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piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
The Future Is Now: A Reimagining Of How We Treat Diseases Is Already Underway
If there is a single idea that has defined the year in the area of health, it is this – the rethinking of conventional approaches to diagnosis and treatment. In this context, this radio hour on TED makes for illuminating listening. It features some big names including oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch who famously discovered that certain brain cells have the ability to generate new cells and author of the bestseller ‘Being Mortal’ Atul Gawande.
Though I would recommend a full listen (around 50 minutes), the first 13 minutes is crucial if you wish to obtain a glimpse into the new paradigms that are opening up in the world of medicine. Siddhartha Mukherjee discusses how it is time for us to reimagine the ways our bodies heal. For centuries, medical thinking has remained stagnant; identify disease, take a pill and kill something. This method largely has worked because of the success of antibiotics, as Mukherjee says: this (too) clean ‘lock and key’ approach is "tantalising and seductive". So much so that it has prevented us from looking beyond and kept us in a sort of ‘chemical darkness’.
He argues that it is easier to throw a spanner in the works (which is what medicine has been doing for ages to tackle disease) rather than make a cog from scratch. He quotes the example of the recent usage of immune therapies to treat cancer – wherein the micro-environment in which a tumour grows is targeted and made less hospitable for cancer cells. This is what he terms ‘building up’ rather than ‘going down’. He comes up with the ‘seed in soil’ hypothesis in which he explains how medicine’s focus has long been on the seed. But the spotlight is at last shining on the soil: the environment of the organism and the connections that sustain it. This opens up a whole new world – of nutritive prevention, regenerative treatments, precision medicine and so on – which have the potential to transform our understanding of the human body.
