jjablkowski's blog

DRR’s March editorial touched me greatly [BCMJ 2019;61:61]. It was about his dementia-touched father’s journey and walking with him on that journey “with grace, love, and laughter.”

Recently I came upon a complex article about the alarmingly low sperm counts and sperm concentrations of some of the 43 000 men measured between 1971 and 2013.[1] Using various statistical methods, the data were compiled from over 750 abstracts and close to 2500 articles published over 42 years. Laboratory results from men from North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia (called the Western group) were compared and contrasted with results from men from South America, Asia, and Africa.

Reading about the Cleveland Clinic’s predictions of medical innovations for 2019 got me thinking about the medical ideas and practices from the past 100 years that did not turn out well. 

Humor is the tendency of experiences to provoke laughter, or at least some amusement. People of all ages and cultures respond to humor of one kind or another. The word comes from the Latin for “body fluid” and its origin has some connection to the Greek theory of humoral balance required for health. Neurophysiologists today think that perception of humor comes from engagement of the temporo-occipital-parietal areas of the brain detecting and resolving incongruity, as well as the dopaminergic system and the amygdala, which are the key structures for reward processing.