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.

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!

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.

Eating for Blood Type

Several years ago I read Eat Right 4 Your Type, by Peter D'Adamo. It was a revelation both the story and the science behind the book . The premise that some foods act as medicine and some as poison is intuitively obvious to most of us. However, the tie in to blood type is ingenious, as is the sleuthing that led to the discovery.

I was already attracted to many of the foods for blood type A+. But the grains that really help my body are allegedly, buckwheat and amaranth. Huh? All the rest are neutral, so they are okay. But if I eat the things that act like medicine, that is supposedly the upgrade. Buckwheat I once used as a cover crop when I used to garden on a large scale. Amaranth is a family that includes an extremely weird looking flower, called Love Lies Bleeding, and does look somewhat gory.

Long story short, this week my breakfasts included both buckwheat and amaranth and it was a decidedly different experience from eating other things. Hard to put into words, but eating buckwheat was like eating air. It was both light and filling. I prepared it by sprouting it, drying it, roasting it, then boiling it in water. Talk about good. Then the amaranth I just boiled on the stove. With a little sweetener, nuts and raisins, it was a great start to the day.

So you might want to check this out. Whether the foods on the list just give your body a total vacation by digesting themselves or whether they are doing something sneaky and wonderful inside, who knows. For me it feels like a rest.

Meat is not medicine for blood type A. We must be the veggie blood type. Whereas Type O's who forgo meat often suffer. But in case I indulge, I have HCl pills that make short work of a mess of ribs or a hot dog. There is no blood type that can boast hot dogs as medicine. Dream on!

Chaos For Real

Today, as promised earlier, I'm going to talk about meditation. The dictionary is no help here. MEDITATE: to reflect on or muse over; CONTEMPLATE; INTEND, PURPOSE; to engage in contemplation or reflection. The definition my friends have range from formal zazen to taking big drags off a cigarette in a contemplative way. I think fishing might be the modern day equivalent. With a rod in my hand, aside from a jingling anticipation of the BIG BITE, I feel at one with the water, trees and dirt.

The thing I never realized about meditation is that it is truly a litmus test for sanity. Hey Zeus! The minute I attempt quiet on my own, all hell breaks loose in my mind. A tidal wave of agendas, instructions, manic fantasies, music, a horror movie, ear splitting harmonics. Its like I got cable in my head. Like there is a conspiracy to keep me rattled and unable to actually think something through. Well, the good news is that if I am willing to attempt it over and over, sitting on my cushion with my eyes closed, breathing deeply, it settles down in there and I can breath and have some 'no thought' spaces before the other stuff sneaks back in.

If I get away from it though, it takes 3-4 days of sitting on my zafu (cushion inherited from my buddhist Dad) before I find peace. That feels like failing every minute, while exerting maximum exertion. Try that one on for size ! Could be I'm doing it wrong. Today I heard about a better way.

More later. The demons are dancing on my head today.
Time to read a book.

Is Peace Practical?

Just finished my quiet time and wondered if having a good life is so much simpler than I ever thought. Like when I am feeling gratitude, it might be a reset button for my whole body. Or laughing at a joke, saying hi to a friend is the most spiritual of activities. Eckhart Tolle is pretty adamant about staying in the moment being the answer to our ills. I'm starting to be convinced.

Yesterday I got really rattled about something, checked in with myself and handed it off to my 'special assistant' who takes care of everything difficult. Getting back to a peaceful state of mind suddenly showed me all the possible solutions. Instead of wasting the day on fretting, I was off on a fantastic and productive day. It was a Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde moment for sure. One minute, my brain is in the blender, my face would probably inspire someone to turn and run, the sky is dark and no relief in sight. Next moment, the sun is out, I can breath freely and and I have not a care in the world. Wow! It sure is fun being me.So is peace the answer to all my problems? A peaceful state of mind... The research on meditation is, of course, staggering in its implications for our well being. The research on the Maharishi Effect has been around for 40 years but I am always surprised how few people know about it. That 1% of a population practicing (transcendental) meditation can reduce crime rates in a given region by upwards of 20% on any given night, everytime, is a fact worth exploring.

For the individual though, informal quiet time, or mindfulness meditation, has "produced lasting positive changes in both the brain and the function of the immune system" according to an article explaining this preliminary study at University of Wisconsin. In another study, violent or sociopathic behaviors previously assumed to be caused by character defects, bad parenting, or bad genes, may actually be caused by abnormally high or low activity, in specific parts of the brain. If this is true, there may be a simple solution to the most baffling of human behaviors.

The Maharishi Effect has implications that affect every sphere of life from how corporate decisions are made to improving the quality of family life, to averting mental and physical illness. That is cause for celebration. Next time, I'd like to look at how everyday people find that peaceful place. I don't know about you, but the word meditation has always seemed like a closed door to me, rather than an invitation. Then, when I ask everyone I know, they each have a completely different definition for what meditating is for them. So this might be fun to look at.

How far can we go

Humans are capable of the most miraculous feats of survival, strength, endurance and even shape shifting as I mentioned in the Alley Grazer post today. In addition to the evidence mentioned there about extreme survival, other powers deemed impossible by current wisdom, are being taught in online and regular classrooms and tutorials around the country. Healing techniques (the links are coming), and power techniques-distant viewing, telekinesis, levitation, shape shifting- are all available at a price. In the past centuries, initiates to the sacred sciences prepared themselves for years before they were deemed worthy to plunge into the secrets of such powers.

I first heard about some of these super powers (including the ability of the human body to bi-locate and to contort into silly putty shapes during types of religious rapture),when Carolyn Myss talked about the lives of saints in her tape, Why People Don't Heal and How They Can. There are eye witness accounts back in the 16th through 18th centuries of the most miraculous occurrences. Even as recently as War II, a friar who was famous for his stigmata as well as his ability to bi-locate, saved the village of San Giovanni Rotondo by appearing to the American pilots as they were about to release their bombs. The pilots did a 180 and all reported back to base with the exact story of this guy in the sky. Padre Pio was doing chores at the monastery when it happened.

There is a lot of talk now about activating the inactive strands of DNA (of 12, we only use a couple). When we do that, they say, we will be capable of amazing feats. There are people making scads of money teaching people to activate their DNA or live on pure air. These folks are talking about reverse aging and immortality. Euwwww. Living forever has no appeal for me, but it is an intriguing idea. I read somewhere that there is no scientific evidence that the human body can't live healthily for 140 years. I think Wallace, the Dead Doctors Don't Lie guy, said that. I am more interested in having robust health for the 20-30 years I may have and feeling like this:

Interestingly enough, quantum physics supports the 'anything can happen' stories about human powers. The reason is, that we are not what we think we are. Big newsflash. We are mostly, no not mostly... we are entirely composed of are energetic wave patterns. If you've never read Richard Bach's Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, it will help you question the solidity of all of 'physical' matter. A wonderful yarn about a barnstorming pilot who can walk through walls.

So wiseguy (I can hear you say), if we are made of pure energy, why do we look and feel so solid? Apparently, the electrons are orbiting so fast, they create the illusion of solidity the same way a ceiling fan does. I still have a problem with that because I can't pass my hand through my face. More will be revealed on that.

Why am I so convinced the human body is capable of miraculous things? One time, in my early twenties, I emerged from a yoga class with my friend. When I went home, something felt very weird. It had never felt this vibrant in here. I felt this purr of well being from my toes to the top of my head and everywhere in between. It felt as though I could fly.

So what is the connection between alleged human super powers and this extreme well being I experienced and that imprinted so deeply, I'm still hooked on it?

I'm not sure, but I have a theory. So my plan for the this blog is to explore some ideas about all that and find out what others have experienced. I know exactly how I want to feel. Like you, I have some ideas about how to do it, so my first job is to find a starting point for doing it. Not thinking about it, or blogging about it, but doing it. What is the starting point?

I want to get that sparkle back. How about you?
In the meantime, here's to your health!