Everyone used to think eyesight degeneration was just a natural consequence of aging. But we now know how wrong we were!
Keeping your eyes healthy can be so simple. All you have to do is properly nourish the right muscles, cells, and blood vessels, with two secret nutrients your eyes are starving for.
These days, many of us are all too familiar with the sensations of worry and anxiety -- the physical sensations, I mean. First comes the worry (it can be about anything), then after a while a headache or neck pain sets in or maybe a queasy stomach... and even chest pain -- which all, of course, only increases our anxiety. It’s obviously all connected, but I have to say it was a surprise to me when a string of studies revealed that there is an important overlap in our brains between emotional and physical pain... and that acetaminophen (Tylenol), which is, of course, used to relieve headaches and other physical ailments, helps reduce emotional pain. Could this garden-variety painkiller actually be a happiness drug?
The Pain Overlap
The initial studies on the emotional/physical pain overlap were conducted at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences and published in 2010. They followed 62 volunteers who took either 1,000 mg of acetaminophen (the equivalent of one dose of Extra Strength Tylenol) or a placebo daily -- and who reported their emotional states on a "Hurt Feeling Scale" (a self-assessment tool widely used by psychologists to measure how a person reacts to such potentially distressing experiences as teasing or being criticized).
As the three-week trial progressed, the acetaminophen group reported that they were less inclined than normal to have hurt feelings during regular day-to-day activities, while the control group reported no change. This prompted the study researchers to want to look more closely at the neural mechanisms behind such findings, so they set up another experiment using 25 different volunteers who took either 2,000 mg daily of acetaminophen or a placebo, again for three weeks. At that point, participants played a computer game rigged to make them feel socially rejected and isolated while a scanning device (functional magnetic resonance imaging) monitored their brain activity in two areas where it is already known that physical pain is processed -- the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula. The scan revealed that feelings of social rejection activated the same areas of the brain as physical pain does... and, as added evidence of an emotional/physical pain overlap, the brains of participants taking acetaminophen showed less activity in those "hurt" brain areas, and these participants reported feeling less troubled by rejection than the control group.
Now comes a new study from the University of Michigan that goes even further. While undergoing MRI scans, subjects viewed photos of former romantic partners and were asked to think about the pain of their breakups. Then, while still being scanned, they wore an arm device that created pain similar to the sensation of hot coffee being spilled on their skin. According to the researchers, the MRI results showed that the activity in the two areas of the brain mirrored each other. Romantic relationship expert Geoff MacDonald, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a coauthor of the Kentucky study, said that scientists have known that some of the same regions of the brain handle both physical and social pain. But now they have evidence that the brain doesn’t appear to distinguish clearly between the pain from spilling hot coffee on yourself and the pain of a bad love affair!
Tylenol and Your Hurt Feelings
Discovering that acetaminophen can dull emotional pain is a fascinating finding of the research, but Dr. MacDonald says the more important message is that emotional pain, like physical pain, is serious business. "It is easy to put aside touchy-feely stuff as less important, but it can literally kill people," he says -- because humans depend on social connections for their survival. So it is not surprising to learn that the brain would perceive social rejection -- i.e., not belonging -- as a threat to well-being. As Dr. MacDonald points out, physical pain protects people by warning of risk (within the environment or within the body), and social pain has an analogous function. His advice: In spite of the research findings, Tylenol is not the answer to help you get through a rough emotional patch -- it can wreak havoc on your liver and digestive system if used routinely. Instead, stop and think about the kind of damage emotional hurt can do, and take real action to correct what is causing that psychic pain.
Source(s):
Geoff MacDonald, PhD, associate professor of psychology, University of Toronto, Canada.
Drug-Free Treatment Reverses Even Bone-on-Bone Arthritis...
"Bone-on-bone" is the term doctors use for the last agonizing stage of arthritis. Your cartilage is totally ground away. Steroids and supplements are pointless. Alice was told her only hope was total knee replacement. Yet thanks to a brilliant physician, she skipped the surgery and feels like new. That's right. Alice licked "bone-on-bone" arthritis without surgery or drugs. And she did so with astonishing speed. In fact, not long after seeing this doctor, she left on a three-week shopping vacation -- then returned to the doctor's office with gifts for the entire staff and pronounced herself pain-free! What's the secret?
Learn more...
A Quandary for Those With High Blood Pressure
My brother-in-law has high blood pressure and a family history of stroke. So in addition to taking antihypertension medication, he practices an exercise program developed by his trainer. The problem: His doctor informed him that exercise can elevate his blood pressure (and in fact he takes scheduled breaks during his workout so that his blood pressure can return to normal). He’s walking a difficult line in doing his best to keep healthy -- but I’m happy to say that now a small study from University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center has shed at least some light on this tricky issue.
Before we get into the study findings, it will help to have a little background in how people with normal blood pressure respond to exercise. Any type of exercise triggers a need for increased blood flow to the exercising muscles. Seeming to counteract that, however, is the fact that exercise also stimulates activity in the nervous system that can constrict blood vessels (vasoconstriction). This would seem to set the stage for actually decreasing blood flow during exercise. Luckily this doesn’t happen in people with normal pressure thanks to an ingenious mechanism called functional sympatholysis, which the UT study discovered for the first time. Amazingly, this system blunts vasoconstriction and keeps blood flowing as needed to the working muscles.
Abnormal Changes
The lead author of the hypertension study -- which included 13 people with hypertension and 17 with normal blood pressure -- was Wanpen Vongpatanasin, MD, director of the hypertension section in the cardiology division at UT Southwestern Medical Center. She told me that all participants performed a mild form of exercise -- rhythmic squeezing of a hand grip. This was sufficient to activate muscles in the arm to trigger the nervous system response, and in the group with normal blood pressure, it also triggered the functional sympatholysis mechanism that blunted vasoconstriction in the muscles. But functional sympatholysis did not happen in people with high blood pressure. In fact, her study showed that having high blood pressure apparently impairs this protective mechanism along with its steadying influence. This is just what people like my brother-in-law don’t want to hear.
An additional finding of the study was that when people who have high blood pressure exercise, it stimulates the release of a hormone called angiotensin II. This hormone causes blood vessels to constrict, which in turn causes high blood pressure in some people. To further test the finding, for four weeks the study group with high blood pressure took a type of hypertension medication that blocks the hormone -- appropriately enough it’s called an angiotensin II receptor blocker (ARB).
Then, for another four weeks, the group instead took a different type of hypertension drug called a thiazide diuretic, which does not block angiotensin. The finding: While the ARB drug had readily restored the functional sympatholysis mechanism in spite of hypertension, the thiazide drug did not -- at last, pointing to a way for people with high blood pressure to exercise with less worry!
Exercise Guidelines
Dr. Vongpatanasin says that people with high blood pressure can exercise safely by following certain guidelines. Although we still have much to learn about this subject, she says we do know that gentle exercising, such as brisk walking, easy bicycling, yoga and the like, are safe and, indeed, regular participation in them is encouraged. However, more intense workouts, such as heavy weight lifting, may be risky for hypertensive people. To determine if you are in the safe zone when doing more demanding workouts, Dr. Vongpatanasin advises checking your blood pressure immediately following a workout. (Do-it-yourself cuffs for monitoring pressure are inexpensive and useful to have.) Doing this every few weeks provides enough monitoring information, but if you see pressure headed toward the range of 220/120, she says, your exercise is too intense and you need to moderate it. And -- the new strategy -- if you are not taking an ARB type of drug, you might want to discuss with your doctor whether it would be an appropriate choice for someone with your medical profile.
Source(s):
Wanpen Vongpatanasin, MD, associate professor, director, hypertension section, cardiology division at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.
Be well,
Carole Jackson
Bottom Line's Daily Health News
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