July 7th, 2008
I have used the phrase above many times in my medical practice to illustrate a point: motherhood shares some characteristics found in many addictive behaviors. Just a few of these likenesses:
- The pain (labor and delivery) of achieving the stimulus is forgotten in the euphoria of experiencing the stimulus (that first young smile, for example).
- The stimulus can override instincts of self-preservation. We’ve heard the stories of mothers who place themselves in physical danger to protect their child. This is the rule, not the exception.
- “Self” can become secondary to the stimulus in smaller ways, as well. How many mothers forgo dessert to let their kids have a bit more? How many moms are the last ones in the house to get showered and ready for bed at the end of a long day?
Now, along comes a scientific study supporting such an analogy, and it is published in the respected journal Pediatrics. In short, women were placed in a functional imaging scanner to detect blood flow to certain areas of the brain. When shown pictures of infants, the women had increases in blood flow in the part of the brain commonly referred to as the “reward center” - the same response that can been seen when addicts get their fix. The blood flow was greater when a woman viewed a picture of her own child and the greatest increase was when her own baby was smiling. Little difference was noted when moms were shown a picture of a crying child - whether the child was their own or not. A news article on this study can be seen at http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5874711.html.
(A side note: smart alecks everywhere will cry out “Duh!” since the natural high of parenthood is assumed. But science doesn’t work too well on untested assumptions. Otherwise it would be safe to assume the sun rotates around the earth since that looks like what happens.)
There is, however, a major and defining difference between addictive behaviors and motherhood - motherhood is healthy. And when that bond is broken, such that the mother does not feel pleasure when seeing her child smile, the outcome is frequently unhealthy as it can lead to neglect or abandonment.
Let me wrap up this musing by adding another wrinkle. Should a mother become consumed with her child to the detriment of her own health she is doing the young one no favor. Just as the airlines tell us to place the oxygen mask on ourselves before placing one on our kids, sometimes the best protection for your offspring is to make sure you will be there for them in many years to come.
Eating your own vegetables is just as important as getting your kids to eat theirs.
Posted in Taking charge of your health | No Comments »
July 2nd, 2008
Years ago, when I was a young physician, I was struck by the prospect of pharmaceutical advertising on television. At the time it seemed a waste of money since doctors were the ones who wrote the prescriptions, therefore going around them shouldn’t yield much. It seemed to undermine the doctor-patient relationship.
That naïve view ignored a reality: patients can and will take more control of their care when given good information. In fact, more direct-to-patient marketing is taking place than ever so the public must be buying into the concept. Magazines, radio airtime, Internet sites, billboards – you name it and the ad folks are using it to get information into your hands and heads. (Chances are good you stumbled over a couple of them just to get to this blog.) I hope this does not sound cynical for I think it is actually a very good thing. After all, someone is going to make decisions about your health…shouldn’t you be sitting in the room when they do? And to be there you need information.
Learning more about wellness, prevention, and early detection of disease equips folks to make better decisions for themselves. I believe that arming patients with more information does not threaten the doctor-patient relationship…it strengthens it.
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July 1st, 2008
The first symptom for 50 percent of people that experience a heart attack is the heart attack itself. This is a scary statistic because it seems to be so sudden. But in actuality it is not a sudden occurrence at all, like many other diseases, cardiovascular disease is a chronic condition that progressively gets worse. The good news is that there are ways to test someone’s blood to determine the progression of the disease, which will allow an individual and their physician to put together the most effective prevention plan.
As with many diseases, we see that with sudden heart attacks there is actually a constellation of causes leading to a common outcome - the failure of the heart to deliver oxygen to the rest of the body or to itself. We once thought this was about high cholesterol, period. Then we discovered there are good and bad cholesterols - HDL and LDL, respectively. Then we found Lp(a), which is even worse than LDL. To goå even further, there are biomarkers of inflammation and rupture that can be evaluated, alerting a physician to an imminent cardiovascular incident.
Many annual physicals just look at the usual cholesterol and lipid markers without looking at inflammatory biomarkers, which is a big mistake. Even standard stress tests can prove to be ineffective because they are so narrow in scope. There are countless examples of individuals who pass a stress test and have normal overall cholesterol levels that later go on to have fatal heart attacks. This is just further evidence that physicians have to dig deeper in their exams rather than just skimming the surface with cholesterol panels and stress tests.
The cornerstone of prevention is the early detection of correctable health risks at a stage when it’s reversible. Biomarkers let us do this. An individual’s blood is the first place in which a medical condition or disease manifests itself. By evaluating the levels of specific blood-based biomarkers, you can detect a potential problem early when the condition can be more successfully treated.
Tags: Cardiovascular Risk, Heart Attack, Prevention
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