Short-term meditation increases blood flow in anterior cingulate cortex and insula

If this is true then the ER doctors should immediately have you meditating to get as much blood flowing to your brain as possible. What are they waiting for?
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00212/full?

Yi-Yuan Tang^1,2*, Qilin Lu³, Hongbo Feng^3,4, Rongxiang Tang⁵ and Michael I. Posner²

• ¹Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA
• ²Department of Psychology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
• ³Institute of Neuroinformatics and Lab for Body and Mind, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
• ⁴First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, Dalian, China
• ⁵Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Asymmetry in frontal electrical activity has been reported to be associated with positive mood. One form of mindfulness meditation, integrative body-mind training (IBMT) improves positive mood and neuroplasticity. The purpose of this study is to determine whether short-term IBMT improves mood and induces frontal asymmetry. This study showed that 5-days (30-min per day) IBMT significantly enhanced cerebral blood flow (CBF) in subgenual/adjacent ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), medial prefrontal cortex and insula. The results showed that both IBMT and relaxation training increased left laterality of CBF, but only IBMT improved CBF in left ACC and insula, critical brain areas in self-regulation.

Introduction

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to produce positive effects on psychological wellbeing (Hölzel et al., 2011). As an important benefit of meditation practice, changes in self-reported positive mood or emotion are often observed (Kabat-Zinn et al., 1992; Tang et al., 2007). In particular, one form of meditation, the integrative body-mind training (IBMT) that originates from traditional Chinese medicine, improves attention, self-regulation, and mood after only few hours of training in comparison with relaxation training in a random assignment design (Tang et al., 2007; Ding et al., 2014).

Since late 1970s, frontal EEG asymmetry has had widespread use in measuring individual differences in emotional state. In general, it is believed a left-sided frontal activation indicates a positive emotion, although the evidence is not always consistent with this view (Allen and Kline, 2004; Allen et al., 2004; Cacioppo, 2004; Travis and Arenander, 2004, 2006).

A number of EEG studies have examined the relationship between meditation and frontal asymmetry (Davidson et al., 2003; Moyer et al., 2011). For example, 8-weeks mindfulness-based stress reduction, in comparison to a wait-list control, increased left-sided lateralization of alpha power and decreased negative affect (Davidson et al., 2003). Another study suggested 5-weeks of meditation shifts EEG asymmetry toward a pattern associated with positive emotion compared to a waiting-list control although there was no significant difference between the two groups (Moyer et al., 2011).

However, previous studies have used EEG with low spatial resolution and have not involved an active control group. To our knowledge, only one single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging study reported a marginal significant left frontal asymmetry of cerebral blood flow (CBF) but this study involved a sample of 12 long-term meditators compared to normal controls (Newberg et al., 2010) and was not a randomized test with an active control. Thus, we set out to apply brain imaging to investigate the CBF asymmetry induced by short-term training in a relatively large sample of 40 undergraduates with a random assignment to IBMT or relaxation training groups. We hypothesize that IBMT could improve left frontal CBF at resting state, which may underlie the promotion of positive emotion.

Do doctors exhibit plasticity?

This is the title of one of the chapters in The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution will create better health care by Eric Topol.
A couple of quotes;
Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet.
Medical education is fundamentally conservative, indoctrinating new generations into the failed ways of the old. For too long we have hugged the shore of safe and acceptable tradition.
Jay Parkinson, Fast company
We're using 3,000 year old tools to deliver health care in the richest country on the planet.
Dr. Topol states; Of all the professions represented on the planet, perhaps none is more resistant to change than physicians. If there were ever a group defined by lacking plasticity, it would first apply to doctors.
My doctor fell into this non-plastic group, no knowledge of plasticity, Saebo or any idea how to communicate. In the 1960s, Paul Bach-y-Rita
proved neuroplasticity.
Some fascinating ideas in the book on continuous monitoring - for us that could be blood pressure, warfarin/INR levels. Read it and bring those ideas to your researchers.

Remember that the Internet cannot replace a physician’s expertise and training….

From a press release from the AMA, Dec. 20, 2001.
So what the hell do you do when your physician doesn't know anything about your condition? You go to the experts, others with the same condition.
Ok, this is not medical advice, ask your doctor for who you should go to when they don't know.
http://www.e-patients.net/AMA_Dec2001.pdf

Do We Need Doctors Or Algorithms?

Fascinating premise. In my stroke hospitalization my doctors could have offered me treatments that had only been proven in rats and
I would have agreed. And the only way to get that kind of up-to-date information is to have computers do it. Its taken me 3 years to compile all my information and it is still totally incomplete.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/10/doctors-or-algorithms/


Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

3D Brain on iTunes By Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

This might be the only reason I might want an iPhone, It would be wonderful to get a 3d picture of a brain, then I might be able to speculate on where my clot occurred in the MCA. I never was able to get Google body maps to work
Or you could talk to your neurologist and get The Visible Human Project
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/3d-brain/id331399332?mt=8

Description

Use your touch screen to rotate and zoom around 29 interactive structures. Discover how each brain region functions, what happens when it is injured, and how it is involved in mental illness. Each detailed structure comes with information on functions, disorders, brain damage, case studies, and links to modern research.
Created by Vivid Apps and AXS Biomedical Animation Studio for the Dolan DNA Learning Center (DNALC) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). The 3D brain is derived from the Genes to Cognition (G2C) Online website funded by the Dana Foundation and Hewlett Foundation.
Here is the URL to play with this on the internet;
http://www.g2conline.org/

Every neurologist needs to have one of these in order to show you your damage diagnosis

Serially successful doctors fail

To help you understand your doctors.
http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/serially-successful-doctors-fail.html
Success-chasing may not only lead doctors to make flawed decisions in diagnosing and treating patients, but it can also distort the thinking of other high-stakes decision makers, such as military and political strategists, stock market investors, and venture capitalists. An fMRI study of physicians suggests that physicians seen to pay most attention to failures as well as successes become more adept at deciding on the correct treatment.

Team member Jonathan Downar told me that there is an upside to the study: “We may be able to train our young physicians to avoid success-chasing and confirmation bias by asking themselves [specific, pertinent] questions [about their decisions],” he says. “Most of the applications will be in teaching our physicians to think of alternative hypotheses and remember to orders the tests that would prove their diagnostic hunches wrong, not just the tests that would confirm their hunches,” he told us. “Ultimately, these are just the basic principles of hypothesis-testing, and I think formal instruction in these principles in medical school would probably be helpful.”

He adds that future studies are now being planned by his colleagues to look the effects of training physicians to get better at these kinds of tasks, either through a series of lessons or through neural feedback from real-time fMRI performed while the physician does the task.

All the Ways the System Doesn’t Work - Health Care

I know this was written for medical staff but us patients can really put eye-opening problems out there. No real place to put this for now, but start thinking about it. The first would be we don't have evidence-based stroke rehab. In fact we don't know what we are doing at all because we have such a poor understanding of the brain.
http://thehealthcareblog.com/blog/2011/05/21/how-to-blow-the-big-one/
The author put it exactly as it is: every one of us working in healthcare today must decide which side we are on…the stupid, misguided, incoherent, suboptimal, and deadly status quo – or to join those who would dutifully serve the roles these times have thrust upon us to guide systemic change.

Healthcare has, right now, the greatest opportunity we have seen in our lifetimes to make a big change, to rebuild itself in a hundred ways to become better for everyone, and cheaper—to get cheaper by getting better. We’re not talking “bending the cost curve,” cutting a few points off the inflation chart. We’re not talking a little cheaper, a little less per capita, a few percentage points off the cut of GDP that healthcare sucks up. We’re talking way cheaper. Half the cost. You know, like in normal countries.

We’re not talking a little better, skipping a few unnecessary tests, cutting the percentage of surgical infections a few points. No. Don’t even think about it. We’re talking way better. Save the children, help the people who should know better, nobody dies before their time, no unnecessary suffering. Seriously.

I don’t know how high you want to aim, but personally, I think we should aim at least as high as the cutting-edge programs and facilities that are already out there, in the system as it exists today, cutting real healthcare expenses of real people, even “frequent fliers,” by 10, 20, even 30 percent, while making them healthier, much healthier. At least. To me, that’s a wimpy goal, just doing as well as some other people are already doing. Because these programs are just getting off the ground. They’re in the first few iterations. The stretch goal, the goal we can take seriously, is to cut real costs by 50 percent, by making people healthier. There is at least that much potential out there.

Eight Methods for Screwing This Up

So this is, as the sportscasters say, our game to lose. It’s our change to screw up. And we can screw it up, big time. In case you are interested in helping that happen, here are eight ways to go about it:

Pretending it’s not there. Denial. A few tweaks. Business as usual. Same-old. Flavor of the week. Hey, it’s not my problem. I can squeak through to retirement anyway. [Note: Hello.]

Pretending it’s there and we know exactly what it is. We know its address and its measurements, the forms to fill out and the boxes to tick off. It’s all execution. Trust me, I’ve done this before. [Note: Actually, you haven’t. Nobody has.]

Fending off risk. Going for the safe choice. Pulling up the drawbridge. Hunkering down. We can’t afford to extend ourselves in this budget cycle. If we try that, it’ll just piss off the doctors. Better wait until this whole thing settles out. [Note: Let us know how that works out for you. From here, it looks like the waters are rising really fast.]

Grabbing an answer. Downloading a package. Not recognizing the edge of panic in your voice when you say reassuringly, “This is what works. This is the solution.” [Note: When the problem is not simple or static, the solution is not unitary.]

Mistaking it for an opportunity for empire. Building ACOs as regional monopolies to push up our compensation and grab market share. [Note: Consider this. How would your answer change if the question was not “How do we grow the enterprise and make our careers safer?” but instead was truly (truly now—be brutally honest, at least with yourself) “How do we help the people we serve better? How do we ease the suffering? How can we do that for more people? Cheaper? Earlier?”]

Making it a turf war. Grabbing territory. Knocking out the other guy.

Pretending it’s not a turf war, and losing it. Standing by while the other guy eviscerates your hold on the market. [Note: Of course people are going to treat it like a turf war. When everyone’s livelihood is threatened and their value is challenged, that’s what they do. That doesn’t mean you have to. In some games, the only way to win is to not play.]

Gaming the system. Figuring the angles. Making “What’s in it for me? What’s in it for us?” the only questions worth asking. [Note: Here’s the invitation: Play a bigger game. The author Harriet Rubin said a marvelous thing. She said, “Freedom is a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.”]

Consider This

“Since death alone is certain, and the time of death is uncertain, what shall I do?” Yes, I’m quoting somebody. Never mind who. No, don’t write it down. Don’t Facebook it, Tweet it, stick it in Evernote, e-mail it to someone. In fact, don’t even think about it. Don’t think it through, generate options, prioritize. Stop. Just sit with it, just for this one moment: “Since death alone is certain, and the time of death is uncertain, what shall I do?”

Whoever you are, however you have defined yourself so far, you have your hands on some portion of this great rambling chaotic sacred Grand Guignol parade we call healthcare. You have some influence. You can nudge it, poke and prod it, re-shape it, help it grow, make new connections, try new skills. Healthcare is where we bring our suffering, and our tricks to defeat suffering.

We can do this. It is as if the sky has opened up, a break in the pattern; there is an urgency, a swiftness to events, a tide, a moment, a momentum. Let’s roll.

Why good doctors give useless answers

Found this on Kevinmd.com - See which one your doctor uses on your stroke questions.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/09/good-doctors-give-useless-answers.html

Why would a good doctor give useless answers?

1. There is an answer, but your doctor doesn’t know it. Don’t be hard on doc for this one. There is no MD in the world that knows the entire breadth of medical knowledge. Some docs pretend they do. Trust me, they’re faking it. While it may not help you “I don’t know” is a refreshing answer to get from a doctor. MDs don’t often admit this.

2. Your doctor knows the answer, but it is too complicated to explain. A lot of the physical processes doctors think about are pretty complex. Translating all the technomedical concepts into layman’s terms to sensibly explaining it would just take a lot of time and bore you to tears, so the doc just gives you a vague answer instead.

3. The answer depends on a lot of variables. Predicting the course of an illness or recovery can be tricky. A lot of things that are in our control and out of our control can make a straightforward “here’s what to expect” answer impossible. Doctors are busy. It would take a lot of time to explain all the variables. So they often dodge any answer that asks they explain the future.

4. There is no answer. You’d be surprised how many of your questions just don’t have have answers. Doctors have no idea of the answer and no good way of finding out. Sorry! Most patients (and quite a few doctors) get unnerved at the amount of real uncertainty in the world of medicine. We often cover the uncertainty with total bullshit. We make up things that sound intelligent. For example: “Probably a virus …” is secret doctor code for “I have no idea why you feel this way, but it probably isn’t serious.”

5. The answer went right over your head. The doctor did answer your question. Doc just said the answer in technomedical jargon that made no sense to you. While you may have technically gotten a “straight answer”, the doc replying in a foreign language you don’t speak really doesn’t count.

6. The answer doesn’t matter. “Look, you patient, I give out info on a need-to-know basis, and you don’t need this answer!” This is probably the root of all vague, dodgy answers given by doctors. We don’t think the answer is important for you to know. It won’t make a difference. Answers take time and energy that might be spent on something productive. “Trust me, if you needed to know the answer I would have told you already!”

All doctors dodge questions!

demylination and stroke rehab

After nearly three years I finally decided to see another neurologist at a different clinic. It was quite interesting that there was no real interest in the MRI I brought along so I made the assumption that he was not interested in determining a diagnosis of my deficits.I was asking some difficult questions of him that he had no idea on. The first was whether I could go insane because neuroplasticity had taken over my cognitive functions in order to relocate my motor functions. He said it wasn't possible because the routing of nerves from the motor functions would no longer function because those nerves would have demylinated from lack of use. (What a load of bull - there are enough instances of recovery years later to disprove this.) I asked him if this was the same problem that MS patients have. I think he was just blowing smoke to try to bamboozle me with big words. He did suggest that maybe I wanted to try the RIC (Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago). That won't be occurring because Chicago is an 8 hour drive for me, so I will continue on the do-it-yourself plan. I have been unable to find any research that shows this to be the case.

And the questions I asked will be nothing compared to a high-powered Type A baby boomer.