Maintaining your body’s stability

 Your body contains complex regulatory systems to keep things running smoothly. For example, when you wake up your blood pressure increases to get you ready for the day. When you’re in a stressful situation, your body releases hormones that prepare you for fight or flight. 

Your brain is the command center for maintaining your body’s stability. It does this by predicting what your body will need and responding to challenges. This process is called allostasis—a relatively new field of study. It's kind of a budgeting process. Among other things, your brain manages your body’s levels of water, salt, and glucose. When you spend these resources by exercising, for example, your body responds by initiating an appropriate response —making you thirsty or hungry. In general, you can replenish used-up resources by drinking, eating, sleeping, or other restorative actions.

It gets trickier when dealing with your mental life, which also affects your body’s regulatory system. Every mental experience—your thoughts and feelings—affects your body’s budget. In a stressful situation, your body releases hormones to prepare your body to fight or flee (neuroendocrine responses). But if stress is chronic, your body is unable to restore itself. Withdrawals from your account exceed deposits, and your organ systems suffer as a result. Cardiovascular disease and depressive illness have been shown to be particularly affected by chronic stress.

Even though it might seem more difficult to regulate your mental state than your physical state, remember that, whether mental of physical, it’s your brain that’s in charge of your body budget. Every feeling of happiness or anger becomes part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs. Take a deep breath.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

New respect for our sense of smell

 Smell loss is a more common symptom of Covid than fever or cough. It is also the most reliable predictor of the disease. Most who lose their sense of smell recover it in a matter of weeks, but some have yet to recover it. Many have experienced new smell sensations and, interestingly, use the same words to describe those sensations: metallic, decayed, chemical, burnt, urine. For others, their sense of smell came back broken. Things don’t smell like they should, and the new smell was usually bad (“poo now smelled better than coffee”). 

Prior to this pandemic, most people didn’t consider our sense of smell to be particularly important or interesting. Now, a wide range of scientists are collecting vast amounts of data on our sense of smell. It turns out that olfaction is related to many diseases: smell loss is an early warning sign of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia. People with depression tend to have decreased olfaction and smaller olfactory bulbs than others. Children with autism have different sniff reaction than those who are neurotypical. A wide spectrum of autoimmune or immune-related diseases are associated with smell loss or irregularity.

Here are some more interesting things about our sense of smell: Humans are much better at sensing odors than we’ve been led to believe. Our 400 smell receptors can detect as many as a trillion smells. Sensory neurons are the only type of neuron directly exposed to the outside world, so they sustain an unusual amount of damage. They’re also a rare part of our nervous system that is able to renew itself. Smell has a nearly direct pathway to the centers for memory and emotion in our brains.

Covid is putting our sense of smell on the map. More and more scientists are thinking of smell not as a  "bonus sense" but a dominant one, elevating it, in the words of one scientist, "from a secondary sense to one of the primary things that influences our life."

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Affordable hearing aids on the way

 I lost fifty percent of my hearing in my left ear because of childhood measles. But I can hear pretty well with my right ear, although I sometime have to make accommodations, such as listening to the phone with my right ear and turning my head when someone is speaking to the left of me. I’m glad I don’t have to shell out $4,700 for hearing aids, which is the typical cost for a pair. Medicare covers testing but not the devices. Even with a Medicare Advantage plan, you’ll still pay 79 percent of the cost out of pocket.

Only state-licensed providers have been allowed to prescribe and sell the devices. To make matters worse, providers and manufacturers have kept prices high by combining testing, fitting and sales into one costly package. To ameliorate this problem, in 2017 Congress passed legislation allowing the devices to be sold directly to consumers without a prescription from an audiologist. The next step was for the FDA to establish safety and effectiveness benchmarks for over-the-counter devices. The deadline for the guidelines was August 2020, but the FDA hasn’t yet delivered. I guess they’re busy with other matters. Perhaps by this summer you’ll be able to go to CVS or Best Buy to buy FDA-approved hearing aids.

When given the go-ahead, companies such as Bose, Samsung, and Apple are ready to sell you hearing aids that cost hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. A year or so ago, I saw a big selection of these devices on television. They seemed pretty nifty. The show indicated that the devices would soon be available. I told friends who were looking for hearing aids to wait until they could go try and purchase them at various stores. Bad advice. Eventually, though…

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.

Environmental illness

 When, in group settings, we were asked not to use perfume because it makes some people sick, I would mentally roll my eyes. But now, because of a book I read, I think such sensitivity is real. For some people, everyday substances–scented products, pesticides, plastic, synthetic fabrics, smoke, electronic radiation, mold, car exhaust, preservatives–cause them serious respiratory, gastrointestinal, and neurological illness. A subset of this group is so hypersensitive they can’t bear to live in ordinary settings. Some moved to a small community near Snowflake, Arizona, which, at 6000 feet altitude, is relatively free of toxic substances. They live in peculiar dwellings.

As one sufferer described an incident of exposure to mold, “My neck was throbbing. It was hard to breathe. My whole body hurt.” A doctor could find nothing wrong with him. As you might expect, medical doctors tend to dismiss the notion of environmental illness, but some do not, including one professor of environmental and occupational medicine, who calls the disease TILT: Toxicant-Induced Loss of Tolerance. She believes that the disease starts with an exposure, which leads to sensitivity. Thereafter, even minimal exposures can provoke outsize effects.

Even though such extreme sensitivity is not common, some degree of environmental sensitivity is probably more common than we realize. Consider chemicals alone: the US environment is home to more than 85,000 chemicals, the vast majority of which have never been tested. That new car smell is the product of 275 different volatile organic compounds. Umbilical blood tested in some Canadian newborns found evidence of 137 different chemicals.

I’m not careful about using chemicals. When I clean the bathroom, the air I breathe is inundated with the odors of the various cleaning compounds I use. Probably all toxic.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.