Public health policies as regards the elderly in Colombia

A literature review was performed on the laws passed, and adopted in accordance with international regulations, in Colombia and which currently benefit or affect the quality of life of the elderly. Public policies in Colombia are inclined towards the well-being of the elderly, but this documental analysis concludes that the elderly Colombian is unprotected and defenseless against the obstacles and difficult situations due to the biological, political, social, economic and environmental conditions. This makes them vulnerable as it is a scheme that only benefits in cases of poverty and by being a member of the General Social Security in Health system, with transfer of obligations to the family, society and likewise the elderly.     

‘I need help’: caregivers' experiences of caring for their relatives with mental illness in Jamaica

The findings reported here form part of a larger research project that examined non-compliance with medication among the mentally ill patients attending public clinics in a specific parish in Jamaica. The aim of the research was to explore the perceptions of caregivers about caring for the mentally ill at two outpatient psychiatric clinics. Caregivers involved in looking after their relatives with mental illness played a vital role in mental health promotion. This study sought to examine the caregivers'' perception of mental illness, including how they thought the illness was best controlled, the reasons why their relatives found it difficult to take their medication as instructed, and the coping skills that they employed when caring for their relatives. There were two focus groups, consisting of four individuals each, at two psychiatric clinics.The results revealed the following about the majority of the caregivers. First, it was recognised that caregivers have a good knowledge (and awareness) of medication usage inferred by either the absence or the presence of their relatives'' symptoms. Secondly, they sometimes felt sad and hopeless as a result of being the victims of violent attacks by those for whom they provided care. Thirdly, they highlighted issues of cost, accessibility and availability of medications as being problematic. Fourthly, in some cases they received little or no assistance from other family members.     

Auditory processing of complex sounds: an overview.

The past 30 years has seen a remarkable development in our understanding of how the auditory system--particularly the peripheral system--processes complex sounds. Perhaps the most significant has been our understanding of the mechanisms underlying auditory frequency selectivity and their importance for normal and impaired auditory processing. Physiologically vulnerable cochlear filtering can account for many aspects of our normal and impaired psychophysical frequency selectivity with important consequences for the perception of complex sounds. For normal hearing, remarkable mechanisms in the organ of Corti, involving enhancement of mechanical tuning (in mammals probably by feedback of electro-mechanically generated energy from the hair cells), produce exquisite tuning, reflected in the tuning properties of cochlear nerve fibres. Recent comparisons of physiological (cochlear nerve) and psychophysical frequency selectivity in the same species indicate that the ear's overall frequency selectivity can be accounted for by this cochlear filtering, at least in bandwidth terms. Because this cochlear filtering is physiologically vulnerable, it deteriorates in deleterious conditions of the cochlea--hypoxia, disease, drugs, noise overexposure, mechanical disturbance--and is reflected in impaired psychophysical frequency selectivity. This is a fundamental feature of sensorineural hearing loss of cochlear origin, and is of diagnostic value. This cochlear filtering, particularly as reflected in the temporal patterns of cochlear fibres to complex sounds, is remarkably robust over a wide range of stimulus levels. Furthermore, cochlear filtering properties are a prime determinant of the 'place' and 'time' coding of frequency at the cochlear nerve level, both of which appear to be involved in pitch perception. The problem of how the place and time coding of complex sounds is effected over the ear's remarkably wide dynamic range is briefly addressed. In the auditory brainstem, particularly the dorsal cochlear nucleus, are inhibitory mechanisms responsible for enhancing the spectral and temporal contrasts in complex sounds. These mechanisms are now being dissected neuropharmacologically. At the cortical level, mechanisms are evident that are capable of abstracting biologically relevant features of complex sounds. Fundamental studies of how the auditory system encodes and processes complex sounds are vital to promising recent applications in the diagnosis and rehabilitation of the hearing impaired.     

Anomalous perception in synaesthesia: a cognitive neuroscience perspective

An enduring question in cognitive neuroscience is how the physical properties of the world are represented in the brain to yield conscious perception. In most people, a particular physical stimulus gives rise to a unitary, unimodal perceptual experience. So, light energy leads to the sensation of seeing, whereas sound waves produce the experience of hearing. However, for individuals with the rare phenomenon of synaesthesia, specific physical stimuli consistently induce more than one perceptual experience. For example, hearing particular sounds might induce vivid experiences of colour, taste or odour, as might the sight of visual symbols, such as letters or digits. Here we review the latest findings on synaesthesia, and consider its possible genetic, neural and cognitive bases. We also propose a neurocognitive framework for understanding such anomalous perceptual experiences.     

Twice-Born, Once Conceived: Meaning Construction and Cultural Cognition

Cultural cognition is the product of two different sorts of meaning: (a) the (objective) semiotic organization of cultural texts or models, and (b) the (subjective) processes of meaning construction through which cultural symbols become available to consciousness as "experience." This article proposes a way to bridge these two kinds of meaning by considering how cultural knowledge is grounded in sensory experience. Several cognitive processes (schematization, synesthesia, secondary intersubjectivity) are proposed for linking the objectively available schemata found in cultural practices and the processes of meaning construction by which individuals appropriate symbols to consciousness. The nature of the relation between public symbols and individual experience is discussed in relation to a number of current issues in post-structuralist culture theory.     

Category-Specific Processing of Scale-Invariant Sounds in Infancy

Increasing evidence suggests that the natural world has a special status for our sensory and cognitive functioning. The mammalian sensory system is hypothesized to have evolved to encode natural signals in an efficient manner. Exposure to natural stimuli, but not to artificial ones, improves learning and cognitive function. Scale-invariance, the property of exhibiting the same statistical structure at different spatial or temporal scales, is common to naturally occurring sounds. We recently developed a 3-parameter model to capture the essential characteristics of water sounds, and from this generated both scale-invariant and variable-scale sounds. In a previous study, we found that adults perceived a wide range of the artificial scale-invariant, but not the variable-scale, sounds as instances of natural sounds. Here, we explored the ontogenetic origins of these effects by investigating how young infants perceive and categorize scale-invariant acoustic stimuli. Even though they have several months of experience with natural water sounds, infants aged 5 months did not show a preference, in the first experiment, for the instances of the scale-invariant sounds rated as typical water-like sounds by adults over non-prototypical, but still scale-invariant instances. Scale-invariance might thus be a more relevant factor for the perception of natural signals than simple familiarity. In a second experiment, we thus directly compared infants'' perception of scale-invariant and variable-scale sounds. When habituated to scale-invariant sounds, infants looked significantly longer to a change in sound category from scale-invariant to variable-scale sounds, whereas infants habituated to variable-scale sounds showed no such difference. These results suggest that infants were able to form a perceptual category of the scale-invariant, but not variable-scale sounds. These findings advance the efficient coding hypothesis, and suggest that the advantage for perceiving and learning about the natural world is evident from the first months of life.     

Research Notes on Social Order and Subjectivity: Individuals' Experience of Susto and Fallen Fontanelle in a Rural Community in Central Mexico

Disciplines such as sociology and anthropology have showed that the experience of illness is, above all, a social product, that is, that social factors of different kinds play a central role in shaping individuals' subjectivity. This paper refers to the case of Ocuituco, a rural town of central Mexico. The article presents some of the results achieved through an interpretive sociological study of individuals' subjective experience of traditional illnesses such as susto, soul-loss, and fallen fontanelle. The aim is to analyze how Ocuituco's inhabitants attach meaning to, interpret, and experience these illnesses. The main point being made is that the subjective experience of traditional illnesses is shaped both by the cultural background of individuals, and by the sociological features of the setting where these individuals live. Data are interpreted in connection both to structural factors (poverty, medicalization, and patriarchy), and to the main traits that characterize individuals' view of their world: a sense of uncertainty, a sense of the unexpected as being normal, a sense of being oppressed, a familiarity with a patriarchal order. It is shown that both susto and fallen fontanelle are belief systems which allow individuals to interpret their circumstances and attach meaning to their problematic everyday life.     

Application and investigation of a bound for outcome reporting bias

Self-care interventions are promoted as effective strategies for improving the quality of life and health outcomes for individuals with long-term health conditions. Outcome measures used in evaluations using Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) are not designed to consider patients' prior management strategies and experience of illness. Yet the experience of illness literature suggests that adjusting to living with chronic illness, together with broader contextual influences, are likely to be relevant to understanding responses to self-management initiatives. Using group and individual interview data we attempt to illuminate the transposition of IBS from a condition unsatisfactorily managed by medicine to one successfully managed within the life worlds of individuals. If routine embedding of complex interventions depends on the accomplishment of integration and workability in patients' everyday lives then the design and evaluation of such interventions should view participation as part of a process of continuity as well as change. Responses to formal self-management can be extended beyond psychological and other quantitatively measured outcomes. A useful addendum to trial outcomes for self-management education is an understanding of change as being inextricably linked to people's previous attempts to, and experience of, managing long-term conditions. We suggest that the benefits of understanding the prior experience of managing illness and contact with health services include the acceptability and workability of complex interventions in patients' everyday lives.     

Stress, illness, and illness behavior.

This paper examines adaptation as a transactive process involving the skills and capacities of individuals and their supporting groups on the one hand, and the types of challenges they face on the other. Many difficulties in understanding stress processes in illness result from the confusion between illness and illness behavior. It is argued that the medical record is as much a history of the individual's behavior and social selection processes as it is a reflection of levels of physical health. Various examples are discussed, illustrating how medical records can be misleading in research examining the relationship between stress and illness, and how influences attributed to stress may be the result of illness behavior. The paper concludes by examining alternative conceptual models for studying the relationships between life challenges, illness behavior and illness.     

Development of a tele-stethoscope and its application in pediatric cardiology

Over the years, many attempts have been made to develop special stethoscopes for the teaching of auscultation. The objective of this article is to report on the experience with the development and implementation of an electronic stethoscope and a virtual library of cardiac sounds. There were four stages to this project: (1) the building of the prototype to acquire, filter and amplify the cardiac sounds, (2) the development of a software program to record, reproduce and visualize them, (3) the testing of the prototype in a clinical scenario, and (4) the development of an internet site, to store and display the sounds collected. The first two stages are now complete. The prototype underwent an initial evaluation in a clinical scenario within the Unit and during virtual out-patient clinical sessions. One hundred auscultations were recorded during these tests. They were reviewed and discussed on-line by a panel of experience cardiologists during the sessions. Although the sounds were considered "satisfactory" for diagnostic purposes by the cardiology team, they identified some qualitative differences in the electronic recorded auscultations, such as a higher pitch of the recorded sounds. Prospective clinical studies are now being conducted to further evaluate the interference of the electronic device in the physicians' capability to diagnose different cardiac conditions. An internet site (www.caduceusvirtual.com.br/ auscultaped) was developed to host these cardiac auscultations. It is set as a library of cardiac sounds, catalogued by pathologies and already contains examples from auscultations of the majority of common congenital heart lesions, such as septal defects and valvar lesions.     

Stigma,shame, and blame experienced by patients with lung cancer: qualitative study

Objectives To draw on narrative interviews with patients with lung cancer and to explore their perceptions and experience of stigma.Design Qualitative study.Setting United Kingdom.Participants 45 patients with lung cancer recruited through several sources.Results Participants experienced stigma commonly felt by patients with other types of cancer, but, whether they smoked or not, they felt particularly stigmatised because the disease is so strongly associated with smoking. Interaction with family, friends, and doctors was often affected as a result, and many patients, particularly those who had stopped smoking years ago or had never smoked, felt unjustly blamed for their illness. Those who resisted victim blaming maintained that the real culprits were tobacco companies with unscrupulous policies. Some patients concealed their illness, which sometimes had adverse financial consequences or made it hard for them to gain support from other people. Some indicated that newspaper and television reports may have added to the stigma: television advertisements aim to put young people off tobacco, but they usually portray a dreadful death, which may exacerbate fear and anxiety. A few patients were worried that diagnosis, access to care, and research into lung cancer might be adversely affected by the stigma attached to the disease and those who smoke.Conclusion Patients with lung cancer report stigmatisation with far reaching consequences. Efforts to help people to quit smoking are important, but clinical and educational interventions should be presented with care so as not to add to the stigma experienced by patients with lung cancer and other smoking related diseases.     

An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer's Odyssey

The meaning, even the sheer presence, of birds in the Odyssey has been ignored by all but a few scholars. A similar statement could be made about an aphrodisian reading of the text. Yet Homer felt that birds were deeply significant, often as symbols of Aphrodite. Examination of these meanings leads to a unique understanding of essential, underlying values in Homeric culture. Such efforts are consonant with the anthropological goal of understanding how culturally defined natural phenomena work in the articulation, expression, and condensation of powerful, culturally defined emotions.     

Breast feeding and lower respiratory tract illness in the first year of life. Group Health Medical Associates.

OBJECTIVE--To assess the relation between breast feeding and subsequent experience of lower respiratory tract illness. DESIGN--Prospective (from well child visits) and retrospective (from maternal recall) study of breast feeding and prospective assessment by paediatricians of lower respiratory tract illness in infants during first year of life. SETTING--Health maintenance organisation. PARTICIPANTS--Over 1000 infants who were healthy at birth and whose parents used the paediatricians of a local health maintenance organisation. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES--Duration of breast feeding and type of lower respiratory tract illness (wheezing and non-wheezing) at different age intervals during the first year of life. RESULTS--Breast feeding was associated with a decreased incidence of wheezing illnesses only in the first four months of life. Interactions existed between breast feeding and sharing a room, being Mexican American, and being a boy. Multivariate techniques showed that after controlling for a variety of factors children who received minimal breast milk had a greater risk of early wheezing illnesses; the risk was further increased by simultaneous exposure to sharing a room. CONCLUSION--Breast feeding seems to protect against wheezing respiratory tract illnesses in the first four months of life, particularly when other risk factors are present.     

Shaping adult phenotypes through early life environments

A major question in the biology of stress and environmental adaptation concerns the neurobiological basis of how neuroendocrine systems governing physiological regulatory mechanisms essential for life (metabolism, immune response, organ function) become harmful. The current view is that a switch from protection to damage occurs when vulnerable phenotypes are exposed to adverse environmental conditions. In accordance with this theory, sequelae of early life social and environmental stressors, such as childhood abuse, neglect, poverty, and poor nutrition, have been associated with the emergence of mental and physical illness (i.e., anxiety, mood disorders, poor impulse control, psychosis, and drug abuse) and an increased risk of common metabolic and cardiovascular diseases later in life. Evidence from animal and human studies investigating the associations between early life experiences (including parent‐infant bonding), hypothalamus‐pituitary‐adrenal axis activity, brain development, and health outcome provide important clues into the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate the contribution of stressful experiences to personality development and the manifestation of illness. This review summarizes our current molecular understanding of how early environment influences brain development in a manner that persists through life and highlights recent evidence from rodent studies suggesting that maternal care in the first week of postnatal life establishes diverse and stable phenotypes in the offspring through epigenetic modification of genes expressed in the brain that shape neuroendocrine and behavioral stress responsivity throughout life. Birth Defects Research (Part C) 87:314–326, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

ETHNOBOTANICAL CONSERVATION STATUS OF MARGALLA HILLS NATIONAL PARK, ISLAMABAD

马加拉山国家公园自建立以来,在自然环境保护方面面临着一些问题。园内住民向来使用药用植物治疗各种疾病,长期依赖周围的植物资源提供食品、房舍、饲料、保健品和其他人文生活的需要。然而,工业化的兴起以及随之而来的人们生活方式的改变,使得利用当地植物作医药的情况不断减少。因此,有必要进行民族植物学研究,把本土植物的利用信息在丧失之前记录下来。调查结果表明,ＡｓｐａｒａｇｕｓａｄｅｓｃｅｎｄｅｎｓＲｏｘｂ．,ＢｅｒｂｅｒｉｓｌｙｃｉｕｍＲｏｙｌｅ（柯杞小檗）和ＶｉｏｌａｃａｎｅｓｃｅｎｃｅＷａｌ．ｅｘＲｏｘｂ．只能少量采集,ＡｃａｃｉａｍｏｄｅｓｔａＷａｌ．,Ａ．ｎｉｌｏｔｉｃａ（Ｌ．）Ｄｅｌｉｌｅ（阿拉伯胶金合欢）,ＢｕｘｕｓｐｉｐｉｌｏｓａＣ．Ｋ．Ｓｃｈｎｅｉｄ．和Ｄｏｄｏｎａｅａｖｉｓｃｏｓａ（Ｌ．）Ｊａｃｑ．（车桑子）等作为薪材面临砍伐的压力。而ＧｒｅｗｉａｏｐｔｉｖａＤｒｕｍ．ｅｘＢｕｒｒｅｔ作为持续利用的饲料和制绳用的种类显示良好的前景     

BIOACOUSTIC PUBLICATIONS, 1989

ABSTRACT

Coruros Spalacopus cyanus, social fossorial rodents from Chile, use a complex acoustic repertoire with eleven different true vocalisations and one mechanical sound in various behavioural contexts. The complex of contact calls is particularly well differentiated. Juvenile coruros produced six true vocalisations of which four were structurally identical to adult calls. One vocalisation had components of two adult sounds and one occurred only in juvenile animals. Certain calls from the adult repertoire were lacking. The frequencies of sounds of juveniles were considerably higher than those of adults, with many sounds reaching the ultrasonic range. Nevertheless, pure ultrasonic sounds were not recorded.

The frequencies of the analysed sounds of coruros extended from 0.17 to 20.33 kHz with dominant frequency components between 0.17 and 10 kHz. The acoustic properties of calls are suitable for transmission above and below ground, thus providing further indirect evidence that coruros are not strictly confined to an underground way of life. Indeed, the great variability of frequency ranges, with lower frequencies always being included, reflects a specialisation for communication in variable acoustic environments.

The most distinctive and unique vocalisation of coruros is the long duration musical trilling (lasting up to two minutes), which is a long-distance call emitted in alarm and arousal contexts. Recordings of this call from natural burrows in the field in Chile showed similar structural features to vocalisations from captive colonies in the laboratory.

Our findings provide a further example of matching physical properties of vocalisations to the acoustic conditions of the habitat. However, vocalisations in subterranean rodents consist almost exclusively of short-distance calls, the trilling of coruros being the notable exception. Since the selective pressure of the acoustic environment upon the evolution of short-distance vocalisations is probably minimal, we suggest that during their evolution, subterranean mammals have matched their vocalisations primarily to their hearing range and not directly to the acoustics underground. Hearing probably has been the primary target of natural selection, serving not only for communication but also for detection of predators (and, in carnivores, of prey).     

Do People Agree on What Makes One Feel Loved? A Cognitive Psychometric Approach to the Consensus on Felt Love

This pragmatic study examines love as a mode of communication. Our focus is on the receiver side: what makes an individual feel loved and how felt love is defined through daily interactions. Our aim is to explore everyday life scenarios in which people might experience love, and to consider people’s converging and diverging judgments about which scenarios indicate felt love. We apply a cognitive psychometric approach to quantify a receiver’s ability to detect, understand, and know that they are loved. Through crowd-sourcing, we surveyed lay participants about whether various scenarios were indicators of felt love. We thus quantify these responses to make inference about consensus judgments of felt love, measure individual levels of agreement with consensus, and assess individual response styles. More specifically, we (1) derive consensus judgments on felt love; (2) describe its characteristics in qualitative and quantitative terms, (3) explore individual differences in both (a) participant agreement with consensus, and (b) participant judgment when uncertain about shared knowledge, and (4) test whether individual differences can be meaningfully linked to explanatory variables. Results indicate that people converge towards a shared cognitive model of felt love. Conversely, respondents showed heterogeneity in knowledge of consensus, and in dealing with uncertainty. We found that, when facing uncertainty, female respondents and people in relationships more frequently judge scenarios as indicators of felt love. Moreover, respondents from smaller households tend to know more about consensus judgments of felt love, while respondents from larger households are more willing to guess when unsure of consensus.     

Social Defeat in Recovery-Oriented Supported Housing: Moral Experience, Stigma, and Ideological Resistance

Drawing from ethnographic observations and interview data gathered during 6?months working as a home caregiver at the Pinewood Apartments, a recovery-oriented supported housing community in Texas, I demonstrate how stigma and social defeat were moral and social processes that pervaded life for all involved, including service providers. Yet, because of the extreme power differentials that characterized tenant-staff relationships, the assault of stigma and social defeat was much more frequent, existentially intense, and morally and materially consequential for certain tenants, whose attempts at ideological resistance were delegitimized by service providers, including myself, who were backed by the authority of dominant psychiatric and moralistic discourses concerning the inherent irrationality and irresponsibility of people with severe mental illness. Nevertheless, due to the indeterminate and at times inharmonious nature of moral experience, it is not my intention to portray tenants as wholly defeated. Rather, individual tenants often exhibited defeat and resistance simultaneously.     

Language, gesture, skill: the co-evolutionary foundations of language

This paper defends a gestural origins hypothesis about the evolution of enhanced communication and language in the hominin lineage. The paper shows that we can develop an incremental model of language evolution on that hypothesis, but not if we suppose that language originated in an expansion of great ape vocalization. On the basis of the gestural origins hypothesis, the paper then advances solutions to four classic problems about the evolution of language: (i) why did language evolve only in the hominin lineage? (ii) why is language use an evolutionarily stable form of informational cooperation, despite the fact that hominins have diverging evolutionary interests? (iii) how did stimulus independent symbols emerge? (iv) what were the origins of complex, syntactically organized symbols? The paper concludes by confronting two challenges: those of testability and of explaining the gesture-to-speech transition; crucial issues for any gestural origins hypothesis.