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Posts Tagged ‘The New York Times;’

It’s summer. The weather is beautiful, the water warm and inviting. It’s time once again for shorts and swimsuits. “Oh, no!” you grown. “I can’t go out like in that with these ugly old spider veins all over my legs.” Sounds familiar. Well, it’s a common complaint for the millions of people who have these unsightly little blood vessels.

Spider veins, so called because the “arms” of these tiny dilated blood vessels appear to project outward from a central denser area like the legs of a spider from its torso, are also called sunburst varicosities, for a similar reason, or telangiectasias (“broken” blood vessels). In fact, they are simply diminutive, thick venules (literally: little veins) that lie close to the surface of the skin. And because they principally carry deoxygenated blood (blood that is not saturated with oxygen needed by the tissues) they actually serve no useful function. Even nutrition-wise, it is the function of the the blood vessels hidden below the surface, within the dermis, that carry nutrients to the skin. In short, spider veins are just a plain, disfiguring nuisance.

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DTC television prescription medication adds have hit an all-time high at 4.5 billion dollars last year. But a throw down is sure to come between the new house and senate, and drug companies.

According to the New York Times, “The consumer ads will be on the griddle early in this session at hearings on the user fees that manufacturers pay to speed the reviewing of new drugs by the Food and Drug Administration. The user fee law will die in the fall unless Congress acts to renew it. The pharmaceutical industry, which often gets what it asks for from Congress and the executive branch, seeks to renew the law and add a new set of user fees that would be pay salaries for additional FDA employees to evaluate all consumer drug ads, before they are shown on television.”

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If you have adult ADD, then you know that sometimes, slowing down is a very hard thing to do. There are so many tasks to accomplish and so little time to get them done. So your mind goes into high speed, trying to accomplish it all and more, or worrying about the fact that it seems impossible to get it all done. As a result, you spend a lot of time stressing, and very little time enjoying life.

While slowing down is a difficult skill to build, it can be done. Here are 6 proven ways to slow down the adult ADD brain:

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Undoubtedly, the fastest growing non-surgical cosmetic procedure is Botox injections, with over 1.3 million administered last year alone. Type-A exotoxin, or Botox Cosmetic®, marketed by Allergan, Inc., Irvine, CA, is produced, perhaps surprisingly, by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, the cause of botulism.

While skin researchers have demonstrated that wrinkles in the aging face are clearly related to the accumulated effects of excessive sunexposure, smoking, volume loss, and gravity, facial expressions and animation, known as dynamic wrinkling, also play a major role in the development of many types of neck and facial lines and furrows. By binding to the junction between nerves and muscle tissue, Botox effectively blocks the release of acetylcholine, the chemical responsible for normal muscular contractions, weakening the ability of certain facial muscles to induce fine lines, wrinkles, frowns and furrows through their repetitive use.

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Adults with ADD are not “wired” for details. We’re creatives, entrepreneurs, inventors, idea generators, and big picture thinkers.

When an adult with ADD is confronted with too many details to tend to, overwhelm quickly sets in. This is not a character flaw – it’s quite simply just not what we’re wired for.

There is actually a simple solution for dealing with details, and it might surprise you: don’t deal with them.

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Depression is a bully you must finally face down. I’m a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist who was once diagnosed with manic depression. I’m one of those who went into the field of psychotherapy to help myself. I found out that, when forcefully encountered, depression lets you alone. Depression is like living in a room of pain. You can learn how to leave the room.

Depression only occurs in the subcortex, the feeling part of the brain. There is never any depression in the neocortex, the thinking part of the brain. You can learn to switch from one brain system to the other when depression hits. The use of simple mind techniques can thoughtjam depressive focus and keep it at bay.

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Have you heard about omega-3s? You may have seen headlines in the New York Times or CNN touting their benefits. Maybe you have seen them highlighted on cereal boxes and other food products. What are they and why is it such a big deal?

The fat brain

Omega-3s are one type of Poly-Unsaturated Fatty Acid or PUFA that are incredibly important for your heart and brain. In fact, your brain is about 25% PUFA by weight and about 40% fat overall. Yes, the brain is a big fat organ! This is one reason why low-fat diet fads are not the best option.

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Who among us hasn’t had a conversation with a pre-baby-boomer [senior] who didn’t take pleasure in pointing out that their generation was made of sturdier stuff compared to ours?

“We never suffered from depression and stress!” they say. “We accepted what was, sucked it up and soldiered on…. We never had time for ‘nothin’ else!… You kids today aren’t as tough as we were!”

Sound familiar? The important question then is, are they right?

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So much for new scientific information. “Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss” revives defunct “set point” theory, which holds the tenant that everyone has a different set point for weight and that the individual’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep their set point weight. In “Rethinking Thin” we have the mythical genetic determinism, so popular in current scientific thinking. Science somehow is relegated only to physics, chemistry, and biology, leaving out abstract areas such as society or psychology, which are poo-pooed as unscientific.

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Research at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center casts serious doubts about the prevailing medical view of the cause of asthma and suggests an entirely new way of thinking about a disease that affects a growing number of people today, particularly children.

Until now, doctors assumed that asthmatics were hypersensitive to irritants like dust, pollen or pollutants. This hypersensitivity was thought to cause the airways in the lungs to contract, blocking the flow of air and leaving the patients gasping for breath. This lung airway constriction process was assumed to be absent in nonasthamatics.

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Excerpt from The Steroid Deceit

Having abused steroids for three and a half years, I was always afraid of being found out. I took pains to keep my steroid use hidden from my parents. They thought my newfound muscles were the result of all the time I spent at the gym, as well as the various supplements and powders that I always seemed to be taking. Little did they realize that some of those pills I called “vitamins” were actually oral steroids.

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