Depression is not only the most common mental illness, it’s also one of the most tenacious. Up to 80 percent of people who experience a major depressive episode may relapse. Drugs may lose their effectiveness over time, if they work at all.
But a growing body of research is pointing to an intervention that appears to help prevent relapse by altering thought patterns without side effects: mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT. Read more
The stress of managing diabetes can take its toll, but knowing how to ease your mind and body in anxious moments can contribute to a sense of security. Here are nine strategies to help you feel safe and centered. Read more from Diabetes Forecast
Scientists are putting more effort into studying complementary therapies, including hypnosis, meditation and yoga, that may ease pain with fewer side effects and help people manage their own symptoms. Read more
With its emphasis on acceptance, continual exploration and compassion, the practice of mindfulness makes sense as a tool for clinical psychologists and their patients, said author and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg. She spoke before some 200 psychologists in a conversation with Donna Rockwell, PsyD, a clinical psychologist who is also a meditation teacher.
By training the mind to focus on the present and accept thoughts without judging or dwelling on them, mindfulness can help patients who ruminate over past events, catastrophize or worry about the future, Salzberg said. Read more
Mindfulness training holds promise for treating mood disorders partly because it may lead to changes in patients’ brains, improving connectivity among some brain areas and changing tissue density in key regions, research suggests. Read more
Recent research suggests chronic stress damage starts before we’re even conceived and cuts into our very cells. A number of studies have linked stress with shorter telomeres, a chromosome component that’s been associated with cellular aging and risk for heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
How do personality and environment play into this phenomenon? Read more (Monitor on Psychology, Oct. 2014)
Raghava KK is an artist, TEDMED/TED speaker and National Geographic Emerging Explorer.
Q. In your talk at TEDMED 2013, you showed us your latest work, in which brain wave technology helps viewers shape your art according to their thoughts and moods. How have people responded so far?
Contrary to what I anticipated, my talk at TEDMED received an overwhelmingly positive response. I thought the TEDMED audience would predominantly think in fundamentals, and there would be a disconnect. But any science taken to a certain level becomes art. It goes into the ability to transcend to abstract the essence of its thing, and apply it beyond a single application. There’s only a limit to which you can be trained in any one thing.
From doctors to scientists, there are now a lot of people who are in conversation with me about how we can add value to each other’s methods of inquiry. I’m really excited that I’ve gotten to write the forward to a textbook on cultural sensitivity using perspectives in psychiatry that is being brought out by Massachusetts General, Harvard’s teaching hospital.
Did you learn anything surprising about the brain during this project?
Yes! It shocked me the number of emotions we can go through in one minute.
We like to think about ourselves in absolutes, but we are dynamic and continually changing. Also, I’m surprised by the degree to which you can control brain activity. I can manipulate my art pieces on cue. When some people have that feedback, it can make them feel uncomfortable; with others, it helps neutralize their feelings of fear.
You’re working with an education innovation initiative, NuVu, that stresses creative problem solving skills, and have said, in an interview with Dowser, that education now should be about welcoming instability. Your art encourages dynamic perspectives as well. What is it about the world we live in that makes this so important? Can you point to something in your life or learning that led you to embrace the impermanent?
The one thing we know about the world for sure is that it’s constantly changing. Evolution is not a ladder that’s built on linear progress. It’s more like a round treadmill, where we’re constantly adapting in relation to a dynamic environment.
So it seems appropriate that we learn in a manner that correlates to the state of the human condition and environment. I’ve reinvented myself many times. I’ve always felt that my education was great; it taught me who I am.
But it’s been my creativity that has constantly told me I can be much more. I could have never planned my whole art career and trajectory. I allowed it to unfold by taking an active role in my life and my future. I think that the incident that really sparked this idea was my decision to quit formal education, and to embrace and learn from impermanence. I haven’t had a formal education since high school, so the world has been my classroom.
A screen for POP-IT, an iPad app designed by Raghava KK. Viewers change the characters by shaking the tablet.
In that same interview, you said, “Even in my own life, I keep putting myself in uncomfortable situations because of the amount I learn.” Can you give a few examples?
Here are three. First, I recently moved back to India, although I was well settled in New York. I wanted to have my third child here, and expose my children to this impossible democracy, which is an experiment in bringing together multiple, dissimilar perspectives and thus gives us so much to experience and to learn from.
Second, I’m starting a company from scratch and learning about entrepreneurship, because I really want to make an impact with this idea, to transcribe it among audiences. It’s a web-based and mobile educational platform called Flipsicle, and it allows you to actually see multiple visual perspectives on any topic. It’s a man-powered Google for images that uses collaboration and crowdsourcing.
We are producing and consuming more pictures than ever before, but desensitizing us to the fact that pictures are only a single view on an event and truth. Even in our schools, we start out with absolutes and go to abstract at a later stage, like high school, which is far too late. We need to disrupt this teaching and go to abstract thinking at a much earlier stage to really teach perspective.
Third: Once my wife and I accidentally found ourselves in a nudist resort.
This is what happens when an Indian books a holiday without knowing the difference because naturist and nature, because in California “naturist” means “nudist.” We checked in late in the evening; everyone was wearing clothing, because it was cold. In the morning I opened the window and saw a guy doing yoga in the buff. Then, my wife and I walked out and we were the only people clothed. So – do we stay here, or we go back home and pretend this never happened? But we thought, ‘What the hell do we have to lose?’ And it led to an entire series of paintings I did on eros and nudity. I discovered that it’s the continuum that’s erotic, not the absolute states of nudity. The feeling of the weight of clothing is something you just forget; it’s a change of the clothed state you notice.
“Untitled” by Raghava KK, acrylic on canvas, 2011.
You mention often that you hope your work will inspire empathy. Can you name a piece of art, or an artist, who inspired that in you, or who/that greatly changed your own perspective?
An artist need not look to art to be inspired, but to life. I see a need for empathy in the world, and that’s what inspired me.
Empathy is fashionable word right now, and it can be easy to misrepresent.
To me, empathy is a tool and it has survival value based on context. For example, sometimes apathy is important. Extrovertism is overrated. Leadership is overrated; not everyone is a leader. We need to understand these things as continuums that have value based on context. So empathy means contextualizing where I come from, where you come from.
For example, I don’t measure myself by the same metrics by which others do, whether it’s the art world or the commercial world or the entrepreneurial world or the TED world. For someone to understand what I – or anyone — does, they have to have an understanding of how I measure my actions. The need for human dignity comes from these factors. It’s a constant need. And I need to be more than an artist. Life is just a tool. Art is just a tool.
Reprinted from TEDMED.com
Deborah Belfatto worried that her daughter might have an eating disorder when the 12-year-old eliminated all fat from her diet and started getting very thin.
But she didn’t act on her suspicions until an older family friend commented on her daughter’s weight loss.
“The comment came from such an unlikely source that it gave me a jump-start into taking some real action,” Belfatto says.
A breast-cancer survivor, Belfatto considers herself someone who doesn’t shy away from hard truths. But she was not alone in her reluctance to confront her child’s anorexia. Many mothers resist acknowledging a child’s eating disorder, out of fear, guilt – and sometimes because they’re struggling with their own food issues.
Belfatto’s daughter fit the anorexic “profile,” in that she was a high achiever who rarely gave her parents cause to worry. Disordered eaters, particularly anorexics – who severely limit food intake — tend to be very successful in other areas, and Lindsay was an outstanding student and competitive ice skater.
“These high achieving, outgoing, activity-oriented girls are very perfectionist and anxious, and our perception is they respond differently to dieting than other kids do. They actually find caloric restriction calms their anxiety,” says Cynthia Bulik, M.D., author of “The Woman in the Mirror: How to Stop Confusing What You Look Like with Who You Are.”
Like mother, like daughter: Seeing her child with an eating disorder may hit too close to home for some moms. Research shows disorders run in families; a relative of a person with an eating disorder is ten times more likely to have the illness than someone without a family history of disorders. Read more on NBCNews.com
Reprinted from TEDMED.com
Why don’t we always do what’s best for us?
It’s a question that has long preoccupied Vic Strecher, founder and head of the Center for Health Communications Research at University of Michigan and TEDMED 2009 speaker.
After years of teaching health education and helping to create computer-based interactive programs that inspire better personal choices, Strecher is working on a website and a graphic novel based on new thinking in the field and on his own momentous life experience. TEDMED spoke with him about his new projects.
So…why don’t people make more healthful choices? There’s no lack of available health information, and yet lifestyle choices have led many to develop chronic diseases.
VS We know that the choices we make can slowly kill us, like frogs that will stay in water that’s slowly heated until they literally boil to death without jumping out of it. And we’re learning that one reason we resist health messaging is defensiveness. We have this wall around our ego for evolutionary reasons, and ironically our wall has been getting thicker with all the societal messaging we’re getting. With the barrage of junk information and all the choices we face, we’re less able to make competent decisions.
How do you prod people out of that warming water?
VS There’s a relatively new idea being explored called self-affirmation theory. It says that the process of affirming your fundamental beliefs — core values — reduces defensiveness. For example, if you write down or are rating your core values, such as your faith or your commitment to family, and then are exposed to a health message that you may normally process defensively, you’re more likely to accept it.
When you start to put things in writing, you realize, “Hey, my values differ from my behaviors, don’t they?” Research shows that cigarette smokers who affirm their core values are more open to anti-smoking messaging. People are more likely to participate in diabetes risk assessments if they have just completed their values list. So how can we get people to start making that kind of connection?
Some of your recent talks have mentioned how empathy can lead to healthier behaviors. Can you explain?
VS Jennifer Crocker of Ohio State University, a psychologist who studies self-esteem, wanted to take a look at people’s thoughts while they were affirming their values. And what they were doing was thinking of a connection with loved ones, their friends and family and community, and things bigger than themselves; it drew on something called self-transcendence.
What started you down this path of looking at the bigger picture?
VS Two years ago my daughter passed away; she was 19 years old. I went through a significant grieving process, which included struggling with lethargy, and as a behavioral scientist I was noting my own reactions. I began studying the old philosophers – the Stoics, Existentialists – some like Kierkegaard who were very religious, and some who were atheists. They all said you have to have a purpose or meaning in your life. Victor Frankl, a Holocast survivor, found out people who were losing their purpose were dying faster in the death camps.
That started me thinking about the epidemiology of this in the medical and health field. People that have a purpose in life are 2.4 times less likely to die from Alzheimer’s Disease, less likely to have a heart attack, and more likely to have good sex. Having a purpose can also help repair our DNA, potentially promoting a longer life. We spend so much time scaring the crap out of people about death and disease, and we should be thinking about teaching them to have purpose in life. We’re so used to telling people, ‘Smoking is bad for you,’ and then ratcheting that fear up. Why not just focus on a totally different direction for this?
You’re working on several new projects with this in mind. Can you share details?
VS I’m self-publishing a graphic novel, “On Purpose,” working with a comic book illustrator and a screenwriter. I decided to put together a story that connects my own personal tale with the related science. It will be about the importance of finding purpose in your life in a nihilistic world, basically. It touches on themes from ancient and modern philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and Egyptology.
I’m also working on a web site. There will be a blog app for people to share their stories. I want to build a community where people can record their purpose and see others’. There will be some kind of filter to group people through their common core values, in a way they might not expect. Some of the real beauty of life is discovering things that you wouldn’t expect to discover or to agree with.
Imagine a comprehensive, clinically relevant well-patient checkup using only smartphone-based devices. The data is immediately readable and fully uploadable to an electronic health record. The patient understands — and even participates — in the interaction far beyond faking a cough and gulping a deep breath. For real? From The Huffington Post
Johns Hopkins medical student and Medgadgeteditor Shiv Gaglani says it is not only possible, but may in fact be the checkup of the future. Gaglani and a team of current and future physicians will do a first-of-its kind demo of a “smartphone physical” for hundreds of attendees at TEDMED 2013 on April 16 to 19 in Washington, D.C.
The checkup will capture quantitative and qualitative data, ranging from simple readings of weight and blood pressure to more complex readings such as heart rhythm strips and optic discs. Measurements and instruments will include:
• Body analysis using an iHealth Scale.
• Blood pressure reading using a Withings BP Monitor.
• Oxygen saturation/pulse measured simultaneously with blood pressure, using an Masimo iSpO2 placed on the left ring finger.
• Visual acuity via an EyeNetra phone case.
• Optic disc visualization using a Welch Allyn iExaminer case attached to a PanOptic Ophthalmoscope.
• Ear drum visualization with a CellScope phone case.
• Lung function using a SpiroSmart Spirometer app to conduct a respirometer test.
• Heart electrophysiology using the AliveCor Heart Monitor.
• Body sounds: A digital stethoscope from ThinkLabs auscultates and amplifies the sounds of a patients lungs and heart.
• Carotid artery visualization using a Mobisante probe.
While it all sounds very slick and tech-y, Gaglani says the smartphone-enabled checkup will actually improve doctor-patient relationships. For one thing, the related medical devices are generally smaller and less invasive than their predecessors.
“For example, thanks to the AliveCor Heart Monitor, it has never been easier to get a one-lead ECG reading. Similarly, the Withings and iHealth blood pressure cuffs are plug-and-play so a clinician doesn’t have to fumble around with both a stethoscope and sphygmomanometer to assess whether her patient is hypertensive,” Gaglani says.
Second, smartphone-based devices usually provide a visual or auditory output that patients can actually see and hear, hopefully increasing their understanding of their bodies and engagement during the checkup. For example, the Welch Allyn iExaminer captures an image of the retina that is displayed on the phone screen, and digital stethoscopes like ThinkLabs’ record heart and lung sounds that can be replayed through the microphone.
Third, the patient can participate in data gathering. As Gaglani says:
“These devices can abstract away the mundane and standardize the unreliable aspects of the physical exam. Measurements such as weight and blood pressure are so variable day-to-day, or even hour-to-hour, that an annual exam doesn’t provide much insight into an individual patient’s health status. Some of the smartphone devices are already being used by patients to collect and store their data so when they see their clinicians they can have productive and informed conversations, rather than relying on fragmented and unreliable metrics.”
Hypothetically, once the data is uploaded to an electronic medical record, back-end clinical decision support software can help both patients and clinicians come up with treatment plans.
The technology may of course be particularly helpful for mobile physicians, particularly in emergency health care settings, and for global health workers, as even untrained staffers can carry the tools to low-resource settings to collect data and then, via telemedicine, receive instructions for how to treat patients. Some of these tools are already being combined into a versatile clinical data-gathering device, called a Tricorder, Gaglani says.
How long will it be before we’re all having our own smartphone physicals every one or two years? Devices such as the body analysis scale, blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, and ECG are already in use as teaching devices in med schools and by some patients, and some early adopting clinicians are using them in daily life. Dr. Eric Topol, for example, has used his AliveCor not once but twice to diagnose patients with arrhythmias on airplanes.
While there will be an inevitable learning curve and hopefully constant assessments of cost-effectiveness and value to patients, Gaglani says some of these devices, or at least second and third generation versions, will successfully make their way into the clinic.