Federal officials have tentatively identified the potential source of recently reported vaping-related respiratory illnesses and deaths. The culprit appears to be vitamin E acetate, a substance long used as a nutritional supplement and topical skin treatment but whose oily consistency may make it quite toxic when inhaled via vaping. While these findings are preliminary and require confirmation in multiple studies, the unfolding story of vaping-related injuries is pregnant with implications for those on the frontlines of harm reduction, addiction treatment, recovery support, and recovery advocacy.
The vaping illnesses and deaths affirm several principles that can guide our monitoring of emerging drug trends. New technologies that increase the efficiency of drug consumption by altering per episode and lifetime drug dosage, drug purity, or route of drug administration may require a fundamental rethinking of the risks associated with particular drugs.
While the toxic effects of new drugs and new ways of using known drugs are usually identified early in their social emergence, the nightmare scenario would be a Trojan Horse that possessed few if any short term negative effects but devastating effects linked to long-term use. That is precisely the scenario that forced a radical rethinking of the effects of smoking tobacco over the past century. When toxic drug effects become quickly apparent before widespread use, mass public health damage can be minimized. In the case of tobacco smoking, short term studies would not have revealed smoking as the ticking time bomb that it is. We must be vigilant in identifying other drugs and patterns of drug consumption that may share a similar trajectory.
This is the only point I wish to make in this blog. Those at the forefront of dealing with addiction are in a unique position to identify such threats early in their emergence. Through careful listening and observation we may be able to identify new threats to the health of individuals and communities early in the history of their emergence. Seeing such threats, we can communicate what we are observing to public health and community leaders, and by so doing, arouse action to reduce the numbers of people exposed to such threats as well as get people already exposed the help they need as quickly as possible. Listen. Observe. Help. Advocate. We are a crucial part of a desperately needed early warning network.
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You know that eating a good mix of foods from the plant kingdom ensures kids get plenty of vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phytonutrients. You’re probably aware that children who are raised on a variety of plant-based foods have a reduced risk of obesity—and a lower likelihood of developing heart disease, cancer, and diabetes later in their lives.
What you may not know is how to get your kids to eat enough veggies to actually reap all those benefits. Or how to get them off junk food and onto better-for-them treats. With these delicious, wholesome dishes, you can do both … without breaking the bank or breaking a sweat.
Cozy Vegetable Soup
Creamy Avocado Pasta Salad
Soft and Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Behind any landmark cure is years of medical research. But the old goal of research — to find a one-size-fits-all treatment for a disease, based on a set of standard protocols — must radically change to further and diversify advances in the field, experts argued at the TIME 100 Health Summit on Thursday.
Sean Parker, an entrepreneur and founder of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, came to the complex world of biotech, life sciences and health care research as an outsider. (Parker co-founded Napster and was the first president of Facebook.) “It seemed like there was tremendous opportunity. The field looked and felt a lot like the early Internet,” he explained at the summit.
“There was a lot of similarity in terms of enthusiasm and excitement and breakthroughs… and yet there were these inherent systemic obstacles that felt like they were slowing down progress,” Parker said. The cost of enrolling a patient in a clinical trial, for instance, can be “extraordinarily high,” and researchers focused on similar treatment goals often work separately from one another — without sharing data. The Parker Institute’s goal is to connect cancer doctors, share information among researchers and accelerate new treatments. Work at the Parker Institute has led to the first approved gene immunotherapy for blood cancers and Nobel Prize-winning immune-based cancer drugs.
“We’re all in it, at the end of the day, for our patients,” said Dr. Laura Esserman, professor of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. “We want to get people to a better outcome.” In the field of breast cancer, for example, the same cancer screening and treatment guidelines have traditionally been applied across the board. But people have different genetic profiles and risk factors, necessitating a range of different approaches. “Breast cancer is many diseases,” Esserman said, and a treatment path for one patient may not be appropriate for another.
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This precision-focused medicine approach is best achieved through collaboration, which is partly why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is in the process of ensuring recipients of NIH grant funding must make their data accessible, said NIH director Dr. Francis Collins at the summit. “We can all learn from it.”
This approach is useful not only to discover how to treat people once they get sick, but also to understand how they remain well. “We have these one-size-fits-all approaches to how to stay healthy” — diet and exercise, for example — “and most people ignore them,” he said.
In the NIH’s “All of Us” trial, which is currently enrolling participants, researchers will follow 1 million Americans who are providing electronic health records, blood samples for DNA sequencing, and information from Fitbits and questionnaires. That rich trove of data will then be available to other researchers. “Imagine you have this as a platform to understand wellness,” Collins noted.
How much of you do the people closest to you really know? What do they understand of the person that you are, as something distinct from the things you do? And when the time comes, inevitably, will your story die with you, or will it remain with your friends, your spouse, your children?
Being known — really known — by the people who matter most to us forms a core part of our everyday relationships. When someone feels that those closest to them don’t really know them well, it not only negatively impacts their experience of the quality of those relationships, it can also compromise their own sense of wellbeing and belonging. But being known is also a big part of what we leave behind when we die, and many extra challenges can arise for grieving loved ones when they realise how little they knew of the person they lost.
When reflecting on the inevitability of their own death, many people’s thoughts turn first to more traditional aspects of ‘legacy’ and leaving behind material possessions or visible signs of achievement. Some might aim to leave an inheritance for children or a spouse, or perhaps for charity; those with unusual wealth might even endow a foundation to carry on their work or their name after their death. But these kinds of things say more about the aspect of ourselves that is what we do, as distinct from the aspect that is who we are. While it may be tempting to think that we can infer all we need to know about who someone is by looking through the lens of what they do, in reality only rarely do we actually have enough information about what someone does to understand more than superficially who they are as a person. (Just ask any disappointed ex-fan of one of the myriad recently discredited actors, actresses, or other public figures whose actions in their private lives, once disclosed, have revealed them to be someone other than who we all thought.) We might leave behind plenty of indicators of the things we’ve done without leaving behind much at all of who we are.
In everyday life, probably some people are naturally talented at making themselves known, for example automatically talking about themselves in such a way that who they are becomes easily understood by those in close relationships with them, such as a spouse, children, friends, and so on. For others, by contrast, this process doesn’t come naturally at all. And for others still, the changing circumstances of life, such as becoming a parent and making a child the centre of their universe, taking on a new role at work, or even being struck with a major illness, mean that being really known by others happens much less automatically than it once might have.
For those in the latter two categories, sometimes it happens that others notice and reach out to understand more. Children, for example, may want to know details about their parents or their grandparents; sometimes it even comes up as a school assignment to interview a family member about their life. Many adults have made a point of sitting down with an ageing parent, jotting notes or making audio recordings. Many more have intended to do so but never did, with other circumstances getting in the way until it was too late.
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Probably more often than not, however, others don’t notice — and, in fact, we might not even notice ourselves. Sure, we might get a sense of distance from those who matter to us, but we chalk it up to being busy. Or we reminisce about times when we somehow felt closer to others, but without necessarily being able to put our finger on the sense that we no longer feel as known by them. Instead, we may just wind up feeling that little bit more distant, that little bit more alone, that little bit less settled.
This can happen to anyone, even to those who would ordinarily be talented at making themselves known.
When it does, I believe it’s essential to remind ourselves that who we are matters — over and above the things we do now or the things we did in the past. It matters to ourselves, it matters to those closest to us, and it will matter to those left behind after we die. In a sense, it matters even to the rest of the social fabric around us: by being an example of a person who is, a person who is known for who they are, we make a fundamental statement about personhood and the value of the person.
This is not in any way to take away from the value or importance of actions; rather, it is to attribute something extra to the underlying person. A collection of events or achievements from a life doesn’t begin to tell who we are until it is woven together with some kind of narrative, some story of what those events meant to us, the role they played in our lives and in our development. That narrative, as a reflection of who we are, is a central way of being known in our relationships and of offering ourselves to others.
It is also the primary means by which our loved ones will carry on a relationship with us long after we have died, far more so than any traditional ‘legacy’ of money or possessions or even the most well-heeled foundation.
All clinical material on this site is peer reviewed by one or more clinical psychologists or other qualified mental health professionals. This specific article was originally published by on and was last reviewed or updated by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on .
https://counsellingresource.com/features/2019/04/17/left-behind/
Here are five ways to help preserve the life and growth of a good idea when circumstances mean we can’t follow it up right now, ways to stop it becoming just another weighty addition on a “to do” list.
Great ideas and creative inspiration can come with little warning. There you are, minding your own business, and suddenly an idea strikes: the creative process is flowing, you ride along with it for a little while, start fleshing out extensions and connections and growing the idea. But often we aren’t able to set aside enough time or attention right at that moment to ‘complete’ all the details and nuances of the idea right then and there. We set it aside temporarily, intending to return to it later — and then, sometimes, we find ourselves still trying to implement the idea weeks or months or even years later.
Over time, what was once a sparkling ember of possibility can become a cold, dark lump that we carry around with us, either literally or metaphorically. Maybe it lives in an actual notebook; many academics, authors and entrepreneurs have collected stacks of paper notebooks over the years. It might get stored electronically on a phone or computer. Or perhaps it just sits in the back of the mind, awaiting its turn while other matters occupy us. Whatever the medium, the end result is similar: the idea goes dormant, becoming a “to do”, an awaiting task to go back and recapture that creative process and flesh it all out again.
Unfortunately, that task of recapturing the creative process can become more and more difficult as time goes on. When it’s forming, an idea is like a growing crystal, one with a huge surface area where new structures are created and new connections are made. But when it’s rattled around in the mind with too many other things for too long, even if only as a vague awareness of something we jotted down in a notebook or on a computing device, it can get ground down until it’s shiny and smooth, like a marble. (Alternatively, I think of the round lead weights, or ‘sinkers’, that I used to attach to a fishing line when I was a child, before we all realised that throwing pieces of lead into lakes wasn’t a good idea.) The original nugget might still be very recognisable, clearly visible and solid and beautiful even, but it lacks those all-important edges and faces that allow it to accrete new additions to itself and grow.
This can happen to anyone, with any kind of idea, from the grandest plan for a groundbreaking novel to the most straightforward strategy for reorganising the garage. Some of us are still lugging around marble-ideas from years ago, still unimplemented, still awaiting their turn! Inoculating yourself against the problem probably is impossible, but here are a few thoughts on ways to shift the odds in your favour.
- Capture it!
- Jot the idea down, including as many of the extensions and connections floating around with it as you can manage, however potentially irrelevant or pointless they might seem. This isn’t the place for a concise, polished, focused “to do”; rather, it’s a whole messy and disorganised “brain dump” of an idea; irrelevancies can be pruned away in the future. An entirely unedited snapshot like this can help later on to create a new creative flow that is informed by the one you had the first time, offering a glimpse at the living nature of the idea and preventing it from shrivelling into a wrinkly raisin of an idea.
- Let it go.
- With a snapshot safely preserved, go ahead and let the idea drift away as far as it may from your attention, releasing yourself from the obligation to carry it with you, rattling around within your awareness. But — and this is a big but — combine this with a routine of some kind to go back periodically and review what you’ve captured and saved. The reviewing process needn’t be particularly thorough or time consuming; even a cursory glance can provide an opportunity to pick up a saved idea again. You can have faith that the idea won’t be lost when you let it go.
- Make space.
- Making some mental space to just “be” and to allow creativity to start to flow again — or, sometimes, not to flow at all — can help make the process of creativity feel more like a close friend and frequent visitor who drops around for a casual chat all the time and less like a long lost relative who must be hugged and squeezed and fussed over whenever they appear. Accepting that sometimes, the creative juices aren’t going to flow anyway, regardless of how much space we make, reinforces the sense that we’re just “being”, not forcing or grasping at anything.
- Be confident.
- Have confidence that however difficult the creative process might seem at any given point in time, you will create again. It’s not like you’re limited to only a certain number of ideas per lifetime, and then you run out. Struggling to recover one of those saved snapshots and generate new thought processes akin to those that once surrounded it? No problem: it happens! But that idea came from your mind in the first place; what better environment could there be to welcome it back to active growth? Like Arnie in a Terminator film: it will be back!
- Cut yourself some slack.
- Not every great idea needs to be followed up according to some particular timeline; not every great idea needs to be followed up at all. Some you may even reject later after reassessing their greatness, maybe because your views have shifted, your experience has deepened, or external factors have changed the context in which the idea would be implemented. That’s OK.
All clinical material on this site is peer reviewed by one or more clinical psychologists or other qualified mental health professionals. This specific article was originally published by on and was last reviewed or updated by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on .
https://counsellingresource.com/features/2019/03/25/great-ideas-lead-weights/
How we deal with prejudice in our own lives, at an individual level, makes all the difference to the impact we have on society at large.
In terms of their public visibility and their impact on conversations in the media and in politics, two of the more vocal groups of people seem to be those who fear their prejudices and those who live their prejudices.
The latter group includes the unapologetic racists, sexists, homophobes, and so forth. We see them in the news when they commit violent crimes against those they don’t like or when they join in rallies for extremist political parties; in everyday life, we might glimpse their disapproving glances or intimidating stares when they encounter someone with the wrong colour or the wrong gender or the wrong partner. For present purposes, I will also include in the group of those living their prejudices the subset of anti-fascists, anti-racists, or anti-whatever it happens to be whose resentment toward the injustices of past or current discrimination or privilege at a societal level leads them to try to make up for these wrongs by introducing new and diametrically opposed discriminations or privileges. In other words, they aim to make the world more just not by reducing privileges that favour one set of people, but by creating new and opposing privileges designed to favour another set left disadvantaged by the first. In grouping them together, I am not hinting at any moral similarity between the unapologetically prejudiced and the ‘anti-prejudiced’, but I am highlighting the shared trait that each has a clear external focus, generally on some specific target population, as a source of problems to be fixed.
By contrast, the other of the two particularly vocal groups includes those who fear their own internal sense that they themselves might be prejudiced, or who fear that others will perceive or infer prejudice within them. While many in this group handle the fear of their own prejudice in silence, others are very noisy about it. Some, for example, are highly motivated to criticise what they see as potential prejudices in those around them less because they believe that is an effective way to make the world more just and more because they fear that if they do not criticise — and criticise loudly — then others might infer from their silence that they sympathise with or even agree with the person they are criticising. Some do not merely fear that they might be prejudiced but actively proclaim that they must be prejudiced due to an accident of birth such as their skin colour or gender. Others go even further, suggesting for example not only that they themselves must be racist because they happen to be white, but also that they cannot really even understand racism or be qualified to comment on it in any way because of the colour of their skin. Often this type of suggestion extends to the belief that the same must apply to everybody who shares the same skin colour, or gender, or sexual orientation, or whatever it might be. From there, it’s an easy segue to the corollary that the internal coherence and logic of arguments or the accuracy of observations carry less weight than the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person articulating them. (This likewise makes it easy to suppose, for example, that anything non-trivial that is uttered about race by a white person must be ‘whitesplaining’.) Notably, proclaiming everyone in a particular group to be necessarily racist, sexist, or whatever is a great way of both avoiding individual responsibility and framing the problem as entirely intractable.
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In addition to these two groups which seem to dominate the news, the politics, and the national conversation — that is, in addition to the unapologetically prejudiced and anti-prejudiced, plus those fearful of their own prejudices — I think there is another group. This is the set of people who accept without resentment that the world is the way it is, but who work actively to improve it, all while acknowledging that nobody, including themselves, has perfect inner egalitarianism toward the outside world. These people do not shy away from that lack of inner egalitarianism, but they do work to be aware of it, to understand it, to mitigate its effects. These people are more apt to reflect on their inner prejudices than to fear them, more apt to devote themselves to changing them from the inside than to work to ensure nobody suspects them of harbouring them in the first place. They are not blind to the structural unfairness in society that has grown out of unfettered prejudice, but they also believe in the power that overcoming prejudice at the level of the individual has on eliminating that unfairness. Unsurprisingly, this set of people is largely unheard amongst the hubbub and back-and-forth of the two noisy groups I’ve described above. I’ve often wondered how many of them there might be; is it a large proportion of the population, a majority even, or is it just a small slice? I suspect that many in the more outspoken groups would maintain that such people are simply confused, deluded, or living in pollyannaish denial.
To be clear, I think there’s nothing wrong with being afraid of our own prejudices. But what really matters in terms of our impact on the world around us is how we behave when we experience that feeling. Do we put our energy into maintaining a façade to protect ourselves from having those prejudices discovered? Do we protect ourselves by chalking it all up to an accident of birth? Or do we focus on the feeling itself and work to understand it better? Generally speaking, when we respond to fear by trying to protect ourselves, those factors within us which go into the fear tend to remain stuck in place, ensuring that change is slow or non-existent. By contrast, when we accept the fear, sit down alongside it, and listen to it, we can drain away some of its energy, and we can ultimately work to transform it and perhaps rid ourselves of it altogether. That, in turn, opens the way to teasing out and examining with a clear head our assumptions and inferences and outright prejudices, increasing our self-awareness and, at least some of the time, correcting our faulty thinking. It also means we can more easily listen to and understand what other people are saying about their own lives, including about the impact of prejudice and discrimination on them.
All clinical material on this site is peer reviewed by one or more clinical psychologists or other qualified mental health professionals. This specific article was originally published by on and was last reviewed or updated by Dr Greg Mulhauser, Managing Editor on .
https://counsellingresource.com/features/2019/05/22/fear-your-prejudices/