The Art of Healing Vol 1 Issue 78

Towards the end of 2021 the Global Wellness Summit put out their trends for 2022, which included the suggestion there was going to be a convergence of healthcare meeting wellness. They argue “a new era is upon us, one where the complementary yet often combative relationship between medicine and wellness gets rethought, leading to new conversations and convergences between these two worlds.” Their reasoning? That the pandemic has provided the shock that has forced healthcare to finally focus on prevention and more holistic models of medicine. I really like to think this is true. I have often thought that it really does take a crisis before people will change – this is what sickness is often about, and we are currently going through a collective crisis – finally. Because, well,…

But a recent study suggests that retreating from compassion in the name of safety may not protect us as we hope. Shutting off our compassionate response may threaten our mental health, the research team found, and fray the social connections that sustain our wellbeing. This research shows the corrosive effect of suppressing our instinct to connect with others, says Leah Weiss, a founding faculty member of Stanford University’s compassion cultivation training program. “When we get into a fear-based, anxiety-driven perspective, we’re going to withdraw and isolate. When we withdraw and isolate, we have even more anxiety, so it leads to a negative loop,” Weiss says. “The whole thing ramps us up, and then our resilience and our resources go down.” How Retreating From Compassion Can Backfire To explore how attitudes toward compassion were…

With the traditional breathing group, the functional connection with the brain’s frontal regions increased, because this region was focused on the body’s internal sensory details called interoception (the conscious refocusing of the mind’s attention to the physical sensation of an internal organ function). Lead researcher and associate professor at the School of Dentistry Alexandre DaSilva says this competed with the external pain signals and inhibited the ability of the somatosensory cortex to process pain. In the virtual reality group, subjects wore special glasses and watched a pair of virtual reality 3D lungs, while breathing mindfully. The technology was developed in-house and the lungs synchronised with the subjects’ breathing cycles in real time. This provided an immersive visual and audio external stimulus. Pain decreased when the sensory regions of the brain…

Penn State researchers used data on diet and mental health collected from more than 24,000 U.S. adults between 2005 and 2016. “Mushrooms are the highest dietary source of the amino acid ergothioneine - an anti-inflammatory which cannot be synthesised by humans,” said lead researcher Djibril Ba, who recently graduated from the epidemiology doctoral program at the College of Medicine. “Having high levels of this may lower the risk of oxidative stress, which could also reduce the symptoms of depression.” White button mushrooms, which are the most commonly consumed mushroom variety in the U.S., contain potassium, which is believed to lower anxiety. In addition, certain other species of edible mushrooms, especially Hericium erinaceus, also known as Lion’s Mane, may stimulate the expression of neurotrophic factors such as the nerve growth factor…

This earlier detection by the Self-Administered Gerocognitive Examination (SAGE test) is critical to effective treatment, especially as new therapeutics for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are being developed and approved. “New disease modifying therapies are available and others are currently being evaluated in clinical trials, and we know that the earlier cognitive impairment is detected, the more treatment choices a patient has and the better the treatments work,” said Dr. Douglas Scharre, director of the Division of Cognitive and Memory Disorders in the Department of Neurology at Ohio State and lead author of the study published in the journal Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy. While the test does not definitively diagnose problems like Alzheimer’s, it allows doctors to get a baseline of their patients’ cognitive functioning, and repeat testing allows them to follow their memory and thinking…

You can load up your plate with kale, quinoa, salmon, avocado, and all kinds of other incredibly nutritious food, but if you’re in an anxious state of mind when you sit down to eat, then your body will not receive all the nourishment from that meal. Here’s how it works. When you feel agitated, worried, or tense while eating, this stressed-out mood actually changes your body’s physiology. Any guilt or judgement about health, or shame about your food choices is perceived as a stressor by the brain and turns on your sympathetic nervous system, triggering your body’s stress response. To your body, any kind of stress means, “Danger!” which kicks off a series of events to get you primed to deal with it. How Your Body Reacts To Stressors What happens?…