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[drwalshnd]

Antibacterial Soap? You Can Skip It – Use Plain Soap and Water | FDA.gov

The FDA issued a final ruling today restricting the sale and marketing of antibacterial soaps. The use of triclosan and 18 other antibacterial chemicals must be phased out within one year from over-the-counter soaps available to consumers.

In 2013, an FDA rule was proposed that brought these product ingredients under government scrutiny. Since then, “manufacturers haven’t proven that those ingredients are safe for daily use over a long period of time” or “that these ingredients are any more effective than plain soap and water in preventing illnesses and the spread of certain infections.”

Apart from limiting harm to consumers from the ingredients themselves, this rule is part of a wider battle against bacterial resistance, a major public health crisis.

[drwalshnd]

Antibacterial Soap? You Can Skip It -- Use Plain Soap and Water | FDA.gov

The FDA issued a final ruling today restricting the sale and marketing of antibacterial soaps. The use of triclosan and 18 other antibacterial chemicals must be phased out within one year from over-the-counter soaps available to consumers.

In 2013, an FDA rule was proposed that brought these product ingredients under government scrutiny. Since then, “manufacturers haven’t proven that those ingredients are safe for daily use over a long period of time” or “that these ingredients are any more effective than plain soap and water in preventing illnesses and the spread of certain infections.”

Apart from limiting harm to consumers from the ingredients themselves, this rule is part of a wider battle against bacterial resistance, a major public health crisis.

[drwalshnd]

If nature is good for you...

…then is Pokémon GO good for you?

If this game is getting people off the couch and out of the house who are depressed, anxious, inactive, and/or lonely, then YES.

Consider it (tentatively) Doctor Approved.*

*May cause wandering through your town late at night. Do not follow any Pokémon into traffic, bodies of water, power substations, or other unsafe areas. Avoid if you have a history of video game addiction. Please wear sunscreen and keep hydrated.

[drwalshnd]

[compoundchem]

Today we’re taking a look at the chemistry of elderflowers and elderberries… and there’s also a guide to making your own elderflower syrup here: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-1PA

[drwalshnd]

A midwife, herbalist, and trailblazing physician – Dr. Tieraona Low Dog, MD

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but I did, and I was anything but disappointed! She was so kind to me (I even got a little teary) and I feel so inspired. It’s been incredibly important for me to have a Native role model like Dr. Low Dog, who is an advocate for the health of women, children, and the planet.

[vox]

If you want to lose weight, you have to do more than exercise. Just working out is almost useless for weight loss.

When you work out, those extra calories burned only account for a tiny part of your total energy expenditure.

Learn more about how weight loss works.

[drwalshnd]

Great summary of the evidence for nutrition (with and without exercise) as the cornerstone of weight loss...because “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”

[drwalshnd]

Pseudoscientist

An MD called me a pseudoscientist this week. I had sent a patient back to him, the PCP, for lab work that I can't order, because no ND can accept Medicare. He grumbled the whole time and called me this name in front of the patient. In turn, the lab work I ordered correctly diagnosed his patient with a serious condition, a condition he, the PCP, had ignored the obvious signs of for the past 10 years. I met the patient once.

Right. Pseudoscience. That’s what I do. Sorcery and witchcraft and Paps and STI checks and CBCs and vaccinations and recommending diet and exercise. You caught me.

[drwalshnd]

Frying vegetables in extra virgin olive oil is healthier than boiling them and prevents cancer, research shows | The Telegraph

A study published this week in the Journal Food Chemistry shows that frying veggies in extra virgin olive oil preserves certain nutrients better than boiling--specifically, phenols. You might recall that phenols are the antioxidants that give wine, tea, coffee, chocolate, berries, and other highly-pigmented fruits and vegetables some of their many health benefits. Cooking in olive oil allows food to soak up some of these beneficial phenols, since olive oil itself has plenty of them. Burning your food in olive oil still isn’t a great idea, either for your health or taste buds...so watch the stove, please.

[neurosciencestuff]

Mindfulness Meditation Trumps Placebo in Pain Reduction

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found new evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo.

This is significant because placebo-controlled trials are the recognized standard for demonstrating the efficacy of clinical and pharmacological treatments.

The research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, showed that study participants who practiced mindfulness meditation reported greater pain relief than placebo. Significantly, brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation produced very different patterns of activity than those produced by placebo to reduce pain.

“We were completely surprised by the findings,” said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and lead investigator of the study. “While we thought that there would be some overlap in brain regions between meditation and placebo, the findings from this study provide novel and objective evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain in a unique fashion.”

The study used a two-pronged approach – pain ratings and brain imaging – to determine whether mindfulness meditation is merely a placebo effect. Seventy-five healthy, pain-free participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups: mindfulness meditation, placebo meditation (“sham” meditation), placebo analgesic cream (petroleum jelly) or control.

Pain was induced by using a thermal probe to heat a small area of the participants’ skin to 49 degrees Centigrade (120.2 degrees Fahrenheit), a level of heat most people find very painful. Study participants then rated pain intensity (physical sensation) and pain unpleasantness (emotional response). The participants’ brains were scanned with arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (ASL MRI) before and after their respective four-day group interventions.

The mindfulness meditation group reported that pain intensity was reduced by 27 percent and by 44 percent for the emotional aspect of pain. In contrast, the placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by 11 percent and emotional aspect of pain by 13 percent.

“The MRI scans showed for the first time that mindfulness meditation produced patterns of brain activity that are different than those produced by the placebo cream,” Zeidan said.

Mindfulness meditation reduced pain by activating brain regions (orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate cortex) associated with the self-control of pain while the placebo cream lowered pain by reducing brain activity in pain-processing areas (secondary somatosensory cortex).

Another brain region, the thalamus, was deactivated during mindfulness meditation, but was activated during all other conditions. This brain region serves as a gateway that determines if sensory information is allowed to reach higher brain centers. By deactivating this area, mindfulness meditation may have caused signals about pain to simply fade away, Zeidan said.

Mindfulness meditation also was significantly better at reducing pain intensity and pain unpleasantness than the placebo meditation. The placebo-meditation group had relatively small decreases in pain intensity (9 percent) and pain unpleasantness (24 percent). The study findings suggest that placebo meditation may have reduced pain through a relaxation effect that was associated with slower breathing.

“This study is the first to show that mindfulness meditation is mechanistically distinct and produces pain relief above and beyond the analgesic effects seen with either placebo cream or sham meditation,” Zeidan said.

“Based on our findings, we believe that as little as four 20-minute daily sessions of mindfulness meditation could enhance pain treatment in a clinical setting. However, given that the present study examined healthy, pain-free volunteers, we cannot generalize our findings to chronic pain patients at this time.”

[drwalshnd]

Aujourd'hui

…nous somme tous Français.

Je vous souhaites la paix en ce temps de crise et tristesse.

[currentsinbiology]

Probiotic bacteria may aid against anxiety and memory problems

A daily capsule of probiotic bacteria may help people cope with mild anxiety and memory problems, according to a small study of healthy men.

Those who took the bug-bearing capsules for a month reported less stress and anxiety, and had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the morning, than when they took a placebo instead.

Those on probiotics also fared better on memory tests that required them to pair objects together, such as a colour and a number, said Ted Dinan, head of psychiatry at University College Cork.

Bifidobacteria, found in the gut. Many bacterial species live there symbiotically, gaining energy from substances absorbed in the intestine. Photograph: Phototake Inc/Alamy

[drwalshnd]

Happy Halloween! Please remember to use any and all body parts responsibly.

[drwalshnd]

Seattle/King County free clinic at Key Arena 

Today I had the pleasure of participating in a final, full day of delivering free medical care at Key Arena. The arena floor was converted into a dental clinic, and vision checks, labs, physicals, imaging, social work, nutrition, acupuncture, and chiropractic were all offered from converted VIP suites. 

Last year the SKC free clinic provided care for 3,400 people, and this year we saw approximately 3,600. When patients were surveyed, 97% of them said they "felt respected." 

So glad I could represent my profession at this event and serve so many this weekend.

[themidwifeisin]

Hello, earlier in the week I started experiencing frequent urination, and it wasn't until it was happening every hour that I realized it could be a UTI. I purchased Uristat and tested positive. I never had any major symptoms, just some abdominal discomfort along with peeing every 15 minutes at my worst. I drank 2 doses of Uristat, it took away my UTI symptoms, but the meds made me very sick, I think I'm allergic. I'm no longer feeling the symptoms of a UTI, but should I still go to the doctor?

Let me tell you a story.

Instead of going straight from high school to college, I took a year off in between to travel with my sweetie.  We had an amazing year - working at home to save up, then traveling through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, meeting friends in Costa Rica on the way home, and spending the rest of the year living communally off the grid in a canvas tent.  (A hippie you say?  Me?  Never.)

About halfway through the first month I got what I later realized was a urinary tract infection, though the symptoms weren’t text-book so I kind of just put up with it.  After about a week of this UTI I also came down with strep throat.  They had to bring me down the mountain on a donkey because I was so sick I couldn’t make the 2 hour walk to the bus to town.  I was treated with a single dose of penicillin for the strep throat and low & behold, the symptoms from the UTI also seemed to settle down.

Over the next month I had various digestive tract issues (read: so much diarrhea it was ridiculous) for which I was occasionally given small doses of antibiotics that seemed to do the trick.

Finally, about two months after the first signs of the UTI I woke up in the middle of the night crying in pain - I had the most excruciating pain on the right side of my lower back.  (Are you seeing where this is going, healthcare providers??) By the next night my fever was so high I was hallucinating and my panicked sweetie called a doctor to come to the hostel and check me out.  I can remember very little about that time except for the look of shock and fright on the doctor’s face when he forced a smile and said, “Ah.  Well.  I don’t believe we should wait for an ambulance.  I can take you to the hospital in my car RIGHT NOW.”

I had a severe kidney infection, for which I was hospitalized and on IV antibiotics for almost a week.  Ever since the UTI had not been properly treated, the bacteria had been slowly trekking up through my urinary tract to infect my kidneys.

So all of that is to say: TREAT YOUR UTIS!  TREAT THEM WELL!

If you think there’s any possibility that you did not treat your UTI completely, go get checked out by a healthcare provider - it’s super easy, all you have to do is pee in a cup.  They might prescribe you antibiotics, or they might say everything is fine and it is well treated.  Personally, I am always on the side of “better safe than sorry.”

[lastrealindians-deactivated2015]

Native Student Silenced by Michigan State University College of Law Student Bar Association for Speaking Out Against Cultural Appropriation, By Emmy Scott

Coming to law school, I knew I would need to expect a certain amount of racial microaggressions due to white privilege. As a graduate from the University of North Dakota,  who formerly had the Native sports logo “Fighting Sioux,” you could say I am pretty accustomed to it. I listened tacitly to one law student in my year complain about having to read Louise Erdrich’s The Round House for his Lawyer and Ethics Class. He shouted in the graduate dorm lobby sarcastically saying, “Yes, that’s exactly how I wanted to spend my weekend, reading about some Native woman being raped.” I stood in the back of an elevator while another student railed about one of the few Native law professors. The student said he could never tell when the professor was stating actual facts or bullshitting, as the professor inserted opinion into everything. I watched yet another classmate hijack a class to “argue” with the professor, who was simply explaining the Supreme Court’s logic. I laughed because what many students do not realize about these situations is how they’re realizing their inherent privilege. Being a Native student, these situations that were so bothersome to white students are an everyday reality for us- to the point where we almost become desensitized to it. Imagine if I got upset about every Supreme Court decision that did go the way I would have liked…

I currently attend Michigan State University College of Law in East Lansing, Michigan. Last year I attended with a fellow Native 3L the MSU College of Law Halloween mixer. I purchased my $5 wristband well in advance. I had worked on my costume for days and was stoked because Halloween is my favorite holiday ever. In the midst of eating snacks and good conversation, I noticed one woman on the dance floor in a typical “Pocahottie” costume. As she was most likely under the influence and I knew that if I stayed I would end up confronting her about her choice of costume, I decided it was probably best for me to leave.

This brings me to the events of October 14, 2015. I was invited by another student to this year’s Halloween mixer via Facebook. Not wanting a repeat of last year, I decided to post in the event. I posted the following meme accompanied by the text: Please don’t dress as a Native American as somebody did last year and I had to leave before I called her out on it. Friends don’t let your friends be THAT person.

I received this message in my Facebook inbox.

I issued a response and was replied to.

I was confused as to how exactly a post by me asking my law school peers to be respectful in their costume choices could be interpreted as an SBA endorsement. The gist of that message to me said that I was ruining other people’s fun by a request for respect. Other people’s fun was more important than my need to feel welcome. I am not excited because I do not find it fun when my culture is the butt of the joke. Obviously, I will not be attending the Halloween mixer this year.

The mixer is put on by MSU’s Student Bar Association. According to their website: The Student Bar Association (SBA) is the governing body of the students at Michigan State University College of Law. Through its activities, the SBA endeavors to further legal education, promote fellowship and goodwill among students, faculty and the administration, and advocate the concerns of the Law School’s students. In addition, the SBA coordinates student activities and organizations, and is charged with appropriating funds for student activities and student organizations.

Emmy Scott (Winnebago/Spokane/Arikara) is from the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska and is a first year law student at Michigan State College of Law with a passion for Indigenous rights. Twitter: @EmmyNawjoopinga

[drwalshnd]

A culture is not a costume. Asking for others to be respectful is completely reasonable. Emmy, you have the right to feel welcome in a shared space, too.

[digiti-minimi]

Anti-vax/Alternative/Natural/etc...I graduate didactic in a few months and this topic makes my blood boil whenever I see or hear about it. I don't want this to be outwardly expressed when I start to see patients. What does a typical conversation sound like when you see patients that are into this stuff? What are your thoughts and advice?

Yeah, this is definitely aggravating but I also understand where people are coming from because that was how I was raised and I understand the feelings behind it (even if the logic seems nonsensical now). Anyway. I think my answer is probably different from somebody working in primary care. My goal with patients like this is to ask them WHY they don’t believe in it, and then I try to plainly and calmly educate them on the emergent consequences that could come from not following my advice. If they still refuse: document, document, document. Some people are super stuck in their ways and won’t budge and you just have to protect yourself against those people. Others are more open-minded.

As an example I had a kid recently who was bitten by the family dog. Parents initially refused antibiotics and tetanus prophylaxis because they did not want to treat him with antibiotics “unnecessarily” and were anti-vaccine. I told them that it was their right to refuse, despite it being the standard of care. I then explained that since the bites were on the face, they needed to be closed for the best cosmetic result. The closure would put him at a higher risk for infection. If the wounds do become infected, he would have significantly more scarring than he would have otherwise. I then explained the potential consequences of tetanus, given that dog bites are tetanus prone wounds and he had absolutely zero protection against it.

In the end, they ended up being amenable to both the tetanus prophylaxis and the antibiotics. I think this was because I was able to provide them factual patient education while not explicitly saying what we’re all thinking - “hey you’re both giant dill-holes and you’re putting your child at risk.”

Generally, if people want to try “all natural” stuff as long as it is IN ADDITION TO the actual medical treatment, I’m all for it unless there’s any indication it could actually cause harm or interfere with the medical treatment. It gives the patient the feeling of being more in control of their healthcare, and I also believe in the power of the placebo effect. A good example is people who eat local honey to help allergies. (This doesn’t actually work.) But as long as you’re not a raging diabetic, I’m OK with you putting some local honey in your daily tea. I’ll still tell you it won’t work, but I certainly won’t fight you on it.

Hope that helps! You will learn to keep your cool over time. I honestly feel like I hear such inane, ridiculous things from patients that anti-vax is pretty average, run-of-the-mill ridiculousness. Beats someone telling you they put that giant candle up their rear end because they were constipated.

[totipa-s]

“hey you’re both giant dill-holes and you’re putting your child at risk.” In tears 😂 I really appreciate the response! This was what I saw prior to asking you and a few others this question:  

Their heart is in the right place. You can’t judge someone for not knowing about the consequences and others wanting to help. I just want to make sure that when I start practicing I don’t come across judgemental because I was passionate about that kid not getting rheumatic fever later, ruining the patient-provider relationship in the process and scarring them from medicine entirely.

[digiti-minimi]

IMO that mom needs to be informed about the dangers of strep. It’s not just a run of the mill sore throat. If it was, sure, go ahead and give her elderberry. I will have to do some research on colloidal silver. My mom used it FOR EVERYTHING including sore throats but I feel like I recall it potentially being harmful? Anyway, I think if this mom understood the potential consequences of glomerulonephritis and rheumatic fever, she might feel differently. Her feelings about a secret vaccine being sneaked into the antibiotic shot shows two things: patients’ general distrust of doctors, and the fact that injections of all varieties have somehow become demonized.

Also, “my child refuses to swallow medicine and I don’t want her to freak out about a shot.” Have some balls and take charge in your parenting. Sometimes kids have to take medicine. Sometimes they have to get shots. It’s a part of being a kid. Plus, if your kid isn’t going to take a bubblegum flavored antibiotic, how are you going to spray colloidal silver down their throat or make them eat a clove of garlic? People…

And my final question… IF YOU AREN’T GOING TO LISTEN TO YOUR MEDICAL PROVIDER AND YOU FEEL LIKE YOU KNOW HOW TO TREAT YOUR CHILD BETTER THAN WE DO… WHY DO YOU COME TO US IN THE FIRST PLACE?

[totipa-s]

I agree!

[mrspediatricpa]

The caps tho!

[drwalshnd]

I'm a primary care ND and I spend a good deal of time convincing people not to try dangerous natural treatments (like colloidal silver), helping them get themselves and their children up to date on vaccinations (because my patient population tends to be under-vaccinated), and getting people to take their medicines as prescribed (insulin, BP meds, antibiotics, you name it). Many people come to an ND after having been their own doctor for some time. If they don't have an open-minded physician, they won't tell them what other things they're taking or doing, exposing themselves to the risk of interactions and injury. Unconditional positive regard is your best tool to make sure your patients feel listened to and stay safe, because your acceptance of them personally makes your evidence-based advice easier to hear.