If you’ve ever known anyone with Alzheimer’s Disease, you know how devastating this horrible problem can be. The afflicted person gradually loses everything that had made them who they are. Their memories fade. Their ability to relate with others, even their closest family members, erodes. Ultimately they’re in complete isolation and completely unable to care for themselves..

As bad as it is for the person with Alzheimer’s, in some ways it’s even worse for the family. It’s horrible to watch this slow deterioration take place. Caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s have extremely high rates of depression.

It would be great if we could prevent this disease. We may be making some progress in that direction.

While we don’t have a perfect answer yet, a recent study in The Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease reports some interesting findings. The study shows that two safe and readily available supplements may help in preventing Alzheimer’s.

I’ll tell you about the study and these supplements in a moment, but first a want to give you a little background.

We really don’t know what causes Alzheimer’s. About 25% seem to have a genetic component. For the other 75% of victims, we really don’t know what the cause is. It appears to be a combination of a predisposition and environmental factors, possibly including diet.

Some research suggests that chronic, low-grade inflammation plays a role.

Whatever the cause, the distinguishing feature of Alzheimer’s is to build up of a polypeptide called amyloid in the brain. As the amyloid builds up, its forms plaques that lead to the cognitive decline typical of Alzheimer’s.

The body does have some degree of protection against amyloid buildup. Specialize white cells can differentiate into cells called macrophages that can remove the amyloid as it forms. The study I mentioned earlier was designed to see if nutrients could improve the ability of macrophages to clear amyloid.

Previous studies have suggested that vitamin D (specifically vitamin D3) and curcumin may be protective against Alzheimer’s. In the recently reported study, researchers collected white blood cells from nine patients with Alzheimer’s disease as well as some normal volunteers. They incubated the white cells from both groups in the presence of amyloid.

They then added vitamin D and curcumin to the mixture, both individually and together and watched what happened.

The results were dramatic. Both supplements ncreased the macrophages’ ability to ingest and remove amyloid.

With some patients white cells, one of the other of the supplements had a greater effect. In others, the effects were synergistic – the results of adding both vitamin D and curcumin were more than the additive effects of each individual.

In their usual conservative fashion, the researchers pointed out that this is a preliminary study and they do not make any clinical recommendations.

However, we’d have to wait a very long time to make a decision on the basis of solid clinical trials. From my viewpoint, both vitamin D and curcumin (a major component of the spice turmeric) are safe enough and have enough other beneficial effects that I consider it very reasonable to begin supplementing with them now.

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The Fountain of Youth is Made of Iron

Aerobic exercise (walking, jogging, bike riding and such) has long been the darling of the wellness folks.  For years, these people wouldn’t consider lifting weights.  They somehow thought they’d morph into a bodybuilding freak if they so much as touched a dumbbell.

As if…

They also didn’t think that muscle mass and strength had much to do with health.  More and more evidence shows the error in that way of thinking.  A recent long-term study reported in the British Medical Journal adds to this body of evidence.

In this study, researchers followed 8,762 men between the ages of 20 and 82 years of age for an average of 18.9 years (as I said, this was a long-term study).

When the men signed up for the study, their comprehensive evaluation included measuring upper and lower body strength as well as their performance on a treadmill.

Adjusting for age, the risk of death during course of the study was highest in the weakest men and lowest in the strongest.  This difference persisted even when other factors such as lifestyle, family history and other medical conditions were allowed for.

The difference persisted even allowing for cardiovascular fitness.  That is, the men who were both aerobically fit and strong did better than men who were equally fit aerobically but not as strong.

This ties in with a lot of other evidence supporting the importance of strength training.

It used to be taught that losing muscle mass and strength was an inevitable part of aging.  We now know this isn’t the case at all.

Training with weights minimizes the strength loss that would otherwise occur.  Studies show resistance training benefits even nursing home residents.

The image of an ideal exercise program has shifted dramatically in the last decade.  Gone are the long hours of repetitive aerobic exercise sessions at 60-80% of maximal heart rate.

The new model rests on shorter, more intense, and highly varied exercise periods.  It definitely includes resistance training.

Body weight exercises such as squats and pushups are a great beginning.  There are lots of strength building programs you can try.  The main thing is to begin.  The “use it or lose it” maxim definitely applies to muscle mass and strength.

references

BMJ. 2008; 337:a349

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How to Use Action and the Law of Attraction to Make Your Dreams Real
To get something done, generally you’re going to have to do something.

Pretty obvious, right?  It should be, but these days a lot of people have interpreted the Law of Attraction to mean that dreaming alone is all that is required to make those dreams a reality.

Not in this physical world.  Bringing a dream to physical reality requires some form of action.

All creation begins first as an idea in someone’s head.  Then action makes it real.

For example, an engineer may get an idea for a fantastic new style of bridge.  He sees it in his minds eye, but it’s not yet real.  Making it so requires action.

The engineer needs to translate the idea to paper (or these days a computer screen).  Perhaps there’ll be discussions with colleagues, review of material manuals, construction of models and so forth.  All of these are actions.

With each action, the engineer adds more energy to the project.  The bridge begins to move from the world of ideas and dreams to the realm of the physical.

Eventually, completion of the bridge becomes the next logical step.

The dream was important, but its manifestation came through action.

I think action works through two mechanisms.

First, it gets something done in the physical world, and small results add up.  As the proverb goes: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.

More importantly, taking action convinces your subconscious mind that you’re serious.  Action primes the subconscious to bring opportunities related to your dream to your conscious attention.

This is what Goethe alludes to when he says:
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.”

Thoreau says much the same thing:

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

The first time I clearly experienced this was in my final year of medical school.

Fourth year medical students have several months of elective courses.  If you followed certain guidelines, you have wide leeway in arranging the elective you take, including taking one at another medical school.

Most of my classmates took the path of least resistance.  They took an elective offered at our medical school.

Others took electives at the institutions they wanted to apply to for their residencies, hoping to increase their chance of acceptance.

My roommate and I went a different route.

We did our elective at Johannesburg Non-European Hospital in South Africa.  It was a fabulous, fabulous experience.  It was medically excellent and politically eye-opening  (apartheid was in full swing at the time).  We grew in many ways during our time there.

At the end of the year, when everyone had completed their electives and we were all comparing notes, Joe (my roommate) and I encountered several different reactions.

Many were glad for us.  They may have had no desire to do what we did but enjoyed the fact that we had done it.

Others had a response that bordered on jealousy with a twinge of resentment tossed in.

These students made different choices and had different experiences.  Most had gone the easy route and done an elective at our school

When they heard where we had gone, what we saw, how we grew, what we learned, they realized what an opportunity the elective time had been.  They regretted not taking full advantage of it.

In response, they made excuses for why they didn’t do something more adventurous.  Often, their internal story involved Joe and I having some special connection that made it easier for us than it was for anyone else.

“You sure are lucky.”

“Wish I knew who you know.”

“Wish I had the money.”

“I was going to do something like that too, but I couldn’t because…”

The people that were jealous chose to think we were able to do it because we had of some special access or knowledge or grace or ability or whatever that they didn’t have access to.

I knew differently.  I knew that the only reason we completed our trip was that we dreamed.  Then we took action.

It began in junior year.  My roommate was on medical rotation with a Chief Resident from South Africa.  Many times on rounds, the resident told stories about a professor he studied with in South Africa.

My roommate repeated these stories to me and over time Professor Seftel grew to mythic proportions.   Gradually the idea of doing an elective with this professor was born.

Making this elective a reality was a big dream.  It didn’t exist.  No one had done it before.

Remember, this was way before the internet. Making arrangements between Washington, DC and South Africa was an affair of letters.  Write to enquire, send it off, wait for a response, send more information, get forms, send back, etc.

Looking at the whole process was daunting.  But writing the first letter was easy. (“Dear Professor Seftel, I’m a medical student at Georgetown University School of Medicine and I’m writing to ask if …).

Each subsequent step of a rather involved process (applications, department approvals, visas, figuring out how to pay for it, finding someplace to live, etc.) was also small in itself.

A logical sequence unfolded.  Eventually, the small steps accomplished a great goal.  The dream became real.

The dream was important, but so was the action.

Goal setting, vision boards, visualization, etc. are all important and useful.  And it is true that sometimes someone will put a list of goals away, forget about it, then years later come across it and realize that they had achieved the items on their list without consciously thinking of them.  In fact, that’s happened to me.

But you’ll always find that action was necessary.  Ideally the action flows from spontaneous inclination rather than a sense of trying to force something to happen.

I differentiate between forced action and what Jerry and Esther Hicks call “inspired action”.

When we set a goal or identify a desire, we generate energy around it.  We’ve cued our subconscious to notice things relating to it.

The trick now is to keep a relaxed attitude, not one of effort or struggle or forcing, and notice what arises.

Playing around with the idea in an open-minded, wondering way often brings forth an idea for action.  This is the inspired action.

You recognize an inspired action because you’re drawn to it.  You want to do it.  Often it seems easy, or at least the effort required inspires rater than discourages.

All this, of course, is easier to talk about than to do.  And it’s easier to do when the issues don’t feel major.

When the issue seems important, our desire for the outcome can make us feel anxious.  We may worry about the possibility of not getting what we want.  These feelings works against us.  It leads us away from inspired action to forced action.

My best advice is to keep your focus clearly on what you want, not what you don’t want.  Dream your dreams.

Then, when you feel a call for action, do it!

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It doesn’t take a fancy study to realize there’s an epidemic of childhood obesity in this country – a drive past any school yard offers proof enough.  The question is what we do about it?  A new study offers some suggestions.

Researchers in Massachusetts evaluated infants three times between the ages of six months and two. (1) At each visit, they recorded the amount of time the child slept and the amount of time they spent watching TV.

At three years of age, they evaluated the children for obesity, measuring body weight and height as well as skin fold thicknesses.  The findings are noteworthy.

Infants who slept less than 12 hours were almost twice as likely to be overweight at age 3 (12% vs. 7%).  If the low-sleep children also watched more than 2 hours of television a day, their risk of obesity rose to 17%.

Many factors contribute to the rise of obesity in America.  Of course diet and exercise are important but research increasingly points to other issues as well.

Previous studies have shown an association between short sleeping hours and obesity in older children and adolescents (2).  This study shows that association begins even in infancy.

Experts debate about the mechanism by which sleep affects weight.  Some researchers postulate that being awake longer simply gives a child more time to eat.  Another possibility is that decreased sleep leads to decreased activity while awake.

Others wonder if certain studies in adults apply to children as well.  These studies show that lack of sleep has an adverse effect on hormones that influence appetite. (3, 4)

Whatever the cause, more and more evidence demonstrates the importance of adequate sleep for people of any age.  Make getting adequate sleep a priority – both for yourself and for any children under your care.

1) Short Sleep Duration in Infancy and Risk of Childhood Overweight
Taveras, Elsie M MD, MPH et al.  Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2008;162(4):305-311.

2) Seicean A, Redline S, Seicean S; et al. Association between short sleeping hours and overweight in adolescents: results from a US Suburban High School survey. Sleep Breath. 2007;11(4):285-293.

3) Spiegel K, et al. Brief communication: sleep curtailment in healthy young men is associated with decreased leptin levels, elevated ghrelin levels, and increased hunger and appetite. Ann Intern Med. 2004;141(11):846-850.

4) Taheri S, Lin L, Austin D, Young T, Mignot E. Short sleep duration is associated with reduced leptin, elevated ghrelin, and increased body mass index. PLoS Med. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0010062. 2004;1(3):e62.

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Even if you don’t believe in visualization, I’ll bet you practice at least one form of it sometimes.

Most people have heard of visualization – clearly imagining a desired outcome.  Many people use it hoping to increase their chance of success.

Other people consider visualization New Age fluff.  They deride those who recommend it.

However, even though they scoff, they’re often dedicated practitioners of a specific form of visualization.

In this form, they dwell on an outcome to the point of obsession. They imagine in such detail that they actually experience emotions and shift their physiology.

In fact, this form of visualization may be the most commonly applied.  The only problem with it is that it focuses on negative outcomes.  It’s usually goes by its common name: worry.

Think about it.  Worry is really just a form of negative visualization.

A person worries by vividly imagining an undesired outcome.

People say they can’t visualize, but they have no difficulty worrying.  With no coaching at all, they’re able to conjure up vivid images of the feared event or outcome.  They have no trouble enhancing the images with gruesome details of any possible negative consequence.

Some people are really quite creative as they do this.

Asking the same person to imagine a positive outcome stymies them.

It’s ironic that master worriers often dismiss positive visualization as New Age fluff.  Then they visualize away, only they specialize in the negative.

I’m not quite sure why they consider negative visualization (worry) a responsible, mature use of their time yet denigrate the positive version of the same activity.

In reality, most awful things people worry about never happen.  As Mark Twain expressed it:  “I’ve experienced many terrible things in my life, most of which have fortunately never occurred.”

Vividly imagine something and you do experience it.  Not only that, you might be charting your future.

Athletes know this.  They use visualization to imagine their success – whether it’s a perfect golf shot or a personal record in a race.

I’ve found it useful to prepare for performing surgery.  When I performed major operations, I mentally rehearsed them the night before.  I imagined making the incision and obtaining exposure.  I’d mentally go through the technical aspects in precise detail.  I imagined difficulties I might face or anatomic variations I might encounter.  Then I imagined how I would handle them.  Naturally, I imagined a very successful outcome.

Maybe it was only superstition, but I always thought the operations went better when I did that.

However, there’s a proven added bonus for spending your time imaging positive outcomes.  It makes you happy. (1)

Worry, on the other hand, accomplishes no good.

Now, I’m not talking about evaluating a grim situation to decide what action is most appropriate. That’s responsible and appropriate.

By worry, I mean repeatedly dwelling on grim outcomes when no action is possible.  Worry itself won’t resolve the situation.  It only makes you miserable.

For example, worrying about your teenager driver won’t get them home safely any sooner.

What worry does do is poison your present moment.   You imagine now, in the present.  If you think disturbing, negative thoughts, you’re making a choice that leads you to suffer in this moment.  You aren’t experiencing where you are and what’s actually happening now.  Instead, you’re experiencing what might (or might not) happen in the future.

Not only that, but worrisome thoughts and emotions drive your body to release hormones associated with stress.  Over time, this has a very detrimental effect on your wellbeing.

Some people become habitual worriers.  For them, it may be difficult to stop.  I’ll give some specific advice on how to deal with habitual worry in the future.  For now, know that it is possible to change.

A good start is to imagine positive outcomes for a change.  You can do it for task specific events, such as my examples before of athletes or my preparing for surgery.

But why not do it just for fun?

As children, we daydreamed naturally.  We easily imagined joyfully.  As we grew, most of us daydreamed less and worried more.

There’s no need to go into why we changed.  It’s enough to know that as mature people taking responsibility for our lives we are in control.  We may have unconsciously drifted into patterns of thought that didn’t serve us.  Now that we recognize what’s going on, we’re back in charge. We can choose how we use our mind and to what end we direct our mental energies.

1)  King;  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27: 798-807

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“It’s not what you get that matters, it’s who you become.”
My appreciation of the wisdom of that statement has grown over the years. Most recently, I thought of it while I was getting my hair cut.

I go to a one-person shop in the village close to where I live (we actually do refer to it as the village, quaint as that may sound to some). The woman who cuts my hair rents a cute, small free-standing building behind the inn on the main street. The patisserie that bakes for the inn is right across the brick driveway. It’s a nice location.

When I was there earlier this week, she told me that she was thinking of expanding her business and hiring two talented women who wanted to work with her. She wasn’t worried about the hair cutting part, but about the management part.

She realized, as the book “The E-Myth” points out, that being able to run a business is different than being able to do the work of the business. That is, just because you’re a good electrician doesn’t mean you’ll be good at running an electrical contracting business.

This woman realizes that she will need to develop new skills if her venture is to be successful. She will need to grow and become more.

If the expansion succeeds, she will probably earn more. More importantly she will have added the ability to run a larger small business to her already significant list of talents and abilities.

With her new skill set, new opportunities will open to her. For example, she would be much more comfortable starting again elsewhere. Also, she’d be more qualified to start a business in a different field. After expanding herself, she could act as a consultant and advisor for others wishing to do the same.

In short, the most important benefit from expanding her business is that it helps her expand as a person. The benefit isn’t what she would get, it’s who she would become.

We all can continue to grow and become more throughout life.

Maybe the most important question one can consider before engaging in an activity or relationship or making a career decision is who you are likely to become as a result of it.

Ask who you will become from all vantage points. What type of values will you develop? What skills will you acquire? What new ways of thinking will you be exposed to? What habits of thought and action will you develop? What quality contribution will you be able to make? What mentors will you learn from?

In choosing a career, the answers to these questions are much more important than the salary or the job title.

Ultimately, becoming a person of quality delivers much more satisfaction that merely becoming a person of material accumulation. The combination is desirable – there’s nothing wrong with material aspirations as long as they don’t supplant more profound values – but personal integrity proves more enduring than a bank account.

Ultimately, who you’ve become is what you’re left with at the end of life.

Material things decay. You can lose them. Someone can take them from you.

Friends or family may die or otherwise leave you.

Who you’ve become can never be lost, never be taken – it’s truly yours.

As you may know, I like the metaphor of living life as if it’s a work of art in progress. Taking active control of who you’re becoming is part of creating a masterpiece.

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 A Modest Proposal That May Shock You

Here’s a two-week experiment to help you clear your mind of distorted perceptions.  As a bonus, you’ll find yourself happier.

We all like to think that we have an accurate worldview.  Most of the time, we’re wrong – we have a distorted view of the world around us.

A large part of this distortion occurs because we’re careless about what we let affect our internal filters. 

You notice what you’re interested in.  Your perceptions tend to support your pre-existing beliefs.  You can sift through the external world and find evidence to back up just about any belief you want.

For example, can you recall, from your own personal experience, events to support the belief that people are shallow, self-centered, and mean and will stab you in the back if you give them half a chance?  I imagine that you can.

However, I also imagine that you can recall, again from your own experience, events to support the belief that people are kind, generous, and supportive and often go out of their way to help others.

Evidence exists for either belief.  Which you notice and remember depends in part on what you are primed to notice.

A person with a pre-existing belief tends to notice events supporting that belief.  They’re blind to equally valid evidence of the opposite viewpoint.

In a way, it’s the same as noticing all the blue Ford cars on the road the day after you buy one yourself.

We have control over our beliefs and our filters, but only if we actively exert that control.  If we don’t take control, outside influences will do it for us.

The news media constitutes one such outside influence.  It consistently and persistently presents a very selective and distorted worldview.  If we follow the media regularly, we’re at great risk of assuming this distorted perspective as our own.

I remember teachers in high school declaring that good citizens should follow the news media to “stay abreast of the world around us”.  That was lousy advice.

The news media, God bless it, doesn’t exist as a public service.  Their primary mission is not to inform and educate.  It does not give us a balanced view of the good and the bad in the world.  If it did, good news would hugely dominate.

Zzzzip.

“What was that?”

“Oh, that was just the bad news for the year.”

The media doesn’t strive for balance.  The media’s overarching drive is to attract viewers or readers.

To that end, the media picks its stories based on their sensationalism, their likelihood of getting attention.  The saying in the newsroom is “If it bleeds, it leads”.

Most news stories convey little or no information you need to know or that you’ll be able to take action on.

For example, I used to have my clock radio set to go off with the radio rather than an alarm.  As often as not, I’d wake up to the top-of–the-hour news summaries.  Awful. 

One morning, in the horrifying few seconds it took me to rouse enough to push the off button, I heard about a serious school bus accident in Europe, a child in Texas that died because his mother left him in a car on a hot day and a soldier who was killed on his way back to base by someone throwing a cinder block off an overpass.

Consider those stories.  Yes, they’re true, they happened.  But what do they have to do with my life?  Is there some action I can take about any of them?  Is the information useful?  Of course not. 

The wire service this radio station subscribed to scoured the globe looking for the most sensational, headline-grabbing stories they could find.  They weren’t interested in accurately representing the overall state of the world. They just wanted to get people’s attention. These were the most sensational stories they could find and they foisted them onto me
As a result, I began my day with my mind filled with horrible images.  They were remarkably hard to shake.

How do you think hearing those stories might have affected my internal filters and my thoughts about the world we live in?  Rather badly, obviously.

Filters based on those stories would be extremely inaccurate.
 
Yes, there was a school bus accident.  It’s also true that every day, year in and year out, tens of thousands of school buses safely convey millions of students between their homes and school.  Also, maternal love, care and nurturing expressed all over the globe daily far outweighs the rare episodes of maternal neglect that make the headlines.

If you let the news media decide what stories enter your experience, you’ll be seeing the world through a very distorted set of filters.

So here’s my modest proposal.  Drop the media.  Fire them. 

You don’t have to do it forever.  Just as a trial, say for two weeks.

For two weeks, I’d like you to avoid any media news sources.  That means no radio, no CNN, no news blogs, no news magazines – none of it.

The point is to just notice what you notice.

You might experience a change in the way you feel.  Your outlook may shift.  You may find yourself more engaged in the world immediately around you.  If you’re not distracted by news about mud slides in California, you’re more likely to appreciate the beautiful weather that’s your experience.

Some people find this experiment difficult because they’ve established a habit of checking the news.  That means it’s even more important for them to try it.

Others worry that they’ll miss something important.  They don’t need to.  If something truly important happens, someone will tell them.  Here’s how that goes.

We all remember where we were when we heard of the attack on the World Trade Center. I was in middle of an operation on a man’s carotid artery. 

An OR nurse not involved with the case came to the operating room to tell us about the first plane going into the World Trade Center. 

Then she felt the need to come back with updates.

After about the third news flash, I rather sharply told her to stay the hell out of my operating room.  I had the major artery to one side of a man’s brain opened and I needed to have my attention and the attention of everyone in the room completely focused on the job at hand.

Even important stories can have low priority in your personal world.

This news fast is only an experiment. It’s just something to try.  I want you to experience the quality of your life with and without the news media in it.  If you think the media really helps you and you’re better off with it, great – go back to following it.  I think you won’t want to.

But you won’t know for sure unless you try the experiment.

One more story.  Most of the things we think are so important in the present moment turn out to be completely irrelevant in the very near future.  Watching a movie recently brought this point home to me.

“Dave” is a pleasant romantic comedy.  In it, Kevin Klein plays a man who looks amazingly like the president of the United States.  In a plot twist typical of romantic comedies, he winds up standing in for the president (hey – it might happen). 

If you enjoy light comedies, I recommend the movie. I gave it 4 out of 5 stars on Netflix.

I mention it here because it was filmed in 1993.  Because of its political theme, the movie had a cute little twist of major politicians and news reporters doing cameo appearances as themselves.  These folks were the movers and shakers of the time.

What struck me as I watched it was how forgotten most of them are now. 

You may remember “Tip” O’Neal, but even his performance on the national stage has become a footnote.  His contemporaries’ roles have faded even more.

This suggests to me that time spent following the soap opera that was politics of the early 90’s might not have been the best investment of one’s time and attention. 

I think we’ll feel the same someday soon about the big stories of today.

So try this little experiment.  I think you’ll find your world a better place and your view of it much clearer.

 I’d love to hear your results.  Email me at jsphfm-jfm@yahoo.com

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I just read a research study that has me a little concerned.  Physicians at an infertility clinic in Ohio reported an association between cell phone use and infertility in men.

They evaluated 361 men who were undergoing infertility investigation.  They excluded anyone with chronic problems known to affect sperm production.

The men were divided into four groups depending on their average daily cell phone usage.  The groups were:
• no use
• less than 2 hours
• 2 – 4 hours
• more than 4 hours.

The researchers then looked at factors like sperm count, microscopic appearance of the sperm, sperm motility and sperm viability in each group.

The results were a little disturbing. The more a man used a cell phone, the worse his sperm looked.

Now a study like this doesn’t prove cause and effect.  Still…  It does make you wonder.

Some of my colleagues in alternative medicine have worried about possible health hazards from cell phones for some time.  After all, they do emit a form of radiation and many of us have them on and in close proximity to our bodies for much of the day.  There haven’t been major studies definitely proving health risks, but that doesn’t mean they won’t show up down the road.

It presents a problem for me. I’m not ready to give up my cell phone.

I well remember what it was like to be a physician in the pre-cell phone days.  Being on call meant being near a phone.  I knew where every pay phone was within at least a 30 mile radius of my home.

I have a vivid memory of standing thigh-deep in snow at a phone by the side of a road during a snow storm, freezing and having trouble hearing because of the wind noise and the passing trucks.

My first portable phone was the size of a shoe box and had very spotty reception.  Even so, it was a great improvement over the pay phones.

 It was marvelous to watch cell phone size decrease while performance increased.  When the first flip phone arrived, we knew we were in the Star Trek age.

I really can’t imagine going without a cell phone now.  I suspect you may be in the same position.  So what are we to do with information like that in the study I just told you about?

First, be aware that cell phone usage may be an issue and minimize it to the extent possible.

Your cell phone emits radiation searching for a tower even when you’re not talking, so keep it turned off if you don’t really need it on.

Keep your cell phone away from your body as much as possible.  Carry in a briefcase or leave it in a holder in your car or on your desk at work or home.

Using a speaker phone reduces your radiation exposure.  The sound quality varies, so when you buy a phone be sure it has speaker phone capabilities (most do currently) and check out its performance in the speaker phone mode.

Even if it works great, it’s not always practical to use a speaker phone – for example in public places.  A hands free headset is another alternative.

Wireless (Bluetooth) units have their own issues.   They communicate with the phone or other electronic device by sending  their own signal.  The signal strength is smaller than a cell phone emits, and it doesn’t emit it constantly.  A Bluetooth earpiece is an improvement, but it does emit radiation close to your ear.

A wired hands free ear piece produces minimal radiation, but purists argue that it still isn’t zero.

There is a hands free device on the market called Blue Tube that uses a hollow plastic tube to direct the sound to the ear.  This avoids having a wire or anything producing any level of radiation right next to your ear. 

That sounds like a good idea, but I haven’t used one and have no idea how well it works.  However, as a physician I have used a sound transmitting device that relies on plastic tubes to transmit sound for years.  It’s called a stethoscope and it works quite well. 

The Blue Tube units cost about $25 or $30.  I may get one just to try it out.  If I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s the summary.  People hotly debate whether or not cell phone radiation poses any health hazard.  To date, large studies haven’t shown definite risks.  Critics claim these studies are flawed and biased by the interests of big industry.  

Studies like the one I told you about here aren’t proof of cause and effect, but they are concerning.  People opposed to cell phones point to such studies as evidence of the danger of cell phones.

I share their concern, but I’m not ready to give up my cell phone anytime soon – it’s just too convenient.

We often undertake risks to achieve a benefit.  Driving a car is one example.  The more you drive, the greater your risk of injury or death.   Most of us decide the benefits of using a car outweigh the risks.  We go ahead and drive, but reduce the risks as much as we can.  We use safety equipment and drive cautiously.

I think the same approach can be used here. 

If you can live without a cell phone, great.  If not, follow the advice above to reduce your exposure while the science is being sorted out.

Reference:

Agarwal et al.  Effect of cell phone usage on semen analysis in men attending infertility clinic: An observational study.  Fertil Steril 2008 Jan; 89:124

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Here’s a concept for you to consider.

Our experience of the world isn’t what’s out there; it’s what we perceive to be out there.  That means our reality can be quite arbitrary because we sense the outside world through filters.  These filters exist beneath our conscious mind.  Most people aren’t even aware they’re there.  Yet they determine just what we perceive and therefore deterimine our reality.

We need these filters – we couldn’t possibly keep track of all the information coming in otherwise.

For example, if I asked you what your right foot feels like right now, you could tell me.  It feels warm or cool or you shoe’s too tight or it’s comfortable or whatever.  The point is you could immediately tell me.  Yet a moment before I asked, you weren’t aware of your foot.

How did that happen?  What changed?  Is there a little switch in your brain that turned on the nerves to your foot when I asked the question so you could answer it?

No, of course not.  The nerves in your foot, and everywhere else, send a constant stream of information to your brain.  That information gets filtered out at a pre-conscious level unless you need it – I ask a question or you step on a nail.

The same thing goes on with all your other senses and perceptions.  There’s  a flood of information coming in.  Only a small bit that the filters pass along reaches conscious awareness.

This works at a higher level of functioning as well.  This filtering is why, for example, you buy a certain make and model of a car and then start to notice all the other cars like it on the road. 

I used to drive a green 1994 Intrepid.  I still notice green Intrepids of that model when I see them. 

The cars like yours were always there – it just didn’t mean anything to you until you had one of them.  Before you bought the car, ones like it were filtered out.  When you bought your car, your filter changed and you began to see them.

As I began, this means your experience of life isn’t as much determined by what’s out there as by what you perceive to be out there.

Here’s something else: your perceptions may well be distorted by your filters. 

A real life example of this is a lunch my brother Chris had with a client in New York.  They had a lousy waiter.  The client was convinced they received such terrible service because he was Jewish.  He saw the waiter as anti-Semitic. 

Chris just thought the waiter was a frustrated aspiring actor not at all into his job as waiter.

Which perception was accurate?  Who knows?  We do know that two men sitting at the same table at the same time with the same external events had different experiences based on their filters.

Also, we can be pretty sure that that lunch wasn’t the first time Chris’s client saw life through the filter of anti-Semitism.  Anti-Semitism exists, but it probably doesn’t exist in as many places as he sees it.  He might be able to improve the quality of his life if he adjusted his filter somewhat.

There’s a very effective form of psychological therapy called cognitive restructuring that does just that.  It’s based on the premise that most emotional distress arises from distorted perceptions and that if you clear up the distortions, the distress goes away.

I’ll teach some cognitive restructuring techniques in future notes.  For now I just want you to realize that these filters exist, that there’s a possibility they might be distorted, and, most importantly, that you can change them.

Dr. Bruce Lipton has a fun exercise at his talks.  He has the audience select a pair of glasses with either green or red lenses.  Then he shows a slide.  Depending on which color glasses the audience member is wearing, they see either a friendly cottage and the word “love” or a scary haunted house and the word “fear”. 

What they see depends on which set of filters they use.  When they change filters, they change their experience.

Most of us develop our filters haphazardly as we go through life.  We pick them up from family, the media, early experiences and any number of other sources.  We never examine them for accuracy or usefulness. 

Now you’re different.  You know they exist.  That’s the first step to taking control of them and using them to give you the life you desire and deserve.

 

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Are we a slave of our genes?

That is, do genes determine everything?

We all know that some things – like the color of our eyes – are determined by our genes.  Is everything determined by our genes?

The answer to this question has huge implications.  Are kindness, violence, intelligence, wit, stupidity and all other human traits the pure results of genetic inheritance?  If so, is gene manipulation the only way to change things?

The “nature vs. nurture” debate has gone on for a long time. Is it the genes or the environment?  For a while, it looked like genes were the answer – the explosion of knowledge about genes tilted the balance toward a deterministic view.  That is: “It’s in your genes.”

Some factors are very strongly influenced by genes.  Most of the time, the genes we inherit merely indicate a tendency toward a certain state.  What we do and our environment determines the actual outcome.

Science has unraveled a bit of the puzzle of how this works.  There has been too much emphasis on genetic determinism and not enough on environmental influences.  The new science called epigenetics changes that. 

The Greek word “epi” means upon.  As a prefix here, epi- means on or above genetics.  Epigenetics studies what really controls genes.

You have probably heard of the Human Genome Project – the effort to map out all the genes in human DNA.  The effort was a great success. 

What you may not have heard is that the DNA mappers didn’t find nearly as many genes as they predicted.  This shocked the research community – accepted genetic dogma was completely wrong!

Previous thinking held that one gene produced one protein and that additional genes were required for regulation.  The genome project found less than 80% of the genes that would be required if this was the way things work.

It turned out that humans have only a few thousand more genes than primitive worms and about the same number as rodents.  Obviously, DNA alone doesn’t explain the vastly greater complexity of human beings.  Epigenetics wants to find out what does. The initial research is exciting. 

The genetic material, the actual DNA, resides in the chromosomes of the cells.  These chromosomes are composed of the DNA covered by layers of protein material.

Those proteins surrounding the DNA turn out to be critical.  These are regulatory proteins – whether or not and to what extent a gene is expressed depends on them.  The regulatory proteins in turn respond to environment.

In an amazing experiment, researchers took two groups of mice with an identical abnormal gene.  This gene causes mice born with it to have yellow fur instead of the normal brown fur and overeat to the point of obesity.  The scientists gave one group a standard mouse diet.  The other group had the same diet with added supplements. The scientists then waited to see what happened to the offspring of the two groups. The results were dramatic.

The offspring of the mice given the supplements grew up with brown fur and of normal weight!  In other words, their genes did not determine their destiny.  The effect of a gene that definitely determined an outcome could be overridden by environmental factors – in this case diet of the mother. (1)

Some researchers suggest that the influence of the regulatory factors can cause one gene to produce over 2,000 different proteins. (2)  The environment plays a definite role in the actions of the regulatory genes.

What does all this mean to you?  Can you use this information?

Well, first, this is both liberating and sobering.  Liberating because it means our genes don’t determine our life.  Sobering because now we have to accept responsibility for our own life.  Our choices affect our internal state and hence which genes get expressed in what way.

The influence of regulatory genes is probably part of why a healthy lifestyle works as well as it does.

In future notes I’ll keep you informed about developments in this area and what specifically you can do to take advantage of current research.

One example is the now well known fact that women who supplement with 400mcg of folic acid a day prior to conception and through pregnancy are less than half as likely to give birth to a child with the devastating birth defect of spinal bifida. 

I try not to rage too much against “the system” but I can’t help but respond with anger and disgust every time I recall that the FDA prohibited supplement manufacturers from promoting this fact for years after the science was proven.  I don’t want to think about how much suffering and heart ache could have been prevented if clear thinking had prevailed over bureaucracy.

I think it’s reasonable to give people current information and let them make their own decisions.  That’s what I try to do for you in my writing.

1) Waterland and Jirtle.  Transposable elements: Targets for early    nutritional effects on epigenetic gene regulation. 
Molecular and Cell Biology (2003). 23(15):5293-5300

2) Bray. Molecular Prodigality
Science (2003). 299:1189-1190.
 

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