I have never made any secret of the fact that I hate yoga. Mostly because I have spent a lifetime doing sports that compact all my muscles and here comes this ancient exercise or meditation or whatever you want to call it that pulls everything out and forces me to stretch parts of me that don’t want to stretch and twist things that shouldn’t twist and have me assume positions that are just not natural. So when I recently saw an article in the New York Times saying that yoga might be bad for people my initial thought was “yeah, I was right all along.” The article said all that twisting and bending can be bad for you, it can strain muscles, rip tendons, pull your back out of shape.

But then I thought

Why am I doing this?

Wait a minute, any exercise can do that to you. If you haven’t played soccer in years then you can hurt yourself doing that. If you used to love ping pong as a kid and took it up again as an adult you can hurt yourself. And maybe yoga is a slightly exaggerated form of any exercise because it really works every single part of your body, but the basic premise is the same. If you do it properly and carefully and with good guidance it can be safe and really beneficial.

That’s not to mean I like it any more, but it does mean that it isn’t dangerous just because you do it wrong or have a crappy teacher who teaches you bad form or you try to get into a full lotus when you have spent the previous ten hours sitting in front of a computer screen and wonder why your tendons just don’t want to go there.

The point is, exercise in any form can be bad for you if you haven’t done it before – or for a long time – and you do it badly. You need to know what you are doing or work with someone who knows what they are doing and knows how to show you how to do it.

Good form is essential

The other day, the other month actually, I pulled the heck out of my calf muscle playing squash. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done a thousand times before. I wasn’t moving in a way I hadn’t done a thousand times before. And yet this time, for whatever reason, my calf went kablooey. Maybe I was just pushing it too hard, or my form was bad. All I know is that as soon as I hit a great cross court shot and was moving back into position in case my opponent – damn you Austin – got it back, my calf went bang and that was that. I’ve been slowly getting back in shape since then. But it takes time. And patience.

And that’s why when I read that article about yoga being bad for you, much as I wanted to jump on the blog and say “see, the NY Times agrees with me” my own experience taught me otherwise. Yes, of course yoga can be bad for you. Playing tiddlywinks can be bad for you if one of them jumps up and hits you in the eye. Anything, done badly, can be bad for you. But that’s no reason to dismiss the enormous potential health benefits of yoga.

Downward facing “you dawg you”

Don't try this at home folks

I once met an 83 year old man who had become a devotee of Bikram yoga. That’s the kind where they heat the room to 110 degrees so you sweat like crazy. It’s meant to warm up the muscles and tendons in your body so that they are more flexible. It’s also meant to replicate the conditions in India where yoga first was practiced. This gentleman had only taken up yoga when he was 80 and swore by Bikram, saying it gave him more energy, made him feel healthier and happier.

Frankly I think he just liked watching lots of young, cute women bend into positions that in his youth would have been unthinkable.

I still don’t like yoga. But I would never tell other people not to do it. For my 83 year old friend it’s the highlight of his day. And that’s reason enough to do any exercise isn’t it.

Faith and trust are such delicate things. Once broken or damaged they are not easily repaired. Just as a dog that bites you is always going to be suspect, when an organization that you turn to for help lets you down you will have a hard time trusting it ever again.

I was thinking about that today when I read an article in the New York Times about something called “hospital delirium”, where patients experience episodes of disorientation, even hallucination, during their time in the hospital. It mirrored a couple of recent personal experiences and left me wondering just how widespread the problem is.

Scared and Confused

Delirium can be deadly for elderly patients

In one incident my aunt in Ireland, a feisty 94 year old, was in a care facility for a few days and became – as they called it – confused. She fell out of bed. Three times. Fortunately she’s in great shape for her age and although she suffered some pretty bad bruises and some cuts she didn’t break anything. A few days later she went back home and is now fine – no confusion. Coincidence!

The second incident was when the mother of a friend had to undergo surgery for a hernia. Afterwards the mother, who is in her mid-80′s, was hooked up to all sorts of monitors and devices in the Intensive Care Unit for days. She also had a tube down her throat to help her breathe, which caused her a lot of discomfort and anxiety. My friend was eager to get her mother out of the Intensive Care Unit and back to her own home as quickly as possible and was working hard to get the doctors to remove the tube so her mother could breathe on her own. Things were progressing nicely until one night when her mother became “disoriented” and fell out of bed, breaking her hip.

She had to undergo surgery the next day to repair the break, further complicating her already complex recovery.

Word Play Hides Problem

Note the words used in both cases. “Confusion.” “Disoriented.” Words that effectively absolve the hospital of blame. But the piece in the NY Times on delirium shows how often times the care that people get in the hospital, and in particular the cocktail of medications they are placed on and the changes in their routine – waking them up to do tests, moving them from one room to another, being in shared room with another patient, being in a room that is rarely dark or quiet – can lead to delirium. In fact the article quotes one study showing that one third of elderly people in the hospital suffer from the problem and that it can greatly increase their risk of dying.

So substitute the words that absolve the hospital of responsibility, and replace them with “delirium” which is often a direct result of the care they receive and all of a sudden you begin to get a completely different view of hospitals. And it’s not a very reassuring one.

If I were elderly – and I’m no spring chicken – it would make me think twice about going into the hospital.

Need for Open and Honest Approach

Medications can be a cause of delirium in patients

Hospitals don’t like to talk about these kinds of things because it doesn’t reflect well on the level of care they give. That’s why they like to use terms that deflect attention away from the cause, to make it appear as if the problem just arose out of thin air. I can understand that. I work for a hospital – and a darn good one at that – and know just how dedicated and hard working the staff are, and how committed they are to doing their best for all their patients. But sometimes things go wrong and when they do we need to face up to it.

If we don’t, we risk losing two precious things. A patient. And trust

10 Tips to Avoid Confusion in the Hospital

If you have an elderly friend in the hospital,  Dr. Sharon Inouye’s website, “The Hospital Elder Life Program” (HELP) has some great advice and useful information for you, including, 10 tips to avoid confusion in the hospital.

I love getting the New York Times on Sundays and devouring it, curled up in my favorite chair sipping a cup of coffee!  It’s a luxury to me to be able to “really” read the paper and absorb the stories rather than just race through and grab information from the newspaper while getting ready to go to work.   Sundays, I use the time to discover “new” ideas, different opinions, cultural trends and business practices.  This Sunday, while reading one of my favorite features, “Corner Office” I discovered an important message.

NYTimes reporter, Adam Bryant interviewed Cristobal Conde, the president of SunGard (a software technology company) Mr. Conde is an IT kind of guy and his company is built on how to make technology available to financial, higher education, and government agencies.  Now you would think Mr. Conde is a techie freak but he isn’t.  In fact, the lessons he learned as CEO of his company it all about relationships and thinking.  Mr. Conde says he tries to take 1 1/2 hours everyday just to close his office door and think.  My first thought when reading that was, “Wow, an hour and a half? Where does he find the time?”  Think about it, or do you have the time?

Mr. Conde “makes” the time.  He believes it is so important for his company’s future that he takes time to consider, contemplate, goof off in his mind.  It doesn’t matter what he thinks about but it is important to take the time.  Mr. Conde says, “Sometimes it gets cut short.  But many topics or issues can only be dealt with in an uninterrupted format.  I worry about our entry-level people- they’re bombarded with information, and they never get to think”.

Well friends, guess what, there is a study out about that!   Yes, Stanford researchers have found that people who are multitaskers, and by that I mean even folks who are instant messaging, writing a report, and listening to music or taking phone calls do not pay attention, control their memory, and are easily distracted from any focus on the array of tasks before them.  The study was published in the Aug 24 edition  of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Their findings show that multitasking actually impairs the organizing mechanisms in your brain.

100 Students in the study were put though a series of three tests,  half were self confessed heavy multitaskers and the others were low multitaskers.  After the tests the researcher found that the high taskers were constantly distracted by irrelevant information because they just couldn’t ignore it.  Follow up studies showed that high multitaskers had a low performance in  memory  and organizing information.  They just couldn’t filter out the irrelevant information. Plus, they didn’t take in enough information to contemplate with any depth of knowledge.

So there you have it, take it from a high tech guy like Cristobal Conde, if you really want to get ahead, take time to think, one thought at a time.  Still, how the heck does he find an hour and a half?  Maybe he’s lifting weights, or would that be multitasking?  How many tasks makes multi.  Hmmm, I’ll have to think about that.

Do you remember that old “Jefferson Airplane” song “White Rabbit. It’s about Alice in Wonderland and there’s a line that goes “One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small.”

I was reminded of that when I read about new weight-loss methods that use smell to help you cut back on eating, to feel fuller sooner and to avoid eating too much. Some of those products use smell to help you find foods less pleasant so you eat less. Others make foods really lovely but trigger the brain to say ‘enough’ sooner. They both use smell but in different ways, yet the end result is supposedly the same; you eat less and lose weight.

On first glance it sounds great. But upon closer examination something made me smell a rat!I read about these approaches in the New York Times. The article featured a number of different products and companies, including Compellis Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They reportedly have some nasal sprays that can help curb your appetite by interfering with your sense of smell. It’s based on a pretty simple notion; the less delicious a food smells the less likely you are to eat it, and the stinkier a food smells the less likely you are to eat it. So, just before you eat you spray this stuff in your nose and you aren’t hungry.

To be honest, if I sprayed vinegar, mustard or spicy salsa in my nose I probably wouldn’t feel much like eating. So I can’t see why you need to spend a lot of money on fancy sprays. But then again maybe I’m just cheap.

On the other side of the equation is a product called Sensa that makes food smell even lovelier than it ordinarily does, like sprinkling salt to enhance the flavor of food. The idea is that by adding extra olfactory elements to the food (that’s just a fancy $5 word for making it smell nicer) you trigger the brain into feeling fuller sooner, so you eat less.

So, basically. Make stuff smell worse and you eat less. Make stuff smell nicer and you eat less.

In theory it sounds wonderful and makes a lot of sense. But in theory bumble bees can’t fly and yet somehow they do. So theory does not always equal reality.

The big problem with this smell stuff is that there’s no really good evidence, or even halfway decent evidence that it works. No good studies, no good research. In fact some of the studies seem to suggest that even if it works for a while, like anything else, our bodies adapt, so that within a relatively short time even squirting the stinkiest of nasal sprays up your nose will lose its ability to dampen your appetite.

Like anything else we do to lose weight, our bodies are much smarter than we think. Even our noses.

Which brings me back to that Jefferson Airplane song. Another line in it, the one immediately after how one pill makes you big and one makes you small,  runs, “And the ones that Mother gives you, don’t do anything at all.”

They may have been on drugs when they wrote that song, but they really nailed it. Some of those pills really ‘don’t do anything at all’. Stinks don’t it!

So, a couple of weeks ago I read a fascinating article in the New York Times Sunday newspaper about people making small fortunes developing applications for the iPhone.

Now these “apps” as they are commonly called can be anything from video games you can play on the phone to fun screen effects  or even stupid apps – one recently recalled one – “Baby Shaker” – allowed users to “shake” a baby until it died. Tasteful eh! But all had one thing in common, every time someone downloaded one it sent money straight into the makers account. As they say in my old stomping grounds in London, “nice little earner eh!”

But not all the Apps designed for the iPhone are designed to make money, one at least can help you kick a nasty and deadly habit;  it can help you stop smoking.

It’s called “My QuitLine” and it was developed by the George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services - try saying that in a hurry if you smoke 20 ciggies a day.

“My QuitLine” connects you to the National Cancer Institute’s quitline service where would-be ex-smokers can get advice from a coach on how to stop or get regular text message updates to help them stay on course.

Now, just linking you from your phone to another service might seem like a waste of time but the QuitLine counseling has been shown to double your odds of kicking the habit. That’s a pretty impressive number, particularly when you consider that it takes the average smoker six attempts before they finally quit. If you can double your odds, just by using your phone, you can halve the time it takes to quit.

And what’s even cooler is that it’s all free to download.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that while I don’t have an iPhone or any stock in Apple I do use a Mac at home. However, I typed this at work on a regular old – and I do mean old – PC.

Just don’t tell my boss.