It is a natural, non-invasive modality designed to affect the whole person not just the symptom or disease and to assist the body’s natural ability to balance, regulate, heal and maintain itself by the correct use of essential oils.

Essential oils are concentrated extracts taken from the roots, leaves, seeds, or blossoms of plants. Each contains its own mix of active ingredients, and this mix determines what the oil is used for.

In addition to essential oils, aromatherapy encourages the use of other complementary natural ingredients including cold pressed vegetable oils, jojoba (a liquid wax), hydrosols, herbs, milk powders, sea salts, sugars (an exfoliant), clays and muds.

It is believed that the inhalation of essential oils stimulates the part of the brain connected to smell – the olfactory system; a signal is sent to the limbic system of the brain that controls emotions and retrieves learned memories. This causes chemicals to be released which make the person feel relaxed, calm, or even stimulated. If the aromatherapy includes massage the effect is to further relax the person.

Weins, 25, of Fort Worth received a new nose, lips, skin, muscle and nerves from an anonymous donor.

A team of more than 30 doctors, nurses and anesthesiologists at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital in Boston worked for more than 17 hours to give Wiens a new face — complete with skin and the muscles and nerves needed to animate it.

Wiens was able to show his three-year-old girl, Scarlette, his new face last week and on Monday.

Less than a month after Wiens’ surgery – which was paid for by the U.S. military in an effort to use the knowledge from this experience to help soldiers with severe facial wounds – doctors at Brigham and Women’s performed the face transplant.

“I adapted to it very quickly,” Wiens told reporters. “As time went on … I was able to smell again and breathe through my nose. Every step of the way was amazing.”

The first thing Wiens’ nose was able to detect after months of having no smell? Hospital lasagna.

“You wouldn’t imagine it, but it smelled delicious,” Wiens said.

Since the transplant, Wiens said, the most rewarding moment came when he was reunited with his preschool daughter.

“She was amazed. She actually said, ‘Daddy, you’re so handsome,’” Wiens said at a news conference at Brigham and Women’s, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, where a team of more than 30 medical experts replaced his nose, lips, skin, muscles of facial animation and nerves in March.

“Data show Afinitor delays tumour growth and reduces risk of disease progression in patients with advanced neuroendocrine tumours (NET) of pancreatic origin,” the Swiss drugmaker said in a statement.

Neuroendocrine tumors, which can originate in the pancreas, lung and gastrointestinal tract, are a rare form of cancer. In most cases, the tumors are slow-growing and patients can live for many years. Estimates are that neuroendocrine tumors affect 2.5 out of every 100,000 people in the U.S. A study involving Afinitor showed it was able to stop tumor growth for about six months longer than patients on a placebo medicine.

“Patients with this cancer have few effective treatment options,” said Richard Pazdur, MD , director of the Office of Oncology Drug Products at the FDA, in a prepared statement. “Afinitor has demonstrated the ability to slow the growth and spread of neuroendocrine tumors of the pancreas.”

The drug is currently approved to treat patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma after they fail treatment with sunitinib (Sutent, Pfizer) or sorafenib (Nexavar, Bayer) and patients with subependymal giant cell astrocytoma associated with tuberous sclerosis who cannot be treated by surgery, according to an FDA press release.

On “The Early Show,” CBS News Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton said the American Heart Association study is “very reputable. … They looked at about 250 people who had suffered a ruptured aneurysm … surveyed them and followed them for about a three-year time period.”

Just what is an aneurysm? It’s a weakened portion of a blood vessel. Aneurysms can occur in various places throughout the body, but cerebral aneurysms are especially dangerous. If they burst and bleed – an event known as a subarachnoid hemorrhage – they can be deadly.

Eight factors

Calculating population attributable risk — the fraction of hemorrhages that can be attributed to a particular trigger factor — the researchers identified the eight factors and their contribution to the risk as:

* Coffee consumption (10.6 percent)
* Vigorous physical exercise (7.9 percent)
* Nose blowing (5.4 percent)
* Sexual intercourse (4.3 percent)
* Straining to defecate (3.6 percent)
* Cola consumption (3.5 percent)
* Being startled (2.7 percent)
* Being angry (1.3 percent)

“All of the triggers induce a sudden and short increase in blood pressure, which seems a possible common cause for aneurysmal rupture,” said Monique H.M. Vlak, M.D., lead author of the study and a neurologist at the University Medical Center in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

The team were surprised to find that nearly half of samples of beef, pork and poultry tested from popular grocery stores were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) doesn’t even monitor in the food source, because it’s not known as a common food-borne pathogen. And of the bacteria found, nearly all were strains that were resistant to more than one antibiotic.

“For the first time, we know how much of our meat and poultry is contaminated with antibiotic-resistant Staph, and it is substantial,” Dr. Lance B. Price, senior author  of the study and Director of TGen’s Center for Food Microbiology and Environmental Health, said in a news release. “The fact that drug-resistant S. aureus was so prevalent, and likely came from the food animals themselves, is troubling, and demands attention to how antibiotics are used in food-animal production today.”

The FDA said it is aware of the study’s findings, and similar studies of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in meats, and is working with the U.S. Agriculture Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the issue.

Proper cooking kills the germs, and federal health officials estimate staph accounts for just 3 percent of foodborne illnesses, far less than more common bugs like salmonella and E. coli.

In fact of all the abs exercises that were studied the “crunch” fell in the bottom 3. This study was sponsored by the American Council of Exercise.

The study included thirty healthy women and men between the ages of twenty and forty-five.

These people all had different exercise habits, some exercised very little, and some exercised every single day. The study showed that the most effective ab exercise is the bicycle maneuver. The Captains Chair came in second, while the Ball Crunch came in third place.

The biological basis for post-traumatic stress disorder remains unclear. However this new study offers clues about why some people rebound from horrific events while others relive them, and may lead to predictive tests and even treatments.

In the new study, researchers led by Kerry Ressler, a psychiatrist and molecular neurobiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, focused on a peptide thought to play a role in cells’ response to stress: pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP).

The hormone — pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) — is known to affect central nervous system activity, metabolism, blood pressure, pain sensitivity and immune function.

The scientists used blood samples  taken from more than 1,200 highly traumatized patients treated in an Atlanta emergency room, some of whom went on to develop PTSD and others who did not.

Ressler says that it will be important to replicate the finding in separate population groups including in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition, identifying when PACAP levels rise in the brain and blood during the development of PTSD will help determine whether drugs that act against PACAP could aid in treatment.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is not limited to soldiers who have seen combat–more than 7 million people in the U.S. suffer from the disorder, and a woman’s risk of developing PTSD may be twice that of a man’s.

In a preliminary study a team of researchers found that holding a mobile phone next to your head for 50 minutes does increase brain activity.

For the study, researchers looked inside the brains of 47 healthy subjects using positron emission tomography, also known as PET scanning, to measure the location and timing of brain activity by detecting signs that cells were consuming energy. The PET scan showed that the brain’s metabolism in the orbitofrontal cortex and the temporal pole – the two closest areas of the brain to the mobile phone’s antenna, had an approximate 7% increase in glucose metabolism in brain regions nearest to the cell phone antenna.

“The study shows that the human brain is sensitive to electro-magnetic radiations that are emitted by mobile phones,” explains Dr. Nora Volkow, the led author of the study.

Scientists found – had an increase of almost 7% when the mobile phone was on.

Some medical experts have been concerned for years about the possible long-term health consequences of frequent cellphone use.

Until further research is done, Dr. Volkow is suggesting to use an ear piece or the speaker phone, “particularly in children and adolescents whose brains are much more vulnerable to insults of certain kinds.”