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Mevrouw M. had jeuk en krabde tot het hersenvocht naar buiten kwam, misschien een kwestie van perceptie. Hoogst fascinerend.

The New Yorker, Annals of Medicine, The Itch. Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies:

“The theory—and a theory is all it is right now—has begun to make sense of some bewildering phenomena. Among them is an experiment that Ramachandran performed with volunteers who had phantom pain in an amputated arm. They put their surviving arm through a hole in the side of a box with a mirror inside, so that, peering through the open top, they would see their arm and its mirror image, as if they had two arms. Ramachandran then asked them to move both their intact arm and, in their mind, their phantom arm—to pretend that they were conducting an orchestra, say. The patients had the sense that they had two arms again. Even though they knew it was an illusion, it provided immediate relief. People who for years had been unable to unclench their phantom fist suddenly felt their hand open; phantom arms in painfully contorted positions could relax. With daily use of the mirror box over weeks, patients sensed their phantom limbs actually shrink into their stumps and, in several instances, completely vanish. Researchers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recently published the results of a randomized trial of mirror therapy for soldiers with phantom-limb pain, showing dramatic success.”

A lot about this phenomenon remains murky, but here’s what the new theory suggests is going on: when your arm is amputated, nerve transmissions are shut off, and the brain’s best guess often seems to be that the arm is still there, but paralyzed, or clenched, or beginning to cramp up. Things can stay like this for years. The mirror box, however, provides the brain with new visual input—however illusory—suggesting motion in the absent arm. The brain has to incorporate the new information into its sensory map of what’s happening. Therefore, it guesses again, and the pain goes away.

The new theory may also explain what was going on with M.’s itch. The shingles destroyed most of the nerves in her scalp. And, for whatever reason, her brain surmised from what little input it had that something horribly itchy was going on—that perhaps a whole army of ants were crawling back and forth over just that patch of skin. There wasn’t any such thing, of course. But M.’s brain has received no contrary signals that would shift its assumptions. So she itches.

Interview (audio) met de schrijver, Atul Gawande, van het artikel.

NPR’s Weekend Edition, Can ‘Blue Zones’ Help Turn Back the Biological Clock?

“Sardinian sheepherders, Japanese grandmothers and Seventh-Day Adventists in Los Angeles don’t seem to have that much in common. But within these groups there are some of the longest-lived people in the world.”

(…)

“Although the aging process isn’t fully understood, scientists do know that there’s a complex interplay of genetics and the environment that factors into health and longevity. And Buettner says he was able to identify shared patterns among people who live in Blue Zones.

“They didn’t take any supplements or pills or wine extracts,” he says. “They tended to live in houses and environments that nudged them into bursts of physical activity in kind of an effortless way.

“Okinawans sat on the floor; Sardinians lived in vertical houses; the Costa Ricans had gardens. So they were doing little things all day long that added up significantly over the years and the decades,” Buettner says.”

Excerpt: Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest.

Zie ook: How To Live Forever. Is the secret to be found among the centenarians in an isolated region of Sardinia?

AFP, Dead Bodies No Threat To Disaster Victims:

“”There is a widespread and erroneous belief that dead bodies are a source of disease and therefore a threat to public health. This is untrue,” [Arturo Pesigan, WHO's Western Pacific Region's headquarters in Manila] said.

“There has never been a documented case of a post-natural-disaster epidemic that could be traced to dead bodies,” said the doctor, who helps oversee emergency and humanitarian services in the region.

He said those killed by disasters were generally healthy at the time of their death, and were unlikely to be a source of infection to others.

“The micro-organisms responsible for the decomposition of bodies are not capable of causing disease in living people,” the WHO technical officer said.”

Meer: Effect Measure.

VPRO’s Tegenlicht: de integrale versie van het interview met Michael Pollan.

Tegenlicht uitzending: De toekomst van ons voedsel: landbouw of laboratorium? (maandag 28 januari 2008, 21:00 Ned 2)

‘Shipwreck timber littering coast’ (BBC). Photo: pip aka flipflop :) (idem)

Eric G. Wilson, In Praise of Melancholy. American culture’s overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life:

“I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life’s enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.”

Michael Pollan, In Defence of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating (eerder)

Extract 1/2: Consuming passion:

“That eating should be first and foremost about bodily health is a relatively new and destructive idea – destructive not just of the pleasure of eating, which would be bad enough, but paradoxically of our health as well. The scientists haven’t tested the hypothesis yet, but I’m willing to bet that when they do they’ll find an inverse correlation between the amount of time people spend worrying about nutrition and their health and happiness. This is, after all, the implicit lesson of the French paradox, so called not by the French (Quel paradoxe?) but by Anglo-Saxon nutritionists, who can’t fathom how a people who enjoy their food as much as the French do, and eat so many nutrients deemed toxic by nutritionists, could have substantially lower rates of heart disease than others on elaborately engineered low-fat diets. No people on earth, by contrast, worry more about the health consequences of their food choices than Americans – and no people suffer from as many diet-related health problems.”

Extract 2/2: How to get back to real food

“The first time I heard the advice to “just eat food” was in a speech by the nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled me. Of course you should eat food – what else is there to eat? But Gussow, who grows much of her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting into the Hudson River, refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in the supermarket with that title. “In the 34 years I’ve been in the field of nutrition,” she said, “I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world.” Taking its place has been an unending stream of food-like substitutes – “products constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly little actual knowledge”.

Real food is still out there, however, still being grown and even occasionally sold in the supermarket. Here are a few rules of thumb to help you recognise it – and then make the most of it.”

In Defense of Food. An Eater’s Manifesto, Michael Pollan.

Morning Edition, ‘In Defense of Food’ Author Offers Advice for Health (interview):

“”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

(…)

The implication of Pollan’s advice, however, is that what we’re eating now isn’t food.”

Slate, The Holy Church of Food:

“There’s always been a streak of the willfully impractical in Pollan’s worldview. Like the other great, radical writers whose subject is the death grip of the food industry—Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser—he’s eloquent and persuasive; but come the revolution, he probably doesn’t belong on the tactics-and-logistics committee. What he likes best is spinning long, mesmerizing tales from his immense research, as he did in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that made him a star. It’s a beautifully handled polemic against modern agribusiness until you get to the last chapter, the one that’s supposed to bring it all home.”

LA Times, ‘In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto’ by Michael Pollan

“The third section offers rules (rather, gentle suggestions) for how to “escape the Western diet.” Many are familiar, if you’ve spent any time paying attention to what you eat — for example, don’t eat packaged foods with lots of chemical ingredients. Some involve behavioral changes: Eat mostly plants, avoid supermarkets whenever possible, buy a freezer, “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” pay more to eat less and don’t buy food where you buy gas. Some are more about how we eat than what we eat — for example, do all your eating at a table, don’t eat alone, eat slowly.”

Houston Chronicle, Houston scientists see hope in cocaine vaccine:

“In concept, the idea seems simple. Cocaine (and many other drug) molecules are so small the immune system fails to recognize them and make the antibodies necessary to mount an attack. To help the immune system, Kosten attached inactivated cocaine to the outside of inactivated cholera proteins.

In response, the immune system not only makes antibodies to the combination, which is harmless, but also recognizes the potent naked drug when it’s ingested. The antibodies bind to the cocaine and prevent it from reaching the brain, where it normally would generate the highs that are so addictive.”

BMJ, Medical myths:

“Physicians understand that practicing good medicine requires the constant acquisition of new knowledge, though they often assume their existing medical beliefs do not need re-examination. These medical myths are a light hearted reminder that we can be wrong and need to question what other falsehoods we unwittingly propagate as we practice medicine. We generated a list of common medical or medicine related beliefs espoused by physicians and the general public, based on statements we had heard endorsed on multiple occasions and thought were true or might be true. We selected seven for critical review:

• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
• We use only 10% of our brains
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
• Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.”

via

Der Spiegel, Is Atomic Radiation as Dangerous as We Thought?

“The findings hardly jive with the popular image of the atom as evil incarnate. Nightmarish scenarios of lingering illness and birth defects on an apocalyptic scale populate nightmares. In West Germany, the moral and political self-image of an entire generation arose from its battle against radiation, from “no nukes” protest marches to facing off against police water cannons at the Brokdorf nuclear power plant to sit-ins in front of Castor rail containers of reprocessed nuclear waste.”

Ben Goldacre, What’s wrong with homeopathy:

“And there is the rub. Because Winterson tries to tell us – like every other homeopathy fan – that for some mystical reason, which is never made entirely clear, the healing powers of homeopathic pills are special, and so their benefits cannot be tested like every other pill. This has become so deeply embedded in our culture, by an industry eager to obscure our very understanding of evidence, that even some doctors now believe it.”

Number of inhabitants per doctor.

Doctors of the World, Netherlands: Perspective

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Thirty illnesses, sorted according to whether or not you can eat the victims (Via o.a. Anarchaia.)

ScienceDaily:

“The AIDS virus entered the United States via Haiti, probably arriving in just one person in about 1969, earlier than previously believed, according to new research.”

Physorg.com:

“The study, published in the September 2007 issue of Psychiatric Services, also found that religious physicians, especially Protestants, are less likely to refer patients to psychiatrists, and more likely to send them to members of the clergy or to a religious counselor.”

MetaFilter:

““What is fitness?”(large PDF) is an essay by the leaders of the CrossFit movement. (…) Develop the capacity of a novice 800-meter track athlete, gymnast, and weightlifter and you’ll be fitter than any world-class runner, gymnast, or weightlifter.””

AD: “VVD-Kamerlid Edith Schippers vindt het een schande dat mensen met een aanvullende verzekering bij sommige zorgverzekeraars verplicht premie betalen voor de bedevaarten zonder dat dit wordt vermeld in de polisvoorwaarden.”"

Pruned: “In between reports from (…) we heard reports of the guy stricken with an extremely resistant type of tuberculosis, under quarantine at a hospital jet-set TB-infected Atlanta lawyer quarantined (in a rehab center of a different kind) in Denver, flown there yesterday with an escort of federal marshals.”