Health & WellnessS


Health

Changing Thoughts Key to Battling Even Severe Depression


Science Daily
Fri, 14 May 2010 15:53 UTC
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© Unknown
Moderate to severely depressed clients showed greater improvement in cognitive therapy when therapists emphasized changing how they think rather than how they behave, new research has found.

The results suggest cognitive therapists should concentrate, at least during the first few sessions, on using cognitive techniques to help those with more severe depression to break out of negative thought patterns and to see events in their lives more realistically.

The study found that a concentration on changing behavior -- such as having patients schedule activities to get them out of the house, and tracking how they spent their time -- did not significantly predict subsequent change in depressive symptoms.

"There has been a lot of attention recently on behavioral approaches to treating severe depression, and that may lead some people to suspect that cognitive techniques are not important for more severely depressed patients," said Daniel Strunk, co-author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University.
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Health

Mum Knows Best? Research Suggests Pregnant Women Are More Likely to Follow Their Mothers' Wisdom Than Medical Advice


Science Daily
Fri, 14 May 2010 15:38 UTC
Researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London have found that pregnant and postnatal women, while wanting to do the best for their baby, do not follow medical advice without question and are more likely to adopt practices their mothers and grandmothers carried out during their pregnancies.

The study by Professor Paula Nicolson and Dr Rebekah Fox from the Department of Health and Social Care at Royal Holloway is published in the Journal of Health Psychology and explores three recent generations of women's experiences of pregnancy, questioning those who gave birth in the 1970s, 1980s and 2000s.

The women who were interviewed said they knew their mothers and grandmothers had their best interests at heart when they offered them advice. For the older women questioned, the advice from their female relations was their main source of information.

The 1980s and 2000s group, however, had to reconcile what they heard from older generations with direct advice from their doctors, midwives and health visitors as well as the numerous health messages on the web and self-help books.
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Health

Family child care providers' behavior found to affect children's stress


Science Daily
Fri, 14 May 2010 15:31 UTC
A new study on preschoolers attending full-day child care in licensed day care homes has found increases in cortisol, a stress hormone, when the children are in child care that exceeds their levels at home. The increases were larger in day care homes where providers were intrusive or overcontrolling.

The study, in the May/June 2010 issue of the journal Child Development, was conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota, Georgetown University, and the Oregon Social Learning Center.

The researchers looked at about 150 mostly White, largely middle-class 3- and 4-year-olds in 110 different family child care homes, observing the children's behavior at child care as well as the behavior of their care providers, and sampling saliva to measure cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone that helps individuals adapt to challenges and stretches their coping skills.
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Health

Poor Children More Vulnerable to Effects of Poor Sleep


Science Daily
Fri, 14 May 2010 15:24 UTC
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© Unknown
Elementary-school-age children from poor families are more vulnerable to the effects of poor sleep than their peers. That's the finding of a new study that assessed the ties between children's sleep and their emotional development.

The study, by researchers at Auburn University, appears in the May/June 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers looked at how sleep disruptions -- namely, the amount, quality, and schedule of sleep -- affect children's adjustment. They examined more than 140 children in third to fifth grades, of whom three-quarters were White and almost a quarter were African American. Families varied widely in terms of annual income and parents' education and jobs.

The study gathered information from parents' and children's reports, as well as motion sensors worn by the children at night to examine their sleep. The researchers looked at relations between sleep and emotional development when children were in third and fifth grades; they also compared how children's sleep when they were in third grade was related to their well-being when they were in fifth grade.
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Arrow Down

1,200 Patients Killed in Hospital, Abused by Staff, Lying in Filth

Ethan A. Huff
NaturalNews
Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00 UTC
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© www.midstaffs.nhs.ukMid Staffordshire National Health Service - Stafford Hospital
A huge U.K. health care scandal recently shocked the public with reports that up to 1,200 patients in a British hospital needlessly died from abuse and neglect. And the worst part is that not a single worker involved has been prosecuted for his crimes.

It all started when an independent review of the U.K.'s Mid Staffordshire National Health Service (NHS) hospital found that patients there were routinely neglected, bullied, abused and treated poorly. The details of the report include evidence that:
  • Nurses regularly ignored patients and left them unwashed in their own filth for as long as a month, and even ignored requests by patients to use the restroom or have their sheets changed.
  • Four family members, including a newborn baby girl, all died at the hospital due to carelessness and malpractice. The baby had to be delivered by her grandmother because the midwife was not paying attention. Upon birth, the baby was not breathing, but workers resuscitated her. However she died four days later because a junior pediatrician went against the family's wishes and decided to release the sick baby.
  • Patients were regularly released prematurely because medical workers feared they would lose their jobs for perceived "delaying".
  • Hospital wards were filthy and contaminated with blood, used needles, and dirty dressings.
Those workers who had concerns about the horrible conditions at the hospital were bullied by managers into not coming forward with the truth.
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Magnify

Vitamin D Deficiency Finally Being Recognized as Increasingly Common

David Gutierrez
NaturalNews
Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Getty ImagesVitamin D
Doctors are becoming increasingly concerned about growing rates of vitamin D deficiency, leading many of them to recommend that people get more sun or even take supplements.

Vitamin D has long been known to play an important role in bone health. Deficiency can lead to osteoporosis in adults, and in children and some adults can lead to a bone-softening disease known as rickets.

Although the vitamin is synthesized by the body upon exposure to sunlight, people living far from the equator can have trouble producing enough of it in the winter time. For this reason, numerous governments began fortifying dairy products with vitamin D decades ago, leading directly to a near-elimination of rickets. The disease is starting to make a resurgence, however, even as researchers start to believe that humans may need higher levels of the vitamin than previously thought.
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Magnify

Calcium Alone is Not Enough for Healthy Bones

Tony Isaacs
NaturalNews
Thu, 13 May 2010 00:00 UTC
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© Getty ImagesFoods rich in magnesium include green leafy vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, and halibut.
Practically everyone knows that calcium is vital for healthy bones. What many people are unaware of is that calcium alone is not nearly enough to insure that bones remain healthy. There are in fact a number of other vital minerals and nutrients that are essential for maintaining healthy bones, preventing bone loss and even building bone mass. There are also herbs and other items that can help build and maintain healthy bones

Bones are not made from calcium alone. They're an amalgam that includes various minerals such as zinc, boron and copper. Foremost of the additional minerals needed for healthy bones is magnesium, which is actually considered by health experts to be more important for bone health than calcium.

Magnesium is important for many, many areas of health and it is an essential co-factor for calcium. Unless you take magnesium with calcium, your body is unable to properly absorb and utilize calcium. That means that even if you get plenty of calcium, if you do not also get enough magnesium the calcium will be of limited benefit. Alarmingly, various studies and estimates have determined that anywhere from 70 to 95% of us are deficient in magnesium.
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Cow

The Problem with Factory Farms


Dr. Mercola
Thu, 13 May 2010 17:36 UTC
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The book Animal Factory, by David Kirby, takes a close look at factory farms and the problems they cause. In an interview with Time Magazine, Kirby talked these farms and the appalling lack of government oversight.

Among the problems Kirby notes:
"... you're often no longer feeding animals what they're genetically designed to eat. CAFO cows eat a diet of milled grains, corn and soybeans, when they are supposed to eat grass.
The food isn't natural because they very often put growth hormones and antibiotics in it. That becomes a problem when you put that manure on the ground."

Animal Factory also looks at the fate of the Neuse River in North Carolina, where waste runoff from pig farms caused massive fish die-offs.

Sources:

Time Magazine April 23, 2010
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Better Earth

Best of the Web: President's Panel: 'Eat Organic, Ward Off Cancer'

Marion Nestle
The Atlantic
Wed, 12 May 2010 15:10 UTC
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© EraPhernalia Vintage/flickr
Thanks to Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times ("New alarm bells about chemicals and cancer") for telling readers about a report on chemicals and cancer released last week by the President's Cancer Panel.

I had never heard of this panel - appointed during the Bush Administration, no less - and went right to its 2008-2009 annual report (PDF).

The Panel says that the "risk of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated," that "nearly 80,000 chemicals [are] on the market in the United States, many of which are ... understudied and largely unregulated," and that "the public remains unaware ... that children are far more vulnerable to environmental toxins and radiation than adults."
evidence suggests that some environmental agents may initiate or promote cancer by disrupting normal immune and endocrine system functions. The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health, even though we may lack irrefutable proof of harm.
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Red Flag

Bodies of Pregnant Women Polluted with Chemicals Found in Consumer Products

David Gutierrez
Natural News
Thu, 13 May 2010 17:14 UTC
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Every pregnant woman's body is probably contaminated with multiple toxic substances, according to a study conducted by researchers from the Washington Toxics Coalition, the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center and the Toxic-Free Legacy Coalition.

"This study reveals that children spend their first nine months in an environment that exposes them to known toxic chemicals," said study author Erika Schreder. "Pregnant women can't avoid every exposure to these chemicals because they are in so many products. ... We need policies that keep toxic chemicals away from pregnant women and the most vulnerable - the developing fetus."

Researchers analyzed the blood and urine of nine pregnant women and found that all of them tested positive for mercury, bisphenol-A (BPA), at least four phthalates, and two to four perfluorinated compounds.
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