Caramel
• Want to add some flavor to your protein shake, pancakes, oatmeal, etc. This Caramel Extract gives a very bold caramel flavor, no calories. Just don’t use too much.
Blood pressure
• Many lifestyle factors are associated with reductions in blood pressure. Meditation, exercise, foods, and many supplements. One such supplement is Taurine, an amino acid that occurs in food, appears quite safe, and is very cheap. One option (to add to exercise and stress management) if your doctor is talking to you about creeping blood pressure readings.
Watercress
• Apparently tied for the healthiest plant on planet Earth, watercress has tons of benefits. Not always easy to find at the grocery, but it is versatile to add to salad, soup, or sautéed spinach.
Milk alternative
• We had protein shake wellness day last month and whipped up a bunch of shakes, mostly Ghost brand protein. We made a few batches with So Delicious plant milk. This might be the closest plant milk to real cow’s milk in color, flavor, and consistency. A close second is Trader Joe’s Hemp milk.
Muscles
• If you are feeling brave in the face of an injury, check out this post detailing an aggressive, possibly completely insane method of rehabilitation after a muscle tear. Obeying the “use it or lose it” approach, these guys think one should just get right back in the gym and work the muscle that is injured. Not recommended if you have torn a tendon or ligament.
Active Resting
• Check out this old post from Mark’s Daily Apple on the importance of sitting on the floor, backed up by a 2020 articlefrom Herman Pontzer’s anthropology team.
• According to the inactivity mismatch hypothesis, we in the modern setting do not engage our muscles as much as hunter-gatherers even when resting. If you read the article, check out Figure 3, showing the muscle activity in 5 different leg muscles with chair, two types of ground, assisted squat, and full squat. Even if you can’t hold a squat, at least sit on the ground when you can.
Writing and Medicine
• Why we need more writers practicing medicine. A well done article by Xi Chen, who is a current medical student and student in a creative writing MFA program. He reminds us of the many writers in the past who either were physicians or who left medicine for the vocation of writing.
• Think of a novelist or other writer coming to follow you in the hospital, how potentially mind-blowing that could be for them. Now what if you dabbled in the world of writing, articulating your own responses and reflections to the crazy stuff we see in medicine. How your world could open up, how you could relate to and bond with patients, how you could slow down and process some of the emotions we experience, and what insight you could provide for others if you chose to share that writing. Many medical schools have added humanities courses and most journals publish humanities pieces (including Journal of Wellness). Write something down, even if you don’t show anyone else.
Emergency Medicine and Life
These two articles from a single issue of our EM newspaper had some great lessons for medicine but also life:
• This article on why we are not happier covers two very important topics. First is the arrival fallacy, the belief that once you finally ‘make it,’ you will be happy. Once you get to college, once you get accepted into medical school, once you Match in residency, once you land the job you want (in engineering, finance, medicine, etc), once you get married, have a child, … once you retire! The fallacy is that you never really get to that point. If we chase happiness, or relief from stress, or rest, thinking it will come someday when we make it, we may never get there. The authors talk about physicians who chase happiness and how we might really just be chasing relief from pressure/burden. They then bring up the floating moment fallacy, the idea that we can be content in life if we just chase temporary pleasure all day long. Unfortunately, this also does not lead to contentment or meaning in life. They end by telling us that meaning and happiness come from the journey. The happiness researcher they quote, Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, recommends having multiple simultaneous goals in and out of work life.
• This article discusses the relationship between courage and resilience. Author Raquel Harrison, MD (who is boarded in Lifestyle Medicine) points out that resilience refers to our ability to get stronger after something bad happens. She asks if working in a hospital offers us inherently bad experiences? She contrasts resilience, a backward looking trait, with courage, which is forward looking. Courage is what you need to enter a situation that could help you develop resilience.
Quotes
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
– Martin Luther
Bless you prison. Bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
