Brief Comments on Recent Medical News

Updated 10.31.2014; reformatted 9.18.2015
Happy Halloween, if you enjoy that sort of thing. For me, the adult co-opting of what used to be a children's holiday ruined the holiday for me. Or maybe I just think dropping real money to play dress up isn't worth it. In any event, the extent of Halloween around here is that we give candy to anyone who rings the door bell (thankfully mostly young kids in my neighborhood) and says, "Trick or treat."

The purpose here though is to comment on a few recent articles, blog posts or papers discussing medical topics.

Four minutes of sleep

First up is a recent article from the New York Times that talks about a study where the put wrist band sensors on seniors and monitored how well they slept. Sleep complaints are common amongst older people, however, in this study the difference in sleep time between those who complained about poor sleep and those who didn't was four (4) minutes. That's an average of course, but that difference is not statistically significant.

Of course, the wrist bands don't measure the quality of sleep, and that might make all the difference. My take away was that not everyone has the same sleep pattern. And that's entirely normal. Accept yours for what it is and don't stress if it doesn't match the prescribed norm. In particular, just because it's different doesn't mean you need to drug it into submission— but that is exactly what too many do.

My father probably got adequate sleep, it was just spread out through the 24 hours of a day. Which meant that he'd be up in the middle of the night watching a television show. As he had no place to go and no schedule to keep, that should NOT have mattered. And yet it did. It so completely did. Because everyone around him was so adamant that his sleep pattern conform to their arbitrary standard, he had to take a sleeping pill to try and force it to be so.

Insomnia is a terrible thing. I've known women who suffered through it and it's tough to watch. But I couldn't help wonder if they weren't making things worse by stressing out over it. Being tired is terrible, but how does being convinced that you're destroying your health help? My own sleep patterns vary depending upon a number of factors. When I find I can't sleep, I don't follow the instructions typically given to insomniacs.

I never get out of bed, unless it's within an hour of when I'd get up after a good night's rest. Instead, I lay in bed and relax. I don't get upset that I'm not sleeping, because I figure that lying down resting is more restorative to my system than getting up and doing something. I do try to clear and quiet my mind, but that is sometimes easier said than done. Even so, I think I wind up dosing more often than not if I stay in bed. Is that the deep sleep that is best? No, but it's better than being up staring at a screen for a couple of hours.

Bottom line: if you can't sleep one night, keep calm and stay in bed. Give your body a chance to rest, even if it won't sleep. That having been said, I get it if this doesn't work for you— sleep is crucial, if what works for me doesn't for you, by all means do something different.

The nose knows.

The ability to smell is more important that previously recognized. This recent study (full study available for free) looked at mortality rates for people who had lost the ability to smell. Apparently the smell receptors are the only part of the body regularly rebuilt by stem cells. If this stops happening the suggestion is that the body can no longer regenerate and as begun the long slide back to the ooze (or to dust).

This result also cause me to speculate. The cells that regenerate are actually stem cells, which suggests a new way to gather stem cells for research, and perhaps a way to create now body parts that would not be rejected upon implantation.

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