To flip through the latest draft of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in the works for seven years now, is to see the discipline's floundering writ large. Psychiatry seems to have lost its way in a forest of poorly verified diagnoses and ineffectual medications. Patients who seek psychiatric help today for mood disorders stand a good chance of being diagnosed with a disease that doesn't exist and treated with a medication little more effective than a placebo.

Psychopharmacology, or the treatment of the mind and brain with drugs, has come to dominate the field. The positive side is that many illnesses respond readily to medication. The negative side is that the pharmaceutical industry seeks the largest possible market for a given drug, and advertises huge diseases, such as major depression and schizophrenia, the scientific status of which makes insiders uneasy.

While governments and aviation authorities the world over contrive to increase the dose of ionizing radiation travelers are exposed to by installing full body backscatter scanners, the real question we should concern ourselves with is how do we protect our health in the face of the inevitable.

Make no mistake about it, they will be installed and we will be subjected to these searches whether we like it or not. This imposition follows the precedent set after the terror attacks of 9/11. The infringement of civil liberties is nothing new in these times and shouldn't come as a surprise especially as most nations have declared a war on terror.

Supporters of the scanners will probably tell you that this measure is taken with everyone's safety in mind. They will also tell you that the doses of radiation used in the backscatter technology are within safe limits. What they won't tell you is that there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation. The effects of exposure to radiation are cumulative. Increased and repeated exposure accumulates in the body and continues to damage tissue and organs.

Two to three times more pregnant women may soon be diagnosed and treated for gestational diabetes, based on new measurements for determining risky blood sugar levels for the mother and her unborn baby, according to a study that was coordinated by investigators at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"As result of this study, more than 16 percent of the entire population of pregnant women qualified as having gestational diabetes," said lead author Boyd Metzger, M.D., the Tom D. Spies Professor of Metabolism and Nutrition at Feinberg and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. "Before, between 5 to 8 percent of pregnant women were diagnosed with this."

Blood sugar levels that were once considered in the normal range are now seen as causing a sharp increase in the occurrence of overweight babies with high insulin levels, early deliveries, cesarean section deliveries and potentially life-threatening preeclampsia, a condition in which the mother has high blood pressure that affects her and the baby.

Even premature babies at 33 weeks post-conceptional age, about 2 months before term (40 gestational weeks), are capable of recognizing and distinguishing two objects of different shapes (a prism and a cylinder) with their right or left hands. This is the first demonstration of fully efficient manual perception in preterm human infants.

The phenomenon was discovered by researchers at two laboratories: the Laboratoire de psychologie et neurocognition (CNRS / University of Grenoble 2 / University of Chambéry) and the Laboratoire de psychologie de la perception (CNRS / University of Paris Descartes) in cooperation with a team from the Neonatology Department of the Grenoble University Hospitals. The findings have been published on the PLoS One website.

The source of all perceptual knowledge, the sense organs and sensory systems of premature babies are less efficient than those of full-term babies, even though the latter are also not yet fully developed. Starting in the very first minutes after birth, a full-term infant is subjected to extensive tactile stimulation: it is washed, held on its mother's stomach, nursed, diapered, etc. Its body almost immediately experiences contact with skin other than its own, with towels, sheets, nipples -- in short, with objects of different textures, shapes and consistencies. It is common knowledge that a baby will flex its fingers tightly if its palm is touched by a finger, but this grasping reaction is not just a simple reflex. Even in the first hours of its life, a full-term newborn already has effective manual perception, a tactile capacity that enables it to make sense of its environment. But what about the premature infant, whose neurological functions are even less developed due to its early birth?

A mother's nurture may provide powerful protection against risks her baby faces in the womb, according to a new article published online February 25 in the journal Biological Psychiatry. The research shows that fetuses exposed to high levels of stress hormone -- shown to be a harbinger for babies' poor cognitive development -- can escape this fate if their mothers provide them sensitive care during infancy and toddler-hood.

The new study represents the first, direct human evidence that fetuses exposed to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol may have trouble paying attention or solving problems later on. But what may be more intriguing is the study's second finding -- that this negative link disappears almost entirely if the mother forges a secure connection with her baby.

"Our results shape the argument that fetal exposure to cortisol -- which may in part be controlled by the mother's stress level -- and early caregiving experience combine to influence a child's neurodevelopment," said study author Thomas O'Connor, Ph.D., professor of Psychiatry and of Psychology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, and director of the Wynne Center for Family Research. "If future studies confirm these findings, we'll need to not only engineer ways to reduce stress in pregnancy, but we'll need to also promote sensitive care-giving by moms and dads."

Junk food advertising has reached a new low with the recent Doritos "Crash the Super Bowl" ads which portray Doritos consumers as violent murderers who will kill fellow human beings to get a bag of Doritos.

One Doritos ad portrays a man backing out of a parking lot when his car strikes an innocent person who drops a bag of Doritos and falls to the ground behind the car. Rather than trying to help the innocent victim, this man throws his car into reverse and drives over the victim, killing him with the vehicle and stealing the bag of Doritos.

The message? Doritos are so valuable that it's okay to kill people just to score a bag.

A second Doritos ad shows two loser-looking gym bums being attacked by an insane junk food ninja who uses Doritos chips as throwing stars to murder the guy who stole his bag of Doritos. The message here? Doritos are so valuable that it's okay to kill others to defend your snack.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a popular method by which women who are having trouble getting pregnant are able to use donor sperm to achieve pregnancy. In the UK, however, there is a shortage of donor sperm that is causing British women to have to travel to countries like Denmark in order to find some.

A 2005 British law change outlawed the donating of sperm anonymously. UK law also has a long-standing rule that prohibits men who donate from receiving any sort of monetary compensation. Because of these rules, and the fact that many men fear having to provide their identities with the donation because the children may eventually try to find and meet them, few British men are donating sperm these days. As a result, the waiting list to receive IVF in the UK is several years.

In 2007, Denmark changed its laws and now permits anonymous donors, which has led to a surge in foreign women coming there to receive IVF treatment. Danish donors are also compensated between $60 and $200 for their donations which has helped to facilitate a large number of casual donors. The Danish sperm bank, Cryos, is the largest sperm bank in the world and is a popular destination for "infertility tourists" seeking to have children.

Head lice are easily transmitted by head-to head contact or by sharing combs, brushes or caps. Infestations are common in school children but this is not an indication of poor hygiene or dirty hair. Lice lay their eggs along the base of the hair shaft, close to the scalp. Conventional cures include the application of strong smelling insecticides or shampoos which can be harmful to health, especially in the case of small children. Go the natural route in preventing and treating head lice infestations.

Preventing Head Lice

Do not think a problem with lice will not affect you or your family. Inspect your child's head regularly for lice and nits, paying particular attention to the hairline, neck and areas above the ears. If there is an outbreak at your child's school, be even more thorough. To repel lice, comb the hair twice a week with a comb dipped in a mug of warm water containing a few drops of tea tree oil.

Since at least the days of Socrates, humans have been advised to "know thyself." And through all the years, many, including many personality and social psychologists, have believed the individual is the best judge of his or her own personality.

Now a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that we are not the know-it-alls that we think we are.

Simine Vazire, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, has found that the individual is more accurate in assessing one's own internal, or neurotic traits, such as anxiety, while friends are better barometers of intellect-related traits, such as intelligence and creativity, and even strangers are equally adept as our friends and ourselves at spotting the extrovert in us all, a psychology domain known as "extroversion."

"I think that it's important to really question this knee-jerk reaction that we are our own best experts," says Vazire. "Personality is not who you think you are, it's who you are. Some people think by definition that we are the experts on our personality because we get to write the story, but personality is not the story -- it's the reality. So, you do get to write your own story about how you think you are, and what you tell people about yourself, but there still is reality out there, and, guess what? Other people are going to see the reality, regardless of what story you believe."

The night my daughter was born, I was filled with conflicting emotions. I had dreamed, hoped and prayed for a baby and now here she was, at last. While I was overjoyed, I still could not believe that this longed-for, perfect child was actually mine. Caroline, now 15, will always be extra special to me because I never thought I'd be lucky enough to have her. After years of tests to find out why I was not getting pregnant, followed by invasive medical treatment and devastating miscarriages, my beautiful baby, my own miracle, had entered the world.

Nowadays, the IVF treatment I underwent to conceive her is almost commonplace, but back then women like me still felt like pioneers. The birth of the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, had happened only a dozen years earlier. I didn't know anyone who had had a test-tube baby, as they were then called, and the whole experience felt like a leap in the dark. I was undeterred though: like most infertile women, I was driven by an all-consuming need to hold my own child in my arms, whatever the cost.