Generosity Might Keep Us Health

Psychologist Liz Dunn spoke with us from the PopTech conference in Camden, Maine, about the link between greed and long-term health. Christie Nicholson reports

Do Cortisone Shots Actually Make Things Worse?

But that cautionary experiment and others didn’t slow the ascent of cortisone (also known as corticosteroids). It had such a magical, immediate effect against  pain. Today cortisone shots remain a standard, much-requested treatment for tennis elbow and other tendon problems.

But a major new review article, published last Friday in The Lancet, should revive and intensify the doubts about cortisone’s efficacy. The review examined the results of nearly four dozen randomized trials, which enrolled thousands of people with tendon injuries, particularly tennis elbow, but also shoulder and Achilles-tendon pain. The reviewers determined that, for most of those who suffered from tennis elbow, cortisone injections did, as promised, bring fast and significant pain relief, compared with doing nothing or following a regimen of physical therapy. The pain relief could last for weeks.

But when the patients were re-examined at 6 and 12 months, the results were substantially different. Overall, people who received cortisone shots had a much lower rate of full recovery than those who did nothing or who underwent physical therapy. They also had a 63 percent higher risk of relapse than people who adopted the time-honored wait-and-see approach. The evidence for cortisone as a treatment for other aching tendons, like sore shoulders and Achilles-tendon pain, was slight and conflicting, the review found. But in terms of tennis elbow, the shots seemed to actually be counterproductive. 
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But in the decades since, numerous studies have shown, persuasively, that these overuse injuries do not involve inflammation. When animal or human tissues from these types of injuries are examined, they do not contain the usual biochemical markers of inflammation. Instead, the injury seems to be degenerative. The fibers within the tendons fray. Today the injuries usually are referred to as tendinopathies, or diseased tendons.

The Claim: Lying on Your Left Side Eases Heartburn

THE BOTTOM LINE Lying on your right side seems to aggravate heartburn.

Big Insurance, Big Medicine

ObamaCare is already driving a wave of health-care consolidation—and higher costs. 

ObamaCare's once and future harms have been well chronicled, but the major effects so far are less obvious and arguably more important: A wave of consolidation is washing over the health markets, and the result is going to be higher costs.
The turn toward consolidation among insurance companies is not new, and neither is it among doctors, hospitals and other providers. Yet the health bill has accelerated these trends, as all sides race to anticipate and manage political risk and regulatory uncertainty. This dynamic is leading to much larger hospital systems and physician groups, and fewer insurers dominated by a handful of national conglomerates. ObamaCare was sold using the language of choice and competition, but it is actually reducing both.

 

Scenes from Thailand

The last time we focused on Thailand, the government crackdown on Red Shirt protesters was taking place in Bangkok. Since then, much of the damaged part of downtown Bangkok has been repaired, and the Red Shirts continue their protests both in the streets and online. Thailand has also been hit with severe flooding, struggled with terrorist attacks, and celebrated Queen Sirikit's 78th birthday. Collected here a a handful of recent photographs from around Thailand. (31 photos total)

Seeking Proof in Near-Death Claims

At 18 hospitals in the U.S. and U.K., researchers have suspended pictures, face up, from the ceilings in emergency-care areas. The reason: to test whether patients brought back to life after cardiac arrest can recall seeing the images during an out-of-body experience.
People who have these near-death experiences often describe leaving their bodies and watching themselves being resuscitated from above, but verifying such accounts is difficult. The images would be visible only to people who had done that.
"We've added these images as objective markers," says Sam Parnia, a critical-care physician and lead investigator of the study, which hopes to include 1,500 resuscitated patients. Dr. Parnia declined to say whether any have accurately described the images so far, but says he hopes to report preliminary results next year.
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Yet the fundamental debate rages on: Are these glimpses of an afterlife, are they hallucinations or are they the random firings of an oxygen-starved brain?
"There are always skeptics, but there are millions of 'experiencers' who know what happened to them, and they don't care what anybody else says," says Diane Corcoran, president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, a nonprofit group in Durham, N.C. The organization publishes the Journal of Near-Death Studies and maintains support groups in 47 states.
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Several follow-up studies have found that people undergo profound personality changes after near-death experiences—becoming more altruistic, less materialistic, more intuitive and no longer fearing death. But some do suffer alienation from spouses or friends who don't understand their transformation.
Other relatives understand all too well.
Raymond Moody, who first coined the term near-death experience in his 1975 book "Life After Life," explores the even stranger phenomenon of "shared death experiences" in a new book, "Glimpses of Eternity." He recounts stories of friends, family and even medical personnel who say they also saw the light, the tunnel and accompanied the dying person partway on his or her journey.  "It's fairly common among physicians who are called to resuscitate someone they don't know—they say they've seen a spirit or apparition leave the body," says Dr. Moody.
Meanwhile, in his book, "Visions, Trips and Crowds," David Kessler, a veteran writer on grief and dying, reports that hospice patients frequently describe being visited by a deceased relative or having an out-of-body experience weeks before they actually die, a phenomenon called "near-death awareness."  While some skeptics dismiss such reports as hallucinations or wishful thinking, hospice workers generally report that the patients are otherwise perfectly lucid—and invariably less afraid of death afterward.

Lungs Can 'Taste' Dangerous Bacteria, Researchers Say

The same taste buds we have on the tongue to detect bitterness also exist on lung muscle so that the airways can "taste" dangerous illness-causing bacteria, according to new research published Sunday that could lead to better treatments for respiratory conditions.
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The finding "suggests that nature has designed multiple pathways to prevent things from going down the wrong way," said Y.S. Prakash, an airway biologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who wasn't involved in the work.

Dr. Liggett said that because bitter taste receptors are so effective at opening the airways, he estimated that a drug that targets taste receptors could be three times as effective as current respiratory medications on the market.

His group is now screening some of these compounds for ones that are potentially safe and effective and can be used in spray form rather than a pill to activate receptors in the lung.

Medicare Faulted on Surgery Evaluation

Researchers are casting doubt on Medicare's methods for trying to reduce surgical deaths and complications, suggesting the agency focus more on actual outcomes of surgeries than on how operations are conducted.

In a study published Monday, researchers at the University of Michigan said the better way to lower death and complication rates could well be to publicize such rates, hospital by hospital.

How to Push Past the Pain, as the Champions Do

And that is one of the secrets of elite athletes, said Mary Wittenberg, president and chief executive of the New York Road Runners, the group that puts on the ING New York City Marathon. They can keep going at a level of effort that seems impossible to maintain.

“Mental tenacity — and the ability to manage and even thrive on and push through pain — is a key segregator between the mortals and immortals in running,” Ms. Wittenberg said.

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The mentality was I will do whatever it takes to win,” he added. “I was totally willing to have the worst pain. I was totally willing to do whatever it takes to win the race.”

But the question is, how do they do it? Can you train yourself to run, cycle, swim or do another sport at the edge of your body’s limits, or is that something that a few are born with, part of what makes them elites?

Sports doctors who have looked into the question say that, at the very least, most people could do a lot better if they knew what it took to do their best.

“Absolutely,” said Dr. Jeroen Swart, a sports medicine physician, exercise physiologist and champion cross-country mountain biker who works at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa.

“Some think elite athletes have an easy time of it,” Dr. Swart said in a telephone interview. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And as athletes improve — getting faster and beating their own records — “it never gets any easier,” Dr. Swart said. “You hurt just as much.”

But, he added, “Knowing how to accept that allows people to improve their performance.

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To find this motivation, the athletes must resist the feeling that they are too tired and have to slow down, he added. Instead, they have to concentrate on increasing the intensity of their effort. That, Dr. Swart said, takes “mental strength,” but “allows them to perform close to their maximal ability.”

Vision: A Quick High for Sex May Damage Vision

Users call them poppers: a class of chemicals called alkyl nitrites that can be inhaled for a quick high, or to enhance sexual pleasure. Now doctors in France are warning that they can also cause eye damage and impaired vision.

Antoine Dufour - Trilogie Acoustic Guitar

A replacement for walking sticks for the visually impaired

From Israeli designer, Norm Klopper

Deaf Cats Have Enhanced Vision

Recent research explains how the deaf can have extraordinary sight. 

Gene Sites Tied to Obesity Identified in New Research

An international research consortium says it has identified 18 new gene sites linked to obesity and 13 others associated with how fat is distributed in the body, advances that shed new light on the complex biology underlying one of the world's most pressing public-health problems.

Corruption in Afghanistan: An Aid Worker’s Experience

I think as aid workers we all accept that an uncorrupted social or economic transaction would be suspicious in its own way here. Most accounts of living or working in Afghanistan touch on corruption for a reason, after all, and I’ve learned that Afghans are as exhausted by it as we are.

It is more than the bribes offered to be seen sooner in a clinic, or those required to get access to appropriate and unexpired medicines, or those requested for an official’s signature on a cooperative agreement. It is actually the corruption of priorities that challenges the very core of what we’re trying to do, day to day.

Later

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?

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It’s hard to ignore the fact that all these tools are at root about imposing limits and narrowing options—in other words, about a voluntary abnegation of freedom. (Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.) But before we rush to overcome procrastination we should consider whether it is sometimes an impulse we should heed. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which. ♦

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki?currentPage=all#ixzz11Ue6bsxe

World divided over new scramble for African land

A World Bank report has confirmed that 45 million hectares of land in developing countries were bought in 2009, a tenfold jump from the previous decade.

Moreover, two-thirds of these controversial “land grabs” have been in Africa where critics say public and governmental institutions offer weak defences against western multinationals and Far Eastern state companies seeking farm land for food and biofuels.

Vdara ‘death ray’ captures imagination of world’s media

On warm days, Vdara’s glass-sheathed curve focuses the sun into an intense beam capable of melting plastic and burning skin.

MGM Resorts is examining the CityCenter hotel’s architectural flaw. Company executives call what it causes a “solar convergence phenomenon.”

The news media, however, prefer “death ray” — the term used by hotel employees — conjuring 1950s sci-fi and hysterical masses running for their lives. Death Ray ... Las Vegas ... It has proved too tempting for the world’s media. And the media can resist anything but temptation.

Hat tip to Gaye Nickles

Sensational Technology

Josh Silver designs some funny-looking eyeglasses that can easily and cheaply match prescriptions for those in even the poorest villages.

Las Vegas Faces Its Deepest Slide Since the 1940s

The nation’s gambling capital is staggering under a confluence of economic forces that has sent Las Vegas into what officials describe as its deepest economic rut since casinos first began rising in the desert here in the 1940s.

Even as city leaders remain hopeful that gambling revenues will rebound with the nation’s economy, experts project that it will not be enough to make up for an even deeper realignment that has taken place in the course of this recession: the collapse of the construction industry, which was the other economic pillar of the city and the state.

Unemployment in Nevada is now 14.4 percent, the highest in the nation and a stark contrast to the 3.8 percent unemployment rate here just 10 years ago; in Las Vegas, it is 14.7 percent.

August was the 44th consecutive month in which Nevada led the nation in housing foreclosures.