Many of us struggle to find real happiness. Why is that? Studies in psychology suggest that part of the reason is that most of us are very bad at predicting how we’ll react when faced with many of life’s experiences. Consequently, we end up making choices that are potentially harmful to our emotional well-being. According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we tend to overestimate, by a long way, the extent and duration of the emotional impacts of, say, a pay rise, the death of a loved one, or even moving to an area that’s sunny all year round. This is simply because, when we’re trying to imagine how an experience will affect us emotionally, we tend to focus too much of our attention on the most salient features of the experience in question.

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Dear EarthTalk: Should I fear radiation exposure associated with medical scans such as CT scans, mammograms and the like?
– Shelly Johansen, Fairbanks, AK

The short answer is…maybe. Critics of the health care industry postulate that our society's quickness to test for disease may in fact be causing more of it, especially in the case of medical scans. To wit, the radiation dose from a typical CT scan (short for computed tomography and commonly known as a "cat scan") is 600 times more powerful than the average chest x-ray.

Critics of the health care industry
postulate that our society's quickness
to test for disease may in fact be
causing more of it, especially in the
case of medical scans. The radiation
dose from a typical CT scan is 600
times more powerful than the average
chest x-ray.
Photo credit: Getty Images

A 2007 study by Dr. Amy Berrington de González of the National Cancer Institute projected that the 72 million CT scans conducted yearly in the U.S. (not including scans conducted after a cancer diagnosis or performed at the end of life) will likely cause some 29,000 cancers resulting in 15,000 deaths two to three decades later. Scans of the abdomen, pelvis, chest and head were deemed most likely to cause cancer, and patients aged 35 to 54 were more likely to develop cancer as a result of CT scans than other age group.

Another study found that, among Americans who received CT scans, upwards of 20 percent had a false positive after one scan and 33 percent after two, meaning that such patients were getting huge doses of radiation without cause. And about seven percent of those patients underwent unnecessary invasive medical procedures following their misleading scans. CT scans are much more common today than in earlier decades, exacerbating the potential damage from false positives and excessive radiation exposure.

"Physicians and their patients cannot be complacent about the hazards of radiation or we risk creating a public-health time bomb," says Dr. Rita Redberg, a cardiologist at University of California-San Francisco. "To avoid unnecessarily increasing cancer incidence in future years, every clinician must carefully assess the expected benefits of each CT scan and fully inform his or her patients of the known risks of radiation." Read the rest of this entry »

More than 30 million Americans practice some sort of yoga in an ever-expanding industry generating an estimated $6 billion in the United States alone.

But in the birthplace of yoga, an Indian government agency is fighting what it calls "yoga theft" after several U.S. companies said they wanted to copyright or patent their versions. Yoga is a part of humanity's shared knowledge, the agency says, and any business claiming the postures as its own is violating the very spirit of the ancient practice.

Read more on WashingtonPost.com

Ideally, anger arises in a comfortable, local situation and is vented right away. Voices are raised, sharp words are exchanged, and then some resolution is achieved; and with time the incident is forgotten. If remembered, it can be the subject of laughter. But we live in a complicated, overwhelming world that feels so out of control. Read the paper, watch TV — there's a lot out there to make us angry.

What to do with all that anger? An anger fantasy is that process whereby I grow really angry about somebody and I work it out in my head by verbally lashing that person and then beating him to a pulp, all so that he might learn the important lesson: You Should Always Be Considerate. In my anger fantasies, I shout and I beat and I kick until I'm satisfied that the jerk who brought it on himself is deeply sorry and won't ever do it again.

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Question: I've been reading about the use of 35% food grade hydrogen peroxide as an additive to maintaining healthy living. Is this something you would recommend?

Answer: Definitely not. Hydrogen peroxide has long been promoted as a treatment for various diseases, including some types of cancer, asthma, emphysema, AIDS, arthritis, heart and vascular diseases, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer's disease. The flawed rationale for its use is that the chemically active oxygen provided by hydrogen peroxide boosts the body's ability to destroy cells that cause disease. However, this is not true.

The idea that oxygen might destroy cancer cells goes back at least to the 1930s when Otto Warburg, M.D., a Nobel Prize winner, discovered that compared to normal cells, cancer cells have a low rate of respiration (i.e. oxygen-based metabolism) and seem to thrive in low-oxygen environments. He proposed that higher levels of oxygen should be toxic to cancer cells and might kill them. Unfortunately, Dr. Warburg was wrong. Oxygen doesn't slow cancer growth – in fact, tumors grow rapidly in tissues well supplied with oxygenated blood. According to the American Cancer Society, attempts to treat cancer patients by injecting hydrogen peroxide directly into solid tumors or into the blood system have generally been ineffective.

Diluted hydrogen peroxide has legitimate medical uses – to cleanse wounds, for example. But taking it by mouth, as some proponents suggest, or injecting it into veins can be dangerous. Food grade hydrogen peroxide is more than 10 times stronger than the solution approved for use on the skin. The higher strength solution is approved by the FDA to clean food surfaces and for use in certain phases of commercial food production. However, the FDA also requires that any peroxide added to food must be broken down into oxygen and water before the product reaches consumers. Drinking food grade hydrogen peroxide can cause vomiting, severe burns of the throat and stomach, and even death. What's more, it can burn your skin, and if it gets into your eyes, can damage the corneas, causing loss of vision.

Diluted hydrogen peroxide administered intravenously as some promoters recommend, is particularly dangerous. It can cause gas embolism, a condition that can lead to permanent lung damage, embolic stroke, and, sometimes, death.

Andrew Weil, M.D.

published 7/22/10

Researchers say a type of meditation called integrative mind-body training can strengthen connections in certain areas of the brain, even when practiced for as little as 11 hours. Psychologist Michael Posner describes the study, and explains the brain changes he documented.

Read more on NPR.org

The ancient Chinese practice of tai chi may be effective as a therapy for fibromyalgia, according to a study published on Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

A clinical trial at Tufts Medical Center found that after 12 weeks of tai chi, patients with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, did significantly better in measurements of pain, fatigue, physical functioning, sleeplessness and depression than a comparable group given stretching exercises and wellness education. Tai chi patients were also more likely to sustain improvement three months later.

Read more on NYTimes.com

Dear EarthTalk: Is the dairy industry really trying to stop soy milk makers from calling their products "milk?" They must feel very threatened by the preponderance of soy milks now available in supermarkets.
– Gina Storzen, Weymouth, MA

Indeed, just this past April the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF), a trade group representing dairy farms, petitioned the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to crack down on what it calls "the misappropriation of dairy terminology on imitation milk products." NMPF has been asking for such a ruling for a decade, and argues that the soy industry's "false and misleading" labeling is now more common than ever.

The National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) would
like to stop soy drinks from being labeled "milk,"
arguing that the terminology is misleading. Soy
proponents argue, however, that consumers know the
difference between soy milk and dairy milk, that soy
milk is less fatty than dairy milk, and that NMPF's
efforts are a ploy to hurt the soy industry, which is
rapidly gaining market share at the expense of
dairy products.
Photo credit: Timothy Valentine, courtesy Flickr

According to NMPF president and CEO, Jerry Kozak, the FDA has let the issue slide so that the meaning of 'milk' and even 'cheese' has been "watered down to the point where many products that use the term have never seen the inside of a barn."

Furthermore, Kozak adds, the use of "dairy terminology" on non-dairy products can lead people to think they are eating healthier than they really are, especially because non-dairy products "can vary wildly in their composition and are inferior to the nutrient profile of those from dairy milk."

The website FoodNavigator-USA.com reports that on the other side of the Atlantic, the European Dairy Association (EDA) has also called for the term 'soy milk' to be replaced with 'soy drink'. EDA also suggests other options including 'soy beverage', 'soy preparation' and 'soy-based liquid'. It's no wonder the soy industry isn't quick to give up the milk moniker, given how catchy the alternatives could be! Read the rest of this entry »

Cancer is the world's top "economic killer" as well as its likely leading cause of death, the American Cancer Society contends in a new report it will present at a global cancer conference in China this week.

Cancer costs more in productivity and lost life than AIDS, malaria, the flu and other diseases that spread person-to-person, the report concludes.

Read more on Google News