Philippa Stevenson: Time to lift couch potatoes

Do two laps and call me in the morning.

That may not be quite the advice your GP will dish out if you call up in the middle of the night, but new research suggests that doctors will be doing their patients a healthy favour by urging them into greater physical activity.

Former Te Aroha GP Raina Elley has recently had the results of her investigation into the effectiveness of "green prescriptions" published in the BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal.

Green prescriptions are a Hillary Commission (now known as Sport and Recreation NZ) initiative in which GPs counsel patients and prescribe a course of physical activity.

Dr Elley, now a lecturer and PhD student in Auckland University's General Practice and Primary Health Care department, studied 800 sedentary 40-year-old to 79-year-old patients from 42 Waikato rural and urban medical practices for more than a year.

She found that green prescriptions, including follow-up advice from sports foundation exercise specialists, did get people up off their couches and into a more active lifestyle. Their pay-off from as few as five sessions of 30 minutes a week was better health, including lower blood pressure.

Sedentary lifestyles have been calculated to take the lives of more than 2000 people a year and to cost the country $55 million.

Dr Elley said her results showed that the Hillary Commission was on the right track. Medical practices could also gauge the benefits of putting more resources into green prescriptions.

Her study has attracted interest in Britain and the United States, countries that, like New Zealand, are keen to lower national medical bills.

All this and more I learned by popping along to Friday's open day at the Waikato Clinical School, since 1993 an arm of Auckland University's faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at Waikato Hospital.

So who knew Waikato Hospital had a medical school?

Very few people, according to its head, associate professor Jack Havill.

He manned the door to greet career prospecting school kids and anyone else who managed to negotiate the hospital's hilltop labyrinth to find the school's home in the smart Peter Rothwell Academic Centre.

There you could get your haemoglobin level tested, see surgery practised on a pig's eye or other body part, learn about tropical and sexually transmitted diseases and, among other things medical or experimental, check out the New Zealand trial of an American prototype needle-less drug delivery device.

Back in the tiny seminar room it was into slime and scum with Waikato University lecturer Michelle Prinsep.

She is looking for novel biologically active compounds where few have looked before - in 4 billion-year-old cyanobacteria (or primordial slime), and marine bryozoans, or those plant-like moss animals boaties know as the scum fouling their boat hulls.

So far one cyanobacteria, Tolyporphin A, is showing most promise as a compound to combat drug resistance in cancer patients.

The bryozoans, of which New Zealand has a thousand of the world's 5000 species, are proving more shy in revealing their potential for benefiting humankind.

There was too much to see for me to hear all the talk on research into the benefits of eating vegetables to combat cancer.

But I caught just enough to know I'm doing myself a favour by munching yummy broccoli (do you hear that, you green-hating George Bush Snr), cabbage and brussels sprouts.

I was less enamoured by the fact that, should I end up in intensive care with sepsis, or massive infection, I'd have a 30 per cent chance of dying.

Waikato Clinical School Professor Jamie Sleigh said worldwide treatment of sepsis has been a "spectacular pharmacological failure".

He is working with Dr Ray Curson, of the Waikato Universities Biological Sciences department, in an attempt to unravel how the body's defence, or immune, system works to overcome sepsis and how drugs or other treatment might aid it.

They have more questions than answers, but the seminar audience shared a real sense of excitement with the science sleuths as we were let in on the baffling intricacies of this life and death conundrum.

All up the clinical school's open day was an educational hit served up with a hot cuppa and biscuits.

Check out the clinical school's open day next time around - the walk up the hill alone will probably extend your life a tad.