Angry? It May Not Be So Good For Your Health

“Sorry I’m late,” apologized the manager of a local furniture store who rushed in at 9:15 a.m., a plastic pharmacy bag dangling from her wrist. “I had to stop at the drugstore,” she explained, gesturing to the bag.

“Sick?” The customer asked.

“No,” she rasped. “I was screaming so loudly at my kids this morning that I lost my voice.”

Anger. Rage. Fury. Ire. Wrath. Spleen. Petulance.

The English language has dozens of words to describe an emotion that all of us feel keenly, whether we express it or not.

We all get angry—whether it is at our kids, or at the driver who cut us off at the stop light, or at our boss, or at our editor.

But is anger good for you? Does anger have any health benefits? To lead a healthy life is it better to express anger or suppress it?

There is an abundance of recent health studies that suggest that anger is not good for your health.

For example, one University of North Carolina study, published in the medical journal, The Lancet, showed that men and women who possessed the most anger traits were as much as seven times more likely to develop coronary heart disease.

Another study of anger management in 54 married couples conducted by Dr. Sybil Carrère, Ph.D., similarly found that women who could not control their anger, or who got angry more frequently than they would have liked, had feelings of dissatisfaction in their marriages, higher heart beats, and more trouble decompressing physically after a bout of anger. According to Dr. Carrère, this evidence suggests that women’s cardiovascular health could be jeopardized by frequent anger.

“I just feel clenched,” explains 28-year-old Natasha Pangburn of Eugene, Oregon, who stops talking and feels herself “shutting off” when she gets angry. “If I’m really angry I just turn off. I get this tight feeling. I feel like people don’t understand me no matter how hard I try.”

Pangburn, who has been trying to find ways to express her anger more overtly, believes that anger is harmful and makes intimate relationships strained. “It creates a divide between me and other people."

Kristen Bernard, an obstetric nurse at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital in Vermont, agrees that bottling up anger is not good for you.

“Anger goes along with a whole cycle of health issues,” says Bernard. “I have one client who is angry and has irritable bowel syndrome. This person is getting bleeding ulcers from the tension the anger creates.”

Bernard believes that people need to be encouraged to resolve their anger in order to help them lead healthier lives: “As a health care practitioner, that is one of the first things I focus on—what are you angry about? How can I help you with it? It is my number one priority.”

According to Joni Cohen-Mitchell, Director of the Brick House in Turners Falls, Massachusetts, there are many ways to help people resolve conflicts and diffuse anger. The Brick House runs programs that help people learn to listen to others, to agree to disagree respectfully and then move on, to use humor to break the tension in an angry encounter, to write about their feelings as a way of recording and validating them, and to use “I” statements (“I feel angry,” “I get upset when...”) instead of being accusatory.

Although studies show that people who are angry more often than not—whether they express their anger or suppress it—are at higher risk for heart problems, the American Psychological Association (APA) advocates expressing anger in a controlled way.

According to a brochure published by the APA, “Expressing your angry feelings in an assertive—not aggressive—manner is the healthiest way to express anger. To do this, you have to learn how to make clear what your needs are, and how to get them met, without hurting others. Being assertive doesn't mean being pushy or demanding; it means being respectful of yourself and others.”

According to Harriet Lerner, Ph.D., a world renown specialist on anger and author of the best-selling book, The Dance of Anger, anger is both a natural emotion and an emotion well worth paying attention to.

Dr. Lerner argues that anger can be productive, and that recurring anger can help a person become aware of a more serious underlying problem.

Lerner says anger should not be used as an excuse to blame other people. Instead, anger should be recognized as a signal that harmful behavior patterns need to be changed.

When men and women pay attention to their anger and use it as a starting point to change then anger, according to Dr. Lerner, is something for which we can be grateful.

Rally in Medford, Oregon this Thursday to Support Health Care Reform

Mothers Voices For Health Care Reform (Fathers' too!)

Thursday, June 25, 5 - 6 p.m.
Vogel Plaza
Main & Central
Downtown Medford

A rally to show support for health care reform that will give all parents peace of mind. We support Obama's goal of providing QUALITY AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL.

Wear red on Thursday in heartfelt support of health care reform.

Write to the public officials in your state. In Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley has become an eloquent spokesperson in favor of reform.

Senator Ron Wyden, also a democrat, has NOT signed on to the idea of a public health insurance plan. We need to tell him to get on board the Obama train and to stop being silent. Representative Greg Walden, a Republican, also has not committed to any of the principals of health care reform.

Please send personal letters about the importance of health care reform to Senator Wyden at:

Senator Ron Wyden
310 West 6th Street
Room 118
Medford, OR 97501

To fight the big business interests involved in this debate, we all need to speak up about our support for change. Polls this week by non-partisan polling groups show that 72-83% of Americans support a reform of our nation's current health care system.

For more information, call HEALTH CARE FOR AMERICA NOW at 541-772-4029.

Learn As Much As You Can Before You Vaccinate Your Baby

It's overwhelming to have a new baby -- in a wonderful, fearful, giddy sort of way -- and there's a lot that you'll wish you did differently after the fact.

But here's one mistake not to make: Find out about vaccines before you start shooting up your child.

The Hep B vaccine is administered a few hours after birth. But Hep B is a sexually transmitted disease. If you and your partner are monogamous and do not use drugs or share needles and do not have Hep B, you should not give this vaccine to your newborn or your child at any age. (Hep B tends to be a mild illness in adults but a dangerous one in very small children.)

Vaccinating a newborn against Hep B is not only not necessary but it is also dangerous to your baby. The vaccine is known to cause adverse reactions. The link there is to the government's National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

Here's another link to a less mainstream source that discusses the dangers of the Hep B vaccine. The small chance that you child could have an adverse reaction, including anaphylactic shock, is more of a risk than the disease, Hep B, itself. The long term immune consequences and potential harmful effects of megadosing children on vaccines have yet to be studied.

There is nothing wrong with vaccines. Though some skeptics argue that diseases like Polio were already on the decline because of improved sanitation, chlorine added to swimming pools, and natural immunity--as well as the normal epidemiological trends--most people agree that the Polio vaccine helped save many children from being crippled or worse.

But Polio has been eradicated in the United States and most countries in the world, which is a good reason to think and consider before giving your baby that vaccine.

All of this was the subject of a lot of debate during a CDC vaccine community meeting in Ashland, Oregon. You can read more about that meeting here.

I am writing a feature for a national magazine about whether unvaccinated children put others at risk. If you want to weigh in on the debate, please contact me.

More reasons to NAP with your baby (and not to drink coffee)

This article, just in from the New York Times, talks about how napping is beneficial to learning and caffeine isn't. We say any excuse to nap with your baby is a valid one. If your wife is skeptical of why you need to snooze a roo, print this out for her:

VITAL SIGNS
Regimens: For the Best Pick-Me-Up, Lie Down

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: December 1, 2008

Scientists spent a morning training 61 people in motor, perceptual and verbal tasks: tapping a keyboard in a specific sequence, discriminating between shapes on a computer screen and memorizing a list of words. Then the scientists randomly divided the subjects into three groups. The first took a nap from 1 to 3 p.m. At 3, the second group took a 200-milligram caffeine pill, and the third took a placebo. The subjects repeated the tasks they had been taught earlier and were scored by researchers who did not know which group they were in.

Those who had caffeine had worse motor skills than those who napped or had a placebo. In the perceptual task, the nappers did significantly better than either the caffeine or placebo group. On the verbal test, nappers were best by a wide margin, and the caffeine consumers did no better than those given a placebo. Despite their mediocre performance, caffeine takers consistently reported less sleepiness than the others.

“People think they’re smarter on caffeine,” said Sara C. Mednick, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and the lead author of the study, which appeared in the Nov. 3 issue of Behavioral Brain Research. “But this study is a strong argument for taking a nap instead of having a cup of coffee.”

Don't (Always) Trust Your Doctor

You know yourself and your baby better than anyone, and you may find that what you think is the right thing to do is not always what the doctor tells you to do.

If you live in a big city, you may have to wait 45 minutes to an hour (or longer) for a Well Baby Check-up. This happened to us in Atlanta and by the time the doctor saw us our baby, long overdue for a nap, had screamed herself hoarse. The doctor looked in her ears and said she had an ear infection, and prescribed antibiotics and "something for the pain."

She didn't have an ear infection. She didn't need anything for the pain. She was tired. She needed to not be at the doctor's!

We filled the prescription and hightailed back to the crib. And found Robert S. Mendolsohn's masterful, readable, smart book called How to Raise a Healthy Child ... in spite of your doctor.

Mendolsohn points out that babies are often misdiagnosed as having ear infections from crying.

He also says that in Europe ear infections aren't usually treated.

We disposed of the unnecessary antibiotics and pain meds and that was the last Well Baby Check-up we ever took our baby to.

Tainted Milk

It's been all over the news this week -- on the radio, in the newspapers, on TV -- that over six thousand children in China are sick from drinking tainted milk products. Here's a relatively in-depth story about it from the AP, posted on MSNBC (a news organization with a conservative, pro-business, pro-vaccine slant).

What's the moral of the story here? Don't feed your baby "products." Feed your baby food. We all know that human breast milk is best for babies. If your wife can't breast feed, you can still make your own substitute milk or use goat milk supplemented with other real whole food that babies can tolerate and digest.

But formula companies would have us think that they have the magic elixir and without it our babies won't grow up to be healthy. The opposite is actually true and China is a case in point. Don't be fooled by the formula companies and the billions they spend in advertising and brainwashing.

Older Dads = Higher Chance of Bipolar Disease

A Swedish study reported on in the Health section of the New York Times links the age of the father with the frequency of bipolar disease in offspring. The New York Times article is here. Some highlights:

Researchers examined health records of more than 7 million people, identified over 13,400 with bipolar disease (who they matched with 5 controls), and divided fathers into 5-year age categories starting at age 20.

After adjusting for other factors (like a history of mental illness), they found consistently increasing risk as the fathers aged.

Fathers aged 55 and older had the highest risk of having children with bipolar disease.

Advanced paternal age has also been linked to higher rates of autism and schizophrenia in adult children.