One of the best movies I’ve ever seen was the Rob Marshall adaptation of the Broadway musical Chicago. Not only was the historical depiction of the Windy City in 1920’s fascinatingly presented but watching funnyman John C. Reilly put out an Oscar worthy, if not Oscar winning performance, and listening to him belt out a tune was a pleasant surprise as well.
My favorite song in the film was Reilly’s character Amos Hart’s rendition of “Mr. Cellophane” a plaintive plea for recognition from an oblivious love interest that many of us can find familiar. "Mr. Cellophane" tells the story of the trials of an under-appreciated and misunderstood man in love. And, who among us can say that they never felt unrequited love from a guy or girl we simply wanted to acknowledge our affections.
When I think of unrequited love, sometimes I think of our human body and its parts. Like Chicago’s Amos Hart, our heart, and spleen and thymus and thyroid among other structures faithfully love us but remain unrecognized and unappreciated. And no organ in the body is more unrecognized and unappreciated than the pancreas. While everyone knows about the heart and the brain and the stomach and the skin hardly anyone ever give this little 2 or 3 ounce organ its due.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Cancer patients and survivors who felt tired or sluggish reported feeling noticeably better after taking ginseng supplements for two months, in a new study.
"Nearly all patients with cancer can suffer from fatigue at some point; either at diagnosis, during treatment and even after treatment, and (fatigue) can linger for several years," said lead author Debra Barton, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
"The issue with cancer-related fatigue is that it can be a profound fatigue that is not relieved by sleep or rest and that it can significantly impact the ability of people to accomplish the things they are used to doing every day," Barton told Reuters Health by email.
Ginseng had shown promise for fatigue in earlier studies as well, researchers said.
Tired cancer patients and survivors often turn to that and other dietary supplements such as Coenzyme Q-10, L-Carnitine and guarana, but not all are supported by evidence.
For over a thousand years diabetes was recognized as a deadly disease that caused those afflicted to waste away and die a painful death, but it took until the 7th century BC for the development of the disease to be linked to sugar. Doctors in ancient India were the first to make the connection, diagnosing the disease by observing whether ants were attracted to a patient’s urine.
Although it has been long assumed that once insulin producing cells die they can longer regenerate. However, according to the website diabetesselfmanagement.com, there is growing evidence that these cells actually can regenerate themselves. This is great news for type 1 diabetics who until now been told their disease is incurable.
The skin care business is, like many other businesses, steeped in and dependent on consumerism and marketing. Rather than having real effects, products have come to rely much more on sizzle; many purchases are the result of nothing more than hype and buying decisions are often functions of ignorance and ads. The world of cosmetic products as we know it today was birthed in the late 19th and early 20th century, at the same time that business enterprises were beginning to understand Freudian psychological theories of human motivations and buying behaviors and how to use them to exploit and manipulate consumer minds and emotions. No business has leveraged human desires and vulnerabilities via sales and advertising more than the business of beauty. We are endlessly manipulated and contorted into spending our hard earned cash via celebrity sales pitches, advertising slogans and the recommendations of dubious department store “advisers”.
But that all changed with the active ingredients dubbed “cosma-ceuticals” which worked as powerfully as prescriptions but were only regulated as cosmetics. The father of the cosmaceutical, Dr. Albert Kligman coined the term to distinguish inactive and superficial ingredients from those that went “…beyond mere camouflage…” and could achieve real and often long-term results. While it’s true that everything including water will inevitably alter the skin in some way, only true cosmaceuticals can provide the kind of performance most consumers expect and are (mis-)led to believe they’ll get when they purchase and apply their cream, lotion, toner and treatment skin care preparations and products.
The brain is an electrical generator endlessly producing and emitting streams of energy. And no mere random chaotic emanations of energy are these.
Rather, they are more akin to the organized flow of water on the on the surface of the ocean. Scientists actually refer to the movements as waves. They measure their motion and patterns on a device called an EEG (electroencephalogram).
Like all waves, the ones produced by the brain ebb and flow. Electrical bursts “fire” and then cease firing, essentially blinking on and off. The amount of times a burst of brain electricity and its subsequent cessation, turn on and off in every second is called a “cycle” and is measured as “cycles-per-second” (CPS). The number of cycles-per-second is referred to as the “frequency”. One that fires and stops firing, or cycles once a second, is said to have a frequency of one. If flow and ebb occur twice a second the frequency would be 2, three flows and ebbs, or “cycles-per-second” would have a frequency of 3 and so on.
The energy emitted by the brain ebbs and flows at various frequencies throughout the day and ranges from a slumberous 1 to a frenzied 100 CPS. Researchers divide this range into five categories, each associated with its own characteristic subjective qualities.
