NewsTrust - Wellness - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

10 amazing truths you already suspected

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By Mark Morford - Aug. 07 (Opinion) - 1) Let's start with, say, tanning beds. Turns out they cause cancer like a mofo. I mean, as bad as arsenic. As mustard gas. Smoking. Chimney sweeping. The Jonas Brothers. I mean, obviously. Like you didn't already know. Like you thought it was all healthy fun and games to strip yourself naked and lay on a bed of giant blue light bulbs and have ultraviolet rays blasted into every inch of your skin for hours per week and think, yeah, this can't be all bad, can it?

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Earlier Puberty in European Girls

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Tara Parker-Pope - May. 04 (Opinion) - A 15-year study of young girls in Denmark found that the average age of breast development has fallen by a full year compared to girls studied in the early 1990s. The findings, published this month in the journal Pediatrics, add to a growing body of evidence that the timing of puberty is changing, possibly related to environmental exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals that mimic estrogen in the body.

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Why there are pathogens such as MRSA in our pork

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Nicholas D. Kristof - Mar. 25 (Opinion) - Five out of 90 samples of retail pork in Louisiana tested positive for MRSA — an antibiotic-resistant staph infection — according to a peer-reviewed study published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology last year. Regardless of whether the bacteria came from the pigs or from humans who handled the meat, the results should sound an alarm bell, for MRSA already kills more than 18,000 Americans annually, more than AIDS does.

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The Father Factor

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Scientific American - By Paul Raeburn - Jan. 30 (Research) - It is widely recognized that a 40-year-old woman has an increased risk of bearing a child with Down syndrome. What is not known is that a 40-year-old man has the same risk of fathering a child with schizophrenia—and even higher odds of his offspring having autism. The risk of bipolar disorder appears to rise as well. In the past couple of decades, the number of older fathers has increased. Birth rates for men older than 40 have jumped as much as 40 percent since 1980. The mechanisms behind the higher risks are still being investigated, although scientists have several hypotheses that could someday lead to better therapies or possibly even cures for these mental illnesses.

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New administration: Secretary of food

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - Dec. 22 (Editorial) - Talking to NPR's Renee Montagne, Pollan summed up why it is so important to get out of the limited mind-set favoring promotion of big agricultural-related corporations: "The food system is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gases. It is responsible for the catastrophic American diet that is leading 50 percent of us to suffer from chronic disease, and that drives up health care costs."

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Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Nature - Dec. 08 (Opinion) - The authors statement is clear "In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks"

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Why the doctor can't see you now

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By S. Smiley Thakur - Nov. 21 (Opinion) - Physicians have been keeping a secret from you: The practice of medicine simply isn't a viable business. This reality affects not only the availability of doctors to care for patients, but also the quality of delivered care. After 10 years in full-time clinical practice, I decided to stop accepting Medicare and all private insurance. Such a move seems illogical to physicians and patients, but was made to preserve patient access to quality care. Physicians who don't come to the same conclusion risk going out of business.

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Consider McCain's health as well as candidate's age

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Richard E. Seroussi - Oct. 13 (Opinion) - As a physician, I am concerned that presidential candidate John McCain has not been willing to release his medical records for public scrutiny. While I can appreciate that the senator is a "very young" 72-year-old man, he is clearly at an age where his mortality is significantly more likely than for a younger man. The country should understand if he is at significant risk for a disease process that would carry enough morbidity to make him unable to perform the position of president for the next four years.

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Household Products: Start with labels

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - Jul. 24 (Editorial) - The public is getting a stinky deal from industry on many fresh-smelling products such as air fresheners, fabric softeners and detergents. The federal government needs to regulate the products more aggressively.

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Family Planning: Striking Plan B

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - Jul. 16 (Editorial) - The Bush administration continues its fight to prevent women from accessing birth control. According to The New York Times, a new proposal would require that clinics and hospitals receiving government aid under health programs "certify that they will not refuse to hire nurses and other providers who object to abortion and (emphasis ours) even certain types of birth control." The proposal also takes issue with state laws forcing hospitals to provide rape victims with emergency contraception, a form of birth control also known by its brand name, Plan B.

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Bouncing Back

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Examiner.com - By karen salmansohn, betsy talbot - Jun. 05 (Opinion) - Today's post is courtesy of Karen Salmansohn, author of The Bounce Back Book. She is also the best-selling author of many books, most notably, Be Happy, Dammit! Karen has stopped by our blog on her book tour of the blogosphere.

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Training the Mind for Resiliency - Shifting Careers - Small Business - New York Times Blog

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By karen salmansohn - Jun. 04 (Interview) - Karen Salmansohn has written 29 books and, in the process, created her own mini genre that she calls "self-help for people who wouldn't be caught dead reading self-help." The ingredients for a Salmansohn book include bold graphics, advice distilled to digestible nuggets and lots of humor. The levity does not preclude her from tackling weighty subjects, and her latest, "The Bounceback Book," looks at the psychology behind resiliency and offers 75 tips on how to bounce back after both minor setbacks or major trauma.

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Madness: A Bipolar Life and Poets on Prozac

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Abigail Zuger - Apr. 30 (Review) - Marya Hornbacher is a virtuoso writer: humorous, articulate and self-aware. She is also, as she has now documented in two books, incurably mentally ill. Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Madness: A Bipolar Life By Marya Hornbacher. Houghton Mifflin. 299 pages. $25. Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment and the Creative Process. Edited by Richard M. Berlin, M.D. Johns Hopkins Press. 200 pages. $21.95 Related An Excerpt From Madness (Houghton Mifflin) RSS Feed * Get Health News From The New York Times » Even on the best possible treatment, Ms. Hornbacher tiptoes along the same high wire as Plath, Lowell, Woolf and the rest of the unbalanced artistes. Off medication, she reliably falls into a turmoil of confused self-destruction, which, as she would be the first to acknowledge, means heartbreak and worry for her friends and relatives, challenges for her doctors, and, in the age-old contradiction, new fodder for her muse.

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The responsible shopper as do-gooder

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Boulder Daily Camera - By Julian Friedland - Apr. 27 (Opinion) - One of my pet peeves is the notion that consumers who attempt to shop responsibly are merely vain and somewhat hypocritical shoppers who seek elevated do-gooder social status.

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Single-payer would be good solution

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Amy Goodman - Apr. 24 (Opinion) - "I think that our current presidential candidates understand that ideally single-payer would be the best, but they don't have the political will to move that forward. Their job is to feel which way the wind is blowing. Our job is to turn that wind."

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Brain-enhancing drugs work by focusing brain activity... for better or worse

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ScienceBlogs.com - By Ed Yong - Apr. 19 (Opinion) - But for many people, taking a pill to sharpen your mental faculties - a so-called "cognitive enhancer" - is a much easier deal. A large number of prescription drugs can indeed give you a little mental boost, including amphetamine and methylphenidate (more familiarly known by its brand name Ritalin). Both the use and the range of such drugs are on the rise and they seem capable of stimulating debate just as readily as they do the brain.

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Designing better choices

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein - Apr. 02 (Opinion) - The director of food services for a big-city school system hatches an interesting idea: If she changes the arrangement and display of school food, will it alter kids' decisions about what to eat? Without modifying menus, she decides to place the desserts first on the cafeteria line in one school, last in another and on a separate line altogether in others. She varies the location of other foods as well. The results are dramatic. Simply by rearranging the cafeteria, the consumption of many items increases or decreases.

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Many casualties of war go unmentioned

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Amy Goodman - Mar. 27 (Opinion) - We just passed the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the invasion five years ago. Still, the death toll climbs. Typically unmentioned alongside the count of U.S. war dead are the tens of thousands of wounded (not to mention the Iraqi dead). The Pentagon doesn't tout the number of U.S. injured, but the Web site icasualties.orgreports an official number of more than 40,000 soldiers requiring medical airlifts out of Iraq, a good indicator of the scale of major injuries. That doesn't include many others. Dr. Arthur Blank, an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder, estimates that 30 percent of Iraq veterans will suffer from PTSD. Tomas Young was one of those injured, on April 4, 2004, in Sadr City.

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The Power of Power Naps

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Scientific American - By Jessica Payne, Matthew Walker - Mar. 25 (Review) - Sleep is such a fundamental biological drive that it's shared by practically every species, from fruit flies to humans. Indeed, sleep is so essential that animals will die as quickly from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation. And yet despite such alarming evidence (not to mention all the things your mother told you about the importance of sleep), human beings are one of the few species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep. Why do we do this? Most would blame the frantic pace of modern life: we live in a 24/7 world, fuelled by ever-present deadlines, demands and responsibilities. With so much to do and so little time, it seems tempting, or perhaps even necessary, to shave off a few hours of sleep in order to get things done. Given this chronic shortage of shuteye, wouldn't it be wonderful if a quick nap could refresh us mentally and improve our memories? Results from a recent study by Lahl et al. (2008) suggest that a mere six-minute nap may be able do just that.

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Amid decline, Bush appears carefree

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Maureen Dowd - Mar. 18 (Opinion) - The dollar's crumpling, the recession's thundering, the Dow's bungee-jumping and the world's disapproving, yet George W. Bush has turned into Gene Kelly, tap dancing and singing in a one-man review called "The Most Happy Fella." "I'm coming to you as an optimistic fellow," he told the Economic Club of New York on Friday. His manner -- chortling and joshing -- was in odd juxtaposition to the Fed's bailing out the imploding Bear Stearns and his own acknowledgment that "our economy obviously is going through a tough time," that gas prices are spiking, and that folks "are concerned about making their bills."

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Poverty Is Poison

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Feb. 18 (Opinion) - Neuroscientists have found that "many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development." The effect is to impair language development and memory -- and hence the ability to escape poverty -- for the rest of the child's life.

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Healing a Troubled Mind Takes More Than a Pill

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Charles Barber - Feb. 10 (Comment) - Feeling depressed? No problem, pop a pill. That's what more and more Americans are doing these days to quell what ails their troubled souls. The use of antidepressants in the United States has exploded in the past couple of decades, and drugs such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, which didn't even exist 20 years ago, are household names, almost household staples.

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Can't get no satisfaction from a forgotten pastor

Sat, 09 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By D. Parvaz - Feb. 09 (Opinion) - But look. Here's the thing. This guy was lying to himself, his family and his followers for years. He had the chance to come clean, and he didn't. That's what the guy needs therapy for.

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Healthy Food: Fresh pesticides

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By (board) - Jan. 30 (Editorial) - The dangers of pesticides on what should be our healthiest foods ought to spur or reinforce caution on the part of the public. That's largely because regulators have done a poor job of studying and controlling pesticides.

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Gratitude is the antidote

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:00:08 -0800

San Francisco Chronicle - By Jon Carroll - Nov. 22 (Opinion) - Gratitude is the antidote. It is useful in combatting a variety of diseases, from something as vague as the discontents of civilization to something as specific as personal grief. Thanksgiving is the holiday of gratitude, and I am always willing to celebrate it. We are told frequently that "it is what it is." That's a tautology, of course, and an increasingly grating cliche, but it gained prominence because it's a real reminder of a real thing: What happened happened. You can't change the past. All we have is today. See you in the future! But regret is real. Sorrow and pain and loss - all real. I sometimes think of civilization or society as a kind of floor, a patchy, rickety floor in constant need of repair. Below the floor is the chasm. Some people know that chasm well - those who have scrabbled to exist in war zones, those who have tried to cope after hurricanes or earthquakes, those who have lost multiple family members simultaneously. For them, the daily comforts of society are of little use. The network of routine, the solace of art, the hope for the future - none of it seems real. Only the chasm seems real. The chasm is only metaphorical, of course, but sometimes we live our lives entirely within metaphors. Our choice of metaphors is just a matter of taste. There's no right answer in this quiz, kids.

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