My daughter, Catrina, has been working on more of her fantastic portrait drawings. You can see some of them, including her more recent works, on her gallery.

Oh, and in case you didn't know, we've been using her portrait of Norma Jeane Baker (AKA Marilyn Monroe) for the site logo for a while now... As you can see, Catrina has an affinity for classic movie stars and starlets.

Is it ethical for a doctor to talk up a drug in exchange for payments from drug companies?

You may be unaware of a practice that is considered 'ethical' conduct between drug companies and doctors. Doctors are offered compensation to give talks to other doctors about the benefits of certain drugs.

Here's an interesting story from a doctor on the receiving end of drug company 'incentives'. The story begins:

On a blustery fall New England day in 2001, a friendly representative from Wyeth Pharmaceuticals came into my office in Newburyport, Mass., and made me an offer I found hard to refuse. He asked me if I’d like to give talks to other doctors about using Effexor XR for treating depression. He told me that I would go around to doctors’ offices during lunchtime and talk about some of the features of Effexor. It would be pretty easy. Wyeth would provide a set of slides and even pay for me to attend a speaker’s training session, and he quickly floated some numbers. I would be paid $500 for one-hour “Lunch and Learn” talks at local doctors’ offices, or $750 if I had to drive an hour. I would be flown to New York for a “faculty-development program,” where I would be pampered in a Midtown hotel for two nights and would be paid an additional “honorarium.”

Why do we go off-program when we know better?

Why do we allow temptation to derail us?

Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, describes the battles in our brains, in an experiment that may help us understand why we choose things that aren't always best for us.

Here's an interesting note. An antibiotic seems to delay aging in mice even if treatment starts late in life...

A new star has appeared in the field of drugs that delay aging in laboratory animals, and are therefore candidates for doing the same in people.

The drug is an antibiotic, rapamycin, already in use for suppressing the immune system in transplant patients and for treating certain cancers.

Rapamycin treatment had the remarkable effect of extending life even though it was not started in the right dose until the mice had lived 600 days — equivalent to a person at age 60. Most interventions that prolong life in mice, including a very low-calorie diet, need to be started early in life to show any effect.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/health/research/09aging.html

This could be a bit of bad news if you do the low carb diet thing and eat unlimited quantities of meat, bacon, hot dogs, etc. It appears that heavy intake of meats and animal fats may increase your risk of pancreatic cancer, according to a recent study:

Researchers followed 500,000 people who had completed a food diary for an average of six years.

The Journal of the National Cancer Institute paper found those who had the most animal fats in their diet had a higher risk of developing the cancer.

UK experts said cutting down on the fats was a way of reducing risk.

There has previously been confusion over whether there was a link between animal fats and pancreatic cancer, with different studies reaching opposite conclusions.

People are irrational.

I've observed over the years that many people assume that the term LOW FAT means NON-FATTENING or HEALTHY. That they can eat as much of that stuff as they want, and it will only make them healthier. I blame the simplistic "fat bad, carbs good" education campaign for much of this bizarre behavior.

The overwhelming evidence shows that the best way to improved health and longevity is through overall caloric reduction (note that I'm not advocating a simplistic low-fat or low-carb lifestyle, only that reducing overall caloric intake seems to be the key component of improving fitness.)

I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say "It's fat free! and proceed to eat an economy-sized helping. Reading the ingredients label usually shows sugar or high fructose corn syrup as the second or third ingredient.

I'm not the only one who has concluded that people are just plain nuts when it comes to food packaging and labeling. Check out the following stories:

I've always had this nagging suspicion that daylight savings time might be responsible for a variety of deleterious health effects -- including things like increases in traffic accidents and other operator-related incidents -- so it came as no surprise when I read the following news blurb:

When researchers in Sweden examined the impact of daylight saving time on heart attack rates in that country, they discovered that people had slightly fewer heart attacks on the Monday after they set their clocks back in the fall and slightly more heart attacks in the days after they set their clocks ahead in the spring.

They presented their findings in a letter published in the Oct. 30 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

[snip]

Researchers have discovered -- surprise! -- that obese women are self conscious (and/or fear injury) and those emotions prevent successful exercise:

Obese women may have a 'phobia' of exercise which stops them being active because they feel self-conscious and are afraid of injury, researchers argue.

Far from being excuses to be lazy, these 'mental barriers' are real problems which must be overcome to encourage overweight women to exercise more, a conference was told.

[snip]

[Participants] were asked what factors stopped them from exercising at the start of the programme, three months into it and at the end.

Low fat diets are not the best way to lose weight according to a new study.

The research which looked at more than 300 obese people found those who stuck to a Mediterranean or low carbohydrate diet lost more weight over two years.

Low fat diets are the most commonly recommended diets in the UK to help people lose weight, and also to reduce the risks of heart disease and cancer.

However, researchers led by a team at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, found those on a Mediterranean diet lost on average 60 per cent more weight.

Link (telegraph.co.uk)