Meditation and Pain management

26 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in Meditation, mindfulness, pain management, Research, Wellness

≈ 1 Comment

According to a new study, mindfulness meditation exhibited even stronger physical pain reductions than morphine, says the study’s lead investigator
Open any magazine and you’ll find that mindfulness has gone mainstream. You’ll also notice there are studies that purport to show meditation’s benefits on just about everything, from kids’ math scores and migraine length to HIV management and bouncing back after a crisis. Now, an elaborate new forthcoming study looks at how the brains of meditators respond to pain, to be published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
f-202.jpgDr. Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, has studied mindfulness for 15 years and has observed improved health outcomes as a result. “But what if this is all just a placebo?” he wondered. “What if people are reporting improvements in health and reductions in pain just because of meditation’s reputation as a health-promoting practice?” He wanted to find out, so he designed a trials that included a placebo group.
Zeidan recruited 75 healthy, pain-free people and scanned their brains using an MRI while they experienced painful heat with a 120-degree thermal probe. Then, the researchers sorted them into four groups and gave them four days of training. Everyone thought they were getting the real intervention, but most of them were getting a sham treatment.
“I want to be restrained about the efficacy of mindfulness, and the way to be restrained about it is by making it harder and harder to demonstrate its effectiveness,” Zeidan says.
First, there was a placebo cream group that participants were told reduces pain over time, Zeidan says (it was really just petroleum jelly). For four days, they rubbed it on the back of their leg and tested it against that painfully hot thermal probe. Little did they know, the researchers cranked down the heat each day; the participants thought the cream was working.
Another group was taught a kind of fake mindfulness meditation—they were told to breathe deeply for 20 minutes but were given no instructions on how to do it mindfully. The control group was subjected to 20 minutes of a very boring book on tape: The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.996972_621934824532791_1132991476_n
For the real intervention, people sat for 20 minutes with straight posture, closed their eyes and listened to specific instructions about where to focus one’s attention and how to let thoughts and emotions pass without judgment. “Our subjects are taught to focus on the changing sensations of breath and to follow the breath with the mind’s eye as it goes down the chest and abdomen,” Zeidan says.
After four days, everyone re-entered the MRI machine and endured the same pain from the 120-degree probe. They were told to use their training—breathing deeply, mindfully meditating or the cream. They used a lever to indicate the physical intensity and emotional unpleasantness of the pain.
They found that people in all of the groups had greater pain reductions than the control group. The placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by an average of 11% and emotional unpleasantness of pain by 13%. For the sham mindfulness group, those numbers were 9% and 24% respectively. But mindfulness meditation outperformed them all. In this group, pain intensity was cut by 27% and emotional pain reduced by 44%.
That shocked Zeidan. Past research has indicated that the opioid morphine reduces physical pain by 22%—and mindfulness had surpassed even that. But the MRI results, which showed how pain was registering in their brains, surprised him even more. People who had practiced mindfulness meditation seemed to be using different brain regions than the other groups to reduce pain.
“There was something more active, we believe, going on with the genuine mindfulness meditation group,” Zeidan says. This group had increased activation in higher-order brain regions associated with attention control and enhanced cognitive control, he says, while exhibiting a deactivation of the thalamus—a structure that acts as the gatekeeper for pain to enter the brain, he explains. “We haven’t seen that with any other technique before.”create
It’s an important preliminary study, Zeidan says, but exactly who will benefit from meditation’s impact on pain is still unknown. “We’re now at the stage, at least in my lab, where we have enough evidence that meditation reduces pain and it does it in a really unique fashion, different from any other technique we’ve seen,” he says.
And as for the questions left unanswered? “We don’t have the studies yet,” he says, “but we’re getting there.”

art can

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by in photo, quote

≈ Comments Off on art can

“Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensity social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.”  Angela Y. Davis

3 Dietary Interventions that Can Help Children with ADHD

21 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in ADHD, food, kids, Wellness

≈ Comments Off on 3 Dietary Interventions that Can Help Children with ADHD

Are dietary inter­ven­tions effec­tive for treat­ing ADHD? For many par­ents and pro­fes­sion­als, try­ing to parse through the dif­fer­ent claims about the impact of diet on ADHD has been chal­leng­ing and confusing. At this point, sub­stan­tial research on how dietary inter­ven­tions impact ADHD has accu­mu­lated and sev­eral meta-analyses of this work have been pub­lished. Recently, a review of sev­eral meta-analyses of dietary inter­ven­tions for ADHD was pub­lished [Research review: The role of diet in the treat­ment of attention-deficit/hyper­ac­tiv­ity dis­or­der — an appraisal of the evi­dence on effi­cacy and rec­om­men­da­tions on the design of future stud­ies]. In this paper, the authors sum­ma­rize find­ings across 6 dif­fer­ent meta-analyses of the impact of diet on ADHD to pro­vide a high level sum­mary of the best avail­able evi­dence to date.

Types of dietary interventions

Three types of dietary interventions were reviewed — Restricted Elimination Diets (RED), Artificial food coloring exclusion (AFCE), and supplementation with free fatty acids (SFFA). Although other types of supplements beyond free fatty acids have been investigated, the authors felt there was not sufficient research on any sin­gle approach to include in their summary.

1. Restricted elimination diets (RED) — There are 2 different approaches to implementing this diet. In one approach, the child is placed on an extremely restricted diet, e.g., rice, turkey, a range of veg­eta­bles (let­tuce, car­rots, cau­li­flower, cab­bage, beets), pears and water; this is some­times referred to as the Few Food Diet. When a reduc­tion in ADHD behav­iors results — this would gen­er­ally occur within 2–3 weeks if the diet is going to have a pos­i­tive effect — new foods can be added back one at a time to see if they are well-tolerated or lead to an increase in prob­lem behav­iors. Alter­na­tively, par­tic­u­lar foods that are sus­pected to exac­er­bate a child’s symp­toms may be removed one at a time to see if the child’s behav­ior improves.

2. Arti­fi­cial food col­or­ing exclu­sion (AFCE)- As the title indi­cates, this involves efforts to remove all arti­fi­cial food col­or­ings from a child’s diet, e.g.,Yellow #6, Yel­low #5, Sodium Ben­zoate, Blue #2, etc., and observ­ing whether this is asso­ci­ated with a reduc­tion in ADHD behav­iors. Care­fully con­ducted tri­als have demon­strated that AFC’s – in amounts chil­dren could typ­i­cally con­sume – can increase ADHD symp­toms in many children.

3. Essen­tial fatty acid sup­ple­men­ta­tion — Cer­tain fatty acids, e.g., Omega 3 and Omega 6, pro­mote neural func­tion­ing. These fatty acids are called essen­tial because they are not syn­the­sized in the body and must be ingested. Chil­dren with ADHD may have lower lev­els of essen­tial fatty acids rel­a­tive to peers and sev­eral stud­ies have demon­strated a link between low lev­els of EFAs and the sever­ity of ADHD symp­toms. Stud­ies inves­ti­gat­ing the ben­e­fits of fatty acid sup­ple­men­ta­tion for youth with ADHD raise fatty acid lev­els by admin­is­ter­ing cap­sules con­tain­ing the fatty acids or sometimes by introducing diets rich in fish products.

See more at: http://www.creativitypost.com/science/3_dietary_interventions_that_can_help_children_with_adhd_especially_when_pr

The Hidden Dog

21 Friday Dec 2018

Posted by in dogs, Pets

≈ Comments Off on The Hidden Dog

Tags

,

Dogs were the first non-human members of the human group. They are our original companions. The first animals we domesticated, they share a 40,000 year history with humans. To them humanity owes its very survival and evolution through enhanced meat acquisition dogs made possible via hunting, as a consequence of which humans grew physically and intellectually.

 BD12669_.JPG

It was co-evolution of both species which shows up in the parent-child relationship between dog and human, as psychological research has recently uncovered. Only after the agrarian revolution when the importance of the dog to food acquisition declined did we see a loss of status of the dog.

Read the entire story here.

The Ten Rules For Being Human

19 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by in human, Wellness

≈ Comments Off on The Ten Rules For Being Human

1. You will receive a body.
2. You will be presented with lessons.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
4. Lessons are repeated until learned.feelings-12
5. Learning does not end.
6. “There” is no better than “here.”
7. Others are only mirrors of you.
8. What you make of your life is up to you.
9. All the answers lie inside of you.
10. You will forget all of this at birth.

Dance Movement Therapy and Children

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in creative arts therapy, Dance Movement Therapy, research

≈ Comments Off on Dance Movement Therapy and Children

Dance Movement Therapist (DMT) practice in a wide variety of settings. One example is DMT’s who work with children and their care givers (such as parents) in a safe, structured and creative environment. In this type of setting DMT’s observe interactions such as how and when a child moves toward and away from their care giver. A DMT might use the Kestenberg Movement Profile (KMP) to observe the natural developmental based rhythms, attunements and clashes of the child and care giver as they play and interact. For instance, a child may have a gradual rhythm and moves slowly into activities and the care giver may have a more aggressive/biting rhythm. A cash of rhythms occurs when the care giver pushes the child into activities at the care giver’s rhythm and not the child’s. The result is the child will often resist the care giver and the more the care giver pushes the more the child resists.
One successful outcome of this situation is to teach the care giver how to attune to the natural physical, mental and emotional rhythms of the child. When the care giver attunes to the child, the child begins to attune to the care giver and instead if resisting each other’s rhythms they begin to “move” together.

treemail

15 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by in trees, writing

≈ Comments Off on treemail

Tags

, , ,

Some people talk to their plants. In Melbourne, they email the trees. This became possible thanks to a decision to map every tree in the city and give it a unique ID number.

About 3,000 emails have been sent to individual trees in the last two years. This didn’t start out as an exercise in sentiment, but a hard-headed attempt by Melbourne city council to manage an urban forest in decline – as a result of drought, by 2009 40% of the 77,000 trees in Australia’s “garden city” were struggling or dying

Pasted from <http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33560182> trees-melbourne

Selected treemail Below (July 2015)

Weeping Myrtle, Tree ID 1494392

5 July 2015

Hello Weeping Myrtle,

I’m sitting inside near you and I noticed on the urban tree map you don’t have many friends nearby. I think that’s sad so I want you to know I’m thinking of you. I also want to thank you for providing oxygen for us to breath in the hustle and bustle of the city.

Best Regards, N

Gum, Tree ID 1032002

11 July 2015

Dear Gum,

Apologies if that’s not the form of address you prefer. I wanted very much to tell you how much I miss your family. I’ve lived in Texas for two and a half years now, and I so fervently miss the heady scent of your cologne as the morning sun warms you.

I miss your gentle swish swish as the wind tousles your leaves playfully. I miss your strong white trunk, rising majestically from the earth, striking up towards the clouds. I miss the dappled shade you so generously provide.

The sound of magpies, harbouring in your foliage, does not grace my ears. The silver green of your long, lithe leaves does not appear in my current surrounds.

I miss you, Gum. I miss all that you represent for me. Stand tall and strong, and know that my heart reaches out to you across the seas.

With immense fondness, A

Golden Elm Tree ID 1040779

11 July 2015

Dearest Golden Elm Tree, I finally found you! As in I see you everyday on my way to uni, but I had no idea of what kind of tree you are. You are the most beautiful tree in the city and I love you ^_^ It always makes me so happy to see you standing there minding your own business. I have to say, you have the most beautiful canopy and I love how the light green leaves on your branches contrast with the darkness of your trunk. We really should have more trees of your kind in our city.

Stay awesome.

Hugs! A

Variegated Elm, Tree ID 1033102

13 July 2015

Dear Elm, I was delighted to find you alive and flourishing, because a lot of your family used to live in the UK, but they all caught a terrible infection and died. Do be very careful, and if you notice any unfamiliar insects e-mail an arboriculturist at once. I miss your characteristic silhouettes and beautifully shaped branches – used to be one of the glories of the English landscape – more than I can say. Melbourne must be a beautiful city.

Sincere good wishes, D

Pasted from <http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33560182>