Despite the fact that most bosses equate naps with laziness, the article also discusses the plight of one New York city-based company, MetroNaps, a company that is touting the benefits of napping in workplaces everywhere.

MetroNaps offers “fatigue mitigation” services for companies big and small, including sleep assessments (testing and interviews to determine if employees are sleep-deprived and how that may be affecting their work) and the installation of futuristic bed-chairs called EnergyPods. Company headquarters also has a quiet retreat in the Empire State Building for clients to sleep during the day

If your workplace hasn’t accepted the idea of napping for productivity, I suggest utilizing your lunch break for taking advantage of the power nap.

To assess the benefits of Green care, the researchers asked ninety patients (59 women and 31 men) with schizophrenia, affective disorders, anxiety, and personality disorders to complete self-assessment questionnaires on quality of life, coping ability and self-efficacy, before a 12-week period spending three hours, twice a week working with the farm animals.

The research results showed that the patient’s experience with the farm animals provided positive results on the patient’s ability to cope with psychiatric symptoms and thus improving their quality of life. In addition, after six months self-efficacy was shown to be better in the treatment group than in the control group.

Orthorexics are typically raw food enthusiasts, vegetarians and vegans that obsessively check food labels, avoid junk food, plan menus and often eat a healthy diet so they can feel “pure.”

What is the problem with being concerned about what you ingest? Some believe the problem is not that these people want to eat healthy; it’s that they are completely preoccupied with planning their next meal. The article also goes on to say that because Orthorexics often refuse to eat out, shunning restaurant food that is fraught with artificial ingredients, they may suffer from isolation and depression.

I’m not sure I buy into this whole thing. I can see how being completely obsessed with anything can hinder one’s progress in life, however I think there is an important distinction that needs to be made between people that are just concerned about being healthy and those that are all-consumed by it.

The study, conducted by the research division of Kaiser Permanente, looked at 6,583 men and women in their 40’s, measuring their abdominal diameter in order to determine whether each had a concentration of body far around their midsection. The researchers then looked at medical records for these same individuals an average of 36 years later, finding that 1, 049 now had dementia. The researchers concluded that the twenty percent of individuals in the study with the greatest concentration of fat in the midsection, when measured in their 40’s, were three times as likely to develop dementia later in life.

It may start with a belittling comment at a staff meeting. Later it becomes gossip to co-workers and forgetting to invite someone to an important work event. If the bully is a supervisor, victims may be stripped of critical duties, then accused of not doing their job, says Gary Namie, founder of the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group based in Bellingham, Wash.

Another study out of the University of Manitoba reported that the effects of such emotional bullying are often “more severe than that of sexual harassment”.

So what can one do about the workplace bullying? Well, New York State is considering an “anti-bullying bill”, since many of the workplace regulations aren’t able to adequately address this problem. A number of other states have followed suit, but without much success so far.

“Insomnia is both common and chronic among adolescents,” wrote lead author Robert E. Roberts, Ph.D., a professor of health promotion and behavioral sciences at The University of Texas School of Public Health. “The data indicate that the burden of insomnia is comparable to that of other psychiatric disorders such as mood, anxiety, disruptive and substance abuse disorders. Chronic insomnia severely impacts future health and functioning of youths.”

Researchers went on to say that adolescents with insomnia are likely to seek medical attention and so the primary care physician would likely be an important instrument in the screening and treatment of insomnia.

To spite the positive benefits to Alaska’s bottom line, it’s definitely not a win for the rest of us. The fact that Lilly didn’t admit fault for not disclosing the drugs possible side effects from doctors and patients raises a bigger issue. Should pharmaceutical companies have to let the public know about any possible side effects no matter how small they believe the chance of a patient developing them?

I believe a person should know all the risks, however small, so that they can make an informed decision. Also, their doctor should know all the risks too, in order to advocate for the patient’s best interests. Otherwise, what’s to stop companies from even completing adequate testing to ensure a drug’s safety, if they are not going to disclose such information to the public.

The site, patientslikeme.com, allows a user to search for other people who may be suffering from the same ailments and share a wealth of information such as symptoms and treatment, in excruciating detail and also create your own profile.

Although a great deal of profiles on the site are from people suffering from MS, AIDS, ALS and Parkinson’s disease, searching through the “Mood” tab of the website, I was able to view information about patients with mental health problems such as, OCD, Depression and Bipolar Disorder, among others. One thing which is really exciting about this site is that it allows you to track a wide variety of data and expresses it in a graphical format so that it is easy to see fluctuations.

While this site seems like a good place to get information about what others are doing about their illness, please exercise your best judgment when posting your personal health information online, because once you do, it’s out there for all the world to see. Maybe you should test the waters first — joining the site is free, but you can search for profiles and information without signing up for anything.

1) If you feel as though your therapist is “off-course” with his/her approach or treatment suggestions, be direct; discuss your concerns with your therapist right away. Therapists are human and therefore subject to make errors in judgment just like the rest of us.
2) If your therapist makes a suggestion you don’t like, such as a medication or treatment you don’t agree with, make sure to get all the information about the suggestion before completely discounting it.
3) Once your therapist’s suggestions have been completely laid out, if you still don’t agree, you may have the option to invite a second therapist into the sessions to act as a consultant. This consultant would work with the primary therapist and yourself in order to establish a more collaborative relationship. Once the conflict is resolved, the consultant would discontinue coming to the sessions and you and your therapist will continue working together.

This article points out that while leaving one therapist for another is always an option, it may be discouraging to have to start over with a new therapist, especially if a significant amount of time has been put in to establish the patient/therapist relationship, so it’s best to try and reconcile the communication problems rather than start all over with another therapist.

The team’s 15-year study of 1,000 senior citizens revealed that women with had higher levels of anxiety at the beginning of the study lived longer than women with lower levels of anxiety. To spite any anxiety level changes from year to year, these results remained consistent. This was not the case for men however, those of which with high levels of anxiety tended to die earlier. The researchers believe that these results may be due to the fact that anxious women seek medical attention more often than the women with lower levels of anxiety or men in both the low and high level of anxiety groups.

1) Think old people can’t “get-down”? I guess you haven’t seen The Zimmer’s new video, a remake of Pete Townsend’s song, My Generation. This geriatric band has a median age of 79; the youngest member is 64, the oldest 100! The band also has a MySpace page which you can view here.

2) I’m pretty sure I can’t run a marathon and I’m considerably younger than 101 year-old Buster Martin, a man from the UK that is doing just that. Check out this article the BBC news ran on Martin. By the way, Buster is still working three days a week as a plumber.

3) Check out this article about 62 year-old Marlene Limmer who’s favorite out door sport is white water rafting. She also enjoys canoeing and hiking, but she’s most looking forward to trying rock climbing and rappelling.

4) Okay, you’re not into rock bands or extreme sports, but you still need to get some exercise. If you’re thinking Wii is only for the grandkids, think again. Check out the Erikson Sports Wii bowling championship which features four teams of elderly people who are serious about Wii bowling and seriously talking trash to their elderly opponents.

Saks, now associate dean of research at UCLA law school and well-known scholar on competency and the right to refuse treatments in patients with mental illness, talked about her book about her life; “The center can not hold; my journey through madness” at the UCLA Medical school grand rounds, which you can view by clicking on the link from this blog entry at schizophrenia.com. Elyn is quick to say that she’s not a person who has overcome a mental illness, but someone who has lived a full and rich life with a mental illness. Saks also goes on to say that without extensive mental health treatments, she would probably not be able to manage outside of a hospital.

Drunkorexia is not an official medical term. But it hints at a troubling phenomenon in addiction and eating disorders. Among those who are described as drunkorexics are college-age binge drinkers, typically women, who starve all day to offset the calories in the alcohol they consume. The term is also associated with serious eating disorders, particularly bulimia, which often involve behavior like bingeing on food — and alcohol — and then purging.

The article states that the typical anorexic avoids alcohol because of the high calorie content; however they may ingest alcohol to numb the anxiety around having to eat or having eaten a full meal. Further there are some anorexics that use alcohol as a food substitute;

”There are women who are afraid to put a grape in their mouth but have no problem drinking a beer,’ said Douglas Bunnell, the director of outpatient clinical services for the Renfrew Center, based in Philadelphia.

In this study, which examined mice with early-stage Huntington’s disease, researchers attempted to delay the progression of dementia through providing more mentally and physically stimulating environments. According to the study, the mice with these enhanced environments performed better on memory tests then than those mice that were provided less stimulating environments.

While this study was conducted with mice as opposed to human subjects, these results support the fact that further research in this area is crucial toward delaying dementia in humans. This study is especially important since a lot of nursing homes and assisted living facilities that house Alzheimer’s patients still do not have a dynamic physically and mentally stimulating environment.

A New York Times article reports that acupuncture and “ear seeds” in particular is a growing trend in the treatment of conditions such as depression, anxiety and addiction. The article titled, “A Traditional Therapy Finds Modern Uses”, discusses the application of ear seeds to a patient being treating for cigarette addiction. Specifically, the application of ear seeds is referred to as auricular therapy and involves applying seeds from the Vaccaria plant, using small bits of tape, to specific areas on the outside of the ear. Reportedly the seeds are now used at the Promises Treatment Center in Malibu, a popular drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. In addition, the article mentions that ear seeds are being used to treat people who have been traumatized from 9/11, Katrina and the California wildfires.

The article reports that there is no specific evidence proving the ear seeds effectiveness in treating these mental ailments, however it’s something to consider before taking a more invasive pharmacological route.