Health & WellnessS


Bad Guys

Diabetes Drug Linked to Kidney Problems, But FDA Keeps It on the Market Anyway

David Gutierrez
NaturalNews
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
Three days after approving the Eli Lilly and Amylin Pharmaceuticals drug Byetta as a stand-alone treatment for Type 2 diabetes, the FDA announced that the drug has been linked to kidney damage.

"Health care professionals and patients taking Byetta should pay close attention to any signs or symptoms of kidney problems," said Amy Egan of the metabolism and endocrinology products division.

Byetta (known generically as exenatide) was first approved in 2005 for use in conjunction with other diabetes drugs only if a patient's blood sugar was failing to respond well to primary treatment. In 2007, the drug was linked to an increased risk of acute pancreatitis, a severe and potentially fatal inflammation of the pancreas. Symptoms of the condition include severe abdominal pain, sometimes with nausea and vomiting.
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Natural Ways Control Your Blood Sugar

Danna Norek
NaturalNews
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
Diabetes has run rampant in our society today. The sad part is that the majority of diabetes cases here in the US can be prevented via dietary and lifestyle changes. Instead, we have been over medicated with insulin shots and other diabetic medications.

Granted, there are some people who are born with strong genetic predisposition to diabetes that need this type of more radical treatment. Those that are insulin dependent just may need to undergo medical treatment. However, the vast majority of diabetics have "acquired" diabetes. How does that happen?

Most of the time, those who get diabetes later in life had some sort of genetic factor which facilitated its development. Diet is the number one factor identified as causing this jump from pre-diabetic conditions to diabetes. The kicker is that these diet modifications not only apply to diabetes, but also positively impact every facet of your health.
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Natural Treatment Helps Hair Loss in Women

Fleur Hupston
NaturalNews
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
Many women are dismayed to see hair falling out in clumps, either following childbirth, during or after menopause or due to other causes. While some daily hair loss is normal, thinning hair and partial baldness is a frightening prospect for women. What causes hair loss in women and what natural treatments are available that are not chemically based or dangerous to health?

Causes of Hair Loss in Women

There are various reasons why a woman's hair may thin or fall out. If hair loss occurs as a result of an underlying condition or disease, the specific condition needs to be treated first.

A woman's hair loss is different to the typical receding hairline and crown loss in men. Instead, androgenetic alopecia causes a general thinning of women's hair, with loss predominantly over the top and sides of the head.
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Health

Medicated in the Cockpit: FAA Says Pilots on Psych Drugs Can Fly Commercial Airliners

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© NaturalNews
What would happen if the Columbine high school rampage shooters who were psyched out on mind-altering antidepressant drugs had been piloting a jet airliner instead? On Friday, the FAA issued a new rule that says pilots taking psychiatric medications are now allowed to pilot passenger airliners while medicated!

This "permission to fly while medicated" decision by the FAA covers pilots taking the antidepressant psychiatric drugs Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa and Lexapro. Not coincidentally, these are the same drugs that, in the minds of many industry observers, are linked to acts of aggression, suicide and mass murder. People on these drugs may simply lose touch with reality and feel like they're playing out a video game rather than acting out in the real world.

It begs the question: Why is the FAA putting medicated pilots in control of jet airliners? What happens if a psych drug medicated pilot suddenly thinks he's in a video game and aims his Boeing 767 at a civilian target "just for the fun of it?" Or what if he goes raving mad, strangles the copilot and then crashes the jet airliner nose-first into the ground?

While this kind of scenario may seem remote, you have to remember: It only takes one such event to cost the lives of hundreds of air passengers (and perhaps thousands of people on the ground).
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Arrow Up

Service dogs help ease war veterans back into life: Relief for PTSD

Janie Lorber
The Columbus Dispatch
Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:59 UTC
Service dog in training
© STEPHEN CROWLEY | THE NEW YORK TIMESA psychiatric service dog in training in the Puppies Behind Bars program
Just weeks after Chris Goehner, 25, an Iraq war veteran, got a dog, he was able to cut in half the dose of anxiety and sleep medications he took for post-traumatic stress disorder. The night terrors and suicidal thoughts that kept him awake for days on end had ceased.

Aaron Ellis, 29, another Iraq veteran with the stress disorder, scrapped his medications entirely soon after getting a dog - and set foot in a grocery store for the first time in three years.

The dogs to whom they credit their improved health are not just pets. Rather, they are psychiatric service dogs specially trained to help traumatized veterans leave the battlefield behind as they reintegrate into society.

Because of stories like these, the federal government, not usually at the forefront of alternative medical treatments, is spending several million dollars to study whether scientific research supports anecdotal reports that the dogs might speed recovery from the psychological wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Attention

AIDS Vaccines Stop Working After a Few Months, Shocked Researchers discover

Ethan A. Huff
NaturalNews
Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:00 UTC
An experimental new AIDS vaccine is proving to be effective for only a very short time, according to researchers who have been finding it difficult to explain whether or not the drug is actually useful. Dr. Nelson Michael, a colonel at the Walter Reed Army Research Institute of Research in Maryland, and his team observed only a minor, temporal benefit in patients who took the vaccine, followed by a decline in efficacy.

The experimental vaccine is a combination of Sanofi-Pasteur's ALVAC canarypox/HIV vaccine and VaxGen's AIDSVAX. After AIDSVAX was found to be ineffective in 2003, researchers decided to combine it with ALVAC to see if that combination would work. Early results appeared to show that the vaccine reduced the risk of becoming infected with AIDS by 31 percent. However within a year, the risk level seemed to return back to normal.

At the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco, the team explained that they may be able to come up with a new trial to verify the legitimacy of the vaccine. Dr. Michael said he plans to work with Dr. Anthony Fauci from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop new trials to be conducted in Asia or Africa.
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Family

What Pregnant Mothers Eat Affects the Skin Health of Newborns

Ethan A. Huff
NaturalNews
Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:00 UTC
A recent study conducted by researchers from Fukuoka University in Japan found that babies born to women who eat high amounts of green and yellow fruits and vegetables, and those rich in beta carotene, have a reduced risk of being born with eczema, a type of condition where dry, itchy red patches emerge on skin.

Most people recognize, even without a study, that eating habits affect a person's health. Nevertheless, Dr. Yoshihiro Miyake and his team evaluated 763 women and their babies to see if there was a link between the mothers' eating and lifestyle habits and the health of their children.

The women who participated in the study were roughly 30 years old and about 17 weeks pregnant when they were asked to provide pertinent information about their lifestyles and medical history. When their babies were between 16 and 24 months old, researchers gathered a second set of data from the women regarding birth and breastfeeding history, family information, and if their children were exposed to any second-hand smoke.
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Heal with Traditional Home and Folk Remedies of Nature

Fleur Hupston
NaturalNews
Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:00 UTC
Folk medicine is the age old wisdom passed down from generation to generation that would traditionally provide cures for minor ailments. Simple remedies dealt with the recurrent minor hazards of life - coughs, colds, sore throats, cuts, bruises and minor burns. Many these days are turning away from conventional medicine and re-discovering simple home cures in order to have a more natural lifestyle.

What are Folk Remedies?

Folk remedies do not provide a miracle cure, but almost anyone can benefit from the healing effects of herbs, flowers, fruits and vegetables. A variety of home grown herbs and vegetables should be eaten on a daily basis as a matter of course to promote good health. Follow the advice of an herbalist for a specific condition as some herbs can be toxic if taken in excess.
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How the Brain Stores Memories of Specific Fears


The Asian News International
Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:07 UTC
Neuroscientists have found that the human brain is capable of holding and retrieving memories for specific fears.

The discovery reveals a more sophisticated storage and recall capacity of the brain than previously thought, boffins claim.

The study, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience, was conducted by researchers at New York University's Center for Neural Science, the Department of Psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine-Bellevue Hospital Center, the Copernicus Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Krakow, Poland, Université Paris-Sud, and the Emotional Brain Institute at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.

The research focused on the brain's amygdala, which has previously been shown to store fear memories.
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How Human Brain Remembers the Future


The Asian News International
Sat, 03 Apr 2010 04:42 UTC
A group of researchers has discovered that the brain saves energy by forecasting what it is likely to see.

Boffins in the Dept. of Psychology at the Univ. of Glasgow, working in collaboration with the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany, claim that the visual cortex does not simply react to visual stimuli but proactively predicts what it is likely to see in any given context.

And by doing so it uses less energy to process images, but if something unexpected were to appear in that familiar environment, the visual cortex becomes more active in order to process this information, reports New Scientist.

"The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again," says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK.
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