How to Deal with a Loved one with Cancer from the Perspective of the Cancer Patient:

4/15/15

Dear Daughter or Son
 of Cancer Patient,

   I want to say something from my perspective which I believe is similar to your Mother’s or Father's. 

  When I found out that my cancer had returned to all parts of my body.  I felt depressed but not surprised. My loved ones were shocked and felt like helpless bystanders. Now they are very supportive and positive but I know that is for my edification. Because of this I decided it’s a lot easier to be the cancer patient than the loved one of the cancer patient.

   Remember the old Cowboy/Indian movies….the hero got captured by the Indians and the Indians didn't trust his motives so to prove himself the Cowboy has to” Run the Gauntlet”….if he made it to the other end they would be trusted friends.  This is an apt analogy for the cancer patient, the loved ones, the treatment and the ending.

   The hero is the cancer patient…the gauntlet is the treatment the cancer patient will endure….the onlookers are the loved ones who feel  helpless  and the end of the gauntlet is remission. You must run the gauntlet to reach remission…...if you don’t  get up and continue at any time you die. 

   What the helpless love ones don’t realize is they are imbibing the cancer patient with the courage to run the gauntlet and when things get tough to get up and continue to the end…they are sending love/courage to the patient. You have heard of people who refuse to run the gauntlet…they aren’t getting very many love/courage messages.

  I feel bad for you and the loved ones and I’m sure there were many for your Mother or Father.  Because your Mother/Father didn’t make it to remission…they tried, they didn’t give up and all their seemingly helpless loved ones imbibed them with the courage to give it all. They died trying….with courage and could only endure the gauntlet with the people around them. Nobody should feel guilty and they need to recognize their positive part in the struggle.                                                                  Now you want to get to the next step….when you Mother/Father appears in your thoughts I want a smile to come to your lips. You lived most of your life with your Mother/Father with a smile on your lips and I want you to spend the rest of your life with your Mother/Father with that same smile!

                                                                         With love and sincerity,

                                                                                 Patty Pomeroy

   

Prehistoric Plaque Reveals What Early Humans Ate

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When looking for a meal, prehistoric people in Africa munched on the tuberous roots of weeds such as the purple nutsedge, according to a new study of hardened plaque on samples of ancient teeth.

Researchers examined the dental buildup of 14 people buried at Al Khiday, an archeological site near the Nile River in central Sudan. The skeletons date back to between about 6,700 B.C., when prehistoric people relied on hunting and gathering, to agricultural times, at about the beginning of the first millennium B.C.

The researchers collected samples of the individuals' dental calculus, the hardened grime that forms when plaque accumulates and mineralizes on teeth. Such buildup is fairly common in prehistoric skeletons, the researchers said. [The 7 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth]

"The oral hygiene activities were not as good as they are today," lead researcher Karen Hardy, a professor of prehistoric archeology at the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, told Live Science.

An analysis of the chemical compounds and microfossils in the dental calculus point to the purple nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus), Hardy said. In the teeth of each of the skeletons, Harder and her colleagues found starch granules that share a chemical composition with nutsedge. A close look at the granules also revealed how these people likely prepared their food: Those from the earlier time period likely ate the plant raw or lightly heated, which would have helped make the roots easier to peel.

In contrast, granules from the Neolithic period, beginning in about 4,500 B.C. in central Sudan, are cracked and enlarged, suggesting that people may have ground or roasted these granules over a fire.
The hardened dental calculus on prehistoric teeth suggests that people ate purple nutsedge, a weedy plant rich in carbohydrates.
It's difficult, however, to determine how prehistoric people prepared their meals based on the present appearance of starch granules, said John Dudgeon, an associate professor of anthropology at Idaho State University in Pocatello, who was not involved in the study. Further research may help scientists determine whether the food was roasted or boiled, or if it simply degraded on its own.

"Starches are particularly sensitive," Dudgeonsaid. They fall apart as soon a person begins chewing on them. "The fact that they even survive in the dental calculus in the teeth is amazing."

However, he commended the researchers for their detailed work in matching the chemical analysis of the purple nutsedge to the fragments found in the dental calculus. "It provides a novel way to look at the micro-residues on the skeleton," Dudgeon said. "This a pretty good way to fingerprint what that material is that is coming out of the calculus."

It's unclear why prehistoric people chewed on the tubers, but other ancient societies have benefited from the plant's many uses. Hunter-gatherer societies, such as the Aboriginals in central Australia, relied on these tubers for carbohydrates, and studies show that the plant contains lysine, an essential amino acid that the human body cannot produce on its own.

The ancient Egyptians and Greeks used purple nutsedge for water purification, perfume and medical purposes, records suggest. What's more, the plant has antimicrobial, antimalarial, antioxidant and anti-diabetic compounds, studies have found.

In high concentrations, purple nutsedge also inhibits atype of bacteria that leads to tooth decay.This may explain why researchers have found fewer cavities in the Al Khiday individuals at the turn of the first millennium B.C., compared to their counterparts at Gabati, an archeological site to the north, Hardy said. Still, more research is needed to examine indicators of dental hygiene in these areas.

Though purple nutsedge and its related sedge species are rich in carbohydrates, modern-day farmers consider these plants a nuisance. The slender-stemmed, flowering nutsedge has deep, tuberous roots that are hard to pull out of soil.

"It’s a veggie, weedy thing," Hardy says. "It’s very prolific. That's why it's such a problem for farmers today."

Purple nutsedge typically grows in tropical areas. In the 1980s, researchers found that the plant's tubers taste bitter when grown in wet areas, but reported that the taste improved when the weed was planted in drier places. Though the plant is no longer a common carbohydrate snack, people still use it today for herbal medicine in the Middle East, Far East and India, Hardy said. From Huffington Post 7/20/14

Ancient Dental Implants

Dental Implant Discovery Suggests Ancient Celts May Have Sported Serious Bling

LiveScience  | By Tia Ghose

Posted: 07/16/2014 8:12 am EDT Updated: 2 hours ago

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Sparkly, gold grills aren't just for Flavor Flav; ancient Celts may have sought out flashy smiles as well. Archaeologists have unearthed a dental implant in a grave in France that dates to the third century B.C.

The implant — an iron pin that may have screwed into the gum to hold a decorative tooth in place — was found in the mouth of a skeleton in a Celtic burial site in La Chêne, France. The tooth was described in the June issue of the journal Antiquity. [Smile Secrets: 5 Things Your Grin Reveals About You]

Though it's not clear what the false tooth would have been made of, it was likely put in to enhance the owner's smile, said Guillaume Seguin, an archaeologist at Archeosphere in France and co-author of the study.

"In Le Chêne, the replaced tooth is a central maxillary incisor," which is one of the "most visible teeth when you speak or when you smile," Seguin told Live Science in an email. "So there, the intention was probably aesthetic."

Ancient teeth

The replacement of lost teeth is nothing new: Previous studies have reported on a 7,000-year-old skull from Algeria that sports a replica tooth sculpted from bone. Other excavations have unearthed a 5,500-year-old skeleton from Egypt with a replacement incisor fashioned from a shell. And an Anatolian site has potential implants fashioned from calcite, though the remnant wasn't found in the mouth, so it could be an amulet, the authors wrote in the paper.

These ancient teeth were also likely implanted after death, the researchers wrote in the paper. After all, Egyptians believed that they would use their bodies in the afterlife, so some may have wanted to get started with a full set of choppers.

Celtic elite

Seguin and his colleagues were excavating an Iron Age tomb in France when they uncovered the skeleton of a woman who was 20 to 30 years old when she died.

The skeleton was bedecked with finery, including a bronze belt strung with brooches, a bronze bracelet and ring, and a pair of iron shears to trim her hair. Along with coral and amber necklaces that were found in nearby graves, the new discoveries suggest the woman was a member of the Celtic elite, Seguin said.

Though the skeleton was badly preserved, her teeth were fairly intact, with no cavities, tartar or wearing of the enamel, Seguin said.

In her mouth, near where the central maxillary incisor would have been, was a small iron pin. The location suggests it was used as part of a dental implant, which was either inserted into the pulp canal of the root, or into the tooth socket.

Both would have been painful, Seguin said.

If she did receive medicine for the pain during surgery, it was likely from a medicinal plant, such as a weeping willow, which contains acetylsalicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, Seguin said.

Cause a mystery

The skeleton didn't preserve signs of trauma, but one possibility is that the Celtic woman lost her tooth from either a punch or a fall, Seguin said.

"The central maxillary incisors are the most commonly broken teeth by a facial trauma," Seguin said.

The false tooth was probably inserted when the person was still alive, though it may have been placed after death, the researchers said.

It's not clear exactly what material the tooth would have been made from, but Etruscan elites sported decorative gold teeth. The ancient Celts came into contact with them via trading routes, the authors wrote in the paper. As such, it's possible that the Celts admired the Etruscans' penchant for bling-filled smiles and emulated them, they speculated.

Fluoridation:Public health, not forced medication

The battle against fluoridation is like the battle against vaccinations. It never stops, and it’s a continuing threat to public health.

A skirmish has begun in Fircrest, whose water has been fluoridated since 1957. A group of citizens there has been pressing the City Council to stop the practice, offering the usual “scientific” claims.

We don’t question the sincerity of fluoridation opponents. They obviously believe in their cause and feel genuine concern. Some are quite passionate. The problem is that belief, concern and passion don’t always translate into what’s best for a community.

Let’s be clear: Excessive levels of fluoride can be dangerous. That’s true of any substance on Earth, including salt, water and even oxygen.

But like many minerals, fluoride functions as a micronutrient in the right concentrations. It strengthens teeth and bones. It occurs naturally in water; in some communities, Mother Nature already provides optimal levels of it. Since low-fluoride cities began adding it to their public water supplies in the 1940s and 1950s, it has been spectacularly successful at preventing tooth decay in children.

Cavities are not a minor nuisance: They lead to worse diseases, including severe abscesses. The chronic pain alone can stall a child’s education.

The public health organizations that track fluoride consumption are not operating on autopilot. Their scientists know that Americans are now getting the mineral from other sources, including soft drinks and processed foods.

As a result, they lowered their recommendations for fluoride levels a few years ago. Decisions like that are driven by evidence, unlike sweeping claims that fluoridation at any level is intrinsically harmful.

The claims of fluoridation opponents should be weighed against the credibility of the organizations that reject those claims. Supporters of fluoridation include the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the American Dental Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other scientific groups too numerous to list in this space. These are not sinister or deluded people.

Then there’s the argument that people are being medicated against their will. Not quite. The common definition of a medicine is something that treats disease. Fluoridation — like vaccination, or water chlorination, or the iodization of salt — prevents disease, and does it successfully on a large scale.

That makes it a public health measure. It’s a critically important one, especially for low-income children who have limited access to dentists and fluoride treatments.

More than two-thirds of Americans today drink fluoridated water. Fircrest itself has had more than 55 years of experience with fluoridation. If its population were suffering from it, you’d think we’d know by now.

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Dementia and Dental Care: Nurse Offers New Oral Hygiene Strategies

Amanda Chan, MyHealthNewsDaily Staff Writer   |   May 03, 2011 12:03pm ET

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When someone has dementia, normal daily activities become difficult. Something as simple as brushing your teeth can become a challenge. And for those caring for people with dementia, helping them brush their teeth can be challenging, too, because dementia increases threat perception and decreases ability to understand things in context, health experts say.
But it's important to care for the teeth of this aging population, especially as more of them are able to retain their natural teeth because of good preventive dental care (regular checkups) and fluoridated water, said Rita Jablonski, an assistant professor of nursing at Pennsylvania State University. A dirty mouth provides a breeding ground for dangerous bacteria, such as Streptococcus pneumoniae that causes pneumonia.
During dementia, there are changes to a region of the brain called the amygdala, Jablonski said. The amygdala holds and moderates memories of fear, which is a good thing for example, getting stung by a bee teaches a person to avoid bees, she said.

"It's important for the organism to have a recall of adverse events and avoid these things," Jablonski told MyHealthNewsDaily.
But for people with dementia, other parts of the brain are unable to communicate with the amygdala, leaving neurological plaques and tangles that literally obscure pathways in the brain, she said. For a person with dementia, everything is a threat including a nurse who is trying to clean teeth or scrub dentures.
But throughout Jablonski's career as a nurse and then a nurse practitioner, she has used trial and error to compile several tips to help both nurses and family caregivers deal with people suffering from dementia.
"I started accidentally finding ways to interact with people with dementia , whether it was looking into their mouths or listening to their lungs or undressing them," she said. "I was finding things that worked."
Here are a couple of the techniques included in the Managing Oral Hygiene Using Threat Reduction (MOUTh) oral hygiene approach, developed by Jablonski and her colleagues, that are important not only for oral care , but for overall care of a person with dementia:
No 'elderspeak'
When a lot of people talk to older adults, they engage in a type of speech called "elderspeak," Jablonski said.
"Elderspeak is characterized by high-pitch, sing-song voice, use of plural pronouns, and it sounds comical," she said. "It's how I talk to my cat."
A person with dementia may forget the day of the week, the year or even the names of his or her children or spouse. But a person with dementia never forgets that he or she is an adult, Jablonski said.
So when a person uses elderspeak with an older person -- whether he or she has dementia or not -- it's a direct assault on their personhood, and that person better duck, she said.
"If you do baby talk to an 85-year-old, they're not going to like it," Jablonski said.
This falls in line with a study published in 2008 in the American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias, which showed that elderly patients exposed to elderspeak were more likely to be aggressive and uncooperative than patients who were spoken to like adults.
Promote independence
Another thing that people do that generates a negative response from an older person is doing things for the person, Jablonski said.
"It's faster, it's easier, so if I grab a toothbrush and I do it because I have to leave in 10 minutes, I'm rushing the older adult," she said. "I may be rough and I may not realize it. I may be hurting them and not realize it."
Therefore, allowing someone with dementia to do take care of his or her own hygiene -- within reason -- helps to promote their independence, she said.
One strategy is to use the "hand-over-hand" technique, which allows the person to hold the toothbrush. Then, the caregiver puts a hand over the dementia patient's hand, so that he or she is still technically brushing the teeth, Jablonski said.
Another good strategy is to gesture and pantomime, especially because words can get jumbled up and confusing for people with dementia , she said.
"Sometimes with dementia, the ability to process verbal directions is compromised," Jablonski said. "So if I say to you, 'Brush your teeth,' you may hear 'Brush your teeth' but have no idea what I'm talking about. But if I open my mouth and gesture like I'm brushing my own teeth, then you understand."
Pass it on: Don't use elderspeak and help retain independence for people with dementia, especially when it comes to their oral care.

Otzi the Iceman needed to see a dentist

Ötzi the Iceman Needed a Dentist

Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer   |   April 11, 2013 11:41am ET

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Otzi the iceman, an astonishingly preserved Neolithic mummy found in the Alps in 1991, shows evidence of severe gum disease and cavities (shown in red). Credit: UZH View full size image

Ötzi the Iceman could have used a dentist. The amazingly preserved Neolithic mummy found in the Italian Alps had tooth decay, gum disease and dental trauma, new research suggests.
The new findings, published Tuesday (April 9) in the European Journal of Oral Sciences, suggest that the Iceman mummy's grain-heavy diet took a toll on his dental health.
"It's surprising how bad condition he is in," said study co-author Frank Ruhli, a paleopathologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "We have the whole range of disease pathologies you can imagine." [Album: What Otzi the Iceman Looked Like]

Ötzi is probably the most-studied Neolithic man in history. More than 5,000 years ago, the ancient iceman was hit by an arrow and bled to death on a glacier in the Alps between modern-day Austria and Italy. The glacier preserved his body until it was discovered by hikers in 1991.
Since his discovery in the Ötzal Alps by the hikers, scientists have reconstructed Ötzi's face, analyzed his clothing, scrutinized his body and sequenced his genome.
These extensive studies revealed that Ötzi was a middle-age, well-to-do agriculturalist who lived not far from where he died. He also suffered from heart disease and joint pain, and probably had Lyme disease.
But somehow, scientists had never analyzed his teeth before. So Ruhli and his colleagues used a CT scanner to analyze the condition of Ötzi's teeth. They found that the ancient farmer had several cavities, likely caused by his carbohydrate-rich diet.
Ötzi also showed severe wear of his tooth enamel and severe gum disease. Hard minerals in milled grains abraded the surface of his teeth and gums, exposing the bone below and making the roots loose. Similar wear-and-tear is found in the teeth of Egyptian mummies who ate milled grains, Ruhli said.
"This is like a sandpaper acting on your teeth," Ruhli told LiveScience. "In another five to 10 years, he certainly would have lost some of his teeth."
As a result of his poor dental health, Ötzi would have felt pain when eating hot or tough foods, Ruhli said.
Ötzi also showed evidence of trauma to his front right incisor from being struck, either in a fight or an accident.
Ötzi's dental problems show the results of switching from a strict hunter-gatherer diet to an agricultural one, Ruhli said.
"Hunter-gatherers were depending on meat and berries, whereas [Ötzi] had processed food," Ruhli said. "The processing added a bigger variety of food but also impacted the quality of the teeth."

Science from ancient plaque...Huffington Post

Ancient Dental Plaque From 1,000-Year-Old Human Skeletons Sheds New Light On Disease

LiveScience  | by  Tanya Lewis

Posted: 02/25/2014 9:17 am EST Updated: 02/25/2014 9:59 am EST

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A "microbial Pompeii" has been found on the teeth of 1,000-year-old human skeletons. Just as volcanic ash entombed the citizens of the ancient Roman city, dental plaque preserved bacteria and food particles on the skeletons' teeth.

Researchers analyzed dental plaque from skeletons in a medieval cemetery in Germany, and found that the mouths of these aged humans were home to many of the same bacterial invaders that cause gum disease in the mouths of modern humans.

"One thing that is clear about the population we studied is that they didn't brush their teeth very often, if at all," said study leader Christina Warinner, an anthropologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

The discovery of these bacteria also revealed clues to the dental hygiene and diets of these centuries-old humans, according to the study detailed today (Feb. 24) in the journal Nature Genetics. [5 Surprising Ways to Banish Bad Breath]

Plaque is a dentist's worst enemy, but it turns out to be a great time capsule for preserving the bacteria (or "microbiome") and bits of food on the teeth of humans long after they die. The sticky bacteria on teeth trapped particles of food and other debris, and over time, the calcium phosphate in saliva — the same mineral found in bones and teeth — caused the plaque to calcify into tartar.

"We knew that calculus preserved microscopic particles of food and other debris but the level of preservation of biomolecules is remarkable — a microbiome entombed and preserved in a mineral matrix, a microbial Pompeii," another study researcher, Matthew Collins from the University of York, in England, said in a statement.

With their new study, Warinner and her colleagues are the first to sequence the DNA in ancient dental tartar, using a rapid method known as "shotgun sequencing." The team reconstructed the genome of a major bacterial pathogen and recovered some of the first evidence of food molecules from ancient dental plaque.

The DNA in food found in the plaque matched pigs, sheep, bread wheat and vegetables such as cabbage. The researchers also found starch granules that matched cereals and the pea/bean family.

"Amazingly, it's much the same thing you would find at a German restaurant today," Warinner said.

The skeletons had many years' or decades' worth of plaque built up on their teeth, and many of them showed signs of gum disease and tooth decay. While a few individuals had surprisingly healthy teeth, most of the older adults had lost most or all of their teeth due to wearing, decay or dental disease.

The microbe species found in the ancient plaque were remarkably similar to ones found in modern mouths, the researchers said. Gum disease is most often caused by the species Porphyromonas gingivalis, Tannerella forsythia,Treponema denticola and Filifactor alocis, and these microbes were all present on the teeth of the skeletons with dental disease.

Gum diseases are usually caused by infections or inflammation of the gums and surrounding bone. About 47 percent of adults ages 30 or older in the United States have some form of gum disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Non-human primates and other wild animals rarely get dental diseases, Warinner said, which raises the question, "What is it about humans that allows these pathogens to grow?"Scientists speculate that modern human diets and lifestyles may be to blame, but Warinner's team plans to analyze more ancient populations from other time periods to find out.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook &Google+. Original article on Live Science.

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