What Is Immune System? 5 Ways You Weaken The Ability To Fight Diseases

“A few things to keep in mind as flu season is around the corner.”

— Dr. Dale

What Is Immune System? 5 Ways You Weaken The Ability To Fight Diseases

http://www.medicaldaily.com/what-immune-system-5-ways-you-weaken-ability-fight-diseases-397427 

The activities we do in our day-to-day lives may result in a weak immune system. And, an underactive and poor-performing immune system may lead to several diseases and illnesses.

The immune system’s prime function is to protect the body against infection. The enhancement and strengthening of the immune system is a vital step to achieve resistance to diseases as well as to reduce chances of getting diseases like cold, flu and cancer. Individuals need to be involved in a health-promoting lifestyle, adopt stress management, exercise, have a proper diet and appropriately use nutritional supplements and herbal medicines for a strong immune system. However, there are several ways in which we end up weakening our immune system.

• STRESS: According to the National Cancer Institute, prolonged periods of intense stress can affect the immune system. John Spangler, MD, a professor of family and community medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina, reportedly says that stress causes the brain to boost the production of the hormone cortisol, which weakens the function of the infection-fighting T cells. People should adopt stress-relieving activities in order to help their immune system.
• POOR SLEEP: This is strongly associated with poor immune system function and reduces the number of killer cells that fight germs. University of Chicago researchers found in a study that men who slept only four hours a night for one week produced half the amount of flu-fighting antibodies in their blood compared with those who slept 7-8 hours.
• ALCOHOL:  John Spangler believes that excessive intake of alcohol may reduce the immune system's response to invading pathogens. "Alcohol’s major metabolite, acetaldehyde, likely impairs ciliary function in the lungs, making them more prone to bacterial and viral invasion," he explains.
• POOR DIET: Excessive consumption of refined sugars and highly processed food containing pesticides, chemical additives and preservatives can weaken the immune system. According to a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the ability to kill white blood cells was harmed after eating 100 gm of sugar. 
• OBESITY: Obesity can lead to a weakened immune system as it affects the ability of white blood cells to multiply, produce antibodies and prevent inflammation.

Should Boys Get The HPV Vaccine?

“For my patients who are parents.”

— Dr. Dale

Should Boys Get The HPV Vaccine?

https://www.romper.com/p/should-boys-get-the-hpv-vaccine-17933 

Some parents struggle with the decision to get their babies the recommended vaccines from birth through early childhood. So making the decision to give your child an elective vaccination to protect against a sexually transmitted disease, or STD, is a topic that parents should thoughtfully consider before making the choice. Many commercials and advertisements for these type of vaccines often feature young girls, who are considered most at risk, but this doesn't mean boys are immune. Parents of boys should be asking questions about these shots. Should boys get the HPV vaccine? Or is this one your son can pass on? 

Human papillomavirus, more commonly known as HPV, is a very common sexually transmitted infection that has more than 100 strands and is believed to effect most sexually active people, according to Planned Parenthood. Since it is so widespread, it is thought that giving your child the vaccine for HPV before they become sexually active can protect them from some of the side effects associated with the infection. Although a common symptom of HPV is genital warts, this is not the primary concern or motivation of those encouraging parents to vaccinate their sons, according to the website for Very Well. It's actually the side effects of this virus that pose a potential threat. 

The big push for early vaccination is because the shot is only effective if given before your son contracts HPV. The Center For Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) website recommends boys receive the HPV vaccine around 11 or 12 because of the potential consequences related to the virus. According to the CDC, more than 9,000 males are affected by cancers caused by HPV infections every year. Commonly, these are cancers of the mouth, throat, anus, and penis, which are believed to be avoided if the vaccine is administered in time. Preventing boys from getting HPV can also help reduce the number of girls who are infected with the virus through sexual contact. 

Aside from these links to certain cancers, doctors are still debating whether or not giving boys the HPV vaccine is necessary. According to the website for ABC News, experts can seem to agree on vaccinating boys for HPV since there has been so little unbiased research done to test the overall effectiveness as it relates to the long term health of both males and females.

Is Reality Trying To Tell You Something?

“An enjoyable read.”

— Dr. Dale

Is Reality Trying To Tell You Something?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/is-reality-trying-to-tell_b_11763012.html

One of the greatest puzzles facing each of us is whether the events in our lives form a pattern, and if so, what does the pattern mean. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.” Some people say it in passing, others take it more seriously. But officially, if we accept the basic scientific principle that the physical world operates essentially through random chance, it’s not credible to believe that we live in a universe that has purpose and meaning. We can ask when the big bang occurred but not why. We can investigate how sodium and chlorine combine to form salt, but it makes no sense, scientifically, to ask the purpose of salt. Salt and the big bang just are.

Since the question of meaning and purpose are deeply embedded in religion, let’s set those claims aside. If God or the gods control human life, this is a matter of faith, not science. Humans have constructed faith-based systems for many centuries, of course. Placing an invisible higher power at the center of reality, a power who judges right from wrong, who punishes and rewards according to divine morality, is simply outside the rules developed by science and secular society. There are enough glitches in those rules without hauling God into the argument.

Those glitches center around a simple observation. Human life has meaning and purpose. The physical world, absent humans, doesn’t. When we are motivated by love or fear, when we make moral choices or create a vision of a better life, there is no doubt that human beings not only value meaning and purpose, we have evolved, along with the higher brain, to support meaning and purpose. Since Darwinian evolution allows for only genetic mutations, how did DNA, which is built from completely ordinary atoms and molecules, acquire any more meaning than salt? Or if DNA isn’t linked to the meaning of life, how can there be meaning and purpose outside our genes?

Surprisingly little is ever said about the conflict between the meaningless physical world and the meaningful human world, largely because the mismatch is so radical. In some vague way certain theories will point us in the direction of complexity, for example, claiming that as simple molecules accumulated to form a hugely complex molecule like DNA, evolution took a leap into consciousness, and with consciousness came reason, leading to civilization. But this is false reasoning. It amounts to saying that if you add enough cards to the deck, they learn to play poker.

There is another popular strain of argument based on information. It holds that the obvious patterning in the universe, from the pattern of atoms to the huge scope of spiral galaxies, DNA’s double helix, and so on, is founded on bits of information, and this information is indestructible, like matter and energy. But there’s no proof that information exists “out there” in empty space or anywhere else. The big bang, in fact, was a chaotic state devoid of what we call matter and energy, an unruly state where even the laws of nature may not yet have emerged. Getting order out of chaos is difficult enough—and far from proven by physics—much less information. Moreover, information is a mental concept; it takes the human mind to either create or recognize the concept. In either case, saying that information created the human mind gets it backwards.

The bottom line is that meaning and purpose, wherever they came from, are attributes of consciousness, and no physical theory of the universe has been able to account for the exact moment, either in the cosmos or here on Earth, when atoms and molecules learned to think. In fact, it seems absurd to say that atoms and molecules think, yet the human brain is composed of them, so if the brain is the source of consciousness — as 99.9% of neuroscientists believe without question — the transition from random, unthinking, everyday atoms to a thinking machine either exists or it doesn’t.

There is good reason to say that consciousness cannot be considered a property of atoms, a byproduct of complexity, or a pile-up of information. The simplest way to account for meaning and purpose is to say that consciousness has always existed. Cosmic mind has evolved within itself to give rise to every aspect of meaning and purpose that we as humans are aware of. We are aspects of cosmic mind looking at itself through human awareness. If this is so, then meaning and purpose are part of a grander scheme that surpasses religion by needing no transcendent God or the gods. Instead, the universe is telling us to look at ourselves if we want to understand how deeply meaning and purpose permeate the whole of Nature.

This viewpoint is too important to relegate to a few words, so in the next blog the reality of cosmic mind will be described in terms of a universe where consciousness rules, and ultimately a universe with human beings at its core.

(To be cont.)