Follow These 7 Tips to A Healthier Life
By Geoff Tan* | my paper | Tuesday, Apr 17, 2012
This article is inspired by a slide presentation - entitled The Art Of Being Well - by medical doctor, writer and TV personality Drauzio Varella, who recommends seven things that we must do if we do not want to fall ill.
I'll share with you his headers and offer my take on what these seven mean to me.
If you don't want to fall ill, speak your feelings.
There's nothing like letting out all your pent-up feelings from deep within. Bottling them up will just raise your stress levels and cause all forms of internal imbalances, possibly resulting in ulcers, gastritis, backaches and, sometimes, even cancer.
If you don't want to be ill, make decisions.
When you are undecided about things, anxiety and doubt creep in. This could result in unnecessary trauma, worries and - many a time - relationship problems. More often than not, procrastination will result in less-than-healthy outcomes.
If you don't want to be ill, find solutions.
Be positive and actively look for answers. Nip a small matter in the bud so that it will not have a chance to grow into an unmanageable animal.
If you don't want to be ill, don't live by appearances.
I am not referring to what we wear physically, but to any pseudo image we adopt that is far from our true selves. Being positive and true to oneself is the way to go. As for the rest, in Dr Varella's words, "their destiny is the pharmacy, the hospital and pain".
If you don't want to be ill, accept.
Only by accepting ourselves can we boost self-esteem and eradicate all forms of negativity, such as jealousy, arrogance and envy. There is so much to benefit from by just being one with ourselves.
If you don't want to be ill, trust.
Without trust, there can be no true friendships. Your relationships will tend to be shallow and peripheral, and you would always be on your guard, your defences always up - but your resistance to ailments can only go down.
If you don't want to be ill, do not live life sad.
Someone once said: "Good humour saves us from the hands of the doctor." How true this is. Take every opportunity to joke, laugh and be happy. These traits are highly contagious and, the more we spread these positive "viruses", the more folk around us cannot help but contract good health and peace of mind as well.
Live your life with some or all of the above in mind and you can expect to be rewarded with a positive spirit, a healthy mind, a vibrant aura and a holistic healthy disposition.
*The writer is a senior vice-president of Singapore Press Holdings' marketing division.
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
A monster lurks within every soul
A monster lurks within every soul
The question isn't why someone snaps but how the rest of us refrain from our darkest urges.
It's always interesting to read the quotations of people who knew a mass murderer before he killed. They usually express complete bafflement that a person who seemed so kind and normal could do something so horrific.
Friends of Robert Bales, who is accused of massacring 16 Afghan civilians, have expressed similar thoughts.
Friends and teachers describe him as caring, gregarious and self-confident before -- in the vague metaphor of common usage -- he apparently "snapped." As one childhood friend told the New York Times: "That's not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him."
Any of us would be shocked if someone we knew and admired killed children. But these days it's especially hard to think through these situations because of the worldview that prevails in our culture. According to this view, most people are naturally good, because nature is good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people (like Hitler or Idi Amin) who are fundamentally warped and evil. This worldview gives us an easy conscience, because we don't have to contemplate the evil in ourselves. But when somebody who seems mostly good does something completely awful, we're rendered mute or confused. But of course it happens all the time. That's because even people who contain reservoirs of compassion and neighborliness also possess a latent potential to commit murder.
David Buss of the University of Texas asked his students if they had ever thought seriously about killing someone, and if so, to write out their homicidal fantasies in an essay. He was astonished to find that 91 percent of the men and 84 percent of the women had detailed, vivid homicidal fantasies. He was even more astonished to learn how many steps some of his students had taken toward carrying them out.
One woman invited an abusive ex-boyfriend to dinner with thoughts of stabbing him in the chest. A young man in a fit of road rage pulled a baseball bat out of his trunk and would have pummeled his opponent if he hadn't run away. Another young man planned the progression of his murder -- crushing a former friend's fingers, puncturing his lungs, then killing him.
These thoughts do not arise from playing violent video games, Buss argues. They occur because we are descended from creatures who killed to thrive and survive. We're natural-born killers and the real question is not what makes people kill but what prevents them from doing so. People who murder often live in situations that weaken sympathy and restraint. People who commit massacres, for example, often live with what the researchers call "forward panic." After having endured a long period of fear, they find their enemies in a moment of vulnerability. Their fear turns to rage, and, as Steven Pinker writes in "The Better Angels of Our Nature," they "explode in a savage frenzy."
Serial killers are often charming, but have a high opinion of themselves that is not shared by the wider world. They are often extremely conscious of class and status, and they develop venomous feelings toward people who do not pay them sufficient respect. In centuries past, most people would have been less shocked by the homicidal eruptions of formerly good men. That's because people in those centuries grew up with a worldview that put sinfulness at the center of the human personality.
John Calvin believed that babies come out depraved (he was sort of right; the most violent stage of life is age 2). G.K. Chesterton wrote that the doctrine of original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved. This worldview held that people are a problem to themselves. The inner world is a battlefield between light and dark, and life is a struggle against the destructive forces inside. The worst thing you can do is, in a fit of pride, to imagine that your insecurity comes from outside and to try to resolve it yourself. If you try to "fix" the other people who you think are responsible for your inner turmoil, you'll end up trying to kill them, or maybe whole races of them. This earlier worldview was both darker and brighter than the one prevailing today. It held, as C.S. Lewis put it, that there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.
According to this older worldview, Robert Bales, like all of us, is a mixture of virtue and depravity. His job is to struggle daily to strengthen the good and resist the evil, policing small transgressions to prevent larger ones.
If he didn't do that, and if he was swept up in a whirlwind, then even a formerly good man is capable of monstrous acts that shock the soul and sear the brain.
-------
David Brooks' column is distributed by the New York Times News Service
Friends and teachers describe him as caring, gregarious and self-confident before -- in the vague metaphor of common usage -- he apparently "snapped." As one childhood friend told the New York Times: "That's not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him."
Any of us would be shocked if someone we knew and admired killed children. But these days it's especially hard to think through these situations because of the worldview that prevails in our culture. According to this view, most people are naturally good, because nature is good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people (like Hitler or Idi Amin) who are fundamentally warped and evil. This worldview gives us an easy conscience, because we don't have to contemplate the evil in ourselves. But when somebody who seems mostly good does something completely awful, we're rendered mute or confused. But of course it happens all the time. That's because even people who contain reservoirs of compassion and neighborliness also possess a latent potential to commit murder.
David Buss of the University of Texas asked his students if they had ever thought seriously about killing someone, and if so, to write out their homicidal fantasies in an essay. He was astonished to find that 91 percent of the men and 84 percent of the women had detailed, vivid homicidal fantasies. He was even more astonished to learn how many steps some of his students had taken toward carrying them out.
One woman invited an abusive ex-boyfriend to dinner with thoughts of stabbing him in the chest. A young man in a fit of road rage pulled a baseball bat out of his trunk and would have pummeled his opponent if he hadn't run away. Another young man planned the progression of his murder -- crushing a former friend's fingers, puncturing his lungs, then killing him.
These thoughts do not arise from playing violent video games, Buss argues. They occur because we are descended from creatures who killed to thrive and survive. We're natural-born killers and the real question is not what makes people kill but what prevents them from doing so. People who murder often live in situations that weaken sympathy and restraint. People who commit massacres, for example, often live with what the researchers call "forward panic." After having endured a long period of fear, they find their enemies in a moment of vulnerability. Their fear turns to rage, and, as Steven Pinker writes in "The Better Angels of Our Nature," they "explode in a savage frenzy."
Serial killers are often charming, but have a high opinion of themselves that is not shared by the wider world. They are often extremely conscious of class and status, and they develop venomous feelings toward people who do not pay them sufficient respect. In centuries past, most people would have been less shocked by the homicidal eruptions of formerly good men. That's because people in those centuries grew up with a worldview that put sinfulness at the center of the human personality.
John Calvin believed that babies come out depraved (he was sort of right; the most violent stage of life is age 2). G.K. Chesterton wrote that the doctrine of original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved. This worldview held that people are a problem to themselves. The inner world is a battlefield between light and dark, and life is a struggle against the destructive forces inside. The worst thing you can do is, in a fit of pride, to imagine that your insecurity comes from outside and to try to resolve it yourself. If you try to "fix" the other people who you think are responsible for your inner turmoil, you'll end up trying to kill them, or maybe whole races of them. This earlier worldview was both darker and brighter than the one prevailing today. It held, as C.S. Lewis put it, that there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.
According to this older worldview, Robert Bales, like all of us, is a mixture of virtue and depravity. His job is to struggle daily to strengthen the good and resist the evil, policing small transgressions to prevent larger ones.
If he didn't do that, and if he was swept up in a whirlwind, then even a formerly good man is capable of monstrous acts that shock the soul and sear the brain.
-------
David Brooks' column is distributed by the New York Times News Service
An end to modern medicine?
An interesting article from the star dated 19 March 2012 for our consideration. (admin)
An end to modern medicine?
GLOBAL TRENDS By MARTIN KHOR
A warning by the head of WHO that antibiotic resistance is so serious that it may lead to an end to modern medicine should alert health authorities to contain this most serious health crisis.
LAST week, the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) sounded a large alarm bell on how antibiotics may in future not work anymore, due to resistance of bacteria to the medicines.
Antibiotic resistance has been a growing problem for some time now. From time to time, there will be news reports of the outbreak of diseases, old and new, that cannot be treated because the bacteria have grown more powerful than the antibiotics used against them.
And experts have been warning about how the wrong use of antibiotics has given the bacteria the opportunity to develop resistance, enabling them to become immune to the medicines. What is needed, of course, is a multi-prong strategy to prevent the abuse and wrongful use of antibiotics. Drug companies should not over-market their products. Doctors should not over-prescribe. And antibiotics should not be used on animals that are not sick but to fatten them and thus enable higher profits.
Now, the Director-General of the WHO has given a big warning that the growing threat of resistance may mean an end to modern medicine, and the entry of the post-antibiotic era. Speaking at a meeting of infectious disease experts in Copenhagen last week, Dr Margaret Chan said there was a global crisis in antibiotics caused by rapidly evolving resistance among microbes responsible for common infections that threaten to turn them into untreatable diseases. Every antibiotic ever developed was at risk of becoming useless.
"A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill. For patients infected with some drug resistant pathogens, mortality has increased by around 50%," she said.
"Some sophisticated interventions, like hip replacement, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapy and care of pre-term infants, would become far more difficult or even too dangerous to undertake."
Dr Chan called for action to restrict the use of antibiotics in food production. "Worldwide, the fact that greater quantities of antibiotics are used in healthy animals than in unhealthy humans, is a cause for great concern," she said.
She called for measures — doctors prescribing antibiotics appropriately, patients following their treatments — and restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animals. These actions have, in fact, been suggested for many years, including by the health group REACT, based in Sweden, by health networks such as Health Action International, and locally, by the Consumers' Association of Penang.
The WHO itself has the scope to do much more in alerting health authorities and in building the capacity, especially of developing countries, to act.
There are forms of TB that have become untreatable because of multi-drug resistance. The TB pathogen has become immune to many antibiotics. This has resulted in a resurgence of the deadly disease. The story is the same for many other pathogens causing other diseases.
As Global Trends reported in June 2011, a worrying development is the discovery of a gene, known as NDM-1, that has the ability to alter bacteria and make them highly resistant to all known drugs, including the most potent antibiotics.
In 2010, there were reports of many such cases in India and Pakistan and in European countries. At the time, only two types of bacteria were found to be hosting the NDM-1 gene – E coli and Klebsiella pneumonia.
But it was then feared that the gene would transfer to other bacteria as well, since it was found to easily jump from one type of bacteria to another. If this happened, antibiotic resistance would spread rapidly, making it difficult to treat many diseases.
These concerns have been proven to be justified. In May 2011, the Times of India published an article based on interviews with British scientists from Cardiff University who had first reported on NDM-1's existence.
The scientists found that the NDM-1 gene has been jumping among various species of bacteria at "superfast speed" and that it "has a special quality to jump between species without much of a problem".
While the gene was found only in E coli when it was initially detected in 2006, now the scientists have found NDM-1 in more than 20 different species of bacteria. NDM-1 can move at an unprecedented speed, making more and more species of bacteria drug-resistant.
Since there are very few new antibiotics in the pipeline, when the resistance grows among the whole range of bacteria to the existing drugs, human beings will be more and more at the mercy of the increasingly deadly bacteria.
In May 2011, there was an outbreak of a deadly disease caused by a new strain of the E coli bacteria that killed more than 20 people and affected another 2,000 in Germany.
They were affected by a new strain of the already rare 0104 type of E coli. There are other common types of E coli which normally cause only a mild ailment. The WHO said the variant had "never been seen in an outbreak situation before".
Although the "normal" E coli usually produces mild sickness in the stomach, the new strain of E coli 0104 causes bloody diarrhoea and severe stomach cramps, while in some of the more serious cases so far, it also causes haemolytic-uraemic syndrome (HUS), which damages blood cells and the kidneys.
A major problem is that the bacterium is resistant to antibiotics. Eradication of these kinds of bacteria is impractical partly because they are able to evolve so rapidly, according to medical experts.
Now that the WHO chief has sounded the alarm bell, health authorities should redouble their efforts to contain the crisis. An "end to modern medicine" and a "post-antibiotic era" are predictions too horrible to imagine.
Antibiotic resistance has been a growing problem for some time now. From time to time, there will be news reports of the outbreak of diseases, old and new, that cannot be treated because the bacteria have grown more powerful than the antibiotics used against them.
And experts have been warning about how the wrong use of antibiotics has given the bacteria the opportunity to develop resistance, enabling them to become immune to the medicines. What is needed, of course, is a multi-prong strategy to prevent the abuse and wrongful use of antibiotics. Drug companies should not over-market their products. Doctors should not over-prescribe. And antibiotics should not be used on animals that are not sick but to fatten them and thus enable higher profits.
Now, the Director-General of the WHO has given a big warning that the growing threat of resistance may mean an end to modern medicine, and the entry of the post-antibiotic era. Speaking at a meeting of infectious disease experts in Copenhagen last week, Dr Margaret Chan said there was a global crisis in antibiotics caused by rapidly evolving resistance among microbes responsible for common infections that threaten to turn them into untreatable diseases. Every antibiotic ever developed was at risk of becoming useless.
"A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratched knee could once again kill. For patients infected with some drug resistant pathogens, mortality has increased by around 50%," she said.
"Some sophisticated interventions, like hip replacement, organ transplants, cancer chemotherapy and care of pre-term infants, would become far more difficult or even too dangerous to undertake."
Dr Chan called for action to restrict the use of antibiotics in food production. "Worldwide, the fact that greater quantities of antibiotics are used in healthy animals than in unhealthy humans, is a cause for great concern," she said.
She called for measures — doctors prescribing antibiotics appropriately, patients following their treatments — and restrictions on the use of antibiotics in animals. These actions have, in fact, been suggested for many years, including by the health group REACT, based in Sweden, by health networks such as Health Action International, and locally, by the Consumers' Association of Penang.
The WHO itself has the scope to do much more in alerting health authorities and in building the capacity, especially of developing countries, to act.
There are forms of TB that have become untreatable because of multi-drug resistance. The TB pathogen has become immune to many antibiotics. This has resulted in a resurgence of the deadly disease. The story is the same for many other pathogens causing other diseases.
As Global Trends reported in June 2011, a worrying development is the discovery of a gene, known as NDM-1, that has the ability to alter bacteria and make them highly resistant to all known drugs, including the most potent antibiotics.
In 2010, there were reports of many such cases in India and Pakistan and in European countries. At the time, only two types of bacteria were found to be hosting the NDM-1 gene – E coli and Klebsiella pneumonia.
But it was then feared that the gene would transfer to other bacteria as well, since it was found to easily jump from one type of bacteria to another. If this happened, antibiotic resistance would spread rapidly, making it difficult to treat many diseases.
These concerns have been proven to be justified. In May 2011, the Times of India published an article based on interviews with British scientists from Cardiff University who had first reported on NDM-1's existence.
The scientists found that the NDM-1 gene has been jumping among various species of bacteria at "superfast speed" and that it "has a special quality to jump between species without much of a problem".
While the gene was found only in E coli when it was initially detected in 2006, now the scientists have found NDM-1 in more than 20 different species of bacteria. NDM-1 can move at an unprecedented speed, making more and more species of bacteria drug-resistant.
Since there are very few new antibiotics in the pipeline, when the resistance grows among the whole range of bacteria to the existing drugs, human beings will be more and more at the mercy of the increasingly deadly bacteria.
In May 2011, there was an outbreak of a deadly disease caused by a new strain of the E coli bacteria that killed more than 20 people and affected another 2,000 in Germany.
They were affected by a new strain of the already rare 0104 type of E coli. There are other common types of E coli which normally cause only a mild ailment. The WHO said the variant had "never been seen in an outbreak situation before".
Although the "normal" E coli usually produces mild sickness in the stomach, the new strain of E coli 0104 causes bloody diarrhoea and severe stomach cramps, while in some of the more serious cases so far, it also causes haemolytic-uraemic syndrome (HUS), which damages blood cells and the kidneys.
A major problem is that the bacterium is resistant to antibiotics. Eradication of these kinds of bacteria is impractical partly because they are able to evolve so rapidly, according to medical experts.
Now that the WHO chief has sounded the alarm bell, health authorities should redouble their efforts to contain the crisis. An "end to modern medicine" and a "post-antibiotic era" are predictions too horrible to imagine.
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