Of Rabbits and Kindness
This past week was intense and interesting. I took a few days off from the mayor’s duties (still keeping in touch with City Hall) to attend a national rural hospital conference. This is an annual conference focused specifically to small rural hospitals, which have their own challenges that larger facilities don’t experience. The conference is a combination of key note speakers who address issues common to all of us, and individual sessions where we could pick and choose topics that are specific to our needs.
This year’s conference started off on a somewhat surprising topic for a medical conference. The speaker was an emergency room psychiatrist. She deals with people who are in crisis, often times brought in by police, and not always thinking clearly or behaving rationally. Her subject was kindness and its medical benefits. You may be thinking ‘OK, of course, kindness would help people calm down and behave and reason better.’ But, that was not the point. Her point was how kindness affects our physical well-being.
This was first noticed in a study on cholesterol and heart disease on rabbits. Allotments of genetically identical rabbits were fed the same high cholesterol diet. The results were all the same with one exception. One allotment did 60% better than the others. When the researchers checked into it, what they found was the person feeding this particular group talked to them, petted them, and was just plain kind to them. Rather than treating it as an anomaly, the researchers were smart enough to check into this further and did it over again with the same results. This information has been replicated with other studies to show that kindness is not just something nice to do. There is medical benefit to being kind to people and on those being kind. Intuitively we know this, but it is fascinating that there is scientific evidence to back it up.
And so, this is another reason to live in Weiser. The people are kind and courteous. Please keep it up! We will all live to enjoy each other longer!
Speaking of being kind, if you are planning a nice candle-lit dinner with your Valentine this week, the Fire Chief wanted me to let you know of the following safety precautions:
• Keep candles at least 12 inches from anything that can burn.
• Blow out all candles before you leave a room or go to bed.
• If a candle must burn continuously, be sure it is enclosed in a glass container, placed in a sink, or on a metal tray.
• Hand-held candles should not be passed from one person to another.
• Never leave children alone in a room with a burning candle.
Hope you have a wonderful week. And be kind out there. The life you save may be your own.
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