2017.05.15 04:24
2017.05.15 04:48
2017.05.15 05:46
Years ago, one of Indian doctors that I worked with told me about an Indian old saying, "everybody is born
with the given number of heart beats." That may explain that meditation leads to severe bradycardia.
Too much exercise will consume it too fast.
I am a teetotaler, not because my brother is an alcoholic, but a alcoholic dehydrogenase deficicirncy runs in
my family.
2017.05.15 09:54
Effects of deep meditation by the accomplished yogi were studied for the first time in 1970's.
A bunch of medical researchers went to India and made observations on those meditators in the cave
and in addition brought one master to Menninger Foundation for more in depth studies.
To everyone's surprise and on the contrary to what we were taught in medical schools around the world,
these accomplished meditators had ability not only to slow down heart rate and to lower the BP but also
to raise or to lower skin temperature. In the snowy and icy winter day they can walk barefooted without
having frostbite. In other words they could control their autonomic nerve system consciously in a remarkable way.
Out of all these research the so called biofeedback therapy came about in the mainstream of medicine.
Migraine headache, idiopathic postural hypotension, etc. have been treated by this method.
University of Michigan has had a biofeedback dept to which I referred one of my patients with severe migraine,
not very well responding to drug therapy. This was many years ago when we didn't have good medicines other than beta blockers.
The problem lowering heart rate by meditation is that it takes too many years of dedication to reach the stage
where one can indeed slow down the heart rate significantly.
Modern men and women with families have no chance to accomplish that, I believe.
These yogis studied in 1970's spent decades and their lifetimes before they achieved this ability.
I remember seeing one on a TV show where they put him in a airtight glass box with not enough oxygen.
He was in the box for over an hour during which time he lowered the heart rate to 20's and lowered body temp
in order to lower body metabolism and O2 consumption. And he was fine afterwards.
Some of the aspects of martial arts, I believe, share a similar phenomenon that cannot be explained well
by old standard medical school teaching.
The story of acupuncture is another eye opening experience for the western medicine after President Nixon's visit to China.
All of these just show us the limitations of human knowledge in medical science as well as in every branch of science.
2017.05.15 10:42
Thank you for your comment about meditation. I learned something today. May I try?
2017.05.15 11:36
You may certainly do so, Dr. Ohn.
Asides lowering heart rate, the benefits of meditation are said to be many, which we are finding out
more as we learn more about our brain.
https://theconnection.tv/use-mind-control-heart-rate/
2017.05.16 15:25
I think the theory of "Fixed Energy or Fixed Amount of Heart Beats" is a dumb excuse
for the lazy or crazy people. How can you believe such things?
I am really curious in that some cardiologists believe in this stuff.
One of our senior SNU medical alumni believed the same thing of fixed amount of heart beats.
He, being a senior and a writer in our website, I stayed quiet without challenging his theory.
If this is correct, by having exhausted my heart beats and energy, I should have died long time ago.
Just let you know that my heart seldom beat less than 75-80/min while I was young
and now it runs about 72/min. What then,...Am I running out of my heart beats?
I skied three hours on moguls today at the expenditure of extreme energies and hear beats.
Whose energies and heart beats did I use today? I ran out my own long time ago.
2017.05.16 20:03
A new study, published in Heart, suggests that a higher resting heart rate is an independent predictor of mortality — even in healthy people in good physical condition.
Danish researchers gave physical exams to 5,249 healthy middle-aged and elderly men beginning in 1971. In 1985 and 1986, they tracked survivors, of whom there were 3,354. Of these, 2,798 had sufficient data on heart rate and oxygen consumption for the analysis. Researchers followed them through 2011.
After controlling for physical fitness and many other health and behavioral factors, they found that the higher the resting heart rate, the greater the risk for death. Compared with men with rates of 50 beats a minute or less, those at 71 to 80 beats had a 51 percent greater risk. At 81 to 90 beats, the rate of death was doubled, and over 90 it was tripled.
“If you have two healthy people,” said the lead author, Dr. Magnus Thorsten Jensen, a researcher at Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte, “exactly the same in physical fitness, age, blood pressure and so on, the person with the highest resting heart rate is more likely to have a shorter life span.”
A version of this article appears in print on 04/23/2013, on page D4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Regimens: Heart Rate and Life Span.
2017.05.16 22:19
J Am Coll Cardiol. 1997 Oct;30(4):1104-6.
Among mammals, there is an inverse semilogarithmic relation between heart rate and life expectancy. The product of these variables, namely, the number of heart beats/lifetime, should provide a mathematical expression that defines for each species a predetermined number of heart beats in a lifetime. Plots of the calculated number of heart beats/lifetime among mammals against life expectancy and body weight (allometric scale of 0.5 x 10(6)) are, within an order of magnitude, remarkably constant and average 7.3 +/- 5.6 x 10(8) heart beats/lifetime. A study of universal biologic scaling and mortality suggests that the basal energy consumption/body atom per heart beat is the same in all animals (approximately 10(-8) O2 molecules/heart beat). These data yield a mean value of 10 x 10(8) heart beats/lifetime and suggest that life span is predetermined by basic energetics of living cells and that the apparent inverse relation between life span and heart rate reflects an epiphenomenon in which heart rate is a marker of metabolic rate. Thus, the question of whether human life can be extended by cardiac slowing remains moot and most likely will only be resolved by retrospective analyses of large populations, future animal studies and clinical trials using bradycardic therapy.
(from Internet)
2017.05.18 04:00
Why don't they give us the actual number of the total heart beats that was assigned to human species?
Then, we will all know the exact date and time when we run out of the assigned beats and die.
Don't you see the stupidity in this assumption? This is almost as stupid as Trump himself.
Should we abstain ourself from doing anything exciting? No excercise, hard work, sex, love, and etc.
We shall stay in bed all day long to save the extra heart beats??
People with fast heart rate die early because of the problem or the nature associated with the fast rate
or something we do not yet know, not because of the pre-determined total heart beats.
Here is the "amended" Fox News:
The CEO of Fox, Roger Ailes died today as he ran out either the energies or heart beats
assigned to him when he was born.
He just had too much of hard works, or sexual activities and harassments.
Trump's theory about exercise,
"....human body is like a battery with a fixed amount of energy, which exercise can only deplete ...."
He doesn't believe in regular, aerobic or any kind of exercise according to this report.
Obviously he also thinks active life style including doing pleasure sport like golf is all one needs.
There is some logic to his theory.
It reminds me of a debate cardiologists had when I was having my Cardiology fellowship training in 1970.
Some cardiologists have believed that every one's heart is born with so many heart beats, let's say one billion beats.
If you are not careful, you will use up the number by exercising too much and making heart beat faster so that
you will die sooner than otherwise as Donald Trump is saying.
The reason aerobic exercise is advocated according to these cardiologists is partly because the fitted person's heart
beats slower even under stress than the non-fit person's heart.
As a consequence the properly fitted heart will not use up the fixed number of heart beats, one billion,
not as fast so that it will last longer.
I have to give some credit to Donald Trump regarding his observation.
He also observed his older brother died prematurely of alcoholism and decided not to drink early and
has become a teetotaler.