May 2, 2018

Light is a Drug:

• Thanks Ashlee Melendez for this article that is absolutely packed with concisely presented information on healthy light-dark cycles. Article on BBC about Linda Geddes, who spent two weeks with no artificial light. I am bookmarking the article and have printed numerous references. Looking forward to her book (Chasing the Sun, early 2019). Two of the many pearls would be:
1. The importance not only of darkness at night, but exposure to sunlight during the day. Daytime light is as important for sleep as the avoidance of bright light at night. 
2. Not only do you sleep better with light exposure during the day, but alertness and mood improve.

Habits:

• Article from Adam Ross on bad habits that could be undoing your mental wellness. A couple interesting ones: 1. you are never alone. 2. you don’t actually talk to anyone.
• Give yourself time alone to do nothing. When you have time to connect, have an actual interaction with a real person, not on Facebook. 

Bleeding:

• Blog post on the physiology of acute blood loss. Might be a good idea to print this one out and really digest it. Oddly enough, blood loss in healthy volunteers leads to different effects from blood loss in people undergoing severe trauma. The body has a “depressor reflex” to blood loss in healthy volunteers, causing a decrease in heart rate and vascular resistance. This is overridden when you lose blood while fighting a tiger. Also interesting is how amazingly quickly the blood vessels fill with interstitial fluid, up to a liter in the first hour. 
• If you manage shock patients, read this 3 times. If you don’t, just remember not to fight tigers. 

Cooking:

• Last week we learned not to eat vegetable oil. Based on a fairly large Chinese study, you also should not smoke it. This NYTimes piece summarizes the findings of increased lung cancer in women in China who did a lot of cooking with primarily rapeseed oil (parent of canola oil). 
• These women had the same lung cancer rate as US women, but smoked half as much.
• If it is made in a factory with chemicals, don’t eat (or breathe) it. And a general rule is to use low heat for all of your cooking. Interestingly they found less stomach cancer in folks who ate certain green vegetables. Others have shown that while scorched meat may cause cancer, scorched vegetables might be protective. 

Truth:

• One trend in history Nietzsche pointed out was that the Christian quest for ultimate truth spawned what is now a given to most of us, scientific thought. Prior to the Enlightenment, few would have distinguished moral/narrative truth from objective material truth. A lemon was full of the sun, not cells. The scientific method literally changed how we interact with the world around us. 
• So in striving for truth, Christianity in a way unraveled its own foundation. Watch the first 90 seconds of this video for a more clear explanation (watch the whole thing really). 

Quote:
People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.
-F.M. Alexander

Martin Huecker, MD, is co-editor in chief of the free, open access Journal of Wellness. He is an Associate Professor and Research Director in the Department of Emergency Medicine (EM) at the University of Louisville. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. Dr. Huecker graduated from UofL’s EM Residency Program and (Chief Resident in 2011). He works full time seeing patients and teaching residents in the UofL Emergency Department. His diverse research interests include substance use, accidental hypothermia, and healthcare professional wellness. Dr. Huecker is also a Certified Lifestyle Medicine Physician (DipABLM). He loves books, (cold) trail runs, dogs, and coffee. His wife is an OB/GYN and they have 4 children with cool names.