To eat or not to eat? Mental budgets help winning diet battles.

Mental budget helps.Coupled with a strong will, diet can be controlled..
Story:
Ever felt like you are losing the battle with a triple-chocolate cake, don’t worry just set a “mental budget” as a new study claimed that it helps in controlling consumption.

According to researchers Parthasarathy Krishnamurthy from University of Houston and Sonja Prokopec from ESSEC Business School, France, one can rein in overeating by setting a mental budget, Journal of Consumer Research reported.

“For those who wish to cut out those desserts, our research suggests some simple tips. First, it is important to have a mental budget. At the very least, it allows you to keep track of how you are doing with respect to your goal,” they said.

They added, “Second, make sure the budget works as a limit rather than a licence for the consumption behavior. To do this, it is important to have an active goal of controlling the consumption.”

Krishnamurthy said, “There are some behaviors that people try to limit but have trouble doing so. Even as one aims to curtail consumption of sugars and fat, one ends up consuming the tiramisu or the triple-chocolate cake. Such discrepancies between one’s goals and actual behaviors represent instances of self-control failure”.

The authors conducted several studies where they encouraged some participants to set mental budgets and compared them to people who did not set budgets. They examined their consumption of sweet treats, and they discovered that they controlled over-eating.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/health/To-eat-or-not-to-eat-Mental-budgets-help-winning-diet-battles/Article1-477950.aspx

New ways of regulating dose given to patients: Individualized Medicine

Last year the official completion of the human genome sequence was announced, capping years of hard work. Now that the flashbulbs have dimmed, scientists are taking a hard look at the results. Benefits of the sequence were prophesied to include ‘magic bullet’ therapeutics, individualized medicine, and the prediction of disease long before symptoms surface.

But to realize these breakthroughs, we must fashion the four-letter code we all share into tools physicians can use, and ensure that these tools are readily available. Although one graduate student can now make huge strides with access to the Internet and basic molecular biology equipment, true success may demand nothing short of entirely new methods of clinical study and reorganization of existing academic structures.

The road to treatments based on genomic information has not been smooth, but clinical trials are underway for a number of new therapies. New methods of mutation screening are emerging, both for the genome and for the ‘epigenome’ layered onto it.

An understanding of the many mutations that underlie complex diseases and adverse drug reactions is now in our sights, aided by a large international effort to define the differences between our individual genomes. And the availability of genome sequence from our close and far evolutionary relatives is helping us to decipher the signals of genes and regulatory elements from the noise of background DNA, which is not yet fully understood.

Another Bill Maher Smackdown

Maher has fallen prey to the alternative medicine’s package of propaganda, misinformation, and subtle distortions. Because he is a popular media personality, his views are influential. Fellow skeptic Michael Shermer wrote an open letter published in the New York Times urging Maher to reconsider his anti-vaccination views.

Maher has responded here called A conversation worth having. In it, Maher attempts to justify his position in much the same way that creationists tackle the science of evolution: by evasion, logical fallacies, placing blame, and basically refusing to do the work necessary to understand the science but more than willing to improperly criticize that which he does not understand. So what can we make of Maher’s response?

To our rescue comes another smackdown by Neurologica’s Steve Novella. Why should he bother? As Steve explains, Maher is contributing to the public misunderstanding of science in perhaps the most important area – medicine. That is very serious, and he needs to start taking it seriously. That’s very good advice for all of us: we need to take scientific misunderstanding seriously.

Physicians' Night Shifts are Dangerous

I know the title won’t surprise anyone but now here is a publication that tried to find a scientific explanation for this phenomenon.

Aims: To evaluate the effects of a 24 h (h) physicians on-call duty(OCD) (‘night shift’) on 24 h electrocardiogram(ECG), heart rate variability, blood pressure (BP), and variousbiochemical serum and urine ‘stress markers’ comparedwith a ‘regular’ day at work.

Methods and results: The study was designed as a prospective randomized cross-overtrial with each physician completing a 24 h (h) OCD and a 24h control period including a regular 8 h non-OCD. Thirty healthyphysicians with a median age of 33.5 years (range 29.0–45.0)were analysed. Twenty-four hours ECG and BP monitoring wereperformed and participants were instructed to fill out an eventdiary and perform a 24 h urine collection. Furthermore, bloodwas drawn before and after OCD and control day.

Conclusion: Our results highlight the association of OCD with an increasedrisk profile for cardiovascular disease. In addition to theacute effects observed, frequent night-calls over a longer periodpossibly elicit sustained alterations in cardiovascular homeostasis.

Reference:

Arrhythmias and increased neuro-endocrine stress response during physicians’ night shifts: a randomized cross-over trial

Rauchenzauner et al, European Heart Journal 2009 30(21):2606-2613;

어마어마한 여드름 짜내기

I am looking for people to translate this post into Spanish for me. Email me if you are interested.

This post has been translated into Italian as Un Bisturi Una Cisti (traduzione in italiano) and into French as Un Bistouri Un Kyste (en Français).

This is a Korean translation of the One Lance, One Cyst post. Most people should be able to handle watching this post, though it is rather gross. It was translated by 넝근넝근, who does incredible work.

나는 단지 의학적 지식을 궁구히 하는 목적으로 올렸을 뿐입니다이 비디오는 정말 역겹습니다.

전 이걸 단지 의학 비디오로 보고있습니다. 아마도 진료실에서 촬영한것 같군요. 보기엔 더러운 낭종 (혹은 염증, 여드름 아니면 다른 어떤걸)을 채혈하고 있습니다. 외관상으로는 피지낭으로 보입니다.

전 중년이지만 여드름 터뜨리는걸 좋아합니다. 흉터를 남긴다는 건 알지만 솔직하게 말하면 특히 당신이 손을 깨끗이 씻고 샤워를 자주 한다면 여드름은 없어질 것이고 문제가 되지 않을겁니다.

여기에 나오는 건 역사상 가장 무시무시한 여드름 같군요. 계속 짜내자 서서히 줄어들어 끝날 것 처럼 보입니다. 의사가 막 끝낼거라고 생각하는 순간 이 여드름은 또 다시 우글우글 쏟아집니다.

당신이 내가 이 영상을 올린데에 불만스럽다면.

Smoking ban in the time of swine flu

(c) Getty Images

People all over the world are sent home to get well or they are hospitalised due to the swine flu. It has been established that the illness is highly contagious so people who think they caught it are encouraged to avoid meeting their colleagues and friends and family members.

At the same time, smokers who are proved to have caused thousands of deaths of people who suffered from second-hand smoke can happily live their lives, unchanged.

But what is the difference between a patient who may spread the swine flu and a smoker whose bad habit will sooner or later get some people sick and seriously ill as well? I don’t see any difference.

Many countries have strict smoking bans, and they work. Other countries’ governments stick to stupid arguments why it is not possible. We have hundreds of thousands of people walking around, slowly killing their fellow citizens.

Let’s say I have lunch in a restaurant.  A group of beer friend enters, they sit down, order beers and start smoking. I approach them, start coughing and tell them I am positive I have the swine flu. They are going to tell me “Are you nuts, walking around making other people sick?”

At which point it would be my turn to say “See my f****** point?”

Ayurvedic Tongue Analysis

“While thou livest, keep a good tongue in thy head.”

William Shakespeare

Recently I attended a class at the Ayurvedic institute, and had the good fortune of seeing Dr. Lad individually for a tongue analysis. With one brief look Dr. Lad responded “There’s pain in your shoulder blades, grief and sorrow in your heart, a thyroid condition and a harmless parasitic infection.”

I got chill bumps and could barely speak. I nodded and waited to hear what else he might say, hoping he would prescribe some magic remedy. Without me saying a word about the details of my health, Dr. Lad had figured out that I had lost function of my thyroid (a few years earlier from Graves disease-he didn’t know that part), sorrow from a recent divorce, chronic pain in my shoulder blades from stress and that I had a mild parasitic infection, perhaps from the New Mexico tap water.

He told me to watch the changes in my tongue as I began my healing process. He wrote down a mysterious Ayurvedic herbal remedy especially designed for each of my imbalances, taking into consideration my genetic Ayurvedic constitution. After religiously taking these herbs, (that tasted like dirt by the way) every day with warm water, I curiously watched my tongue clear up and reshape itself.

The tongue is a holographic map of every aspect of ourselves. Once we learn to identify the markers it’s very easy to read, and basic tongue diagnosis can be taught in a weekend workshop.

The ancient art of Tongue Analysis has it’s root in the science of Ayurveda, although many other ancient eastern healing systems use this method as well, including Chinese Medicine. When we use the tongue as a tool for analysis and diagnosis, we are looking at the shape, shadings, markings, wetness, texture and even the “way” someone sticks out their tongue. Having this knowledge can help describe the current state of a person’(or animal’s) health, as well as their genetic tendencies.

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