morning sky stirling station, originally uploaded by bobsee.
There’s no end to the variation of light in the sky.
When I looked up and saw this sunrise it looked as if someone had dipped a paintbrush in the emerging sun and streaked the colour up through the clouds
Posted in from the dark room, photography | 2 Comments »
A recent article in the Journal of Nutrition Reviews raises the issue of how focusing on single ingredients or nutrients within food in relation to health both misleads us and at times even results in harm.
The authors propose the concept of “food synergy” by which they mean “a perspective that more information can be obtained by looking at foods than at single food components”. They point out for example that measuring the amounts of a single nutrient – for example a vitamin, or a mineral, or an energy supply like fat or carbohydrate – frequently (I think they may even mean usually) significantly underestimates the levels that have biological effects on human beings which are available from actual food, due to synergistic effects of a variety of components within a foodstuff.
They take an example of the dietary connections with heart disease and cite several pieces of research which show that considering only the fat content in a diet to lower cholesterol levels in blood and so reduce the chances of heart disease is actually pretty inadequate. In fact, they even cite studies which show that certain other food factors in the diet may be even more important than lipids. For example, diets rich in unrefined plant foods such as whole grains, dark green and yellow or orange fleshed fruits and vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds etc can lower blood cholesterol “comparably to statins”. Wow! What does that mean?
Well, before I draw any conclusions let me say one further thing from this paper – they show that what is most important is not the levels of single nutrients or components of food, but that the way components interact within a food is more significant. But more than that, they show that food patterns within a diet are also very important.
So here’s the conclusion. You can’t consider the impact of diet on food by measuring components and classifying some as good, some as bad, and defining optimal levels of them. No. What you have to do is consider the diet as a whole. And that’s much harder for scientists – because scientists have become dependant on “randomised controlled trials” and they can do those with single components of single foods but its much much more difficult to do that with the complexity of whole diets.
But, just cos its difficult for scientists to use their traditional componential methods, doesn’t mean we can’t develop emergent ones instead!
Look at the example of the relation between diet and heart disease again. There are two standout features there. Unrefined foods. And colourful foods. The more your diet contains refined foods, the worse it is. The more your diet contains brown or beige foods, the worse it is. (And, hey, no cheating – no artificial colourants allowed!!)
Posted in from the consulting room, health | 4 Comments »
It’s Amy‘s birthday today. Happy Birthday Amy
I’m gonna watch you shine
Gonna watch you grow
Gonna paint a sign
So you’ll always know
As long as one and one is two
There could never be a father
Who loved his daughter more than I love you
Posted in from the viewing room, life, video | 2 Comments »
I understand the value of focusing on only the part of something to try and understand it better. It’s an essential part of the way we make sense of our world. BUT we must never lose sight of the fact that we CANNOT understand the whole by understanding the parts when we deal with complex adaptive systems.
My own area of medical practice is holistic and that’s not a New Age concept – it’s a focus on the person, rather than just a part of the person which is damaged (the pathological lesion).
A couple of authors I’ve read recently have used other vocabularies to address this issue. Robert Solomon describes a focus on parts as “thin” – it lacks “richness” and “depth”. That strikes me as very true. There’s too much left out of explanatory models which are reductionist. So much left out in fact that they fail to help us understand real life complexity. And Andy Clark uses the term “componential explanation”. Somehow this immediately makes sense to me. He shows how this only works when “the parts display the relevant behaviour even in isolation from each other.” Otherwise, we try a “connectionist explanation” similar to that described so beautifully by Barabasi in Linked. But, he points out, even a focus on the connections is not enough and he describes another model – “emergent explanation” (as explored in Dynamical Systems Theory). This is a good explanatory model for real life complexity and includes a study of “collective variables, control parameters, attractors, bifurcation points and phase portraits”.
Now doesn’t that sound much richer than the reductionist approach?
Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy, science | 1 Comment »
Being There, by Andy Clark (ISBN 0-262-53156-9) is one of the most interestingly challenging books I’ve read for a long time. Let me say first that it’s taken me longer to read than I’d have expected it to. There are whole swathes of it which just didn’t engage me easily. In fact, a few times I thought I’d pack it in, then I’d come across a few sentences or a paragraph that not only would grab me and turn my thinking upside down, but it’d be exciting, visionary and, yes, down right thrilling.
I really enjoyed Robert Solomon’s, The Joy of Philosophy, not least because I feel he gave me a new vocabulary. His one word/concept of “thin” really expanded my thought. You can read more about it here, but what really excited me about this word was the way it captured the inadequacy of logical/analytical/reductionist thought.
I then read Barabasi’s Linked, which homed in on the key concepts of connections and nodes. I especially liked the way he demonstrated that the world, though a complex and at times chaotic system, is not random. Randomness turns out not to be the explanation for the phenomena we experience daily. That changed the way I thought about the world – there are patterns to be discovered, and phenomena to be understood. Sure, there is such a thing as chance, and life is often extremely unpredictable, but we can begin to unravel the connections between things and events, and in the process we can improve our understanding of the world.
Now I’ve just read Andy Clark’s Being There and he puts forward concepts that similarly change the way I understand the world and uses language in some novel ways which open the doors to other ways to explore life. His main thesis is that to understand the mind we have to step outside of the study of the brain – not that the brain is not important of course – but we need to understand the environments in which brains exist. He draws the connections between the brain and the physical, social and symbolic environments in which we live and shows that to fully understand how the mind works we need to explore the interactions between brains and the world. He calls this concept of the mind, the “extended mind” and in the process he nicely shows how we use our brains primarily for pattern recognition and for creating change in the world. In particular how we create the structures in the world that we can then use to extend the functions of our minds.
Let me highlight one simple example – doing a jigsaw. To do a jigsaw we don’t work it all out in our heads but we use our hands to literally manipulate the pieces, turning them around to view each piece from different angles, so stimulating our pattern-recognising brains, and moving the pieces towards and away from different sections of the puzzle. In other words we manipulate the physical environment to help our pattern-spotting brains do what they do best, and to do that more quickly. Andy Clark nicely shows how we do exactly the same thing with our social environment and, crucially, with our ability to handle symbols and signs, which has reached its highest point in our development of language.
What does public language do for us? There is a common, easy answer, which, though not incorrect, is subtly misleading. The easy answer is that language helps us to communicate ideas. It lets other human beings profit from what we know, and it enables us to profit from what they know. This is surely true, and it locates one major wellspring of our rather unique kind of cognitive success. However, the emphasis on language as a medium of communication tends to blind us to a subtler but equally potent role: the role of language as a tool that alters the nature of the computational tasks involved in various kinds of problem solving.
I’ve never read this idea anywhere else – it highlights language as not only being a tool of communication but also being a tool we use to reshape the world to enable our brains to more effectively use their capacities.
This whole thrust can feel a little vertiginous. Look at this for example –
Every thought is had by a brain. But the flow of thoughts and the adaptive successes of reason are now seen to depend on repeated and crucial interactions with external resources. The role of such interactions, in the cases I have highlighted, is clearly computational and informational: it is to transform inputs, to simplify search, to aid recognition, to prompt associative recall, to offload memory, and so on…
and this –
Our brains are the cogs in larger social and cultural machines – machines that bear the mark of vast bodies of previous search and effort, both individual and collective. This machinery is, quite literally, the persisting embodiment of the wealth of achieved knowledge. It is this leviathan of diffused reason that presses maximal benefits from our own simple efforts….
Well, I don’t know about you but this embedding of the brain in the web of relationships, stretching backwards, sideways and forwards in time, makes my head spin! It turns the mind into an even more dynamic phenomenon than I had previously realised and at the same time it turns it into a much less isolated phenomenon too.
Posted in books, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy | 2 Comments »
I know, you might be a bit underwhelmed by this news, but scientists have found that
found that the baby’s intellectual development is influenced by both genes and environment or, more specifically, by the interaction of its genes with its environment.
Apparently, nine out of ten children have a particular gene. When this gene is present breastfeeding increases their intelligence. When it’s not present (one child in ten, the breastfeeding doesn’t make a difference)
The thing that really grabbed my attention however was in the conclusion –
“We’re more interested in proving to the psychiatric community that genes usually have a physiological effect,” Moffitt said. “When looking at depression or intelligence, the key bit that’s often left out here is the environmental effects.”
Surely this is where the future discoveries will lie – in understanding the way in which genes and the environment (and I include nutrition here) interact to affect mental functioning.
Here’s to more joined up thinking!
Posted in from the consulting room, health | 3 Comments »
One of the main themes of this blog is that we are all different and when it comes to health a one-size-fits-all approach fails to address that reality.
This is certainly true of diet where the old adage “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” is so right. But here’s an interesting piece of research into the role of exercise in weight loss.
“This study is the first evidence-based study that shows despite people doing the same amount of supervised exercise people lose different amounts of weight.”
Turns out peoples’ bodies respond differently to the same amount and type of exercise. It really is the case that you need to find what works best for YOU.
You can become the expert in your own body by observing carefully and becoming aware of how different foods and different activities affect you.
Posted in from the consulting room, health | 1 Comment »
My fellow blogger, sugarmouse in the rain, suggested I update my about me page to include a photo and something about why I blog. So, I’ve taken his advice.
Click on the “me” tab at the top of the blog to go and read it.
By the way, I really am open to suggestions, love to get creative feedback and am happy to respond to requests if I can. Let me know if there’s an issue you’d particularly like me to cover (for example, damewiggy recently asked for a post on nutrition and mental health)
Posted in from the reading room | 1 Comment »
red, originally uploaded by bobsee.
What can I say?
Just glorious red!
Took this the other day there in the garden of Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital where I work
Posted in from the dark room, photography | 4 Comments »
I know, this is going to sound odd, but did you know that just because you have a symptom doesn’t mean that you have anything wrong? It’s odd because most of us only go to see a doctor because we have symptoms – pain, or dizziness, or lack of energy, or whatever. Kurt Kroenke and others have done a lot of interesting work on this phenomenon, showing that if you take the top 10 symptoms patients complain of to their doctors, over 80% of them never turn out to be related to any pathology or disease.
Charlie Vivian, an Occupational Health Consultant in Gloucester, wrote an excellent letter to the BMJ about this. Here’s a quote –
Western medicine is based on the biomedical model. This model is reductionist—all symptoms can be explained by underlying pathology—and dualist—if there is no pathology, it’s all in your head. This model was drilled into us at medical school and is the principal model for the National Health Service. Society largely accepts the model too.
But it’s wrong. For up to 90% of people presenting to their general practitioner with genuine physical symptoms, the symptoms are not explained by pathology. It is also not appropriate to label most of these patients as anxious or depressed. I now explain this to patients, and tell them that the problem lies with the model, not with them. It is normal to have genuine physical symptoms that cannot be explained through radiographs or blood tests.
You know, a lot of doctors don’t know this! There’s a general assumption two ways – that if someone has symptoms they have a disease, and that if a disease is treated then the symptoms will get less. Neither is actually true. For many people their symptoms are only indirectly related to their diseases. He also nicely summarises some of the psychological impediments to recovery from disease –
catastrophising (fearing the worst), low mood, avoidance behaviour, and having an external locus of control (for example, make me better doctor)
I like that latter summary. It gives us things to work with.
Posted in from the consulting room, health | 4 Comments »
