Health Beyond Civilization

Probably more than anything else, the discovery of antibiotics heralded the age of modern medicine, enabling the eradication of heretofore deadly diseases. Coinciding as it did with the rise of oil use and oil-dependent technologies, and the industrial-technological-scientific-futurist mindset, it seemed to mark a permanent change in the way diseases were treated.

But the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way.

An article in the Guardian begins,

Just 65 years ago, David Livermore’s paternal grandmother died following an operation to remove her appendix. It didn’t go well, but it was not the surgery that killed her. She succumbed to a series of infections that the pre-penicillin world had no drugs to treat. Welcome to the future.

The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.

Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. “Is this the end of antibiotics?” it asked.

The crux, of course, is that all living things adapt to stresses. As modern medicine began to rely more and more on its “magic bullet” of antibiotics, it was inevitable that some bacteria would evolve strategies to survive the onslaught.

And they have. First it was MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant strain of staphylococcus that got hospitals in a panic. Now it’s another one called NDM 1. The general trend of resistance to antibiotics is spreading.

Have we reached Peak Antibiotics?

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Good essay over at Of Two Minds, titled, “What Is Good Medicine?” by Michael Horowitz.

One of my finest teachers taught me that the most important tool at a physician’s disposal for diagnosis and treatment was their relationship with the patient. This began as a sort of slogan for me but in time I understood the profound reality the words pointed to. Experience has taught me that the most important part of diagnosis is a subtle history taken by the doctor and the key to treatment is a well-founded sense of trust on the part of the patient.

Medicine is appallingly complex in its demand for knowledge, experience and judgment and technically informed consent is essentially impossible, even when the patient is a sick physician. Informed consent arises from the patient’s own character and experience, or not.

When all these elements – knowledge, judgment, ethics, compassion and relationship-are coupled with access – then good medicine is present.

In its origins, Hippocratic medicine emerged independent of religion, the state or any financial institution: there was no licensure, no insurance companies, and no malpractice law. Medical practice was taught by master to apprentice and conveyed from healer to sufferer.

This simplicity is gone. The first profound complication in medicine came in the form of licensure by the political state. The state was put into a position to decide what medicine was. This gave one group of physicians the power to eliminate a mass of competitors, whose method was at variance with their own, by excluding them from endorsement by the state.

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Hi all. I haven’t posted on here for quite awhile, and somehow the blog got hacked and a bunch of things moved around. Hopefully everything is back to its proper location, but if you see anything out of place or any text mysteriously missing, please let me know.

I hope to be a little more regular in adding to this blog as things settle down for me.

Fitness is defined in evolutionary biology as the “fit” between organism and environment, and is ostensibly about the physical body, physical health, and the organism’s ability to survive physically in the natural environment. But modern humans no longer have to adapt their bodies to survive physically in the natural environment; instead, they adapt the environment to fit them. Thus the survival and evolutionary pressures are eased, and cultural pressures take greater precedence. High heels rather than sensible footwear. Thin bellies rather than a good layer of fat to insulate against freezing temperatures. Huge biceps rather than functional strength.

It’s artificial, of course, a graft onto the natural. It could be argued that this is only an extension of what’s been done in indigenous cultures—after all, natives pierced and tattooed themselves, wore jewelry, rubbed themselves with oil, wore face and body paint, had outrageous hairstyles—just like modern humans. But they still had to answer to survival pressures. We don’t.

So here’s the dilemma. If fitness is “blending with what is,” but “what is” is not what has been or what should be, and moreover, “what is” does not practically lead somewhere useful, then what do we do? How do we find a context, a reason, a motivation for doing things with my body that does not need to be done? How, in other words, do we avoid the trap of modern fitness, which is to train for purposes that have been invented?

I don’t believe it’s possible.

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Read this article about an exciting new fitness system coming into existence, based on natural/primitive human body dynamics.

Our workouts are domesticated, while the world out there is still plenty wild. In a pinch, can a man put gym-generated biceps and tank-tread abs to any real use? Could it be that our treadmill-running, elliptical-gliding, well-oiled Cybex world has turned us into show dogs who can’t hold our own in the hunt?

“I meet men all the time who can bench 400 pounds but can’t climb up through a window to pull someone from a burning building,” Le Corre says. “I know guys who can run marathons but can’t sprint to anyone’s rescue unless they put their shoes on first. Lots of swimmers do laps every day but can’t dive deep enough to save a friend, or know how to carry him over rocks and out of the surf.”

… “Being fit isn’t about being able to lift a steel bar or finish an Ironman,” Le Corre says … “It’s about rediscovering our biological nature and releasing the wild human animal inside.”

The founder, Erwan Le Corre, has a website at movnat.com.

Here’s a podcast about improving your vision, integrated with rewilding games, from Willem Larsen.

In this seemingly tangential podcast, I further explain the use of the sensory tune-up game, and talk about how every game we play has both diagnostic and therapeutic properties. I speak a little bit of the history of Vision Therapy, the improvement of eyesight without corrective lenses, tell my own story of recent radical vision improvement, and offer up a method for those living in a similar context as myself; i.e. improving their health, changing their lifestyle, gaining self-clarity.

Listen to the podcast at The College of Mythic Cartography.

This post is about hypoglycemia, but it may also be useful for those who have other blood sugar disorders such as diabetes. And given the state of affairs in the developed world, what with the heavily sugared diet, I think almost everyone is at risk for blood sugar disorders.

I have hypoglycemia, a pre-diabetic condition that mandates that I avoid refined carbohydrates, including sugars, starches, and grains such as rice or bread. If I don’t, I very quickly notice it: My energy drops precipitously, I feel dangerously drowsy, and I start getting a pounding headache. If it gets bad, I’ll throw up or even pass out (but I’ve learned enough not to let that happen!).

Hypoglycemia is “hypo” (low) “glycemia” (blood sugar). Blood sugar, or glucose in the bloodstream, is a primary energy source to cells throughout the body. We get it from carbohydrates, roughly broken down into “refined” carbs (white rice, white flour products, white sugar) or “simple” carbs (usually, fruits), and from “complex” carbs (the many types of vegetables). Simple/refined carbs go more quickly to the blood and so give a quick jolt. Complex carbs break down more slowly. Generally, the sweeter it tastes, the quicker it goes to the bloodstream.

Diabetes is hyperglycemia; it happens when, for whatever reason, there’s too much sugar in the blood. Hypoglycemia is opposite, but related; basically both indicate that the body has trouble regulating and distributing energy, usually because there’s some kind of underlying energetic deficiency, which can be caused or aggravated by poor diet (and usually is, with diabetes).

I had always eaten lots of rice and pasta. Things started going awry during my first summer at Teaching Drum in 2000. Higher quantities of sugar were eaten there as part of a food addiction cycle that I’ve written about elsewhere. Then one day we were all fasting for the entire day in preparation for a sweat lodge ceremony that evening, and as the day went on I felt more and more horrible as my blood sugar plummeted. I was barely able to stumble my way the half-mile down the trail to where the van was parked, and the ride in to the house was very difficult because every bump on the dirt road threatened to make me puke.

When I finally got to the house, everyone else left for the sweat, and I staggered into the house, opened up a can of tomato soup, ate a little, lay down, and passed out. When I woke up I felt tons better.

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This is a fascinating technique that I stumbled across a few years ago and have never really used, but I was reminded of it recently.

Serge Kahili King, a Caucasian teacher of Huna, presented it in his book Urban Shaman:

Repatterning

A long time ago, so long that I can’t remember the source, I learned that if you stub your toe, all you have to do is repeat the same action several times, without quite stubbing your toe again, and the pain will go away. I used that a lot unthinkingly, but in later years I studied the process in detail and began teaching it in my courses, suggesting that the students try out variations. The concept I developed was that by re-creating the pattern and changing the ending, you were, in effect, giving the ku [subconscious] a new memory of the event, requiring the ku to change the body state in conformity to the new version of what happened. The sooner you could do this after the event, the sooner the body would get back into harmony.

What the students did amazed and delighted me.

A man in California, one week after the training, was in his backyard building a fence. At one point he smashed his thumb hard with a hammer and then pulled the hammer back prior to dropping it and following the normal routine of jumping up and down while squeezing his thumb and cussing. At the high point of his swing away from his thumb he remembered my lesson about repeating the pattern and changing the ending, so he followed through with his swing without quite touching his thumb. He repeated that action about seventeen more times. By then his thumb barely tingled and he went on with his work. When he was through he looked at this thumb and there was neither bruising nor swelling nor pain.

A medical doctor in Texas reported that he was chopping up lettuce for salad with a knife and sliced deep into a finger. Professionally he knew it would require several stitches, but he decided to try out my crazy idea anyway. After a few repetitive passes with the knife his finger stopped bleeding and the pain went away so he forgot about it and finished the salad. Three days later he remembered the accident and looked at his finger. There was no sign it had been cut.

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The Beijing Olympics are in full swing, and Michael Phelps is getting a lot of hype as the greatest Olympian ever, i.e. having won the most career gold medals, as well as shattering a lot of world records for speed. Seeing the attention paid to Olympic sports and herculean athletic feats, and to Tiger Woods’ recent epic tournament win among other things, gives me pause for thought.

Sometimes I compare myself with those athletes and it makes me feel, not inadequate, but profoundly puzzled. I look at the statistics on growing obesity and health problems on the one hand, and the massive adulation (and salaries) given to sports figures on the other, and it makes me think something is not quite right.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that virtually all of the modern sports do not even touch on the basic philosophy of living life, much less achieve the complete integration and unity of physical activity with living life that should be the foundation of a healthy human being’s relationship with body and nature. Take Olympic swimming as an example. These are essentially very simple races, back and forth in a straight line, in predefined distances. You can train for that, sure, and practice over and over again, expecting the same basic conditions every time. You can become great at it, compete with other athletes who have trained for the exact same circumstances, and win handily over them multiple times in a week to be called one of the greatest athletes ever.

I don’t mean to demean Phelps’ achievements, or Tiger Woods’ achievements, or Lance Armstrong’s achievements; they are remarkable feats. What I do want to do is question the frame.

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Welcome to our new contributing author, Pathfinder. See a short bio of Pathfinder on the About page.

Being a modern alternative medicine practitioner in modern day America, one of the biggest challenges you face is that ultimately what is at the root of what is wrong with almost all of your patients is that they are overworked, over-stressed, over-tired, have a poor diet, and under exercise. And worst of all it’s not their fault. Essentially, most people’s bodies are falling apart in one way or another because of one simple thing: MODERN CIVILIZATION.

What we are facing is that ultimately, we as a species have spent tens of thousands of years as bipedal hunter-gatherers and perhaps ten-thousand years as an agrarian based civilization. It is only in the last 100 years, that our society has transformed to such a degree that what our bodies do every day is completely different from what we are designed to do. Consider what most of us do every day: We sit. We sit in front of computers, we sit in vehicles, we sit in front of televisions, we sit in vehicles. Even manual labor jobs, such as construction or farming involve heavy machinery that requires sitting, and even if they don’t they require a repetitive action over and over that ultimately damages the body.

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