Health & WellnessS


Pills

Warning: drug ads are harmful to your health

S. L. Baker
NaturalNews
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:40 UTC
If you watch TV or ever flip through a glossy magazine, you are bound to have seen ads conjured up by Big Pharma working with slick advertising agencies. As it turns out, what they are selling isn't necessarily health -- or the truth. They are pushing pills, even if they have to twist the facts a bit about what their drugs do, who needs them and why. Now a new study just published in the American Journal of Public Health concludes this prescription drug direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) carries significant risks for the public.

Currently, some members of Congress, including Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), are calling for stricter FDA regulations of DTCA because the ads can lead to inappropriate prescribing. They also portray what may be a non-medical problem (such as over-active bladder, the latest "malady" discovered by Big Pharma) as a treatable medical illness requiring side-effect-laden medication.
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Does High Cholesterol REALLY Cause Heart Disease?


Second Opinions
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:12 UTC
An Interview with Uffe Ravnskov MD, PhD.

Part 1: The Cholesterol Hypothesis

Q: When did you begin to suspect that the cholesterol theory of atherosclerosis might be wrong? What led you to this conclusion? Before then, had you believed in the cholesterol theory? Was this part of your training?

UR: I have never thought that it was true. I heard about it for the first time in 1962 shortly after having got my MD. My biochemical knowledge was still intact at that time and I knew that cholesterol was one of the most important molecules in our body, indispensable for the building of our cells and for producing stress and sex hormones as well as vitamin D. The idea that cholesterol in the blood should kill use if its concentration is a little higher than normally, as they wrote in the Framingham paper, seemed to me just as silly as to claim that yellow fingers cause lung cancer.
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Bad Guys

The Reality Behind the Swine Flu Conspiracy

Irina Galushko
RT
Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:39 UTC
The message is clear - we are all going to die from swine flu. It spreads fast, it is dangerous, and it must be feared - says the World Health Organization.

But worry not - there is a way to save yourself. Just get a flu shot - and purchase a remedy for the deadly virus. Those are the instructions from the WHO.

However, the WHO may find itself coughing up explanations, as more and more scientists and health researchers, and even journalists, are starting to question the organization's motives behind raising the alert so quickly.
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Radar

Direct Evidence Of Role Of Sleep In Memory Formation Is Uncovered


ScienceDaily
Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:36 UTC
Image
© Stockphoto/Mads Abildgaard
A Rutgers University, Newark and Collége de France, Paris research team has pinpointed for the first time the mechanism that takes place during sleep that causes learning and memory formation to occur.

It's been known for more than a century that sleep somehow is important for learning and memory. Sigmund Freud further suspected that what we learned during the day was "rehearsed" by the brain during dreaming, allowing memories to form. And while much recent research has focused on the correlative links between the hippocampus and memory consolidation, what had not been identified was the specific processes that cause long-term memories to form.
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Why Emotional Pain Really Affects Us

Steve Pogonowski
Medical News Today
Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
Have you ever felt overly upset by a social snubbing? Your genetics, not your friends, may be at fault.

Scientists have long known that opium-like painkillers, called opioids, relieve not only physical pain, but also some forms of emotional stress. Now, a new study reviewed by Faculty of 1000 Biology member Markus Heilig shows that small genetic differences in the gene for the opioid receptor can determine the intensity of people's responses to social rejection.

In the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles questioned people about their responses to social rejection, which is a form of emotional stress.
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How Mental Imagery Training Aids Perceptual Learning

Michael Mitchell
Medical News Today
Sat, 05 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
Practice makes perfect. But imaginary practice? Elisa Tartaglia of the Laboratory of Psychophysics at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and team show that perceptual learning - learning by repeated exposure to a stimulus - can occur by mental imagery as much as by the real thing. The results, published in Current Biology, suggest that thinking about something over and over again could actually be as good as doing it.

"When trained, radiologists are able to detect anomalies on medical images which are extremely hard to detect for untrained people," Tartaglia says. "The results of our study would predict that mental imagery training, hence, repeatedly mentally visualizing the anomalies that one wants to detect, would be sufficient to become able to detect them."

In a series of experiments, the scientists asked some participants to practice identifying which line, the right or the left in a series of parallel lines, a central line was closest to and to identify it by pushing the correct button. In follow-up, "post-training" exercises, these participants improved their baseline performance significantly.
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Info

'Slim Fast' Recalls All Shakes, Diet Drinks

Brian Hartman
ABC News
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:39 UTC
Slim Fast is recalling every last one of its popular diet drinks over concern they may be contaminated with bacteria that can cause moderate food poisoning. All cans and cartons of ready-to-drink Slim Fast products -- about 10 million of them -- are affected, "regardless of flavor, best-by date, lot code or UPC number," the recall notice reads.

Unilever, which makes Slim Fast, said the recall was prompted by "quality testing" that turned up Bacillus cereus, a toxin that can cause nausea and diarrhea but that is not life-threatening.

A Food and Drug Administration official said the inspection that uncovered the B. cereus was conducted after several consumers complained to the company. The official said FDA has received "a handful of complaints from time to time about this product but not recently."
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Penis Pump

'All men' have watched porn, scientists find

Jonathan Liew
Telegraph.co.uk
Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:41 UTC
Scientists at the University of Montreal launched a search for men who had never looked at pornography - but couldn't find any.

Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.

But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not seen it.

"We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography," said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. "We couldn't find any."

Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examined the habits of those young men who used pornography - which would appear to be all of them.

Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old.

Around 90 per cent of consumption was on the internet, while 10 per cent of material came from video stores.
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Trawling the Brain

Laura Sanders
Science News
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:00 UTC
New findings raise questions about reliability of fMRI as gauge of neural activity

The 18-inch-long Atlantic salmon lay perfectly still for its brain scan. Emotional pictures - a triumphant young girl just out of a somersault, a distressed waiter who had just dropped a plate - flashed in front of the fish as a scientist read the standard instruction script aloud. The hulking machine clunked and whirred, capturing minute changes in the salmon's brain as it assessed the images. Millions of data points capturing the fluctuations in brain activity streamed into a powerful computer, which performed herculean number crunching, sorting out which data to pay attention to and which to ignore.

Image
© C. Bennett/UCSBA region of a dead Atlantic salmon's brain appeared to glow with activity (red) in response to emotional scenes. Statistical checks corrected the spurious findings.
By the end of the experiment, neuroscientist Craig Bennett and his colleagues at Dartmouth College could clearly discern in the scan of the salmon's brain a beautiful, red-hot area of activity that lit up during emotional scenes.

An Atlantic salmon that responded to human emotions would have been an astounding discovery, guaranteeing publication in a top-tier journal and a life of scientific glory for the researchers. Except for one thing. The fish was dead.
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Adults Have Dreamlike Thoughts During Sleepwalking and Sleep Terrors Episodes


ScienceDaily
Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00 UTC
A study in the Dec.1 issue of the journal Sleep shows that short, unpleasant, dreamlike mental activity occurs during sleepwalking and sleep terrors episodes, suggesting that people with these sleep disorders may be acting out dreamlike thoughts.

Results show that 71 percent of participants reported at least one incident of dreamlike mental content associated with an episode of sleepwalking or sleep terrors, and the action in the dreamlike thoughts corresponded with the observed behavior. A total of 106 reports of dreamlike mental activity were collected; the mental content was brief, with 95 percent of the reports involving a single visual scene.

These dreamlike thoughts were frequently unpleasant, with 84 percent involving apprehension, fear or terror; 54 percent involving misfortune, in which injury, mishap or adversity occurred through chance or environmental circumstances; and 24 percent involving aggression, with the dreamer always being the victim. Compared with healthy controls, patients with sleepwalking and sleep terrors reported more severe daytime sleepiness and had four times as many arousals from slow-wave sleep.
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