Is Insomnia Harming Your Immune System? (Guest Post)

Marquette La/Flickr   I recently heard a celebrity doctor say 7 hours of sleep per night is ideal; more than that, we are shortening our life spans. But not long after, I read an article in a health journal advising 8 hours of sleep for optimal health. Obviously, there are conflicting views about how much …

Late Night Nosh Can Damage Your Teeth & Other News of Note

Midnight Snacking Damages the Teeth, Experts Warn (BBC) Eating food in the middle of the night can seriously damage your teeth, Danish experts have warned. Researchers examined medical records of 2,217 Danes and found midnight snacking ups the risk of tooth loss, regardless of the type of food eaten. The University of Copenhagen team blamed …

Mind-Body, Mindfulness & Health

 

A Link Between Stress & Colds

 

Teeth Grinding Linked to Sleep Apnea & Other News of Note

Teeth Grinding Linked to Sleep Apnea (Reuters) There is a high prevalence of nocturnal teeth grinding, or bruxism, in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), particularly in Caucasians. New research presented at CHEST 2009, the 75th annual international scientific assembly of the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP), found that nearly 1 in 4 patients …

Eminently Quotable: Boris Pasternak

The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.

AP’s “Assault on Alternative Medicine”

Another week, another installment in the Associated Press’ ongoing series of articles on what they call “alternative medicine.” Despite being positioned as “news,” the series has appeared highly biased and ill-informed in a way that feeds the needs of Big Medicine. We’ve written about this before (see “The ‘Alternative’ Controversy”). There really seems no need …

Chinese Herbs for Heart Health, the Healing Power of Art & Other News of Note

Ancient Chinese Herbs May Help Heart (UPI) Ancient Chinese herbal formulas for heart disease may produce large amounts of artery-widening nitric oxide, U.S. researchers said. Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston said nitric oxide is crucial to the cardiovascular system because it signals the inner walls of blood vessels to …

Tooth Damage from OJ, Motor Function Loss from Lack of Social Interaction and Other News of Note

OJ Worse for Teeth than Whitening, Researchers Say (PhysOrg) Eastman Institute’s YanFang Ren, DDS, PhD, and his team determined that the effects of 6 percent hydrogen peroxide, the common ingredient in professional and over-the-counter whitening products, are insignificant compared to acidic fruit juices. Orange juice markedly decreased hardness and increased roughness of tooth enamel. Unlike …

Biofilm-Fighting Cool Plasma and Other News of Note

Wiping Out Tooth Infections: Cool Plasma Packs Heat Against Biofilms (ScienceDaily) Though it looks like a tiny purple blowtorch, a pencil-sized plume of plasma on the tip of a small probe remains at room temperature as it swiftly dismantles tough bacterial colonies deep inside a human tooth. But it’s not another futuristic product of George …