Homoeopathy – A Presidential Pedigree?

We tend to think of homoeopathy as a European invention, which in fact it was, but historically there has been a great interest in it in the USA. Abraham Lincoln, before he was elected president, was a lawyer and he was given the job of preparing a state legislative proposal to charter a homeopathic medical college in Chicago, against the concerted wishes of the American Medical Association, which had its headquarters there. In fact he was successful and when in office he was known to be a regular user of homoeopathic medicines and many of his advisers were powerful advocates for homoeopathy, Major General George BrintonMcClellan who commanded the Union army during the Civil War. In fact the Confederates were also users of homoeopathic medicines, including General Robert E. Lee himself.

Scientists take the mystery out of kissing

Trust a scientist to take the romance out of life – and as we have just celebrated Valentines’ Day I saved this story until now as I didn’t want to take the fun out of it for you.

A professor of neuroscience at Lafayette College, Louisiana has examined what exactly happens during a kiss. You think she would have known from her own experience, but hey ho. In case you are wondering, kissing releases chemicals that ease stress hormones in both sexes and encourage bonding in men, though not so much in women. Personally I don’t find kissing always eases stress, but maybe I am kissing the wrong people.

If you are a sloppy kisser then you get even more stress release as it is the chemicals in saliva that change the levels of chemicals in the body. Some lucky pairs of college students got drafted for this research which involved kissing a partner for 15 minutes while listening to music. Presumably Mantovani and not Meatloaf, as it was found they experienced significant changes in their levels of the chemicals oxytocin, which affects pair bonding, and cortisol, which is associated with stress. Their blood and saliva levels of the chemicals were compared before and after the kiss which must have taken some of the romance out of it. Though as the experiment took place at the Student Health Centre that’s probably not the most atmospheric of settings.

Every subject showed a decline in cortisol when their 15 minutes was up which showed their stress levels had gone down also. In the men, oxytocin levels increased, indicating more interest in bonding, while oxytocin levels went down in women. Just to be sure they also tested couples that just held hands, and they had similar changes in body chemicals – but not to the same extent.

As proof that scientists can be just as obvious as the rest of us, I will leave you with the good professor’s final observations: “When you kiss an enormous part of your brain becomes active,” Oh really, just the brain? And to reassure you as you dust off that Valentine card, “Romantic love can last a long time if you kiss the right person.”

Life can add years to your face

This definitely comes into the ‘Oh Really?’ category, as I don’t imagine any of my readers think anything else. However, I am always impressed by people’s willingness to dress up the obvious in scientific ‘facts’ and a new study of identical twins claims that despite genetic make-up, certain environmental factors can add years to a person’s perceived age. As this study comes from the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), I do feel there is a vested interest at work here, but apparently factors like divorce or the use of antidepressants are the real culprits when it comes to your face looking like the hide of an elderly elephant.

Back to attitude is what I say, because of course being unhappy does add years to your face, and how anyone can doubt that is a bit beyond me, but I guess if your business is facelifts then you can’t afford to understate the obvious. Anyone who can cry without wrinkling up their face is obviously not in need of their services, but they kindly suggest that you avoid anything that can age you faster – that would be life I guess. The author of this study is Bahaman Guyuron, MD, professor and chairman, department of plastic surgery, University Hospitals Case Medical Center who wants us all to cheat our biological clock by avoiding things like being divorced because if you do you are going to look nearly 2 years older than your happily married twin – or others of your age who are married, single or even widowed.

This also applies if you are taking antidepressants, or are overweight – you will appear significantly older. To quote the good doctor, “the presence of stress could be one of the common denominators in those twins who appeared older. Researchers suspect that continued relaxation of the facial muscles due to antidepressant use, could account for sagging”.

He’s not a modest man either, as he claims that he has discovered a number of new factors that contribute to aging – which aren’t new to me, or to you – and secondly that his findings put science behind the idea that volume replacement rejuvenates the face. There you have the real reason for the research, as according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons statistics, there were more than 1.5 million filler injection procedures – such as Botox – performed in 2007 and I imagine they are looking to do more smoothing out of our worried brows, lips, cheeks and necks.

So avoid getting divorced, being depressed or eating too much and you will look younger is his message, though presumably if you don’t do those things he can fix it for you in the flash of a scalpel.

Can snoring help weight loss?

This almost came into the ‘I don’t believe it’ category, but it is a valid piece of research and I shudder to think how people are going to exploit it. A new piece of research has been revealed that shows you can burn up to an extra 2000 calories a day if you are a heavy snorer. There is of course a known link between being overweight and snoring, but as a weight loss aid it’s a new one on me. I would have thought it’s the partner of the snorer that burns more calories from all that digging them in the ribs and rolling them over onto their backs, but what do I know?

The researchers have, not surprisingly, said they don’t know if the snoring is actually causing people to put on the pounds because they believe it might be. This comes from the fact that disturbed sleep patterns can alter the way your body metabolizes energy, and that could affect your weight. As a dietary regime I don’t think snoring will catch on, and one of the great dangers of heavy snoring is that it can be related to sleep apnoea. This condition needs to be taken seriously because it can reduce the oxygen content in the blood to dangerous levels.

Oh Really?

Procter & Gamble may be a household name for washing powder, but they also have a pharmaceutical arm that has just joined with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to produce a finding that will leave you as amazed as I was – not!

One of the often reported effects of the menopause is a loss of libido. When my good friend Dr Shirley Bond and I were giving workshops on coping with menopause this often came up in the discussion. We found women fell into two camps: they were worried by it, or delighted with it – unfortunately low libido is also associated with depression so it’s hard to sort out if it is the menopause or another life challenging situation that is causing it.

This new report was found in the official journal of the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (I often find the longer the name the less valuable the information, or is that just me?) and states at length what I just mentioned in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. Obviously brevity doesn’t bring a handsome research grant – where am I going wrong? The researchers ‘discovered’ that women with a low libido suffered physical symptoms and memory problems as well as depression. Lack of a fulfilling sex life could depress anyone, and those ‘senior moments’ are not an exclusively female characteristic in my experience. Being depressed just by itself can, and does, manifest all the same symptoms that they are describing in their report.

The research was done by phone over 1000 women in the USA by asking them to undertake a quality of life study. The women were asked about their levels of sexual desire and feelings of physical and emotional well-being or distress. Sadly they didn’t phone me, and I would hazard a guess that if they phoned women during the world cup or while trying to get dinner ready then they would have got some interesting results that weren’t necessarily typical of that woman’s everyday experience. Amazingly the women who had a low libido were more likely to be depressed and to express dissatisfaction with their home lives and their sexual partners. Having a low libido and an unsatisfactory partner can depress anyone but I am not convinced it is solely applicable to menopausal women as I said before.

Still I am sure there is another research project already under way to investigate my theory, and if you want to give your libido a boost and avoid all those symptoms, then I suggest you go to it in any way that works for you – I expect consumption of George Clooney DVD’s and boxes of chocolate to soar.

Your Doctor in a Twitter

If you are not familiar with online social networking sites like Facebook, Friends Reunited and Twitter, this may come as a bit of a shock. Most people use these sites to contact their friends and post photos of themselves and information about what they are doing. However, it now emerges that doctors in the US are also using them to find information about difficult cases.

If they get a patient with symptoms that confuse them, or they haven’t seen before, then they are asking questions on the web of other doctors in the hope they can help. Sounds sensible, but given the way that such sites are vulnerable to invasion and piracy I am not sure I want my doctor asking an unknown faceless person on the web what he thinks of my rash. Given the way people hide behind false identities on the web, they may not be talking to other doctors at all.

Oh Really?

This is an area where common sense, your mother’s advice and science have finally met. Having a good cry to relieve your frustration, tension or unhappiness is what we naturally tend to do, usually accompanied – if we are lucky – by someone holding our hand and telling us to ‘let it all out’.

Scientists love to explain the everyday things we have all taken for granted, and reported by the Association for Psychological Science is a joint study by the University of South Florida and Tilburg University in the Netherlands that explores the benefits of crying. Not surprisingly they found that most people in their study reported improvements in their mood following a bout of crying, but that around a third found no difference and a tenth felt worse.

Oh Really?

Sorry, couldn’t resist this one – and although this piece of research confirms what we already know, it’s valuable to remember it at this stressful time of year. We know that stress is a powerful trigger for heart attacks and strokes, but apparently it is not the stress in and of itself that is the problem it is the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we often turn to that have been investigated by University College in London. When I talk about stress in my book ‘How To Cope Successfully With Stress’ I point out that stress is not always a bad thing; it is how you cope with it that is important. If you turn to healthy methods of dealing with it like meditation, exercise and changes in diet then you can handle it without adverse health effects.

However stress makes us reach for those comfort props whether that is food, alcohol, or smoking and those are the factors that impact on your health and can lead to heart disease or strokes. When we are stressed our good health resolutions often go by the board and we stop exercising and eating healthily and generally take less good care of ourselves. If you get stressed, try to maintain at least some healthy habits and make your ‘comfort’ blanket a little more active – swop it for a down filled coat and go for a walk.

Oh Really?

I don’t know, you do one of these items and along comes another – this one for the chaps. More in the category of ‘well we could have guessed that’ comes the news that men who were have an increased risk for prostate cancer are almost twice as likely to undergo screening for the disease if married or living with a partner. As most men are far more reluctant to consult doctors for anything, this is no surprise so if you want to have a healthy prostate don’t stay single seems to be the advice and comes from no less a body than the University of Michigan.

They found that although prostate cancer screening programmes specifically target men with a high risk for the disease, little is known about the factors that influence these men to take the decision to get tested. But, apparently, one of the factors that gets them to the screening is fear – no surprise there – and accompanied by a relationship where they are ‘persuaded’ (read nagged) into going for checkups is the most effective of all.

Oh Really?

Haven’t done one of these for a while, but sometimes one comes along that is irresistible. Are you ready for this earth shattering revelation? John P. Robinson and Steven Martin are the happy sociologists from the University of Maryland who were given real money by apparently sane people to find out what activities contribute most to a happy life.

Now lots of people have already written many books on this subject, but as always there is still more to learn. They ploughed through the diaries of over 30,000 adults over a 30 year period and analysed what they did and how pleasurable they found it.

What their research has shown them is that people who described themselves as happy were more socially active, attended more religious services and read more newspapers. Unhappy people, however, watched more television. As one of the prime symptoms of depression and unhappiness is withdrawal from the society of others this doesn’t strike me as a major breakthrough, but what do I know.

Apparently television watching provides temporary pleasure to unhappy people; but, in the long run is a waste of time and not particularly fulfilling. The others compare it to an addiction where you get momentary pleasure and long-term misery. They must have been watching Strictly Come Dancing, but they did come up with a neat catch phrase, that ‘tuning in’ can be an easy way of ‘tuning out’ so I can forgive them for making me feel like a social outcast because of my addiction to brilliant US drama series like Boston Legal and The Closer. ”

So, stun your family by letting them know that happy people read and socialize while unhappy people watch TV. If that doesn’t get them playing charades or monopoly after Christmas dinner, then nothing will.

Anyone interested in paying me to study whether breathing is a necessary evil?

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