On Compassion

Dov Michaeli

Posted 5/12/13 on The Doctor Weighs In

For Joel Klepper, who can do it all

My friend’s son, Joel Klepper, a student at the University of Oregon, sent his father a summary of a talk by the Dalai Lama at the university. I am not going to quote the whole report, brilliant as it is. But a few choice paragraphs illuminate the thought-provoking talk of this awe-inspiring religious leader. Here is the Dalai Lama on religion and compassion:

“He started by pointing out that all of the world’s major religions have compassion and love as their defining message, and pointed to the many people that all of the major religious traditions have produced who have used it as inspiration to devote their lives to compassion and the good of humanity. He was careful to differentiate between religion and religious institutions, saying it was the latter that was susceptible to corruption, and therefore it is the institutions that drive people away, but that generally that people don’t tend to have a problem with most core tenets, but that also as human understanding advances, it is critical that religion adapt itself, and not become mired in tradition or dogma when they clash with reality. Throughout, he was big on practicality and realism”.

The most surprising to me was the broad-mindedness of the leader of Tibetan Buddhism:

Continue reading “On Compassion” →

Second Opinions: How Should You Choose?

Dov Michaeli

Posted 5/9/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

I have frequently been asked to render judgment on another doctor’s diagnosis, or treatment plan. Other times I am asked anxiously: “should I get a second opinion”? The implicit assumption in this sort of questions is that “two heads are better than one.” Or stated more broadly, we put our faith in the “wisdom of the crowd,” whether the “crowd” is made up of two or two-thousand individuals.

I have to admit I’ve had some nagging doubts about this all-encompassing wisdom. For instance, wisdom of the crowd has been amply documented in estimation tasks (“how many people in this crowd? What is your estimate of the completion date of the project?”). The reason this works is that it exploits the benefit of error cancellation; the outlier estimates on either side cancel out each other and we end up with the consensus opinion, that is closest to the truth. But how do you decide when the issue is not quantitative? Think of the virtually unanimous opinion of the White House crowd to go to war in Iraq. Where was the “wisdom” there? More interesting, we could drill deeper and ask why is it that the crowd reached such a wrong decision? Wisdom of the crowd was hailed as a source of near-magical creativity and unparalleled wisdom and forecast accuracy. Some of these attributions have proved to be unfounded. For instance, with respect to creative potential, groups that engage in brainstorming lag hopelessly behind the same number of individuals working alone. The key to benefiting from other minds is to know when to rely on the group and when to walk alone. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had some sort of an algorithm to guide us in making this decision?

Continue reading “Second Opinions: How Should You Choose?” →

You Seem Distracted: The Effects of Loss

Dov Michaeli

Posted 5/2/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

We all know the feeling; we experience something terribly unpleasant, such as loss in of a friend or a family member, betrayal by a spouse or a close friend, significant loss of money. Are your senses as sharp as normal, or are you distracted, having difficulty analyzing situations and making decisions?

You are not alone. Even animals show what on the surface seems to be poor decision-making. Shock an animal with an electric current and it will tend to cower in a corner, trying to avoid not only a repeat of the shock, but any potentially negative stimulus. This kind of behavior is not maladptive. In fact, it is adaptive. How so? Because in a dangerous environment there is no time for the brain to analyze situations and judge their degree of risk. The animal that reacts defensively and fast will survive. The one that lingers to assess the situation is likely to perish.

Continue reading “You Seem Distracted: The Effects of Loss” →

Is Sugar Carcinogenic?

Dov Michaeli

Posted 4/30/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

Last Sunday on his show on CNN, Dr. Sanjay Gupta interviewed pediatrician, Dr. Robert Lustig, who made the assertion that sugar is toxic, and probably carcinogenic. This attention-grabbing statement had earned him a wide following on UTube. But is it true? Let’s examine the evidence.

How is sugar used in the cell?

Every cell in our body needs energy in order to survive and perform its functions. Our biochemistry has evolved over billions of years to extract energy from simple sugars, like glucose and fructose. I mentioned the evolutionary ancient-ness (is this a word?) for a reason. In the beginning (relax, I am not getting into the creation debate) the atmosphere was poor in oxygen. Yet cells had to extract energy from their nutrients. The solution? Extract energy from glucose without the participation of oxygen. This process is called anaerobic glycolysis, and even today, there are anaerobic bacteria that survive solely through glycolysis. This process nets a measly 2 ATP molecules (these are the molecules that store the energy necessary to drive chemical reactions in the cell), and two 3-carbon molecules of pyruvic acid.

Continue reading “Is Sugar Carcinogenic?” →

Vitamin E Supplements May be Hazardous to Bone Health

Dov Michaeli

Posted 4/2/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

Vitamin E is a fat-soluble vitamin that has antioxidant properties. It is present in vegetable oils (safflower, sunflower, corn, soybean), nuts (almonds, peanuts, hazelnuts), sunflower seeds, and green leafy vegetables (spinach, broccoli). A balanced diet provides all the vitamin E you need, but most people take supplements of the vitamin, on the assumption that if a little is good, more is better. Is it really so? Let’s examine the evidence.

Continue reading “Vitamin E Supplements May be Hazardous to Bone Health” →

Exercise, Diabetes, Cancer and Autophagy: A Fascinating Connection

Dov Michaeli

Posted 3/27/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

I can already see the yawn forming: exercise again? we know it; it’s good for you, it makes you feel better because of endorphins, it makes your cardiovascular function better because it strengthens your cardiac muscle and improves your circulatory system, and it may even protect you from cancer. But have you thought about what could be the common denominator to the beneficial effects of exercise? If you did, and came up with a blank, I don’t blame you. Until recently we didn’t have a good answer, but now the outlines of an answer are forming. So here goes.

Continue reading “Exercise, Diabetes, Cancer and Autophagy: A Fascinating Connection” →

The Amazing Journey of the Lowly Aspirin

Dov Michaeli

There are few stories in the annals of medicine that can rival the rise of aspirin from an obscure chemical to the status of something akin to a folk hero (well, at least among medical history buffs). And now it has attained new heights of media fame; every newspaper, news broadcast or blog worth its name has commented on the latest finding of its cancer-protective effect.

Who discovered aspirin?

Like everything else, all paths lead to the ancient Greeks. Hippocrates, who lived in the 4th century B.C.E described a powder made from the bark and leaves of the willow tree to help heal headaches, pains and fevers. And there it lay for 23 centuries, unexplored and forgotten.

Continue reading “The Amazing Journey of the Lowly Aspirin” →

Is It True What They Say About Fructose?

Dov Michaeli

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has been the whipping boy of nutritionists and advocates for several years now. Many ills that afflict us and the globe (global warming?) were attributed to this gooey liquid. So let’s examine the evidence dispassionately, and maybe we can add some light to the heated controversy.

What is fructose?

Fructose is a sugar, a monosaccharide, just like the more familiar glucose. In fact, in most cases they are found together, either as a mixture or as the disaccharide sucrose (table suger), which is made up of equal proportions of glucose and fructose.

Continue reading “Is It True What They Say About Fructose?” →

Exercise and Sleep Quality

Dov Michaeli

Posted 3/11/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

According to a report issued by the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research, 30% to 40% of people in the United States have insomnia within any given year, defined by the National Institutes of Health as ‘‘an experience of inadequate or poor quality sleep’’.

Continue reading “Exercise and Sleep Quality” →

Weekend Athelete: Should You Have Sex Friday Night?

Dov Michaeli

Posted 3/06/12

The Rabbis of the Talmud decreed that having sex on Friday is a Mitzvah (a must do)! But I have a sneaking suspicion they didn’t have athletic performance in mind. On the other hand, for many years, football coaches, Olympic athletes, and even Muhammad Ali, have advocated sexual abstinence the night before an athletic event. Marty Liquori, one the world’s number one-ranked 5,000-meter runner believes that Sex makes you happy, and happy people don’t run a 3:47 mile. Marv Levy, head coach of the Buffalo Bills, insisted that the team be separated from their wives before their appearance in four Super Bowls; a policy that apparently was not successful (four losses out of four Super Bowls).

On the other hand, there are also plenty of anecdotal stories of athletes who claim to have benefited from sex the night before an event. Both U.S. track star David Wottle and Canadian downhill skier Karin Lee Gardner attribute their Olympic gold medals in part to their pre-race preparation.

Continue reading “Weekend Athelete: Should You Have Sex Friday Night?” →

The Myth of Noblesse Oblige

Dov Michaeli

Posted 3/4/12 on the Doctor Weighs In

In this season of hateful rhetoric and screams of “class warfare”, one cannot be blamed for perceiving people on the lower socioeconomic rungs as unprincipled, predatory, entitlements-moochers, and welfare cheats. President Reagan rode into office on the back of the “welfare queen” who, it turned out later, was invented out of whole cloth. But perceptions persist, and in politics perception trumps fact. Some social theorists even invoke Darwinism to describe the social environment of the lower classes as a Hobbsian, dog-eat-dog world. Except that in Darwin’s world dogs don’t eat dogs -they actually cooperate, which makes them extraordinarily successful hunters.

Recently, a raft of studies took a close look at the question of lower vs. upper socioeconomic behavioral patterns. And the results are truly amazing, albeit not surprising.

Continue reading “The Myth of Noblesse Oblige” →

The Science of Interval Training

Dov Michaeli

Posted 2/17/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

In my marathon-running days (I’ve got 13 under my belt) I used to train as I was told: put in the miles. Going out at five in the morning to run my daily allocation of 10-15 miles, with weekends of 20 miles, put me in great cardiorespiratory shape, and wrecked my body. I was constantly battling aches and pains, achilles tendinitis, and the blahs of overtraining. Despite all this dogged effort I was stuck in a frustrating plateau that I just couldn’t improve on. Until I stumbled oninterval training. It came in the form of a short hill, off the trail of my daily run. Just for fun (weird what runners consider fun) I decided to run up the hill (about 300ft) at maximum speed. I did, and was literally doubled over from breathlessness and exhaustion. But I also had a sense of euphoria, elation at the accomplishment. Well, when you hear euphoria, think endorphins (which are the endogenous morphins) and addiction. I kept coming to that hill and regularly increased the number of those short bursts of maximum effort, about a minute in duration each. I felt high. More important, I had a quantum jump in my next marathon time. So what happened?

Continue reading “The Science of Interval Training” →

Obesity is Also in Your Head

Dov Michaeli

Posted 2/14/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

More than 300 million people worldwide are considered obese (BMI >30) and more than a billion people are classified as overweight (BMI 25-30). This is a global epidemic that puts to shame such well-known epidemics as the black plague of the 14th century, which wiped out about a third of the European population. So what does this epidemic wipe out? among other things, your memory. Quite surprising, considering that our attention is riveted by the cardiovascular and renal effects of type 2 diabetes.

New research suggests that consuming between 2,100 and 6,000 calories per day may double the risk of memory loss, or mild cognitive impairment (MCI), among people age 70 and older. The study will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 64th Annual Meeting in New Orleans April 21 to April 28, 2012. MCI is the stage between normal memory loss that comes with aging and early Alzheimer’s disease.

Continue reading “Obesity is Also in Your Head” →

Massage and Your Brain

Dov Michaeli

Posted 2/7/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

For Elizabeth, Super Yogi

In a previous post we described the benefit of massage at the crime scene, so to speak, the site of the muscle injury. The mechanical deformation of tissue causes reduction in local inflammation, increases the biogenesis of mitochondria, and accelerates the remodeling of the injured tissue. But could that account for the emotional experience of massage? How could all these local effects cause the sense of relaxation and general well-being? In short: they don’t.

Continue reading “Massage and Your Brain” →

Massage Benefits: The Scientific Evidence

By Dov Michaeli

Posted 1/6/12 on The Doctor Weighs In

Massage therapy feels good, everybody loves it. But is it also good for your health? Intuitively we “know” that it is “good for you,” but where is the objective evidence?

The experiment

For the weekend warriors, which is most of us, the feeling is familiar. You run 10 miles, or do one hundred pushups; you feel great, and disgustingly self-rightous. But then comes the morning-after, and it’s payback time: your muscles are sore, you are waddling like a duck, and you feel generally stupid for overdoing it. First thing you do is reach for the ibuprofen or aleve, or some other NSAID (non-steroidal anti inflammatory drug). Don’t! There is a better way to deal with it.

Continue reading “Massage Benefits: The Scientific Evidence” →

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this: