Addicted To Your Baby’s Smile
Jul 8 at 3:03pm by Aileen
Most parents know very well how heart-warming their baby’s smile can be, to the point where just doing something silly to get that smile-fix becomes a regular way of life. I’ve heard all sorts of weird philosophies about baby smiles - “it’s just gas,” “they’ve got the intelligence of rats,” etc., etc., things that only non-parents would ever think of.
So it’s cool that researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine have finally demonstrated the addictive quality of baby smiles, as reported recently in the journal Pediatrics. Turns out that baby smiles actually ‘light up’ the reward centers of the human brain, particularly in Moms - it’s what they call a “Natural High.”
Baby’s Smile Is A Natural High
The researchers hope their work will help scientists understand the unique mother-infant bonding so critical for proper child development (and mothers’ mental health).
No doubt this is fine research, and it’s gratifying to know that science is actually looking at phenomena they could have known all along if they’d just asked a Mom. Oh, well. That famous scientific skepticism needs physical ‘proof’ of physical phenomena before it will believe anything most regular people know from direct empirical experience. Maybe they’ll now come up with a pill that mimics this high, which will no doubt be a big item on the black market for pharmaceuticals…
Big Pharma’s Big Lie Refuted
Jan 8 at 5:05pm by Aileen
Two York University researchers have published a study in the January 3rd issue of PLoS Medicine [Public Library of Science] demonstrating that U.S. pharmaceutical companies spend nearly twice as much money promoting their drugs to doctors and the public than on research and development of new drugs.
Big Pharma Spends More on Advertising than Research and Development puts the lie to the pharmaceutical industry’s self-serving mantra that the cost of drugs in the U.S. has to be higher than anywhere else in the world so that newer, better drugs - and drugs designed to treat relatively rare but deadly diseases - can be developed. High prices for prescription drugs offset this massive expenditure, they tell us, and the U.S. government has tended to accept the lie without challenge.
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