Health & WellnessS


Health

How fear makes some things clear


New Scientist
Sat, 30 May 2009 17:46 UTC
Fear changes how we see things, enhancing our ability to identify blurry shapes but impairing our perception of fine details. This may help us to escape threats.

Looking at a fearful face, which activates the brain in a similar way to feeling fear, enhances sensitivity to visual contrast, but whether it improves vision across the board wasn't clear. So Bruno Bocanegra and René Zeelenberg at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, showed people pictures of faces with either fearful or neutral expressions, followed by a "blob" covered in stripes of varying thicknesses.

Those shown a fearful face were better at identifying whether thick stripes were vertical or slightly tilted and worse at identifying the orientation of thin stripes than those shown neutral faces (Psychological Science, DOI: link).
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Health

Intestinal bacteria associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease


PhysOrg
Sat, 30 May 2009 05:17 UTC
Intestinal permeability and an overgrowth of bacteria in the small intestine are both associated with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). These findings are revealed in a new study in the June issue of Hepatology, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD).

Previous studies have suggested that bacteria from the intestine might play a role in NAFLD, which is the hepatic component of the Metabolic Syndrome. NAFLD can worsen to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, and some experts have wondered if liver exposure to bacteria from the gut could promote this progression.
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Red Flag

Flashback Psychological Warfare Techniques -- Used on Your Doctor


Dr. Mercola
Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:18 UTC
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Pharmaceutical sales reps are trained in tactics that are on par with some of the most potent brainwashing techniques used throughout the world, according to an in-depth report co-written by former Eli Lilly drug rep Shahram Ahari, and Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C..

Pharmaceutical companies spend more than $15 billion each year promoting prescription drugs in the United States.

These campaigns are designed to effectively alter prescribing behavior, to sell more of the high-profit drugs (as opposed to the most effective, and least dangerous).
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Attention

Do Perfectionists Face Early Deaths? Study Suggests Yes

Tom Jacobs
Alternet
Thu, 21 May 2009 18:44 UTC
Perfectionism, as a way of life, tends to be self-defeating. New research suggests it may also be deadly.

That's the conclusion of a Canadian study of senior citizens just published in the Journal of Health Psychology. Researchers conducted psychological tests on 450 elderly residents of southern Alberta, and then kept tabs on them for 6½ years. During that period, just over 30 percent of the subjects, who ranged in age from 65 to 87, died.
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Pills

Why are More Americans Taking Drugs for Mental Illness?


Dr. Mercola
Fri, 29 May 2009 18:00 UTC
Many more Americans have been using prescription drugs to treat mental illness since 1996. In fact, 73 percent more adults and 50 percent more children are using drugs to treat mental illness now than were doing so in 1996.

Among adults over 65, use of so-called psychotropic drugs -- which include antidepressants and antipsychotics -- doubled between 1996 and 2006.

The findings come from several large public surveys of health in the United States, including from the National Center for Health Statistics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Social Security Administration.
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Magnify

1,000 Species of Bacteria Found on Healthy Humans

Karen Kaplan
Los Angeles Times
Fri, 29 May 2009 17:44 UTC
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© Julia Segre, National Human Genome Research InstituteMicrobes: Through studies of skin bacteria, researchers hope to learn more about eczema and other skin diseases.
The organisms that inhabit the skin may not be the bad guys. They probably enable the body to function properly, researchers say in the journal Science.

Here's a finding that'll make your skin crawl: A healthy human epidermis is colonized by roughly 1,000 species of bacteria.

Furthermore, the microorganisms have evolved to exploit the unique attributes of those body parts they call home, according to a study to be published today in the journal Science.
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Blackbox

New swine flu cases point to "invisible" pandemic

Debora MacKenzie
New Scientist
Fri, 29 May 2009 17:18 UTC
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© KPA / Zuma / Rex FeaturesRussian scientists are trying to create a vaccine against swine flu in the Flu Scientific Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences in St Petersburg
Hospitals in Greece have identified H1N1 swine flu in two students who had no contact with known cases of the virus and had not been in countries with widespread infection. The infections were discovered even though the students should not have been tested for swine flu under European rules. The Greek authorities say this shows the rules must change.

Indeed, an investigation by New Scientist earlier this month showed that the EU rules would exclude exactly such cases and could make H1N1 appear much less widespread in Europe than it is.

Takis Panagiotopoulos of the Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in Athens and colleagues reported on 28 May in Eurosurveillance, a weekly bulletin published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, Sweden, that two Greek men returning home from Scotland had tested positive this week for H1N1 swine flu.
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Attention

Food Companies Are Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers

Michael Moss
The New York Times
Thu, 14 May 2009 02:51 UTC
The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.

The pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. It also tried cooking the vegetables at high temperatures, a strategy the industry calls a "kill step," to wipe out any lingering microbes. But the vegetables turned to mush in the process.

So ConAgra - which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label - decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The "food safety" instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: "Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots."
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Footprints

How the American Medical Association Got Rich

Dana Ullman
Natural News
Fri, 08 May 2009 18:30 UTC
History reveals that the AMA was dictatorially led for the first half of the twentieth century by George H. Simmons, MD (1852-1937) and his protégé, Morris Fishbein, MD (1889-1976). Simmons and Fishbein both served as general manager of the organization and as editor of its journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). While these two leaders provided substantial benefit to the organization and to medical doctors, their methods of doing so have been severely criticized, with some historians referring to them as "medical Mussolinis."
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Syringe

Patient detained at border: Cancer Drug erases fingerprints

S. L. Baker
Natural News
Thu, 28 May 2009 14:04 UTC
Imagine being treated like a suspected criminal or terrorist by immigration officials all because you have cancer and your doctor gave you a drug that causes a strange side effect -- your fingerprints have disappeared into thin air. Does that sound like a novel or movie plot? Unfortunately for one 62-year-old cancer patient, and possibly others, this was anything but fiction.

In a letter just published in the cancer journal Annals of Oncology, Dr Eng-Huat Tan, a cancer specialist in the medical oncology department at the National Cancer Centre in Singapore, reported on a perplexing case of missing fingerprints due to the cancer drug capecitabine. And he has warned that other people taking the drug should start carrying a doctor's letter with them if they want to travel to the U.S.

Here's what happened: Dr. Tan's 62-year-old patient (known only as Mr. S., due to privacy considerations) was suffering from metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma -- a head and neck cancer that had spread. Fortunately, the malignancy had responded well to treatment and, in hopes of preventing a recurrence of the malignancy, the patient was put on capecitabine, the generic name for the drug sold in the U.S. as Xeloda. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in some people, capecitabine stops cancer cells from growing and decreases the size of tumors. But it also can produce a host of adverse side-effects including severe diarrhea, life-threatening bleeding and hand-foot syndrome. The latter problem is a condition that stems from chronic inflammation of the palms and/or soles of the feet. It makes the skin peel, bleed and develop ulcers or blisters. "This can give rise to eradication of finger prints with time," Dr. Tan stated in his letter.
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