In the chapter on setting boundaries, the author lists the 10 most common warning signs of an abusive relationship.
Here they are:
1. Does he push your boundaries, your limits? (Ex. Trying to force you to do things you don't want to do)
2. Is he moody? Is he nice to you one day and mean or obnoxious the next?
3. Does he tell you who to be friends with? Is he rude or insulting to your friends?
4. Does he criticize your appearance (clothes, hairstyle, weight)?
5. How does he react in situations of frustration, ex- waiting for the waiter, traffic jams, waiting for your to get ready
6. Does he speak to your in a hurtful or disrespectful way?
7. Has he threatened to hurt you or your family members?
8. Does he take responsibility for his actions or blame everyone else?
9. Is he jealous and/or possessive (checking up on who you called, who's calling you; does he read your e-mails/texts?)
10. Do you often find yourself alienated from friends and family since you started dating him?
If your man is guilty of one or two of these things it's one thing, but if you find yourself answering yes to a lot of the following questions and find that these things occur on a regular basis, you might want to assess if this is the right relationship for you. I have dated several guys where the answers to the many of the questions above were "yes" but at the time, I just did what most girls do when they're riding the initial high of infatuation... I followed by heart rather than my head and focused intently on the good things he did while making innocent excuses for the bad.
While "emotional abuse" may sound like a strong term, a relationship in which a man does any of the actions listed above on a regular basis can cause enormous damage, leaving you with emotional scars that can take significantly longer to heal than any physical wound so it's crucial to look out for these things.
You can get the book from amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9652294985/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=anewmode-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=9652294985
I dont get any commission publishing this post, just hoping to help someone who is in trouble of his or her relationship. Enjoy reading! :)
Life- http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/67686/title/2010_Science_News_of_the_Year_Life
Warming changes how and where animals liveNew concerns have emerged about how climate warming might challenge animals and change the way they go about their lives. For example, a coalition of lizard specialists suggests that by midcentury a third of lizard populations won’t have enough time for foraging or other vital pursuits simply because they’ll have to spend long stretches cooling off in shady refuges (SN Online: 5/13/10). Overall, organisms such as lizards that depend on their environment to regulate body temperature — those often referred to as cold-blooded — may get a disproportionate jolt in the tropics. A temperature uptick has more metabolic impact on lizards living in already hot climates, researchers report, with effects that could ripple through tropical ecosystems (SN Online: 10/6/10).Climate change also appears to be revamping relationships among species, according to an analysis of Europe’s common cuckoo and the birds it dupes into raising its young. As warmer springs have pushed short-distance migrators toward earlier nesting times, cuckoos have fallen out of sync and are instead laying more eggs in the nests of fellow long-distance migrants such as reed warblers (SN: 10/9/10, p. 11). Meanwhile, migration itself has become problematic for a population of Yellowstone elk that can no longer find good summer grazing in high meadows (SN: 7/17/10, p. 12).
O no Three species of tiny sediment-dwelling loriciferans from a briny basin deep in the Mediterranean may live their entire lives without oxygen, which would make them the first multicellular animals known to do so (SN: 5/8/10, p. 5).
O yes Microbiologists have found a fourth biological pathway for producing oxygen: a method, employed by certain bacteria, that breaks down nitrite compounds (SN Online: 3/24/10).
Keeping blood sugar close to normal and taking drugs to hold down blood levels of cholesterol and other fats can help people with diabetes avoid the potentially blinding eye disease retinopathy, researchers report.
Until now, it hadn’t been clear whether strict control of blood sugar and fats, or lipids, could still deter retinopathy in patients who had been diabetic for as long as a decade.
“The question was whether the horse was out of the barn for this group,” says study coauthor Emily Chew, an ophthalmologist at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Md. It turns out, she says, “that you can reduce the risk of retinopathy in these patients.”
Years of high blood sugar can damage blood vessels in the retina, leading to diabetic retinopathy. This results in the buildup of fluid and other deposits in the eye, which can lead to blindness if not treated.
The new study, published online June 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved patients who had lived with type 2 diabetes for roughly 10 years. The study is actually two parts of a large ongoing trial in the United States and Canada. In both parts, patients had no history of eye disease at the outset. All underwent a standard eye exam at the start of the trial and again after four years.
In one analysis, Chew and her colleagues randomly assigned 2,856 people to undertake either an aggressive effort to lower their blood sugar levels or a standard course of blood sugar control that was less stringent. Those in the group that aggressively reduced blood sugar were 33 percent less likely than the others to have developed retinopathy at the four-year point — 7.3 percent compared with 10.4 percent.
In the other analysis, the researchers randomly assigned 1,593 of the study participants to get the cholesterol-lowering drug simvastatin plus either a placebo or a drug called fenofibrate that lowers lipids such as triglycerides. These patients had higher than normal levels of triglycerides at the start. After four years, those getting the drug combination were 40 percent less likely to develop retinopathy than were those getting only the statin — 6.5 percent versus 10.2 percent.
An intervention to lower blood pressure in some of the volunteers showed no effect on retinopathy development.
The beneficial effects of statins in lowering cardiovascular risk in people with diabetes have been shown in the past, says Amod Gupta, an ophthalmologist at Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh, India. “This study on progression of retinopathy would provide an additional motivation for diabetic patients to control their lipid levels and prevent sight-threatening retinopathy which, for some diabetics, is just around the corner.”
Diabetic retinopathy is highly treatable with steroid injections to stop swelling, laser surgery to cauterize leaky blood vessels and with other surgery to remove excess fluid from the eye. While these interventions can maintain vision in most patients, none cures the underlying biological process by which retinopathy develops.
Retinopathy often occurs with, or precedes, diabetes-related complications of the kidney, nervous system and blood vessels, says physician Barbara Klein of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. Writing in the same NEJM issue, she says the report therefore “has great importance, particularly because of the increasing prevalence of diabetes related to aging of the population and also the increasing prevalence at younger ages, which is likely to be related to obesity.”
Meanwhile, roughly half of diabetes patients don’t get eye exams as often as they should, which is annually, Chew says. “We need to do a better job educating our patients,” she says.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/58350/title/Mercury_surprise_Rice_can_be_risky
Ask toxicologists how best to avoid mercury poisoning and they’ll almost certainly advise against eating too much of the wrong types of fish. (Never mind that there’s considerable confusion about what the wrong types are.) But a new study out of China shows that for millions of people at risk of eating toxic amounts of mercury-laced food, fish isn’t the problem. Rice is.
And that’s bad news because in their part of the world rice is the dietary staple
A team of Chinese and Norwegian researchers investigated dietary mercury contamination in rural, inland China — a region were few people eat fish. They focused on Guizhou province, which they describe as the “mercury capital of China.” The area is home to 12 large mercury-mining and smelting operations, not to mention other heavy coal-powered industry. All of these industrial operations belch out tons of air- and water pollution laced with substantial quantities of mercury.
Hua Zhang and Xinbing Feng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Graduate University in Beijing and their coauthors measured mercury in the air, water and in all major foods from local markets. Then they modeled likely ingestion rates of these foods for residents of various communities across the province. These included a village located inside a nature preserve, a region downwind of a major coal plant, people living near a defunct zinc smelter and a community whose air was polluted by mercury-mining operations.
In an upcoming issue of Environmental Health Perspectives, the researchers report that although mercury exposures for these communities varied dramatically, in every one of them “rice accounted for 94 to 96 percent of the probable daily intake of methylmercury” — the most neurotoxic and readily absorbed form of mercury. Methylmercury poisoning has been linked with diminishing the IQ of children exposed in the womb and with raising blood pressure and other heart-disease risks among adults.
Methylmercury is a highly toxic substance; a number of adverse health effects associated with exposure to it have been identified in humans and in animal studies. Most extensive are the data on neurotoxicity, particularly in developing organisms. The nervous system is considered to be the most sensitive target organ for which there are data suitable for derivation of an RfD (reference dose).
It is known that methylation of Hg2+ is mediated by a series of enzymatic reactions that are also responsible for the anaerobic evolution of methane. However, under highly reduced environments the reaction can also occur nonbiologically. It is possible that certain bacteria use methylation as a resistance/detoxification mechanism.
Guizhou’s heavy cereal contamination traces in large part, the study says, to the fact that rice paddies harbor the types of bacteria that can convert inorganic mercury to its more toxic, methylated form. Moreover, in Guizhou, more than 70 percent (27 million people) live in rural areas — impoverished communities where the annual household income averages less than the U.S. equivalent of $300.
Not surprisingly, these rural families derive a large share of their calories from rice. And locally grown rice had high total mercury levels. It varied by region, with the highest contamination in Wanshan, the mercury-mining region.
More importantly, some 11 percent of the mercury in the grain they sampled in Wanshan was methylated. It averaged 9.3 micrograms of this especially toxic mercury per kilogram of rice in an area where people down an average of more than a half-kilogram of the grain each day.
Meat, on a per-kilogram basis, contained even more total mercury than rice — an average of 220 micrograms versus 78 µg. However, meat contained a far smaller share that was methylated than in rice, just 0.85 µg/kg.
Ironically, even though people don’t eat much fish in Guizhou, area fish have relatively low methylmercury concentrations — 0.06 millligrams per kilogram, about one-tenth of China’s recommended limit for dietary items.
Bottom line: Guizhou diners probably don’t face huge risks except from rice subjected to mercury-laced mega-fallout from Wanshan-type mercury-mining and –smelting. But in such communities, tainted rice could contribute more mercury in a typical year than will fish in coastal Japan or in Norway, the researchers observe. That said, intake of the methylated form of mercury in Guizhou still would be “much lower” than among heavy consumers of fish in coastal Asia and in many Western nations.
The big question, of course, is whether mercury contamination of rice is unique to Guizhou. The authors suspect it isn’t, but note that follow-up studies will be needed to confirm that. And, of course, any tainted rice may not stay put in our increasingly global economy.
