Health & WellnessS


Light Saber

Study Says Hip-Hop Dumbs Listeners Down

Tolu Olorunda
ThisIsRealMusic.com
Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:47 UTC
"Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show."

--Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Essays. New York: Peoples Book Club, 1949, pp. 253.

In a recent study conducted by Virgil Griffiths, a PhD student in California, Hip-Hop music listeners are portrayed as unintelligent and intellectually deficient. The independent study, titled "Music That Makes You Dumb," found that those who listen to Lil' Wayne, T.I., Kanye West, Jay-z and Ludacris (the usual suspects) are, essentially, dumb. On the contrary, listening to Beethoven, U2, Bob Dylan, Counting Crows and Sufjan Stevens displays intellectual sophistication. Excuse my coarseness: BULLSHIT! We've been through this before. We need not pretend otherwise. For how long do we entertain these barrages of insults, before responding back?
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Cheeseburger

Angry? It might be something you ate

Jenn Gearey
The Ottawa Citizen
Mon, 09 Mar 2009 04:56 UTC
Research is finding a connection between your food and your mood

Imagine that a calm, happy life could be served on a breakfast, lunch or dinner plate, even in a brown bag. According to some, it can be.

You won't find it in a fast-food hamburger box or a vending machine. But more and more research shows there is a correlation between good food and good mood.

"It's a fast-food nation, and we don't always take the time to make the connection between what we eat and how we feel," says Kristy Lewis, a naturopathic doctor at Pure Med Naturopathic Centre in Ottawa.

"We live in a society where people want to take a quick pill, whereas conscious nutrition is a lot of work."

Aggression is a behaviour that many food experts say can be altered by diet. What we eat can even affect our sense of right and wrong.

"Food is not just something that fills our stomach. It's very active biologically and chemically, and it affects us," says Jack Challem, Montreal-born author of The Food-Mood Solution. "Your body needs vitamins, protein and other nutrients to make the brain chemicals that help you think clearly, maintain a good mood and act in socially acceptable ways."
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Pills

Smoke from tissue-burning tools like lasers can be toxic to surgical team

Sheryl Ubelacker
The Star
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:33 UTC
laser surgery
© Darren Calabrese/The Canadian PressA cloud of plume escapes into the air as Dr. John Semple, Chief of Surgery at the Women's College Hospital, demonstrates a common surgical procedure during a press conference in Toronto on Wednesday, March 18, 2009. Using lasers or cauterizing tools during surgery creates a noxious smoke that can affect the health of doctors, nurses and patients. New voluntary standards were unveiled Wednesday to minimize the number of pathogens that enter health workers' lungs.
Smoke from tissue-burning tools like lasers can be toxic to surgical team

The surgeon touches an area of exposed flesh with a cauterizing tool for less than a minute, sending up a cloud of noxious smoke that quickly wafts across the room and catches at the eyes and throat.

It is only a demonstration - the flesh is actually raw turkey - but the result illustrates the hazard that doctors, nurses and even patients can be exposed to during operations that employ lasers and other tissue-burning tools.

Known as "plume," the smoke is laden with all manner of potentially toxic substances and disease-causing microbes that can make their way past surgical masks and into the lungs.

"According to one study, exposure to (vapours from) one gram of laser-cut tissue is like smoking three unfiltered cigarettes," said Suzanne Kiraly, president of the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), which on Wednesday released new guidelines for capturing and disposing surgical plume.

"Thus far, researchers have identified more than 600 organic compounds in plume generated by vaporized tissue," Kiraly told a news conference at Women's College Hospital in Toronto, where the demonstration took place.

Comment: While reporting on a legitimate problem, mainstream medicine can't resist getting a dig in at smoking. What cigarette or pipe tobacco will ever contain "aerosolized blood and blood-borne pathogens"? The two are hardly equatable.

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Red Flag

Silent victims opt for jobs over workplace bullying, sexual harassment complaints

Charles Brewer
News Com Australia
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:30 UTC
Image
© Charles BrewerTough times ... a new survey reveals bullying and sexual harassment are rife in Australian workplaces
Australian workers are putting up with bullying and sexual harassment because they fear a complaint would mean "career death".

Almost two thirds of Australian workers say they have been bullied at work, and nearly one third claim to have been sexually harassed, according to a survey by employment website CareerOne.com.au. It showed 74 per cent of of sexual harassment cases went unreported, often because workers feared the impact it would have on their job.

Australian Human Rights Commision sex discrimination commisioner Elizabeth Broderick said the findings were no surprise, and said the dire economic climate would reinforce the culture of silence.

"Job security is now seen as all-important," she said. "People will be reluctant to do anything.

"It's too soon to tell, but I would expect (low levels of reporting) to become worse."
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Arrow Down

Book: Columbine shooters mentally ill, not bullied

Michael Rubinkam
Associated Press
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:35 UTC
Shortly after the massacre at Columbine High School, a question popped into Peter Langman's mind: What would possess a child to pick up a gun, take it to school and mow down his classmates?

His interest wasn't merely academic. Langman, a child psychologist, had been asked to evaluate a teenager who posted a hit list on his Web site.

"To be sitting face to face with someone who was thought to be a potential risk for doing something like a Columbine attack was very intense," Langman says now. "A lot was riding on what we did with him. This was a potential mass murderer."

Since there was very little research at the time to guide him, Langman says, he felt an "ethical obligation" to learn all he could about the psychology of school shooters. The result of his decade-long inquiry: a book that plumbs the lives of 10 notorious school shooters - including Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho - to draw conclusions about what set them off.
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Heart - Black

US: Shaken baby cases on the increase

Carey Goldberg
Boston.com
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:30 UTC
Specialists link rise to economic stress

Cases of the potentially devastating brain injury known as shaken baby syndrome have at least doubled in the last few months, a jump that Massachusetts child abuse specialists say is apparently influenced by families' economic stress.

Child protection teams at Children's Hospital Boston and Massachusetts General Hospital, which consult on many of the state's cases of maltreatment, have seen nine infants with shaken baby syndrome in the last three months, compared with four in the same period last year.

The number of cases of brain trauma has increased statewide, officials say, amid an overall rise in child abuse and neglect reports of 8 percent in the 2008 fiscal year, compared with the previous year.
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Syringe

Spinal Taps Carry Higher Risks For Infants And Elderly


ScienceDaily
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:24 UTC
An X-ray-guided spinal tap procedure fails more than half of the time in young infants and should be used sparingly, if at all, for those patients, according to a new study done by researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

The study also shows that the X-ray-guided form of spinal tap, called fluoroscopy-guided lumbar puncture, causes a doubling in risk of bleeding for patients older than 80 compared to younger patients and that the risk of bleeding caused by the procedure can be reduced by doing the puncture at the middle of the lower back rather than at the lowest levels of the spine.
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Pills

US study: Provigil, a narcoleptic drug, may be addictive

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:17 UTC
Provigil, a narcolepsy drug increasingly used by healthy people to boost brain performance, may be addictive in vulnerable people and should be monitored, U.S. drug abuse experts said on Tuesday.

A pilot study on 10 healthy men found that at normal doses, the Cephalon Inc (CEPH.O) drug known generically as modafinil increases levels of the reward chemical dopamine in the same part of the brain that becomes active with other drugs of abuse.

"It has the signature that it could potentially be addictive," said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Pills

Drug Maker Told Studies Would Aid It, Papers Say

Roni Caryn Rabin
New York Times
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:10 UTC
An influential Harvard child psychiatrist told the drug giant Johnson & Johnson that planned studies of its medicines in children would yield results benefiting the company, according to court documents dating over several years that the psychiatrist wants sealed.
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Health

Spinal cord device helped mice with Parkinson's

Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 02:06 UTC
Chicago - A spinal cord stimulator helped rodents with Parkinson's disease move more easily, offering the hope of a less-invasive way of treating the disease in humans, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

"We see an almost immediate and dramatic change in the animal's ability to function when the device stimulates the spinal cord," said Dr. Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University in North Carolina, whose study appears in the journal Science.

If it works in humans, Nicolelis said, the device could be used to treat the disease early on, reaching far more patients than current stimulators, which are implanted deep in the brain, and can benefit only about one third of Parkinson's patients.
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