Health & WellnessS


Health

Propaganda Alert! VA Says Six Percent of Combat Vets Have TBIs

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Comment: The report would like to 'talk it down' and have us believe that trauma and brain injury is only a minor problem for soldiers at war, affecting only an insignificant minority. An assertion which does not stand up to scrutiny in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary:

Undiagnosed brain injury - the hidden legacy of Iraq

Thousands of GIs cope with brain damage


Low Morale Has U.S. Troops in Iraq Pretending to Patrol

Soldiers in silent revolt in Iraq

Pentagon Denies Increase in Troops' Suicides a Result of War

Shelters take many vets of Iraq, Afghan wars

The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness

Soldiers to learn signs of stress, brain injury. Army program aims to encourage troops to seek treatment, remove stigma

Depression may play a bigger role in readjustment than previously thought in troubled vets

Overstretched armed forces leading to mental health problems

Study shows fallout! Iraq veterans suffer stress and alcoholism

Iraq commanders say no to mental health breaks in combat

Insanity Alert! Pentagon may drop mental health question

Finding therapists proves hard for troops

Parrots, war vets team up in L.A. healing program

Treating trauma: Veterans programmed to kill and later thrown away.


Bulb

Training and experience can affect brain organization, research shows

New research comparing music conductors and non-musicians shows that both the conductors and the non-musicians "tuned out" their visual sense while performing a difficult hearing task. As the task became harder, however, only the non-musicians tuned out more of their visual sense, indicating that the training and experience of the conductors changed how their brains work.

The research, a joint project of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) Music Research Institute, was presented today at the 37th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, Calif.

The study involved 20 conductors and 20 musically untrained subjects. The subjects were between the ages of 28-40, and the conductors had an average of more than 10 years of experience as a band or orchestra director in middle or high school.

People

Diabetes "coach" may help diabetic teenagers

A "personal trainer" can enhance an adolescent's motivation and capability of managing diabetes, according to a randomized trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Tonja R. Nansel, at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues developed a program to provide young type 1, or "insulin-dependent," diabetics with one-on-one interaction with a facilitator to improve self-monitoring, goal-setting, and problem-solving.

Attention

Cargill recalls 1 million pounds of ground beef in U.S.

Agricultural giant Cargill Inc said on Saturday it was recalling more than 1 million pounds of ground beef distributed in the United States because of possible E. coli contamination.

Cargill Meat Solutions said the 1.084 million pounds (491,700 kg) of ground beef was produced at the Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, facility between October 8 and October 11, and distributed to retailers across the country.

Syringe

Flashback New York's HIV experiment

HIV positive children and their loved ones have few rights if they choose to battle with social work authorities in New York City.

Comment: For further reading, we recommend "Out of control: AIDS and the corruption of medical science" by Celia Farber, which has been published in the March 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine. Ms. Farber provides ample evidence that experimenting on unsuspecting people has become a standard in drug manufacturing:

**America is a place where people rarely say: Stop. Extreme and unnatural things happen all the time, and nobody seems to know how to hit the brakes. In this muscular, can-do era, we are particularly prone to the seductions of the pharmaceutical industry, which has successfully marketed its ever growing arsenal of drugs as the latest American right. The buzzword is "access," which has the advantage of short-circuiting the question of whether the drugs actually work, and of utterly obviating the question of whether they are even remotely safe. This situation has had particularly tragic ramifications on the border between the class of Americans with good health insurance, who are essentially consumers of pharmaceutical goods, and those without insurance, some of whom get drugs "free" but with a significant caveat attached: They agree to be experimented on. These people, known in the industry as "recruits," are pulled in via doctors straight from clinics and even recruited on the Internet into the pharmaceutical industry and the government's web of clinical trials, thousands of which have popped up in recent years across the nation and around the world. Such studies help maintain the industry's carefully cultivated image of benign concern, of charity and progress, while at the same time feeding the experimental factories from which new blockbuster drugs emerge. "I call them what they are: human experiments," says Vera Hassner Sharav, of the Alliance for Human Research Protection in New York City. "What's happened over the last ten to fifteen years is that profits in medicine shifted from patient care to clinical trials, which is a huge industry now. Everybody involved, except the subject, makes money on it, like a food chain. At the center of it is the NIH, which quietly, while people weren't looking, wound up becoming the partner of industry.

By June 2004, the National Institutes of Health had registered 10,906 clinical trials in ninety countries. The size of these trials, which range from the hundreds to more than 10,000 people for a single study, creates a huge market for trial participants, who are motivated by different factors in different societies but generally by some combination of the promise of better health care, prenatal care, free "access" to drugs, and often - especially in the United States - cash payments. Participating doctors, whose patient-care profits have been dwindling in recent years because of insurance-company restrictions, beef up their incomes by recruiting patients." **

Additionally, many pharmaceutical companies take their clinical trials to developing countries because of lesser costs, more lenient laws and the availability of participants, for whom even the unproven drugs represent a major improvement over the standard of care they receive at local hospitals. That often turns deadly, as it was in a recent case of children in a Russian orphanage who died from an experimental measles vaccine. The manufacturer of the vaccines, a Belgian company, suffered no penalty.


Heart

Onions 'cut heart disease risk'

Eating a meal rich in compounds called flavonoids reduces some early signs of heart disease, research shows.


Gear

Small Amounts Fluoride Destroy The Will To Resist

The following letter was received by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954, from Mr. Charles Perkins, a chemist:

"I have your letter of September 29 asking for further documentation regarding a statement made in my book, The Truth About Water Fluoridation, to the effect that the idea of water fluoridation was brought to England from Russia by the Russian Communist Kreminoff. "In the 1930's, Hitler and the German Nazi's envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass-control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in women, and so on. In this scheme of mass-control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place.

Attention

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Tap Water

That nutjob senator from Oklahoma had it wrong: It's not climate change that's the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American People.

It's bottled water. Way back at the Bioneers conference in 2005, when I traded my Nalgene bottle for a stainless steel Klean Kanteen, which I fill with filtered tap water, I had reservations about drinking bottled water that had been transported from Australia/Fiji/England/France/Venus in plastic. I was only concerned about my health back then, not so much the planet.

But after reading about plastic in the oceans, plastic in the landfills, the environmental cost of manufacturing and disposing of plastic bottles and this:

Question

Flashback Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn't the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley's venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he's renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.

Bomb

Emotional Intelligence and the use of tobacco and cannabis

The term Emotional Intelligence could be defined as the capacity to perceive, comprehend and regulate one's own emotions and those of others so as to be able to distinguish between emotions and use this information as a guide for one's thoughts and actions. One of the important benefits of developing this type of intelligence is the ability to learn how to interact with others and to face an ever changing social and cultural world more effectively.


Comment: In other words, so called "emotional intelligence" is a defense/dumping mechanism or buffer against ever increasing stress of everyday reality.


The Stress and Health Research Group (GIES) of the UAB Department of General, Development and Educational Psychology has carried out a research entitled "Perceived emotional intelligence and its relation to tobacco and cannabis use among university students".The objective of this research consisted in analysing the possible relation between EI and the use of tobacco and cannabis among 133 UAB psychology students with an average age of 21.5.