Psychology
Almost 20 percent cancer patients wait to enroll in Hospice until their last three days of life.
Their courage and determination is admirable, Hospice is palliative care, but it shortchanges both patients and their families and a new paper seeks to create a profile for people like to be late admissions.
The team examined de-identified data from electronic medical records of 64,264 patients in 12 hospices in the Coalition of Hospices Organized to Investigate Comparative Effectiveness network from January 2008 to May 2013. Hospices spanned 11 states, including Pennsylvania, with censuses…
In the UK, where health care is paid for by the government, and in the United States, where health care is increasingly government controlled, fat shaming has become the norm. Since everyone will have to pay for health care, and obese people are more likely to need it, gthe public gets to have a voice in behavior.
The federal government has even taken to micromanaging school lunches.
But does it work, or is it just a way for elite social authoritarians to assert their superiority over the masses? New University College London research funded by Cancer Research UK finds that discrimination is…
A pop song goes that rainy days and Mondays bring people down. There was always some truth to that and a new paper in JAMA quantifies the link between a lack of sunshine and suicide. The authors found that lower rates of suicide are associated with more daily sunshine in the prior 14 to 60 days.
Light interacts with brain serotonin systems and possibly influences serotonin-related behaviors. Those behaviors, such as mood and impulsiveness, can play a role in suicide.
The authors examined the relationship between suicide and the duration of sunshine after mathematically removing…
African American women and their female children have the highest obesity prevalence of any demographic group in the United States, and they are also most likely to underestimate their body weight, according to a paper from Rush University Medical Center.
The authors say cultural norms for body size may prevent awareness among many African American women about the potential risks of obesity and the benefits of weight loss.
Led by Elizabeth Lynch, PhD, the study recruited African American women in a low-income neighborhood of Chicago. All 69 participants were full-time caretakers of at least…
If you are fat, you might look for excuses that go beyond eating too much and not exercising - and nutritionists and people selling miracle products and fad diets are happy to jump on the latest trend, like that fat, sugar or wheat is doing it to you.
But though some people can become addicted to eating for its own sake, there remains no evidence that specific foods such as those high in sugar or fat are addictive. There remains no addiction for substances in certain foods because the brain does not respond to nutrients in the same way as it does to addictive drugs such as heroin or cocaine.…
An analysis of over 7,000 women over a decade after unsuccessful fertility treatment found that women who have difficulty accepting the fact that they can't have children following unsuccessful fertility treatment have worse long-term mental health than women who are able to let go of their desire for children.
The study is the first to look at a large group of women to try to understand mental health after unsuccessful fertility treatment, including factors such as whether or not they have children, whether they still want children, their diagnosis and their medical treatment.
Lead author Dr…
Despite challenges, prescription drug monitoringprograms are essential tools in ensuring opioids and other addictive medicinesare prescribed and used appropriately.
The field of medicine is being pulled in two directions. On one hand, doctors are becoming more aware of the consequences of pain, leading to the prescription of more and more aggressive pain medicines; and on the other hand, we are also becoming more aware of the addictive potential of many of these drugs. We see the necessity of using opioid painkillers for people in pain, but we see the destructiveness of these painkillers when…
By Rob Brooks, UNSW Australia.
Settle in for a long read. Over the coming weeks you will be bombarded by shorter, snappier pieces about a controversy inflaming the front where evolutionary and social psychology meet. I’ve touched on this controversy already, and promised you more. Here’s that more, in 2,300 words of detail … rather too long for a column, I know.
Still with me? Thanks.
In June I wrote a column about the idea that women’s preferences for attractive, masculine and dominant men peak around the time conception is most likely. What particularly intrigued me was the fact that two…
America is a liberal democracy.
Given the modern colloquial connotation of 'liberal' and its undertones of social authoritarianism, calling the United States a liberal democracy will make conservatives bristle, but it's true, and it is part of the reason they then say America is the greatest country in the world, or at least was until January of 2009. Ironically, conservatives, even those living in a liberal democracy, are happier than liberals pretty much...anywhere.
An analysis of 16 Western European countries found that liberals are less happy overall, while conservatives tend…
Feeling comfortable in our own skin when it comes to clothes is more complicated than just “being yourself”. Image: Flickr, Maria Morri
By Rosie Findlay, University of Sydney.
Here’s a phrase that strikes terror into my heart: boyfriend jeans. I came of age in the era of the skinny jean, which started out like a low-slung pair of denim stovepipes and ended up, in recent years, as “jeggings” (also known as denim spray-painted onto the wearer’s legs). So perhaps it’s not surprising that my initial denim “comfort zone” is slim and fitted from hip to ankle.*
Of course, we all know the denim…