December 17, 2011
No poo (short for ‘no shampoo’) is a collective term for methods of washing hair without commercial shampoo. Methods for washing hair without shampoo include washing with dissolved baking soda, followed by an acidic rinse such as diluted apple cider vinegar. Also honey and various oils (such as coconut oil) can be used. The notion of non-shampooed hair being unhealthy is reinforced by the greasy feeling of the scalp after a day or two of not shampooing. However, using shampoo every day removes sebum, the oil produced by the scalp. This causes the sebaceous glands to produce oil at a higher rate to compensate for what is lost during shampooing.
A gradual reduction in shampoo use will cause the sebaceous glands to produce at a slower rate, resulting in less oil on the scalp. Shampoo typically contains chemical additives such as sulfates (e.g. sodium lauryl sulfate). These chemicals can irritate the skin of sensitive persons (or of anyone if not promptly rinsed). Some shampoos also include silicone derivatives (e.g. dimethicone), which coats the hair, protecting it and making it more manageable; however, it also prevents moisture from entering the hair, eventually drying it out. Dimethicone is a common ingredient in smoothing serums and detangling conditioners.
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December 15, 2011
Bad trip (or psychedelic crisis) is a disturbing experience sometimes associated with use of a psychedelic drug such as LSD, Salvia, DXM, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT and sometimes even other drugs including cannabis, alcohol and MDMA. The manifestations can range from feelings of vague anxiety and alienation to profoundly disturbing states of unrelieved terror, ultimate entrapment, or cosmic annihilation.
Psychedelic specialists in the therapeutic community do not necessarily consider unpleasant experiences as threatening or negative, focusing instead on their potential to be highly beneficial to the user when properly resolved. They can be exacerbated by the inexperience or irresponsibility of the user or the lack of proper preparation and environment for the trip, and are reflective of unresolved psychological tensions triggered during the course of the experience.
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December 8, 2011
Personalized medicine is a medical model emphasizing the customization of healthcare, with all decisions and practices tailored to individual patients. Recently, this has mainly involved the systematic use of genetic or other information about an individual patient to select or optimize preventative and therapeutic care. Over the past century, medical care has centered on standards of care based on epidemiological studies of large cohorts. However, large cohort studies have previously been unable take into account the genetic variability of individuals within a population. Personalized medicine seeks to provide an objective basis for consideration of such individual differences. Traditionally, personalized medicine has been limited to the consideration of a patient’s family history, social circumstances, environment and behaviors.
Since the late 1990s, the advent of research using biobanks (cryogenic storage facilities that archive biological samples) has brought advances in a number of molecular profiling technologies including proteomic profiling, metabolomic analysis, genetic testing, and molecular medicine. Since about 2007 the term Stratified medicine has been used for the current approach.
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December 8, 2011
Personal medicine is an activity that a person does to obtain wellness, rather than something a person takes (e.g., medication) for wellness. In the psychiatric setting, personal medicine, or other self-initiated, non-pharmaceutical self-care activities, is used to decrease symptoms, avoid undesirable outcomes such as hospitalization, and improve mood, thoughts, behaviors, and the overall sense of well being. Not to be confused with ‘personalized medicine’ (a medical model emphasizing the customization of healthcare, with all decisions and practices being tailored to individual patients).
The self-care use of ‘personal medicine’ was first introduced in early 2003 as a result of qualitative research conducted by Patricia E. Deegan through the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare. After interviewing individuals who were taking psychiatric medication as a part of their recovery process, Deegan found that: ‘When describing their use of psychiatric pharmaceuticals or ‘pill medicine,’ research participants also described a variety of personal wellness strategies and activities that I have called ‘personal medicine.’ Personal medicines were non-pharmaceutical activities and strategies that served to decrease symptoms and increase personal wellness.
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December 8, 2011
A cowlick [kou-lik] is a section of hair that stands straight up or lies at an angle at odds with the style in which the rest of an individual’s hair is worn. They appear when the growth direction of the hair forms a spiral pattern. The term originates from the domestic bovine’s habit of licking its young, which results in a swirling pattern in the hair.
The most common site of a human cowlick is in the crown, but they can show up anywhere. They also sometimes appear in the front and back of the head.
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December 8, 2011
Uncombable hair syndrome (also known as Pili trianguli et canaliculi, Spun-glass hair, and Cheveux incoiffables) is a rare structural anomaly of the hair with a variable degree of effect. It was discovered in the 1970s. It becomes apparent from as little as 3 months to up to 12 years.
The hair is normal in quantity and is usually silvery-blond or straw-colored. It is disorderly, it stands out from the scalp, and cannot be combed flat. The underlying structural anomaly is longitudinal grooving of the hair shaft, which appears triangular in cross section. To be noticeable, 50 % of hairs must be affected by the structural abnormality. Improvement often occurs in later childhood.
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December 8, 2011
John B. Watson (1878 – 1958) was an American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising. In 1920 Johns Hopkins University asked Watson to leave his faculty position because of publicity surrounding the affair he was having with his graduate student-assistant Rosalie Rayner.
In addition, he and Rayner conducted the controversial ‘Little Albert’ experiment. After his divorce was finalized, Watson and Rayner married in 1921. They remained together until her death in 1935. In his post academic career, Watson worked for many years for J. Walter Thompson, a leading American advertising agency. He is credited with popularizing the ‘coffee break’ during an ad campaign for Maxwell House coffee.
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December 7, 2011
Paradoxical [par-uh-dok-si-kuhl] laughter is an exaggerated expression of humor which is unwarranted by external events. It may be uncontrollable laughter which may be recognized as inappropriate by the person involved. It is associated with altered mental states or mental illness, such as mania, hypomania or schizophrenia, and can have other causes.
Paradoxical laughter is indicative of an unstable mood, often caused by the pseudobulbar affect (a neurologic disorder characterized by uncontrollable episodes of crying and/or laughing), which can quickly change to anger and back again, on minor external cues. This type of laughter can also occur at times when the fight-or-flight response may otherwise be evoked.
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December 7, 2011
Blissymbols or Blissymbolics was conceived as an ideographic writing system called Semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. Blissymbols differ from most of the world’s major writing systems in that the characters do not correspond at all to the sounds of any spoken language.
Blissymbols were invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985), born Karl Kasiel Blitz in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (in what is now Ukraine), which had a mixture of different nationalities that ‘hated each other, mainly because they spoke and thought in different languages.’ Bliss graduated as a chemical engineer at the Vienna University of Technology, and joined an electronics company as a research chemist. When the German Army invaded Austria in 1938, he was sent to the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenbald. His German wife Claire managed to get him released, and they finally became exiles in Shanghai, where Bliss had relatives.
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December 4, 2011
Supersize is a very large portion of fast food. At McDonald’s it once referred to the largest size of French fries (7-ounce) and soft drinks (42-ounce). After taking a customer’s order, employees would ask, ‘Would you like that Supersized?’
The 2004 documentary ‘Super Size Me’ is often credited with associating the term with obesity and unhealthy portions sizes. The movie followed one man’s month-long McDonald’s diet. McDonald’s began to phase out the Super Size option from their menu in the spring of 2004, and by the end of the year it was gone completely.
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November 29, 2011
The mirror test is a measure of self-awareness, as animals either possess or lack the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror. The test was developed by Gordon Gallup Jr. in 1970, based in part on observations made by Charles Darwin. While visiting a zoo, Darwin held a mirror up to an orangutan and recorded the animal’s reaction, which included making a series of facial expressions.
Darwin noted that the significance of these expressions was ambiguous, and could either signify that the primate was making expressions at what it perceived to be another animal, or it could be playing a sort of game with a new toy.
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November 29, 2011
Pleasure center is the general term used for the brain regions involved in pleasure. Discoveries made in the 1950s initially suggested that rodents could not stop electrically stimulating parts of their brain, mainly the nucleus accumbens, which was theorized to produce great pleasure.
Further investigations revealed that the septum pellucidium and the hypothalamus can also be targets for self-stimulation. Yet, more recent research has shown that such ‘pleasure’ electrodes do not, in fact, lead to pleasure but only a form of ‘wanting’ or motivation to obtain the stimulation. Instead, the weight of the evidence suggests that the pleasure center of the human brain is not a single center but rather a distributed system of brain regions of which important nodes include subcortical regions (such as the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum) and cortical regions (orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex).
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