nothinnormal.com

Fish Oil Claims Not Supported by Research

2015-05-25T00:00:00.000+01:00

Do you really need to be taking supplements?--

Fish Oil Claims Not Supported by Research - NYTimes.com: "Dr. Manson says that although she recommends eating fatty fish first, she usually does not stop people from taking fish oil, in part because it does not seem to have major side effects in generally healthy people. “But I do think people should realize that the jury is still out,” she said, “and that they may be spending a lot of money on these supplements without getting any benefit.”" (emphasis added, read more at the link above)

Mark it down to the magical effects of Placebos?

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Transgender Celebrities Nothing New -- London Newspapers 1770

2015-05-18T00:00:00.000+01:00

"... Jenner’s story reveals a complexity similar to that of d’Eon. Rejecting the oft-heard formula that he is a woman stuck in a man’s body, Jenner insisted to ABC’s Sawyer that gender identity is about the brain and the soul and has nothing to do with sexual behavior or the performance of one’s body. He told Sawyer that “as a woman” he would still be ready to “kick butt”. Just as there was a feminine side to his manhood, Jenner insists that there is a masculine aspect to his womanhood. While both stories defy simplistic narratives, what does tie d’Eon and Jenner together – along with thousands of others – is that their transformations occurred when they were fully mature individuals with little left to prove. Soon after I wrote my biography of d’Eon, I was invited to speak at an annual meeting in Texas of 200 transgender women, most of whom began transitioning only in their 50s. They saw d’Eon as one of their own. We are all on a journey towards working out our gender identities. As d’Eon taught us centuries ago, and Jenner today, it may take most of our lifespans to figure it out." more at: Transgender celebrities are not new... | The Guardian

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

American Epidemic: Unnecessary Medical Care

2015-05-11T00:24:00.003+01:00

America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care - The New Yorker: ".... An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?... The one that got me thinking, however, was a study of more than a million Medicare patients. It suggested that a huge proportion had received care that was simply a waste. The researchers called it “low-value care.” But, really, it was no-value care. They studied how often people received one of twenty-six tests or treatments that scientific and professional organizations have consistently determined to have no benefit or to be outright harmful...." (read more at the link above)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Endometriosis, Ignored in Teenage Girls

2015-05-03T13:00:00.000+01:00

Another medical problem where practitioners are part of the problem--

Endometriosis Is Often Ignored in Teenage Girls - NYTimes.com: "“Many times, we hear that girls are told they’re too young to have the disease, they’re trying to get out of school, or that they’re exaggerating. Add the misconception that pain with menstruation is normal, and you get a bundle of confusion. And not the least, most gynecologists are uncomfortable treating adolescent gynecological problems, and pediatricians don’t.”" (read more at the link above)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

How to Get the Best Deal in a Billion-Dollar Divorce (video)

2015-04-05T13:00:00.000+01:00

How to Get the Best Deal in a Billion-Dollar Divorce -

Source Financial Advisors CEO Michelle Smith discusses divorce finances and settlements. She speaks on Bloomberg's “In The Loop” March 25th.

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Breast Biopsies, Misinterpretation, Unneeded Surgeries

2015-03-29T13:00:00.000+01:00

Breast Biopsy + Physician Misinterpretation + Unneeded Surgery = a BIG problem for patients and doctors --

Breast Biopsies Leave Room for Doubt, Study Finds - NYTimes.com: Breast biopsies are good at telling the difference between healthy tissue and cancer, but less reliable for identifying more subtle abnormalities, a new study finds. Because of the uncertainty, women whose results fall into the gray zone between normal and malignant — with diagnoses like “atypia” or “ductal carcinoma in situ” — should seek second opinions on their biopsies, researchers say. Misinterpretation can lead women to have surgery and other treatments they do not need, or to miss out on treatments they do need. The new findings, reported Tuesday in JAMA, challenge the common belief that a biopsy is the gold standard and will resolve any questions that might arise from an unclear mammogram or ultrasound... (read more at the link above)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Neural Addiction, Why Social Media Is Bad For Your Brain

2015-03-22T12:00:00.000+00:00

Why the modern world is bad for your brain | Science | The Guardian: ".... Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

How to Make Love Last

2015-03-15T12:00:00.000+00:00

"... focus of a new book by noted gerontologist Karl Pillemer, “30 Lessons for Loving: Advice From the Wisest Americans on Love, Relationships and Marriage.” Dr. Pillemer, a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., surveyed more than 700 women and men age 65 and older. Among his key findings: A willingness to share new interests in midlife and beyond is critical..." (source infra)
Forget ‘Gray Divorce’: Here’s How to Make Love Last - WSJ: (excerpt)--

DR. PILLEMER: Pay attention to and make a habit of small, positive everyday actions. Say it’s a cold, rainy morning, and it’s your partner’s day to walk the dog. You offer to do it instead. Or you surprise your partner by cleaning out the garage to give him a break. And don’t forget to give compliments. A major regret I heard was not expressing enough positive feelings, and of too often taking the other for granted. Marriage is made up of thousands of micro-interactions. If you can keep creating positive feelings in those small ways, that will have a major impact.

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Girls In A Bad Romance Risk More Than Broken Hearts

2015-03-08T12:00:00.000+00:00

Girls who get caught in a bad romance risk more than just their broken hearts | Jill Filipovic | Comment is free | theguardian.com: "....That's the conclusion of a new study from the University of New Mexico, which found that girls are more likely than boys to experience negative mental health effects when the reality of a given relationship doesn't match up with their expectations of it. "Romantic relationships are particularly important components of girls' identities and are, therefore, strongly related to how they feel about themselves – good or bad," the author of the study, Brian Soller, an assistant professor of sociology and a senior fellow of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico, said. "As a result, relationships that diverge from what girls envision for themselves are especially damaging to their emotional well-being."...."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Love Hot Sauce? Personality As Predictor

2015-03-01T12:00:00.000+00:00

Love Hot Sauce? Your Personality May Be A Good Predictor : The Salt : NPR: "More recently, a group of researchers at Penn State has shown that personality seems to be a significant player in our lust for heat or spice in our food. One study found that people who were most inclined to enjoy action movies, adventure-seeking and exploration were about six times more likely to enjoy the burn of a spicy meal." (more at the link above)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Why Chocolate Is Good For You (video)

2015-02-22T12:00:00.000+00:00

The Economist: Why eating chocolate is good for you

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Remember, Do Not Trust Your Memory

2015-02-15T12:00:00.000+00:00

Remember Not to Trust Your Memory: "Daniel Schacter, a Harvard memory researcher, says that when the brain remembers, it does so in a way that is similar to how an archaeologist reconstructs a past scene relying on an artifact here, an artifact there. The end result might be informative and useful, but don’t expect it to be perfect. This is important because those who don’t know anything about how memory works already have one foot in fantasyland. Most people believe that our memory operates in a way that is similar to a video camera. They think that the sights, sounds, and feelings of our experiences are recorded on something like a hard drive in their heads. Totally wrong. When you remember your past, you don’t get to watch an accurately recorded replay." (more at link above)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Mindful Breathing, Sleep, Stress

2015-02-08T12:00:00.000+00:00

How I Learned To Fall Asleep In Under 1 Minute | Byrdie.com: "the “4-7-8” breathing trick. She happens to be a licensed wellness practitioner who studies meditation, stress, and breathing techniques, and told me it would change my life. You simply breathe in through your nose for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, and exhale through your mouth for eight seconds. She explained that the studied combination of numbers has a chemical-like effect on our brains, and would slow my heart rate and soothe me right to sleep that night. “It works,” she told me. “It’s crazy.” How it Works I couldn’t wait to put the trick to the test, and to my complete disbelief, I woke up the next morning unable to even remember getting to the eighth second of the exhale because it knocked me out that fast. For the next four nights leading up to the big day, even as my stress increased, I was able to fall asleep the minute I tried the 4-7-8 trick. I also used it to relax in the moments leading up to the speech.... Mindful breathing practices have been a part of yoga and Eastern wellness modalities for centuries, but aren’t as popular in Western culture. The most well-known champion of the 4-7-8 breathing technique in the U.S., who is somewhat responsible for the prevalence that the technique does have amongst integrative medicine practitioners, yogis, and those in search of stress reduction and overall relaxation, is Harvard-educated Dr. Andrew Weil ..."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

How sugar affects the brain (video)

2015-02-01T12:00:00.000+00:00

How sugar affects the brain - Nicole Avena -

more info -- see:

How Sugar Affects the Brain

Sugar Cravings

Why We Get Fat

The Science of Addictive Food

Coevolution and Artificial Selection

America’s Food Crisis: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Ancient Wisdom For Lifelong Health

Mindless Eating

What Predicts a Healthy Diet

(source: TED)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

The Detox Myth, How To Get Your Body Healthy

2015-01-25T12:00:00.000+00:00

The Guardian: "... Susan Marchant-Haycox, a London psychologist: “Trying to tie detoxing in with ancient religious practices is clutching at straws,” she says. “You need to look at our social makeup over the very recent past. In the 70s, you had all these gyms popping up, and from there we’ve had the proliferation of the beauty and diet industry with people becoming more aware of certain food groups and so on. “The detox industry is just a follow-on from that. There’s a lot of money in it and there are lots of people out there in marketing making a lot of money.” Peter Ayton, a professor of psychology at City University London, agrees. He says that we’re susceptible to such gimmicks because we live in a world with so much information we’re happy to defer responsibility to others who might understand things better. “To understand even shampoo you need to have PhD in biochemistry,” he says, “but a lot of people don’t have that. If it seems reasonable and plausible and invokes a familiar concept, like detoxing, then we’re happy to go with it.” Many of our consumer decisions, he adds, are made in ignorance and supposition, which is rarely challenged or informed. “People assume that the world is carefully regulated and that there are benign institutions guarding them from making any kind of errors. A lot of marketing drip-feeds that idea, surreptitiously. So if people see somebody with apparently the right credentials, they think they’re listening to a respectable medic and trust their advice.” Ernst is less forgiving: “Ask trading standards what they’re doing about it. Anyone who says, ‘I have a detox treatment’ is profiting from a false claim and is by definition a crook. And it shouldn’t be left to scientists and charities to go after crooks.”" (emphasis added, read more at link above)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Traveling Patients, Traveling Disease, Ebola

2015-01-18T12:00:00.000+00:00

Traveling patients, traveling disease, and Ebola | OUPblog: "... the terrifying truth is that Ebola is just the tip of the iceberg. Diseases have long traveled with patients, and as the phenomena of medical tourism and the more general globalization of health care grow, these problems are likely to grow as well. Medical tourists are very good targets of opportunities for pathogens. Many are traveling with compromised or suppressed immune systems to destination countries for treatment with relatively high infection rates, including the risk of exposure to multi-drug–resistant pathogens. Doctors typically distinguish commensals—the bugs we normally carry on our skin, mouth, digestive tracts, etc.—from pathogens, the harmful bacteria that cause disease through infection. But what is commensal for a person in India might be an exotic pathogen for a US population. Medical tourist patients are transporting their commensals and pathogens to the hospital environments of the destination countries to which they travel, and are exposed to the commensals and pathogens of hospitals and population at large in the destination country. These transmissions tax the health care system and the knowledge of physicians in the home country to whom the new microbe may be unknown, and diagnosis and treatment more difficult." (Read more at link above.)

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Obesity, A Worldwide Fight

2015-01-11T12:00:00.000+00:00

How the world could better fight obesity | McKinsey & Company: "...The main findings of this discussion paper include: Existing evidence indicates that no single intervention is likely to have a significant overall impact. A systemic, sustained portfolio of initiatives, delivered at scale, is needed to reverse the health burden. Almost all the identified interventions (exhibit) are cost effective for society—savings on healthcare costs and higher productivity could outweigh the direct investment required by the intervention when assessed over the full lifetime of the target population. In the United Kingdom, for instance, such a program could reverse rising obesity, saving the National Health Service about $1.2 billion a year..."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Overdiagnosis, Overtreatment, Your Biggest Health Threats

2015-01-04T12:00:00.000+00:00

"Until tests can more accurately distinguish the rabbits from the turtles (not to mention the dodos — it’s now looking like some cancers detectable by screening may actually disappear or go extinct on their own), cancer screening may harm more people than it helps."(source infra)

The Case Against Early Cancer Detection | FiveThirtyEight: "....Early detection might remain a laudable goal if it caught some deadly cancers in time to make a difference and didn’t bother anyone. But it is bothering people. Tens of thousands of South Koreans have undergone surgical procedures for cancers that likely would never have threatened their lives, and the overdiagnosis/overtreatment problem exists to varying degrees for every cancer test. The problem gets worse, the more people you screen, as evidenced by the numbers for mammography and PSA [prostate] screening...."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Powerful Predictor of Successful Relationships

2014-12-28T12:00:00.000+00:00

The "little things" matter--

The Powerful Predictor Behind Successful Relationships | Farnam Street: ".... seemingly big moments are not the defining ones that make or break relationships. Rather it’s almost always the small things, like that time two weeks ago when your friend asked you if you wanted a cup of coffee. How you responded to that question may have influenced the relationship more than you can imagine. These apparently inconsequential moments determine the fate of relationships more than arguments. Psychologist John Gottman can determine the fate of a married couple with an accuracy rate in the 90s. Mind Gym: Achieve More by Thinking Differently, a fascinating new book, explores his research. Gottman looked at those “seemingly meaningless and inconsequential exchanges between people.”..."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Health Care Law, Insurers, Obama, Allies

2014-12-21T12:00:00.000+00:00

Health Care Law Recasts Insurers as Obama Allies - NYTimes.com: "...“These companies all look at government programs as growth markets,” said Michael J. Tuffin, a former executive vice president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the main lobby for the industry. “There will be nearly $2 trillion of subsidized coverage through insurance exchanges and Medicaid over the next 10 years. These are pragmatic companies. They will follow the customer.” The relationship is expected only to deepen as the two sides grow more intertwined. Consumers are already hearing the same messages from insurance companies and the government urging them to sign up for health plans during the three-month enrollment period. Federal law requires most Americans to have coverage, insurers provide it, and the government subsidizes it. “We are in this together,” Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, told insurers at a recent conference in Washington. “You have been our partners,” and for that, he said, “we are very grateful.”..."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Europe, GMO Opponents, Human Health

2014-12-14T12:00:00.000+00:00

Europe Drops Chief Science Adviser. Don't Like the Facts? Kill the Messenger. | Big Think | Risk: Reason and Reality: "...The office was not involved in policy making, just in giving the policy makers a read on what the science said. But of course what the science says on climate change or GMOs points toward some obvious policy conclusions; climate change is real and we’d better do something…thousands of studies on GMOS have found no harm to human health (and only a few questionable studies have hinted otherwise) so there is no need for a blanket Precautionary Principle ban on all applications of agricultural biotechnology. The problem is, those conclusions threatened the values of GMO opponents. Their answer? “Kill the Monster!” Not the monster of the evidence, of course. Kill the messenger, the CSA. Environmental groups, noting specific concern about the GMO issue, called on the EU government to abandon the entire idea of an independent science adviser, after the CSA reported what every independent national science advisory board in the world has found; the science is about as clear on GMOs as it is on climate change…there is no reliable evidence that GMOS harm human health...."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Medical Establishment Got It Wrong, Eat More Fat

2014-12-07T12:00:00.000+00:00

Experts: Eat More Fat - Business Insider: "According to a new study from the National Institutes of Health, a diet that reduces carbohydrates in favor of fat – including the saturated fat in meat and butter – improves nearly every health measurement, from reducing our waistlines to keeping our arteries clear, more than the low-fat diets that have been recommended for generations. "The medical establishment got it wrong," says cardiologist Dennis Goodman, director of Integrative Medicine at New York Medical Associates. "The belief system didn't pan out.""

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Olestra, Fat Free Failure

2014-11-30T12:00:00.000+00:00

The Failure of the Fat Free Revolution: "....In 2011, a Purdue study hammered the final nail in the olestra coffin. It found that olestra incites weight gain by tricking the body into thinking it doesn’t need to metabolize fatty foods. Used to olestra fat without any calories, the body is surprised by the calories of the real thing. The finding fits our current organic ethos; it would have surprised parents in the 1990s who regarded fat-free cookies and crackers as healthy. It’s only relatively recently that applying the laboratory to our food supply ceased to seem futuristic and be in vogue. Today, olestra has achieved immortality, just not in the way its inventors expected: in 2010, TIME Magazine ranked it as one of the 50 worst inventions of all time."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Phineas Gage, Famous Frontal Lobe Patient, Neuroscience

2014-11-23T12:00:00.000+00:00

Another truth stranger than fiction--

Phineas Gage neuroscience case: True story of famous frontal lobe patient is better than textbook accounts.: "....Modern neuroscientific knowledge makes the idea of Gage’s recovery all the more plausible. Neuroscientists once believed that brain lesions caused permanent deficits: Once lost, a faculty never returned. More and more, though, they recognize that the adult brain can relearn lost skills. This ability to change, called brain plasticity, remains somewhat mysterious, and it happens achingly slowly. But the bottom line is that the brain can recover lost functions in certain circumstances. In particular, Macmillan suggests that Gage’s highly regimented life in Chile aided his recovery. People with frontal-lobe damage often have trouble completing tasks, especially open-ended tasks, because they get distracted easily and have trouble planning. But in Chile Gage never had to plan his day: Prepping the coach involved the same steps every morning, and once he hit the road, he simply had to keep driving forward until it was time to turn around. This routine would have introduced structure into his life and kept him focused...."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal

Implanted Electrical Devices Treat Hypertension, Other Conditions

2014-11-16T12:00:00.000+00:00

Bodily functions, Parkinson's--

Implant Offers New Treatment for Hypertension | MIT Technology Review: "...Implanted electrical devices that control bodily functions have been used for many years. Pacemakers for heart patients are perhaps best known, but electrical devices are also used to control Parkinson’s disease and, experimentally, some psychiatric conditions (see “Brain Pacemakers” and “Brain Implants Can Rest Misfiring Circuits”). They may be helpful even for such unlikely conditions as bladder dysfunction and rheumatoid arthritis (see “Implanted Device Controls Rheumatoid Arthritis”)...."

more news below

Follow @nothinnormal