Healthcare Continuing Education

Changing bad habits is not impossible. No matter how long you’ve done them, no matter how many decades. It can be done. By you. By taking a single step. Here’s how:

A controversial decision to reclassify grief as a mental illness has been criticised by medical experts. The change in classification was intended to add flexibility to how early people can be treated for depression following the death of a loved one. But it has led to worries that bereaved people will be treated with pills rather than empathy.

Proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the fat text used to help identify and categorize mental illness, are not sitting well with many mental health professionals and the public.

Giant portion sizes are one of the culprits behind the epidemic of bulging waistlines, and nowhere is the portion-creep more evident than in restaurants with French fry-heavy meal deals or plates overflowing with pasta. Now scientists are tapping into the psychology of eating to find ways to trim portions without people feeling cheated — focusing on everything from the starchy sides to the color of the plates.

Want coworkers and clients to enjoy being in your company? Just follow these absurdly simple rules.

Every February 14, across the United States and in other places around the world, candy, flowers and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint, and where did these traditions come from?

Surf the web too much? That might soon land you on a psychiatrist’s couch. The DSM-5, as the new edition will be called, is scheduled to be released in May 2013, and could list “Internet addiction” among its diagnoses.

Scientists say they "serendipitously" discovered that a drug used to treat a type of cancer quickly reversed Alzheimer's disease in mice. "I want to say as loudly and clearly as possible that this was a study in mice, not in humans," he said. "We've fixed Alzheimer's in mice lots of times, so we need to move forward expeditiously but cautiously."

These days there is an incredible amount of information available on what to eat for health, fitness and weight loss. Unfortunately, a good deal of it is distorted, biased, or simply untrue. Often, the scientists conducting studies on a given food product, or supplement, are employed by the very company which produces the product — how can they possibly be impartial? At other times, studies are completed in a very short period of time, or are improperly carried out, producing misleading results. This is why you need to be so careful where you get your health information from, and make sure you always examine claims with a critical eye.

February 29th is special…it’s the reason that a season comes at the same time every year. According to folklore, leap year day gives those women who don’t want to wait for a marriage proposal the go ahead to pop the question themselves. Since it only comes around every four years, here are some rarefied offers to celebrate the occasion:

The sound of silence. It’s what many of us yearn for when working. We try to get away from all of the noise and distractions of our surroundings and get to a place – whether natural or virtual – to achieve that quiet space we long for. But that’s not necessarily the best thing for you to do.

A small but growing number of teens and even younger children who think they were born the wrong sex are getting support from parents and from doctors who give them sex-changing treatments, according to reports in the medical journal Pediatrics.

Currently, clinicians can’t diagnose autism until toddlers are about 2, when the first behavioral and language symptoms of the developmental disorder become noticeable. There is a push to identify at-risk babies earlier, though, since early intervention may be critical for halting abnormal development and preventing the most troublesome behavioral outcomes associated with autism. But while scientists are developing more sophisticated screening tests that rely on brain-imaging techniques or eye-tracking technologies that monitor an infant’s gaze to pick up early autistic signs, there is still no reliable way to diagnose the condition in younger infants.

So it isn’t only that merely making negative interpretations and judgements about a situation can render people vulnerable to depression. Rather, it is the tendency to think too much about one’s depression, stress, and difficulties that poses an important risk factor. And this thinking seems to be what keeps the majority of people with depression depressed.

Trouble sleeping in middle age could herald Alzheimer’s disease later in life, according to new research linking dementia and slumber.

Pop legend Whitney Houston was apparently found unresponsive in her bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, with bottles of prescription sedatives in her room. The cause of the singer’s death at age 48 has not been confirmed as an overdose — and the results of a toxicology report may not be available for weeks — but the circumstances bear many of the hallmarks of such a death.

People 70 and older who eat between 2,100 and 6,000 calories a day may be at double the risk of these deficits in memory, which can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, the study authors said.

In previous posts, I discussed why the so-called “negative” emotions of anger, shame, sadness, and fear are actually good friends and guides. In this post, I am going to close the loop on this project by outlining why joy, a “positive” emotion, can be your enemy.

Life has a way of teaching us lessons that we would never learn otherwise. Some of life’s lessons we would rather not have, some of what we learn we wish we did not have to, and that is exactly what makes life such an excellent teacher.