Category: Health

Rock-a-Bye

 

Ahhh, wundaful west and wewaxation, as Elmer Fudd might have said, referring to wonderful rest and relaxation. As the weather warms, there can be few finer ways to gain satisfying rest and relaxation than lying in a hammock. Scientists have not studied a great deal the quality of sleep we get while in a hammock, but what little they have gleaned is that the rocking motion of a hammock along with the lack of pressure points on the sleeper’s body promotes deeper, more restful sleep than average.

 

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Ahhh, living the dream! A hammock on Kuata of the Yasawa Group of islands in the Western Division of Fiji. Photo by Isderion.

Hammocks are not sophisticated technology, though there are options available now with some technology such as lights built into them. A hammock in its basic form without a stand, the kind meant to be strung between two trees or posts, is sleep technology going back centuries and invented in the New World. A net of ropes, sometimes with a length of fabric woven in and sometimes using spreader bars at both ends for the ropes, is suspended from two supports like a sling for the sleeper or napper. It is the sling suspension that does away with pressure points. There is not a lot of hard scientific evidence to support the claim, but people with joint problems such as arthritis do often report the lack of pressure points helps them sleep more comfortably. Judge for yourself if and when you have the opportunity to doze off in a hammock.

How is it that after all the years of technological expertise and research spent on improving conventional beds, the simple hammock remains a more comfortable way to rest yet has never seen widespread adoption for every night sleeping except among sailors on old sailing ships or campers staying in the woods? The portability and light weight of hammocks has worked to their advantage for both sailors and campers, but for people in homes that hasn’t mattered as much as permanence and ease of entry and exit for old people and invalids. It is also pretty nigh impossible to engineer a hammock for comfortable long term use by two people at once. In the home, therefore, the hammock has been relegated to the same niche of peculiarity as the bean bag chair, more so really, since the great majority of folks consider hammocks suitable for outdoor lounging only.

What a shame then that the better quality sleep and more comfortable lounging afforded by hammocks is experienced by many only on summer days in their backyard or on vacations to warm resorts. Though a soothing experience, it’s not entirely idyllic. Going to sleep outdoors under the stars makes for a good snooze until the small hours, when it often gets chilly and dewy. For those lucky enough to have a deep, covered porch on their house, the six to eight foot deep kind that is styled more properly a veranda, and is rarely built even on expensive houses anymore since the general adoption of air conditioning, those lucky folks can sling hammocks outdoors under the eaves, which help to keep the dew from settling on them as they snooze happily away, perhaps pulling a light blanket closer around them to ward off the chill before dawn. A comfortable hammock, a book printed on paper, and a tall, cool drink make summer heat bearable, and all three can be a respite from the technological world we inhabit now.
— Techly

 

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The Pause That Refreshes

 

Editor’s note: There was no post on this website last Friday, April 27, because it is healthy to take a break and go fishing once in a while.

 

“The pause that refreshes” was a slogan coined in 1929 by Coca-Cola marketers, and nearly a century later it remains one of the most memorable advertising slogans for Coke, or for any other product. It was also in the 1920s that Henry Ford instituted a new policy at his automobile manufacturing plant to shorten workers’ shifts to eight hours and their work week to 40 hours, a model that soon became the standard throughout American industry. In 1938, the federal government established with the Fair Labor Standards Act a minimum wage and rules for most workers to receive time and a half payment for hours worked over 40 in a week.


Niels Frederik Schiøttz-Jensen An afternoon's rest
An Afternoon’s Rest, an 1885 painting by Niels Frederik Schiøttz-Jensen (1855-1941).

It’s still up to the states to regulate breaks and lunch time off for workers, and many do so in a minimal way, if at all. It may come as a surprise to some workers that their breaks often come solely at the discretion of their employer or, if they are with a union, because breaks are written into the contract between the union and management. Even bathroom breaks can be a source of contention between labor and management. It is a wonder then to consider how much conditions for workers have generally improved since the early years of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when 12 and 16 hour days were not uncommon and workers’ welfare and safety were entirely their own lookout.

What changed things was when workers started to organize and bargain collectively in the late nineteenth century. It is a misconception to think the worker holiday of May Day started in communist countries, because it actually began in the United States, and has come to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago, Illinois, in May of 1886 when workers on strike and demonstrating for an eight hour workday ended up in deadly confrontations with the police over the course of two days. Unionization continued wringing concessions from management through the first half of the twentieth century, and from 1945 to 1975 the percentage of the non-farm workforce belonging to a union peaked at over 30 percent. In the years since, union membership has declined to less than half that, and the remaining unions, many of them organizations formed for the benefit of state employees such as teachers, are under attack from Republican controlled state governments.

A discussion of ways of coping in life from the 1964 film of The Night of the Iguana, based on the play by Tennessee Williams, directed by John Huston, and starring Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Richard Burton as the defrocked Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon.

None of that changes the need of people concentrating on their work to take a break from it every once in a while throughout the day, and for weeks or more at a time throughout the year. Robots have no need of breaks, but for the time being there are still jobs robots cannot do and those jobs will require the talents of fallible, sometimes frail humans. Enlightened management can choose to view breaks for workers as beneficial to both parties, since a more rested worker can be more productive in the long run than one who is run ragged. Less enlightened management may consider the burnout of workers as the cost of doing business, believing they are easily replaceable cogs in management’s profit making machine. That mindset prevailed over a hundred years ago, before Henry Ford, who was by no means enlightened in all areas, nonetheless saw that his workers and people like them were the buyers of his automobiles, and raised their wages and improved their conditions in the interest of maintaining a kind of partnership with them, rather than treating them wholly as chattel, as cogs in the gears of production.
— Vita

 

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No One Gets Out Alive

 

There’s a wonderful feeling that comes with stepping outside into the cool of the evening after a hot day. There are a lot of little things that go toward making life pleasant if a person has been lucky in their circumstances. Living past middle age into one’s sixties and seventies is a great blessing, and while there may be pain associated with such longevity, most people would accept the trade-off. Asking for more life is almost too much. There are others waiting.

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“Into the Jaws of Death”. United States soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division wade ashore on Omaha Beach, France, on the morning of June 6, 1944. During the initial landings on D-Day, as many as two thirds of the soldiers in some infantry companies became casualties. Photo by Coast Guard Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert F. Sargent.


In the Native American cultures of North America, everything is living and everything eventually returns into the cycle of life when it dies, including people. In Old World cultures, and particularly those of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, almost everything is regarded as dead or inert, and when people die their passing has finality. No one in either culture knows for certain what happens after death, but it seems evident to some people that in a living world where a person is one part joining a river flowing to the sea, there is less terror in death, and more an acceptance of it as a metamorphosis into another part of life.
— Izzy

 

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It’s a Dirty Job

 

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”
— Genesis 3:19, from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scientists working at Rockefeller University in New York City have isolated a soil bacterium which shows the ability to destroy illness causing bacteria that have developed resistance to other antibiotics, notably the type known as Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSA has been the scourge of nursing homes and hospitals for decades now, where opportunistic infections kill patients weakened by age and other illnesses, and treatment with antibiotics has become ineffective. The discovery of the new antibiotic, called Malacidin, is a major development in the fight against bacterial infections and diseases, which has seen little progress over the last 30 years.


Sir Alexander Fleming, Frs, the Discoverer of Penicillin Art.IWMARTLD4217
A 1944 illustration from the British Imperial War Museum depicting Sir Alexander Fleming at work in his laboratory 16 years after his discovery of the first antibiotic, Penicillin, in 1928.

The breakthrough is the result of an alternative approach to the standard tedious practice of testing antibiotics one at a time against various illnesses, and instead used computers to look at vast numbers of soil microbes for certain antibiotic characteristics and then narrowed down the search progressively. To cast this wide net, the Rockefeller University scientists requested the help of volunteers from around the country in submitting soil samples. The scientists particularly requested soil samples from out of the way places, reasoning that they were more likely to find microbes there for which illness causing bacteria like MRSA had not developed resistance. Places like agricultural fields are more apt to have the usual microbial soil life that has already been tested and tried because it has been in the human food chain for generations.

All of this serves as a reminder that the humble soil beneath our feet is the start and the end of everything. Food, disease and the medicine to fight disease, the foundations of our dwellings, all of it starts and cycles through the soil. Taking care of the soil is taking care of ourselves. Showing no concern for the long term health of the soil and the life inhabiting it by dumping salt producing fertilizers on it year after year in a short term effort to boost crop yields ultimately destroys ourselves because such practices destroy the life in the soil. It becomes sterile, reliant solely on a chemical stew of fertilizer that offers no substantive nutrition. It becomes like the Petri dishes that scientists struggled for years to get soil microbes to grow in, largely unsuccessfully. Now scientists are trying new methods that work within healthy soils, and they are achieving greater success. It’s a continuing battle against newly resistant bacterial strains, but without a reservoir of healthy soil to draw antibiotic reinforcements from the war would already be lost.
— Izzy

 

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Fahrenheit 161

 

There are several time and temperature combinations for pasteurizing milk, but one of the most common involves heating it to 161 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds, known as High Temperature Short Time (HTST). The milk still needs refrigeration afterward to slow the growth of microorganisms that may remain in it, since pasteurization kills most of them but does not completely eliminate them from the milk. In Europe, milk is most often treated with Ultra High Temperature (UHT) at 275 to 302 degrees Fahrenheit for 4 to 15 seconds, making it aseptic and capable of being stored at room temperature for up to six months. Both processes have grown out of public health measures which have transformed food safety over the past 150 years, a period when such oversight was especially needed as increasing urbanization meant fewer people retained direct connections to the production of their food.

 

Emile Charles Dameron Besuch am Bauernhof
Visit to the Farm, painting by Emile Charles Dameron (1848-1908).

The body temperature of a cow is 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit. That is well below the 145 degrees Fahrenheit which is the absolute minimum for any kind of effective pasteurization. Drinking raw milk can be safe for only a short time before any pathogens present in it start to proliferate. Calves have understood this for millennia, which is why they have never bothered with any storage measures. They drink mama’s milk straight from her udder, and that’s been good enough for them. Things are different and more complicated with humans, as they always are. To begin with, it’s strange for one species to be drinking the milk of another at all. Be that as it may, people have decided they enjoy drinking cow’s milk, and apparently have done so for millennia, though not as long as the calves the milk was meant to succor.

In the ensuing thousands of years, and especially in the past 150, people have moved off farms and into cities in such great numbers that the majority of them now do not come any closer to cows than a hundred yards or more on a drive through the countryside. This means they have little idea of the conditions those cows live under and are milked under, and also rarely have the opportunity to drink that milk as it was meant to be drunk, at 101.5 degrees Fahrenheit within seconds of milking. So to get around all that we cook the milk. Raw food can be a great, healthy addition to anyone’s diet, but for the sake of safety we cook a lot of our food, and particularly food we haven’t grown or raised ourselves and aren’t prepared to consume immediately. Cooked food must be an acquired taste, because obviously in nature food is seldom cooked. Our ancestors must have discovered good reasons to cook food, probably through much trial and error involving unfortunate intestinal distress or even death. Louis Pasteur observed under the microscope the reasons for our ancestors’ common sense use of fire to cook food. Cooking food may not be the most natural thing, but it’s better than guessing and throwing the dice. Fire is good.
— Techly

A scene from Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Young Frankenstein, with Peter Boyle as The Monster, and Gene Hackman as Blindman.

 

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The Gut Puncher

 

Norovirus, the most common cause of gastroenteritis, also known more inexactly as stomach flu, is making an unwelcome visit to the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Considering how norovirus thrives in crowded conditions, its appearance in Pyeongchang before the Games even began is a nightmare for organizers, as well as for the poor unfortunates who come down with the illness. One of the names it has become rather unfairly known by is “cruise ship virus”, as if the illness were more prevalent on cruise ships than anywhere else. Norovirus actually afflicts cruise ship passengers no more or less than people existing in similarly crowded conditions elsewhere, but when it strikes on a cruise ship the outbreak attracts notoriety because of reporting requirements in the industry and because changes in the itinerary of cruise ships to offload sick passengers easily become common knowledge.

Rembrandt Saskia in Bed
A Woman Lying Awake in Bed, circa 1635-1640 drawing by Rembrandt (1606-1669).

As much as the cruise ship industry chafes under its unfairly exaggerated association with norovirus, the citizens of Norwalk, Ohio, might have been perturbed that for the last third of the twentieth century their small city not far from Cleveland lent its name to the virus until the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) changed it officially from Norwalk virus to norovirus. An outbreak of the virus at a Norwalk elementary school in 1968 led to the first scientific isolation and identification of it under the microscope, though it had been known to exist from similar outbreaks around the world since at least the 1920s. The history of the virus before then is unknown, which could be due to any number of factors, including the similarity of some of the symptoms to influenza and the low risk of life-threatening complications compared to those brought on by the influenza virus, leading to it not receiving as much notice over the years as influenza, or getting lumped together with it. It is also possible it wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that the virus mutated to become the causative agent of misery we recognize it for today, drawing our attention, our fear and loathing, and our research efforts toward a vaccine to limit the suffering.
— Vita

 

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Can This Be Flu?

 

Since gastroenteritis is commonly known as stomach flu, and since this is influenza season, people can mistake one illness for the other or believe they are different names for the same illness. They are not. Gastroenteritis is technically not influenza, though it is most often caused by a virus and usually presents with some of the same symptoms in the early stages – headache, body aches, chills, and fever. It is in the lack of respiratory distress symptoms that the two illnesses diverge, that and the continued nausea and diarrhea brought on by gastroenteritis. Nausea may subside to a low level, and vomiting may cease after the first bouts simply because of a lack of contents to regurgitate as the sufferer no longer desires solid food. Diarrhea continues, however, since the sufferer’s inflamed intestines do not absorb liquids as they should.

Influenza Pandemic Masked Typist
Typist wearing mask, New York City, October 16, 1918, during the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic. Wearing a mask would have helped stave off the influenza virus, which is most often inhaled, but done little to protect the wearer from a gastroenteritis virus, which is ingested.

That last part is the most important in understanding how to treat gastroenteritis. Fluid intake becomes even more important than in treating a case of true influenza because while the overall risk of life-threatening complications is less, the risk of life-threatening dehydration is greater. As with any illness affecting them, pregnant women need to carefully monitor their symptoms as well as take special care using medications. In poor areas of the world, where access to clean water may be limited, dehydration is the biggest killer in cases of gastroenteritis. In wealthier areas, even though a sufferer got the infection by ingestion of contaminated food or water, access to cleaner supplies of both after the illness develops makes chances for recovery much greater. The important things to remember in getting well from a bout with this illness which, dreadful as it feels at the time, are that the risks of developing something more serious are lower than with the actual flu virus, and that dehydration needs to be remedied not just by drinking water but by replenishing salts, sugars, and electrolytes in the right combination.
— Ed.

 

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A Spoonful of Honey

 

In 1964 when the Walt Disney Studio made Mary Poppins, a spoonful of sugar may have helped the medicine go down in the most delightful way, but today honey has proven healthier and more effective in treating the symptoms of the common cold. Cough drops made with honey for soothing the throat, and mint or eucalyptus to clear sinuses are popular, as are herbal teas with a spoonful of honey added. Unlike sugar then, honey is a soothing remedy as well as a sweetener.

Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling in 1954.

Vitamin C is for many people another component of fighting off the effects of a cold, despite evidence it has no specific role in the fight. Being otherwise healthy and well nourished, a person with a cold has no need of supplementing their diet with extra vitamin C. Linus Pauling, an American who won two Nobel prizes in the mid twentieth century, the first for chemistry and the second for peace, exerted tremendous influence from the 1960s until his death in 1994 in asserting the value of vitamin C in alleviating cold symptoms or preventing the onset of a cold altogether. Pauling’s influence was so great that he not only boosted sales of vitamin C supplements, but inadvertently set the ball rolling for the entire nutritional supplement industry, resulting in the enormous sales displays at today’s grocery stores and drug stores.

Considering the variety of foods now available year round to consumers in wealthier countries, it’s questionable whether most nutritional supplements are necessary. Many people will nonetheless take a multi-vitamin every day on the grounds that it can’t hurt, as insurance. In addition to the outsized influence wielded by Linus Pauling, it could be that the idea of combating a cold with vitamin C is a holdover from the time when people in colder countries did not have ready access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter cold and flu season. Poorer people in particular would have seen their health deteriorate in the winter due to poor nutrition and a consequently weakened immune system.

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A store vitamin supplement sales display. Photo by Raysonho.

Canja de galinha
A bowl of Canja de galinha, or Portuguese chicken soup. Photo by Flickr user Sebástian Freire.

At such a time, the gift of an orange in a sick person’s Christmas stocking would have been most welcome. As long as the difficulties of transport to the north could be overcome, oranges, one of the few fruits available fresh after November, could supplement diets starved for fresh fruit all winter, not just at Christmas. Oranges are higher in vitamin C than other fruits commonly available in temperate countries, and therefore people might naturally jump to the conclusion that it was the lack of vitamin C, rather than poor nutrition generally, that contributed to susceptibility to colds.

An old remedy for cold symptoms that science has found real value in is chicken soup, due to its chemistry and the healthy effects on the respiratory system of steaming liquid both before and after ingestion. Doctors say liquids in all forms except those containing caffeine or alcohol are a good remedy for a cold. Herbal tea, chicken soup, hot chocolate, all are good. An aspirin or other pain reliever now and then for an adult is okay, but not for infants and toddlers, and aspirin not at all for children under 16. Honey also is not recommended for infants. Meanwhile, all the vitamin supplements in the world, vitamin C included, won’t help unless poor nutrition was a problem before the cold came on. The best way to avoid coming down with a cold in the first place? Good hygiene and healthy eating, including when a cold settles in despite everything. Feed a cold, and feed a fever. Starving never helped anyone overcome anything, unless they called the starving fasting, but then that’s a whole other story.
― Izzy

 

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