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Health
& Medicine
Vital Signs
. Vital
Signs
The Healing Power of Stories
Herbal Supplements Can Interfere with HIV/AIDS Meds ... and
Who
Can Predict the Staying Power of Your Relationship? With
anthrax in the news these days, it seemed like a good idea to provide some info
on anthrax that might not be the stuff making the headlines.
...
- The Healing Power of Stories.
The holiday season is a time of,
among other things, stories. And cultural traditions have recognized
for a long time the importance of stories to health and well-being.
But increasingly, the healing power of stories has been coming to the
attention of the medical community.
.
One
example is a recent review of a book entitled Tell Me a Story: The
Life-Shaping Power of Our Stories by Daniel Taylor [Bog Walk Press,
2001] in MedScape's
on-line General Medicine Journal [free reg. required]. Evidently,
Taylor, who is a Professor of English Literature at Bethel College in St.
Paul, Minnesota, came to the attention of reviewer, Dr. Beverly Steinman, of
the Northwest Center for Physician-Patient Communication, at an earlier
Annenberg conference on patient safety.
.
While
Dr. Steinman acknowledges that Taylor's Tell Me a Story is not
written specifically for the medical community, she says its "the type
of book that can expand horizons so that health professionals may go beyond
the usual approach to patients." She also goes on to emphasize in
particular the sixth chapter, "Healing Broken Stories," which,
according to Steinman, "illustrates strongly how stories can play a
role in the practice of medicine." She goes on to note that
"sharing stories -- especially those of brokenness -- can lead to a
connection between healer and patient that empowers the therapeutic
relationship beyond its usual confines."
. - Herbal
Supplements Can Interfere with HIV/AIDS Meds
Researchers at the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [NAAID] have reported
that garlic supplements -- which many ordinarily think of as a helpful
supplement with a variety of uses, including fighting infections and
lowering cholesterol and blood pressure -- were found to reduce the efficacy
of saquinavir, a protease inhibitor commonly used as part of cocktail
regimens in the treatment of HIV/AIDS.
.
In
a sample of healthy test participants, three weeks of daily intake of garlic
supplements were shown to reduce serum blood levels of saquinavir by more
than 50%. And even after the participants stopped taking the
supplements and were re-tested 10 days later, blood levels were still 35%
below what would have been expected. According to a Doctor's Guide
report, senior co-author Judith Falloon, M.D., an AIDS clinical researcher
at NAAID said, "We saw a definite, prolonged interaction. The
clear implication is that doctors and patients should be cautious about
using garlic supplements during HIV therapy."
.
The
garlic supplement study was the second by the team of researchers, who had
earlier found that the common herbal remedy St. John's Wort exhibited a
potentially dangerous interaction when used with the protease inhibitor
indinavir. They turned their attention next to garlic because, since
many HIV/AIDS treatment regimens often result in increased cholesterol
levels, the cholesterol-inhibiting properties associated with garlic had
made it a popular supplement among those being treated for HIV/AIDS.
The researchers are not sure about precisely why garlic supplements causes
the reduction in blood levels of saquinavir. They do know that both
garlic and protease inhibitors share the same pathway into the body -- the
CYP450 enzyme system, a metabolic route. But how garlic supplements
actually disrupt the uptake of saquinavir is still not clear.
. - Who
Can Predict the Staying Power of Your Relationship?
Stability and
longevity in a relationship isn't always synonymous with good health, but it
is usually a pretty good barometer of some things. But will your
relationship or marriage last? ...
.
In
order to answer that question, Dr. Christopher R. Agnew of Purdue University
and some colleagues undertook a study to see whether or not
"outsiders" can have any real insight into a relationship and its
staying power. According to Agnew, as Reuters' Health recently
reported, despite assumptions to the contrary "friends can possess a
great deal of prognostic information concerning our involvements."
.
Agnew
& Co. studied 74 male-female couples and their friends, including mutual
friends and friends of either individual of the couple. All
participants, including the couple, were then asked to rate the couple on
things like commitment and closeness. The results? The women's friends
were best at predicting the fate of the relationship 6 months down the
road. Men were least likely to be accurate in that regard, and the
mutual friends of both partners of a couple were almost as likely as the
woman's friends to be accurate. But even more interesting, perhaps,
the ability of the women's friends to predict a couple's future remained
significantly accurate "even when the couple members' own perceptions
were taken into consideration." The findings appear in the
December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
. *******
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