Being Socially Acceptable

Everything we do in our social lives is to build upon our reputation and most individuals go to great lengths to not only build a solid reputation, but to maintain it at all cost. Our reputations are platforms that enable us to obtain jobs, cultivate a social circle, and determine our place in the world.

Interestingly enough, one of the latest studies showed that our ability to build a reputation and maintain social relationships is directly related to a portion of our brain called the lateral prefrontal cortex, or PFC. This study has shown that disrupting the neurons in this particular area of the brain actually disrupts an individual’s ability to play psychological games by making it more difficult for them than for others. For example, individuals suffering a disruption in the PFC find it more difficult to fight off the compulsion to cheat and while most of us understand that it is better for us to simply not act upon these impulses because of the corresponding social ramifications, the study shows that individuals suffering a disruption are not always able to withstand the rigors of maintaining positive social status.

The research was conducted by Daria Knoch and a team from the University of Basel. While there have been a variety of other studies over the years which have compared neural activity in this part of the brain to an individual’s behavior, the brain scans conducted previously had not been able to determine whether or not the activity caused the behavior, or if the behavior caused the activity.

Understanding Reputation

In order to understand this better, Knoch and her team used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation. This used rapidly changing magnetic fields to induce a weak electrical current in a specific part of the brain to suppress the activity of local neurons.

The research took 87 volunteers and put them through a rigorous trust game designed to see how individuals reacted to decisions about trust. What they found was that when they targeted the right lateral PFC, patients were significantly less likely to repay trust than other participants. The volunteers who were undergoing the TMS scan understood that what they were doing was unfair and unjust, but they were unable to put it into useful practice because of the corresponding disruption in their brains.

Knoch’s team is currently investigating a different scope of study to determine how other parts of the brain interact when reputation is on the line.

At the University of Manchester, a team recently studied special cells which they believe can play an important role in helping regulate an individual’s inner clock or biological rhythms. Previously, scientists had believed these particular cells were inactive during the day and therefore were tied to an individual’s chronological clock, but the new studies show that the inverse is true.

According to Professor Hugh Piggins, a neuroscience expert at the University, these findings can possibly pave the way to learning how to effectively combat various sleep disorders which affect millions of individuals throughout the world. These sleep disorders are triggered by malfunctions in their biological clocks. This research will hopefully allow scientists to discover a new approach to finding ways to help individuals re-tune their daily clocks.

Researching Chronobiology

The Manchester research team took the concept of chronobiology, or the idea that the body regulates itself by firing off more cells during the daylight and fewer during the night, and turned it on its head.

According to Professor Piggins, “The traditional model said that the clock and the brain communicated to the rest of the brain via the number of electrical impulses that the brain cells were producing. These impulses would travel around the brain, telling it what time it is. What we have found is in fact that there are at least two types of cells in this part of the brain.”

What the researchers discovered was that these particular cells are unlike any other cells currently understood. They contain a specific gene that allows them to sustain what the researchers described as “unusually high levels of excitability”. During this time, the cells become highly excited, but eventually they calm down and recover sufficiently to become naturally active. This is the specific activity which notifies the human body when it needs to be awake.

According to Professor Piggins, “There is a lot of interest in the pharmaceutical industry, obviously, to try and develop chemical treatments to reset your daily clock in order to counteract things like jet lag. Or, perhaps more importantly, different kinds of sleep disorders for which dysfunctions in this clock are often involved.”

While far from conclusive, this is the first type of study to discover and consequently scrutinize these types of “quiet” cells. What they hope is that this research will ultimately show that there are cells in other parts of the body, and the brain, which can also survive under these conditions, which is fairly groundbreaking in terms of understanding chronobiology.

What Causes Gray Hair?

For years, common wisdom has deemed that the main factors for gray hair are age, lifestyle stress and poor diet – stress being the primary factor. However, recent research has demonstrated that there may be other, more complex reasons. Scientists at Unilever recently undertook a study, published in the journal PLoS One, where they studied more than 200 identical and non-identical Danish twin sisters between the ages of 59 and 81. What they found was that there was little difference between identical twins who shared the same gene in terms of gray hair, but there was a significantly different margin between non-identical twins whose genes differed.

The study also examined receding hairlines, but found that hair thinning on top of the head seems to be connected to environmental and lifestyle factors as opposed to genetics, and lead researcher Dr. David Gunn says that while many theories have been put forward to explain rates of graying in individuals over the years, there has been little hard scientific evidence to support these theories. In his words, “Our study offers us a fascinating insight into the reason why women go gray, and it certainly suggests that environmental factors are not as important as we once thought. The research indicates that irrespective of how stressful a woman’s life is there are more forces at play which are more likely to cause her hair gray.”

Research into Graying Hair

Meanwhile, Nina Goad of the British Association of Dermatologists said that previous research had also found very few environmental factors that were identifiable among individuals who grayed more quickly than their relatives. According to her, “This means that for the majority of people, graying hair is not down to something you have done, but to genetic factors beyond your control, and that generally your lifestyle will not greatly impact when your hair loses its color, although there are exceptions to this rule.”

Dr. David Fisher of the Dana Faber Cancer Institute has conducted his own series of research studies into graying; while he agrees that genetics play a key role in determining when hair turns gray. Research also suggests that there is evidence that certain types of chemicals can promote graying. In the end, the study is far from conclusive, but it offers a different point of view to the traditional concept that stress is the primary factor behind the onset of graying hair.

Combating Depression

Depression is one of those dysfunctions which can present with a wide variety of symptoms that may or may not be related. These can range from feelings of sadness, changes in sleep patterns, weight changes, lack of energy, cognitive function impairment, to a wide variety of other issues.  According to Dr. Jennifer Wild, a senior instructor at the Institute of Psychiatry, despite a large increase in cognitive behavior therapy – otherwise known as CBT – doctors are still advocating the use drugs on their patients. Wild argues that doctors need to have a better understanding of the psychological therapies available and should be offering such therapies to individuals in lieu of medications which simply mask the dysfunctions. Her findings were posted on the BBC’s website.

Using Therapy, not Drugs

According to Dr. Wild, “People with depression often get better when they change the way they think. Since with therapy it is more likely to achieve this with longer lasting results than drugs, doctors need to stop pushing pills and start pushing treatments that work.”

The problem with many clinicians is that they have been taught over the years to simply provide medication to aiding masking or alleviating the symptoms and that is exactly what antidepressants do: make a person feel better. They do not solve the underlying symptoms, nor do they treat the problem that is causing the depression in the first place. When doctors simply prescribe a pill, they are only enabling a temporary solution.

Professor Robert DeRubeis at the University of Pennsylvania took a team of researchers and looked at CBT as a way of treating depression. They found that individuals who received such treatment as compared with medications showed significant long-term recovery through retraining the patient’s thought patterns.

In 2008, the UK Government introduced an initiative called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, or IAPT, which is effectively halting the automatic prescription of pills and expanding the availability of psychological treatments that are effective in treating the symptoms. Prior to the initiative, most doctors in the UK offered 80 percent of patients’ drugs and only 20 percent were offered therapy. Now, 115 out of 154 of England’s primary care trusts now offer IAPT service.

If one suffers from a disease or dysfunction, a doctor should first and foremost focus upon finding an answer that addresses all the symptoms, as opposed to masking the symptoms through pills. There is simply no substitute for a carefully considered diagnosis. .

Studying Stem Cells

According to Robert Weinberg, one of the authors of the study and a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, “Evidence is accumulating rapidly that cancer stem cells are responsible for the aggressive powers of many tumors. The ability to generate such cells in the laboratory, together with the powerful techniques available at the Broad Institute, made it possible to identify this chemical. There will surely be dozens of others with similar properties found over the next several years.”

The paper was published in the medical journal Cell, and the lead author, Eric Lander – director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School – says that, “Many therapies kill the bulk of the tumor only to see it grow. This raises the prospect of new kinds of anti-cancer therapies.”

The evidence was fairly overwhelming and backs an emerging idea in cancer biology that tumors can harbor a group of cells within them that have a unique ability to regenerate cancers, which in addition to promoting the growth of tumors are also extremely resistant to current cancer therapies. By identifying chemicals which can specifically kill these cancer stem cells, these chemicals may be used in future drug development to create cancer-seeking drugs that literally seek and destroy the cancerous cells within the body.

Unfortunately, these cancer stem cells are extremely rare, and considering that they lose their properties when grown outside of the body, research has been severely limited due to a lack of material available for analysis; however, there are a variety of studies underway seeking to establish a better consensus.

A Future Cancer Cure?

Researchers from Broad and Whitehead Institute have used additional research to generate a fairly large number of these cancer cells in laboratory environments. Unfortunately, this has only been completed on mice and limited in scope to focusing upon breast cancer in particular. The compound they discovered is called salinomycin. It destroys not only cancer stem cells created in the laboratory, but also those which are naturally occurring.  Salinomycin, when compared to the common chemotherapeutic drug paclitaxel, reduced the number of cancer stem cells by more than 100-fold in 30 mice. In addition, it also reduced the size of the breast tumors that it did not eliminate completely.

While not conclusive by any means, the evidence is fairly compelling and has sparked further research into the cure for cancer.

In today’s medical world, it is the role of a clinician to make an educated diagnosis based upon particular criteria. Doctors are of course required to go through intense medical training and education, plus a stringent series of procedures and tests before they ever obtain a license to practice. Many family practitioners literally spend upwards of 15 to 20 years in various schools or undergoing various training procedures prior to being allowed to run their own clinic. Not only does a physician need to understand terms of normality, or homeostasis of the body, they also must understand the anatomy, physiology, pathology and psychology of the human body. In order for a clinician to determine what is normal, they must be able to measure a patient’s current condition against the normal range of results. Then they must determine where the patient departed from homeostasis and how to treat the problem.

Medical Art?
Some individuals have likened making a medical diagnosis to a form of art; superior clinicians are set apart by their ability to move beyond the simple science of lab tests and delve into the manipulation of physical knowledge created thousands of years ago by ancient physicians such as Hippocrates. In the modern world, many clinicians have come to rely upon lab work rather than physically checking a patient’s symptoms. The days of doctors rigorously poking and prodding your body are fading, much to the detriment of many professionals. According to Dr. Steven Y. Park, MD, the problem with many doctors these days is their obsession with discovering a rare or exotic diagnosis in order to establish a form of celebrity. This is not only a hindrance to medicine, but also a disservice to the patients.

Unfortunately, this has led to a wide variety of patients being misdiagnosed because the clinicians are failing to perform thorough physical exams. Many of the doctors are focusing upon rare oddities rather than mundane medical conditions that are simple to diagnose and easy to treat, but are passed over in favor of searching for that elusive super-disease. Establishing a diagnosis should begin with attentive listening, understanding a patient’s lifestyle and life stressors, and obtaining a holistic overview of the patient’s symptoms – as opposed to a simple review of laboratory work and imaging that is most common today.

Many of the simplest problems patients are suffering from can be diagnosed by physically inspecting the patient and taking the time to speak with them about their history, rather than looking at a chart and making a ‘guesstimate’. It is for this reason that many individuals turn to alternative medical practitioners, as holistic overviews are mandatory in such practices.

The overall goal of CPR is to physically intervene and create artificial circulation in the body by rhythmically pressing on the chest of an individual suffering from a cardiac or respiratory arrest in order to manually pump blood to the heart. CPR will also inflate the lungs and force oxygen into the blood. Unfortunately, the odds of surviving a cardiac arrest in a hospital via CPR are fairly low and it is one of the few areas in medical study that have failed to make any significant advances in the last decade. According to a recent study put out by Medicare, conducted by researchers at the University of Washington-Seattle and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the lack of progress is troubling.

How effective is CPR?

The rates of effectiveness of CPR, in conjunction with electric defibrillators, have definitely increased the chance of survival when performed by non-medical professionals, but for some reason, the rate of success in hospitals has not kept pace. One researcher involved in the study, Paul S. Chan of the St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, found that in one of three cases, individuals suffering from cardiac arrest in a hospital failed to receive a defibrillator shock within the recommended time window of two minutes after the onset of cardiac arrest. Also discovered was that most hospital staff actually failed to apply the CPR chest compression at the necessary rate of 100 per minute, or were performing them inadequately, effectively resulting in no beneficial effects whatsoever.

The study achieved its results by reviewing the medical records of close to 444,000 Medicare patients across the United States – all were treated for cardiac arrest between 1992 and 2005. The study found that the rate of cardiac arrest survival in hospitals hovered at a steady 18 percent over the entire time period. According to Dr. Gerald Buckberg of the University of California-Los Angeles Medical Center, doctors have become so accustomed to the failure rates that they accept them. According to Buckberg, “We should not accept this level of failure.”

Setting Standards

No one is exactly sure why precise standards are maintained out in the field, but are not similarly maintained in the hospital setting. Research suggests that hospitals have begun accepting the low numbers as nothing more than inevitable rather than pushing themselves to save more lives. While the evidence is far from conclusive, it points to a level of complacency that is fairly alarming not only to physicians, but to every individual who might be at risk of suffering a cardiac arrest at some time in the future.  Hopefully, the study will spark more results and force hospitals to take a closer look at regulating proper CPR procedures with patients who suffer from cardiac arrest while visiting the hospital. When performed properly, CPR is one of the most effective ways to treat

Guidelines for Consumption

Most guidelines are fairly vague when it comes to recommending a specific amount of sunlight required for healthy living, and the problem with vague guidelines is exactly that: the recommendations are too general to be useful and considering each individual has a distinctly different requirement, the levels of vitamin D necessary depend upon several factors; these range from where one lives, skin type, time of year and even items as mundane as atmospheric conditions.

A recent study put forth by scientists at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research demonstrated the creation of a calculator that takes into consideration the various factors and estimates the number of minutes of exposure each individual requires on a daily basis to produce sufficient vitamin D for optimal health: roughly 25 mcg. Unfortunately, while it does provide a general idea, the criteria for determining how much specific individuals require is extremely complex and US cities are not listed in the calculator.

Dietary Requirements

These days, most individuals consume their dietary requirements of vitamin D from supplements or from foods which have been fortified to reduce the risk of deficiency. However, above and beyond natural sunlight – the most natural way for your body to produce the necessary vitamin – a regular diet that includes vitamin D sources is the best choice. Fatty fish and premium essential fatty acid supplements are two excellent choices.

How much is too much?

It can be a complex task to calculate exactly how much time in the sun is necessary for an individual to obtain an unnatural amount of vitamin D. During that time, individuals need to be totally exposed – the arms, face and hands – something that becomes quite difficult for individuals living in areas where cold weather necessitates layers of clothing to stay warm. Thus, if you happen to live in a part of the world where it is overcast most of the time or chilly throughout most of the year, one needs to find additional ways to supplement the vitamin D in the diet to avoid deficiency and the corresponding side effects that such deficiency can wrought.

Connecting Spiritually

The spiritual connection of yoga relates to an issue described by Kino Macgregor in his article, The Breath of Life. Individuals are born with breath taken into their bodies and when we pass away that breath is extinguished. Everything between those two moments comprises our life experiences and, from a limited perspective, it is difficult to understand the importance of the span of time between these two moments.

Practicing Yoga

The practice of yoga is such that individuals who learn the techniques not only benefit from the physical side effects of muscular control and enhanced breathing, but they also learn how to access the very nature of life itself in between those two moments of time when an individual first comes into being and when they pass away. While many individuals practicing yoga do so specifically for the health benefits, the spiritual benefits can equally important for others.

Breathing Control

Controlling breath is considered to be one of the most difficult aspects of learning yoga. While the muscles can eventually be taught through repetitive use, learning to control one’s breathing requires complete control of one’s physical and mental processes – a task that often takes years to achieve.

Even one who is not a believer in the spiritual side of yoga, it is scientifically proven that the regulation of breathing directly affects an individual’s ability to remain calm. This in turn reduces stress and inhibits the release of harmful chemicals and hormones that is triggered by feeling of stress. This is why one of the primary methods of treating anxiety attacks is through controlled breathing routines – the oxygen levels help maintain the proper chemical balance for well-being.

Bringing Balance

Without careful attention to breathing patterns, yoga would be nothing more than just another form of cardiovascular exercise, similar to an aerobics workout. Yoga goes beyond a simple cardiovascular routine and helps the body maintain a natural balance of chemicals and hormones through controlled breathing and regulated strength routines. You do not have to be a believer in the spiritual side of yoga to understand the scientific explanation, but for many individuals it is because of the spiritual balance that it brings that they practice the various forms, seeking to unlock the secret that has been referred to over the years as ‘the breath of life’.

Breathing is one of the most fundamental basics when it comes to maintenance of the body, and learning how to control the inhalation and exhalation of their body allows an individual greater control over their natural stress levels in any situation.

Myth Number One

The first big myth is that you can get six-pack abs virtually overnight.  Muscle takes time to build, no matter how hard you work.  And it actually will build better with some rest in between workouts.  Not too long a rest, of course, but alternating your workouts between cardio and weight-bearing will actually bring you bigger benefits that doing weight-bearing exercise every single day.  So plan your workouts to take the biggest advantage of them, but keep in mind that your body needs time to re-build and refresh, as well as get rid of fat and build muscle. If you are intent on maximizing your ab workout, then work them hard by doing both straight crunches and also turning to an angle to work the lateral obliques.  THEN give them a day to rest – they will almost certainly need it!

Myth Number Two

Another common myth is that abdominal exercises will “melt away” any surrounding fat.  Not true.  Fat is fat and muscle is muscle, and the only way to “melt” fat is to burn more calories than you take in.  There is no difference whether you burn those calories via abdominal exercises, by swimming, running, or horseback riding.  You simply have to burn more calories than you take in.  Abdominal exercises will, of course, build abdominal muscle, so exercising your abs while losing weight will help you build those core muscles so they are ready to shine when the excess fat is gone.

Myth Number Three

Ever heard this myth – sit-ups are all you need?  Not true!  Actually, full sit-ups do not work your abs as well as crunches do.  Once you have raised your upper body past a certain point, your hip flexor muscles take over from the abs and you do not receive that specific benefit from your workout.  If you really want to give your abs a workout, try this variation on the crunch:  crunch up to your left side, then down, then crunch to the center, go down, and finally crunch to the right and go down.  That counts as one rep.  Do the crunches at a controlled pace, and you get a fabulous workout for those muscles.

The Most Dangerous Myth

And finally, probably the worst myth of all is that barbell twists will trim your obliques faster than anything else.  Wrong.  They are far more likely to give you a back injury than anything else.  Remember, the barbells are pulling straight down by virtue of gravity, while you want to twist at an angle.  All it takes is one incorrect twist on your part, and you just strained your back.  Use angled crunches or a stability ball to work the obliques, rather than any type of weight. Give yourself a far better benefit and avoid the injury that the barbells can cause.