Hand sanitizers have become a $200-million-a-year industry in the U.S., and the industry continues to grow. While the fear of contracting swine flu has been a significant engine behind the growth of the industry, most people don’t realize that according to the Center for Disease Control, there is no hand sanitizer proven to kill the swine flu virus.
Until now that is.
Professor Elka Touitou, a world renowned expert in the field of drug delivery, on the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has created an antiviral hand sanitizer, which, according to an FDA certified laboratory in the U.S., is highly effective against the H1N1 virus. The innovative product, known as EtoClean (TM), deactivates the swine flu virus in just 15 seconds.
Additionally, EtoClean has also been found to inactivate other viruses that are not effected by regular alcohol-based sanitizers such as hepatitis and norovirus (a common cause of gastroenteritis).
For more information on EtoClean and the company that produces it, click here.
http://www.yissum.co.il/upload/Forbes.pdf
Friday, February 12, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Pathologist warns herbal remedies can be lethal
A forensic pathologist has sounded a worldwide alert about the dangers of herbal medicines, saying "these substances may cause serious illnesses."
What Professor Roger Byard of the University of Adelaide writes in the Journal of Forensic Sciences is in reference to the false assumptions many people have about herbal medicines.
“There’s a false perception that herbal remedies are safer than manufactured medicines, when in fact many contain potentially lethal concentrations of arsenic, mercury and lead,” Professor Byard says.
“These substances may cause serious illnesses, exacerbate pre-existing health problems or result in death, particularly if taken in excess or injected rather than ingested.”
Professor Byard declares there can also be fatal consequences when some herbal medicines interact with prescription drugs. “As access to such products is largely unrestricted and many people do not tell their doctor they are taking herbal medicines for fear of ridicule, their contribution to death may not be fully appreciated during a standard autopsy.”
After examining 251 Asian herbal products that were found in stores in the United States, analysts found a significant level of harmful ingredients that included arsenic in 36 of them, mercury in 35 and lead in 24 of the products.
“Herbal medicines are frequently mixed with standard drugs, presumably to make them more effective. This can also have devastating results,” Professor Byard adds.
Not only can herbal medicines have a deleterious effect on individuals, the interaction of herbal medicines and traditional therapies can have very serious consequences, as Professor Byard explains. He tells his readers how St. Johns Wort can reduce the effects of warfarin and can also cause intermenstrual bleeding in those women who take oral contraceptive medications. Other herbal remedies such as gingko and garlic can increase the risk of bleeding. Borage Oil and Evening Primrose Oil can lower the threshold at which epileptic seizures can occur.
Around 30 percent of people in the United States use herbal medicines as do a high number of people in Canada and the United Kingdom. This is why Professor Byard underlines the significance of a worldwide warning on the use of herbal medicines.
Despite warnings such as these, articles, books and websites continue to proliferate and are devoted to recommending herbal medicines. The emphasis is on the curative value of these remedies, while few mention the problems taking them.
What's interesting is that not only are people able to buy herbal products, often without knowing the potential risks of some of them, plenty of places on the web give instruction on how to make Chinese herbal remedies, some of which, as noted in Byard's research, can cause harm.
The website gives information on how to make herbal medicines with an organized presentation, but without any apparent warnings for readers to review. Instead the warnings are directed towards the user making sure that he or she uses the right remedy for the right medical condition.
There are risks involved when taking herbs for medical purposes, doctors warn. This new research underlines what many doctors have noted for years: when in doubt check with your doctor.
What Professor Roger Byard of the University of Adelaide writes in the Journal of Forensic Sciences is in reference to the false assumptions many people have about herbal medicines.
“There’s a false perception that herbal remedies are safer than manufactured medicines, when in fact many contain potentially lethal concentrations of arsenic, mercury and lead,” Professor Byard says.
“These substances may cause serious illnesses, exacerbate pre-existing health problems or result in death, particularly if taken in excess or injected rather than ingested.”
Professor Byard declares there can also be fatal consequences when some herbal medicines interact with prescription drugs. “As access to such products is largely unrestricted and many people do not tell their doctor they are taking herbal medicines for fear of ridicule, their contribution to death may not be fully appreciated during a standard autopsy.”
After examining 251 Asian herbal products that were found in stores in the United States, analysts found a significant level of harmful ingredients that included arsenic in 36 of them, mercury in 35 and lead in 24 of the products.
“Herbal medicines are frequently mixed with standard drugs, presumably to make them more effective. This can also have devastating results,” Professor Byard adds.
Not only can herbal medicines have a deleterious effect on individuals, the interaction of herbal medicines and traditional therapies can have very serious consequences, as Professor Byard explains. He tells his readers how St. Johns Wort can reduce the effects of warfarin and can also cause intermenstrual bleeding in those women who take oral contraceptive medications. Other herbal remedies such as gingko and garlic can increase the risk of bleeding. Borage Oil and Evening Primrose Oil can lower the threshold at which epileptic seizures can occur.
Around 30 percent of people in the United States use herbal medicines as do a high number of people in Canada and the United Kingdom. This is why Professor Byard underlines the significance of a worldwide warning on the use of herbal medicines.
Despite warnings such as these, articles, books and websites continue to proliferate and are devoted to recommending herbal medicines. The emphasis is on the curative value of these remedies, while few mention the problems taking them.
What's interesting is that not only are people able to buy herbal products, often without knowing the potential risks of some of them, plenty of places on the web give instruction on how to make Chinese herbal remedies, some of which, as noted in Byard's research, can cause harm.
The website gives information on how to make herbal medicines with an organized presentation, but without any apparent warnings for readers to review. Instead the warnings are directed towards the user making sure that he or she uses the right remedy for the right medical condition.
There are risks involved when taking herbs for medical purposes, doctors warn. This new research underlines what many doctors have noted for years: when in doubt check with your doctor.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed
Exhibition Review | 'Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom'
Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
In the 18th century Casanova referred to them as “English frock coats” and made prodigious use of the “little preventive bag invented by the English to save the fair sex from anxiety.” In 1709 the English literary journal The Tatler alluded to their supposed invention by an eponymous doctor of “eminent Quality”; the success of his “Engine” eventually “made it an Immodesty to name his Name.”
But there was never a Dr. Condom as far as we can tell, and no one really knows who first created condoms (or named them), since bladders, animal membranes, sheaths and salve-coated cloths have been used for similar purposes since the beginning of recorded history.
Spend some time at the fascinating new exhibition at the Museum of Sex, “Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom,” and their origins hardly matter: their history is what is extraordinary. These commonplace objects — widely used and rarely spoken of, often seen but infrequently displayed — are icons of far more than the phallus.
The museum’s curator, Sarah Forbes, has gathered condom boxes and vending machines, horrific photos of disease and collections of birth-control devices, American military videos and a dress made out of dyed condoms, television commercials and artworks, creating a modest exhibition that elevates the status of the condom. And, not incidentally, the show explicitly encourages its use — particularly, as one major section reminds us, to prevent the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS.
It is no wonder that the company that makes Trojan condoms became a sponsor of the exhibition, though the extent of its presence here is limited, including a display of contemporary equipment used in making condoms (metallic phallic molds that are dipped into liquid latex, for example) and a video of laboratory tests showing their resiliency. (Condoms are attached to valves and inflated, becoming enormous balloons well before they finally burst.)
The evolution of the condom is too briefly told, but it includes Charles Goodyear’s discovery of a treatment for rubber that retained its flexibility; a photograph of a well-preserved reusable rubber sheath from mid-20th-century London is here. In Germany, we learn, condoms are colloquially referred to as Fromms because that was the name of the Jewish manufacturer who, before the Nazis came to power, sold 50 million condoms a year. (His condoms were also, interestingly, packaged with slips of paper that could be discreetly handed to a pharmacist, ordering another supply.) But Julius Fromm had to flee to London and lost the factory.
It is partly because condoms graphically suggest the sex act that they have so often been known through their covers: a collection of boxes and containers here range from antique exoticism (picturing desert camels) to whimsical contemporaneity (portraits of candidates from the last presidential election). A New York pharmacy case has wooden doors that would have decorously concealed the contents until the customer was prepared to survey the various Sheik condoms for sale. Condoms have also accumulated nicknames that are covers of sorts, hiding their identity while provocatively suggesting it. (A wall displays a roster of aliases, including, most mildly, “copper hat,” “love sock,” “frogskin,” “night cap.”)
Condoms have encouraged sophomoric humor (a historical etching of Casanova shows him blowing into a condom and inflating it for the amused delectation of his lady admirers) and avant-gardish flirtatiousness (as in Randy Polumbo’s artworks on display, which include a ribbed dirigible and a solar-powered flying machine that inflates and deflates attached condoms).
And they have a dark side, which casts its shadow over such play. There are early photographs here of victims of syphilis, including a chilling image of a pox-covered baby nursing at a pox-covered breast.
Like the diseases they prevent, condoms have also proliferated with the march of armies. As the show points out, 18,000 American soldiers a day were on sick leave with venereal diseases during World War I, inspiring the United States government to begin a campaign about the transmission of disease and the distribution of military “pro-kits” to allow cleansing and protection.
The show’s grim accounting of sexually transmitted disease is tempered by an upbeat 2006 news account of a Florida retirement community in which condom use is being encouraged for its residents because of the spread of sexual diseases. The cure and the prevention have become so routine, they scarcely intrude on the pleasures.
But the last half of the exhibition is more preoccupied with controversy: the condom becomes a political instrument in long-running cultural and religious debates. A 1915 edition of Margaret Sanger’s once-controversial book, “What Every Girl Should Know,” is here. (Her birth-control advocacy led to the creation of Planned Parenthood.) So is a 1989 poster of deliberate crudity attacking the pope and the Roman Catholic Church for opposing the use of condoms for birth control and disease prevention.
The onset of H.I.V. and AIDS in the 1980s created another crisis in which advertisements and educational materials invoked death and disease, just as the warnings about sexual diseases did in earlier centuries. One series of commercials shown here, from MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation, depicts passionate sex, ending with the man pulling a gun on his lover: unprotected sex is murder.
But while the earlier response to similar dangers was chastisement (avoid prostitutes; keep a “healthy mind and clean body,” warns a 1941 United States Army film), here the condom offers another possibility: a series of Keith Haring drawings promote both sexual activity and protection, offering satisfaction along with immunity.
This message is literally a promotion of the condom; the condom even becomes a cause. This is one impulse behind the purple couture cocktail dress displayed here, designed by Adriana Bertini: it is constructed from 1,200 hand-dyed condoms. In such a form the condom is not private but public, not hidden but extravagantly and profusely evident. It is associated with pleasure, not prevention, but is meant to provide both. Such is the new image of the condom.
Yet this is just a variation on a theme. The history of condoms is a chronicle of appetite and fear, of desire and darkness. The aspect of condoms that offends some orthodox religious beliefs, after all, is that it treats the possibility of pregnancy as something as unwanted as a disease, something to be prevented for the sake of sexual gratification: the condom is an indulgence, an avoidance.
If the condom appears to be a sign of promiscuous satisfaction, though, it is also, in its essence, a compromise: at the moment of greatest potential pleasure, it interferes. It requires that the rush of desire be interrupted, its course modified, its sensation diminished. At the moment of being consumed by the present, a concern with the future intrudes. The condom is a declaration of sacrifice in the midst of indulgence. It is evidence of civilization and its discontents.
“Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom” is on view at the Museum of Sex, 233 Fifth Avenue, at 27th Street; (212) 689-6337, museumofsex.com.
Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
In the 18th century Casanova referred to them as “English frock coats” and made prodigious use of the “little preventive bag invented by the English to save the fair sex from anxiety.” In 1709 the English literary journal The Tatler alluded to their supposed invention by an eponymous doctor of “eminent Quality”; the success of his “Engine” eventually “made it an Immodesty to name his Name.”
But there was never a Dr. Condom as far as we can tell, and no one really knows who first created condoms (or named them), since bladders, animal membranes, sheaths and salve-coated cloths have been used for similar purposes since the beginning of recorded history.
Spend some time at the fascinating new exhibition at the Museum of Sex, “Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom,” and their origins hardly matter: their history is what is extraordinary. These commonplace objects — widely used and rarely spoken of, often seen but infrequently displayed — are icons of far more than the phallus.
The museum’s curator, Sarah Forbes, has gathered condom boxes and vending machines, horrific photos of disease and collections of birth-control devices, American military videos and a dress made out of dyed condoms, television commercials and artworks, creating a modest exhibition that elevates the status of the condom. And, not incidentally, the show explicitly encourages its use — particularly, as one major section reminds us, to prevent the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS.
It is no wonder that the company that makes Trojan condoms became a sponsor of the exhibition, though the extent of its presence here is limited, including a display of contemporary equipment used in making condoms (metallic phallic molds that are dipped into liquid latex, for example) and a video of laboratory tests showing their resiliency. (Condoms are attached to valves and inflated, becoming enormous balloons well before they finally burst.)
The evolution of the condom is too briefly told, but it includes Charles Goodyear’s discovery of a treatment for rubber that retained its flexibility; a photograph of a well-preserved reusable rubber sheath from mid-20th-century London is here. In Germany, we learn, condoms are colloquially referred to as Fromms because that was the name of the Jewish manufacturer who, before the Nazis came to power, sold 50 million condoms a year. (His condoms were also, interestingly, packaged with slips of paper that could be discreetly handed to a pharmacist, ordering another supply.) But Julius Fromm had to flee to London and lost the factory.
It is partly because condoms graphically suggest the sex act that they have so often been known through their covers: a collection of boxes and containers here range from antique exoticism (picturing desert camels) to whimsical contemporaneity (portraits of candidates from the last presidential election). A New York pharmacy case has wooden doors that would have decorously concealed the contents until the customer was prepared to survey the various Sheik condoms for sale. Condoms have also accumulated nicknames that are covers of sorts, hiding their identity while provocatively suggesting it. (A wall displays a roster of aliases, including, most mildly, “copper hat,” “love sock,” “frogskin,” “night cap.”)
Condoms have encouraged sophomoric humor (a historical etching of Casanova shows him blowing into a condom and inflating it for the amused delectation of his lady admirers) and avant-gardish flirtatiousness (as in Randy Polumbo’s artworks on display, which include a ribbed dirigible and a solar-powered flying machine that inflates and deflates attached condoms).
And they have a dark side, which casts its shadow over such play. There are early photographs here of victims of syphilis, including a chilling image of a pox-covered baby nursing at a pox-covered breast.
Like the diseases they prevent, condoms have also proliferated with the march of armies. As the show points out, 18,000 American soldiers a day were on sick leave with venereal diseases during World War I, inspiring the United States government to begin a campaign about the transmission of disease and the distribution of military “pro-kits” to allow cleansing and protection.
The show’s grim accounting of sexually transmitted disease is tempered by an upbeat 2006 news account of a Florida retirement community in which condom use is being encouraged for its residents because of the spread of sexual diseases. The cure and the prevention have become so routine, they scarcely intrude on the pleasures.
But the last half of the exhibition is more preoccupied with controversy: the condom becomes a political instrument in long-running cultural and religious debates. A 1915 edition of Margaret Sanger’s once-controversial book, “What Every Girl Should Know,” is here. (Her birth-control advocacy led to the creation of Planned Parenthood.) So is a 1989 poster of deliberate crudity attacking the pope and the Roman Catholic Church for opposing the use of condoms for birth control and disease prevention.
The onset of H.I.V. and AIDS in the 1980s created another crisis in which advertisements and educational materials invoked death and disease, just as the warnings about sexual diseases did in earlier centuries. One series of commercials shown here, from MTV’s Staying Alive Foundation, depicts passionate sex, ending with the man pulling a gun on his lover: unprotected sex is murder.
But while the earlier response to similar dangers was chastisement (avoid prostitutes; keep a “healthy mind and clean body,” warns a 1941 United States Army film), here the condom offers another possibility: a series of Keith Haring drawings promote both sexual activity and protection, offering satisfaction along with immunity.
This message is literally a promotion of the condom; the condom even becomes a cause. This is one impulse behind the purple couture cocktail dress displayed here, designed by Adriana Bertini: it is constructed from 1,200 hand-dyed condoms. In such a form the condom is not private but public, not hidden but extravagantly and profusely evident. It is associated with pleasure, not prevention, but is meant to provide both. Such is the new image of the condom.
Yet this is just a variation on a theme. The history of condoms is a chronicle of appetite and fear, of desire and darkness. The aspect of condoms that offends some orthodox religious beliefs, after all, is that it treats the possibility of pregnancy as something as unwanted as a disease, something to be prevented for the sake of sexual gratification: the condom is an indulgence, an avoidance.
If the condom appears to be a sign of promiscuous satisfaction, though, it is also, in its essence, a compromise: at the moment of greatest potential pleasure, it interferes. It requires that the rush of desire be interrupted, its course modified, its sensation diminished. At the moment of being consumed by the present, a concern with the future intrudes. The condom is a declaration of sacrifice in the midst of indulgence. It is evidence of civilization and its discontents.
“Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom” is on view at the Museum of Sex, 233 Fifth Avenue, at 27th Street; (212) 689-6337, museumofsex.com.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Medical Clowns
This report takes a look at the increasingly popluar trade of Medical Clowns in Israel.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Detecting skin cancer at an earlier stage
Detection of skin cancer is usually done by the eye alone. Now Israeli researchers have developed a new device that can detect cancerous tumors at an earlier stage.
Sunbathers are particularly at risk of developing skin cancer if they don't protect their skin from the sun.
Researchers in Israel are developing a new device that can detect cancerous skin tumors, including melanomas that aren't visible to the naked eye, at an earlier stage of the disease.
The Optical Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging (OSPI) instrument, developed at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), reveals new textures of lesions that have never been seen before - including melanoma in patients who were diagnosed with various skin lesions and were awaiting surgery for their removal. The instrument diagnosed 73 types of lesions, some of them cancerous.
More than one million cases of skin cancer are diagnosed in the US every year according to the American Cancer Society. Of the 11,590 deaths due to skin cancer in 2009, some 8,650 will be due to melanoma, the most serious and dangerous type of skin cancer.
Today, dermatologists and plastic surgeons typically diagnose skin tumors with the naked eye and only rarely use a dermatoscope - a magnifying tool that allows tumors to be examined in detail.
Skin cancer and beyond
Cancerous mole detection is usually done by looking for one or more telltale visible symptoms: if the mole is asymmetrical; if it's outline is blurred or irregular; if it has multiple colors; if it is larger than five millimeters in diameter; and if stands up above the skin.
The OSPI biosensor, however, uses safe, infrared wavelengths and LC devices to measure tumor characteristics, including contours and spread, identifying tumors at an earlier stage.
"This is an exciting preliminary development since the initial testing shows that we can now identify microscopic tumors in the biological layers of the skin," explains Prof. Ibrahim Abdulahim, who is head of the BGU Electro-Optical Unit in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences and is leading the research group.
"As we continue to develop the OSPI, we also see an opportunity to use this technology for detecting other types of cancerous growths."
Abdulahim is supervising this research with Ph.D candidate Ofir Aharon and MS.c student Avner Safrani. He is also collaborating with BGU Prof. Lior Rosenberg and Dr. Ofer Arnon from the Department of Plastic Surgery at Soroka University Medical Center.
Sunbathers are particularly at risk of developing skin cancer if they don't protect their skin from the sun.
Researchers in Israel are developing a new device that can detect cancerous skin tumors, including melanomas that aren't visible to the naked eye, at an earlier stage of the disease.
The Optical Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging (OSPI) instrument, developed at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), reveals new textures of lesions that have never been seen before - including melanoma in patients who were diagnosed with various skin lesions and were awaiting surgery for their removal. The instrument diagnosed 73 types of lesions, some of them cancerous.
More than one million cases of skin cancer are diagnosed in the US every year according to the American Cancer Society. Of the 11,590 deaths due to skin cancer in 2009, some 8,650 will be due to melanoma, the most serious and dangerous type of skin cancer.
Today, dermatologists and plastic surgeons typically diagnose skin tumors with the naked eye and only rarely use a dermatoscope - a magnifying tool that allows tumors to be examined in detail.
Skin cancer and beyond
Cancerous mole detection is usually done by looking for one or more telltale visible symptoms: if the mole is asymmetrical; if it's outline is blurred or irregular; if it has multiple colors; if it is larger than five millimeters in diameter; and if stands up above the skin.
The OSPI biosensor, however, uses safe, infrared wavelengths and LC devices to measure tumor characteristics, including contours and spread, identifying tumors at an earlier stage.
"This is an exciting preliminary development since the initial testing shows that we can now identify microscopic tumors in the biological layers of the skin," explains Prof. Ibrahim Abdulahim, who is head of the BGU Electro-Optical Unit in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences and is leading the research group.
"As we continue to develop the OSPI, we also see an opportunity to use this technology for detecting other types of cancerous growths."
Abdulahim is supervising this research with Ph.D candidate Ofir Aharon and MS.c student Avner Safrani. He is also collaborating with BGU Prof. Lior Rosenberg and Dr. Ofer Arnon from the Department of Plastic Surgery at Soroka University Medical Center.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
5+ Foods to Fight the Flu
Keep your digestive system happy. When the digestive system is healthy it is able to breakdown and access nutrients from the foods you eat, it is better able to get rid of toxicity, and process “bad” bugs such as bacteria & viruses
ChicagoHealers.com Practitioner Dr. Helen Lee offers the following free flu-fighting foods:
Ginger: The volatile oils in ginger warm the body, helping the body to sweat, break a fever and eliminate toxins. Ginger also stimulates mucous release. Ginger is also a metabolic enhancer and the warming also helps with nausea, is a great digestive aid, lung and chest decongesting, and a body cleansing herb. Add fresh ginger to your food or in tea, or eat alone. Ginger tea (especially combined with honey) helps too sooth the throat.
Garlic: Garlic has allicin as an active ingredient giving it antiviral and antibacterial properties. Garlic cleans your liver (which cleans your blood) since your blood cycles through your liver every three minutes. So thereby stimulating the white blood cells and in turn boosting the immune system. An onion garlic syrup can help with mucous release.
Honey: Honey acts as a natural antibiotic with antiseptic properties. There are vitamins such as B-complexes, C, D, E, minerals enzymes and propolis. The propolis in honey boosts the immune system, disables viruses and fights infections. Furthermore, pediatric studies have shown that honey is more effective than cough syrup because it coats the throat better. Locally grown honey is best for seasonal allergies, asthma and respiratory conditions because you are treating with the irritants that are common to your area. Take a tablespoon 4 times per day, taken straight or in tea.
Cayenne: Cayenne pepper has a high vitamin C content making it a natural choice for a cold, as well as vitamin A, B, calcium and potassium. Cayenne also increases the circulation in the body. You may take in capsule form taking 2 – 40,000 heat units (950mg), or liquid 4 drops of the 200,000 heat units. Place a few drops in water and gargle with it every 15-30 minutes to make a sore throat disappear.
“Good” Bacteria: Increase “good” bacteria such as acidophilus and bifidus which can be found yogurt or kefir.
Go Green: Eat dark leafy green vegetables like kale, swiss chard, and spinach provides vitamins B12, folic acid, potassium, vitamins A, C & K which supports a healthy immune system.
Acid and Alkaline: Keep your internal acid/alkaline chemistry balanced by squeezing a half lemon into a cup of hot water to break up congestion, stimulate digestion, and create an alkaline or healing pH chemistry in the body
ChicagoHealers.com Practitioner Dr. Helen Lee offers the following free flu-fighting foods:
Ginger: The volatile oils in ginger warm the body, helping the body to sweat, break a fever and eliminate toxins. Ginger also stimulates mucous release. Ginger is also a metabolic enhancer and the warming also helps with nausea, is a great digestive aid, lung and chest decongesting, and a body cleansing herb. Add fresh ginger to your food or in tea, or eat alone. Ginger tea (especially combined with honey) helps too sooth the throat.
Garlic: Garlic has allicin as an active ingredient giving it antiviral and antibacterial properties. Garlic cleans your liver (which cleans your blood) since your blood cycles through your liver every three minutes. So thereby stimulating the white blood cells and in turn boosting the immune system. An onion garlic syrup can help with mucous release.
Honey: Honey acts as a natural antibiotic with antiseptic properties. There are vitamins such as B-complexes, C, D, E, minerals enzymes and propolis. The propolis in honey boosts the immune system, disables viruses and fights infections. Furthermore, pediatric studies have shown that honey is more effective than cough syrup because it coats the throat better. Locally grown honey is best for seasonal allergies, asthma and respiratory conditions because you are treating with the irritants that are common to your area. Take a tablespoon 4 times per day, taken straight or in tea.
Cayenne: Cayenne pepper has a high vitamin C content making it a natural choice for a cold, as well as vitamin A, B, calcium and potassium. Cayenne also increases the circulation in the body. You may take in capsule form taking 2 – 40,000 heat units (950mg), or liquid 4 drops of the 200,000 heat units. Place a few drops in water and gargle with it every 15-30 minutes to make a sore throat disappear.
“Good” Bacteria: Increase “good” bacteria such as acidophilus and bifidus which can be found yogurt or kefir.
Go Green: Eat dark leafy green vegetables like kale, swiss chard, and spinach provides vitamins B12, folic acid, potassium, vitamins A, C & K which supports a healthy immune system.
Acid and Alkaline: Keep your internal acid/alkaline chemistry balanced by squeezing a half lemon into a cup of hot water to break up congestion, stimulate digestion, and create an alkaline or healing pH chemistry in the body
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Reconstructive memory
The term 'Rashomon effect' is often used by psychologists in situations where observers give different accounts of the same event,and describes the effect of subjective perceptions on recollection. The phenomenon is named after a 1950 film by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. It was with Rashomon that Western cinema-goers discovered both Kurosawa and Japanese film in general - the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1951, as well as the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film the following year.
Rashomon is an adaptation of two short stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Set in the 12th century, the film depicts the trial of a notorious bandit called Tajomaru (played by Kurosawa's frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune), who is alleged to have raped a woman and killed her samurai husband. In flashbacks, the incident is recalled by four different witnesses - a woodcutter, a priest, the perpetrator and, via a medium, the murder victim. Each of the testimonies is equally plausible, yet all four are in mutual contradiction with each other.
The film is an examinantion of human nature and the nature of reality. It compels the viewer to seek the truth. Each testimony is influenced by the intentions, experiences and self-perceptions of the witness. They all tell their own 'truth', but it is distorted by their past and by their future. Under Kurosawa's masterful direction, the characters start off happy in the knowledge that they know exactly what happened between the samaurai, his wife and the bandit. One by one, each character begins to doubt their own account of the incident. In the end, both the cast and the viewer are left in a state of confusion and bewilderment.
The idea that we do not remember things as they actually happened is usually attributed to Sir Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969), who spent much of his professional career at Cambridge University, where he became head of the psychology department. He describes the process of memory in his classic 1932 book, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology:
Remembering is not a completely independent function, entirely distinct from perceiving, imaging, or even from constructive thinking, but it has intimate relations with them all...One's memory of an event reflects a blend of information contained in specific traces encoded at the time it occurred, plus inferences based on knowledge, expectations, beliefs, and attitudes derived from other sources.
According to Bartlett, memories are organized within the historical and cultural frameworks (which Bartlett called 'schemata') of the individual, and the process of remembering involves the retrieval of information which has been unknowingly altered in order that it is compatible with pre-existing knowledge.
Bartlett's ideas about how memory works came to him during a game of Chinese whispers, in which a short story is relayed through a chain of people, each of whom makes minor retrieval errors, such that the final retelling may be completely different from the original. One of his experiments involved asking subjects to read a Native American folk story called The War of the Ghosts, and then recall it several times, sometimes up to a year later. He chose it because the cultural context in which it is set was unfamiliar to the participants in his experiments.
Bartlett found that upon recall, the subjects altered the narrative of the story to make it fit in with their existing schemata. Participants omitted information they regarded as irrelevant, changed the emphasis to points they considered to be significant, and rationalized the parts that did not make sense, to make the story more comprehensible to themselves. In other words, memory is reconstructive rather that reproductive.
Although Remembering was largely ignored upon its publication, it is today highly influential. Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of California, Irvine, has devoted her career to studying the reconstructive nature of memory in relation to eyewitness testimony.
Loftus is concerned mainly with how the recollections of eyewitnesses can be deliberately manipulated by misinformation. In extreme cases, this can lead to completely false memories of events that did not take place. One of Loftus's more famous studies addresses the use of 'leading' questions in the courtroom. In the study, students were shown film clips of a car accident, and then asked a question about the accident. Those asked "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" gave answers which averaged about 39 mph, whereas those asked "About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?" gave answers with an average speed of 32 mph.
Loftus's research, like that of Bartlett's, shows that our memories are quite often not as accurate as we would like to think they are. The knowledge that memory is to some extent confabulation has very serious implications for the use in the courtroom of eyewitness testimonies, because if eyewitness testimonies can be unreliable, then the validity of criminal convictions based upon them is open to question.
As well as confabulating the past, the brain also envisages events that have not yet occurred. The process of anticipating oneself attending a future event probably involves drawing on past experiences to generate a 'simulation' of the future event. Daniel Schacter argues that this 'episodic-future' thinking is entirely dependent on reconstructive memory:
...future events are not exact replicas of past events, and a memory system that simply stored rote records would not be well-suited to simulating future events. A system built according to constructive principles may be a better tool for the job: it can draw on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form. Such a system will occasionally produce memory errors, but it also provides considerable flexibility.
Most of the evidence that reconstructive memory may be essential for envisioning future events comes from amnesic patients who also have difficulties picturing themselves in the future, and now there is also some experimental evidence. For example, recent functional neuroimaging studies show that some of the brain regions that are activated when recalling a personal memory - the posterior cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus and left occipital lobe - are also active when thinking about a future event.
Rashomon is an adaptation of two short stories by Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Set in the 12th century, the film depicts the trial of a notorious bandit called Tajomaru (played by Kurosawa's frequent collaborator Toshiro Mifune), who is alleged to have raped a woman and killed her samurai husband. In flashbacks, the incident is recalled by four different witnesses - a woodcutter, a priest, the perpetrator and, via a medium, the murder victim. Each of the testimonies is equally plausible, yet all four are in mutual contradiction with each other.
The film is an examinantion of human nature and the nature of reality. It compels the viewer to seek the truth. Each testimony is influenced by the intentions, experiences and self-perceptions of the witness. They all tell their own 'truth', but it is distorted by their past and by their future. Under Kurosawa's masterful direction, the characters start off happy in the knowledge that they know exactly what happened between the samaurai, his wife and the bandit. One by one, each character begins to doubt their own account of the incident. In the end, both the cast and the viewer are left in a state of confusion and bewilderment.
The idea that we do not remember things as they actually happened is usually attributed to Sir Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969), who spent much of his professional career at Cambridge University, where he became head of the psychology department. He describes the process of memory in his classic 1932 book, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology:
Remembering is not a completely independent function, entirely distinct from perceiving, imaging, or even from constructive thinking, but it has intimate relations with them all...One's memory of an event reflects a blend of information contained in specific traces encoded at the time it occurred, plus inferences based on knowledge, expectations, beliefs, and attitudes derived from other sources.
According to Bartlett, memories are organized within the historical and cultural frameworks (which Bartlett called 'schemata') of the individual, and the process of remembering involves the retrieval of information which has been unknowingly altered in order that it is compatible with pre-existing knowledge.
Bartlett's ideas about how memory works came to him during a game of Chinese whispers, in which a short story is relayed through a chain of people, each of whom makes minor retrieval errors, such that the final retelling may be completely different from the original. One of his experiments involved asking subjects to read a Native American folk story called The War of the Ghosts, and then recall it several times, sometimes up to a year later. He chose it because the cultural context in which it is set was unfamiliar to the participants in his experiments.
Bartlett found that upon recall, the subjects altered the narrative of the story to make it fit in with their existing schemata. Participants omitted information they regarded as irrelevant, changed the emphasis to points they considered to be significant, and rationalized the parts that did not make sense, to make the story more comprehensible to themselves. In other words, memory is reconstructive rather that reproductive.
Although Remembering was largely ignored upon its publication, it is today highly influential. Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law at the University of California, Irvine, has devoted her career to studying the reconstructive nature of memory in relation to eyewitness testimony.
Loftus is concerned mainly with how the recollections of eyewitnesses can be deliberately manipulated by misinformation. In extreme cases, this can lead to completely false memories of events that did not take place. One of Loftus's more famous studies addresses the use of 'leading' questions in the courtroom. In the study, students were shown film clips of a car accident, and then asked a question about the accident. Those asked "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" gave answers which averaged about 39 mph, whereas those asked "About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?" gave answers with an average speed of 32 mph.
Loftus's research, like that of Bartlett's, shows that our memories are quite often not as accurate as we would like to think they are. The knowledge that memory is to some extent confabulation has very serious implications for the use in the courtroom of eyewitness testimonies, because if eyewitness testimonies can be unreliable, then the validity of criminal convictions based upon them is open to question.
As well as confabulating the past, the brain also envisages events that have not yet occurred. The process of anticipating oneself attending a future event probably involves drawing on past experiences to generate a 'simulation' of the future event. Daniel Schacter argues that this 'episodic-future' thinking is entirely dependent on reconstructive memory:
...future events are not exact replicas of past events, and a memory system that simply stored rote records would not be well-suited to simulating future events. A system built according to constructive principles may be a better tool for the job: it can draw on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form. Such a system will occasionally produce memory errors, but it also provides considerable flexibility.
Most of the evidence that reconstructive memory may be essential for envisioning future events comes from amnesic patients who also have difficulties picturing themselves in the future, and now there is also some experimental evidence. For example, recent functional neuroimaging studies show that some of the brain regions that are activated when recalling a personal memory - the posterior cingulate gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus and left occipital lobe - are also active when thinking about a future event.
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