Finding a doctor you trust and believe in could improve your health – partly because of the placebo effect, an intriguing new study suggests.
Research published this week in Nature Human Behavior indicates that patients may pick up on subtle, inadvertent facial cues from the health workers caring for them – a curled lip, a furrowed brow – that reveal the healer’s belief about how effective the treatment will be.
And that can have a real impact on the treatment’s outcome.
"It used to be considered a smirky field," says one research psychologist of the study of placebos. “But it's starting to be understood that these effects are very powerful, and that we can use them to the benefit of people."
There seems to be some sort of relationship between wild swings in blood sugar and the development of Alzheimer’s disease, particularly for people who have metabolic syndrome or diabetes, according to hints from several reports at a meeting this month of the Society of Neuroscience.
The question, scientists say, is exactly how might uncontrolled blood sugar elevate the risk for dementia about twofold?
Calm down, cat people – this one’s all about the life-lengthening gift of canine companionship.
A team of cardiologists searched the medical literature for studies that, using a variety of parameters, compared the health of people who have dogs with those who don’t.
According to the analysis, which looked at 10 different studies, “Dog ownership was associated with a 24% risk reduction for all-cause mortality [during the 12-year study period] as compared to non-ownership.”
And the drop in deaths among people with heart disease seemed particularly striking.
It’s not just that dog owners tend to get more exercise because they walk the dog, Harvard cardiologist Dhruv Kazi says.
A second study from Sweden that tracked the health of more than 100,000 people controlled for that likelihood and found a similar heart-sparing, health-enhancing effect that was particularly pronounced among people who live alone, versus those who live with others.
“That suggests the companionship of a dog is possibly very important to their heart health,” Kazi says.
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