H e a l t h T h o u g h t s

How our thinking affects our health

Defeating fear of Ebola will help defeat Ebola

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© GLOW IMAGES (model used for illustrative purposes only)
© GLOW IMAGES (model used for illustrative purposes only)

I’m not an authority on dealing physically with contagious diseases but I do know about handling fear.  I’ve learned that stopping fear of disease can go a long way toward stopping disease itself.

The Christian Science Monitor quoted Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group:  “There are two kinds of contagion, one is related to the virus itself and the other is related to the spread of fear about the virus.  Both contagions must be defeated.”

This Daily Mail article agrees that worry and fear are often unhealthy and linked to various health problems:  “Ebola: A crash course in fear and how it hurts us.”  (See related article, “Five Rock Solid Ways to Master Fear.)

Just how connected the contagion of fear about Ebola is to the actual spread of the virus is becoming more widely understood.  What happens in our thinking does not stay in our thinking.  Fears can be manifested in our bodies.  Protecting ourselves and our communities from Ebola and wiping it out, is as much about what we do mentally as physically.
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Health care after doomsday

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On December 21, 2012, my wife and I happened to wake up at 4:00am.  As we were talking, the power went out.

Being familiar with apocalyptic predictions for that date based on the Mayan calendar, we looked at each other with an eerie feeling.  I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

As you probably know, the world didn’t end.  Our power came back on in a couple of hours.  There was a tomorrow and I’m confident there will be many more.

In thinking about that morning and its implications on health, I remembered a famous comment by the great jazz pianist, Eubie Blake.  Near the end of his 96 years, (he’d been a smoker for 85 of them) he quipped, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”

Since it looks like we’re all going to be living longer here on the earth, health care still matters.  Some survivors of 12/21/12 are currently striving to follow through on New Year resolutions to be healthier.  And they’re reaching for that common goal from many different angles. 

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Also featured in West Central Tribune

The health benefits of gratitude (beyond Thanksgiving)

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© GLOW IMAGESThanksgiving is over.  Now what?  Where does all that gratefulness go?  Do we just move on and dive right into Christmas shopping?

I once overheard this comment on a bus in New York City on Thanksgiving Day:  “There should be 364 days a year of thanks-giving and one day for griping.”  What a wonderful idea!

With each passing year, it seems that Thanksgiving, the holiday, faces stronger and ever earlier competition from Christmas and the consumerism that is so aggressively urged on us.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the true meaning of Christmas.  But when two of my local radio stations start playing only Christmas music starting November 1st!, gratitude tends to get drown out.

Giving thanks needn’t be relegated to just a day or even a season.  We can do it every day.  In addition to having us identify the good in our lives, which can help ward off the depression that we hear is more prevalent at this time of year; gratitude is healthy in other ways.

In fact the health-giving effect of acknowledging our blessings and has been so widely studied and proven, it can literally be said that gratitude is good medicine.

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Also featured in the West Central Tribune

The future of healthcare: Patient Choice

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Check out this excerpt from the first post on my new Areavoices blog called,
Healthy Thinking Minnesota!  It’s also featured in the West Central Tribune.

© GLOW IMAGES

My wife and I recently saw the powerful documentary, “Escape Fire – the fight to rescue American healthcare”.

The film portrays a healthcare structure that’s designed for quick fixes rather than prevention or cure and is profit-driven rather than patient-driven.  One message that came through loud and clear to us is that healthcare needs to be rescued from lack of choice – for doctors and especially for patients.

The “Escape Fire” phrase refers to a 63 year-old true story of wildfire fighters known as “smoke jumpers.”  Several of them were trapped by a rapidly spreading fire and escape the top of the ridge appeared impossible.

Their crew chief, Wag Dodge, had an idea that was the perfect answer – but it was counter-intuitive.  He actually started a fire, so that when the main fire reached that point there would be nothing left to burn.  The others were either too frightened by that concept or misunderstood it and tried to run to safety.

Most of them perished.  Dodge’s escape fire enabled him to hunker down in the already burnt area and survive.

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The secret to a long and healthy life?

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The other day was my birthday.  I asked my wife who was born in the same year, “How old are we now?”

I asked because we try not to think of ourselves as a certain age and get bogged down with limiting predictions about getting older.

A few days later I read an article about finding the fountain of youth which had quotes from the great Hall-of-Fame baseball pitcher, Satchel Paige.  He asked, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?”  Hmm…I’m still pondering that one.

And in his inimitable, lite-yet-deep way, he gives us this wisdom:  “Age is mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”

September is Healthy Aging Month, and I’ve been thinking about what’s needed to age healthily.  It seems that expectations for how healthy or active we will be at certain ages keep evolving as people live longer.  Our perspectives keep shifting.

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Positive thinking can change our GENES?

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“…thinking is ‘real’ medicine, as proven by the placebo effect,” says Deepak Chopra in a CNN article called, “Can positive thinking make you well?”

He asks how far we can take that:  “…is there a placebo effect that doesn’t involve fooling the patient? Can you trigger your own inner defenses by the way you think?”  He says that camps are divided on the effect of just positive thinking, since many disorders are considered to be genetically triggered.

Then he drops this bomb:  “In the public’s mind, being told that cancer or diabetes is genetic acts as final authority. Luckily for the positive-thinking camp, this fatalistic attitude is mistaken. Genes are dynamic, not fixed; they respond to a person’s environment, behavior and attitudes. Indeed, a now-famous study in Sweden showed that a tendency to diabetes may be strongly affected by the diet your great-grandfather ate. A whole new field is studying how much choice we have at the genetic level.”

Wow!  Thinking affects genes!  Did you know that?

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Expectation — the ultimate placebo effect

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Everyone knows that the placebo effect depends on not knowing that it’s a placebo, right?  Wrong!!

Here’s the link to a 1/10/12 piece from, The Wall Street Journal, called “Why Placebos Work Wonders:  from weight loss to fertility, new legitimacy for ‘fake’ treatments”.

The author, Shirley S. Wang, gives several impressive examples of effective placebo treatments but also reports this:  “It doesn’t seem to matter whether people know they are getting a placebo and not a ‘real’ treatment.”  What?!

She mentions a study done by Dr. Ted Kaptchuk, director of Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.   Patients were informed that what they were taking was made with inert ingredients and yet they still had beneficial results.

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