Posts Tagged ‘health’

I’m trained in first aid. I have a certificate to prove it and everything. There is a good chance you do too. If you haven’t, some people at your work will do – it’s a legal requirement.

I wonder what the evidence for its efficacy though.

Think about how much you remember from your first aid course. Probably very little. Indeed, in my experience speaking to first aid reps at various companies, they say they can remember very little from their course.

Even if they do remember something, those that do usually admit that when they were actually called on to deal with an accident, they were in such a panic that even though knowledge blanked from their mind. Given what we know about psychology, that is no surprise – unless you do this every day, you’re going to struggle with the pressure.

The one thing people do tend to remember is CPR, presumably because having to kiss a dummy seems rather strange and therefore sticks in the mind. This is unfortunate as CPR isn’t a particularly useful piece of first aid because the survival rates are so low, as I’ll go into detail about.

CPR is bad. If you need to give CPR, it means someone’s heart has stopped, so they’re probably going to die. In fact, as my first aid instructor explained, all you’re doing is keeping the meat warm until the paramedics get there. You probably won’t manage it, and even if you do, they will probably die in hospital as a result anyway. Survival rates from by standers giving CPR is 5%; you have a 1 in 20 chance of making it.

That isn’t because people aren’t trained to do CPR, it’s because when someone’s heart has stopped, they’re fucked. Even if you are in a hospital at the time, and a doctor is watching you, the odds are against you, and if a doctor isn’t watching, the unfavourable odds drop to 1 in 50.

My point isn’t that first aid isn’t useful – I think it is. But I think we need to teach it in a far more effective way. A way in which people come away with more than only one piece of knowledge, that probably won’t save anyone’s life anyway.

Ideally, we would teach it in schools so that everybody knows it too. Then hopefully at least one person will be calm enough to remember what they learned.

Recently, Bill Gates delivered the 2013 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, in which he discussed the struggle to eradicate polio from the world.

The good news is, that it is now only endemic in three countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

This in itself is no small achievement – polio is a disease that takes weeks to diagnose, which means the percentage of the population you need to immunise is higher, in this case 95%.

Take a country like India, with over a billion people – 75,000 new babies are born every day, and each of them requires several rounds of immunisation. That means that you need 200,000 vaccines per day, that need to be taken to rural communities, while being refrigerated, often that need to be carried for miles on foot by health workers. No wonder it took a staggering 2,000,000 people working on the programme – but they did it!

Unfortunately, you can’t stop fighting it until it’s eradicated, but with only three countries to go, the plan is to read that milestone by 2018. But more than being about one single disease, Gates points out…

Polio eradication is a proving ground, a test. It will reveal what human beings are capable of, and suggest how ambitious we can be about the future.

Together, we can achieve great things.

Having really enjoyed Rob Lyon’s Skeptics talk on his book Panic on a Plate, I decided it would be a great topic to give a talk on at Toastmasters. Turns out it worked quite well, and I was lucky enough to pick up my second Best Speaker ribbon.

I’m a big fan of the Gates Foundation, they do a lot of fantastic research and are working to wipe out a lot of diseases that are prevalent in the third world, such as malaria. Plus, it was co-founded by Bill Gates, who I am a big admirer of.

However, one thing that has always bugged me is their pushing of woo in one particular area – using circumcision to prevent the transmission of HIV. They even have a page about it on their website.

It doesn’t work though. Or, at least, we should say that there is insufficient evidence to suggest that it does work. This was the finding of a meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Pooled analyses of available observational studies of MSM revealed insufficient evidence that male circumcision protects against HIV infection or other STIs.

Ok, fine, you could argue, but there are some studies that suggest otherwise. IE, if you cherry pick your studies and ignore the meta-analysis, you can get the result you want. But interestingly, there was a study in 2009 by Maria J Wawer, and here is what they concluded.

Circumcision of HIV-infected men did not reduce HIV transmission to female partners over 24 months; longer-term effects could not be assessed. Condom use after male circumcision is essential for HIV prevention.

Why is this study so key to the debate? Because of its funder – the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Their own study concluded that circumcision does not stop HIV. So why are they still pushing it?

Recently, I gave a speech on drug legislation, pointing out that tobacco is a far more dangerous drug than ecstasy is. Which is true. To add a bit of colour to my speech, I included in it the use of a bottle of alcohol and a pack of cigarettes as props.

Obviously, being a non-smoker I didn’t have any cigarettes and Ryan having disappeared for the day, I had to resort to going out and buying some. This wasn’t a big deal, they were only £3.95, but it then put forward an interesting question – what to do with the pack of cigarettes after I had used them.

My first instinct would just be to give them to a friend who smoked, so they wouldn’t go to waste. But then, maybe they should go to waste. I had just given a talk on how dangerous cigarettes were after all, and so it seemed that the best thing to do would just be to throw the pack of cigarettes away so that nobody could smoke them.

This seems to undermine freedom of choice though. I don’t want to restrict what people can and cannot do. As both a libertarian and a rationalist, the ideal world for me is one where everything is allowed but people make sensible decisions – so doing heroin would be legal, but nobody would do it because everyone makes rational decisions.

But then, by throwing them away, I wouldn’t be preventing people from smoking. I just wouldn’t be supporting it, which is all I can really do.

In the end, though, I decided to give them to a friend. The decision came down to this – the cigarette company already has my £3.95 from the sale. Now if I throw them anyway, my friends are unlikely to smoke any less, so they’ll just go out and buy some as normal and the cigarette company has got £7.90 out of us. But by giving them away, it avoids the need for them to buy cigarettes and so effectively the tobacco industry hasn’t got any money out of me. This seemed the most satisfying solution.

Recently, I undertook my first session of EMDR.

It’s a relatively new form of therapy (albeit, older than Elina), which in it’s full title is named “Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing” originally developed to help trauma victims and has since expanded into other areas.

So far, I’m quite torn about it. On one hand, EMDR is now approved and recommended by The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and has shown to be affective in dozens of randomised controlled trials.

On the other hand, it really, really sounds like Dianetics.

For those not familiar with it, Dianetics is a concept developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard which divided the mind into two parts – one of which is the reactive mind that stores traumatic memories, and anything associated with those memories, related or not.

This is why Scientologists are very quite around people who have been knocked out – because anything they say will be linked to the memory of being knocked out in the reactive mind. These are stored as negative engrams and the only way to get rid of them is to pay for Audit Counseling.

I’m not a subscriber to Dianetics, and even though EMDR has a lot of key differences (for example, the traumatic memories don’t just pop out of existence in a second), it’s similarities have thrown me somewhat, despite all the evidence to show EMDR genuinely does work. It’s like some kind of reverse-placebo affect, is there a term for that?

Hey, remember ten years ago when everyone smoked in pubs and it was rubbish?

I just thought I would remind us all because it’s a good example of a paradigm shift. A decade ago most of us thought that it was acceptable to smoke on confined spaces, now most of us think that it isn’t OK because the evidence shows that passive smoking does genuinely kill people^[1].

Actually, it feels, at least to me, like a hole different world now. It’s not just that I’ve changed my opinion, but society itself has now fundamentally shifted its opinion to the point where I simply can’t imagine going back to the dark ages where everything smelt of smoke and your pint was served with a free topping of lung cancer.

Last week, one of my friends posted on Facebook about the depression she had been suffering from. I found it rather inspiring and so have been meaning to post an update on my own mental health issues with anxiety. Her command of the English language allowed her to put it very eloquently. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for me, so here is a rambling mess about the whole situation.

Of course, now you’re thinking, “Chris, surely you can’t have any problems – you’re my hero, the person I idolised most in the world, the closest thing we have to a human archetype.” You’re right of course, but clearly in order to achieve that I need to possess some characteristic that makes me more relatable so that the rest of you mere mortals can identify to me. It was a choice between this, or changing my name to Chris Every-Man ;).

I’ve just taken my first beta blocker. It’s a new type of medication I’m trying, after SSRIs proved to be ineffective for me. I’m now experiencing quite a wide range of side effects. None of which are listed in the list of side effects in the booklet. They’re almost certainly not caused by the medication. But that’s one of the odd things about the placebo effect, it has its good side and its bad side.

Actually, as I continue to work through my issues, I often feel like I’m learning loads about what anxiety is, and nothing about how to control it!

I also sometimes feel like the anxiety itself is also undervalued. For example, any therapist you speak to will describe it as difficulties and feeling uncomfortable. I don’t classify anxiety attacks as uncomfortable, I classify them as painful. In the same way, I would if I cut myself – it, in itself, is what I want to avoid, not just the consequences I am worrying about that are causing the anxiety in the first place.

Still, that’s just my 2p, and that’s worth a lot less than when I was a kid and you were 20% of the way to a Fredo with that. The moral of the story, it does very gradually get better. Here is some anecdotal evidence (you know, the singular form of data). So, as Professor Farnsworth would say, “keep your chin up.”

“OW! My chin!”

Having been quite impressed by the Leeds Salon event I attended, and I decided to head down to their next one – Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder at which Rob Lyons made the case that we all need to chill out about what we’re eating before being cross-examined by a panel of experts.

The key points in Rob’s talk were that people now eat a more varied, nutritious diet than ever before. One hundred years ago people didn’t have freezers, microwaves or even cookers, so the idea that until recently everyone had eaten warm home cooked meals is nonsense.

Supermarkets have only come round in the past 50 years, and before then you simply couldn’t get the variety you can access now. Let alone a thousand years ago, or ten thousand years ago as the species was evolving (not that it’s stopped). Only as far back as 1914, people simply couldn’t afford the fuel to run their cookers, so would often only cook hot food once a week for Sunday lunch. People would be eating junk food all the time – they would often by down the fish and chip shop three or four times a week.

In 1930, food made up 30% of your household budget, it now accounts for 10%. It was only in the 1970’s that freezers became affordable to everyone. In short, food today is cheaper, easier to store and easier to cook than ever before. The result is that people benefit from a more varied, more nutritious diet than ever before. Even if you’re eating takeaway every night, compared to what people were eating a hundred years ago, you’re doing pretty well.

While the panel didn’t buy into the talk wholesale, there was a lot more agreement than I expected. Generally, the consensus was that Rob was speaking a lot of sense – but there still was a healthier way to live, if only by ensuring you have different coloured foods on your plate each night.

Alcohol is an interesting creature. As Gijsbert points out, it makes us feel really ill every Saturday morning and yet we all go out and drink it again next Friday night. That is in large part due to how addictive alcohol is, and leads it to be classified as a more dangerous drug than cannabis, LSD, ecstasy and many others.

Some groups are so afraid that their members will go off the rails if they drink the Devil’s Nectar that they are banned completely. Some groups are even so intolerant that they refuse to enter buildings which serve alcohol, even if they aren’t participating themselves.

A few months ago, I started to wonder if my life would actually be better without alcohol. I don’t really get hangovers because I always take a lot of time to sober up before going to bed, but that none the less brings its own problems with sleep deprivation on school nights.

I hadn’t wondered enough to actually give it a go, but as a result of recent events I ended up giving up alcohol as a side effect of some health issues. I also have up caffeine and have made a few other small changes to my diet and lifestyle as well.

However, having been trying all this for a few months now, it turns out that it isn’t any better.

Actually, your life is much better with alcohol. Alcohol is something which can bring real, measurable benefit to our lives. Of course, if you abuse it there are consequences, much like chocolate, credit cards, gambling, vitamins and basically everything in life ever. But enjoyed responsibly, drinking alcohol is really a pleasurable experience.

So learn from my experience. Alcohol is great and there is little to be gained from this clean living nonsense. As with everything else in life, the best path is responsible usage.