Scientists have looked our ancestors in the mouth and extracted a new insight about human evolution. Slowed-down tooth growth, a marker of extended childhood development in humans, emerged by only around 100,000 years ago, the investigators have found.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Even fossil species treated as direct or close ancestors of Homo sapiens, such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, exhibited relatively rapid tooth growth, more like that of apes than of people, report anatomist Christopher Dean of University College London and his colleagues. Overall, people take 18 to 20 years to reach full growth, while chimpanzees and gorillas take 11 to 12 years.
"I was quite surprised to find that tooth enamel grew at such different rates in early Homo species, [especially] Homo erectus, compared with Homo sapiens," Dean says. In his view, this dental disparity indicates that prolonged childhood development emerged when our ancestors evolved brains and bodies similar to those of people today. Dean's group presents its results in the Dec. 6 Nature.
Steven R. Leigh, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, calls the new study "a fine piece of work with important implications for understanding the evolution of human-life histories."
In particular, Dean's data highlight the "unusual nature" of individual development in H. sapiens and Neandertals, Leigh says. He suspects that delayed dental growth accompanied a substantially longer lifespan in these species.
The scientists focused on microscopic features of teeth to establish a time scale for dental growth throughout human evolution. Children's permanent teeth grow in layers that preserve a record of their developmental pace. One sheet of enamel gets laid down daily, the process forming a criss-cross pattern inside the tooth. Ridges on the enamel surface accumulate every 8 or 9 days.
Daily enamel layers grow more slowly and therefore are thinner in people than in apes, reflecting our longer period of physical development.
Of 13 fossil teeth examined by Dean and his coworkers, those attributed to australopithecines�members of the human evolutionary family that lived between 5 million and 1 million years ago�and to three Homo species�Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and H.
erectus�displayed signs of speedier, apelike enamel growth.
In a separate study, Spanish researchers identified a modern sequence of tooth development in an 800,000-year-old Homo species (SN: 6/2/01, p. 346: http://www.sciencenews.org/20010602/bob14.asp).
However, the new results suggest that this dental sequence occurred more rapidly than in modern people, Dean holds.
Scientists had expected that H. erectus, the first fossil ancestor with body proportions and tooth sizes like those of modern people, grew relatively slowly. Yet using measurements of the fossil teeth, Dean's group determined the time needed for tooth formation. The results indicate early and rapid growth for the teeth of H. erectus and earlier Homo species. For example, the first permanent molar, which erupts at around
6 years in modern humans and at about 3� years in apes, erupted between 4 and 4� years in H. erectus, Dean says.
The new study included teeth from a juvenile H. erectus skeleton found in Kenya and dating to 1.5 million years ago. Many researchers regard this boy, who was 5 feet 3 inches tall, as having been close to 12 years old. Evidence of more-rapid dental growth in H. erectus now places this boy at closer to 8 years old when he died, according to Dean. The earliest evidence for slower tooth growth appeared in a 100,000-year-old Neandertal specimen from an Israeli site, he adds.
A slowing of dental growth may have contributed to a tendency for the skulls of H. sapiens adults to look like larger versions of juvenile H. erectus skulls, comments anthropologist Susan C. Anton of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Even with refined theories about tooth growth throughout human evolution, she says the developmental picture for H. erectus remains fuzzy.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Tooth growth may have proceeded at varying paces in far-flung H. erectus groups, Anton suggests. For instance, African and Asian H. erectus specimens display shape differences in their skulls and teeth that may reflect disparities in the timing of enamel growth, Anton says.http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
Nonetheless, it's now clear that the thick tooth enamel in H. sapiens develops more slowly than comparably thick tooth enamel in our ancient ancestors grew, remarks Italian anthropologist Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi of the University of Florence.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
engel 5.0020 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Does psychotherapy work?
Depends on what you mean by “psychotherapy.” And by “work.”
The answer matters. In trying to ascend from (as Freud once put it) “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness,” millions of Americans attend weekly therapy sessions of myriad kinds, at costs that can exceed $10,000 a year. Large professional edifices — psychiatry, psychology, social work, among others — are constructed atop the notion that psychotherapy works. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com If it were to be conclusively demonstrated that therapy doesn’t work, therapists would be put out of business; that’s effectively what’s already happened to Freudian psychoanalysts.
Jonathan Engel, a professor of health care policy at Baruch College, begins “American Therapy” by asserting: “Psychotherapy works. Multiple studies conducted over the past half-century have demonstrated that two-thirds of people who engage in psychotherapy improve.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com But then, intentionally or not, he dedicates the better part of this fascinating book to complicating that proposition.
For starters, there’s that one-third of patients who don’t get better with psychotherapy; by definition, it doesn’t work for them. And then, perhaps more damningly, there’s the one-third of patients who have been consistently shown to get better without any treatment at all.
And then there’s this: a survey published in the early 1970s found that whereas a majority (59 percent) of people who had visited a professional psychotherapist for mental distress reported having been “helped” or “helped a lot” by the consultation, much larger majorities of people who had consulted a clergyman (78 percent) or a physician without specialized psychological training (76 percent) or — get this — a lawyer (77 percent) reported the same thing. Of course, psychotherapy did develop some pretty wacky offshoots in the 1970s — primal scream therapy, rebirthing therapy and Z-therapy (which seems to have involved, among other things, poking and tickling the patient) — so maybe it’s not surprising that people got more psychic relief from their lawyers than their therapists. But while a 1974 paper by a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist criticized the “charlatans” who “preyed on the gullible and the self-deluded,” these kooky therapies were actually surprisingly effective; many of the patients who underwent them reported themselves cured. This would certainly seem to undermine the claims of mainstream professional psychotherapy to specialized knowledge of any particular usefulness. If someone can poke and tickle a neurotic patient to health, why should an aspiring psychotherapist bother to get a graduate degree? Is psychotherapy just a high-priced placebo?
Engel describes an experiment that seems to have been animated by these very questions. In 1979, a Vanderbilt University researcher named Hans Strupp divided 30 patients with psychological problems into two groups, one to be treated by trained psychotherapists, the other by humanities professors with no psychological expertise. The result? The two groups reported improvement at the same rates. “Effective psychotherapy,” Engel writes, “seemed to require little more than a willing patient and an intelligent and understanding counselor who met and spoke regularly and in confidence.”
A University of Pennsylvania study found that the most successful therapists — regardless of whether they were Freudians or behaviorists, cognitive therapists or Z-therapists — were honest and empathic and connected quickly and well with other people. (Krupp’s humanities professors may have fared so well because they were chosen based on how well likedthey were.) Studies like Krupp’s rattled the foundations of the field and, as Engel puts it, “shook therapists’ confidence in their own rectitude.” But, as Engel takes pains to remind us, if twice as many distressed people improve with therapy as without it — as studies consistently show — those are still pretty good odds for psychotherapy.
The question of effectiveness is only incidental to Engel’s main goal, which is to tell the story of how, over the course of less than 100 years, psychotherapy went from being an obscure treatment for upper-middle-class Jews in fin-de-siècleVienna to being a staple of mainstream American medical practice and a fixture of our popular culture. Mining both medical journals and the popular press, Engel spins a richly textured tale of psychotherapy’s rise.
Naturally, the story begins with Freud, a thoroughly unlikely candidate to become the progenitor of anything distinctly American. He visited the United States only once, in 1909, and found the country rather barbaric. Practical-minded Americans, for their part, would not seem to have provided a receptive audience for his arcane theory of mind, with its id, ego and superego, and its references to Oedipal crises, castration complexes and penis envy. But the most eminent American psychologists of the day — G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, James Jackson Putnam at Harvard, Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins and, later, Harry Stack Sullivan, of the Washington School of Psychiatry, among others — embraced and promoted Freudian theory. Psychoanalysis, Engel observes, “seemed to be compatible with a strain in the American zeitgeist,” and the psychoanalytic establishment here “rigidly stood by the Freudian canon for decades” after his death.
For several decades after Freud’s visit to America, psychotherapy remained at the margins of American culture; mental illness was still a little discussed, and highly stigmatized, phenomenon. World War II changed that: when 12 percent of draftees — nearly two million men — were rejected for “neuropsychiatric” reasons, it profoundly altered the American perception of mental illness; psychiatric problems became, in some sense, normal. William Menninger, who was serving as chief psychiatrist of the United States Army, noted that “people are beginning to see that damage of the same kind can be done by a bullet, bacteria or mother-in-law.” After the war, terms like “repression” and “inferiority complex” began cropping up in movies and best-selling novels. “Where the public once turned to the minister, or the captain of industry, or the historian or the scientist,” one social critic observed, “it is now turning more and more to the psychiatrist.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com (Engel writes about the fascinating battle lines drawn between psychiatrists and the clergy during this time, with their diametrically opposed notions of guilt.)
When Time magazine put Freud on its cover in April 1956, the psychoanalytic moment in America had arrived, and for the next several decades psychoanalysts largely dominated the mental health field. But even as Freudians occupied the top echelons in the psychiatric institutes and the medical school residency programs, and the psychoanalytic idiom was tightly woven into the culture, more and more studies were calling into question the effectiveness of the psychoanalytic enterprise. In 1975, the behavioral psychologist Hans Eysenck declared (controversially) that “Freudian theory is as dead as that attributing neurotic symptoms to demonological influences, and his method of therapy is following exorcism into oblivion.”
The death warrant may actually have been written earlier, in the 1950s, on the first prescriptions for Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication so effective that it became known as “the drug which emptied the hospitals.” Though Freud himself anticipated the age of biological psychiatry (in 1938, he wrote “the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus”), the realization that drugs could so successfully treat some forms of mental illness thoroughly discombobulated the psychoanalytic profession. If drugs worked, that implied an organic, or medical, basis for neurosis, which in turn challenged some of the basic assumptions of psychoanalytically oriented therapy. If mental illness was due to some physical anomaly in the brain, wasn’t the best way to treat the illness by directly addressing that anomaly, with a pill? By the mid-1960s, the psychiatric establishment was moving definitively in a pharmaceutically oriented direction.
Meanwhile, the advent of even better drugs like Prozac (which went on the market in 1987), and the proliferation of cognitive therapies, in which the patient works with a therapist in a focused way to change maladaptive ways of thinking, further diminished Freud’s standing; repeated controlled studies clearly showed both drug and cognitive therapies to be effective in ways that psychoanalysis, with its hours on the couch, has not been shown to be.Though some Freudian analysts continue to practice today, Engel writes, they resemble “nothing more than a fanatical Essene sect, living apart in the wilderness where they could continue to seek truth in the master’s writings.”
Engel describes how factors like changes in the structure of health insurance shaped (and often distorted) psychiatric care, and his book is studded with fascinating tidbits like this one: in the mid-1960s, two buildings on the corner of 96th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan had as many analysts as Minnesota, Oregon, Delaware, Oklahoma, Vermont, Wisconsin and Tennessee combined.
Engel gestures at, but doesn’t directly address, some of the most interesting questions prompted by the rise of psychotherapy. Is the enormous growth of the field over the last century simply a case of supply surging to meet demand, or does the volume of neurosis fluctuate over the years? Are anxiety and alienation always symptoms to be treated, or are they sometimes appropriate — even healthy — responses to the vicissitudes of late modernity? Is psychotherapy an art or a science, a subcategory of humanism or of biology?
But the story Engel does tell is plenty interesting and his conflicted view of Freudianism well worth absorbing: the most influential school of therapy in American history may not have worked very well as a treatment — but it did revolutionize how we think about the human mind. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Depends on what you mean by “psychotherapy.” And by “work.”
The answer matters. In trying to ascend from (as Freud once put it) “hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness,” millions of Americans attend weekly therapy sessions of myriad kinds, at costs that can exceed $10,000 a year. Large professional edifices — psychiatry, psychology, social work, among others — are constructed atop the notion that psychotherapy works. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com If it were to be conclusively demonstrated that therapy doesn’t work, therapists would be put out of business; that’s effectively what’s already happened to Freudian psychoanalysts.
Jonathan Engel, a professor of health care policy at Baruch College, begins “American Therapy” by asserting: “Psychotherapy works. Multiple studies conducted over the past half-century have demonstrated that two-thirds of people who engage in psychotherapy improve.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com But then, intentionally or not, he dedicates the better part of this fascinating book to complicating that proposition.
For starters, there’s that one-third of patients who don’t get better with psychotherapy; by definition, it doesn’t work for them. And then, perhaps more damningly, there’s the one-third of patients who have been consistently shown to get better without any treatment at all.
And then there’s this: a survey published in the early 1970s found that whereas a majority (59 percent) of people who had visited a professional psychotherapist for mental distress reported having been “helped” or “helped a lot” by the consultation, much larger majorities of people who had consulted a clergyman (78 percent) or a physician without specialized psychological training (76 percent) or — get this — a lawyer (77 percent) reported the same thing. Of course, psychotherapy did develop some pretty wacky offshoots in the 1970s — primal scream therapy, rebirthing therapy and Z-therapy (which seems to have involved, among other things, poking and tickling the patient) — so maybe it’s not surprising that people got more psychic relief from their lawyers than their therapists. But while a 1974 paper by a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist criticized the “charlatans” who “preyed on the gullible and the self-deluded,” these kooky therapies were actually surprisingly effective; many of the patients who underwent them reported themselves cured. This would certainly seem to undermine the claims of mainstream professional psychotherapy to specialized knowledge of any particular usefulness. If someone can poke and tickle a neurotic patient to health, why should an aspiring psychotherapist bother to get a graduate degree? Is psychotherapy just a high-priced placebo?
Engel describes an experiment that seems to have been animated by these very questions. In 1979, a Vanderbilt University researcher named Hans Strupp divided 30 patients with psychological problems into two groups, one to be treated by trained psychotherapists, the other by humanities professors with no psychological expertise. The result? The two groups reported improvement at the same rates. “Effective psychotherapy,” Engel writes, “seemed to require little more than a willing patient and an intelligent and understanding counselor who met and spoke regularly and in confidence.”
A University of Pennsylvania study found that the most successful therapists — regardless of whether they were Freudians or behaviorists, cognitive therapists or Z-therapists — were honest and empathic and connected quickly and well with other people. (Krupp’s humanities professors may have fared so well because they were chosen based on how well likedthey were.) Studies like Krupp’s rattled the foundations of the field and, as Engel puts it, “shook therapists’ confidence in their own rectitude.” But, as Engel takes pains to remind us, if twice as many distressed people improve with therapy as without it — as studies consistently show — those are still pretty good odds for psychotherapy.
The question of effectiveness is only incidental to Engel’s main goal, which is to tell the story of how, over the course of less than 100 years, psychotherapy went from being an obscure treatment for upper-middle-class Jews in fin-de-siècleVienna to being a staple of mainstream American medical practice and a fixture of our popular culture. Mining both medical journals and the popular press, Engel spins a richly textured tale of psychotherapy’s rise.
Naturally, the story begins with Freud, a thoroughly unlikely candidate to become the progenitor of anything distinctly American. He visited the United States only once, in 1909, and found the country rather barbaric. Practical-minded Americans, for their part, would not seem to have provided a receptive audience for his arcane theory of mind, with its id, ego and superego, and its references to Oedipal crises, castration complexes and penis envy. But the most eminent American psychologists of the day — G. Stanley Hall at Clark University, James Jackson Putnam at Harvard, Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins and, later, Harry Stack Sullivan, of the Washington School of Psychiatry, among others — embraced and promoted Freudian theory. Psychoanalysis, Engel observes, “seemed to be compatible with a strain in the American zeitgeist,” and the psychoanalytic establishment here “rigidly stood by the Freudian canon for decades” after his death.
For several decades after Freud’s visit to America, psychotherapy remained at the margins of American culture; mental illness was still a little discussed, and highly stigmatized, phenomenon. World War II changed that: when 12 percent of draftees — nearly two million men — were rejected for “neuropsychiatric” reasons, it profoundly altered the American perception of mental illness; psychiatric problems became, in some sense, normal. William Menninger, who was serving as chief psychiatrist of the United States Army, noted that “people are beginning to see that damage of the same kind can be done by a bullet, bacteria or mother-in-law.” After the war, terms like “repression” and “inferiority complex” began cropping up in movies and best-selling novels. “Where the public once turned to the minister, or the captain of industry, or the historian or the scientist,” one social critic observed, “it is now turning more and more to the psychiatrist.” http://sheehan.myblogsite.com (Engel writes about the fascinating battle lines drawn between psychiatrists and the clergy during this time, with their diametrically opposed notions of guilt.)
When Time magazine put Freud on its cover in April 1956, the psychoanalytic moment in America had arrived, and for the next several decades psychoanalysts largely dominated the mental health field. But even as Freudians occupied the top echelons in the psychiatric institutes and the medical school residency programs, and the psychoanalytic idiom was tightly woven into the culture, more and more studies were calling into question the effectiveness of the psychoanalytic enterprise. In 1975, the behavioral psychologist Hans Eysenck declared (controversially) that “Freudian theory is as dead as that attributing neurotic symptoms to demonological influences, and his method of therapy is following exorcism into oblivion.”
The death warrant may actually have been written earlier, in the 1950s, on the first prescriptions for Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication so effective that it became known as “the drug which emptied the hospitals.” Though Freud himself anticipated the age of biological psychiatry (in 1938, he wrote “the future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus”), the realization that drugs could so successfully treat some forms of mental illness thoroughly discombobulated the psychoanalytic profession. If drugs worked, that implied an organic, or medical, basis for neurosis, which in turn challenged some of the basic assumptions of psychoanalytically oriented therapy. If mental illness was due to some physical anomaly in the brain, wasn’t the best way to treat the illness by directly addressing that anomaly, with a pill? By the mid-1960s, the psychiatric establishment was moving definitively in a pharmaceutically oriented direction.
Meanwhile, the advent of even better drugs like Prozac (which went on the market in 1987), and the proliferation of cognitive therapies, in which the patient works with a therapist in a focused way to change maladaptive ways of thinking, further diminished Freud’s standing; repeated controlled studies clearly showed both drug and cognitive therapies to be effective in ways that psychoanalysis, with its hours on the couch, has not been shown to be.Though some Freudian analysts continue to practice today, Engel writes, they resemble “nothing more than a fanatical Essene sect, living apart in the wilderness where they could continue to seek truth in the master’s writings.”
Engel describes how factors like changes in the structure of health insurance shaped (and often distorted) psychiatric care, and his book is studded with fascinating tidbits like this one: in the mid-1960s, two buildings on the corner of 96th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan had as many analysts as Minnesota, Oregon, Delaware, Oklahoma, Vermont, Wisconsin and Tennessee combined.
Engel gestures at, but doesn’t directly address, some of the most interesting questions prompted by the rise of psychotherapy. Is the enormous growth of the field over the last century simply a case of supply surging to meet demand, or does the volume of neurosis fluctuate over the years? Are anxiety and alienation always symptoms to be treated, or are they sometimes appropriate — even healthy — responses to the vicissitudes of late modernity? Is psychotherapy an art or a science, a subcategory of humanism or of biology?
But the story Engel does tell is plenty interesting and his conflicted view of Freudianism well worth absorbing: the most influential school of therapy in American history may not have worked very well as a treatment — but it did revolutionize how we think about the human mind. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
secret 5.sec.002005 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Fifteen years ago, scientists at the National Institutes of Health reported that malformed prions—proteins that can trigger lethal illnesses including mad cow disease—remain on soil surfaces for at least 3 years. Now, scientists report why rain doesn't flush away the prions: The proteins bind almost irreversibly to clay. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
In fact, clay can "retain up to its own mass of ... prion proteins," says Peggy Rigou of the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in Jouy-en-Josas, France. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Her team added sheep prions to pure clay, sandy soil, and loam. Positively charged parts of the protein molecules bound to the negatively charged surface of the clay that was present in all the soil samples. Extensive washing failed to dislodge the prions. However, when the chemists treated the mixtures to make the proteins negatively charged and then ran an electric current through each mixture, the prions migrated off the clay particles.http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Freeing the prions was a major achievement, Rigou notes, because it enables scientists for the first time to measure prion concentrations in soil. Until now, no technique could confirm that intact prions were present in soil. In an upcoming Environmental Science & Technology, her team reports that the new procedure permits detection of concentrations as low as 0.2 part per billion.
Soils might acquire prions from animal wastes or carcasses. Scientists' concern is that livestock might ingest infected clay particles while eating grass or drinking from mud puddles, Rigou says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In fact, clay can "retain up to its own mass of ... prion proteins," says Peggy Rigou of the National Institute of Agronomic Research (INRA) in Jouy-en-Josas, France. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Her team added sheep prions to pure clay, sandy soil, and loam. Positively charged parts of the protein molecules bound to the negatively charged surface of the clay that was present in all the soil samples. Extensive washing failed to dislodge the prions. However, when the chemists treated the mixtures to make the proteins negatively charged and then ran an electric current through each mixture, the prions migrated off the clay particles.http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Freeing the prions was a major achievement, Rigou notes, because it enables scientists for the first time to measure prion concentrations in soil. Until now, no technique could confirm that intact prions were present in soil. In an upcoming Environmental Science & Technology, her team reports that the new procedure permits detection of concentrations as low as 0.2 part per billion.
Soils might acquire prions from animal wastes or carcasses. Scientists' concern is that livestock might ingest infected clay particles while eating grass or drinking from mud puddles, Rigou says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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