You’re A Teenage Dirtbag, Baby…

With each passing year, the new songs I hear increasingly sound like unpleasant noise and the music I loved as a teenager means more to me than ever.

Now, I can’t seriously claim that Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag” is a lyrical work of art, yet I treasure every second of this song…and of course, science has had a rough hand in these feelings..

The songs of our youth hold a disproportionate power over our emotions.

Researchers have uncovered evidence that suggests our brains bind us to the music we heard as teenagers more tightly than anything we’ll hear as adults—a connection that doesn’t weaken as we age…musical nostalgia.

When we first hear a song, it stimulates our auditory cortex.

If you sing or hum along to a song in your head, you’ll activate your premotor cortex, which helps plan and coordinate movements.

Pay close attention to the lyrics and instrumentation, you’ll activate your parietal cortex, which helps you shift and maintain attention to different stimuli.

These nostalgic songs often are associated with positive memory - your prefrontal cortex, which maintains information relevant to your personal life and relationships, will spring into action.

All the above helps this nostalgic music embed itself deeper into your neuronal circuity and brain studies have shown that our favourite songs from our past stimulate the brain’s pleasure circuit, releasing an influx of neurochemicals that make us feel good.

The more we like a song, the more we get treated to neurochemical bliss, flooding our brains with euphoria.

Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development—and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. The songs you loved years ago becomes the soundtrack of your teenage dreams and hopes.

Chances are you’ll never love another song the way you loved the music of your youth. Perhaps that is a little depressing.

The nostalgia that accompanies our favourite songs is basically a neurological wormhole that gives us a glimpse into the years when our brains were forming our personalities.

Possessed By The Liquid Sh*t Demon…

On Wednesday afternoon at work, I was alerted to the fact that a member of staff had brought in some homemade biscuits and left them out at the nurse’s desk for all the staff to enjoy. Naturally, I had to sample these baked goods…

I only found out after consumption that they’d been out there for 2 days. In a busy ward. With fingers from likely dozens of people who had those very same fingers God knows where….time will tell where this would lead…

I finished my operating list and rushed home to the toilet…not good.

The next 24-36 hours saw me attacked by the diarrhoea demon. I was briefly married to the porcelain throne.

It was a relatively short war of attrition between me and my bowels but I suspect these few things I did helped me reduce the severity and duration of my symptoms:

1) Low fibre diet:

Fibre usually is great for bowel motions, but when you’ve got diarrhoea and low grade intestinal inflammation.. the last thing you want is fibre rubbing against your intestinal lining and worsening that inflammation… so keep this to a minimal.

Any fibre consumed should preferably be foods with a high amount of soluble fibre which can help to bulk up your stool.

2) I added in fermented products like Greek yoghurt.

Diarrhoea = a state of imbalance within your gut.

There is disharmony between the population of microbes. The gut protective species are being overcrowded by pathogenic species of bacteria or gut unfriendly ones.

Adding in things like Greek yoghurt can aid by adding in gut friendly strains of bacteria and provide nutrients in the form of prebiotics to those that already exist within your gut.

3) I fasted from morning to early afternoon.

These brief hours of fasting just help to stifle and slow down colonic motility meaning less explosive symptoms!

The fasting also allows your gut microbiome to re-centre and “reset” itself without the constant barrage of food coming in.

The reduced physical load entering your intestines allows the intestines to do a “repair” job on the intestinal lining too.

4) No caffeine based products – teas, coffees, energy drinks (not that I drink much of the latter anyway).

I cut down on my favourite spicy foods because they contain capsaicin, a phytochemical which can irritate the gut and shorten intestinal transit time and worsen diarrhoea (and add a sting in the tail..literally).

Naturally this worked for me in minimising symptoms and I feel back to 100%. In fact most of what I’ve said can actually help people symptomatically having IBD or IBS flare ups too!

If you’re best by a demonic intestinal entity..I hope these tricks stand you in good stead. Good luck soldier!

 Using antimatter to fight cancer?!

One of the worst things you can hear in life is the phrase “you have cancer”.

Decades ago, depending on the type of cancer this may have been a death sentence…

However now due to improving diagnostic and treatment strategies, our management of many types of cancer is life prolonging and curative in many cases.

Our advancements in cancer diagnostics sometimes evolve at a dizzying pace…

I’ve spoken previously on this newsletter about the use of AI to help with identifying someone’s risk of pancreatic cancer, but a tool we already have that doesn’t use AI is still the most sci-fi tool we have…

The PET scan (positron emission tomography) ; it literally uses anti-matter to help us detect cancer.

You might have heard of antimatter – a potentially dangerous substance that releases vast amounts of energy when it combines with matter. But how do we use it to detect cancer?

In the case of PET scans, as the name implies, we use positrons. These are essentially the antimatter equivalent of electrons. They have the same mass as an electron but are positively charged.

This now gets increasingly smarter and mindblowing… to release these positrons we have some manmade isotopes (chemical elements which have been manipulated to make them unstable).

These unstable isotopes continue to decay over a short period of time and emit positrons.

One isotope commonly used in PET scans is fluorine-18 – specifically added to a tracer molecule to create fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG).

FDG is a glucose analogue that is absorbed by cells in the body but not metabolised by them. Cancer cells love to absorb FDG so doctors can look for places where there are high concentrations of it.

A build up of FDG means more decay of the fluorine-18 and more positrons being emitted.

The positrons, when they meet an electron, annihilate each other and the result is gamma-rays with specific energies which can be detected using computers.

Over a 10-20 minute scan, a million positrons are emitted and we can use this to determine cancer clusters!

Understandably this is expensive because these require specialised tools and to use these tools, hospitals need to have the equipment to create radioactive isotopes.. so some hospitals actually have a particle accelerator on site!

We almost became extinct….

Almost 99% of all human ancestors may have been wiped out around 930,000 years ago, a new paper has claimed.

The new research which was published in the journal Science, used DNA from living people to suggest that humans went through a bottleneck, a global population crash. The paper estimates that as few as 1,300 humans were left for a period of around 120,000 years.

This near-extinction event has been blamed on Africa’s climate getting much colder and drier. It’s worth noting this was a reduction in the population of our ancestors before our particular species, homo sapiens, emerged.

The researchers reconstructed ancient population dynamics on the basis of genetic data from present-day humans by constructing a complex family tree of genes.

This period in question was part of the Early-Middle Pleistocene transition — a time when there were significant changes to the climate and glacial cycles became longer and more intense.

In Africa, this led to long periods of drought and famine.

In fact, the researchers suggest that the changing climate might have wiped out human ancestors and forced new human species to emerge and eventually, these might have evolved into the last common ancestor of modern humans and our extinct relatives, the Denisovans and Neanderthals.

What we don’t know is how the small group of 1,300 or so survived and what allowed their population to flourish.

What is clear, however, is that the bottleneck is likely to have had a crucial impact on human genetic diversity, driving many important features of modern humans, such as brain size.

The study estimates that up to two-thirds of genetic diversity was lost in this near extinction event.

What to Watch:

“Ragnarok” Netflix

I’ve always been obsessed with Greek, Roman and Norse mythology and the stories of these “old gods” – less Marvel Thor and more ancient Nordic folklore.

This Norwegian series is worth watching not least for the beautiful shots of the Nordic scenery but the small town origins of Thor’s avatar and the battle to ensue.

Life updates:

This last week has been a painful one. My monster Shadow has had surgery on both his eyes so he was feeling incredibly sorry for himself and it was pretty miserable watching him mope around in his “cone of shame”.

I’ve switched his cone for a pair of doggy visors which allows him more freedom (see pics on my Instagram stories!).

I’m speaking at YouTube HQ this Thursday about being a health creator online and the successes I’ve seen and challenges I’ve faced along the way.

Then I’ll be at Brighton this weekend (Friday – Sunday) to speak at IFS (International Fitness Summit) about the use of social media as a professional and how to maximise the impact of your message.

Sometimes in the middle of all those things I’ve got a couple of clinics, operating lists and ward rounds!