Olwen Anderson's Blog

Avoiding uncomfortable topics works well in social situations; but it’s all too easy to carry this custom into a practitioner’s consultation room. When you do, it can result in you leaving with the frustrating sense that your real concerns haven’t been addressed. Feeling like you wanted to speak up but somehow couldn’t.

As practitioners we call this effect the ‘imbalance of power’. The client (or patient) visits us in our ‘home’, our office. As a result, the visitor can feel constrained from speaking frankly, from disagreeing. For you, that can mean that the ‘elephant in the room’, what you’re really worried about or don’t agree on, isn’t discussed.  After a few of these kinds of consultation with different practitioners you can come to feel that no-one will help you.

I hope this hasn’t happened to you, but it seems that some folk (like women, those with disabilities, and members of minority groups) are more vulnerable to this imbalance of power, and are less likely to get the health services they need. So, if you sense you’re not getting what you came for, here are a couple of tips to help next time you sit down with a practitioner.

One technique is to write down before you go what you want from the consultation. Keep it with you. This is a fast way to communicate what you need when it can seem time to talk is too brief. It will help you stay on topic too. 

Another technique is to take a wingman with you – an assertive person you trust who also knows what you want to achieve from the visit, and is happy to speak up for you if it seems you’re not being heard.

Whichever technique you use, just remember that when it comes to your health care, this is the time to forget the keep-everyone-comfortable custom and speak your mind instead.

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We used to have to physically thumb through card catalogues and roam through dusty library shelves to locate a single study. But since the internet was born, the computer does this work for us. There’s now an overwhelming amount of information available with just a few clicks: good, mediocre and useless varieties. And the speed of our 24/7 news cycle can mean that research might not be checked diligently before the broadcasting begins.

We now have this problem because the internet doesn’t differentiate between what’s real and what’s make-believe. To help out, there’s a process in academic publishing called ‘peer review’, where a study is subjected to the scrutiny of several experts before the journal will agree to publish it. Although the process isn’t perfect, it does winnow out a lot of the chaff of research. Good quality scientific information is peer-reviewed, and worth reading; the rest might not be. Here’s how you find out if what you’re hearing is worthwhile.

First, seek out the journal. If where it was published isn’t mentioned, do an ‘advanced’ search through Google Scholar using clues from the news report. Once you know the journal name, head to their web site. There, perhaps in ‘instructions for submitting articles’, or the ‘about’ section will be the term ‘peer reviewed’ or ‘refereed’ or similar. If their website doesn’t mention this vetting process, or if it charges writers to publish, then you can suspect nobody’s checked the article before printing.

Still not sure? You could look for studies on the academic databases. Most libraries (including ours here in the Tweed) have access to research & study databases whose octopus-like tentacles reach into vast collections of academic journal articles. You can just tick a box in your search requesting ‘peer reviewed articles only’ and voila, it will locate the kind of research worth reading.

Now, when you hear about some fabulous new research you know how to reach behind the veil of publicity and see if it’s real.

Then I came across another video clip, this time of a grandfather, Jean Titus, who had decided in his mid-40s that, really, he probably wasn’t even half way through his life, so it was time to get the mindset that would help him stay fit – and healthy – so much so that age would become just a number. He didn’t want to die at 25 to be buried at 70, realising that health & wellness were something money couldn’t buy. Judging by the film footage, he’s doing OK.
Now perhaps I was spending too much time on the internet. But these kinds of video clips and social media shares serve a purpose: they can shake us out of our habitual belief that our health and fitness will only be as good as the people around us. Which, if you’re living amongst people who have given up, might not be so good.

Maintaining your health certainly does become more challenging as the decades pass, partly thanks to the decline in reproductive hormone production from the middle years onwards. But I suspect that another powerful de-motivator is when you see the people around you getting tubbier, purchasing mobility aids, and forgetting where they were headed to after they’ve walked out the front door. 

As social beings, we’re hard-wired to perceive the way most of the people around us look as being normal. For example, it might seem normal now to be overweight since more than half of our population now wear plus-sized clothes. But if you were regularly mixing with people like Sister Buder and Mr Titus, your outlook on your own health and vitality might be a little different, perhaps?

So, if a little voice in your head is whispering that you might enjoy life more and feel better if you were healthier, maybe watching some of the inspiring folk on the internet, and getting amongst people intent on staying fit and healthy could help you shift aspirations into actions.
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You can obtain relatively inexpensive genetic tests now to determine whether your genes for methylation are defective (we can easily arrange this through the clinic); but even without the testing there’s something in your diet that can help your methylation processes and boost your health. Something ordinary. Something most of us don’t eat enough of: greens.

These vegetables, particularly raw greens, contain an important nutrient for methylation: folic acid, also known as folate or folinic acid. The name for this nutrient comes from where it’s most abundant, in green leafy vegetables. It’s in quite a few other foods as well, but green vegetables are a particularly rich source. As folate is a water soluble vitamin your body can’t store it, you have to top up on it each day. 

Vitamin C, found in all fresh raw fruits and vegetables, also helps the methylation process along by ‘recycling’ the folate so it can be used again and again to make the biochemical process happen at the right rate to keep you healthy and happy.

The big challenge is how to include more of these greens in your diet. The easiest way is to enjoy a salad every day. Not just salad in a sandwich, but a real salad; about two cups of salad vegetables with plenty of leafy greens like lettuce, dandelion leaves, rocket and herbs. Plus a yummy dressing, of course. Then for your evening meal aim to cover half your plate with steamed greens. 

You can even add greens to your breakfast: For example, lay a couple of rocket leaves on top of the bread before topping with eggs or savoury mince. 

Green smoothies are okay too, but try not to overdo them, as some raw greens regularly included in this drink, like kale, actually need to be cooked first to disable the phytic acid that can block the uptake of minerals.

One last tip to help you eat more leafy greens: Wrap them in a damp tea towel and enclose in a plastic bag to keep them fresh in your fridge.

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If you didn’t already know that your brain can create emotional feelings this may come as a surprise. But your brain really is running the show when it comes to your behaviour, craftily squirting out a bit of serotonin for happiness, or dopamine for satisfaction, and many other neurotransmitters designed to get you experiencing particular feelings so you’ll behave in certain ways. And you thought you were in control. Not as much: if your brain decides that what you just did was something worth doing again, it will produce happiness neurotransmitters. It has decided that what you just did is worth repeating: job well done, do it again.

There are two problems with this: sometimes those neurotransmitters are produced in response to doing something that really isn’t good for us: like smoking, alcohol, caffeine and recreational drugs. Over-use of computer games and social media (that smart phone you’re carrying can induce a shot of dopamine, making it all too easy for us to get lured back to swiping and liking.) It’s good old self-discipline that helps you control those urges towards self-destructive behaviours that feel good in the moment but less so in the long term.

Brains can get inflamed, too, which inhibits their ability to produce neurotransmitters, including happiness inducing serotonin and dopamine.  If your body is inflamed then it’s possible your brain can become inflamed too, generating mood disorders like depression and anxiety. 

Although some of that dopamine can be re-absorbed and used again, your brain needs a steady supply of nutrients like protein, minerals and glucose to keep producing more. There’s another problem with dopamine: it can be exhausted. This is most evident with recreational drugs, where larger amounts are needed as time passes to extract the same feelings the drug offered.

On the positive side, ordinary helpful day-to-day activities can spark a dopamine reaction too. Exercise, particularly, is well known to produce the class of neurotransmitters known as ‘endorphins’ because they make you feel good. One of the best ways to boost your mood (in a healthy way) is to get sweaty exercising.  

There’s a reason why you’re not feeling overwhelmed by different smells already: soon after experiencing the new scent your nose stops registering it. For example, as you’re putting on your t-shirt you’ll briefly get a whiff of the laundry powder, but then it will go. So although it seems like the perfume you applied earlier has all gone, in fact other people can still smell it. 

Think your life isn’t over-perfumed? Tally up the number of fragranced products you’ve encountered already today. You might have washed your hair with a nice-smelling shampoo, used a perfumed soap. An aerosol deodorant spray helped avert worries that your perspiration would offend others, and you used after-shave too, the one your partner appreciates. The clothes you’re wearing were washed in perfumed laundry powder. In the kitchen, your bin liner was fragranced, the dishwasher detergent had its own distinctive smell, and just in case your house didn’t smell pristine, an automatic dispenser sprayed air ‘freshener’ regularly. That’s a lot of artificial chemicals your body has encountered even before breakfast.

Questions are being asked now about whether our exposure to fragrance is affecting our health. After all, we can absorb chemicals across our lungs, increasing the burden of toxins our livers and kidneys have to process. Kate Grenville, the author of ‘The Case Against Fragrance’ has asked some hard questions about perfume while reviewing research already done on the effect of synthetic fragrances. She didn’t find many answers, but her research generates even more worrying questions about what we are unconsciously splash around in our quest to smell good.  It’s a book worth reading if you suspect breathing in artificial fragrances could be affecting your breathing, generating mysterious headaches, creating nausea, even upsetting your hormones and nervous system.

There’s lots you can do to help yourself, beyond opening windows. Select unfragranced products more often. And grow some greenery indoors: House plants have been found to be particularly adept at absorbing the chemicals that make up artificial fragrances. 

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References: 

Grenville, Kate 'The Case Against Fragrance' 

Patel, S. (01.05.2017). Medical hypotheses: Fragrance compounds: The wolves in sheep's clothings Elsevier.