Cenacle Treatment Centre

Lack of sunshine,obesity link

Researches at Aberdeen university studied over three thousand women in Scotland and concluded that a lack of vitamin D caused by a lack of sunshine could be the reason why so many people in Scotland are obese. Those with a body mass index of thirty four produced ten percent less vitamin D compared with those of average weight.

Super healthy fruit

A new super healthy fruit known as the Baobab will soon be marketed in the UK thanks to clearing from EU ruling authorities.

Originating from Africa this fruit contains, six times the vitamin C of an orange and twice as calcium that is in milk, also containing potassium, iron and antioxidants.

The shell of this fruit is too hard to crack so it will be marketed as an ingredient in cereal bars and smoothies. Sales of this product will also help more than two and a half million of the poorest families in southern Africa.

Side effects of ritalin

Why is the only answer to ADHD seem to be a mass produced over prescribed Ritalin, is this for our children's benefits or the interests of Pharmaceutical industries.

Side effects of Ritalin

• drowsiness
• dizziness
• reduced appetite
• rebound – irritability/ depression for the hour following doseage
• headaches
• shakes, tremors
• gastrointestinal upset
• sleep difficulty
• anxiety
• increasing blood pressure.

How depression debilitates

A number of studies suggest a role for depression in many other medical conditions, especially in worsening an illness once it has taken hold. The evidence is mounting that for patients with serious disease who are depressed , it would pay medically to treat their depression too.

Eighty percent of heart attack patients attribute their illness to factors they feel they cannot change- such as worry, stress or overwork- and such beliefs have shown to cause further anxiety and depression. And depression does appear to double the risk of premature death. In a study of two thousand eight hundred and thirty two middle aged men and women tracked for twelve years, those who felt a sense of nagging despair and hopelessness had a heightened rate of death from heart disease. For the three percent or so who were most severely depressed, the death rate from heart disease, compared to the rate for those with no feelings of depression, was four times greater.

How chronic anxiety kills

Anxiety- the distress evoked by life’s pressures- is perhaps the emotion with the greatest weight of scientific evidence connecting it to the onset of sickness and course of recovery. When fear prepares us to deal with danger ( a presumed benefit in evolution), then it has served us well. But in modern life anxiety is more often out of promotion and out of place- distress comes in the face of situations that we must accommodate or that are conjured by the mind as threats to our self esteem, not physical dangers of the type early man encountered. Repeated bouts of anxiety signal high levels of excess stress.

A1993 review in the “Archives of internal medicine” of extensive research on the stress/disease link noted a broad spectrum of effects these included;

• Compromising immune function to the point that it can speed the metastasis of cancer;
• Increasing vulnerable to viral infections;
• Exacerbating plaque formation leading to atherosclerosis and blood clotting leading to myocardinal infarction.
• Accelerating the onset of type one diabetes and the course of type two diabetes
• And triggering or worsening an asthma attack.

Stress can also lead to ulceration of the gastro-intestinal tract, triggering symptoms in ulcerative colitis and in inflammatory bowel disease. The brain itself is susceptible to the long-term effects of extreme stress, including damage to the hippocampus, and so to memory. In general, evidence is mounting that the nervous system is subjected to “wear and tear” as a result of prolonged stress.

How chronic anger kills

In the automatic stress response, the prevailing emotion which precipitates nearly one thousand four hundred instantaneous physiological changes is either anger (if it is perceived as one that should be avoided).Recent research indicates how these powerful emotions have medical significance, even if the biological mechanisms by which they have their effect are yet to be fully understood.
Patients at Stanford university medical school who had suffered a first heart attack all experienced a drop in the pumping efficiency of their hearts five to seven percentage points when asked to recount incidents that had made them angry. While recalling the upsetting incident, the patients said they were only about half as angry as they had been while it was happening. Yet this is a range that cardiologists regard as a sign of myocardial ischemia, a dangerous drop in blood flow in the heart itself.

A hostility test conducted on doctors while still at medical school showed that those with the highest hostility levels were seven times more likely than those with low levels to have died by the age of fifty. Being prone to anger is a stronger predictor of dying young than are risk factors as of smoking, high pressure and high cholesterol. Further findings show that in heart patients undergoing angiography, scores on a test of hostility correlate with and coronary artery disease.

Emotions and the immune system

In 1974, research in a laboratory at the school of medicine and dentistry in the university of Rochester, USA, rewrote biology's map of the body. A psychologist, Robert Ader, discovered that the immune system, like the brain, could learn. His finding sent shock-waves trough the medical world. he prevailing wisdom had been that only the brain and central nervous system could respond to experience by changing how they behaved. Ader's finding led to the development of what is now the leading edge medical science of psychoneuroimmunology or pni. It prompted the investigation of what are turning out to be myriad ways in which the nervous system and the immune system communicate - biological pathways that make the mind, the emotions and the body not separate, but intimately entwined.

The immune system is the body's "brain" defining the body's own sense of self of what belongs within it and what does not. A network of researchers is finding that the chemical messengers that operate most extensively in both brain and immune system are those that are most dense in neural areas that regulate emotion. It was already known that emotions have a powerful effect on the autonomic nervous system, which regulates everything from how much insulin is secreted to blood-pressure levels.

Polarised conventional views

Historically, medicine in modern western society has defined is mission in terms of curing disease the medical disorder while overlooking illness the patients experience of disease. By accepting this view of their problem, patients experience of disease. patients have been taught to ignore how they are reacting emotionally to their medical problems or to dismiss those reactions as irrelevant to the cause of the problem itself. That attitude has been reinforced by a medical model that dismisses entirely the concept that mind influences body in any consequential way.

Yet there is an equally extreme ideology in the other direction : the notion that people can cure themselves of even the most pernicious disease simply by making themselves happy or thinking positive thoughts, or that they are some how to blame for having made themselves sick in the first place. The result of this "attitude will cure all" rhetoric has been to create widespread misunderstanding and confusion about the extent to which illness can be affected by the mind and, perhaps worse, something to make people feel guilty for having a disease, as though it were a sign of some moral lapse or spiritual unworthiness.

Does the mind matter

Abstract: Reviewing recent research across several disciplines makes it clear not only that the emotions communicate direct with the immune system - but how they do so. The causative effect of chronic negative emotions upon a wide range of life threatening conditions, like cancer and heart disease, is now statistically proven. The case for incorporating an emotional intervention as a standard element of medical care for serious disease is now irrefutable.

Reflexology for child birth

Reflexology can be extremely beneficial through the many stages of child birth,

Pregnancy is one of the most special and emotional experiences a woman can go through. Hormonal changes occur dramatically, provoking an alteration in many physiological functions. Reflexology can help restore balance in most of the cases, treating conditions symptomatically, alleviating and stimulating. These are a few examples of particular cases in which reflexology has demonstrated to be beneficial in pregnancy and as a preventative of serious conditions during labour.

• Anaemia, Anxiety,Appetite regulation
• Backache, Blood pressure regulation
• Haemorroids, Insomnia, muscular fatigue
• muscular tension, Nausea and vomiting
• Oedema
• To improve flexibility of pelvic floor

During Labour, reflexology is of great help to improve and stimulate several conditions that occur during the process, and as a consequence, helping the mother to better administrate her energies.