Divorce could damage your health

Brittany — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 14:00:43 +0000

Who thought the age old phrase “died from a broken heart” was ever to be taken literally? I’m talking heart disease, heart failure, heart attack literally. According to some recent studies, this appears to be the case.

We’re all familiar with the feeling of loss and sometimes depression that accompany the separation of a serious relationship, especially a marriage. Even those who’ve never been married have experienced this with boyfriend/girlfriend breakups. They’re never easy. It truly is as if a piece of your heart is ripped, beating and bleeding, from your chest, a feeling you’re not soon to forget.

What comes after the separation stage is the healing stage, and many find themselves feeling incredibly better about life in general a few weeks or months later. However, it appears that this mental protection device may only provide benefits on the surface. The damage has already been done and there may be no turning back the clock with regard to the detrimental health effects.

According to Daily News, “divorced or widowed people have 20 percent more chronic health conditions than married people (such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer), and 23 percent had more mobility limitations (such as climbing stairs).”

I can only imagine why. I know for myself, having gone through a couple bad breakups, I lost several pounds and barley slept in the days and sometimes weeks that followed. I paid very little attention to my health, I was stressed out, ignored my doctor’s visits and completely disregarded exercise. Depressed. That’s exactly what I was.

(Let’s not forget that acute stress can cause heart failure.)

According to recent studies, these are all contributing factors in poor health that surround divorce and harsh separations.

Only to make matters worse, the current divorce rate in the U.S. is 1 in 2. That’s half. I’m not trying to insult your intelligence by repeating what you got from the first go ’round in delivering that statistic. I’m merely repeating it because it’s so staggering.

With all this information, it’s not difficult to see the flip side of things. Happy marriages equate to healthier bodies and lives.

Another study, published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, reported by WowOWow, shows that married couples over the age of 50 generally lead healthier, more productive and far less depressed lives than those who remain single.

The study also showed that losing a spouse, such as to death or divorce, could be detrimental to your health. Adults who are divorced or widowed experience more health problems when it comes to chronic conditions compared to those who never married. Even those who choose to remarry, a second, third — fourth, fifth, sixth (celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Lopez and Liza Minelli, anyone?) — time doesn’t always eliminate those potentially increased health risks from separation in the first place.

A study performed back in 2005 at the Johns Hopkins University fond that the sudden death of a loved one or other emotional stress can bring on a heart attack, something also known as cardiomyopathy, which, in this case could further be known better as “broken heart” syndrome.

Of course, this information isn’t meant to suggest that if you’re currently in a bad marriage you should try to hang on for as long as you can because you’re worried about the possible negative health effects of a divorce. If you’re, for example, in an abusive relationship, get out as soon as you can. You’ll do far more damage staying in the relationship versus getting out of it.

With that said, the same thing goes for those people unsure of getting into marriage, what to expect from it, what to do, etc. Think of marriage as an investment, one in your own health. The happier, the longer, the better.

So what’s love got to do with it? Maybe not a whole lot, but the marriage part sure does. Love happy. Live happy.

Plastination at the museum: Body Worlds review

andrea — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:00:17 +0000

I saw dead people today at a museum. Real, live dead people.

Well, obviously they weren’t “alive,” but they used to be not too long ago. As I walked through the Body Worlds exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa, Fla., created by Dr. Gunther von Hagens, there was so much to take in. I’m not one to be freaked out by anatomical stuff like that or dead bodies, but I couldn’t get over the fact that the bodies posed in educational positions were actual, real human bodies.

The muscles I saw were their actual muscles. The facial structures I saw were their actual facial structures.

Was I creeped out? Well, yes and no.

Surprisingly, the actual bodies themselves didn’t weird me out as much as looking at the various body parts that were laid out in display cases. There were livers, pancreases, hearts, lungs, you name it, and it was there.

The Body Worlds exhibit “The Story of the Heart” has been in Tampa for the past few months and I’ve been dying (no pun intended) to get in and see it. According to their Web site, this exhibit has been seen by more than 25 million people worldwide and will continue to travel around when it leaves Tampa in a few weeks. Among other exhibits are “The Mirror of Time,” a look at the aging process, and “Our Three-Pound Gem,” an in-depth look at the human brain.

Currently, there are similar exhibits in Asia, other parts of the U.S. and Europe.

The way that Body Worlds is able to transport and display these pieces of the human body is through a process called plastination, which was developed by Dr. Gunther von Hagens. The process is consists of five steps and takes about one year to complete.

1. Embalming and Anatomical Dissection – This includes placing formalin in the body to stop decaying. Also at this time, the skin, fatty and connective tissues are removed.
2. Removal of Body Fat and Water – This one’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s done by submersing the body in an acetone bath
3. Forced Impregnation – (I’m not sure why they couldn’t have chosen less awkward terminology.) At this time, they change the acetone in for “a reactive polymer” like silicone rubber. Then, the body is placed in a vacuum sealer. This makes it so that all the acetone is sucked out and the silicone rubber penetrates (since we’re using awkward terminology) every last cell in the body.
4. Positioning – Each body in the exhibit is positioned in a certain way, which is the purpose of the plastination stage. Everything is aligned at this time with the help of wires, needles, clamps and foam.
5. Curing (Hardening) – This is done either with gas, light or heat.

The result is an impressive, but dark look at the human body. I can’t say that I would like to go again, but I definitely recommend it for adults.

(One note: some may be especially freaked out by the dead babies section where you can see each and every stage of human infancy, in the flesh, including the stage when a baby looks something like a mini shrimp.)

So if you’re in the Tampa area, I strongly suggest checking this exhibit out before it leaves on June 28. Or, check out the Web site to see when it might be heading your way.

26 Magazine » Heart & Circulatory System

Divorce could damage your health

Plastination at the museum: Body Worlds review