, , , , , , ,

212. Pandemic

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Scott Nelson

Author:  Sonia Shah

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Health, Medicine, History, Public Policy

288 pages, published February 16, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Pandemic recounts the history of pandemics in the world with particular focus on the nature and spread of cholera, Ebola, SARS and AIDS.  It then explores the decline in animal species and spread of animals to all corners of the world and how that can lead to increased risk for human populations, what types of pathogens are likely to cause a global pandemic in the near future and what we can do to prevent it.

 

Quotes 

“In the nineteenth century, cholera struck the most modern, prosperous cities in the world, killing rich and poor alike, from Paris and London to New York City and New Orleans. In 1836, it felled King Charles X in Italy; in 1849, President James Polk in New Orleans; in 1893, the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg.”

 

“But far from being a harmless source of fertilizer, dog feces is both an environmental contaminant (and is classified as such by the Environmental Protection Agency) and a source of pathogens that can infect people. Like human excreta, dog poo teems with pathogenic microbes, such as strains of E. coli, roundworms, and other parasites. One of the most common parasitic infections in Americans is the result of their exposure to dog feces. The dog roundworm Toxocara canis is common in dogs and, because of the ubiquity of dog feces, widespread in the environment. It can contaminate soil and water for years.”

 

“the global bonfire of fossil fuels will heighten the likelihood of pandemics on its own, in a way that is likely to be even more consequential than all of its contributing factors put together.”

 

“Globally, 12 percent of bird species, 23 percent of mammals, and 32 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, global populations of these creatures have declined by nearly 30 percent. Just how these losses will shift the distribution of microbes between and across species, pushing some over the threshold, remains to be seen.”

 

“As avian diversity declined in the United States, specialist species like woodpeckers and rails disappeared, while generalist species like American robins and crows boomed. (Populations of American robins have grown by 50 to 100 percent over the past twenty-five years.)48 This reordering of the composition of the local bird population steadily increased the chances that the virus would reach a high enough concentration to spill over into humans.”

 

“a single opossum, through grooming, destroyed nearly six thousand ticks a week.”

 

My Take

Pandemic is a fascinating, but chilling, read.  While human beings have largely conquered many ravaging diseases of the past (small pox, typhus, polio), we are still at risk from old and new diseases, especially in our global age where air travel can quickly spread a disease from its point of origin to all corners of the globe.  I also found the discussion of animal sources of disease to be intriguing.  Another reason not to have a dog or cat!

/by
, , , , ,

65. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Atul Gawande

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Medicine, Health, Public Policy

282 pages, published October 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

In Being Mortal, Gawande, a practicing surgeon, tackles the difficult issue of how medicine can not only improve life but also death.  While modern medicine has made amazing advances in the past few decades, it is still challenged when dealing with end of life issues where the interests of human spirit and dignity are often inadequately considered.  Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Doctors, committed to extending life, often impose devastating procedures that may extend the quantity of life, but also severely impact the quality.  Gawande argues that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families and offers examples of better models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly.  He also explores hospice and shows that a person’s last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Quotes

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence.  A seemingly happy life may be empty.  A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.  We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss?  Because a football game is a story.  And in stories, endings matter.”

“Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.”

 

“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”

 

“It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, “Old age is a continuous series of losses.” Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

 

“Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self.”

 

“Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”

 

“The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said Royce, “solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.” In more recent times, psychologists have used the term “transcendence” for a version of this idea. Above the level of self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they suggest the existence in people of a transcendent desire to see and help other beings achieve their potential.”

 

“You may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.”

 

“We’re always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.”

 

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

 

“The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”

 

“Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.”

 

“People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete.”

 

“Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have.”

Read more

/by
, , , , ,

61. Vegan Before Six

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mark Bittman

Genre:

288 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

Vegan Before Six or VB6 as it is referred to was written by food writer Mark Bittman after his doctor told him to adopt a vegan diet or go on medication.  He didn’t want to do either, so he compromised and decided to become a “flexitarian” in which he focused on a vegan diet heavy in vegetables, fruits, and grains until 6:00 p.m.  After that time he would eat however he wanted in moderation. The results were quick and impressive.   Bittman lost 35 pounds and saw all of his blood numbers move in the right direction.  He also kept the weight off and his health continued to improve.

Quotes

“I live full-time in the world of omnivores, and I’ve never wanted to leave. But the Standard American Diet (yes, it’s SAD) got to me as it gets to almost everyone in this country.”

 

“Like pornography, junk [food] might be tough to define but you know it when you see it.”

 

“We spend a trillion dollars a year on food, but it’s only 9.4 percent of our expendable income, the lowest percentage of any country on record.”

Read more

/by
, , ,

47. How Not to Die

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Michael Greger

Genre:  Health, Nutrition

576 pages, published December 8, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary 

How Not to Die is written by Dr. Michael Greger, the physician behind the extremely popular website NutritionFacts.org, and makes the case that the vast majority of premature deaths can be prevented through simple changes in diet and lifestyle.   Dr. Greger examines the fifteen top causes of premature death in America (heart disease, various cancers, diabetes, Parkinson’s, high blood pressure, etc.) and explains how nutritional and lifestyle interventions can are often superior to pharmaceutical and surgical approaches, allowing us to live healthier lives.  In addition to showing what to eat to help treat the top fifteen causes of death, How Not to Die includes Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen, a checklist of the eleven foods (and one habit) we should consume or do every day:  1) Cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, spring greens, radishes, turnip tops, watercress; 2)

Greens including spring greens, kale, young salad greens, sorrel, spinach, swiss chard; 3) Other vegetables, including asparagus, beetroot, peppers, carrots, corn, courgettes, garlic, mushrooms, okra, onions, pumpkin, sugar snap peas, squash, sweet potatoes, tomatoes;

4) Beans, such as black beans, cannellini beans, black-eyed peas, butter beans, soyabeans, baked beans, chickpeas, edamame, peas, kidney beans, lentils, miso, pinto beans, split peas, tofu, hummus; 5) Berries or any small edible fruit, including grapes, raisins, blackberries, cherries, raspberries and strawberries; 6) Other fruit, such as apples, apricots, avocados, bananas, cantaloupe melon, clementines, dates, figs, grapefruit, honeydew melon, kiwi, lemons, limes, lychees, mangos, nectarines, oranges, papaya, passion fruit, peaches, pears, pineapple, plums, pomegranates, prunes, tangerines, and watermelon; 7) Flaxseeds; 8) Nuts or nut butter; 9) Spices, especially turmeric; 10) Whole grains such as buckwheat, rice, and quinoa; 11) Exercise (ideally 90 minutes a day of moderate activity, such as walking); and 12) Water

(five large glasses a day).

 

Quotes

“For disease prevention, berries of all colors have “emerged as champions,” according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.  The purported anticancer properties of berry compounds have been attributed to their apparent ability to counteract, reduce, and repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation.  But it wasn’t known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells.”

 

“The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet.”

 

“While the pathology of stroke and Alzheimer’s are different, one key factor unites them: Mounting evidence suggests that a healthy diet may help prevent them both.”

 

“Here’s a statistic you probably haven’t heard:  Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.   A review in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience concluded that, in general, eating lots of fruits and veggies may present “a non-invasive, natural, and inexpensive therapeutic means to support a healthy brain.”

 

“Back in 1903, Thomas Edison predicted that the “doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patient in the care of [the] human frame in diet and in the cause and prevention of diseases.”

 

“The flaxseeds managed to drop subjects’ systolic and diastolic blood pressure by up to fifteen and seven points, respectively. Compare that result to the effect of powerful antihypertensive drugs, such as calcium-channel blockers (for example, Norvasc, Cardizem, Procardia), which have been found to reduce blood pressure by only eight and three points, respectively, or to ACE inhibitors (such as Vasotec, Lotensin, Zestril, Altace), which drop patients’ blood pressure by only five and two points, respectively.  Ground flaxseeds may work two to three times better than these medicines, and they have only good side effects.  In addition to their anticancer properties, flaxseeds have been demonstrated in clinical studies to help control cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood sugar levels; reduce inflammation, and successfully treat constipation.”

 

“Though the majority of lung cancer is attributed to smoking, approximately a quarter of all cases occur in people who’ve never smoked.  Although some of these cases are due to secondhand smoke, another contributing cause may be another potentially carcinogenic plume: fumes from frying.”

Read more

/by