Smartphones

Smartphones. Everyone has one. The technology involved boggles the mind if you put too much thought into it. Not too long ago computers looked like this.

And even then about all you could do on them was play Solitaire and do long division. Nowadays, your average toddler can do anything from play a cheeky game of Candy Crush, to manage their bank account, to remotely controlling their central heating at home. That's right, the average toddler.

The value we place on the versatility and convenience of having these tiny gadgets in our back pockets is immense. I have friends who buy every new instalment and marginal upgrade that the companies decide to make. “But look Gareth, the menu layout has been redesigned; this is going to change my life!” And I am certain you know similar people in your life, or are one yourself. The industry in the smartphone market has exploded. Samsung, Apple and Microsoft are all riding this train to colossal profits. Ever heard of Huawei? They’re a Chinese company with some new phones being released in the UK, but they are the largest telecoms company in the world.

Apple purchases in excess of 50% of the world’s total production of sapphire to provide for its new screens.

What am I going on about with all this? Well, smartphones are a new phenomenon, but they are not going away anytime soon. This is why I wanted to give you some insights into what the little box in your left pocket is doing to your life, and also some interesting facts you can use to impress your colleagues over lunch.

Using smartphones dramatically increases sensitivity in the tips of your fingers. Find out a bit more about it here. The study seems to show that after a certain period of using a phone, the piece of your brain responsible for the sensory nerves in your thumb and fingers become dramatically more sensitive. So maybe using your phone is affecting your brain, but probably not cooking it like your Gran warned you.

You’ve heard of Athletes Foot and Tennis Elbow. Well how about Texter’s Neck?  Did you know your head weighs 12lbs? (average) That’s equivalent to the green bowling balls you find in your local bowling lanes. Now imagine the length of time that you spend hunched over staring gormlessly down at your phone waiting for twitter to Load New Tweets.  The study shows just how much strain you are putting on your cervical spine by spending so much time on your phone.  Up to 60lbs worth of strain, depending on how deeply you incline your head. Maybe try and keep it at eye level?

Ever have trouble sleeping at night? Tossing and turning because your mind is still active, thinking about plans for the next couple of days? Well we can blame that one on your phone too. The act of looking at a screen is a remarkably taxing one for your eyes to perform. Just the simple act of scrolling down your Facebook wall is a highly mental activity, and is something that preoccupies a great deal of attention. To an even greater extent, relaxing by playing a simple game like Clash of Clans is an activity that requires a whole lot of brainpower.

This is the opposite of what you want to be doing before bed. In an ideal world, you would stick on some smooth jazz or whale song, depending on preference, and relax in a semi-meditative state repeating the word “Ohm” to yourself until your mental activity has ceased, from whence you fall into a blissful sleep carried on the wings of angels. Is this going to happen every night? Without a doubt, no. What you can do to help yourself out before going to bed, is maybe relax downstairs on your phone, then when you are ready to go to bed, toddle up stairs and put your PJs on, brush your teeth, and get some multiple of 40 winks without poring over your phone.

So the smartphone is using its powers for evil, for the most part right? All part of the plan, so that when Skynet rises we will all be an oversensitive, ill-rested and chronic back pain suffering lot who lack the vim and vigour to resist the machine uprising.

We all know the surface benefits of having a phone. 24hr access to information wherever you are, an ability to contact everyone you know in a matter of seconds, distracting yourself in important meetings, and all manner of other tasks.

Wondering how this is all relevant to the library? Wonder no longer! With a flawless segue, here are a couple of links about services you can access on your phone.

UptoDate has a great mobile site just waiting for you to scroll down.

http://www.scoop.it/apps is well worth a look. I told you about Scoop it a couple of weeks ago, but the content curation is a really valuable feature and a novel approach to information access.

See you next time!

This Blog Will Save Your Life!

As long as you have some kind of heart defect that can only be cured by reading this blog. Convenient, right?

This week’s blog is about headlines. More specifically about headlines in health and medical articles, and is a companion piece to the article from last week.

We all know the press loves to sensationalise stories. Remember the craze about superfoods I talked about last week? How pomegranates and blueberries cure cancer, stop child abuse and fight fires, all while rocking a James Dean slicked back hair do?

Maybe not in so many words, but in 2013 the world went a bit doolally* over these unassuming constituent parts of muffins and smoothies.  The studies so far failed to figure out why exactly this was, especially regarding Blueberries, as they contain no particularly high or dense quantities of nutrients or antioxidants. (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fruits-and-fruit-juices/1851/2)

Don’t just believe me though. (http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/healthyliving/cancercontroversies/superfoods/)

So while the media went a bit mad with articles like “Superfoods Fight Cancer” really all that was happening was they wanted you to click on their article or pick up the paper. Had you done so, you would have found dubious sourcing and abbreviated quotes to sensationalise otherwise quite well balanced opinions.

Of course it didn’t take long until people like yours truly were shouting about the over hyping and misleading headlines, before we got this from the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2598694/Why-called-superfoods-BAD-Nutritionist-says-kale-send-thyroid-haywire-quinoa-irritates-gut.html)

Anyway, that’s quite enough links for one article, but I think you get the idea. Linking to last weeks article, make sure you see through the headline glare, and read what the article actually says, and who it sources. Before you decide to cut Kale totally out of your diet in case your Thyroid gets a bit antsy, consider looking in a bit more depth at what proof the Daily Mail cares to provide you.

I lied about the last link. This one is. http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/12December/Pages/your-guide-to-hitting-the-headlines.aspx

The reason I wrote this is because I wanted to bring this one to your attention. It’s a light-hearted piece by the Behind the Headlines team at NHS Choices, and I recommend giving it a read.

This is quite a short one this week, but if I went any further I might be impinging on the intellectual property of NHS choices, and woe betide he who does such a thing.

I hope these last two articles were a bit more enlightening, and that you are now armed with the knowledge to think a bit more critically about the headlines. And maybe not believe everything you read. Except this blog. You should treat this as gospel.

*Interesting fact about the expression Doolally. It originated in early 20^th centuryBritish India, and refers to Deolali Transit camp, where soldiers being sent home would wait for a ship back to ol’ Blighty. The waiting times were severe, and so stemmed the phrase Doolally Tap, to meaning crazy waiting. (Doolally being a corruption of the name Deolali, and tap from the Sanskrit word “tápa” meaning fever.) Don’t say I never teach you anything.

 

AMR- What, Who, When, Where and How?

What is AMR? Well, I’m glad you asked. If you hadn’t I probably would have assumed I didn’t need to write this. AMR is fancy jargon for AntiMicrobial Resistance. It may be something you have heard about in the news, and should you be clinical staff, on the job. It refers to how the bugs are winning the fight.

Since the discovery of Penicillin, humans have used all kinds of cultures to stave off infection by the trillions of little gribblies all just waiting to force you to take a day off work. It is in fact a hard-pressed conflict. As we go on using them, many bacteria will develop an immunity or resistance to certain types of antibiotic, similar to how you are likely immune to Smallpox. (Thanks Edward Jenner!)

This provides quite the challenge for the brainy folk who go about their daily jobs trying to find new weapons in this ongoing struggle. Miracle drugs don’t grow on trees! Or maybe they do, but there are a lot of trees to check.

So is that it? Just wait for the inevitable tide of Bacteria to come kick down your front door and abscond with your spouse, all while you sit there blowing your nose?
Ridiculous hypotheticals aside, there are several things you can do as an individual to curtail the spread. You never know, if everyone starts doing this, maybe it’ll have an impact!

Some decent guidelines to follow are:

·         Cover your mouth when you sneeze. For one, it’s just polite. Second, logic dictates that if a strain of bacteria infects less people, it will have less likelihood to be subjected to a gauntlet of antibiotics, and will therefore have less of a chance to develop immunity.

·         Follow basic Infection Control guidelines. You should be doing this already, I’m just pointing out there are reasons beyond NHS officials having a thing for clean hands.

·         Do not save antibiotics prescribed to you by your doctor as part of a course “for next time.” That isn’t how it works. If you don’t finish the course, the antibiotics don’t do their job properly. Antibiotics need to reach a certain level of saturation in your cells to have any effect. Bacteria that survive the course because the levels of drug are too low to kill them, have an opportunity to develop resistance to it. Don’t be Patient Zero of the dreaded Hedgehog Flu Outbreak of 2015. By “saving it for next time” you are undermining the whole reason to take the course in the first place!

·         Do not use antibiotics without the advice of a clinician. Those drugs you saved from last time may not be tailored in the correct dosage and quantity to appropriately attack the particular infection you have acquired. Let the doctor and pharmacist do their job. They probably know better than you. They get paid to do it for a living. And if you are a doctor? You should probably know better.

 

 

Right, well that’s that bit done with. Believe it or not, that all came from reading a couple of books on the topic, and consulting various publications by various institutions rather more qualified to declaim on the matter than I. They can all be found down at the library, as we are creating a display on the topic! I’ve even marked the relevant sections in a number of books hand-picked by a librarian for your convenience! We’re good like that.

 

Hope to see you soon, and I leave you with this little joke on the history of medicine.

2001 BC	Here, eat this root.
1000 AD	That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.
1850 AD	That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.
1920 AD	That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.
1945 AD	That pill is ineffective. Here, take this penicillin.
1955 AD	Oops... bugs mutated. Here, take this tetracycline.
1960-1999 AD	39 more “oops”... Here, take this more powerful antibiotic.
2000 AD	The bugs have won! Here, eat this root.

Musings on the New Year

January. A time of reinvention, of crowded gyms, streets filled with joggers and smoothies that taste “all right”, but only because it’s better than yesterdays.

I touched on the health craze that annually sweeps the nation this time of year briefly in my last article, but I wanted to go into a bit more depth this week in light of a pair of articles my colleague very kindly pointed out to me.

These articles are from the NHS Choices website, which I heartily recommend as a goldmine of good and grounded information on all manner of topics. Find it here.

I despair at what comes at the turn of each year. My twitter feed is inundated with various celebrities and public figures all promising to be better people and eat less junk food  My Facebook wall is similarly burdened with old schoolmates swearing off Alcohol/Cigarettes/McDonalds (other fast food chains are available)* only for me to see them outside the pub later that week with a cigarette in one hand and a pint in the other.

This rant is not aimed at making people feel bad about their New Years Resolutions, and if you are taking part in the Dry January challenge, or quitting smoking, and used the New year as a starting point then well done, and I believe you are more than capable of doing it. Remember, if you need help, there are organizations set up to help you quit smoking and reduce alcohol intake.  And you can always help others while doing it! https://registration.dryjanuary.org.uk/

What I want to express though, and the point of the article, is that there are a myriad of schemes, plans, mantras and “diets” that are based in dodgy science at best. The article my aforementioned colleague showed me was penned by Dr  Alicia White, who shared the same concerns as me.

She was concerned that most people do not know how to properly assess the legitimacy of a particular piece of text, be it a research paper or newspaper article.

The problem we face these days is oversaturation of the news. You can’t possibly read every piece of news that meanders its way through over your breakfast table, there simply isn’t time.  Just as you are unlikely to research into the minutiae of every diet you consider. Many people pick one based on a celebrity who lost a bunch of weight, or a “Superfood” like flavour of 2013, the blueberry.

The article I refer to explains this in a much more concise and enjoyable fashion than I will here, so the link is right here: http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/Howtoreadarticlesabouthealthandhealthcare.aspx.

Please give it a read, it’s well written and convincing, and provides invaluable information about several extremely relevant topics.

I’d also like to qualify this article by mentioning that by no means should you write off all diets and healthy living plans. As an example, I have been adhering to the 5:2 diet mentioned in the article above. A “fad” diet by definition, it suggests you reduce your calorific intake on two of every seven days to around 500 calories. Remember, I am not advertising this diet, but I would like to mention that I went into it with eyes open, and sceptical myself, which I believe is key to anything run by a for profit organisation. I did my research and found the scientific basis to it sufficiently convincing that I was prepared to try it. I was helped by my Dad’s success at it, and have been using what is effectively an altered eating plan for around 9 months. I’ve lost 3 stone now, and feel good. However, rather than risk this turning into a Weightwatchers Testimonial, I acknowledge that a good part of this weight loss is down to me starting to exercise more, drinking  less beer after leaving Uni, and that willpower isn’t just the force that Prince Charles' son can exert.

Why is this all relevant on a library blog? Well, for one thing, I wanted to write an article about this, and saw my chance when Helen the aforementioned colleague showed me the relevant source material. The other reason is that as a library, our job is to make knowledge more accessible. However, there is a lot of knowledge out there, and we can’t sift through the whole lot to ensure it is all pertinent and trustworthy for each individual. The referred to article lets you critique what you are reading for yourself.

 Knowledge is power, and we want to empower you.

 

Sorry for the slightly more serious article this week, but some topics don’t lend themselves to wanton tomfoolery. We’ll be back to more fun and frolics next week!

*Oh wait, I don’t work for the BBC…