Why we should talk more shit

I chose this talk given by Rose George in February 2013. A "curious Journalist", she cares about topics that we are unaware but always surrounded of. In this talk about the humble latrine, she presents the dangers that derive from bad sanitation in a very engaging way. It is 14 minutes long.

Rose George - Let's talk crap. Seriously.

Summary

In the what she calls the "flushed and plumbed world", people think of toilets as their rights rather than what they actually are - a privilege. A shocking 40% of the world's population lack decent sanitation which leads to diseases like diarrhea, killing more than 4000 children a day. Sanitation can not only improve hygiene and thereby save lives, it can actually keep girls at school (who, without a toilet, are likely to drop out by the time they reach puberty and start menstruating). By bringing the toilet out from behind the locked door and making it conversational, Rose George thinks and hopes that sanitation does indeed become a right rather than a privilege.

Vocabulary

Open Defecation: 

the practice of defecating (pooping) outside. This is still part of the lives of more than 1 Billion people. By doing that, people are prone to contaminate their water supplies, food and environment with diseases that may be hidden in fecal particles. And because people without sanitation usually don't wash themselves after finishing their business, these particles stay on their hands and feet.

feces: 

medical term for poop

(the other) WTO: 

World Toilet Organisation. Their whole focus is on sanitation and toilets. They try to raise awareness and break the silence to improve the worldwide toilet and sanitation conditions.

communicable disease: 

a disease that is infectious and transmissible among people

Personal Reaction

As you have probably guessed, it was the title that drew my attention. I clicked on this talk because I kind of wanted a distraction, something funny, because I had already watched too many serious talks on serious problems. What a fool. 

The sheer extent of this problem is just very shocking. It is just like she says, we have locked it out of conversation and out of our minds, even though the toilet is something we use several times a day. Before, I had not really given sanitation that much thought. I knew that not everybody in the world has even a rudimental kind of toilet, but I didn't think that this was so crucial to (a child's) health. 

I think we should all "talk shit". This is definitely something that is worth more attention.

Presentation

Rose George has a very blunt, funny, and yet serious way of communicating her ideas. She starts the talk by telling the audience how she one day used a public toilet and then found herself "plunged into the world of sanitation". 

She manages to make the talk both funny and educational at the same time. By making japes and using colloquial language she gets the audience to laugh, catches their attention, and the next moment she shows them shocking statistics. 

I also liked her relaxed way. Throughout the whole 14 minutes, she stands at the same spot and seems very calm and confident.

Stop being stressed and be awesome instead

We all have these tiring days where we just want to escape from everyday life because of emotionally stressful situations. Most people cannot deal with this kind of stress and find themselves in therapies or even worse, doing drugs to calm down. While many believe stress is harmful to the body, it actually has the opposite effect. In a 14-minute video of TED Talks, called ‘How to make stress your friend’ released in June 2013, Kelly McGonigal explains how stress can be healthy and save lives.

Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist who is known for her scientific research on achieving personal goals despite inner conflicts. With her willpower techniques and her stress-coping strategies, she enhances the patients’ quality of life, making it enjoyable again. The emphasis of her work is primarily directed towards people with less self-esteem and self-confidence.

Before I go over to the part where I tell you how to embrace stress, I want to explain several important terms that I find necessary to know in life.

Cardiovascular disease is a term for several other diseases that involves heart or blood vessels, such as heart attack, stroke, arrhythmia, etc. The most common way how to get it is probably by suffering from chronic stress.

Oxytocin is a hormone that is being released when we hug or kiss our loved ones. It can also be released when we help someone out or support people, increasing our empathy and compassion. When it comes to stress-induced damage, this hormone regenerates and heals heart-cells.

Stress-induced heart attack means that the heart attack was caused by stress.

Complementary therapy is being used for treatments without traditional Western medicine. For example, acupuncture.

Alternative therapy is being used for treatments without traditional medicine, i.e. chiropractic, homeopathy, faith healing, etc.

Stress is known as the 15^th largest cause of death in the world. However, this applies only to people who believe that stress is harmful to one’s body. After finding yourself in a situation where the heart pounds vigorously and the uncontrollable urge to breathe faster appears, it is important to see these sensations as energy rather than bad feelings. Your body is preparing you for a challenge that you need to succeed. The way how to make stress your friend is to change your attitude towards stress. What truly matters is how you think about it.

The problem with mental pressure is that it not only affects my milieu, but also everyone else’s. Everyone experiences stress differently, for example, I do when giving presentations. The next time I experience stress, I will recall the discussion with Kenny McGonigal which will help me to succeed not only when presenting, but also in life.

Her presenting techniques are just brilliant. In the beginning, she asks a question and tries to interact with the audience which makes her charismatic. Moreover, her jokes draw the crowd’s attention and, therefore, it increases her self-confidence. With these techniques, it shouldn’t be a problem to give a presentation the next time.

Remember: See the stress-induced sensations as energy, not as a weakness. 

or watch it here:

Your Health Depends On Where You Live

Bill Davenhall - Your Health Depends On Where You Live

This is the TED talk I have chosen for my health-related blog post. The speaker is Bill Davenhall who shows the importance of environment in our lives. He works in the U.S., where he has been living his entire life, as a Senior Health Adviser at ESRI. The video is filmed in October 2009 and is approximately 9 minutes long. The goal he is trying to accomplish is to include environmental and geographical data and merging them into patient's medical record together with medication and surgery history.

Summary

Having experienced the heart attack few years ago Bill decided to find the culprit of it. He started looking where no other doctor had looked before: environment. Air and toxic gases, that factories are letting out and which we inhale every day are damaging our health. But we do not worry about it because they are insidious. What we cannot see cannot harm us, right? Our body and our health depend highly not only on our lifestyle and genetics, but on the environment as well.  

3 useful phrases from the video

Geo-medicine - this is new branch of the medicine so many people haven't even heard about it yet. It is the branch of medicine that takes the environmental, climatic and topographic* impact into consideration. It uses modern technology to see the connection between the patient's health and the exposure to the places he/she has been. This is happening while the patient is in doctor's office. 

(source: https://www.esri.com/library/ebooks/geomedicine.pdf
  http://medicaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Geomedicine)

*topography is earth science, graphic representation of the surface features of a place or region

Intensive care ward - if you would suffer from serious disease like trauma (injury), sepsis or organ failure, you would be put in an intensive care ward. It is a room in hospital separated from the rest of the hospital and there work highly trained doctors and nurses. If you're in emergency department and your condition deteriorates, this would require immediate transport to the intensive care unit.

(source:http://medicaldictionary.thefreedictionary.com/ward

               http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_care_unit)

to recuperate from emergency surgery - if you're recuperating from a surgery it means your recovering, your condition is getting better,  you regain your strength, be on the mend
(source: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/american-english/regain)

What is the takeaway message for me?

I am glad I stumbled upon this topic by accident because this is the topic I really like. What I like about it is that Bill took example from his life, his experience and based on that explained why is the area where you live so important for your health. People always talk about how air is polluted, how others don't recycle and how we should start taking care of the planet. But have doctor's taken this global problems into account? No. I hope that you, dear readers, as well as my friends and family will take environment into account next time you don't feel well or feel something is not the way it should be. This is tightly connected to the environmental problems and pollution and I honestly hope that people will start taking care of the planet because it means taking care of your health as well. 

Presentation skills

The first thing that caught my eye was the introduction. First, he starts with rhetoric question: "Can geographic information make you healthy?" It's interesting because the question is so simple but it really makes you think. And, in my opinion, it is because people never really thought about it or read about it. It continues with metaphor he later explains. He says: "In 2001 I got hit by a train. My train was a heart attack." His entire presentation is accompanied by a very good presentation that makes it easier to understand. He speaks in a normal speed and uses words everyone can understand so his message can be delivered to everyday people and not only experts of this field. He also has few humorous moments and what definitely intrigued the audience to pay attention throughout the presentation.

I hope you enjoyed my post and learned some new words as well as notice some tips for the presentation you thought were irrelevant before. If you want to find out more about geomedicine here is the link to Bill's official website:
http://www.esri.com/industries/health/geomedicine
https://www.esri.com/library/ebooks/geomedicine.pdfHis Twitter:

https://twitter.com/BillDavenhall
And some of his posts in Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-davenhall/

Sex, drugs and HIV – lets get rational

For this post I've chosen the TEDtalk of Elizabeth Pisani. She's an epidemiologist specializing in HIV and author of the book "Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS".
The talk is called "Sex, drugs and HIV – let's get rational". It was published in April 2010 and is about 19 minutes long (on the TED website).

Summary

The video deals with HIV and how "rational" decisions by drug addicts, politics and partners of those affected influence the HIV rate. Elizabeth Pisani also explains how likely a sexual transmission of HIV is, which is surprisingly much less likely than one would think. She also points out how successful therapy affects people's perception and way of dealing with HIV.

Vocabulary

• to transmit a disease

transmit
transitive verb | trans-mit
medical definition: to pass, transfer or convey from one person or place to another
noun: transmission

• to expose oneself to a disease

expose
transitive verb | ex-pose
medical definition: to make liable or accessible to something (as a disease or environmental conditions) that may have detrimental (=harmful) effect <children exposed to diphtheria>

• to provide national health service

national health service
noun | na-tion-al health ser-vice
a system that provides free health care for everyone and is paid for by taxes

Personal Reaction

This TEDtalk was rather compelling because it provided a more intimate view on HIV and AIDS. It also showed how national health services related to the rate of HIV infection. How political decisions in general can affect this rate.

The correlation between the amount of therapy and infections was quite intriguing as well. Diseases that are under control extremely well are rather likely to rise again. This is mainly due to the fact that will not be as visible. Therefore, people will lose their fear of infection and start to neglect protecting themselves. In some cases, the drawbacks might also simply outweigh the advantages. Something that can also be noticed in the recent discussions about vaccination.

Presentation Technique

Elizabeth Pisani presents her talk really well in my opinion. She speaks slowly and clearly. There is some interaction with the audience and keeps eye contact. Even though she talks about medical issues such as the transmission of HIV, she makes it easy to understand for people who are no specialists in this field.

Pisani uses a lot of humor in her presentation – at the beginning to catch the audience's attention and later to keep it. She also uses slang quite generously, sometimes simply making extremely straight forward statements ("She is a chick with a dick.") This way, she manages to keep the audience from getting bored. It also helps to get the attention of those whose mind has already started wandering back.  Oh, and she chose a really catchy title. What good is a presentation that nobody listens to?

The beginning of her presentation already caught my attention. She started with a quote, which she then revealed as her own in a humorous way. The thing that really spiked my interest though, was when she explained that it was only partially true and she would argue against it. From then on I just really wanted to know how this would turn out.

How a man's disease inspired a big health initiative

Hello my dear fellow students ☺

As you know, we are supposed to write about a TED talk video. I have chosen a presentation called The big idea my brother inspired given by the mechanical engineer Jamie Heywood. In 1998, he had to discover that his younger brother Steven was diagnosed with the terminal illness ALS (explanation below). From this moment on, he focused all his energy on establishing a revolutionary healthcare initiative, called PatientsLikeMe. The video was filmed in October 2009 and lasts approximately 17 minutes.

Fiona and Frank asked us to keep our summary short and sweet. Well, I’ll try. When Jamie’s brother Steven was diagnosed with ALS, the whole family felt alone with all their questions in relation to this disease. The conversations with the doctors weren’t really satisfying – the Heywoods wanted to get first-hand information. For this reason, Jamie founded together with his youngest brother Benjamin and their friend Jeff Cole PatientsLikeMe, a website comparable to a community in which patients with all kind of diseases share their stories, statuses and data. The founders describe it as ‘a health data-sharing platform that […] can transform the way patients manage their own conditions, change the way industry conducts research and improve patient care.’

Well, let’s have a look at some useful terms:

ALS

ALS is an acronym for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS is a motor neuron disease which leads to a progressive degeneration of nerve cells that control muscle movements. The disease eventually weakens all of the body’s muscles, including the muscles humans need to breathe, until they become paralyzed. For this reason, most people with ALS die of respiratory failure.

Some collocations are ALS patient, ALS association and of course ALS Ice Bucket Challenge ;)

Terminal disease

A terminal disease is a disease that always leads to death. It’s lethal. ALS is an example for a terminal disease.

This term was used in the description of Jamie Heywood:

When MIT-trained mechanical engineer Jamie Heywood discovered that his younger brother was diagnosed with the terminal illness ALS, […].

Stem cell transplant/Bone marrow transplant

A stem cell transplant, also known as bone marrow transplant, is a medical procedure in which healthy stem cells are infused into the human body in order to replace damaged or diseased ones. Transplant can either be gained from your own body or from a donor’s body. Jamie Heywood donated some of his stem cells for his brother.

Collocations: Stem cell transplant recipient, stem cell transplant donor

I really admire the spirit of this family and I think all of us should be inspired by this positive thinking from time to time. When Steven was diagnosed with ALS they didn’t give up. On the contrary, they started to search ways to make Steven’s live better and to help him and other ALS patients. Today, PatientsLikeMe is a huge community with 45,000 members who all profit from the initial idea. That’s a great success. And even though Steven passed away in 2006, I am really happy that the idea of his brothers and friends still helps many patients all over the world by bringing them together and helping them to build each other up.

When it comes to presentation techniques, I especially liked the introduction. The speaker starts by telling the audience the story of his brother. That's catching – in a sad way of course – and awakes the viewer’s interest. I also like the way Jamie gesticulates in order to emphasize his words. Something I really enjoyed are the charts and pictures that are included in the presentation. They are embedded very well and support the presentation instead of disturbing it.

I am looking forward to reading your health blogs :)