Orthodox Compulsive Disorder?

“You see a lot of compulsive behaviors with the intention of undoing something that has been done wrong,” said Dr. Jeff Szymanski, the executive director of the International OCD Foundation. “I have to repeat it until it’s done perfectly.”

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

‘Mr. A” is a 43-year-old chasidic man who is so afraid to make mistakes in his daily prayers that he cannot bring himself to get out of bed until noon or 1 p.m. The reason? Obsessions he’s faced since his days in yeshiva, when he was consistently the last person to finish praying each morning.

“He thought he was just more religious than everyone in the class,” said Dr. Steven Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry at SUNY Downstate, who was addressing a group of fellow therapists. “Patients who have religious obsessions often don’t recognize or admit that they have symptoms.”

Friedman was speaking to a group of 30 therapists — at least 20 of them Orthodox Jews — who had gathered for a three-day conference this week at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn sponsored by the Behavior Therapy Training Institute of the International Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Foundation. While the Institute holds about three of these meetings annually, this was the first conference tailored specifically to the needs of Orthodox Jewish therapists, who had been unable to attend regular Saturday programming.

Sessions last weekend were largely the same as any other Behavior Therapy Training curriculum, aside from Friedman’s Sunday afternoon lecture about “Religious Scrupulosity,” which targeted obsessions and compulsions rooted in Jewish ritual. In addition to discussing these specific behaviors and treatment techniques, the doctors focused on the unwillingness of many Orthodox Jews to even seek treatment, in a community where mental health issues are somewhat taboo.

“You can speak Yiddish like I do and you’ll still find that that won’t get you access to certain populations,” Friedman said. “Since the community is so small, most of them you know and it’s one degree of separation. If you give me the name of an Orthodox person in the United States, I can find someone who knows something all about them.”

“This is problematic when you do therapy,” he added.

OCD is a genetic disorder that equally affects men, women and children of all backgrounds, typically appearing between the ages of 10 to 12 or in late adolescence or early adulthood, according to the Foundation. On average, OCD inflicts 1 in 100 adults and 1 in 200 kids and teens, amounting to about 2 to 3 million adult cases and 500,000 childhood cases in the United States alone. Because OCD runs in families, there is a 15 percent chance that a patient’s child will also exhibit OCD, though not necessarily in exactly the same form, Friedman explained. For example, he said, a parent might be an incessant hand-washer, while the child might become a compulsive checker.   Continue reading…

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This article was also reposted on the blog FailedMessiah, and has many interesting comments below it.

Also reprinted on VosIzNeias, with additional comments.

Mumps Spreads To New Communities

by Sharon Udasin

A mumps outbreak in the Orthodox community, which began last summer, has spread beyond Williamsburg and Borough Park to include scattered incidents in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway, Queens, city Health Department officials say.

Far Rockaway pediatrician Dr. Hylton Lightman told The Jewish Week that he has seen about 20 mumps patients, most of them men between 17 and 23, as well as four or five girls and two mothers. Among his patients is a staff member at the Bnot Shulamith Elementary School in Woodmere, L.I.

Of particular concern to some doctors is that the age range of patients — who remain 80 percent male — now includes an older population of young adults, many of whom misplaced their immunization records after graduating high school, according to Dr. Jane Zucker, assistant commissioner for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In the affected communities, 70 percent of children under 18 have received their two immunization dosages, but for young adults statistics remain unclear.

“People who are not vaccinated have a higher rate of complications,” Zucker said. “We want people who don’t know their status to go and get vaccinated.” This week, the Department of Health will host free vaccination clinics in Borough Park and Williamsburg with Jewish organizations.

The total of New York City cases has risen to 909 as of Feb. 8. Outside the city, the state now accounts for a total of 928 cases, with 317 occurring in Rockland County and 611 in Orange County as of Feb. 10, according to State Department of Health Spokesman Tom Allocco.

The most common symptoms of the mumps are fever, muscle aches and parotitis, the signature inflammation of the salivary glands below the ear. Rarer side effects can include meningoencephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and pancreatitis, which can cause abdominal pain and vomiting.

Original version here.

Cross-training The Body

by Sharon Udasin

For Caroline Kohles, cardiovascular fitness is a vital part of both her career and her personal life. Kohles, 48, has been the Health and Wellness fitness director at the JCC in Manhattan since it opened in 2002. Both an athlete (she has participated in triathlons) and a dancer, she is known for her combined emphasis on mind and body in every workout, a trademark that specifically comes to life in her work as a Nia martial arts trainer and black belt teacher. In April, she says, the JCC will be hosting a free multi-sport triathlon symposium.

What stands out for you when training fellow Jews at the JCC?

“Jewish people tend to want their workout to make sense – there is an intellectual component to working out. They don’t want to just do it for the sake of doing it – they want to do it because it makes sense to their livelihood and their spirit and their intellect, knowing that by taking care of their bodies they’ll be able to do other things in their life.”

Does cardiovascular training at the gym translate well to outdoor settings?

“The trick with training is what are you training for? … If it’s heart health, then you want to have a component of cardiovascular fitness. The great thing about cardiovascular fitness via triathlon training is that you cross-train the body…Triathlon training appeals to such a wide variety of body types that we find people who are all ages, shapes, sizes and genders doing triathlon training.”

How do you help JCCers to prepare for the New York City Marathon?

“For the Marathon we ran a program where we showed a film, and we had a running coach, a chiropractor that specialized in sports and running injuries, a nutritionist that specialized in running and triathlons and a massage therapist that specialized in training. … When we’re talking about heart rate and cardiovascular training specifically, there’s an opportunity for education to happen. There’s an opportunity for people to understand, ‘Wow, my heart rate is different everyday — and why wouldn’t I pay attention to that and adjust my workout accordingly?’”  Continue reading…

The Health Burden Of The Survivors

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

For Jews who escaped Europe during the Holocaust and settled in Israel, the Jewish state really was a kind of Promised Land. Yet from a health perspective, the young
country couldn’t immunize them from the physical and mental burdens they carried with them.

In fact, Europeans who immigrated to Israel after the Holocaust were 2.4 times more likely to develop cancer than those who arrived before the war, according to a recent study published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Researchers at the University of Haifa’s School of Public Health compiled a database of 315,544 Israeli Jews of European heritage born between 1920 and 1945. Lital Keinan-Boker, one of the authors of the study, explained that the data came from the Population Registry as well as the National Cancer Registry. Of the more than 300,000 immigrants studied, 57,496 were born in Europe and immigrated to Israel before or during World War II and did not endure the Holocaust; the remaining 258,048 moved to Israel after the war and had been caught up in the Shoah.

The scientists theorize that the biggest risk factors for these post-war immigrants were prolonged periods of both famine and severe mental stress at an early age. But funding is not yet available to test these hypotheses, wrote Keinan-Boker, who also works for the Israel Center of Disease Control.

“We cannot be sure that all of [the immigrants] were in the camps; some may have been hiding away, some in the resistance movements and some — in the USSR — running away from Poland eastwards,” she said in an e-mail interview with The Jewish Week. “The point is that our information is based on existing databases, not on individual data, and this is why we refrained from using the term ‘Holocaust survivors’; we could not be positive that all of the ‘exposed’ were indeed Holocaust survivors.”  Continue reading…

New Look For 14th Street Y

Y members find a relaxing gathering space in their newly renovated lobby, where ceiling-to-floor windows splash the new tiles and fixtures with sunlight, and a welcoming staff answers questions.Photos by Michael Datikash

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Even before he was born, 6-year-old Shane Fleming spent lots of time in the 14th Street Y’s pool, a 20-year-old neighborhood oasis that is now home to some of his favorite weekly classes.

“Shane literally took every class he could possibly take since he was born” up to the present, said his mother, and longtime Y member, Jill Shely. “He totally feels like the Y is his home.”

The Y has especially become a home to him in recent months, Shely says, as the institution underwent a complete programmatic upgrade two years ago, followed by physical overhaul this past summer.

In what used to be a drab, unwelcoming lobby, huge windows now splash sunlight into a bright blue-tiled meeting space stocked with neon yellow lounge chairs and matching coffee tables. Babysitters patiently rock babies in strollers and wait for preschool-age siblings to finish up for the day, while college students and young professionals stride through to the brand-new fitness center.

Upstairs, a group of senior citizens rehearses for their upcoming staged reading of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” and children play indoor soccer in the gymnasium.

“My hunch about what this place could be was correct,” said Stephen Hazan Arnoff, who began his work as executive director of the 14th Street Y two years ago. “The concept was to transform our infrastructure, accounting for the many, many talents of our staff and our interests in the community — it really is a diverse and vibrant community.”  Continue reading…

Not Immune From Mumps

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Stemming from an initial mumps outbreak that wreaked havoc at a Jewish camp this summer, 247 New York City residents plus 131 other state residents have since contracted the disease, which remains mostly contained among fervently Orthodox adolescent boys in pockets of New York, New Jersey and Quebec, according to official reports from the New York City and State Departments of Health.

The trigger case occurred back in June, when an 11-year-old boy returned to his Sullivan County summer camp after traveling in the United Kingdom, where an ongoing outbreak has now reached about 4,000 cases, the Centers for Disease Control reported.

From there, the mumps spread to 24 other boys at the camp and continued to plague their local communities when they returned home, and the median age of patients remains around 14. But perhaps the most frustrating news to some parents is that most of the affected patients had received their proper two-dose vaccination as children — 83 percent, according to the CDC.

“This is a very confusing issue not only for ourselves but for providers and parents,” said Cindy Schulte, vaccine-preventable disease surveillance officer at the New York State Department of Health. “If you have a population that’s fairly well but unevenly vaccinated, by logic, you’re going to end up having some disease in the effective population.” The Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine has an 85 to 91 percent efficacy rate among those who take the proper doses, she said.  Continue reading…

They’ve Got A Nit To Pick

In what Harel calls the “busy season” for nits, her LiceBusters staff carefully plucks the bugs from a young client’s hair.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Every Rosh HaShanah, as Dalya Harel welcomes friends and relatives from abroad into her home from abroad, she eagerly awaits the arrival of some other New Year favorites — apples, honey and head lice..

“It’s a very busy season,” she said. “I had guests from Israel, and I cannot tell you what they brought me.”

But these guests couldn’t have chosen a better place for their High Holy Days visit. Harel, the maven behind Lice Busters NYC, runs a thriving delousing business through her home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she says she receives customers from all over the country.

The crowded nature of local camps and schools, both public and private, make New York a convenient city for lice spread, according to Harel, though she says that infestations are even more prevalent in Europe and Israel, where schools don’t check students. Harel first decided to start her company in 1995, shortly after the two oldest of her nine children came home from school with lice.

“They came home and I couldn’t go to sleep at night,” she said. “You can’t sleep at night if your kids have nits in their hair.”

Harel isn’t the only leader in Brooklyn’s lice-slaying business. Her colleagues — other Orthodox women — offer equally popular delousing services throughout the densely populated borough. Some of these women include Susan Sherman at LiceBGoners, Adie Horowitz of LiCenDers and Abigail Rosenfeld, the “Lice Lady of Brooklyn.” Others include Lice Be Gone in northern New Jersey and Licebeaters, with locations in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Florida.

“There’s work for everybody,” Harel said.  Continue reading…

Man Of Science, Man Of Faith

Shorr, both a rabbi and a research scientist, brings God to his laboratory as he fights against cancer.

by Sharon Udasin

Staff Writer

When it comes to curing cancer, one scientist gives God all the credit as he moves one step closer to slaying the resilient killer.

Rabbi Dr. Robert Shorr, 55, the CEO of Cornerstone Pharmaceuticals, is overseeing the Phase I/II clinical trials of his newly developed cancer combatant drug, CPI-613, produced in conjunction with researchers and technology at Stony Brook University’s Long Island High Technology Incubator. Aiming to target pancreatic cancer and a wide array of other diseases, doctors are testing CPI-613 both alone and in conjunction with gemcitabine, an already standard chemotherapy treatment for pancreatic cancer — the disease that recently killed actor Patrick Swayze after a 20-month battle.

Meanwhile, as Shorr dives headlong into cancer research, the Orthodox biochemist remains a practicing rabbi, teaching students for free through the Partners in Torah over-the-phone learning service.

“I try to infuse in my professional life not [just] learning the Torah, but living it, and that’s a sanctification of Hashem’s name,” said Shorr, who finds no conflicts between matters of God and science.

For Shorr, the biggest obstacle in developing cancer drugs is the fact that no two cancer cells are the same. “Even within a single patient not all the cancer cells are going to be the same,” he said.

But Shorr’s new drug works to destroy a resource that every cancer cell needs for survival — adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy-transferring molecule that cells produce through glucose conversion.

“Without ATP, cells can’t do anything and they eventually die,” Shorr said. “What our drug does is turn off the ability of cancer cells to make ATP — a catastrophic shut-down of ATP synthesis.”   Continue reading…

Searching For The Right Genes

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Women with breast cancer have seen a modest increase in survival rates over the past decade, as both prophylactic and combative treatment options become more widely available, and as expertise in genetics and molecular biology continue to expand on the clinical level.

In this context, Jewish women in particular may benefit from genetic testing to determine whether or not they have BRCA1 and 2 gene deficiencies, which make one more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers. Worldwide, breast cancer patients can also benefit now from hormonal chemotherapy treatments like tamoxifen, which inhibits estrogen from binding to its receptor, and herceptin, which inhibits the over-expressed HER2 cancer-causing growth factor receptor protein.

But what about those women — and men — who don’t respond to these targeted drugs, and therefore must be subjected to general chemotherapy? (While the majority of breast cancer patients are women, men also get breast cancer.)  Continue reading…

Moving On To The Next Tragedy

Not forgotten: A woman who lost a firefighter friend in the 9/11 attacks touches a plaque honoring him at a local firehouse. Getty Images

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Eight years after the Twin Towers crumbled over downtown Manhattan, rescue worker Charlie Giles still wakes up regularly with nightmares of the North Tower collapsing on top of him, enveloping his body his flames and in suffocating debris. One night recently, he even woke up to find himself throwing things.

“I said to my wife, ‘He’s in our room, he’s in our room,’” Giles remembers. “She said, ‘Who’s in our room?’ I said, ‘bin Laden.’”

Giles, now 42, was the director of Citiwide Mobile Emergency Medical Services during the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and on that day alone he personally treated 14 victims of the attacks. Since that fateful day, Giles has accumulated 15 medical diagnoses, 30 medications and 17 hospitalizations — as well as an intense phobia of airplanes that prevents him from flying anywhere.

Debilitated by both the permanent physical damages and pervasive mental health problems from 9/11, both victims and first responders rely on a dwindling but crucial set of private foundations and government-funded programs that help cover their daily expenses. But in both the Jewish community and in all of America, 9/11-focused charities and support groups have become few and far between, with the exception of tiny scholarship funds named for individual victims. 

“There are very few organizations still providing funds/financial assistance to persons impacted by 9/11,” said Scottie Hill, director of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Center at Mount Sinai Medical Center. “Most of the organizations in the NYC area, including the primary source of financial assistance in recent years (New York Disaster Interfaith Services), have shut down their programs due to termination of funding.”  Continue reading…