Category: health

Not Getting Enough Sleep? Camping In February Might Help

It’s tempting to keep the computer running late and promise yourself an extra 30 minutes of bed rest in the morning. It’s tempting to do it again the next night, too. But sleep inevitably loses out to getting up early for school or work.

There’s a simple way to combat this: End all artificial lights at night for at least a weekend and drench your eyes in natural morning light, says Kenneth Wright, a professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and senior author on a study on resetting sleep cycles. The most straightforward way of doing this is to forbid any electronics on a camping trip.

In the study, published Thursday in Current Biology, Wright reports on the latest of a series of experiments where he sent people out camping in Colorado parks to reset their biological clocks. Small groups of people set out for a week during the summer, an experiment published in Current Biology in 2013.

NPR

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper.

NYTimes

Your Brain During Hypnosis

Many skeptics consider hypnotism as some sort of a trick, but being hypnotized really does change the way your brain works. According to a recent study conducted by Dr. David Spiegel, the associate chair of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, reveals interesting facts about how the brain changes during hypnosis.

For the hypnosis study, Spiegel and his colleagues chose 57 people to participate. More than half of the participants were highly hypnotic, whereas 21 did not appear to be successfully hypnotized.

“I hope this study will demonstrate that hypnosis is a real neurobiological phenomenon that deserves attention. We haven’t been using our brains as well as we can. It’s like an app on your iPhone you haven’t used before, and it gets your iPhone to do all these cool things you didn’t know it could do.”

During the study, MRIs were used to display the difference in blood flow through the brain. First, a scan was completed while the participants was resting. Next, the MRI scanned their brains while recalling a memory. Lastly, the participants were scanned while being induced into a hypnotic state.

Inquisitr

You Will Not Believe The Outrageous Ways Big Pharma Has Bribed Doctors To Shill Drugs

At the 2010 meeting of a psychiatric association in New Orleans, a psychiatrist from the East coast shared her anger with me about the recent clamp down on Pharma financial perks to doctors. “They used to wine us and dine us. An SSRI maker flew my entire office to a Caribbean island…but now nothing,” she lamented.

She was right. Before news organizations and the 2010 Physician Financial Transparency Reports (also called the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act) reported the outrageous amount of money Pharma was giving doctors to prescribe its new, brand-name drugs, there was almost no limit to what was spent to encourage prescribing.

At another medical conference I attended, soon after, when it was suggested that doctors not accept free meals from Pharma reps because of indebtedness, a doctor asked in all earnestness “but what do we do for lunch?”

He was right. Doctors seldom have to go hungry at lunchtime when Pharma reps are around. Not only do reps reliably bring lunch and free drug samples, until fairly recently they wielded thousand-dollar budgets to send doctors on trips to resorts, golf vacations and to sought after sports events. No wonder the docs saw them.

NCNP.org

My Sleep Button: for Insomniacs

The purpose of this web page is to explain the scientific rationale of mySleepButton.

mySleepButton is based on a new super-somnolent mentation theory of sleep induction proposed by CogSci Apps Corp. co-founder, Luc P. Beaudoin. Beaudoin published this theory in an open-access paper on March 31, 2013 at Simon Fraser University where he is adjunct professor:

The possibility of super-somnolent mentation: A new information-processing approach to sleep-onset acceleration and insomnia exemplified by serial diverse imagining (MERP Report No. 2013–03).Meta-effectiveness Research Project, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University.

MySleepButton

Report on physician sexual abuse stirs alarm

(CNN)A yearlong investigation conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper, published last week, uncovered thousands of cases of physician sexual abuse spread across every state in America. Emotions ran deep, especially among patient advocates and sexual violence centers.

“The results are very concerning,” said Laura Palumbo, a spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “It is astounding that, at the systemic level, there seem to be conditions where sexual abuse is allowed to happen and physicians aren’t held accountable.”
Violations during physician-patient encounters can cause deep harm to patients since trust is “the absolute cornerstone of the whole relationship,” said Julia A. Hallisy, founder and president of the Empowered Patient Coalition. Hallisy is a dentist and has experienced the loss of her daughter to cancer; she understands firsthand that doctors bear witness to some of the happiest and most tragic moments in people’s lives.
CNN

Early Puberty in Girls Is Becoming Epidemic and Getting Worse

Padded bras for kindergarteners with growing breasts to make them more comfortable? Sixteen percent of U.S. girls experiencing breast development by the age of 7? Thirty percent by the age of 8? Clearly something is affecting the hormones of U.S. girls—a phenomenon also seen in other developed countries. Girls in poorer countries seem to be spared—until they move to developed countries.

No scientists dispute that precocious or early-onset puberty is on the rise but they do not agree on the reasons. Is it bad diets and lack of exercise that cause growing obesity? Is it soft drinks themselves, even when not linked to obesity? Is it the common chemicals known as endocrine disrupters that exert estrogen-like effects (and also cause obesity)? Is it the many legal, unlabeled hormones used in the U.S. to fatten livestock? Some researchers even believe precocious puberty could be triggered by sociological factors like having no father in the home or even stress.

Alternet

Sick at Work: Staggering Number of Americans Go to Work With Bad Colds or Flu

If there is one type of co-worker Americans dread coming into contact with above all others, it is the sick co-worker—the one who should be home in bed but showed up at work despite incessant coughing and sneezing, a runny nose and a painful sore throat. Unfortunately, going to work sick is all too common in the United States: a survey released by Wakefield Research earlier this year found that 69% of working Americans don’t take sick days, even when they’re genuinely ill, because they feel they can’t afford to miss even a day of work. That is if they even have paid sick days; many American workers don’t. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families, 40 percent of private-sector workers and 80% of low-wage workers do not receive any paid sick leave.

Between job insecurity, rising housing and healthcare costs, wage stagnation, outsourcing to developing countries and the lack of federal legislation mandating sick leave, too many Americans feel compelled to show up at work sick when they should be home recovering, and their co-workers—and sometimes the public—pay the price when they get sick as well.

Alternet

The Best Medicine for ADHD isn’t Necessarily Medicine

Steve and Michelle were desperate—their 6-year-old son, Sam, was diagnosed with ADHD soon after entering first grade.  Sam’s behavior seemed outright defiant—he “ignored” being called and he moved constantly, often from room to room even when being directly spoken to. Sam let out bloodcurdling screams when forced to stop playing a game on the iPad. Sam’s teacher had struggled with some similar behaviors in class and his guidance counselor said Sam needed to be on medication. Steve and Michelle were not so sure, but began to wonder if they were being negligent by not putting him on Ritalinor something similar.

Despite the relentless advertising in parenting magazines and websites, and the occasional coercion by some school personnel, there is a good chance your young ADHD child may not need medication. Or at least not yet. The Centers For Disease control just released results from their first national study to look at therapy, medication, and dietary supplements to treat kids with ADHD ages 4-17.

Psychology Today

Why More Teen Girls Are Getting Genital Plastic Surgery

By college, a third of women and 90% of men have viewed porn, which some experts say has become a main source of sex ed for millions of American teens. “A lot of girls watch porn to learn how to have sex,” Bernstein said. “What they see there influences the way things should go, and how they think things should look.”

Especially, it seems, how things should look. Between 2014 and 2015, there was an 80% increase in the number of girls 18 and younger receiving genital plastic surgery, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. The numbers shot up so quickly that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) issued new guidelines this monthfor doctors who perform labial and breast surgery. Among the recommendations: physicians are now encouraged to screen girls for body dysmorphic disorder, an obsession with an imagined or slight defect in appearance.

Time