The Kevin Trudeau Show: 2-23-10
Today, Kevin risks his own freedom to give YOU the truth! Find out why the FTC is going after him and not McDonald’s or Big Pharma and why the first amendment apparently doesn’t apply to him.
Plus, get the headlines you won’t hear from the mainstream media:
Big Pharma Researcher Admits to Faking Research!
GlaxoSmithKline Hid Evidence of Avandia Harm
Pfizer Found Guilty of Criminal Fraud
Hospital Infections Have Killed Over 48,000 People
Acne Drug has Side Effect of Death
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Big Pharma Researcher Admits to Faking Research!
February 23, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
It’s being called the largest research fraud in medical history. Dr. Scott Reuben, a former member of Pfizer’s speakers’ bureau, has agreed to plead guilty to faking dozens of research studies that were published in medical journals.
Now being reported across the mainstream media is the fact that Dr. Reuben accepted a $75,000 grant from Pfizer to study Celebrex in 2005. His research, which was published in a medical journal, has since been quoted by hundreds of other doctors and researchers as “proof” that Celebrex helped reduce pain during post-surgical recovery. There’s only one problem with all this: No patients were ever enrolled in the study!
Dr. Scott Reuben, it turns out, faked the entire study and got it published anyway.
It wasn’t the first study faked by Dr. Reuben: He also faked study data on Bextra and Vioxx drugs, reports the Wall Street Journal.
As a result of Dr. Reuben’s faked studies, the peer-reviewed medical journal Anesthesia & Analgesia was forced to retract 10 “scientific” papers authored by Reuben. The Day of London reports that 21 articles written by Dr. Reuben that appear in medical journals have apparently been fabricated, too, and must be retracted.
After being caught fabricating research for Big Pharma, Dr. Reuben has reportedly signed a plea agreement that will require him to return $420,000 that he received from drug companies. He also faces up to a 10-year prison sentence and a $250,000 fine.
He was also fired from his job at the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass. after an internal audit there found that Dr. Reuben had been faking research data for 13 years. (http://www.theday.com/article/20100…)
Business as usual in Big Pharma
What’s notable about this story is not the fact that a medical researcher faked clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry. It’s not the fact that so-called “scientific” medical journals published his fabricated studies. It’s not even the fact that the drug companies paid this quack close to half a million dollars while he kept on pumping out fabricated research.
The real story here is that this is business as usual in the pharmaceutical industry.
Dr. Reuben’s actions really aren’t that extraordinary. Drug companies bribe researchers and doctors as a routine matter. Medical journals routinely publish false, fraudulent studies. FDA panel members regularly rely on falsified research in making their drug approval decisions, and the mainstream media regularly quotes falsified research in reporting the news.
Fraudulent research, in other words, is widespread in modern medicine. The pharmaceutical industry couldn’t operate without it, actually. It is falsified research that gives the industry its best marketing claims and strongest FDA approvals. Quacks like Dr Scott Reuben are an important part of the pharmaceutical profit machine because without falsified research, bribery and corruption, the industry would have very little research at all.
Pay special attention to the fact that the Anesthesia & Analgesia medical journal gladly published Dr. Reuben’s faked studies even though this journal claims to be a “scientific” medical journal based on peer review. Funny, isn’t it, how such a scientific medical journal gladly publishes fraudulent research with data that was simply invented by the study author. Perhaps these medical journals should be moved out of the non-fiction section of university libraries and placed under science fiction.
Remember, too, that all the proponents of pharmaceuticals, vaccines and mammograms ignorantly claim that their conventional medicine is all based on “good science.” It’s all scientific and trustworthy, they claim, while accusing alternative medicine of being “woo woo” wishful thinking and non-scientific hype. Perhaps they should have a quick look in the mirror and realize it is their own system of quack medicine that’s based largely on fraudulent research, bribery and corruption.
You just have to laugh, actually, when you hear pushers of vaccines and pharmaceuticals claim their medicine is “scientific” while natural medicine is “unproven.” Sure it’s scientific — about as scientific as the storyline in a Scooby Doo cartoon, or as credible as the medical license of a six-year-old kid who just received a “let’s play doctor” gift set for Christmas. Many pharmaceutical researchers would have better careers as writers of fiction novels rather than scientific papers.
For all those people who ignorantly claim that modern pharmaceutical science is based on “scientific evidence,” just give them these three words: Doctor Scott Reuben.
Drug companies support fraudulent research
Don’t forget that the drug companies openly supported Dr. Scott Reuben’s research. They paid him, in fact, to keep on fabricating studies.
The drug companies claim to be innocent in all this, but behind the scenes they had to have known what was going on. Dr. Reuben’s research was just too consistently favorable to drug company interests to be scientifically legitimate. If a drug company wanted to “prove” that their drug was good for some new application, all they had to do was ask Dr. Reuben to come up with the research (wink wink). “Here’s another fifty thousand dollars to study whether our drug is good for post-surgical pain (wink).”
And before long, Dr. Reuben would magically materialize a brand new study that just happened to “prove” exactly what the sponsoring drug company wanted to prove. Advocates of western medicine claim they don’t believe in magic, but when it comes to clinical trials, they actually do: All the results they wish to see just magically appear as long as the right researcher gets paid to materialize the results out of thin air, much like waving a magician’s wand and chanting, “Abra cadabra… let there be RESEARCH DATA!”
Shazam! The research data materializes just like that. It all gets written up into a “scientific” paper that also magically gets published in medical journals that fail to ask a single question that might exposed the research fraud.
I guess these people believe in magic after all, huh? Where science is lacking, a little “research magic” conveniently fills the void.
The whole system makes a mockery of real science. It is a system operated by criminals who fabricate whatever “scientific evidence” they need in order to get published in medical journals and win FDA approval for drugs that they fully realize are killing people.
What is “Evidence-Based Medicine?”
The fact that a researcher like Dr. Reuben could so successfully fabricate fraudulent study data, then get it published in peer-reviewed science journals, and get away with it for 13 years sheds all kinds of new light on what’s really behind “evidence-based medicine.”
The recipe for evidence-based medicine is quite simple: Fabricate the evidence! Get it published in any mainstream medical journal. Then you can quote the fabricated evidence as “fact!”
When pushers of pharmaceuticals and vaccines resort to quoting “evidence-based medicine” as their defense, keep in mind that much of their so-called evidence has been entirely fabricated. When they claim their branch of toxic chemical medicine is based on “real science,” what they really mean is that it’s based on fraudulent science but they’ve all secretly agreed to call it “real science.” When they claim to have “scientific facts” supporting their position, what they really mean is that those “facts” were fabricated by criminal researchers being paid bribes by the drug companies.
“Evidence-based medicine,” it turns out, hardly exists anymore. And even if it does, how do you know which studies are real vs. which ones were fabricated? If a trusted, well-paid researcher can get his falsified papers published for 13 years in top-notch science journals — without getting caught by his peers — then what does that say about the credibility of the entire peer-review science paper publishing process?
Here’s what is says: “Scientific medicine” is a total fraud.
And this fraud isn’t limited to Dr Scott Reuben, either. Remember: he engaged in routine research fraud for 13 years before being caught. There are probably thousands of other scientists engaged in similar research fraud right now who haven’t yet been caught in the act. Their fraudulent research papers have no doubt already been published in “scientific” medical journals. They’ve been quoted in the popular press. They’ve been relied on by FDA decision makers to approve drugs as “safe and effective” for widespread use.
And yet underneath all this, there’s nothing more than fraud and quackery. Sure, there may be some legitimate studies mixed in with all the fraud, but how can we tell the difference?
How are we to trust this system that claims to have a monopoly on scientific truth but in reality is a front for outright scientific fraud?
Keep up the great work, Dr Reuben
Thank you, Dr Scott Reuben, for showing us the truth about the pharmaceutical industry, the research quackery, the laughable “scientific” journals and the bribery and corruption that characterizes the pharmaceutical industry today. You have done more to shed light on the true nature of the drug industry than a thousand articles on NaturalNews.com ever could.
Keep up the good work. After paying your fine and serving a little jail time, I’m sure your services will be in high demand at all the top drug companies that need yet more “scientific” studies to be fabricated and submitted to the medical journals.
You may be a dishonest, disgusting human being to most of the world, but you’re a huge asset to the pharmaceutical industry and they need you back! There are more studies that need to be fabricated soon; more false papers that need to be published and more dangerous drugs that need to receive FDA approval. Hurry!
Because if there’s one place that extreme dishonesty is richly rewarded, it’s in the pharmaceutical industry, where poisons are approved as medicines and fiction is published as the truth.
Click here for the full report.
Glaxo Taking Focus off of Antidepressants
February5, 2010
The Wall Street Journal
By Jeanne Whalen
GlaxoSmithKline PLC said it will stop research into new antidepressants and focus on diseases for which it believes it can develop more valuable drugs, a major shift for a company that developed some of the biggest-selling antidepressants of the past 20 years.
Profits at the U.K. drug giant, which posted a 66% increase in fourth-quarter earnings Thursday, were long fueled by the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin, which at their peak generated billions of dollars a year in sales. Similar medicines, such as Eli Lilly & Co.’s Prozac and Pfizer Inc.’s Zoloft, also generated big sales for those companies.
However, low-cost …
30% of Americans Approaching Poverty
January 26, 2010
The Business Insider
by Vincent Fernando
A shocking report from Brookings exposes just how massive America’s poverty problem is. While substantial reductions in poverty were made during the 1990’s, America’s poor have been rocked by the dual economic downturns since 2000.
The result is that poverty grew at twice the rate of U.S. population growth from 2000 – 2008, and now encompasses 39.1 million Americans.
If one were to expand the definition of poverty to merely ‘poor’ (yet still very poor), then a eye-popping 30% of the nation lives no higher than twice the poverty base line.
Brookings: In 2008, 91.6 million people—more than 30 percent of the nation’s population—fell below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. More individuals lived in families with incomes between 100 and 200 percent of poverty line (52.5 million) than below the poverty line (39.1 million) in 2008. Between 2000 and 2008, large suburbs saw the fastest growing low-income populations across community types and the greatest uptick in the share of the population living under 200 percent of poverty.
Here’s where it gets even more ridiculous — If you break down the data to individual areas, then there’s at least ten U.S. cities with poverty rates of around 30%. Moreover, Brookings latest research highlights how poverty has been getting worse especially fast in the suburbs, thus the U.S. is faced with the challenges of suburban poverty like never before.
California and Florida have been hit especially hard.
Finally, this bad news has likely become far worse already. This research doesn’t include 2009 since full data hasn’t come out yet. When it does, expect a huge up-tick in poverty rates given since that’s when the real brunt of the recent crisis hit ‘Main St.’.
Unfortunately, our regression analyses suggest that these metro areas are not likely to see such decreases in 2009, a year in which no metro area proved exempt from increased unemployment rates. Although the Census will not officially release poverty rates for 2009 until fall of next year, job losses alone foretell a substantially larger increase in the metropolitan poverty rate than the 0.3 percent reported from 2007 to 2008, when unemployment increases were just beginning to accelerate.
20% of Hospital Patients in UK Has Diabetes
January 26, 2010
Telegraph
by Laura Donnelly
Soaring obesity levels have triggered record levels of the condition, which increases the risks of heart and kidney failure, and can result in blindness, nerve damage and amputations.
The first ever diabetes audit of NHS hospitals has found that 20 per cent of patients on hospital wards are now suffering from the disease – twice the proportion previously estimated.
Doctors said the figures, which will be published officially later this year, showed the “terrifying burden” the epidemic is placing on Britain’s population and the crippling effect it is having on NHS resources.
Some patients were being treated for direct consequences of the condition, after uncontrolled blood sugar levels caused them to fall into a coma, or suffer kidney failure, ulcers, or nerve damage.
Others suffered heart attacks and strokes, the risk of which is increased fivefold by diabetes.
While the figures include diabetics admitted for ill-health unrelated to their condition, the audit is expected to show that these patients stayed in hospital far longer than others, in some cases, because of the extra risks posed by their condition and in others, because the diabetes was not properly managed.
Experts said the existing burden on Britain’s hospitals reflected the impact of increasingly unhealthy lifestyles.
Prof Anthony Barnett, clinical director for diabetes at Heart of England NHS Foundation trust, said: “The situation we are facing as a country is absolutely terrifying.
“The obesity rates get worse and worse, the numbers with diabetes keep mushrooming, and given that these people are prone to a whole range of other serious medical conditions, it has an enormous impact on NHS resources.”
Of the 2.6 million people in the UK with the condition, 2.3 million have type 2 diabetes, where nine out of ten cases are related to lifestyle causes, such as obesity, low exercise levels, smoking and alcohol use.
Cases of type 2 diabetes have doubled since 1996, in line with the rise of obesity. If rates of obesity continue to spiral, by 2025, treatment costs for more than 4 million diabetics could consume one quarter of the NHS budget, projections show.
The Government’s diabetes tsar Dr Rowan Hillson, who is leading the audit of 200 hospitals said all patients admitted to hospital with diabetes should be given access to specialist advice, whatever the reason for their admission, so that potentially lethal complications were not missed.
She said: “This is absolutely crucial; there is evidence that the appointment of specialist nurses can reduce re-admissions of patients with diabetes, as well as drug errors, and length of stay.”
Previous research by charity Diabetes UK has found that just half of diabetes patients reported being seen by a specialist nurse during their hospital stay.
Another study found 20 per cent of diabetes patients were not given their medication at the right time, while 30 per cent said staff had been unaware they suffered from the condition.
Research has shown that the number of people undergoing lower limb amputations because of ulcers caused by diabetes has doubled in the last decade.
Around 5,000 people a year undergo a lower limb amputation, when circulation problems caused by diabetes result in foot ulcers and sores which become infected.
Surgeons say as many as half of the operations could have been avoided if expert care was received sooner.
Vascular surgeon Prof Roger Greenhalgh, from Imperial College Healthcare trust, said: “The numbers of amputations are going up, and that is partly because of the increased prevalence of diabetes, but we are also finding too many cases are not referred to specialists early enough”.
Dr Hillson, a consultant at Hillingdon Hospital in London, said the best parts of the NHS referred all diabetics with foot problems to a team made up of several types of specialists, to ensure complex problems were not missed, but said this was not yet standard practice.
She said: “One of the complications of acute diabetes is foot problems that can lead to amputation and even death.
“We know an enormous amount can be done to prevent this, and that this can save limbs, but there is variable practice across the country,” she said.
Russ Harris, from Bournemouth, was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, aged 61, in 1999.
The former salesman, who enjoyed a rich diet while on the road, working for a company which sold Danish pastries, was 19 stone when he suddenly lost five stone in just three months, and began to suffer thirst and frequent urination.
Since his diagnosis, he has been admitted to hospital several times for complications linked to diabetes, including major fluid retention, while renal problems have reduced his kidney function to one quarter.
Decade of Decline in U.S. Teen Pregnancies Ends
January 26, 2010
The Washington Post
by Rob Stein
The pregnancy rate among teenage girls in the United States has jumped for the first time in more than a decade, raising alarm that the long campaign to reduce motherhood among adolescents is faltering, according to a report released Tuesday.
The pregnancy rate among 15-to-19-year-old’s increased 3 percent between 2005 and 2006 — the first jump since 1990, according to an analysis of the most recent data collected by the federal government and the nation’s leading reproductive-health think tank.
Teen pregnancy has long been one of the most pressing social issues and has triggered intense political debate over sex education, particularly whether the federal government should fund programs that encourage abstinence until marriage or focus on birth control.
“The decline in teen pregnancy has stopped — and in fact has turned around,” said Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research for the Guttmacher Institute, the nonprofit, nonpartisan research group in New York that conducted the analysis. “These data are certainly cause for concern.”
The abortion rate also inched up for the first time in more than a decade — rising 1 percent — intensifying concern across the ideological spectrum.
“One of the nation’s shining success stories of the past two decades is in danger of unraveling,” said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. “Clearly, the nation’s collective efforts to convince teens to postpone childbearing must be more creative and more intense, and they must begin today.”
The cause of the increase is the subject of debate. Several experts blamed the increase in teen pregnancies on sex-education programs that focus on encouraging abstinence. Others said the reversal could be due to a variety of factors, including an increase in poverty, an influx of Hispanics and complacency about AIDS, prompting lax use of birth control such as condoms.
“It could be a lot of things coming together,” said Rebecca Maynard, a professor of economics and social policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It could be we just bottomed out, and whenever you are at the bottom, it tends to wiggle around. This may or may not be a sustained rise.”
The report comes as Congress might consider restoring federal funding to sex-education programs that focus on abstinence. The Obama administration eliminated more than $150 million in funds for such groups, but the Senate’s health-care reform legislation would reinstate $50 million.
The new findings immediately set off a debate over funding. Critics argued that the disturbing new data were just the latest in a long series of indications that the focus on abstinence programs was a dismal failure.
“Now we know that after 10 years and over $1.5 billion in abstinence-only funding, the U.S. is lurching backwards on teen sexual health,” said James Wagoner of Advocates for Youth, a Washington advocacy group.
Supporters of abstinence programs, however, said the findings provided powerful evidence of the need to continue to encourage delayed sexual activity, not only to avoid pregnancy but also to reduce the risk for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
High Blood Pressure May Increase Risk of Dementia
January 26, 2010
The Canadian Press
by Lauran Neergaard
If the cardiologist’s warnings don’t scare you, consider this: Controlling blood pressure just might be the best protection yet known against dementia.
In a flurry of new research, scientists scanned people’s brains to show hypertension fuels a kind of scarring linked to later development of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Those scars can start building up in middle age, decades before memory problems will appear.
The evidence is strong enough that the U.S. National Institutes of Health soon will begin enrolling thousands of hypertension sufferers in a major study to see if aggressive treatment – pushing blood pressure lower than currently recommended – better protects not just their hearts but their brains.
“If you look … for things that we can prevent that lead to cognitive decline in the elderly, hypertension is at the top of the list,” Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told The Associated Press.
Age is the biggest risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia that affect about one in eight people 65 or older.
Scientists have long noticed that some of the same triggers for heart disease – high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes – seem to increase the risk of dementia, too. But for years, they thought that link was with “vascular dementia,” memory problems usually linked to small strokes, and not the scarier classic Alzheimer’s disease.
Now those lines are blurring as specialists realize that many if not most patients have a mix of the two dementias. Somehow, factors like hypertension – blood pressure readings of 140 over 90 or higher – that weaken arteries also seem to spur Alzheimer’s disease-like processes.
One suspect: Scarring known as white matter lesions. White matter acts as the brain’s telephone network, a system of axons, or nerve fibres, that allow brain cells to communicate with each other. Even slightly elevated blood pressure can damage the tiny blood vessels that nourish white matter, interrupting those signals.
Among the strongest new studies:
-MRI scans showed women 65 and older with high blood pressure had significantly more white matter lesions in their brains eight years later. The study included 1,403 women who were enrolled in a memory subset of the landmark Women’s Health Initiative that tracked postmenopausal health. The worse their blood pressure, the higher volume of white matter damage, says the study published online last month in the Journal of Clinical Hypertension.
“This is a silent disease in the brain,” says lead researcher Dr. Lewis Kuller of the University of Pittsburgh. “It’s evolving over time and it leads to very bad outcomes.”
-The journal Stroke just published similar evidence from a Johns Hopkins University-led study that tracked 983 people for more than 15 years, starting in middle age. The longer people spent with uncontrolled high blood pressure, the more white matter damage they accumulated. The researchers could see a change with each 20-point jump in too-high systolic pressure, the top number in a blood-pressure reading.
Clearly, hypertension alone doesn’t doom someone to later dementia. Far more people, nearly one in three U.S. adults, have hypertension.
And there are plenty of other reasons to lower blood pressure: Hypertension is a leading cause of heart attacks, strokes and kidney failure.
But while some studies have found hypertension treatment lowered the dementia risk, others haven’t.
Enter the NIH’s SPRINT study, which in a few months is to begin enrolling 7,500 hypertension patients age 55 and older around the country. The test: Whether aggressive treatment to lower systolic blood pressure below 120 – what’s considered normal – will prove healthier than today’s guidelines that urge getting it below 140, or 130 for diabetics.
The main focus is on heart and kidney health. But all participants will be screened for dementia, and a subset will undergo repeated cognitive testing and MRI scans to tell if lowering blood pressure also protects against a slide toward dementia. Another question: If older patients can tolerate bigger than usual blood pressure drops without side effects, such as falls.
With dementia rising fast as the population greys, even a small effect from better blood pressure control could have a big public health impact, says Dr. William Thies of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Other dementia-preventing efforts, such as targeting the sticky amyloid plaques in Alzheimer’s patients brains, haven’t panned out so far – while hypertension control has little downside, notes Pittsburgh’s Kuller.
More Proof Exercise Leads to Healthier Aging
January 26, 2010
Time
by Alice Parker
We all know that exercise is good for you. Staying physically active helps keep your heart healthy and your muscles strong, and in cancer patients it has even been shown to ward off relapse. Now a series of independently conducted studies on the effects of exercise in healthy older adults, published on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirms that logging time at the gym not only helps maintain good health but may even prevent the onset of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, osteoarthritis and dementia.
In one surprising trial, researchers led by Dr. Teresa Liu-Ambrose at the University of British Columbia randomly assigned 155 aging women to three separate groups and directly compared the cognitive effects of two types of exercise: resistance training, done once or twice weekly, in which participants worked out with free weights and weight machines and did squats and lunges, versus toning and balance exercises, which participants did twice a week.
By the end of the yearlong study, the women who weight-trained saw an improvement in their performance on cognitive tests of memory and learning as well as in executive functions such as decision-making and conflict resolution — women who trained once a week improved their scores in executive functioning by 12.6% — while those who did balance and toning exercises showed no such improvement. The muscle-strengthening exercise also helped the volunteers, ages 65 to 75, boost their walking speed, a commonly used indicator of overall health status in the elderly, as faster pace has been linked with lower mortality.
The Canadian researchers’ findings were somewhat unexpected, given that previous studies on the issue have typically focused on aerobic exercise, which experts believe enhances cognitive function by promoting blood flow to the brain. Liu-Ambrose says her team speculated that anaerobic weight training would have a similar effect for other reasons. First, a resistance-training regimen requires a considerable amount of learning, especially for elderly people who may not be accustomed to the equipment. To learn how to use dumbbells, a leg press or a latissimus pull-down machine correctly, for example, the volunteers were required to focus on the task at hand, master new techniques and retain new information about proper and safe use of equipment. Previous studies have shown that such learning can help older adults maintain mental acuity.
The women also had to remember their weight settings and adjustments to the seats and keep track of the number of repetitions they completed, says Liu-Ambrose. “There is a lot more learning involved that may not occur if you take up a walking program,” she says, noting that it took the volunteers a good two months to get comfortable with the equipment and the training regimen.
In addition, Liu-Ambrose says, other studies have found that people who weight-train show an increase in blood levels of a growth factor that is important for maintaining skeletal mass. This factor, it turns out, also promotes nerve growth, which could be another way that resistance training boosts mental function.
In a second brain-function study, published in the same journal, scientists in Germany found that increased physical activity was associated with a lower incidence of dementia. In this study, researchers recruited 3,485 elderly residents in Bavaria and asked them about their physical activity. None of the participants had dementia at the start of the analysis, but after two years of follow-up, researchers found that those who exercised at least three times a week were half as likely to have developed dementia, compared with the people who reported no physical activity. Based on his results, says lead author Dr. Thorleif Etgen, a professor of psychiatry and psychotherapy at München University, “it doesn’t make a big difference if you have moderate or high physical activity. The important message is that you do any activity. And even if you start late in life, at 60 or 70, there is a benefit, for it’s never too late to start exercising.”
The key words are “moderate or high,” according to another study that was published on Monday in the Archives. Dr. Qi Sun, a researcher at Harvard School of Public Health, analyzed 13,000 women participating in the Nurses’ Health Study and found that when it came to exercise, more was better. Compared with women who jogged for 20 minutes a week, those who jogged three hours a week or walked briskly for five hours a week were 76% more likely to age successfully, free of chronic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, as well as mental and physical impairment.
Sun’s group found that this benefit occurred across all weight divisions, meaning that even among those who were overweight or obese, women who exercised improved their odds of aging without chronic disease. The effects may apply across different age groups as well; the women were at least 60 years old by the time they enrolled in the study, and while Sun was not able to determine how long they had been exercising prior to that, the results suggest that the health benefits are not limited to the young.
That was the same message of the final exercise paper in the journal, by researchers at University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. In this trial, a group of 246 elderly women were randomly assigned to an 18-month exercise regimen or wellness program. The women participating in the four-times-weekly exercise sessions, which involved aerobics and balance and muscle training, improved their bone mineral density by nearly 2%. The women in the wellness group, which focused on walking, muscle relaxation and breathing skills, had a 0.33% increase in bone density over the same time period. Perhaps more important, participants in the exercise group saw no increase in their risk of experiencing a fracture-causing fall, compared with a 66% higher risk in the control group.
Despite the positive evidence, however, not all researchers are ready to suggest that exercise is a sure-fire prescription against mental decline or chronic disease in healthy people. To make that claim, a large, longer-term, controlled trial would be needed, in which participants are randomly assigned to exercise or not, and are then followed for the development of chronic conditions such as cancer, heart disease or dementia.
FDA Will Not Regulate BPA
January 18, 2010
AllHeadlineNews.com
The Food and Drug Administration announced last week that it will not, for now, regulate a commonly-used chemical used to harden plastic used in many products, including baby bottles.
The agency said that there is concern that exposure to the chemical, BPA, or Bisphenol A, could cause a number of health problems, but more research is needed before it can be regulated.
In an overview released Jan. 15, the FDA said studies using standardized toxicity tests used globally for regulatory decision making support the theory that low level exposure to BPA is safe. But the agency indicated that regulation could come with more research.
This includes a $30-million from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
In the meantime, the FDA said in the overview that parents should continue feeding infants formula and other foods using baby bottles, even those containing BPA, “as the benefit of a stable source of good nutrition outweighs the potential risk of BPA exposure.”
Click here for the full report.
Mental Illness in America
January 12, 2010
NY Times
by Ethan Watters
AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.
This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing.
The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book “Mad Travelers,” the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time.
“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,” Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book “Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom.” “In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”
In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another.
That is until recently.
For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.
DR. SING LEE, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, watched the Westernization of a mental illness firsthand. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was busy documenting a rare and culturally specific form of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong. Unlike American anorexics, most of his patients did not intentionally diet nor did they express a fear of becoming fat. The complaints of Lee’s patients were typically somatic — they complained most frequently of having bloated stomachs. Lee was trying to understand this indigenous form of anorexia and, at the same time, figure out why the disease remained so rare.
As he was in the midst of publishing his finding that food refusal had a particular expression and meaning in Hong Kong, the public’s understanding of anorexia suddenly shifted. On Nov. 24, 1994, a teenage anorexic girl named Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying collapsed and died on a busy downtown street in Hong Kong. The death caught the attention of the media and was featured prominently in local papers. “Anorexia Made Her All Skin and Bones: Schoolgirl Falls on Ground Dead,” read one headline in a Chinese-language newspaper. “Thinner Than a Yellow Flower, Weight-Loss Book Found in School Bag, Schoolgirl Falls Dead on Street,” reported another Chinese-language paper.
In trying to explain what happened to Charlene, local reporters often simply copied out of American diagnostic manuals. The mental-health experts quoted in the Hong Kong papers and magazines confidently reported that anorexia in Hong Kong was the same disorder that appeared in the United States and Europe. In the wake of Charlene’s death, the transfer of knowledge about the nature of anorexia (including how and why it was manifested and who was at risk) went only one way: from West to East.
Western ideas did not simply obscure the understanding of anorexia in Hong Kong; they also may have changed the expression of the illness itself. As the general public and the region’s mental-health professionals came to understand the American diagnosis of anorexia, the presentation of the illness in Lee’s patient population appeared to transform into the more virulent American standard. Lee once saw two or three anorexic patients a year; by the end of the 1990s he was seeing that many new cases each month. That increase sparked another series of media reports. “Children as Young as 10 Starving Themselves as Eating Ailments Rise,” announced a headline in one daily newspaper. By the late 1990s, Lee’s studies reported that between 3 and 10 percent of young women in Hong Kong showed disordered eating behavior. In contrast to Lee’s earlier patients, these women most often cited fat phobia as the single most important reason for their self-starvation. By 2007 about 90 percent of the anorexics Lee treated reported fat phobia. New patients appeared to be increasingly conforming their experience of anorexia to the Western version of the disease.
What is being missed, Lee and others have suggested, is a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering. “Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology,” Lee says. “When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize eating disorders, then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick eating-disorder pathology as a way to express that conflict.”
The problem becomes especially worrisome in a time of globalization, when symptom repertoires can cross borders with ease. Having been trained in England and the United States, Lee knows better than most the locomotive force behind Western ideas about mental health and illness. Mental-health professionals in the West, and in the United States in particular, create official categories of mental diseases and promote them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. American researchers and institutions run most of the premier scholarly journals and host top conferences in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. In addition, Western-trained traumatologists often rush in where war or natural disasters strike to deliver “psychological first aid,” bringing with them their assumptions about how the mind becomes broken by horrible events and how it is best healed. Taken together this is a juggernaut that Lee sees little chance of stopping.
“As Western categories for diseases have gained dominance, micro-cultures that shape the illness experiences of individual patients are being discarded,” Lee says. “The current has become too strong.”
Would anorexia have so quickly become part of Hong Kong’s symptom repertoire without the importation of the Western template for the disease? It seems unlikely. Beginning with scattered European cases in the early 19th century, it took more than 50 years for Western mental-health professionals to name, codify and popularize anorexia as a manifestation of hysteria. By contrast, after Charlene fell onto the sidewalk on Wan Chai Road on that late November day in 1994, it was just a matter of hours before the Hong Kong population learned the name of the disease, who was at risk and what it meant.
THE IDEA THAT our Western conception of mental health and illness might be shaping the expression of illnesses in other cultures is rarely discussed in the professional literature. Many modern mental-health practitioners and researchers believe that the scientific standing of our drugs, our illness categories and our theories of the mind have put the field beyond the influence of endlessly shifting cultural trends and beliefs. After all, we now have machines that can literally watch the mind at work. We can change the chemistry of the brain in a variety of interesting ways and we can examine DNA sequences for abnormalities. The assumption is that these remarkable scientific advances have allowed modern-day practitioners to avoid the blind spots and cultural biases of their predecessors.
Modern-day mental-health practitioners often look back at previous generations of psychiatrists and psychologists with a thinly veiled pity, wondering how they could have been so swept away by the cultural currents of their time. The confident pronouncements of Victorian-era doctors regarding the epidemic of hysterical women are now dismissed as cultural artifacts. Similarly, illnesses found only in other cultures are often treated like carnival sideshows. Koro, amok and the like can be found far back in the American diagnostic manual (DSM-IV, Pages 845-849) under the heading “culture-bound syndromes.” Given the attention they get, they might as well be labeled “Psychiatric Exotica: Two Bits a Gander.”
Western mental-health practitioners often prefer to believe that the 844 pages of the DSM-IV prior to the inclusion of culture-bound syndromes describe real disorders of the mind, illnesses with symptomatology and outcomes relatively unaffected by shifting cultural beliefs. And, it logically follows, if these disorders are unaffected by culture, then they are surely universal to humans everywhere. In this view, the DSM is a field guide to the world’s psyche, and applying it around the world represents simply the brave march of scientific knowledge.
Of course, we can become psychologically unhinged for many reasons that are common to all, like personal traumas, social upheavals or biochemical imbalances in our brains. Modern science has begun to reveal these causes. Whatever the trigger, however, the ill individual and those around him invariably rely on cultural beliefs and stories to understand what is happening. Those stories, whether they tell of spirit possession, semen loss or serotonin depletion, predict and shape the course of the illness in dramatic and often counterintuitive ways. In the end, what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche. It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host.
