Posts Tagged ‘Health’
“Restless Vagina Syndrome”: Big Pharma’s Newest Fake Disease
From Alternet:
It’s not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner’s), that you don’t orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.
You are among the “43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function,” according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA’s evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties — but only if the woman feels “personal distress” about it.
So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them.
By promoting…
Cat Registered as Hypnotherapist
From BBC:
The regulation of hypnotherapists in the UK is so lax that even a cat can become accredited, the BBC has found.
Chris Jackson, presenter of Inside Out in the North East and Cumbria, registered pet George with three industry bodies.
Each one accepted a certificate from the non-existent Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists as proof of George’s credentials.
It follows a similar investigation by an American clinical psychologist.
Dr Steve Eichel suspected industry bodies in the US were not running checks on their members.
[Read more at BBC]
First U.S. Marijuana Cafe Opens in Portland
From Reuters:
The United States’ first marijuana cafe opened on Friday, posing an early test of the Obama administration’s move to relax policing of medical use of the drug.The Cannabis Cafe in Portland, Oregon, is the first to give certified medical marijuana users a place to get hold of the drug and smoke it — as long as they are out of public view — despite a federal ban.
“This club represents personal freedom, finally, for our members,” said Madeline Martinez, Oregon’s executive director of NORML, a group pushing for marijuana legalization.
“Our plans go beyond serving food and marijuana,” said Martinez. “We hope to have classes, seminars, even a Cannabis Community College, based here to help people learn about growing and other uses for cannabis.”
The cafe — in a two-story building which…
Darpa: Freeze Soldiers to Save Injured Brains
From Wired:
The Pentagon’s mad science division has a new way to deal with the 70,000+ troops diagnosed with traumatic brain injury: freeze ‘em.
Darpa, the military’s far-out research arm, is looking for research projects that would create a “therapeutic hypothermia device” to prevent traumatic brain injuries from causing permanent molecular damage to the brain. The idea is based on successful studies that used cortical cooling to treat survivors of strokes and cardiac arrest. According to Darpa’s solicitation, cooling down the brain after trauma can offer “dramatic neuroprotection” that will prevent long-term harm to cognition and motor skills.
So far, Darpa-funded studies suggest that traumatic brain injuries are caused by repeated exposure to blasts, specifically the “supersonic wave” of highly-pressurized air they emit. Within a fraction of a second after impact, brain cells, tissues and blood vessels are stretched,…
Why Are More Americans Smoking?
Surprising news from the Centers for Disease Control, reported in U.S. News & World Report:
After decades of progress, the number of Americans who smoke hasn’t budged over the last five years and actually rose slightly from 2007 to 2008, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over the longer term, smoking rates have declined. From 1998 to 2008, the percentage of smokers in the United States dropped from 24.1 to 20.6 percent.
However, the report notes that “during the past five years, rates have shown virtually no change,” and in fact the percentage of Americans who smoke has begun to creep up again, rising from 19.8 percent in 2007 to 20.6 percent in 2008.
Many experts blame the turnaround on recent cutbacks in funding for state…
EyeWriter Source Code Released To The Public
This technology is pretty incredible. via wooster collective
The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks, the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group communities have teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE. Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes. The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.
This week the team behind the EyeWriter project released all the Source code, free software, DIY instructions, and eye tags by Tempt1 to the public at eyewriter.org
High-Carb Diets Lower Weight and Raise Mood Levels
By Jeannine Stein in the LA TImes:
Which is better for weight loss — a high-protein diet or a high-carb diet? That endless debate got a new twist Monday.
In a yearlong study, Australian researchers found that both diets worked equally well when it came to shedding pounds but those on the low-carb diet were in considerably worse moods.
The report, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, assigned 106 overweight and obese men and women to either a low-carb diet high in fat and protein or a high-carb diet low in fat and protein.
The participants’ weight was noted at weeks eight, 24, 40 and 52, and their emotional state was evaluated via three standard questionnaires measuring aspects of mood, including anxiety, depression and anger.
Both groups lost an average of 30 pounds, slightly…
The Gut Response To What We Eat
Nell Greenfield Boyce reports for NPR:
A high-fat, high-sugar diet can quickly and dramatically change the population of microbes living in the digestive tract, according to a new study of human gut bugs transplanted into mice.
Trillions of microbes live inside the human gut, and one of their functions is to process parts of foods that we can’t digest on our own. Recent studies have suggested that certain populations of microbes may be associated with obesity.
“The energetic and nutrient value of food may not be an absolute term, but one that is modified in part by the microbes that live in our gut — who’s there in this community, how they operate, and how they operate in relationship to what we are eating,” says Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University School of Medicine in…
Three More UK Drugs Advisers Resign
From BBC News:
Three more government advisers have resigned after the home secretary’s sacking of his chief drugs adviser Prof David Nutt, the BBC has learned.
Dr John Marsden, Dr Ian Ragan and Dr Simon Campbell have quit the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs after two others left earlier this month.
Members of the council had met Alan Johnson seeking reassurance that their independence would not be compromised.
Mr Johnson dismissed Prof Nutt for “crossing a line” into politics.
BBC home affairs editor Mark Easton said the absence of certain experts on the council meant it was “stymied” and effectively was now unable to operate under its current constitution.
[Read more at BBC News]
Medical Marijuana Home Delivery (Video)
Members of this California Medical Marijuana collective enjoy the benefit of home delivery, but drivers risk arrest for distribution even though the patients who most need the week often are too sick to drive themselves:
Thinking Negatively Can Boost Your Memory, Study Finds
From Reuters:
Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.
“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world,” Forgas wrote.
“Our research suggests that sadness … promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations.”
[Read more at Reuters]
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Judge OKs Challenge to Human-Gene Patents
From Wired:
A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit can move forward against the Patent and Trademark Office and the research company that was awarded exclusive rights to human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer.The first-of-its-kind lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law claims that the patents violate free speech by restricting research.
U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet of New York, in ruling that the case may proceed to trial, noted that the litigation might open the door to challenges of a host of other patented genes. About one-fifth of the human genome is covered under patent applications and claims.
[Read more at Wired]
Another Kind of AIDS Crisis
David France reports that a striking number of HIV patients are living longer but getting older faster—showing early signs of dementia and bone weakness usually seen in the elderly, in New York Magazine:
When David Simpson was working at Mount Sinai Medical Center as a young neurologist in 1984, the neuro-AIDS program occupied a dark warren of tiny rooms in the complex’s basement. It was a place overwhelmed by plague, a final stop on a doomed journey. “People came in with seizures or paralyzed on half their body. People came in in comas. Men were screaming—I have videotapes of this,” says Simpson, the program’s director. “Bedbound, incontinent, couldn’t sleep. They could be dead in a number of days.”
Those are memories of a distant past. When the drugs arrived in 1996, they…
