Switchcraft – by Dr. Elaine Fox

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How do we successfully balance “a mind is like a parachute: it only works if it’s open”, with the importance of also actually having some kind of personal integrity and consistency?

Dr. Fox recommends that we focus on four key attributes:

  • Mental agility
  • Self-awareness
  • Emotional awareness
  • Situational awareness

If this sounds a little wishy-washy, it isn’t—she delineates and explains each in detail. And most importantly: how we can build and train each one.

Mental agility, for example, is not about being able to rapidly solve chess problems or “answer these riddles three”. It’s more about:

  • Adaptability
  • Balancing our life
  • Challenging (and if appropriate, changing) our perspective
  • Developing our mental competence

This sort of thing is the “meat” of the book. Meanwhile, self-awareness is more a foundational conscious knowledge of one’s own “pole star” values, while emotional awareness is a matter of identifying and understanding and accepting what we feel—anything less is self-sabotage! And situational awareness is perhaps most interesting:

Dr. Fox advocates for “trusting one’s gut feelings”. With a big caveat, though!

If we trust our gut feelings without developing their accuracy, we’re just going to go about being blindly prejudiced and often wrong. So, a whole section of the book is devoted to honing this and improving our ability to judge things as they really are—rather than as we expect.

Bottom line: this book is a great tool for not only challenging our preconceptions about how we think, but giving us the resources to be adaptable and resilient without sacrificing integrity.

Click here to check out Switchcraft on Amazon and level up your thinking!

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    Revamped for heart-health: the latest edition of the classic cookbook steers clear of salt, oil, sugar, and gluten for comforting plant-based culinary delights.

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  • Alzheimer’s may have once spread from person to person, but the risk of that happening today is incredibly low

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    An article published this week in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine documents what is believed to be the first evidence that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person.

    The finding arose from long-term follow up of patients who received human growth hormone (hGH) that was taken from brain tissue of deceased donors.

    Preparations of donated hGH were used in medicine to treat a variety of conditions from 1959 onwards – including in Australia from the mid 60s.

    The practice stopped in 1985 when it was discovered around 200 patients worldwide who had received these donations went on to develop Creuztfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which causes a rapidly progressive dementia. This is an otherwise extremely rare condition, affecting roughly one person in a million.

    What’s CJD got to do with Alzehimer’s?

    CJD is caused by prions: infective particles that are neither bacterial or viral, but consist of abnormally folded proteins that can be transmitted from cell to cell.

    Other prion diseases include kuru, a dementia seen in New Guinea tribespeople caused by eating human tissue, scrapie (a disease of sheep) and variant CJD or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, otherwise known as mad cow disease. This raised public health concerns over the eating of beef products in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.

    Human growth hormone used to come from donated organs

    Human growth hormone (hGH) is produced in the brain by the pituitary gland. Treatments were originally prepared from purified human pituitary tissue.

    But because the amount of hGH contained in a single gland is extremely small, any single dose given to any one patient could contain material from around 16,000 donated glands.

    An average course of hGH treatment lasts around four years, so the chances of receiving contaminated material – even for a very rare condition such as CJD – became quite high for such people.

    hGH is now manufactured synthetically in a laboratory, rather than from human tissue. So this particular mode of CJD transmission is no longer a risk.

    Scientist in a lab
    Human growth hormone is now produced in a lab.
    National Cancer Institute/Unsplash

    What are the latest findings about Alzheimer’s disease?

    The Nature Medicine paper provides the first evidence that transmission of Alzheimer’s disease can occur via human-to-human transmission.

    The authors examined the outcomes of people who received donated hGH until 1985. They found five such recipients had developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

    They considered other explanations for the findings but concluded donated hGH was the likely cause.

    Given Alzheimer’s disease is a much more common illness than CJD, the authors presume those who received donated hGH before 1985 may be at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

    Alzheimer’s disease is caused by presence of two abnormally folded proteins: amyloid and tau. There is increasing evidence these proteins spread in the brain in a similar way to prion diseases. So the mode of transmission the authors propose is certainly plausible.

    However, given the amyloid protein deposits in the brain at least 20 years before clinical Alzheimer’s disease develops, there is likely to be a considerable time lag before cases that might arise from the receipt of donated hGH become evident.

    When was this process used in Australia?

    In Australia, donated pituitary material was used from 1967 to 1985 to treat people with short stature and infertility.

    More than 2,000 people received such treatment. Four developed CJD, the last case identified in 1991. All four cases were likely linked to a single contaminated batch.

    The risks of any other cases of CJD developing now in pituitary material recipients, so long after the occurrence of the last identified case in Australia, are considered to be incredibly small.

    Early-onset Alzheimer’s disease (defined as occurring before the age of 65) is uncommon, accounting for around 5% of all cases. Below the age of 50 it’s rare and likely to have a genetic contribution.

    Older man places his hands on his head
    Early onset Alzheimer’s means it occurs before age 65.
    perfectlab/Shutterstock

    The risk is very low – and you can’t ‘catch’ it like a virus

    The Nature Medicine paper identified five cases which were diagnosed in people aged 38 to 55. This is more than could be expected by chance, but still very low in comparison to the total number of patients treated worldwide.

    Although the long “incubation period” of Alzheimer’s disease may mean more similar cases may be identified in the future, the absolute risk remains very low. The main scientific interest of the article lies in the fact it’s first to demonstrate that Alzheimer’s disease can be transmitted from person to person in a similar way to prion diseases, rather than in any public health risk.

    The authors were keen to emphasise, as I will, that Alzheimer’s cannot be contracted via contact with or providing care to people with Alzheimer’s disease.The Conversation

    Steve Macfarlane, Head of Clinical Services, Dementia Support Australia, & Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Monash University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • 12 Things Your Urine Says About Your Health (Test At Home)

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    Urine has been used to assess health since Ancient Egypt (fun fact: because of Egyptian language having multiple sounds that get transliterated to “a” in English, the condition of passing blood in one’s urine was known as “Aaaaa” ← this word has three syllables; “Aa-a-aa”).

    Modern techniques are more advanced than those of times past (for example, diabetes is no longer diagnosed by a urine taste-test), but basic urine inspection is still a very useful indicator of many things. Recognizing changes in urine can even help detect life-threatening conditions early:

    Traffic lights?

    How urine works: water that we consume is absorbed into the bloodstream and filtered by the kidneys. Urine is essentially blood with actual the blood cells filtered out and/or broken down. The yellow color comes from urochrome, produced during red blood cell breakdown. Here’s how things can happen a little differently:

    1. Fluorescent yellow: caused by excess vitamin B2 from supplements; harmless.
    2. Red urine: can indicate blood (bladder cancer, UTIs), hemoglobin, or myoglobin; seek medical attention.
    3. Dark brown/tea-colored urine: may result from muscle damage or blood cell destruction; requires evaluation.
    4. Orange urine: caused by dehydration, medications, or liver/bile duct issues (if paired with pale stools).
    5. Purple urine: UTI bacteria produce pigments that can cause this; treatable with antibiotics.
    6. Green urine: rare; caused by medications or dyes like methylene blue.
    7. Frothy/foamy urine: indicates high protein levels, often from kidney damage (e.g. per diabetes and/or hypertension).
    8. Crystal-clear urine: suggests overhydration, which can dangerously lower sodium levels.
    9. Dark yellow/amber urine: may mean dehydration; drink more water to maintain a light yellow color.
    10. Not peeing enough: may indicate severe dehydration or kidney failure; urgent medical attention needed.
    11. Peeing too much: often linked to diabetes or excessive water intake; can lead to dehydration or low sodium.
    12. Color-changing urine: port wine color signals porphyria; black urine indicates alkaptonuria (oxidation of homogentisic acid). Both are serious.

    Bonus: if you eat a lot of beetroot and then your urine is pink/red/purple, that’s probably just the pigments passing through. If it persists though, then of course, see above.

    For more on each of these, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like to read:

    Why You Don’t Need 8 Glasses Of Water Per Day

    Take care!

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  • Dry Needling for Meralgia Paresthetica?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    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

    ❝Could you address dry needling, who should administer it, and could it be a remedy for meralgia paresthetica? If not, could you speak to home-based remedies for meralgia paresthetica? Thank you?❞

    We’ll need to take a main feature some time to answer this one fully, but we will say some quick things here:

    • Dry needling, much like acupuncture, has been found to help with pain relief.
    • Meralgia paresthetica, being a neuropathy, may benefit from some things that benefit people with peripheral neuropathy, such as lion’s mane mushroom. There is definitely not research to support this hypothesis yet though (so far as we could find anyway; there is plenty to support lion’s mane helping with nerve regeneration in general, but nothing specific for meralgia paresthetica).

    Some previous articles you might enjoy meanwhile:

    Take care!

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Related Posts

  • The Well Plated Cookbook – by Erin Clarke
  • Antibiotics? Think Thrice

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Antibiotics: Useful Even Less Often Than Previously Believed (And Still Just As Dangerous)

    You probably already know that antibiotics shouldn’t be taken unless absolutely necessary. Not only does taking antibiotics frivolously increase antibiotic resistance (which is bad, and kills people), but also…

    It’s entirely possible for the antibiotics to not only not help, but instead wipe out your gut’s “good bacteria” that were keeping other things in check.

    Those “other things” can include fungi like Candida albicans.

    Candida, which we all have in us to some degree, feeds on sugar (including the sugar formed from breaking down alcohol, by the way) and refined carbs. Then it grows, and puts its roots through your intestinal walls, linking with your neural system. Then it makes you crave the very things that will feed it and allow it to put bigger holes in your intestinal walls.

    Don’t believe us? Read: Candida albicans-Induced Epithelial Damage Mediates Translocation through Intestinal Barriers

    (That’s scientist-speak for “Candida puts holes in your intestines, and stuff can then go through those holes”)

    And as for how that comes about, it’s like we said:

    See also: Candida albicans as a commensal and opportunistic pathogen in the intestine

    That’s not all…

    And that’s just C. albicans, never mind things like C. diff. that can just outright kill you easily.

    We don’t have room to go into everything here, but you might like to check out:

    Four Ways Antibiotics Can Kill You

    It gets worse (now comes the new news)

    So, what are antibiotics good for? Surely, for clearing up chesty coughs, lower respiratory tract infections, right? It’s certainly one of the two things that antibiotics are most well-known for being good at and often necessary for (the other being preventing/treating sepsis, for example in serious and messy wounds).

    But wait…

    A large, nationwide (US) observational study of people who sought treatment in primary or urgent care settings for lower respiratory tract infections found…

    (drumroll please)

    the use of antibiotics provided no measurable impact on the severity or duration of coughs even if a bacterial infection was present.

    Read for yourself:

    Antibiotics Not Associated with Shorter Duration or Reduced Severity of Acute Lower Respiratory Tract Infection

    And in the words of the lead author of that study,

    ❝Lower respiratory tract infections tend to have the potential to be more dangerous, since about 3% to 5% of these patients have pneumonia. But not everyone has easy access at an initial visit to an X-ray, which may be the reason clinicians still give antibiotics without any other evidence of a bacterial infection.❞

    ~ Dr. Daniel Merenstein

    So, what’s to be done about this? On a large scale, Dr. Merenstein recommends:

    ❝Serious cough symptoms and how to treat them properly needs to be studied more, perhaps in a randomized clinical trial as this study was observational and there haven’t been any randomized trials looking at this issue since about 2012.❞

    ~ Dr. Daniel Merenstein

    This does remind us that, while not a RCT, there is a good ongoing observational study that everyone with a smartphone can participate in:

    Dr. Peter Small’s medical AI: “The Cough Doctor”

    In the meantime, he advises that when COVID and SARS have been ruled out, then “basic symptom-relieving medications plus time brings a resolution to most people’s infections”.

    You can read a lot more detail here:

    Antibiotics aren’t effective for most lower tract respiratory infections

    In summary…

    Sometimes, antibiotics really are a necessary and life-saving medication. But most of the time they’re not, and given their great potential for harm, they may be best simultaneously viewed as the very dangerous threat they also are, and used only when those “heavy guns” are truly what’s required.

    Take care!

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  • Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory – by Dr. Andrew Budson & Dr. Maureen O’Connor

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    First, what this is not: a “how to improve your memory” book of the kind marketed to students and/or people who want to do memory-themed party tricks.

    What this book actually is: exactly what the title and subtitle claim it to be: seven steps to managing your memory: what’s normal, what’s not, and what to do about it.

    Drs. Budson & O’Connor cover:

    • which memory errors can (and usually do) happen at any age
    • how memory changes with normal aging, and
    • what kinds of memory problems are not normal.

    One thing that sets this book aside from a lot of its genre is that it also covers which kinds of memory loss are reversible—and, where appropriate, what can be undertaken to effect such a reversal.

    The authors talk about what things have (and what things haven’t!) been shown to strengthen memory and reduce cognitive decline, and in the worst case scenario, what medications can help against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

    The style is halfway between pop-science and a science textbook. The structure of the book, with its headings, subheadings, bullet points, summaries, etc, helps the reader to process and remember the information.

    Bottom line: if you’d like to get on top of managing your memory before you forget, then this book is for you.

    Click here to check out Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory, and safeguard what’s most important to you!

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  • You can now order all kinds of medical tests online. Our research shows this is (mostly) a bad idea

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Elena.Katkova/Shutterstock

    Many of us have done countless rapid antigen tests (RATs) over the course of the pandemic. Testing ourselves at home has become second nature.

    But there’s also a growing worldwide market in medical tests sold online directly to the public. These are “direct-to-consumer” tests, and you can access them without seeing a doctor.

    While this might sound convenient, the benefits to most consumers are questionable, as we discovered in a recent study.

    What are direct-to-consumer tests?

    Let’s start with what they’re not. We’re not talking about patients who are diagnosed with a condition, and use tests to monitor themselves (for example, finger-prick testing to monitor blood sugar levels for people with diabetes).

    We’re also not talking about home testing kits used for population screening, such as RATs for COVID, or the “poo tests” sent to people aged 50 and over for bowel cancer screening.

    Direct-to-consumer tests are products marketed to anyone who is willing to pay, without going through their GP. They can include hormone profiling tests, tests for thyroid disease and food sensitivity tests, among many others.

    Some direct-to-consumer tests allow you to complete the test at home, while self-collected lab tests give you the equipment to collect a sample, which you then send to a lab. You can now also buy pathology requests for a lab directly from a company without seeing a doctor.

    Hands preparing a RAT.
    We’ve all become accustomed to RATs during the pandemic.
    Ground Picture/Shutterstock

    What we did in our study

    We searched (via Google) for direct-to-consumer products advertised for sale online in Australia between June and December 2021. We then assessed whether each test was likely to provide benefits to those who use them based on scientific literature published about the tests, and any recommendations either for or against their use from professional medical organisations.

    We identified 103 types of tests and 484 individual products ranging in price from A$12.99 to A$1,947.

    We concluded only 11% of these tests were likely to benefit most consumers. These included tests for STIs, where social stigma can sometimes discourage people from testing at a clinic.

    A further 31% could possibly benefit a person, if they were at higher risk. For example, if a person had symptoms of thyroid disease, a test may benefit them. But the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners does not recommend testing for thyroid disease in people without symptoms because evidence showing benefits of identifying and treating people with early thyroid disease is lacking.

    Some 42% were commercial “health checks” such as hormone and nutritional status tests. Although these are legitimate tests – they may be ordered by a doctor in certain circumstances, or be used in research – they have limited usefulness for consumers.

    A test of your hormone or vitamin levels at a particular time can’t do much to help you improve your health, especially because test results change depending on the time of day, month or season you test.

    Most worryingly, 17% of the tests were outright “quackery” that wouldn’t be recommended by any mainstream health practitioner. For example, hair analysis for assessing food allergies is unproven and can lead to misdiagnosis and ineffective treatments.

    More than half of the tests we looked at didn’t state they offered a pre- or post-test consultation.

    A woman opening a box, which sits on her lap.
    Ordering medical tests online probably isn’t a good idea.
    fizkes/Shutterstock

    Products available may change outside the time frame of our study, and direct-to-consumer tests not promoted or directly purchasable online, such as those offered in pharmacies or by commercial health clinics, were not included.

    But in Australia, ours is the first and only study we know of mapping the scale and variety of direct-to-consumer tests sold online.

    Research from other countries has similarly found a lack of evidence to support the majority of direct-to-consumer tests.

    4 questions to ask before you buy a test online

    Many direct-to-consumer tests offer limited benefits, and could even lead to harms. Here are four questions you should ask yourself if you’re considering buying a medical test online.

    1. If I do this test, could I end up with extra medical appointments or treatments I don’t need?

    Doing a test yourself might seem harmless (it’s just information, after all), but unnecessary tests often find issues that would never have caused you problems.

    For example, someone taking a diabetes test may find moderately high blood sugar levels see them labelled as “pre-diabetic”. However, this diagnosis has been controversial, regarded by many as making patients out of healthy people, a large number of whom won’t go on to develop diabetes.

    2. Would my GP recommend this test?

    If you have worrying symptoms or risk factors, your GP can recommend the best tests for you. Tests your GP orders are more likely to be covered by Medicare, so will cost you a lot less than a direct-to-consumer test.

    3. Is this a good quality test?

    A good quality home self-testing kit should indicate high sensitivity (the proportion of true cases that will be accurately detected) and high specificity (the proportion of people who don’t have the disease who will be accurately ruled out). These figures should ideally be in the high 90s, and clearly printed on the product packaging.

    For tests analysed in a lab, check if the lab is accredited by the National Association of Testing Authorities. Avoid tests sent to overseas labs, where Australian regulators can’t control the quality, or the protection of your sample or personal health information.

    4. Do I really need this test?

    There are lots of reasons to want information from a test, like peace of mind, or just curiosity. But unless you have clear symptoms and risk factors, you’re probably testing yourself unnecessarily and wasting your money.

    Direct-to-consumer tests might seem like a good idea, but in most cases, you’d be better off letting sleeping dogs lie if you feel well, or going to your GP if you have concerns.The Conversation

    Patti Shih, Senior Lecturer, Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values, University of Wollongong; Fiona Stanaway, Associate Professor in Clinical Epidemiology, University of Sydney; Katy Bell, Associate Professor in Clinical Epidemiology, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney, and Stacy Carter, Professor and Director, Australian Centre for Health Engagement, Evidence and Values, University of Wollongong

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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