Tea Treatment

ScienceDaily (Sep. 16, 2008) — Drinking chamomile tea daily with meals may 

help prevent the complications of diabetes, which include loss of vision, nerve damage, and kidney damage, researchers in Japan and the United Kingdom are reporting.

The findings could lead to the development of a new chamomile-based drug for type 2 diabetes, which is at epidemic levels in this country and spreading worldwide, they note. Their study appears in the Sept. 10 issue of the ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.

In the new study, Atsushi Kato and colleagues point out that chamomile, also known as manzanilla, has been used for years as a medicinal cure-all to treat a variety of medical problems including stress, colds, and menstrual cramps. Scientists recently proposed that the herbal tea might also be beneficial for fighting diabetes, but the theory hasn't been scientifically tested until now. (Full Story at sd)

I'm glad they found something that can help people. What I don't get, however, is why the focus is always creating a drug that bandaids a problem rather than focusing on the root cause. 

Placebos in Kids

It's a strange finding nestled inside a weird phenomenon: children are 50 percent more likely than adults to respond favorably to placebos.

So concludes a Public Library of Science Medicine review by French pediatricians of anti-epilepsy drug studies. If replicated in other drugs, researchers may need to adjust their analyses of clinical drug studies involving kids.

What could account for the tendency of kids to feel better after taking a drug designed to do nothing? The reasons, write the researchers, "remain largely unknown and mostly speculative." (Full Story at wired)

What do you think folks? I wonder if imagination has something to do with it. The whole placebo thing, in general, facinates me.

The Magic Pill

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2008) — Trying to reap the health benefits of exercise? Forget treadmills and spin classes, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies may have found a way around the sweat and pain. They identified two signaling pathways that are activated in response to exercise and converge to dramatically increase endurance.

The team of scientists, led by Howard Hughes Medical Investigator Ronald M. Evans, Ph.D., a professor in the Salk Institute's Gene Expression Laboratory report in the July 31 advance online edition of the journal Cell that simultaneously triggering both pathways with oral drugs turned laboratory mice into long-distance runners and conferred many of exercise's other benefits.

In addition to their allure for endurance athletes, drugs that mimic the effects of exercise have therapeutic potential in treating certain muscle diseases, such as wasting and frailty, hospital patients unable to exercise, veterans and others with disabilities as well as obesity and a slew of associated metabolic disorders where exercise is known to be beneficial.(Full Story at sd)

If it can help people with rare diseases I'm all for it, but I'm just too skeptical (bitter?) to believe that the drug companies will leave it there. If this drug ever does make it to market, it will be perscriped like crazy. The real problem is that people will start thinking they can eat anything (junk) and look better by taking this pill, and everything will be OK. It just doesn't work that way, and you can't convince me otherwise.

Seconds Please

Police in Russia are investigating after pupils stripped off their clothes, climbed walls or lay on the floor laughing after their school dinners were spiked with drugs.The teenaged students were given ecstasy in their soup and drinks at their school in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in eastern Russia.

Doctors who were called in said the students showed signs of intoxication and prosecutors later found traces of ecstasy.

The students ranged in age from 13 to 15-years-old. (From 13wham)

I would assume this was a prank done by one of the students, but whose to say. I would like to hear how this eventually turns out.

IQ In a Pill

. . .That’s when I stumbled across a small story in an American scientific magazine. It said there was a spiky debate across America’s universities about the increasing use by students of a drug called Provigil. It was, they said, Viagra for the brain. It was originally designed for narcoleptics in the seventies, but clinical trials had stumbled across something odd: if you give it to non-narcoleptics, they just become smarter. Their memory and concentration improves considerably, and so does their IQ. . .

When the American journalist David Plotz took Provigil, he said it should be given a slogan. Just as valium was marketed as “the housewife’s little helper,” he said this should be sold as “the boss’ little helper.” It makes you work better and harder than before. . .

Is all this just the placebo effect: I expect it to do this to me, so it does? Perhaps. But in the clinical trials, it worked much better than the placebo. (Full Story at johannhari)



Make sure to read the whole article. Its some pretty interesting stuff. It also raises a lot of ethical questions. I would have to think about it some more before giving an opinion on whether or not someone should take the stuff, but I'm interested in your opinion. What do you think?