002 - Hangover Pills, Animal Dreams, and Sound - HealthHippie Week In Review - July 24, 2022
Here are a few of the interesting stories I read this week...
Chronic Fatigue and Covid
Freakonomics, M.D.: 46. Could Long Covid Help Treat Other Chronic Illnesses? on Apple Podcasts This was an interesting discussion about the similarities between Long Covid and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome(ME/CFS). I learned that ME/CFS is the most underfunded disease in the NIH portfolio relative to disease burden. Interestingly, there was no mention of the influence of the microbiome. I will be astounded if changes in the microbiome aren't involved with (or even responsible for) both diseases.
How to Hack Intrusive Thoughts
"It's not about controlling your thoughts; it's about not letting the thoughts control you..." This was the opening statement in the article A psychiatrist's guide to coexisting with intrusive thoughts. The report is a summary of If you don't let it in, you don't have to get it out: Thought preemption as a method to control unwanted thoughts.A 2020 NIH survey reported more than 1 in 5 Americans have a mental illness, but even a higher percentage have unwanted or obsessive thoughts. Rumination can adversely affect longevity as well as physical and mental well-being. The best take-home advice from the article was "We encourage people to think of intrusive thoughts as strangers at a party who drift into a room that you might happen to be in, you might engage with them for a little bit, but then eventually, they wander out the other door, and you may not spend too much time engaging with them.".
Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Depression
More interesting news on the gut-brain axis. A new study, Bidirectional association between inflammatory bowel disease and depression among patients and their unaffected siblings demonstrated a bidirectional link between Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Depression. The findings were summarized in New study shows a bidirectional link between inflammatory bowel disease and depression
Anthropause
The article Did Nature Heal During the Pandemic' Anthropause' is fascinating. "Anthropause" is what scientists named the slowdown of human activity during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Interestingly, according to the authors, the impact of diminished human activity is both positive AND negative.
Superbugs
The pandemic has impacted healthcare well beyond patients that contract Covid. I read a depressing article, The Pandemic Fueled a Superbug Surge. Can Medicine Recover?, about how the pandemic influenced a rapid rise in deadly resistant superbugs that will impact us all. The article was written in response to a recent CDC report, COVID-19, U.S. Impact on Antimicrobial Resistance. Unfortunately, not much good news there that brings greater urgency to out-of-the-box thinking to treat infections such as last week's story on Maggot Therapy.
Combatting Burnout
Burnout: How to recover and enjoy your free time is an interesting article on how burnout has reached epic proportions during the pandemic, and how to cope. The main points I took from the article:
- The more stressful the job, the more difficult it is to recover and the more significant the impact on self-care behaviors.
- Scientists group downtime into two categories: relaxation and mastery (and the importance of mastery in recovery).
- The importance of self-directed downtime activities.
- The importance of regularly separating oneself from work.
Sabine Sonnentag wrote an excellent review on the topic: Recovery from Work: Advancing the Field Toward the Future | Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior Also see my article on Time Poverty.
A Probiotic Pill for Hangovers? Not So Fast!
In my blog entry, Are Probiotics Making You Fat? probiotics, prebiotics, and fermented food,, I warned about the over-zealous promotion of probiotics as a miracle cure-all. Myrkl: new anti-hangover pill said to break down 70% of alcohol in an hour, is a perfect example of the need for caution. This is the latest instance I've read about of a companies trying to cash in on the probiotic gold rush. Myrkl, recently released in the U.K., is an enteric coated pill (resistant to stomach acid) that delivers a load of Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus coagulans to the small intestine. The company claims the two bacteria break down alcohol, thereby preventing a hangover. Putting aside the fact that a hangover is caused only indirectly by alcohol, the claim Myrkl can "cure" hangovers is based on a single, weak, poorly designed, non-generalizable investigation. I also disagree with the author of the article that probiotics are entirely safe--we don't know enough about them to make that claim. Buyer beware!
Do Animals Dream?
The article, Do Animals Dream, is a review of the book When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness. I'm adding this to my queue.
Turtle Time
There are three ways to die: injury, disease, or old age. The aging process is called senescence, the gradual breakdown of bodily functions. The article, What Turtles Can Teach Humans About the Science of Slow Aging, discusses recent studies that examine the factors contributing to the prolonged aging process of turtles. By studying slow-aging species, scientists hope to gain insight into human healthspanmight be improved.
An Apple A Day
Apple released a 65-page reporton their activities in the healthcare and wellness space. I'm working my way through the report now. Big tech is finally deeply embracing healthcare: see this article in the Economist about Alphabet/Google (Alphabet is spending billions to become a force in health care) and Amazon (Amazon to Acquire One Medical Clinics in Latest Push Into Health Care.) Amazon and other large corporations aim to control a portion of their healthcare expenditures by bringing primary care in-house rather than paying incumbent health systems and insurers. The tech giants and other prominent players (e.g., national pharmacy chains like CVS and Walgreens and retailers like Walmart) will ultimately attempt to keep their company workforce healthy (through wellness and preventative care) and OUT of incumbent health systems. Healthcare tech development is the first phase of what promises to be a massive shift in healthcare: Deloitte Estimates Wellness will Play a $3.8 Trillion Role in the Future of Medicine.
Weekend Warriors
A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Association of the "Weekend Warrior" and Other Leisure-time Physical Activity Patterns With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality, showed that Weekend Warriors, those who only engage in exercise on the weekends, had many of the same reduction in the risk of dying as those that exercised more frequently.
Arthur Brook's Three Biggest Happiness Rules
I'm a big fan of Arthur Brook's How to Build a Life Series in The Atlantic. The article, A Happiness Columnist's Three Biggest Happiness Rules, is worth a read. The best quote: " Happy people love people and use things; unhappy people use people and love things."
Sleep and Sound
I read an interesting article on how your brain is still responsive to sound during sleep, The missing conductor: Your brain still hears sound as it sleeps. It made me think of the work at MIT looking at specific frequencies of sound and light and their effect on immune function Alzheimer's Disease and Gamma Waves. The article made me wonder if I should play particular frequency sounds while sleeping.