One advantage of being a science major is knowing fancy scientific words for everyday things. Since my teenage years, I developed the habit of reading the ingredients list before purchasing any packaged food item. Recently while searching for a snack at the store, I stumbled upon the potato chips aisle (admittedly, salty, crunchy snacks have always been a weakness of mine). Given how expensive everything has gotten lately, the more affordable budget brands peaked my interest. After quickly glancing over the ingredients of one bag, I noticed that "silicon dioxide" was listed at the end; in fact, it was a common ingredient in that particular brand's entire line of products! Knowing that silicon dioxide is the main component of beach sand, my ...

Chiropractic medicine is an approach that is derived from the Greek roots "cheir," meaning hand, and "praxis," meaning practice, and was formulated by the founder of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer (originally of Canada), to mean "done by hand." The emphasis in chiropractic is on the use of physical manipulation or adjustments to correct misalignment of the spinal vertebrae and other musculoskeletal joints to improve the function of the related organs and musculature.

The main treatments used by chiropractic physicians are adjustments, or physical manipulation of the musculoskeletal system. Chiropractors also use heat and/or cold therapy, immobilization (with splints, for example), hydrotherapy, ultrasound, and massage.

Chiropractic treatme ...

Surgeons have successfully replaced a patient’s skull with a 3D-printed version. Three months after the operation the patient, a 22-year-old woman with a rare disorder that thickened her skull and gave her poor eyesight as well as headaches, has recovered her eyesight and has gone back to work.

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Try imagining for a second how it'd feel to lose your eyesight. It's almost unimaginable because your vision is perhaps the most valuable tool for survival. This is why we need to constantly protect our eyes and learn what could potentially ail them. Below is a list of five common illnesses that plague the precious eyes of people around the globe.

Glaucoma

Glaucoma is damage to the optic nerve, often caused by elevated intraocular pressure. It results from excessive production of aqueous humor or diminished ocular fluid outflow. Glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness, secondary to optic nerve damage.

As of yet, there is no cure. Everyone is at risk, and there may be no warning signs. It is six to eight times more common in African Americans ...

If emotions can make you sick, if a belief that you will die can kill you (as in voodoo deaths), and if a sugar pill that you believe is a powerful drug can take away your pain, can a belief that you can bring about your own recovery help you to recover?

Even with acceptance of the role of emotional factors in both illness and recovery, the assumption has persisted that emotional factors work on an unconscious level, and because of this they are not subject to voluntary control. Most of us still see illness as something that happens to us.

Dr. Carl Simonton, chief of radiation at Travis Air Force Base, questioned this assumption. He was impressed by demonstrations that people could learn to control autonomic processes through biofeedback and ...