials on prime-time TV, it's jarring to learn that this advertising is legal only in the United States and New Zealand. The pharmaceutical industry doesn't just target Americans directly, but also spends roughly $25,000 per physician per year. With the aid of information from data mining companies, a pharmaceutical representative knows exactly how many prescriptions for what medication a doctor has written, allowing the industry to individually target them.

How Americans came to this fraught relationship with the pharmaceutical industry and its drugs -- particularly antidepressants -- is the subject of Charles Barber's new book, Comfortably Numb. A veteran of mental health programs in homeless shelters and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Barber trains his eye to the confluence of science and culture that have led to the widespread prescribing of medications once reserved for the most serious cases.