Is there no limit to academic foolishness?

I was amazed to read in The Guardian’s blogs that a Professor Joseph Ferrari from DePaul University in Chicago claims procrastination is a serious disease that needs to be recognized and treated by clinicians. He blames the ‘condition’ for everything from depression, low self-esteem, and insomnia, to “discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor,” and “more accidents at home involving unmended appliances.” (“Oh, I’ll do it tomorrow”)

Another academic, Professor Piers Steel from Calgary University has calculated, apparently, that: “the beeps notifying the arrival of email are . . . causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.” How he works this out is beyond me — and I suspect beyond any kind of logic or commonsense. (“Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters”). Continued

Playing classical piano music to patients prior to surgery has unexpected benefits

In an article in The Guardian, Susan Tomes reports a study by an eye surgeon in Hawaii that found playing live classical piano music in the “preoperative holding area” produced a beneficial decrease in heart rate and other signs of anxiety once the patient was in the operating theater (“Going under the knife? Ask for a concerto first”).

There seems to be something about classical music — maybe the gentler tempo and strong melodic line of many pieces — that has a power to relax not offered by more up-beat, popular genres. I know that, when I was at university, I always studied to the sound of classical music in the background. I still much prefer to hear classical pieces if I’m feeling stressed.

Even when driving, I find that music that is too fast, aggressively rhythmic or loud adds to my anxiety and distracts me from what I’m doing. In heavy traffic, I have to turn it off. Continued

What are you wishing on your children?

Perfectionism is a form of control that lasts a lifetime. Parents who seek too much from their children leave them emotionally and mentally crippled. Adults who demand too much of themselves increase their stress, ruin their health, and destroy most of their relationships. Organizations that demand too much of their employees produce burnout, increased turnover and a corporate culture riddled with no-holds-barred competitiveness — and often dishonesty too.

The killer that lurks within perfectionism is that constant sense of criticism: the knowledge that whatever you do is never going to be quite good enough; the sense that every achievement will create an instant demand to do better. It is, in the words of Hara Estroff Marano, author of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, in Psychology Today (“Pitfalls of Perfectionism”):

. . . an endless report card; it keeps people completely self-absorbed, engaged in perpetual self-evaluation—reaping relentless frustration and doomed to anxiety and depression.

Continued

We aren’t becoming more cynical, we’re becoming more dependent on authority and simplistic views of the truth

Ben Goldacre, writing about a week ago in “Comment is Free,” the blog network of the British newspaper The Guardian, mentioned an interesting study into the way the media handle science stories (“Why reading should not be believing”).

The researchers found that 65% of stories didn’t correctly deal with “the study methodology and the quality of the evidence.” Obsessed with giving out eye-catching ‘truths’ from authority figures in white lab-coats, these reporters skidded over any drawbacks or uncertainties and reduced the numerical information in the studies to simple headlines, preferably with big numbers in them. Continued

. . . now we have health issues linked to personality traits

It seems that just about every personality trait comes with its own characteristic type of disease, according to an article in Britain’s Daily Mail (courtesy of The Huffington Post>)(“Your personality type could decide what makes you ill”).

The article, by Roger Dobson, lists research that suggests personality traits are more significant than previously thought in future health. Quite how the mechanism works is unknown, though it may be a mixture of behavioral pressures and genetic tendencies.

The article then helpfully lists a series of personality traits and the diseases linked to them. Here are some examples Continued

Your sexual orientation may be linked to brain configuration

According to Healthzone.ca (part of the website of The Toronto Star), a study has found similarities in MRI scans both between the brains of gay men and straight women and between the brains of lesbians and straight men (“Gayness linked to brain”).

A new Swedish study shows significant similarities between the brains of homosexual men and straight women and between the brains of lesbians and heterosexual men. Some researchers are saying this provides important proof that people are born gay and don’t choose to act that way. Continued

Here’s a ‘map’ you can use to get the most out of your siesta

The Boston Globe has published a simple, graphical guide to taking a nap. I guess Americans have never quite got the habit, which comes naturally to certain Europeans like the Spanish and Italians. Where I live in the desert Southwest, afternoon temperatures this past week have hovered between 106 and 111 degrees Fahrenheit (around 42 to 44 degrees Celsius). The only sensible thing to do in heat like that is take a nap. And we don’t even have to content with the high humidity that turns similar or lower temperatures into potential killers.

Besides, researchers are now telling us that even a short nap in the middle of the day — or any other time you need one — makes you mentally more alert and improves your judgment and decision making. It also improves blood pressure and lowers the risk of heart attack and stroke. I guess the main thing that still stops many people from heeding this advice is that quintessentially American bug bear: the Puritan Work Ethic. Continued

The ‘placebo effect‘ is real enough, even if what causes it isn’t quite as clear as the result

According to a report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a study in the online journal PLoS Medicine reported that placebos, simple sugar pills with no medical qualities, were as effective as four brand-name antidepressants in treating mild to moderate depression. Needless to say, this research, which included data the drug companies never published, caused something of a stir (“A little good news: It’s all in your head”).

The report concludes:

Drug–placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication.

So, even in severely depressed people, the benefits of medication surpassed those of the placebo mostly because they didn’t respond to ‘the placebo effect’, not because the medication was so much more effective. Since so-called double-blind trials, demanded by just about all government drug-licensing agencies, are based on showing that the drug produces results that the placebo does not, these finding raises some doubt about the quality of the initial research. Continued

If every stage in humanity’s development has a typical cause of death, ours may be the diseases of abundance

You might think that advances in medical knowledge, living standards and nutrition would mean that most people today — at least in the developed world — should be able to live out their full life-span. Longevity has increased on average, but I suspect that may be more due to better sanitation and the ability to deal routinely with medical situations that, in the past, would have meant almost certain death (such as infected wounds, appendicitis and complications in childbirth).

This would certainly be consistent with the idea that each stage of human development comes with its own set of death-causing problems or diseases — as suggested in this article by William Saletan in Slate magazine (“Saturated Fat: The genetic limits of obesity”). Continued

According to neurologist Oliver Sacks it can

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeIn an article on Huffington Post (“The Healing Power Of Music”), Sacks is reported as saying: “Even with advanced dementia, when powers of memory and language are lost, people will respond to music.”

Oliver Sacks is a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, so what he says should carry some weight. He’s also a highly successful author, with books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales to his credit. Continued