This Week In Wellness

This Week In Wellness Australian researchers have shown that infant tummy time is associated with improved development, healthier weight babies and improved head shape. It was also linked with improved social and cognitive function as well as walking.

https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2020/05/02/peds.2019-2168

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/24-04-2019-to-grow-up-healthy-children-need-to-sit-less-and-play-more

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This Week In Wellness social media giants Facebook and Youtube have increased their efforts to censor and “deplatform” debate around Covid19 lockdowns from lay people, scientists and experts alike whilst Twitter has maintained a more open approach and more and more people are flocking to MeWe, founded by entrepreneur and privacy advocate Mark Weinstein.

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This Week In Wellness a study from Clinical Reviews in Food Science and Medicine has indicated that avoidance of meat in the diet may be linked to increased rates of anxiety and depression. This is not the first time that these links have been drawn and suggested reasons for the link include reduced omega-3 fatty acid intake, vitamin B12 and folate deficiencies, iron and zinc deficiencies and even the potential for higher levels of pesticide consumption due to the higher consumption of plant based foods.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2020.1741505

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This Week In Wellness Germany has moved to ban the use of the herbicide Glyphosate from 2023 and phase out its use from 2020 as Adelaide council Marion moves to join other Australian councils in phasing out its use. Several legal challenges by over 50,000 Americans against the manufacturers of Glyphosate (ag and pharmaceutical company Bayer) claim it has contributed to Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma cases with the three trials completed so far all falling against Bayer. Despite this Germany plans on banning the chemical over concerns for their insect populations rather than their human ones, citing concerns for the impact on their food sources. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has labeled glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic.”

https://www.agprofessional.com/article/germany-will-ban-glyphosate-after-2023-save-insects

https://www.agweb.com/article/glyphosate-overview-where-are-we-now

https://usrtk.org/monsanto-roundup-trial-tracker-index/

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This Week In Wellness a research article published in Biomed Central (BMC) has shown that women choosing to birth outside of hospitals, be that a home birth or a free birth, did so in search of the “best and safest” birth experience.

In Australia 97% of births occur in a hospital setting however this paper investigated 28 women who chose to birth outside of that system between 2010 and 2014, with 13 choosing a home birth and another 15 choosing a freebirth (intentionally unassisted by any health professional).

https://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-020-02944-6

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This Week In Wellness a study has shown that receiving Chiropractic care at regular planned intervals regardless of symptoms had more pain free weeks and shorter painful episodes of lower back pain compared to people who sought care “when needed”. The study was conducted in Sweden where 98% of all chiropractors who are members of the Swedish Chiropractic Association consider maintenance care to be clinically useful and beneficial for patients with recurrent and persistent musculoskeletal pain and was published in Chiropractic and Manual Therapies.

https://chiromt.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12998-020-00309-6

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This Week In Wellness a pre-print study published by medRxiv for the first time measured the prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies in a representative sample of the Californian population. Stating that “to date, many epidemic projections and policies addressing COVID-19 have been designed without seroprevalence data to inform epidemic parameters”. “A sero-survey gives you a snapshot in time of who is infected in your given population,” says Kanta Subbarao, a virologist at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne going on to say that these kinds of studies are very important for a virus that can cause mild or no symptoms.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v1

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0

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This Week In Wellness Sweden could be the new model that countries around the world seek to model as their Coronavirus infection rates and deaths plummet despite not imposing the strict lock-downs seen in other parts of the world. Sweden has not closed bars, cafes, restaurants, playgrounds or schools and gatherings of up to 50 people are still allowed. Despite this the Swedish infection rate and death rate for the last two days has dropped lower than it has been in a fortnight as the logarithmic growth charts suggest that the curve is well and truly flattening.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8212365/Swedish-PM-tighten-coronavirus-restrictions-Austria-De

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/10/europe/sweden-lockdown-turmp-intl/index.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-sweden-trump-lockdown-herd-wrong-a9459111.html

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This Week In Wellness physical exercise could help reduce the amount of time people spend in acute mental health facilities and reduce their reliance on psychotropic medications when they are there according to a study published in SAGE Journals.

“The general attitude of medicine is that you treat the primary problem first, and exercise was never considered to be a life or death treatment option. Now that we know it’s so effective, it can become as fundamental as pharmacological intervention,” explains David Tomasi, a lecturer at the University of Vermont

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190521124650.htm

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2164956119848657

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This Week In Wellness whilst the media is reporting the seemingly exponential growth of Coronavirus worldwide some are suggesting that the spread of the disease may be plotting a different path.

It is common in the media to show linear graphs of the Coronavirus that show seemingly exponential growth and this growth has been extrapolated by many experts in the media to forecast dire results. Kenneth Chang, science reporter at the New York times argues that we should be looking more closely at the logarithmic graphs of the spread rather than the linear graphs.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/health/coronavirus-data-logarithm-chart.html

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

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