Sunday, April 25, 2010

Are Doctors Bad for My Health?


My Dad was a surgeon so we grew up with a weird take on modern medicine. On the one hand we were completely indoctrinated into the belief that doctors knew all. On the other hand, our esteemed papa when off the job was a shower singing, beer drinking, risk taking maniac. At rest, he often seemed to be dissociated. He could fart a trumpet riff-several stanzas (in public or private). He once had to haul his fainting daughter out of church and was unconscious of the blue streak he cussed the length of the church aisle.

Besides all that, he was one of the most rascally, hilarious and creative humans I've ever met. Off duty it was almost impossible to think of him as a doctor.

In my early 20's, my gynecologist's misinformation almost killed me, so I had a parting of the ways with allopathic medicine. That and a childhood hospitalization for spinal meningitis, terrorized me into looking for the truth about health for my body. Yes indeed.

My beef with medical science and those who 'practice' it comes down to this. The one-size-fits-all paradigm is clearly hazardous to many. And given the obvious fact that science is always in process, always changing with expanding research, doctors could be more humble about their information. Today's medical doctrine is tomorrow's embarrassment, always. Look at the cholestral fiasco. There are still people not eating eggs under the complete disinformation campaign of a few decades ago.

Near the end of his life, my Dad admitted that there was no way to know if the surgery/ and treatment got rid of the cancer or something else. He once had a patient with a watermelon size tumor who went home and cured herself. When he developed prostate cancer, he went inter-dimensional looking for solutions. We could finally talk about medicine.

I get so pissed off when MDs give a 'diagnosis' of arthritis, for example. In America, there is no cure except eventually replacing joints. In Europe, you go to a spa, alkalize your body with juices, get the lymph moving with massage and sauna, and upgrade the entire system so that organs are working, toxins are expelled, and the pain is eased because the conditions that caused it are removed. That is modern medicine on the continent. Why not here? (Don't get me started!)

If I go to an MD with anything outside the slender realm of that specialty or level of knowledge, I am in danger of misdiagnosis or a diagnosis that puts me in the group of 'unhelpables'. So I am very careful with my choice of professional. Those awesome practitioners whose love of the human body allow them to utilize and transcend the limits of that science are a joy to work with. I hope you have one.

My own family physician admitted (God love her) that there was no evidence that neither mammograms nor self exams did anything to save lives through early detection. I was just concerned about the radiation. So she supported me to decline the procedure.


Tuesday, April 13, 2010

How Do I know It's Food?


How do we tell the food from the non-food? You know that joke when looking at the cereal aisle in the grocery store, it might be a toss up whether the box or the contents provide more nutrition. I don't know if someone has tested that!

Last few weeks, I got obsessed with sprouting, especially things on my grain list for Type A. So I started a little buckwheat farm. After a week, that thing wouldn't stop. I ate 3 inch sprouts that were pretty tasty all week. They just kept growing, new ones coming. In the photo you can see the little hulls dangling on the ends. About ten cents worth of seed and I had salads all week. Interesting! Then amaranth and chia for cereal. That took care of two thirds of my meals, which left Quinn's Wrap Shack and a couple friends' soup/stew gifts to round out the week. I probably spent under $10 for food. But the big payoff was how good I felt. That bulge in my belly went away and my guts were happy.

Remember chia seeds? Among his Elvis memorabilia, my friend Fran had an Elvis chia pet which was too cool to be believable. What got lost in the 'chia pet' frenzy was the high nutritional value of chia. It was considered sacred for that reason in Mexico and parts of South America, yet another gift from that region. Soaked in a little water, chia can be added to anything-bread, cereal, waffles, smoothies. It seems to enhance flavor as well. Just getting started on this project. I can get a close to a gallon of chia seeds for $4.37 from Azure Standard and I use a couple tablespoons for a serving. That comes to 1.7 pennies per tablespoon. I defy you to find a bigger nutritional bang for your buck. The complete protein is super portable since you can eat them any way you want. Amaranth costs half that but it takes more so it comes out about the same.

The former sacred cows of nutrition are justifiably under attack. Milk, whole grains, fresh greens and vegetables (non-organic). When do the sulfites, pesticides and herbicides in commercial produce cancel out the nutritional value. Is anyone doing the math? GMOs, growth hormones, anti-biotics, ultra-pasteurizing and preservatives have unbalanced the nutrition in dairy products. I didn't even count the herbicide and pesticide dose from the cattle feed. I don't see that commercial dairy products even qualify as food anymore.

In a brilliant marketing move, the dairy industry has shifted the blame onto the consumer. Lactose intolerant. Interesting. Pasteurizing while important for sanitation, killed the digestibility for most adult and many infant humans by removing the enzyme that allows us to digest it. A calf could not get anything out of her mother's milk if passed through the gamut of pasteurizing, homogenizing and hormone enhancing that has been the recent fate of all commercially available milk.

I'm going to continue the optimum diet experiment. What I demand-freshness, affordability, and maximum nutritional wallop. Check out alley grazer for more ideas on that.

The question for me is, even if the food has maximum value on all these scales, can my particular body digest it? Is it food if I get nothing out of it? There is so much more to nutrition than what is in the food, though that is the first hurdle for sure. If it isn't there in the food, I'm not going to manufacture it out of thin air. Might have to question that presumption as well. Still, it is good to look at everything involved from when the substance enters my lips to all the work those nutrients do and how, in my specific human body. More on that next time.

Happy Eating!

Friday, April 2, 2010

Unintentional Affirmations

My friend Jenifer called today about crazy stuff happening, in addition to her back pain. For some reason I started telling her about 'affirmations' we use every day without thinking. Such as:

I'm getting old
I can't stand it!
My back is killing me
This is absolutely the last straw!
This piece of cheesecake will add 5 pounds to my hips
If he does that one more time, I'm going to shove this laundry up his...

We lie to ourselves all day long. I tell myself impossible fibs, outright untruths, most of which I am unaware of. Why? Why with a perfectly splendid mind, would I use it in this fashion? That is a whole other topic. But if this sounds familiar, the same principle that works on positive affirmations, I believe, operates in the cellular activation of negative messages. Well, two things happening, really.
1. It is a lie. Always. Almost any statement I make extolling my limitations is a lie. This I suspect creates a dissonance within my system related to my intention to be truthful. That is different from the normal cognitive dissonance which an affirmation creates.
2. It is an Affirmation because it is declarative. It states something as a given. Not a question, not a possible scenario, not 'I wonder if'. Every statement I make to myself gets run through the truth filter to determine whether something has to change to make it so.

All affirmations work on the principle of cognitive dissonance, I seem to remember from Psychology 101. There is a part of our mind that is like the 'go-fer'. If we say to ourselves, cheeseburger for lunch, the mind starts unraveling that into a plan. If I say my positive affirmations...the world is a safe and loving place, for example, then, supposedly, the primitive brain will begin to arrange my actions and perceptions to make that true. The mind has two contradictory pieces of info and tries to reconcile them. It can't stand the dissonance. Like a bad chord. Aaaaah, stop that noise.

So when I say, my back is killing me, who is to say what takes place in there. What if that reptilian brain doesn't question my logic and go, "Yo, does not compute, dingbat". What if cognitive dissonance demands a specific response as in MAKE IT SO. Then I think I better question some of those lies I tell myself.

Here is my favorite. I was lost in the woods about 10 years ago (still comes up on google). My hiking partner and I had bushwhacked over a couple, up-hill miles of the worst country I had ever come across. Our day hike near Kintla Lake gone horribly wrong. Me in shorts and a tank top going over fallen trees that were scattered like pic up stix (remember that game). We had been at it 3 hours and hadn't found the trail. As we sat on a log panting, me examining my bloody legs. I was dizzy from exhaustion. I thought, I'm toast...can't walk another step.

Well, guess what ? Six and a half hours and 15 miles later, including a close shave with grizzlies, I was still hoofing it. The next morning when search & rescue caught up to me, I had spent the night by my fire, watching for predators with a sharpened stick, floated down the North Fork (think ice) on my day pack, followed countless dead end trails. No, I had such a monumental 'second wind' that it makes me laugh now when I tell myself I'm all in, all exhausted, couldn't do another step!!So whether those negative affirmations encourage the universe to play tricks on us, or our polarized brain to make it so, it is worth tuning in on the internal monologue. It might be a 'to do' list you don't want your brain to take on. Also, those negative affirmations may have more to do with our physical well being than we could ever know. Experiment freely. It's your body.