Meditation Help Brain Block Out diversion

Mindfulness meditation can help relieve pain and improve memory by regulating a brain wave known as the alpha rhythm, which turns down the volume on distractions. Using meditation was better able to modulate the waves when they were told where to direct their attention after they finished an eight-week course. It has been reported to enhance numerous mental abilities, including rapid memory recall, our discovery that mindfulness mediators more quickly adjusted the brain wave that screens out distraction could explain their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.

The alpha rhythm plays a role in the cells that process senses like touch, sight and sound in the brain's cortex. It helps the brain ignore distractions, helping a person to focus while many things are going on, the findings may explain reports that mindfulness meditation decreases pain perception, Enhanced ability to turn the alpha rhythm up or down could give practitioners greater ability to regulate pain sensation.

Given what we know about how alpha waves arise from electrical currents in sensory cortical cells, these data suggest that mindfulness meditation practitioners can use the mind to enhance regulation of currents in targeted cortical cells. The implications extend far beyond meditation and give us clues about possible ways to help people better regulate a brain rhythm that is deregulated in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and other conditions.

Exercise is solution for People with Arthritis

Exercise is a good way for people with arthritis to control pain and improve physical function. People who have arthritis are often scared to exercise because they think they will hurt themselves, but the condition will only get worse if people don't get moving. The best way to start is to talk to your doctor about exercising and then work with a therapist or personal trainer to establish guidelines.

Exercise offers a number of benefits for people with arthritis, including: increasing muscle strength and endurance to improve joint stability; preserving and restoring joint motion and flexibility; and boosting aerobic conditioning to improve mental health and decrease the risk of other diseases.

Osteoarthritis is the most prevalent form. It occurs when cartilage deteriorates, leaving nearby joints with no cushion between bones. Many people also suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, which occurs when inflammation in the joint causes it to lose shape and alignment. The best type of exercise program can depend which form of arthritis a person has, but some workouts benefit all patients. All arthritis sufferers can benefit from stretching to increase range of motion around an affected joint. The type of stretching one should do depends on which joint is affected. Arthritis sufferers may also want to try light weights a few times a week to build muscle strength and low-impact aerobic exercise such as walking.

Start slow, with 10 to 15 minutes of aerobic exercise every other day, to see how it impacts your body, as your body adapts to the new routine, gradually increase duration to 30 to 45 minutes. Other good exercises can include water aerobics, stationary cycling, gardening, swimming, yoga and Tai-Chi.

Almost 20 percent of Lung Cancer Patients Keep Smoking

Many patients diagnosed with lung cancer as well as their family caregivers continue to smoke even though doing so may risk their recovery and long-term health. They looked at 742 cancer patients and caregivers at multiple sites and found that 18 percent of smokers with lung cancer failed to quit after their diagnosis. Smoking is the leading cause of lung cancer.

Among a subset of smokers with colorectal cancer, which is not strongly associated with tobacco use, 12 percent of the patients continued smoking. An even higher proportion of the patients' family caregivers also kept on smoking 25 percent of those caring for lung cancer patients and 20 percent of those caring for colorectal cancer patients. Most of the caregivers were middle-aged females and were often spouses of the patients. In some cases, both the patient and the caregiver continued smoking. If family caregivers see the cancer patient quit, they're more likely to quit themselves. But if either the patient or caregiver continues to smoke, it can trigger issues of guilt, stigma or blame.

Continued smoking has serious repercussions for lung cancer patients. Patients may develop appetite loss, fatigue, and cough or coughing up of blood, pain and poor sleep. Self-esteem suffers too, and anxiety and depression may also develop. The immediate benefits of quitting smoking are easier breathing, increased circulation and improved efficacy of cancer treatments. People find that once they quit, they have an increased joy of life, no matter how much they believed in the myth that they would miss cigarettes.

Vaccine measured for Deadly Brain Cancer

Adding up a new vaccine to standard therapy extensive survival for people with the most deadly type of brain cancer. The patients were divided into two groups: Both received surgery, radiation and the chemotherapy drug temozolomide, but one group of 18 patients also began receiving injections of the new vaccine one month after completing radiation and continued to receive the vaccine as long as it appeared to be effective.

Median survival time for those in the vaccine group was 26 months, compared with 15 months for the control group. Progression-free survival was 14.2 months in the vaccine group, compared to 6.3 months in the control group. The vaccine appeared to stimulate an immune response in approximately half of the patients who received it, suggesting such responses were linked to increased survival time, but the numbers are so small that we cannot conclude this with any degree of certainty.

The vaccine knocks out a growth factor associated with the most aggressive form of the brain cancer. The presence of EGFRvIII allows cancer cells to multiply out of control, seeding new tumors throughout the brain, the researchers explained. Even with advances in chemotherapy and radiation, prognosis for patients with glioblastoma is poor, with an average survival time of one year after diagnosis.

Why Is Quitting Smoking So Hard?

There are a variety of reasons why quitting smoking is so hard. These reasons can be broken into medical reasons, psychological reasons and practical reasons. In one way or the other these reasons may overlap. However in order to understand a variety of reasons why people fail to stop smoking it is worthwhile to categorize them in this manner.
Due to these reasons many people spend almost their whole life attempting to quit smoking but still finding it extremely hard. A simple grasp of some of these reasons may in itself change the entire game plan turning failures into surprising successes.


Medical Reasons
Medical reasons that explain the difficulty of quitting smoking are embedded in the biological work of nicotine in tobacco. by way of background what causes tobacco to be addictive is the interaction between nicotine and a smoker's brain. Nicotine alters the brain receptors leading to total dependency. Any attempt to stop smoking will lead to severe withdrawal symptoms a form of protest from the brain using your body. Nicotine addiction is therefore the strongest and most important reason why quitting tobacco smoking is so hard. The backlash can be so severe that many people become so gripped with fear to ever try again condemning themselves to a life of cigarettes.

Psychological Reasons
There is yet another side of the story to the difficult associated with stopping cigarettes. Some people are gripped with the fear of the unknown. This makes it difficult to quit. Often this is also fed by the general knowledge that quitting is hard making a lot of people failures whilst they still have cigarettes on their mouths. This means the battle has to be worn in the brain if one is to quit for good.

Doctors often advise that quitting smoking is also a matter of the willingness to do so. Just deciding to quit without the needed accompanying will-power will go so far. The individual making a decision to quit will need to be fully mentally prepared for what follows. This is why counseling and quit smoking programs produce better results in patients than those who go alone.

Practical Reasons
Practical reasons why stopping smoking is hard are found in the practical steps one needs in order to succeed. For example, most people decide to quit smoking yet they continue hanging out with people who smoke. They expose themselves to what are known as triggers. they easily find themselves triggered into smoking relapse.

Other practical reasons include the methods people choose to help them stop smoking. people who quit cold turkey almost always fail compared to people who use medications such as nicotine replacement products. All these are a matter of choice. What is it that you choose as your way to stop smoking. Of all the three reasons the most difficult to deal with is the medical reasons followed by the psychological reasons.