Albert B Fernandez's List: Health

• s little evidence that soda, chocolate, and
• greasy foods cause breakouts.
• There
• Dairy consumption has also been linked to increased acne. "The theory is that hormones in cow's milk could possibly  exacerbate acne,"
• Yes, especially if the blemish is inflamed. Squeezing forces infected material deeper into the skin. That can worsen inflammation  and increase the chance of scarring. If you have a lot of blemishes,
• Blackheads and whiteheads form when excess skin oil and dead skin cells clog pores. Bacteria can multiply in this oily environment,  causing a red and inflamed pimple. Over-the-
• very effective OTC remedies contain salicylic acid, which helps unclog pores, or benzoyl  peroxide, which dissolves dead skin cells and reduces acne-causing bacteria

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• vitamin B₆ (1.10; 1.01-1.21; 4.1%), folic acid (1.15; 1.00-1.32; 5.9%), iron (1.10; 1.03-1.17; 3.9%), magnesium (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.6%), zinc (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.0%), and copper (1.45; 1.20-1.75; 18.0%)
• vitamin B₆ (1.10; 1.01-1.21; 4.1%), folic acid (1.15; 1.00-1.32; 5.9%), iron (1.10; 1.03-1.17; 3.9%), magnesium (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.6%), zinc (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.0%), and copper (1.45; 1.20-1.75; 18.0%)
• vitamin B₆ (1.10; 1.01-1.21; 4.1%), folic acid (1.15; 1.00-1.32; 5.9%), iron (1.10; 1.03-1.17; 3.9%), magnesium (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.6%), zinc (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.0%), and copper (1.45; 1.20-1.75; 18.0%)
• vitamin B₆ (1.10; 1.01-1.21; 4.1%), folic acid (1.15; 1.00-1.32; 5.9%), iron (1.10; 1.03-1.17; 3.9%), magnesium (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.6%), zinc (1.08; 1.01-1.15; 3.0%), and copper (1.45; 1.20-1.75; 18.0%) were

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• this article b
• July 14, 2011 issue
• In its June 23 edition, The New York Review chose to review three books that are highly critical of modern psychiatry. We regret that a more bala

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• KOMBIGLYZE XR should be temporarily discontinued in patients undergoing radiologic studies involving intravascular administration of iodinated contrast materials because use of such products may result in acute alteration of renal function.
• Intravascular contrast studies with iodinated materials can lead to acute alteration of renal function and have been associated with lactic acidosis in patients receiving metformin. KOMBIGLYZE XR should be temporarily discontinued at the time of or prior to the procedure, and withheld for 48 hours after the procedure and reinstituted only after r
• enal function is normal.

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• many adages promising long life—get married, exercise regularly, think happy thoughts, don't work so hard—are not shortcuts to immortality, and for certain groups of people, they can actually have the opposite effect.
  
• optimistic people have a tendency to ignore details
• It was the conscientious people—careful, sometimes even neurotic, but not catastrophizing—who lived longer
• precocious, active children who were sent to school a year early, as Philip was, tended to have emotional problems that led to unhealthy behaviors and shortened life span.
  
• imarily for men who were well-suited to marriage and had a good marriage. For the rest, there were all kinds of complications.
• Marriage was health-promoting
• women who got rid of their troublesome husbands stayed healthy—most women, it seemed, can rely on their friends and other social ties. Men who got and stayed divorced, on the other hand, were at really high risk for premature mortality. It would have been better had they not married at all.
  
• We found lots of instances where worrying was healthy, especially for men.
  
• One breakthrough finding was that conscientious children and conscientious adults stay healthier and live significantly longer.
• his discovery has now been widely replicated by other scientists
• conscientious people do more things to protect their health
• The second, and not obvious, reason for the health benefits of conscientiousness is that some people actually seem to be biologically predisposed both to have that personality trait and
• to be healthier
• working hard to overcome adversity or biting off more than you can chew—and then chewing it—does not generally pose a h
• alth risk. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive are exactly what those heading to a long life tend to do
• On the other hand, if you hate your co-workers and have many job demands but inadequate resources to accomplish anything worthwhile, then it is time to look for new employment.
  
     S
• s—as it turned out, starting formal schooling at a very early age turned out not to be a very good idea for most. Children need unstructured play time, and they need to get along with their peers; starting out young seemed to alienate them.

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• • Lung cancer kills 75% of those who get it (v page bottom)
• Lung cancer is the most common cancer killer, with 1.61 million cases worldwide, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer and it kills 1.2 million of them.

• In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings.
• mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told
• or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression
• or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t re
• lly help fend
• off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed
• Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to u
• nclog heart arteries.
• before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.
• The studies were biased
• There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded
• To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent.
• Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter.
• Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that’s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly “proves” it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news?
• Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises—after all, simply re-proving someone else’s results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions.
• PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be
• Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time
• 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials
• and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.
• He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals. These were articles that helped lead to the widespread popularity of treatments such as the use of hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to reduce the risk of heart disease, coronary stents to ward off heart attacks, and daily low-dose aspirin to control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes.
• Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated.
• In a single week this fall, Google’s news page offered these headlines: “More Omega-3 Fats Didn’t Aid Heart Patients”; “Fruits, Vegetables Cut Cancer Risk for Smokers”; “Soy May Ease Sleep Problems in Older Women”; and dozens of
• these studies often sharply conflict with one another.
• Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.
• even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect
• health “markers” such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, and meta-experts have shown that changes in these markers often don’t correlate as well with long-term health as we have been led to believe.
• when a study does go on long enough to track mortality, the findings frequently upend those of the shorter studies. (For example, though the vast majority of studies of overweight individuals link excess weight to ill health, the longest of them haven’t convincingly shown that overweight people are likely to die sooner, and a few of them have seemingly demonstrated that moderately overweight people are likely to live longer.
• Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol were among the widely prescribed drugs found to be safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials before the drugs were yanked from the market as unsafe or not so effective, or both.
• Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found
• that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades
• That we’re not routinely made seriously ill by this shortfall, he argues, is due largely to the fact that most medical interventions and advice don’t address life-and-death situations, but rather aim to leave us marginally healthier or less u
• nhealthy, so we usually neither gain nor risk all that much.
• I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.

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• • VINEGAR: Video supports that vinegar lowers glucose. Also helps with weight control.
• Vinegar
• Chromium
• • Chromium has been widely publicized as therapy to improve diabetes control. Although there are several studies that support a role for chromium as beneficial in diabetes, currently there are no recommendations for its use in diabetes management.
   
  • Magnesium has been studied for years as a form of therapy to improve blood sugar control in people with diabetes. A lack of magnesium has been associated with insulin secretion abnormalities and has been associated with diabetes complications.
   
  • Vanadium is derived from plant sources and has been shown in a few studies to increase a person's sensitivity to insulin. Thus far, no recommendations exist for supplementation to be given to people with diabetes.
• several studies that support a role for chromium as beneficial in diabetes,
• Magnesium
• lack of magnesium has been associated with insulin secretion abnormalities and has been associated with diabetes complications.
• Vanadium
• shown in a few studies to increase a person's sensitivity to insulin

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• 12 supplements you
• should avoid
• blackwort, common comfrey, slippery root)
• (yohimbine, Corynanthe yohimbi, Corynanthe johimbi
• Usual doses

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• Two new studies suggest that there are certain times when it’s dangerous, even deadly, to seek hospital care, validating what doctors, nurses and other health care workers have said privately for years.
• I have to say, I wouldn’t have surgery on a Friday. Staffing is down and quite honestly you might not get the best treatment.”
• fatal medication errors rose 10 percent in July in U.S. counties with teaching hospitals, giving credence to what’s long been known as the “July effect.”
• July, the month that just-graduated medical residents start their new jobs,
• Scant off-hours staffing and other administrative problems — including low doctor-to-patient ratios and difficulty obtaining necessary tests and therapies — likely contribute to the increased weekend deaths in the ICU
• The new studies are only the most recent reports to suggest that patients are more likely to die during off-hours
• It’s a matter of not being afraid to question something you don’t understand,” said Cohen. “Have someone with you who speaks the language of medicine
• When a nurse comes in with a bucket of medications for them to take, ask what’s in the bucket,

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