The EchoSOS phone app is an alert app that you load onto your phone PRIOR to a holiday abroad or before undertaking any sort of adventure activity particularly away from a city.
I found out about this from several readers of the Times who had responded in the comments section about the disappearance of a man in his sixties in a mountainous area of southern France. This follows on from the loss of several other tourists in Mediterranean countries over the summer.
One said that it had saved her life more than once.
It is a free app. You put in your personal details, contact numbers of relatives or friends, your blood group, medical history, allergies and medication. You then allow the app tracking and response permissions.
Should you have a medical or other emergency in your home, city, or outside location, you can press the emergency button. Obviously, you still have to have some sort of signal for this to work.
The app takes note of your details, your location and transfers this to the nearest emergency response number to your current location. This means that you should be able to speak to a relevant dispatcher without the palaver of finding emergency numbers.
Several tourists have died because they have not been able to contact emergency services or have not been able to give their locations if they did. For readers of this blog, many of whom have diabetes, the ability to contact emergency services fast and being able to be located precisely is of even more relevance.
Please pass this information on to anyone that you think will benefit.
Compared to people who sleep 7 to 8 hours each night, people who slept for five hours or less were more likely to develop type two diabetes. The risk increased in those getting 3-4 hours a night. This risk was present even when people eating a “healthy” diet were compared. This study was done in the UK Biobank participants.
It is already known that night shift workers have an increased rate of metabolic syndrome and cancer. They also have lower life expectancy rates.
If you are sleep deprived, you will also be aware that you tend to eat more, particularly carbohydrate containing foods.
For many people they don’t have a choice over whether they even get the chance to sleep. They may have long commutes, work shifts, work night shifts and have high noise levels when they are trying to sleep either by night or day. A new baby is a particular difficulty especially in the first year of life.
Socioeconomic deprivation is associated with poorer outcomes for many medical conditions. The scale of the problem for those with type one diabetes is stark. A UK study has shown that type ones are diagnosed with sight threatening diabetic retinopathy three times as commonly as those in the least deprived areas.
This could be due to many reasons. Food intake, attendance at clinics, care over injections, education, stress, leisure activities and support. It does point to the fact that changing what you do can make a substantial difference to health outcomes.80% of the money spent on diabetes is for treating the complications of diabetes rather than on prevention.
The World Values Survey Wave 6 2010-14 asked people from many different world countries what mattered the most to them. The topics that they said were grouped into six categories and these were ranked for the countries.
These were ranked in the world overall as being in order: Family, Work, Friends, Leisure Time, Religion and then Politics. How would you have answered?
There were some interesting differences. Almost all countries said that Family was the most important thing to them. Those in the Netherlands said Friends. People from Ghana said Work. Quatar, Egypt and Algeria all said Religion. All of these countries put Family in second place, so Family is still extremely close to people’s hearts all over the world.
Work and Friends seemed to be the most popular second choices.
Work was the next highest priority in Brasil, Ecuador, Peru, Romania, Azerberjan, India, Kyrgystan, Armenia, Thailand, Zimbabwe, Columbia, Mexico, and Uruguay.
Friends were the second highest priority in Argentina, Belarus, Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Rwanda, Slovenia, Taiwan, Australia, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Ukraine, USA, China, South Korea, Lebanon, Uzbekistan, Turkey, and Georgia.
When it came to lowest priorities almost all countries agreed that Politics was what they cared about least. The Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, China and South Korea all put Religion last.
Leisure Time tended to be on the low end of priority too, but never the lowest.
If you are looking for the most fun, I think that the Netherlands is the place. They ranked Friends, Family and Leisure Time way above Work, Politics and Religion. I don’t know that they would be keen on overtime though!
Other fun prioritising countries are Australia, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Ukraine, and the USA.
The least fun countries from this survey seem to be Algeria and Ghana. They both rank Work, Religion, and Family ahead of either Friends or Leisure Time.
When comparing my priorities with those in other countries it would seem that the clear winner for me is Uruguay.
Nature Medicine has published the results of the use of the Zoe METHOD study on 347 people.
They were allocated either general advice on cardiometabolic health or were trained and supported to use the Zoe app for 18 weeks. The Zoe users are trained to individualise their diet with feedback on their gut microbiome and post meal blood glucose and triglyceride levels.
What improved: Triglycerides reduced, weight lowered, waist circumference reduced, energy levels improved, and sleep improved.
What didn’t change: LDL-C concentration, hip circumference, blood pressure and glucose levels.
My comment: I only know one woman who used the Zoe app. She said that as a result she increased the variety and amount of fruit and vegetables she was eating and reduced sugar and starch intake. She had lost weight and felt more energetic. When I answered the Zoe questions myself I was advised that it wasn’t a suitable programme for me due to my irritable bowel syndrome and wheat intolerance as these foods are encouraged as a major part of the diet. It seemed reasonably priced to me and could be a good help for people to understand the effect food has on their metabolism.
The risk of death from delays in cancer treatment is rising in the UK. Treatment has been delayed twice as often in 2023 compared to 2022. Workforce shortages are the main reason.
The Royal College of Radiologists say that almost half of cancer treatment centres are experiencing weekly delays. Figures for delay in radiotherapy treatments were 22% in 2022 compared to 43% in 2023.
Cancer Research UK says that 382,000 patients in England missed target treatment rates of 85% within 62 days of an urgent referral since 2015.
97% of Clinical Directors said that workforce shortages were the problem. A delay of a month in treatment raises mortality rate by 10%.
The NHS is short of 1,962 Consultant Radiologists meaning that the workforce is only two thirds of what it need to be. There is a shortage of 185 Clinical Oncologists. There are 15 out of a hundred posts unfilled. It is predicted that the shortages will be 40% and 21% by 2028 if nothing is done to address the problem.
Demand for chemotherapy increased by 6-8%, but the consultant workforce only increased 3.5%. Some regions of the country are much more affected than others.
Cancer Research UK said that health boards had finally caught up with the COVID backlog. Shortages of staff and equipment remain and in April 24 only two thirds of cancer patients began treatment within 62 days of referral.
The NHS is treating a record number of cancer patients. 30% more people with cancer are being treated compared to 2015 figures.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder now affects 2-5% of people across western populations.
Becker P et al focussed their research on things that people affected could do to lessen the impact of the problem on their lives. Inattention, lack of concentration and impulsivity are the main features of the diagnosis. Rather than use medication, these things can be effective.
Gain self awareness.
Be responsible and learn from the effects of your actions.
Stay active during the day.
Have a schedule to follow.
Remove distractions or move yourself away from them.
Schedule activities for the time of day that suits you best.
To stay organised and on time set alarms and reminders on your phone.
Have supportive relationships with your family and friends.
Consider medication if you are not managing.
Becker P. Self care strategies shown to be useful in daily life for adults diagnosed with ADHD. A systematic review. Issues in Mental Health Nursing. 2023.
The incidence of peanut allergy has tripled in recent decades and now affects 2% of the population. Researchers from Southampton University and King’s College London found that peanut allergy could be cut by 77% if peanut products are added to baby’s diets.
They suggest that babies with eczema are started at 4 months and other babies at 6 months. The effectiveness of allergy prevention reduced with every month that peanut introduction was delayed.
Most peanut allergies had developed by the age of one. Professor Gideon Lack said, “there is a narrow window of opportunity to prevent allergy developing.
Mary Feeney, paediatric dietician at King’s College London says, “Breast feeding should still continue. The baby should be developmentally able to take solids. Small amounts of pureed vegetable, fruit or cereals such as baby rice should be introduced first. Once this is established then add peanut butter which has been loosened with a little baby milk. Whole or chopped peanuts should not be used. A heaped teaspoon of peanut butter three times a week is good.”
Frequent or persistent crying in babies after three months of age, and sleeping and feeding problems after six months of age, are associated with an increase in mood disorders in young adulthood.
The affected adults also report less likelihood of social support from friends and contemporaries.
This association was found in data from Finnish and German longitudinal studies. (BMC Psychiatry 2023).
My comment: Looking after a new baby is spectacularly boring, demanding, and relentless. Time seems to slow down to a snail’s pace. Night after night you hope for a better night than the last one, only to face a long day ahead and another long, long night. We don’t know why some babies are easier or worse than others.
Is it personality differences due to genetics? Parenting problems? The wrong milk? Breastfeeding problems? Colic? Heartburn? Why do such miserable babies have a higher chance of becoming miserable adults? Does the fractured sleep of the parents affect how they react to the baby? Does this affect future childhood interactions? Are miserable people just born miserable?
Localised shock wave treatment has been used to treat patients with tendinitis, non-healing bone fractures, chronic leg ulcers, soft tissue wounds, post-stroke spasticity and spinal cord injury.
Now, Austrian researchers have found a small, but definite effect, in heart muscle regeneration in patients who have coronary artery bypass surgery.
An electric current is applied to electrodes in water, not the patient, so they get a sonic shock rather than an electrical shock. The sonic wave cannot be heard by humans. They say that this, “activates the innate immune system of treated cells, leading to increased DNA accessibility and cellular plasticity, together with the secretion of angiogenic cytokines and growth factors. This induces angiogenesis in the hibernating myocardium. Newly formed vessels then support the recruitment of chronically under-supplied myocardium.”
In a trial of 63 patients undergoing CABG surgery, some had the sonic treatment and others had sham treatment. After a year, left ventricular ejection fraction in the shockwave group increased by 11.3% compared to 6.3% in the control group. The treated group could walk further in six minutes compared to the untreated group and also reported a better quality of life.
Lead researcher Johannes Holfield said, ” for the first time, we are seeing the heart muscle regenerate in a clinical setting, which could help millions of people.” Larger trials are now planned for chronic ischaemia patients.
In the cathedrals of our minds resides the quality of our lives.
In this inner sanctum, we experience every moment and memory of our lives.
Whatever the duration of our lives or the degree of physical or cognitive quality we possess, it is how we experience our lives that matter most.
Fundamentally, the quality of our minds dictates the quality of our lives.
What Is Health?
In my view, health is the optimisation of three factors:
Lifespan – How long you live.
Health Span – The quality of your movement and cognition.
Soul Span – The quality of the experience of your life.
We are all too familiar with examples of those who have excelled in the domains of lifespan and health span but have seriously struggled in the domain of soul span.
When I speak of Soul Span, I am not referring to organic mental illness.
This is an entirely different matter that requires the input of trained medical personnel and often the use of mood-altering medications.
I am referring to our felt experience of the world.
Whether we feel engaged in a life that is meaningful?
Whether we experience periods of joy or happiness?
Because as Cicero once said:
“Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.”
The Formula
There are very clear formulas to optimise the domains of lifespan and health span.
I have covered these in detail over the last 100-plus articles here.
What these factors consist of have been discovered through the application of hard science.
Science can tell us a lot about the factors that determine our life experiences, but many of the answers reside in the domain of philosophy, art, and literature.
I do not profess to have the answer to this issue.
Minds far greater have struggled with the question for thousands of years, and no consensus has yet been reached.
Anything I say here is based on my own experience and reading.
The journey here is one you must traverse.
You and you alone.
As Rumi once said, “It’s your road, and yours alone, others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.“
The question is whether there is a formula for optimising soul span similar to lifespan and health span.
Maybe there isn’t an exact formula, but the following are three key ideas I believe make a major difference to the factor of soul span and the quality of your life.
You Are Not Your Thoughts.
Each and every one of us has an internal dialogue in our heads.
All day.
Every day.
It’s probably chattering away right now.
“What is this guy talking about? I wonder, should I have a coffee now or later? Damn, I feel tired. I must not have slept well last night.”
If you spoke that internal dialogue out loud all the time, people would start avoiding you pretty quickly.
And yet, that dialogue is constantly pecking away inside your head.
And in the heads of everyone you meet.
But as Joseph Nguyen says, “Don’t believe everything you think”.
It does not take long for us to become identified with the chatter in our minds.
Without realising it, we become our thoughts.
They define who we are.
But those thoughts rarely glitter in praise of who we are and are more commonly an endless stream of low-grade negativity.
And we wonder why we are not happy.
We have no idea where our thoughts come from.
None.
We do not control our thoughts.
But…
We can control how we react to them.
We can learn to observe them.
Non-judgmentally and view them at a distance.
We can detach ourselves from our endless stream of thoughts and watch them.
Like we would a squirrel in our garden.
And when we learn how to do that we free ourselves from the negative chatter.
This is the purpose of meditation.
It is not to rid yourself of thoughts.
It is to stand at arm’s length from them.
And observe them.
For the strange and mysterious things that they are.
But in doing so, we free ourselves from being emotionally whipsawed around by them and can add some peace to our lives.
You are not your thoughts.
If you want to free yourself of them, learning to meditate is a must.
The Meaning Of Life.
Like so many others before me, I have spent years reading and learning in an attempt to discover the answer to the question:
What is the meaning of life?
The answer is…
There is no answer.
And that searching for one may not be helpful.
And might even be harmful.
As Albert Camus once said, “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
But do not confuse this with the idea that you cannot live a meaningful life.
Just because there may not be a precise answer to this question or we may never know what the ‘meaning of life is’ does not mean we cannot live a life that is imbued with meaning and purpose.
These are similar but, importantly, different concepts.
One is a definitive end-point answer.
The other is a process of discovery and experience.
We can live incredibly meaningful lives without knowing the specific answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”
Understanding this has been incredibly liberating for me.
We live in a time when the grander narratives of myth and religion have lost their foothold. This freedom has left many adrift without an answer to foundational questions we have as humans.
I do, however, believe we must all feel connected to something greater than ourselves.
As Carl Jung says, “The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life.“
There is no doubt that this world is full of mysteries.
Why are we here?
Where did we come from?
Did we exist before birth?
What happens after we die?
Are we alone in the universe?
And so many other dizzying questions.
Simply staring up at the stars at night provides us with an immense sense of awe and beauty.
It connects us to the numinous, a sense that is ‘inexpressible, mysterious, terrifying”.
I know that life can be meaningful.
For me, that is enough.
Do Not Lie.
The opening scene of the HBO series Chernobyl starts with a question.
“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth.
The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all. What can we do then?
What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?
In these stories, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: “Who is to blame?”“
When I say, ‘Do not lie,’ most of all, I mean that we must not lie to ourselves.
We are the easiest to fool with our own lies.
And when we do, we often also look for someone to blame.
We are also the ones who will pay the greatest price for those lies.
What I have learned is the greatest lie is to not live the life you know that you truly should.
When asked on their deathbeds, this is people’s number one regret.
Above working too hard is the regret of not having the courage to live the life they knew they should have.
But didn’t.
Their greatest regret was lying.
Lying to themselves.
That they were someone different to who they knew they really were and convincing themselves to live a life aligned with the values of someone who they were not.
In the deepest recesses of our minds, we know who we really are.
But as Nietzsche says, “They fear their higher self because when it speaks, it speaks demandingly.”
We fear what our deepest selves tell us.
We fear the pain that pursuing that path would lead to.
But we forget the greater pain that will result if we do not.
We lie. To ourselves.
As Abraham Maslow says, “What one can be, one must be”.
To not become who you are is to lie.
And as the HBO Chernobyl series finishes, the protagonist who asked about the cost of lies refrains:
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
You know what to do.
You know when you are lying.
We all do.
The question is whether you realise the cost of those lies.
Because sooner or later that debt will be paid.
A life well lived.
The journey of optimising soul span is fundamentally about a life well lived.
We can take guidance and counsel from greater minds that have reflected on this topic but in the end we must walk our own paths.
Maybe we can never know precisely what our destination may be, but I am confident that each and every one of us knows when we are on the right path.
When we are moving towards the manifestation of our highest selves we feel a sense of meaning.
A meaning that makes this life worthwhile.
But when we track away from what represents our highest selves, we suffer.
The goal, then, must be to identify your highest goals and then have the courage to move towards them.
Doing so will undoubtedly bring pain and suffering.
But not doing so will likely bring even more.
At least the pain and suffering we endure on the path to our highest selves will be worthwhile.
This life is short.
Lifespan and health span matter.
But for me, soul span matters most of all.
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As with all the material on this site it is not medical advice and is for general informational purposes only. None of the information provided constitutes the practice of medicine, or any professional healthcare services. No doctor patient relationship has been formed. Information contained on this platform is used at the readers own risk. Readers of this information should not delay or disregard in obtaining professional medical advice or treatment for any health related issue. The information presented is in no way a substitute for medical advice.
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