Monday, December 27, 2010

archeology of disease

NEW YORK TIMES: Often thought of as a modern disease, cancer has always been with us. Where scientists disagree is on how much it has been amplified by the sweet and bitter fruits of civilization. Over the decades archaeologists have made about 200 possible cancer sightings dating to prehistoric times. But considering the difficulties of extracting statistics from old bones, is that a little or a lot?

A recent report by two Egyptologists in the journal Nature Reviews: Cancer reviewed the literature, concluding that there is “a striking rarity of malignancies” in ancient human remains.

Read the full story here... http://nyti.ms/eC525w

politics of dualism

the western mercantile/military power complex doesn't want you to learn of the wide disparity between the north american, but especially american national indexes on health, wealth and happiness, versus the quality and dignities of life enjoyed in the European Union.

there is a concerted attempt to reduce basic standards of living in the west in order to ignite an internal class war which would in turn furnish said complex with the public will it requires to stage the great fiscal-profiteering-for-the-few that waging polarization and its endgame of war must be understood to be.

Read the full report here... http://bit.ly/fPp1R2

essential reading

"The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions." [Dr. Gabor Mate]

from Trauma: How We've Created a Nation Addicted to Everything: Post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed the conditions required for healthy childhood development.

Read the full article here... http://bit.ly/dUCR2K

Friday, December 24, 2010

big pharma caught spying on the WHO

SNAPSHOT: "evidence of a deeper problem in WHO regarding the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, and its philanthropic supporter, the Microsoft founder's Gates Foundation."

"This is a very disturbing set of documents," said Sarah Rimmington, from nongovernmental organization Essential Action's Access to Medicines Project. She added that the report "embraces the status quo and rejects the feasibility of almost every single important proposal aimed at truly solving these complicated problems."

read the full report here... http://bit.ly/ean0Dy

Monday, November 1, 2010

Herbert Fritsche, Erlosung durch die Schlange

"Throughout the whole of life the fullness of what constitutes one's integral self must ever and again be bounded, tempered, and ordered anew. Constantly the power potencies of this fullness are wont to break out into arbitrary self-arrogation of separate power. Arrogating power means to 'show'off in individual separate ways instead of remaining within the 'spirit-ordered' dynamic.

"These separative urges are necessary, however, lest man the microcosm become inert and in order to make him guard and outgrow the anarchic drives of his formative forces. Yet, they make him ill. Illness is necessary, is fundamentally morbus sacer (sacred illness)."

Homeopathy in Pandemics & Epidemics

A great precis by Jayney Goddard of the records established in the last two centuries comparing mortality rates and treatment success in epidemics and pandemics by both homeopathic and allopathic protocols. Also discusses the emergence of homeopathic prophylaxis in diseases such as small pox, polio.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

"Nothing's going right in my life. I feel anxious and paranoid all the time. My relationships are a mess." In my line of work, people make confessions like that to me. My first response is usually something like this: "Do you habitually gobble junk food near bedtime, steal a paltry five hours of sleep per night, gulp two cups of coffee and no breakfast in the morning, then bolt to a workplace where you get no sunlight or exercise and sit in an uncomfortable chair?" They often reply, "You must be psychic! How did you know?!" My point is that many psychological troubles stem from our chronic failure to take good care.

*

The preceding oracle comes from Rob Brezny's, PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings.

Monday, October 11, 2010

deaf to our own signal

its early running in this age of reason and science, this sterling era from which we expect much and require little. dazzled by the idea of new diagnostic certainties and the promise of cutting-edge 'miracles,' we invest what little hope for personal grace and glory our niggling disappointment in the church has left us with (and whatever abundant and unexamined roleplay needs we carry over from unfinished childhoods) in the peat of whitecoat autocracy and its television medicine, its supermarket politics. the combo makes for a rotten crop indeed.

the dichotomy of old was of fatalism versus free initiative. theocentric worldviews looked on disease or other functional misfortunes of body or mind as the activity of a zealous god who's plan for us we could not question, we could only subordinate ourselves in apologia servility to, ever hoping of some last minute mitigation. the rational sciences sought to distance themselves from such antiquated casuistry by divorcing any notion of dramaturgic significance from our of-the-moment complaints and larger life stories, applying instead the rules of naked objectivity and existential resignment to chance coincidence, both underwritten by a genetic lottery for which we cannot be held to account.

the emergence of an anatomic inquiry that used the tools of the butcher to render the body into its reducible parts (and once the blade could take us no further, the microscope lent its scale) which in turn fostered the reductios of descartes and his ilk, the living machine model with its construct of parts without a logic of its own save what could be imposed through projected human ingenuity in time of need. disease was no longer an act of god, but it was still a clear departure from self-preserving sense.

it's always been somewhat baffling to me that we're able to recognize the functional genius of the body when it behaves, when it serves us, its mostly disinterested and abusive masters. but when the fleshy machine begins to tend in the direction of threatened viability, we assume the worst of its strategies and seek to silence its symptom-forms like junkies to needle. we're frightened off any discussion of what we're manifesting in the role we become and continuously assume during an illness out of a goodly repulsion for being blamed for our condition. but this is taking ourselves off hook too easily.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

the problem with chiropractic just occurred to me...

misalignment of the bony structures of the body lead to compression/laxity effects in soft tissue, nervous and circulatory systems and the viscera they serve. soft tissue postures are a product of our subradar self-concept, therefore an embodiment of a dynamic that will always reassert itself unless transformation is effected at a level deeper than the one at which the problem itself was formed.

further, there's no doubt conditions of organ health express in structural changes. organs are likewise suspended in soft tissues, the matrix in which all bones float. viscera express dysfunction (hyper or hypo or some melange of the two) in torques, draws, and dropsies in their connective tissue bags and surrounding tendon architectures, which in turn conditions the organ's volumetric capacity and the effectiveness of its proximal or distal connections to bone.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

the collective psyche orients to the body, its very animal nature, not so much as a backseat driver or third world cabbie, but as incarcerated cargo in the trunk.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

deconstructing ayn rand

objectivism and enlightened self-interest seem, on face, valid proposals, save they hinge on a proposed human facility, admittedly needful of disciplined development, for reasoned interpretation and focused (ie. delimited) action... the notion that we could possibly escape relativism to see things plain and unfettered by either personal context, mysticism or, worse, primitive imaginal mind. yet here lies the root of twenty-first-century insanity, to grow a human crop at the whip of dry, commercial logic, irrigated not by the chaotic (yet highly organized) infrastructure of bios, spiritus, and the drawl of infinity's backdrop.

rand and her muscular insistence on logic and reductio-materialism emerge as a reactive flowering in the wake of the industrial era, the first to harness the herd to commonly-held aspirations, comforting political demagoguery and line production ambitions. an era that was on the one hand, prudish and god-fearing, on the other, in awe of the coming technological age and its gloss poetry of convenience, fancy, and quasi-eugenic-perfection schemes.

but it was principally the need to collectively organize an uneducated workforce that proved most stifling to what would become the post-war western cult of individuality that latterly led to the me-generation of the sixties, the pursuit of happiness and all its virtues and excesses.

ironically, rand paid the price for her command of mind and certainty of philosophy with an unconscious enslavement to the collective archetypes, fascinated as she was with the inner ideal man of her intense capito-erotic fantasies.

'atlas shrugged' premised group action even while it dared not regard it as 'collective' behaviour given it was effected by a leading elite, the rogue mid-century new intellectual above the common and its ties-that-bind. yet, the acerbic wit and rapier cerebrality was fed and took nourished root in gatsby-esque new-age architecture and design, infantilizing "tiddlywink" (her term for the chaplinesque music of the thirties so adored) not to mention the hubris of the last century's skyscrapers and rhinestone skylines that now lie vulnerable to the very disowned mysticism she feared, that now thrives in modern-age religious intolerance and fundamentalist madness.

rand derided the irrational function because her only model for it was the brute ruskie peasant who took to god or committee like the freaks took to LSD and knock-n-roll. had she been more fortunate, she might have been able to synthesize the nuance and sukha of the immortal human chain of ancestors with her valid protectionism of the right to happiness and free expression... so well (and logically one would add) developed by the zen, the buddhist, the shaman. but in the end she spoke exclusively and deridingly to those inner rivers of numen, idealizing the trite, dry and predictable exercise of practical reason and the autocracy of cash interest.

when she exhorted immortality, quoting a now forgotten greek who said, we don't die, its the world that comes to an end, she was evoking a next-stage thinking that eluded her in life but surely baked her to core first with the loss of her husband and then in her own death.

rand was a necessary atheist, a philosophic wunderkind of her age and i like her very much, but her limit and her sorrow came in not being able to next-stage it and synthesize the two functions that must be married for true laterality and depth to be achieved. such is the task of our era and our players.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

vortices

i've become enamoured of late with the idea that our connective tissue system, with its 3D highway lines of myofascial continuity that run longitudinally and spiralize round the body, responds _vortically_ to stress, injury, and strain. the farther the originating point of injury is from its force-expression of impact, the more liable the body is to torque little black holes into these highways, the way we ties knots into fabric.

Monday, May 3, 2010

leading edge of a kite

reflecting on the lateral edge of the hands, the leading edge under the fifth, little finger. its like the fleshy brain compartment of the two kites, the arms and hands, our extensible and endlessly specializing motor tool of choice. but perhaps more importantly, the extensible and endlessly fluid remnant of our adaptation to air (wings) and space (gravitational manipulators). the hub for the fluid tensional branches of the arms is the rib basket, the spine, an interlocutor between the upper body and the pelvic root bulb and its levers, the legs, knees, ankles to feet that give purchase in gravity to ground.

injuries to nerves, nerve-rich areas, hypericum is often indicated. i say often since some injuries can be rather textbook, in which case hypericum brings great relief. but if there are other symptoms, their character, atypicality and degree of impact may indicate other similimum.

HYPERICUM: injuries of any kind, contusions, lacerations, punctures, surgeries, to parts rich in nerve, and injuries to the spine and coccyx. pain is sharp and shooting. this remedy picture is worse for movement, not better.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

holistic embryology: van der Wal

"Your whole life long it’s a matter of ’taking off coats’. That is the gesture of development. To be born will turn out to be a gesture of ’dying out of…’. The philosopher Mansukh Patel says: 'When we die, we just take off a coat.' Actually we don’t do anything else right through our lives. We shed the body of the baby to step into that of a toddler. Next we put on the body of a child, adolescent, adult and so on. The embryo can teach you a great deal about the real dynamics of growth and development, about dying and being born." [Jaap van der Wal, "Embryo in Motion"]

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

tenderhearted is tenderized



transversus thoracis
MYO-EMO profile: need and lack fulfillment.

the transversus thoracis armours the heart and important thoracic organs. in contraction it pulls the bony basket of our ribs toward core. emotions easily translate into holding patterns with this muscle, especially when emotional traffic in the body has lots of build but no release.

this is the muscle we need to relate to if we really want to become tenderhearted in the world.

Friday, March 19, 2010

problem with reason is the same problem called god

i find it endlessly fascinating that the times posit such extremes in unreconciled couplets. on the one hand, the fervor of religious fundamentalism which insists on the existence of a dumbed-down dimension, retro precepts, and almighty parochial wardens. on the other, the elitist faith of rational dogmatists who insist that only those models of truth which can be factually constrained by current evidentiary laws are worth the human bother. both points of view must by rights denounce and refute each other, ignoring content and experience which defies both the reductionist maw of thought divorced from spirit and the mandelbrot perpetuity of faith divorced from muscular sense. for human progress to occur, integration of these functions require new models, new explications.

to bring next-level stability to complex systems we must find ways to withdraw unconscious human affect from the theatre of its primitive roleplay needs, and use its conscious-retention-for-the sake-of-integration as the impetus for another flowering in human evolution, both personal and interpersonal. this is the challenge. and should we fail in our task to meet it, we have long records of old results to gird us for the catastrophic losses.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

celebrity and economics

in the examination of world trends, both economic and gubernatorial, historian niall ferguson has suggested that racial/ethnic distinctions, rather than hierarchies of class, are the principal engine of discord, taken together as they need must with market instabilities, hegemonies in collapse, and the old east-west polarity play.

well, even within racial and ethnic groupings, we still find hierarchies that posit some underling class and some favoured elite. the question is why and the answer to this is rarely couched in humanistic terms. this seems in keeping with the surficial analysis (ie. description of surface appearances) so trendy in academe. the notion that objective, quasi-scientific assessments of fact are somehow more telling than holistic surveys which seek to provide as much depth as latitudinal coverage. science likes the flatland of two-dimensional assessment, free of the human stain carried via psyche and soul. this accounts for the denigration of psychological inquiry and its devolution into mere behaviorist dogma, and the quarantine of the spiritual life in the mere rule/role tautologies of religion.

what appeals more to my inquiring mind is the quest to understand what is evidently a constant in human affairs since earliest times, this need for hierarchical experience. the need to segregate an elite from the common in what i would term a displaced spiritual neurosis which plays out in a dramaturgy we have self-created but long since disowned so as to experience it as something imposed on us from without, and beyond our control, and therefore, quasi-divine.

even today, in the manufactured world of celebrity, we are gifted the service, scarcely recognized for truth, to see this function at its most base and obvious. it's one of the last outposts of our considerable unconsciousness, this need we have to imagine ourselves in the midst of an elite, a royal, appointed-for-distinction class which possesses qualities more akin the gods than mere mortals. thusly we can project the processes once satisfied by integrated spiritual experience known to the shamanic ancestors into an artificial hierarchy play that satisfies our need for the numinous on earth about as well as a shit chocolate bar satisfies our need for gastronomic heavenliness.

as usual, i'm short on time and can only offer this quick precis, but if and when time permits i'd like to write more on the subject. for only by understanding the needs which inform the behaviour of our species can we really begin to unravel why we create the structures and divisions and turmoils we do, and how to better harness our god-like creativity, inherent-but-little-used trans-temporal faculties, not to mention the irrational technologies of instinct and intuitiveness, and our inbred need of worship and wonder.

more soon. i hope.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

empiricism

Somewhat of an understatement to say it was interesting to hear Paul Stamets riff on the world of fungi courtesy the folks at Longevity Now. But I was surprised to hear the oft repeated suggestion that our ancestors lived out an empirical worldview, that this kind of trial and error approach is what accounts for the evolution of understanding we now profit from in terms of both materia medicum and prosaic usage schemes for the variegated bounty of this earth. Its a frequently repeated idea but I can't get behind it.

It seems more plausible to me that our ancestors enjoyed an unbroken continuum with archetypal consciousness. The human mind was not compartmentalized and fractured as it was to become in the service of all that led to modernity and its exploitation of the rational axis for construct and progress. Instead mind was a part of the numen of matter, the vent of the jungle. It had not yet sought to see itself as distinct for the purposes of abstraction and mastery. It was still in the garden of eden, conversant with the powers of time and place and the mother earth forces. We see vestiges of this in the plant theologies of the Amazon basin, the technology of animal totems employed by shamans thru the ages.

There was no need for a concept such as synchrony for the world was experienced as a defacto interlocutor of both spiritual and practical mysteries, the as yet undivided heaven and hell of pitiless exposure and tender harbour. Our ancestors walked in ever-present communion within the living, ribald world. Ecstatic states and extreme adjuncts on consciousness via deprivation or feats of endurance made the veil between worlds even thinner, permitting knowledge to reveal itself in aristotelean alacrity. The forest taught the man what he already knew, not thru chance observation or cunning experiment, but by silting itself into the deep stream of the unformed mind where everything is at once already understood, already discovered, already known, already cultivated, already employed, already defiled, already destroyed, already returned to the ash of ages and born of light again and again and again...
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For further reading I recommend The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes and anything by Jeremy Narby and Joseph Campbell.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

full research texts available for viewing

HELENE M. LANGEVIN

Research Associate Professor
Department of Neurology
M.D., McGill University, 1978

Residency: Internal Medicine, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1985; Certified: American Board of Internal Medicine, 1986

Fellowship: Johns Hopkins Hospital (Endocrinology & Metabolism), 1986; Certified: Endocrinology and Metabolism, 1987

RESEARCH
The research interests of my laboratory are the mechanism of action of acupuncture, and the interaction between connective tissue and sensory nervous system. Acupuncture has been practiced for over 2000 years, but its mechanism of action remains unknown. An important aspect of acupuncture treatments is that needles are manipulated after being inserted into the tissue. Manipulation typically consists of rapid rotation and/or pistoning of the needle. In humans, we have found that acupuncture needle rotation causes a marked increase in the force necessary to pull the needle out of the skin (pullout force). In animals, (both in vivo and tissue explants), we have shown that this increase in pullout force is due to subcutaneous tissue winding around the needle, creating a tight mechanical coupling between needle and tissue. The importance of this phenomenon is that, once this needle/tissue coupling has been established, further movements of the needle can transmit a mechanical signal into the tissue. We are currently investigating the hypothesis that transduction of this mechanical signal to a cellular response underlies some of the therapeutic effects of acupuncture.

Our long-term goal is to understand how the effect of mechanical forces on connective tissue matrix composition may influence sensory afferent input originating from that connective tissue. Understanding these interactions may give important insights into the pathogenesis of musculoskeletal pain.


visit Dr. Langevin's site and download the articles here...

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Helen Langevin

Helene Langevin a research professor of neurology from University of Vermont found that most of the Qi points are located in the areas of inter-muscular or intramuscular connective tissue planes. In other words the Qi points are located in areas where fascia planes or network converges. They showed that acupuncture points mostly lie along the fascia planes between muscles or between a muscle and bone or tendon. When a needle is inserted along the fascia plane, it will first penetrate through skin's dermis & subcutaneous tissue, then through deeper interstitial connective tissue. They hypothesized that the Qi meridians are the representation of a network of fascia. A blockage of Qi can be viewed as an alteration in fascia composition. Acupuncture points correspond to the sites where fascia network converges. Thus needling or pressure at the acupuncture or trigger points will have more prominent effect because a point represents convergence of several fascia plane or lines. Thus manipulation produces changes in the cellular level that can propagate along the fascia network (Langevin & Yandow, 2002).

http://www.terrarosa.com.au/fascia.htm

spatial medicine isn't just about myofasciae

its also about the quality of vascular and lymphatic irrigation of the tissue soils that be we. here, a link to an exciting report detailing the discovery of an Italian physician that links improper iron uptake and vascular insufficiencies to MS. it appears (and makes sense) that a simple operation to stent any obstructed veins that drain blood from the brain bag in turn assists plasmic traffic in its ability to remove excess iron from the barrier portal.

As the vessels rupture, they allow both the iron itself, and immune cells from the bloodstream, to cross the blood-brain barrier into the cerebro-spinal fluid. Once the immune cells have direct access to the immune system, they begin to attack the myelin sheathing of the cerebral nerves - Multiple Sclerosis develops.


read the article here... and the original globe and mail article here...

why some shapes are better than others

The BBC has reported that hip fat, unlike abdominal fat, "mops up harmful fatty acids and contains an anti-inflammatory agent that stops arteries clogging."

What's more, the article continues, "Fat around the thighs and backside is harder to shift than fat around the waist. Although this may sound undesirable, it is actually beneficial because when fat is broken down quickly it releases a lot of cytokines which trigger inflammation in the body, say experts. These cytokines have been linked to cardiovascular disease, insulin resistance and diabetes. The slower burning hip fat also makes more of the hormone adiponectin that protects the arteries and promotes better blood sugar control and fat burning."

The scientists go on to conjecture that the calling of medicine might be to learn how to induce a shape limiter as a means to health through prescription of some kind, one that would "redistribute body fat to the hips."

I would say that hip fat performs its virtues by dint of its proximity to major lymphatic activity in the general area where the legs meet the trunk. Clean and well-exercised interstitial fluid, optimum communication of informational substances and nutrition to cells, these are the things that make for higher tissue function and improved system integrity, as when your body like your circumstance, works for you rather than against you.

So the issue isn't to induce body fat, thru chemical contrivance, to lay itself down at the hip and not the belly, it's to improve the body's food supply, it's quality of activity and hydration. It's to expand the posture of mind that it might overcome its own nature, and most important, eliminate the need to hold on to toxic matter.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8451674.stm