Searching for a cure to insomnia the Israeli way
Photo from Israel21c
Haaretz recently published an article about an Israeli website they dubbed “Dr. Google.” The site is called Treato; its goal is to aggregate health and medical information, in particular on drug side effects, in a single place rather than forcing sufferers to wade through thousands of hits on Google, many of which are either irrelevant, unverified, or thinly veiled ads for the drug manufacturers themselves.
I had a chance to speak with the Treato guys last November for an article on Israel21c and their aim, as Elvis Costello might croon, is indeed true. The site, which is backed by the former CEO of Israeli powerhouse Commtouch and some $9 million in venture capital, covers some 13,000 conditions and 11,000 medications. There are 800 million patient discussions indexed, coming from 23 million patients. Treato then analyzes and prioritizes all that data, so you don’t have to.
When I was writing the article, I decided to give Treato the personal touch. I’ve suffered from insomnia most of my life. People who don’t sleep have a lot of extra time on their hands, which often translates into trolling discussion boards in the wee hours of the night. Everyone has their own treatment successes or failures, and they’re all ready to share, push and proselytize as if their solution is just on the cusp of curing the rest of us.
There are the magnet hucksters, the CBT wonks, the magnesium machers, the anti-chocolate crowd, the acupuncture/homeopathy/chiropractor/melatonin/meditation groupies and, of course, an unending stream of recommendations for this or that sleeping pill or anti-depressant.
I’m not putting any of these true believers down – on the contrary, I’ve tried the gamut of proposals and some have actually provided some relief. It’s just that Google is an unforgiving intermediary. She doesn’t tell you what ranks higher and what the potential side effects might be. Treato does.
You still have to work it. A search on Treato for “insomnia + not sleeping” resulted in 33,000 comments, from both expected sites (anxietyzone.com, askapatient.com, healthboards.com) and some surprises (breastcancer.org, autismweb,com, schizophrenia.com). But at least I don’t have to open each site one at a time; Treato puts it all in one place.
Treato launched in 2011, is aiming for revenues of $10 million this year, and hopes to break even in 2013. It’s not a play likely to be picked up by Mark Zuckerberg or other social media moguls. “People don’t like to talk about anti-depressants on Facebook,” Gideon Mantel, the company’s CEO says.
In the meantime, I’ll keep using Treato. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll discover that pickles and ice cream are the perfect cure for insomnia. Either that or I’m pregnant.
Apping the Omer
The "Sefiros" iPhone app
From the second day of Passover until the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, observant Jews perform a ritual called “counting the Omer.” Between those two dates, there are 49 days and, during evening prayers, one is commanded to say a few special phrases to mark each day (the “Omer” refers to a measure of barley offered as a sacrifice during Temple times).
There are Kabalistic connotations as well as historical/mythological ones: it’s said that a great plague that killed 24,000 followers of the first century CE luminary Rabbi Akiva abated on the 33rd day of the Omer. In Hebrew, it’s known as L’ag b’Omer, or more popularly in Israel, the “night of the bonfires” (ask any kid toting a rotted old bathroom door and you’ll quickly get the gist).
Counting the Omer is not terribly difficult in and of itself, but there’s a built in trick: if you miss counting for just a single day, you can’t say it with a blessing again for the remainder of the 49 days. For the frummer among us, that can be a big deal. It’s like Survivor or Big Brother, except the last one standing doesn’t win a million bucks, just the undying gratitude of a possible deity.
I can tell you that, when I was more religious myself, there wasn’t a single year that I got through until Shavuot intact. So I probably would have been delighted to have discovered a new iPhone app called “Sefiros” (that means “counting”) which is here to remind you to, well, count.
It’s really a very simple app: you set a timer and the app beeps to tell you it’s time to say the prayer. Sure you could do that with your regular iPhone calendar…but would you? A dedicated app with a repeating alarm that expires after 49 days is just that much easier.
To make it a bit more robust, the Sefiros app lets you add “action alerts” to your reminders; you can set them be with “with God,” “with others,” or “with yourself.” You can even reach out for a little social media feedback and post your success to Twitter. “Hey fellow frumsters, I made it to day #29. Nya, nya, nya.”
Not sure when sunset is? Never fear, Sefiros checks the time using GPS. The blessing you’re supposed to say is all there in punctuated prayer book Hebrew. And to beef it all up, the app includes a page of Kabalistic and personal growth insights for each day, written by Rabbi Yaakov Haber (his whole book is included in the app). Jerusalem-based AppStudio built the whole thing.
Can I recommend Sefiros? If you always lose the “did I remember to count” game like I once did, sure, why not? At $4.99, it’s not cheap, as far as apps go. But who’s counting anyway?
Srugim co-creator tells all in Jerusalem lecture
Poster advertising Laizy Shapira's lecture this week
For its three season run, I was hooked on the Israeli TV drama Srugim. The program told the tale of four religious (and one formerly religious) young Israelis living in Jerusalem’s singles-centric Old Katamon neighborhood, affectionately known as the “swamp.”
The show won praise from both religious and secular society – the latter were captivated by its realistic portrayals of a “hidden” slice of an Israeli demographic they knew little about, while the former cringed but stayed glued to the tube for the way Srugim touched subjects often painfully close to home, much like thirtysomething did for Yuppie Americans in the late 1980s.
So it was quite a treat to hear the show’s co-creator Laizy Shapira speak about the show this week as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Ginot Ha’ir Community Council in Jerusalem. The lecture also coincided with the release of the third and final season of the show on DVD including English subtitles.
Shapira is a charmer – personable, energetic and transparent in the best Israeli way (i.e., open but not too aggressive). It’s not hard to understand how he sold an initially skeptical television network on a show that defied stereotypes and embraced modesty (there’s sex but it’s mostly off screen). Srugim went on to win the top awards for a television drama at Israel’s version of the Emmy’s.
For a die-hard fan like me, some of the best moments of the talk were the insights into character development that only one of the show’s creators could share (warning: if you haven’t finished the show yet, spoilers ahead).
Q: Why did Amir and Yifat have such a tough first year of marriage? A: If you want to see a good marriage, watch your own wedding videos (“hopefully,” Shapira added).
Q: Why did Hodaya and Avri have to get back together, break up, and then only acknowledge their true love in the last scene of show? A: The dramatic tension between the two was all about the religious-secular divide which vanished once Hodaya left religion herself. But the fans (and ultimately the writers) demanded a happy ending.
Q: Why did Ro’i, who struggled with his sexual identity all through season two, have to turn haredi (ultra-Orthodox)? A: That subplot was too tragic to sustain itself indefinitely. The show’s writers decided they needed to resolve it. He either could have come out of the closet entirely or repressed himself by going frum. The latter seemed to give him more peace.
And the most important question: Why is Shapira voluntarily calling it quits, seemingly at the height of the show’s popularity? A: Srugim was all about the journey. Now that many of the characters have found closure, Shapira says “there’s nothing interesting left to tell.”
I’m not so sure about that. When I spoke with him after the presentation, Shapira noted that the writers scrutinized every word in the scripts, to make sure nothing came across as too far out. He then related a personal story.
Just before his own wedding a couple of years back, Shapira got hit in the eye by a hard candy hurled at him in synagogue, resulting in a huge shiner. He covered it up with make up (after all, he is in the business) but was concerned what people would say the next morning when he exited the bridal chamber with his face all black and blue!
That was a plot line that no one would have believed if it was in the show, Shapira joked; the kind of thing he was worried might creep into the scripts if the show edged past its proper expiration date. Maybe. But for 1,000+ members of the Srugim Facebook fan page, it would have been worth another season even full of bloopers like that.
But, hey, how about a spin off show? Look how well it worked for Joey from Friends…
New Waze to social justice
You can message from Waze user to user
Twitter and Facebook have rightly become famous as the most powerful new media tools used today to organize protests against social and governmental injustice. Now there’s a new one, and it has the potential to be not only influential but annoyingly intrusive.
The latest mobile service to be drafted into the fray is Waze, the social driving app that I wrote about for Israel21c last year. Waze shows you where traffic is slowing down…or where you yourself should slow down to avoid a cop at a speed trap. It’s all crowdsourced, meaning that the data Waze gets comes from fellow Waze users out on the road, posting manual updates or letting Waze do it for them automatically.
It’s an incredibly seductive app and has an estimated 1.5 million drivers in Israel on the road with their Android and iPhones working away. Full disclosure: I have Waze and love it too.
But Waze also has a feature where you can send messages to other Waze users (they show up with smiley car icons on your Waze map). And that’s how, last weekend, a group called Free Israel took advantage of Waze to send out mass messages to other Waze users protesting the fact that public transportation doesn’t operate on Shabbat.
The “message-in” took place in Tel Aviv and included such slogans as “Buses to and from hospitals were forced to stop due to religious coercion,” and “Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz won’t let me on the bus.” The protest organizers implied that, were there buses running on the weekend, people wouldn’t be forced to drive in their cars, although I suspect a one-to-one correlation would be a tad hard to prove.
Now, here’s where it gets potentially meddlesome. There’s nothing to stop other Waze users from mass messaging themselves. That could take the form of an advertisement (“Hey everyone, we’ve got the best sushi in Herzeliya”) or political activism beyond lobbying for Saturday buses. In this article in last week’s The Times of Israel, for example, West Bank activist Shmuel Ben-Yosef suggested using Waze “to bring more Israelis to Judea and Samaria.”
His innovative method: when Waze users see the traffic jams around their favorite parks this coming Israeli Independence Day, Ben-Yosef would send out a message informing drivers about “some beautiful destinations just a few minutes away from the population centers that many residents of the large cities don’t know about,” he says.
The Tel Aviv bus protests may have let the genie out of the bag for a whole range of unexpected uses for unsuspecting drivers.
Taking care of our children
Hila Betzaleli poses at the Mount Herzl parade grounds, two hours before the tragedy in which she lost her life. (photo credit: Channel 2 News)
Two soldiers died tragically yesterday in what would seem to have been preventable accidents. The incident that grabbed the top headlines was at Mount Herzl where a lighting rig fell during practice for the next week’s Independence Day ceremony, crushing to death 20-year-old Hila Betzaleli from Mevesseret Zion.
The other death was 19-year-old Yehoshua Hefetz who collapsed during an exercise at the Combat Engineering Corps. in the Negev desert where he was training for the group’s elite Sayeret Yahalom special operations unit. First reports were that he was severely dehydrated on an unusually hot day with high winds and lots of dust. The army says it was cardiac arrest, although a post-mortem electrocardiogram performed at Eilat’s Yoseftal Medical Center showed no evidence of any congenital heart defect.
The second death hit closer to home: our daughter knew the young man, a Jerusalemite, through a mutual friend and went to high school with Hefetz’s sister. She texted me yesterday quite upset, understandably.
The two incidents – the second one in particular – always raise the question of “how could they have let this happen?” We send our children off to the army and entrust that the IDF will take care of them. War is one thing, but training accidents are particularly tragic.
And there have been others: earlier this year, Private Dvir Moor died after contracting an infection during basic training. And two years ago, another training incident claimed the life of Omri Shoshan was accidentally shot in the back.
I know that sh*t happens. As a parent, I have sometimes imagined locking my children in the house so that they’d be free from any harm out in the big scary world. I can’t imagine our children would agree.
Our daughter said that Hefetz’s father had died just two months ago. He is survived by his mother and two sisters. Our hearts go out to him and Hila Betzaleli. May their families know no more sorrow.
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