Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol 1 Issue 90 i The Art of Healing

The study, published in JAMA Network Open, tracked patients hospitalised for hip fractures in Victoria, Australia from March 2013 to June 2018, who had used gabapentinoids before the injury. Often seen as a safer alternative to opioids for the treatment of neuropathic pain, gabapentinoid use increased eightfold between 2012 and 2018, with one in seven Australians aged 80 and older prescribed a gabapentinoid during this period. Currently, gabapentinoids are within the ten most subsidised medications by volume in Australia. Study co-author and Director of the Centre for Medicine Use and Safety (CMUS) at the Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Professor Simon Bell, said gabapentinoids can be effective for neuropathic pain but can also result in adverse events including dizziness, gait disturbance and balance disorder. “Our results showed patients had 30…

Associate Professor Carlo Longhitano, Head of Psychiatry at JCU, and Dr Sam Manger, GP and Senior Lecturer at JCU, have led this change by integrating deprescribing in the mental health teaching curriculum of future doctors graduating from JCU and postgraduate health professionals trained in lifestyle medicine. “Psychological issues are the most common reason for a patient visit to the GP, increasing from 61% in 2017 to 72% in 2023 according to the RACGP’s General Practice: Health of the Nation report,” said A/Prof Longhitano. “Around 45 million mental health-related medications were dispensed in 2022–23, with 85% prescribed by GPs. Antidepressants are helpful and effective for many people, but they are not generally advised to be used for longer than 6–12 months, and can come with serious side effects,” said Dr Manger.…

True, old age brings with it some physical and cognitive declines that may impact driving performance such as slower reflexes, a shrinking peripheral vision and a reduced capacity to react to fast-moving and changing conditions. But bad driving isn’t exclusive to any agegroup, as a glance at the high rates of accidents among young drivers could tell you. Scientia Professor Kaarin Anstey is an expert in cognitive ageing and has been involved in several projects researching older driver safety at UNSW Sydney. Her team at the UNSW-affiliated institute, Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), has recently completed a randomised controlled trial of older drivers called the Better Drive Study, to see whether driving skills can be improved despite the physical and cognitive challenges of old age. “We know that older drivers have…

AI-Powered Health Insights at Your Fingertips Imagine a world where you don’t have to sift through endless graphs and tables to make sense of your fitness data. Instead, you could simply ask your smartwatch a question and receive a tailored response. “How did I sleep last night?” or “What’s my activity level like today?” With advanced AI now baked into wearables, this is becoming reality. Take the Fitbit Insight Explorer for example. Using this tool within the Fitbit app can answer your questions about sleep, activity, and health trends directly, with no need to manually interpret data. And with Apple’s latest Series 9 users can ask Siri for detailed health information, transforming voice commands into actionable insights. Even Samsung is joining the AI health revolution. The company’s newly introduced Energy…

Australians are increasingly aware of the link between food and mood, but a new survey reveals that almost half of us aren’t making the dietary changes needed to boost our wellbeing. The survey, conducted by one of the world’s leading food and nutrition tracking app MyFitnessPal, found that 64% of Australians have noticed changes in their mood after eating certain foods. Despite this awareness however, nearly half (49%) are not taking steps to adjust their diet to improve their mood and overall wellbeing. The survey highlights a growing understanding among Australians about how nutrition affects mental and emotional health. In fact, 72% of respondents recognise the connection between what we eat and how we feel. “There is no doubt that a nutrient-rich diet plays a crucial role in supporting our…

In the article, ‘Solving Climate Change Requires Changing Our Food Systems,’ published in the leading scientific journal Oxford Open Climate Change, prominent scientists from around the world propose that the pressing nature of irreversible climate change requires rethinking our food systems. Lead researcher Dr Feigin and her co-authors assert that “we must undertake a global shift to a fundamentally plantbased diet and a gradual global reduction and eventual phaseout of intensive factory farming, the most prolific and damaging form of agriculture.” The Food and Agriculture Organisation in the U.S. estimates that demand for meat will double by 2050, which would require approximately 80% of existing forests and shrubland be converted into land devoted to raising animals. Such a trajectory would have devastating consequences for humans and the planet. “As the…

This article is an extract from Saltwater Cure by Ali Gripper. Murdoch Books RRP $29.99. Tony Pearce is living proof of the transformative power of surfing. Every Saturday morning, the 52-year-old army veteran drives for two hours to the New South Wales south coast in his work van, which he’s kitted out with a bed, a surfboard rack, and on the dashboard some healing crystals. Within minutes of arriving at Seven Mile Beach, ‘Big Tony’ as he is known, has changed into his wetsuit, grabbed his new fibreglass board and is out in the sea with a group of other surfers, catching the long rollers the beach is famous for. When the bigger waves throw them off, they dive under before resurfacing and letting out a few whoops of joy.…

Growing Mini-Organs to Find New Treatments for Complex Disease Mayo Clinic investigators are growing three-dimensional human intestines in a dish to track disease and find new cures for complex conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease. These miniorgans function like human intestines, with the ability to process metabolites that convert food into energy on a cellular level and secrete mucus that protects against bacteria. These 3D mini-intestines grown in a dish and known as “organoids,” provide a unique platform for studying the intricacies of the human gut. Brain Stimulation Shows Promise in Treating Drug Addiction A Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon and his colleagues believe deep brain stimulation (DBS), a form of neurostimulation, is poised to solve one of the most significant public health challenges: drug addiction. “Drug addiction is a huge, unmet…

Millions of people who take widely prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs like naproxen and ibuprofen to ease joint pain may unintentionally increase swelling and discomfort in their knees over time, a recent study suggests. The study focused on people with moderate to severe knee osteoarthritis, a condition that typically develops with advanced age as wear and tear on the body erodes cartilage in the joint and makes movement painful. Scientists studied 277 people who took non-steroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) for at least one year to manage their pain, and a control group of 793 people who didn’t use these medicines. At the start of the study, all of the participants had detailed MRI scans of their knees. People using NSAIDs had worse cartilage quality and joint inflammation than individuals who weren’t taking…

Researchers from institutions across Japan teamed up to analyse data on 8,766 volunteers over the age of 65, collected as part of a survey conducted between 2016 and 2018. Self-reported green tea and coffee consumption was crossreferenced against magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans, which measured overall brain volume and features of five different brain regions. “The cross-sectional study found a significant association between lower cerebral white matter lesions and higher green tea consumption (but not coffee consumption) in older adults without dementia, even after adjusting for confounding factors,” say the researchers. Averaged out, those who had three cups of green tea per day had 3 percent fewer white matter lesions compared with those drinking one cup per day. Those who drank seven to eight cups per day had 6…

Most previous research on young-onset dementia has looked at genetics passed down through generations, but in this study, researchers identified 15 different lifestyle and health factors that were associated with young-onset dementia risk. “This is the largest and most robust study of its kind,” said epidemiologist David Llewellyn from the University of Exeter in the U.K., when the results were published in December 2023. The research team analysed data collected on 356,052 people aged under 65 in the U.K. “Excitingly, for the first time it reveals that we may be able to take action to reduce the risk of this debilitating condition, through targeting a range of different factors.” Vitamin D deficiency and high levels of the C-reactive protein (produced by the liver in response to inflammation) also meant a…

Can you imagine a world in which the economy serves us? Wellbeing Economics posits that there is a different way to grow our nations, by letting go of GDP growth as the central guage for economic policy, and focussing on a new set of measures that firmly places the wellbeing of the people, and the wellbeing of the planet as the central tenet. After viewing the film Purpose (released in 2024) which unpacks this concept, The Art of Healing dug a little deeper. What is the Economy? An economy is a system for deciding how resources are used so that goods and services can be produced and consumed. More simply put, it’s the way we produce and provide for one another. We often think of the economy as something given,…

“An overall dietary pattern of eating whole foods from a variety of food groups and much fewer ultra-processed ones provides the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to improving brain health outcomes,” says Bonnie J Kaplan PhD, a research psychologist and c-oauthor of The Better Brain: Overcome Anxiety, Combat Depression, and Reduce ADHD and Stress with Nutrition. Ultra-processed foods, which are typically packaged snack foods and beverages that contain lots of sodium, added sugars, and saturated fats, appear to be a big culprit in the risk for cognitive decline, but alarmingly, they make up a large portion of the typical Western diet. Replacing just 10 percent of ultra-processed foods in an individual’s diet with the same amount (by weight) of unprocessed or minimally processed foods has been associated…

Many people ask me how I stay positive and optimistic despite the challenges I’ve faced. I’ve spent more than a quarter of my life in hospitals. I was part of a trial drug program involving 25 patients worldwide 24 of whom didn’t survive. I was diagnosed with stage four neuroblastoma, a cancer of the central nervous system. I had my first heart attack at 12. At 24, I had bacterial meningitis and got fluid on the brain when I was 28. At the age of 32, I was diagnosed with four more tumours in the throat, the following year they found a melanoma on my nose, six months later we had an 11-week premi baby with a horrible blood disease called sepsis, and late 2022 six more tumours were found.…

Concept Mirror Scans Your Health and Then Talks To You About It Omnia is sort of like if your smart scale and smartwatch decided to team up with an AI chatbot inside your bathroom mirror. This is a smart mirror that measures and displays your health metrics, offers feedback from an AI voice assistant, and then can set you up for a telehealth consultation with a doctor. It can also pull in data collected from other trackers like smartwatches, blood pressure monitors, even a smart bed. The AI voice assistant could potentially even give motivational pep talks. The Verge This Saliva-Testing Wand Knows How Stressed You Are These are stressful times, and Eli Health’s new Hormometer is an at-home kit that tests your cortisol and progesterone levels. Eli Health isn’t…

“Pharmaceuticals are emerging as micropollutants and are a growing global concern as their presence has been reported in freshwater ecosystems, rivers, and oceans worldwide,” says mammologist Dara Orbach from the Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC). In 2020, researchers routinely testing hormone levels in common bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates) were surprised to find multiple pharmaceuticals in the samples of cetacean fat tissue. Biologist Anya Ocampos and colleagues have since run tissue samples from 89 dolphins through a mass spectrometer to see how widespread this contamination was. They found fentanyl – a painkiller 100 times more powerful than morphine – in 24 of the samples, including all postmortem specimens taken from the six dolphins that had died. The sedative meprobamate and the skeletal muscle relaxant carisoprodol were also found in the blubber…

The new study on developing and training an AI model to analyse lung ultrasound videos and diagnose respiratory diseases has been developed by researchers from Charles Darwin University, United International University, and the Australian Catholic University. The model works by examining each video frame to find important features of the lungs, and assesses the order of the video frames to understand the patterns of the lungs over time. It then identifies specific patterns indicating different lung diseases and based on this information, classifies the ultrasound into a diagnosis category such as normal, pneumonia, COVID-19 and other lung diseases. Co-author and CDU adjunct Associate Professor Niusha Shafiabady said the model had an accuracy of 96.57 per cent, with the AI analyses verified by medical professionals. “The model also uses AI techniques…

“They said it was ‘stupid at my age,’” Heather wrote. “But what hurt the most was how easily they could control our relationship - devoid of feeling, love, or passion.” Heather’s story began during the “winter stage” of her life, a time when responsibilities had been fulfilled, dreams chased, and passions thought spent. In the seemingly bleak environment of the aged care home, she unexpectedly found a spark of romance with another resident. “We shared stories from the past, but also began dreaming of new experiences - something that gave life meaning again,” she explained. Although hesitant at first, the two slowly grew closer. “The touch of his hand felt like a connection of souls,” Heather said. “When he kissed me, I felt beautiful and valued - like a person…

Two studies by Flinders University expand on existing evidence that a diet rich in fruit, vegetables, whole grains, fish, legumes and dairy may protect against the risk of gastrointestinal (GI) cancers including bowel cancer - and improve the outcomes of these diseases. “We’ve identified many direct links between poor diet choices and digestive cancers,” says senior author Dr Yohannes Melaku from Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute (FHMRI). “Importantly, we found that a diet high in healthy fats and vegetables, whilst limiting the consumption of sugars and alcohol, could potentially reduce the risk of bowel and other cancers.” “Notably, we found that high-fibre foods such as fruit and vegetables promote healthy gut bacteria that can reduce inflammation. The emphasis on fibre and healthy fats should be an integral part of…

Self-esteem doesn’t just shape how we view ourselves, it impacts every aspect of our mental and physical health. According to Dr. Sanam Hafeez, a New York City neuropsychologist, self-esteem is about how we evaluate our worth, abilities and qualities. And when self-esteem is low, it can pave the way for mental health struggles like anxiety and depression. The good news? You can actively work on improving your self-esteem, and by doing so, significantly boost your emotional health. If you’re looking for ways to elevate how you feel about yourself, here are 10 practical strategies to help you grow your self-worth and emotional wellbeing. 1 SURROUND YOURSELF WITH SUPPORTIVE PEOPLE The company you keep can have a huge impact on your self-esteem. Build a network of supportive, encouraging individuals who lift you…