Why Compassion is a Wonder Drug & Essential Survival Advice - SYSK Choice
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Today on Something You Should Know, when you put on sunscreen, you're probably missing a few spots. I'll tell you where they are. Then, helping other people. It can provide you with huge benefits. The scientific evidence supports that serving others can be the best medicine for yourself, both for your physical health

your mental health, your emotional health and well-being, happiness and fulfillment, and even your professional success. Also, it can be hard to be left-handed in a right-handed world, except maybe in school. And would you know what to do if you had a heart attack or got lost in the woods or bit by a snake?

One of the things you want to do is not get your heart rate accelerated, so try not to panic. But at the same time, you just got bit by a snake, so good luck not panicking. So the thing to do is just to keep the limb lowered so it's not above your heart and then get to medical help as soon as you can. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. As the weather warms up and we're spending more and more time outdoors, it's important to remember to apply sunscreen.

And there's a pretty good chance the last time you applied sunscreen, you probably missed a spot or two. Hard-to-reach spots and body parts we can't see are just as important to protect. So here are some places you may have missed. Behind the knee and crooks of the elbow. That skin is extra tender and needs protection. Your feet. 50% of volunteers in a study missed the tops of their feet.

Skin cancers on the foot and ankle often go unnoticed. Your hands. Your palms and fingers probably get sunscreen because you use that to apply it to the rest of your body. Just don't forget the sensitive, exposed parts of the hand. The backs of your hands are exposed more than any other body part. Your ears. If you've got short hair or wear it back, that's the first spot to burn.

And don't forget your scalp. Just because you have hair doesn't mean you're protected from the sun. If you're not wearing a hat, you need to apply sunscreen to your head. Melanoma on the scalp and neck results in much quicker death than melanoma that appears elsewhere on the body.

And your back. Men in particular are at high risk of developing melanoma on their back, according to the American Cancer Society. The reason it's often missed is it's just hard to reach. You need someone else to do it. But if there is no one else to do it, you really should wear a shirt. And that is something you should know. Music

If you were offered a drug, a wonder drug that could measurably and specifically improve your health, give you more energy and resilience, reduce or eliminate burnout, depression and anxiety, and increase your chances of personal and professional success with no harmful side effects, would you take that drug? Probably.

Well, such a drug actually exists in a strange sort of way. The drug is to serve other people, according to Stephen Treziak, M.D. He's been studying this since 2014, and he has found that doing good for others not only feels good, it has real, noticeable, measurable effects, positive effects on your health and well-being.

Stephen is co-author of the book Wonder Drug, Seven Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself. Hi, Doctor. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Well, thanks so much for having me. Well, I think everybody has heard that giving to others is a good thing. It's good for you. It's and maybe somewhat in a mystical way that, you know, what you give, you get back and that kind of thing. But this is more than that. This is like real medicine here. So.

explain it. My colleague and I, Anthony Mazzarelli, we tend to look at familiar things in unfamiliar ways. So we look at things that are typically in the domains of moral or ethical domains or emotional, sentimental domains, and we put them under the scrutiny of

of science. And specifically in our current project, what we've done is we have examined serving others. And since we're both physician scientists, we have gone through all the scientific evidence to examine the question, what is the evidence-based way to live your life? And what we found is

is that the scientific evidence supports that serving others can be the best medicine for yourself, both for your physical health, your mental health, your emotional health and well-being, happiness and fulfillment, and even your professional success. And so what we share with you in our current work is not what we think or what we believe. It's not our opinion, but rather it's what we found in going through the scientific evidence.

Great. So serving others has all these benefits. So let's define serving others. What does that mean? So in contrast to serving ourselves or being self-focused, it means being other focused and kindness to others. A term that's sort of a research term is called pro-social acts. Really, that's just a research term for kindness to others.

But it's looking at those around us and shining our attention light away from ourselves on other people and looking for ways that we can help those that need help or just have what some people call random acts of kindness for people who are in our orbit. So how do you know this is true? Because it sounds great, right, that helping others is good for you and has all these benefits, but it would seem kind of hard to measure. So how do you know this?

For example, the research supports, and I can go through all the mechanisms if you like as well, but the research supports that people who volunteer to serve others are on average have longevity, longer life. And that's after adjustment for potential confounders like baseline health status or other factors that can confound the relationship. So we found signals for physical health not only in longevity but

but in cardiovascular health. And research also supports that having purpose in life, which is generally focused on something bigger than yourself, is also strongly associated with better health, not just mental health and well-being, but actually physical health, including preserving physical functioning and good functional status into later in life.

Okay, and I've heard some of this before, and I think other people have, that those who help others get this benefit back. But what I really want to understand is how does it work? It sounds like magic. It sounds like what could possibly be the connection between my doing something nice for someone else and me having better vascular health? It seems like a stretch.

I understand. So let's talk about mechanisms for a moment. So what we're talking about is not something transactional, like pay it forward or anything like that. What we're talking about is something actually transformational. And so specifically, there are five different mechanisms of action by which serving others can affect really the biology of your own body. So number one,

research using functional MRI brain scans. So those are our brain scans that can tell us what part of the brain is being activated at any given moment in time. When we are focused on compassion for others, serving others in some way, giving meaningful help to others, it actually activates a reward center of the brain associated with positive affect, feelings of affiliation, and

that's associated with mechanism number two, which is a mechanism

upregulation or release of neurotransmitters, which we call the Fantastic Four. So you may have heard of them before, serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, and endorphins that are also amplified when we serve others. And so putting those two things together, activation of the reward center of the brain plus the Fantastic Four, those explain part of the reasons why

it feels good to help others

In addition, what serving others does is it fine tunes the nervous system, meaning it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. So that's the calming part of the nervous system in contrast to the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight response. And so it quiets the nervous system. And then two others that specifically relate to physical health. One is

is that over time, being other-focused, that's associated with down-regulation of the genes that produce systemic inflammation. And when produced in large quantities over time, systemic inflammation is associated with not only cardiovascular disease and cancer. Lastly,

Serving others can buffer your own stress response. Specifically, as it relates to longevity, the effects of stress and chronic stress on shortening your life is actually buffered by in such a way that volunteers that routinely serve others can, it buffers their, the stress effects on their mortality and it's associated with longevity. But let's talk about

Like what and how much that, as you say, it's not transactional. If you do a good deed, you know, good things happen. But we also hear of people who care for elder parents who get completely burned out and sick because of all that responsibility, constant around-the-clock care. So obviously too much is not good. Too little is obviously not good. So what's enough?

There are multiple studies to support that there is a threshold effect of serving others at approximately 100 hours per year. And so what that breaks down to is on average...

16 minutes per day, or perhaps you want to chunk it together and do two hours on a weekend in service to other people or perhaps in some sort of a service project.

but it's a 100-hour threshold effect, and that's annually, so that you can think of it as two hours per week or just 16 minutes a day. So Dr. Maz and I, we call it the daily 16. And if you think about 16 minutes per day and all the different activities that we do, we don't really think that that's an insurmountable amount of time.

We're talking about giving, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it's really good for your health. My guest is Dr. Stephen Treziak. His book is called Wonder Drug, Seven Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolf Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. So, Stephen, I'm wondering, is giving in the eye of the giver? And what I mean by that is giving.

You go volunteer for an organization, and because you're the new guy, and you think you're going to go there and give and help people, but really you end up washing the floors and the toilets because you're the new guy that just came. And so it doesn't feel like giving. So if it doesn't feel like giving, does it count as giving? Or, you know, maybe you come in and clean the toilets and the floor, and you're just happy to help, and it feels like giving, right?

So maybe that's, maybe it is giving. So who decides what it is to give? Yeah. Okay. I love the question actually, because it all, it all comes back to framing and how is it that you're framing your own helping and serving? So for example,

In my ICU, we have environmental services personnel, people that I've known very well now for years, who if you ask them what they did, they might say, well, I clean the rooms after the patients leave the ICU and then before they bring another patient in.

Well, that's one way to frame it. That's not the way I would frame it. The way I would frame it is I would prefer that, and I've passed this on to my colleagues in environmental services, that they are the key member of the team that is going to make sure that that ICU bed is not only sparkling clean to the eyes, but free of any possible germs to keep our patients safe.

And when you frame it that way, you frame it with a different sense of purpose. Your example of going to help and serve others, perhaps you have not necessarily a job right out of the gate where you're facing the people that are the recipients. But if you frame it in a way that this is meaningful to the cause, so to speak, in this way, then you can get the benefits because you'll realize its importance.

I suspect there are a lot of people who would like to help, who would like to volunteer to help the homeless or to help some organization or volunteer in a hospital or wherever. But they don't because they don't want to see it. And it's too painful to watch pain and suffering of other people.

So they have the desire to help. It's just that the toll it would take or the toll that they fear it would take on them of having to witness so much pain and suffering is too much to take, at least in their own mind. And I think one of the ways to address this is how you differentiate between compassion and empathy. So explain the difference.

We differentiate between empathy and compassion because in this way, most researchers define compassion as an emotional response to another's pain or suffering involving an authentic desire to help. So it's an action. It's a response to pain or suffering, whereas empathy is the sensing, feeling, detecting, and understanding component. What the research shows is that that sensing, feeling, detecting, understanding absolutely affects

activates the pain centers of the brain, whereas taking action to find some way in which you can alleviate a person's pain or suffering, even if it's just a little bit, that is associated with activation of a reward center of the brain. And so I definitely believe that that research taken together supports that empathy hurts, but compassion heals. And so when you are resonating with another person's

emotions, pain or suffering, yes, it absolutely hurts. We all know experientially, you didn't need functional MRI studies. We all know that to bear witness to suffering is uncomfortable. It hurts, but we also know it feels good to help people. And so it's the, as it relates to your question for empaths, yes, experiencing other person's emotions absolutely can be painful. But what the neuroscience supports, as well as other studies from the psychology domain, is that

Finding some little light to focus on, something that you can do to alleviate that person's pain or suffering can actually transform the experience for you. And there's neuroscience behind it. So you said there's a threshold effect at basically 100 hours of giving per year or 16 minutes a day. So the question is,

If you do more, is that better? Or once you hit that level of 100 hours per year, it doesn't get any better for you. You may want to volunteer or give more than that, but the benefits start and stop at 100 hours. Well, there are a couple aspects to that question. One is how much do you do per day? And the other question is at what point in your life did you start? So most of the physical health effects...

Come from populations of older people, which is natural, because if you're a researcher and you wanted to study the the incidence of death or cardiovascular events, you would pick a population that has a lot of experience with that. Right. So you would study older people.

Uh, but all, uh, it is important to note that physiologically there's, there's no, there's no basis to think that if you started sooner, um, to build up the, that reserve earlier on in your life that you wouldn't get longer effects. And so starting early, uh, makes sense. The, the other thing, um, is that I said, I don't have any magical thinking. And so it's not a one or one and done.

So that would be like thinking, well, if I did my 16 minutes a day today, I'm set, right? That'd be like thinking, well, if I eat my spinach once, I'll have good health and longevity into my 80s.

And of course, that's not true. It has to be something that we habituate, meaning we build it into our we do it so often that it becomes a habit, that it becomes part of our daily rituals. It becomes part of who we are. And then once it becomes part of who we are and we sustain it over time, that's when we can get the benefits.

You know, there's definitely not a one and done effect. And there is abundant research that serving others is good for your health, physical health, mental health and all the other aspects I mentioned earlier. But if the rest of your life is filled with like cigarettes and cheeseburgers, I mean, you're probably not going to get the results that you're looking for.

And so the assumption that we make is that helping and serving others is built upon already a foundation of a healthy lifestyle. Let me ask you one more thing because you've made a pretty good case. I mean, I get it and I believe what you're saying.

But I imagine people listening, and I admit myself that I wonder, how is it that when you do this research, you can filter out things so that you can come to this conclusion that it is the giving that has all these health benefits, as opposed to someone's diet or the fact that they exercise or they don't smoke? How do you filter all of that out?

So that you can go, aha, you see they're a giver and that's why they're so healthy. Anytime we see a study design where there are what we call exposures, in this case it would be exposure to helping and serving and then an outcome. So these are called cohort studies. When you see results that maybe you think they're just too good to be true,

that you might question whether or not there's something fishy with the research. And so the research term for that would be residual confounding. What that means is when you do these types of studies, you can adjust the analysis for everything that you can measure. So you can adjust the analyses for age or somebody's underlying health status or their socioeconomic status. So you can adjust...

the analyses for the things you can measure, but there might be unmeasured confounders that are altering the results in some way. Like, for example, are the people who are not helping and serving and volunteering, do they also eat too much junk food? And you didn't measure that. Or do they live next to a toxic waste dump? And you didn't measure that. And so researchers wanted to address this specifically. It was published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. And what they

who they studied was hundreds of married couples. So these were cohabitating married couples. So living in the same house and,

presumably eating the same dinner, living at the same address, of course, probably having the same friends. And so that helps to account for anything that might be hard to measure. So what they found is that the helping and serving spouse issue

that was associated with a benefit in terms of risk for mortality, but the non-helping serving spouse did not get those benefits. And so it's not something in the water. It's not the drapes. And what the research points to then is that there is something about helping and serving, perhaps through those five mechanisms that I mentioned to you earlier, that

that changes our biology, changes not only our health, but our well-being if sustained over time.

Well, I think what this discussion has done is it's really put a fine point on the phrase of, you know, giving is good. Well, we've all heard it's good to give. Well, in what way? How is it good to give? And you've explained that pretty well. Dr. Stephen Treziak has been my guest, and his book is called Wonder Drug, Seven Scientifically Proven Ways That Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself.

and you'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Stephen. Thank you for being here. Thanks. Take care.

As you go about your life day to day, things happen. Sometimes bad things happen. You injure yourself. Someone standing next to you has a heart attack or a seizure. You get caught in bad weather. You get bitten by a snake. You get lost in the woods. I mean, there are all kinds of things that can and do happen to people. And if you haven't thought through in advance how you would deal with these types of emergencies or disasters...

You likely won't be as effective in dealing with them when they happen, which is why John Torres is here. John is an emergency room doctor. He's also senior medical correspondent for NBC and author of Dr. Disaster's Guide to Surviving Everything. Hey, John, thanks for being here. Thanks. Thanks for having me here.

So as a doctor and as somebody who's really into this, do you think people are generally pretty knowledgeable about like first 80 things and, you know, what to do when there's trouble like a disaster or are we woefully inadequate?

Actually, surprisingly, I think that most people have a basic understanding of what to do, but they don't necessarily have an understanding of when to do it and how to do it at the time period. And the best example I can give you is it's very common in the emergency room, and we often talk about this, that somebody will come in and they're bringing a loved one who's bleeding and they're not doing anything. The blood is just dripping in.

Not to be gross, but it's just kind of falling on the floor. And we have nurses go over to him and say, you know, just use this gauze and apply direct pressure, which is one of the more basic things. And they're like, I knew that. But for some reason in the midst of this, I didn't think about it. Yeah. There's kind of this thing about don't touch him. You might cause more damage or something.

Well, I think part of it's that you want to make sure you're not, you know, everyone kind of has a little bit of what we, you know, our oath of do no harm. But at the same time, I think a lot of people just kind of freeze in that moment and, and don't really think about the things that they know work or they know you should be doing because they're so worried about the other person. So do you, does that happen a lot in the ER that you, that you look at things like that and go, Oh God, if they had only done X, then this wouldn't have been so bad. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. And you talk to them afterwards and you try to educate them saying, you know, if this happens again, here's what you should do. And oftentimes they say, you know, I knew that. I either couldn't think of it, I couldn't recall that information I had, or I knew to do it, but I was too afraid to do it. Or, you know, there's some reason, but oftentimes too, they didn't know it. And it's simple things. And, you know, granted, you know, I've been through, you know, four years of med school, three years of emergency medicine residency, 20 years of ER, you know. So, you know,

Obviously, I'm talking from very heavy experience, but talking to these people, it's very basic information that they hopefully know or if not should know, and then how to apply it is the second part of it and when to do it. So one thing that I know happens, and many people have seen it happen, where someone will just drop, and you think they're probably having a heart attack or maybe they're having a stroke, and how do you tell the difference and what do you do? So address that.

I always tell people, I said, I can't imagine being in a situation where a loved one or even somebody who you don't know drops in front of you and you don't know what to do and just how bad of a feeling that would be knowing that if you had that little bit of skill, you can go ahead and address whatever's going on and at least give them a fighting chance and give yourself that knowledge that you at least tried to do something.

Best example, CPR. You know, it used to be that when we taught CPR, it was a two-day course, and you had to go through all this intensive training and testing, and you had to learn how to synchronize the chest compressions with the breaths. And then they found out that people just weren't going to the classes. They were too long, too complicated. They were afraid to do that, especially the breathing part with, you know, infectious disease concerns.

And so then they came out and they did these studies and they found that just simple chest compressions, just pushing on the chest and even somebody who hasn't gotten CPR training. And I'm not saying don't get it because CPR training is great. But even if you don't have CPR training, just pushing on a chest at 100 beats a minute.

And then they realized, okay, maybe most people don't know what 100 beats a minute is. So let's do it to the tune of Staying Alive, that Bee Gees song, because that's 100 beats a minute. And so, you know, just simple things like that and just getting more education out there, I think is one of the keys to people being able to do something like

But when somebody does that, falls over, how do you determine maybe they just fainted? Maybe they're having a heart attack? Maybe there's a stroke? It could be a seizure. There's a lot of things going on.

The best thing to do by far is what they teach you. If you've ever taken a CPR course, the first thing they teach you is they usually have a mannequin they call Annie. And the thing they teach you, and you feel kind of weird doing it, but it's the best thing to do, is just shake the shoulder and go, are you okay? And if they respond to you and they're like, oh, yeah, I'm fine. I just tripped on the curb.

That's different than if they don't respond to you at all. If they don't respond to you at all, and then just look at them and say, okay, do they look like they're breathing? Most of us from TV know where you can kind of approximately go to to try and find a heartbeat. And if you don't find a heartbeat, if they're not breathing, well, that's when you start CPR. And, of course, the big important thing is have somebody, yourself or somebody else, call 911. You want that ambulance there as soon as possible.

Let's talk about maybe something a little less dramatic is, you know, a heart attack. But but but this time of year, particularly bee stings. I mean, I hear people say, oh, I'm allergic to bees. If I get stung by a bee, you know, I'll die or I'll you know, I'll go into shock or, you know, how common is that? What what is the danger? Just fill me in.

And as we say in medicine, it's not uncommon, but it's not necessarily common. So not everybody around you is going to have it, but there could be people around you that have that type of reaction to bee stings or to eating shrimp, or there's a variety of things. And if that happens, if you notice somebody having difficulties, especially if they're starting to say, you hear wheezing and I'm having problems breathing, one of the first things you should do is

you know, are you allergic to something that just, you know, either you ate or stung you? And do you have an EpiPen with you? Because if you have an EpiPen with you, let's get that and give you that injection. And EpiPens are great because they have directions on the side. You can read the

biggest thing is people are afraid to do it because it's a big needle going into the thigh. And so they're afraid to do it. You can't because that is life-saving. And then of course, calling 911. I can't overemphasize how important it is to make sure you get EMS activated very quickly because for somebody like this, time is of the essence.

So let's talk about some of the, go back to some of the summertime things that, that happened to people, you know, insect bites, um, you know, you get cut, you get scraped, something gets in your eye. I know those are lots of different things, but can you just kind of generally talk about those kinds of things?

Right. And summertime is one of those times that we happen to be outdoors. So when you're outdoors, you're going to end up encountering more of these things. Now, the way the summers are, heat is a huge thing too. And so you want to be very careful with heat. And you just need to be ready for anything that could be happening in your area. And that doesn't mean carrying a backpack full of stuff because none of us can do that. But it just means having the understanding of what to do in situations like that. And then when something does happen, just take a deep breath and think about what you need to do. But

If it's heat emergencies, if it's very hot, there's that 10 to 4 time period where you want to be indoors. You want to take a look at other people, especially the elderly. Unfortunately, always those sad events of children being left in cars accidentally. You want to make sure that you have some mechanism set up that doesn't happen. One of the best things I've heard is,

Just basically put your cell phone underneath the car seat or next to the car seat because you're not going to forget your cell phone. And if you do, within 10 minutes of going inside the building, you're going to look for your cell phone and remember it's in the car. What about if you get bitten by a snake?

One of the things you want to do is not get your heart rate accelerated, so try not to panic. But at the same time, you just got bit by a snake, so good luck not panicking. So it's one of those things that you just have to think about these things as they go on. And the main theme behind all of this is to just take a split second, take a deep breath, and then try to analyze what's going on and move from there.

There are some things, though, that maybe they're just old wives' tales. Like I remember hearing, like, if you get bit by a snake, you should suck out the blood, which just sounds like all wrong. That's got to be wrong. It is completely wrong. And the reason it's wrong is a couple of fold. Number one, we all have little cuts and nicks inside our mouth. So if you're sucking up the blood and if you do happen to get some venom, then you're going to get that inside your mouth and you could get inside your body and you could have problems as well. So you want to be careful with that. Number two...

the venom spreads very quickly. So it's not going to be sitting at that one place where the bites are. So you're really not going to get a whole lot anyway. And then number three, most people end up cutting deeper than they think they are and it can cause nerve damage, muscle damage. They could hit a blood vessel and cause a lot of bleeding. So it's not anything we recommend.

As a matter of fact, we recommend against doing that anymore. If you get bit by a snake, the thing to do is just to keep them calm, keep the limb lowered so it's not above your heart because you're trying to keep the blood from flowing through the rest of your body, and then get to medical help as soon as you can. But there's nothing to do specifically for a snake bite other than get professional help.

You get professional help. If you have ice, you can put ice on it, and that kind of slows down the blood flow in that area for a little bit. But the main thing is just getting that professional help. What about burns? Because I remember, oh, put butter on it. Well, again, that seems like kind of a dumb idea, but people did it.

And I think the reason they did it, you know, thinking about it, is because it's a lot more common than you think. But I think the reason they did it is because it's cool, it's cold, and it's moist. And I think they thought that could help out. The problem with butter is butter is organic, and organic materials can build bacteria up and they can cause more problems. You have to be careful with it. And to tell you the truth, what happens in the ER, if you come in and somebody has put butter on a burn, besides us shaking our heads going, ah, you should never do this, we also have to clean it off.

And that can be very painful, cleaning off a burn, you know, something like that, because you have to get it all off. And then you put on your own ointment. You know, one of the best things, if you, you know, basically you just want to cover it up with moist cloth. Just if you have gauze, that's great. Moist gauze. If you want to put anything on it, because you,

don't have any way of putting moist guys, triple antibiotic ointment or just any kind of antibiotic ointment works really well. Put that on there as well. And then we don't have to worry about cleaning it off so much when you get there. We, you know, we will clean it and make sure it's okay. But at the same time, it doesn't have that organic material to it. It could cause problems. But yeah, this is, it's something that, you know, I was taught when I was a kid. I know my parents were taught their parent, you know, that kind of thing. It's just been around forever. And I don't, I'm not sure why. Yeah. It kind of like put a stake on a black eye. I never understood that one either. Yeah.

Well, how does that help? I think that's just the coolness again. I think it's just for some reason when they reached in there, you know, now it's a bag of frozen peas, which is great because then you just put it back in the freezer. When someone has a seizure, when you see that, I've seen it happen and I honestly don't know. It's scary, isn't it? Yeah, because you don't know what's causing it. Is it a condition that they have and this happens a lot or is this some kind of weird, bizarre thing? And here's this person writhing on the ground and you feel so helpless. Yeah.

And watching it happen, again, if you didn't know what to do or didn't know why it was happening, it can be very scary. And the main thing to realize is that if somebody's having a seizure, it could be a seizure because of epilepsy. It could be a seizure because they hit their head or had some kind of head trauma. It could be a seizure because their blood sugar levels are too low and they're diabetic. There's a variety of reasons behind it.

But the one thing you have to realize is you're not going to really fix the seizure while they're having it. They need to just go ahead and have it and let it pass. As you call an ambulance and make sure that EMS is getting activated, the best thing you can do, and we had things we did years ago we don't do anymore, the best thing you can do right now is protect their head.

If they're standing up, help them get to the ground, protect their head, and then try to protect their limbs if you can because if it's a grand mal seizure, they're going to be flailing around. Their limbs are going to be moving all over the place, and they could get hurt. But your primary concern is the head, making sure they don't sustain any kind of head trauma. It used to be in the old days we would try to – we were worried about them swallowing their tongue, and they'd try to put books or rulers in their mouth. And that just ended up being a mess and causing a lot more trauma. And you can't do it anyway because –

Most of the time when they have a seizure, they clench their jaws so tight you can't open up their mouth. And so that would just cause broken teeth and things like that. We don't do that anymore. They're not going to swallow their tongue. That's not going to happen. I'm telling you right now. But they are going to hurt their head. So you just want to protect it. So what does that mean? If you were there and you know I've got to protect their head, by doing what?

That's a great question. One of the best things you can do is if you can, just lay their head in your lap. Sit behind them, lay their head in your lap. If you can't do that for some reason, whatever, get some pillows or even your coat around them or a shirt or anything you can get around them to pad their head a little bit to help them out. And then again, just making sure that they're not in a dangerous situation. The other thing is if they are in a dangerous situation, if they're in a position where they might get run over by traffic, if they fell in the middle of the street or anything like that,

and you need to move them, then move them, but at the same time protect them as best you can. Usually these seizures only last a few minutes, if not just a few seconds, and they go. The other thing to remember is after the seizure, they have a condition called a postictal state, and that is basically their brain trying to recover. And so for 20, 30, 40 minutes, they are going to be completely out of it. They're going to be like somebody who you're trying to wake up from a deep sleep and really groggy and not able to follow your commands too well. But that should slowly improve with time.

But again, call 911, activate the ambulance. The ambulance, when the professionals get there, they can figure it out from there. Something that very often happens, particularly in the summer, is you get something in your eye. And usually it's nothing. It kind of comes out or maybe you sprinkle some water on it or something. But is that a good thing to do? I mean, what do you do when you get something in your eye?

And the best thing by far is because people try different things to put in their eyes to get stuff out. The best thing by far is just to run it. Well, number one, if your tears can get rid of it, perfect. You know, just keep your eyes closed, let your tears get rid of it. But if not, just run it under tap water, just real gentle tap water. And that's it. If you look...

you know, any industrial site, they usually have that one little fountain. It's almost like a sink. It looks strange because it has these two protruding tubes coming out of it. And that's for eyewash. That's the eyewash station. And it's just basically tap water to wash your eyes. Same thing here. Just, you know, go to the sink, the kitchen sink or whatever, and run tap water through your eye. The key though,

If it's in your right eye, do it so that the right side of your head is down so the water is running from the right eye to the sink, not from the right eye to the left eye.

if that makes sense. So you don't want to cross your face and potentially contaminate the other eye. So just do that if you need to. But the first thing I would do is just try to keep the eye closed, see if the tears can work that thing out. And then sometimes if it's something in there, especially if you've got it inside the cornea, then it's not going to come out. We're going to need to remove that. And that's when you essentially just patch that eye up, get them to the emergency room, and then let us take care of it.

So you talk about what to do if you get lost in the woods and probably everybody's been lost in the woods, but usually you figure it out or, oh, there's the house or, you know, oh, I see the chimney or whatever. But what, but if you do get lost in the woods, I mean, how you're lost in the woods, what do you do?

Yeah, so one of the best things you could do to get lost in the woods, and I used to teach my kids this, is essentially one of the best things you can do is hug a tree. And that doesn't mean hug a tree literally, although for kids we teach them that just because it makes sense to them. But it basically means stay still, don't move, stay where you are. The reason is when search and rescue comes looking for you, they're going to come looking for you using a grid system.

And they're going to go to grid A. They're going to look there. If they don't find you in grid A, they're going to eliminate it and go to grid B, then grid C. They're just going to move through those grids. And they're not going to go back to the grid they went to before because they have so many to search. The problem is if you're moving and you think you're going in the right direction but you may or may not be, you could move from grid A. They could check it.

you're in grid C at the time, they're checking grid A, they're done with that, they go to B, and then in your movement, you end up going back to grid A, and they miss you. And so you want to make sure they're going to get to you eventually by using their grid system. So you want to stay still. The only caveat there, if you happen to be in a situation where you're...

So you're in danger. You need to get out of there. Then you need to move in places like that. But for the most part, the best thing to do is just stay absolutely still. If you're with a car, if you're in a situation where you're like at a campsite or anything like that, just stay there because that's one of the first things they're going to check. If they were told that you took a road trip up somewhere and then were going to hike, one of the first things they're going to do is check your car. So just stay there as well.

I remember hearing somebody say, well, if you're lost, you just go downhill because water runs downhill, a stream runs into a river, the river runs into the ocean, eventually you'll come to a city.

But that is true, but eventually is a long time. Because you can imagine if you're in the middle of, like here in Colorado, and you try to take, you know, go downstream to find a creek that goes to a river that goes to, you know, you're going to be walking for a long time. And you may come upon civilization, you may not. And it could be way more miles than you think you're going to go. So...

theoretically, it sounds like great advice and it does eventually happen. And over the days and weeks and months, you'd probably would come to some place, but in the short term, it doesn't make a lot of sense because that's not the way nature is set up or designed. That's not the way we've set up our civilizations either. So you just want to, again, best thing to do, hug a tree. Do you have some general advice when something horrible happens around you or you're in a situation or someone's injured or,

Just like the general mindset, right?

In any situation, the best thing to do is, number one, is just to kind of take a deep breath and kind of just sit there and assess the situation for half a second to a second. And because oftentimes people will start doing things and they'll get in kind of a panic mode and end up doing the wrong thing or something in the wrong way or wrong direction. But the other thing to do is not to spend so much time thinking that you don't do. And my father used to always say, hesitation kills.

And he would particularly say that because as a kid, like most kids, I'd get in the middle of the street. And if I saw a car coming, I'd kind of do that dance back and forth. And my dad would say, no, just move in a direction. And that makes sense. And they found out time and time again in different disasters that just moving, even if you might move in a wrong direction, you're going to understand very quickly you're moving in a wrong direction. And you're going to reverse that and go in the right direction versus if you just stay still and you're frozen. Right.

To get past that frozen part, you just want to move. And that movement is going to start the thought process and start your process of moving. The example I can give you, if you're in a situation of building fire and you just sit there and you're going to freeze and bad things are going to happen versus if you move and you take a right and all of a sudden there's a fire there, you're going to turn directly around and go left.

That's just human nature. So, but at least you moved and that's the important thing. Well, it's a lot of really good advice, but the takeaway I get from this is really, you got to think you really have to think. And when something happens, you got to take a second and get your wits about you so you can, so you can take the right action.

I've been speaking with John Torres. He is an ER doctor and the senior medical correspondent for NBC, and he's author of Dr. Disaster's Guide to Surviving Everything, and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, John. Thanks for sharing that advice. There you go. Thank you. Thank you.

As someone who is left-handed, I would never wish that on anybody because I have found that it's difficult being left-handed in a right-handed world. And there is this assumption, I think, that left-handed children struggle more at school than right-handed kids. However, a study shows that actually left-handed children seem to embrace school more and actually have a more positive relationship with their teachers.

Almost half of left-handed youngsters, 47%, said they enjoyed school so much they couldn't wait to get up in the morning. Yet just 38% of right-handed children said the same thing. 63% of left-handed children say they get on very well with their teacher, compared to just 54% of those who are right-handed.

But right-handed children are better when it comes to their homework, with 14% of left-handed kids saying that they leave it to the last minute if they do it at all. And that is something you should know. You know, when people evaluate whether or not to listen to a new podcast, one of the things they look at when they go to, say, Apple Podcasts is how many ratings and reviews it has.

Well, we have a lot of ratings and reviews, but we can always use more. So if you have a moment, please go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. And it would be really great if you made it a five-star rating. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Talmor is my home. My family have worked the land for generations. My gran says the island does not belong to us, but we belong to the island. And we must be ready, for a great evil is coming, and death follows with it.

Listen and subscribe to the latest season of Undertow, The Harrowing, a Storyglass production presented by Realm. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce.

That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.