Loneliness is Cold, Really

Research published in the journal Psychologlical Science shows that feeling loneliness literally feels cold. "Unpopular" participants in studies were more likely to want hot soup or coffee and to report a lower room temperature than other participants involved in the research at the University of Toronto.

Raising the temperature may help someone who is feeling loneliness much like light therapy helps those suffering from seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Question is: Why is science continually surprised by the correlation between mind and body?

Medicare Progress

Recently, Medicare agreed to provide coverage for the Ornish Program, the only medically-proven therapy to reverse heart disease without drugs or surgery. This is the first time that Medicare has covered a program of comprehensive lifestyle changes, something insurance companies aren't even doing yet.

Way To Go Medicare!

It's good to see government health care leading the way, especially when it involves saving money and avoiding drugs and surgery. Dr. Ornish and his colleagues are now training and licensing health professionals from around the world in his program for reversing heart disease for free in an open source model ... a radical new trend in medicine.

You may have read about Dr. Dean Ornish in the news lately. Dr. Ornish has expanded his research and recently directed the first randomized controlled trial demonstrating that comprehensive lifestyle changes may stop or perhaps even reverse the progression of prostate cancer. The initial results demonstrated that 500+ genes were modified by lifestyle in only 3 months, basically turning on more cancer-fighting genes and turning off genes that support cancer growth. For those of you familiar with Bruce Lipton's work or UnBreak Your Health you recognize this is the new science of Epigenetics.

More Mind-Body Connection

The facts continue to pile up about the Mind-Body connection but doctors continue to ignore it or dismiss it as so much "woo-woo" New Age mumbo-jumbo. The latest evidence comes from research with 1,032 adults with whiplash injuries in Sweden.

"There is a dose-response relation between recovery expectations and the degree of subsequent disability," accord to Dr. Lena Holm of the Institute of Environmental Medicine in Stockholm. Surveys were taken about 23 days after their accident and again six months later.

As expected those with less initial disability had higher expectations for recovery. But more thorough review produced an interesting discovery. Compared with individuals reporting the highest expectations of recovery, those with the lowest expectations were FOUR TIMES more likely to have higher disability and TWO TIMES more likely to have moderate disability six months later.

In other words, early identification of people with low expectations for recovery from whiplash injuries may be a better indicator of future disability. No mention of whether Sweden will begin using some type of complementary or alternative therapy to improve expectations.

NBC Series on Mind-Body Medicine

Have you caught the NBC News series this week on Mind-Body medicine? Monday's segment featured Duke Integrative Medicine where they talked about the benefits of health and wellness. The catch: trying to get insurance companies to realize it's better and cheaper to pay for wellness than it is disease management. Big task, but with hospitals realizing that it's better to capitalize on the rising consumer popularity of complementary and alternative medicine perhaps there's hope the insurance companies will "get it" eventually too.