North Coast Cafe, South

Smoking As Mental Illness

Ever wonder about those people one sees standing outside entrances to public buildings and offices smoking?  No matter what weather or time of day they isolate themselves to toke tobacco.  What a hold nicotine addiction has on its victims.

Almost half of all cigarettes sold in the United States (44 percent) are consumed by people with mental illness. This is because so many people who have mental illnesses smoke (50 to 80 percent, compared with less than 20 percent of the general population) and because they smoke so many cigarettes a day -- often three packs.

...smoking is concentrated among people with mental illness, often compounded by substance-abuse disorders such as alcoholism.

Go to most AA meetings, and the room will be so full of smoke that you can cut it with a knife.

Ask the members, and they will tell you that it was much easier to stop drinking than to stop smoking. Indeed, nicotine, the addictive component of tobacco smoke, is as habituating as cocaine or heroin, and it has a similar effect on chemical receptors in the brain. More

The Health Care Issue Short and Sweet

"The issue about what to do with the health-care system is sometimes presented as a technical argument about the merits of one kind of coverage over another or as an ideological argument about socialized versus private medicine. It is, instead, about a few very simple questions. Do you think that this kind of redistribution of risk is a good idea? Do you think that people whose genes predispose them to depression or cancer, or whose poverty complicates asthma or diabetes, or who get hit by a drunk driver, or who have to keep their mouths closed because their teeth are rotting ought to bear a greater share of the costs of their health care than those of us who are lucky enough to escape such misfortunes? In the rest of the industrialized world, it is assumed that the more equally and widely the burdens of illness are shared, the better off the population as a whole is likely to be. The reason the United States has forty-five million people without coverage is that its health-care policy is in the hands of people who disagree, and who regard health insurance not as the solution but as the problem."

(The New Yorker)

Autism and Pesticides

Scientists in California have collected data which links autism for the first time exposure by pregnant women to certain agricultural insecticides.

The rate of autism among children of women who lived in California's Central Valley was exceptionally high leading public health officials to the suspicion exposure to pesticides in the womb may play a role in the neurological disorder.   LA Times   

The two pesticides (organochlorine) (implicated are older-generation compounds developed in the 1950s and used to kill mites, primarily on cotton as well as some vegetables and other crops.

Boy Dies For Lack of Dental Care--in America

Twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died of a toothache Sunday.

A routine, $80 tooth extraction might have saved him.

If his mother had been insured.

If his family had not lost its Medicaid.

If Medicaid dentists weren't so hard to find.

If his mother hadn't been focused on getting a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth.

By the time Deamonte's own aching tooth got any attention, the bacteria from the abscess had spread to his brain, doctors said. After two operations and more than six weeks of hospital care, the Prince George's County boy died.

Deamonte's death and the ultimate cost of his care, which could total more than $250,000, underscore an often-overlooked concern in the debate over universal health coverage: dental care.

Some poor children have no dental coverage at all. Others travel three hours to find a dentist willing to take Medicaid patients and accept the incumbent paperwork. And some, including Deamonte's brother, get in for a tooth cleaning but have trouble securing an oral surgeon to fix deeper problems.  Link

Happiness Is?

Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia says in his new book, The Happiness Hypothesis, "Happiness has a very weak relation to the events in our lives. Your happiness level is determined mostly by the structure in your brain - not by whether good or bad things happen to you. Negative events hurt or feel bad, but they are not usually as bad as we think and don't last as long as we think."

Still, researchers at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center surveyed 1,340 people in 2004 to find out what problems most negatively impacted their lives. Most of the problems were related to increased incidents of illness and the inability to afford medical care; mounting bills; unemployment.

The inability to afford health care rose from 7% in 1991 to 11% in 2004. Those who said they lacked health insurance increased from 12% to 18%.  Link

Health Care in the USA

According to a new survey commissioned by the  Commonwealth Fund, a private, nonpartisan, nonprofit foundation and reported Nov. 4 in the Washington Post Americans pay more when they get sick than people in other Western nations and get more confused, error-prone treatment, according to the largest survey to compare U.S. health care with other nations.

The survey of nearly 7,000 sick adults in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Germany found Americans were the most likely to pay at least $1,000 in out-of-pocket expenses.

More than half went without needed care because of cost and more than one-third endured mistakes and disorganized care when they did get treated.

Although patients in every nation sometimes run into obstacles to getting care and deficiencies when they do get treated, the United States stood out for having the highest error rates, most disorganized care and highest costs.

Bibliotherapy

For Mild Depression, British Doctors Prescribe Books

When some British doctors see a patient with mild to moderate depression or anxiety, they pull out their pads and prescribe a self-help book.

Under a new program in more than a dozen counties across the United Kingdom, patients take the prescription to their local library, where they check out reserved titles such as "Overcoming Depression" and "The Feeling Good Handbook."

Doctors say they began prescribing books out of concern that too many depressed people were either being medicated too hastily with antidepressant drugs like Prozac or going untreated.  link

No Sleep For You!

The Defense Department is investing heavily in the development of a new drug for troops that can replace sleep. Investigators are trying to see if it will keep soldiers awake and on duty, in Iraq for example, for 80 out of 88 hours: two 40-hour shifts separated by eight hours of sleep.

Could it solve the recruitment problems for the Bush war on Iraq?  No need for a draft is soldiers can keep hours like that.

The drug is modafinil, with the catchy commercial name of Provigil. It is described by the Drug Guide as a memory-improving, mood-brightening psycho-stimulant thought to allow avoidance of sleep without detrimental effects—no buzz, no crash, no jitters or impairment of judgement, and no need for 'make-up sleep.”

Provigil, has been shown to increase both wakefulness and "vigilance." Researchers define "vigilance" as the ability to stay on task, think clearly and function normally.

Military use of  amphetamines recently has come under criticism and scrutiny following an incident in which two American pilots accidentally killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan last year. Defense lawyers for the pilots claim that Air Force-issued Dexamphetamine (Dexedrine) was to blame for the accident.

Credit: Harvard Magazine

Pollen: Are Your Allergies Worse?

On the North Coast, as elsewhere, over a period of time, the types of plants selected by homeowners, landscapers and government agencies have changed significantly -- and
the changes have made the plant allergy problem substantially worse.

For reasons of convenience, more and more shrubs, trees and other plants are
selected for their "litter-free" characteristics -- that is, they are
male plant types and generate little or no seeds or fruits.

In 1949 the USDA first recommended that American cities begin planting male tree and
shrub cultivars on our streets and in our public parks. Over the past
fifty years that advise has become firmly rooted in the psyche of
American ornamental horticulture. M

any American cities have plant ordinances that ban the planting of seed, fruit or nut producing
cultivars on our streets or in our public spaces. As a result, modern
urban landscapes have evolved to consist predominantly of trees, shrubs,
grasses and ground covers that are:

* Dioecious male cultivars selected because they produce no fruit or
seed; or

* Monoecious cultivars selected, at least in substantial part, because
they minimize female sexual characteristics (fruit and seed).

These plant choices, of course, incidentally maximize the most
significant male sexual characteristic: pollen production. Thus, in
order to avoid the problem of cleaning up fruit and seeds from female
trees we have -- unthinkingly -- altered the natural mix of male and
female plants in such a way that pollen loads have increased, and
correspondingly, so have allergies and asthma.

Pollen is the invisible "litter" in urban America. We have increasingly clean sidewalks and,
from a pure health perspective, dirty air.

More here.

 

Behaviorists have recently floated a new theory for why men and women react differently to stress.

For men, upon whom most of the research has been done, stress is thought to stem from a privative fight or flight responses, aggravated by testosterone. Repeated or prolonged exposure to stress is thought to contribute to insomnia, anxiety, burnout, phobias, drug and alcohol abuse, depression, physical violence, and worse.

What researchers have found by studying women's response to stress is that females produce a lot more of a hormone called oxytocin which is associated with relaxation and social interaction.

Many clinical studies of anxiety have shown that women often respond to stress by tending to others such as children, family members and by 'befriending' – getting together and talking. Men on the other hand tend to deal with stress by withdrawing and dealing with it alone.

The importance of oxytocin in the gender differences in stress reaction is not yet completely understood. Clinical observations indicate that women who tend to others and seek the comfort of friends and family are not only diverting attention from the stressors but usually also place themselves in a safer situation.

 

The question of whether hormones account for the differences in male and female reactions to stress or the different behavioral reactions to stress is key is still unanswered.

 

What is clear is that anyone wanting to reduce or cope with stress in their lives, 'tending' and 'befriending' is the way to go.

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