Physical and Emotional Pain: It’s All the Same to Your Brain

Heartache. Hurt. Crushed. Broken-hearted. Tortured.

We all know the vocabulary of emotional pain. It turns out there is a deeper truth underlying the metaphorical use of terms describing physical injury to describe our emotional injuries. According to a study published this spring in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our brains don’t distinguish emotional from physical pain. Although we can intellectually identify the source of the “injury” as being emotional rather than physical, the same neural circuitry is fired up by both kinds of pain.

Researchers discovered that areas of the brain heretofore exclusively associated with physical pain were stimulated when subjects were shown photos of romantic partners who had jilted them. The discovery that the pain of rejection registers just as deeply as a literal body blow gives new insight into the complexities of the mind-body connection.

Scientists have long noted the correlation between depression and the onset of physical conditions such as fibromyalgia, arthritis and colitis. A reciprocal connection is suggested by anecdotal evidence that shows that people may even feel symptoms of depression or some nonspecific emotional distress as a prelude to the onset of a physical illness like a cold, or even as a symptom of an undetected cancer.

Understanding how deeply our emotional pain registers in our brains can also give us permission to process our hurt feelings without a sense that we are being weak or indulgent. Emotional injury is as real as physical injury and deserves the same level of attention so that we can heal and move on.

This compelling new evidence of the connection between mental and physical health gives important support for an Inclusive approach to health. By giving our need for emotional self-care the same priority as we do our needs for internal nutritional care and topical skincare, we give ourselves the best opportunity to look and feel our best.

Teaching Children to Take Control of Their Health

Children in the developed world are suffering, in unprecedented numbers, from a host of health problems related to obesity. And sadly, obesity is just one symptom of an unhealthy lifestyle that may reverse a 100-year trend toward longer and healthier lives. Inactivity, ignorance about health basics, Cultural Stress® and a high-calorie diet that is low in the diversity that marks good nutrition appear to be the principle culprits.

So how do we help the next generation to change direction?

Inclusive Health in Education is helping kids understand how small shifts in their habits can lead them to a healthy, life-sustaining lifestyle.

The pilot project for Inclusive Health in Education is a ten-week program that not only teaches kids why skincare, diet, exercise and stress management matter—it gives them an opportunity to see how basic indicators of health, like weight and blood pressure, start to move in a positive direction as they adopt a healthier lifestyle.

The lead educator for the pilot project is Inclusive Health Practitioner Paula Coyne. Taking Inclusive Health into schools has been an eye-opener for Paula. “It was startling to discover that 90 percent of the kids entering the program had high blood pressure. These are elementary and middle-school children who are showing the kind of compromised health we expect to find in a sedentary person who is in late middle age. But the poor health comes as no surprise when you find out that some children cannot identify whole fresh vegetables because they have never seen them at home.”

Read the rest of this entry »

What You Need to Know About Melanoma

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, every year close to 70,000 people in the U.S. will be diagnosed with melanoma, and nearly 9,000 will die of the disease. The good news is that with routine skin inspections and prompt removal of any suspicious skin features, the cure rate is excellent. So when do you call the doctor? 

Here’s some basic guidance for all skin cancers. Consult your doctor if:

• You see a change in the color or texture of your skin. New growths, changes in size or color of a mole or other darkly pigmented growth or spot should be checked. Melanomas are typically darker than the surrounding skin.
• You see or feel a change in the appearance of a bump or nodule.
• You see scaliness, oozing or bleeding.
• You see pigmentation that spreads beyond a defined border, such as the edge of a mole or mark.
• You see a mole, spot or mark that is asymmetrical or has irregular or scalloped borders.
• You feel a change around a mole or mark such as itchiness, tenderness or pain.

Read the rest of this entry »

Healthy Vitamin D Levels: One More Reason to Love Salmon

A number of exciting studies have come out in the last few years suggesting that the benefits of Vitamin D are much broader than just bone health. While long recognized as essential for the body to absorb calcium, Vitamin D may also play a critical preventative role in a wide range of health concerns, including diabetes, cancers, chronic inflammation and high blood pressure.

This new focus on Vitamin D has also revealed that about 25 percent of the adult population may have some degree of Vitamin D deficiency. Fortunately there are three easy ways to boost your Vitamin D levels. If you expose your unprotected skin to UV rays it will quickly synthesize all the Vitamin D you need. Naturally, this plan puts your skin in harm’s way and increases your risk of premature aging and sun-related cancers. Darker skin that is more naturally resistant to sun damage is also less efficient at synthesizing Vitamin D because the melanin that darkens the skin absorbs the UV light needed to trigger synthesis.

A second option is supplementation. Vitamin D dietary supplements are cheap and readily available. The current recommended daily allowance for adults is 600 IU. The third, and most delicious, option is making Vitamin D–rich foods part of your diet. While many foods, such as milk, are fortified with Vitamin D, many fish that are naturally high in omega fats, such as salmon, black cod, mackerel and tuna, are also naturally high in Vitamin D. As an example, a single three-ounce serving of sockeye salmon has approximately 450 IU of Vitamin D.

Because Vitamin D is fat-soluble, your body will store Vitamin D in fatty tissue to use as you need it. This also means that if you are determined, you can get too much of a good thing. Wildly excessive amounts of Vitamin D can lead to cardiovascular issues and other negative consequences, so current guidelines recommend an upper limit of Vitamin D consumption for adults from all sources at 4,000 IU. Curiously, there is no risk of Vitamin D toxicity associated with sun exposure.

Given the known and potential importance of Vitamin D to long-term good health, it’s important to have your levels tested periodically by your doctor. This is doubly important as we grow older because our ability to absorb Vitamin D from our diet and to synthesize it from UV light both diminish over time.

Radiation: Real and Imagined Dangers

By Howard Murad, M.D., FAAD

The continuing release of radioactive materials from the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan has justifiably caused a great deal of concern around the world.

But what exactly is the nature of the danger posed by radiation?

Radiation is a broad term that covers waves or fields of energy of all sorts. There are the generally harmless forms of radiation that we harness for our everyday use, such as infrared energy, visible light, microwaves, electromagnetic energy fields and radio waves. The forms of radiation that most concern us, in the context of a nuclear event, are the forms that have the potential to pass into or through our bodies.

This type of radiation is known as ionizing radiation, because as it passes through matter it can cause that matter to become electrically charged or “ionized.” It is this ionizing process that can destroy or disturb the DNA of our cells. Destruction of our cells on a scale that exceeds our body’s ability to replace them results in injury—a radiation burn, for instance. Massive or chronic damage to our DNA can result in a mutation—the root of all cancers.

Read the rest of this entry »