Health & WellnessS


Better Earth

Making Too Much Sense! Study: Organic Farming Can Feed the World


Organic Consumers Association
Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:05 UTC
Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as conventional farming in developing countries, and holds its own against standard methods in rich countries, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They said their findings contradict arguments that organic farming -- which excludes the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides -- is not as efficient as conventional techniques.

"My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can't produce enough food through organic agriculture," Ivette Perfecto, a professor at the University of Michigan's school of Natural Resources and Environment, said in a statement.

She and colleagues analyzed published studies on yields from organic farming. They looked at 293 different examples.
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Magic Wand

'Shoulda, woulda, coulda...' New study sheds light on how we would have done things differently


EurekAlert / Association for Psychological Science
Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:38 UTC
If you're like most people, you've probably experienced a shoulda-woulda-coulda moment; a time when we lament our missteps, saying that we should have invested in a certain stock, should have become a doctor instead of a lawyer and so on.

Psychologists refer to this process, in which we evaluate how we would do things differently, as "counterfactual thinking" and while it can have a positive spin, more often than not it is a psychological mechanism that causes us to harbor feelings of disappointment and regret.

In order to study counterfactual thinking, researchers are fond of having participants read stories in which the main character makes decisions that will ultimately doom him or her to failure and then ask these same participants how they would have done things differently.

But this method may not provide a complete picture of this mental process. New research published in the June issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that our counterfactual thinking may be markedly different when we are actually experiencing failure rather than reading about someone else's.

In a series of experiments, Vittorio Girotto of the University IUAV of Venice, Italy and his colleagues attempted to demonstrate and explain the differences in counterfactual thinking between actors (those actually experiencing the problem) and readers (those who merely read about the problem).
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Ambulance

Six-year-old Indonesian boy succumbs to bird flu


AP
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:06 UTC
An Indonesian boy died of bird flu, bringing the death toll to 81 in the only country regularly logging human fatalities from the virus, a health official said yesterday.

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Bomb

Flashback The Bush administration's abuse of science

Editorial opinion
Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, Pa
Sun, 25 Sep 2005 23:21 UTC
Today we are facing a full-fledged national crisis over the role of scientific information in public policy-making. It's a subtle crisis in some ways, often obscured by the complexities of scientific disputation. But it is a crisis nonetheless, one that threatens every one of us because it affects not only public health and the environment, but the way we treat knowledge itself in American society.

©Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh, Pa
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Health

TB Patient Flees Ark. Quarantine


Associated Press
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 22:03 UTC
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - A man placed in isolation after he was diagnosed with contagious tuberculosis broke a hospital window and fled, health officials said.
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Attention

Taunting may affect health of obese youths

Stephen Smith
The Boston Globe
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:15 UTC
Remember that time in third grade when you called the pudgy boy in gym class "fatso?"

It wasn't just mean. It might have inflicted lasting wounds, according to a Yale University study released yesterday that found that overweight and obese children who are subjected to verbal taunts and physical bullying are substantially more prone during childhood to suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, and high blood pressure than their peers.

Yale clinical psychologist Rebecca M. Puhl and a colleague from the University of Hawaii at Manoa reviewed four decades' worth of psychological, social and medical research on childhood obesity -- more than 100 studies. They discovered that taunts, shoves, and social isolation can wreak emotional and physical harm in childhood and possibly beyond that is distinct from the health consequences of being overweight.
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Magnify

Blood test can spot hidden body fat

Roxanne Khamsi
NewScientist
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:03 UTC
A blood test could be used to detect dangerous hidden belly fat, - even if it is buried so deep within the abdomen that a person outwardly appears lean. Scientists say new research indicates that a diagnostic test could be developed to help identify these individuals, who have a higher risk of heart disease and diabetes.

For most people, a simple tape measure can indicate if they are winning the battle of the bulge. But while doctors acknowledge that waist circumference generally correlates with fitness, some seek more sophisticated methods of assessing patients' health.

"Waist circumference correlates to some extent, but it's really a crude measure," explains Barbara Kahn at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, US.
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Attention

Obesity Rates Continue to Climb in the United States


Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:06 UTC
The U.S. obesity prevalence increased from 13 percent to 32 percent between the 1960s and 2004, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Human Nutrition. The prevalence of obesity and overweight has increased at an average rate of 0.3 - 0.8 percentage points across different sociodemographic groups over the past three decades. Some minority and low socioeconomic status groups - such as non-Hispanic black women and children, Mexican-American women and children, low socioeconomic status black men and white women and children, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders - are disproportionately affected. The meta-analysis was published online on May 17, 2007, in advance of the 2007 issue of the journal Epidemiologic Reviews.
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Light Saber

I told the truth all along, says doctor at heart of autism row


The Guardian
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:26 UTC
In his only interview before he appears in front of the General Medical Council to face serious charges of malpractice, the campaigner against the MMR vaccine tells Denis Campbell that he has no regrets
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Health

Medics Continue To Push Psychotropic Drugs Like There Is No Tomorrow

Elizabeth Cohen
CNN
Wed, 11 Jul 2007 05:49 UTC
Dr. Ronald Dworkin tells the story of a woman who didn't like the way her husband was handling the family finances. She wanted to start keeping the books herself but didn't want to insult her husband.

The doctor suggested she try an antidepressant to make herself feel better.

Comment: And that was supposed to SOLVE the problem!? Whatever happened to the Hippocratic oath?

She got the antidepressant, and she did feel better, said Dr. Dworkin, a Maryland anesthesiologist and senior fellow at Washington's Hudson Institute, who told the story in his book "Artificial Unhappiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class." But in the meantime, Dworkin says, the woman's husband led the family into financial ruin.

"Doctors are now medicating unhappiness," said Dworkin. "Too many people take drugs when they really need to be making changes in their lives."

Antidepressants are America's most-prescribed drugs.

Comment: It should be obvious to anyone with any shred of conscience or empathy combined with a competent understanding of human psychology, that the reactions of discomfort, unhappiness and depression are normal healthy responses to the traumatic stimuli provided by the ponerized world that surrounds us.

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