Eat enough, but not too much. Eat good food. The best diet is balanced; all food groups should be part of your daily meal plan. Your body’s engine will thank you for assuring the best fuel. You are what you eat, so if you seek to be your best, the first step is to assure that your protein, carbohydrate and fat are well distributed.

2. Dare to get your essential vitamins from your food and not from a bottle.

A sound, balanced diet provides all the necessary vitamins that your body chemistry requires. Remember, however, that taking a hundred times the necessary amount is simply wasteful and may be dangerous. Eating a balanced diet is a good vitamin insurance policy.

3. Dare to watch your salt intake.

Many people simply use salt before tasting. Too much salt in the diet causes fluid retention, thereby encouraging high blood pressure. Know too that a hot climate causes sweating, which means loss of salt. Some salt is good, but too much is a burden on your system.

4. Dare to consume enough calcium in your food.

Calcium is the most important mineral in the body. Without it, you would be a jellyfish. Your body contains three pounds [about 1.4kg] of calcium. The recommended daily intake is the equivalent of three glasses of milk. Many do not reach this ideal. Fish and green vegetables are notably alternative dietary sources of calcium. A chronic deficiency of calcium leads to weak bones, osteoporosis, and the human equivalent of a jellyfish.

5. Dare to stay wet.

Our bodies are mostly water so it makes compelling sense not to dry out as we age. A prune is not an attractive fruit. Water is the most available source of fluid, but these days more and more people derive their fluid allowance by using other liquids—coffee, tea, and soft drinks are everywhere. However, none of them is as valuable as plain water as a fluid replacement. Besides, other liquids may carry negative features. Do not dry out. Dare to drink water.

6. Dare to watch your alcohol intake.

Is alcohol a friend or a foe? I confess to a personal delight in my wine and beer ration. However, I am lucky because I am in control. Too many others are not. Alcohol has two strong negatives associated with its excessive use. First is a danger to the liver, which acts as a blotter to soak up this potentially dangerous chemical. The second and more dangerous concern is the harm alcohol causes to a person’s psychosocial development. Alcohol is never the answer to a problem; it makes many problems worse. Stay in control.

7. Dare to be an optimist.

My friend, Norman Cousins [American political journalist and author], insisted, “No one is smart enough to be a pessimist.” It is hard to have a really good day, if you view the world through dark glasses. If you say that today is going to be rotten then what chance does good fortune stand? If you say yes to each morning and to confronting issues, only then will it be a good day.

8. Dare to ask why.

What is your meaning? Are you only a lone voyager on a lonely planet or do you have a larger role in the cosmos? Everything and everyone matters. A poet observed, “You cannot touch a flower without just the troubling of a star”. We are all intimately interconnected, and this interaction compels each of us to find meaning in our lives. Why live, if not to matter? Oblivion is avoided, if we find meaning.

9. Dare to take risks.

The turtle only gets ahead by sticking its neck out. The same holds true for us. If we choose the ease and comfort of our constrained lives, then challenges go unmet and our potential languishes.

10. Dare to laugh.

Understanding the frequent absurdities of life helps to defy sickness and encourage smiles and laughter. A sense of humour is strong medicine, stronger certainly than most of the things that come in bottles. Laughter lightens the burdens of life and releases tension and depression.

11. Dare to touch.

Modern life is often dehumanising and with this comes the temptation to allow machines to take over. However, no machine can replace the reality of human touch.

12. Dare to believe.

Commitment overcomes the many negatives of life. Faith in yourself is much more important than unreasonable reliance on extrinsic agencies. As a physician, I see too many of my patients believe that I am going to take care of them. Wrong! They take care of themselves. I pledge all the help I can in this effort, but belief in self is the real healer.

13. Dare to be in flow.

My friend, Mike Csikszentmihaly, psychologist in California, has made life flow his concentration. He defines flow as that idealised state when the presenting task is met by appropriate competence. When a task is too much and is not met by competence, stress results. On the other hand, when a task is less than your competence flow, boredom follows. A person is in maximum flow state when competence and challenge are in good balance.

14. Dare to grow old with competence.

Don’t abandon the best years to fate. Stay in control. Only you can decide how long you will live, and more importantly, how well you will live long. My mother lived to be 95 years old. She died healthy without an illness, doctors, or pills. That is the ideal. Go to the finish line healthy and independent. Stay in the race until it is fully run.

15. Dare to die well.

Death is a certainty and no one has yet discovered how to deny it. Rather than letting this reality lead to a helpless, hopeless life scheme, place death in its natural context. Do not let the medical system rule your last moments. Stay in charge of your dying, as you insist on control of your living.

16. Dare to have a good health adviser, nurse, doctor or pharmacist.

Know whom to trust to answer your questions honourably and competently because there are far too many charlatans who pretend to be your trusted health advisers. You must work hard to know where to place your trust. When you need advice, don’t take the easy choice. Be informed about whom you can trust.

17. Dare to be smart.

Your brain is a muscle. It needs to be worked to stay sharp. Ageing is a not a disqualification for intelligence. In fact, it brings with it the responsibility to keep growing intellectually. Smart people live longer and better.

18. Dare to be wise.

Wisdom is a rare virtue. My friend Paul Baltes, former director of the famous Berlin Longevity Study said, “Not many old people are wise but all wise people are old.” This major claim derives from the fact that wisdom consists of accumulated knowledge, which is simply not available early in life. Most knowledge that is valuable derives from defeats, not from successes. An old person has lived long enough and had more defeats to confront. Wisdom is a late life credential.

19. Dare to work.

Idleness breeds decay. Nature has little tolerance for inactivity. Age is no disqualification for productive endeavour, if we maintain the conviction that added years provide work advantage. Who would you trust more, a young airplane pilot or an old one? Who would you trust more, a young banker or doctor or an old one? Remain useful.

20. Dare to remain fit.

Fit people live longer and better. Frailty is the principal pathology of ageing and a choice and not fate. If you retain your fitness, you can enter the last decades of life full of confidence and vigour. Fitness cannot be bought. It must be earned over and over. Earn it.

21. Dare to know how hard, how long, and how often to exercise.

Exercise must be an integral part of life, but our industrial age has made our muscles almost vestigial. To acknowledge this, we need an enlightened protocol to keep our muscles fit. Use them or lose them.

22. Dare to honour your heart.

Your heart is your life pump. Its job is to keep you vital, moving your blood to every remote part of your anatomy. The best tonic for the heart is exercise. Exercise is a 30 year age advantage. A fit 80-year-old has the same mechanical advantage for the heart as does an unfit 50 year old. What medicine can match that claim?

23. Dare not to lose it.

Too many people accept the notion that, “I don’t want to lose it, but it hurts too much to use it.” A little discomfort, often arthritic in origin, is frequently used as an excuse not to exercise. Wrong! Not exercising is not an option in late life. If something hurts, do something about it! But not exercising is absolutely out of the question.

24. Dare to deny depression.

Too often older people become gloomy. The answer is not the bed, but exercise. I’ve participated in studies that showed that the beta endorphins—our best antidepressants—are directly associated with movement. Depressed? Take a walk!

25. Dare to be 100.

100 healthy, robust, creative years are your birthright. Demand it. No excuses.

The post 25 dares for a long, healthy life. Are you up to them? appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

In his popular 1992 book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, American author John Gray proposes that women complain about problems because they want their problems to be acknowledged, while men complain about problems because they’re looking for solutions.

Gray further suggests that men’s suppression of emotion represents a “retreating into their cave” motif in that they withdraw from stress, while ruminating about it. This leads too often to the hopeless/helpless syndrome [we quit trying because we believe nothing we do matters] described by psychologist Martin Seligman. Is this male brittleness the reason behind the general fact that women live longer than men?

The topic of gender inequality is loaded with emotional overtones. There can be little argument raised about the wonderfully different anatomic and hormonal aspects of the two sexes. It is in the behavioural and cultural realms where frictions arise. Freud and many psychologists after him have weighed in on the differing male/female patterns. The psychological inventory lists many differences. Females rank higher in agreeability, empathy, happiness, emotional lability, and communication skills. Most workers agree that females exhibit superior inter-personal sensitivities. Males rank higher in aggression, mathematics and spatial awareness. The rare
savant syndrome, in which other-worldly mathematic or musical capacities astound, is invariably found in males for which no clear brain development miscuing is suggested. Up for grabs is intelligence, although most authorities rate this as a tossup. Further, anthropologists have had a field day providing rules, which derive from our jungle existence as precursors for our current behaviour differences.

Much of male aggression is rooted in sexual jealousy. Even in those few remaining aboriginal cultures today, murder over sexual issues is extremely high. In fact, 67 per cent of the married women in New Guinea described themselves as ‘battered’ with one in five suffering injuries severe enough to require hospitalisation at least once. A survey of the murders in Detroit, Michigan in 1972 shows that over 80 per cent of them are precipitated by a jealous man.

This activity goes back into prehistory, as it is recorded that Paris’s seduction of Helen was the proximate cause of the Trojan War. Innumerable duels and thousands of lives have been caused by infidelity, imagined or real.

In his book Demonic Males, Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham suggests that men fight neither because they are aggressive, nor because they are acquisitive. They do so because they reason or think they reason that there are some dangers that can be surmounted if they are addressed before they become real. He suggests further that fights or lust for imperial dominion exist largely because of pride. He notes that in the chimpanzee world, once a male has been accepted as the alpha, this tendency for violence falls. In fact, they may actually become benign leaders, but before this time, there is considerable intertribal competition and aggression.

But for every rule, there are exceptions, which make the male-female interface more complex. The bonobo chimpanzee of Congo, West Africa, is a notable exception because of the matriarchal society in which it exists. There, when the male starts to cause a rumpus, the females gang up, and beat him into submission, thereby generating a society, which is termed ‘gentle’ by anthropologists. This is in contrast to the ordinary violent pattern of most other animal species.

Men have been aggressive; and it’s linked to their testes. But is it really just testosterone? My Stanford colleague, neurologist Robert Sapolsky studies his own personal baboon colony in Kenya. He has written a book titled, Trouble with Testosterone, in which he features the high amount of mischief that can be tied to this male hormone. Robert, however, says that aggression is far more tied to behavioural issues than hormonal ones. In this regard, the ranking in the tribe seems to be the more critical issue. A similar set of observations goes with the important Whitehall study in Great Britain, in which instead of baboons, the psychologists surveyed British civil servants to find that once again it is the relative rank in the social strata that appears to carry most influence in creating strife.

Most of us are aware of couples that have suffered from what is commonly termed as ‘testosterone toxicity’ in which a seemingly sober male suddenly engages in dangerous behaviour, which has wide repercussions. ‘Sex crazy’, seems appropriate as an epithet.

A striking difference between men and women and one that really concerns me is the observation that upon death of a spouse, men and women react in opposite ways. There are many more widows than widowers. When the wife of a man dies, the widower does poorly, and often dies soon thereafter. I would predict a similar result were my wife of 57 years to die. In contrast, when the husband dies, the widow carries on without evidence of apparent life-shortening. My mother was a widow for 24 years after my father died.

The woman is the nurturer and peacemaker. She is there to repair the damage of us men. Men are here for the moment, for the sporadic episode, whereas women must preside in life over its entire course.

An important corollary behavioural observation is that depression is noted to be twice as common among women. A slick reason for this may be that the neurotransmitter molecule known as adrenalin is more apparent in the male. Adrenalin is the alarm signal; it is what makes you more alert and your heart go pitter-patter. In depression, the levels of adrenaline in the brain are low and almost all of the antidepressant medications essentially represent cousins of adrenaline, to replace
the chemical deficit. The male exhibits spikes of adrenaline secretion, whereas the female pattern is more modulated. Thanks to the excess adrenalin and testosterone, the macho male contrives to base his existence around confrontation, challenge, and dominance.

Further, it appears that the testicle is not the only gland that burdens the male. The adrenal gland, the source of the stress hormone cortisol, is dominantly involved in the hierarchical and gender issues of dominance. The male seems to be immersed in cortisol,
which has a list of harmful effects on the body. A little stress is probably good but when chronic stress and its overload of cortisol is prominent, much of the body is susceptible to harm. The male animal swims in cortisol, adrenalin, and testosterone.

The Darwinian basis for this is clear and leads not only to reproductive advantage, but to economic outcomes as well. The epic battles between rival males for alpha-dom pervade the animal world.

Then we could ask why is there such inequality with income and political power in a civil society? I am personally embarrassed that in America the voting rights for women were only so recently come by. And yet today employment disparities pervade our world. In large segments of the globe the gender gap remains huge.

The female of the species is the more successful and imperative partner in our evolutionary history. Certainly her longevity speaks to that effect. However, males are slow to acknowledge any second rank. As we mature, let us hope that these gaps minimise and equality reigns.

The post The great Gender divide appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

In The Art of War, Chinese philosopher and strategist, Sun Tzu, said, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Sun Tzu’s thought spread west to Rome over 2,000 years ago, and has been applied in military contexts in every century until modern times as “peace through strength”.

However, in relation to the prevention of disease, this concept has been internalised only in the East as “health through strength”. We can protect ourselves from the siege of sickness only by taking responsibility for strengthening ourselves, our personal fortresses, before the battle.

Thus, the way to prevent chronic diseases, or at least to lower your risk of getting them, is to keep two general principles of health in mind: lower your risk factors and increase your functionality.

Lowering risk factors

Your risk factors are:

• tobacco use
• unhealthy diet
• stress [including environmental stressors]
• alcohol abuse
• lack of physical exercise.

While almost every healthcare professional will agree that no tobacco use is the best use of tobacco as a preventive practice, it is beyond the scope of this article to prescribe what is the best diet for you, how much alcohol you should or should not consume, or exactly how much physical exercise you should get [although you probably need a lot more exercise than you are getting now].

Meanwhile, what is considered to be a harmful level of stress can vary from individual to individual, and stress takes many forms—physical, physiological and psychological. You will need to search more, in this magazine and elsewhere, for how to balance these risk factors into a lifestyle that is best for you.

Increasing our functionality

While getting more exercise is a way of reducing your risk of contracting chronic diseases, the concept of increasing your physical functionality goes beyond that, to performing important survival functions, to embrace the essence of life itself. Much of what we associate with old age and frailty is actually the result of disuse. As with, any skill or craft, we lose our ability and functionality without practice.

Thus, in life we must also move, with sustained effort to be able to keep on moving. After the age of 30, remaining functional requires approaching our bodies and our minds with a “use it or lose it” mentality. Disuse is not a survival option.

The words ‘health’ and ‘function’ are inseparable aspects of remaining physically and socially engaged in life. A healthy body is one that is working well. So too, a healthy intestine, leg, or brain are each an organ that performs its dedicated duties in the most functional fashion.

Endowed with more than we need

We are blessed with much redundant extra functions—we have two eyes, two ears, two lungs, two kidneys, two sex glands, when we really only need one to get by.

I can run a Marathon with one lung; I can excrete my waste material with one kidney, or overpopulate the world with one testicle. The Darwinian reason for this apparent excess of function stems from the fact that we do not simply live in the idle gear. The environment delivers constant challenges that force us to do more than merely “get by”. Hence, we have the survival imperative of “extra health” or “reserve health.”

In this regard, scientists have even found that pieces of the “junk DNA” in the human genome can turn themselves on under certain circumstances, as if they are there as a “rainy-day reserve,” to insure that we have the genetic capacity to adapt to a changed environment in the future, with completely new demands on our bodies.

Dynamics of usage and function

Consequently, our biological system is one of excess capacity, allowing us to surrender at least half of our original capacity with no apparent functional loss. At 60 per cent loss there is still no problem with any deterioration of function. However, when only 30 per cent of our original functionality is left, we start to have symptoms of shortness of breath or a pileup of waste materials, and we develop chronic diseases.

With another 10 per cent debit from of our 100 per cent, we are brought down to 20 per cent of our starting total. This means either a profound loss of function, or death. But we do not die in our sleep from old age; we die from lack of function. This is, therefore, a good-news/bad-news story, as with a bank account. When you have extra cash in the bank, you can be a big spender. But when your balance declines below your debts, you become bankrupt.

However, if we increase our physical strength and our aerobic capacity, we can gain the extra margin needed to remain healthy and functional until at least age 100. The extra fitness margin that we accumulate makes all the difference when it comes to handling the next debt—that next stress or challenge—be it running up the stairs, lifting a child, avoiding the flu, or sleeping through another night.

The vast majority of medical encounters and expenditures are in this narrow 20 – 30 per cent margin of our starting function. Prevention involves making the efforts to remain as far above this level as possible.

Enhanced function facilitates prevention

Thus, one of the two main principles of prevention is to preserve and enhance function. This is accomplished by good preventive maintenance, thereby avoiding the trouble and expense of being sick. Health, and the extra margin afforded us by increased fitness, trumps illness by any possible measure.

Western Medicine spends all its intellectual and fiscal capital in trying to repair the damage or loss of function. Eastern medicine places its emphasis on retaining health and function.

Health and the whole

Aristotle observed the truth, “Man is by nature a social animal.” As such, our social life determines our health, as, in turn, our health determines our ability to have a social life.

In the Eastern concept of health, remaining socially engaged is an integral part of our health, harking back to the root word of “health,” in the Proto-Indo-European word kailo, meaning “whole.”

Thus, the Eastern concept of being in good health means to be in balance with one’s entire environment, to remain whole, physically, spiritually and socially. No matter what our age, our physical and psychological wellbeing also depends on us remaining socially engaged, doing things that we are passionate about and interacting with others.

This prevents loneliness and boredom, and increases our general feeling of wellbeing. It also increases the flow of endorphins, which boosts our immune system.

The path to complete wellbeing

To maintain our psychological wellbeing and in turn physical wellbeing, each of us must find our path to what renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote about in many articles and books, including Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Csikszentmihali’s studies have shown that people are happiest when they are extremely focused on an all-absorbing task that is difficult enough to be challenging, but not so easy as to instil apathy. Great athletes are said to be “in the zone” when they are in a state of flow.

What they do is a result of thousands of hours of training and experience, to be “naturally” in a state of peak performance. In this regard, American mythologist Joseph Campbell had one mandate for life and the prevention of illness, “Follow your bliss.”

If we cannot find our bliss or flow at work or at home, we can often find it in our hobbies or in volunteer work, or in amateur activities [the things we do, by definition, for our love of them] in a path that can help us fulfil our interests and our passions, to realise our human potential.

Thus, the path to prevention of disease is the same as the way to complete wellbeing.

An integrated approach

For millennia, the East and the West have followed divergent maps to guide them in their practice of medicine—preventing and treating disease. The difference between the two approaches extends far beyond the physical territories demarcated by their geography and languages. The East and the West have been guided by vastly different mental constructs of the concepts of medicine and health. The West has illuminated components and events as integral landmarks of its territory, while Eastern medicine has highlighted systems and processes as fundamental focal points of its provinces.

» The East focuses on the whole

In Eastern Medicine, the main focus is on life-energy, or Qi [also called chi, prana, and life force]. Eastern medicine defines health as a state of wellbeing, in which the Qi is the invisible essence of life, maintaining itself in harmonic equilibrium with its environment, through the balancing forces of Yin and Yang. The Eastern approach has embraced the principle of emergence, insisting that the whole is much more than just the sum of its parts. In this formulation 1 + 1 = 3, the final result of the energy forces emerging in a non-reductionist response to inputs, as extolled by the spirits of Aristotle and Confucius.

Huang Di, China’s legendary Yellow Emperor, who reigned from about 2,697 BC to 2,597 BC, is credited as the founder of traditional Chinese Medicine. He emphasised prevention as the best way to ensure that one remained in a state of good health. One of his more-profound expressions in this regard is, “To fight a disease after it has occurred is like trying to dig a well when one is thirsty or forging a weapon once a war has begun.”

Eastern medicine uses ancient techniques and is high on touch. It carefully looks at changes in the patient, palpating and touching, listening, asking questions, smelling, and using the senses to locate and treat subtle changes, taking in the entire body, in all its complexity, as a whole system.

» The West concentrates on the parts

Western Medicine has taken a different approach to medicine, defining health as “the absence of disease, pain, defect, or symptoms of illness.” The West has no holistic theory of health. Instead, Western medicine has emphasised reductionism as its primary scientific methodology, by taking the body apart, breaking it into ever-smaller units. The Western approach has yielded the genome and molecular probes. Yet, these do not show us how to live better or to prevent illnesses.

In regard to disease, the Western orthodoxy has centred on the extrinsic agencies; throughout the West’s recent history, the major threats to human health were thought to be the by-products of adverse encounters with external hostile threats. Technological advances have allowed Western Medicine to address and redress countless states of illness that were unapproachable just a few decades ago. The conventions of Western Medicine yield quantitative metrics derived from empirical experimentation, with the dominant mantra being evidence-based medicine. Western medicine is high-tech and low-touch.

Western Medicine has had ‘disease’ as its primary compass setting while the East has steered towards ‘health’

» The key difference

Underlying all of the important divergences between the continents is the fact that Western Medicine has had ‘disease’ as its primary compass setting while the East has steered towards ‘health’. Thus, the West has pointed to what makes us sick, while the East has been guided towards what keeps us well.

» Opening up to the Eastern way

At the beginning of the 20th century, eight of the top 10 causes of death were infectious diseases. Since then, Western medicine has largely eliminated these. At the beginning of the 21st century, those eight leading causes of death have been replaced by chronic diseases. Unfortunately, these diseases cannot be eradicated, as smallpox was in 1978, or banished by a pill or medical intervention. Indeed the causes of these diseases emanate largely from our lifestyle and our man-made environment.

As healthcare costs accelerate in the West at unsustainable rates, carving out a larger share of the total economy, the West is starting to realise that it cannot rely on expensive new technological interventions to solve all of its healthcare needs. The West is slowly recognising that the progressive dissection of the body into its finer parts is insufficiently relevant to the concept of health. This is particularly evidenced by the two epidemics of ageing and type-2 diabetes. These two conditions affect East and West alike. But their adequate treatment is more in accord with the Eastern medical model with its approach toward treating the whole person.

Ageing and type-2 diabetes are not conditions that lend themselves to cure and repair, but they present magnificent opportunities for prevention. The operational tools in Western medicine’s black bag are pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. But these two tools are simply not relevant to ageing or diabetes.

In the West, the issue of prevention has only recently been presented as a health-determining agent, though less than five per cent of the West’s healthcare spending is currently allocated toward prevention. According to the WHO, chronic disease accounts for at least 60 per cent of all deaths. The WHO reports that most of these diseases are preventable, or their onset can be considerably delayed. The prevention of these diseases is not only cheaper, but is far more preferable than curing them after the fact. Addressing this point, American physician Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “To guard is better than to heal—the shield is nobler than the spear!” The insistence of the West on repair, with its obvious financial implications, cannot resolve the current and increasing challenge that medicine faces. It inevitably must look to the East for answers.

» What took West so much time?

Though the Eastern preventive approach to Medicine dominates good sense, why does the West emphasise repair instead of prevention? It is because repair pays well, while prevention does not. Zimmerman’s Law asserts, “Nobody notices when things go right.” Such a perverse reality is now coming under increasing scrutiny as the costs of Western healthcare [read illness care] begin to threaten the fiscal solvency of the nations that have embraced the repair model of Medicine. The West has started to look to the East for an alternative solution.

» A broader view

At the end of World War II, the United Nations was already taking a broader view of health than most medical doctors in the West. It was looking East and West to insure global health. The World Health Organization [WHO] was formally launched in 1948, with its definition of health as follows:

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”—Signed by representative of 61 nation-states in 1946. Entered into force by the World Health Organization, April 7, 1948 [Not amended to date].

The WHO saw global peace and global health as integral parts of its goal, since war was seen as a disruptor of social wellbeing, and therefore of health. Thus, while wars and diseases continue, the United Nation and the WHO have tried to have fewer of them, and to alleviate their impact, largely through efforts of prevention.

» The choice is ours

Fortunately, on a global scale, medical science is slowly maturing sufficiently to provide a rigorous, more inclusive, science of health. Health is no longer a bland platitude, but a firm format. Health is not simply the absence of disease but a physical state of specified content. The determinants of lifelong health are not to be found in hospitals or pharmacies, but in our everyday lifestyles. We must either select health or illness. We can either deliberately select the path to health or neglect it—it is our choice.

The ancient precepts of self-knowledge and moderation in all things have been rediscovered, uniting the East and the West. The future will decree how effective we will be in the integration and broadening of our curriculum for health. We must reduce the harmful risks to our health, while taking personal responsibility for preserving and increasing our functionality—physically, physiologically, socially, and even spiritually.

» Welcome World Medicine

Now that the notion of East-West convergence is gathering momentum, a major ideological gulf no longer separates the two. The mysterious and elusive Qi, drives both systems, and will ultimately provide the paradigm shift that will unite us. No longer can we afford to have just Eastern Medicine or Western Medicine as separate practices. The ultimate approach unites them into the notion of World Medicine, as envisioned in part by the WHO.

This approach is gradually capturing the hearts and minds of the medical fraternity across the globe. Instead of the highly-restricted, reductionist emphasis on disease, as I experienced in my years as a medical student 50 years ago—and was the prevalent Western attitude even 10 years ago—World Medicine promises a much more holistic approach, with broader horizons.

As the hemispheres and continents connect by building bridges and isthmuses, the universal hope for world peace and world health will inevitably come closer to realisation under the rubric of prevention. In this process, we must banish health illiteracy wherever it exists, since it is inconsistent with the concepts of prevention and world health.

Enlightenment and enrichment remain for us all, as new hope for health and the prevention of disease arise from convergence.

The post The prevention mindset appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Rest needs activity

There are many myths about sleep and ageing. One of the traditional statements is that as you grow old, sleep adequacy suffers. You sleep less, it becomes more fragmented, you waken earlier, and you have less deep sleep. All wrong.

It is not because you are old that your sleep problems arise. It is because you’ve lost your physical relationship with your environment. We spend one third of our lives in the rest mode. The remainder is active. Activity needs rest. Rest needs activity, and when activity is taken out of the equation, rest suffers.

Physical activity acts as a control switch giving instructions and timetables to every organ of the body. Further, activity regulates the many circadian rhythms, which characterize all of our functions. Both the anatomy and function of sleep depends on the regular integration of waking and resting periods, interspersed. There must be a synergy between the two.

Age, activity and sleep

Physical fitness is perhaps the strongest therapy and preventive for insomnia. As we age, we become less physically active and pay numerous costs for this degradation of our activity. As a result of not expending the energy in the daytime that will help us sleep at night, we gain weight.

This weight gain can further aggravate our ability to sleep, because being overweight can increase the risk of sleep apnoea that prevents a restful night’s sleep by obstructing our oxygen flow. Our physical inactivity can cause a chain of reactions that progressively destroy our natural sleep order.

Our body rhythm

Also part of our modern problem with sleep is that our body rhythms are tightly linked to the sun’s consistent circuitry, its daily rhythm. For millions of years, we woke up when the sun was out and slept when it was dark. Electricity has conspired to change this natural cycle, and more technology only separates us further from one of our most-basic and natural rhythms.

Our addiction to the television set or the Internet are all threats to good sleep hygiene. They keep us up late, and prevent us from getting the rest-inducing physical activity we need. To sleep better, instead of turning on an electronic device to be entertained, try taking an after-dinner walk.

Fatal mistake

Lack of sleep exacts severe penalties on all of our body systems. In laboratory experiments animals that are prohibited from sleeping, die. For us too insomnia can be a potentially fatal disorder that may warrant clinical intervention. But generally the ‘medicalisation’ of sleeplessness drives many healthy people to the medicine bottle, when most sleep problems can be solved with healthy lifestyle changes instead. There are other easy ways to sleep better.

For sweet slumber

Have a bath

A hot bath really works if taken about an hour before going to bed. You might think that raising the temperature in a hot bath is what tricks the body into feeling sleepy, but it is the cooling down that occurs when you get out of the bath that facilitates sleep.

Relax your muscles

Gently tense and relax your muscles, shortly before going to bed. Beginning with the feet, close the eyes and try to tense all the muscles in one foot for a few seconds, and then completely release all the tension.

Repeat this tensing, holding and relaxing for the rest of the body. Close your eyes and really enjoy the release of the muscles when you relax them. The whole exercise should last for about 10 – 15 minutes, and should leave you feeling a lot more relaxed, and ready to sleep. Also, keep your feet warm at night.

Spare the pill

Pills should be used as the last resort rather than the first. Pills bring the threat of chemical dependency and also markedly increase the incidence of falls due to lack of coordination. Plus, pills never deliver the rest and refreshment we get from a natural sound sleep. Pills are dangerous, and the older we get, the more danger they present. Take a walk instead.

We all face life’s occasional sleep interruptions, such as melancholy, twitchy legs, diminished sex drive, and worry. These may leave us feeling less rested the next day. However, these human conditions do not necessarily indicate that we have a sleep disorder, or that we should seek medical intervention, unless they interfere significantly with our daily lives. Sometimes all we need is an adjustment to our daily routine in order to enhance our ability to get a restful sleep.

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Aerobics improves your oxygen levels

Yes, we can retrain our bodies at any age and at any stage in life to use oxygen better, just by doing aerobic exercise. Other good forms of exercise such as yoga or weight lifting provide their benefits by improving muscle strength, balance, and flexibility, but their design doesn’t generate the increase in total body exertion needed to open all the tubes and allow greater oxygen transport.

Aerobic exercise is absolutely necessary to make meaningful improvements in your VO2 Max levels [Ed: our body’s maximum ability to absorb and transport oxygen. For more on this read box]. Aerobic exercise means doing a routine that gets your heart rate up for a prolonged period of time, with activities such as jogging, running, or swimming, bike riding or taking a brisk walk.

How much should you exercise

The amount of rhythmic-sustained exercise necessary to improve the VO2 Max value is, at a minimum, three half-hour periods per week. Four sessions are better; five sessions, best. The exercise must be of sufficient intensity to increase the pulse rate to 70 per cent of your heart’s maximum rate.

You can calculate your personal maximum heart rate by taking the number 220 and then subtracting your age from it. To then get the minimum heart rate training level necessary to improve your VO2 Max level, you multiply your maximum heat rate by 0.7 [70 per cent].

Thus, according to this formula, if your are 30 years old, the formula is: [220 – 30] x 0.70 = 133 heart beats per minute [BPM] exercise level for 30 minutes a day for 3 – 5 days per week. If you are age 50, the minimal heartbeat level to exercise is at 116 BPM, at age 60, 112, at age 80, 90 BPM, and so on.

After sustained aerobic training, you will notice VO2 Max improvements expressed through what you do in everyday life. For example, you will not be easily winded doing simple tasks such as dashing across a busy street to beat a traffic light, or by running up a flight of stairs.

It’s possible at any age

Eminent USC scientist Herbert DeVries took a group of unfit 70-year-olds and showed that they still had the ability to train and increase their VO2 Max. After six weeks of training, their VO2 Max values improved dramatically.

However, proof of the oxygen story derives from the critical research work of Stanford-trained Steven Blair. Surveying the VO2 Max fitness levels of over 10,000 men over a period of years at the Institute for Aerobics Research in Dallas, Texas, Steven Blair showed that fit people had an extremely strong survival advantage. In his article, Physical Fitness and All-Cause Mortality, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [JAMA] in 1989, he showed some striking perspectives on the role of aerobic fitness in our mortality rates.

Fitness matters most after age 60

The advantage of fitness was not particularly notable until 60 years of age. Causes of death before age 60 were not clearly related to physical fitness. However, after age 60, the participants’ survival rates were closely related to their fitness levels.

Aerobically-fit participants had lower mortality rates from cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and other causes of death. Thus, they had better overall survival rates. A more-recent study from Dr Blair’s group in 2007 looked at 4,060 men and women over the age of 60 for an average observation period of 13.6 years. During this time, 989 members of the group died. However, the fittest portion of the group had only one-third of mortality rate of the least fit. As the percentage of older people in the world population age creeps upward, it is critical to assess those vital predictors of how we will age. Fitness, especially aerobic fitness, is a major key indicator.

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