Phosphatidylserine also has been marketed as a “brain booster” for the young, although there is no evidence that it produces any significant effect.

Recently, it has been proposed for use as a training enhancement supplement for sports enthusiasts.

This is based on modest evidence that phosphatidylserine prevents the physiological elevation of cortisol that occurs following heavy exercise.

Janssen Pharmaceutica, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, said that the decision was not related to safety concerns raised by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after Hismanal was approved in 1988.

The FDA said in a statement that the drug had been subject to a series of labeling changes and warnings.

“In light of the choices of other prescription antihistamines now available, and the overall risk-benefit profile of this drug, FDA supports the decision of the company to withdraw the product,” agency officials wrote.

In a February 1998 warning, the FDA said that Hismanal could cause irregular heart rhythms or severe allergic reactions if taken at higher-than-recommended doses or in conjunction with some other drugs, including certain antihypertensive, anti-asthma, and anti-HIV/AIDS drugs, as well as certain antibiotics. The label for the drug also cautioned patients with liver problems not to take the drug, and warned against taking it with grapefruit juice.

But a Janssen spokesman said that the New Jersey-based company was not withdrawing the drug because of safety problems. He said that the company saw limited potential for Hismanal, taken by millions since it was launched in 1989, which was not selling as well as competing antihistamines.

“It was a business decision… due to limited consumer potential and number of therapies,” Janssen spokesman Greg Panico said. “The market share was relatively low compared to competitors.”

Hismanal was approved by the FDA to treat hay fever and hives. It was the first once-a-day allergy drug that did not cause drowsiness, Panico said.

The FDA advised patients currently taking Hismanal to consult with their physicians about alternative treatments

Watkins, surprisingly, sometimes recommends martial arts training, both for bullies and the bullied. “With the right instructor, it can be a place where people learn self-discipline and etiquette,” she said. She recommends watching a class and talking with waiting parents to see if the values being taught seem appropriate.

The “Verbal Aikido” Defense
For everyday teasing and meanness, Watkins says humor is a great diffuser. “Humor is something that can be taught,” she said. For the bully, learning what is fair and appropriate is the goal. For those bullied, she says, children who learn to respond with humor “are less likely to be victimized.”

Kate Cohen-Posey, author of “How to Handle Bullies, Teasers and Other Meanies” (Rainbow Books, $8.95), agrees. This Florida-based therapist teaches the young children she counsels — just as she taught her own daughter — to develop a form of what she calls “verbal Aikido,” in which the child being bullied uses language — and humor — to diffuse and neutralize negative language. “Kids who are vulnerable are more susceptible to the teasing and bullying behavior,” Cohen-Posey said.

She says that the instinctual response to being bullied is to fight or to flee. Either action encourages the bully. But using the bully’s negative momentum against him or her — as you would use it in the martial arts — has proven effective, Cohen-Posey asserts.

Her method involves combinations of three basic techniques:

using negativity as if it were a compliment;

asking questions (“Are you mad at me?”);

using “hypnotic” words, such as “try,” “dare” and “but” (“You can try to keep upsetting me if you want to,” “I dare you to say something nice,” “You may think I’m fat but you look nice”).

“Once you handle it a couple of times, even the most hateful things can be empowering,” Cohen-Posey added. Some children pick up the technique faster than others, but parents can replay the day’s events and talk about rejoinders. “Bullies repeat themselves, and so the comeback the child didn’t have one day can be rehearsed for the next time,” she said. “You can even practice generic one-liners,” Cohen-Posey added. Much of her book lists common insults and defusing responses.

Parenting Bullies
But what if your child is doing the bullying? Watkins cautions parents to really listen to what may prompt bullying behavior, but lists some exceptions that require immediate and formal intervention — hitting, exceeding another student’s physical boundaries (such as sexual groping) and pressuring children for money or test answers.

“People have an urge for mastery. You don’t want to get rid of that,” Watkins said. “You don’t want to make your child a wimp, but you need to get them to use their strength in the right way.”

Cohen-Posey takes the positive approach as well. “You need to say, ‘You’re a good kid, what’s going on that makes you do it?’” Watkins distinguishes for analytical purposes between the conscious, planning bully and the more impulsive bully who may have developmental problems that interfere with his or her reading of social cues — such as physical boundaries. “But explanations are not excuses,” she added.

To Cohen-Posey, it is important to really listen to the bully, since so often they are repeating behavior already directed at them from another source.

Extreme times may demand extreme measures, but bullies — and their victims — settle into behaviors early unless an informed intervention occurs. “There is no metal detector for the heart,” said Eric Chester, motivational speaker and author of “Teen Power Too”. Chester speaks to 1.5 million teens every year, exploring issues on the minds of what he calls the “Why Generation.” He also lives near Littleton, Colo., scene of the Colombine High School massacre.

Chester says there is little that can be done to prevent the kamikaze-like strike that left more than a dozen dead in April 1999, but he and a host of other experts agree much can be done to identify and limit the kind of teasing and bullying that impacts children negatively every day and in some cases escalates with deadly results.

A Bully-Free Past?
Parents can’t help but ask: Are things worse now than when I was growing up? The answer is a simple yes — and no. Pennsylvania is typical of states gathering statistics on “violent incidents” in schools. Reported incidents rose 21 percent in the 1998-99 school year, compared to the previous year. Attacks on teachers in Pennsylvania schools rose 12 percent, but weapons use dropped 17 percent. A “zero tolerance” outlook tends to increase reporting. “A district that historically might not have reported a shoving incident in a hallway might now be reporting that,” according to a spokesman for the state education department.

“Bullying has always been with us,” said Dr. Carol Watkins, a psychiatrist who specializes in children and adolescents in Baltimore, Md. “But some bullying has become more dangerous because of access to weapons,” she said. And the limits on bullying imposed by an earlier social order have eroded. “There are fewer parents ‘out on the stoop’ watching what children are doing,” Watkins explained. And even when there are, she said, “there’s more of a sense of things being not your business.”

Open Communication
Some experts worry that parent and teacher over-reaction to lesser incidents may close off the very communication between adults and children necessary for combating negative behavior.

“If in doubt, let it out,” Chester said. “But we don’t want to turn our schools into a tattle-tale battlefield either.”

The key, Chester believes, is training school personnel to effectively — and discreetly — handle the concerns students bring to them. And then to make those trained adults known to the students. Parents share the responsibility for opening the lines of communication, Chester asserts.

“No one can tell me that Eric and Dylan were the only ones who knew what they were planning.” Chester said. “The kids just didn’t know where to take it.”

He agreed that humor is a great tension reliever. Aggression and frustration can be expressed with a joke, and the joker can get away with saying things that would otherwise be offensive.

But Mintz doesn’t find medical research on laughter’s health benefits to be persuasive. Yes, studies show an optimistic, positive attitude can promote the release of beta endorphins — natural pain-blocking, feel-good chemicals. But so can chocolate, sex, exercise and meditation, and of the four he said meditation has proved the most effective.

“People who really know and are very interested in this subject tend to be very skeptical,” Mintz said.

Both Mintz and Hensel cited the once-famous case of Norman Cousins, an editor and author who credited his recovery from an extremely painful back disorder to watching Marx Brothers movies and reading joke books. Mintz said Cousins’ condition was one from which some people recover spontaneously, and that could have been what happened in his case.

Hensel confirmed Kupersmith’s report that researchers have established that humor, cheerfulness and optimism increase the number of immune cells and improves their ability to fight disease. “Epidemiological studies show that married people live longer than single ones, and optimistic ones have fewer illnesses and recover better than pessimists do. People who hold stress inside are more likely to fall ill than those who handle stress well.”

If laughter does have health benefits, Hensel said it could be from the release of those endorphins, which he called “the body’s natural morphine,” or serotonin, a chemical that makes one feel happy.

But some happy people are ill, and some depressed people are healthy. “It’s not a one-to-one relationship,” Hensel said. “But it is a factor.”

Hensel said better testing methods are needed to find out what the effects of humor and optimism are, and then to find out how to use humor in therapy.

A person who is able to laugh at a joke or prank is likely to be more optimistic and deal better with stress, Hensel said. But which comes first? Perhaps it’s only that people who are healthy in the first place are more optimistic and better able to deal with stress.

Still, Hensel said, “there’s no down side to dealing with stress and taking an optimistic attitude, and humor goes along with those things. A good laugh can turn things around.”

There’s been a lot of medical research on that question, but the answer is still uncertain.

Doctor, a neuropsychiatrist at Texas Tech’s Medical Center, says a daily dose of laughter can bring serious health benefits. Dr. Lawrence Mintz of the University of Maryland’s Center for Humor Studies is not convinced. He said studies he’s seen show that most researchers are still in doubt about that.

Doctor, chief medical correspondent for drkoop.com, tends to agree with Mintz, but said even if we don’t know the answer yet, it is a fact that people who are able to enjoy a good laugh are probably dealing better with stress. That can mean they won’t fall ill as often and will recover faster when they do.

Humor is “a high-level defense against anxiety,” Kupersmith said. It can take the edge off a stressful situation and it also helps people deal with aggression. “When a person is feeling aggression, they can control those feelings by saying something humorous, something the opposite of what they are feeling,” she said.

Stress is a serious threat to emotional health, Kupersmith said, “and in today’s high-stress environment, we are all looking for stress reduction and ways of coping.”

Kupersmith sees stress as a particular problem among adolescents, who “have it much harder today than years ago, even with the economic advantages they often have now. We look at them and see that they have cars, they have clothes, they have money, so why are they stressed? We see the problem in younger and younger children. Their childhood is getting shorter and shorter.”

Kupersmith said there is much interest in research on the interaction of the body and mind, and the psychological, neurological and immunological systems. It has been shown that the more stress one has, the less able one is to fight off illness. “By using humor and monitoring laughter for a certain period of time, researchers can compare blood counts in cancer patients, for instance, and are finding that the immune system is healthier in those who laugh.”

Laughter can boost physical health in four ways, she said. It enhances the cardiovascular system, improves circulation and oxygen exchange, stimulates the nervous system, and increases endorphins, which help block pain.

Mintz said he thought the health benefits of humor involve “reaching a long way down the holistic ladder.” Mintz, a historian, has been studying the role of humor in American culture for 35 years.

He said a difficulty with humor studies is that one person’s joke is another person’s insult. Is an April Fool’s Day joke only a clever prank, or a rude, crude assault? Some Maryland students once offered a pie-ing service. For a fee, they would give a professor a custard pie in the face. The professors were not amused. They filed assault charges, and the students spent time in jail.

The corner stretch targets the muscles of the upper chest. The following description, taken from the American Physical Therapy Association Book of Body Maintenance and Repair, describes how to perform the stretch correctly.

Corner Stretch
Stand up straight. With your feet parallel, face the corner of a wall.

Keep your stomach in and chin tucked. Gaze forward with your head upright and knees slightly bent.

Bend your arms and raise them as close to shoulder height as you comfortably can. Place your arms on the wall (as if you’re about to do a pushup) and point your fingers toward the ceiling. Inhale.

Slowly lean your body toward the corner. Be careful not to flex at your hips; you should press your hips slightly forward. Exhale as you lean into the wall.

Hold the stretch for 10 to 30 seconds, breathing evenly as you hold it. Inhale as you straighten up.
Additional Points to Remember
Stretch when your body is properly warmed up, such as after performing cardiovascular exercise.

The pull of the stretch should be felt in the center of the muscle, not at the joints.

Don’t try to force flexibility. Start slowly and progress gradually.

Never stretch muscles that are injured or strained.

African-American women have strikingly higher death rates from breast cancer than white women do: a 60% greater chance. Why? According to a new report, the time between an abnormal mammography reading and a diagnostic test is twice as long for non-white women than for white women. Non-white women (which included African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians) waited an average of 15 days, while white women waited only a week.

The October 1 issue of Cancer reported the discrepancies among white and non-white women in “Racial Differences in Timeliness of Follow-Up after Abnormal Screening Mammography.” The northern California study, led by Sophia W. Chang of the University of California at San Francisco, analyzed the records of 317 women who visited a mammography screening program in a mobile van in 1993 and 1994.

What’s causing the hold-up?

The study concluded that further research is necessary before determining exact causes, though several possibilities were discussed. Chang and colleagues noted that “patient-induced delay may be related to individual fears or anxieties,” and cited other studies that showed racial and ethnic differences in mammography.

Medical providers contributed to the wait in some cases, noted Chang. This may be a factor since non-white women may have visited “overburdened community and public health clinics” more frequently than did the white women. The study also cited potential language barriers between patients and health care workers.

Finally, the lack of easy access to health care may have influenced the non-white women. The research claimed that these women are more likely to have inadequate insurance, or none at all. Not having regular medical care could also contribute to the wait.

While the effects of these longer waits are unknown, the study claims the delay may be insignificant. Nonetheless, “the finding of racial/ethnic differences in our setting is worrisome,”

My basic pantry contains ingredients that can be mixed and matched in a snap: canned, fat-free chicken broth; canned vegetable broth; chunky salsa; Italian seasoning;10-minute brown or white rice in a bag; flavored stewed tomatoes; flavored diced tomatoes;

Small-size pasta like orzo or angel hair; all kinds of canned beans (some flavored); extra virgin olive oil; large yellow onions; a garlic bulb; canned, low-fat cream soups; selection of frozen vegetables; red wine vinegar; canned potatoes; canned beets; canned chickpeas; peeled baby carrots; washed fresh baby spinach; fresh scallions; and frozen or fresh broccoli.

As a general rule, you can try mixing fresh ingredients with recipes that use prepared foods to cut time and add nutrients.

Over a one and a half year period, the researchers determined that 70% of those with recurrent canker sores were deficient in vitamin B-1 compared to only 4% in the control group. The low levels of thiamine in those suffering from this condition suggests that this tiamin may play an important role in the onset of this disorder.

Your smile is the primary thing people discern about you. Find out about the various kinds of professional teeth whitening ways which are obtainable and how effectual to apply them.