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The Current Transcript for March 29, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

My expectation's here's what happened is they were just scanning the internet, found a system that they compromised, got it spread and then after that they realised 'Oh no! We just compromise the government'.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: He's an ethical hacker a guy hired to test the defenses of computer systems in this era of ransom ware attacks but was, as he suggests, the ransom ware attack that has hobbled the municipal government in Atlanta merely an opportunity that hackers stumbled upon and couldn't resist. Or was this a deliberate targeted attack on a government? Atlanta systems have been hobbled for a week. Baltimore's automated 911 system succumbed on the weekend. And in Canada the computer systems of more than one municipality have fallen prey to digital extortion. In a moment we're asking how vulnerable are computer dependent government systems really are. Also today a different kind of vulnerability.

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I tripped over a stool and went into free fall, broke my shoulder, damaged all kinds of muscles, had a paralysed hand and now I'm forever fearful of having a serious fall.

AMT: Seniors who fear falling are not making it up. Roughly one in five seniors who fall and fracture a hip die because of it. And for a long time the attention has been on improving balance and strength. Now doctors are looking at the cognitive connection. Falls and fractures can be related to previously undetected dementia. And at the same time improving cognition can improve mobility. We're asking what they're learning in an hour. And just when another headline has you staggering under the weight of global conflict seemingly relentless crime and menacing illness, psychologist Steven Pinker has a graph for that.

SOUNDCLIP

I was just flabbergasted seeing graphs of, say, ward deaths over time. It's not a straight line going down. It's a roller coaster but the overall trajectory is downward and the same for violent crime, same for disease.

AMT: That's right. This Harvard heavyweight has reached back through 250 years to affirm that the Times in which we are living are pretty wonderful. He offers up some unapologetic facts supported optimism in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

How white-hat hackers are helping cities fight back against ransomware attacks

Guests: Kevin King, Alan Blinder, Aleksander Essex

SOUNDCLIP

This is much bigger than a ransom ware attack. This really is an attack on our government which means it's an attack on all of us. And we just want to continue to be thoughtful and will continue to be thoughtful to make sure that as a city that we are doing all that we need to do to make sure that we are secure. And as I've said repeatedly we certainly are not averse to experiences and likely will not be the last.

AMT: Keisha Lance Bottoms is the mayor of a city. Entering day seven of a cyber-siege. The ransom ware attack on Atlanta Georgia has left the municipality and many of its operating systems hobbled. And at the podium yesterday she was addressing people far beyond her city as what's happening in Atlanta has caught the attention of cities everywhere wondering if they could be next. Baltimore already knows. It announced yesterday that it was digital extortion, a ransom ware attack, that forced a shutdown of its 911 emergency system for 17 hours last weekend. There was no ransom demand in Baltimore but Atlanta was told it had to pay fifty one thousand dollars US. It isn't clear if it will. Alan Blinder is a reporter for The New York Times. He's been on this story and he's with us from Atlanta. Hello.

ALAN BLINDER: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

AMT: What are people waking up to in Atlanta this morning? Are city services back online?

ALAN BLINDER: Some city services are functioning and frankly they never went offline in the first place. But Atlanta you've still got a city government somewhat crippled by what happened. You still can't pay a traffic ticket online. You've got some of these very basic services that people have come to rely on that can get on the Internet and complete that are unavailable to them at this point. You can't pay a water bill for instance, online or even in person right now.

AMT: And it happened a week ago. How does that compound problems? It seems to be going on quite a while.

ALAN BLINDER: Sure. So the attack happened last Thursday morning and city has really not so much about the details of what happened except that it was a ransom ware. So city services have gradually come back up on Tuesday. City employees were allowed to turn on their computers for the first time since the attack. But I think you've got some frustration, some fear here. The city has been very careful to say, repeatedly, that they don't believe personal information was compromised in the attack. But I think people- They are being asked to be patient right now but it's been going on for a week. And you've got a city that is one of the largest in the Deep South and it's massive inconvenience right now.

AMT: What do we know about the group behind the attack?

ALAN BLINDER: So researchers believe the attack was the work of a group called SamSam and they don't know much more about the organisation besides that. My colleagues and I have been writing and looking into SamSam, the last few days. And that's a group that is believed to have taken in more than a million dollars in ransom so far this year. It's one of the more meticulous cyber-attack outfit. One of the more sophisticated ransom ware attack outfits on the Web right now.

AMT: And do you know where do they operate from, any idea.

ALAN BLINDER: It's mostly unclear. We have not seen a copy of the ransom note in Atlanta but other examples that have been used before show perhaps that English is not the writer's native language. But there aren't a lot of the civic clues about where these people might be operating from. They demand that their ransoms be paid in Bitcoin. So they're very difficult to trace.

AMT: And they want about, what, the equivalent of about 51,000 USD?

ALAN BLINDER: That's what we're told about fifty one thousand dollars U.S. currency.

AMT: That be a lot for an individual for a municipality. You'd think they'd want more wouldn't you?

ALAN BLINDER: Our understanding of the Samsam and some of these other ransom ware groups really want to make some money off of this but they don't want to put it too high. They still want it to be some kind of incentive where government might want to pay. For instance they're gambling that a government might say it's going to cost us more than fifty one thousand dollars in time and money and inconvenience to repair the system. Maybe they just pay it and move on. We've seen some governments around the United States that have agreed to pay over the years. Not necessarily a sum this large, but sums you know low five figures perhaps just to unlock their data.

AMT: And do we know if Atlanta is going to pay?

ALAN BLINDER: The mayor has been steadfast in saying nothing publicly. She said that she has her own opinions about whether the city should be paying or not. She has not shared them with us.

AMT: In your own story you've talked about the fact that this is the most sustained and consequential cyber-attack mounted against a major U.S. city. This is not a small thing. This is like raising everybody's red flags is it not?

ALAN BLINDER: It is. I mean it's a significant concern and we've seen a rise in cyber-attacks in recent years and the fact is a lot of local governments are unprepared for this kind of assault. We've seen a survey from a few years ago. It was of chief information officer from around the country of local governments and they said that about a quarter of local governments were experiencing attacks, whether they were successful or not, at least once an hour.

AMT: Wow. Alan thanks for your insights into this.

ALAN BLINDER: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

AMT: That's Alan Blinder a reporter for The New York Times. We reached him in Atlanta. Now if you're wondering whether Canadian cities are vulnerable to attacks similar to what is happening in Atlanta look no further than the Ontario municipalities of Cambridge and Pickering. Both suffered attacks in the past month and had their computers used to mine for crypto currencies. Experts say critical infrastructure right across the country is actually vulnerable. Aleksander Essex is an assistant professor of software engineering who specialises in cyber security. He's also the director of the WHISPER Lab and WHISPER is Western Information Security and Privacy Research Laboratory at Western University. Aleksander Essex joins us from London Ontario. Hi.

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Good morning.

AMT: Just remind us what a ransom ware attack is. How does it work?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Oh ok well. Imagine you're working in your office and you go grab a coffee and when you come back there's a safe that is appeared in the middle of your office. Imagine. And there's a note taped onto it that says while you were gone we took your laptop and put it in the safe. And if you want the combination put you know ten thousand dollars in an envelope and mail it to a P.O. box. Now instead of an actual Harry Houdini safe imagine it's encryption instead of mailing cash in an envelope, imagine that you're sending Bitcoin to some address on the Internet.

AMT: Okay so that's what's happening there. Our last guest mentioned this group SamSam. But do you know many groups are out there?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: No well we don't even know if SamSam is a cohesive group or sort of a collective. So we really don't know much about who these people are although in the case of the WannaCry ransomware attack last year - which was quite large in scope, I think 150 countries and tens of thousands of victims - the U.S. government ultimately attributed that attack to hackers from North Korea.

AMT: Okay so it really could be anywhere. How vulnerable then are Canadian municipalities to these attacks?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Well it's unclear how vulnerable Canadian cities are to ransom ware attacks although we have seen recently instances of something called crypto jacking, where the visitors to Web sites were caused through a hack on a third parties web resource to download and then run crypto currency mining software. So both of these attacks, crypto jacking and ransom ware, they're both criminal for-profit schemes but they work slightly differently. And so we've seen the latter in the case of municipalities in Canada

AMT: So that's what happened in Pickering and in Cambridge?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: And also Oshawa and you know Yellowknife and the Ottawa Carlton District School Board. There was a number of victims across Canada.

AMT: Well it's a long list. So basically they're hijacked to run the computers for crypto currency that somebody just takes over the computer and you come in and it's like it's busy working on something else.

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Yes imagine somebody breaks into your house and makes a bunch of long distance phone calls you know.

AMT: Well we reached the that we reached out to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities to find out what they're doing to mitigate the risk factors of cyber-attacks and crypto jacking. And I've got a quote here "Unfortunately FCM has no cyber-security experts and does not work on this issue". What do you make of that response?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Well first of all I want to point out that the municipalities that were impacted by this effectively did nothing wrong. And this is what's really fascinating about this that you can by all accounts do everything right and still be impacted by a hack of this kind. It was a third party that was hacked and it was only because the cities were including this browser plug in that their visitors were even affected at all.

AMT: So how do you protect yourself as a municipality?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Well that's really a challenge because in many cases municipalities are kind of left to their own devices to secure their cyber infrastructure. And in some cases, depending on how big the city is, they might not have adequate resources to really tackle that adequately. In the case of the crypto jacking there's really nothing that they could have done except maybe to host all of their own services but that gets costly and complicated. So there's no good solution.

AMT: And we're talking about really automated systems running most municipalities right, now are we not? Like our last guest talked about people not being able to pay parking tickets. But things like water systems and emergency systems like that went down in Baltimore. There's a lot of stuff that's automated through these systems.

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Yes. Well fortunately a lot of the really critical stuff tends to be separate or at least isolated from the main city website. It is not to say that they're impossible to hack, it's just that you know when you have a little bit of segmentation, especially with the critical infrastructure, it makes that a little more challenging to get hacked.

AMT: Do you see other vulnerabilities in Canada beyond municipalities?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Oh I mean everyone is facing this challenge. So with the ransom ware attack the main victims in Canada are small and medium sized businesses. Estimates are that as many as 4 percent of all small to medium size businesses in Canada were hit by ransom ware in 2016 and 17.

AMT: And they're not all looking for Bitcoin, are they? There's another crypto currency out there, Manero?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Oh there are tons of crypto currencies out there now. Manero has the sort of you know the quote unquote "advantage" that it's a little bit more private with the transactions. With Bitcoin you can see all of the money going to the address. And so law enforcement actually can use that information in many cases, in combination with other information, to track the money. And that's the real trick with ransom attacks, any kind of financial crime the real trick for the criminals is to actually make the exchange of money and get away with it. So Bitcoin is a little bit more risky and Monero offers them that feature. It's a little more private.

AMT: And before I let you go, what about elections? Any concerns about hacking and ransom ware on Election Systems?

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Definitely. In Ontario in October we're going to be having our municipal elections and many municipalities will likely deploy internet or online voting. And unfortunately the provincial government does not actually have a list of all of the cities that will be running online voting. We know in 2014 there was about 98 municipalities that ran online voting. But for 2018 we don't actually know. And online voting is a particular challenge because it doesn't have the same kind of transparency that a conventional you know paper ballot in the box, all the folks down at the local church or school has.

AMT: Well that's a cue for us to ask more questions as that gets closer. Thank you, Aleksander Essex.

ALEKSANDER ESSEX: Thank you.

AMT: Aleksander Essex assistant professor of software engineering. He specialises in cyber security. He's the director of the WHISPER lab at Western University. We reached him in London Ontario. Well in an effort to shore up its defences from cyber-attacks the city of Halifax is on the hunt for a weapon of its own. The municipality is looking to hire an ethical hacker. Kevin King is one of those people. He's the Director of Integrated Learning at E.C. Council an organisation that trains and certifies people in cyber security. Kevin King is in Albuquerque New Mexico. Hello.

KEVIN KING: Greetings. Good to be here today.

AMT: Tell me what an ethical hacker is?

KEVIN KING: An ethical hacker is somebody who is able to do the same type of hacking that you would associate with the bad guys but in our case it's the good guys doing it. So just like you might learn to defend yourself and learn how to punch and kick and so on. You're not going to do that to go attack people. You're doing that to defend yourself in the case that you're attacked and so ethical hacker as one who would engage organisations, such as municipalities and organisations like schools and large and small businesses, and help them to determine their level of vulnerability to various types of attack. And one of the terms that you often hear referred to is called penetration testing. You want to be able to see if that computer, that network, those protocols, those programs if they can be attacked if they are vulnerable. And if so show the organisation exactly how to shore up those defences to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And so that's the role of an ethical hacker.

AMT: You're also called white hat hackers, huh?

KEVIN KING: That's correct. There are actually three designations of hackers. One is the black hat hacker - And by the way just to take the term hacker itself is really a term that is used for somebody who's very good at taking a system or a method of doing something and using it for another purpose. In the case of computer hacking it's to suborn the systems. But a black hat hacker is somebody who uses those advanced capabilities to do things like we've seen and be allowed to attack to take down systems and you know request money or to deface them and so on. Whereas a white hat hacker is somebody whom a municipality like Atlanta might employ to make sure that they are not vulnerable to any type of attack that they can imagine. A grey hat hacker - There's one more, There is grey hat hacker and it's somebody who would be employed to do vulnerability testing in the daytime but at night time maybe do something different.

AMT: I was just going to ask you. Some of that some of the best white hats might actually have a black hat background. You got to be careful, huh?

KEVIN KING: Yes that's true. And here at E.C. Council we train, we've certified over 200000 white hat hackers and what we do is we make them sign an agreement. Most of these people are sent to the training by their companies so that they can create what's called the red team or blue team to work on attacking and defending the organisation to shore up every small hole possible. The biggest hack possible, the most important and fastest and complicated computer system that is hackable is right between our ears. That's our brain and we use their techniques through social engineering online and in many other ways that really is the responsibility of the person themselves. And you find that ransom ware attacks are often done because the person themselves made the mistake of going to a Web site that had malware and they clicked on something or open something that they shouldn't have. And that's where that type of training comes in to make sure that our users make good decisions and then that our systems are not vulnerable themselves.

AMT: You know we are talking to someone who opened the I Love You virus years ago probably about 7 times. So I understand what you're saying. Full disclosure here. Anyway Kevin King we have to leave it there. And you're wearing a white hat. We'll just make that real clear. Thanks for your time today.

KEVIN KING: Thank you.

AMT: Kevin King he is an ethical or white hat hacker. He's the Director of Integrated Learning at the E.S. Council. He is in Albuquerque New Mexico. Let us know what you think of that story. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. The news is next and then:

SOUNDCLIP

ANNOUNCER 1: Syria has now been at war for seven years. It's getting worse.

ANNOUNCER 2: A triumphant North Korea says its latest ballistic missile test demonstrates that it now has the capability to strike in anywhere in the United States.

ANNOUNCEWR 3: We have eleven once in a thousand year downpours just in the last seven years.

AMT: There is no shortage of bad news in the world but according to Harvard psychologist and author Steven Pinker the evidence clear; life on this planet is getting better and better. He joins me to make his case and explain why he believes we should focus more on the positive. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why you should be happy you're alive right now

Guest: Steven Pinker

AMT: Hello I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme

AMT: Still to come: It is something a lot of seniors live in fear of and rightfully so. One bad fall can mean all the difference in terms of quality of life. In half an hour we'll hear about some of the latest research and thinking about how to stop bad falls before they start and even how to fall the right way, if you have to. But first enlightenment, now.

SOUNDCLIP

This is the paradox that defines our world today. A quarter century after the end of the Cold War, the world is by many measures less violent and more prosperous than ever before. And yet our societies are filled with uncertainty and unease and strife.

AMT: At the United Nations General Assembly. Leaders from around the planet get together and almost inevitably focus on what is wrong in the world, wars, famine, disease which is what made Barack Obama's final speech there as U.S. president so refreshing. He did not ignore the major challenges facing the world - such as climate change - but he made a conscious choice to put the focus on progress. Author Steven Pinker has been doing something very similar in his work lately. As a cognitive scientist at Harvard University he's been doing it in a very systematic evidence based way. His latest book is entitled Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason Science Humanism and Progress. It charts humanity's progress in everything from health to happiness over the past 250 years. Steven Pinker is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello and welcome.

STEVEN PINKDER: Thank you.

AMT: What do you think about Barack Obama's decision to emphasize global achievements instead of the challenges ahead in his final address to the U.N. General Assembly?;

STEVEN PINKDER: I used a quote from Barack Obama as the epigraph to the section on progress in my book. Namely if you had to pick a time in history to be born and you didn't know where you'd be or who you'd be you'd pick now. And that is exactly right. To make that point is not to ignore the very real challenges that face us but it's to embolden us to try to meet those challenges knowing that challenges of the past had been met. We're never going to have a world free of problems. There's never going to be a utopia or a messianic age. But problems can be solved, new problems arise but they can be fewer in number and less severe than the old problems.

AMT: How high are our standards now compared to the past?

STEVEN PINKDER: They are undoubtedly higher. To go back to Barack Obama he gave a speech during his presidency on the evils of bullying. Now when I was a boy bullying was just considered part of childhood. In fact you didn't want to suppress bullies otherwise boys who grow up to be sissies and nancy boys and pantywaist. Now are our moral circle is expanded to include children and them being traumatized is an item on our moral agenda. I just give that as an example. That's obviously not the world's top priority but we care about people being displaced or suffering anywhere on earth. In the 50s and 60s there were regions that had genocides and mass killings and displacements that were just not on the world's agenda at the time and which many people forget today.

AMT: And of course they weren't technologically as available to us either.

STEVEN PINKDER: Exactly. Now you've got billions of people who are on the spot reporters and can beam colour video footage to the Web instantly.

AMT: What do you mean when you talk about the enlightenment?

STEVEN PINKDER: So I refer to the period usually located the second half of the 18th century that saw a burst of ideas that promoted reason over dogma and authority and tradition, that promoted science including science of human nature, that promoted institutions that we enjoy today like democracy and markets and organisations of international cooperation and that believed in the possibility of progress that humanity could solve problems and make people better off. So these are people like the American Founders and Framers Madison and Jefferson and Adams, in France Voltaire and Condorcet and Les Philosophes, in Britain David Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland, Emmanuel Khant in Germany. It was really a remarkable period for people advancing and exchanging ideas on how we can make society better off.

AMT: How much progress has been made since the end of the 18th century?

STEVEN PINKDER: Oh tremendous. I mean to take the most obvious example at the end of the 18th century life expectancy at birth was 30. Now in the developed world it's 80 and worldwide it's 71. Around that time a minority of people could read or write. Now the world is enjoying a literacy rate of 90 percent for people under the age of 25. Famines could wipe millions of people out anywhere in the world. Now famines are confined to remote war zones. And of course scientific knowledge has exploded since. We understand how life evolved. We understand the origin of the Planet of the universe how the brain works how the body works. So in just about every aspect life is more interesting richer and most important longer and healthier.

AMT: You're talking about a lot of achievements in your book does explore achievements theme by theme everything from longevity to health to peace and happiness. Tell me more about the achievements that stand out for you now.

STEVEN PINKDER: Certainly one of the greatest is the reduction of global poverty, extreme poverty. If you define extreme poverty - obviously going to be arbitrary but say a dollar ninety per person per day, 200 years ago 90 percent of the world was extremely poor. Now it's less than 10 percent. The United Nations has set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty everywhere by the year 2030. An ambitious goal probably won't be met down to the very last country. But it's not utopian or romantic. It is possible and if not 2030 then possibly a bit beyond. The decline in war between nations it's hard to appreciate because there still are civil wars. But it used to be that the great powers of the day the militarily powerful nations were constantly at war. Now we haven't had a great power war since the Korean War 65 years ago. We're much safer. We're safer from accidents, car accidents, acts of God like earthquakes and landslides, even lightning strikes were 96 percent less likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning. Were safer from violent crime. The homicide rate is down worldwide about 30 percent just in the last 20 years. And they're lower rates of rape, of child abuse, of bullying and of other violent crimes. We're working less work week. In the West used to be 60 hours. Now it's less than 40 hours.

AMT: I am just here nodding at you because we just have so many on your list.

STEVEN PINKDER: Yes. I'll mention one other one. A 100 years ago women spent eight hours a day doing housework. Now it's two hours a day. And I say women not only women but in practice housework is pretty gendered.

AMT: That hasn't changed.

STEVEN PINKDER: It changed a little bit probably not enough. But huge chunks of our life have been returned to us because of labor saving devices like refrigerators and washing machines and the vacuum cleaners.

AMT: Steven Pinker as people listen to you, there's a lot of talk about inequality there. There are people who would argue that you are sounding like an eternal optimist while everyone else sees things in a very different way. And you quote comedian Louis C.K. in a monologue where he once said "Now we live in an amazing world and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots". Why do you think the achievements of the last 250 years - you've run me through a list - aren't more appreciated?

STEVEN PINKDER: Part of it is that we are amnesic for history and it's not even the history of the last 200 years but the history of the last 20 or 30 years. You can put together a list of everything that's going wrong in the world and there are many things that are going wrong. But people forget how many things went wrong in the 1980s and 1990s too and we aren't in the habit of comparing the present against the past. We're also not in the habit of looking at the world with data as opposed to with examples or anecdotes or images. And a few of them will really changes when you plot something over time and you look at which way the curve has gone. And without doing that you just can't really understand which way the world is going. I mean this is what led me to write my previous book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, and the current one is that I was just flabbergasted seeing graphs of say war deaths over time and it's not a straight line going down. It's a roller coaster but the overall trajectory is downward and the same for violent crime. The same for disease.

AMT: I always remember the conversation we had about that book. When I see the statistics and more because you did, you did plot over time right and we do forget but what is it about human psychology that makes us so fixated on the negative then?

STEVEN PINKDER: Part of it is that it is adaptive to worry more about what can go wrong than what's gone right. Because it's just a fact of the universe that there are more things that can go wrong than can go right. And the things that can go wrong can do a lot more harm than the things that go right can help you. Our psychology I think has adapted to that fact about the universe and so there is a negativity bias in human cognition. We dread losses more than we enjoy gains. Now you combine that with a society with many domains of expertise. You've got journalists. You've got academics. You've got business people. You've got the military. You've got religious leaders and they're all kind of in competition for prestige and moral authority. And to point out what's wrong with society can be a backhanded way of what of these gilds to disparage the other's way of academics to feel superior to businesspeople and business people to feel superior to politicians. There is a moral coloring to pessimism namely pessimism. Kind of like Old Testament prophets gain a lot of moral authority by pointing out how terrible things are and how they could get worse.

AMT: Well in fact you write I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populist depiction of the modern Western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional that nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them.

STEVEN PINKDER: Yes the one of the ironies of the 2016 American presidential election was that Donald Trump ran on a campaign of deterioration and decline to will make America great again, claimed completely contrary to fact that crime was up, that unemployment was up, that education was down. Even though statistics show the opposite. And ironically his opponents on the left didn't counter him. They too subscribe to this dystopian vision of society is as careening out of control. And so he was able to capitalize on that pessimism. It took him to the White House. It marked his infamous inaugural address about American carnage. Again contrary to all facts showing that crime is actually down not up. In fact near record lows in the United States.

AMT: Well now he can use the real statistics and take credit.

STEVEN PINKDER: He could have easily if he's clever enough to do that [laughter] and unfortunately his opponents in the centre and the left handed it to him with the exception of people like Barack Obama, let him have that feel to himself.

AMT: So let's talk about responsibility and since you know we're on a program where we cover a lot of heavy stories, we talk about climate change, we talk about the wars, the racism, the boil water advisories on First Nations. What role does the media play in shaping how people see the world.

STEVEN PINKDER: I think the media have gotten more negative over time. I mean that can be proven to have a graph in the book showing the tone of the news since the 1940s and the journalism has gotten more and more morose over the decades. In some ways that's good. It's good to point out dangers that we may have overlooked or injustices that we may have overlooked. But if the pessimism becomes too indiscriminate it's just everything is a crisis then people start avoiding the news. We actually know that from studies because just too depressing and they become fatalistic. They say 'Why even bother reforming our institutions if they're all failing. Why try to make the world a better place. It's just throwing money down a rat hole. Let's enjoy life while we can'. Especially if that pessimism extends to a doomsday scenario. If climate change doesn't do us in then the runaway artificial intelligence will. Then that rational response as well enjoy yourself while you can, eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. These are all dangers of indiscriminate pessimism that I think is a bad habit of contemporary journalism. There is a movement within journalism, sometimes called constructive journalism or solutions journalism, which is not to balance bad news with happy news. I mean the last thing people need are coverage of Tiger Cubs in the zoo having a birthday. But it's rather to bring people's attention to the solutions, to the fact that sometimes when cities address a problem they actually succeed. There are cities that have reduced homelessness, that have reduced school failures. There are countries that we forget about that are at peace that were wracked by war for decades. We should really remind people of how peacekeeping forces and peace treaties often do work. Easy to forget that Vietnam for example was host to a war that killed almost 3 million people and it's been at peace free for decades.

AMT: Now it's a tourist destination.

STEVEN PINKDER: Now it's a tourist destination exactly.

AMT: Remember that when you look at other places.

STEVEN PINKDER: Seeing the glass as half- it's half full. But it is reporting - as news - the fact that problems sometimes get solved.

AMT: That's called follow. Through we're supposed to do that.

STEVEN PINKDER: Follow through exactly.

AMT: But we don't do it not enough.

STEVEN PINKDER: Not enough.

AMT: Well how do you think populism might be related to the so-called negativity bias in the media and elsewhere?

STEVEN PINKDER: Certainly populism has been driven by this dystopian negative view of the world that everything is deteriorating so rapidly and inexorably that we shouldn't try to reform our institutions. Let's just burn the empire to the ground because anything that arises from the ashes and rubble is bound to be better than what we have now. Now that's a terrible political philosophy. We know where it can lead. It can lead to Venezuela, can lead to Nazi Germany. But that is what we see in a much milder form in the United States, Donald Trump trampling over a lot of the political norms and trying to dismantle institutions like the Environmental Protection Agency that really have done a tremendous amount of good.

AMT: At one point in the book you write 'intellectuals hate progress'. Why are you so critical of academics and intellectuals?

STEVEN PINKDER: I think academics are victims of indiscriminate pessimism and cynicism. Many academics have set themselves up as the opposition to all of society's institutions including liberal democracy, including regulated markets and as a result promoted a kind of nihilism or a kind of radicalism that let society collapse because anything that replaces it is bound to be better. Let's wait for the revolution to come. Not all academics, it varies by discipline but they're going back to the 19th century. There's a tradition of decline ism in intellectual life, the belief that society is on the verge of collapse and that this can only be a good thing because it's so unjust and corrupt.

AMT: You lump together on point thinkers like Edward Said, Franz Anand, Michel Foucault. Why those scholars?

STEVEN PINKDER: Well just that there is a part of this tradition of declineism. Going back to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler; the decline of the West, Heidegger; the existentialists. To be an Intellectual capital 'I' to meet people's stereotype of the intellectual in the cafe with a cigarette and the birett, drinking espresso, that kind of intellectual has always argued that society is on the verge of collapse.

AMT: I am negative. Therefore I am an intellectual.

STEVEN PINKDER: Almost, not all intellectuals. And scientists tend to be more constructive, I would say and of course many scholars in the humanities as well. But this fatalism this decline-ism has characterised an awful lot of intellectuals.

AMT: You're not afraid of pissing them off though are you, your fellow intellectuals?

STEVEN PINKDER: That's right. And relative to say anything interesting you're bound to piss off someone.

AMT: So the Princeton historian David Bell describes your book as dogmatic. In a review in the nation he writes that enlightenment now and I'm quoting here "offers an oversimplified excessively optimistic vision of human history and a starkly technocratic prescription for the human future. It also gives readers the spectacle of a professor at one of the world's great universities treating serious thinkers with populist contempt". How do you respond to that Steven Pinker?

STEVEN PINKDER: This is a book against populism and he's taking it very personally, the fact that I do criticise certain strands of thought among intellectuals. But to disagree with someone is not populist contempt and it shows a little bit of I think a little sensitivity a little bit of a thin skin that he can't - or his style of thinking can't be criticised without calling it populist contempt. Its disagreement, dogmatic- Absolutely not. I have 75 graphs showing which way the world is going. This is the opposite of dogmatism. This is evidence but it does come as a shock to a certain brand of humanities professor that is just not used to thinking in terms of data and facts that have- They like to tell stories. They rely on narratives but they're not used to thinking in terms of actually counting the number of people who get sick, who can read or write, who die, who are educated. And that is that is a mindset that I have imported from the sciences to some of the questions of the humanities which way history is gone. A lot of traditional scholars are just allergic to numbers and if they're offended and too bad for them because that's the only way that we can rationally and objectively decide on certain questions of which way history is gone.

AMT: So let me cherry pick a bit. Imperialism, eugenics, the atomic bomb, climate change are they not also the legacy of the Enlightenment?

STEVEN PINKDER: Well imperialism certainly isn't. Empires go back to the dawn of civilisation. Colonial expansion occurred way before the 18th century. And in fact the probably the most conspicuous product of the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, was opposed to colonialism and imperialism that was the whole point of the American Revolution. So it's completely anachronistic. And it's part of the habit of I think of a lot of traditional scholars of blaming science for everything that they deplore. Some of these things are deplorable but it's but it's anachronistic it's not based on an analysis of what led what to what. Likewise the wars of the 20th century the world wars were counter enlightenment movements. They were driven by nationalism by the quest for glory not request quest for universal human well-being. Nuclear weapons I agree are the stupidest thing our species has ever done. But they have not been used in war since Nagasaki and there are road maps toward eliminating nuclear weapons which I hope the world will follow. We've had political leaders such as Barack Obama who won a Nobel Prize for it. Such as Gorbachev. Such as Medvedev Putin's predecessor such as many of the Cold War hawks like William Perry and Henry Kissinger who have advocated Global Zero. That has been certainly been derailed by the presidency of Donald Trump and the ascension of Vladimir Putin. But we can work toward getting the world back on track to denuclearization. It's not going to happen anytime soon, not in our lifetimes. But it's not a crazy aspiration for the next century.

AMT: Well it's interesting because I mean we look at the huge wave of refugees and maybe statistically it is not the worst in our history but it's in front of us. It is a crisis. It may not be the worst crisis since you know how the media does this. It's the worst crisis since the last crisis. But for so many people it is their reality. It's like inequality for so many people it is their reality. Should we be ignoring this? Should we be saying well too bad so sad, get some perspective and get back to your war zone?

STEVEN PINKDER: No. I mean I think this is an example of how people can't wrap their minds around progress because you know that that's a non sequitur, that if things have gotten better it doesn't mean that we should ignore the problems that remain. That's just a complete illogical conclusion.

AMT: But we have to put it in context is what you're telling me.

STEVEN PINKDER: Absolutely. In fact we have to diagnose the problem and figure out how to solve it. And we have to know that solutions are possible. Indeed we should not be fatalistic about the possibility of solving the problem knowing that similar problems were solved in the past. That's what should embolden us to solve the problems that remain.

AMT: So what concerns if any do you have about the future?

STEVEN PINKDER: Well I certainly have concerned about climate change. I'm concerned about the risk of nuclear war which is I think low, but much higher than zero that it should be and which could have catastrophic damage. You can't even predict all the problems that we're going to face and we are going to face problems. The universe does not have any force that makes people better off. We're better off because we try to analyse our situation and try to understand our world and try to implement solutions that make people better off. Populism I think is another threat because it contradicts many of the ideals of the Enlightenment such as science and reason and universal human flourishing, in flavor of tribalism and tradition and looking backwards to a golden age as opposed to solving problems to make a better future. So that in the political arena that that's another threat that I worry about.

AMT: Enlightenment Now is dedicated to your father and your grandson.

STEVEN PINKDER: Indeed my father who were Harry Pinker who died while I was beginning the book. He was a congenital optimist. I don't consider myself a congenital optimist. In fact I wrote a book with a somewhat tragic picture of human nature with a blank slate in which I said that evolution has saddled us with a number of traits that lead us to conflict and strife and biases and illusions and fallacies. But looking at all these graphs showing that the human condition had improved. That made me an optimist but perhaps I should be the last person to judge whether I've inherited some genes for optimism but certainly my father was filled with them. And the other dedicatee is my my grandson Solomon Lopez. I dedicate it to him and the 22nd century. He was born in 2017. January 2017. Certainly the statistics for life expectancy at birth at present show him surviving into the 22nd century to say nothing of the medical advances that we can't even foresee. But it was a note of positivity that despite the doomsayers there will be a 22nd century with people some of them alive today who are going to be solving the problems that face them at that time.

AMT: Steven Pinker, thank you for your optimism, for your documented optimism.

STEVEN PINKDER: Evidence based optimism. Thank you for having me.

AMT: Thank you. There you go. You thought The Current was too dark. There you go Steven Pinker the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His new book is called Enlightenment Now. He joined me in Toronto let me know what you think of what you're hearing from Steven Pinker. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our Web site cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link, and stay with us in our next half hour we're talking about the search for the cure for the common fall from the physical to the mental. All the latest approaches in keeping seniors safe from falls. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: Theme]

Why preventing a fall is vital for seniors

Guests: Dr. Manuel Montero-Odasso, Barbara Adams

AMT: Hi I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

So Stan, walk. Pivot. Come back. Turn and sit. [Sigh]

AMT: A fitness class in a church hall in Springfield Nova Scotia. The instructor is Cathy Bearisto and the moves she's calling out may seem pretty simple: stand, walk, pivot, sit. But these basic exercises can help prevent one of the biggest health care issues in Canada today. They can help prevent falling. The women in this fitness class are all senior citizens and one of the participants is 96 years old. Now falls on one of the top reasons seniors find themselves getting hurt and hospitalised and it's a problem that is getting worse. In Cathy Bearisto's class the focus is on balance because good balance is the key to reducing falls.

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Okay everybody is down. Let's do 10 more. This time 10 in succession, we are going to come up are going to come up tall out of the chair pushing weight into heels and then...

AMT: Many of the seniors in that class have already had serious fall but they are still the lucky ones. Roughly one in five seniors who fall and fracture a hip die because of it. Seventy five year old Doreen Mason and 76 year old Lynn Simpson were both in Ms Bearisto's class and they both know what it means to have a serious fall.

SOUNDCLIP

DOREEN MASON: I tripped over a stool and went into free fall broke my shoulder damaged all kinds of muscles and had a paralysed hand because I damaged nerves. I was a caregiver at the time to a 93 year old. It was a really bad time for me. And recovery was long and painful and I would say it took me about 14 months to recover. That was pretty bad but I'm glad it's behind me. And now I'm forever fearful of having a serious fall. I'm almost obsessive, because it's so important because once you are down down and you're hurt the road back is long and difficult.

LYNN SIMPSON: I was foolishly standing near an old garage on a kind of a rickety stool and I was painting a window frame when the stool gave out from under me without any warning. And I went backwards and my stool went down and my legs skidded on all these rocks underneath the building and I laid there for a minute. I thought I've either broken my back or arms or wrists or legs I don't know what. I laid there for a minute and then I started to feel I felt okay. And I got out and I thought it's because I've been doing those exercises.

AMT: Well improving balance and strength are factors that can help prevent falls. But new research is starting to shed more light on the brain-body connection and how it plays a role in mobility and balance. Dr. Manuel Monteiro Odasso is a professor of medicine and geriatric medicine at Western University. His latest study looks into the link between certain kinds of cognitive impairment and a greater risk of falls among seniors. And Dr. Manuel Montero-Odasso joins us from London Ontario. Hello.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Hello. Good morning. Thank you very much for having me.

AMT: Well it's good to have you with us. What got you looking at that relationship between cognitive ability and the risk of falling.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Well basically clinicians scientists means I have a basic clinic with patients but also in doing research. And we start seeing that when we help people come in with falls sometimes we do a new diagnosis of cognitive and permanent dementia. And on the other hand, when we have a mission a person with dementia we found the whole history of falls. So clinically those clinicians seen older adults we see that connection. And our research and all the researchers across the world in the last year would discover that the falls are no random events. So when fall happens there is some underlying factors like muscle weakness, balance problems, arthritis, joints problems. However triggers sometimes are related to cognitive problems or cognitive processes. For example in the case that you described today the two ladies that fell those ladies who were falling, one while trying to avoid an obstacle and the other one when trying to paint in the tools so they're multitasking. That means they were trained to do more than one thing at the same time. So we do know that when multitasking your attention may switch to the cognitive task rather than to focus into maintain your balance and that can trigger a fall.

AMT: Okay so tell me a little bit more about that. So how can changes in your brain affect the risk of falling?

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Well research has demonstrated in the last decade- We're proud that we're proud that our research and under the Canadian consortium and [unintelligible] in Canada we contribute to that. That sudden brain networks in the frontal lobe of the brain are important not only for cognitive processes, like attention unexpected function, which is one of the capability to multitask, but also to control navigation and gait, the way we walk. And when we get older for several mechanisms some are related to aging processes, some related to diseases those networks are become a little slow. And when they share the capability to focus in the balance and gait, plus in the cognition, they become overwhelmed and they fail in the process in its bid to regulate mobility. For example you may fall or you could try some rescue strategies or defences but they are not fast enough. You cannot prevent the fall.

AMT: You talk about the gait in the brain. You actually have a brain and gait lab. Do you not?.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Yes yes.

AMT: So your study suggests the brain exercises can help guard against falling.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Yes there's some very interesting emerging evidence showing the cognitive training may improve balance and gait, particularly gait when multitasking. And there is some emerging evidence right now that can improve falls.

AMT: So what kind of training, what kind of exercises do you have like brain exercises when you'd have people do?

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Well particularly it is still in research. There's some places we apply a little bit of those but they are doing test training in a tablet in where you train how people can switch attention. Some researcher from our work team - particularly Dr. Louis Verret and Karen Lee in Montréal which are part of our [unintelligible] team in Canada [unintelligible] we call it transfer effect, which is quite interesting because it seems you do puzzles, you become very good doing puzzles but doesn't transfer to improve other aspects of cognition or mobility. However this kind of dual test training in tablets we demonstrate it and groups from Montreal also that may improve balance and gait and had the capacity to reduce falls.

AMT: Interesting so if I do a puzzle on like sort of I'm sitting at a table and doing a puzzle that's not going to have the same effect as doing something on a tablet.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Exactly because it's a different exercise, right. You do puzzles; you repeat the cognitive training in puzzles. You're becoming better doing puzzles not necessarily you will improve your balance. However if you train some aspect of your cognition like this switching in the vision that we call dual tasking or multitasking that may transfer an improvement, particularly gait and balance when you become distracted. It became a bit better trained to avoid or to cope with distractions.

AMT: This has real implications to how people avoid falling then.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Well yes. In fact as you know in our article that we published in the American Geriatric Society Journal, we postulate that cognitive training and cognitive improvement in older people can be a complementary way to reduce falls. Importantly we do know that one of the best interventions to avoid fall is [unintelligible] exercises and balance exercises. Our team with others also had demonstrated that those exercises not only improve muscle and joint flexibility but they also improve cognition. So it's becoming evident that the effect of exercises are not just focusing the muscle are also improving some aspect of cognition related to frontal lobe health in our brain.

AMT: That's really interesting. So one helps the other and the other helps the other.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Exactly.

AMT: OK so when seniors do fall they are much more likely to get injured and there is padded clothing on the market that is designed to help minimize the impact of falls. There is one company that's taking it a step further and it's developed what it calls smart belts which read how a person moves and when the user moves out of the range an airbag blows up around the hips. I've got a clip explaining that. I want you to listen to it. This is Drew Lakotos the chief executive about Active Protective explaining the smart belt.

SOUNDCLIP

It is like landing on a pillow. It deploys sort of like two baseball gloves that go around the backside of a person and when you land it really is like falling into a soft pillow. What you'll notice if you fall on the belt is really not only your hip impact is greatly attenuated but the rest of your body, even your extremities, your head and neck, also those motions are attenuated because you're falling into a soft surface.

AMT: And that is Drew Lakotos. He's from active protective. By the way he has an employee whose job it is to fall. But Dr. Montero-Odasso, what do you think of the idea of airbags for your hips?.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Well I think all the time we apply technology to prevent the falls is welcome. But also thing, those technologies need to prove in experiment that would go clinical trials, that they work for example. In the past we have used hip protectors, and still hip protectors has a role in preventing fractures, particularly people falling in nursing homes who are very frail. However when we tried to use hip protector's in more general population we found that they may reduce their risk of hip fractures but increase the risk of pelvis fractures. So we tried to check those interventions in real patients in clinical trials, we found that the results are not good with respect. So again technology all the time is welcome. I think it is the future; wearable sensors; and wearable technology. However they need to be proven in a clinical trial that they are effective

AMT: What message should doctors and caregivers take away from the research you're doing now then?

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Well the first message is that falls are a very important geriatric issue. Sometimes we focus just on the mechanical consequences of falls like that fractured, the bruise of the injury. However there's only one to five percent of that consequence of falls. It's just that people [unintelligible]. As one of the patients said before in your interview, fall has several consequences and sometime have psychological consequences that involve fear of falling, depression, lack of engage in activities. Patients became in a vicious spiral in where they become more depressed and having lack of activities, more immobility a more falls. And it's a very important cause of nursing home placement. Interestingly you go to a nursing home, you're going to see that the majority of people in a nursing home are there because cognitive problems or mobility problems. And the majority have both dementia and falls. So first to know that falls is not just the injuries. So you have in the last two year falls, that means you're a higher risk of falling again, high risk to get disability due to falls. And you need to consult a specialist like a family physician with training in care of the elderly or geriatrician a nurse practitioner to have a comprehensive genetic assessment, to know your fall is just related to a specific balance problem or that is some coding issue there. The second message is exercises are very good to prevent false, for mechanism related to the muscle but also to the brain. We have sometimes some challenges to provide access to older people but in general there are hospitals and systems we can help that. And the third message is becoming evident that cognition has a role in falls and can be a complimentary treatment to all the established treatment we have right now which include doing physical exercises, review your medication to be sure there is no any medication that may affect your processing speed in the brain or may affect your balance, and generate in a very good control of chronic diseases.

AMT: Well that said there's a lot of optimism in what you're telling us in terms of how people can move forward. So thank you.

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Thank you for having me again.

AMT: Bye bye

DR.MANUEL MONTERO-ODASSO: Bye.

AMT: That is Dr. Manuel Montero - Odasso and he is a professor of medicine and geriatric medicine at Western University. We reached him in London Ontario. His new research appears in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Now it is impossible to prevent every fall from happening. But there is a right way and a wrong way to fall in order to minimise the risk of injury. In the Netherlands one physiotherapist has set up a class for seniors to teach them those skills. So you're going to hear a piece of tape. Here is Diedeke van Wijk explaining the safest way to fall.

SOUNDCLIP

You fall safe when you make your body round. So you make your sides like a ball. So when you stick out your hip or your arm you have the chance that the impact is so high that you could break it. So you want the people to roll from their knee to their hip we hit to their shoulder and then keep up their heads so they don't get an injury. And we teach people that you're never too old to learn. And it is very difficult to get old on the right way. So you have to practice to get old on the right way.

AMT: Okay well in Nova Scotia Barbara Adams has been teaching people how not to fall for three decades. Ms. Adams is a long time physiotherapist and she is also Nova Scotia self-proclaimed Queen of falls prevention. She is also an MLA for the provinces opposition Progressive Conservatives and Barbara Adams joins us from our Halifax studio. Hello.

BARBARA ADAMS: Good morning Anna Maria.

AMT: Do you agree with that lesson we just heard on how to fall safely?.

BARBARA ADAMS: Well it is the right way to fall. But I can tell you most falls happened in a split second and there's not time to really think that through that quickly.

AMT: Yes because she's talking about making your body round and most people are just kind of panicking.

BARBARA ADAMS: The natural instinct is to float your arms and your legs and that's a protective mechanism. So although I agree with what she's saying I don't. I don't teach that.

AMT: How devastating can a fall be on an older person's life?

BARBARA ADAMS: It's the difference between life and death in too many cases. And you mentioned the statistic that I was talking about yesterday that a senior who has a fall and breaks a hip has a 20 percent chance of dying that year from complications like blood clots and pneumonia. And I see it far too often. That statistic is real and when I heard it about 10 years ago it was when I went into overdrive to try to help reduce the risk.

AMT: You know you have seen it yes, even personally.

BARBARA ADAMS: yes.

AMT: Why do so many seniors die after falling? You see it's blood clots and a pneumonia.

BARBARA ADAMS: Well seniors have a lot of health issues anyway diabetes, heart disease lung disease. So when you do anything to a senior that puts them in bed for any reason, it doesn't have to be from a fall. It's just that a fall is one of the first things that put you in bed. When you stop moving your circulation slows down, your breathing slows down so you become more susceptible to blood clots and pneumonia. And those are the complications that usually take the life of somebody who's had a fall.

AMT: What's the biggest misconception when it comes to seniors falling?

BARBARA ADAMS: The biggest misconception is that a fall is not that big a deal and that it's just an embarrassing moment that the person wants to forget about. If they fell there are physiological and cognitive reasons why that happened and what we do now is we just pick them up and pretend it never happened and we never look at trying to prevent the next one.

AMT: And that's in fact what we just heard. Dr. Montero-Odasso say right. Like if you've fallen twice maybe somebody should look at what else might be happening. Early stage dementia sometimes.

BARBARA ADAMS: In the year before I became elected I did 39 falls prevention talks for both physio care at home and the Atlantic bounce dizziness center because I worked for both of them. And I started every lecture off by saying I watched you all walk into the room and I know which of you is going to fall this year. So the biggest misconception is that it's an accident. It isn't. It's something that we see coming months ahead of time. And I can predict which of my patients is going to have a fall. And when I tell them that I can tell you they do their exercises and all of the other things that we tell them are critical to reducing their risk of falling.

AMT: So what do you see, Barbara, when they walk into the room that makes you say that?

BARBARA ADAMS: Well what Dr. Montero is talking about are what we call Oakham measures. And so it's when you test somebody physically and functionally and we give them scores. And there's hundreds of different tests but there are definite fall predictor Oakham measures that we use and a simple one is the ability to stand on one foot. And you and I should be able to do that for 30 seconds without any sway. A senior should be able to do it for 10 seconds. If you can do it for 10 seconds on both feet your chance of falling is pretty low. When you get down to only being able to do it for three seconds or less, we know you're going to have a fall unless you use the right safety mobility aids. Walking speed is another dead giveaway. If every doctor timed how long it took for a senior to walk from the seat they're sitting into his office he could know from their gait speed who's going to fall, because the slowest ones to get to him have the weakest muscles. They have the slowest reflexes and have the tightest joints. And so we can see what's coming based on those simple Oakham measures.

AMT: And what else about the gait do you look at then?

BARBARA ADAMS: Step length is another dead giveaway. If they start walking with their feet wider apart then we know that they're feeling unsteady and their bodies naturally compensating. If they're taking a very short step. We should take a step length of about 50 to 60 centimetres. When it gets down to half that distance then you know. If you watch your mother or grandmother tonight and she's only taking a step where one foot just barely going in front of the other, she's the one who is at risk of falling.

AMT: This stuff really matters, huh.

BARBARA ADAMS: It really does. Because I have seen people who they didn't take their pain medication properly, after the first fall. So they stopped moving to control the pain. And that is the biggest mistake but the most common impact of a fall. They're terrified. They're hurt. They don't want to take pain meds because they're afraid of getting addicted. And so they stopped moving to control the fear and the pain. So then they weaken. And now the second fall is going to be almost certain. And this time they're going to break something.

AMT: Is our health care system taking falls seriously enough?

BARBARA ADAMS: Well unfortunately our health care system is certainly- in Nova Scotia is 43 percent of a 10 billion dollar budget. And I just spoke about health to the Minister of Health yesterday and what we are putting in place for home care - because they want to keep everybody home and not build new nursing homes - is they are putting in place what we call CCAs continuing care assistance who will help you do a bath, make a meal, tidy up the house. So what we're doing is we're putting somebody in place who's going to keep the seniors sitting because that CCA is going to do all the work for them. And that just makes him worse. What we're not funding is a rehabilitation or the pre habilitation. So the physiotherapist who can go into the home and tell that person in the family how to get somebody more active, more immobile and improve their balance, dizziness and strength. And the occupational therapist as well as the physios, the first thing we do is don't treat the person. We go into the home. We look at the height of the furniture which is almost always too low and too soft. We look at that bed that's usually too high or too low. They don't have a railing. The toilet is too low. They can't get up. So they struggle. So they're using their arms. So if you have a senior with shoulder pain I guarantee you they've had a fall because they're using their arms to help them walk.

AMT: Oh. It's so interesting. So even just what is in their homes. If you go in and you can change some things. You can change some furniture you can- carpets on the floor or things like that too?

BARBARA ADAMS: Well the carpet on the floor is the obvious one that we talk about but it is where you've got the dishes placed in the kitchen and how much they have to reach for them. And even you know taking the dishes from being glass to plastic so that that senior feels confident to load the dishwasher or to wash a couple of plates without fear of dropping things. Making things on the main level if the person is unable to do the stairs because that's one of the places that people fall. But just looking at the lighting and keeping the lights on because vision control 70 percent of your balance. So one of the reasons seniors fall more is that their vision starts to go in if they don't get their cataracts or glaucoma operated on or looked after their risk of falling goes up.

AMT: And I just want to ask you just briefly about lifestyle because you said people need to keep moving. No don't be afraid of moving. Don't sit still because you think you're going to fall.

BARBARA ADAMS: Well the thing is most homes, to get from the living room to the kitchen for your meal and back again is only about 30 to 60 steps and to the bathroom it's the same. A senior is supposed to walk between 60,000 and 8500 steps a day which is 60 to 80 five minutes of walking a day. And we don't have family around anymore to take theem out for walks in the park to the mall. It's just a quick out to the doctor and back again. So seniors are cocooned in their home and they're literally- you know we call it the sitting disease. And it is the number one reason why seniors are falling is they sit too much.

AMT: So what's your best piece of advice for improving the chance of a strong recovery after a fall?

BARBARA ADAMS: I tell the person that the more they are on their feet the more they are doing for themselves, and the more they practice the very skills that we have identified are missing in them, the better their chances of regaining recovery. And we can tell as physiotherapists based on your balance scores what equipment you need. So if you have a perfect balance score of 56 out of 56 you don't need a walker cane. If you're down from zero to 20 on the Berg balance scale, you're in a wheelchair and somebody else is looking after you. So we can tell people this is what your Oakham measures are. If you work on standing up and sitting down. That's one of my three favourite exercises is walk walk walk, do a what's called a functional reach and then the squat which is just sitting to standing. So here's a quick, here's a quick Oakham for everybody: You and I should be able to stand up and sit down five times in less than 10 seconds. A senior should be able to do that in less than 17 seconds. And if it's over that, and sometimes it's up to two or three minutes to stand up five times. If every senior practice going from sitting to standing every single day, they will lower the risk of falling significantly.

AMT: Okay, Barbara Adams, we have to leave it there. Thanks for your insights.

BARBARA ADAMS: Thank you very much for having me.

AMT: Barbara Adams long time physiotherapist who specialises in preventing falls. She is also the Conservative MLA for the writing of Coldharbour Eastern Passage in Nova Scotia. She joined us from our Halifax studio. Time now for a word from the team that made the show this week.

[Music: Credits Theme]

LISA AYUSO: Hi I'm Lisa you so the web producer here at The Current this week the show was produced by Alison Waisman Howard Goldenthal percent Metar Idella Cirino Julie Kreisler Kristen Nielsen Liz hove John Chipman Rosie Kim Sameera Moya KAREN MARLEY Suzanne to Frain Mary Catherine McIntosh and Jessica Lindsay. Special thanks to Anne Penman in Vancouver and Lauren Jardin in Montreal. The current intern is Danielle Carr the currents writer is Peter Mitton and our digital producer is pouring Mourne transcriptions are provided by Rasha Shehata and Nikil Sharma our technical producer is Gary Francis our senior producers are Willow Smith in Toronto and Cathy Simon in Vancouver and the executive producer of The Current this week is Joe Weber.

AMT: That's our program for today. Stay with radio 1 for Q. Comedian Brent Butt joins host Tom Power to talk about the animated reboot of his long running show Corner Gas. Now after my conversation with Steven Pinker about his belief that since the Enlightenment the world has been getting better all the time. We're going to leave you with the Beatles and Getting Better from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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[Song: The Beatles' Getting Better]

Thursday March 29, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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