Health

Our society has taught people to always work hard. People are learning how to be more productive, but they also have the idea that they should always be busy. These people think "busy" and "productive" are the same thing. When these people finally rest, they feel bad. They think they are lazy. They might even work until they break down from tiredness.

American psychotherapist Sarah McLaughlin says 70% of visits to the doctor are because of stress-related issues. She suggests we start taking care of ourselves as much as we try to complete tasks. She says that we need to think more realistically about ourselves, “If this task does not get done today, it does not mean I have failed. It just means that I will get to it tomorrow.” Here are some pieces of advice from two psychotherapists, McLaughlin and Pantha Saidipour, on how to forget about work before resting:

People today are taller, on average, than their ancestors 100 years ago. This is true for every country in the world.

The data shown below is based on a global study. It reports mean height for adults by year of birth, from 1896 to 1996; in other words, people who had reached their eighteenth birthday from 1914 to 2014.

Please look at the graph and discuss it with your teacher.

National Geographic answers the question: what is forest bathing? The term emerged in Japan in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise called shinrin-yoku. It can mean “forest bathing” or “taking in the forest atmosphere”. The purpose was to offer an ecological antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with the country’s forests.

The Japanese quickly embraced this form of ecotherapy. In the 1990s, researchers began studying the physiological benefits of forest bathing, providing the science to support the idea that time spent surrounded by nature is good for us. The concept at the heart of shinrin-yoku is not new. Many cultures around the world have long recognized the importance of the natural world to human health.

People’s diets have varied considerably around the world, and have often been dictated by geography, the types of crops that the land can sustain and animals that dominate the ecosystem. However, with advances in technology and globalization, billions of people can now eat all sorts of fruits and vegetables out of season, as well as exotic, imported meats.

Take a look at the two maps below and discuss what you see with your teacher.

One night at a hotel in 2009, tech executive Shawn Seipler thought about how many bars of soap guests use for a night and then leave. He called the front desk to find out what they did with the used soap and learned that they just throw it away. In the U.S. alone, hotels throw out about 3.3 million bars of soap every day.

So, Seipler started Clean the World, a nonprofit that recycles soap, in his garage. He quickly discovered that major hotel chains, airlines, cruise companies and casinos were happy to pay him to take their waste. The business has since grown into a $750k production facility in Orlando, Florida, with branch operations around the world.

Around 18 billion cigarettes are sold around the world every day. In the United States alone, it is estimated that cigarette-related healthcare costs exceed USD $300 billion per year. However, the sale of cigarettes in the US has had an interesting history over the past century.

Please have a look at the chart below and discuss what you see with your teacher.

In 2017, Shanna Swan and Hagai Levine, along with six other researchers, estimated the average sperm count for 43,000 men in 55 countries across the world. The data, from 185 previously published studies, suggest that sperm counts fell by about 25% between 1973 and 2011. They found that sperm counts had in fact fallen by about 50% in Western countries over the period. Although the data were less plentiful, similar trends were observed in developing countries, too.

Please have a look at the chart below and discuss what you see with your teacher.

Human beings are flawed. So no system of defense that depends on human action is going to be able to protect us 100% of the time. But we can prevent most problems. In 1990, Professor James Reason came up with the "Swiss Cheese model" to create defenses that are hard to break through.

Think about Swiss cheese—it has lots of holes in it, right? Well, the Swiss Cheese defense model takes the "holes", or human flaws, into account by using several layers of defense. Each layer has holes, but not every layer has the same holes. So, put enough different layers together and there won't be a complete series of holes that line up to allow something through. Each human failure will be blocked by other successes.

This opinion is a rant—a passionate, typically angry, speech or piece of writing about one particular topic.

This rant is about American anti-maskers—people who are opposed to wearing a face mask during the coronavirus outbreak. 

Take a deep breath and try to read as emphatically as you can.
—
"I can't stand it! These people who won't wear masks even though all the medical science says it helps prevent the spread of COVID-19. I hope all the anti-maskers have never taken meds for anything, or know anyone who has. That includes blood pressure meds, insulin, asthma inhalers, allergy medicine, pain relievers, eye drops—heck, even bandaids! What do they put on a cut? Natural remedies like moss and honey? I highly doubt it. So they're either totally ignorant, or total hypocrites.