Month: September 2009

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Positive thinking

Making Life Yours

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Perception :-
There is no secret recipe for happiness and contentment. The individuals who move through life joyously have not necessarily been blessed with lives of abundance, love, success, and prosperity. Such people have, however, been blessed with the ability to take the circumstances they’ve been handed and make them into something great. Our individual realities are colored by perception—delight and despair come from within rather than without. Situations we regard as fortuitous please us while situations we judge inauspicious cause us no end of grief. Yet if we can look at all we have accomplished without dwelling on our perceived misfortune and make each new circumstance our own, the world as a whole becomes a brighter place. A simple shift in attitude can help us recognize and unearth the hidden potential for personal and outer world fulfillment in every event, every relationship, every duty, and every setback.

The universe is often an unpredictable and chaotic place, and the human tendency is to focus on the negative and assume the positive will care for itself. But life can be no more or no less than what you make of it. If you are working in a job you dislike, you can concentrate on the positive aspects of the position and approach your work with gusto. What can you do with this job that can turn it around so you do love it. When faced with the prospect of undertaking a task you fear, you can view it as an opportunity to discover what you are truly capable of doing. Similarly, unexpected events, when viewed as surprises, can add flavor to your existence. By choosing to love life no matter what crosses your path, you can create an atmosphere of jubilance that is wonderfully infectious. A change in perspective is all it takes to change your world, but you must be willing to adopt an optimistic, hopeful mind-set.

To make a conscious decision to be happy is not enough. You must learn to observe life’s complexities through the eyes of a child seeing everything for the first time. You must furthermore divest yourself of preconceived notions of what is good and what is bad so that you can appreciate the rich insights concealed in each stage of your life’s journey. And you must strive to discover the dual joys of wanting what you have. As you gradually shift your perspective, your existence will be imbued with happiness and contentment that will remain with you forever.

Source: Daily Om

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Secrets Your Dentist Doesn’t Want You To Know

Here are the secrets your dentist may not want you to know — but you need to know to get the best care possible:

………………..
Secret #1: Your dentist may not be as educated as you think.

Dentistry has changed a lot since your dentist graduated from dental school. There have been major advances in most materials used in fillings, bonding and root canals. If your dentist is not actively engaged in continuing education, it is unlikely that he or she is keeping up with these developments.

Secret#2. Your dentist may not have the latest technology. ret #2:

Digital x-ray: Dentists who do not have digital x-ray equipment are practicing in the dark ages. Digital x-rays use less radiation than film. They are easier to read and the ability to manipulate contrast makes diagnosis more accurate.

Ultrasonic Cleaning: Ultrasonic instruments vibrate plaque and calculus off your teeth, even in areas below your gums. It is much more comfortable than old-fashioned hand scraping.

CEREC: The CEREC system lets your dentist provide a ceramic crown or veneer in only one visit. CEREC means fewer injections, less drilling and no annoying temporaries.

Diagnodent: This is a laser that the dentist shines on the tooth and it tells whether there is a cavity and how deep it is. With the use of this technology, the dentist can detect cavities, and find them at an earlier stage, than traditional poking around the tooth.

Secret #3: Your dentist may be using mercury.

Mercury is toxic. Norway and Sweden have banned the use of mercury fillings.. But mercury fillings are less expensive and easier for the dentist to use. If your dentist does not use composite fillings, don’t go to that dentist any more. In the US, the FDA is way behind the ball and not actively warning patients about this like they have been mandated by the courts to do.

Secret #4: The lab may be more important than your dentist.

Dental labs create dentures, crowns, bridges, orthodontic appliances, and other dental restorations like implant crowns. There is a huge difference in the quality of these labs. You should be particularly wary if your dentist is using a lab in China or Mexico. Some of the top labs in the U.S. are Aurum Ceramics, MicroDental Laboratories, da Vinci Dental Studio, and Williams Dental Lab.

Secret #5: There’s more to good dentistry than filling cavities.

A competent dentist screens for more than tooth decay. He or she should be concerned about sleep apnea, jaw-related pain known as TMJ or temporomandibular joint disorder, periodontal disease, oral cancer, diabetes and hypertension.

Secret #6: You are probably using the wrong specialist for dental implants.

Since dental implants involve the removal of a tooth and replacing it with an artificial tooth, many patients assume that an oral surgeon is best qualified to do it. This can be a flawed assumption. Periodontists, who specialize in gum disease, may be a better option. Periodontists have special training in gum tissue and underlying bone in the mouth, which are significant issues in dental implants.

Secret #7: Bad dental advice about dentures can be fatal!

Dentures are no joke. Your dentist should examine your dentures for evidence of wear. Wearing down the teeth on your dentures can result in distorted facial characteristics, collapse of the bite and closure of the airway.

Secret #8: Your dentist may not know enough about sleep apnea.

The most common form of sleep apnea is caused by a blockage of the airway during sleep. It is a pretty scary condition. The patient can stop breathing hundreds of times during the night. A common treatment for sleep apnea is Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP), which involves blowing pressurized room air through the airway at high enough pressure to keep the airway open.

As an alternative, your dentist, working with your physician, can custom make a device that guides the lower jaw forward, called a mandibular advancement device or MAD. MAD devices are more comfortable to wear and the compliance rates are much higher than using CPAP.

Secret #9: Not all cosmetic dentists have the skills to really improve your smile.

Any dentist can call herself a “cosmetic dentist.” Your dentist should be able to show you ten or more before and after photographs or videos, and be willing to give you the names of patients who have consented to be used as references.

Secret #10: How to avoid the root canal your dentist says you need.

Ask about the “ferrule effect.” Technically, this means that a root canal is unlikely to be successful if there is not enough tooth structure above the gum line to protect the tooth from coming loose or fracturing after it has been prepared for a crown. If your tooth fails the “ferrule effect” test, you might be better off with an extraction and an implant.

Source: Daily Finance August 27, 2009

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Healthy Tips News on Health & Science

7 Reasons to Eat More Saturated Fat

Tim Ferriss of The Four Hour Work Week has posted an exclusive excerpt from Drs. Michael and Mary Eades’ newest book, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle.

………CLICK & SEE
The two doctors note that no matter how the story spins from the denizens of the anti-fat camp, one piece of their advice remains staunchly constant: “You should sharply limit your intake of saturated fats.” But will saturated fats really increase your risk of heart disease and raise your cholesterol? In a word, no. In fact, humans need them, and here are just a few reasons why:

1) Improved cardiovascular risk factors
Saturated fat plays a key role in cardiovascular health. The addition of saturated fat to the diet reduces the levels of a substance called lipoprotein (a) that correlates strongly with risk for heart disease. Research has shown that when women diet, those eating the greatest percentage of the total fat in their diets as saturated fat, lose the most weight.

2) Stronger bones
Saturated fat is required for calcium to be effectively incorporated into bone. According to one of the foremost research experts in dietary fats and human health, Dr. Mary Enig, Ph.D., there’s a case to be made for having as much as 50 percent of the fats in your diet as saturated fats for this reason.

3) Improved liver health
Saturated fat has been shown to protect the liver from alcohol and medications, including acetaminophen and other drugs commonly used for pain and arthritis.

4) Healthy lungs
For proper function, the airspaces of the lungs have to be coated with a thin layer of lung surfactant. The fat content of lung surfactant is 100 percent saturated fatty acids. Replacement of these critical fats by other types of fat makes faulty surfactant and potentially causes breathing difficulties.

5) Healthy brain
Your brain is mainly made of fat and cholesterol. The lion’s share of the fatty acids in the brain are actually saturated. A diet that skimps on healthy saturated fats robs your brain of the raw materials it needs to function optimally.

6) Proper nerve signaling
Certain saturated fats, particularly those found in butter, lard, coconut oil, and palm oil, function directly as signaling messengers that influence metabolism, including such critical jobs as the appropriate release of insulin.

7) Strong immune system
Saturated fats found in butter and coconut oil (myristic acid and lauric acid) play key roles in immune health. Loss of sufficient saturated fatty acids in white blood cells hampers their ability to recognize and destroy foreign invaders, such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi.

Source: Four Hour Work Week September 6, 2009

Footnotes:
It is recomended to use  olive oil, but recommend against the use of canola oil, despite its widely perceived healthful reputation. In order to be fit for human consumption, rapeseed oil (which is canola oil) requires significant processing to remove its objectionable taste and smell. Processing damages the oil, creating trans fats. Also, the oil is sensitive to heat, so if used at all, it should never be used to fry foods.

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Too Close for Comfort

The scientific study of a person’s sense of personal space may one day lead to ways of treating neurological diseases such as autism.
………..
Have you been annoyed by people standing too close to you? Do you feel uncomfortable when people stare at you? If you are offended by excessive proximity, you are among the billions of normal people on this planet. If you are not, there may be something abnormal in your brain.

A person’s sense of private space is considered so important that scientists have given a name to its formal study — proxemics. The subject is already throwing up interesting theories and practical applications.

Studies show that our sense of personal space determines a large part of our public behaviour. It is this sense that stops us from staring at others in crowded places, opt for unoccupied rows in a train or bus, or not stand close to another person in a urinal. Also, it enables us to sense danger in people’s expressions. Our sense of personal space — or more accurately, lack of it — could even be linked to some neurological diseases such as autism.

At the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the US, professor of psychology and neuroscience Ralph Adolphs recently found that our sense of personal space resides in a part of the brain called amygdala. This almond-shaped structure is in the medial temporal lobe, equidistant from either ear. The amygdala has been known for over a century but neuroscientists were not interested in it until recently. The region was known to be associated with emotions, but scientists are now learning that it also plays a role in a number of brain disorders.

Adolphs and his team had come across a woman who they prefer to call SM. SM had no sense of personal space, because of which she had got into potentially dangerous situations. She participated in an experiment at Caltech where people were asked to walk towards the experimenter but stop at a distance where they felt comfortable. SM got very close to the experimenter, far closer than anyone else did. The other 20 volunteers stopped at about two feet; SM stopped at one foot. She did not feel uncomfortable even when the noses were about to touch. “She had earlier got into relationships with people whom normal people would not associate with,” says Adolphs.

Obviously, SM cannot decide whom to trust and is uniformly friendly with everybody she meets. Adolphs then used imaging techniques to determine what part of the brain lit up when people felt uncomfortably close to the experimenter. It was undoubtedly the amygdala. SM had lesions on both sides of the amygdala. Now the team is investigating the relationship of the amygdala, our sense of space and autism. Autistic people have difficulties with personal space and have to be taught its importance.

The experience of SM clearly suggests that our sense of personal space is also a necessary part of a defensive mechanism. She could not recognise fear in the faces of others and could also not judge whether someone is trustworthy, both being abilities that could be related to our sense of personal space. So important and so ingrained is our sense of this space that we carry it even to cyberspace. In experiments performed at Stanford University, scientists had found out that people maintain their sense of personal space even in virtual worlds. Says Nick Yee, former Stanford PhD student and now research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Centre, “When avtars gather in Second Life, they tend to maintain a distance as they do in the real world.”

Second Life is a 3D virtual world where people can create “avtars” who interact just as in the real world. The Stanford Virtual Reality Lab research team, of which Yee was a part, had created algorithms that could analyse the behaviour of avtars in Second Life. The aim of this project was to study virtual environments and not our sense of personal space, but it clearly demonstrated that personal space was important even in virtual worlds.

Around 10 years ago, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, professor Dane Archer videotaped several individuals in situations where they felt their sense of personal space was being violated. These situations involved urinals, libraries and other public places. The videos are now sold by Berkeley Media LLC, a leading distributor of documentaries in the US. The clips show that though people feel their personal space is being violated, their response is to move away rather than confront the aggressor.

Although the term proxemics is only a few decades old (its originator, Edward Hall, passed away this July), the scientific study of personal space is just beginning. It is providing fascinating insights into non-verbal communication. And scientists hope it would one day also lead to ways of treating neurological diseases.

Source:The Telegraph (Kolkata, India)

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Dealing with Sexual Assault

We perceive India as a safe, tradition bound country that honours women and loves children. Yet, our cities are becoming famous, even internationally, for molestation and rape. The number of cases reported has increased 700 per cent since Independence. And this is probably only the tip of the iceberg….CLICK & SEE

Shame, family pressures, social stigma, economic vulnerability and lack of knowledge of legal procedures coerce a victim into silence. To make things worse, the victim is often regarded by our inadequately educated, underpaid and insensitive police personnel as the one at “fault”.

Rape is traditionally considered a crime against women. But times are changing. Horror stories abound about homosexual sexual predators targeting, kidnapping and victimising young boys. The victims range from six-month-olds to 80-year-olds. The perpetuators of rape, however, are almost always male.

Around 80 per cent of the crime is committed by someone known to the victim. Often, the abuser is a member of the victim’s family or belongs to his or her circle of acquaintances. In such cases, the crime is perpetuated in a known place, in either of their homes or that of a friend, relative or neighbour.

Today, children of both sexes are in danger, in exclusive neighbourhoods as well as the slums. Their lack of knowledge, inexperience and trusting nature make them ideal victims. Many of these attacks are not random but well planned by a predator known to the victim.

Police complaints are often followed by unwelcome media publicity. There are no “special victim units” in the police force yet, that may be trained to handle such cases with discretion and empathy. The guidelines provided deal mostly with the rape of women. The concept of male or child rape is new and the level of expertise in dealing with this is low.

Despite this, if a parent or the victim wishes to prosecute the assailant, a physical medical examination, documentation of the evidence and registration of an FIR (First Information Report) must be done.

Even otherwise, a thorough medical examination must be undertaken as soon as possible to treat and record lacerations and injuries, both external and internal.

The greatest fear about sexual assault is that of acquiring STDs. The number infected varies between 5 and 10 per cent. Infection depends upon several factors, such as the type of sexual contact, number of assailants, and whether or not they had an STD at the time of the assault.

The risk of contracting STDs can be reduced by taking medication as a preventive measure. Immediate and effective treatment options are available for some STDs such as hepatitis B, gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, chlamydia and trichomonas vaginalis.

The regimen recommended is a single injection of ceftriaxone, plus an oral dose of azithromycin, plus either secnidazole, tinidazole or metronidazole. Herpes can be tackled with a five or seven-day course of acyclovir.

The risk of acquiring HIV infection is less than 1 per cent. However, it is important for medico-legal reasons to document the HIV status immediately. The test should be repeated after six months and then a year. A 28-day regimen of zidovudine and lamivudine provides post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV and should be started as soon as possible, preferably within 72 hours.

Injuries and lacerations require a single booster dose of tetanus toxoid. Hepatitis B can be sexually transmitted. Most children today have received three doses of the vaccine as part of their immunisation schedule and are thus protected against the infection. In that case, only a booster dose needs to be given. If the victim has not been immunised in childhood, immunoglobulin needs to be given. In addition, three doses of the vaccine must be given — immediately after the incident, after a month and after six months.

Prophylactic treatment against syphilis is not advised. Instead, a blood test can be done after three months to ascertain if infection has occurred.

Counselling, psychiatric evaluation and support are necessary for the victim as well as his or her family to overcome the trauma.

To protect children —

• Make them learn addresses and phone numbers by heart

• Teach them certain body parts are not to be touched

• Discourage them from talking to strangers

• Do not send them anywhere alone, especially after dark

• Escort them to and from school bus stops

• Encourage physical fitness and teach them martial arts

• Teach them to trust their survival instincts and, if needed, run in the opposite direction as fast as they can, shouting all the way.

For adults, the best bet is —

*To have peepholes in the front door

*Avoid dark and deserted areas

*Be physically fit and able to run fast.

Source: The Telegraph ( Kolkata, India)

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