Hot MedFax

Uh oh.  A new study has found people are hard-wired to fall out of love and move into new romantic relationships. “Our review of the literature suggests we have a mechanism in our brains designed by natural selection to pull us through a very tumultuous time in our lives,” says Brian Boutwell, Ph.D., associate professor of criminology and criminal justice and associate professor of epidemiology at Saint Louis University. “It suggests people will recover; the pain will go away with time. There will be a light at the end of the tunnel.” As anyone who has endured a break-up knows, some break-ups take more time than others.  I didn't have a lot of serious relationships in my life (I met my husband in my late 20's), but they didn't all end the way I wanted and some of them certainly required much more time to recover (I remember, after one break-up, going running and as I circled the gym, realizing, well, I got through one minute.) Drawing largely upon the field of ...

Why does this not surprise me?  Apparently six percent of marriages end in divorce when the wife gets sick. We're not talking tonsillitis or the flu, but major, serious  illness, like heart attack or cancer. I should know.  I was diagnosed with breast cancer 11 years ago, and though my husband went with me to the appointment where we discussed treatment, all I remember is him saying, "This is nothing," as we walked through the parking lot to Tully. Of course, as the surgeon talked on, telling us that though my cancer was non-invasive, it was the highest grade, which meant they weren't totally sure it hadn't spread outside the milk duct, he kept looking at me.  (Thankfully, it turned out not to.)  Walking out of the office, Larry said, "You were right.  It's something." I don't remember much about that time.  We had a three-year-old and I was more concerned about taking care of him (and making sure he didn't notice anything was wrong) ...

This is truly shocking. Almost half the kids in this country have been exposed to violence or a traumatic situation in their families in their childhoods. According to newswise.com, nearly 50% of all children in the United States are exposed to at least one social or family experience that can lead to traumatic stress and have an impact on their healthy development – be it having their parents divorce, a parent die or living with someone who abuses alcohol or drugs – increasing the risk of negative long-term health consequences or of falling behind in school, suggests new research led by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Growing up, parents were expected to hit their kids, some with belts, others (like my mom) with whatever was handy!  And we've all heard the outcry, right or wrong, against Adrian Peterson.  Today we know better, supposedly.  But looking at the results of this study, clearly, it still happens.  The good news is...

Sad but true.  Adults are at higher risk of suicide if one parent, or both, were alcoholics. A new study has found that " People who grew up with a parent who abused alcohol may be 85 percent more likely to attempt suicide than people whose parents did not abuse alcohol, according to research published by the American Psychological Association," reports newswise.com. Having divorced parents increased by 14 percent the risk that a person would try to take his or her own life when compared to people whose parents did not divorce, the study found. But having both -- parents who abuse alcohol and are divorced -- did not increase suicide attempts, according to the study.  One good thing! In the study, almost 14,000 participants reported they had suffered major depression at some point in their life and of those, 1,073 said they had attempted suicide. In the group that reported attempted suicide, 25 percent said they had parents who divorced and 46 percent said one or both p...

I found this truly depressing.  Adolescents who have half-siblings with a different father are more likely to have used drugs and had sex by age 15 than those who have only full siblings. Researchers examined a phenomenon known as “multi-partnered fertility” or MPF, according to newswise.com. "This happens when parents who are not romantically involved with each other form new relationships and have another child with a new partner," the Web site reports.  (Hmm.  Wonder if they know Kody Brown.) What the researchers focused on were the connections between this re-partnering and additional childbearing on adolescent drug use and early sex. They focused on mothers and first-born children who lived with their mothers most of their lives. “For children, MPF means having a half-sibling, but it also means, for first-born children, that they usually experienced their biological parents splitting up — if they were together at all, lived in a single mother household fo...

Uh oh.  Having more siblings protects you from divorce later in life as an adult.  That's according to a new study . Now, my son, Phillip, is an only child but I'm hoping he's in the  50% who stays married, anyway.  But I have a while to wait.  He's only 12. The new study found that "growing up with siblings may definitely provide some protection against divorce as an adult."  And the more siblings, the better. Each additional sibling a person has (up to about seven) reduces the chance he'll divorce by 2 percent. More siblings didn’t provide additional protection, although they did not hurt, either. “But when you compare children from large families to those with only one child, there is a meaningful gap in the probability of divorce,” newswise.com quotes Doug Downey, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. Why? One of the biggest surprises of the study was that it wasn’t the difference between being an...

I don't know about you but I've always pretty much lived my life like danger was always lurking just around the corner.  Probably because I've experienced a number of traumatic things, but as Mark Epstein writes at The NYT, you can grow up all you want, but " Trauma never goes away completely." He adds that it changes perhaps, "softens some with time, but never completely goes away." Epstein, a psychiatrist, says an undercurrent of trauma runs through ordinary life, "shot through as it is with the poignancy of impermanence." There is no way to be alive without being conscious of the potential for disaster.  Not my words.  Epstein's.  But exactly the way I feel.  " One way or another, death (and its cousins: old age, illness, accidents, separation and loss) hangs over all of us,"he writes. "Nobody is immune. Our world is unstable and unpredictable, and operates, to a great degree and despite incredible scientific advance...

OK, so it's not very scientific (in fact, it might not be at all!).  But a survey produced in 2007 by steptalk.com found that only 15% of participants would marry their spouse again.  I doubt it would have changed much six years later, maybe might even be lower. That got me thinking.  My husband and I will be married 20 years next year (though we've been together for 30), and we've had some pretty tough times.  I have contacted a lawyer about separating in the past, when our son was young and I wasn't getting the help or support I needed,  and I've thought about it again from time to time, like when I was diagnosed with breast cancer (twice) and he just couldn't deal with it. My husband's not very romantic (I think I've heard "I love you," exactly twice), and his way of proposing was, "I guess we could get married." Yet, there's a side of him that's kind and warm (he bought a special ankle brace for a friend's daught...