The Weekly Dose - Episode 21

The Weekly Dose...

... the latest from Dr Karan

  Here is your weekly dose...  

Hi all!Here is your weekly dose of the Sunday Six! A few things I found interesting this week. If you enjoy this please feel free to forward this to friends. families and enemies alike!**You'll find more in depth analysis of some of these subjects on my social platforms in the links just below, including Dr Karan Investigates! for deep dives into interesting topics on my YouTube channel.**

What Saved My Career...

In early 2020 when the pandemic was raging and hospital shifts were squeezing the life out of me, I came precipitously close to burning out and calling it quits.Thankfully, around the same time I got a puppy - a monstrous mastiff called Shadow. People say dogs are great for anxiety & stress - Shadow certainly caused that and more but he has given me more stress relief and joy so currently the equation is favourable!Any pet, not just furry ones, actually change your brain's neurochemistry. In addition to helping to lower cortisol (one of the stress hormones), they trigger the release of oxytocin (comfort), serotonin (mood regulator, social skills etc) and dopamine (pleasure, reward etc) which occur when you bond with your new found friend.Merely petting an animal has a positive effect in the anterior cingulate cortex which processes emotion, empathy & impulse control. You can see why they make great companions for children with neurodivergent brains (autism, aspergers, ADHD).Anyway, he forced me to take care of myself more - I had to take him out for long walks every evening on top of wrestling with him daily (a fully body workout!) and lifted me out of the rut I was stuck in. Forever grateful for my fur baby.

The Chemical Everyone Is Addicted To...

Don't drink coffee first thing in the morning. I made a video about this almost 2 years ago and it got a fair amount of attention...

If you need coffee to shake of your morning zombie mode, this might say more about your chronic sleep deprivation than your desire for coffee. In an ideal setting, your morning energy should be supplied by a rise in cortisol, one of the natural stress hormones. This usually dips mid-morning so you might get more "bang for your buck" with coffee consumed in these natural cortisol dips than first thing in the morning where you might be better of letting cortisol do its job!The issue with coffee is most people think caffeine is an alertness chemical but it's actually an anti-sleep one. Caffeine competes with adenosine (a sleep chemical) and binds to the same receptors thus blocking the action of adenosine. Thus, it prevents the sleep chemical manifesting it's effects so you feel *less sleepy* rather than *more alert*. The downside is once caffeine wears off, the accumulated adenosine molecules overload your system and you experience a sudden crash in energy as your sleep desire increases. Furthermore, caffeine has a notoriously long half life. If you consume a cup of coffee or an energy drink equivalent at 4pm, thats the equivalent of having half a cup of coffee at 10pm!TL;DR --> 1) Try to delay caffeine consumption til mid-morning energy dip between 9am-11am. 2) Avoid caffeine after 2pm (max) if you can so your sleep isn't disrupted.

The Unwanted Body Gems You Don't Want!

Year 1 of being a doctor I did some shift swaps with a friend and ended up with 9 twelve hour shifts on the trot. On shift 7, it was 11pm and I was in the emergency room reviewing a patient and became a patient myself. I yelped and collapsed to the ground in agony...an in hospital CT scan revealed the culprit - a kidney stone in my left ureter. I had been dehydrated all week (all shift workers know this feeling of not drinking enough on shifts) and my reward was this worthless gemstone in my water-work system.Whilst you can't ever 100% avoid kidney stones there are some basic risk reducing behaviours you can action - the number 1 being to avoid or limit prolonged dehydration, number 2: make sure you avoid holding in your pee so you're constantly flushing your system. Holding in your urine = increased urine infection risk = increases kidney stone risk and number 3: keep an eye on your red meat intake. Excessive red meat intake has been associated with an increase risk of stone formation.

What I Need You To Know About The Female Body...

In German, ovulation = Eisprung which literally means egg-jump. In fact, women even feel this ovulation pain as the egg emerges from the ovary like a medicine being pushed out of a blister pack.The perilous journey of the egg begins when it has to "jump" across a gap between the fallopian tube and the ovary which it usually does successfully. Occasionally a fertilised egg might fall in this gap and implant itself in the abdominal cavity (exceedingly rare but can happen) and this is known as an abdominal ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies, where the fertilised egg lands in an area that isn't the uterus can be life threatening and usually occurs in the fallopian tubes.The strangest case report I've come across was an odd case of an abdominal ectopic in the liver with a fetus growing in this highly vascular organ. You don't need to be a medic to know this is not good. So yes, there is a gap between the ovary and fallopian tubes and all your biology teachers and textbooks lied to you and made you think (probably) that they were all joined like some fancy bit of lego.Pic: Fetus growing in the Right Upper Quadrant (Liver) 

What I'm Pondering About Online Racism

Not for the first time I received a generic racist comment on social media. On the scale of to smooth-brained this was up there. Racism online doesn't affect like it used to but it will likely add to the accumulated micro-doses of stress a person experiences during an average day. This desensitisation of mine is likely to due over-exposure to these types of comments. However fall all its positives, social media has provided a petri dish to allow racism to prosper due to a variety of reasons: 1) the ability to be anonymised 2) the ability to avoid direct contact with a person thus providing a degree of disinhibition.I'm reading this interesting article which covers the "online disinhibition effect" and explains why vitriolic racist spew still exists and flourishes online.*Thanks to James, an aspiring psychologist for the idea!

Why Ancient Greeks Ballsed It Up

November is typically Men's Health Month worldwide but really men should be keeping an eye on their health year round...not just when moustaches become a month long fashion statement. Testicular cancer remains a highly curable cancer and the first time it is usually picked up is by the patient themselves.When you play with your balls just remember these 3 things if nothing else:1) Check during / just after a hot shower so the scrotal muscles are relaxed and stretched out so you can feel for lumps more easily.2) Check at least once a month so you know what is normal for you and what isn't. For example it is perfectly normal for one testicle to be bigger and one to hang lower. You will feel a "lump" at the back and top of your testicles and this is likely your epididymis (sperm tube)3) If in doubt get it checked out! Any lump or swelling even if painless is worth a trip to the doctor. You will likely get an ultrasound scan of your testicles and scrotum if there is any concern which in most cases will be normal and reassuring.Now onto the Greeks - why did the ancient Greek sculptors, so meticulous and observant when it came to depicting the human body, so often got it wrong when it came to the male organ?The left testicles of ancient Greek statues are always larger than the right AND always lower down. Typically in men the testicle which is higher tends to be the larger one and gravity is not a factor.

There are two prevailing theories today about the false male anatomy of ancient Greek statues. One has to do with physiology. Since one testicle is higher, the logical assumption is that it is lighter (and therefore smaller) than the other. 

The second theory is based on more symbolic reasons. The ancient Greeks believed that one testicle produced male offspring and the other female. By depicting one higher than the other, the artists implied that the obvious masculinity of the depicted male would only produce male offspring.

As always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which of this weeks Sunday six is your favourite? Is there something you want more, or less of? I'm open to any suggestions so please let me know! Just send a  tweet to @drkaranrajan and use the hashtag #theweeklydose at the end so I can find it!

Have a wonderful week, all.

Much love,

Karan