Dr. Terry Rondberg: Up Close and Personal

I’ve often written about the benefits of yoga, mostly centering on how much it can help improve health and wellness, flexibility and stamina. I sometimes forget that yoga can also offer tremendous emotional and psychological rewards.

A recent study that appeared online at The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine was an interesting reminder of that “hidden benefit.” Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) found that yoga may be superior to other forms of exercise in its positive effect on mood and anxiety. The study is the first to demonstrate an association between yoga postures, increased GABA levels and decreased anxiety.

The researchers set out to contrast the brain gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) levels of yoga subjects with those of participants who spent time walking. Low GABA levels are associated with depression and other widespread anxiety disorders.

The researchers followed two randomized groups of healthy individuals over a 12-week long period. One group practiced yoga three times a week for one hour, while the remaining subjects walked for the same period of time. Using magnetic resonance spectroscopic (MRS) imaging, the participants’ brains were scanned before the study began. At week 12, the researchers compared the GABA levels of both groups before and after their final 60-minute session.

Each subject was also asked to assess his or her psychological state at several points throughout the study, and those who practiced yoga reported a more significant decrease in anxiety and greater improvements in mood than those who walked. “Over time, positive changes in these reports were associated with climbing GABA levels,” said lead author Chris Streeter, MD, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at BUSM.

According to Streeter, this promising research warrants further study of the relationship between yoga and mood, and suggests that the practice of yoga be considered as a potential therapy for certain mental disorders.

SOURCE: “Effects of Yoga Versus Walking on Mood, Anxiety, and Brain GABA Levels: A Randomized Controlled MRS Study,” The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. doi:10.1089/acm.2010.0007. Abstract online.

As the father of two grown daughters, and the grandfather of small children, I know how amazing kids can be and how incredibly “adult” they can act when called upon to do so. Still, every time I watch this video, I’m stunned by how intelligent even a five-year-old can be. I wonder sometimes if we stunt their intellectual and emotional growth by assuming they’re “just kids” and expect so little of them. I’m not saying we should treat them like small-sized grownups, but we need to remember that they’re often capable of far more than we realize, as you’ll see when you watch this:

When I first read the e-mail, my hopes soared.

The message supposedly reported on a new “cancer update” from Johns Hopkins University, in which they disavowed chemotherapy and radiation therapy and even surgery as “treatments” for cancer, and suggested nutrition and other natural preventive measures as alternatives.

Gilman Hall at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

Too good to be true, I thought! Sure enough, it was. I’m really trying to be positive in outlook about these kinds of announcements because almost daily things are showing a decided trend toward the alternative health care universe. But, in this case, a check with Snopes revealed that the message is one of the urban legends that arise out of a widespread desire for such news to be true. The e-mail report generated so much interest that Johns Hopkins had to issue a disclaimer, stating: “Information falsely attributed to Johns Hopkins called, ‘CANCER UPDATE FROM JOHN HOPKINS’ describes properties of cancer cells and suggests ways of preventing cancer.  Johns Hopkins did not publish the information, which often is an email attachment, nor do we endorse its contents.”

They even went on to claim: “Traditional therapies, such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, work. The evidence is the millions of cancer survivors in the United States today who are alive because of these therapies. We recognize that treatments don’t work in every patient, or sometimes work for awhile and then stop working, and there are some cancers that are more difficult to cure than others.”

It’s hard to imagine, in this day and age where so much is being discovered about the damage done by radiation and chemotherapy, that any “legitimate” medical institution could continue to praise these approaches so highly. At the very least, they might have conceded that the perceived “benefits” of such radical (some say barbaric) practices are extremely small compared to the risks and side effects.

Several medical research papers have concluded that most types of cancer do not respond positively to chemo or radiation therapies. Naturally, these papers receive little publicity, particularly compared to the “breakthrough” articles for research funded primarily by drug companies.

One such article is the 1992 paper by Dr. Ulrich Abel, a German biostatistician who spent 10 years as a statistician in clinical oncology. He found that:

“Apart from lung cancer, in particular small-cell lung cancer, there is no direct evidence that chemotherapy prolongs survival in patients with advanced carcinoma. Except for ovarian cancer, available indirect evidence rather supports the absence of a positive effect.

“In treatment of lung cancer and ovarian cancer, the therapeutic benefit is at best rather small, and a less aggressive treatment seems to be at least as effective as the usual one. It is possible that certain sub-groups of patients benefit from the treatment, yet so far the available results do not allow a sufficiently precise definition of these groups.

“Many oncologists take it for granted that response to therapy prolongs survival, an opinion which is based on a fallacy and which is not supported by clinical studies. To date, it is unclear whether the treated patients, as a whole, benefit from chemotherapy as to their quality of life.

“For most cancer sites, urgently required types of studies such as randomized de-escalations of dose or comparisons of immediate versus deferred chemotherapy are still lacking. With few exceptions, there is no good scientific basis for the application of chemotherapy in symptom-free patients with advanced epithelial malignancy.”

The actual report has been so well suppressed that it’s nearly impossible to locate. Yet, the interest in his findings has increased so much in recent years that the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine included a synopsis of his findings on its pubmed.gov site.

Naturally, I’m disappointed (but not surprised) that the e-mail stating a change of heart of Johns Hopkins wasn’t true.

But I’m hanging on to it. Someday, it will be true.

The good news: Americans have cut their risk of dying from coronary heart disease in half during the past two decades.

The even better news: We did it ourselves, by smoking less, watching our diet, and lowering our cholesterol levels and blood pressure. All the expensive and risky treatments from the medical and pharmaceutical industries haven’t helped much in achieving this progress in healthy hearts.

That’s not just my opinion — it’s the conclusion of researchers reporting in the September issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

The Heart Truth, a national heart disease awareness and prevention campaign.

Using data from 1980 through 2000, they found that the biggest difference in death rates was due to prevention: reducing risk factors among healthy individuals. Drugs or surgery for people with heart disease had only a minor impact (and if you ask me, even that impact was greatly outweighed by the damage done by those medical treatments).

“We were surprised by the small proportion of the mortality fall attributable to primary preventive drug interventions such as statins and blood pressure tablets,” said lead author Fiona Young, at the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University in England.

Why should she have been surprised? Death due to medical treatment — including medical errors, infections, unnecessary surgeries and other factors — is considered one of the, if not the leading cause of death in the United States.

“Knowledge about what has caused these large mortality declines allows us to plan effective measures to reduce disease rates in the future,” Young added.

Good! That should mean less treatment … more healthy living!

To uncover this information, the researchers gathered data on total cholesterol level, systolic blood pressure, and smoking prevalence from The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a yearly national survey representing the entire US population. They entered those statistics into a model that estimates changes in heart disease mortality between two points in time.

The results reinforce previous research showing that prevention — NOT TREATMENT — is the key to staying healthy.

SOURCE: “Coronary mortality declines in the U.S. between 1980 and 2000: quantifying the contributions from primary and secondary prevention” American Journal of Preventive Medicine.39(3), 2010.

By Terry Rondberg

Whenever a problem crops up that seems like a BIG DEAL, I watch this video from NASA.

Astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at absolutely nothing and left it there, first for 10 days then for 11 days. What they found in that “nothingness” was nothing short of  incredible. Watch.

It definitely puts life in perspective.

In his book, “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” author Brian Wansink makes an important point when he reminds us that fast food restaurants and packaged food manufacturers don’t sell calorie-laden, high-sodium, super-processed foods to deliberately make us fat or unhealthy. They do it because those items are what sell. If the public shows that it wants healthier foods, they’ll start making and selling them.

A discussion that took place at the 2010 Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting and Food Expo recently backs up his premise. Consumer demand for foods with health and wellness benefits has increased in recent years and the food industry is sitting up and taking notice.

At the Expo, Suzy Badaracco, a registered dietitian and president of Culinary Tides, Inc. (a company that tracks food trends) pointed to a growing body of research that supports the health benefits of a wide range of ingredients from all over the world. She named several “rock star” ingredients from around the globe, such as kefir from Russia, adzuki beans from Japan and black currant from the European Union, among many others.

Carlos Barroso, president and founder of another food industry consulting firm, explained that timing is right for such products, given the ongoing demand for “authentic” foods. Already, probiotic-enriched foods that have been popular overseas for years are a hit in this country. “It’s not a European phenomenon anymore — it’s already a multimillion dollar business here,” he said, adding that traditional incentives like marketplace success are as important as ever. “You can certainly make money from importing health and wellness trends from outside the U.S.”

Barroso says the next step is to use food as a way to deliver health properties. He cited a dietary supplement called triphala, made with a natural extract of three fruits. “Why put it into a pill? What about a natural triphala fruit snack?”

Expo speaker Kara Nielsen, a “trendologist” at the Center for Culinary Development in San Francisco, said that food product developers here can easily and successfully incorporate such medicinal ingredients into food products that already have a certain cultural flair: using the Indian spice turmeric, shown to have healthful properties, in Indian-style simmer sauces, for example. “And don’t ignore common wisdom built on folk remedies — like enhanced chicken soup or extra cinnamon in baked goods,” she added.

Eventually, the food industry may go a step further and stop thinking of food as “medicine” to treat specific conditions and just focus on helping the body achieve the highest possible level of natural wellness (just as chiropractic does). But for now, at least they’re moving in the right direction!

Here’s an interesting new research finding: married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. That’s the conclusion of a recent survey of American adults, reported in the July 2010 issue of Harvard Men’s Health Watch.

According to the Harvard online publication, numerous studies conducted over the past 150 years suggest that marriage (or, at least, a good marriage) is good for health (at least for men!). Now, scientists are beginning to understand how marriage affects heart disease, cancer, and other conditions in men.

The survey — part of the from the Framingham Offspring Study — found that married men had a 46% lower rate of death than unmarried men, even after taking into account major cardiovascular risk factors. In this study, the happiness of the marriage didn’t seem to influence the overall protective effect. In other studies, though, marital unhappiness and stress were linked with high blood pressure (hypertension), an important cardiac risk factor. Over time, marital stress is associated with thickening of the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber. On the flip side, a supportive marriage is associated with improved survival among men who develop heart failure.

Makes sense to me. Being in a loving partnership with someone (married or not) has to make a positive impact on your life. If nothing else, being able to share one’s joys and sorrows with another person reduces stress which, as we well know, is the key element in almost all health problems.

And, despite the fact that this survey focused on men, other studies have shown the same is true for women. A fascinating report published by the National Center for Health Statistics notes that research consistently documents associations between formal marital status and health and well-being. Compared with unmarried people, those who tie the knot generally have better mental and physical health outcomes, live longer, and have lower prevalence of cardiovascular disease.

Interestingly, the only real “negative” health outcome due to marriage is that husbands tend to pack on some extra pounds!

So, next time you get into a fight with your spouse, keep in mind that it’s worth it — for your health’s sake — to kiss and make up.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) just came out with a report warning about a growing and potentially life-threatening trend known as “Robo tripping,” the abuse of over-the-counter cough and cold medications by America’s youth.

The ASA is involved in the problem because anesthesiologists are often among the first medical people to deal with overdose cases at hospitals.

From what the ASA says, nearly 10% of all American teens have admitted to getting high on cough medication containing the synthetic drug dextromethorphan (DXM), which produces a hallucinogenic high when consumed in large amounts.

Kids as young as nine-years-old have admitted to Robo tripping, mainly because the drug is readily available without a prescription and inexpensive. The “Robo” refers to Robotussin, although many other cough medicines also contain DXM.

“Consuming large amounts of drugs containing DXM can have a variety of serious and very dangerous side effects on a child’s short- and long-term health, ranging from hallucinations to loss of motor control, and even death,” said Michael H. Entrup, MD, ASA director for the Massachusetts Society of Anesthesiologists. “As summer swings into high gear and many kids are home from school, it’s especially important for parents to be aware of what their kids are doing during the break. As anesthesiologists, we want to help family members not only recognize the signs of Robo tripping but also to ensure that children are aware of the danger inherent in this type of drug abuse.”

The ASA is taking action to curb Robo tripping among teens and tweens by providing parents with the information to recognize and prevent it. DXM, the active ingredient in cough medications that is abused when children Robo trip — also referred to as Robo, Skittles, Dex and Tussin — is available in more than 125 medications, including well-known brands.

Parents should actively monitor for possible signs of Robo tripping, which can include:

• An unusual medicinal smell on the child.
• Empty or missing cough and cold medicine bottles.
• An unexplainable disappearance of money from the house.
• A sudden change in their child’s physical appearance, attitude, and sleeping and/or eating habits.
• Questionable or unexpected packages arriving in the mail addressed to the child.
• Visits by their child to pro-drug websites.

Parents can help protect their children from DXM abuse by:

• Educating them about the dangers of drug abuse.
• Controlling access to cough and cold medicines (which may include locking the medicine cabinet).
• Keeping their own medications out of the reach of their children.
• Familiarizing themselves with — and not stockpiling — medicines that contain DXM.
• Actively checking their credit card statements.
• Monitoring their child’s internet use.

I’m going to add my own advice: set an example for your kids. Look into your medicine cabinet and ask yourself whether you REALLY need all those medicines and pills. Are you taking them for every little ache and pain? Are you taking them more out of habit than need? Are you buying into the drug makers’ propaganda that chemical substances are good for you (as though you may have an aspirin deficiency!)?

If your kids see you reaching for an OTC drug every day, what kind of message are they getting from you? If they see you drinking alcohol every night, they’re likely to see this as an accepted behavior. Same thing for both prescription and OTC drugs. Your acceptance of these medications as good and healthy things can give your children a green light to try their own version of the OTC banquet. At the very least, it gives them the parental example they need to justify their actions.

Reduce the likelihood that your children will be lured into taking drugs of any kind by making sure you teach by example, and achieve wellness through wise lifestyle choices.

As the new Jackie Chan/Jaden Smith version of “The Karate Kid” sweeps the world’s multiplexes, a new wave of karate kids is expected to sweep into studios and rec centers. At least that’s the prediction of Lou Illar, screenwriter and associate producer of “Sidekicks,” the classic ’90s martial arts movie.

“Karate is tailor-made for the movies. It’s exciting to watch, and involves personal and spiritual components that make great story-telling devices,” he explains. Illar, in pre-production for “Sidekicks II,” is witnessing firsthand the resurgence of martial arts from his Louisiana Dojo. “Plus, it doesn’t need to have winners and losers like Western sporting activities do; and the character building aspect for young people is key. At their heart, martial arts are about discipline and humility. The best part is that anyone can do it and excel. There’s a reason they’ve been around for centuries.”

As a holder of a black belt in karate, I can attest to the fact that it’s a very healthy sport. The combination of mind-body training, self-discipline, and aerobic exercise makes it an ideal choice for any fitness program.

The University of Houston’s campus karate club touts the physical benefits to students.

“The obvious benefit from learning karate is the improvement of physical health,” stated Krassimir Doynov, PhD. “The student learns to exercise regularly several times a week, which is one of the most useful lifetime habits. This results in balancing blood pressure and circulation, lowering the cholesterol level, and reducing the number of visits to the doctor and all medical expenses. Moreover the student gets flexible muscles and joints, which increases the chances for surviving car accidents with fewer injuries when compared to a person who does not train karate.”

The experts over at karate.com agree.

“Karate is a physical exercise that will improve cardiovascular and musculoskeletal health. By practicing karate regularly, you exercise your heart, muscles, and bones for a stronger body. Karate will help build muscle, stamina, and strength. Regular exercise has long-last positive effects on overall physical health… Karate is one of the best ways to promote overall health. By finding a strong balance from within, and using that in coordination with a stronger body, karate creates a healthier person. ”

It’s definitely something I can recommend to anybody looking for a more interesting and fulfilling way to exercise the mind and body. Sure beats doing pushups!

Judge Young

I thought this might be of interest to those who haven’t seen this information, which is being circulated via e-mail. I checked out the truth of the story at Snopes.com and this is an accurate report of the verdict delivered by Judge William Young in the case of Richard C. Reid, a would-be terrorist who was prevented from igniting plastic explosives hidden in his shoe on an American Airlines flight in 2001.

After admitting his guilt to the court for the record, Reid boasted of his “allegiance to Osama bin Laden, to Islam, and to the religion of Allah,” defiantly adding: “I think I will not apologize for my actions … I am at war with your country.”

Judge Young then delivered the statement quoted below.

-Terry Rondberg

“On counts 1, 5 and 6 the Court sentences you to life in prison in the custody of the United States Attorney General. On counts 2, 3, 4 and 7, the Court sentences you to 20 years in prison on each count, the sentence on each count to run consecutively. (That’s 80 years.)

“On count 8 the Court sentences you to the mandatory 30 years again, to be served consecutively to the 80 years just imposed. The Court imposes upon you for each of the eight counts a fine of $250,000 that’s an aggregate fine of $2 million. The Court accepts the government’s recommendation with respect to restitution and orders restitution in the amount of $298.17 to Andre Bousquet and $5,784 to American Airlines.

“The Court imposes upon you an $800 special assessment. The Court imposes upon you five years supervised release simply because the law requires it. But the life sentences are real life sentences so I need go no further.

“This is the sentence that is provided for by our statutes. It is a fair and just sentence. It is a righteous sentence.

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