” IF WE HAVE A PULSE, WE HAVE A PURPOSE.”
Unknown
Month: January 2020
Can A Spine Stimulator Stop Chronic Pain?
After working with a Pain Management doctor for six months he’s determined I’m a good candidate for a Spine Stimulator. It works by leads placed in your mid-back attached to the implanted stimulation device, the stimulation disrupts the pain signals to the brain thus relieving the pain. I had my psychological evaluation yesterday and now waiting for insurance approval. My hope is to have the trial surgery in early February.
Melinda
#Weekend Music Share
I’m so glad you stopped by today. I appreciate you and so glad to be a part of your day. Melinda
“#SoSC” Prompt for Week is “last call”
Your prompt for #JusJoJan and Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “last call.” Talk about the enterprise (sales or service) conducted by the last phone call you received from a business you’re not associated with (i.e. your workplace), or talk about that phone conversation itself. Have fun!
There was a time when “last call” was a total bummer and often meant an end to a fun night of drinking. After 15 years of sobriety and not being in a bar at that hour the prompt “last call” didn’t get any reaction. There is a famous sale at Neiman Marcus called Last Call and you know about even if you don’t shop there.
It’s a great time to pick through all the high end goods looking for that can’t pass up buy. I find myself looking for the diamond in the rough at below cost prices. Like most retail it’s not really a “last call’ it’s more of a siren to pull shoppers in.
Have a great weekend. Thanks for reading, I appreciate you.
Melinda
Join us for the fun and sharing good media stories.
For more on the Stream of Consciousness Saturday, visit Linda Hill’s blog. Here’s the link:https://lindaghill.com
Here are the rules for SoCS:
- Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.
- Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.
- There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.
- Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top. NOTE: Pingbacks only work from WordPress sites. If you’re self-hosted or are participating from another host, such as Blogger, please leave a link to your post in the comments below.
- Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.
- Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!
- As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.
- Have fun!
Friday Quote
Here’s the truth about CBD, from a cannabis researcher
IDEAS.TED.COM
Sep 23, 2019 / Jeffrey Chen, MD
iStock
Is CBD a cure-all — or snake oil? Jeffrey Chen, executive director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative, explains the science behind the cannabis product.
CBD gummies. CBD shots in your latte. CBD dog biscuits. From spas to drug stores, supermarkets to cafes, wherever you go in the US today, you’re likely to see products infused with CBD. There are cosmetics, vape pens, pills and, of course, the extract itself; there are even CBD-containing sexual lubricants for women which aim to reduce pelvic pain or enhance sensation. CBD has been hailed by some users as having cured their pain, anxiety, insomnia, depression or seizures, and it’s been touted by advertisers as a supplement that can treat all of the above and combat aging and chronic disease.
As Executive Director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative, I’m dedicated to unearthing the scientific truth — the good and the bad — behind cannabis and CBD. My interest was sparked in 2014 when I was a medical student at UCLA, and I discovered a parent successfully treating her child’s severe epilepsy with CBD. I was surprised and intrigued. Despite California legalizing medical cannabis in 1996, we weren’t taught anything about cannabis or CBD in med school. I did research and found other families and children like Charlotte Figi reporting success with CBD, and I knew it was something that needed to be investigated. I established Cannabis Research Initiative in the fall of 2017, and today we have more than 40 faculty members across 18 departments and 8 schools at UCLA working on cannabis research, education and patient-care projects.
So what exactly is CBD and where does it come from? CBD is short for cannabidiol, one of the compounds in the cannabinoid family which, in nature, is found only in the cannabis plant (its official scientific name is Cannabis sativa l.). THC — short for tetrahydrocannabinoid — is the other highly abundant cannabinoid present in cannabis that’s used today. THC and CBD exert their effects in part by mimicking or boosting levels of endocannabinoids, chemical compounds that are naturally produced by humans and found throughout our bodies. Endocannabinoids play an important role in regulating mood, memory, appetite, stress, sleep, metabolism, immune function, pain sensation, and reproduction.
Despite the fact that they’re both cannabinoids found only in the cannabis plant, THC and CBD are polar opposites in many ways. THC is intoxicatingand responsible for the “high” of cannabis, but CBD has no such effect. THC is addictive; CBD is not addictive and even appears to have some anti-addictive effects against compounds like opioids. While THC stimulates the human appetite, CBD does not. There are areas where they overlap — in preliminary animal studies, THC and CBD exhibit some similar effects, including pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory properties and anti-oxidant and neuroprotective effects. In some early research, they’ve even shown the ability to inhibit the growth of cancer cells, but years of rigorous studies need to be conducted before we’ll know whether they have the same impact on humans.
Even though humans have been using cannabis for thousands of years, the products available today are not the cannabis that has traditionally been consumed. After cannabis was prohibited at the federal level in 1970 by the US Controlled Substances Act, illicit growers were incentivized to breed strains that had higher amounts of THC, so they could increase their profits without needing larger growing spaces. What they didn’t know was that by driving up THC content, they were dramatically reducing the CBD content. In 1995, after decades of surreptitious breeding, the ratio of THC to CBD was ~15:1, and by 2014 the ratio had jumped to ~80:1 as CBD content further plummeted.
Due to decades of research restrictions in the US and growers’ focus on THC, there are very few human studies that look at CBD and its effects. The strongest evidence we have is that CBD can reduce the frequency of seizures in certain rare pediatric disorders — so much that a CBD-based drug called Epidiolex was FDA-approved in 2018 for this purpose. There is also preliminary human data from small clinical trials with dozens of subjects that suggests CBD may have the potential to be used for conditions like anxiety, schizophrenia, opioid addiction, and Parkinson’s disease. But please note that the participants in these studies generally received several hundreds of milligrams of CBD a day, meaning the 5mg to 25mg of CBD per serving in popular CBD products may likely be inadequate. And even if you took dozens of servings to reach the dosage used in these clinical trials, there is still no guarantee of benefit because of how preliminary these findings are.
But while there is a lack of concrete and conclusive evidence about CBD’s effects, there is considerable hope. Recent legislative changes around hemp and CBD in the US and across the world have enabled numerous human clinical trials to begin, investigating the use of CBD for conditions such as autism, chronic pain, mood disorders, alcohol use disorder, Crohn’s disease, graft-versus-host-disease, arthritis and cancer- and cancer-treatment-related side effects such as nausea, vomiting and pain. The results of these studies should become available over the next five years.
Furthermore, in an effort to protect consumers, the FDA has announced that it will soon issue and enforce regulations on all CBD products. Buyers should beware because the products being sold today may contain contaminants or have inaccurately labelled CBD content — due to the deluge of CBD products on the market, government agencies haven’t been able to react quickly enough so there is currently no regulation in the US whatsoever on CBD products.
While CBD appears to be generally safe, it still has side effects. In children suffering from severe epilepsy, high doses of CBD have caused reactions such as sleepiness, vomiting and diarrhea. However, we don’t know if this necessarily applies to adults using CBD because these children were very sick and on many medications, and the equivalent dose for an average 154-pound adult would be a whopping 1400 mg/day. And while CBD use in the short term (from weeks to months) has been shown to be safe, we have no data on what side effects might be present with chronic use (from months to years).
Right now, the most significant side effect of CBD we’ve seen is its interaction with other drugs. CBD impacts how the human liver breaks down other drugs, which means it can elevate the blood levels of other prescription medications that people are taking — and thus increase the risk of experiencing their side effects. And women who are pregnant or who are expecting to be should be aware of this: We don’t know if CBD is safe for the fetus during pregnancy.
So where does this leave us? Unfortunately, outside of certain rare pediatric seizure disorders, we scientists do not have solid data on whether CBD can truly help the conditions that consumers are flocking to it for — conditions like insomnia, depression and pain. And even if it did, we still need to figure out the right dose and delivery form. Plus, CBD is not without side effects. Here’s the advice that I give to my friends and family: If you’re using CBD (or thinking about using it), please research products and talk to your doctor so they can monitor you for side effects and interactions with any other drugs you take.
So is CBD a panacea or a placebo? The answer is: Neither. CBD is an under-investigated compound that has the potential to benefit many conditions. While it does have side effects, it appears as if it could be a safer alternative to highly addictive drugs such as opioids or benzodiazepines. And thanks to a recent surge in research, we’ll be learning a lot more about its capabilities and limits in the next five years.
Watch his TEDxPershingSq talk now:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Chen, MD , is the founder and Executive Director of the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative where he leads an interdisciplinary group of 40+ UCLA faculty conducting cannabis related research, education and patient care. You can follow him @drjeffchen or visit his website http://www.drjeffchen.com.
There’s an art to happy memories — you can make more by experiencing more “first”s
IDEAS.TED.COM
Jan 14, 2020 / Meik Wiking
Jared Oriel
Studies show we’re better at remembering the novel and the new, so let’s use this tendency to add to our storehouse of memorable and meaningful moments, says happiness expert Meik Wiking.
Ask any older person to recall some of their memories, and there’s a good chance they will tell you stories from when they were between the ages of 15 and 30. This is known as the reminiscence effect, or reminiscence bump.
Memory research is sometimes conducted by using cue words. If I say the word “dog,” what memory comes to mind? Or “book’? Or “grapefruit’? It’s best to use words that are not related to a certain period in life. For instance, the phrase “driver’s license” is more likely to prompt memories from when you were a specific age than the word “lamp.”
In studies, when participants were shown a series of cue words and asked about the memories they associate with those words and how old they were at the time of the memory, their responses will typically produce a curve with a characteristic shape, the reminiscence bump. The recency effect — a final upward flip of the curve — can usually be seen, too. For example, when asked what memory comes to mind when cued with the word “book,” what people have read recently may pop up more easily than what they read 10 years ago.
You can also see the reminiscence effect in some autobiographies, where adolescence and early adulthood are described over a disproportionate number of pages. If you look at Agatha Christie’s autobiography, which is 544 pages long, the death of her mother happens on page 346, when Christie was 33. In the period that covers the reminiscence bump in her life, memories fill more than 10 pages per year. In contrast, she sums up the events of 1945 to 1965, when she was aged between 55 and 75, in just 23 pages — a little over one page per year.
What do you remember about being 21, or from another year? And how do your memories from different decades compare?
One theory behind the reminiscence bump is that our teens and early adulthood years are our defining years, our formative years. Our identity and sense of self is developing at that time, and some studies suggest that experiences linked to who we see ourselves as are more frequently retold in explaining who we are and are therefore remembered better later in life.
One study found that 73 percent of people’s vivid memories were either first-time experiences or unique events.
Another theory is that the period involves a lot of firsts. Our first kiss, our first flat, our first job. In the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute, we found that 23 percent of people’s memories were of novel or extraordinary experiences.
Novelty ensures durability when it comes to memory. Several studies show that we are better at remembering the novel and the new, the extraordinary days when we did something different. One study by British researchers Gillian Cohen and Dorothy Faulkner found that 73 percent of vivid memories were either first-time experiences or unique events. Extraordinary and novel experiences are subject to greater elaborative cognitive processing, which leads to better encoding of these memories. That is the power of firsts. Extraordinary days are memorable days.
The importance of firsts also means that, say, if you go to university, you are more likely to remember events from the beginning of your first year than later in that same year. In a study led by David Pillemer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, participants were asked to describe memories from their freshman year in college. “We are not interested in any particular type of experience,” said the researchers, “just describe the first memories that come to mind.” The researchers interviewed women who had graduated 2, 12 or 22 years ago from Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
In the second part of the study, participants were asked to analyze, one by one, each of the memories they had described earlier. The memories were rated on the intensity of the emotions the experience involved, the impact the event had on their life (both at the time of the memory and also in retrospect), and the estimated date of the experience they remembered.
The study showed that the majority of memories took place at the beginning of the academic year: around 40 percent in the month of September and around 16 percent in October. These results suggest that transitional and emotional experiences are especially likely to persist in the memory for many years. That is the power of firsts.
In our study, we also found evidence of the power of extraordinary days and novel experiences when it comes to happy memories. That is why I remember every first kiss I’ve ever had — including the very first.
In our study, we also found evidence of the power of extraordinary days and novel experiences when it comes to happy memories. More than 5 percent of all the happy memories we collected are explicitly about firsts. First dates, first kisses, first steps — or traveling alone to Italy at the age of 60 for the first time. The first job, the first dance performance or the first time you watched a movie in the cinema with your dad.
That is why I remember every first kiss I’ve ever had — including the very first. Her name was Kristy and I was 16 and scared of her dad, who was a professional rugby player.
If you want to create a night to remember for dinner guests, serving them something they have not tasted before might do the trick.
New and memorable experiences can also come in the form of food. I was 16 when I first tasted a mango. It was in 1994, I was an exchange student in Australia, and mangoes had not yet been introduced to supermarkets in Denmark, where I grew up.
I remember the sweetness, the texture. I remember thinking, “Where have you been all my life?” Since then, I have been chasing mangoes — other great food experiences out there which I have not yet had. I have tried fermented Icelandic shark and snails in a street market in Morocco. Both made me throw up a little, but I remember those moments quite vividly.
My point is that firsts can come in the shape of gastronomy. If you want to create a night to remember for your dinner guests, serving them something they have not tasted before might do the trick (but maybe not fermented shark, if you want them to come again). Ideally, it would be something that is not over and done with in a second, like a shot of licorice vodka at 3 AM. Nobody remembers that — for several reasons.
Better to go with something like an artichoke, which takes a bit of an effort to eat, as you have to peel each leaf off, dip it in salted butter, then use your teeth to harvest that wonderful flesh. This makes the whole experience longer lasting and multisensory.
It might also be the reason why life seems to speed up as we get older. When we’re in our teens, there are a lot of firsts, while firsts at age 50 are rarer. This is also why studies find that people who immigrated from a Spanish-speaking country to the US have their reminiscence bump at different times, depending on how old they were at the time of the move. Temporal landmarks of firsts and changes of scene play an important role in organizing autobiographical memory. There is a before and an after.
If we want life to slow down, to make moments memorable and our lives unforgettable, we may want to remember to harness the power of firsts. In our daily routines, it’s also an idea to consider how we can turn the ordinary into something more extraordinary in order to stretch the river of time. It may be little things. If you always eat in front of the television, it might make the day feel a little more extraordinary if you gather for a family dinner around a candlelit table—and if you are always eating candlelit dinners, it might be nice to eat dinner during a movie marathon.
Adapted from the new book The Art of Making Memories: How to Create and Remember Happy Moments by Meik Wiking. Published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2019 by Meik Wiking. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers.
Watch his TEDxCopenhagen talk here:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Meik Wiking is CEO of the Happiness Research Institute, research associate for Denmark at the World Database of Happiness, and founding member of the Latin American Network for Wellbeing and Quality of Life Policies. He is the author of The Little Book of Hygge, and he lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.
#Wordless Wednesday
Have a great day, I so glad you stopped by today. Melinda
Mens Healing new video “Beyond Survival: Hope and Healing on Kilimanjaro”
| Dear friends, “Beyond Survival: Hope and Healing on Kilimanjaro” is the 11th addition to the MenHealing library of videos that feature the healing journeys of male survivors. This 22-minute video chronicles the incredible journey of Weekend Of Recovery Alumnus Jordan Masciangelo’s successful climb to the 19,341 foot summit of Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro In January 2019 This Expedition Climb project was a labor of love to heighten public awareness about male sexual victimization and was successful in raising nearly $9,500 for the WOR Scholarship Fund. We are deeply grateful to David James Findlay, a professional television commercial editor in Toronto, for producing this video FOR FREE as a gift to Jordan and to MenHealing. To watch the video click here.  All “Beyond Survival: Voices of Healing” videos now have closed caption accessibility. Several videos are also currently available with Spanish language access; Spanish translation for all videos will be completed soon.Jim Struve Executive Director, MenHealing/Weekends of Recovery www.menhealing.org Stay connected on our social media platforms! |
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Looking For The Light is a proud member of the Chronic Illness Bloggers Network
Looking For The Light is a proud member of the Chronic Illness Bloggers Network. I joined six months ago and want to remind others who may be interested in joining or utilizing the resources they have available.
If you suffer from a Chronic Illness and want more information or to join, you can find us at http://www.chronicillnessbloggers.com.
lookingforthelight.blog 