Recognizing Renewal “My feeling is that sleep is fundamentally important to regenerating all cells.” So says Akhilesh Reddy, a body clock researcher at Cambridge University. He was referring to a new study out of the University of Surrey from a group involving Professors Dirk Jan Dijk and Colin Smith. Yet the same issues appear for […]
In Defense of Sleep (3/12/13)
In Defense Recently a journalist asked to summarize important facts about sleep. Here’s an attempt to defend sleep – and it’s role in human regeneration. Some will be interested by a new large European study showing that the worse the insomnia, the worse future heart failure. Yet the story is much bigger than that: The […]
Post-Election Depression? (11/19/12)
Who’s Depressed? Some of my medical colleagues thought I would see patients sleepless and unhinged, suffering “post-election depression.” I haven’t seen it. Bodies regenerate themselves continuously. They never stay the same, always rebuilding, from the beginning to the end of life. Countries do the same. Populations are born, immigrate, emigrate, grow up and die witnessing […]
How You View Your Body Changes Your Body (10/17/12)
Thought As Action Ideas change the world. They also change your body. In the early nineteenth century scientists worked eagerly to discover the fundamentals of chemistry. Using progressively more accurate equipment they measured the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen in water, of oxygen to carbon in what we now call carbon dioxide. The ratios they […]
The New Age of Anxiety (10/9/12)
The Future? One of my patients recently told me “I don’t worry about the future. I don’t see a future.” We have been living through a new Age of Anxiety. It does and does not resemble the times W.H. Auden wrote about in his 1948 Pulitzer Prize winning poem of that name. Auden had written […]