Helium Speech - An Astronaut Calls the President of the United States

When you take a breath from a helium balloon and speak, your voice rises humorously. What happens when an astronaut does the equivalent and calls the President of the United States?

In 1965, Sealab II replaced Sealab I, 62 meters (200 feet) down on the ocean floor (photo at left). Sealab II was sometimes called the “Tiltin' Hilton" because of the slope of the site. Teams of "aquanauts" lived and slept inside, dry, breathing air pressurized to that depth. The Sealab project was under command of Dr. George Bond, Captain, U.S. Navy Medical Corps, affectionately called "Papa Topside."

NASA Astronaut Scott Carpenter (photo right) spent a record 30 days in Sealab II. After spending that much time at that depth, specific protocols of changing the breathing mixture and the pressure are needed to avoid problems from the dissolved gas that was absorbed while breathing the air at SeaLab pressure. Commander Carpenter did that inside a special decompression chamber, while breathing an air mixture containing helium. Yesterday's post How To Stay Underwater For A Month explains.

Helium changes heat transfer both inside and outside your body, and changes how fast sound can travel. Sound travels faster through helium than through air. That is the "Donald Duck" effect. People who inhale helium from a balloon and speak on the exhale have a distinctive humorous voice change. Funny voice is temporary, lasting only as long as helium is passing the vocal apparatus. (Helium can't support life. Don’t continuously breathe balloon or other helium source to get a few laughs talking funny.)

I had heard from my Navy friends that an old recording existed of Commander Carpenter trying to phone President Johnson for a formality of congratulations while still inside the recovery chamber breathing the helium mix.

Recently, my colleague Dr. Derrick Pitts, Director of the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and I were talking about space and underwater habitats. He told me that the recording of Commander Carpenter had been found, restored, and was available through NPR National Public Radio.


The description lists the event as 1964, but I think it would have been 1965. It doesn't matter. Enjoy the recording.


Over this summer, I hope to write you some interesting stories about decompression, scuba, space research, cool people involved, and my work living under the sea. Until then, here are related stories:

• Space Walks
• Indiana Jones Rocket Sled
• Exercise and Medicine Underwater and at High Pressure
• Exercise and Fitness in Decompression Sickness Risk
• How To Stay Underwater For A Month
• Collapsing Astronaut Gives Healthy Reminder
• Altitude Sickness, Viagra, and Bubbles on Flights
• Altitude Sickness on Flights
• Living Under The Sea

Labels: aerospace, altitude, breathing, hyperbaric, movie/media fitness, scuba

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Pain Free Trekking to Kingdom of Lo

This is the story of trekking to record the sacred music and art of LUNG-TA, the Windhorse.

Travel was by horseback and walking, at elevations approaching 14,000 feet, over treacherous areas with washouts, slides and erosion, some with sheer drop-offs over 1000 feet.

Composer Andrea Clearfield and artist Maureen Drdak trekked a month in Nepal in September 2008, to research and collect music, history, personal accounts, and art from Buddhist communities and monasteries, for a commissioned major work to be performed in March in Philadelphia.

They spent fourteen days trekking northward across the western highlands, arriving at Monthang, capital of the remote restricted Kingdom of Lo in Upper Mustang, close to the Tibetan border.

The Kingdom of Lo has been described as the "American Southwest on steroids." The artists' trek led northward following the canyon of the Kali Gandaki river, recognized as the worlds deepest gorge, cutting between the Himalayan mountains of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri.

Andrea had been one of my students for several years. Before she left for Nepal she met with me to ask what conditioning she should do.

I told her that good bending will serve her for many of the most important things she will do.

I reminded her she will be sitting horseback for hours and will not need exercises that sit or bend forward, but those that restore muscle length to get straightened up again. She would benefit by sitting and squatting comfortably on the ground. I evaluated her ankles for stability and reminded her that while the Westerners on treks will have expensive boots holding their ankles up for them, atrophying and leaving their muscles without use, the porters for her trek will likely be in flip-flops, holding their own leg position using their own muscles.


Andrea wrote me:

"On my trek to Nepal, what I found most beneficial was having learned from you the proper use of bending from the knees with straight back, particularly for squatting - necessary for using the "toilets" and for other functions in village life. I also incorporated your teachings of good posture into my long treks on horseback, and found my back to be strong and pain-free, even after 8 hours of riding through fierce winds and remote high desert environments through the Himalayas. I also practiced daily yogic asanas in the various tea-houses where we stayed, paying attention to keeping a straight spine, relaxed shoulders and open chest. Although I left the States with an ankle injury, this has slowly healed as well."

"Thank you, Jolie, for helping me stay healthy and pain-free on the trek!"

Namaste and Tashi Delek,
Andrea

Andrea and Maureen were accompanied by Dr. Sienna Craig - Dartmouth anthropologist, and Dr. Gyaltso Bista, Amchi physician to King Jigme Palbar Bista of Lo.

They met with the King and Queen of Lo, Bista nobles, high ranking lamas, and the court singer Tashi Tzering. They met with John Sanday and Luigi Fieni, international experts in restoring the treasured monasteries of Monthang and newly discovered caves of the region. They also met with the Lobas, the people of, "this last enclave of pure Tibetan culture."


Lung-Ta, the Windhorse was commissioned by the Network for New Music. The Lo Monthang region
of Nepal is home to a horse culture that is, "threatened by the encroaching pressures of the outside world." The horse carries the prayers of the faithful upwards toward the heavens.

The performance will be March 6, 2008 at the Great Hall at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Relatives of the King of Lo have been invited to speak to the audience about the cultural and environmental fragility of this remote kingdom.



Lung-Ta: Music by Andrea Clearfield. Group Motion Artistic Director Manfred Fischbeck will choreograph accompanying dance, performed by Network for New Music. visual art by Maureen Drdak, Dance by Group Motion Dance Company.

Maureen writes:
"The title refers to the Tibetan Buddhist prayer flag, as well as that quality of the individual that manifests 'inner vibratory power' – the wellspring of infinite compassion. Incorporating text written for this work by Senior Lama Tenzin Bista of Lo Monthang’s Chode Monastery, it is a prayer for the planet."

Three large paintings will be suspended (like prayer flags) across the expanse of the Great Hall in the University of the Arts, beginning two weeks before the premiere.

A second performance/exhibition of Drdak's work and Clearfield's music will be held at West Chester University on March 8, 2009.

Information for the LUNG-TA project is on the Network website, networkfornewmusic.org.


Healthy Trekking:

• Achilles Stretch in the Bathroom
• More Fun Squatting
• Save Knees When Squatting
• How Often Should You Be Healthy?
• Quick and Easy Strength and Balance Exercise
  
• Fast Fitness - Balance and Ankle Stability in the Dark
• How To Treat Ankle Sprains and Prevent Them
• No More Ankle Sprains Part II
• Arch Support Is Not From Shoes
• Which Shoes Help Exercise, Fall Prevention, and Ankles?
• Fast Fitness - Fix Flat Feet, Pronation, and Fallen Arches
• Prevent Neck Pain and Get Upper Back Exercise Carrying Backpacks
• Healthier Backpack Carrying to Get Better Exercise and Stop Back Pain
  
  

Labels: altitude, ankle, lunge, movie/media fitness, readers inspiring story, squat

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Tour De France 2008 and Increasing Aerobic Capacity

The Tour de France is a 23-day bicycle race. This year it runs from July 5 to 27, 2008. It is a stage race, broken into individual races, from one town to another. The number of stages has varied over years since the tour began in 1903. Course distance runs approximately 3,000 km (1,864 mi) through most of France and often through one or more adjoining countries.

Some of the essence of "le Tour" was incorporated in the synthpop song "Tour de France," a 1983 hit single by the German group Kraftwerk. They put the motto of France in krautrock (krautrock is considered a fun and positive term by enthusiasts): Liberté, égalité, fraternité, French for liberty, equality, good company - which is the point of much of the race.

The Tour de France is a difficult event. Even with light bicycles designed for each stage, it is still grueling. Athletes must train for exceptional aerobic ability.

Cardiovascular endurance, also called aerobic capacity, determines how long you can continue activity at your chosen pace. When you exercise, your body needs more oxygen, so your cells extract more of the oxygen your blood provides. Aerobically fit people can extract more oxygen when exercising, and so, can do more exercise. Average exercise needs about 10 times more oxygen supplied to your active tissues, than at rest. Heavy exercise can increase need to around twenty times. If you do not have high enough capacity from training, you will be too out of breath to continue. World-class athletes have been recorded to reach over 30 times their resting rate.

With regular endurance activities, such as biking, running, swimming, your body makes many changes that improve function. You increase blood volume, the number of oxygen-carrying blood cells, expand the network of blood vessels, reduce incidence of vessels clogged with fatty deposits, increase number of cellular organelles and enzymes your body uses to process oxygen into energy, and other physical improvements, to be covered in future posts.

Breathing in more oxygen won't increase your ability to extract more oxygen. For that you need training. When your body senses it needs more oxygen than it is getting - during hard aerobic exercise or exposure to altitude - the kidneys secretes a natural human hormone called erythropoietin (EPO). EPO stimulates the bone marrow to make more red blood cells. Everyone can do this on their own through regular aerobic training. When some people want more EPO, they may try blood transfusions, called Transfusion Doping, an illegal procedure to increase maximum oxygen carrying ability. They may also inject various kinds of synthetic human erythropoietin. Whether having the money and access to these substances is fair play is topic of many debates in sports ethics. More important is that they are not healthy. Blood can thicken and cell count increases to a dangerous level leading to cardiac problems. Deaths have occurred in young athletes from blood doping practices. There have been experiments with artificial oxygen carriers based on recombinant, bovine (cow), and human hemoglobin or perfluorocarbons. These substances have potentially lethal side effects including renal toxicity, increased blood pressure, and immune depression. Champions don't need them. You don't need them.

Posts to come will cover more on performance enhancement, drugs, supplements, Le Tour and other bike races, The Olympics and other events. Posts on supplements and performance enhancing drugs:

• Human Growth Hormone
• Nutrition for Endurance Swim Training
• Get Muscles for Christmas

Books that cover aerobic training and performance enhancement are Health & Fitness THIRD edition (good for general populations) and Healthy Martial Arts (more for athletes of body and mind).

Labels: aerobic, altitude, biking, drugs, endurance, performance enhancing modality, Tour De France

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Hyperbaric and Aquatic Medicine On Travel

For the next 2 weeks we will be away attending the annual meeting of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (UHMS). The post Exercise and Medicine Underwater and at High Pressure tells about the UHMS, the fun people, and the meeting. My friends and colleagues who attend are scientists and flight surgeons, SEAL team captains and commercial divers, submarine and aircraft personnel from navies of many countries. As we like to say, the rest have paying jobs.

I won't have computer access to see comments. Healthline will be changing format for answering reader comments and requests. Before you write with questions, check the hundreds of Fitness Fixer posts already here and all the replies already given to comments. If you still want more, click this post which gives a list of labels. Clicking a label will give all posts on that topic.

I will be posting as always, even on the road. Posts to come while I am away will cover swimming and other topics. Here are posts that cover some of the subjects we study at the meeting:

• Does Hyperbaric Treatment Help Muscle Injuries?
• Does Hyperbaric Treatment Heal Sprains?
• Does Hyperbaric Oxygen Help Exercise Ability?
• Exercise and Fitness in Decompression Sickness Risk
• Hyperbarics for Diabetic Foot Injury
• Respiratory Muscle Training for Swimming, Diving, and Running
• Collapsing Astronaut Gives Healthy Reminder
  
• Altitude Sickness on Flights
• Altitude Sickness, Viagra, and Bubbles on Flights

I am a career researcher in human performance in extremes of environment. That means extremes of heat, cold, altitude, exercise, injury, submersion, crimes (forensics) breathing different gases at different pressures (hyperbarics, see above), different g-forces, sometimes all at once. Many years of my work was spent on immersion physiology. If you are interested in scuba, diving medicine, clinical hyperbarics, wound healing in a hyperbaric environment, check my books page and scroll down toward the bottom for three books on these topics.

Labels: aerospace, altitude, education, military fitness, scuba

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Can We Teach Young Doctors to Be Healthy?

We have been traveling for the past 2 months in Asia and are on the way to the chilly Smokey Mountains of Tennessee USA to teach medical students for a week during their rotation elective in Wilderness Medicine. This is the third year I will teach there.

I will teach the entire curriculum of diving medicine and physiology, plus a workshop on why commonly prescribed stretches are not healthful, and what to do instead. Several members of the Knox County Sheriff's Office from Knoxville TN have requested to attend my lectures, and several readers made the effort to find the class information on my web site and make arrangements to travel to the camp to attend.

As a physiologist, I design the techniques that physicians use. I spent many years as a military and university researcher in environmental physiology, which is how the body functions in the heat and cold, at altitude and underwater, breathing different mixtures of gases, doing different forms and intensities of exercise. It's important to understand why things work. If you don't understand, then you can't think for yourself, and all you can do is repeat the mistakes of the generation before you, who also were just repeating what they learned in a book from teachers who just were repeating what they had heard.

This problem occurs with some of the exercises and stretches given as physical therapy. An introduction to the problem is in the post What Does Stretching Do? In the past two years teaching at the camp, we encountered young students who were not interested to change bad stretches, and made a point of showing me after my lectures that they will keep doing their rounded bent forward toe touches, since "everyone knows" that is how it is done. However, Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch.

The problem occurs with nutrition. The medical school food at the wilderness camp is not healthy, and students have defended eating candy and junk food as reasonable, even saying that what they eat is not unhealthful - What Medical Students Told Me About Nutrition and When Did Health Become Thinking Out Of The Box?

The problem can occur with medical treatments that are in the books, even though wrong. In my diving physiology lectures, I try to show that if you understand the physiology, you will know why certain treatments do not work or are not needed. Immersion in water, for example, creates many interesting effects such as distributing blood volume more out of the limbs to the body. This is similar to the effect that occurs in space, described in Collapsing Astronaut Gives Healthy Reminder. Recently, during our travels, Paul wound up in the hospital with a swollen leg. The doctor who was Chief of Medicine of the hospital, announced that the treatment was bed rest. Paul was told he must lie flat in bed for at least three to fours days with the leg elevated to drain the fluid. We understand that bed rest is often listed in books as a treatment for this, but it is wrong. I asked the doctor if going in the water could help. The doctor said that standing in the water meant the leg would be "hanging down" and the leg needed to be elevated to drain. If you understand immersion, then you know why immersion can more effectively treat limb edema and water retention than medicines and lying in bed. Extended bed rest is unhealthy, and reduces muscle and bone health so much that it is used to study the damage to the body from floating around during space travel. We escaped the medical care and went into the water. I will post more on immersion, edema, and health soon.

I will not have Internet access for the next week to read or reply to comments. Enjoy the posts. Start taking and sending in fun photos of your successes using all the fun techniques.

Labels: aerospace, altitude, children, cold, education, fix pain, green fitness, hamstring, heat, hyperbaric, injury, nutrition, practice of medicine, scuba, sitting, stretch, swimming

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Space Walks

The space shuttle Endeavour landed yesterday at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Endeavour's two-week assignment to the International Space Station was shortened for safety arrangements concerning Hurricane Dean.


The Endeavour name uses British spelling because it was named for the HMB Endeavour, a sailing ship commanded by 18th century explorer James Cook. Before launching the space shuttle Endeavour, NASA hung a humorous, quickly replaced "GO Endeavor" banner. The formal name is STS - Space Transportation System. This mission was STS-118.


During STS-118, crewmembers went outside the vehicle for assorted tasks. Going out is called extravehicular activity (EVA). Space doesn't support human life. Crew going on EVA wear pressurized suits to protect against radiation, space debris, temperature extremes, and low air pressure. The suits aren't just called suits, they are Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs). EVAs get interesting because EMUs are pressurized higher than the near vacuum of space, but aren't pressurized as much as inside the shuttle. Because of the lower air pressure inside EMUs, risk increases for problems like gas embolism, but chiefly, decompression sickness, also called the bends.

Air pressure around us keeps nitrogen gas dissolved all over in our body all the time. When you go up a mountain, in a high airflight, or on an EVA, there is less surrounding pressure. Nitrogen becomes undissolved. If you reduce pressure slowly enough, nitrogen comes out peaceably and you can breathe it out. If you come up from a scuba dive or jump out for your EVA too fast, nitrogen offgases too fast, making bubbles, which are believed to be the basis of decompression sickness. Beside the role of exercise in countermeasures for space health and after returning, exercise is one of several factors affecting risk of decompression sickness. The post Exercise and Fitness in Decompression Sickness Risk explains.

If you could start an EVA with less nitrogen in your body, you could reduce your risk of decompression sickness. Crew preparing for an EVA do lengthy de-nitrogenation procedures. They breathe oxygen instead of air, and do physical exercise to "wash-out" nitrogen in several stages taking many hours. One goal of aviation scientists is to develop faster protocols for denitrogenation without increasing risk of decompression sickness during EVA.

American and Russian space programs use different denitrogenation protocols and different EVA suits. Russians use EMUs with higher suit pressure. The American suit design uses lower pressure, making it more flexible and maneuverable. The lower pressure suit is considered riskier for decompression sickness, and needs longer prebreathing and denitrogenation exercise. The Russian suit, higher pressure inside, is stiffer, needing more muscle to move. My Russian scientist friends say it is like the AK-47 - tough but good. My American scientist colleagues state that the Russian egress suit is a bull, lacking dexterity. My Russians reply they don't need it, as their vehicles, suits (and cosmonauts) are built strong and austerely, not needing fussy fine-tuning. Da.

My crew surgeon friends from both agencies are all submerged in triplicate paper forms for permissions to send me mission stories and photos to post for you. Nice that everyone can feel universally understood.

Related:

• Indiana Jones Rocket Sled
• Exercise and Medicine Underwater and at High Pressure
• Exercise and Fitness in Decompression Sickness Risk
• How To Stay Underwater For A Month
• Collapsing Astronaut Gives Healthy Reminder
• Altitude Sickness, Viagra, and Bubbles on Flights
• Altitude Sickness on Flights
• Living Under The Sea
• Helium Speech - An Astronaut Calls the President of the United States

Labels: aerospace, altitude, scuba

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Altitude Sickness, Viagra, and Bubbles on Flights

The previous post Altitude Sickness During Flights told how certain symptoms occurring during air travel are from exposure to altitude.

If a craft were not pressurized, air pressure inside would be equivalent to air pressure outside. At high altitude, there would not be enough air pressure inside the craft for crew to be functional enough to fly. Crew in unpressurized craft wear oxygen-delivery equipment. This was one of my areas of study with the Navy.

Passenger planes are pressurized. The inside is kept at higher pressure than actual flight altitude (equivalent to lower altitude). The pressure inside is still not as much as at sea level. Keeping that much air pressure inside would create extreme metal fatigue on the craft and huge fuel costs. Regular passenger aircraft keep interior pressure equivalent to mild altitude exposure.

In the last few years, Viagra (sildenafil citrate) has been tested by various groups, including the military, as intervention against altitude sickness. Recently, it was also found that the drug reduced symptoms, thought to be jet lag, after flights. My guess is that it was effective for symptoms from flights because of the same properties that may help reduce symptoms, in some, of altitude sickness.

Another component that I discovered many years ago in my work in altitude sickness, was a bubble component - an altogether new dimension to the altitude sickness puzzle. Decompression sickness bubbles can form in the body when coming up after a scuba dive. I found the same kind of bubbles can form in your body when going to elevations encountered in aircraft and mountain travel, with no prior scuba diving. More of this in future posts.

Decompression sickness is also an issue when going into space during extra-vehicular activities. Click Space Walks.

Altitude sickness in flight is different from (or in addition to) the motion sickness of flight motion, or being stiff after not moving enough during long flights. The post Exercise and Stretch for Long Travel Sitting covers some exercises and stretches to relieve those problems.

Altitude exposure is not always a bad thing - certain athletes use altitude training to expose their body to conditions that make it work harder and develop greater oxygen carrying capacity. Future posts will cover different kinds of athletic training at altitude, and training to perform better physically at altitude. Click the labels under this post for more on each topic.

Labels: aerospace, altitude, drugs, injury, military fitness, scuba

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Altitude Sickness on Flights

It has made recent news that certain symptoms during air travel are due to altitude sickness. This seems simple enough. Air pressure inside common passenger aircraft is equivalent to mild altitude exposure.

People who get symptoms when going to the mountains may get the same headache, tiredness, achyness, and other symptoms of altitude in flight. Drinking alcohol adds to symptoms. Severity of symptoms depends on several things, mainly how high the altitude, and how fast you reach it.

Cabin pressure varies with cruising altitude and type of aircraft. During a flight, the inside of a large commercial passenger air flights may range between 5000 to 9000 feet (~1525-2743 meters), occasionally higher or lower. Small lower planes flying may be able to maintain pressures closer to (or equal to) ground pressures.

How fast aircraft reach these altitudes depends on the flight path, final cruising altitude, type of aircraft, and other factors. Some of my commercial pilot friends say they will pressurize the cabin far more gradually when they see babies onboard, so that they (the babies) cry less as pressure changes around their ears. Pressure change on the ears is not altitude sickness, just simple air volume change. Earplugs do not prevent this problem, and can make it worse in some situations. Future posts can cover why.

Susceptibility to altitude sickness does not seem to be affected by better or lesser physical conditioning, or any kind of fitness or physical training. It is still a hugely interesting topic to understanding how the body reacts to and works at altitude, why certain interventions work or don't, and how soon you can fly after going scuba diving - important to risk of decompression sickness.

Reader Bill, athlete and pilot, writes, "Regulations require no more than a 10,000 foot cabin altitude (3048m) be maintained for commercial passenger flights. Anyone not acclimatized to altitudes between 7 to 10 thousand feet (~2-3 thousand meters) will feel some symptoms of a mild hypoxia, surely after several hours or/and a couple stiff drinks."

The next post tells more about altitude sickness on flights and more interesting issues and a few proposed cures - Altitude Sickness, Viagra, and Bubbles on Flights.

Labels: altitude, headache/migraine, injury, military fitness

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