Climate Change and Your Health
When I hear the continuing arguments about climate change, I often fancy that I can in the far distance hear Nero playing his lyre while Rome burns. In March the BBC reported faster than expected warming of the Antarctic over the last 30 years. This report was based on a paper in the journal Science by a team from the British Antarctic Survey.
Gradual climate change is drawing particular attention in Europe, where the climate is exquisitely dependent on the Gulf Stream. In some places records have been kept for centuries, and there seem to have been genuine changes in a short space of time. A few years ago I was in Stockholm in the week before Christmas, and it was so warm that I was able to walk around in my shirtsleeves. That made it the warmest December in almost 800 years. People notice things like that, and governments and populations are eager to do something before the Arctic is reduced to a puddle.
Even if we are just seeing a natural climatic cycle, the consequences could be disastrous. Leaving aside the obvious matter of a rise in sea level, there is also the impact of global climate change on health. Earlier this year the BBC reported a speech by Professor Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, to the Society of Applied Microbiology at the Royal Society in London. He pointed out that global warming, with hotter summers and more frequent and heavy rainfall and storms, would create the right conditions for an increase in food poisoning and other gastrointestinal upsets caused by microorganisms.
Global warming could also create conditions favorable for a return of malaria to the United Kingdom. Professor Hunter has published papers on this important topic before. He is no alarmist, and his work underscores the way in which our environment and we are closely interlinked, and even small climatic changes may have major effects on illness.
We could discuss this topic in a great deal of detail. Suffice to say that it is more important than ever for all of us to get into the habit of washing our hands, ensuring the cleanliness of food, and even more so of the water that we use, and that we do all that we can to build our resilience.
There is also another matter of equal importance, and that is the dwindling supply of fresh water around the world. The number of us is growing fast and our water use is growing even faster. A third of the world’s population now lives in water-stressed countries, and it is expected that this will rise to two-thirds by the year 2025. The cruelty of the situation is that there is altogether more than enough water available for everyone’s basic needs. The water is in the wrong places and much of it is unusable.
The United Nations recommends that people need a minimum of 50 liters of water a day for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitation. Global water consumption rose six-fold between 1900 and 1995 – more than double the rate of population growth – and goes on growing as farming, industry and domestic demand all increase.
As important as quantity is quality – with pollution increasing in some areas, the amount of useable water declines. Each year, more than five million people die from waterborne diseases, which is 10 times the number killed in wars around the globe. Most of the victims are children.
Seventy percent of the water used worldwide is used for agriculture. Much more will be needed if we are to feed the world’s growing population, which is predicted to rise from about six billion today to 8.9 billion by 2050. And consumption will further increase as more people expect Western-style lifestyles and diets. Here is a useful statistic: one kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic meter of water, while a kilo of cereals needs only up to three cubic meters. Many futurists are already predicting that water will become as much of a strategic issue as oil is today, with wars being fought over the water supply.
As of today, we should all start thinking about ways in which we can reduce our own water consumption and make provision to collect and purify water ourselves.
“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” — Charles Dudley Warner (American Author, 1829-1900)
Technorati tags: global warming, water, Environment, Climate Change, pollution
Win A Copy of Healing, Meaning & Purpose
Between now and May 31, 2006, if you sign up at www.richardpettymd.com to receive the newsletter you will be entered into a drawing to receive a free, autographed copy of Healing, Meaning & Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life. We will hold the drawing on June 1, 2006 and there will be 5 winners.
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And Now For Something Completely Different
I wouldn’t like it to be thought that this blog only deals with the serious side of life. I’m also eager to alert you to products and services that may enhance and enrich you. I was perusing a favorite blog: when I came upon mention of an important resource: Strange New Products Blog
Seeing such weirdness and creativity should give us all hope for the future….
Though it may be a somewhat "different" future….
Taking the Measure of a Society
“You don’t have to be big to be great.” — Sholom Aleichem (a.k.a. Solomon Rabinowitz, a.k.a. “The Jewish Mark Twain,” Russian-born American Yiddish Writer, 1859-1916)
How do we really take the measure of a society? How do we decide whether it is compassionate and great? Is it just a subjective, culture-bound opinion? I have faced this question on many occasions when doing interviews and having meetings in which I am advocating for the mentally ill. I have seen are many different criteria for trying to evaluate a society and a country:
1. The way in which a society treats its youngest and oldest citizens;
2. How a society honors its dead;
3. What opportunities it offers to its citizens and for people who come to the country and join the society;
4. How it behaves toward other countries;
5. The leaders it chooses to follow.
All of those are correct. But I would like to suggest that we should expand on those.
For me: “The true measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members.”
For this is a measure of how far a society has progressed from a dog-eat-dog dominator model toward a more egalitarian partnership model. I have previously described my admiration for the work of Riane Eisler, and in my book and CD program Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I dedicate a whole chapter to ways of applying and expanding on some of her work.
I was once speaking to a Minister of Health in another country, and he expressed the view that providing care for the mentally ill was not the responsibility of government, and that they were simply a drag on the country’s economy. I politely but firmly disagreed, and was able to show him that providing good quality compassionate care for the mentally ill was not just the right thing to do, but it could also have a positive impact on his country’s bottom line. It happened that we were in a Buddhist country and he had a small image of the Buddha in his office, with some incense in front of the statue. At the end of my presentation I used a quotation attributed to the Buddha:
“In separateness lies the world’s great misery; in compassion lies the world’s true strength.”
When I talk about the advantages of an expanded, five dimensional model of thinking about people and their interactions, it is exceedingly practical. Many of the same things that are good for individuals are also good for society as a whole. That seems such an obvious statement, but when you think it through and apply my same principles of personal integration to integrate relationships and to produce an integrated society, the results can be remarkable.
“Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian Writer, 1821-1881)
Technorati tags: Riane Eisler, compassion, Buddha, society
Glucosamine and Chondroitin
A study has been published in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine that seems to show that there’s no advantage in taking the popular dietary supplements glucosamine and chondroitin. Indeed that’s what has been reported in the media . But notice that I said, “Seems to show,” for on closer examination there is more to this paper than it appears.
The investigators are to be congratulated for doing the study in the first place. What they did was to take a large group of 1583 patients who all had osteoarthritis of the knees, and divide them into five groups:
- A placebo group
- A group that took celecoxib (Celebrex) 200mg/day
- 1500mg of glucosamine/day
- 1200mg of chondroitin/day
- A combination of 1500mg of glucosamine/day and 1200mg of chondroitin/day
The study lasted 24 weeks, and the main outcome measure was pain in the knees. The study showed that although patients on Celebrex did very well compared with the placebo group, those on glucosamine and chondroitin did not do better than placebo, although the combination was better than using either supplement alone. But one of the odd things was that people with moderate to severe pain WERE helped by the combination, and in fact the combination out-performed Celebrex!
Not only does the combination seem to help people with the biggest problems with pain, but also there are some other important points:
1. The worse someone is, the bigger the room for improvement. If someone only has mild pain, you need a lot more patients to find a statistically significant improvement.
2. As in most studies, multiple measurements were done, and Celebrex was no better than placebo in 12 out of 14 of them. So if the “active comparison” failed on multiple measures, we need to be very cautious about how we interpret the study.
3. The placebo response rate in the study was 60%, while the average is 30-35%. This is a huge difference. This may be because the patients knew that they had a four in five chance of getting a treatment that might help them, so they went into the study with high expectations.
4. This is only one study, concerning one type of joint problem. There are more than 30 others that have in general been even more positive then the findings in the moderate to sever group, including a very long-term study that showed that over an eight-year period, the combination dropped the rate of knee replacement by almost 75%. It is crucially important to examine the results of any study in the context of everything else that has been known and discovered. Every type of study has to be checked, and verified.
5. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and is the first of two parts, with a second study of the impact of the treatments on X-rays of the knees still pending.
6. None of the groups had many side effects, but it is worth remembering that medicines of the Celebrex type are under intense scrutiny because of the possible association with cardiovascular disease.
7. Many specialists use anti-inflammatory medicines together with glucosamine/chondroitin, at least at the beginning of a course of treatment. And that makes good sense.
8. What about the dosing of the supplements? Although those are the doses used by most people, they may not always be enough. In patients who weigh more than 200 pounds, many experts recommend 2000mg of glucosamine and 1600mg of chondroitin. It is also wise to take the supplement in divided doses with food. (I have sometimes also found it very useful to add Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM), 1000mg/day to the glucosamine and chondroitin, though there is little research to support it.)
None of these treatments can be given to pregnant women or nursing mothers.
One other small caveat, if you are having surgery make sure that you tell you surgeon if you are taking these supplements. Chondroitin has minor anticoagulant activity , and so may glucosamine.
And remember that the maintenance of joint health is not just a matter of taking some supplements. It is a judicious mixture of taking the right medication when needed, together with supplements, a healthy diet containing some omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants, exercise, management of posture, particularly of the spine, and weight management. To say nothing of ensuring that joint problems are not being compounded by psychological and relationship problems, and disturbances in the subtle systems of the body.
Technorati tags: glucosamine, chondroitin, knee pain, arthritis
Online Therapy
There is a very interesting article in Newsweek that talks about the growing trend to offer psychotherapy online. The article highlights the main reasons for this new development: convenience, anonymity and low prices. Without the overhead of running an office, internet therapy is roughly half the price of a regular office visit.
I was initially rather skeptical about the potential effectiveness of internet therapy: any experienced therapist will tell you of the amount of non-verbal material which is used during a session. Body language is a potent indicator of internal psychological states, and there is often a meta-text in communication, that can be difficult to pick up if you are not in the room with someone. And good therapy requires a lot of intuition. But on the other hand, there are times when people will open up when they do not see another person. It is one of the reasons that psychoanalysts used to use a couch, with the therapist out of sight of the patient.
So I have reviewed the research literature on the use of the internet for psychotherapy for an array of conditions, including addictions, and found over 190 studies, at least a third of which were reports of well conducted studies. Although it is still early days, and most of the research studies are small, the results are almost all positive. Clearly we cannot use the internet for trying to treat people with severe or life threatening problems, but for many of the problems which create such difficulties in many peoples’ lives, I think that this is a very positive development. So much so, that I am currently considering setting up an online service myself. I would be interested to hear of other people’s experiences of online services, and whether they would like me to offer one myself.
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