Health & WellnessS


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Kava Kava has Many Health Benefits and Uses

Henri Junttila
NaturalNews
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:00 UTC
Kava is a well-known herb that originated in the Pacific. Also scientifically known as Piper Methysticum, the roots and stem hold the key ingredient that has been used for medicinal purposes both in traditional and modern times.

Traditionally chewed or crushed to form a liquid, Kava can now be commonly found in capsules, teas and liquids aimed at reducing a variety of stress and anxiety related conditions and illnesses.

Scientific research has pinpointed its effectiveness whereby in terms of neurotransmission, feel good vibes are sent to the brain which then aids muscle relaxation, increases concentration, decreases insomnia, lowers inhibitions and can also be suitable for pain such as back aches or hyperactivity in children. Although there is no absolute evidence, it has been suggested that Kava may affect serotonin and dopamine neurotransmitters.

Extracts of the Kava root have been processed to provide the population with immediate access to the various associated health benefits. Other health benefits of this herbal remedy include help for asthma, urinary tract infections, depression and menopausal symptoms. Due to its calming and muscle relaxing qualities, it has provided a health improvement to many that would have otherwise still have been suffering.
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Probiotic Found to be Effective Treatment for Colitis In Mice


ScienceDaily
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:00 UTC
The probiotic, Bacillus polyfermenticus, can help mice recover from colitis, a new study has found. Mice treated with B. polyfermenticus during the non-inflammatory period of the disease had reduced rectal bleeding, their tissues were less inflamed and they gained more weight than mice that did not receive the treatment.

Colitis is a disease in which the inner tissue of the colon, the mucosa, becomes inflamed and damaged and can result in painful sores. Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease are the two major types of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). It is not yet known what causes the diseases, but both are believed to be the result of altered intestinal immune responses in genetically predisposed individuals.

A probiotic is a live microorganism -- in this case, a bacterium -- that benefits its host. B. polyfermenticus is available in Japan and Korea to treat intestinal disorders such as diarrhea and constipation. The bacterium is quite hardy and can survive the hostile environment of the stomach and intestine.

The study not only provided evidence of B. polyfermenticus' usefulness in treating colitis during the non-inflammatory phase, but also showed that it works by healing intestinal wounds more quickly by encouraging the growth of new blood vessels, a process known as angiogenesis.
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Faulty 'Wiring' in the Brain Triggers Onset of Schizophrenia


ScienceDaily
Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:00 UTC
A new study by researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP), King's College London has discovered abnormalities in the white matter of the brain that seem to be critical for the timing of schizophrenia. The study, led by Professor Phillip McGuire and Dr Sophia Frangou, has been published in this month's edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The white matter of the brain consists of nerve fibres that connect parts of the brain and help regulate behaviour. The normal brain develops in a back to front fashion, i.e. posterior regions mature first and the frontal lobes last. The research discovered that if there are very severe deficits in the white matter in these posterior (specifically parietal) regions, then schizophrenia develops early in adolescence. As people grow older their deficits "migrate" in a back to front manner and in adulthood, they impact the frontal lobes of the brain quite dramatically.

Schizophrenia is a disabling and emotionally devastating illness that affects about one per cent of the population worldwide. Professor McGuire, from the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and IoP comments: 'Although we can trace the origins of schizophrenia to early brain development we still do not know what triggers the onset of the full blown symptoms. Our study suggests that at least part of the answer lies in problems affecting the "wiring" of key brain areas.'
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People

Are Women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?

Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara's Blog
Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:56 UTC
Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness, a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate's DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos... and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: "[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach... [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."

But it's a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's mood.
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Syringe

Nurses Sick From the Swine Flu Vaccine in Sweden


Health Freedom Alliance
Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:04 UTC
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© Unknown
190 Adverse Reactions 1 Suspected Death

Yesterday 30 people had been reporting to the authorities in Sweden that they experienced such severe side effects that they felt the need to contact a hospital. Today the number is 140. The Swedish newspaper Expressen is the only one in Sweden reporting on these cases and as usual this is most likely only the tip of a rather large iceberg.

Update: According to Dagens Nyheter, the number of reported side effects are now a few hours later 190. 1 person dies after the injection but "no direct relation with the injection has been established". The biggest medical scandal in the history of Sweden has just started.

Even so, Annika Linde, director of The Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SMI) manages to spin this into something positive by stating "The vaccine has more side effects than the normal flu vaccine. It is a sign that proves that it gives an effective protection."
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Bizarro Earth

Reality Bites

Joyce Marcel
Commondreams.org
Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:03 UTC
If you're like me, at some point in the past few years you've had the conversation about why there are so many dead bodies -- fake dead bodies -- on television.

We have dead bodies lying on slabs in the morgue on most of the "Law & Order" franchises -- and there are three of them, plus endless reruns. We have three "CSI" (Crime Scene Investigation) franchises, one each in Las Vegas, Miami and New York. We have two naval crime shows, although only one has an autopsy component. And only one has Mark Harmon, which is reason enough for watching.

Then we have all the non-uniformed detective shows -- the dead bodies battered, spattered, tossed, drowned, ripped apart or what have you just to jump-start the plot. Plus the British shows which pop up on PBS stations. Even "Inspector Lewis," the upscale British mystery series set in the ancient town of Oxford, England, features an occasional conversation around a slab.
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Regulating Emotion after Experiencing a Sexual Assault


Medical News Today
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:00 UTC
After exposure to extreme life stresses, what distinguishes the individuals who do and do not develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? A new study, published in the October 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry, suggests that it has something to do with the way that we control the activity of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region thought to orchestrate our thoughts and actions.

Researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine examined women who had been the victims of violent sexual assault, some of whom developed PTSD and others who did not develop any serious emotional symptoms afterwards. Using a brain imaging technique, they evaluated the ability of these women to voluntarily modify their own responses to unpleasant emotional stimuli and found that it was the trauma history itself, not how well they endured this sort of trauma, that influenced their ability to dampen subsequent emotional responses.

Surprisingly, however, the ability of the subjects to amplify their emotional responses to unpleasant stimuli was related to psychological outcome after the sexual assault. The resilient individuals, that is, those who endured sexual assault without developing emotional symptoms, were able to enhance the activation of emotional brain circuitry in response to unpleasant stimuli more than either those with PTSD or healthy controls who had never experienced a serious sexual assault.
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Link Between Pesticides Exposure And Suicidal Thoughts

Melanie Haberstroh
Medical News Today
Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:00 UTC
A new study in China has found that people with higher levels of pesticide exposure are more likely to have suicidal thoughts. The study was carried out by Dr Robert Stewart from the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London together with scientists from Tongde Hospital Zhejiang Province.

The agricultural pesticides commonly used in China are organophosphates which are in wide use in many lower income countries but have been banned in many Western nations. It is well known that they are very dangerous if ingested as an overdose but there is also biological evidence that chronic low-grade exposure to these chemicals, which are very easily absorbed into the body through the skin and lungs, may have adverse effects on mental health. This study is the first epidemiological evidence to suggest possible effects on suicidal thoughts.

The study was carried out in central/coastal China, a relatively wealthy area with a rapidly developing economy. In a very large survey of mental health in rural community residents, participants were also asked about how they stored pesticides. The study found that people who stored pesticides at home, i.e. those with more exposure, were more likely to report recent suicidal thoughts. Supporting this, the survey also found suicidal thoughts to be associated with how easily accessible these pesticides were in the home and that the geographic areas with highest home storage of pesticides also had highest levels of suicidal thoughts in their populations.
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Coffee

Drinking Coffee Slows Progression Of Liver Disease In Chronic Hepatitis C Sufferers


Medical News Today
Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:28 UTC
Patients with chronic hepatitis C and advanced liver disease who drink three or more cups of coffee per day have a 53% lower risk of liver disease progression than non-coffee drinkers according to a new study led by Neal Freedman, Ph.D., MPH, from the NationalCancer Institute (NCI). The study found that patients with hepatitis C-related bridging fibrosis or cirrhosis who did not respond to standard disease treatment benefited from increased coffee intake. An effect on liver disease was not observed in patients who drank black or green tea. Findings of the study appear in the November issue of Hepatology, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infects approximately 2.2% of the world's population with more than 3 million Americans infected. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cites HCV as the leading cause of liver transplantation in the U.S. and accounts for 8,000 to 10,000 deaths in the country annually. Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 3 to 4 million persons contract HCV each year with 70% becoming chronic cases that can lead to cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer.
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Attention

Toxic Waters: Regulatory Absence Allows Chemical, Coal and Farm Industries to Pollute US Water Supplies


Democracy Now
Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:02 UTC
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JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg. For the past several months, he has been working on a series titled "Toxic Waters," examining the worsening pollution in the nation's water systems. Charles Duhigg joined us last month to discuss how chemical companies have violated the Clean Water Act more than 500,000 times in the last five years. Most of the violations have gone unpunished, with state regulators taking significant action in just three percent of all cases.

Since then, he has written articles focusing on how coal-fired power plants and large farms are threatening the nation's drinking water. The Times revealed that 313 coal-fired power plants have violated the Clean Water Act since 2004, but 90 percent of those plants were not fined or otherwise sanctioned. No federal regulations specifically govern the disposal of power plant discharges into waterways or landfills.
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