Lets all go for a run: does exercise really help the brain?
Should I go run a marathon, join a yoga class, or head off to the gym? Is it really worth the time and effort? Afterall, sitting down and watching television can seem just as appealing. Why even bother working out? The reasons to work out may be greater than you think. Physical activity can make you feel good, keep you in shape, keep you healthy, but now researchers also are finding biological evidence that exercise benefits specific brain mechanisms. Just as exercise improves muscle tone and function, it may also have similar effects on the brain.
Some people have thought that exercise positively affects the brain as well as the body. Preliminary evidence suggests that physically active people have lower rates of anxiety and depression than sedentary people do (2). It seems logical that an active lifestyle would help the brain. However, the scientific observations were lacking. Now several biological studies indicate that working out does benefit the brain. This new insight may point more towards the notion that exercise has overall health benefits and also may lead to specialized physical activity programs for patients (1). Exercise may improve mental health by helping the brain cope better with stress, according to research into the effect of exercise on neurochemicals involved in the body's stress response (2). These findings come from animal as well as human studies and are leading to a better understanding of the overall health rewards of exercise and heightened support for exercise regimens that could aid recovery from a wide range of illnesses. Furthermore, the ongoing research indicates that specialized exercise regimens may help repair damaged or aged b...
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...fers,American Psychological Association
http://helping.apa.org/daily/neurala.html
3)Jogging May Make You Smarter, Study Says , Reuters Health
http://nootropics.com/exercise/index.html
4)Running increases cell proliferation and neurogenesis in the adult mouse dentate gyrus , National Neuroscience 1999 Mar; 2(3):266-70
http://nootropics.com/neurogenesis/
5)Mental exercise keeps the brain in motion, Canadian Press News Article, Health News, Tuesday, May 18, 1999
http://www.canoe.ca/Health9905/18_fitness.html
6)Exercise and Your Brain , Southwestern Medical Center
http://www4.utsouthwestern.edu/library/consumer/brainXrcise.htm
7)Exercise 'could halt mental decline' , BBC News, Tuesday, 16 January, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1118603.stm
8)Exercise For Your Brain's Sake , Scientific American News
http://www.sciam.com/missing.cfm
The health care organization with which I am familiar and involved is Kaiser Permanente where I work as an Emergency Room Registered Nurse and later promoted to management. Kaiser Permanente was founded in 1945, is the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plan, serving 9.1 million members, with headquarters in Oakland, California. At Kaiser Permanente, physicians are responsible for medical decisions, continuously developing and refining medical practices to ensure that care is delivered in the most effective manner possible. Kaiser Permanente combines a nonprofit insurance plan with its own hospitals and clinics, is the kind of holistic health system that President Obama’s health care law encourages. It still operates in a half-dozen states from Maryland to Hawaii and is looking to expand...
In the book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and The Brain by Dr. John J. Ratey, MD (2008), Ratey discuses how exercise can help treat many mood disorders and how it can help strengthen our brains. This book is divided into ten chapters all with five to ten subsections in them. The chapters include: Welcome to the revolution: A Case Study on Exercise and the brain, Learning, Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Attention Deficit, Addiction, Hormonal Changers, Aging, and the Regimen.
Miller, H. D. (2009). From volume to value: better ways to pay for health care. Health Affairs
"The Pros and Cons of ObamaCare." UPMC. N.p., 6 Nov 2013. Web. 14 Apr 2014.
Ghosh, C. (2013). Affordable Care Act: Strategies to Tame the Future. Physician Executive, 39(6), 68-70.
Davidson, Stephen M. Still Broken: Understanding the U.S. Health Care System. Stanford, CA: Stanford Business, 2010. Print.
Rodwin, M. (1996). Consumer protection and managed care: issues, reform proposals, and trade-offs. Houston Law Review, 32(1319), 1319-1381
The United States spends vast amounts on its healthcare, while falling short of achieving superiority over other developed nations. One cannot overlook that the deepening recession has left many without jobs and therefore lacking health insurance. According to Fairhall and Steadman, (2009), even though the recession is hard on all, it is worse on the uninsured due to health care and insurance cost rising faster than incomes. Nevertheless, even those with jobs are lacking in health insurance due to employers, who provide insurance, are increasingly dropping their sponsored insurance. Many find that purchasing a health policy or paying for medical care out-of-pocket is cost prohibitive. “Since the recession began in December 2007, the number of unemployed Americans has increased by 3.6 million,” (Fairhall & Steadman, 2009). In 2009 it was stated that approximately 46 million Americans were uninsured, however not all of that number is due to the inability to afford coverage. According to a 2009 story written by Christopher Weaver of Kaiser Health News, 43% of that number should be classified as “voluntarily” uninsured. This subset of uninsured Americans consist of nearly half being young and healthy; therefo...
In order to fully understand the uninsured and underinsured problem that hospital administrators face the cause must be examined. The health outcomes of uninsured individuals are generally worse than those who are insured. Uninsured persons are more likely to experience avoidable hospitalizations, diagnosed at later stages of disease, hospitalized on an emergency or urgent basis, and more seriously ill upon hospitalization (Simpson, 2002) Because the uninsured often lack an ongoing relationship with a health-care provider, they are less likely to receive preventive care and diagnostic tests (Kemper, 2002). Many corporations balance their budget through cost cuts and other moves, but have been slammed with an increasing load of uninsured patients, coupled with reduced payments from government and private insurance programs. In 2000, 564,476 uninsured patients came through Health and Hospitals Corporations health care centers, a 30 percent increase from 1996. In the same period, Congress reduced Medicare reimbursements to hospitals, while Medicaid reimbursements to primary care clinics remained basicall...
It is possible for a patient to want to go to a local competing hospital if they have exceptional customer service or if they feel that staff are more courteous in another facility. If a patient knows that a rival hospital does not have a large volume of patients in the emergency room, a patient may feel that they will be seen faster in this hospital versus a large trauma hospital where they may spend hours waiting before being seen by a doctor. At smaller hospitals there will be fewer patient rooms; therefore, the nurse to patient ratio is significantly lower than our large facility. If a smaller for-profit hospital were to employ a well-known highly skilled doctor to their facility, it is possible that patients will want to seek medical treatment from this doctor or surgeon because of their credibility. For example, if a surgeon was the first to successfully implant a total robotic heart chamber, which would be a new highly advanced technology device, I could only imagine that our hospital would lose many heart patients wanting to come to our facility because our surgeons have never completed such an advanced treatment for heart care. It would cause a threat to substitute one hospital’s products over
The documentary film Bully (2011) – directed by Lee Hirsh – takes the viewer into the lives of five families that live in various, predominantly remote, towns across the United States. All families presented have been affected by bullying, either because their child was at the time being bullied by peers at school or the child committed suicide due to continuous bullying. The film also profiles an assistant principle, Kim Lockwood, whose indiscreetness makes the viewer...
Porter, Eduardo. "Why the Health Care Law Scares the G.O.P." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 1 Oct. 2013. Web. 10 Jan. 2014.
According to Harry A. Sultz and Kristina M. Young, the authors of our textbook Health Care USA, medical care in the United States is a $2.5 Trillion industry (xvii). This industry is so large that “the U.S. health care system is the world’s eighth
Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey civil laws in an effort to induce change in governmental policy or legislation, characterized by the use of passive resistance or other nonviolent means. The use of nonviolence runs throughout history however the fusion of organized mass struggle and nonviolence is relatively new.
Ever since the Affordable Care Act went into effect, the healthcare industry has experienced an increase in hospital mergers throughout the country. Even though Affordable Care Act has made it easier for many Americans to have access to preventing medicine and despite many efforts, the system remains in a complete state of disarray. Patient care has not improved in the industry. Nevertheless, hospital administrators argue that mergers are going to benefit their patients by reducing cost, provide better services and help them to achieve their desired outcome with the minimum use of resources and efforts. On the other hand, experts believe that hospital mergers will influence the healthcare market by causing medical costs to inflate.