HEALTH NEWS AND ODDS AND ENDS
First:  who can be the best "doctor" for what ails you?  It won't surprise my Moebius friends, so many of whom have beloved pets, that more often than not it is man's best friend:
"His name is Valor. He's half Labrador retriever, half Great Dane, and goes everywhere with Sgt. Charles Hernandez. But Valor is more than a pet -- Hernandez considers the dog a personal physician.

When Hernandez was having seizures, Valor would nibble on the side of Hernandez's leg before the veteran realized anything was wrong. And the dog pulls him away from conflicts and jumps on him during anxiety attacks to calm him down. In combination with medications, Hernandez says the dog has helped his symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

"I'm alive again," says Hernandez, 49, of the Bronx, New York, now retired from the U.S. National Guard. "What keeps me going is my dog."

A growing number of Americans are getting dogs for mental health needs, experts say. In the case of psychiatric service animals, such as Valor, they are trained specifically to help people with mental illnesses, in much the way seeing-eye dogs are taught to help to blind people.

PTSD in returning veterans is a major reason for the increasing demand for these dogs, said John Ensminger, a New York attorney and author of "Service and Therapy Dogs in American Society."

Unlike guide dogs for people with more obvious physical disabilities, there's a lot of gray area regarding who gets to have a dog accompany them to places -- from restaurants to stores to airplanes -- where animals are usually not allowed.

Why people get psychiatric service dogs

There's pretty good evidence that in some people, interacting with pets produces biochemical changes in the brain, says Hal Herzog, professor of psychology at Western Carolina University.

"In a way, we could all use a psychiatric service or therapy dog because of the incredible amount of stress that we're all under," says psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman, author of "Coping With Terrorism: Dreams Interrupted."

Caring for a pet helps people become less frightened, more self-sufficient and secure. It takes the attention off their own fears, she said. Through owning a pet, you can "prove to yourself that you can take care of another living creature," she said. It "reassures you that you can take care of yourself."

Several categories of dogs that provide care to people with mental health issues have arisen, as the organization Heeling Allies describes:

The first is psychiatric service dogs, which is where Valor falls. These are individually, intensely trained dogs for people with mental disabilities. The Psychiatric Service Dog Society has extensive information about these dogs and how to get a dog trained. Heeling Allies calls them "mental health service dogs" because of the stigma associated with the term "psychiatric."

Then there are emotional support dogs, which provide comfort and motivation to people with disabilities. They may be taken on planes and live in housing situations where animals are not usually allowed, with proper documentation.

Finally, there are therapy dogs, which help a large group of people. For instance, Ensminger's dog Chloe is a therapy dog, and he voluntarily takes her to hospitals to comfort patients.

One of Lieberman's recent patients, for whom the psychiatrist wrote a letter to help a dog get certified, was a woman whose husband has a serious, progressive medical disorder, and she felt stretched to the limit taking care of him.

Her standard poodle "provided the emotional support when she was out of the house without her husband, that her husband used to provide," Lieberman said.

Another patient, also female, is undergoing stress because her home was put in foreclosure. She's also involved in a lawsuit and a countersuit regarding the potential loss of her multimillion-dollar property, Lieberman said.

The woman has to travel a lot because her children live across the country, and her mental state is such that sometimes she can't get out of bed. In this case, Lieberman compares the therapy dog to a baby blanket: evoking feelings of warmth and being taken care of. "It reminds her of when things were less traumatic," she said. "It's a tie to the past."

Hernandez joined the National Guard in 1996 and was one of the first responders at ground zero on September 11, 2001. He was deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2006.

While in Iraq, Hernandez suffered a spinal cord injury that limited his ability to walk and a traumatic brain injury. Inside, he had changed, too. He became violent and agitated. And he had nightmares, uncomfortable thoughts and dreams.

"Not all wounds are visible," he said. "That's how I explain it to people."

Hernandez received a service dog in 2010 through Project HEAL, part of ECAD, an organization that trains and breeds assistance dogs. Project HEAL sets up veterans with PTSD with service dogs. Hernandez still volunteers with Project HEAL.

"He knows if something is wrong, and I can't figure it out," Hernandez said of Valor. "The dog has the extra Spider-Man sense." Hernandez still takes medication for PTSD."

There's more--read the whole thing.

Meanwhile--do you want to lose weight?  Just exercise itself--without refining what you eat--might not help you, as new studies show:

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Two groundbreaking new studies address the irksome question of why so many of us who work out remain so heavy, a concern that carries special resonance at the moment, as lean Olympians slip through the air and water, inspiring countless viewers to want to become similarly sleek.
And in a just world, frequent physical activity should make us slim. But repeated studies have shown that many people who begin an exercise program lose little or no weight. Some gain.
To better understand why, anthropologists leading one of the new studies began with a research trip to Tanzania. There, they recruited volunteers from the Hadza tribe, whose members still live by hunting and gathering.
Providing these tribespeople with a crash course in modern field-study technology, the researchers fitted them with GPS units, to scrupulously measure how many miles each walked daily while searching for food. They also asked them to swallow so-called doubly labeled water, a liquid in which the normal hydrogen and oxygen molecules have been replaced with versions containing tracers. By studying these elements later in a person’s urine, researchers can precisely determine someone’s energy expenditure and metabolic rate.
The researchers gathered data for 11 days, then calculated the participants’ typical daily physical activity, energy expenditure and resting metabolic rates. They then compared those numbers with the same measures for an average male and female Westerner.
It’s long been believed that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle involves considerable physical activity and therefore burns many calories, far more than are incinerated by your average American office worker each day. And it was true, the scientists determined, that the Hadza people in general moved more than many Americans do, with the men walking about seven miles a day and the women about three.
But it was not true that they were burning far more calories. In fact, the scientists calculated, the Hadza’s average metabolic rate, or the number of calories that they were burning over the course of a day, was about the same as the average metabolic rate for Westerners.
The implication, the scientists concluded, is that “active, ‘traditional’ lifestyles may not protect against obesity if diets change to promote increased caloric consumption.” That is, even active people will pack on pounds if they eat like most of us in the West.
The underlying and rather disheartening message of that finding, of course, is that physical activity by itself is not going to make and keep you thin. (It’s worth noting that the Hadza people were almost uniformly slight.)
The overarching conclusion of that study, which was published last week in the journal PLoS One, is not really new or surprising, says Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the John S. McIlhenny Endowed Chair in Health Wisdom at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana and who has long studied exercise and weight control. “It’s been known for some time that, calorie for calorie, it’s easier to lose weight by dieting than by exercise,” he says.
People stick with low-calorie diets more readily than they continue with exercise to drop pounds.
And another newly published and fascinating review, by Dr. Church and others, goes some way to explaining why. Its main point: As in the Hadza study, human metabolism appears to be less revved by activity than was once believed.
“There’s this expectation that if you exercise, your metabolism won’t drop as you lose weight or will even speed up,” says Diana Thomas, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who led the study.
But she says close mathematical scrutiny of past studies of exercise and weight loss shows that that happy prospect is, sad to say, unfounded. One of the few studies ever to have scrupulously monitored exercise, food intake and metabolic rates found that volunteers’ basal metabolic rates dropped as they lost weight, even though they exercised every day. As a result, although they were burning up to 500 calories during an exercise session, their total daily caloric burn was lower than it would have been had their metabolism remained unchanged, and they lost less weight than had been expected.
The problem for those of us hoping to use exercise to slough off fat is that most current calculations about exercise and weight loss assume that metabolism remains unchanged or is revved by exercise.
So Dr. Thomas has helpfully begun to recalibrate weight loss formulas, taking into account the drop in metabolism. Using her new formulas, she’s working with a group of volunteers at Pennington, providing them with improved predictions about how much weight they can expect to lose from exercise.
The predictions are proving accurate, she says, and although her forecast is for less weight loss than that under the old formula, the volunteers are pleased. “It’s better to meet lower expectations,” she says, “than to be disappointed that you’re not losing what you supposedly should.” (You can find a basic version of the revised weight loss calculator here.
She is perhaps her own best advertisement. In the past few years, she’s shed 70 pounds and, using her formulas for how many calories she’s actually burning each day thanks to a daily walk, has regained none of it."

“Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.”--Margaret Lee Runbeck (1905-1956)

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