Ahsan Iqbal

You have to take into account the long term effects. I posted in this forum about a minute ago to the topic "Effects of Junk Food on Energy Levels. That answer I provided there will be closely related to what I am going to write here. As I said, You have to take into account the long term effects. There is no doubt about how good caffeine can be in temporarily boosting the efficiency of a person. But in the longer run, it has quite a few side-effects. The person who uses it regularly becomes an addict. He will require more amount of caffeine to reach the same level of efficiency. A vicious circle develops, causing the person to take more and more caffeine and thus deteriorating his health further. On the other hand, fruit juices won't give you an efficiency boost as caffeine. They would provide you the nutrients you need but won't activate you like caffeine does, but if you look in the longer run, using fruit juice have NO SIDE-EFFECTS AT ALL. You will stay healthy in you life.

The real problem with junk food becomes visible in the long run. It is one of the major causes of obesity. So when someone tells you that you should eat healthy balanced diet, his purpose would be to ensure that you live a healthy life. Clean food doesn't give a boost to the energy level. In fact, some junk food may give you more energy than clean balanced food, but the real problem is that how is your body going to react to that in longer run. Clean food would make you stay fit and healthy, while junk food will get you into troubles like obesity, cardiovascular diseases and lot of other stuff.

For a 15 year old, 5'9" is a very good height. What's more important is that you are still in your growing age, and will remain for about another 5-10 years. So my advice is that instead of looking for such programs (some of which might not be scam) you should wait until you are at least 18. I am sure that in coming three years you would exceed 6".

What about Netter's atlas of human anatomy.

The project seems to be nice. Good luck!

See your doctor. That's the best thing you can do.

There is a basic thing to understand about consciousness. It is not something like if axons are active, we feel they are active. No, we don't feel this way. Actually, there are specific areas in the brain (cerebral cortex) that gives us that specific feeling of being conscious. The other thing to note is that these areas of the brain, which give the feeling of being conscious need to be stimulated by something. The current for stimulation starts at the sensory cells of the nervous system, under normal conditions. And connecting the sensory neurons and the cerebral cortex are various other neurons. So we need three things working and connected to one another: Sensory cells, conducting neurons and cerebral cortex. The role of neurotransmitters is that they connect these structures in a functional way. So if something else can do that, (which I am not sure about if anything like that exists), we can certainly have consciousness without the neurotransmitters (but by using that specific substance)

I am not sure about death but I have heard people getting a heart attack because of increased emotions (sad emotions obviously). And there is a medical reason behind it. You would know the role of sympathetic nervous system in human body. The sympathetic fibers that go to the heart tend to increase its rate of beating. And emotional stress causes an increase in sympathetic activity. Like when you are emotional, you can't sleep, you would move around purposelessly, your sleep will fly away and all that stuffy. It is all due to increased sympathetic activity. If the subject has some problem in the blood supply to heart, the increased heart rate won't be paralleled by increase in heart's blood supply, which would result in damage to muscles of heart and ultimately heart attack. And to end: everyone knows that heart attacks can be fatal (and they are fatal in many cases). So indirectly, broken heart can kill you but only if your heart is very weak.

Why don't you make the person you suspect eat the same salad. If he refuses to, force him by every possible (but civilized) means. If he still refuses even if there is no reason to refuse, then you may be right in your suspicion.

Nice example and I completely agree. But that is what I am trying to say. If somehow we con only activate the neural pathway for consciousness (and do take into account that it is just a one-way path), we can make the person conscious. The neural pathway I am talking about would obviously contain the synapses between involved neurons. So when I say activate neural pathway, I mean activate neurons as well as the synapses.

It is correct that most neurons of the body have life span equal to the life span of the individual. Some of the organelles are constantly destroyed and reformed, while the major ones like nucleus will have to stay there for life. Internal repairs to the DNA and membrane of nucleus do occur from time to time.

There has to be something which tells the muscle cells "Ok, now you need to grow more". There has been evidence that within hours after extra work-load on muscles (like during gym workout), new blood vessels start to sprout in the muscle substance. This indicates that something is influencing the muscles, and rather quickly. So there has to be something, but unfortunately I haven't ever read anything about this.

Look, first of all you will have to appreciate that not all neurons of the nervous system are involved in consciousness. The motor part of the nervous system has nothing to do with it. If someone argues that we know when we move our skeletal muscles by will, so how it can be that it is not related to consciousness? The answer would be that you know when you move your muscles because there are small sensory structures within the substance of the muscle (neuromuscular spindles) as well as the tendon (neurotendinous organs, also called golgi tendon organs). These little sensors send information to brain whenever you stretch or relax your muscle. And it is this sensory information that reaches consciousness. Now let me build on this. Suppose a person's motor system is not functioning, can he still have conscious feeling. The answer is Yes. He still can have. So as I said in my previous answer, if there is some way to only make those neurons functional that are involved in the neural pathway of consciousness, the person would have conscious feelings.

Yes this is correct. Microglia are an important component of the immune system on the other side of blood-brain barrier. The have a phagocytic activity similar to phagocytes found elsewhere in the body. And it is essential because blood phagocytes cannot enter the brain tissue so there must be someone to take care of stuff there.

A vertebral disc is a circular structure that is composed of two parts. The central part is known as the nucleus pulposus and the peripheral part is known as annulus fibrosus. The annulus fibrosus consists of circularly arranged fibers which surround the nucleus pulposus, which is a jelly like mass. In case of a herniated disc, the annulus fibrosus tears and the nuclus pulposes bulges out of it, pressing on the spinal nerves or the spinal cord itself. The problem with treatment of the disc is that there is not enough access (so you can't tape it or do similar stuff). The healing of the disc is not considerable because the torn annulus fibrosus cannot be healed until the nucleus pulposus gets to its original position (which is not possible because of the compression generated by weight of the body). I hope this helps John

I use the Snell's Clinical Neuroanatomy. I have never looked for another. The reason is that I have been using the gross anatomy book by snell so going for the neuroanatomy book by the same author was a natural option.

As Ringer said, there are thousands of things in your body which according to you should have been the other way, but we are what we are. And by the way, the fact that you have two kidneys doesn't mean that one is for backup. A person who donates one kidney, or whose one kidney is damages, has to reduce his physical activities to a great extent. Other wise the single kidney becomes overloaded. So for normal activities, both kidneys has to perform and there is nothing like backup.

Muscle growth takes place both by enlargement of fibers (hypertrophy) and increase in number of fibers (hyperplasia). In normal conditions, there is a greater tendency for hypertrophy to occur, but hyperplasia does occur. One of the causes for hyperplasia to occur is that when a muscle fiber cannot grow more in size, while the function requires the mass to be increased, the fiber will give rise to new fiber (hyperplasia) to increase the muscle mass. There must be some hormones or other substances influencing this, but I don't think it has been discovered yet.

Thanks for sharing the valuable information.

Absolutely right, but in a hypothetical case where supposedly we can activate the neurons involved, without the neurotransmitters (maybe with something else) so that they can perform their function, we would get conscious feelings.

There are certain areas of the brain that gives you conscious feeling about things. The most important of these is cerebral cortex. So if these cells are kept working, in addition to the entire sensory pathway that conducts information towards the cortex to be processed, consciousness will be there.

I know you have created a website about heart and vein and when you found that the best practice to get your website in top spot in google is to get lots of backlinks, you came to spam this forum. Mate, I also have a website that I want to promote but keep in mind that spamming isn't the way to do it. At least you should have added some good informative content about heart. Say a little about the structure of heart or something similar. And you can always add links to your website in your signature, as I have done it. No one would mind that. And believe me, if you try to catch visitor's attentions more than search engine's, you will find yourself much more successful.

Obviously these are symptoms of angina pectoris, a premature form of Myocardial Infarction.

First of all let me say that the first post has some errors in it. I am seeing a lot of HTML code in it and that's why I can't read it. There is some voltage thing mentioned in there. I think the author wants to say that diseases can be treated by a specific voltage. I don't agree. Nowadays, we know the root cause of almost every disease out there. If you know the root cause, the only way you should treat a disease is to remove the root cause. And I can't bring to mind any disease the root cause of which can be treated by giving voltage to the affected cells. Let me give the example of Cold here. The root cause is irritation of cells lining the respiratory tract, which produce mucous secretion. How are you supposed to restore the cells to their prior form by giving them the voltage.

May be things are not as complex as they seem. Let me explain. There are two classes of material required to build human body and keep it healthy. One class consists of those that can be synthesized within the body itself from simpler substances. The other class consists of those, which cannot be synthesized by the body itself and must be taken through the diet. Now at the minimum level, the diet must contain all those substances that cannot be synthesized in the body itself. If these substances are taken adequately, there is no need for other substances to be taken. That is why, humans can live a healthy life even if they don't take all the nutrients the body is made of. A simple set of diet containing all the essential elements, which cannot be synthesized by the body is sufficient, but if you want to take more than enough care of your body, you can always go for other non-necessary elements.