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C. Diff Infections Are Falling, Thanks To Better Cleaning And Fewer Antibiotics

The risk of getting a deadly, treatment-resistant infection in a hospital or nursing home is dropping for the first time in decades, thanks to new guidelines on antibiotic use and stricter cleaning standards in care facilities.

The rate of new Clostridium difficile or C. diff infections climbed year after year from 2000 to 2010, researchers found. But an early look at 2011-2014 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infections Program suggests infection rates are improving.

“Preliminary analyses suggest a 9 to 15 percent decrease in health care [C. diff] incidence nationally,” says Dr. Alice Guh, a medical officer at the CDC. “It’s very encouraging, but there’s still a lot to do.”

C. diff infections, which rose for decades, are now falling, according to the CDC. David Phillips/Science Source

Is Witchcraft a Placebo?

What is the “placebo effect” -  a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient’s belief in that treatment

One of the hardest aspects of witchcraft is proving it actually works. When it comes to spell jars, sigils, and other energy type work the only proof we have of its abilities to actually do anything is our own experiences.

Think of it this way:

You create a spell jar to banish negative energy from your home. You’ve been having this feeling in your gut that something just isn’t right. When you come home you feel some sort of bad mojo around you.

So you put together a spell jar. You collect all your ingredients and you perform your spell. Everything went just as planned and you have your jar all finished. You decide to place it on your altar or maybe you choose to bury it in your yard, or place it somewhere hidden like a closet or dresser..

You start to feel a lightness surrounding you (like that heavy bad feeling is gone or at the very least, slowing dissipating). ~ it’s working ~ the spell is actually working…. or is it?

You’ve been told that this will banish the negative energy from your home and you believe it. So did a jar full of herbs, objects and whatever else you used actually banish the negative energy? Or did it work because you believed it would? 

We’ve argued to a point of exhaustion about intent in witchcraft. “All you need is intent, everything else is just extra shit.” You ever wonder why witches tell you this? It’s because they have some awareness that all you need to do is believe it works and it’ll work. 

I’m not one of these witches lol. I’m into science and hard facts. Which is probably why my craft mostly centers around herbalism (and the medicinal properties of herbs) but I do still use crystals, candles and I’m a tarot reader but that doesn’t mean I’m not self-aware. I understand that my craft will be questioned and what kind of witch would I be if I didn’t also question my own craft and how it works. 

Of course I’m not saying magick isn’t real or that witchcraft is just made up bologna. I am a witch afterall lol. What I am saying is that witchcraft and the placebo effect are very similar.

There have been medical studies where they’ve found that more than 30% of those given a placebo reported the same results as those given the actual drug. This begs the question; are the active ingredients (or properties) in the drugs actually doing anything? or is the power of suggestion strong enough to mimic the results of the drug in question?

Thoughts?

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Split brain does not lead to split consciousness

A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest edition of the journal Brain. 

Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to alleviate severe epilepsy among patients. During this procedure, the corpus callosum, a bundle of neural fibres connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres, is severed to prevent the spread of epileptic activity between the two brain halves. While mostly successful in relieving epilepsy, the procedure also virtually eliminates all communication between the cerebral hemispheres, thereby resulting in a ‘split brain’.

This condition was made famous by the work of Nobel laureate Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. In their canonical work, Sperry and Gazzaniga discovered that split-brain patients can only respond to stimuli in the right visual field with their right hand and vice versa. This was taken as evidence that severing the corpus callosum causes each hemisphere to gain its own consciousness.

Divided perception

For their study, Pinto and his fellow researchers conducted a series of tests on two patients who had undergone a full callosotomy. In one of the tests, the patients were placed in front of a screen and shown various objects displayed in several locations. The patients were then asked to confirm whether an object appeared and to indicate its location. In another test, they had to correctly name the object they had seen, a notorious difficulty among spit-brain patients. ‘Our main aim was to determine whether the patients performed better when responding to the left visual field with their left hand instead of their right hand and vice versa’, says Pinto, assistant professor of Cognitive Psychology. ‘This question was based on the textbook notion of two independent conscious agents: one experiencing the left visual field and controlling the left hand, and one experiencing the right visual field and controlling the right hand.’

To the researchers’ surprise, the patients were able to respond to stimuli throughout the entire visual field with all the response types: left hand, right hand and verbally. Pinto: ‘The patients could accurately indicate whether an object was present in the left visual field and pinpoint its location, even when they responded with the right hand or verbally. This despite the fact that their cerebral hemispheres can hardly communicate with each other and do so at perhaps 1 bit per second, which is less than a normal conversation. I was so surprised that I decide repeat the experiments several more times with all types of control.’

(Image caption: A depiction of the traditional view of the split brain syndrome (top) versus what the researchers actually found in two split-brain patients across a wide variety of tasks (bottom). Credit: Yair Pinto)

Undivided consciousness

According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients. ‘The established view of split-brain patients implies that physical connections transmitting massive amounts of information are indispensable for unified consciousness, i.e. one conscious agent in one brain. Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent. This directly contradicts current orthodoxy and highlights the complexity of unified consciousness.’

In the coming period, Pinto plans to conduct research on more split-brain patients to see whether his findings can be replicated. ‘These patients, who are rapidly decreasing in numbers, are our only way to find out what happens when large subsystems in the brain no longer communicate with each other. This phenomenon raises important questions that cannot be investigated in healthy adults because we have no technique to isolate large subsystems in healthy brains.’

Top 10 Biggest Brain Damaging Habits

1. No Breakfast

People who do not take breakfast are going to have a lower blood sugar level.This leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.

2. Overreacting

It causes hardening of the brain arteries, leading to a decrease in mental power.

3. Smoking

It causes multiple brain shrinkage and may lead to Alzheimer disease.

4. High Sugar consumption

Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development.       

5. Air Pollution

The brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body. Inhaling polluted air decreases the supply of oxygen to the brain, bringing about a decrease in brain efficiency.

6. Sleep Deprivation

Sleep allows our brain to rest. Long term deprivation from sleep will accelerate the death of brain

7. Head covered while sleeping

Sleeping with the head covered, increases the concentration of carbon dioxide and decrease concentration of oxygen that may lead to brain damaging effects.

8. Working your brain during illness

Working hard or studying with sickness may lead to a decrease in effectiveness of the brain as well as damage the brain.            

9. Talking Rarely

Intellectual conversations will promote the efficiency of the brain.

10. Lacking in stimulating thoughts

Thinking is the best way to train our brain, lacking in brain stimulation thoughts may cause brain shrinkage.

March for Science, California State University, Chico

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15+ Things We Wish People Understood About Anxiety

It is utterly exhausting living in a near constant state of fight or flight for so long.

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