A bin for my favorite articles
Posts tagged health
Lack of oxygen. The Real Cause of Cancer — And the Only Way to Stop It
Jun 17th
By Dr. Robert Rowan, MD
Did you know that if you contract stage-4 cancer, conventional medicine has absolutely nothing that can cure you? Some time ago, the Congressional Record stated that no one has ever been cured at this late stage with chemo, radiation, surgery, or any combination of these.
What’s worse, though, is that the government knows this is true and still gives orthodox medicine a government-granted monopoly on cancer treatment.
Fortunately, there are mavericks that risk their livelihood to offer treatments that can beat cancer at any stage. While some of them end up in prison or in poverty, there are others who fly below the government’s radar and make a huge difference in the way we fight cancer.
One such man was Otto Warburg, one of my greatest medical heroes. What he discovered about cancer more than half a century ago won him the Nobel Prize. But more importantly, it may spare your life.
Dr. Warburg was a brilliant German scientist who found the common denominator of all cancers. It’s a very simple thread that connects every cancer — and exposes cancer’s weakness. His meticulous research won him the Nobel Prize in 1931. And subsequent groundbreaking work earned him a second Nobel Prize offer in 1944. Unfortunately, the Nazis wouldn’t let him receive it.
Warburg studied cancer in real time. That means he studied cells as they transformed from normal to cancer as it was happening. His incredible paper was called “The Metabolism of Carcinoma Cells.” It was published in America in the Journal of Cancer Research in 1925.
The connection he discovered was a common metabolic link in all cancers. And it was not pesticides, preservatives, radiation, chemicals, poisons, or any other carcinogen. Wait a minute! Weren’t we taught to believe that carcinogens damage DNA and cause cancer by genetic injury? It’s true all of these are factors. But they all lead to only one simple bottom line — they all prevent your cells from getting or using oxygen.
Warburg’s story is all about oxygen. You know that I, too, love to use oxygen to treat disease. It’s the stuff of life. Consume more oxygen and live longer. Consume less and your life will be shortened with more chronic degeneration. Just what kind of degeneration? Not just circulatory diseases and infections, but cancer!
Most doctors think that less oxygen simply means a heart attack or stroke. But Warburg proved it also can mean cancer. Here’s why: You know that your cells need to make energy. They do that by burning sugars and fats with oxygen. It’s sort of like the combustion engine, which burns gasoline and oxygen in your car’s engine. Deprive your car’s engine of gasoline or oxygen, and it will stop running. Warburg found that malignant tumors always have a degree of oxygen deprivation.
He also found that cancerous tumors produced far more lactic acid than benign tumors. Lactic acid is what cells produce when they burn sugar without enough oxygen. It’s also what yeast produces when it ferments. Warburg argued that, malignant cancer cells are essentially cells that are fermenting. As the degree of fermentation increases, so does the degree of malignancy.
So the next question is, “Why don’t you get cancer in your brain or heart when a clot forms cutting off the blood supply?” That kind of oxygen deficit will cause instant cell death — a heart attack or stroke.
Warburg found in order for cancer to develop, damaged cells must survive long enough for fermentation to start. Total oxygen deprivation definitely means cell death and no subsequent degeneration to cancer. So there’s a mysterious delay between a partial insult and the development of cancer. The length of this delay is different in different animals. In man, it can take several decades. Or it can happen much quicker.
Warburg emphasized that you can’t make a cell ferment unless a LACK OF OXYGEN is involved. In 1955, two American scientists, R.A. Malmgren and C.C. Flanigan, confirmed Warburg’s findings. They found that oxygen deficiency is ALWAYS present when cancer develops.
Now here’s the real kicker. Warburg found that you can reverse fermentation simply by adding oxygen – but only if you do it early enough. He incubated cells in nitrogen, starving them of oxygen for regular but short periods. Starving the cells of oxygen caused them to begin fermentation. Restoring oxygen promptly enabled the cells to recover. But the longer they were oxygen starved, the slower and less certain the recovery. With enough oxygen starvation, cells don’t recover. Once they reach a certain point, no amount of oxygen will return them to normal.
So all of this begs the question, “Why do cells lose oxygen in the first place?” I mentioned earlier that poisons, preservatives, radiation, or other carcinogens all affect a cell’s ability to use oxygen. But there’s something far more common that has the same impact — glucose.
Warburg said that glucose brings a cell’s ability to use oxygen to a standstill. So if you flood your cells with glucose, your cells won’t get the oxygen they need to function correctly. That will begin fermentation, which leads to cancer. This is why I repeatedly call for you to avoid all refined foods. That’s the best way to stop the flood of glucose into your cells.
Now you know the underlying cause of cancer. The next question to consider is what we can do to enhance oxygen delivery. Well, one method is exercise with oxygen therapy (EWOT or multi-step therapy), which I’ve told you about in the past.
But what about your diet? Warburg did a lot of work on vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. He found that they help cells use oxygen more efficiently. Today, we know that vitamins and minerals are absolute requirements for your enzymes to work. When you’re deficient in nutrients, it impairs your cell’s ability to use oxygen and produce energy. I prefer you get most of your nutrients from your food. But supplements will also help.
Ref: Cancer Research, vol. 15(7).
Cancer patient recovers after injection of immune cells
Mar 16th
A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.
The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.
After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs.
Doctors took cells from the man’s own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as “immunotherapy”.
Experts said that the case could mark a landmark in the treatment of cancer.
It raises hopes of a possible new way of fighting the disease, which claims 150,000 lives in Britain every year.
Ed Yong, health information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “It’s very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it’s always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used.”
However, the treatment could prove extremely expensive and scientists say that more research is needed to prove its effectiveness.
Genetically altered white blood cells have been used before to treat cancer patients but this is the first study to show that simply growing vast numbers of the few immune cells in the body to attack a cancer can be safe and effective.
Normally there are too few of the cells in a patient’s body to effectively fight cancer.
Dr Cassian Yee, who led the team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said: “For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study.”
The work raises hopes that this approach could not only offer a more effective treatment for skin cancer, or melanoma, which kills around 2,000 people in Britain alone, but be applied to other cancers too.
The patient was one of nine with metastatic melanoma, that is skin cancer that has spread, who were being treated in a recently completed clinical trial to test bigger and bigger doses of their own white blood cells.
Larger, more elaborate, trials are now under way.
Almost 9,000 new cases of melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, are diagnosed every year in Britain, and nearly 2,000 patients die from the disease.
Prof Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said: “This is another interesting demonstration of the huge power of the immune system to fight some types of cancer.
“Although the technique is complex and difficult to use for all but a few patients, the principle that someone’s own immune cells can be expanded and made to work in this way is very encouraging for the work that Cancer Research UK and others are carrying out.”
Immunotherapy, in which a patients own immune cells are used to treat cancer, is a growing area of research that aims to develop less-toxic treatments than standard chemotherapy and radiation.
Because cancer occurs when the body’s own cells grow out of control, the immune system only responds weakly.
The ability of the body’s own defences to tackle cancer in this case is all the more remarkable because most deadly feature of the disease is its ability to colonise other parts of the body, when it becomes much more difficult to treat.
A dramatic example of immunotherapy was reported two years ago by one pioneer of the field, Dr Steven Rosenberg of the US National Cancer Institute, who eradicated cancer from two dying men using genetically modified versions of their own cells.
Both Mark Origer and “Thomas M” were suffering from advanced melanoma but the hope is that such methods could be customised to attack other common cancers, notably breast, colon and lung.
Dr Rosenberg told The Daily Telegraph the new work is an “interesting study that helps to confirm the effectiveness of cell transfer immunotherapy for treating cancer patients. We have now treated 93 patients with metastatic melanoma using their own anti-tumour cells with response rates up to 72 per cent. Mark Origer remains disease free now over three years after treatment.”
Biofeedback-Mind Teaches Body to Heal Itself
Oct 30th
FOR almost seven years. Mrs. Andrews had been unable to move her head. Her condition—known as wryneck—had started with painful muscle spasms, which grew worse until her head was always pulled to the left. After years of going to doctors, including psychiatrists, she was referred to New York’s lCD Rehabilitation and Research Center to learn a new technique of sensory feedback (also called biofeedback) training.
“Now look at me!” Mrs. Andrews said after her fourth treatment. She slowly moved her head from side to side, then held it proudly eyes-forward. “First, the doctors explained that I could learn to relax the major muscle that turns my head. I was skeptical, but willing to try. Electrodes from a small machine were attached to my neck, and the machine made loud clicks. My job was to lower the number of clicks by relaxing my neck muscle. I can’t tell you how I did this, but I did, and the next thing I knew, I could hold my head straight.” Having leaz1ed how to relax this muscle, Mrs. Andrcws is now able to do it without the aid of the machine.
Biofeedback training is based on the premise that we can modify or gain control over a range of bodily functions once thought to be totally automatic. We all use natural forms of feedback to perfect skills. For example, in learning to serve a tennis ball, we throw it in the air, hit it, and watch where it lands. If the ball sails 15 feet past the service line, seeing that constitutes a feedback on our actions. Accordingly, we modify our swing and footwork until we make the ball land where it should. Learning such a skill requires only making an effort, then seeing, hearing or feeling the results.
In many instances—if we want to relax a back muscle at will, or move a paralyzed ann, say—we cannot carry out the intention. Either nature has not provided us with a feedback mechanism, giving us signals we can use to learn that skill, or disease has destroyed a feedback system. Now, however, researchers have developed a host of sensory instruments that can help bridge the gsp.
For example, an instrument called an electromyograph tG) picks up electrical activity within muscles. Other devices monitor galvanic skin response (GsR)— the resistance that skin offers a minute amount of electricity. Other instruments detect minute temperature changes. The signals that are picked up are converted into sounds or visual aids for the patient to hear or see, and to use as signposts in controlling specific processes.
The list of chronic ailments being treated—experimentally, at least—with biofeedback includes asthma, back pain, migraine and tension headache, to name a few. Some favorable results have been achieved in the areas of stroke and, to a lesser extent, epilepsy.
“The potential is quite encouraging, and some results are truly amazing, especially in treating neuromuscular problems,” says Dr. Joseph Brudny, former director of the Sensory Feedback Therapy Unit at the lCD Center. “But I see it as a useful adjunct to our present medical tools, not as a panacea.”
“It may not, always work,” a New York University professor of neurology, Dr. Julius Korein, says. ‘But it doesn’t seem to have any harmful side effects—something you can’t say about many drugs or surgical trcatments.”
Just how the technique works may be seen at Denver’s National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, where researchers arc refining EMO bic feedback to help patients control asthma attacks. Although asthmatics suffer because they arc sensitive to environmental agents like dust, fumes, cold, foods and certain plants. their attacks arc sometimes complicated by their psychological reaction to such potential threats. An asthmatic enrolled in the hospital’s biofeedback program is placed in a
comfortable, soundproof room and electrodes are connected to his forehead, to detect electrical activity in the muscles just above the eyebrow. If relaxed, he hears only slow, lethargic clicks. If he is tense, his forehead muscles knot up, and the machine bursts into frantic clicking.
The patient is asked to visualize flowers, trees, dust—whatever threatens him with an asthma attack. As he reacts instinctively to the image, the biofeedback equipment, reflecting his mounting anxiety, clicks like a Geiger counter. Hearing the crescendo, the patient knows he is laying the groundwork for an intensified asthma attack. Over the course of several training sessions, he learns to keep the click rate slow by keeping his tension down. (Just how he does this, he cannot explain, any more than he can explain exactly how he learns to ride a bicycle.) In time, patients learn to relax even without the machine.
Many doctors, especially those who deal with chronic pain and pain that defies medical analysis, are eagerly embracing biofeedback training as a way of inhibiting nonspecific pain feelings in the brain. One is Dr. Stuart H. Mann, an associate clinical professor in the Department of Rehabilitation at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. After tests are run to rule out a discernible cause for pain (a tumor, for example), the patient is attached to a GSR device, which emits a shrill, piercing sound. “We tell the patient the sound is the pain,” Dr. Mann says. “He has to turn it off.”
In time, a large percentage of Dr. Mann’s patients learn to “think” the sound down. Then, after intensive practice, even without the machine, they are able to sit down when they feel the pain coming and “work it down.” They are very proud when they can get themselves off drugs.
Even the crippling pain of migraine headache has proved amenable to biofeedback training. An instrument, highly sensitive to temperature changes, is attached to the patient’s hand and emits increasingly higher sounds as hand temperature rises—the result of increased blood flow. Patients have learned to increase blood flow to the hand enough to raise its temperature ten degrees in two minutes. As this happens, relaxation takes place—and as a side effect the migraine is aborted. Researchers who discovered this biofeedback technique at the Menningcr Foundation, in Topeka, Kari., helped 80 percetfi of the migraine patients they first treated with it.
Physicians who deal with stroke and paralysis are also using biofeedback to help patients regain muscle function. To move an arm, there must be sensory input to the brain as well as motor output. Without input we cannot monitor our actions. A basketball player who loses his sight, for example, will not be able to make baskets consistently from a set spot on the floor. However, if a buzzer goes off every time the ball goes ‘in. by substituting his hearing fqr his sight he can eventually releai-n the skill. Similarly, for some stroke and paralysis patients with brain injury, whose normal feedback system has been disrupted, biofeedback instruments can serve as a substitute. The patient learns to monitor an activIty through another, undamaged pathway. The instruments are used to pick up muscular electrical activity in the paralyzed limb and make it audible or visible to the patient. The patient works with the signals until he can actually begin to use the muscle.
In an initial study by Dr. Brudny and his colleagues, involving 36 patients with varying degrees of paralysis or other neuromuscular disorders, 34 achieved improvement ranging from meaningful functional gains to full recovery. One patient was a young electrician who had been left seemingly para1yzd from the neck down. With several weeks of painstaking training, .the young man slowly regained use of his arms and hands to the point where he could shave, feed himself, even do leacherwork.
“I wore a leg brace for iwo and a half years,” says a former stroke patient of Dr. Herbert E Johnson, former medical director and a psychiatrist at Casa Colina Hospital for Rehabilitative Medicine in Pomona, Calif. “But I had read about biofeedback training at Casa Colina, and asked to be taught it. I had to practice every day, one hour in the morning and one at night. I would practice starting and stopping the noise from the machine 100 times every ten minutes—about 600 times an hour. In three or four weeks, I had been able to strengthen my ankle and get rid of the brace”
About 1000 medical researchers are now working with biofeedback at some of the nation’s leading medical centers, and many more ire involved in clinical research outside the hospital.
If you think biofeedback may be the answer for your problem, ask your doctor if it can help you. He may be able to refer you to acceptable programs in your area. But avoid any so. called “expert” who uses the devices indiscriminately and shuns proper medical supervision. The Federal Drug Administration cautions that biofeedback devices used for diagnosis or treatment of disease conditions be used only by or after consulting a physician or other licensed practitioner.
Bear in mind that biofeedback is still in its early stages, not a magic cure-all or a substitute for other treatment. It is simply an adjunct which, as one research psychologist points out in connection with asthma, may help the patient feel he is back in the driver’s seat.
Think Thin! Behavior Control of Dieting
Sep 15th
Don’t look in this article for menus, calorie counters or weight tables. Here, instead, is a scientific technique that can change your eating habits for the rest of your life—and become the key to making that life last longer.
The technique is called behavior control, and is based on the reward-and-punishment ideas of B. F. Skinner and the many psychologists• who followed him. I came upon it quite by accident. The year was 1956. 1 weighed 190 pounds. For a five-foot, ten-inch man at the age of 30, 1 was 35 pounds overweight. My father, too, had been overweight by 35 pounds when he died of a coronary heart attack in 1948, at the age of 44. His diet had been rich in high-calorie, high-fat foods, as mine was. As a science reporter, I understood well the relationship between overweight and his misfortune.
On the day my father died, I arrived a few minutes after his last heartbeat. The picture of his final agony was burned into my mind: jaw drawn back, mouth slightly open, skin gray. I shall never forget it.
I recount that sad, terrifying moment because of b curious phenomenon that occurred when I began to try to lose weight eight years later. Lunchtime. A cafeteria. Like an addict, I am drawn to the hot table with its corned beef and french-fried potatoes. At the sight of corned beef, I actually feel my jaw working. And then, an image of my father’s face as I last saw it flashes before me. I am appalled. I try to turn off the picture by moving away from the hot table. I take a salad. The picture returns. I shout silently to myself: “Stop!” I try to think of something pleasant: my forthcoming trip to Europe—anything to get that hospital scene off the screen of my mind. But note:
I ended up with the salad rather than the corned beef. And it happened day after day.
Unconsciously, I had altered my eating habits through behavior control. I did not hear about the technique until many years later. Indeed, it was not until the I 960s that psychologists showed that human beings can use thoughts to reward and punish themselves in order to bring unwanted behavior under control. And only more recently have the psychologists applied these techniques to eating behavior.
The use of thoughts as reward or punishment is enormously convenient if you can make it work, because thoughts are always available. However, each person must find the technique that fits his own life and convenience. And he must use it in a formal and systematic way—that is, set it up as if it were an operating manual for driving a car.
Let’s analyze how it worked with me. It depended on the fact that eating is automatic, my eating behavior and yours being governed by signals—stimuli. The sight of food is obviously a signal to start eating. Hunger may also be triggered by a glance at the clock, a TV commercial, a feeling of anxiety. On that day back in 1956:
I. I am confronted with a stimulus (a signal)—the corned
beef.
2. The stimulus initiates an automatic response—I start to reach for the corned beef.
3. At that moment, the unpleasant thought (punishment), the image of my father, appears in my mind.
4. Instead of the corned beef, I take the salad—a desired behavior.
5. Because the image of my father is disturbing, I shut it off by shouting, “Stop!” in my mind. I must do this or else the punishing image will overlap with the desired behavior and perhaps stop that, too.
6. Finally, a pleasant thought as a reward. I used a trip to Europe, imagining that picture immediately after—not before—the desired behavior. The sooner rewards are given, the better they work.
7. 1 move rapidly away from the food table, so as not to let the persistence of the corned-beef signal overwhelm me.
Such a system can be adapted to your own situation. By using thoughts in this way consistently and—it should be emphasized—over a long period, you will instill a new eating pattern. And the result will be a “permanent” weight loss.
The first concrete step in formalizing your own diet change is to make sure you can get your imagination under conscious control. You need to learn three skills: conjuring up an unpleasant thought, stopping that thought (remarkably, imagining yourself shouting, “Stop!” will momentarily clear it away), conjuring up a pleasant thought. Practice this sequence in your mind while lying down.
If you cannot imagine a scene that is sufficiently punishing,
perhaps one of these will do:
• An image that will make you nauseated, such as a bowl of ice cream covered with maggots.
• Someone you know who is so obese that he or she disgusts you. Then let that person’s face dissolve and replace it with
your own.
• Rolls of fat around your abdomen come off in your hands like sticky, hot taffy—and then grow back instantly.
The essence of such negative thoughts must be that they are sufficiently horrifying to deter you, even momentarily, from undesirable eating behavior. Indeed, the rougher a negative thought, the better will be its effect. Heart-attack victims often have no problem losing weight initially, because they unconsciously use scenes of themselves in the hospital or dead to deter eating behavior.
in the punishment-stop-reward sequence, the punishing thought loses its potency if you do not reward yourself—at once—for the desired action. The following scenes are suggestions for thought rewards:
• Walking arm in arm, thin and handsome or beautiful, with someone you love.
• A thin you standing before a mirror in a bathing suit.
• Playing with your children on a smooth, green lawn.
Whatever image you use, it must give you great pleasure; it should almost have the quality of a daydream.
Once you get your imagination under control, you are now ready to put the technique of reward/punishment to work. As far as your diet itself goes, it really makes little difference what plan you use—counting calories, restricting or eliminating certain foods, or following a specific menu. The key is to be consistent. If you count calories, count them every day and eat a variety of nutritious foods. You must end up each day, however, having eaten less food than is required to keep the energy balance in your body.
Unfortunately, habit often overrules plan. Calorie-counters find themselves wolfing down a piece of apple pie when they “could not resist it any longer.” When they count up the calories later in the day, the thought of having “broken the diet” is so punishing that they give up counting. But remember that in the reward/punishment system, there is no such thing as “breaking the diet.” Instead, you are concerned with achieving control at the moment of eating. Occasional failures are not critical; the idea is to adhere to the method more often than not.
To keep track of your food intake, I suggest you make a chart. A graph that shows a line of what your basic weight loss should be over a period of time will suffice. (Don’t try to lose more than a pound or two a week.) Just remember as you go along to make another line on the chart of what your actual weight loss is. Such a chart has some reward/punishment features. For instance, you are about to reach for a slice of pie; in your mind you picture the chart with the line representing your actual weight crossing above the projected weight-loss line; the punishing image will deter you. Even without its psychological utility, the chart is essential as a method of monitoring the amount of food you eat.
After you have chosen your dieting plan—calories, food restriction or menus—and set up a chart, you still face the major problem of handling eating behavior in the presence of a stimulus. Learn to recognize the external signals that trigger your eating. Keep a diary in which you list for each eating occasion what happened to start you eating. Then develop tactics for avoiding these stimuli. If a commercial acts as stimulus, never have food near the TV set, or better, never have a high- calorie, ready-to-eat food in the house.
But behavior control is more powerful than avoiding stimuli,
because every refusal increases your resistance. To review the
sequence once more: stimulus, television commercial, for in-stance; food desire: punishment thought, a fat person—your’ self—unable to get off a sinking ship; alternate activity, you pick up a book or a magazine; stop the punishment thought; pleasant thought. walking along a beach, for instance, held long enough so that the eating stimulus (the commercial) ends,
Each success makes the next effort easier, because the power of the stimulus to make you feel hungry will be reduced—and that will reduce your food intake.
How well does all this work? Experiments indicate that reward/punishment methods can cause weight loss. If you are more than 50 percent overweight, you probably will need the help of a doctor and perhaps a behavior therapist to set things up for you and to keep you on track, If you are 15 percent to 50 percent overweight, you will find behavior changes on you own difficult but not impossible. People who are around 15. percent overweight have the best chance of changing on their. own, using the reward/punishment schemes.
They worked well for me. I now weigh 157. I’ve lost 33 pounds—and I never felt better in my life.
Emotions And Health
Sep 15th
“For Two months I’ve had these spells,” Fran Wilson told the heart specialist. “1 get short of breath. My heart beats like a hammer and unevenly. I’m dizzy and I tremble. My chest hurts. ‘ice I’ve fainted. My doctor says that my blood pressure and electrocardiogram are abnormal.”
“Was there any upset in your routine before the spells began?” the specialist asked.
“My husband was transferred to Arizona,” said Fran. ‘1 stayed behind to let the children finish the school year. Since he left, I haven’t slept well. Do you think fatigue brought out my heart trouble’
“I suspect we’ll find,” said the specialist, “that you don’t have heart trouble at all. I suspect that your illness is caused by emotion.”
Although the doctor proved correct, Fran was not imagining her ailments. Nor was she mentally ill in the usual sense of the
phrase. Emotional stress can produce real illness—true changes
in the body chemistry and structure of quite normal people.
And this phenomenon is amazingly common. Many specialists
agree that psychogenic (emotion-caused) disorders account for a large percentage of Visits to the doctor.
Physicians have long known that the mind could make the
body ill. But they did not know how to differentiate between
physically caused illness and that caused by emotional stress.
Today, answers to this problem are beginning to appear. And many doctors are using this new information as regularly as they employ their stethoscopes and tongue depressors.
Fran Wilson’s case illustrates one of the easiest means of recognizing such ills: identifying characteristic “clusters” of physical symptoms which often point to emotional causes. Since Fran’s spells resembled a common cluster called “neurocirculatory asthenia,” the heart specialist tried a simple test. For two minutes he had her breathe deeply and rapidly. She grew dizzy. Her heart pounded. She gasped that she was having an attack.
When she had rested, the doctor explained: “Those were some of the physical signs of great anxiety. Rapid deep breathing produces many such signs in any person. When we are afraid or angry, a part of the brain called the hypothalamus prepares the body for action. The heart speeds up to rush blood to our muscles. We breathe hard to fill the blood with oxygen. Hormones are released to bring the nervous system to a pitch of alarmed readiness. Sometimes our conscious mind, seeing no reason to be angry or afraid, may block out our awareness of anxiety. Yet all the while the hypothalamus continues the alant.”
Fran’s emotional alarm had evidently been triggered by the temporary separation from her husband. “I feel upset if anyone close leaves me,” Fran admitted to the doctor. “When I was a child, my parents left on a trip and were both killed in an accident. When Jim left—the first time in our marriage he’s been away more than overnight—I felt real panic. I pulled myself together, but I guess the fear was still there.” Fran was given tranquilizers and saw the doctor three times to talk over her fears. The symptoms vanished in two weeks.
Everyone knows that the mind evokes certain automatic responses from the body. Think about food and you salivate. Words or thoughts can prepare sexual organs for function, and cause a blush or goose-flesh. But more serious effects can be wrought by emotion. Take the case of Ruth Chadwick.
Four times Ruth had conceived a child but miscarried. On her fifth pregnancy, the obstetrician asked Ruth how she felt about motherhood. He learned that, though she wanted a child, girlhood tales of the rigors of labor and terrified her. The doctor decided to let Ruth talk out her fears at each prenatal visit.
With no other treatment, Ruth delivered a healthy full-term baby.
Why? Researchers at the University of Colorado have said that a woman fearful of pregnancy might, after weeks or months of carrying a baby, produce special hormones of a type normally produced only at the end of pregnancy. They cause contractions, dilate the opening of the cervix, and bring about birth. Indeed, many women like Ruth Chadwick, who habitually miscarry, may need only a little office counseling to carry a child to term.
How can thought work such changes? There is a pathway between the hypothalamus, the brain segment that controls primitive reactions to anger, fear, hunger and sex, and the pituitary gland. This mysterious gland, a lump the size of a sugar cube, located at the base of the brain, had long been known to secrete a growth hormone. But recent research has uncovered a number of other hormones it produces. The front lobe alone was found to create chemicals that trigger the making of sex hormones and govern the thyroid, which in turn controls the body’s metabolism, it yields yet another chemical that regulates adrenal secretion.
The middle and back lobes of the pituitary affect the kidneys, contractions of the uterus, and blood pressure. “We have just opened the door,” says one researcher, “and have had only a superficial look at this gland. But we now know one way in which emotion can be translated into bodily changes.”
With such clues to very real mechanisms, many doctors have begun to look for signs of emotional stress in patients as a matter of routine. Written tests have been designed to seek out the factors most commonly found among people whose ailments have been proved to be caused by emotion.
One such patient was Jean Becker, whose low back pain had grown steadily worse for a year. with no apparent cause. The symptoms seemed to suggest a ruptured spinal disc, which sometimes cannot be seen on X ray. During an office visit her doctor gave her a 20-question test. When he had scored it, he asked, “Have you been depressed lately?”
“Ever since a year ago, when my father died,” she said. “Mother died when I was small, and Dad brought me up alone.
Although my husband and children give me plenty of family,
without Dad all the joy seems to have gone out of things.”
The doctor gave her anti-depressant pills and told her to
come in for a chat every few days. Within a week Jean’s back
pain had disappeared. Moreover, the talks revealed that she felt that her children had little need of her and that her husband
was too occupied with his business to give her much attention.
Only her father had seemed to depend on her.
When the situation was explained to Jean’s husband and
children, they’ quickly gave her the assurance of love she needed, and the pills could be stopped. Had the back pain persisted once Jean’s depression was gone, the doctor would have felt it more likely that the cause was purely physical.
One test devised by doctors at Duke University. Durham, N.C., sought out unexplained fatigue, lack of sex interest, loss of weight, constipation, hopelessness, feelings of uselessness, difficulty in making decisions and restlessness. All of us sometimes have such feelings, of course. The key to the Duke test is whether a number of such factors are present much of the time. Sleep disturbance is one of the prime clues: the person with a psychogenic disorder is likely to wake early in the morning or during the night and have a chronic feeling of fatigue.
Sudden changes in life are often found to precede illness. In one study of patients with a wide range of ailments, three out of four were found to have recently suffered some major loss—loved ones, jobs, homes. Even apparently pleasant changes, such as a trip abroad, can cause trouble. The tourist who complains about foreign food or water would probably be wiser to blame the tension of being in a strange place. More- over, susceptibility to minor illnesses, such as colds, may be caused by small emotional stresses.
Are doctors other than psychiatrists really able to handle
such emotional problems? Numerous experiences show that
they are And some medical schools now are offering short courses in office psychiatry to their graduates Most physicians cannot devote an hour to talk with a patient as psychiatrists do. But so long a time has been found unnecessary in treating most patients with psychogenic illness. They need, primarily, ye- assurance that their ills can be dealt with.
As doctors learn to incorporate the new knowledge of psychogenic illness into their work, some of the responsibility, as
always, must rest with the patient. He should make an effort to protect himself when he knows that stress has made him vulnerable. He can help the doctor by telling him when emotional upheaval has preceded or accompanied an illness. He should be completely frank about his angers and fears, his frustrations and losses. The heroic view that “everything is just fine” may be good manners with a friend, but it is poor judgment when it is your doctor who wants to know.
Microwave ovens unsafe for kids: Study
May 19th
Microwave ovens pose a serious safety hazard to young children. Researchers from America studied 140 children below 5 years of age who were admitted with scald burns to investigate the mechanism of significant scald burns and to discover insights into prevention, Health News reported.
Two types of patterns of injuries were discovered one was burns due to water heaters and the other due to microwave ovens.
It was found that, out of 140 children with scald injuries, 118 children had unintentional injuries. Of those unintentional injuries 14 were tap water scalds and 104 were non-tap water scalds.
Out of non-tap water scalds, 94 scalds were related to hot cooking or drinking liquids. Nine children between the ages of 18 months and 4 years were scalded after opening a microwave oven and removing the hot substance themselves.
Seventeen children were scalded while an older child 7 to 14 years of age, was cooking or carrying the scalding substance or supervising the younger child.
Efforts to prevent scald injuries focus on asking parents to turn down their water heaters so that water temperature never exceeds 120 degrees.
For injuries caused due to microwave, it was suggested to install mechanisms to prevent children from opening a microwave after something had been heated to prevent injuries. It could be difficult to keep young children away from kitchen hazards, especially if an adult is alone at home and trying to cook dinner.
Tap water scalds represent just a fraction of scald injuries overall; but hot foods or liquids from microwave ovens were the fourth leading cause of scald injuries in children under 5 years old.
The researchers suggested that parents should teach their children that the microwave is a potential source of danger as much as the stove is.
Fatty food can help improve exam result during exams
May 9th
Studying for exams? Remember to load yourself with fatty food before you attempt the test, for a new study says that it could boost your results.
An international team has found that indulging in a fatty meal after studying for exam could help in remembering the facts as fat produces a hormone which aids the brain in cementing short-term memories into long-term ones, BBC TV reported.
Researchers, led by Daniele Piomelli of California University, have based their findings on an analysis of an experiment on rodents.
The team trained rats to complete two tasks — avoid an area that gave them a shock, and find a platform in a pool of water.
Immediately after the training, they injected some of the rats with oleoylethanolamide — a chemical produced in the small intestine of vertebrates which creates a sense of fullness after eating fat.
When the rats were retested one or two days later, the ones that received OEA performed better, suggesting they had stronger memories of their training.
More experiments with the rats showed OEA activates the same areas of the brain that mediate the formation of emotionally charged memories in humans, which are more vivid than typical memories.
“The findings make sense from an evolutionary perspective. When foraging animals find a fatty meal, they do well to remember exactly where and how they found it.
Since humans also produce OEA, there is a good chance that it boosts our memory too.
“OEA is only produced after eating a healthy unsaturated fat called oleic acid, so a cheeseburger after a night of cramming may not work — try food with olive oil or soybean oil,” Piomelli said.
Swine flu vaccine could be ready soon: US researcher
May 9th
A US researcher at work developing a vaccine for the swine flu said Thursday he hopes to have it ready for testing in mice in two to three weeks.
Purdue University professor Suresh Mittal said the vaccine could be ready for production in a few months.
“We would like to have a vaccine in two to three weeks to start testing in mice,” said Mittal, a professor of comparative pathobiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine.
Mittal and collaborators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will use a method he developed for dealing with the H5N1 bird flu to accelerate work on the H1N1 swine flu.
They will use a common cold virus to carry a gene of the H1N1 flu virus and stimulate cells to create both antibodies and cell-based protection that will guard against mutated forms of the flu virus.
“The adenovirus is incapable of replicating and does not seem to cause disease in humans,” Mittal said in a press release.
“That makes it a suitable virus to work with for flu vaccines.”
The vaccine Mittal created for the bird flu worked on three different strains isolated over a seven-year period and was described in papers for the Journal of Infectious Diseases and the journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
A number of different institutions, both private and public, are working on the development of a vaccine for swine flu.
The latest WHO figures show 2,371 cases of influenza A(H1N1) infections have been reported by 24 countries, not including Brazil and Argentina which reported their first cases later Thursday. Forty-six people have died; 44 of them in Mexico and two in the United States.
“If things go well, and we achieve full scale production, it will be several months until the vaccine will be available,” a spokesman for the CDC cautioned.
Blood thinner plus aspirin can cut strokes: study
Apr 1st
:Combining an anti-plaque forming drug with aspirin could cut the risk of strokes and heart attacks by more than 20 percent, a new study said on Tuesday.
Plavix, known under the generic name of clopidogrel, is used to stop the platelets in blood from coagulating and forming clots.
Researchers combined it with aspirin, in clinical trials known as ACTIVE-A of 7,554 patients, to show that it could help patients with a trial fibrillation (AF) who are unable to take other blood thinning medications such as warfarin.
“The purpose of the ACTIVE-A trial was to determine if the addition of clopidogrel to aspirin would reduce major vascular events and stroke in patients with AF at an acceptable risk of increased haemorrhage,” said Stuart Connolly, from Ontario’s McMaster University.
Oral anticoagulants such as warfarin and aspirin have been the only therapies proved effective so far in treating patients suffering from atrial fibrillation, in which the heart’s two upper chambers, the atria, quiver instead of beating effectively.
This increases the risk of the blood clotting or pooling in the chambers, which in turn could trigger a heart attack or stroke.
“For the first time in 20 years, there is a new treatment for atrial fibrillation,” Connolly told the annual conference of the American College of Cardiology in Orlando.
According to the American Heart Association, some 2.2 million Americans suffer from atrial fibrillation and often need to be fitted with a pacemaker.
But many of them cannot be treated with warfarin to stop blood clots forming because it increases the risk of an internal haemorrhage by up to 70 percent.
The study found that a combination of clopidogrel and aspirin reduced major vascular events by 11 percent, including a 28 percent reduction in stroke and a 23 percent reduction in myocardial infarction.
‘Superpill’ may cut heart disease: study
Mar 31st
Healthy people could cut their risk of heart disease in half with a new ‘super pill’ that combines low doses of aspirin and drugs that lower blood pressure and cholesterol, a study said Monday.
“We believe that the polypill probably has the potential to reduce heart disease by 60 percent and stroke by 50 percent,” lead investigator Salim Yusuf told reporters at the American College of Cardiology’s annual meeting, where the study was presented. “The thought that people might be able to take a single pill to reduce multiple cardiovascular risk factors has generated a lot of excitement. It could revolutionize heart disease prevention as we know it,” Yusuf said.
In the three-month study cardiologists compared the impact on blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate of the combination “polypill” and the medications that make it up, taken individually or together.
The study involved 2,053 patients, recruited from heart centers around India between March 2007 and August 2008.
The polypill contains low doses of three medications against high blood pressure; simvastatin, which lowers LDL — or bad cholesterol — and aspirin, a known blood-thinner. “Before this study, there were no data about whether it was even possible to put five active ingredients into a single pill,” the study said.
“We found that it works,” the researchers said.
Participants in the study were divided into groups and given either the polypill or aspirin, the cholesterol-lowering medication, or one of the three blood pressure medications on their own; different combinations of blood pressure medications, or all three blood pressure treatments with or without aspirin.
The researchers found that blood pressure in participants in the polypill group was lowered as much as in the group taking the three blood pressure medications together, with or without aspirin.
Those blood pressure reductions “could theoretically lead to about a 24-percent risk reduction in congestive heart disease and 33 percent risk reduction in strokes in those with average blood pressure levels,” the study said.
The polypill reduced LDL cholesterol significantly more than in all other groups except the one in which simvastatin was taken alone. The simvastatin group’s LDL levels fell only slightly more than the polypill group, the study found.
Heart rates in the polypill group and the group taking one of the blood-pressure medications, atenolol, fell by seven beats a minute — significantly more than in the other study groups.
Side-effects in patients taking the polypill were the same as when taking one or two medications, the study found. The study was “a critical first step to inform the design of larger, more definitive studies, as well as further development of appropriate combinations of blood-pressure lowering drugs with statins and aspirin,” said Yusuf.
Dr Christopher Cannon, a cardiologist from Harvard University, said the polypill took the medical world a step closer to beating heart disease, a leading cause of death worldwide. Some 80 percent of heart disease cases are thought to occur in developing countries.
“The concept is simple. Several different drugs are available (generically and thus inexpensively) to treat many of the cardiac risk factors. So, combining them in one pill could reduce heart disease by 80 percent,” Cannon said in a comment piece in The Lancet, in which the results of the study were published.
“This approach has obvious appeal and vast implications for global health, because heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide,” he wrote.
Still, some said the pill was unlikely to provide panacea for all heart patients.
Dr. Robert Bonow, a former president of the American Heart Association and co-director of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago, told ABC News that while the pill might be better than nothing for many who would otherwise receive no care, a one-size-fits-all approach makes individualized treatment difficult.
“This is not a tailored treatment, and it’s low doses,” he told the television network.
“So maybe in people with high blood pressure, it is not enough to lower their blood pressure. Or in people with high cholesterol, it is not enough to get them to the target cholesterol levels that their physicians would like to see.”