Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #174 BITESIZE | Why Friendships, Community and Compassion Matter for Our Health | Dr Julian Abel

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 138 of the podcast with Dr. Julian Abel, a recently retired consultant in palliative care. Now, Julian is joint leader of a project which aimed to end loneliness and improve health in the town of Froome in Somerset. And in this clip, he describes the incredible results and explains why social relationships, compassion and a sense of community are so important for our quality of life, our health and our well-being.

Starting point is 00:01:56 What happened in Froome is remarkable. Maybe you could paint the picture for us. What was going on in Froome before? What did you and colleagues introduce? And what was the profound impact that you saw? Froome is a market town. It's always had something of an independent streak about it going back through the years. And there's an incredibly good-natured, sensible, clear-thinking GP called Dr. Helen Kingston. And she understood that so much of what we do as doctors is not related to drug treatment and wanted people to feel supported by their community. So what she did is that she employed Jenny Hartnell, who's got a background in community development. And Jenny started a community development program from within the medical center. It was really about bringing the community together and making use of the

Starting point is 00:02:52 incredible wealth of resources that are present in every community. And then if people are feeling lonely or isolated, which is very, very common and is worse in illness, in fact, then there's a way of connecting that community resource to what happens inside the medical practice. There's a lady called Kathy, who was a businesswoman who got a very severe form of acute rheumatoid arthritis. And she didn't really know the people around her that well. And the rheumatoid arthritis actually put her in a wheelchair within the space of three weeks and her whole life was devastated. So she went to the doctor and said, look, I need a sense of hope that this isn't my life from now on. And so the doctor said, okay, look, I'm going to get you to see a health connector. And so Rose, a health connector,

Starting point is 00:03:43 went to see Kathy and Kathy said, I need to meet some other people who are going through this because I need to know that I'm not stuck. And then she's connected to this incredible wealth of people of all the stuff that's going on in the community, whether it's talking cafes or whether it's a knitting group or an art group or a healthy walking group or whatever it is. And Kathy makes this journey from being somebody who was relatively isolated and focused to being somebody who is deeply engaged in the community. And she describes the outcome of it about how she has got friends for life. and she knows that they are there for her and she is there for them and her life is transformed. Not only does she regain her health,

Starting point is 00:04:34 she regains her happiness and that the combination of the medical treatment of her disease with this wealth of support transforms her life. When you say she regains her health, right? So she gets tapped into that when she's been diagnosed and I think you said she's in a wheelchair. So when you say she's regained her health, what happens? Her pain and her mobility improve. And obviously some of that is related to her mobility improve. And obviously some of that is related to treatment of her disease, but her wellbeing improves, her sense of social connectedness, her sense of who's around her, who her friends are, her joy in life, her reason for living, everything is transformed. So it's a personal journey of increasing health and well-being and transformation what's interesting

Starting point is 00:05:27 julian for me as you described her improvements there is that we started talking about pain and mobility and of course the medical treatment may have helped that but i i also have seen enough to know that actually it could also be a lot of the other stuff as well. The feeling of connectedness can absolutely reduce pain in my experience. But you said at the end, her joy in living, her love for life, all that sort of stuff, the kind of softer stuff that often in medicine, we don't measure. But in many ways, that's the most important part of being alive. The most important part of being a human being on planet Earth is how much fulfillment, how much joy do we get day to day? But if you start to deal with what matters most in life, and what matters most is so often the

Starting point is 00:06:17 people we know and love in the places we know and love. If you start to work with all of that, then a similar kind of transformation that happened to Kathy can take place. And of course, if people are feeling loved and secure, then their anxiety goes down, their pain levels go down. you start producing all the things that we naturally produce as human beings, including oxytocin and endorphins, which are the morphine-type compounds that we naturally produce inside us. I can't get that out of my head that your biochemistry, your biology, your physiology changes when you have close social connections, when you're compassionate to someone else or they're compassionate to you. It matters so much.

Starting point is 00:07:09 I mean, it's heartening, isn't it? It's heartwarming. Those moments, even those light moments where you have a gentle chat with someone, they're heartwarming. We feel it and it sustains us. And what's great is that that sense of heartwarming is not just with you, but it's everyone involved in it. The outcomes of Froome were totally unexpected. We saw emergency admissions drop by 30% at a time where they were increasing everywhere else. And there are no interventions ever which have reduced population emergency admissions. What's interesting about Froome is that there are some really tangible, measurable improvements

Starting point is 00:07:49 which are groundbreaking through the application of compassion on a population-based level. When communities come together, as Cormac Russell of Nurture Development says, it's about what's strong, not what's wrong, that we build relationships and we recognize the strength in all of us. And we start to create the warmth of the environment where we can start to solve the problems that we face. And it doesn't matter whether those problems are financial or environmental or whatever comes to the surface. Communities acting together through the warmth of human relationships is how we get the transformation. And it goes back to what you were saying.

Starting point is 00:08:37 This is not so much the individual, but it's people together. It's communities. And the reason why that's so powerful is because that's how we evolved. We evolved in communities. It's a really important part of human evolution. Somewhere along the line, this capitalist society where we've been encouraged to buy more, get more things, get more stuff, get these houses, insulate ourselves off from people around us, we've kind of lost it somewhere, haven't we? That actually, it's who we are as humans. I think that's right, that we have been

Starting point is 00:09:12 led to believe that acquisition is the way of happiness. That if we have beauty, if we have lots of goods, that's how we're going to become happy. What's interesting about Froome, to come back to that, is about you can ask a question about can you do that on a population basis? Can you take an area and start to develop the things which create a greater sense of community? And the answer is yes, you can. That you can work at the ground level and bring people together, creating compassionate streets and neighborhoods, looking over the garden fence to check on your neighbor, and then thinking about the things that

Starting point is 00:09:54 interest you. And it doesn't matter what it is because there'll be other people who are interested in the same thing. And I think when we look around us that we can put our compassionate spectacles on and see whether there's the presence or absence of compassion. And so often when you look at what happens in social media or what happens in the media in general or if we're hearing about politics or business or environment and we've got our compassion glasses on, we see that it's absent. And it's heartbreaking to see. And what I hope is that actually we provide a really good argument to say, this is down to us as individuals, that within our life, we can choose to be more compassionate. In any given situation we're in, whether we're at home dealing with the kids or down the shops or in our workplace, actually, at any moment, we have the choice to be compassionate or not. And if we choose compassion, not only is it good for us, it's good for everyone around us. And so in a way, the heart of all of this is down to an individual level.

Starting point is 00:11:07 It's about each person and every person choosing to be just a little bit more compassionate, because I guarantee that once you start, you'll never stop. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity,

Starting point is 00:11:52 articles or books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend.

Starting point is 00:12:06 You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #174 BITESIZE | Why Friendships, Community and Compassion Matter for Our Health | Dr Julian Abel

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