Richard G. Petty, MD

Testing for Telepathy

“By means of thought, we are able to obtain all the elements we need from the universe and to reach all the beings we want to contact. Yes, through the law of affinity, thought takes charge of seeking out these elements or these beings. Even if the person you have in mind is on the other side of the world, out of the six billion people on earth, your thought will go directly to him or her and to no one else, as if it had been magnetized to make contact with precisely this person. So from now on, when you want to acquire an element from the universe or to contact someone, think about this element or this person without concern for their whereabouts. Provided your thought is intense, it will go straight to its target.”
--Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)

Of all the subjects that I’ve discussed, one of the most difficult is telepathy. It is difficult not because of a lack of empirical data, but because it is such a polarizing topic. Some people believe in it, and others claim it is impossible, that any research that says otherwise must be wrong and if you believe in it, you will believe in anything. Yet it is an important subject, and the research data keep on coming.

The English biologist and writer Rupert Sheldrake has just published a study in a well known and peer reviewed journal. Perceptual and Motor Skills is a journal with a reputation to protect, so you can be sure that this study was scrutinized particularly carefully. This study investigated possible telepathic communication in connection with emails. In the study there were four potential email senders, and for each trial one of them was selected at random, and there were 50 email receivers, who had to guess who was going to send them an email one minute before it was sent. Further experiments were done with a small number of people who were videotaped continuously. All the experiments generated results that were significantly above chance.

What this means is that we have another piece of evidence to add to the overall body of knowledge about telepathic interactions between people and animals.

Part of the difficulty about telepathy is in understanding how it could happen. When people are in close physical proximity they can pick up on subtle physical cues like body language and dilation of the pupils. I am also persuaded by the data from the HeartMath Institute, indicating that the electrical field generated by the heart can be detected by other people at a range of several feet, and that it can lead to entrainment of the electrical rhythms two people’s brains. But the email experiment is important because none of these factors come into play. My own take on this is that we are all constantly and inextricably interlinked with one another. Most of the time we don’t notice it because of the constant chatter of the mind and the efforts of the ego to protect our individuality. But under certain circumstances – shock, meditation, deep relaxation, sex, and near-death experiences - the walls come tumbling down and we experience our connection for what it truly is. And then we see the non-dual reality of the world.

The other point is this: I have made the point that the Laws of Healing have been gradually changing and evolving over the last century, and our individual and cultural consciousness is evolving and adapting. Because of that, more and more people are having first-hand experience of the interconnected web of life.

“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together . . .” {All’s Well that Ends Well, Act IV, Sc. Iii} --William Shakespeare English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616

Technorati tags: Intuition, Rupert Sheldrake, Telepathy Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Hyperfocus

“Success isn't magic or hocus-pocus its simply learning how to focus.” --Jack Canfield (American Motivational Speaker, Author and Trainer, 1944-)

We have all been taught the importance of focusing to learn and to get jobs done. But there is also a problem that we call hyperfocus. This phenomenon has been known for centuries; in fact the Athenian Philosopher Socrates had it, and I’m going to put my hand up and admit that I have it too. When I am focused on a task I can easily become oblivious to the world and sit at my desk for many hours at a time without moving. I will not even hear the phone on my desk ring. And I have recently learned the hard way that sitting hunched over a hot computer for hours is not good for the spine. My chiropractor has given me strict instructions to break the spell of hyperfocus every hour and have a good stretch. (Thank you Teresa!). I’ve been giving that advice to other people for years, but doctors are, of course, the worst patients. Now my computer sends me a reminder every hour. Fortunately there can be an upside to hyperfocus, which I shall explain in a moment.

So what is hyperfocus? Interestingly, it is can be a feature of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). People with the disorder may not just exhibit distractibility, but may also have a tendency to focus very intently on things that interest them. The ability of a child to sit for hours playing complex video games does not at all rule out the diagnosis of ADD. I have known many people whose hyperfocus lead them to spend countless hours playing games or surfing the Internet, to the detriment of their relationships.

The real problem in ADD is not a short attention span; it is a poorly regulated attention system. It is thought that attentional problems are related to low levels of dopamine in key regions of the frontal systems of the brain, which is why people with ADD tend to be drawn to activities that provide instant feedback, and may also be part of the explanation for the disastrously high rates of substance abuse and impulsivity in untreated patients. Particularly in young people with ADD, they tend constantly to seek out things that are exciting and entertaining rather than schoolwork and chores.

So what to do about hyperfocus? I shall mention in a moment why, in its place, it can be helpful. But when it is interfering with things that have to get done, or causing other problems, here are some tips:

1. Use you computer’s alarm functions: I use a Macintosh, so I’ve been able to set up some fun distractions that come along once an hour.

2. Alarm watches: set the sound and/or vibration that it will be able to break through your hyperfocus. Experiment to find the decibels needed.

3. You can send yourself regular cell phone messages via email.

4. Most modern cell phones have good alarm functions that you can set to help yourself.

5. Kitchen timers are also very helpful.

Though there’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support it, I have also had some successes with the Bach Flower Essence, Chestnut Bud, in reducing unwanted hyperfocus.

I firmly believe that most problems contain their solution. Therefore I try not to fight hyperfocus, but to harness it. For a child with hyperfocus, learning that is active and physical is far more likely to be successful than book learning. Many entrepreneurs have hyperfocus, because they like working intensely on projects that give them a quick and enjoyable payoff. They often find it difficult to work in corporate America, if they have to work at someone else’s speed and at times laid down by another person.

“Successful minds work like a gimlet, to a single point.” --Christian Nestell Bovée (American Lawyer and Writer, 1820-1904)

Technorati tags: attention, ADD, hyperfocus

Instinct and Intuition

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.” --Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)

One of the problems of psychology is the frequent misuse of terms, which end up confusing everyone! I can think of at least one book that has the word “Instinct” in the title, when in actual fact the book is all about intuition!

So what’s the difference between the two, and why does it matter? An instinct is an inborn pattern of behavior that is often a direct response to specific environmental stimuli. Instincts are characteristic of a species, so they would include things like the spawning instinct in salmon, which leads them to swim hundreds of miles to return to the river in which they were spawned. A more complex example would be the instinct to altruism that we see in social animals. Instincts are powerful behavioral motivators. In humans, instinct is also used to describe an innate aptitude or capability.

There is also another major type of instinct, that we call the “somatic marker mechanism” (SMM). Over the last decade, Antonio Damasio, from the University of Iowa has been developing an extraordinary concept. He has been looking at the way in which bodily changes are represented in the brain in the form of what he calls “somatic markers.” He has proposed that the way the body responds to a situation lets the brain know how the individual feels about an experience. That marker can then be used in future emotional assessments. We think that this could be the basis of “gut reactions.” In fact there’s a very nice book that came out recently that develops some of these ideas. This mechanism supports social intelligence, integrating “somatic” or body states that correspond to emotional responses with the social situations that triggered those emotional responses in the first place. So emotions are body states represented in the brain. Humans and perhaps some apes are aware of these emotions, and when we are aware of our emotions, we call them feelings.

Intuition is quite a different faculty, but one that probably originally emerged from instincts. It is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. For when we speak of intuition, we are talking about faculties that are available to all of us all the time, but which are often dormant.

As the famous Swiss Physiognomist, Theologian and Writer, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) put it: “Intuition is the clear concept of the whole at once.”

I am certain that one of the most valuable things that you can do for yourself is to develop your intuition to help you make choices, and in future posts I shall spend some time taking you through some of the time-tested techniques for doing that. I will also give you tips on how to avoid being misled by false intuitions. In other words how to verify your intuitions and ensure that the answers that you get have objective reality.

"Intuition is a spiritual faculty and does not explain, but simply points the way.” Florence Scovel Shinn (American Artist, Metaphysics Teacher and Author, 1871-1940)

“By learning to contact, listen to, and act on our intuition, we can directly connect to the higher power of the universe and allow it to become our guiding force.” --Shakti Gawain (American Writer and Teacher on Human Potential, 1948-)

 

Taking the Measure of a Society

“You don’t have to be big to be great.” -- Sholom Aleichem (a.k.a. Solomon Rabinowitz, a.k.a. “The Jewish Mark Twain,” Russian-born American Yiddish Writer, 1859-1916)

How do we really take the measure of a society? How do we decide whether it is compassionate and great? Is it just a subjective, culture-bound opinion? I have faced this question on many occasions when doing interviews and having meetings in which I am advocating for the mentally ill. I have seen are many different criteria for trying to evaluate a society and a country:

1. The way in which a society treats its youngest and oldest citizens;

2. How a society honors its dead;

3. What opportunities it offers to its citizens and for people who come to the country and join the society;

4. How it behaves toward other countries;

5. The leaders it chooses to follow.

All of those are correct. But I would like to suggest that we should expand on those.

For me:  “The true measure of a society is how it treats its weakest members.”

For this is a measure of how far a society has progressed from a dog-eat-dog dominator model toward a more egalitarian partnership model. I have previously described my admiration for the work of Riane Eisler, and in my book and CD program Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I dedicate a whole chapter to ways of applying and expanding on some of her work.

I was once speaking to a Minister of Health in another country, and he expressed the view that providing care for the mentally ill was not the responsibility of government, and that they were simply a drag on the country’s economy. I politely but firmly disagreed, and was able to show him that providing good quality compassionate care for the mentally ill was not just the right thing to do, but it could also have a positive impact on his country’s bottom line. It happened that we were in a Buddhist country and he had a small image of the Buddha in his office, with some incense in front of the statue. At the end of my presentation I used a quotation attributed to the Buddha:

“In separateness lies the world's great misery; in compassion lies the world's true strength.”

When I talk about the advantages of an expanded, five dimensional model of thinking about people and their interactions, it is exceedingly practical. Many of the same things that are good for individuals are also good for society as a whole. That seems such an obvious statement, but when you think it through and apply my same principles of personal integration to integrate relationships and to produce an integrated society, the results can be remarkable.

“Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” -- Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian Writer, 1821-1881)

Technorati tags: Riane Eisler, compassion, Buddha, society

Thoughts on Qi

The essential idea that there is some subtle force or "energy" associated with the body is very ancient, and was discussed in India where one form of it was known as prana. Yet there are many types of prana, and there are other forces and energies of increasing degrees of sophistication. The most comprehensive investigations of subtle fields took place - and continue to be explored to this day -in China and Japan, where they have been known as Qi, Chi or Ki. Yet many other cultures also described something similar. Indeed paintings of the Christian saints with golden halos has been thought to be an interpretation of a highly developed subtle energy system. The subtle systems appear to be the bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds.

My book Healing, Meaning and Purpose makes the point that this idea of subtle systems is not some quaint notion belonging to an era of folk medicine and superstition, but is instead a vibrant area of academic research.

Some years ago, before I had started visiting China, I asked the apparently naive question: "What underlies Qi?" I was told that the question was meaningless, because Qi is everywhere and in everything. But I was not so sure, and so began the development of the concept of an "Informational Matrix," that permeates and animates the Universe. Over the years I discussed this concept in great detail with dozens of scientists, intuitives, and then some of the finest acupuncturists and qigong masters in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, as well as in the United States in Europe. I discovered that many people had similar evidence for this underlying principle. And this fundamental animating force has also had many other names: the Inner Light, Mind, Love and God.

I have posted an extract from my book on my website.  If you choose to read it, let me suggest leaving all of your current knowledge and beliefs at the door. You can pick them up again on your way out!

With any luck, you will never again look at things in quite the same way.

Enjoy!

Technorati tags: Qi, chi, Inner light, subtle energy

Monday Folly: Don't try this at home!

I have written before about the benefits of qigong, but your reporter has just heard about a stunt filmed for the British Channel Four Television Network, that left his eyes watering. Channel Four is doing a three part series entitled "Penis Envy." A 50-year-old Taiwanese-born Californian man named Tu Jin-Sheng, The Grandmaster of Iron Crotch, strapped his penis to a rental truck and twice pulled it across a parking lot in Fremont, California while the cameras were rolling. Master Tu, who believes sex organs have great power, tied a strip of blue fabric around the base of his penis and testicles, tugged to make sure it was tight, then lashed himself to the vehicle. I would like to assure my female readers that not all men would be interested in doing something like that!

Technorati tags: Qigong

Partial Attention

“To do two things at once - is to do neither.” -- Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer, 1st Century B.C.E.)

Just yesterday I was counseling a successful young businesswoman who was telling me that she was planning to buy a Blackberry to add to her cell phone, laptop, PDA and pager. I strongly advised her not to buy one. Not because I have anything against Blackberries: they are wonderful pieces of equipment, and some people cannot do their jobs without them. My suggestion was based on something else entirely: Overload. Apart from being in business, she is also a mother of a young teething child and the last thing that she needs is yet another device to occupy her attention.

So I was delighted by the remarkable coincidence that this week’s Newsweek magazine is carrying an important article by Steven Levy, reporting on the recent emerging Technology Conference in San Diego that took "The Attention Economy" as its theme. He described an issue that has been worrying me for several years and which I shall be addressing when I am interviewed for Success.com in a couple of weeks time. A former Apple and Microsoft executive named Linda Stone described the epidemic of continuous partial attention.

We have all been multitasking since before our ancestors came down from the trees, but she discussed the way in which people’s attention is now constantly being distracted by a host of new inputs: email, text messaging, instant messaging and a hundred other things. And think of those news broadcasts that since 2001 have regularly had more than one item at a time on the screen. Many people have learned to give only partial attention to the task before them. The downside of this is that the appearance of competent multitasking (“Look mom, I can do ten things at once!”) is an illusion. If you are only working on a project with 10% of your attention, it is going to take much longer to get it done, and errors are far more likely to occur. What if needed is intense focus on one thing at a time.

In a speech, Linda Stone said that I prominent cause of continuous partial attention is "a desire to live as a node on the network." Some people can manage several inputs very well indeed. I often have more than one screen of input open at once, and Bill Gates is able to monitor four active screens at once. But when I’m really concentrating on producing high quality material for you, gentle reader, I turn off all the inputs until I am finished. In fact, checking my email is a reward for having finished the job at hand. While there are many advantages to being in perpetual contact, the balance has tipped more toward distraction, and, as Linda Stone put it, “a sense of constant crisis.”

I am also reminded of the phenomenon of “Flow” made popular by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We feel that we are in a state of flow state when we are engaged in self-determined, goal-related, meaningful actions that are moving in the direction that we desire. Having our attention and energy pulled away from the flow is likely to interfere without ability not just to be productive, but also to enjoy life. There is, of course nothing wrong at all with being in continuous contact and communication with others people. But in order to be productive or to enjoy the moment, at some point you need to actually stop the conversation and focus on what you are doing.

Professor David Meyer from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is a research psychologist who has demonstrated that multitasking, far from increasing our productivity, actually makes us less productive. Some data from Europe has influenced lawmakers, after research indicated that driving and talking on a cell phone is a particularly bad multitasking combination that has been shown to cause even more accidents than drunk drivimg.

Remember the old saying: “If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”

Technorati tags: attention, multitasking, Productivity, Work, Stress

Modafinil and ADD

The Washington Post has just reported that the FDA has turned an application from the Pharmaceutical Company Cephalon to have modafinil approved for use in children with ADD, because of worries about a potentially serious skin reaction called Stevens-Johnson syndrome .

This is a real shame: we need more options for treating children and adults with ADD, and although I am a huge proponent of non-pharmacological methods of treatment, the fact is that a lot of people simply do not respond to the methods that we currently have available, and some do not even respond to the medications that are available.

Modafinil had looked very promising: in December 1998 the FDA approved modafinil under the brand name Provigil for treating adults with sleepiness associated with narcolepsy. Its main mechanism of action is to inhibit the reuptake of dopamine in key regions of the brain, effectively increasing the amount of dopamine available. It has been used off-label for excessive daytime sleepiness and last year a study form the University of Pennsylvania indicated that it might help some cocaine addicts fight their cravings. It is an open secret that a great many students and academics have been using it for years to enable them to study and work longer. I remember an article from someone who was due to lecture in India, immediately after his arrival from the United States. He admitted to taking modafinil to help him get through the ordeal.

The application to use modafinil in ADD is not dead. The FDA has said that they want a 3000 patients study to assess the risk of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, and the company will discuss that with them. But it will inevitably mean delays.

Technorati tags: ADD, ADHD Modafinil

Neurogenesis 101

The great Spanish histologist and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, was probably the first modern scientist to say that neurons in the adult brain did not divide.  In other words, humans are born with a finite number of brain cells and an individual cannot develop/grow/replicate new cells over the course of their adult lives. This is an axiom that underlies some parts of the stem-cell debate.

There is emerging research that seems to refute this notion.  I have written a long article for my friends over at Psychiatric Resource Forum discussing the research indicating that humans may have the ability to produce new neurons in key regions of the brain throughout life, a process called neurogenesis.  I also discuss what this means for field of psychiatry.

The concept of neurogenesis also engenders hope for the fields of personal and spiritual development.  I will discuss these at a later date.  I just wanted to link to this article because it provides (along with the links) a good primer on neurogenesis that will be helpful as I write new posts.

Technorati tags: neurogenesis, personal growth, Self Improvement

Acupressure for Sleepiness

I’ve been using and teaching about the use of acupressure for boosting energy for a very long time. Since the early 1980s I’ve used pressure and tapping of some specific acupuncture points to give myself a quick jolt of energy. I’ve also had some success in helping patients with chronic fatigue by giving them some acupressure methods to use on a daily basis.

So I was very interested to see the publication of a small study involving 39 students in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. The students were participating in three days of all-day lecture classes. They were taught to apply acupressure - either tapping or massaging – either five stimulating or five relaxing points. The students were not told the intended effects of the different points.

Acupressure stimulation points were:

1. The top of the head

2. The top of the back of the neck on both sides

3. On the back of the hands in between the thumb and forefinger

4. Just below both knees

5. On the bottom of the feet -- at the center just below the balls of the feet

Acupressure relaxation points were:

1. Between the eyebrows

2. Just behind the earlobes

3. On the front of the wrists

4. On the lower legs above the ankles and toward the midline

5. On the top of the feet in between the large and second toes

The methods that the students were shown consisted of applying pressure to these points with light tapping of the fingers and massaging with the thumbs or forefingers.

The study was a cross-over design: Half of the students applied the stimulation acupressure regimen at lunchtime during the first day of class followed by two days on the relaxation regimen, and the other half followed the reverse schedule.

The results showed that students reported significantly less sleepiness and fatigue on the days they used the acupressure stimulation regimen. This is a fertile area for research. People have also claimed to be able to fatigue with both Thought Field Therapy (TFT) and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and I’ve certainly found them to be useful on some occasions. The challenge now is to replicate this acupressure research and also to try out TFT and EFT in a similar study design.

Technorati tags:Thought Field Therapy,  acupressure, sleep, complementary medicine, Qi, Emotional Freedom Technique

Adjunctive Homeopathy in an Intensive Care Unit

Although we normally try to get articles quickly, we are sometimes thwarted and they can be delayed in arriving. I have only just got my hands on a study abstract that was published by a research team from Graz in Austria last October. The investigators from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Homeopathy examined the use of homeopathy in a group of severely ill people in an Intensive Care Unit.

This was a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to see whether homeopathy would be able to influence the outcome of critically ill people with severe sepsis. Seventy people entered the study, and 35 received homeopathic treatment and 35 received placebo, in addition to their regular treatment. The main outcome measure was survival. At day 30 there was no difference between the survival rates of the people receiving homeopathy and placebo. But at day 180, the survival rate in the homeopathy group was 75.8% compared to 50% in the placebo group.

One study does not make a revolution, and it is still early days for this kind of experimental work. Yet two things stand out from this small investigation:

1. The homeopathy was being used as an adjunct to conventional medical care. I sometimes get worried when practitioners of unorthodox medicine say that they would ONLY use herbs or homeopathy. The best approach has to be to combine conventional treatments with those unorthodox ones that can be shown to be helpful.

2. Trained homeopathic physicians did the prescribing. This is important: some studies have foundered because the studies tried to test just one remedy. Yet homeopaths individualize each treatment. So two people may have the same infection, but because they have different personalities and constitutional make-ups, they will receive different treatments.

Technorati tags:

Technorati Tags: homeopathy, complementary medicine, integrated medicine

Scientific Sensationalism

Earlier today I found myself in the audience for a really excellent seminar. But there was one thing that left me troubled. The presenter, who has published a great many successful books, suggested using the services of a research professional in a library to hunt down publications that could be used in books and articles. That’s great advice, but ONLY if the writer then goes and checks all the data in the articles. I have several times highlighted the problems of published research that has been reported in the media, but which turns out has fundamental flaws.

One of the jobs of reporters is to bring us information as quickly and as accurately as they can. I have known a great many people in the media, and they are almost all very smart and inquisitive. They are usually excellent at asking good questions. But nobody can be an expert on everything. I have written articles here about studies that have been reported around the world, but turned out to have great big holes in them that make data interpretation a precarious business! But it is my business to analyze papers in the biomedical field. I’m pretty good at working out the pros and cons in my own fields. But ask me to do a detailed review of a paper in higher mathematics, and I’ll quickly need someone to start administering oxygen to me!

The BBC carried a story About a report from the British Social Market Foundation, which can be downloaded here. The Foundation has warned about something that has been on concern to many of us working in science and medicine, that irresponsible reporting can undermine public confidence in science. The problem is the science rarely produces certain answers: it is painstaking, step-by-step process. There’s an old Yugoslavian proverb: “Grain by grain a loaf, stone by stone, a castle.”

And it’s quite correct: that’s how science progresses. On the other hand, the media has to put out stories quickly, and is less tolerant of the uncertainties inherent in science.

This is also why blogs like this one will, I hope, help the public understanding about science. I’m also going to continue to highlight other blogs and websites that are providing quick, accurate reports of new scientific findings. Let me know how I'm doing!

Technorati tags: science, media, blogging

Chess Does Require a Brain!

Whoever said that chess players are all geeks with no sense of humor, knew little about the real chess world. Yes there are some “unusual” people who play the game, but there are also a very large number of perfectly “normal” people who just enjoy the contest and all the benefits that it confers on our ability to think. As evidence of this, I saw an hilarious blog in response to my comments about unconscious thinking processes.

With tongue firmly in cheek, the blogger asked whether the best way to prepare for a game was to have someone hit you on the head with a hammer before the start of the game, because I had pointed out the superiority of unconscious processing for some types of complex decision-making.

Would that such an approach could raise my rating….

But sad to say consciousness is required for playing even a part way decent chess.

Though here’s a thought, the next time that someone asks why we are “wasting time” on chess, tell them this: It is likely, though not yet proven, that chess may actually be one of the activities that not only stimulates the formation of new connections in the brain, but might actually stimulate the formation of new neurons in key regions of the brain. And if we play enough, we should eventually be able to do a lot of our processing below the level of consciousness.

Come to think of it, I hope that the blogger WAS joking…

Technorati tag: chess

Hunger and Memory

It’s always a good idea to see how new findings fit in with previous knowledge, and also to see if they make sense. We have previously met the hormone leptin, which is involved in decreasing appetite. Its twin is the hormone ghrelin. Discovered in 1999, ghrelin comes from some of the cells lining the stomach and acts in the hypothalamus to increase appetite. When the stomach is empty it is released into the circulation and travels to the brain where it activates receptors in many different regions. Some research has indicated that one of the reasons why gastric bypass surgery may be effective is because it reduces levels of ghrelin and therefore reduces appetite.

Research published in December 2004 showed that in healthy young men, sleep deprivation caused a decrease in leptin levels and an increase in ghrelin levels, which, as expected, was associated with an increase in hunger and appetite. This is one reason why getting less sleep than you need may cause you to gain weight.

A new study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, has found an intriguing link between ghrelin and memory. I noticed that the BBC also picked up on this interesting story. Researchers at Yale have discovered that ghrelin acts in an ancient part of the brain known as the hippocampus: so named because it is shaped like a sea-horse. (As an amusing aside, the old German pathologists thought it looked like a silk worm, so that’s what they called it!) The hippocampus has a number of functions, but is most of all essential for learning new material.

The researchers showed that mice who lack the ghrelin gene had 25% fewer synaptic connections between their hippocampal neurons. They then did the next step, and injected normal mice with ghrelin. They promptly increased the number and density of their synaptic connections, which correlated with significant improvements in the animals’ performance on several tests of learning and memory.

So that means that a hormone produced by the stomach can control some brain functions, and this may represent a link between metabolism and the ability to learn. The more that we discover, the more we see the intimate interactions between the brain, intestines and heart.

This link makes good sense: we know that memory can be switched on and off by a range of factors. In order to help us come up with options for handling the environment and for remembering things to avoid, memory is often switched on at times of stress. Hunger is a form of stress, and it makes good biological sense that we might be more alert and better able to remember and to recall information when hungry. It stands to reason that this has enormous survival advantage. If our early ancestors had not had this hunger/memory link, they might well have died out in the competition for food.

This gives some credence to the old advice that it is best not to try to study or to take an exam on a full stomach. Just have enough food to make sure that you have ample fuel, and that you are not distracted by hunger pains.

Technorati tags: hunger, memory, stress, study habits

Satiety: Another Kind of Gut Feeling

According the World Health Organization, there are currently over one billion overweight people in the world today. The ever-increasing prevalence of obesity in young people promises that this pandemic is likely to worsen in the coming years, putting an intolerable strain on healthcare systems. I have frequently commented on the problems of using a reductionist approach to weight management. You probably know from personal experience that any diet works for a while and then, unless something drastic happens, the weight usually returns. Similarly some of the drugs available for treating obesity may indeed work, but usually only in the short term and their usefulness is limited by side effects.

I want to say more about why the problems of weight can be difficult to manage and why the solution is not another fad diet aimed at modulating one hormone, such as leptin, or one neurotransmitter like serotonin or dopamine. I have mentioned before that there are multiple systems involving at least 260 tightly interconnected hormones and chemical transmitters coordinating the control of body weight. There are so many because weight is critical to survival and, with the possible exception of the brain, the more critical a system, the larger the number of fail safes and backups: the greater the degree of redundancy. Imagine a tent being secured by 260 ropes. But not just any ropes, these are intelligent cooperative ropes. Cut one, and the tent will stay in place because there are still hundreds left in place. Give it a little time, and the remaining 259 ropes will take up the slack, and the tent remains unmoved. Professor Steve Bloom from the Hammersmith Hospital and Imperial College Faculty of Medicine in London, has been a world leader in research into intestinal hormones and weight management for over thirty years, and he has just published a brief overview that focuses on just a few of the hormones known to be involved in the maintenance of body weight, and highlights the reason why some of them are attracting the interest of pharmaceutical companies. As well as holistically-oriented physicians.

It is now known that the regulation of appetite and food intake involves a complex series of interactions between higher cognitive centers in the brain, more primitive brain regions that we share with birds and reptiles, and the rest of the body. Amongst the key players in this whole vast orchestra are the endocrine systems of the gut, that play an important role in inducing and maintaining feelings of satiety.

The list of gut hormones involved in the maintenance of weight is a long one, that can be confusing to people who are not expert in the field. Here are just a few of them:

• Cholecystokinin
• Glucagon-like peptide 1
• Peptide YY
• Oxyntomodulin
• Ghrelin
• Pancreatic polypeptide

This is by no means the whole list, but you get the idea. At least one model for obesity suggests a breakdown or deficiency of some of the gut hormones that normally signal satiety. In effect, people do not know when they are full. In addition, disturbances of some of these hormones may lead to fat being deposited in some of the danger areas of the body, particularly inside the abdomen.

If I were to give you a breakdown of all the recognized weight control systems in the brain, I think that both of us would probably fall asleep

Yes, these understandings will enable drug manufacturers to produce new drugs to help with obesity. But that is only part of the story. We have found time and again, that the most effective way to normalize weight and eating habits is to deal with it from five different directions:

1. Physical
2. Psychological
3. Social
4. Subtle
5. Spiritual

In previous articles I have already given some broad brush strokes about what constitutes healthy eating. Strategies that work WITH rather than against systems that have been evolving for millions of years. In future articles I shall also share some of the weight management techniques that I detail in my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose.

Technorati tags: satiety, weight loss, weight control, diet, holistic diet, healthy eating

Gender and Relationships

I sometimes review interesting or important books at Amazon.com. I’ve just done that with a book entitled This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology by Christina Robb that is important for us on several levels. The book reviews the work of three remarkable individuals – Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller and Judith Lewis Herman - who between them changed the way in which we think about some important gender differences.

The philosopher Ken Wilber first alerted me to Carol Gilligan’s work several years ago. In the mid-1970s, she wrote an essay entitled "In a Different Voice," that was subsequently expanded into a book that I recommend highly. She described the marked discrepancies in moral development processes and self-expression between men and women.

According to Gilligan, the whole notion of a woman's self tends to be inextricably bound up in a web of close relationships. Women tend to be more diligent about maintaining and nurturing these relationships, and inter-personal details tend to be far more important to most of them, than they are for most men. I remember someone sending me a little joke about gender differences, in that mothers know the names of all their children’s friends, their parents’ names, birthdays, favorite music, likes and dislikes in people, food and clothes. While fathers may or may not notice the small people in the house. That was, of course, a joke. But like all jokes it had within it a grain of truth. But notice that I keep using words like “tend to,” when describing gender differences, because there are plenty of men who are into all these interpersonal details and women who are not remotely interested.

At the time that Carol Gilligan started writing about this, much psychological thinking in the United States had not yet dragged itself out of the confines of the post-Freudian theorizing that had dominated American psychology for decades. Gilligan and her co-workers identified relationships as the foundation of psychological and physical states. At the time, the idea that men and women might tend to think and relate in different ways was anathema. I worked in Boston around that time, and it was clear what could and could not be thought about and discussed. Gilligan's work was courageous, and taken together with the findings of psychiatrists Judith Lewis Herman and Jean Baker Miller, would ultimately lead to radical alterations in the way that we understand the psychology of women. Are these gender differences social, political or biological? The answer is, I think, yes: all of the above.

It is surprising how often discussions of gender differences are still omitted from much work on self-psychology. In an otherwise wonderful book - The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, edited by Tilo Kircher and Anthony David - there is scarcely any mention of gender.

I am not much of a fan of trying neatly to cleave men and women’s thinking styles in two. There will always be a great deal of overlap, and the key is not so much biological gender, but the style normally associated with a gender. The research of these three pioneers and of another pioneer – Deborah Tannen - is teaching us that the roots of many problems in our lives may be a consequence of misunderstandings about what men and women consider to be the most important things in their lives. It is also important to recognize that the amount of “maleness” or “femaleness” that we bring to our relationships and to our sense of self will change and evolve over time. Have you ever watched a relationship between a dominant career oriented male and a passive female gradually change into one in which the male takes the more passive role? This is a good example of a shift in “maleness” and “femaleness.”

I have been impressed by some of the recent work of David Deida, who has done a lot to explore the interplay of male and female essences in our lives. I have already mentioned in some of my other postings the importance of moving from a dominator to a partnership model in all of our relationships.

Consider whether problems in any of your relationships may be a result of misunderstanding gender needs.

Technorati tags: gender differences, psychology, relationships, gender

The Amazing Power of Your Voice

I have always considered myself to be musically challenged: I love listening to music of all kinds of different genres, but as for producing it? No.

I was kicked out of the kindergarten choir during a particularly painful attempt to sing "Ring a ring o' roses." I used to worry that I might be responsible for the collapse of the mental health of a succession of music teachers....

I always thought it a bit of a pity that I had no ability to sing because four events have convinced me of the power of the human voice.

The first was a demonstration by Zoroastrian priests who could split a pane of glass in two simply by chanting. This is quite different from the tales of champagne glasses shattering as they resonate with the sound of a soprano’s voice. This was precise and done to order.

The second occurred one Sunday morning, when I was sitting with a number of friends as we were waiting to enjoy our Sunday lunch together. We were having a pleasant discussion, when I heard one of the most beautiful and ethereal sounds imaginable coming from the kitchen. The sound was emanating from Jill Purce , the wife of one of the other guests, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake. She was demonstrating Tibetan overtone chanting. This is something that can be learned by anyone who can speak. Our voices naturally contain a spectrum of sounds, and the technique of overtone chanting makes some of these harmonics audible. There is great power in the sound produced and the dual actions of liberating your voice and concentrating on learning a new way of using your body can have profound effects on your mind, body and subtle systems. In Tibet and Mongolia these techniques are used for raising consciousness and gaining spiritual insights.

The third event that convinced me of the power of the voice was trying a series of mantras and chanting exercises and finding just how quickly each could change my state of consciousness and even produce profound physical effects. Just taking a deep breath and repeating the sound AAAHHH on each slow exhalation quickly showed me the power of just one sound. Another one is to place your right hand over your heart and softly repeat HAWWW, while imagining red light flowing from your hand into your heart can have an amazing calming effect, though some people also find that it cause an emotional release. Doing it for just a minute or so can sometimes have people crying with the release of some of the emotional tension that they were holding in.

The fourth event was being made aware of the effects produced by some of the sub-harmonics produced by own voice when speaking both when woking with individuals and when speaking to large audiences. I’d never been even vaguely aware of them until a sound engineer did a demonstration for me. I’ve since learned that several other speakers produce similar sub-harmonics that can have profound effects on listeners: the best known that I can think of are Caroline Myss (you can download a free meditation by Myss from this site), Deepak Chopra and Ken Wilber (you can actually download a free podcast from this link-- "God is a Blogger" is my favorite!). When you listen to all three of them in person, or listen to their tapes or CDs, your will often learn things really deep down, that go way beyond the actual words being spoken. I was once delivering a speech and I didn’t feel that it had flowed as well as usual in terms of the content. Yet at the end I had a line of people wanting to tell me of the profound effect that I had upon them. And then the organizer immediately asked me to return, telling me that there was “something about your voice,” that had drawn everyone in. I must admit that at the time I was completely oblivious to all this.

For years now I have been interested to learn everything that I could about the therapeutic effects of sound: in particular, music, chants, mantras and sacred language. So I was extremely excited to read a new book by James D’Angelo on the Healing Power of the Human Voice, and it exceeded all my expectations. It is a book crammed with practical exercises and there is an accompanying CD. Taken together, they should be enough to convince the most hardened skeptic. And there is a wealth of wonderful material for the open-minded experimenter.

Technorati tags: voice, healing, Caroline Myss, Deepak Chopra, Ken Wilber, Jill Purce

Green Cheese Claims and Needless Dietary Chaos

The front cover item of today’s Newsweek Magazine concerns the confused and confusing state of dietary advice in America, and indeed around the world. So much of the advice on offer is based on political considerations and a fundamental misunderstanding about the way in which knowledge grows.

People outside the academic world are often astonished to discover that it is not a world of quiet painstaking investigation and careful intellectual deliberation, but is instead a hot bed of neo-Darwinian competitive frenzy. Every academic is under constant pressure to publish or perish. There are constant and intense demands to bring in grant money. This pressure can lead to huge problems. Data is often published before it is ready.

As regular readers of my columns know already, I have been vigorous in exposing scientific misconduct, but I am also concerned about raising false hopes or giving false guidance on the basis of single studies. Any study, however well designed and executed and however many subjects it contained, still needs to be confirmed and confirmed again. If somebody at NASA produced evidence that the moon was made of green cheese, I doubt that they would be believed. Not unless the observation could be confirmed by hundreds of independent investigators around the world.

Yet every day I see people who have fallen victim to green cheese claims. People who have been persuaded to part with millions of dollars to buy supplements to help them lose weight, on the basis of very limited data and sometimes wild extrapolations. Often they are just not needed. As an example, people are usually not told that ten minutes in the sun and a glass of low fat milk will give them all the calcium and vitamin D that they need for a day.

The Newsweek article does a great job of teasing apart many of the competing claims.

A year ago Mike Johanns, the Secretary of Agriculture, launched the new MyPyramid initiative to highlight the 2005 Government Guidelines for healthy eating, which for the first time emphasized the importance of individualizing any approach to diet and exercise. Although there were all the usual allegations that the guidelines were simply a confection designed for the health of American farmers rather than the health of the American population, I really cannot agree with those comments. The guidelines represent a considerable advance on the old food pyramid, but as I have pointed out in previous postings, the problem with weight management is not just what you leave out, but also what to include in any healthy eating plan. I really do suggest that if you haven't already, you look back at some of the suggestions that I've made previously on this blog.

Let me also direct you to another resource: The Psychiatric Resource Forum's article “Nutrition for Americans” will point you toward other good sources of information that we have carefully vetted for accuracy. Although this blog was created for healthcare professionals, it also contains a lot of information of value to readers of this blog.

Later this year, we plan to publish a short book on the precise approach to healthy eating that I have been using with great success for many years now.

Technorati tags: green cheese, diet advice, MyPyramid, Newsweek

More on Chess and the Mind

After my last article about some of the things that one can learn from chess, a blogger in Australia added “patience” to my list. And he is quite right. Except that I have, sad to say, never mastered the art of patience. It's a character flaw. Maybe I would have had more success at the Royal Game if I had been just a bit more patient. I suppose a few extra IQ points might have helped too...

There is a nice article on Susan Polgar’s blog : Susan is the oldest of three remarkable Hungarian sisters who were trained to be geniuses from early childhood by their father László Polgár. She now lives in New York, and she is an International Chess Grandmaster who also happens to be fluent in seven languages. She is doing a great deal to promote the enormous benefits of chess, particularly in the United States. Clearly the sisters had “good genes,” but it is inspiring to see what can be done for youngsters if they are exposed to a highly enriched environment early in life. But there is something else to the Polgar story. Despite the stereotype that over-education might lead people to be unbalanced eggheads, all three have turned out to be remarkably normal and charming young women with children of their own. One sister – Judit – is the highest rated female chess player of all time, and the third sister – Sofia – is an International Master living in Israel.

The normalcy of the sisters is in stark contrast to the situation of many children that I have seen in Japan, who are already having extra tuition in Kindergarten. Scholastic failure is a recognized cause of suicide in Japan, and the Japanese actually have a word for death from overwork: Karoshi.

I wish Susan well in her efforts to promote chess, but I would also love her to share with the world how she and her sisters managed the balancing act of marrying extreme intellectual development with normal emotional and interpersonal relationships. That is in many ways even more remarkable than the sisters’ extraordinary accomplishments.

Technorati tags:  chess, balance, Susan Polgar,

Mr. Black, R.I.P.

I have previously written about the privilege that I have had over the past four years of sharing a great deal of time with a wonderfully wise old soul who appeared in the body of horse.

Well, sad to report, on Friday March 10th 2006, he passed away very suddenly. Early on Friday morning we heard from our farm manager that he seemed to have colic. Horse colic can be a very serious problem in horses, since they are unable to vomit, and distended bowel can perforate. There was no obvious reason why he should develop his first ever attack of colic, apart from the fact that he was twenty-seven years old. And one other thing. Just three days earlier the daughter of his original owner and friend from Virginia who had known the horse all his life, came to visit him. They were thrilled by his incredibly good condition. Mr. Black’s only worry was that someone might take him away from his retirement home!

Despite his age, this was a horse that still wanted to run and jump with the younger ones. He liked to show off to some of the young competition horses that he still had the ability to out run them. The prospect of slowing down and being unable to keep up would not have appealed to him at all.

So although I may be anthropomorphizing here, I think that he had been given the opportunity to see his former owners one last time, and thought that this would be a good time to get out while he was still at the top of his game: still able to perform with all the younger horses, for whom he was an object of veneration.

I know that someone will ask why we couldn’t cure him of his colic. After all, in the days that I was treating a lot of individual patients, I have had humans fly from all over the world to come and see me for an opinion. They came because our success rates have often been far above average. So why couldn’t we pull Mr. Black around? We certainly tried. A superb vet saw him three times in 12 hours and did some very creative things to try and help him. He also received Rescue Remedy, two homeopathic remedies, acupuncture and Reiki, all in very precise coordinated combinations.

Yet he had obviously decided that it was his time to go. And that leads me to the last part of providing integrated health care. It is learning to understand when it is a person’s time to go and learning to accept it. That does not mean becoming passive and giving in! It means understanding what the whole organism is saying and whether we are trying to keep someone alive not for their sake, but because we would miss them. When it became clear that Mr. Black was not going to stay with us, I took him to see all the other horses. They all rubbed noses and said their goodbyes. The other horses took a keen interest in everything that was going on, so we let them watch as he departed, so that they would all know that we will never leave them alone if they are sick or when their time comes.

I’ve never liked the idea that medicine should be a wrestling match between a person and an illness. This is a false duality and ultimately an impossibility that can paralyze treatment and prevent the maintenance of wellness. Illness and even death are inevitable parts of life and it is really important that we learn the art of active co-existence. Do everything that you possibly can to get a good outcome for all involved, but then detach from that outcome. That’s the loving, compassionate and truly integrated approach to care.

Technorati tags: integrated medicine, pets, loss, horses,

Glucosamine and Chondroitin

A study has been published in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine that seems to show that there’s no advantage in taking the popular dietary supplements glucosamine and chondroitin. Indeed that’s what has been reported in the media . But notice that I said, “Seems to show,” for on closer examination there is more to this paper than it appears.

The investigators are to be congratulated for doing the study in the first place. What they did was to take a large group of 1583 patients who all had osteoarthritis of the knees, and divide them into five groups:

• A placebo group
• A group that took celecoxib (Celebrex) 200mg/day
• 1500mg of glucosamine/day
• 1200mg of chondroitin/day
• A combination of 1500mg of glucosamine/day and 1200mg of chondroitin/day

The study lasted 24 weeks, and the main outcome measure was pain in the knees. The study showed that although patients on Celebrex did very well compared with the placebo group, those on glucosamine and chondroitin did not do better than placebo, although the combination was better than using either supplement alone. But one of the odd things was that people with moderate to severe pain WERE helped by the combination, and in fact the combination out-performed Celebrex!

Not only does the combination seem to help people with the biggest problems with pain, but also there are some other important points:

1. The worse someone is, the bigger the room for improvement. If someone only has mild pain, you need a lot more patients to find a statistically significant improvement.

2. As in most studies, multiple measurements were done, and Celebrex was no better than placebo in 12 out of 14 of them. So if the “active comparison” failed on multiple measures, we need to be very cautious about how we interpret the study.

3. The placebo response rate in the study was 60%, while the average is 30-35%. This is a huge difference. This may be because the patients knew that they had a four in five chance of getting a treatment that might help them, so they went into the study with high expectations.

4. This is only one study, concerning one type of joint problem. There are more than 30 others that have in general been even more positive then the findings in the moderate to sever group, including a very long-term study that showed that over an eight-year period, the combination dropped the rate of knee replacement by almost 75%. It is crucially important to examine the results of any study in the context of everything else that has been known and discovered. Every type of study has to be checked, and verified.

5. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and is the first of two parts, with a second study of the impact of the treatments on X-rays of the knees still pending.

6. None of the groups had many side effects, but it is worth remembering that medicines of the Celebrex type are under intense scrutiny because of the possible association with cardiovascular disease.

7. Many specialists use anti-inflammatory medicines together with glucosamine/chondroitin, at least at the beginning of a course of treatment. And that makes good sense.

8. What about the dosing of the supplements? Although those are the doses used by most people, they may not always be enough. In patients who weigh more than 200 pounds, many experts recommend 2000mg of glucosamine and 1600mg of chondroitin. It is also wise to take the supplement in divided doses with food. (I have sometimes also found it very useful to add Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM), 1000mg/day to the glucosamine and chondroitin, though there is little research to support it.)

None of these treatments can be given to pregnant women or nursing mothers.

One other small caveat, if you are having surgery make sure that you tell you surgeon if you are taking these supplements. Chondroitin has minor anticoagulant activity , and so may glucosamine.

And remember that the maintenance of joint health is not just a matter of taking some supplements. It is a judicious mixture of taking the right medication when needed, together with supplements, a healthy diet containing some omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants, exercise, management of posture, particularly of the spine, and weight management. To say nothing of ensuring that joint problems are not being compounded by psychological and relationship problems, and disturbances in the subtle systems of the body.

Technorati tags: glucosamine, chondroitin, knee pain, arthritis

Marital Conflict and Hardening of the Arteries

The Bible contains at least three references to the undesirability of hardening one’s heart:

“And the Lord said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.” -- Exodus 4: 21

The BBC is carrying a report of a paper presented to the American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Denver Colorado. Researchers from the University of Utah have added another piece of evidence that marital conflict bad for you. In a previous posting I discussed the evidence that marital conflict can compromise the immune system. Now we have confirmation that marital conflict can also have an adverse effect on the coronary arteries, leading to hardening and calcification of these crucial blood vessels.

The researchers studied 150 married couples, with at least one partner in their sixties. None of the people in the study had ever been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease. Each couple was asked to pick a topic that caused disagreements in their marriage: topics included money, disagreements about in-laws, children, vacations and household chores. They were then videoed while they discussed the topic, and the videos were watched by psychology students who coded comments as friendly or hostile, submissive, or dominant or controlling. Cardiac scans were then done to look for signs of disease.

Wives who made the most hostile comments during the discussion had a greater degree of calcification of their coronary arteries, indicating the build up of plaque in these crucial arteries. It is not just the behavior of one person: the highest levels of calcification were found in women who behaved in a hostile and unfriendly way and who were interacting with husbands who were also hostile and unfriendly. Husbands who were more controlling, or who were more dominating, or whose wives were controlling or dominating, were also more likely to have more severe hardening of their arteries than other men.

These findings are in line with everything that I have been writing about looking at all the five dimensions or domains of a person: physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual. If you ask most people what they are doing to protect themselves against heart disease, they will probably talk about not smoking, taking exercise and healthy eating. That response is correct, but inadequate. Toxic relationships are just as dangerous, as are certain psychological response styles. For many years it was thought that the so-called “Type A personality,” was a risk factor for coronary artery disease, but research has shown that it is just two aspects of this response style that are responsible for the increased risk of coronary artery disease: anger and hostility.

Disagreements are bound to come up in any relationship, but the way that we communicate gives us a great opportunity to do something healthier for both people. In my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose I discuss the wonderful work of Riane Eisler, and I talk a lot about methods of transforming relationships from an unhealthy dominator model into a healthy partnership model.

Particularly if you are in a relationship, I urge you to take some action today to move towards greater heart health.

Technorati tags: marriage, heart disease, Riane Eisler, bad relationships

The Naked Ape

When I am looking for new articles to analyze for you, gentle reader, I am very fortunate that Carol Kirshner, my web mistress (is that the politically correct term??), is also a researcher, and she does a great job of finding new items that are relevant to our basic themes. But sometimes I wonder if she is kidding me, as happened when she pulled up an article with the enticing title: “All the better to see you blush, my dear...”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology just published a study in the Journal Biology Letters in which years of painstaking neurophysiological research lead them to speculate that the reason that primates evolved complex color vision was not, as previously thought, so that they could find the most tasty ripe fruit, but so that they could detect a blush on someone else’s face or, ahem, their posterior.

The main color sensing cells in the retina are the rods and cones, and it turns out that the cones are exquisitely sensitive to skin tones. The trouble with the old theory about color vision and fruit is that there has never been much evidence for it, and as someone who lives with horses, I know that they have some quite sophisticated color vision, yet are more than happy to munch away on grass.

This new study shows that primates have three-color vision, and the system seems extremely well adapted to pick up colors that are prevalent in the skin, in particular the amount of oxygenated hemoglobin in the blood. This three-color recognition system can signal a primate if a potential partner might be having a rush of emotion in anticipation of mating. It might also be the mechanism for telling if an enemy’s blood has drained out his face because of fear. And rosy cheeks, like smooth skin, are subconscious signs of health and vitality in a potential mate.

As the principle investigator - Mark Changizi - points out; old-world primates are all unique in that they have bare faces and bare posteriors. After all, there’s not much point in being able to see miniscule changes in skin color if the key areas are all covered up. So there seems to have been some co-evolution of the ability to see color modulations in the skin and the loss of fur.

Could this be the real reason for humans being the “Naked Ape?”

And I think that I shall leave it for you to consider all the implications of hiding a signaling system that has evolved over millions of years…

Technorati tags: evolution, Science,

Acupuncture for Migraine

It was frustration at being unable to help so many people with migraine, that first lead me to begin my training in acupuncture. At the time I was working as a young research fellow in the main migraine clinic in London and I quickly discovered that acupuncture could be a wonderful treatment for many people suffering from this illness. I did my advanced training in acupuncture in China and even there – working with some of the best practitioners in the world - I confirmed my observation that acupuncture is no panacea. But it is a very helpful addition to our therapeutic toolbox.

There is a most interesting article in this week’s Lancet Neurology, that was also picked up by the BBC. The study came from Germany, and involved 960 patients who were randomly assigned to normal migraine medication treatment, traditional acupuncture, and sham – or fake – acupuncture. People in all three groups got better, and there was nothing to choose between the treatments in terms of efficacy.

So what does that mean? That acupuncture was in this trial as good as medications. But it adds to the growing literature that indicates that the precise placement of needles is not always as important as we used to think. But we also need to know exactly where the “sham” needling was done. During my years with the Research Council for Complementary Medicine and Prince Charles’ Foundation for Integrated Medicine, I saw a great many studies and proposals for studies in which the “sham” needles had actually been placed in highly active acupunctures points.

When I was training in China, most of my fellow students had trained in classical acupuncture in Europe, and some were outraged when they heard Chinese professors of acupuncture say that only some acupuncture points were always in the same place, and that it was not necessary to follow all the classical teachings. Some of the Europeans felt that the Chinese were destroying an ancient legacy. The Chinese simply responded by saying that the practice of acupuncture was being evolved on the basis of clinical observations and empirical research. It looks as if they were correct!

Technorati tag: acupuncture, migraine

Migraine and Hormones

Migraine (can be a frightfully difficult problem to treat. It is such an interesting puzzle, that the first book that I ever wrote was on migraine and other types of headache. Migraine is a great deal more than just a severe headache. It is can also be associated with neurological symptoms, and people often become exquisitely sensitive to light and sound. Additionally, at the beginning of the attack, the stomach stops working properly, which can make the absorption of medicines very difficult. Then comes the vomiting and sometimes diarrhea.

Although migraine is usually described as a “vascular” headache, there are strong reasons for thinking that it is more than that. People who suffer from the classic type of migraine often have spreading visual problems or partial visual loss, which goes on for between ten and sixty minutes. These visual problems are likely the result of a spreading wave of neurological depression spreading over the visual cortex at the back of the brain. The sensitivity to light and sound suggests that something is going wrong in the neurological systems that normally filter sensations, and the gastrointestinal problems indicate that something is going wrong in some of the control centers of the brain. There are some real oddities about migraine: it is exceptionally uncommon in people with diabetes; appears to be slightly more common in people who are left handed and is one of the only illnesses that tends to gets better as we get older.

There are a number of well-known triggers to migraine attacks. Though the scientific literature on triggers is not conclusive, here are some of the more common ones, that if avoided, have helped a great many people:

• Stress (either during stress, or when the pressure comes off)
• Cheese
• Chocolate
• Coffee
• Citrus fruit
• Red wine
• Changes in the weather (especially when there are a lot of positive ions in the atmosphere)
• Mono-sodium glutamate (MSG)

One of the best-known features of migraine is that it is considerably more common in women and that there is often a relationship between headaches and phases of the menstrual cycle, in particular during the pre-menstrual days. There have been many small studies that have indicated that oral contraceptives might increase the risk of suffering from migraine. A new study from Trondheim in Norway, has confirmed a link between oral contraceptive and migraine. The Nord-Trøndelag Health Study was done between 1995 and 1997. It included 14,353 pre-menopausal women, of whom 13,944 (97%) responded to questions regarding their use of contraceptives. There was a significant association between migrainous and non-migrainous headaches and the women’s reported use of estrogen-containing oral contraceptives. An important finding was that there was no relationship between the number of headaches and the amount of estrogen in the contraceptive pill.

There is one more thing to factor into the equation. Over the last two decades, there have been many reports of an association between certain types of migraine and cerebrovascular accidents (“strokes”). In the largest analysis of the data, that was published in the British Medical Journal, there was indeed a higher rate of strokes in women who had migraine and who were taking oral contraceptives. These studies included some of the older ones done in the days when the doses of hormones were higher than they are today, but when making decisions, it is important to be aware of this rare association.

An editorial in the British Medical Journal made these recommendations, with which I agree:

1. In an otherwise healthy young person, there is little cause for concern because the absolute risk of stroke is very low.

2. People with migraine who are on oral contraceptives have another reason for not smoking

3. Use low dose estrogen or progesterone only contraceptives in young women with migraine.

4. Although there isn’t much good evidence, many neurologists suggest stopping oral contraceptive pills if the migraine becomes more frequent or changes in character.

5. The risk of stroke gradually increases over age, particularly in smokers, so a slightly older smoking woman with migraine, should probably not be taking an oral contraceptive, unless it is the only option for her.

Technorati tags: migraines,hormones, headache, womens health

More on Scientific Misconduct

Today there have been reports from Reuters and the BBC that South Korean prosecutors have started questioning the disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk. The reason for their interest is that his fraudulent research was largely funded by public money. Thus he could be accused of misusing government funds.

The shock waves from this sordid scandal are still spreading.

A report  has just been published by a panel at the University of Pittsburgh that has cleared Gerald Schatten, director of its department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences, of any scientific misconduct in his collaboration with Hwang Woo-suk. However, the University panel decided that although he was not involved in the falsification of data, he should have taken greater steps to ensure that the data were correct. The panel decided that Dr. Schatten was guilty not of research misconduct, but of “research misbehavior.”

Five years ago a former colleague of mine who has had a distinguished scientific career, became mired in scandal. Not because of something that he had done wrong, but because of something that he failed to do right, some ten years earlier. A young researcher in his department was cooking up research data, and even when the first suspicions were brought to his attention, for some reason he failed to check it out.

It is the responsibility of everyone involved in a research project to ensure that everything is correct. After that is the responsibility of reviewers to re-check everything. We owe that to patients, their families, and the public who pays for this research.

I just hope that one day Dr. Hwang will tell everyone why he felt that it was okay to betray the trust of millions of people around the world.

Addendum:  It is a little late, but I recently found a interesting podcast done on Feb 8, 2006 by the good people over at Scientific American that discusses the Stem Cell/Korean debacle.  I'm linking it here in case you want to have a listen. 

Technorati tags: scientific misconduct, Hwang Woo-suk, research

Nonlocal Interactions and Entangled Neurons

“Nonlocal” has become a bit of a buzzword recently, so let me explain what it means and why it so very important. It is an idea first proposed by the Irish physicist, J.S. Bell, in the 1960s, that at the microscopic quantum level particles that have been in contact remain permanently connected.

It has been repeatedly demonstrated in the laboratory, but for a long time seemed no more than a curiosity, the effect being infrequent and unstable, and only occurring at the quantum level. But then data started coming in from surprising sources: The “distant viewing” experiments of Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in the 1970s, and work reported from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Laboratory. Then some exquisitely clear-cut research by Dean Radin, first while he was at the University of Nevada, and now at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and finally data on distant healing. Together these have really made it seem very clear that these nonlocal effects do indeed occur in the world of large physical objects. Not surprisingly, this research is so important for our understanding of the world, that it has all been viciously attacked. But the fact is that the data keep coming in, and keep resisting the most ferocious attacks.

Larry Dossey, an important voice in medicine for more than two decades, asserts that we are now seeing the emergence of what he calls Era III or nonlocal medicine that acknowledges that your thoughts and intentions may affect the functioning of other individuals, at any distance, and with or without the awareness of the recipient.

The same Dean Radin whom I just mentioned, has recently suggested the existence of entanglement in biological systems. A study published by a group of scientists from the University of Milan is intriguing. The investigators used cultures of human neurons derived from neural stem cells. What they did is fascinating and important. They split the neurons into two little dishes, and equipped each dish with tiny electrodes to record the electrical activity of the cells. I remember doing something similar back when the world was new, and I was a physiology student. But what we did not do back then is this: one of the dishes was shielded from electrical or optical inputs, so that there could be no ordinary influence of one dish on the other. However, when cells in the unshielded dish were stimulated with a laser beam, the cells in the shielded culture responded at the same time. The team took every possible precaution to ensure that there was no known way of one dish or cells influencing the other, and yet the stimulation of one dish caused the other to respond. This experiment was repeated and repeated over a three-year period. This provides evidence for some form of nonlocal linkage or entanglement between the cells in the dishes.

Interestingly, the authors themselves remain very cautious and despite repeating the experiment in a number of different ways, still worry that some of the laser light might somehow have leaked and stimulated the cells in the shielded dishes. The prospect that they have genuinely found a new force at work in biology is enough to worry anyone whose future is in the hands of grant givers.

Technorati tags: Nonlocal medicine. Larry Dossey, nonlocal, medicine, neurons, intentions

Integrated Health and Aging

An important principle of the emerging laws of health and healing is that anything helpful should help more than one system of the body at a time. So a diet that might help mitigate the effects of aging in the skin should also have beneficial effects on the major organs of the body.

So I was encouraged to see a new report indicating that cardiovascular health and a healthy lifestyle are associated with maintaining the health of our brains as we age. This is, of course, intuitively obvious, but it is always nice to see such things confirmed by empirical research.

The new report is from a multi-Institute collaboration of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published online in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. The chair of the committee was Hugh Hendrie, the Scottish-born professor of psychiatry from the University of Indiana, and the committee members were many of the most eminent people in the fields of aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

What is encouraging about this new report is that many of the factors associated with cognitive decline as we get older are eminently remediable: we have within our reach a set of potential interventions that could significantly reduce our personal risk of developing cognitive problems later in life. These are the things that we need to work on if we want to reduce our risk of developing cognitive decline later in life:

1. Hypertension: There is excellent evidence that inadequately treated hypertension correlates strongly with cognitive decline.
2. Physical activity: There is good evidence that elders who exercise regularly are less likely to experience cognitive decline. This is over and above the general improvement in quality of life that accompanies regular exercise. The earlier in life that we start, the easier it is to continue.
3. Increased mental activity throughout life, including learning new things and going through higher education may benefit the health of the brain.
4. Moderate alcohol use and the use of vitamin supplements also seem to be brain protectors, though the report does not specify which supplements.
5. Social disengagement and depressed mood are both associated with poorer cognitive functioning, so it is important to be alert to signs of depression, and to maintain a social network. I discuss this in more detail in my book Healing Meaning and Purpose.

There are doubtless some genetic and environmental factors about which we can do little. But the idea that we now have a list of things that we can do to protect our brains is very exciting.

This report also signals another important change. In recent years we have seen the growth of Positive Psychology, the study of how to improve ourselves rather than the constant focus on psychopathology. This report calls for the research community to study health maintenance of the brain with the same energy that it has brought to bear on the study of diseases of the brain. To which I would add, that we must not just focus on how to maintain the health of the brain, but how we can enhance it’s function so that we can all reach and exceed our full potential.

Technorati tags: aging, Integrated health, Positive Psychology, healthy lifestyle,