What causes the itch in mozzie bites? And why do some people get such a bad reaction?
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Are you one of these people who loathes spending time outdoors at dusk as the weather warms and mosquitoes start biting?
Female mosquitoes need blood to develop their eggs. Even though they take a tiny amount of our blood, they can leave us with itchy red lumps that can last days. And sometimes something worse.
So why does our body react and itch after being bitten by a mosquito? And why are some people more affected than others?
What happens when a mosquito bites?
Mosquitoes are attracted to warm blooded animals, including us. They’re attracted to the carbon dioxide we exhale, our body temperatures and, most importantly, the smell of our skin.
The chemical cocktail of odours from bacteria and sweat on our skin sends out a signal to hungry mosquitoes.
Some people’s skin smells more appealing to mosquitoes, and they’re more likely to be bitten than others.
Once the mosquito has made its way to your skin, things get a little gross.
The mosquito pierces your skin with their “proboscis”, their feeding mouth part. But the proboscis isn’t a single, straight, needle-like tube. There are multiple tubes, some designed for sucking and some for spitting.
Once their mouth parts have been inserted into your skin, the mosquito will inject some saliva. This contains a mix of chemicals that gets the blood flowing better.
There has even been a suggestion that future medicines could be inspired by the anti-blood clotting properties of mosquito saliva.
It’s not the stabbing of our skin by the mosquito’s mouth parts that hurts, it’s the mozzie spit our bodies don’t like.
Are some people allergic to mosquito spit?
Once a mosquito has injected their saliva into our skin, a variety of reactions can follow. For the lucky few, nothing much happens at all.
For most people, and irrespective of the type of mosquito biting, there is some kind of reaction. Typically there is redness and swelling of the skin that appears within a few hours, but often more quickly, after just a few minutes.
Occasionally, the reaction can cause pain or discomfort. Then comes the itchiness.
Some people do suffer severe reactions to mosquito bites. It’s a condition often referred to as “skeeter syndrome” and is an allergic reaction caused by the protein in the mosquito’s saliva. This can cause large areas of swelling, blistering and fever.
The chemistry of mosquito spit hasn’t really been well studied. But it has been shown that, for those who do suffer allergic reactions to their bites, the reactions may differ depending on the type of mosquito biting.
We all probably get more tolerant of mosquito bites as we get older. Young children are certainly more likely to suffer more following mosquito bites. But as we get older, the reactions are less severe and may pass quickly without too much notice.
How best to treat the bites?
Research into treating bites has yet to provide a single easy solution.
There are many myths and home remedies about what works. But there is little scientific evidence supporting their use.
The best way to treat mosquito bites is by applying a cold pack to reduce swelling and to keep the skin clean to avoid any secondary infections. Antiseptic creams and lotions may also help.
There is some evidence that heat may alleviate some of the discomfort.
It’s particularly tough to keep young children from scratching at the bite and breaking the skin. This can form a nasty scab that may end up being worse than the bite itself.
Applying an anti-itch cream may help. If the reactions are severe, antihistamine medications may be required.
To save the scratching, stop the bites
Of course, it’s better not to be bitten by mosquitoes in the first place. Topical insect repellents are a safe, effective and affordable way to reduce mosquito bites.
Covering up with loose fitted long sleeved shirts, long pants and covered shoes also provides a physical barrier.
Mosquito coils and other devices can also assist, but should not be entirely relied on to stop bites.
There’s another important reason to avoid mosquito bites: millions of people around the world suffer from mosquito-borne diseases. More than half a million people die from malaria each year.
In Australia, Ross River virus infects more than 5,000 people every year. And in recent years, there have been cases of serious illnesses caused by Japanese encephalitis and Murray Valley encephalitis viruses.
Cameron Webb, Clinical Associate Professor and Principal Hospital Scientist, University of Sydney
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Easiest Way To Take Up Journaling
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Dear Diary…
It’s well-established that journaling is generally good for mental health. It’s not a magical panacea, as evidenced by The Diaries of Franz Kafka for example (that man was not in good mental health). But for most of us, putting our thoughts and feelings down on paper (or the digital equivalent) is a good step for tidying our mind.
And as it can be said: mental health is also just health.
But…
What to write about?
It’s about self-expression (even if only you will read it), and…
❝Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations.
In the expressive writing paradigm, participants are asked to write about such events for 15–20 minutes on 3–5 occasions.
Those who do so generally have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes compared with those who write about neutral topics.❞
Source: Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing
In other words, write about whatever moves you.
Working from prompts
If you read the advice above and thought “but I don’t know what moves me”, then fear not. It’s perfectly respectable to work from prompts, such as:
- What last made you cry?
- What last made you laugh?
- What was a recent meaningful moment with family?
- What is a serious mistake that you made and learned from?
- If you could be remembered for just one thing, what would you want it to be?
In fact, sometimes working from prompts has extra benefits, precisely because it challenges us to examine things we might not otherwise think about.
If a prompt asks “What tends to bring you most joy recently?” and the question stumps you, then a) you now are prompted to look at what you can change to find more joy b) you probably wouldn’t have thought of this question—most depressed people don’t, and if you cannot remember recent joy, then well, we’re not here to diagnose, but let’s just say that’s a symptom.
A quick aside: if you or a loved oneare prone to depressive episodes, here’s a good resource, by the way:
The Mental Health First-Aid That You’ll Hopefully Never Need
And in the event of the mental health worst case scenario:
The six prompts we gave earlier are just ideas that came to this writer’s mind, but they’re (ok, some bias here) very good ones. If you’d like more though, here’s a good resource:
550+ Journal Prompts: The Ultimate List
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
While it’s not good to get stuck in ruminative negative thought spirals, it is good to have a safe outlet to express one’s negative thoughts/feelings:
Remember, your journal is (or ideally, should be) a place without censure. If you fear social consequences should your journal be read, then using an app with a good security policy and encryption options can be a good idea for journaling
Finch App is a good free option if it’s not too cutesy for your taste, because in terms of security:
- It can’t leak your data because your data never leaves your phone (unless you manually back up your data and then you choose to put it somewhere unsafe)
- It has an option to require passcode/biometrics etc to open the app
As a bonus, it also has very many optional journaling prompts, and also (optional) behavioral activation prompts, amongst more other offerings that we don’t have room to list here.
Take care!
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When Doctors Make House Calls, Modern-Style!
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In Tuesday’s newsletter, we asked you foryour opinion of telehealth for primary care consultations*, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of responses:
- About 46% said “It is no substitute for an in-person meeting with a doctor; let’s keep the human touch”
- About 29% said “It means less waiting and more accessibility, while avoiding transmission of diseases”
- And 25 % said “I find that the pros and cons of telehealth vs in-person balance out, so: no preference”
*We specified that by “primary care” we mean the initial consultation with a non-specialist doctor, before receiving treatment or being referred to a specialist. By “telehealth” we mean by videocall or phonecall.
So, what does the science say?
A quick note first
Because telehealth was barely a thing (statistically speaking) before the first stages of the COVID pandemic, compared to how it is now, most of the science for this is young, and a lot of the science simply hasn’t been done yet, and/or has not been published yet, because the process can take years.
Because of this, some studies we do have aren’t specifically about primary care, and are sometimes about specialists. We think this should not affect the results much, but it bears highlighting.
Nevertheless, we’ll do what we can with the science we have!
Telehealth is more accessible than in-person consultations: True or False?
True, for most people. For example…
❝Data was found from a variety of emergency and non-emergency departments of primary, secondary, and specialised healthcare.
Satisfaction was high among recipients of healthcare, scoring 9-10 on a scale of 0-10 or ranging from 73.3% to 100%.
Convenience was rated high in every specialty examined. Satisfaction of clinicians was high throughout the specialities despite connection failure and concerns about confidentiality of information.❞
whereas…
❝Nonetheless, studies reported perception of increased barriers to accessing care and inequalities for vulnerable patients especially in older people❞
~ Ibid.
Source: Satisfaction with telemedicine use during COVID-19 pandemic in the UK: a systematic review
Now, perception of those things does necessarily equate to an actual increased barrier, but it is reasonable that someone who thinks something is inaccessible will be less inclined to try to access it.
The quality of care provided via telehealth is as good as in-person: True or False?
True, ostensibly, with caveats. The caveats are:
- We’re going offreported patient satisfaction, not objective patient health outcomes (we found little* science as yet for the relative incidence of misdiagnosis, for example—which kind of thing will take time to be revealed).
- We’re also therefore speaking (as statistics do) for the significant majority of people. However, if we happen to be (statistically speaking) an insignificant minority, well, that just sucks for us personally.
*we did find some, but it wasn’t very helpful yet. For example:
An electronic trigger to detect telemedicine-related diagnostic errors
this one does look at the incidence of diagnostic errors, but provides no control group (i.e. otherwise-comparable in-person consultations) for comparison.
While most oft-considered demographic groups reported comparable patient satisfaction (per race, gender, and socioeconomic status, for example), there was one outlier variable, which was age (as we quoted from that first study above).
However!
Looking under the hood of these stats, it seems that age is not the real culprit, so much as technological illiteracy, which is heavily correlated with age:
❝Lower eHealth literacy is associated with more negative attitudes towards I/C technology in healthcare. This trend is consistent across diverse demographics and regions. ❞
Source: Meta-analysis: eHealth literacy and attitudes towards internet/computer technology
There are things that can be done at an in-person consultation that can’t be done by telehealth: True or False?
True, of course. It is incredibly rare that we will cite “common sense”, (as sometimes “common sense” is actually “common mistakes” and is simply and verifiably wrong), but in this case, as one 10almonds subscriber put it:
❝The doctor uses his five senses to assess. This cannot be attained over the phone❞
~ 10almonds subscriber
A quick note first: if your doctor is using their sense of taste to diagnose you, please get a different doctor, because they should definitely not be doing that!
Not in this century, anyway… Once upon a time, diabetes was diagnosed by urine-tasting (and yes, that was a fairly reliable method).
However, nowadays indeed a doctor will use sight, sound, touch, and sometimes even smell.
In a videocall we’re down to two of those senses (sight and sound), and in a phonecall, down to one (sound) and even that is hampered. Your doctor cannot, for example, use a stethoscope over the phone.
With this in mind, it really comes down to what you need from your doctor in that consultation.
- If you’re 99% sure that what you need is to be prescribed an antidepressant, that probably doesn’t need a full physical.
- If you’re 99% sure that what you need is a referral, chances are that’ll be fine by telehealth too.
- If your doctor is 99% sure that what you need is a verbal check-up (e.g. “How’s it been going for you, with the medication that I prescribed for you a month ago?”, then again, a call is probably fine.
If you have a worrying lump, or an unhappy bodily discharge, or an unexplained mysterious pain? These things, more likely an in-person check-up is in order.
Take care!
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What is HRT? HRT and Hormones Explained
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In this short video, Dr. Sophie Newton explains how menopausal HRT, sometimes called just MHT, is the use of exogenous (didn’t come from your body) to replace/supplement the endogenous hormones (made in your body) that aren’t being made in the quantities that would result in ideal health.
Bioidentical hormones are, as the name suggests, chemically identical to those made in the body; there is no difference, all the way down to the atomic structure.
People are understandably wary of “putting chemicals into the body”, but in fact, everything is a chemical and those chemicals are also found in your body, just not in the numbers that we might always like.
In the case of hormones, these chemical messengers are simply there to tell cells what to do, so having the correct amount of hormones ensures that all the cells that need to get a certain message, get it.
In the case of estrogen specifically, while it’s considered a sex hormone (and it is), it’s responsible for a lot more than just the reproductive system, which is why many people without correct estrogen levels (such as peri- or post-menopause, though incorrect levels can happen earlier in life for other reasons too) can severely feel their absence in a whole stack of ways.
What ways? More than we can list here, but some are discussed in the video:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to know more?
You might like our previous main features:
- What Does “Balance Your Hormones” Even Mean?
- What You Should Have Been Told About The Menopause Beforehand
- Menopausal HRT: Bioidentical vs Animal
Take care!
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How To Boost Your Memory Immediately (Without Supplements)
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How To Boost Your Memory (Without Supplements)
While we do recommend having a good diet and taking advantage of various supplements that have been found to help memory, that only gets so much mileage. With that in mind…
First, how good is your memory? Take This 2-Minute Online Test
Now, that was a test of short term memory, which tends to be the most impactful in our everyday life.
It’s the difference between “I remember the address of the house where I grew up” (long-term memory) and “what did I come to this room to do?” (short-term memory / working memory)
First tip:
When you want to remember something, take a moment to notice the details. You can’t have a madeleine moment years later if you wolfed down the madeleines so urgently they barely touched the sides.
This goes for more than just food, of course. And when facing the prospect of age-related memory loss in particular, people tend to be afraid not of forgetting their PIN code, but their cherished memories of loved ones. So… Cherish them, now! You’ll struggle to cherish them later if you don’t cherish them now. Notice the little details as though you were a painter looking at a scene for painting. Involve more senses than just sight, too!
If it’s important, relive it. Relive it now, relive it tomorrow. Rehearsal is important to memory, and each time you relive a memory, the deeper it gets written into your long-term memory until it becomes indelible to all but literal brain damage.
Second tip:
Tell the story of it to someone else. Or imagine telling it to someone else! (You brain can’t tell the difference)
And you know how it goes… Once you’ve told a story a few times, you’ll never forget it later. Isn’t your life a story worth telling?
Many people approach memory like they’re studying for a test. Don’t. Approach it like you’re preparing to tell a story, or give a performance. We are storytelling creatures at heart, whether or not we realize it.
What do you do when you find yourself in a room and wonder why you went there? (We’ve all been there!) You might look around for clues, but if that doesn’t immediately serve, your fallback will be retracing your steps. Literally, physically, if needs be, but at least mentally. The story of how you got there is easier to remember than the smallest bit of pure information.
What about when there’s no real story to tell, but we still need to remember something?
Make up a story. Did you ever play the game “My granny went to market” as a child?
If not, it’s a collaborative memory game in which players take turns adding items to a list, “My granny went to market and bought eggs”, My granny went to market and bought eggs and milk”, “my granny went to market and bought eggs and milk and flour” (is she making a cake?), “my granny went to market and bought eggs and milk and flour and shoe polish” (what image came to mind? Use that) “my granny went to market and bought eggs and milk and flour and shoe polish and tea” (continue building the story in your head), and so on.
When we actually go shopping, if we don’t have a written list we may rely on the simple story of “what I’m going to cook for dinner” and walking ourselves through that story to ensure we get the things we need.
This is because our memory thrives (and depends!) on connections. Literal synapse connections in the brain, and conceptual contextual connections in your mind. The more connections, the better the memory.
Now imagine a story: “I went to Stonehenge, but in the background was a twin-peaked mountain blue. I packed a red suitcase, placing a conch shell inside it, when suddenly I heard a trombone, and…” Ring any bells? These are example items from the memory test earlier, though of course you may have seen different things in a different order.
So next time you want to remember things, don’t study as though for a test. Prepare to tell a story!
Try going through the test again, but this time, ignore their instructions because we’re going to use the test differently than intended (we’re rebels like that). Don’t rush, and don’t worry about the score this time (or even whether or not you saw a given image previously), but instead, build a story as you go. We’re willing to bet that after it, you can probably recite most of the images you saw in their correct order with fair confidence.
Here’s the link again: Take The Same Test, But This Time Make It Story-Worthy!
Again, ignore what it says about your score this time, because we weren’t doing that this time around. Instead, list the things you saw.
What you were just able to list was the result of you doing story-telling with random zero-context images while under time pressure.
Imagine what you can do with actual meaningful memories of your ongoing life, people you meet, conversations you have!
Just… Take the time to smell the roses, then rehearse the story you’ll tell about them. That memory will swiftly become as strong as any memory can be, and quickly get worked into your long-term memory for the rest of your days.
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10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
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“Let Them Eat Cake”, She Said…
This is Jessie Inchauspé, a French biochemist and author. She’s most known for her best-selling “Glucose Revolution: The Life-Changing Power Of Balancing Your Blood Sugar”.
It’s a great book (which we reviewed recently) and you absolutely should read it, but meanwhile, we’re going to distill at least the most critical core ideas, 10almonds style. In this case, her “ten hacks”:
Eat foods in the right order
The order is:
- Fiber first
- Protein and fat second
- Starches and sugars last
What happens here is… the fiber perks up the gut bacteria, the protein and fat will then be better-digested next, and the starches and sugars will try to jump the line, but they can’t because the fiber is a physical speedbump and the proteins and fats are taking the prime place for being digested. So instead, the starches and sugars—usually responsible for blood sugar spikes—get processed much more gradually, resulting in a nice even curve.
Add a green starter to all your meals
We know what you’re thinking: “that’s just the first one again”, but no. This is an extra starter, before you get to that. If you’re the cook of the household, this can absolutely simply mean snacking on green ingredients while cooking.
Stop counting calories
Especially, she advises: stop worrying about extra calories from fats, such as if doing an oil-and-vinegar dressing for salad—which she also recommends, because all three components (the oil, the vinegar, and the salad) help even out blood sugar levels.
Flatten your breakfast curve
For many, breakfast is the starchiest meal of the day, if not the sugariest. Inchauspé recommends flipping this (ideally) or softening it (if you really must have a carb-based breakfast):
- Top choices include: a warm vegetable salad, fish, or eggs (or tofu if you don’t do animal products).
- Next-best include: if you must have toast, make sure to have butter (and/or the aforementioned egg/tofu, for example) to give your digestion an extra thing to do.
- Also: she recommends skipping the juice in favour of home-made breakfast smoothies. That way, instead of basically just sugar with some vitamins, you’re getting a range of nutrients that, if you stack it right, can constitute a balanced meal itself, with fiber + protein + fat + carbs.
As an extra note from the 10almonds team: come to think of it, today’s sponsor’s product would be a great choice for this “mixed nutrient breakfast” idea! But more on that later
Have any type of sugar—they’re all the same
They’re technically not, but the point is that your body will immediately take them apart and then they will be just the same. Whether it’s the cheapest white sugar or the most expensive organic lovingly hand-reared free-range agave nectar, your body is going to immediately give it the chop-shop treatment (a process so quick as to be practically instantaneous) and say “this is now glucose”.
Pick a dessert over a sweet snack
Remember that about the right order for foods? A dessert, when your body is already digesting dinner, is going to make much less of a glucose spike than, say, a blueberry muffin when all you’ve had this morning is coffee and juice.
Reach for the vinegar before you eat
We recently did a whole main feature about this, so we’ll not double up today!
After you eat, move
The glucose you eat will be used to replace lost muscle glycogen, before any left over is stored as fat… and, while it’s waiting to be stored as fat, just sitting in your bloodstream being high blood sugars. So, this whole thing will go a lot better if you are actively using muscle glycogen (by moving your body).
Inchauspé gives a metaphor: imagine a steam train worker, shoveling coal into the furnace. Meanwhile, other workers are bringing more coal. If the train is moving quickly, the coal can be shoveled into the furnace and burned and won’t build up so quickly. But if the train is moving slowly or not at all, that coal is just going to build up and build up, until the worker can shovel no more because of being neck-deep in coal.
Same with your blood sugars!
If you want to snack, go low-sugar
In the category of advice that will shock nobody: sugary snacks aren’t good for avoiding blood sugar spikes! This one probably didn’t need a chapter devoted to it, but anyway: low sugar is indeed the way to go for snacks.
Put some clothes on your carbs
This is about olive oil on pasta, butter on potatoes, and so forth. Basically, anything starchy is going to be broken down quickly to sugar and sent straight into the bloodstream, if there’s nothing to slow it down. If you’re wondering what to do with rice: adding a tablespoon of chia seeds to the rice while cooking (so they’re cooked together) will add very healthy fats to your rice, and (because they’ve been cooked) will not seem like eating seeds, by the way. In terms of texture and appearance, it’ll be as though you threw some black pepper in*
*which you should also do for many reasons, but that’s beyond the scope of this “about blood sugars” feature!
Wanting to know more about the science of this?
We’ve done all we have room for here today, but Inchauspé is, as ever, happy to explain it herself:
Prefer text? Check out:
The Science Behind Glucose GoddessDon’t Forget…
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PTSD, But, Well…. Complex.
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PTSD is typically associated with military veterans, for example, or sexual assault survivors. There was a clear, indisputable, Bad Thing™ that was experienced, and it left a psychological scar. When something happens to remind us of that—say, there are fireworks, or somebody touches us a certain way—it’ll trigger an immediate strong response of some kind.
These days the word “triggered” has been popularly misappropriated to mean any adverse emotional reaction, often to something trivial.
But, not all trauma is so clear. If PTSD refers to the result of that one time you were smashed with a sledgehammer, C-PTSD (Complex PTSD) refers to the result of having been hit with a rolled-up newspaper every few days for fifteen years, say.
This might have been…
- childhood emotional neglect
- a parent with a hair-trigger temper
- bullying at school
- extended financial hardship as a young adult
- “just” being told or shown all too often that your best was never good enough
- the persistent threat (real or imagined) of doom of some kind
- the often-reinforced idea that you might lose everything at any moment
If you’re reading this list and thinking “that’s just life though”, you might be in the estimated 1 in 5 people with (often undiagnosed) C-PTSD.
How About You? Take The (5mins) Test Here
Now, we at 10almonds are not doctors or therapists and even if we were, we certainly wouldn’t try to diagnose from afar. But, even if there’s only a partial match, sometimes the same advice can help.
So what are the symptoms of C-PTSD?
- A feeling that nothing is safe; we might suddenly lose what we have gained
- The body keeps the score… And it shows. We may have trouble relaxing, an aversion to exercise for reasons that don’t really add up, or an aversion to being touched.
- Trouble sleeping, born of nagging sense that to sleep is to be vulnerable to attack, and/or lazy, and/or negligent of our duties
- Poor self-image, about our body and/or about ourself as a person.
- We’re often drawn to highly unavailable people—or we are the highly unavailable person to which our complementary C-PTSD sufferers are attracted.
- We are prone to feelings of rage. Whether we keep a calm lid on it or lose our temper, we know it’s there. We’re angry at the world and at ourselves.
- We are not quick to trust—we may go through the motions of showing trust, but we’re already half-expecting that trust to have been misplaced.
- “Hell is other people” has become such a rule of life that we may tend to cloister ourselves away from company.
- We may try to order our environment around us as a matter of safety, and be easily perturbed by sudden changes being imposed on us, even if ostensibly quite minor or harmless.
- In a bid to try to find safety, we may throw ourselves into work—whatever that is for us. It could be literally our job, or passion projects, or our family, or community, and in and of itself that’s great! But the motivation is more of an attempt to distract ourselves from The Horrors™.
“Alright, I scored more of those than I care to admit. What now?”
A lot of the answer lies in first acknowledging to yourself what happened, to make you feel the way you do now. If you, for example, have an abject hatred of Christmas, what were your childhood Christmases like? If you fear losing money that you’ve accumulated, what underpins that fear? It could be something that directly happened to you, but it also could just be repeated messages you received from your parents, for example.
It could even be that you had superficially an idyllic perfect childhood. Health, wealth, security, a loving family… and simply a chemical imbalance in your brain made it a special kind of Hell for you that nobody understood, and perhaps you didn’t either.
Unfortunately, a difficult task now lies ahead: giving love, understanding, compassion, and reassurance to the person for whom you may have the most contempt in the world: yourself.
If you’d like some help with that, here are some resources:
ComplexTrauma.org (a lot of very good free resources, with no need for interaction)
CPTSD Foundation (mostly paid courses and the like)
Some final words about healing…
- You are in fact amazing,
- You can do it, and
- You deserve it.
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