Dreams: Relevance, Meanings, Interpretations
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝I have a question or a suggestion for coverage in your “Psychology Sunday”. Dreams: their relevance, meanings ( if any) interpretations? I just wondered what the modern psychological opinions are about dreams in general.❞
We’ll indeed do that one of these Psychology Sundays! Thanks for suggesting it.
What we can say in advance is that there’s certainly not a single unified scientific consensus yet, but there are two or three prevailing views definitely worth covering, e.g. randomly generated, a by-product of reorganizing information in the brain, or expressions of subconscious thoughts/feelings.
There are also differences between a top-down/bottom-up approach to understanding dreaming, and efforts to tie those two together.
Watch this space!
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Fast. Feast. Repeat – by Dr. Gin Stephens
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We’ve reviewed intermittent fasting books before, so what makes this one different?
The title “Fast. Feast. Repeat.” doesn’t give much away; after all, we already know that that’s what intermittent fasting is.
After taking the reader though the basics of how intermittent fasting works and what it does for the body, much of the rest of the book is given over to improvements.
That’s what the real strength of this book is: ways to make intermittent fasting more efficient, including how to avoid plateaus. After all, sometimes it can seem like the only way to push further with intermittent fasting is to restrict the eating window further. Not so!
Instead, Dr. Stephens gives us ways to keep confusing our metabolism (in a good way) if, for example, we had a weight loss goal we haven’t met yet.
Best of all, this comes without actually having to eat less.
Bottom line: if you want to be in good physical health, and/but also believe that life is for living and you enjoy eating food, then this book can resolve that age-old dilemma!
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Healing Cracked Fingers
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝Question. Suffer from cracked (split) finger tips in the cold weather. Very painful, is there something I can take to ward off this off. Appreciate your daily email.❞
Ouch, painful indeed! Aside from good hydration (which is something we easily forget in cold weather), there’s no known internal guard against this*, but from the outside, oil-based moisturizers are the way to go.
Olive oil, coconut oil, jojoba oil, and shea butter are all fine options.
If the skin is broken such that infection is possible, then starting with an antiseptic ointment/cream is sensible. A good example product is Savlon, unless you are allergic to its active ingredient chlorhexidine.
*However, if perchance you are also suffering from peripheral neuropathy (a common comorbidity of cracked skin in the extremities), then lion’s main mushroom can help with that.
Writer’s anecdote: I myself started suffering from peripheral neuropathy in my hands earlier this year, doubtlessly due to some old injuries of mine.
However, upon researching for the above articles, I was inspired to try lion’s mane mushroom for myself. I take it daily, and have now been free of symptoms of peripheral neuropathy for several months.
Here’s an example product on Amazon, by the way
Enjoy!
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Why Adult ADHD Often Leads To Anxiety & Depression
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ADHD’s Knock-On Effects On Mental Health
We’ve written before about ADHD in adult life, often late-diagnosed because it’s not quite what people think it is:
In women in particular, it can get missed and/or misdiagnosed:
Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women
…but what we’re really here to talk about today is:
It’s the comorbidities that get you
When it comes to physical health conditions:
- if you have one serious condition, it will (usually) be taken seriously
- if you have two, they will still be taken seriously, but people (friends and family members, as well as yes, medical professionals) will start to back off, as it starts to get too complicated for comfort
- if you have three, people will think you are making at least one of them up for attention now
- if you have more than three, you are considered a hypochondriac and pathological liar
Yet, the reality is: having one serious condition increases your chances of having others, and this chance-increasing feature compounds with each extra condition.
Illustrative example: you have fibromyalgia (ouch) which makes it difficult for you to exercise much, shop around when grocery shopping, and do much cooking at home. You do your best, but your diet slips and it’s hard to care when you just want the pain to stop; you put on some weight, and get diagnosed with metabolic syndrome, which in time becomes diabetes with high cardiovascular risk factors. Your diabetes is immunocompromising; you get COVID and find it’s now Long COVID, which brings about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, when you barely had the spoons to function in the first place. At this point you’ve lost count of conditions and are just trying to get through the day.
If this is you, by the way, we hope at least something in the following might ease things for you a bit:
- Stop Pain Spreading
- Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
- Eat To Beat Chronic Fatigue (While Having The Limitations Of Chronic Fatigue)
- When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might
- The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
It’s the same for mental health
In the case of ADHD as a common starting point (because it’s quite common, may or may not be diagnosed until later in life, and doesn’t require any external cause to appear), it is very common that it will lead to anxiety and/or depression, to the point that it’s perhaps more common to also have one or more of them than not, if you have ADHD.
(Of course, anxiety and/or depression can both pop up for completely unrelated reasons too, and those reasons may be physiological, environmental, or a combination of the above).
Why?
Because all the good advice that goes for good mental health (and/or life in general), gets harder to actuate when one had ADHD.
- “Strong habits are the core of a good life”, but good luck with that if your brain doesn’t register dopamine in the same way as most people’s do, making intentional habit-forming harder on a physiological level.
- “Plan things carefully and stick to the plan”, but good luck with that if you are neurologically impeded from forming plans.
- “Just do it”, but oops you have the tendency-to-overcommitment disorder and now you are seriously overwhelmed with all the things you tried to do, when each of them alone were already going to be a challenge.
Overwhelm and breakdown are almost inevitable.
And when they happen, chances are you will alienate people, and/or simply alienate yourself. You will hide away, you will avoid inflicting yourself on others, you will brood alone in frustration—or distract yourself with something mind-numbing.
Before you know it, you’re too anxious to try to do things with other people or generally show your face to the world (because how will they react, and won’t you just mess things up anyway?), and/or too depressed to leave your depression-lair (because maybe if you keep playing Kingdom Vegetables 2, you can find a crumb of dopamine somewhere).
What to do about it
How to tackle the many-headed beast? By the heads! With your eyes open. Recognize and acknowledge each of the heads; you can’t beat those heads by sticking your own in the sand.
Also, get help. Those words are often used to mean therapy, but in this case we mean, any help. Enlist your partner or close friend as your support in your mental health journey. Enlist a cleaner as your support in taking that one thing off your plate, if that’s an option and a relevant thing for you. Set low but meaningful goals for deciding what constitutes “good enough” for each life area. Decide in advance what you can safely half-ass, and what things in life truly require your whole ass.
Here’s a good starting point for that kind of thing:
When You Know What You “Should” Do (But Knowing Isn’t The Problem)
And this is an excellent way to “get the ball rolling” if you’re already in a bit of a prison of your own making:
Behavioral Activation Against Depression & Anxiety
If things are already bad, then you might also consider:
- How To Set Anxiety Aside and
- The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need ← this is about getting out of depression
And if things are truly at the worst they can possibly be, then:
How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)
Take care!
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A Hospital Kept a Brain-Damaged Patient on Life Support to Boost Statistics. His Sister Is Now Suing for Malpractice.
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ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In 2018, Darryl Young was hoping for a new lease on life when he received a heart transplant at a New Jersey hospital after years of congestive heart failure. But he suffered brain damage during the procedure and never woke up.
The following year, a ProPublica investigation revealed that Young’s case was part of a pattern of heart transplants that had gone awry at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in 2018. The spate of bad outcomes had pushed the center’s percentage of patients still alive one year after surgery — a key benchmark — below the national average. Medical staff were under pressure to boost that metric. ProPublica published audio recordings from meetings in which staff discussed the need to keep Young alive for a year, because they feared another hit to the program’s survival rate would attract scrutiny from regulators. On the recordings, the transplant program’s director, Dr. Mark Zucker, cautioned his team against offering Young’s family the option of switching from aggressive care to comfort care, in which no lifesaving efforts would be made. He acknowledged these actions were “very unethical.”
ProPublica’s revelations horrified Young’s sister Andrea Young, who said she was never given the full picture of her brother’s condition, as did the findings of a subsequent federal regulator’s probe that determined that the hospital was putting patients in “immediate jeopardy.” Last month, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the hospital and members of her brother’s medical team.
The lawsuit alleges that Newark Beth Israel staff were “negligent and deviated from accepted standards of practice,” leading to Young’s tragic medical outcome.
Defendants in the lawsuit haven’t yet filed responses to the complaint in court documents. But spokesperson Linda Kamateh said in an email that “Newark Beth Israel Medical Center is one of the top heart transplant programs in the nation and we are committed to serving our patients with the highest quality of care. As this case is in active litigation, we are unable to provide further detail.” Zucker, who is no longer on staff at Newark Beth Israel, didn’t respond to requests for comment. His attorney also didn’t respond to calls and emails requesting comment.
Zucker also didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica in 2018; Newark Beth Israel at the time said in a statement, made on behalf of Zucker and other staff, that “disclosures of select portions of lengthy and highly complex medical discussions, when taken out of context, may distort the intent of conversations.”
The lawsuit alleges that Young suffered brain damage as a result of severely low blood pressure during the transplant surgery. In 2019, when the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scrutinized the heart transplant program following ProPublica’s investigation, the regulators found that the hospital had failed to implement corrective measures even after patients suffered, leading to further harm. For example, one patient’s kidneys failed after a transplant procedure in August 2018, and medical staff made recommendations internally to increase the frequency of blood pressure measurement during the procedure, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that the hospital didn’t implement its own recommendations and that one month later, “these failures were repeated” in Young’s surgery, leading to brain damage.
The lawsuit also alleges that Young wasn’t asked whether he had an advance directive, such as a preference for a do-not-resuscitate order, despite a hospital policy stating that patients should be asked at the time of admission. The lawsuit also noted that CMS’ investigation found that Andrea Young was not informed of her brother’s condition.
Andrea Young said she understands that mistakes can happen during medical procedures, “however, it’s their duty and their responsibility to be honest and let the family know exactly what went wrong.” Young said she had to fight to find out what was going on with her brother, at one point going to the library and trying to study medical books so she could ask the right questions. “I remember as clear as if it were yesterday, being so desperate for answers,” she said.
Andrea Young said that she was motivated to file the lawsuit because she wants accountability. “Especially with the doctors never, from the outset, being forthcoming and truthful about the circumstances of my brother’s condition, not only is that wrong and unethical, but it took a lot away from our entire family,” she said. “The most important thing to me is that those responsible be held accountable.”
ProPublica’s revelation of “a facility putting its existence over that of a patient is a scary concept,” said attorney Jonathan Lomurro, who’s representing Andrea Young in this case with co-counsel Christian LoPiano. Besides seeking damages for Darryl Young’s children, “we want to call attention to this so it doesn’t happen again,” Lomurro said.
The lawsuit further alleges that medical staff at Newark Beth Israel invaded Young’s privacy and violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, more commonly known as HIPAA, by sharing details of his case with the media without his permission. “We want people to be whistleblowers and want information out,” but that information should be told to patients and their family members directly, Lomurro said.
The 2019 CMS investigation determined that Newark Beth Israel’s program placed patients in “immediate jeopardy,” the most serious level of violation, and required the hospital to implement corrective plans. Newark Beth Israel did not agree with all of the regulator’s findings and in a statement at the time said that the CMS team lacked the “evidence, expertise and experience” to assess and diagnose patient outcomes.
The hospital did carry out the corrective plans and continues to operate a heart transplant program today. The most recent federal data, based on procedures from January 2021 through June 2023, shows that the one year probability of survival for a patient at Newark Beth is lower than the national average. It also shows that the number of graft failures, including deaths, in that time period was higher than the expected number of deaths for the program.
Andrea Young said she’s struggled with a feeling of emptiness in the years after her brother’s surgery. They were close and called each other daily. “There’s nothing in the world that can bring my brother back, so the only solace I will have is for the ones responsible to be held accountable,” she said. Darryl Young died on Sept 12, 2022, having never woken up after the transplant surgery.
A separate medical malpractice lawsuit filed in 2020 by the wife of another Newark Beth Israel heart transplant patient who died after receiving an organ infected with a parasitic disease is ongoing. The hospital has denied the allegations in court filing. The state of New Jersey, employer of the pathologists named in the case, settled for $1.7 million this month, according to the plaintiff’s attorney Christian LoPiano. The rest of the case is ongoing.
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6 Kinds Of Drinks That Hasten Dementia
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Dr. William Li, most well-known for his diabetes expertise (remember that there are clear associations between diabetes and dementia), discusses drinks you might want to skip:
Here’s to your good health
The 6 kinds of drink are:
- Alcohol which is bad for pretty much everything and this is no exception. Can cause a deficiency of thiamine, brain-shrinking, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress, and resultant neuron damage.
- Soda / diet soda, the former of which is bad for the diabetes-dementia connection, and the latter of which is also usually (depends on the sweetener) harmful to the gut and thus the gut-brain connection.
- Fruit juices, especially if processed, as the high sugar and zero or nearly-zero fiber can lead to insulin resistance, affecting the brain’s energy processing. In particular, fruit juice drinks sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) can accumulated as fat in the brain (due to how the body processes fructose in the absence of fiber to slow it down), impacting cognition.
- Energy drinks, being basically the same as soda / diet soda, just now with added caffeine too.
- [Caffeinated] late-night coffee, can (shocking nobody) disrupt sleep, and chronic sleep deprivation contributes to the build-up of harmful brain plaques.
- Sports drinks, which (unless you’re super-sure about everything on the label; there are some good sports drinks out there) often contain HFCS in the US, along with various other additives that may not always be great for you. Also, the sodium content of electrolyte drinks are fine if you genuinely are actively sweating it out, but otherwise, can lead to high blood pressure, which is itself a dementia risk factor.
Better options include:
- decaffeinated coffee (or coffee enjoyed in the early afternoon)
- green tea
- turmeric-based drinks
Dr. Li mentions turmeric milk drinks, but unfermented dairy is generally inflammatory, so better to make it kefir (fermented milk drink) or plant-based. Or just have a turmeric tea; that works too.
Dr. Li also mentions berry smoothies, which are not nearly as bad as fruit juice, but still not as good as eating whole berries.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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You might also like to read:
Take care!
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Self-Care for Tough Times – by Suzy Reading
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A note on the author: while not “Dr. Reading”, she is a “CPsychol, B Psych (Hons), M Psych”; a Chartered Psychologist specializing in wellbeing, stress management and facilitation of healthy lifestyle change. So this is coming from a place of research and evidence!
The kinds of “tough times” she has in mind are so numerous that listing them takes two pages in the book, so we won’t try here. But suffice it to say, there are a lot of things that can go wrong for us as humans, and this book addresses how to take care of ourselves mindfully in light of them.
The author takes a “self-care is health care” approach, and goes about things with a clinical mindset and/but a light tone, offering both background information, and hands-on practical advice.
Bottom line: there may be troubles ahead (and maybe you’re in the middle of troubles right now), but there’s always room for a little sunshine too.
Click here to check out Self-Care For Tough Times, and care for yourself in tough times!
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