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The Health Benefits Of Walking In Forests: New York Times Feb 14 2021

Raymond Rupert — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 02:05:07 +0000

As people spend more time indoors, a mountain of scientific research says spending time in nature is critical to health and increases longevity. That means being in fresh air, under trees and away from cars and concrete—on a regular basis.

“There’s an urgent need emerging in science and at the gut level to increase the nature experience. This field is just exploding,” says Gretchen Daily, a professor of environmental science at Stanford University.

The benefits have been clear to scientists for some time, but the pandemic has made the matter more urgent. The physical and emotional toll the virus has taken, especially in urban areas with little green space, has galvanized doctors, researchers and others to tap into nature’s therapeutic effects.

Spending time in the woods—a practice the Japanese call “forest bathing”—is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue.

Scientists have repeatedly found that human anticancer natural killer cells significantly increase after walks in a forest. In one such study, published in 2010 in the Journal of Biological Regulators and Homeostatic Agents, the number and activity of killer cells increased in a group of twelve healthy men after two walks, each two hours long, in a one-day trip to a forest park in the Tokyo suburbs. So did anti-cancer proteins, according to the research led by Qing Li, an associate professor at the Nippon Medical School. Cortisol in the blood and adrenaline in the urine significantly decreased. The effects lasted at least seven days, the researchers found.

Time in a forest is linkednefi to decreased inflammation, which has been implicated in chronic disease.

“People are deciding whether or not this type of coffee bean or that type is better for you, when there is such an obvious health tool at your disposal. You literally just walk outside. People don’t know,” says Jared Hanley, co-founder and CEO of NatureQuant, a startup working on an app for users to track the time they spend in nature much like they count steps.

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Planning, Prevention & Resilience For Family Mental Health: Raymond Rupert patient advocate

Raymond Rupert — Sun, 31 Jan 2021 16:44:12 +0000

Mental health starts at the beginning. The infant coming home and becoming attached to the primary care provider is where mental health starts. The quality of the attachment is felt by modern brain researchers to be one of the key determinants of future mental health for the child.

Unfortunately, if the child sustains adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) including trauma, separation and abuse, then there are likely to be resulting mental health concerns and challenges.

So planning for mental health for the family starts on day 1 of the infant’s journey in attachment and brain development.

If mental health challenges do arise, then the quality of socially and emotionally authentic relationships within the family are the key to helping the person with the mental health challenge.

The analogy often used in mental health involves the use of the oxygen mask on the airplane. The first thing to do on the airplane is for the parent to put on the oxygen mask and then the parent can help the child.

The parents have to take care of their mental health first in order to help the child. The parents must be emotionally healthy in order to help the child.

The family system is an important part of our work at RCM Health Consultancy. In family systems work, we look at the existing narrative within the family system.

The narrative is what the parent’s think. It is their assumptions about the child. If the problem has become entrenched and the parents have suffered with the problem for a decade or more, they might assume that nothing can be done. And then nothing will be done.

We recently spoke with the parents of a 30 year old child assumed to have “failure to launch”. The parent’s narrative and assumptions were that the child was not capable of becoming a productive and purposeful individual. When we offered to help with the narrative and assumptions, the parents said no thanks. Nothing will change because of their assumptions which stopped any possible progress from being made.

If the narrative and assumptions can be unpacked and changed and a new more positive and optimistic outlook is adopted , then the ensuing changes in the conversation and actions might in fact work to help the child. At least, an effort will be directed at changing in a positive and healthful way.

Challenges exist at this stage of implementing change, as well. Having the parents look at their own enabling behaviours is very difficult. It is hard work to change what is unexplored. Even if the parents had the best intentions in raising the child, things can go wrong.

Once the parents have examined their enabling behaviours, and then changed the conversation and their actions including introducing consequences , then things might get worse before things get better. That is to be expected. So put on your seat belts for the bumpy ride and be patient.

This describes the family systems work that we do at RCM Health Consultancy when families commit to work with our teams in helping a family member with a mental health problem.

Raymond Rupert

CEO

RCM Health Consultancy Inc.

647 350 5500

info@rcmhealthconsultancy.com

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Anger Makes Misinformation & Conspiracy Theories Stick In Memory: Raymond Rupert patient advocate

Raymond Rupert — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 02:25:21 +0000

Anger elicits a robust physiological response that includes increases in heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration, but it can also affect attention and memory formation. Anger generally makes people more confident in the accuracy of their memories. Findings from a new study suggest that anger makes people more open to misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Exposure to misinformation can distort memory of past events, a phenomenon known as misinformation effect.
The two-part study involved 79 adults . In the first part of the study, participants watched a short excerpt of a movie. Then they participated in a scripted interview during which they experienced either a neutral exposure or an anger-inducing exposure. Afterward, they completed a test that included misinformation in the questions.
In the second part, half of the participants were asked to write about a time they visited a museum (a neutral exposure), while the other half were asked to write about an event that made them angry (an anger exposure). Then they took a test to assess how much they could accurately recall about the movie and how much misinformation they had absorbed.
The tests revealed that anger did not impair the participants’ ability to recognize details that actually appeared in the movie. But the participants who experienced the anger exposure were more vulnerable to misinformation than those who experienced the neutral exposure.
The participants who experienced the anger exposure were more likely to be very confident in the accuracy of their memories. However, the more confident they were, the less accurate their memories.
These findings suggest that anger influences memory encoding via increased susceptibility to misinformation and conspiracy theories.

Raymond Rupert patient advocate, former family doctor, founder of RCM Health Consultancy.

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