Health

WE ALL WANT TO BE SPECIAL:

Excessive Worry About Health Could be Signs of Illness Anxiety Disorder (Sean Mowbray, Jan 20, 2025, Discover)

Those with illness anxiety disorder will often have trouble finding reassurance in a reasonable way, which can drive “repetitive behaviors or escalating strategies to try to relieve that,” says David Smithson, outreach manager with Anxiety UK.

This can lead to frequent visits to the doctor and recurrent medical testing to gain that reassurance. It can also lead to behaviors that can be harmful to health, such as social isolation, substance misuse, and can lead to other mental health issues such as depression.

“People become preoccupied with that, in some cases, and worry about the slightest suggestion or hint of one of those symptoms being present in their body,” says Smithson. “If you suspect you’ve got a serious life-threatening illness, it can become very debilitating and can be extremely concerning to you as an individual.”

See under Long Covid

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

REVIEW: of I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin (Reviewed by Karl Straub, December 18, 2024, Washington Independent Review of Books)

The big story throughout the book is that different elements of music are processed by different circuits in our brains, and the separate pieces of information are collated and then transferred to new circuits in order to process more complex aspects of the music. Details about pitch, duration, and loudness are stored early on, and the cooperating chain of brain departments eventually turns to complicated issues like the shape of a melody, the sonic character of instruments, and the emotional connections for the listener.

Few human activities compare to listening to music — although hikes in the wild and dancing are distant siblings — with its epic journey of interoffice memos linking both a network of small circuits and the often-isolated two hemispheres of the brain. It’s this sweeping process that leads to medicinal and therapeutic benefits; listening to music can open up alternate neural pathways to substitute for burned-out or dormant ones, and it can also rejuvenate paths exhausted by stress.

Among the book’s other fascinating takeaways: Playing music or singing decreases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, leaving us more relaxed. Children get attached to inanely catchy songs like “Baby Shark” because the repetition of musical information is building the brain pathways they’ll need to enjoy the greater benefits of music later on. Because adults already built their own pathways in childhood, these songs often drive them crazy. (Take heart, Mom and Dad: They really are good for the kids.)

For most music-therapy applications (stress/pain relief, mood alteration, and treating complex neurological dysfunction), the best results happen when the listener picks music they already love. (This means Zell Miller was onto something with his Charlie Daniels theory.) But it’s also true that increased understanding of how music works helps lead to improvements in brain health, even for non-virtuosos. In other words, musical comfort food and the musical equivalent of high fiber are both good for you.

COVID RESTRICTIONS WERE TOO LAX:

Estimating the population-level effects of nonpharmaceutical interventions when transmission rates of COVID-19 vary by orders of magnitude from one contact to another (Richard P. Sear, 12/03/24, Phys. Rev. E )

Statistical physicists have long studied systems where the variable of interest spans many orders of magnitude, the classic example is the relaxation times of glassy materials, which are often found to follow power laws. A power-law dependence has been found for the probability of transmission of COVID-19, as a function of length of time a susceptible person is in contact with an infected person. This is in data from the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 app. The amount of virus in infected people spans many orders of magnitude. Inspired by this, I assume that the power-law behavior found in COVID-19 transmission is due to the effective transmission rate varying over orders of magnitude from one contact to another. I then use a model from statistical physics to estimate that if a population all wear FFP2/N95 masks, this reduces the effective reproduction number for COVID-19 transmission by a factor of approximately nine.

WHAT HAVE VACCINES EVER DONE FOR US?:

Cervical cancer deaths are plummeting among young U.S. women: The findings could be a preview of what’s to come if HPV vaccination rates improve (Andrea Tamayo, November 27, 2024, Science News)

“We had a hypothesis that since it’s been almost 16 years, that maybe we might be starting to see [the] initial impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer deaths,” says Ashish Deshmukh, an epidemiologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “And that’s exactly what we observed.”

Just another reason for the incel Right to hate vaccines.

NOT JUST SHOWER CURTAIN RINGS?:

New 3D Bioprinter Could Build Replicas of Human Organs, Offering a Boost for Drug Discovery (Margherita Bassi, November 19, 2024, Smithsonian)

Currently, scientists have only limited ways to create tissue for testing pharmaceutical therapies, such as using lab-grown samples or by relying on traditional 3D bioprinting, per Popular Science’s Andrew Paul. However, cultivating organs in a lab is complex and expensive—and printing them is currently slow and prone to errors, such as positioning cells incorrectly.

“Incorrect cell positioning is a big reason most 3D bioprinters fail to produce structures that accurately represent human tissue,” David Collins, head of the Collins BioMicrosystems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne and a co-author of the study, says in a statement.

“But with our new approach,” Collins and two other researchers write in an article for Pursuit, “not only can we position cells with precision, we can also fabricate at a scale of single cells.”

NEVER “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”:

Book Review: Why the Medical Establishment Often Gets It Wrong (Lola Butcher, 11.01.2024, UnDark)

“Much of what the public is told about health is medical dogma — an idea or practice given incontrovertible authority because someone decreed it to be true based on a gut feeling,” Makary writes.

Makary’s assertions are supported by hundreds of footnotes as he builds each indictment, but that doesn’t mean all physicians and researchers are nodding in agreement. One example: When a research team analyzed 13 studies comparing antibiotics to appendectomy, it found almost a third of the patients initially treated with antibiotics had an appendectomy within the year. Although the other two-thirds did not, the researchers called the evidence that antibiotics are better “very uncertain.” So surgeons who choose to operate immediately are not necessarily doing something wrong.

Makary, one of medicine’s most prolific iconoclasts, has been poking at America’s health care system since at least 1998 when, as a medical student, his article calling on hospitals, medical schools, and health insurance companies to divest their tobacco stocks was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

A few years later, ignoring criticism from his colleagues, Makary created a checklist to improve surgery safety; after proving that safe surgery checklists reduced surgical errors and deaths, they are now used in most operating rooms around the world. His 2012 book, “Unaccountable,” demanded that hospitals reveal their infection rates and medical errors. A few years later, Medicare began requiring public reporting of those and other indicators of health care quality. His 2019 book, “The Price We Pay,” documented hospitals’ price-gouging practices and called for all hospitals to post cash prices for certain services — which is now required by law. […]

He does not call the medical establishment nefarious; rather, he accuses it of frequently embracing a narrative — that stress causes ulcers, for instance — without evidence, ignoring scientific findings that do not support the idea, and blackballing those who question their position.

THANKS, DARPA!:

Fixing typos in the book of life (Stephen McBride, October 7, 2024, Risk Hedge)

mRNA (messenger RNA) technology can turn cancer from a death sentence into a mere nuisance.

Remember, “mRNA” is the tech that helped scientists develop a COVID vaccine in record time. Please, don’t hate mRNA because of how governments + big pharma forced these vaccines on us.

mRNA really is a game-changing tech with incredible promise. For cancer, it can prime our bodies to seek and destroy solid tumors not easily cured with surgery, and without the nasty side effects of chemo.

These cancer-killing jabs are only in the trial phase. But the results are extremely promising.

What’s even more promising is mRNA vaccines for pancreatic… colorectal… metastatic… and lung cancer are all showing positive results in trials, too. What if mRNA is the “skeleton key” that helps us cure every cancer?

I love how my friend Matt Ridley describes mRNA: “Synthetic messengers that reprogram our cells to mount an immune response to almost any invader, including perhaps cancer, can now be rapidly and cheaply made.”

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Worldview may have more impact on mental health than chemical imbalances – study (Ryan Foley, 30 September 2024, Christianity Today)

The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University released the study Tuesday, attributing the rise in mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and fear, to what researcher George Barna calls “worldview deficiencies” rather than “psychological or chemical imbalances.”

The findings are based on interviews conducted in January with 2,000 U.S. adults aged 18 or older, with a sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

The report highlighted mental health struggles among younger generations, noting that 56% of Generation Z and 49% of millennials regularly experience anxiety, fear or depression. Generation Z refers to the youngest group of American adults, while millennials are defined as those born between 1984 and 2002. In total, one in three adults from these generations has at least one diagnosable mental disorder.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Pain relief from mindfulness meditation not a placebo effect (Paul McClure, September 08, 2024, New Atlas)

New research has found that mindfulness meditation reduces pain by engaging a distinct brain pathway, separate from the pathway activated by a placebo. The standalone analgesic effect that mindfulness produces could be leveraged to help people living with painful conditions.

Practice don’tmindfulness and just your quibbles.