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Salut i benestar

Notícies

Per dormir:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/why-we-sleep-and-why-we-often-cant  According to Robb, there is a means by which we can harness the visionary and problem-solving capacities of dreaming: the lucid dream. This is the kind of dream in which a person is aware of dreaming, and is able to wield some control over events—to decide to fly, say, or to visit Paris. “Those who master lucidity,” Robb writes, “can dream about specific problems, seek answers or insights, stage cathartic encounters, and probe the recesses of the unconscious.” Fifty-five per cent of people have experienced lucidity at least once, apparently, but most of us need to train ourselves to dream lucidly with any consistency. The main training method requires you to ask yourself at regular intervals during the daytime whether you are asleep or awake. The idea is that, since waking habits have a tendency to show up in dreams, you are likely to pose the same question while you are asleep. When you ask yourself “Am I awake?” and the answer is no, lucidity should theoretically commence.
2019
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/magazine/2019/01/14/is-marijuana-as-safe-as-we-think la poca recerca que s’ha fet amb la marihuana, indicis de causar esquizofrènia
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-can-t-we-cure-the-common-cold les farmacèutiques prefereixen les medecines a les vacunes perquè generen més beneficis
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190313-why-more-men-kill-themselves-than-women suïcidi, els homes 3 vegades més, potser perquè es comuniquen menys i busquen menys ajuda. (15 cada 100.000 l’any)
https://khn.org/news/death-by-a-thousand-clicks/ el fracàs de la informatització dels pacients als USA  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-hate-their-computers  (arriben a subcontractar metges a la Índia per apssar en net les notes)
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/on-touch/586588/ La gent que s’abraça més té menys encostipats.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/a-vaccine-for-depression  un possible tractament vacuna per la depressió
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-hidden-air-pollution-in-our-homes recerca sobre la contaminació de l’aire dins de casa
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-challenge-of-going-off-psychiatric-drugs la dificultat de deixar de prndre medicació d’antidepressius
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75 l’opció de viure bé i no allargassar la mort, però sense eutanàsia: a partir dels 75 no fer “reparacions”.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/top-10-design-flaws-in-the-human-body “errors de disseny” al cos humà, soluions que semblen improvisades
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous el programa d’alcohòlics anònims no és el més eficient.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-skin-care-became-an-at-home-science-experiment davant la manca d’informació, la gent comparteix les experiències.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/can-we-live-longer-but-stay-younger Age lab, tenen un trajo per simular els efectes de la vellesa,
Church is aware that the Food and Drug Administration, among other regulatory bodies, may not be crazy about weird new therapies that address what we customarily take to be a natural process. “Our emphasis is on reversal rather than longevity, in part because it’s easier to get permission from the F.D.A. for reversal of diseases than for prolongation of life,” he says. “Longevity isn’t our aim—we’re just aiming at the reversal of age-related diseases.” Noah Davidsohn enthusiastically seconds this: “We want to make people live better, not necessarily longer, though obviously longer is part of better.” But Church makes it plain that these are adjoining concerns. “How old can people grow?” he says. “Well, if our approach is truly effective, there is no upper limit. But our goal isn’t eternal life. The goal is youthful wellness rather than an extended long period of age-related decline. You know, one of the striking things is that many super-centenarians”—people who live productively past a hundred years—“live a youthful life, and then they die very quickly. They’re here, living well, and then they’re not. It’s not a bad picture.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality la mindfulness ens diu que no hem d’obsessionar-nos amb l’entorn i prestar atenció al present. In Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue that traditions of Asian wisdom have been subject to colonisation and commodification since the 18th century, producing a highly individualistic spirituality, perfectly accommodated to dominant cultural values and requiring no substantive change in lifestyle.  Mindfulness is easily co-opted and reduced to merely “pacifying feelings of anxiety and disquiet at the individual level, rather than seeking to challenge the social, political and economic inequalities that cause such distress”, write Carrette and King.  Of course, reductions in stress and increases in personal happiness and wellbeing are much easier to sell than serious questions about injustice, inequity and environmental devastation. All of this may help you to sleep better at night. But the consequences for society are potentially dire. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has analysed this trend. As he sees it, mindfulness is “establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism”, by helping people “to fully participate in the capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity”.
By deflecting attention from the social structures and material conditions in a capitalist culture, mindfulness is easily co-opted. Celebrity role models bless and endorse it, while Californian companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Zynga have embraced it as an adjunct to their brand. Google’s former in-house mindfulness tsar Chade-Meng Tan had the actual job title Jolly Good Fellow. “Search inside yourself,” he counselled colleagues and readers – for there, not in corporate culture – lies the source of your problems.
[és el nou opi del poble]
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-your-therapist-doesn-t-know algortimes que evaluen risc de fracàs en psicoteràpia a partir de qüestionaris
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/the-troubled-history-of-psychiatry la dificultat de la psiquiatria per trobar les causes, les modes de
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/the-promise-and-price-of-cellular-therapies la cura del càncer basada en fer créixer T-cells modificades
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/inflammations-immune-system-obesity-microbiome/595384/ la flora dels intestins té a veure en com absorbim calories o greix; optser l’excés d’antibiòtics fa que creixi l’obesitat.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/confessions-of-a-failed-self-help-guru els que volen ajudar els altres són els que necessiten ajuda
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/medical-bill-debt-collection/596914/ internat a un hospital, inconscient, et fan actes mèdics sense consultar si entren a l’assegurança i després t’ho cobren, ho venen a companyies que compren deute.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/silicon-valleys-crisis-of-conscience  Esalen, un retir zen per a executius de Silicon valley
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/02/the-message-of-measles els virus de la malaltia i el virus de les fake news
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/paging-dr-robot operar amb un robot, i les pràctiques comercials
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-obesity-era factors ambientals de l’obesitat, alteracions del metabolisme
https://aeon.co/essays/how-did-being-happy-become-a-matter-of-relentless-competitive-work la idea de felicitat com a quelcom a perseguir, por de caure en emocions negatives
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/great-american-eye-exam-scam/602482/ Als USA els optometristes han aconseguit que no es venguin ulleres i lens de contacte sense una visita cara, i a sobre a la visita intenten col·locar productes smés cars en lloc de simplement donar la prescripció.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/25/can-babies-learn-to-love-vegetables com la ciència i els fabricants de menjar infantil investiguen què hauriend e menjar els nens + menjars per a pilots de combat i astronautes.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-cancer-industry-hype-vs-reality/ la indústria del càncer, sobrediagnosi i sobretractament
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200303-why-slowing-your-breathing-helps-you-relax respirar més lentament i més conscient. [normalment 23/min, baixar a 6 minut /
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51048366 símptomes del coronavirus
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/pandemics-and-the-shape-of-human-history història de les pandèmies,  If so, history is written not only by men but also by microbes.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/the-quest-for-a-pandemic-pill bactèries, protozous (malària), virus.  If bacteria invade, there’s a long list of antibiotics you can try. Between ciprofloxacin and amoxicillin, we can treat dozens of different types of bacterial infection. For the roughly two hundred identified viruses that afflict us, there are approved treatments for only ten or so. And the antiviral drugs that exist tend to have narrow targets.// A bacterium is a living cell that can survive and reproduce on its own. By contrast, a virion, or virus particle, can do nothing alone; it reproduces only by co-opting the cellular machinery of its host. Each virion consists of nothing more than a piece of DNA or RNA encased in protein, sometimes surrounded by a lipid membrane. When it gets itself sucked into a cell, it manipulates the host into building the proteins necessary for viral replication—in essence, turning it into a virus factory.// experimntant per trobar un antiviral general  But Chavez has devised a method that lets him study more than one viral protein at a time. In each well, he will place about twenty coronavirus proteases, plus about forty proteases from H.I.V., West Nile, dengue, Zika, and so on.// o replicate, viruses need to chop things up; they also need to glue things together. Proteases do the chopping. Another class of proteins, called polymerases, do the gluing. Interfere with the polymerases and you interfere with the assembly of the viral genome.// Most people do extensive testing on one drug, then see if it works more broadly,” Denison said. “We took the opposite approach, which was: we don’t even want to work with a compound unless it works against every coronavirus we test, because we aren’t even worried about SARS and MERS as much as we are about the one that we don’t know about that’s going to come along.”
The usual goal with antivirals is to interfere with the virus, not the host. But some researchers have taken a seemingly counterintuitive approach, seeking to change the host environment in a way that makes it less congenial to viruses. With “host-targeted antivirals,” the aim is to disrupt certain processes in the human cells which are used for viral replication
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200409-why-covid-19-is-different-for-men-and-women afecta el doble als homes, però es queden sense feina més dones.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52234061 Alemanya gasta més en salut per persona, té més indústria farmacèutica, és més descentralitzat, i va començar abans.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52272651 per què califòrnia ho ha fet millor que NY
TLC = Tender loving care
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/women-government-leaders-coronavirus-hnk-intl/index.html els països que han getsionat millor el corona virus estan dirigits per dones
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52425825 el passaport d’immunitat no és una bona idea
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/do-some-surgical-implants-do-more-harm-than-good els abusos dels implants als USA, negoci no regulat per la FDA
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52476128 mentre falten recursos per atendre afectats de COvid, altres hospitals privats envien metges i infermeres a casa ja que com que no poden operar no generen ingressos.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52628283 Vietnam 97 milions i frontera amb Xina, 300 cassos i zero morts.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-complete-guide-to-memory fer sessions de blocs curts separades ir epetides, flashcards com Anki
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-engineers-taking-on-the-ventilator-shortage els ventilators, simples i barats, ajsutables i cars, 150 peces, 700 peces
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p08f8xtf/the-strange-effects-of-loneliness-on-your-wellbeing efectes de la solitud: en absència de relacions socials, tenim a antropoformitzar els objectes del voltant  [i els animals de companyia]  , i tenim somnis més vívids, és com si el cervell vulgués fabricar el que falta. És com la síndrome de Charles Bonnet de l’Hermínia Busquets, que tenia halucionacions visuals.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-america-lost-the-war-on-drugs l’epidèmia de la droga als USA res remunta a quan van tornar els soldats del vietnam addictes a la marihuana i droga barata. EN lloc de regular i legalitzar Nixon va emprendre una batalla. Shan gastat 500 bilions $ en policia, empresonant joves i accions militars a sudamèrica. Un estudi de RAND mostra que amb molt menys diners dedicats a tractar els afectats, els resultats serien molt millors.
Aquestes polítiques no es van poder acxabar de dur a terme perquè políticament donaven una imatge de feblesa.
scientists say that wellness emerges from nourishing six dimensions of your health: physical, emotional, cognitive, social, spiritual, and environmental. According to research published in 1997 in The American Journal of Health Promotion, these dimensions are closely intertwined. Evidence suggests that they work together to create a sum that is greater than its parts.
  • Physical: Move Your Body and Don’t Eat Crap—but Don’t Diet Either
  • Emotional: Don’t Hide Your Feelings, Get Help When You Need It
  • Social: It’s Not All About Productivity; Relationships Matter, Too
  • Cognitive: Follow Your Interests, Do Deep-Focused Work
  • Spiritual: Cultivate Purpose, Be Open to Awe [ cal trobar un substitut per a la religió -> inventar-la ]
  • Environmental: Care for Your Space
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02278-5 cpvod depèn de si la immunitat és de 40 setmanes, 2 anys o permanent.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53875370 alemanya estudia com fer concerts amb seguretat
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54211450 potser sobreestimem els riscos de la radiació nuclear
mambo estimulador clítoris
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/has-the-pandemic-transformed-the-office-forever Ara que et sobra temps per llegir , un article on tracta de la història del workplace, des del cubicle, a l’openfloor, als models híbrids presencials i WHF (work from home), i com estan adaptant-se despatxos com Gensler, O+A, per fer espais que compleixin amb les mesures de seguretat. Es veu que hi ha una empresa que fa auditories d’edificis i els certifica com a segurs. Deixen descarregar-te un document de treball https://www.fitwel.org/resources/#vrmodule . Aquesta mena d’auditories són semblants a les que havia fet jo, de riscos laborals a oficines.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210202-how-mindfulness-can-blunt-your-feelings-and-spike-anxiety massa minffulness pot ser contraproduent. One study showed that at least 25% of regular meditators have experienced adverse events, from panic attacks and depression to an unsettling sense of “dissociation”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-56097028 noruega, tractant els pacients amb psicosi sense recórrer a medicaments
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/01/why-does-the-pandemic-seem-to-be-hitting-some-countries-harder-than-others possibles explicacions de perquè als països pobrs hi ha menys morts per covid: males estadístiques, població més jove, sistema immune més fort
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/three-ways-pandemic-has-bettered-world/618320/ hem après a fer vacunes, a treballar en remot amb zoom i a fer ciència col·laborant
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/seasonal-allergies-blame-male-trees el criteri de plantar arbres mascle a els ciutats fa que hi hagi més pol·len i alèrgies.
Box breathing Pranayama: How to do box breathing
  1. Set a timer for five minutes.
  2. Sit with a straight spine on the floor or in a chair with your feet flat.
  3. Close your eyes and inhale for a count of four.
  4. Hold your breath for a count of four.
  5. Exhale for a count of four.
  6. Hold for a count of four.
  7. Repeat until the alarm sounds.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/persuading-the-body-to-regenerate-its-limbs podria el cos regenerar les articulacions igual que ho fa el fetge?  La bioelectricitat en la morfogènesi
Some of the most important discoveries of his career hinge on the planarian—a type of flatworm about two centimetres long that, under a microscope, resembles a cartoon of a cross-eyed phallus. Levin is interested in the planarian because, if you cut off its head, it grows a new one; simultaneously, its severed head grows a new tail. Researchers have discovered that no matter how many pieces you cut a planarian into—the record is two hundred and seventy-nine—you will get as many new worms. Somehow, each part knows what’s missing and builds it anew. He had cut off the worm’s tail, then persuaded the  organism to grow a second head in its place. No matter how many times  the extra head was cut off, it grew back. The  most astonishing part was that Levin hadn’t touched the planarian’s  genome. Instead, he’d changed the electrical signals among the worm’s  cells. Levin explained that, by altering this electric patterning, he’d  revised the organism’s “memory” of what it was supposed to look like. In  essence, he’d reprogrammed the worm’s body—and, if he wanted to, he  could switch it back.
“Regeneration is not just for so-called lower animals,” Levin said, as an image of Prometheus appeared on the screen behind him. Deer can regenerate antlers; humans can regrow their liver. “You may or may not know that human children below the age of approximately seven to eleven are able to regenerate their fingertips,” he told the audience. Why couldn’t human-growth programs be activated for other body parts—severed limbs, failed organs, even brain tissue damaged by stroke?
Levin’s work involves a conceptual shift. The computers in our heads are often contrasted with the rest of the body; most of us don’t think of muscles and bones as making calculations. But how do our wounds “know” how to heal? How do the tissues of our unborn bodies differentiate and take shape without direction from a brain? When a caterpillar becomes a moth, most of its brain liquefies and is rebuilt—and yet researchers have discovered that memories can be preserved across the metamorphosis. “What is that telling us?” Levin asked. Among other things, it suggests that limbs and tissues besides the brain might be able, at some primitive level, to remember, think, and act. Other researchers have discussed brainless intelligence in plants and bacterial communities, or studied bioelectricity as a mechanism in development. But Levin has spearheaded the notion that the two ideas can be unified: he argues that the cells in our bodies use bioelectricity to communicate and to make decisions among themselves about what they will become.
It’s tempting to think that genes contain blueprints for the body and its parts. But there is no map or instruction set for an organ inside a cell. “The first decisions you make are not behavior decisions, they’re growth decisions,” Levin told me, and the most crucial choices—“where your eyes go, where your brain goes, which part’s going to be a leg, which part’s going to be an arm”—emerge without a central directive. Kelly McLaughlin, a molecular biologist at the Allen Center, explained that it was simple “to take stem cells and cause them to make heart cells beating in a dish.” And yet, she went on, “those heart cells are a sheet of cells, beating in a dish, flat.” Cells turn into three-dimensional organs by interacting with one another, like water molecules forming an eddy.
Having built radios as a kid, Levin now hopes to assemble bodies from first principles. His ultimate goal is to build what he calls an “anatomical compiler”—a biological-design program in which users can draw the limbs or organs they want; the software would tell them where and how to modify an organism’s bioelectric gradients. “You would say, ‘Well, basically like a frog, but I’d like six legs—and I’d like a propeller over here,’ ” he explained. Such a system could fix birth defects, or allow the creation of new biological shapes that haven’t evolved in nature. With funding from DARPA—a federal research agency contained within the Department of Defense—he is exploring a related possibility: building machines made from animal cells.
[ la medecina de morir ]
Now that human beings are surviving longer than ever before, many have another goal: a good death.
Throughout most of the seventeenth century, residents of London could buy, from street hawkers who fought one another for sales territory, a peculiar sort of newspaper. It cost a penny, sold about five or six thousand copies a week, and consisted of a single page. On one side, readers would learn how many of their neighbors had died the previous week, in each parish. On the other, readers would learn what was believed to have killed them. / In “Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer” (Riverhead), Steven Johnson credits John Graunt with creating history’s first “life table”—using death data to predict how many years of remaining life a given person could expect.
Between the Spanish flu of 1918 and the coronavirus  pandemic of 2020, global life expectancy doubled. These developments,  Johnson argues, should be printed in newspaper headlines and hawked on  street corners like the old Bills of Mortality. Extra, extra: The  average human has received thousands and thousands of extra days in  which to live.
Johnson  tries to account for those days. Which scientific or civilizational  advancements should we thank for them? He groups innovations by those  which have saved millions of lives (this list begins with the AIDS  cocktail, anesthesia, and angioplasty), hundreds of millions of lives  (here the roster goes from antibiotics to pasteurization), and, finally,  billions of lives, a small but illustrious pantheon of three:  artificial fertilizer, hygienic plumbing, and vaccines.
Katie Engelhart’s “The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die” (St. Martin’s). A remarkably nuanced, empathetic, and well-crafted work of journalism, it explores what might be called the right-to-die underground, a world of people who wonder why a medical system that can do so much to try to extend their lives can do so little to help them end those lives in a peaceful and painless way. Engelhart writes, “It would be hard to exaggerate how many people told me that they wish simply for the same rights as their cherished dogs—to be put out of their misery when the time is right.”
In recent decades, the increase in life expectancy has triggered a debate among gerontologists: Would the extra years people were living be years of health and well-being? This scenario is known as the “compression of morbidity” theory, according to which improving health would mean that the primary pains and diseases of aging could be squeezed into an increasingly short period at the end of life. The other possibility, known as the “expansion of morbidity” theory, hypothesized the opposite: that more years of life would be achieved mostly through more people spending more time living with pain and disease and dementia. By the turn of the twenty-first century, an editorial in the journal Age and Ageing had noted that the latest trends seemed to be favoring the second theory, with extra years being achieved not through better over-all health but “predominantly through the technological advances that have been made in extending the life” of people who were sick, and experiencing various degrees of suffering. As Engelhart writes, “Increases in life expectancy have been accompanied by more years of age-induced disability. Aging has slowed down, rather than sped up.”
In the United States, physician-assisted suicide is permitted in a slowly growing number of states, but only to ease the deaths of patients who fit a narrow set of legal criteria. Generally, they must have received a terminal diagnosis with a prognosis of six months or less; be physically able to administer the drugs to themselves; have been approved by doctors as mentally competent to make the decision; and have made a formal request more than once, including after a waiting period. In California, Engelhart attends the planned death of an eighty-nine-year-old man named Bradshaw, who is dying painfully of cancer. Bradshaw takes a fatal drug cocktail in the company of his family (“Well, Dad, I love you,” his daughter says uncertainly, as they wait) and a doctor who specializes in just this part of medicine: not saving lives but, instead, helping them end on something a little closer to a patient’s own terms. “Maybe that was a good death,” Engelhart reflects when it’s over. “Or a good enough death. Or the best there is.”
Even in this regulated world, there are lots of difficult questions. (If doctors bring up assisted death with their patients, is that discussing options or influencing their choice? How does aid-in-dying interact with hospice? With organ donation? How does anyone really know when the time is “right”?) But Engelhart finds that the world of people who would like doctors to help them die is far larger, and much more complex, than what current laws cover. Venturing into, and beyond, the legal fringes of the assisted-dying movement, she finds people who do not officially qualify for a medically assisted death but long for it, anyway. All feel abandoned by a medical system that they believe ignores their suffering because of what one palliative-care doctor describes as “modern medicine’s original sin: believing that we can vanquish death.”
If people with dementia were allowed aid in dying, at what point in their decline would they be considered competent to make the decision? For that matter, whose choice would we listen to: the earlier, cognitively intact person who insisted that she “would never want to live like that,” or the current one, who may no longer remember feeling that way, and may seem to still find plenty of pleasure in life? And what about mental illness? One psychiatrist, noting that oncologists will eventually acknowledge that nothing further can be done to stop a cancer, wonders why her field keeps trying ever more rounds of treatment, as if it could not come to terms with its own therapeutic limits. During her education, she notes, “there was no discussion at all about whether a wish to die could ever be a rational response to any illness, let alone a mental illness.”
Given our profit-driven health-care system, highly unequal economy, and hole-riddled social safety net, Engelhart finds herself wondering how often “rational suicide was just a symptom of social and financial neglect, dressed up as moral choice.” The great escape and the great divide, still intertwined.
John Graunt is remembered today as the father of data-driven epidemiology, but you could argue that his greatest insight was simpler, and deeper: that you could tell a lot about how people lived within a society by the way they died. He also realized that seeing those patterns offered an opportunity to try to change them.
Engelhart cites a survey showing that today about half of Americans feel that patients have too little control over the medical decisions that will determine how their lives end. What’s known as “overtreatment” is a real problem; though most people report a desire to die peacefully at home, one in five among the elderly has surgery in a hospital in the month before death, “often supported by loved ones who would do anything to help and who have come to see any option short of do everything as a kind of terrible abandonment.”
America spends more per capita on health care than any other nation—much of it in the final year of patients’ lives—but our inequality and our failures in other areas of public health keep our over-all life expectancy well below that of other rich nations. Health-care-related bankruptcies and what Angus Deaton and Anne Case, his collaborator and spouse, call “deaths of despair” are soaring; suicide rates are higher for the elderly than for any other demographic; doctors report plenty of what one calls “pseudo-conversations,” in which suffering patients ask for sleeping pills or painkillers that both parties know, but do not acknowledge, are for another purpose.
One of the doctors Engelhart interviews—an oncologist in Belgium, where euthanasia laws are widely supported, and aid in dying is legal even for psychiatric patients who request it and qualify—tells her that America is not ready for such laws. “It’s a developing country,” he says. “You shouldn’t try to implement a law of euthanasia in countries where there is no basic healthcare.”
Johnson—in the midst of his excitement about that graph of life expectancy, climbing ever upward—pauses for an acknowledgment. If you poll people about their hopes for their own lives, the answer is that most do not actually want to live longer than current natural limits allow. What they want, in the time available, is to live better.
urnout is generally said to date to 1973; at least, that’s around when it got its name. By the nineteen-eighties, everyone was burned out.
One Swiss psychotherapist, in a history of burnout published in 2013 that begins with the usual invocation of immediate emergency—“Burnout is increasingly serious and of widespread concern”—insists that he found it in the Old Testament. Moses was burned out, in Numbers 11:14, when he complained to God, “I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.”
Around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out. A 2020 U.S. study put that figure at three in four. A recent book claims that burnout afflicts an entire generation.
But what, exactly, is burnout? The World Health Organization recognized burnout syndrome in 2019, in the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases, but only as an occupational phenomenon, not as a medical condition. In Sweden, you can go on sick leave for burnout. That’s probably harder to do in the United States because burnout is not recognized as a mental disorder by the DSM-5, published in 2013, and though there’s a chance it could one day be added, many psychologists object, citing the idea’s vagueness. A number of studies suggest that burnout can’t be distinguished from depression, which doesn’t make it less horrible but does make it, as a clinical term, imprecise, redundant, and unnecessary.
If burnout is universal and eternal, it’s meaningless. If everyone is burned out, and always has been, burnout is just . . . the hell of life. But if burnout is a problem of fairly recent vintage—if it began when it was named, in the early nineteen-seventies—then it raises a historical question. What started it?
Freudenberger visited the Haight-Ashbury clinic in 1967 and 1968. In 1970, he started a free clinic at St. Marks Place, in New York. It was open in the evening from six to ten. Freudenberger worked all day in his own practice, as a therapist, for ten to twelve hours, and then went to the clinic, where he worked until midnight. “You start your second job when most people go home,” he wrote in 1973, “and you put a great deal of yourself in the work. . . . You feel a total sense of commitment . . . until you finally find yourself, as I did, in a state of exhaustion.”
Lost in the misty history of burnout is a truth about the patients treated at free clinics in the early seventies: many of them were Vietnam War veterans, addicted to heroin. The Haight-Ashbury clinic managed to stay open partly because it treated so many veterans that it received funding from the federal government. Those veterans were burned out on heroin. But they also suffered from what, for decades, had been called “combat fatigue” or “battle fatigue.” In 1980, when Freudenberger first reached a popular audience with his claims about “burnout syndrome,” the battle fatigue of Vietnam veterans was recognized by the DSM-III as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Burnout, like P.T.S.D., moved from military to civilian life, as if everyone were, suddenly, suffering from battle fatigue. Since the late nineteen-seventies, the empirical study of burnout has been led by Christina Maslach, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1981, she developed the field’s principal diagnostic tool, the Maslach Burnout Inventory,
In “Can’t Even,” a book that started out as a viral BuzzFeed piece, Petersen argues, “Increasingly—and increasingly among millennials—burnout isn’t just a temporary affliction. It’s our contemporary condition.” And it’s a condition of the pandemic.
The louder the talk about burnout, it appears, the greater the number of people who say they’re burned out: harried, depleted, and disconsolate. What can explain the astonishing rise and spread of this affliction? Declining church membership comes to mind. In 1985, seventy-one per cent of Americans belonged to a house of worship, which is about what that percentage had been since the nineteen-forties; in 2020, only forty-seven per cent of Americans belonged to an institution of faith. Many of the recommended ways to address burnout—wellness, mindfulness, and meditation (“Take time each day, even five minutes, to sit still,” Elle advised)—are secularized versions of prayer, Sabbath-keeping, and worship. If burnout has been around since the Trojan War, prayer, worship, and the Sabbath are what humans invented to alleviate it.
You can suffer from marriage burnout and parent burnout and pandemic burnout partly because, although burnout is supposed to be mainly about working too much, people now talk about all sorts of things that aren’t work as if they were: you have to work on your marriage, work in your garden, work out, work harder on raising your kids, work on your relationship with God. (“Are You at Risk for Christian Burnout?” one Web site asks. You’ll know you are if you’re driving yourself too hard to become “an excellent Christian.”) Even getting a massage is “bodywork.”
Burnout is a combat metaphor. In the conditions of late capitalism, from the Reagan era forward, work, for many people, has come to feel like a battlefield, and daily life, including politics and life online, like yet more slaughter. People across all walks of life—rich and poor, young and old, caretakers and the cared for, the faithful and the faithless—really are worn down, wiped out, threadbare, on edge, battered, and battle-scarred. Lockdowns, too, are features of war, as if each one of us, amid not only the pandemic but also acts of terrorism and mass shootings and armed insurrections, were now engaged in a Hobbesian battle for existence, civil life having become a war zone. May there one day come again more peaceful metaphors for anguish, bone-aching weariness, bitter regret, and haunting loss. “You will tear your heart out, desperate, raging,” Achilles warned Agamemnon. Meanwhile, a wellness site tells me that there are “11 ways to alleviate burnout and the ‘Pandemic Wall.’ ” First, “Make a list of coping strategies.” Yeah, no
The street term spread. To be a burnout in the nineteen-seventies, as anyone who went to high school in those years remembers, was to be the kind of kid who skipped class to smoke pot behind the parking lot. Meanwhile, Freudenberger extended the notion of “staff burnout” to staffs of all sorts. His papers, at the University of Akron, include a folder each on burnout among attorneys, child-care workers, dentists, librarians, medical professionals, ministers, middle-class women, nurses, parents, pharmacists, police and the military, secretaries, social workers, athletes, teachers, veterinarians. Everywhere he looked, Freudenberger found burnouts. “It’s better to burn out than to fade away,” Neil Young sang, in 1978, at a time when Freudenberger was popularizing the idea in interviews and preparing the first of his co-written self-help books. In “Burn-out: The High Cost of High Achievement,” in 1980, he extended the metaphor to the entire United States. “WHY, AS A NATION, DO WE SEEM, BOTH COLLECTIVELY AND INDIVIDUALLY, TO BE IN THE THROES OF A FAST-SPREADING PHENOMENON—BURN-OUT?”
Every age has its signature afflictions,” the Korean-born, Berlin-based philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in “The Burnout Society,” first published in German in 2010. Burnout, for Han, is depression and exhaustion, “the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity,” an “achievement society,” a yes-we-can world in which nothing is impossible, a world that requires people to strive to the point of self-destruction. “It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”
Calm promises to give the anxious, the depressed, and the isolated—as well as those looking to be a bit more present with their family, or a bit less distracted at work, or a bit more consistent in their personal habits—access to a huge variety of zen content for $15 a month, $70 a year, or $400 for a lifetime. For that, its investors have valued the company at $2 billion—roughly as much as 23andMe, Allbirds, and Oatly—making it one of just 700 private start-ups to hit the 10-digit mark. Now flush with venture capital, Calm is in the midst of becoming a full-fledged wellness empire: It is producing books, films, and streaming series, as well as $10 puzzles, $80 meditation cushions, and $272 weighted blankets. It is expanding its corporate partnerships, offering meditations on American Airlines flights and in UK Uber rides, in Novotel hotel rooms and at XpresSpas, and for employees of GE, 3M, and a number of other companies. It even has ambitions to move into hospitality, offering real-world oases to match its smartphone ones.
els robots per fer companyia a la gent gran
It’s an expensive failure. Research from the A.A.R.P. and Stanford University has found that social isolation adds nearly seven billion dollars a year to the total cost of Medicare, in part because isolated people show up to the hospital sicker and stay longer. Last year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine advised health-care providers to start periodically screening older patients for loneliness, though physicians were given no clear instructions on how to move forward once loneliness had been diagnosed.
https://joyforall.com/ pets robotics  https://elliq.com/ una làmpara com npixar que parla, dóna conversa, posa música i avisa del temps ElliQ is designed to get to know its owner: it assembles a personality profile through repeated interaction and machine learning, and uses it to connect more efficiently. The robot determines how “adventurous” a person is, then adjusts how often it suggests new activities. It learns whether its user is more inclined to exercise in the morning or the afternoon; whether she is more motivated by encouragement, or by a joke, or by a list of the benefits of vigorous movement.
Un article sobre els experts en fer adormir els nens petits https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/28/the-promise-and-the-peril-of-a-high-priced-sleep-trainer, sembla que hi ha una dona que després d’un parell de vegades ja consegueix que dormin sols  https://brendathenanny.co.uk/about-brenda-hart, a 500 lliures
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/07/02/1012317032/hospitals-have-started-posting-their-prices-online-heres-what-they-reveal els preus dels hospitals americans
Writing in the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2012, two Japanese scholars surfaced an important cultural difference in the definition of happiness between Western and Asian cultures. In the West, they found happiness to be defined as “a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement.” Meanwhile, in Asia, “happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.”
In Germanic languages, happiness is rooted in words related to fortune or positive fate. In fact, happiness comes from the Middle English hap, which means “luck.” Meanwhile, in Latin-based languages, the term comes from felicitas, which referred in ancient Rome not just to good luck, but also to growth, fertility, and prosperity.
1. Happiness comes from good relationships with the people you love.
This is a combination of the “outer” and “relation” foci. In this model, friends and family are who deliver the most happiness. A good example of a country that fits this model based on how the population tends to define happiness is the United States.
Read: The type of love that makes people happiest
2. Happiness comes from a higher consciousness.
This is a combination of the “inner” and “relation” foci, and is the model for highly spiritual, philosophical, or religious people, especially those who place a special importance on coming together in community. Southern India has been found to be home to a lot of people who follow this model.
3. Happiness comes from doing what you love, usually with others.
This is a combination of the “outer” and “task” foci—that is, a dedication to work or leisure activities that are deeply fulfilling. This is your model if you tend to say “My work is my life” or “I love golfing with my friends.” Look for it in the Nordic countries and Central Europe.
Read: We’re learning the wrong lessons from the world’s happiest countries
4. Happiness comes from simply feeling good.
This is a combination of the “inner” and “task” foci. It is the model for people who prioritize experiences that give them positive feelings, whether alone or with others. It’s a good way to assess your well-being if, when you imagine being happy, you think of watching Netflix or drinking wine. This model is most common in Latin America, the Mediterranean, and South Africa.
The Catalan capital is a hybrid city: Spanish in its emphasis on leisure and friendship, yet more Northern European in work habits. (Between the two, this leaves little time for sleep, which is a bit of a problem.) It is a hardworking, entrepreneurial place, but one with a lot of laughter and bonhomie. It is also where I got married many years ago, and thus where I have most of my loving relationships. As such, it matches my own hybrid concept of happiness: a deep absorption in and enjoyment of my research and teaching, and a strong commitment to the people in my life. Barcelona is the happiest place in the world—for me.
You have your own Barcelona someplace. Go find it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59396041 tres farmacèuiques condemnades per promoure l’abús d’opioids a Ohio, Fentanyl i Oxycontin
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/its-time-to-fear-the-fungi/ les infeccions de fongs ens afecten poc perquè no estan acostumats a viure a temperatures altes com el nostre cos però això podria canviar amb el canvi climàtic.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22783685/covid-19-depression-mental-health-risks-immunology
People with a schizophrenia spectrum diagnosis faced more than two and a half times the average person’s risk of dying from Covid-19, even after controlling for the many other factors that affect Covid-19 outcomes, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, smoking, obesity, and demographic factors — age, sex, and race.
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Psychiatrists who study these mental illnesses say the culprit might lie in a connection between mental health and the immune system. They’re finding that mental health stressors could leave people more at risk for infection, and, most provocatively, they suspect that responses in the immune system might even contribute to some mental health issues.
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Studies have reported that many people with depression, bipolar, and schizophrenia (as well as other mental health issues not highlighted as Covid-19 risk factors by the CDC) have higher levels of inflammation throughout the body.
Inflammation is one of the body’s responses to dealing with dangerous invaders like the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Inflammation is literally a flood of fluids containing immune system cells. They get released from the blood into body tissues to help clear infections. This is why infected areas of the body get swollen. When it comes to Covid-19, scientists suspect that underlying inflammation — or underlying dysregulation of the immune system — is what causes some patients’ bodies to overreact to the virus, causing the worst symptoms that can land people in hospitals and lead to death.
The bigger point, Lee says, is to recognize that schizophrenia is “a whole-body disorder.” “We see inflammation increase in the brain and we see inflammation increase throughout the body.” That leaves people with schizophrenia at risk of a whole host of chronic illnesses. “The inflammation worsens metabolic health, which then in turn usually leads to obesity and worse inflammation,” Lee says. “So it’s all kind of a cycle.”
Finally, the mental health conditions mentioned in this piece — depression, bipolar, schizophrenia — are not fully understood to begin with. Scientists just generally don’t understand how much biological overlap there is among them. With depression in particular, some scientists suspect it isn’t just one disease, but perhaps many different ones that manifest with similar, overlapping symptoms.
So the big picture is complicated and incomplete.
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But if it is true that the immune system can influence the mind and vice versa, it opens up some important, fascinating questions.
For instance: Can getting sick, and the immune system reaction to fighting a virus, provoke changes in mental health? Our bodies get inflamed when we fight off an infection. Could that impact and even possibly cause or contribute to a mood disorder?
Past work suggests it could. An enormous study of the health records of 3.56 million people born between 1945 and 1996 in Denmark showed that a history of infection and autoimmune disorders predicted later diagnosis of mood disorders. More specifically, the study found that the more infections a person had, the more at risk they’d be for mental health issues later on; there could be a causal pathway here. That makes it seem like the infections themselves are a risk factor.
The South African experience is an example of how anti-vaccine sentiment has become a global phenomenon at precisely the worst time. Nearly a quarter of Russians, 18 percent of Americans, and about 10 percent of Germans, Canadians, and French are “unwilling” to get vaccinated, according to a November Morning Consult poll of 15 countries.
“If we had had everybody immunized in the world who is over the age of 18 with at least one dose of COVID vaccine, Omicron might not have happened,” Noni MacDonald, a vaccinologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told me.
Something as complex as vaccine hesitancy is bound to have many causes, but research suggests that one fundamental instinct drives it: A lack of trust. Getting people to overcome their hesitancy will require restoring their trust in science, their leaders, and, quite possibly, one another. The crisis of vaccine hesitancy and the crisis of cratering trust in institutions are one and the same.
The world over, people feel lied to, unheard, and pushed aside. They no longer have any faith in their leaders. They’re lashing out against their governments and health officials, in some cases by rejecting the COVID-19 vaccine.
Populism, a political expression of this mistrust, is correlated with vaccine hesitancy. In a 2019 study, Jonathan Kennedy, a sociologist at Queen Mary University of London, found a significant association between the percentage of people who voted for populist parties within a country and the percent who believe vaccines are not important or effective. Past research has similarly found that populists around the world are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories about issues such as vaccination and global warming.
Medical literature reveals a strong connection between vaccine hesitancy and distrust of pharmaceutical companies, government officials, and health-care workers, even among health-care workers themselves. Studies and polls from various countries over the past two years show that people who are reluctant to get a COVID-19 vaccine are more likely to vote for politically extreme parties and to distrust the government, and to cite their distrust as a reason for not getting the shot. In a recent German poll, half of the unvaccinated respondents had voted for the far-right populist party, Alternative für Deutschland, in the recent election. Anti-vaccine sentiments are also most common in the populist areas of Austria, France, and Italy.
Though many factors contributed to the erosion of trust in government and science, Kennedy highlighted one in particular: As the postwar narrative of optimism and progress failed to pan out for some people, they became suspicious and angry. “There’s large amounts of the population that haven’t benefited economically from globalization,” he said. “There’s lots of people who feel increasingly disenfranchised by politics; they feel like mainstream politicians are aloof and aren’t interested in them.” Populism and anti-vax sentiment, then, “seems to be a kind of rejection of this narrative of civilizational progress … It’s kind of like a scream of helplessness.”
But mostly, restoring trust in medicine and vaccines comes down to the extremely boring and extremely necessary task of properly funding public health, even when there’s not a pandemic raging. African countries have struggled to vaccinate willing people with the doses they have, because clinics are few and the health workforce is strapped. Sometimes even political populism can be overcome if the public-health system is strong: Brazil, where trust in the public-health Sistema Único de Saúde is high, has an excellent immunization track record despite having a populist leader. Brazilians trust the SUS with their lives, so they trust it for their shots.
https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/habits-that-worlds-longest-lived-people-share els hàbits de la gent que viu més anys: moure’s vida activa, tenir un propòsit, Downshift -sense estrés, menjar fins a un 80% ple, menjar vegetals, beure vi moderadament, find belonging (pertànyer a alguna religió), put loved ones first, community
I just watched an episode of The Twilight Zone that explores this in a way only that show could. It’s about a gangster who dies and wakes up in a place that has all the markings of heaven — or at least what a guy like that would imagine as heaven. He has all the sex and money and power he wants. He loves it at first. But then he grows bored and aimless and starts to hate it. So he asks his guide if he can go to hell instead, and that’s when he learns he’s already there.
A new book by the psychologist Paul Bloom, called The Sweet Spot, says this story captures the strangeness of human psychology about as well as anything can. It’s a deep dive into the relationship between suffering and meaning, and why living a purposeful life means caring about much more than happiness.
A hedonist, and I know a few of them, might say, “Well, maybe they’ll regret a little bit at a time, but if they’re having fun 95 percent of the time and there’s regret 5 percent of the time, they made the right life decision.” And there’s a big debate in psychology over what we should try to maximize. Hedonists say you should try to maximize your day-to-day moments of pleasure, while the rest of us say that you should try to maximize other things as well, including your satisfaction with your life.
is a famous thought experiment by the philosopher Robert Nozick, who imagines an experience machine, which now everyone knows as the Matrix./ Because I don’t just want to have experiences, I want to do things. Because I have people I love who I want to be with, and I want to take care of them, not just think I’m with them and take care of them. I’d be abandoning all sorts of friends and family. And yes, while I’m in the machine, I won’t know I’m abandoning them, but I’m abandoning them nonetheless, and that’s wrong. And so, all sorts of other non-hedonistic motivations lead me to say, “I’m going to take my real life.”
So, happiness as I see it has at least two meanings. One meaning is close to day-to-day pleasure. Experiments have been done: I give you an iPhone, it beeps at random times, whenever it beeps, you say how happy you are. And then we just take it, and we count it from one to 10, say, and we average it. And I say, “Your life, you’re at 7.8.”
But another sense of happiness is, I sit you down, I say, “Well, how good’s your life going? How happy are you? How’s it going for you?” Give you a scale from one to 10. Now, the numbers tend to correlate. So, maybe you say eight and a half, or seven, or something close, and they don’t tend to diverge that much, but they do diverge.
There are people who live lives of happiness where they’re really having a lot of fun, but they think they’re just living a crap life and they’re full of regret. And other people, and I met more of these, think they’re living a really terrific life. Imagine somebody with a lot of kids, and a stressful job, and they’re doing a lot of community work, and they have complicated relationships, and they say, “I’m overwhelmed. I have headaches all the time. There’s so much strife, so much struggle. I’m worried about people. And so on.” I ask, “How’s your life?” They say, “My life is wonderful.”
After my book came out, there was a very interesting article by Erin Westgate and Shigehiro Oishi, on psychological diversity and diverse experiences, where they argue that people want some degree of variety in their life experiences. And for me, having kids introduced me to a new emotion, introduced me to a new feeling, which is intense love of a sort that’s not romantic and not towards a friend. The feeling of parental or paternal love for me was like seeing a whole different color, and a whole different set of feelings. And again, nothing is unmixed. I quote Zadie Smith, who just speaks wonderfully about the horribleness of having kids, and the horrible risk of having kids.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-59749967 Israel ha tingut 8.400 morts per covid, amb més vacunació, Catalunya, 25.000
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210720-the-complexities-of-vaccine-hesitancy els recels dels que no es volen vacunar s’haurien de tractar amb respecte
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-calm-your-emotions-with-dialectical-behaviour-therapy flexió i respirar, ser consient de les emocions, gestionar-les
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220103-awe-the-little-earthquake-that-could-free-your-mind experimentar admiració (awe), en un gran espai a la natura, amb una activitat física,  ens fa veure’ns en un context més ample i ens ajuda a pensar millor i ser més generosos.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/09/health/sleep-history-wellness-scn/index.html la idea que hem de dormir tota la nit seguit és només de fa un parell de segles. la humanitat ha dormit per segments.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep a l’edta mitjana es feia un primer son de 21 a 23, s’estava despert un parell d’hores, on es feien tasques i després venia el segon son [ hauria pensat que ens ajustàvem més a les hores de llum natural ]
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-60058120 bacteris resistents als antibiòtics
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60380317 el sistema de salut de Canadà vs USA,  Another set of statistics compiled by Johns Hopkins shows that as of 11 February, 279 US residents have died of Covid per 100,000, compared to about 94 in Canada.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-anti-vaccine-smoking/622819/ una persona no vacunada té 68 vegades més probabilitats de morir de covid. És com el fumar, si deixes
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html l’agència de salut ha retingut dades que qüestionaven l’efectivitat de les vacunes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-60468900 els efectes secundaris de les vacunes es manifesten aviat
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220315-the-paradox-of-how-antidepressants-are-tested els tests d’antidepressius no inclouen persones depressives o amb símptomes de suicidi.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60569647 tractaments mèdics a la Índia
In 2013, a charismatic Mexican doctor took the stage at Burning Man, in Nevada, to give a TEDx talk on what he called “the ultimate experience.” The doctor’s name was Octavio Rettig, and he would soon become known by his first name alone, like some pop diva or soccer star. He told the crowd that, years earlier, he had overcome a crack addiction by using a powerful psychedelic substance produced by toads in the Sonoran Desert. Afterward, he shared “toad medicine” with a tribal community in northern Mexico, where the rise of narco-trafficking had brought on a methamphetamine crisis. Through this work, he came to believe that smoking toad, as the practice is called, was an ancient Mesoamerican ritual—a “unique toadal language,” shared by Mayans and Aztecs—that had been stamped out during the colonial era.
Hunter Biden credits toad with keeping him off cocaine for a year. In 2019, Mike Tyson said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that, ever since smoking toad, he’s “never been the same.” When I first spoke with Octavio, last year, he told me that his work was “the trigger for toad medicine to be spread all over the planet.”
Smoking toad has been likened, in one guide to psychedelics, to “being strapped to the nose of a rocket that flies into the sun and evaporates.” An account from the nineteen-eighties describes how, unlike most hallucinogens, which distort reality, toad “completely dissolves reality as we know it, leaving neither hallucinations nor anyone to watch them.” Michael Pollan, who recently wrote a book on psychedelic science, tried the drug after being warned that it was “the Everest of psychedelics.” He wrote that the “violent narrative arc” of his trip—terror and a sense of ego dissolution, culminating in relief and gratitude—“made it difficult to extract much information or knowledge from the journey.”
Most people say that the experience is euphoric, even life-changing. But, for some, smoking toad can be nightmarish. The drug’s effects come on within seconds, and it’s easy for a novice user to become panicked, which can manifest in reactions such as high blood pressure or tachycardia.
Only one species of toad, Incilius alvarius, is known to induce these sensations. Commonly known as the Sonoran Desert toad, it is found in the arid borderlands between Mexico and the United States. The toad spends most of the year burrowed underground, emerging to mate during the summer-monsoon season. In order to repel predators, it secretes toxins from its skin. Dogs sometimes die from ingesting the toad, and regional pet hospitals issue warnings about it. But, in the nineteen-sixties, an Italian pharmacologist published a chemical analysis of the toads’ skin, later inspiring Ken Nelson, a researcher from Texas, to conduct a series of daring experiments. He obtained the toads’ poison by squeezing, or “milking,” glands on their necks. (This process, which is not unlike popping a pimple, can be done without injuring the toad.) The poison dried into a crystalline substance, and Nelson realized that vaporizing it nullified its toxicity, producing one of the most powerful hallucinogenic agents on Earth.
The scientific name of this compound is five-MethOxy-N, N-Dimethyltryptamine, or 5-MeO-DMT, which many people refer to as the “God Molecule.” In 2011, the U.S. banned 5-MeO-DMT; it is also illegal in several other countries, including Germany and China. But, in recent years, researchers have become interested in its potential therapeutic applications.
As with many other psychedelics, the compound can be synthesized in laboratories and is thought to be nonaddictive and low in toxicity; unlike with many other psychedelics, the trip is relatively short, typically lasting around thirty minutes. Davis believes that 5-MeO-DMT might be administered more cheaply, and to more patients, than substances such as psilocybin, which can remain psychoactive for up to six hours.
As Polanco told me, 5-MeO-DMT can induce “a kind of ontological shock.” He sometimes warns his patients, “This can cure P.T.S.D.—or it can cause it.”
Octavio had invited me to observe his toad-smoking sessions around the state. He serves toad to as many as twenty people at a time—“patients,” as he calls them. He tells everyone to show up sober and to fast for eight hours beforehand, and he charges roughly two hundred and fifty dollars a person. Octavio models his approach on shamanic rituals, though he acknowledges that this is highly interpretive, given that smoking toad is a “lost tradition.” He fills a glass pipe with flakes of toad secretion, lights it, and then instructs the patient to inhale deeply. As the substance takes effect, he picks up a wooden rattle and begins a series of Indigenous Mexican chants. “I could not do toad medicine without the chanting,” he once said.
Mexico is home to numerous shamanic rituals involving psychoactive substances, such as psilocybin and peyote; farther south, communities in the Amazon have been brewing ayahuasca for centuries.
[pràctica violenta]
I asked Octavio about the complaints against him. “My work has been misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused,” he said. He conceded that certain videos might look “barbaric or violent,” but he argued that this was sometimes necessary. “I cannot play by the same rules of conventional therapy,” he said. “Most of my patients already went to many rehab centers. They already tried many drugs. I don’t have time to fool around. I just need to be very straight, very direct”—he clapped his hands together—“to stop the bullshit.”
One was a man named Brian, from Sri Lanka, who had sold his home to travel with Octavio. (Previously, Brian had been a devotee of Osho, an Indian guru who inspired a cult movement.)
For many years, the New Age ethos of radical nonjudgement that pervades the toad world helped Octavio avoid scrutiny. “I best serve the Sacred Medicine and myself by not adding to the infectious negativity and Ego on display by condemning or judging Dr.Octavio Rettig,” one person posted, in 2017. But the atmosphere has begun to shift. In 2018, at a toad conference in Mexico City, Octavio sat on a panel that descended into chaos. Octavio made a “star entrance,” an audience member recalled, but the panel, which was on the subject of ethical practice, turned into an “intervention.” Octavio was confronted about his methods, and he began “shouting angrily, charging around the room, and lashing out at those who raised objections.” Things became so heated that one woman screamed “at the top of her lungs.”
In early 2019, a public letter, written by a group of anonymous toad practitioners and users, circulated online. It detailed “reckless, unethical, and potentially criminal behavior” by Octavio and Sandoval. (Sandoval, who was accused of fraud and of sexual assault, among other offenses, denied the accusations.)
As we spoke, I recalled my conversation with Alan Davis, the psychologist from Ohio State. Warning me about a potential risk of taking psychedelics, he’d said, “When the ego is dissolved, and you are completely at one with what you’re perceiving as God or the universe, there is no difference between you and that thing. . . . You are that thing.” He’d added, “When you come back from that, and your ego reasserts itself, there is a potential to hold onto that belief—that there’s no difference between you and God.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61106081 psilocybin, el bolet alucinògen per tractar la depressió
el sistema sanitari americà, més orientat a facturar que als pacients
But the Village seemed to convey a slightly different message: that life remains full of choices and that autonomy enriches life. Its residents can come and go from their homes as they please, whether through the unlocked door or through a window. They can wake and shower at their leisure; they can shout, pilfer sweets, make tea at 2 A.M., sweep with the broom upside down, and handle sharp knives in the kitchen. Their cognitive troubles don’t permit them to adapt to our world,” Gaëlle Marie-Bailleul, the Village’s head of medicine and a specialist in neurodegenerative disorders told me. “We adapt to them.” Most nursing homes devote themselves to the narrow and perfectly reasonable goal of keeping residents safe and healthy. The Village Landais contemplates a broader question: What might a good life with Alzheimer’s look like?
One of the most radical aspects of the Village is its insistence that a person with Alzheimer’s is not just diminishing into the sum of her symptoms, but flourishing and evolving as a human being until the end. Leticia, a forty-one-year-old villager with early-onset Alzheimer’s, is learning to play the guitar. Many residents who never previously engaged in the arts take to painting or collage-making, staffers told me, and former marathoners and cyclists can re-create long runs and rides within the village. (Academic researchers have noted that some people with dementia appear to enjoy enhanced artistic abilities; Mary Mittelman, a research professor at New York University, told me that, in the chorus she founded for people living with dementia and their families, those who may not remember what they ate for lunch are able to learn as many as eighteen new songs for each concert.)
The Village’s operating costs exceed six million euros a year, of which about two-thirds come from public coffers. In exchange, researchers are studying the experiences of Villagers, from their behavioral troubles to their medication use and levels of depression and anxiety.
ementia isn’t unique to our species—it also shows up in dogs, cats, horses, and rabbits—and has probably been with us for centuries. In a cultural and medical history of dementia, “Dementia Reimagined,” the psychiatrist and bioethicist Tia Powell notes that the writer Jonathan Swift is thought to have been afflicted by it in his old age, during the eighteenth century, when he complained of a fleeting memory, an ill temper, and a lasting despondency. “I have been many months the shadow of the shadow of the shadow,” he confessed in one letter. In another, he told his cousin, “I hardly understand a word I write.” When Swift died at seventy-seven, in 1745, dementia was seen less as a medical condition than as an inevitable feature of aging or, in some cases, a kind of madness.
Dementia finally came to be seen as a public-health crisis in the late nineteen-seventies. In 1976, the National Institutes of Health spent $3.8 million on Alzheimer’s research; by the year 2000, federal funding for research on Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia had reached four hundred million. But this money has overwhelmingly been spent on trying to eradicate Alzheimer’s, and not on experiments in dementia care, like the Village. Even the Alzheimer’s Association, the country’s leading advocacy group for people with the disease, envisions “a world without Alzheimer’s,” rather than a world in which we try to live with it peaceably.
Our fear and hatred of Alzheimer’s ultimately seems rooted in our modern attachment to the idea of the self. “The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist,” Rebecca Solnit writes in “The Faraway Nearby,” a memoir that touches on her mother’s Alzheimer’s, among other subjects.
These alternative approaches do not pretend that the disease is anything but cruel. Alzheimer’s takes away so much that we consider essentially human: knowing, remembering, expressing. But Bonnet, the psychologist, pointed out that people with Alzheimer’s often show a gift for rich presence that eludes many of us. When patients forget about their own condition, a development called anosognosia, they sometimes feel better, as my grandmother did. They inhabit the present moment and may let go of troubling memories or fears about the future.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-63859184 curen el càncer de leucèmia  d’una noia editant el seu DNA
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-64070190 estafa que jeus una hora en un llit especial i augmentes els teus nivells d’energia.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/1/8/23542789/big-meat-antibiotics-resistance-fda la indústrai de la carn fa servir antibiòtics i les bactèries evolucionen fent-se resistents.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/01/bike-helmets-cyclist-deaths-do-you-need-to-wear.html es qüestiona l’eficàcia de l’obligatorietat dels cascs a la bicicleta.
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-expectations-and-conditioning-shape-our-response-to-placebos/ Placebos, Today, researchers are actively exploring using conditioning, or as it is currently termed, associative learning, to reduce the use of opioids. In these “dose-extension” studies, placebo pills are interspersed with verum opioids, and through associative learning, the dose of pain treatments can be gradually reduced and replaced with a placebo.
Further, potent pharmacological drug effects can be modified by suggestion. For instance, the pain-killing effects of morphine are substantially reduced when its administration is hidden from the patient.
The influence of expectations on treatment outcomes is not limited to explicit manipulations of information in the clinical encounter. Studies examining manipulations of cost, branding, and subtle cost-related cues have found that patients hold subconscious associations between cost, branding, and treatment efficacy that influence treatment outcomes. Study participants who receive a treatment that “costs more” tend to experience a greater benefit as compared to when they receive a treatment that “costs less,” even when the treatments are identical and inert.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230120-how-gut-bacteria-are-controlling-your-brain la flora intestinal influeix la ment i l’estat d’ànim.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230120-five-ways-to-be-calm-and-why-it-matters maneres de calmar-se, la filosofia estoica, la música, la imatge, els haiku
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230220-is-air-pollution-causing-us-to-lose-our-sense-of-smell la contaminació de l’aire conté nano partícules que ens poden fer perdre l’olfacte
https://www.wired.com/story/ultra-processed-foods/ ens engreixem més amb els menjars ultraprocessats, no tant pels seus components, sinó perquè el cervell ens en fa menjar més.
https://www.catorze.cat/biblioteca/henry-marsh-200046/ allargar la vida innecessàriament. Tots coneixem i admirem persones que han arribat amb una bona qualitat de vida als vuitanta o noranta anys, però són una minoria. A partir dels setanta-cinc, com més gran et fas més complicada és la vida. Si arribes als vuitanta, tens entre un 30 i un 40% de possibilitats de patir Alzheimer; i si arribes als noranta, entre un 50 i un 60%. Tots ens creiem que serem l’afortunat que no té Alzheimer i arriba als setanta amb un cervell fantàstic, perquè l’evolució ens ha brindat un optimisme biològic i una por de la mort innats. Però les estadístiques són les que són. I la por de la mort, en combinació amb la nostra reticència a acceptar-la, és el motiu pel qual els sistemes sanitaris de tot el món estan en crisi: no sabem quan parar. Ens gastem tants diners intentant mantenir viu un vell de noranta anys com un nen de nou. I si dius que la vida del vell de noranta anys no és tan valuosa com la del nen de nou, perquè el nen encara té vuitanta-un anys per endavant, t’acusen d’edatista i utilitarista.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/13/medicare-advantage-plans-denial-artificial-intelligence/ algoritms retallens prestacions sanitàries als USA. Behind the scenes, insurers are using unregulated predictive algorithms, under the guise of scientific rigor, to pinpoint the precise moment when they can plausibly cut off payment for an older patient’s treatment.
Quin és el mínim d’exercici físic que es necessita? Quants passos diaris quantes hores d’activitat setmanal?
La cosa més important que cal tenir en compte és que el cervell compta cada pas que fem: només una hora caminant ràpid a la setmana ha demostrat tenir efectes en la reducció del risc de patir depressió al voltant del 10%. El màxim efecte que s’aconsegueix és corrent tres vegades a la setmana, 45 minuts cada vegada.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/last-resorts-kislenko els estats no poden o no volen pagar els tractaments dels discapacitats i això els aboca a l’eutaàsia [ tenim una medecina que allarga la vida … als que tenen diners ]
Ja no hi ha Gas. menys pesticides fan baixar els suïcidis.
Means restriction works in part because suicide is often an unplanned act. The time between a suicidal impulse arising and a person acting on that impulse can be as little as five minutes. A person who dies by suicide has traditionally been represented as someone at the end of a long, tortured battle with depression, but this is generally not the case. While having a mental illness is a strong predictor of suicide risk, most people with mental illness will never attempt suicide.
Reducing access to means allows time for the impulse to pass, and the person may never want to try again. One study found that only about 7 percent of people who attempted suicide went on to take their own lives within the following five years.
SUICIDES AREN’T evenly distributed around the world. According to the World Health Organization’s most recent estimates, nearly 80 percent of suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries, where most of the world’s population lives, but high-income countries tend to have higher suicide rates. The general global decline in suicides also hides pockets of the world where rates are climbing—countries like Zimbabwe, Jamaica, South Korea, and Cameroon.
One high-income country is a particular exception to the downward trend: the US. Though rates in the country declined throughout the 1990s, at the turn of the century they began to rise again. Between 2000 and 2018, the suicide rate jumped 35 percent. Suicide is the second-highest cause of death among young Americans aged 10–14 and 20–35 years old.
You might be shouting: The answer is guns! And you’d be mostly right. In the US, over half of all gun deaths are suicides
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230614-how-a-dose-of-mdma-transformed-a-white-supremacist una dosi de MDMA va canviar les idees d’un supremacista blanc  [MDMA extasi)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/15/magazine/doctors-moral-crises.html
A Canadà van legalitzar el cannabis però les empreses legals no aconsegueixen que sigui rendible: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67126243
https://thewalrus.ca/are-we-losing-the-war-on-cancer/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-flu-vaccine-works-in-a-way-most-people-dont-appreciate/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/18/all-the-carcinogens-we-cannot-see?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Misticisme i psilocybin pocket
Abús de la melatonina per dormir, fins i tot en nens BBC
2024
  • https://www.wired.com/story/open-label-placebo-why-does-it-work/?utm_source=pocket_mylist els placebos funcionen fins i tot quan ens diuen que és placebo.
  • https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68105868 tocar un instrument, particularment el piano, ajuda a mantenir el cervell quan ens fem grans
  • Regla 20-3-5 sobre quant de temps hem d’estar fora. 20 min en espais verds tres cops per setmana. 3 hores al mes d’excusió, 5 dies a l’any en plena natura.https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-20-5-3-rule-prescribes-how-much-time-you-should-spend-outside?utm_source=pocket_mylist
  • l’art de no fer res, https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-art-of-doing-nothing-have-the-dutch-found-the-answer-to-burnout-culture?utm_source=pocket_mylist
  • https://undark.org/2024/02/14/edna-emerging-pathogens/?utm_source=pocket_mylist L’anàlisi de les aigües grises ens donaria informació sobre patògens i salut, però hi ha reserves quant a privacitat.
  • https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-so-many-mental-illnesses-overlap/?utm_source=pocket_mylist Hi ha inbdicis que la divisió de malalties mentals del DSM no té fonament i que moltes se solapen
  • https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-dirty-secrets-about-our-hands-role-in-disease-transmission-180983919/?utm_source=pocket_mylist transmissió de malalties per les mans
  • https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68622781 un implant cerebral permet moure el cursor d’un ordinador.
  • https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/club-med-adderall?utm_source=pocket_mylist tot un país funcionant amb adderall
  • https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/22/how-to-die-in-good-health?utm_source=pocket_mylist Com morir gran i amb salut