Ruth Buczynski, PhD

Which room would you prefer…

I imagine that many of you have children or grandchildren. Perhaps nieces or nephews? If you had to picture the nursery that you would want for them, would it look more like this:

Or this:

Did you cringe at the thought of putting a child in the sterile room at the top? There’s nothing to interest or excite them in such a sterile environment.

Every child rearing book will tell you that babies need increasing levels of visual and mental stimulation so that they can grow and develop. Why then do we not expect that the same thing applies to us as adults?

Researchers Elizabeth Gould and Charlie Gross from the Department of Psychology at Princeton looked at the difference that habitats can make in brain structure.

They experimented with adult marmosets and found that animals who lived in more complex environments (vs. laboratory cages) possessed more neural connections and greater rates of neurogenesis. These changes were observed in the regions of the brain commonly associated with cognition and regulation of emotion.

It’s still not known which factors from the complex environment lead to the neural difference, whether it be social interaction or increased physical exercise. I have no doubt that researchers will ultimately fill in the gaps in our knowledge, but in the meantime, what does this mean for us?

Well, for one thing, have you mentally challenged yourself recently?

It’s so easy to keep to the same pattern of work, applying the same formula and seeing new but similar results. How about pushing that mental comfort zone, even a little?

And what about social interaction? Over the years I have had so many private practitioners comment on their sense of isolation. It’s so fulfilling to have your own private practice, but it can also feel like working in a little private bubble.

I love hosting our annual week-long Psychology of Health, Immunity and Disease Conference because it brings together so many professionals just brimming with unshared ideas. While the conference does have to end at the week-mark, the sharing often continues.

If you think you might be interested in joining us this year, I invite you to click here for more information.

Meanwhile, leave a comment below and tell us what you think.

What color do you think of when you think of depression? It’s probably a dark color, like blue, black or gray.

There is a reason for that.

Research from the University of Freiburg shows that depressed patients cannot view black and white contrasts accurately.

A new study in Biological Psychiatry showed a dramatically lower retinal contrast gain in patients with depression than in healthy subjects.

For the study, Seeing Gray When Feeling Blue? Depression Can Be Measured in the Eye of the Diseased, Dr. Emanual Bubl and his team evaluated 40 patients suffering from depression (20 who were taking antidepressant medication and 20 who were not.) 40 healthy patients were also studied as a control.

They found a significant decrease in the retinal sensitivity of depressed patients, even patients taking medication.

Further, the more severely depressed a patient, the lower the retinal response.

Depression can change the way a patient sees the world, eliminating the vibrancy of naturally occurring colors.

But also, viewing the world as a drab, colorless environment could worsen depression, perpetuating the emotions of loneliness and sadness.

According to Mark Hyman MD, there is a significant correlation between biology and mood.

He is part of NICABM’s free teleseminar series: Clinical Applications of Mind-Body Medicine: New Thinking about Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

It’s free; you just have to sign up.

In the meantime leave a comment. How do you treat patients with depression?

Most of us know that what we eat is so very important (for energy, healthy metabolism and all around vibrant health). Actually, much of what we’ve talked about in our teleseminar series so far really starts with what we put in our mouths each day.

Yet preparing healthful meals is often a challenge.

Besides being a physician, a consultant to the White House and a volunteer in the relief effort in Haiti, Mark Hyman MD, our next teleseminar speaker, is also a three-time New York Time’s bestselling author.

Just for fun we asked him to allow us to share one of his recipes from “The Ultra Metabolism Cookbook,” which is filled with over 200 recipes designed to increase metabolism and health.

Artichoke Hearts with Caramelized Onions and Herb Dressing

Ingredients Needed:

2 cups red onion
¼ tsp red pepper flakes
2 cups yellow onion
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 can (9 ounces) artichoke hearts
4 tbsp olive oil
¼ tsp paprika
½ tsp fresh parsley
½ tsp fresh tarragon
2 tbsp lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Julienne the red and yellow onions. Drain and rinse the artichokes. Combine artichokes with 2 tbsp of olive oil, minced garlic, and spices in a bowl. Spread out mixture onto a sheet pan and bake for 35 minutes at 350 degrees, artichokes will be slightly soft and browned—do not burn.

On medium heat, in a sauté pan, heat the remaining 2 tbsp of olive oil. Add the red and yellow onions and sauté on medium for 5–6 minutes. When the onions start to brown, reduce the heat and cook for an additional 15–20 minutes, stir as needed to keep from burning. Once the onions are caramelized, stir in the lemon juice and cook until the liquid is evaporated. Do not burn the onions.

In a large bowl, combine the roasted artichokes and caramelized onion mixture. Gently mix until everything is evenly combined.

Chill.

This recipe makes 4 servings; you will need 15 minutes to prepare, and 30 minutes to cook.

Now of course it takes more than one meal to make a vibrant health regimen.

Join us next week as I interview Dr. Hyman who will be part of NICABM’s teleseminar series: Clinical Applications of Mind-Body Medicine: New Thinking about Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

It’s free – you just have to sign up.

In the meantime, try out the recipe, and let us know what you think.

I was somewhat surprised the other day when I came across an article talking about the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine.

The American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine? Really?

At first, the connection between dentistry and sleep doesn’t seem apparent.

Many psychotherapists think first of psychological causes for sleep disorders, yet increasingly, we are seeing the combination of medical and psychological factors causing various sleep problems.

For dentists, this means recognizing sleep disorders, specifically sleep-related breathing disorders (like snoring or obstructive sleep apnea). They can then coordinate with patients’ physicians such treatments as oral appliance therapy (OAT) and upper-airway surgery.

This tag-team approach is one that we should be using with psychotherapists and physicians too, so that both the psychological and the physical could be incorporated into sleep disorder treatment.

Consider these sleep disorder facts:

• At least 40 million Americans suffer from chronic, long-term sleep disorders each year, with an additional 20 million suffering from sleeping problems (National Library of Medicine).

• There are at least 70 types of recognized sleep disorders, the most common ones being insomnia, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, and narcolepsy (National Library of Medicine).

• Within the USA, lack of sleep causes approximately 100,000 traffic accidents a year, with 1500 fatalities (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).

• Scientific studies have implicated untreated sleep disorders with heart disease (Daniel Gottlieb et al.), heart attacks (Neomi Shah et al.), stroke (Virend Somers et al.), hypertension, diabetes, and obesity.

• According to Barry Krakow MD, author of Sound Sleep, Sound Mind: 7 Keys to Sleeping Through the Night, poor sleep quality can cause greater damage to the heart and brain than cigarette smoking or excessive drinking.

To learn more about sleep disorders and their treatment, tune in this coming Wednesday as we interview Barry Krakow, MD.

He is part of NICABM’s free teleseminar series: Clinical Applications of Mind-Body Medicine: New Thinking about Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

It’s free, you just have to sign up.

In the meantime, I welcome your perspective on the coordination of medical and psychological treatments for sleep disorders. Should physicians and psychotherapists team up for improved sleep solutions?

Most of us believe that sleep is essential for function and focus.

Recent findings suggest that even afternoon naps can improve the quality of brain function throughout the day.

Robert Stickgold, PhD conducted a study through the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

His experiment required 99 college students to inspect and memorize a maze presented to them on a computer screen.

Next, the students were asked to navigate a 3-D version of the maze on the computer. At this point, half of the participants took an hour and a half nap, while the others watched videos.

After the students navigated through the maze a second time, it became evident that nappers were much more successful than students who had stayed awake.

What’s more, nappers who dreamed of the maze performed ten times better then nappers who did not dream.

It is interesting to note, that nappers who dreamed of the maze, had originally done poorly. Some are thinking that possible we dream about situations that are more difficult for us.

Sleep is so important, yet many people not only do not have the luxury of an afternoon nap, they also suffer from sleep disorders.

Sleep disorders are often caused by a combination of things and could be greatly improved if we looked at them from a Mind Body perspective.

To learn more about sleep disorders, tune in this coming Wednesday as we interview Barry Krakow, MD.
He is part of NICABM’s free teleseminar series: Clinical Applications of Mind-Body Medicine: New Thinking about Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

It’s free, you just have to sign up.

In the meantime, leave a comment. How do sleep disorders affect your patients and how do you treat them?

While conducting research on Adrenal Fatigue, we ran across lots of studies documenting the effects of stress on the body.

There were so many new studies that we had a hard time trying to choose one to blog on.

So rather than try to narrow our options, we thought that we would share some of the more interesting results below:

• Chronic stress reduces the number of neurons in the dentate gyrus (the part of the brain associated with the formation of new memories), and also contributes to cognitive problems.

• In the hippocampus (which play a role in long-term memory and spatial navigation), chronic stress causes neurons to undergo remodeling of dendrites. Dendrites act as part of the brain’s communication network.

• Stress-induced remodeling of the hippocampus can be at least partially reversible with the removal of the stress.

• An insufficient amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), is thought to be at least partially responsible for remodeling the brain under stress. Experiments have found that the brains of mice with an inadequate amount of this protein look similar to those of normal mice that have been under stress for long periods. BDNF enhances the adaptability of neurons in the hippocampus.

• Chronic stress effects the functioning and mental flexibility of the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain involved in working memory and decision making. The prefrontal cortex is also involved in overcoming distorted learning (think trauma and phobias).

• Chronic stress is thought to be one of the most common causes of adrenal fatigue.

There were lots of other recent findings and new articles are being published every day.

In an upcoming teleseminar series, we will be looking at mindfulness applications, which certainly are effective in countering the effects of chronic stress in patients’ lives.

But for now, we want to focus on one effect: adrenal fatigue.

To learn more about the effects of chronic stress, tune in this coming Wednesday as we interview James Wilson, ND, DC, PhD, about Adrenal Fatigue.

He is part of NICABM’s free teleseminar series: Clinical Applications of Mind-Body Medicine: New Thinking about Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

It’s free, you just have to sign up.

In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts on the neurobiological effects of stress. Can information from new studies help you become more effective in treating patients with chronic stress?

Please share your thoughts and opinions below.

Many of us know of people who under pressure resort to “stress eating.”

Chocolate, French fries, and potato chips have all been implicated in stress overeating and while I’m sure that most junk foods have also been used for such purposes, I doubt the same could be said for foods like broccoli or blueberries.

The result – chronic stress can lead to habitual stress eating of unhealthy foods, which in turn leads to weight gain and possibly to obesity, diabetes, and a host of other health problems.

Many of us have witnessed this unfortunate progression of events, but up until recently, the biomedical research field has been unable to provide the corroborating scientific evidence.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published a paper out of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel documenting the effects caused by changes to the gene Urocortin-3 (Ucn3).

Ucn3 is produced in certain brain cells during times of stress and is known to play a role in regulating the body’s stress response.

Dr. Alon Chen led a team of Weizmann researchers who were able to increase amounts of Ucn3 in certain areas of the brains of mice.

The results of these Ucn3 increases were two-fold: anxiety-related behavior increased while at the same time, their metabolism changed.

Specifically, the mice burned more sugars and less fatty acids and their metabolic rates increased.

An increase in metabolism is usually considered a good thing for weight loss, but not in this case.

This change in metabolism didn’t necessarily change the amount of food that the mice were ingesting, just their food preferences. Rather than eating a healthy balanced diet, the stress-induced metabolic changes caused them to choose sugary food.

Sugars are good if needing quick bursts of energy in order to escape a physical danger, but become a health issue if abused over the long term.

These mice (back to the Weizmann study) also started to show the first stage signs of type 2 diabetes with decreased sensitivity to insulin, increased sugar levels in the blood, and more insulin being produced by their pancreas.

The findings link stress to metabolic syndromes, especially diabetes and obesity.

To learn more about the effects of chronic stress, tune in this coming Wednesday as we interview James Wilson, ND, DC, PhD, about Adrenal Fatigue.

He is part of NICABM’s free teleseminar series: Clinical Applications of Mind-Body Medicine: New Thinking about Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

It’s free, you just have to sign up.

In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts on the neurological effects of stress. Can information from new neurological studies help you become more effective in treating patients with chronic stress and fatigue?

Please share your thoughts and opinions below.

Do you know the symptoms of adrenal fatigue?

Do your patients report any of the following:

• Tired for no reason?
• Trouble getting up in the morning?
• Need coffee or colas to keep going?
• Feel run down and stressed?
• Crave salty or sweet snacks?
• Struggling to keep up with life’s daily demands?
• Can’t bounce back from stress or illness?
• Not having fun anymore?
• Decreased sex drive?

If they answer “yes” to at least one of these questions, then they may be suffering from adrenal fatigue (reprinted with permission from http://www.adrenalfatigue.org/).

And what is adrenal fatigue?

It is a syndrome that occurs when the adrenal gland functions at a sub-normal level, mainly due to the effects of chronic stress.

To learn more about the signs and symptoms of the syndrome, listen to a preview of our interview with James L. Wilson, ND, DC, PhD, who we are interviewing as part of our Clinical Applications of Mind Body Medicine: New Thinking About Stress and the Remarkable Power of PNI teleseminar series.

We hope that you will join us on Wednesday as we air the entire interview.

The agenda for the call includes:

• Adrenal fatigue: the signs and symptoms
• Lifestyle variables that affect adrenal fatigue
• Why the diagnosis of adrenal fatigue is so challenging
• Why adrenal fatigue is a perfect example of psychoneuroimmunology
• 4 lifestyle changes that have a powerful effect on the treatment of adrenal fatigue
• Mindfulness practices in the treatment of adrenal fatigue
• The evolutionary role of trauma in the origin of adrenal fatigue

The teleseminars are free, you just need to sign up.

How do you manage chronic stress in your treatments?

Please leave a comment.

Have you ever had an ache that’s barely noticeable, until you start to think about it?

Then the ache intensified and suddenly, the pain seems unbearable.

New studies have found that while pain isn’t “just all in your head,” the brain does have ways of influencing our perception of pain.

In a new paper out of Biology Psychiatry, Chantal Berna, MD led a group of researchers from the University of Oxford, UK who looked at the effects that depression had on the perception of pain.

20 healthy volunteers listened to depressing music and were bombarded with negative thoughts.

Researchers then used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to see how their brains would respond to a heat stimulus.

Following the depressed mood induction, brain responses to the heat stimulus resulted in increased perception of pain.

The MRI showed increased activity in the prefrontal areas, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the hippocampus.

These results were marked, especially when compared with significantly less activation when the volunteers were in a neutral frame of mind.

The depressed individuals who indicated the largest increase in pain perception also showed the greatest activation in the inferior frontal gyrus and the amygdala.

As you know, the amygdala is involved in the storing of emotional memories, thus linking emotional regulation and pain enhancement.

The more we know about the workings of the brain, the more we are able to tailor treatments.

The brain plays an interesting role in chronic pain, one that we will be discussing at length when I interview Howard Schubiner, MD as part of NICABM’s newest teleseminar series Clinical Applications of Mind-Body Medicine: New Thinking About Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

These are just a few of the topics we will cover:

• The role of the brain and the mind in pain development
• How neuroplasticity plays an unsuspected role in chronic pain
• Why Mind-Body Syndrome is not diagnosed
• New PNI research into chronic pain
• 6-part model for reprogramming pain pathways
• How mindfulness can be used in pain treatment

I’m particularly looking forward to hearing what Dr Schubiner has to say about neuroplasticity and pain.

You can sign up here for this free teleseminar series.

Please use the comment board below to let us know what you think about the mind-body pain connection. Based on your own work, do you think that depression and pain can be connected?

Here are some important things you may not know about chronic pain:

• According to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, people who have fibromyalgia are 3.4 times more likely to develop major depression than individuals without fibromyalgia.

• Most people with fibromyalgia are women (Female: Male ratio 7:1). However, men and children also can have the disorder. (National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention)

• Though arthritis is often thought to be more common among older patients, nearly two-thirds of arthritis patients are younger than 65. (The National Arthritis Action Plan)

• Over half of adults living with diabetes or heart disease are also living with arthritis. (The National Arthritis Action Plan)

• According to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), clinical investigators have found that chronic pain patients often have lower-than-normal levels of endorphins in their spinal fluid.

• According to the American Pain Society, 50 million workdays are lost each year due to pain.

• According to Howard Schubiner MD, chronic pain is not only a physical condition. Brain function has an effect on this condition.

It’s not just a condition for elderly patients. Everyone is susceptible.

To hear more about chronic pain, check out this video clip:

I will be interviewing Howard Schubiner MD about Modern Medicine’s Blind Spot: The Mind/Body Syndrome of Pain, for NICABM’s newest teleseminar series Clinical Applications of Mind Body Medicine: New Thinking about Stress and the Remarkable Power of Psychoneuroimmunology.

You can sign up here for this free teleseminar series.

In the meantime, do you address issues of chronic pain in your practice? What kind of approaches do you take?

Leave a comment below, we’d like to hear what you have to say.