Hot MedFax

I remember the last time my son lied to me.  Actually, it was last night.  He went in to take a shower and ran the water, then came out.  This morning I noticed that the tab that releases the shower spray wasn't up, the way it always is when he showers (and then splashes down all over me when I get in our shower tub to take mine). "Did you take a shower?" I demanded. "Ye-e-e-e-s," he said in that nasty teenage voice, when they're angry you're asking (and afraid you've caught them).  Of course I can't prove it but he hates taking a shower (what is it with boys?) and would do just about anything to get out of it. So what did I do?  The usual.  Nothing.  I took him at his word, even though I knew he most likely was not telling the truth. Now a new study is saying that maybe I did the right thing, after all.  Researchers have found that punishing kids for lying just doesn't work. If you want your child to tell the truth, it’s best not...

You've heard the expression, every cloud has a silver lining?  Well, how about every silver lining has a cloud? A new study has found that the very same hormone that helps us love also helps us lie. Say what?   Oxytocin - the "love" hormone produced by the body to encourage bonding - may also help us to lie -- but here's the silver lining.  To the benefit of our group. Oxytocin -- which has sometimes been confused (at least by me) for oxycodone, a way to curb pain (and get high) --   has been demonstrated in research as "promoting bonding in couples and between mothers and babies, and is also thought to drive people's impulse to be sociable," according to medicalnewtoday.com. The more oxytocin a person has, the more empathy and trust they will have, as well as lower social  anxiety  and fear response. Oxytocin can also stimulate aggression, if it is required for reasons of defense, medicalnewstoday reports. Oxytocin can also keep men monoga...

Here's another reason not to lie to our children: those who are lied to are more likely to grow up to be liars and cheaters. I'm not talking those little white lies -- "Yes, Virginia, there's a Santa Claus," but the ones that are really damaging, like whether a child's been adopted or has a different parent than his siblings.    “This is the first experiment confirming what we might have suspected: Lying by an adult affects a child’s honesty," newswise.com quotes Leslie Carver,  associate professor of psychology and human development in the UC San Diego Division of Social Sciences.   Experimenters had children ages three to seven listen to music coming from a toy they couldn't see.  Some of it was recognizable to the kids but a classical music piece, was not. When this music sounded, the adult left the room for 90 seconds.  The kids were explicitly told not to look for the toy. Here's the catch: some of the children had been told there was...

If you're lying, it must be afternoon.  No, I'm not implying that you're a liar.  But if you are, you most likely do it in the afternoon, according to a new study . Researchers conducted tests on college students where they would earn money if they answered questions a certain way.  Initially the students didn't know that they would receive anything .But once they found out, they, of course, answered that way even when the answer they chose they knew was wrong. What was learned? Students who participated in the morning session - between 8 am and noon - cheated less, compared with the group who participated between noon and 6 pm. The researchers called this occurrence the "morning morality effect.," m edicalnewstoday.com reports. In another experiment, the researchers presented morning and afternoon participants with word fragments, including "_ _ R A L" and "E _ _ _ C _ _." "Students in the morning group were more likely to spe...

It wasn't really that big a deal.  So he lost $30,000.  But it wasn't the money my husband lost playing futures. It was that he'd told me, when we moved in together, that he didn't have money for a lot of things -- like going on vacations, because his dental practice wasn't doing that well financially. I bought it.  I was doing well, and what the heck, it was only money.  So I paid the lion's share of our vacations -- to Barbados, California, and weekend jaunts around New England. But over time I found out that the money he wasn't making he had already made -- and lost it all playing the commodities market.  I didn't care that that was how he lost it.  I cared that he lied . Twenty years later, we're over it (I think), but today's New York Times explains why I felt so violated.  He changed my life story. The essay in The Times by Anna Fels, a psychiatrist and faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical School, points out that when people lear...

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal today reported that a survey taken in 2009 found that 28% of patients admitted to lying to their doctors about how many drinks a week they had, cigarettes they smoked in a day and how often they exercised. But the medical profession puts it at more than almost triple that -- at 77%. Writer Sumathi Reddy said that it's often because people don't want to disappoint their doctors.  So doctors often add on to what we tell them.  Four drinks a week?  Make that eight, docs say, and base their treatment on that number. What if you're like me, and don't lie (at least, about this stuff)?  Are we then being under- or overtreated?  Reddy didn't say.  But "doctors say omitting important information or lying can lead to the wrong treatment, medicine or even diagnosis," according to the article. Parents, on the other hand, sometimes lie when they don't want to be judged.  Reddy gives the example of a mother te...

Why do we lie?  Is it from that little jab of guilty pleasure, when we follow all the other rules? But you might want to think about it, next time.  Honesty improves both mental health and physical health. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/09/why-we-lie-time-factor-truth_n_1862384.html