Beauty in 2010 will be a combination of old and new trends, the market research firm claims. Here are Mintel’s top beauty predictions for this year.

What isn’t mentioned is cutting edge age related gene clusters and new technology to modulate the expression of how pigmentation, hydration, elasticity, and the free radicals that supplements alone can’t handle.

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A new medical study found a 76 percent surge over an eight-year period in the number of calls to the nation’s poison control centers because of youngsters abusing drugs prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to an Associated Press report.

We live in an age where every feeling is a potentially classifiable mental disorder to be mitigated with a bewildering array of 21st century versions of Mother’s Little Helper; where pharmaceutical drugs get approvals without including all the trials that resulted in negative outcomes and where nutritional science is shut out of research journals. It’s no wonder people abuse and die from drugs. Given how comfortable we are with being medicated, I’m amazed that not more do.

We now know that the Vioxx risks were apparent years before it was withdrawn from the market. In research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, scientists analyzed 30 studies, 12 of which were not available to the public when Vioxx was on the market. They have only become available because of lawsuits filed by consumers who said they were harmed by the drug. Yet the same Big Pharma folks who are telling us we can’t have a single payer health system are the same ones who are telling us we need tort reform. The studies involved more than 20,000 people, who showed an increased risk of heart attacks, strokes and hypertension among people taking Vioxx.

And since everyone seems to want to be famous by let me see, faking a balloon launch of their child, or get on Dancing With the Stars, it’s not really all that surprising that parents drug kids for academic edge.
Given what we think is at stake, it just seems well, so reasonable, doesn’t it?.

Is this what we’re so afraid of losing if we have health reform? I don’t think so. Yet we’re so easily misdirected into thinking what we have is the only thing possible. Just ask Neo after he took the red pill.

With over 40% of Americans unconvinced and unafraid of swine flu, and so many forced into bankruptcy from medical issues and over 40% of us have no health safety net except our own simple, natural ability to be healthy, I’d say we’re well on our way to finally coming to our senses. And when we do, we’ll inevitably begin asking ourselves and each other ‘Is It Healthy?”

Once do do, we’ll stop giving ourselves the shaft and begin playing a game worth winning.

Technorati Tags: ADHD, drug abuse, health reform, teen drug abuse, tort reform, Vioxx

Parents are willing to give their kids drugs to improve academic performance and increase focus. Would you? A story posted on MomLogic.com

According to a recent article in the New Yorker, college students are taking neurological drugs like Adderall and Ritalin to help them party hard — while giving them an academic edge. What’s even worse is that this trend isn’t just occurring in colleges. Parents are giving their young kids Ritalin to help them gain a competitive advantage over their peers, even when they’re not suffering from ADD or ADHD.

While it may come as a surprise to many of you, pediatrician Dr. Anatoly Belilovsky isn’t surprised at all: “This is a more common situation and tendency than many might realize,” he says. “Asking for stimulants to beat other competitive school applicants is not a far step from yelling ‘Kill him!’ at a hockey game. It is perhaps worth noting that ours is not a society that eats the runts of its litters, but enough families act as if it were. Giving children these drugs (when they are not medically necessary) can give them an edge over their ‘un-enhanced peers,’” says Belilovsky. “Imagine your thoughts jumping around inside your brain like middle-schoolers at recess,” he explains. “Stimulants make them behave more like Marines on maneuvers.”

Given the list of side effects from these drugs, it’s surprising doctors are prescribing them at all in non-medically necessary cases: paranoia, sleep issues, being hyper-focused, dehydration, crash and burn, appetite loss, and nausea all add up to outweigh any academic benefits, yet many parents don’t seem to agree.

But give an athlete a perfomance enhancing substance and everyone cries foul. At least with these substances there’s a large body of knowledge on usage, dosage and protocols. It’s the athletes, particularly the professionals who can afford to pay the doctors and experts to design a program that produces the results.

We have erectile dysfunction drugs for men to stay virile. How far do we want to push the envelope on aging or performance? It seems to me that we might want to have a conversation about what “being healthy” looks like before we start experimenting on how we’re going to get an edge.