Health and Medicine

"A pack a day keeps lung cancer away" quoted Dr Ian McDonald prominent cancer surgeon. Dr Henry Garland said it was a "harmless pastime". Both men were enlisted by the FDA to do tests on Laetrile (B17) stating "No satisfactory evidence has been produced to indicate any significant cytotoxic effect of Laetrile on the cancer cell". Dr Ian McDonald died when his cigarette set his bed on fire, Dr Garland died of lung cancer.

@James Thomas Rook Jr. I agree. This is a silly attempt by those companies to get some free coverage and look "good"..... and they figure it will cost them little. It could also backfire a little since they are picking a fight with a celebrity who is dead and cannot defend himself. If we follow this logic then we will start banning President's Day in the US because a US President owned slaves and even had sex with them.

Information about mineral deficiencies and the easy cure of diabetes male pattern baldness all kinds of other diseases that we all want rid of !! minerals.pdf

For more on the health effects of fasting:

(Image caption: Hydration sensing neurons (red) and the glial cells (green) in a 🐭 brain. Essentially, when overhydration is detected by glial cells in the brain, the Trpv4 channel triggers the release of taurine, which inhibit hydration sensing neurons) As harmful as dehydration? We are all familiar with the drawbacks of dehydration, but we rarely hear about the harmful effects of overhydration. It is known that excess fluid accumulation can lead to dangerously low sodium levels in the blood or hyponatremia – a life-threatening condition that can result in brain swelling. Similarly, more is known about the mechanisms in the body that detect and drive thirst while little is known about how the brain detects a state of overhydration. “[Hyponatremia] occurs in common pathological conditions, including brain injury, sepsis, cardiac failure and in the use of drugs, such as MDMA (ecstasy),” says Dr. Charles Bourque, whose team from the Centre for Research in Neuroscience at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) uncovered a 🔑 piece to the puzzle of how our brains detect hyponatremia and regulate overhydration. The new study featured in Cell Reports unearths the fundamental mechanism of how hyponatremia is detected in the brain. “Our specific data will be important for people studying hydromineral and fluid electrolyte homeostasis, and clinicians who treat patients faced with hyponatremia,” reports Dr. Bourque, who is a scientist in the Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience Program (BRAIN) at the RI-MUHC and a professor in McGill’s Department of Neurology. This condition is more common in elderly patients and can cause cognitive problems and seizures in this vulnerable group. While it remains uncertain how hyponatremia develops, a defect in the hydration sensing mechanism of the brain could be the culprit. No strangers to studying the mechanisms of hydration in the body, Dr. Bourque’s team, located at the Montreal General 🏥, has also made several 🔑 discoveries in the past on how the brain detects and prevents dehydration; how salt intake increases blood pressure; and how the brain’s biological 🕜 stimulates thirst prior to 💤. In this instance, experiments by first study’s author Sorana Ciura, a PhD student in Dr. Bourque’s laboratory, who is now at the Institut Imagine, Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades in Paris, revealed that the brain’s hydration sensing neurons don’t detect overhydration in the same way that they detect dehydration. Inhibiting hydration sensing neurons The new research shows that overhydration activates Trpv4, which is a cellular gatekeeper implicated in maintaining the balance of 💧 in the body. Trpv4 is a calcium channel that can be found in glial cells, which are cells that act to surround hydration sensing neurons. “Our study shows that it is in fact glial cells that first detect the overhydrated state and then transfer this information to turn off the electrical activity of the [hydration sensing] neurons,” explains Dr. Bourque. The researchers also found that it is the release of the amino acid taurine that acts to inhibit hydration sensing neurons. Essentially, when overhydration is detected by glial cells, the Trpv4 channel triggers the release of taurine, which acts as a trip wire to inhibit hydration sensing neurons. Hope for patients with hyponatremia The brain’s ability to detect excess hydration is essential to maintaining fluid balance in the body and preventing conditions like hyponatremia. “Preclinical models of hyponatremia will be used to examine if the mechanism we report is affected in this condition with the long-term objective of designing new treatments or diagnostic tools,” says Dr. Bourque. “Hyponatremia is common with as many as one-quarter of hospitalized patients suffering from a traumatic brain injury developing the condition,” says Dr. Judith Marcoux, a neurosurgeon at the Montreal General 🏥 of the MUHC, who collaborates with Professor Bourque to define the basis for the emergence of hyponatremia in patients that suffer from a traumatic brain injury (TBI). “Nothing is really known about the mechanisms that lead to hyponatremia in these patients,” Dr. Marcoux adds. ‘’Hyponatremia can have catastrophic consequences such as causing seizures or leading to a coma, and raised intracranial pressure can cause further damage to the brain, which can lead to a decrease in neurological and functional outcomes for patients. ”

Check this warning out: (Of course I think they were thinking LARGE doses when they wrote it) ?

We don't say this often: It's been a wild month at the FDA. Fresh off its e-cig regulations, the agency announced yesterday it's going to overhaul the procedure for approving most medical devices. Critics have waited a long time for this. The FDA currently operates under a framework from 1976, which allows certain devices to get a speedy, TSA PreCheck-type approval if manufacturers show their products are similar to others that already exist on the market. The problem? Those comparable products (you can call them "predicates") are sometimes decades-old. The data: Nearly 20% of devices cleared through this process are based on predicates that have been around more than 10 years, per the FDA. Zoom out: Just a few days ago, a team of over 50 media organizations published an investigation into medical device safety. What did they find? "More than 1.7 million injuries and nearly 83,000 deaths suspected of being linked to medical devices had been reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over a 10-year period." VIA Morning Brew

Good point! Maybe as people read about this and share it... more will vote with their wallets as you say. I don't hold out a lot of hope though.

Nightmares and insomnia often accompany posttraumatic stress disorder and increase suicide risk. A small study looking at whether the drug prazosin, best known for treating high blood pressure but also used to treat PTSD-related sleep problems, can reduce suicidal thoughts has yielded surprising results. They indicate it may actually worsen nightmares and insomnia and doesn't reduce suicidal thinking, investigators report in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. "I think we have to view this as not the final word on this, but it raises questions," says Dr. W. Vaughn McCall, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. McCall is currently seeking input from PTSD experts across the country but says a likely consensus could be that prazosin may help some, but may not be a good choice when suicide is an active concern. Two larger studies in active and retired military personnel yielded mixed results as well, the first in active duty military showed it helped with nightmares and sleep quality and a follow-up study just published this year on military veterans with chronic PTSD indicated it was no better than placebo. McCall's pilot study is the first in which all participants had suicidal thoughts or actions. "It did not seem to do much for suicidal ideation and that was somewhat disappointing, but the thing what was mind-blowing was that is actually worsened nightmares," says McCall. "Maybe it's not for everybody." He notes that with PTSD, a patient's nightmares often focus on the trauma that produced their disorder. Two study participants required emergency inpatient psychiatric care, but there were no suicide attempts or deaths over the study course. "We need to reconcile how is it that we had 10 years of data saying prazosin is good for nightmares in PTSD, a big study this February indicating it has essentially no affect and now a smaller study showing it can worsen some aspects," McCall says. "We need to know what it all means." The latest study led by McCall looked at a total of 20 seriously psychiatrically ill patients, two with wartime PTSD with the remainder mostly civilian females who experienced sexual assault. All had active suicidal thoughts, some had previous suicide attempts and most were taking antidepressants and/or had them prescribed as part of evaluation for the study. For eight weeks, they took bedtime doses of the short half-life prazosin with the idea of helping avoid nightmares and, by association, suicidal thoughts. They were assessed weekly for relevant factors such as severity of suicidal thoughts, nightmares, insomnia, depression and PTSD. One reason for the unexpected findings of the study could be the severity of participants' PTSD as indicated by the their suicidal thoughts, McCall says of his study. The once daily dose may also have been problematic in impacting suicidal thoughts, McCall notes. There was no significant impact on blood pressure, likely because of the drug's short half-life, and no suicide attempts or deaths. A result of PTSD can be too much noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine, a stress hormone and neurotransmitter that is key to the body's fight or flight response. Its increase ideally is a short-term reaction that constricts blood vessels so we can adeptly respond to some threat. Prazosin readily enters the central nervous system where it blocks the action of norepinephrine. "What trauma does in part is put your brain on edge so you are always ready for the next bad thing," McCall says. "We use terms like hypervigilance, meaning you are always scanning the environment and PTSD patients often sit with their back to the wall so they can see the door. People who are over-diligent by day probably don't sleep well at night," he notes. The work of McCall and others has delineated a clear association between insomnia, nightmares and suicidal thoughts and behavior. McCall reconfirmed in 2013 in The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine the link between insomnia and nightmares and how losing hope of ever getting another good night's sleep itself is a risk factor for suicide. Earlier studies looking at prazosin's ability to help when PTSD appears responsible include a 26-week trial in 271 military veterans with chronic PTSD who had frequent nightmares. The study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association failed to show any benefit of prazosin over placebo in reducing the frequency and intensity of trauma-related nightmares. New or worsening suicidal thoughts occurred in about 8 percent of participants taking prazosin versus 15 percent taking placebo. The study, led by Dr. Murray A. Raskind, vice chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington and director of the VA Northwest Network Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System, took place at 13 VA medical centers. Five years earlier, Raskind led another study of the drug in active duty soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with combat PTSD and nightmares. The drug, administered midmorning and at night for 15 weeks, showed it was actually effective compared with placebo in the 67 soldiers for combat nightmares, overall sleep quality, and generally reducing the impact of their PTSD. McCall's study used the same dosing schedule as the previous larger studies but with only the nighttime dose. Six participants completed the entire course of the trial, and investigators suspected that the weekly visits required for the study may have been arduous for some. Currently the antidepressants sertraline and paroxetine are the only PTSD drug therapies that have Food and Drug Administration approval and neither are widely effective, McCall says.

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