Friday, October 26, 2012

Fear and Anxiety

Cancer on the Brain - NYTimes.com

By DAVID ROPEIK



Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways.

 

Tags:
Anxiety, Cancer, fear, health, illness, Phobias


I got a call from a friend last year. He had prostate cancer and wanted some help thinking through what to do. He had gone to his doctors for the details about his physical condition. He was calling me for help dealing with the other condition he knew he was facing — excessive fear of this dreaded disease that sometimes does more harm than good, what some have called “cancer phobia.” [1]

He knew that, like many cases, his prostate cancer had been detected when it was still asymptomatic, and was the slow-growing kind unlikely to ever become symptomatic or to kill him — given he was an otherwise healthy man in his 50s — before old age did. He also knew about the occasional side effects of treatment — urinary incontinence, rectal bleeding, sexual impotence — risks that thousands of men take each year not so much to remove from their bodies something that might harm them, but to remove from their minds the fear of living with cancer.




Nonetheless, he said he was leaning toward treatment, and recognized that his emotions were making it hard to think rationally about the clinical medical evidence. I gently suggested that the perception of risk is so often based more on emotion than just the facts, and the roots of the fear of cancer are so broad and deep, that understanding these anxieties might not help much. But I offered what I could.




Physical risks, I told him, have psychological characteristics that make them feel scarier or less scary, regardless of actual probability or evidence. And cancer triggers a couple of the most powerful of these emotional alarms. Research by experts in the field of decision and risk, like Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon and Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon, has found that the more pain and suffering a risk involves, the more fear it causes. Many forms of cancer involve a great deal of pain and suffering. We are also more afraid of risks we can’t control and, despite great medical progress, most people still feel they have little control over cancer — either getting it or fighting it. Many people still assume that a diagnosis of cancer is a death sentence.


Michael DeForge







I also told my friend that cancer has been stigmatized. In the psychological sense this means that as soon as we hear the word, subconsciously all sorts of bad and frightening associations go off which frame how we think and how we feel about anything else we then learn. This aspect of cancer phobia is rooted in the perfect storm of conditions in the 1950s and 60s when cancer first fully blossomed into public consciousness. The atomic bombings of Japan, and the Cold War, seared into our psyche the tangible existential threat of nuclear annihilation, a deep dread that was closely linked with fear of radiation from the fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing. The health consequence of radioactive fallout — the reason to fear it — was cancer.

Evidence first started reaching the public in the 1950s about the carcinogenicity of smoking. An issue of Reader’s Digest in 1950 featured an article titled “Cancer by the Carton.” And as the modern environmental movement got going in the ‘60s, it used the threat of cancer as a central rallying theme. Rachel Carson’s classic cri de coeur, “Silent Spring,” featured a whole chapter on cancer, warning that we were “living in a sea of carcinogens.” To drive home those fears, she regularly compared the danger of industrial chemicals to the risks of radiation.

Given how this confluence of events magnified the innately frightening nature of cancer, it was no wonder that when the National Cancer Act passed in 1971 the introduction declared cancer to be “the major health concern of Americans today.” It still is.

A recent Harris poll found that cancer is the most feared disease in the United States; 41 of those polled listed it at the top, with Alzheimer’s next, at 31 percent. The benefit of all this fear, of course, has been a body of laws and regulations, and changes in individual behavior, that have significantly reduced the risk of what is indeed a group of horrible diseases. It has given rise to medical progress that has made many once-fatal forms of cancer treatable, and in some cases even preventable. But the costs of cancer phobia have also been significant.

One example of the impact it has had at the policy level can be seen at the National Institutes of Health, which spends more than twice as much researching the molecular biology of cancer ($5.4 billion a year) than on figuring out the mechanisms of heart disease ($2 billion a year), which kills more people. [2] It’s a fair to suggest that more people might be alive or healthier if those investments were proportional to the risk.

The health damage from cancer phobia has been significant in many ways at the individual level, too, and not just with prostate cancer. In “Overdiagnosis in Cancer” doctors at Dartmouth classified 25 percent of breast cancers detected by mammography, 50 percent of lung cancers detected by chest x-ray or sputum tests, and 60 percent of prostate cancers detected by the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, as “overdiagnosed.” The authors describe how these overdiagnoses often lead to medically unnecessary treatments, sometimes involving radical surgery, that have major impacts on the patients’ quality of life.

The authors of that study are careful not to ascribe this to fear. But a panel of experts on prostate cancer convened by the National Institutes of Health was pretty clear that our dread of cancer contributes significantly to the harm that it does. So much so that for slow growing prostate cancer they recommended: “Because of the very favorable prognosis of low-risk prostate cancer, strong consideration should be given to removing the anxiety-provoking term ‘cancer’ for this condition.”[3]

I didn’t get into all those details with my friend. But I did tell him that the fear of cancer can contribute to chronic stress, which raises blood pressure and increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, and which weakens the immune system and increases the likelihood of all sorts of health problems. (A weakened immune system increases the likelihood of getting cancer in the first place, and makes it harder to fight off once you get it.) [4]) So unless he could deal with the fear of living with cancer, cancer phobia alone might make him sick.

My friend was in a tough place. Cancer, in many of its forms, is a terrible disease. I’ve had it. I’ve lost relatives and friends to it. But cancer is also a frightening disease, and that fear, and the harms it can do, are no less real than the disease itself. Cancer phobia is powerfully rooted in the deep instinctive ways we perceive and respond to risk, and like many forms of cancer itself, hard to overcome. My friend thanked me, and said that just knowing all that gave him a reassuring sense of control and helped him put things in perspective as he faced his difficult choice.

A year after our conversation my friend and his wife treated me to dinner at a fine restaurant. He’d decided to have radiation treatment to eliminate the cancerous cells, and was at peace with his decision, even though the treatment left him with at least one permanent side effect. He had to go to the rest room three times over two hours to urinate, something this 50-ish year-old man will have to deal with for the rest of his life — a price he was willing to pay not so much to cure a physical disease, but to cure the powerful fear he just couldn’t face.






FOOTNOTES

[1] The concept of cancer phobia was first coined in 1955 by Dr. George Crile Jr. in an article in Life magazine, “A Plea Against Blind Fear.”

[2] A full list of what the N.I.H. spends it’s money on.

[3] The report “Role of Active Surveillance in the Management of Men With Localized Prostate Cancer” was released in 2011.

[4] For more on the relationship between stress and cancer, see “Psychological Stress and Cancer: Questions and Answers.”




David Ropeik is an instructor in the Environmental Management Program of the Harvard Extension School and a former environmental journalist.

He is the author of-


 “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Always Match the Facts” and


 “RISK. A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You.”



Anxiety, Cancer, fear, health, illness, Phobias



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Thursday, October 25, 2012

How to be Happy in 12 Simple Steps


By SONJA LYUBOMIRSKY






STEP 1 - Show gratitude 

(* There's a lot more to gratitude than saying "thank you." Emerging research shows that people who are consistently grateful are happier, more energetic and hopeful, more forgiving and less materialistic. Gratitude needs to be practised daily because it doesn't necessarily come naturally.)


STEP 2 - Cultivate Optimism


STEP 3 - Avoid overthinking and social comparison

(* Many of us believe that when we feel down we should try to focus inwardly to attain self-insight and find solutions to our problems. But numerous studies have shown that overthinking sustains or worsens sadness.)


STEP 4 - Practice kindnessChewbaaka and Koya



STEP 5 - Nurture social relationships


STEP 6 - Develop coping skills


STEP 7 - Learn to forgive 

(* Forgiveness is not the same thing as reconciliation, pardoning or condoning. Nor is it a denial of your own hurt. Forgiveness is a shift in thinking and something that you do for yourself and not for the person who has harmed you. Research confirms that clinging to bitterness or hate harms you more than the object of your hatred. Forgiving people are less likely to be hostile, depressed, anxious or neurotic.


* Forgive yourself for past wrongs. Recognising that you too can be a transgressor will make you more empathetic to others. )


STEP 8 - Find more flow

(* "Flow" was a phrase coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the 1960s. It means you are totally immersed in what you are doing and unaware of yourself. Happy people have the capacity to enjoy their lives even when their material conditions are lacking and even when many of their goals have not been reached.)


STEP 9 - Savour the day



STEP 10 - Commit to your goals 

(* People who strive for something personally significant, whether it's learning a new craft or changing careers, are far happier than those who don't have strong dreams or aspirations. Working towards a goal is more important to wellbeing than its attainment.)


STEP 11 - Take care of your soul

 (* A growing body of psychological research suggests that religious people are happier, healthier and recover better after traumas than nonreligious people. ...

* Find the sacred in ordinary life ...)

STEP 12 - Take care of your body

"The How of Happiness" Sonja Lyubomirsky - TalkRational



Sonja Lyubomirsky

link: http://lyubomirsky.socialpsychology.org/




 

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Multiple Sclerosis has no cure but don't let the facts defeat you.


When something of an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.
- Rousseau


Or you learn to work around the obstacle, if it is an incurable disease like M.S. that is ongoing and causes systematically more disability.


It is important to take an attitude of adapting and thriving in spite of the disease.  

Leave the cure to the scientists and manage your life with the attitude that you can deal with the problems created by the disease. 

You will probably need to give up some activities,like the balance beam (LOL) and other athletic pursuits that require balance, strength or require being on your feet for too long. 


Focus on what you can still do and not on what you have lost.


Monday, October 22, 2012

Chew sugar-free Gum tol Prevent Cavities

Your Assignment for Today: Chew Gum

Ezekiel J. Emanuel on health policy and other topics.
Philadelphia


WHEN I was growing up, you would be sent down to the principal’s office for chewing gum in school. We were told chewing gum was bad; it caused cavities.

It turns out that sugar-free gum can actually prevent cavities in children. Instead of banning it, we should require children to chew it in school to promote their oral health.

The human mouth is host to many bacteria. The one that is primarily responsible for cavities is called streptococcus mutans (it’s related to the bacteria that causes strep throat). When the bacteria encounters sugar, it produces acids. Saliva neutralizes acid, so teeth can handle some exposure. But large amounts of sugar — as found in candy or sugary beverages — overwhelm saliva. Prolonged exposure to that acid will damage the protective enamel on teeth — a process called “demineralization” — and eventually cause cavities.

Chewing gum of any kind increases saliva production, and therefore helps neutralize more acid. 

But many gums are sweetened with sugar, which of course increases the acid levels, effectively canceling out the positive benefits. Replacing sugar in gum with xylitol, a naturally occurring sweetener found in fruits and vegetables that has fewer calories than regular sugar, fixes this problem.


More saliva and less acid seems to cause the teeth to remineralize — that is, it actually reverses some cavities. But most important, chewing xylitol gum inhibits the growth of the strep bacteria, which are not able to metabolize the sweetener. Less virulent strains of bacteria slip off the teeth, and this positive xylitol effect lasts years.

The gum seems to work best when it’s chewed routinely just before children’s adult teeth come in, at about ages 5 and 6.

Joren Cull
 
 The United States Army’s Public Health Command recommends that soldiers and their families chew xylitol-sweetened gum. But only schools have the power to make this recommendation a reality, when it really matters in the development of teeth. 

Gums with significant amounts of xylitol include Xylichew, Xyloburst and Hershey’s Ice Breakers Ice Cube gum — which can usually can be found in any deli or drugstore.

But the best way to ensure that all children take advantage of xylitol gum is to have them chew it in school, in kindergarten and beyond. Ideally, they would chew gum three to five times a day for five minutes each time. Not only will it improve their health and school attendance; but they might actually enjoy it.






 
Read More at Source:


Your Assignment for Today: Chew Gum - NYTimes.com

 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/your-assignment-for-today-chew-gum/



Sunday, October 21, 2012

My Sustainability Mantra

A Vegetarian Diet is good for your and good for the Planet.

Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. - Albert Einstein

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. - Howard Zinn

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.”
- Mahatma Gandhi

WHEN SPIDERS UNITE, THEY CAN TIE DOWN A LION.
-Ethiopian proverb




Thursday, October 11, 2012

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?




The Summer Day – Mary Oliver – 1992




Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?


Saturday, October 6, 2012

Synthetic Marijuna Fact Sheet

 

1. What is Synthetic Marijuana? Synthetic Marijuana is a man made drug that is not marijuana.

It was invented to act like marijuana; however, it is more powerful and more dangerous than marijuana.

This fake marijuana, often called Spice, K2 or Legal Phunk, is sprayed on real plant products, like leaves, and sold as incense or potpourri. It is usually smoked,but can be eaten too.

When used, it can be very dangerous. Other names for this include Lava Red, Aroma, Dream, Mr. Nice Guy, and many more.

Beware of name changes as they are changed often as is the chemical make‐up.


2. Where is K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) sold?


K2/Spice can be bought very easily on the internet. They can also be found in head shops, smoke shops,convenience stores and some gas stations.

Government officials are trying to make them illegal, but as of yet, they remain legal.


3. Why is K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) sold if they are drugs and harmful?


K2/Spice are sold in a way that outsmarts state and local regulations by stating on the package that they are “not for human consumption.” Because of this, it is very difficult to regulate and track. It is cheap, easy to purchase, sold as fake (synthetic) marijuana that doesn’t show up on standard drug tests.



4. How does K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) affect you?



People who use K2/Spice or any other synthetic marijuana experience:
 

Fast heart rate Convulsions (seizures)
 

Seeing things (hallucinations) Weakness
 

Dry mouth Passing out (coma)
Death has resulted in some cases!


5. What happens to the people who use K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana)?


When people use K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana), they can have heart attacks, brain damage, kidney failure and scary hallucinations (seeing things) that last for many days.



6. Who uses K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana)?

K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) are used by all people, regardless of age, gender, or status.



Bottom Line: 
K2/Spice (synthetic marijuana) 


A. It is very easy to get. 

B. It is very dangerous and can lead to heart attacks, brain damage, kidney failure and scary images/hallucinations.




For More Information
www.upstatepoison.org




synthetic_marijuna_fact_sheet_public.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Link: http://www.upstate.edu/poison/pdf/news_releases/synthetic_marijuna_fact_sheet_public.pdf

....................................................................................

P.S. This information is posted here because medical marijuana is sometimes used to alleviate the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, cancer and 'aids'.  This is a warning to not cut corners and to not use anything but the Real McCoy when it comes to treating your m.s. symptoms.Marijuana has gained the status of alternative medicine... .