Chronic pain is associated with a loss of the normal capacity to know where your body is. Chronic pain is also associated with odd bodily feelings. To find out if people with chronic back pain had trouble ‘feeling’ their back, they were asked to draw on a piece of paper the outline of where they felt their back to be. This is a bit tricky to understand, but imagine you are surveying, in your head, how your body feels and then drawing its location. Anyway, you might have to read the paper to really get it. This is what we found: six out of six patients with low back pain, when they were trying to draw where they felt their back to be, said “I can’t find it” or “I’ve lost it”. When an independent investigator assessed sensory acuity on the back, sensory acuity was reduced in the same place the patient couldn’t feel properly. (…)
In short we think it demonstrates that chronic back pain is associated with distorted body image of the back.
State Representative James Tokioka did some research and drafted a bill that prohibits catching, selling or even possessing walu in Hawaii.
“I talked [to] many people who sell fish, some of the hotel who [buys] fish, they are aware of it and they’re not buying it anymore,” said Rep. Tokioka.
Tokioka said people have shared their nightmares of severe diarrhea after consuming a large portion of the fish. The oily walu or Escolar contains a high-level of wax esters in its tissue that are beneficial to its deep-sea survival, but can be unkind to humans.
In the late 1970s, while working as a chiropractor and naturopath in Fergus, Ont., James Wilson began noticing patients with circadian rhythms out of whack.
They had trouble waking up in the morning, needed caffeine to get through the day, and felt a drop in energy mid-afternoon. Their second wind came at 11 p.m., revving them up for three hours.
Their deepest sleep, work permitting, was between 7 and 9 in the morning. They felt tired and unable to concentrate.
Their condition improved, Wilson says, when he treated their adrenal glands, boosting the hormones involved in regulating the body’s daily rhythms and dealing with stress.
His diagnosis was based on the pioneering work of the late Montreal endocrinologist Dr. Hans Selye. Modern life, Wilson concluded, is so relentlessly stressful that adrenal glands get overworked, burn out and produce lower levels of hormones needed to cope with stress.
Wilson says he coined the term “adrenal fatigue,” calling it the “21st century stress syndrome.”
Pharmaceutical companies are always on the lookout for secondary drug targets. After all, if you invest billions developing a single drug, you would be more than happy to sell it as a treatment for two, three, or more different ailments. Sildenafil citrate was developed to treat angina and hypertension. During phase I clinical trials, it was found that Sildenafil induces penile erections. The drug was branded Viagra, and the rest is history. Eflornithine, an anti-cancer drug, is also effective against the agent of African Sleeping Sickness, Trypanosoma brucei. African Sleeping Sickness belongs to a group of diseases known as “neglected diseases”, for which drug development is not profitable. However, having a drug already on hand makes it easier to market in affected areas.
Another example of polypharmacology is a drug that binds to multiple targets in the human body. This could be used for overcoming drug resistance, a known problem with cancer. Cancer tumours often develop a resistance to anti-cancer drugs because the protein that the drug bind to mutates, and no longer binds the drug. However, if the drug acts by binding redundantly to several proteins, it would be more effective, since several mutations would be required to effect drug resistance.
What is a “mental illness”? What is an “illness”? What does the description and classification of “mental illnesses” actually involve, and is the description of “new” mental illnesses description of actually existing entities, or the creation of them?
“Solastalgia” is a neologism, invented by the Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, to give greater meaning and clarity to psychological distress caused by environmental change. …) The doctor and former British Foreign Secretary, Lord Owen, has coined the phrase “hubris syndrome” to describe the mindset of prime ministers and presidents whose behaviour is characterised by reckless, hubristic belief in their own rightness.
This paper uses both the concept of solastalgia and the related concepts Albrecht posited of psychoterratic and somaterratic illnesses and hubris syndrome as a starting point to explore issues around the meaning of mental illness, and what it means to describe and classify mental illness.
According to accepted DSM-IV diagnostic criteria, close to 50% of people suffer from a mental illness at some point; a large fraction of this being depression. 10% of Americans took antidepressants last year according to the best estimates.
Guess what? Clever people have started asking “Antidepressants are amongst the biggest selling drugs in the world - but do they work?” And their answer is - not very well.
{ In 1999 ‘Prozac’ – the trade name of fluoxetine – was named on of the ‘Products of the century’ by Fortune magazine. In 2007 Eli Lilly began to market fluoxetine for dogs under the name Reconcile. In this incarnation it’s chewable, tastes like beef and is intended to treat something called ‘canine separation anxiety’. | Frontier Psychiatrist | Continue reading }
Are pillow fights more dangerous than roller coasters?
A paper compared head motions that occurred in 4 participants when they rode 3 different roller coasters, drove bumper cars, and had a pillow fight. What are the implications for brain injury? they asked. (…) “The highest level of rotational acceleration was measured during the pillow fight. Interestingly, the pillow fight generated peak head accelerations and velocities greater than the 3 roller coaster rides.”
A new study suggests that the first letter in your name could be linked to your longevity. If your name starts with “A,” then you probably have no cause for concern, but if your name begins with “D,” study authors suggest the letter’s symbolic significance could result in you dying sooner than your peers, reports the Daily Mail.
Can a person freeze to death? (…) Death strikes long before the body actually freezes.
Yet our bodies are pretty hardy, as we have two built-in mechanisms to protect us from the cold.
As soon as that bitter air hits your face, your body will try to insulate itself by moving blood away from the skin and outer extremities, such as fingers and toes, and toward its core. This process is called vasoconstriction, and it helps limit the amount of heat you lose to the environment, explained John Castellani of the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine.
The second response from your body is shivering. People may experience a little shivering when they’re skin temperatures starts to fall, but major shivering usually doesn’t occur unless your core body temperatures drops, Castellani said.
{ Demographic studies have indicated that in humans, fertility and intelligence tend to be negatively correlated, that is to say, the more intelligent, as measured by IQ, exhibit a lower total fertility rate than the less intelligent. | Wikipedia }
If your children happened to be born since the year 2000 in developed countries, they will most likely live to be 100, and they will be healthier than elderly people in previous generations, according to a recent article in the medical journal The Lancet. (…)
The gain of about 30 years in life expectancy in Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand — and even more in Japan, Spain and Italy — “stands out as one of the most important accomplishments of the 20th century.” Furthermore, most babies born since 2000 in these countries will “celebrate their 100th birthdays if the present yearly growth in life expectancy continues through the 21st century.” The authors expect that it will: “Continued progress in the longest living populations suggests that we are not close to a limit, and [a] further rise in life expectancy seems likely.”
Given that individuals over the coming decade may routinely expect to work well into their 70s and 80s, what kind of environment can they look forward to? “The good news is that the world of work is changing by itself” in ways that will make it more receptive to older employees, says Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. “It’s already easier to work at a distance, easier to telecommute…. The physical demands [of many jobs] are falling, commitments are shorter-term, outsourcing of all kinds is on the rise and there is more contract work — all of which makes it simpler for people to come in and out of the workplace, at least in principle….. The question is, to what extent will employers actually embrace older workers and incorporate more flexibility with respect to schedules, less supervision and more empowerment?”
One potential hang-up centers on the fact that older workers, as they stay on the job longer, are likely to be increasingly supervised by younger managers, says Cappelli.
Posing as patients, three undercover observers got themselves admitted as patients to a locked psychiatric ward to investigate conditions on the inside.
Each undercover patient had rehearsed an extensive back story, and the supposed family members who visited them were professional actors. A remote team monitored the project via hidden cameras and microphones from a command center in a nearby hotel.
The project, which took place this spring in De Gelderse Roos, a psychiatric complex about 40 miles from Amsterdam, was not a sting operation. The staff was told there would be mystery shoppers, of a sort, in the facility over a couple of months.
Le fou est le joueur déréglé du Même et de l’Autre. Il prend les choses pour ce qu’elles ne sont pas, et les gens les uns pour les autres; il ignore ses amis, reconnaît les étrangers; il croit démasquer, et il impose un masque.
Sounds played as you sleep can reinforce memories.
Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois asked people to memorise which images and their associated sounds – such as a picture of a cat and a miaow – were associated with a certain area on a computer screen and then to take a nap. They played half the group the sounds in their sleep, and these people were better at remembering the associations than the rest when they woke up.
How can you boost your sleep learning capacity?
As a rule, hit the hay after learning something new – late-night TV and Xbox marathons are a no-no.
That is, of course, unless the skill you hope to learn is a computer game: when Sidarta Ribeiro of the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience in Natal, Brazil, got people to play shoot-’em-up video game Doom before bed, those who dreamed about the game during their sleep were better players the next day.
Scientific advice may suggest how dangerous things are - like smoking cannabis, taking ecstasy and horse riding - but risk is not all about numbers. (…)
The tables tell us, among myriad morbid details, that through a variety of causes 23 people drowned in the bath in 2008, 108 died from “inhalation of gastric contents” and five starved to death. (…)
There is evidence that the more we try to protect some people from the risks they take, the more danger they seek.
This is known as risk homeostasis and acts like a personal thermostat, so that if someone gives you an airbag, you feel more at liberty to put your foot down. (Funnily enough, one psychological trait among the young is a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of bad things happening. They think the chance of HIV-Aids is far greater than it really is. But does that stop unprotected sex?)
There can also be confusion between the probability of a harm occurring and the severity of that harm. So if a chief scientist says nuclear power isn’t risky, he might mean it’s highly unlikely to go wrong. Someone else might think, “but if it does…”
Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: the young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.
But people can read almost anything into the dreams that they remember, and they do exactly that. In a recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong biases in the interpretations of dreams.
For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.
In fact, research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.
Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery. But it is a real phenomenon.
The movement to ban smoking in New York City has grown so quickly that no place seems immune — certainly not restaurants or bars, and public beaches and parks may not be far behind. Now the efforts are rapidly expanding into the living room.
More landlords are moving to prohibit smoking in their apartment buildings, telling prospective tenants they can be evicted if they light up in them. (…)
And the typical smoker’s refuge — directly outside the building — is also off limits; tenants must agree not to smoke on any of the sidewalks that wrap around the building.
