Chronic Boredom May Be a Sign of Poor Health. Medical Mystery: Man Sheds Tears of Blood. A young man from Tennessee is living with an alarming medical condition — without warning, he begins to bleed from his eyes.
And some of the best doctors in the country are completely stumped by his ailment. What's more confounding is that the condition is very rare, but some of the only other people known to bleed from the eyes — a condition called haemolacria — are also from Tennessee. At age 22, Michael Spann was walking down the stairs of his home in Antioch, Tenn., when he was gripped by an extremely painful headache. "I felt like I got hit in the head with a sledgehammer," he told the Tennessean. Moments later, Spann realized that blood was trickling from his eyes, nose and mouth. The bleeding and headaches became a daily occurrence for Spann; now, about seven years later, they happen only once or twice a week. 'Thought I was going to die' In 2009, Calvino Inman was shocked by what he saw in his bathroom mirror: blood streaming from his eyes. Dr. A Vegan Diet (Hugely) Helpful Against Cancer. If you’re anything like me, the “C” word leaves you trembling.
But today there is very good news to report: Research suggests you can improve your odds of never getting cancer and/or improve your chances of recovering from it. Not with a drug or surgery, although those methods might be quite effective. This is all about the power on your plate, and it’s seriously powerful. A 2012 analysis of all the best studies done to date concluded vegetarians have significantly lower cancer rates.
For example, the largest forward-looking study on diet and cancer ever performed concluded that “the incidence of all cancers combined is lower among vegetarians.” That’s good news, yes. A new study just out of Loma Linda University funded by the National Cancer Institute reported that vegans have lower rates of cancer than both meat-eaters and vegetarians. Peter Attia: Is the obesity crisis hiding a bigger problem? Beyond New Year's Resolutions, Tackle Issues at the Source. Hetty Chin is a program assistant with the NRDC.
This post is adapted from one that appeared on the NRDC blog Switchboard. Chin contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. For the past several years, instead of New Year's resolutions, I've given myself overarching annual mantras. My mantra for 2014 is "Do it, Hetty! " — meaning I should take action in the areas that are important to me. One of these is helping find a solution to the world's current nutrition issues, and to address them, I've adapted a tool that some of you may have seen before: the problem tree. Credit: Hetty Chin, NRDC.
In high-school, I identified poor nutrition as a problem — this was my trunk. The symptoms — or branches — of my tree included the issues that my grandmother suffered with, in addition to the effects diet had on the youth around me: poor self-esteem from difficulties with weight management, diabetes, hypertension, difficulty focusing and much more. 4 scientific studies on how meditation can affect your heart and brain. Many people have tried to sell me on the idea of meditating.
Sometimes I try it, and have an incredible, refreshing experience. But usually, as I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, while I know that I’m supposed to be letting all thoughts go, more and more fly through my mind. Soon I have a laundry-list of “to-dos” in my head … and then my legs fall asleep. It’s all downhill from there. Today’s TED Talk, however, might actually convince me to give meditation another shot. “We live in an incredibly busy world.
In this talk, Puddicombe — who is as equally as turned off by incense as me — shares the fascinating story of how he become a monk, and gives a convincing argument for why it is worth it to take 10 minutes a day to refresh the mind. “Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it’s much different than that,” says Puddicombe. Deadly Blood Type Explains Medical Mystery. A blood type that can turn blood transfusions deadly has proven a perplexing mystery for 60 years.
Now researchers have finally identified the secret behind the blood type known as "Vel," findings that could help make blood safer for hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The mystery began in 1952, when a 66-year-old woman in New York, sick with colon cancer, received a blood transfusion and unexpectedly suffered from a severe and potentially fatal rejection of the blood. Investigators referred to her, using her last name, simply as Patient Vel. Further research found that Mrs. Vel had developed a potent immune response against some unknown compound found on the red blood cells she had received. "The molecular basis of the Vel-negative blood type remained elusive for more than 60 years despite intense efforts worldwide," researcher Bryan Ballif, a biochemist and mass spectrometrist at the University of Vermont, told LiveScience. How Vel works.