Montel Williams touts Israel’s medical marijuana

October 31, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, General, health, Israeliness, Life, Medical Breakthroughs 

Israel’s reputations as having one of the most advanced medical marijuana programs in the world is getting a big boost these days.

American TV star Montel Williams, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and he has since been an outspoken advocate of medical marijuana to relieve pain caused by the disease, is evidently impressed with our medical usage of the cannabis plant and during a visit to Israel this week, said that he believes the US has something to learn from our policies.

“There are chemicals within that plant,” he told AP, “and some of the leading science on where and how those chemicals work is being done right here in this country,” referring to Israel.

The former host of the popular long-running talk show “The Montel Williams Show” – which rivaled Oprah and Geraldo for popularity – was in Israel meeting with MKs, scientists and physicians about Israel’s medical marijuana practices.

Hundreds of Israelis receive medical marijuana on a regular basis in a government program launched in 1994. I spoke to the program director a couple years ago – Dr. Yehuda Baruch – who said that around 60 more patients applied each month to join the program that enables them to receive free marijuana for their medical problems.
Among the conditions accepted by the program are cancer patients, HIV positive patients, people with Crohn’s Disease or ulcerative colitis, who are being treated by gastroenterologists and MS patients specifically for the spasticity symptoms upon recommendation from an MS center or a neurological specialist. Patients with post stress trauma disorder were being tested with the drug on an experimental basis, Baruch told me.

Montel Williams


Itay Goor-Aryeh, the head of the pain management unit at the Sheba Medical Center, told AP that medical marijuana is often more advantageous than other pain-relieving drugs.

Those patients, if they do not get cannabis, they will get morphine-like drugs and other harmful drugs,” said Goor-Aryeh. “I think that in many ways, cannabis is tolerated and is less addictive that morphine-based drugs.”

Williams, who says he uses marijuana daily to alleviate his pain, will surely go back to the US with a different view of Israel.

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Mothers and brain function

October 26, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: education, General, Life, Medical Breakthroughs 

A mom mouse and her pups

I’d had a sense that some kind of instinctive mothering call had been installed in my brain upon becoming a mother — and there are many who would agree — but now two Hebrew University researchers have proof, thanks to mice.

According to Dr. Adi Mizrahi and his post-doctoral colleague Dr. Lior Cohen, and based on research conducted on mice, neural changes integrating odors and sounds lie behind a mouse mother’s ability to recognize and respond to distress calls from her pups. In other words, those certain behaviors associated with motherhood are driven, at least in part, by alterations in brain function.

Mizrahi, who just had the findings published in the journal Neuron, commented that while the distinct brain changes linked with motherhood are known, it was the impact of those changes on sensory processing as well as the emergence of maternal behaviors that were unknown.

“In mice,” explained Mizrahi, “olfactory and auditory cues play a major role in the communication between a mother and her pups. Therefore, we hypothesized that there may be some interaction between olfactory and auditory processing so that pup odors might modulate the way pup calls are processed in the mother’s brain.”

The researchers exposed regular mice, mice that had experienced interaction with their pups, and lactating mother mice to pup odors, and then monitored both spontaneous and sound-evoked activity of neurons in the auditory cortex. The odors triggered dramatic changes in auditory processing only in the females that had interacted with pups, while the lactating mothers were the most sensitive to pup sounds. The olfactory-auditory integration appeared in lactating mothers shortly after they had given birth and had a particularly strong effect on the detection of pup distress calls.

Having been in the mother mouses’s situation, I’m commiserating. But it feels good to have science behind you.

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A Nobel celebration for Israel

October 9, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Science, Social Justice, Technology 

I don’t mean to brag, but… another Nobel Prize for an Israeli?
Everyone know that Technion Professor Daniel Schechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasicrystals last week. But it’s pretty mind-boggling to think that he’s the sixth Israeli to receive the prestigious prize in the last nine years!.
You’ve got Ada E. Yonath – awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome; Robert Aumann – awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis; Aaron Ciechanover – awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation; Daniel Kahneman – awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in prospect theory.

“This is a great day for me personally … and it’s definitely a grea day for science,” said Schechtman at a news conference held Wednesday. He added that the day was one of celebration for all scientists. “I’m sure the prize is also your accomplishment. It is because of you this field is successful.”
Once a source of ridicule, Schechtman won his award for discovering a structure known as a quasicrystal. According to New Scientist, materials with this structure are relatively new to science, and still something of a mathematical curiosity. But they have already found uses in steel armour, non-stick frying pans and devices in cars for recycling waste heat into electricity.

According to New Scientist, back in 1982, Schechtman’s claim to have discovered such a substance provoked so much controversy and ridicule that his boss asked him to leave the lab where he chanced on the discovery, at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Schechtman’s sin was to identify a crystal that broke a golden rule of chemical symmetry. He was eventually proven right though, and last week joined the list of notables for his achievements.

Back to why there’s a statistcally huge percentage of Israelis gaining international acclaim when we are too few to figure even as a marginal statistical error in world population figures, is something that has yet to be figured out. Saul Singer and Dan Senor’s great book Startup Nation offers some great reasons and should be a must-read for anyone interested in Israel.
But for the time being, let’s put the ‘whys’ aside, and celebrate another example of Israel and Israeli minds are helping to contribute to the world’s well being.

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Come Meet the “Other” at TEDxJaffa Today – Streaming Live!

September 7, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Life, Medical Breakthroughs, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Science, Technology 

tedxjaffa TED

Watch the stream live today from Jaffa starting at 9 am EST.

It’s really easy to sit at your kitchen table in Brooklyn, Toronto, Vancouver, or Berkley and shoot off comments about the Middle East conflict. It’s harder when you live in it. It’s hard when you have to think twice about taking the bus, plane, or train because it might blow up, and it’s hard knowing that every person who shares your society with you are paying the majority of their taxes to a staggering defense budget.

I live in Israel. I live in Jaffa, Israel — a city next to Tel Aviv populated by Muslims, Christians and Jews. Some of us are atheists, some traditional and others defiantly religious. I chose to live here and it’s a crazy place. It’s not crazy because people here care about their religion, enough to fight over it or talk about it incessantly. It’s crazy because of its improbability.

In Jaffa, some Muslims call themselves Palestinians. Some Christians call themselves Israeli Palestinian Christian Arabs. The Jews are just Israelis of course, unless they come from Arab countries and they are Sephardic or those from Europe say they are Ashkenazi. You can find escaped donkeys galloping down the streets at midnight. You can find the best European chocolate cake beside a working man’s morning hummous joint. My husband says he wouldn’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a dead body on our front porch: there is also a lot of crime in Jaffa.

But Jaffa has its charm. Its own rhythm is marked by the five calls to prayer, with the one at sunset telling my baby daughter (who is Jewish) it’s time to go to sleep. It’s got a roughness, and sharp corners, and just when you think it’s too hard to handle, you’ll catch a new smell reminding you of some other time from our collective memory when civilization began, somewhere around here.

But more than people know, Jaffa — the city of the Bible where Jonah disembarks from before getting swallowed by the whale and spat out on shore near Nineveh — is a lens through which the world can understand cultural diversity, and cultural freedom in Israel.

Today at my home the East West House we will help host TEDxJaffa under the theme the Desire to Know the Other. There is a strong line-up of people from Jaffa, like my musician husband Yisrael Borochov, but also people from Israel and the Palestinian Authority who will tell their personal and professional stories on working to know the other. One speaker survived a terror attack and was afraid to look in the mirror to see how much of her face was left; one speaker will be a successful Palestinian policeman turned businessman; and if you log on to our simulcast today (or see the videos later) you’ll meet Haya Samir, an Israeli Muslim whose family came to Israel as political refugees from Egypt. Raised as a Jew, she found out as a young woman that she was in fact a Muslim.

Haya is an Israeli diva. And we are so glad to know her. Today she will sing songs of the pioneering days in Israel – Debka Fantasia – before 1948 when young Jews met Bedouin and Arab shepherds. These pioneers longed for a culture that combined, not defined, the Middle East with European values. I think this is what the people in the Arab uprisings are coming to terms with.

Would you like to get off your chair and dance to a little music with us LIVE? Maybe meet someone whose views might change your worldview about the Middle East conflict?

The simulcast starts at at 9 am EST time today Wednesday if you are in New York City. Log on at the TEDxJaffa site to see it. Officially in Israel the event starts at 3.

Alli Meets Aladdin

The idea for TEDx in Jaffa started with my friend Alli Magidsohn, who is producing and curating the event. The fellow Jaffinian, who is from LA, was inspired to fulfill this dream after an encounter with a man (a genie?) in Sinai named Aladdin.

Her words: “We felt lucky to have the opportunity to meet and form a new friendship in an overall context that might have otherwise limited us as enemies and spoke about the area’s conflicts, spirituality, Love, and many other things together. His perspectives broadened my mind and this encounter made me realize that as an American Jew living in Israel, even opposite an Muslim Egyptian man, there is still so much more that we have in common than there is that separates us.

“Other encounters in Sinai, Israel and Palestine led to further ‘broadening’, deeper respect and more curiosity, and TEDxJaffa is the manifestation of this process of personal expansion. ‘The Desire to know The Other’, for me – not necessarily for the event’s speakers – isn’t about explicit things like politics or peace or coexistence, it’s really about that desire to look from the inside, outwards, and to try to take in, understand, or somehow be enriched by exposing oneself to another person’s experience.

Log in folks at 9 am if you are New York or Toronto. All other cities: the event’s at 3 PM + 7 hours EST. Link from here.

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Israelis help ease the headaches during Ramadan

August 24, 2011 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, health, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Medical Breakthroughs 

Observers of Ramadan can get to the goodies without debilitating headaches thanks to Israeli researchers.

The month-long Ramadan period is in full swing, and from our home, we can see the nightly bright lights of our neighboring Muslim village, as the residents gather nightly to end their day-long fast with a culinary celebration.

For an entire month at the height of the oppressive summer heat, the observant Muslim population fasts from dawn to dusk, an effort that goes far past our 24 hour fasts for Yom Kippur, Tisha Be’av and the other lesser Jewish fast days during the annual holiday cycle. So we Jewish Israelis can certainly identify with the trials of our Muslim neighbors, as they abstain from eating for a whole month: so much so, that Israeli researchers have conducted a study on how to help Muslims avoid incapacitating headaches during Ramadan.

According to a study published in the journal Headache, about four of every 10 Ramadan observers get headaches. However, a pill produced by US pharmaceutical giant Merck called Arcoxia, may prevent the headaches from taking shape. The pill, made from the drug etoricoxib, had already been shown to be effective in a study that revealed that Jews fasting for Yom Kippur who took Arcoxia got fewer headaches than those that didn’t take the pill.

Reuters Health reported that in the new study, Michael Drescher, from Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, along with a group of Israeli colleagues, assigned 222 Muslim adults planning to fast in 2010 to either take the drug or an inactive placebo pill just before the start of fasting each day. All participants recorded how often they had a headache, and how severe it was.

After a week they switched treatments. During the first day of fasting, when headaches are thought to be most common, 21 percent of people taking Arcoxia reported having a headache, compared to 46 percent of those who took the placebo pill.

The Arcoxia group also reported fewer total headaches during that first week, the researchers wrote. And when they did have headaches, they rated them as less severe than participants taking the placebo.

Arcoxia isn’t currently approved for use in the US because the FDA decided it was too similar to another Merck drug called Vioxx, which was pulled from the market in 2004 when it was linked to a higher risk of heart attack. But Arcoxia is available in Israel, as well as other countries.

And as far as any Jewish or Muslim religious opposition to taking a pill to prevent headaches during their respective fasts, Drescher told Reuters Health that none of the Muslim participants expressed any objections, and that rabbis who were consulted pointed out that not having a headache could allow people to be “freer spiritually.”

“The religious edict to fast really is not a command to suffer,” Drescher added.

So from one fasting people to another, Ramadan Kareem!

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