Dogs Paired With Providers at Hospitals Help Ease Staff and Patient Stress
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DENVER — Outside HCA HealthONE Rose medical center, the snow is flying. Inside, on the third floor, there’s a flurry of activity within the labor and delivery unit.
“There’s a lot of action up here. It can be very stressful at times,” said Kristina Fraser, an OB-GYN in blue scrubs.
Nurses wheel a very pregnant mom past.
“We’re going to bring a baby into this world safely,” Fraser said, “and off we go.”
She said she feels ready in part due to a calming moment she had just a few minutes earlier with some canine colleagues.
A pair of dogs, tails wagging, had come by a nearby nursing station, causing about a dozen medical professionals to melt into a collective puddle of affection. A yellow Lab named Peppi showered Fraser in nuzzles and kisses. “I don’t know if a human baby smells as good as that puppy breath!” Fraser had said as her colleagues laughed.
The dogs aren’t visitors. They work here, too, specifically for the benefit of the staff. “I feel like that dog just walks on and everybody takes a big deep breath and gets down on the ground and has a few moments of just decompressing,” Fraser said. “It’s great. It’s amazing.”
Hospital staffers who work with the dogs say there is virtually no bite risk with the carefully trained Labradors, the preferred breed for this work.
The dogs are kept away from allergic patients and washed regularly to prevent germs from spreading, and people must wash their hands before and after petting them.
Doctors and nurses are facing a growing mental health crisis driven by their experiences at work. They and other health care colleagues face high rates of depression, anxiety, stress, suicidal ideation, and burnout. Nearly half of health workers reported often feeling burned out in 2022, an increase from 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the percentage of health care workers who reported harassment at work more than doubled over that four-year period. Advocates for the presence of dogs in hospitals see the animals as one thing that can help.
That includes Peppi’s handler, Susan Ryan, an emergency medicine physician at Rose.
Ryan said years working as an emergency room doctor left her with symptoms of PTSD. “I just was messed up and I knew it,” said Ryan, who isolated more at home and didn’t want to engage with friends. “I shoved it all in. I think we all do.”
She said doctors and other providers can be good at hiding their struggles, because they have to compartmentalize. “How else can I go from a patient who had a cardiac arrest, deal with the family members telling them that, and go to a room where another person is mad that they’ve had to wait 45 minutes for their ear pain? And I have to flip that switch.”
To cope with her symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, Ryan started doing therapy with horses. But she couldn’t have a horse in her backyard, so she got a Labrador.
Ryan received training from a national service dog group called Canine Companions, becoming the first doctor trained by the group to have a facility dog in an emergency room. Canine Companions has graduated more than 8,000 service dogs.
The Rose medical center gave Ryan approval to bring a dog to work during her ER shifts. Ryan’s colleagues said they are delighted that a dog is part of their work life.
“When I have a bad day at work and I come to Rose and Peppi is here, my day’s going to be made better,” EMT Jasmine Richardson said. “And if I have a patient who’s having a tough day, Peppi just knows how to light up the room.”
Nursing supervisor Eric Vaillancourt agreed, calling Peppi “joyful.”
Ryan had another dog, Wynn, working with her during the height of the pandemic. She said she thinks Wynn made a huge difference. “It saved people,” she said. “We had new nurses that had never seen death before, and now they’re seeing a covid death. And we were worried sick we were dying.”
She said her hospital system has lost a couple of physicians to suicide in the past two years, which HCA confirmed to KFF Health News and NPR. Ryan hopes the canine connection can help with trauma. “Anything that brings you back to the present time helps ground you again. A dog can be that calming influence,” she said. “You can get down on the ground, pet them, and you just get calm.”
Ryan said research has shown the advantages. For example, one review of dozens of original studies on human-animal interactions found benefits for a variety of conditions including behavioral and mood issues and physical symptoms of stress.
Rose’s president and CEO, Casey Guber, became such a believer in the canine connection he got his own trained dog to bring to the hospital, a black Lab-retriever mix named Ralphie.
She wears a badge: Chief Dog Officer.
Guber said she’s a big morale booster. “Phenomenal,” he said. “It is not uncommon to see a surgeon coming down to our administration office and rolling on the ground with Ralphie, or one of our nurses taking Ralphie out for a walk in the park.”
This article is from a partnership that includes CPR News, NPR, and KFF Health News.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Could Just Two Hours Sleep Per Day Be Enough?
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Polyphasic Sleep… Super-Schedule Or An Idea Best Put To Rest?
What is it?
Let’s start by defining some terms:
- Monophasic sleep—sleeping in one “chunk” per day. For example, a good night’s “normal” sleep.
- Biphasic sleep—sleeping in two “chunks” per day. Typically, a shorter night’s sleep, with a nap usually around the middle of the day / early afternoon.
- Polyphasic sleep—sleeping in two or more “chunks per day”. Some people do this in order to have more hours awake per day, to do things. The idea is that sleeping this way is more efficient, and one can get enough rest in less time. The most popular schedules used are:
- The Überman schedule—six evenly-spaced 20-minute naps, one every four hours, throughout the 24-hour day. The name is a semi-anglicized version of the German word Übermensch, “Superman”.
- The Everyman schedule—a less extreme schedule, that has a three-hours “long sleep” during the night, and three evenly-spaced 20-minute naps during the day, for a total of 4 hours sleep.
There are other schedules, but we’ll focus on the most popular ones here.
Want to learn about the others? Visit: Polyphasic.Net (a website by and for polyphasic sleep enthusiasts)
Some people have pointed to evidence that suggests humans are naturally polyphasic sleepers, and that it is only modern lifestyles that have forced us to be (mostly) monophasic.
There is at least some evidence to suggest that when environmental light/dark conditions are changed (because of extreme seasonal variation at the poles, or, as in this case, because of artificial changes as part of a sleep science experiment), we adjust our sleeping patterns accordingly.
The counterpoint, of course, is that perhaps when at the mercy of long days/nights at the poles, or no air-conditioning to deal with the heat of the day in the tropics, that perhaps we were forced to be polyphasic, and now, with modern technology and greater control, we are free to be monophasic.
Either way, there are plenty of people who take up the practice of polyphasic sleep.
Ok, But… Why?
The main motivation for trying polyphasic sleep is simply to have more hours in the day! It’s exciting, the prospect of having 22 hours per day to be so productive and still have time over for leisure.
A secondary motivation for trying polyphasic sleep is that when the brain is sleep-deprived, it will prioritize REM sleep. Here’s where the Überman schedule becomes perhaps most interesting:
The six evenly-spaced naps of the Überman schedule are each 20 minutes long. This corresponds to the approximate length of a normal REM cycle.
Consequently, when your head hits the pillow, you’ll immediately begin dreaming, and at the end of your dream, the alarm will go off.
Waking up at the end of a dream, when one hasn’t yet entered a non-REM phase of sleep, will make you more likely to remember it. Similarly, going straight into REM sleep will make you more likely to be aware of it, thus, lucid dreaming.
Read: Sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming (actually a very interesting and informative lucid dreaming study even if you don’t want to take up polyphasic sleep)
Six 20-minute lucid-dreaming sessions per day?! While awake for the other 22 hours?! That’s… 24 hours per day of wakefulness to use as you please! What sorcery is this?
Hence, it has quite an understandable appeal.
Next Question: Does it work?
Can we get by without the other (non-REM) kinds of sleep?
According to Überman cycle enthusiasts: Yes! The body and brain will adapt.
According to sleep scientists: No! The non-REM slow-wave phases of sleep are essential
Read: Adverse impact of polyphasic sleep patterns in humans—Report of the National Sleep Foundation sleep timing and variability consensus panel
(if you want to know just how bad it is… the top-listed “similar article” is entitled “Suicidal Ideation”)
But what about, for example, the Everman schedule? Three hours at night is enough for some non-REM sleep, right?
It is, and so it’s not as quickly deleterious to the health as the Überman schedule. But, unless you are blessed with rare genes that allow you to operate comfortably on 4 hours per day (you’ll know already if that describes you, without having to run any experiment), it’s still bad.
Adults typically need 7–9 hours of sleep per night, and if you don’t get it, you’ll accumulate a sleep debt. And, importantly:
When you accumulate sleep debt, you are borrowing time at a very high rate of interest!
And, at risk of laboring the metaphor, but this is important too:
Not only will you have to pay it back soon (with interest), you will be hounded by the debt collection agents—decreased cognitive ability and decreased physical ability—until you pay up.
In summary:
- Polyphasic sleep is really very tempting
- It will give you more hours per day (for a while)
- It will give the promised lucid dreaming benefits (which is great until you start micronapping between naps, this is effectively a mini psychotic break from reality lasting split seconds each—can be deadly if behind the wheel of a car, for instance!)
- It is unequivocally bad for the health and we do not recommend it
Bottom line:
Some of the claimed benefits are real, but are incredibly short-term, unsustainable, and come at a cost that’s far too high. We get why it’s tempting, but ultimately, it’s self-sabotage.
(Sadly! We really wanted it to work, too…)
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Vodka vs Beer – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing vodka to beer, we picked the vodka.
Why?
As you might have guessed, neither are exactly healthy. But one of them is relatively, and we stress relatively, less bad than the other.
In the category of nutrients, vodka is devoid of nutrients, and beer has small amounts of some vitamins and minerals—but the amounts are so small, that you would need to drink yourself to death before benefiting from them meaningfully. And while beer gets touted as “liquid bread”, it really isn’t. A thousand years ago it will have been a lot less alcoholic and more carby, but even then, it wasn’t a health product aside from that it provided a way of making potentially contaminated water safer to drink.
In the category of carbohydrates, vodka nominally has none, due to the distillation process, and beer has some. Glycemic index websites often advise that the GI of beers, wines, and spirits can’t be measured as their carb content is not sufficient to get a meaningful sample, but diabetes research tells a more useful story:
Any alcoholic drink will generally cause a brief drop in blood sugars, followed by a spike. This happens because the liver prioritises metabolizing alcohol over producing glycogen, so it hits pause on the sugar metabolism and then has a backlog to catch up on. In the case of alcoholic drinks that have alcohol and carbs, this will be more pronounced—so this means that the functional glycemic load of beer is higher.
That’s a point in favor of vodka.
Additionally, in terms of the alcohol content, correctly-distilled vodka’s alcohol is pure ethanol, while beer will contain an amount of methanol that will vary per beer, but an illustrative nominal figure could be about 16mg/L. Methanol is more harmful than ethanol.
So that’s another point in favor of vodka.
Once again, neither drink is healthy; both are distinctly unhealthy. But unit for unit, beer is the least healthy of the two, making vodka the lesser of two evils.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
- Can We Drink To Good Health? (answer: we cannot, but this was about alcohol’s proposed heart-healthy benefits)
- Guinness Is Good For You* (it isn’t, but this was the long-time slogan and marketing campaign that fooled many)
- How To Reduce Or Quit Alcohol
- How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver
Take care!
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Can You Reverse Gray Hair? A Dermatologist Explains
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Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states “any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no“—it’s not really a universal truth, but it’s true surprisingly often, and, as board certified dermatologist “The Beauty MD” Dr. Sam Ellis explains, it’s true in this case.
But, all is not lost.
Physiological Factors
Hair color is initially determined by genes and gene expression, instructing the body to color it with melanin (brown and black) and/or pheomelanin (blonde and red). If and when the body produces less of those pigments, our hair will go gray.
Factors that affect if/when our hair will go gray include:
- Genetics: primary determinant, essentially a programmed change
- Age: related to the above, but critically, the probability of going gray in any given year increases with age
- Ethnicity: the level of melanin in our skin is an indicator of how long we are likely to maintain melanin in our hair. Black people with the darkest skintones will thus generally go gray last, whereas white people with the lightest skintones will generally go gray first, and so on for a spectrum between the two.
- Medical conditions: immune conditions such as vitiligo, thyroid disease, and pernicious anemia promote an earlier loss of pigmentation
- Stress: oxidative stress, mainly, so factors like smoking will cause earlier graying. But yes, also chronic emotional stress does lead to oxidative stress too. Interestingly, this seems to be more about norepinephrine than cortisol, though.
- Nutrient deficiencies: the body can make a lot of things, but it needs the raw ingredients. Not having the right amounts of important vitamins and minerals will result in a loss of pigmentation (amongst other more serious problems). Vitamins B6, B9, and B12 are talked about in the video, as are iron and zinc. Copper is also needed for some hair colors. Selenium is needed for good hair health in general (but not too much, as an excess of selenium paradoxically causes hair loss), and many related things will stop working properly without adequate magnesium. Hair health will also benefit a lot from plenty of vitamin B7.
So, managing the above factors (where possible; obviously some of the above aren’t things we can influence) will result in maintaining one’s hair pigment for longer. As for texture, by the way, the reason gray hair tends to have a rougher texture is not for the lack of pigment itself, but is due to decreased sebum production. Judicious use of exogenous hair oils (e.g. argan oil, coconut oil, or whatever your preference may be) is a fine way to keep your grays conditioned.
However, once your hair has gone gray, there is no definitive treatment with good evidence for reversing that, at present. Dye it if you want to, or don’t. Many people (including this writer, who has just a couple of streaks of gray herself) find gray hair gives a distinguished look, and such harmless signs of age are a privilege not everyone gets to reach, and thus may be reasonably considered a cause for celebration
For more on all of the above, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Almond Butter vs Cashew Butter – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing almond butter to cashew butter, we picked the almond.
Why?
They’re both good! But, our inherent pro-almond bias notwithstanding, the almond butter does have a slightly better spread of nutrients.
In terms of macros, almond butter has more protein while cashew butter has more carbs, and of their fats, they’re broadly healthy in both cases, but almond butter does have less saturated fat.
In the category of vitamins, both are good sources of vitamin E, but almond butter has about 4x more. The rest of the vitamins they both contain aren’t too dissimilar, aside from some different weightings of various different B-vitamins, that pretty much balance out across the two nut butters. The only noteworthy point in cashew butter’s favor here is that it is a good source of vitamin K, which almond butter doesn’t have.
When it comes to minerals, both are good sources of lots of minerals, but most significantly, almond butter has a lot more calcium and quite a bit more potassium. In contrast, cashew butter has more selenium.
In short, they’re both great, but almond butter has more relative points in its favor than cashew butter.
Here are the two we depicted today, by the way, in case you’d like to try them:
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts
Take care!
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The Medicinal Chef – by Dale Pinnock
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The philosophy here is very much like our own—to borrow from Hippocrates: “let food be thy medicine”. Obviously please do also let medicine be thy medicine if you need it, but the point is that food is a very good starting place for combatting a lot of disease.
To this end, instead of labelling the recipes with such things as “V”, “Ve”, “GF” and suchlike, it assumes we can tell those things from the ingredients lists, and instead labels things per what they are especially good for:
- S: skin
- J: joints & bones
- R: respiratory system
- I: immune system
- M: metabolic health
- N: nervous system and mental health
- H: heart and circulation
- D: digestive system
- U: reproductive & urinary systems
As for the recipes themselves… They’re a lot like the recipes we share here at 10almonds in their healthiness, skill level, and balance of easy-to-find ingredients with the occasional “order it online” items that punch above their weight. In fact, we’ll probably modify some of the recipes for sharing here.
Bottom line: if you’re looking for genuinely healthy recipes that are neither too basic nor too arcane, this book has about 80 of them.
Click here to check out The Medicinal Chef: Healthy Every Day, and be healthy every day!
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Building & Maintaining Mobility
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Building & Maintaining Mobility!
This is Juliet Starrett. She’s a CrossFit co-founder, and two-time white-water rafting world champion. Oh, and she won those after battling thyroid cancer. She’s now 50 years old, and still going strong, having put aside her career as a lawyer to focus on fitness. Specifically, mobility training.
The Ready State
Together with her husband Kelly, Starrett co-founded The Ready State, of which she’s CEO.
It used to be called “Mobility WOD” (the “WOD” stands for “workout of the day”) but they changed their name as other companies took up the use of the word “mobility”, something the fitness world hadn’t previously focussed on much, and “WOD”, which was also hardly copyrightable.
True to its origins, The Ready State continues to offer many resources for building and maintaining mobility.
Why the focus on mobility?
When was the last time you had to bench-press anything larger than a small child? Or squat more than your partner’s bodyweight? Or do a “farmer’s walk” with anything heavier than your groceries?
For most of us, unless our lifestyles are quite extreme, we don’t need ridiculous strength (fun as that may be).
You know what makes a huge difference to our quality of life though? Mobility.
Have you ever felt that moment of panic when you reach for something on a high shelf and your shoulder or back twinges (been there!)? Or worse, you actually hurt yourself and the next thing you know, you need help putting your socks on (been there, too!)?
And we say to ourselves “I’m not going to let that happen to me again”
But how? How do we keep our mobility strong?
First, know your weaknesses
Starrett is a big fan of mobility tests to pinpoint areas that need more work.
Most of her resources for this aren’t free, and we’re drawing heavily from her book here, so for your convenience, we’ll link to some third party sources for this:
- Timed Up and Go—start with this, before progressing to the next!
- Sit To Rise Test—not to be underestimated (this page also has excerpts from Starrett’s mobility book, by the way)
- Shoulders/Spine/Hips—7 quick tests; note any that you can’t do, or struggle with
Next, eliminate those weaknesses
Do mobility exercises in any weak areas, until they’re not weak:
Want to train the full body in one session?
Try out The Ready State’s 10-Minute Morning Mobility Routine
Want to learn more?
You might enjoy her book that we reviewed previously:
Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully
You might also enjoy The Ready State App, available for iOS and for Android:
The Ready State Virtual Mobility Coach
Enjoy!
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