Category: healthcare

What music history tells us about addressing our reservations

Would you eat an insect if it meant that you were doing your part to save the earth as a world citizen? You might do it as a one-off, or as a dare among your friends, but chances are that insects aren’t really your preferred food at the moment, and you are not among the minority that considers grasshopper scratchings a treat on a Friday night at the pub. So why would you even condescend to even consider that thought and let it dwell in your head?

The truth is that such diets have been growing in popularity. Now diets have always been some sort of fad, as if someone thinks that one day we will stumble upon some sort of protein, carbohydrate and fat combination that allows us to eat as much food as we want, not have to exercise and still be ripped. Vegetarian diets and vegan diets have been getting more and more popular – but what is the reason for that? The reason is that meat production – especially beef from cows – accounts for more than twenty-five percent of greenhouse gas output by human beings. Reducing the consumption of meat would help reduce carbon emissions.

The problem also with reducing meat consumption is that the world population is growing and we cannot afford to carry on with this level of consumption. The world population stands at 7.5 billion people, and there is a finite amount of land for livestock farming. World population currently increases at a billion every two decades or less, and the growth will be exponential (the more people there are, the faster the population increases) so it is inevitable that there will not be enough meat for increasing populations. The solution, as some suggest, is to switch to an insect diet, for they are plentiful, but whether or not these take off really depends on how palatable they are, and how palatable the idea is!

Perhaps a chance encounter with someone who truly believes in this may change your reservations, if you have any. After all, the classical composer Leonard Bernstein, who had a successful career in music, would not have done so had his aunt not left a piano in his house while she was going through a separation. (Learn more about Bernstein from the Piano Lessons Archway website. The same goes for the blind Spanish composer, Joaquin Rodrigo, who would have stopped his career at its outset had he not met people who inspired him in spite of disability. (Read about Rodrigo from the Piano Lessons Archway page.

Eating insects may be a no-go for some for now, but as history shows us, a chance trial may be enough to change our minds!

Managing sound and noise

How loud is loud? You have to wonder. We often see people plugged into their headphones, listening to music. Most of them are quite conscious of the effect their music has on others and not to turn it on too loudly. But there are some for whom music needs to be played loudly, as if they are having a personal disco, for it to have any effect or meaning. And then there are the real anti-socials, playing music deliberately loudly as if to provoke a reaction, antagonising others to speak up while their devices blare away.

It is of course anti-social to play music at loud limits that annoy others. Every one has a different limit, and unfortunately it seems there are those that will challenge these boundaries and step in the gaps of ambuguities. But leaving the anti-social nature of it aside, how loud is loud?

The World Health Organisation recommends 85 decibels to be the safe limit for eight hours of listening, while a maximum of fifteen minutes is recommended for sounds at one hundred decibels. But at discos, the sound levels have been registered to be at higher levels. Even in sporting events, the cheering of football crowds can reach over a hundred decibels. (You can find the information here. Which is why football fans deliberately make noise to rattle opposing teams. Football player Timo Werner had to be substituted in a RB Leipzig match against Besiktas, despite wearing ear plugs to block out the noise, because it was causing him headaches and respiratory problems.

Exposure to loud noises can cause one to lose hearing function over time. The problem with hearing impairment, is that the loss is permanent. The composer and pianist Ludwig van Beethoven had to cope with losing his hearing, but fortunately managed to deal with it. But perhaps we need a keener measure of sound pollution. We know a train may produce sound levels of up to a hundred decibels, but how far away or how close we are to it affects the impact too. If we are standing next to a pneumatic drill and it is constantly drilling, it would do us more harm than if we we heard it from three streets away.

Why is sound pollution a problem? Listening using earphones, by virtue of their proximity to the ear canal, may cause more damage even at a lower volume compared to listening to louder noises from a further distance. If you are at a classical music concert and sat in the front row of say, a performance of music by Wagner, it is going to have more of an impact on your ears than if you were in a back row. It is not inconceivable that we will see more lawsuits filed in the future by various professionals working in the sound industry (stage technicians), music industry (dancers), teachers, construction workers, filing suits against their employers claiming that their health and safety at work as not enforced. A teacher, for example, having to work with noisy classes may sue his school for giving him the class with more noisy students while other colleagues got “better students”. It sounds silly but it is not a far-fetched idea that in an economy that is stagnant, individuals seeking to claim compensation to make up for financial shortfall may resort to noise levels as a source of contention.

Obese children now from lower-income households

In bygone times having large children were prized. It was a sign that you were rich, had the wealth to feed your children and that they ate well. Unlike those skinny people who had no food to eat. Larger children were a mark of status, coming from higher income households where there was more disposale wealth.

This trend appears to be reversing. A study of obese children in England found that many of them were of poorer socio-economic backgrounds.

How has this happened? It is easy to point the finger at an abundance of high fat, high calorie, cheap food. In short, fast food.

Take a walk down your high street. Start by counting how many chip shops you can see, or shops selling fried chicken. You would probably see a fair few. And see what happens when the kids are dismissed after school. You will see many crowding around these shops, getting their fill of fried chicken and chips.

To top that all off: to quench their thirst after consuming the oily, high sodium food, many opt for sugary fizzy drinks.

The high fat, high calorie, high sugar diet is repeated over many days and weeks. We may talk of the social responsibility in allowing fast food places to target school children but that is what happens because fast food shops know where the bulk of their clients lie. To make matters worse, some children assume that eating fried chicken gives them protein to grow big, which is what they want. Chicken is a source of protein, but when fried it is high in fat and the combination of caloric drinks does not help either.

The consumption of such a high fat diet is a ticking time bomb for the NHS. In two or three decades from now many people will increasingly be obese, and there will be a higher population of middle-aged obese that threatens to burden the NHS.

The NHS should encourage exercise, but unfortunately many of the measures – such as to take 10,000 steps a day – are ill conceived. You could do 10,000 steps a day, but if that is done at a slow pace that hardly taxes your heart rate, you are not burning fat. In addition, fat burning only takes place after the body has been active for at least twenty minutes, at a heart rate of at least 60% MHR (Maximal Heart Rate).

The overabundance of cheap fast food has meant that lower income families see it as a cheap affordable way to feed their children. And when their children get obese, they are viewed as being “big” which many think is good for them.

We are at a point of disconnect, but what we have to address is this. Better, nutritional food costs more. And it doesn’t taste as good at the same price. Unless we can introduce subsidies on healthy food, we will only evolve into a society that increasingly consumes junk food. The price we pay for promoting healthy eating through subsidies will go a longer way towards reducing the ticking time bomb of poor social health.

Disconnect for a better quality of life

We live in a world that is more technologically advanced than our grandparents’ generation. For some, the gulf between generations is even closer. Those of us who have parents in their late forties and fifties will almost certainly find that their version of the twenties is much more different than ours. The difference can almost solely be put down to the impact that technology has had on our world.

When computers were rolled out en masse, and the influence of technology was making its way into daily life, we were told that they would simplify life. Computers would do the drudge work that humans used to do, giving us more free time to explore leisure pursuits. At least, that was how it was sold to us.

 

Has that happened? Not really. The average citizen found himself needing to be more computer literate. As the society became more dependent on things like emails, mobile phones, and computers, human beings found themselves needing to know how to work such devices and all their functions. Remember the days when all you had was a simple choice of a digital or traditional film camera? Nowadays the choices have exploded exponentially. Of course, unless you are a purist, you would say having digiital cameras isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t. But making the transition to using them as part of daily life has only increased the mental burden of information we hold in our heads, and that is making us actually less productive. And that arguably is one of the problems with technology. It has resulted in an explosion of information – the information overload that overtaxes our mental processes and leaves us mentally fatigued and less able to focus on important issues.

Social media is another area – touted to enhance links between people from your past, now the need to catch up with the latest social gossip, to promote yourself, to be on track with it all, to be in … all that has a bearing on one’s mind and mental health. It is no wonder that some people report being depressed after scrolling through social media sites like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Has technology enhanced our lives? It has made it easier for companies to push work that used to be done by employees onto users. For example, if Wikipedia existed in the 1980s, it would have had big offices and employees to research and type out the information on its databases. Now it encourages collaborative work – in short, it makes uses do it for them.

The problem is that information is endless and cannot be fully captured, and runs perpendicularly to our innate need to grasp everything. We want to box it all, yet it cannot be boxed. The human civilization generates terrabytes of data every year, and trying to keep on top of it all will leave us tired and fatigued and restless and depressed, an ever-insatiable need.

The solution? Disconnect. It would do you a (real) world of good. And if that is too drastic, trying limiting the amount of screen time you have.

Where dementia treatment meets your NEETS

A recent study has suggested that just ten minutes of social interaction is enough to mitigate the loss of quality of life in dementia sufferers.

A survey among care homes in south London, north London and Buckinghamshire found that dementia sufferers who had chats with care workers for a prolonged period of time – the average amount of interaction is estimated to be as little as two minutes a day in comparison – faired better when it came to measuring reduction in neuropsychotic symptoms and agitation. The chats were about areas of interest such as family, or the social interaction was extended to activity like sport.

Dementia sufferers in care home were divided into two groups – the first received conventional treatment while the second group received an hour of personal interaction over the week. Those in the second group demonstrated the benefits more prominently.

The difficulty with social interaction in many care homes is that the activities are limited to ones such as bingo, where people are together, but not really interacting, or that the interaction is on a one-to-many level, leaving many sufferers actually disengaged or bored, and more withdrawn in many respects. Interaction – if it can be called that – is very passive, and measured more by presence rather than participation. For example. sitting together in a bingo hall and doing “mental” activities such as bingo, or sitting with others to watch the soaps, occasionally piping up to say “What’s gawin on?” is unlikely to do much for one’s mental faculties.

Dr Doug Brown, director of research at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “This study shows that training to provide this type of individualised care, activities and social interactions can have a significant impact on the wellbeing of people living with dementia in care homes.

“It also shows that this kind of effective care can reduce costs, which the stretched social care system desperately needs.”

The problem is that while this interaction may be perceived as cost-saving, because it relies less on medication, having paid carers on minimum wage, paid “conversers” is actually more expensive. But it is a method that seems to work.

The unfortunate state of the healthcare is not that it is based on what works, but what is the cheapest. The base line is not the quality of care, but because it would exceed a threshold that the NHS cannot afford, the cost takes priority.

Perhaps what would be an effective method would be for NEETS – young persons not in education, employment or training to do such work. It would give dementia sufferers someone to talk to, and the NEETS could actually learn something from observing life experience, and it would keep government happy because their unemployment figures would go down. And with recent mental health studies suggesting that only 1 in 5 young people have someone to talk to when they are down, would it not be conceivable that at least getting young people who may be on the verge of being depressed due to lack of employment to talk with someone else, for a bit of wage, might actually be an intangible way of reducing their likelihood of depression?

Getting the young unemployed to be befrienders in care homes – is that worth a thought?

Dogs can sense fear – and seek release

What makes some people more susceptible to being bitten by dogs? A recent study suggests that dogs, with a sense of smell keener than humans, can sense fear in us. And this suggests that perhaps the sense of fear trips or triggers the dog into a fright or flight response that results in the human being bitten.

The Daily Telegraph reported that the best form of prevention against a bite from a dog could be to adopt a slight self-confident front, almost seemingly like a swagger, in order to convince the dog of a sense of confidence to override the inner sense of fear. However, this approach does not address how the dog might deal with the presentation of a confident person yet sense the underlying fear. It is like you meeting a person who you know is lying, yet smiling at you. What do you know? You revert to what psychologists might call the memory bank, the “type 2” kind of thinking which is more analytical, and less immediately responsive – but do dogs have that kind of ability to think and fall back on?

The research was carried out by researchers from the University of Liverpool in the form of a survey in a bit to understand why the likelihood of people being bitten by dogs seemed to be in a higher case of incidence for certain individiuals.

The results from the survey said that the likelihood of taking a nip from a four legged friend was almost 2.5 times more common than the current official figure, which estimates that 7.4 in 1,000 people get bitten by a dog every year in the UK. The figure is likely to be higher, because dog owners who get bitten by their own dogs are unlikely to report them for fear of getting their own dogs put down. Dog bites which also happen within the family – where the dog belongs to a family member – are unlikely to be reported for the same reason.

The results also showed that people who are nervous, men and owners of several dogs were more likely to be bitten.

This study was dependent on the date from questionnaires. This sort of information collection is a good way to obtain responses quickly. However, the limitations of this study include the fact that in this particular instance an assessment of behaviour is difficult, both in a recollection situation – having to do it in hindsight. Also there was the earlier reported case of perhaps dog owners not wanting to get their dogs taken in, and amending their queries.

The current guidelins for dog bit preventions suggest the following:

Never leave a young child unsupervised with a dog – regardless of the type of dog and its previous behaviour.

This is of course a good point, especially with attack dogs or more aggresive breeds. Even if the child is known to the dog, there have been many cases where dogs left alone with toddlers have seized the chance and attacked them. It is almost as if the removal of an adult boldens the dog into an attack it would not normally make, and being left alone with a young child heightens the fright or fight syndrome within a dog.

Another guideline is to treat dogs with respect – don’t pet them when they’re eating or sleeping. Dogs dislike being disturbed when they are meeting their basic needs, and the disturbance awakes and breeds aggressive responses that may evolve later.

A third guideline is to avoid stroking or petting unfamiliar dogs – when greeting a dog for the first time, let it sniff you before petting it. A good idea is to actually converse with the owner first so that the dog has already established you are friendly.

This study was carried out by researchers from the University of Liverpool and was funded by the Medical Research Council Population Health Scientist Fellowship. While the media reporting of the study was fairly accurate, The Guardian pointed out that people’s emotional stability was self-rated. In other words, if respondents were asked to rate their feelings, this may not be an accurate assessment – one person’s level of anxiety may not be the same as another’s.

So can dogs actually sense fear and anxiety? How does this explain the incidence of people being bitten by dogs? The answer to these questions can be answered best perhaps in two parts.

The first is the level of aggression in the dog. This depends of course on the genetic makeup, but also how it is treated. If its needs are met then it is likely that the level of aggression is typically lower than what it would be than if it were harrassed or disturbed persistently, which can build up latent aggression.

The second is the dog’s sense of fear. If a dog is often emotionally angered and there is opportunity to release this tension, even in a moment of madness, then this may result in biting as an emotional release.

So can dogs sense fear? Possibly. Does this explain their tendency to bite? Well, dogs that are treated well and genetically not prone to attacking will be less prone to nipping. Dogs that are not attack dogs but mistreated, or dogs that habitually have their attack responses nurtured, are more prone to biting, when the opportunity presents itself in the form of a less defensive target.

How the dangers of e-cigarettes extend beyond DNA damage

Studies done on laboratory mice suggest that e-cigarettes can be harmful to humans, although to a lesser degree compared to the traditional tobacco they are supposed to replace. This suggests that  cigarette smokers could do themselves some good in switching to e-cigarettes, although those who have yet to pick up the habit should avoid it because it can actually do the body harm – and is not zero-risk smoking as some might view it.

E-cigarettes have been growing in use over the last few years. Because they are aerosol-based, they use compounds to deliver nicotine to the user. This means they avoid the smoke associated with traditional tobacco cigarettes. In the latter, the burning of tobacco releases carcinogens, which cause cell damage and cancer when they are inhaled. The delivery of nicotine by aerosol in e-cigarettes avoids these, although the recent study proposes that this is not enough.

The most recent research into the use of e-cigarettes suggests that they still cause cancer because they damage string DNA and the body’s ability to repair itself.

Laboratory mice were exposed to the vapour of e-cigarettes for a period that simulated normal human consumption. The vapour of e-cigarettes contains both nicotine and solvent, and while the solvent itself had no effect on the mice, the combination of solvent and nicotine had the same impact as nicotine itself.

The limitations of the study were that it was unclear the vapour inhaled by the mice was equal to the amount a human being would, or pro-rated for the difference in mass! Furthermore, the impact on mice may not be comparable to those on humans.

The research does highlight, nevertheless, that there is a potential danger in e-cigarettes. While guidelines in 2016 recommended them as a safer alternative to tobacco, they are not 100% safe. Various groups of people such as the younger generation, for whom smoking is a perceived sign of maturity, think that just because there is no burnt substance, that they are perfectly safe. Unfortunately, the easy availability of these e-cigarettes, just like nicotine gum, means that rather than getting individuals off cigarettes, they may only be building up a lifelong addiction instead.