Following a tragic loss in her family this week, Annie, worried about how the death will impact the health of her grief-stricken loved ones, remembered the first chapter from the 2012 book Zoobiquity, on the potentially-fatal heart condition that was discovered separately by veterinarians and by human cardiologists: Broken Heart Syndrome. It's called Takotsubo (when it effects humans) and Capture Myopathy (when in other species). The chapter goes on to talk about the "One Health" movement and to argue that human doctors (aka veterinarians who only work with one species) could learn something from those who work with medical conditions in other animals, and encourages readers to be more humble about humans' place in the animal kingdom.

Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers

https://amzn.to/32Yd4Ne

Featured "Black-chinned emperor tamarin (S. i. imperator).jpg" by Kevin Barret is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Yesterday, my step-brother died in his sleep. He was only 41. He was in good health. It seems like it, it may have just been a sudden heart attack. We don’t really know what happened. But it’s just been a huge, huge bomb to my family. It’s such a tragedy. He was a wonderful person. Wonderful, wonderful father. He and his wife had been together 21 years. They were foster parents to many little children, and they had two kids of their own who are just two and four. And he was such a great dad to these kids.

He and my stepfather were extremely close. They were really best friends. He’s my stepfather’s only kid. And, yeah, everyone’s just taking it really hard. And, and yesterday on the phone with my mom off and on all day, at one point, she said to me, I’m really worried about him, about my stepfather, that I’m worried he’s not gonna make it through this.

And I wanted to say, Oh, you know, this is awful and terrible, but he’ll pull through. But the truth is, I felt her fear. And I thought of anecdotes, people I know or people I’ve heard about who have seemed to die of heartbreak. I have a friend whose parents were together 70 years and her mother who was in fine health died within, I think within 12 hours of her father dying. And then a few years ago when one of my favorite actresses, Carrie Fisher died, one of my other favorite actresses, her mother died the very next day.

And, you know, one might say that all of this is a coincidence, but the other thing I thought about was this really interesting book I read a few years ago called Zoobiquity. And it is by a cardiologist, I think a cardiologist psychiatrist.  Her name is Barbara Matterson Horowitz, also written with Catherine Bowers. And this isn’t about dog training, but it is about animal behavior, both mental and physical, this book.  It’s really about the overlap between specifically veterinary medicine and human medicine.

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