This just in! University of Iowa Psychiatrist Dr. Susan Shen, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at The University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine and, hold on to your hat, she’s the first female psychiatrist, the first from Iowa, and only the third psychiatrist overall to receive to win the Avenir Award (French for “future), a highly competitive grant!
The $2.3 million dollar grant will help fund her lab’s research into the underpinnings of substance use and psychiatric disorders. The grant is administered through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
We’re going to get about a foot of snow starting tonight according to the weather report. There are webcams about Iowa that will document the storm, which will occur across most of the state. You can watch it’s progress on the University of Iowa webcam.
We’ve charged up the batteries in the Voltask electric snow shovel, which got quite a workout last winter. We took videos of using it that racked up over 5,200 views. Search my site with the term “electric snow shovel.”
Over three years ago, I posted about a waving man we used to see a lot of on a busy street in Iowa City (yes, we have them). He worked at the grocery store and waved at traffic whether he was walking to work or leaving. He still works there but we don’t drive that route much anymore so we don’t see him out waving.
Occasionally I’ll see news stories about men who wave at people driving by. They always look like they have a great time being friendly. I think most of us get a big kick out of it.
I saw another story today about a guy named Kent Proudfit in Urbandale, Iowa who does the same thing. After a while I wondered why I saw only stories about men do the waving thing. And then I found a story about a 74-year-old woman named Patricia Bracey who’s a waver in Chesterfield, Virginia. She says the Lord told her to do it.
So, waving at people driving by is an equal opportunity activity for cheering up others. I get the sense that it’s mostly older people who sit or stand by the side of the road and wave at folks driving by.
On the other hand, there is another phenomenon that works on the same principle of helping others feel good. It’s the Iowa Hawkeye Wave at the end of the first quarter of the football game in which the all the players, staff, and tens of thousands of fans of all ages in the stands get up at wave at the kids and their families in the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital. It’s now called one of the greatest traditions in college sports. It got started in 2017, which is not such a very long time ago.
Iowa's cancer rates are among the highest in the country, and they are rising. In this episode of Rounding@Iowa, Dr. Gerry Clancy and guest experts Dr. Mary Charlton and Dr. Mark Burkard discuss the data, risk factors, and prevention strategies clinicians can use to make a difference. CME Credit Available: https://uiowa.cloud-cme.com/course/courseoverview?P=0&EID=81274 Host: Gerard Clancy, MD Senior Associate Dean for External Affairs Professor of Psychiatry and Emergency Medicine University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine Guests: Mark E. Burkard, MD, PhD Professor of Internal Medicine-Hematology, Oncology, and Blood and Marrow Transplantation University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine Director, University of Iowa Health Care Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center Mary Charlton, PhD Professor of Epidemiology Director, Iowa Cancer Registry Iowa College of Public Health Financial Disclosures: Dr. Clancy, Dr. Burkard, Dr. Charlton, and Rounding@IOWA planning committee members have disclosed no relevant financial relationships. Nurse: The University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine designates this activity for a maximum of 0.75 ANCC contact hour. Pharmacist and Pharmacy Tech: The University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine designates this knowledge-based activity for a maximum of 0.75 ACPE contact hours. Credit will be uploaded to the NABP CPE Monitor within 60 days after the activity completion. Pharmacists must provide their NABP ID and DOB (MMDD) to receive credit. UAN: JA0000310-0000-25-090-H99 Physician: The University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.75 AMA PRA Category 1 CreditTM. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. Other Health Care Providers: A certificate of completion will be available after successful completion of the course. (It is the responsibility of licensees to determine if this continuing education activity meets the requirements of their professional licensure board.) References/Resources: Iowa Cancer Plan
This is a fascinating topic and the discussion ran for close to an hour, which is longer than usual because there’s a lot to say about it. The substances include a lot of chemicals that are not illegal and, in some cases, easily available in convenience stores and gas stations. In fact, the name for one of them is gas station heroin, which is tianeptine, approved in other countries as an antidepressant.
The discussion also included substantial information (or maybe better said, lack of enough information) about bath salts (usually cathinones), kratom, and something I’ve never even heard of: diamond shruumz (chocolate bars which can contain various substances not limited to psilocin). Remember that guy who chewed the face off of somebody in Miami in 2012? That was attributed to intoxication with bath salts.
This is way beyond the 1970s stuff like window pane or blotter (LSD) and pot. Many people end up in emergency rooms for evaluation of what looks like poisoning from multiple drugs. The stickler is the possibility that they got poisoned from something bought at a convenience store. Often it’s difficult to tell what the person ingested.
One of the takeaways from this podcast is that, whenever possible, try to get a history from the patient. They might just tell you what you need to know.
OK, so Sena picked all the patio tomatoes and most of them didn’t turn red, especially the slicers. She’s done with growing vegetables. I saw an article about why tomatoes don’t turn red and it makes sense. The featured image shows the patio tomatoes in the plastic bucket for comparison with the red store-bought tomatoes. The bigger green ones are the slicers.
I’m a little leery about eating green tomatoes. According to another article, it’s safe to eat them as long as you don’t gorge on a lot of them. You’d have to eat about a pound and a half to get the amount of some compounds called solanine, atropine, and tomatine, which would turn you into an extraterrestrial. And University of Iowa researchers discovered green tomatoes have an alkaloid called tomatidine which may actually build muscles (don’t tell teenage boys!).
I noticed the headlines about the DEI flap at The University of Iowa, the one with the official apparently spilling the beans about University of Iowa’s DEI program not going away despite being illegal while maybe being unaware of being filmed. I’m not going to retell the story.
However, it does remind me of a time back in the 1970s in the days of affirmative action when I was a freshman student at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas.
I learned about tenacity to principle and practice from a visiting African American professor in educational psychology from the University of Texas. It was 1975. Dr. Melvin P. Sikes paced back and forth across the Agard-Lovinggood auditorium stage in a lemon-yellow leisure suit as he talked about the importance of bringing about change in society.
He was a scholar yet decried the pursuit of the mere trappings of scholarship, exhorting us to work directly for change where it was needed most. He didn’t assign term papers, but sent me and another freshman to the Austin Police Department. The goal evidently was to make them nervous by our requests for the Uniform Crime Report, which Dr. Sikes suspected might reveal a tendency to arrest blacks more frequently than whites. He wasn’t satisfied with merely studying society’s institutions; he worked to change them for the better. Although we were probably just as nervous as the police were, this real-life lesson about the importance of applying principles of change directly to society was awkward.
Nothing like confronting social issues head on, right?
We would have preferred a term paper. We sat in the police station looking at the Uniform Crime Report, which was the only resource we could get. I think we were there a couple of hours; it felt a lot longer than that. The officer who got us the paperwork was polite, but a little stiff and wasn’t really open to anything like an interview or anything close to that. I can’t remember what we came up with as a write-up for what felt like a fiasco. I’m pretty sure we didn’t bring about anything even close to change. It was a humbling experience. Maybe that was the point but I’ll never know.
Dr. Melvin P. Sikes was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen although he didn’t see combat. He was the dean of two historically black colleges, a clinical psychologist, and a University of Texas professor. He died in 2012 after a long and successful career as a psychologist, teacher, and author.
I found a podcast about him which was sponsored by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health and which aired February 15, 2024. It’s an hour long, but there are segments of interviews of him in 1972 that I consider fascinating. A couple of times he says something which I wish the interviewer had allowed him to expand on. The gist of it is that we need to have a system of education which allows people to speak from the standpoint of pride rather than rhetoric. I think what he might have meant is that it would be wonderful if we felt secure and confident in ourselves to express our minds sincerely. The word “rhetoric” makes me think of talk that is persuasive, even impressive, but maybe insincere. I think it still fits today.
We’ve lived in the Iowa City area for over 37 years and never heard of the Brain Rock until today. I don’t know how we ever missed it. It’s a work of art called Ridge and Furrow created by artist Peter Randall-Page, a world-famous artist from the United Kingdom.
It’s been called the Brain Rock for obvious reasons because the stone has what you might call gyri and sulci all over its surface. It has recently been relocated from the T. Anne Cleary walkway outside the Pomerantz Career Center to the Medical Education and Research Facility (MERF).
As Randall-Page says, if you trace the line from one side of the sculpture you can follow it to its end on the—far side of the rock, I guess you’d call it.
The other interesting thing about the Brain Rock is that a couple of intoxicated college students urinated on it back in November of 2021. No mention of whether they were trying to trace the furrow. Maybe they’d heard of the urinating sculpture and fountain called Piss in Prague.
Today is designated Earth Day although there is such a thing as Earth Month. Among the several trees Sena planted in our back yard trees are a few that we hope exemplify the Earth Day theme, which is Our Power, Our Planet.
One of them is a dogwood, which we’re hoping will bloom soon. Dogwoods represent joy and rebirth. There are a couple of crab apple trees, a red jewel and a perfect purple. Crab apple trees represent love and all are very special to Sena and me.
Love, joy, and rebirth. They can all be linked to power, which can be the power of will. The will to respect the planet also implies respecting each other. Practicing humility can be a kind of power.
The power to be still and listen to each other can make us more open to change.
On that note, because I can’t go for long without joking around, I should retell the story about me and the walking dead meditation. About 13 years ago, I had an even more serious case of not listening to others than I do now, if you can believe that. It eventually led to my choosing to take the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class ( see this current University of Iowa mindfulness essay). I wrote an essay for the Gold Foundation and it’s still available (I updated the links):
How I left the walking dead for the walking dead meditation (August 13, 2014)
About a year or so later, I bought Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Full Catastrophe Living, because I was dimly aware of the burden of stress weighing on me as a consulting psychiatrist in an academic medical center. I didn’t get much out of Kabat-Zinn’s book on my first read. But then in 2012 I started getting feedback from colleagues and trainees indicating they noticed I was edgy, even angry, and it was time for a change.
Until then, I’d barely noticed the problem. Like most physicians, I had driven on autopilot from medical school onward. I had called myself “passionate” and “direct.” I had argued there were plenty of problems with the “system” that would frustrate any doctor. I had thought to myself that something had to change, but I never thought it was me.
After reflecting on the feedback from my colleagues and students, I enrolled in our university’s 8 week group MBSRprogram. Our teacher debunked myths about mindfulness, one of which is that it involves tuning out stress by relaxing. In reality, mindfulness actually entails tuning in to what hurts as well as what soothes. I was glad to learn that mindfulness is not about passivity.
But I kept thinking of Kabat-Zinn’s book, in which he described a form of meditation called “crazy walking.” It involved class members all walking very quickly, sometimes with their eyes closed, even backwards, and crashing into each other like billiard balls. I hoped our instructor would not make me “crazy walk” because it sounded so—crazy. I dreaded crazy walking so intensely that I considered not attending the 6-hour retreat where it might occur.
We didn’t do crazy walking. Instead, we did what’s called the “walking meditation.” Imagine a very slow and deliberate gait, paying minute attention to each footfall—so much so that we were often off balance, close to crashing into each other like billiard balls.
I prefer to call this exercise the “walking dead meditation” because it bore a strong resemblance to the way zombies move. One member of the class mentioned it when we were finally permitted to speak (except for the last 20 minutes or so, the retreat had to be conducted in utter silence). It turned out we had all noticed the same thing!
Before MBSR, I was like the walking dead. I was on autopilot — going through the motions, resisting inevitable frustrations, avoiding unstoppable feelings, always lost in the story of injustices perpetrated by others and the health care system.
In practicing mindfulness, I began noticing when my brow and my gut were knotted, and why. Just paying attention helped me change from simply reacting to pressures to responding more skillfully, including the systems challenges which contribute to burnout. About halfway through the program, I noticed that the metaphor connecting flexibility in floor yoga to flexibility in solving real life problems worked.
Others noticed the change in me. My professional and personal relationships became less strained. My students learned from my un-mindfulness as well as my mindfulness, a contrast that would not have existed without MBSR.
As my instructor had forewarned, it was easy for me to say I didn’t have time to practice meditation. I had to make the time for it, and I value the practice so much that I’ll keep on making the time. I will probably never again do the walking dead meditation.
Today we gather to reward a sort of irony. We reward this quality of humanism by giving special recognition to those who might wonder why we make this special effort. Those we honor in this fashion are often abashed and puzzled. They often don’t appear to be making any special effort at being compassionate, respectful, honest, and empathic. And rewards in society are frequently reserved for those who appear to be intensely competitive, even driven.
There is an irony inherent in giving special recognition to those who are not seeking self-aggrandizement. For these, altruism is its own reward. This is often learned only after many years—but our honorees are young. They learned the reward of giving, of service, of sacrifice. The irony is that after one has given up the self in order to give back to others (family, patients, society), after all the ultimate reward—some duty for one to accept thanks in a tangible way remains.
One may ask, why do this? One answer might be that we water what we want to grow. We say to the honorees that we know that what we cherish and respect here today—was not natural for you. You are always giving up something to gain and regain this measure of equanimity, altruism, trust. You mourn the loss privately and no one can deny that to grieve is to suffer.
But what others see is how well you choose.
Leonard Tow awardGetting the pinOn my lapel; in my heart
I’m still practicing mindfulness-more or less. Nobody’s perfect. We hope the dogwood tree blooms soon.
There’s a CDC ACIP Meeting scheduled to start at 8:00 AM EST today (caught me off guard). The slides are here.
Noteworthy: Dr. Denise Jamieson, MD, MPH is chair of the CMV Working Group. She is Vice President for Medical Affairs and the Tyrone D. Artz Dean, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at University of Iowa. In the Q&A session following the Covid-19 vaccine presentation, Dr. Jamieson expressed a preference for a universal recommendation (citing implementation and uptake challenges, which other attendees mentioned as well) for the Covid-19 vaccine as opposed to a risk-based or permissive recommendation. See slide labeled “Discussion” below:
There was no vote scheduled for today’s meeting on the Covid-19 vaccine.
The presentation by Moderna on the new Covid-19 vaccine, mRNA-1283, was helpful. I gather there will be an FDA meeting about it in June.
The big news for University of Iowa will be a NASA satellite mission to investigate how solar wind interacts with Earth’s magnetosphere. You can read the whole fascinating story in this issue of Iowa Magazine.
According to the story, “twin spacecraft known as TRACERS—Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites—will begin their journey to study Earth’s mysterious magnetic interactions with the sun. The satellites will be packed with scientific instruments along with two small, but meaningful, tokens.”
The two small tokens happen to be purple guitar picks that belonged to University of Iowa physicist, Craig Kletzing, who died from cancer in 2023. Kletzing and colleagues got a $115 million contract from NASA for TRACERS. It’s the largest research award in University of Iowa history.
Kletzing played guitar in a few bands, and one them was named Bipolar—which is the only connection to psychiatry that I could see. He was dedicated to work in basic science, and he was often heard to ask “How can we make this simpler?” referring to chunking big scientific challenges into manageable goals. He was a rare person in that he was both a brilliant scientist and a great teacher. One example of his work ethic was that he skipped a meeting with NASA’s top brass in order to deliver a morning lecture on introductory physics to 275 students.
The members of the UI TRACERS team call the project “Craig’s mission.” I’m pretty sure he would have called it a team effort “… to help scientists better understand the powerful forces harmonizing throughout the universe—something the ancient Greeks described as the music of the spheres.”
And that’s what the purple guitar picks represent.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 