Health & WellnessS


Heart

The Effects of Weather on Health and How to Prepare

The weather really does affect our moods and health as dramatically as it can affect our roads. Everyone has noticed it to some degree throughout their lives. Folks living in hot climates with the sun looming viciously overhead notice an energy level entirely different from those living further north. Even people just visiting climates completely different from their own are often taken aback by the vast differences in the general attitude of locals compared to that of people back home.

Of course, there are more variables that affect mood than just the weather, but the role of atmospheric conditions on our overall health is a proven field of study of its own. It's not just psychological that there are significantly more suicides in winter months. It's not just a coincidence that mortality rates increase by means of heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia, influenza, etc. during the winter. Claiming that disease is simply more rampant during the winter doesn't explain the increased heart attacks, strokes, or suicides. Rather than blaming a change in disease, we should look at the change within our own bodies.

Sheeple

City Workers Accidentally Dump Hydrochloric Acid into Ohio Water Supply Instead of Toxic Fluoride

When you dump the wrong chemical into the public water supply, it makes people nervous. Yesterday, chemical treatment plant workers in Bellaire, Ohio, accidentally dumped 40 pounds of hydrochloric acid into the public water supply instead of 40 pounds of toxic fluoride chemicals they were supposed to dump.

Falling fluoride levels alerted water treatment officials to the problem, and they immediately issued an alert to tell people to stop drinking the water. The water system was then flushed by opening fire hydrants across the town to remove any trace of hydrochloric acid.

Bulb

Infants learn earlier than thought

Until recently, humans could safely view their brains as fatty, spongy masses of electrifying wonder. Brains are, in a sense, a secret place no one else can tap into unless we let them; they are our memory banks and central control centers that dictate how we behave and reason and interact with others.

But in the past decade, neuroscientists across the world have started to peer into the young brain to determine exactly how we learn. Examining their findings, researchers say that learning starts at birth, and perhaps even earlier.

Ambulance

Students protest flu vaccine

A group of Ball State University students are worried a preservative found in a flu vaccine meant to keep you healthy could lead to harmful side effects.

Book

Research Shows Reading Classic Literature can Improve Personal Ethics

A team of researchers, including John Johnson, professor of psychology at Penn State DuBois, have discovered that literature may inspire readers to be ethical members of society. "As an evolutionary psychologist," said Johnson, "I am especially interested in the impact of literature on the emotions of the reader, and in what function these emotions serve."

Johnson and fellow psychologist, Dan Kruger from the University of Michigan, teamed up with English professors Joe Carroll from the University of Missouri and John Gottschall from Washington and Jefferson College to complete this research and draft an article on their findings. Their article, "Hierarchy in the Library: Egalitarian Dynamics in Victorian Novels," appeared in the December issue of Evolutionary Psychology.

Magnify

Hypnosis and Dissociative Disorders of the Self

Think about your daily routine. From the minute you wake up in the morning, to the moment you get back into bed at the end of the day, you generally take on a wide number of different personalities. The way you conduct yourself with your family would not be the same way in which you conduct yourself with your friends, which is definitely not the way you conduct yourself at work. Surely, if you spot a courageous fool walking around with a foul mouth at work, spewing hate and inappropriate language left and right, you would learn to avoid him. You shift your normal personality to best fit your environment, as a result creating a whole new one.

At the end of the day, when we settle back into bed, we once again become the person that we truly know we are. Our abilities to transcend through different personalities is fascinating, but what's more fascinating is that we are constantly aware of who we truly are. There is a statistically small group of people in the world that suffers from a personality disorder that takes away from their given ability to differentiate their personalities. This is known as dissociative personality disorder or better known as multiple personality disorder (MPD).

MPD had only been inducted into the DSM-III in 1980, having been most often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia before. The correct definition is when "a system of thought can be split off from the primary personality, congealing over time as a secondary personality that is unconscious, but which can be accessed by hypnosis."

Health

US: School: Hundreds Sick With Mystery Illness

Parents Asked To Keep Students Home

Boston, Massachusetts - School officials at Bishop Feehan High School in Attleboro aren't sure what has caused it, but they say 20 percent of the school's 1,025-member student body is sick with a flu-like illness.

The situation has caused enough concern that the school has sent an e-mail to parents asking them to keep their children home if they appear to be ill.

The Catholic school south of Boston has seen 220 students come down with a variety of symptoms ranging from fever and chills to body aches, a harsh cough and a sinus type of headache, Principal Bill Runey said.

Comment: Flu vaccinations may not be the best alternative for staving the flu. You might be better off with good hygiene and lots of rest.

In fact, putting the word "vaccine" in the Sott search function will bring up a plethora of articles stating just how dangerous vaccines really are.

Here's an article to get you started.


Sherlock

Researchers Discover New Schizophrenia Gene

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are one gene closer to understanding schizophrenia and related disorders. Reporting in the Jan. 9 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the team describes how a variation in the neuregulin 3 gene influences delusions associated with schizophrenia.

"Neuregulin 3 is clearly one more gene to add to the few currently known to contribute to schizophrenia," says David Valle, M.D., director of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Hopkins. "There's much more to do, but we're making progress."

Schizophrenia is a varied condition with a number of symptoms not shared by all affected. This could be one reason why it's been difficult to identify genes that contribute to the condition.

To address this, the team first rigorously separated the 73 different symptoms into nine distinct factors associated with the condition - prodromal, negative, delusion, affective, scholastic, adolescent sociability, disorganization, disability, hallucination.

Einstein

Muscle Movement Affects How We Hear

The area of the brain responsible for movement plays a larger role than previously thought in how we hear speech.

It makes sense to us that the movement of our face helps in the production of words. We move our mouth to create words. But does it follow, then, that feeling a certain muscle movement in our face helps us hear words?

Researchers recently reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that altering the way facial skin moves, changes the way a person hears a word.

Family

Attention, Shopaholics: Your Weakness May Be a Proper Disease

First there was John A. Thain's $87,000 rug. Then there was Citigroup's planned $50 million corporate jet.

Then the world of politics got involved this week when the New York State inspector general released a report saying that Antonia C. Novello, the former state commissioner of health, had such an ingrained tendency for shopping that she had employees from her office squire her on buying expeditions to Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue and three different Albany-area malls.

Ill-advised shopping has certainly turned up recently in the news, and yet the issue also forms the core of a much more contentious and continuing debate. As spenders spend while the economy plummets, the psychiatric world is trying to decide whether compulsive buying should actually be considered a disease.