A report released last summer states that U.S. consumers spent $14.8 billion on natural supplements in 2007. According to a recent investigation conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) undercover government employees received consistently false information when shopping for supplements, and analyses show most supplements contain trace amounts of contaminants.

Of the 40 herbal supplements tested for the GAO investigation, 37 contained trace levels of at least one hazardous compound. These heavy metal levels are down from a 2004 study, published in JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association, which found dangerous levels of heavy metals in 20 percent of herbal supplements tested.

Despite these findings the FDA only requires pre-market evaluation of products containing any “new dietary ingredient” that has not previously been used in a supplement. However, levels of exposure depend on how much of a supplement a person takes.

The lab also tested the supplements for pesticides and found that 18 of 40 contained traces of at least one formula. Although the EPA sets limits for many pesticides, if a pesticide has not been sufficiently evaluated to have an established maximum level, any amount is considered too much. Sixteen of the supplements thus exceeded the acceptable pesticide levels, and four of the pesticide residues were from formulas not approved for use in the U.S., according to the report.

SOURCE: Curaxis, May 28th, 2010
www.scientificamerican.com

Although the number of women who smoke during pregnancy has declined, smoking is still a major cause of newborn deaths, premature births, and babies born underweight. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains that infant lives could be saved if more mothers quit smoking before pregnancy. The study was published in the July issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and analyzed data from 3.3 million births during 2002. The study suggests that 23-34 percent of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome cases were directly linked to mother’s smoking. Smoking mothers are also responsible for about $232 million in health care costs each year. 

Source:  icyou.com

A study by researchers with Emory University Rollins School of Public Health concludes that at least one large-scale work site wellness program actually fostered meaningful changes, including a drop in employee absenteeism.

To measure the benefits of wellness programs, researchers put in place at 12 Dow Chemical work sites between 2006 and 2007. At five of the sites, employees received intensive interventions; four site received moderate interventions, and three sites implemented the company’s standard programs.

Employee absenteeism fell from 3.9 days in 2006 to 3.4 days in 2007, researchers found. Meanwhile, between 2006 and 2007, average absenteeism at moderate/intense sites was 1.5 days lower than at standard sites. Dow saved about $414.90 per employee per year.

Source: FierceHealthcare Nov. 2009

The sheer volume of often conflicting demands placed upon hospitals — coupled with a deteriorating financial climate—can make the notion of improving care quality seem like an idealistic improbability at best, an impossibility at worst. Many healthcare executives are pretty skeptical that quality improvement is a realistic goal in current healthcare landscape.

In response to the current situation The Institute for Health Improvement (IHI) has designed an “improvement map” to help hospital leaders sift through myriad regulations, measurements, and demands to hone an essential set of processes and craft an organization-specific plan for quality improvement.

The Improvement Map™ is an interactive, web-based tool designed to bring together the best knowledge available on the key process improvements that lead to better patient care. It offers clear guidance helping hospitals set change agendas, establish priorities, organize work, and optimize resources.

View The Gap Analysis Chart

View The Introductory Video

Source: The Institute of Health Improvement

In order for healthcare leaders to make quick accurate assessments they need to develop skills in four
key areas:

Understanding the messiness of improving healthcare
Determining why they are measuring
Understanding and depicting variation
Translating data into information

It’s important the leaders understand that the complexity of healthcare challenges cannot be adequately understood with simple models or theories; and the awareness that rarely does a single variable drive an outcome.

It’s also important to be clear about the purpose of the measurement efforts and make the distinction between the three faces of performance measurement: accountability, research, and improvement.
Healthcare organizations regularly engage in and use all three approaches to performance measurement. These efforts can become counterproductive by mixing measurement for accountability or research with measurement for improvement. When the aims and methods of the three aspects of performance measurement are mixed, we run the risk of thin slicing the intended measurement aim and increase the probability of arriving at incorrect conclusions.

Source: Robert Lloyd, PhD June 2010; Institute for Health Improvement

According to Deepak Chopra the most significant health benefits of meditation are stress reduction, better sleep, lower blood pressure, improved cardiovascular function, improved immunity, and the ability to stay centered in the midst of all the turmoil that’s going on around you. Meditation helps you do less and accomplish more.

Click on the link below to view Deepak Chopra defining meditation, performing a healing meditation and demonstrating the law of attraction and meditation.  Rediscover the purpose of meditation and get tips from one of the world’s most respected authors and spiritual guides:  

Meditation Techniques Demonstrated by Deepak Chopra

A cognitive bias is something that our minds commonly do to distort our own view of reality. Some are adaptive, for example, because they lead to more effective actions in given contexts or enable faster decisions when faster decisions are of greater value. Others result from a lack of appropriate mental mechanisms, or from the misapplication of a mechanism that is adaptive under different circumstances.
Here are some examples:

Gambler’s Fallacy
The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Certain probabilities, such as getting a heads when you flip a (fair) coin, are always the same. The probability of getting a heads is 50%, it does not matter if you’ve gotten tails the last 10 flips.

Reactivity
Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed.

Pareidolia
Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. The Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Testees are shown images of ambiguous pictures, and asked to describe what they see. Responses are analyzed to discover the testee’s hidden thoughts.

Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Self-fulfilling prophecy is engaging in behaviors that obtain results that confirm existing attitudes. A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that causes itself to become true. For example, I believe that I am going to do poorly in school, so I decrease the effort I put into my assignments and studying, and I end up doing poorly, just as I thought.

Economic Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies. Because a recession is 2 quarters of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decline, you cannot know you are in a recession until you are at least 6 months into one. Unfortunately, at the first sign of decreasing GDP, the media reports a possible recession, people panic and start a chain of events that actually cause a recession.

The Halo Effect
The Halo effect is the tendency for an individual’s positive or negative trait to “spill over” to others’ perception of them. For example, the Physical Attractiveness Stereotype is when people assume that attractive individuals possess other socially desirable qualities, such as happiness, success and intelligence. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when attractive people are given privileged treatment such as better job opportunities and higher salaries.

Herd Mentality
Herd mentality is the tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.

Reactance
Reactance is the urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice. “Reverse Psychology” is an attempt to influence people using reactance. Tell someone (particularly children) to do the opposite of what you really want, and they will rebel and actually end up doing what you want.

Hyperbolic Discounting
Hyperbolic discounting is the tendency for people to prefer a smaller, immediate payoff over a larger, delayed payoff. Interestingly, delay time is a big factor in choosing an alternative in decision making. Put simply, most people would choose to get 20 dollars today instead of getting 100 dollars one year from today.

Escalation of Commitment
Escalation of commitment is the tendency for people to continue to support previously unsuccessful endeavors.

The Placebo Effect
The Placebo effect is when an ineffectual substance that is believed to have healing properties produces the desired effect. Especially common with medications, the placebo effect has been observed when individuals given a sugar pill for a real ailment report improvement.

Confirmation Bias
The confirmation bias is the tendency to look for or interpret information in a way that confirms beliefs. Individuals reinforce their ideas and attitudes by selectively collecting evidence or retrieving biased memories.

Availability Heuristic
The Availability heuristic is gauging what is more likely based on vivid memories. The problem is individuals tend to remember unusual events more than everyday, commonplace events. For example, airplane crashes receive lots of national media coverage. Fatal car crashes do not. However, more people are afraid of flying than driving a car, even though statistically airplane travel is safer.

Illusion of Control
Illusion of Control is the tendency for individuals to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly have no influence on. For example when playing craps in a casino, people will throw the dice hard when they need a high number and soft when they need a low number. In reality, the strength of the throw will not guarantee a certain outcome, but the gambler believes they can control the number they roll.

Planning Fallacy
The Planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate the time needed to complete tasks. The planning fallacy actually stems from another error, the “Optimism Bias”, which is the tendency for individuals to be overly positive about the outcome of planned actions. People are more susceptible to the planning fallacy when the task is something they have never done before. The reason for this is because we estimate based on past experiences. “Realistic Pessimism” is a phenomenon where depressed or overly pessimistic people more accurately predict task completion estimations.

Restraint Bias
Restraint Bias is the tendency to overestimate one’s ability to show restraint in the face of temptation, or the “perceived ability to have control over an impulse,” generally relating to hunger, drug and sexual impulses. The truth is people do not have control over visceral impulses; you can ignore hunger, but you cannot wish it away. Unfortunately, this bias has serious consequences. When an individual has an inflated (perceived) sense of control over their impulses, they tend to overexpose themselves to temptation, which in turn promotes the impulsive behavior.

Just-World Phenomenon
The Just-World Phenomenon is when witnesses of an injustice, in order to rationalize it, will search for things that the victim did to deserve it. This eases their anxiety and allows them to feel safe; if they avoid that behavior, injustice will not happen to them. This peace of mind comes at the expense of blaming the innocent victim. The Mean World Theory is a phenomenon where, due to violent television and media, viewers perceive the world as more dangerous than it really is, prompting excessive fear and protective measures.

Endowment Effect
The Endowment Effect is the idea that people will require more to give up an object than they would pay to acquire it. It is based on the hypothesis that people place a high value on their property. This happens frequently when people sell their cars and ask more than the book value of the vehicle, and nobody wants to pay the price. This bias is linked to two theories; “loss aversion” says that people prefer to avoid losses rather than obtain gains, and “status quo” bias says that people hate change and will avoid it unless the incentive to change is significant.

Self-Serving Bias
A Self-Serving Bias occurs when an individual attributes positive outcomes to internal factors and negative outcomes to external factors. This is very common as people regularly take credit for successes but refuse to accept responsibility for failures. When considering the outcomes of others, we attribute causes exactly the opposite as we do to ourselves. When we learn that the person who sits next to us failed the exam, we attribute it to an internal cause: that person is stupid or lazy. Likewise, if they aced the exam, they got lucky, or the professor likes them more. This is known as the Fundamental Attribution Error.

Cryptomnesia
Cryptomnesia is a form of misattribution where a memory is mistaken for imagination. Also known as inadvertent plagiarism, this is actually a memory bias where a person (inaccurately) recalls producing an idea or thought. There are many proposed causes of Cryptomnesia, including cognitive impairment, and lack of memory reinforcement. False Memory Syndrome is a controversial condition where an individual’s identity and relationships are affected by false memories that are strongly believed to be true by the afflicted. Recovered Memory Therapies including hypnosis, probing questions and sedatives are often blamed for these false memories.

Bias Blind
The Bias blind spot is the tendency not to acknowledge one’s own thought biases. There is actually a bias to explain this bias (imagine that!). The Better-Than-Average Bias is the tendency for people to inaccurately rate themselves as better than the average person on socially desirable skills or positive traits. Coincidentally, they also rate themselves as lower than average on undesirable traits.

Attribute Substitution
This explain cognitive biases. Attribute substitution is a process individuals go through when they have to make a computationally complex judgment. Instead of making the difficult judgment, we unconsciously substitute an easily calculated heuristic (Heuristics are strategies using easily accessible, though loosely related, information to aid problem solving). These heuristics are simple rules that everyone uses everyday when processing information, they generally work well for us; however, they occasionally cause systematic errors, aka, cognitive biases.

Source: Listverse, June 2010

Metaskills are skills needed to learn how to learn. They are higher-order skills – like critical thinking, the ability to organize information, the strategy of building on what was previously learned, and the belief that repeated practice can make perfect, or at least result in some improvement.  Going very deep into one subject, learning and understanding it over a course of several years, acts as a point of reference that is useful when we learn other subjects.

The subject or topic is almost unimportant – only it’s easier and more enjoyable if we choose something we are interested in: basketball, Jane Austen’s novels, the gastrointestinal tract, martial arts – the list is endless. The principle is that in the process of learning how to do one thing really well, we learn how to learn.

The question is does learning how to do one thing really well have any economic or personal significance anymore?  According to many experts since we don’t know what skills tomorrow are needed, we must strive to impart real understanding and the ability to apply knowledge to new situations. 

Perhaps the deep learning of a single subject can provide that required general reference point to handle different and new situations, not to mention the patience and fortitude to try, try again.

Source: By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty, June 7, 2010 The Christian Science Monitor

The Affordable Care Act has many positive provisions, including new coverage for two million low-income Californians under Medi-Cal and other public coverage programs and for another two to three million who would be eligible for subsidies to purchase private coverage.

Also, people with health problems (“pre-existing conditions”) will not be denied the ability to purchase private coverage based on their health status. And it will be much less likely that a serious illness will be followed by bankruptcy.

However, the law has only a few elements to help reduce costs, and none of that will work as quickly as we need. If we are to avoid bankrupting our society, we must find ways to reduce costs while maintaining and improving the quality of care.

So what is to be done?

• Change the way we pay for health care: paying health care providers to do more things with more expensive equipment will bankrupt California.
• Squeeze out inefficiency in the system: improve the efficiencies through the proper use of modern information technology.
• Give patients real power to choose: give patients, employers and payers more access to cost and quality information so they can understand the value of what they are buying
• Innovate, innovate, and innovate some more: innovations should allow consumers to participate in their own care, promote use of cost-reducing technologies
• Coordinate the hand-off: decisions on implementing reform must be made soon by the current Administration and Legislature. Today’s leaders should focus on establishing effective governance, defining private and public sector roles, and assuring that patients are well-served by new coverage systems. We need a durable foundation to allow a smooth hand-off to a new administration in 2011.

Source: Mark D. Smith, M.D., M.B.A. June 2010, California Healthcare Foundation

A study reported in 2005 showed that even older Americans may improve their memory by instituting a memory-improvement plan consisting of regular mental exercises (working crossword puzzles, word games, brainteasers, and the like), daily physical activity, a healthier diet, and stress reduction.

Stress
Without a doubt, one of the most common reasons that healthy people find themselves becoming forgetful is stress. And it’s not just major, life-changing stress that affects learning and memory. Most of us never realize how much of a toll the day-to-day irritations, hassles, and annoyances can take. Fortunately, high stress-hormone levels over the short term don’t appear to do permanent damage to the brain. As your stress eases or as you employ coping techniques, you should find that your memory improves. On the other hand, there is some evidence to suggest that prolonged exposure to unmitigated stress may damage the hippocampus, making it less able to signal the body to turn off the stress hormones, leading to a vicious cycle of higher and higher stress-hormone levels and further decay of memory and cognition. In time, the hippocampus may actually shrink.

There’s another reason why you may not remember so well when you are under a lot of stress, and it has to do with paying attention. In order to record information well enough to form a memory, you have to be able to focus on the subject you want to remember. Anything that interferes with your ability to pay attention, therefore, will impair your memory. As the sources of your stress monopolize your thoughts, you simply don’t record information the way you normally would, and if the information never gets properly stored to begin with, there won’t be a memory there to retrieve.

Exercise
Studies have found that people who exercise frequently have a distinctive brain-wave pattern, characterized by steep peaks and valleys, that is associated with alertness. These high-exercise folks are better at blocking out distractions and focusing, which means that they are better at paying attention to material that they want to remember and better at retrieving those memories when needed. Research has also found that aerobic exercise can help maintain short-term general and verbal memory. This type of memory is especially important when you want to recall names, directions, and telephone numbers or match a name with a face. Also the results of research reported in March of 2007 suggest an even more impressive role for exercise: building new cells in a specific region of the brain that is associated with the age-related decline in memory that normally begins sometime around age 30.

Sleep
Recent research, especially studies using high-tech tools — such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) — has begun to reveal much more information about the importance of sleep to memory. Such research suggests that it is during sleep that the brain consolidates the initially fragile memories made during the day, reinforcing them and “uploading” them, so to speak, for long-term storage. Once again our old friend the hippocampus appears to play an essential part in the process, storing the day’s memories until they can be consolidated at night. Sleep also facilitates or improves the brain’s ability to remember both declarative information, such as facts and events, and procedural information, such as how to play the scales on a piano keyboard.

Diet
The quality of the diet appears to affect brain health and function, including memory. The best diet for your brain is, basically, the kind that’s also healthy for the rest of your body — a well-balanced diet, filled with whole grains, a wide variety of colorful fresh fruits and vegetables, and moderate amounts of protein, that supplies just enough calories to fuel your daily activities. That diet should also include some fat such as monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats that are high in omega-3 fatty acids but not the saturated fats.

A brain-healthy, memory-wise diet should also provide sufficient amounts of the vitamins and minerals the body needs for health. Especially Vitamin B, C, E, and Magnesium.

Source: Richard C. Mohs, PhD; How Stuff Works