This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has six segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Sweet or not, the end — Almost everyone who gets old dies. In a gross way, that brief sentence could sum up a Dutch/Danish/British study called “Use of sugar in coffee and tea and long-term risk of mortality in older adult Danish men: 32 years of follow-up from a prospective cohort study“….
- Shocking news —… Feedback cannot stop focusing on a 10-year-old study called “Role of mindfulness-based psychological support during a course of ECT”. ECT is an acronym for electroconvulsive therapy. This study was one of the most successful attempts – perhaps the only attempt – to intentionally combine mindfulness with this therapy….
- Mind the dishes — Just a year later, researchers in the US published a study called “Washing dishes to wash the dishes: Brief instruction in an informal mindfulness practice“….
- Mindful of mindfulness — One can also be mindful about mindfulness. Three researchers (two at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, one at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) looked mindfully at the heaps of published studies about mindfulness, then published a study about what they think they saw….
- Resisting antibiotics — David Gordon adds his non-prescriptive perspective to Feedback’s collection of professional opinions about whether “the art of medicine amounts to entertaining the patient while nature effects the cure”. He says: “All interventions have potential side-effects, so avoidance of unnecessary ones is a no-brainer….
- Losing power — Superpowers – even the trivial ones readers add to Feedback’s compendium – aren’t all permanent. Grainne Collins confides…