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I'm a little cautious to be posting this, because strict materialism is strong with users here, and vitalism-haters always pop up to spout their beliefs. I was once a materialist too, but then the medical establishment left me out in the cold.

Materialism was seemingly supported by science. But in the past few decades non-dogmatic scientists have made great progress in giving names to phenomenon which existed before anyone knew how to describe them, or had tools to measure them. A few examples:

Action potential: In physiology, an action potential is a short-lasting event in which the electrical membrane potential of a cell rapidly rises and falls, A nerve conduction study (NCS) is a test commonly used to evaluate the function, especially the ability of electrical conduction, of the motor and sensory nerves of the human body. The Goldman–Hodgkin–Katz flux equation (or GHK flux equation) describes the ionic flux carried by an ionic species across a cell membrane as a function of the transmembrane potential and the concentrations of the ion inside and outside of the cell. Since both the voltage and the concentration gradients influence the movement of ions, this process is a simplified version of electrodiffusion. Electrodiffusion is most accurately defined by the Nernst-Planck equation and the GHK flux equation is a solution to the Nernst-Planck equation with the assumptions listed below.

My journey back to health started with nearly losing it completely. I knocked myself out and nearly drowned at the lake when I was 17 years old. While the emergency medicine was great - I didn't need a hole drilled to relieve pressure from intra-cranial bleeding, but it was nice of the doctors at the hospital to watch my condition long enough to make sure. I have Retrograde amnesia starting an hour or two before I sustained the injury, and Anterograde amnesia for the next two weeks (first 10 days were at the hospital). My memory started to recover at about the 2-week mark, and had mostly recovered by 6 months.

The neurologist who'd followed my case at the hospital sent me for neuro-psychological evaluation, and said I'd probably get better without interventions. Indeed, the double vision had mostly resolved after 4 or 5 months. But my everyday experience wasn't like before. I got headaches from running, wearing birkenstocks, and certain foods, so I stopped running and wearing birkenstocks, and paid close attention to what I eat.

When I started at college, things went rapidly downhill. It was an entirely miserable 3.5 year experience, and after I graduated with my CS degree I spent the next several years trying to figure myself out.

At one point I found a really neat email list. The owner of said list said that "if you have a health condition, the best place to start is with what Edgar Cayce said about it." He also said that the best current source of information about the body's subtle energies is Donna Eden, author of Energy Medicine (actually written by husband David Feinstein, based on interviews with Donna). Edgar Cayce was known as "the sleeping prophet" because he had no conscious memory of the health readings he gave. They followed up on the recipients of the readings, and people who implemented the suggestions usually got the benefits they were told to expect.

My reason for sharing all this now, in this slashdot story about an Electrotherapy Museum, is that Edgar Cayce sometimes recommended electro-therapeutic devices. These included the violet ray (which is mentioned at the electrotherapymuseum's website), a wea

My introduction to the Flexner Report was 100 Years of Medical Robbery. I don't read mises.org anymore, but that piece is still memorable. I also recommend the followup, Real Medical Freedom.

Read a summary of Voyage from Yesteryear - it sounds interesting. Thanks.

Herbert Shelton, Joel Fuhrman, and Blue Zones?

Not familiar with any of those, sorry. I've read your links, and I have heard of Natural Hygiene before. I had something like lupus, and diet didn't make a difference. From my study of the Cayce material, I decided that I needed to go to an Osteopath, and that was quite helpful for my specific case. The second chapter of Spontaneous Healing has the best introduction to Osteopathic Medicine that I know of. (Most used book stores have a copy - google's preview snips the first page of that chapter. boo, hiss, boo.) Donna Eden's approach to Energy Medicine is also rather successful, and learn-able.

thanks again. :)

-jjk

I guess I'm wondering- are modern medical advances really as expensive as we're led to believe they are in America?

The real advances in modern medicine are the cheap ones that actually treat the root causes of a problem. Nutrition, Osteopathic Manipulation, IV therapies (w/ vitamins, EDTA, H202, and others), Energy Medicine, etc.

Most the other 'advances' can best be explained as 'profiteering' - clinics have to pay for for their $million+ MRI machine somehow, and the handful of cases a month where they're actually justified isn't going to pay the bills..

See links on how healthcare became screwed up, read Dr. Davidson's testimonial pages for examples of conditions which respond well to Cranial Osteopathy, check out Donna Eden's system of Energy Medicine, and get yourself a copy of Dr. Reilly's Handbook for Health Through Drugless Therapy, and I'm sure you can easily get your intestine flowing freely again.

A. For the blood sugar to stay balanced, it is crucial that spleen meridian be kept strong. This is done primarily by sedating triple warmer--which drains energy from spleen--and then by directly strengthening spleen. In Energy Medicine, you'll note that there are several ways to do this, and I'd have your daughter use every way possible since what is required with this illness is to literally retrain a deeply held energy habit in her body. To strengthen spleen meridian:

[list of exercises]

Changing the deep habit of a spleen/triple warmer imbalance will not only help keep her blood sugar in better balance, it can help create a new pattern of insulin production in her pancreas. The type of diabetes determines how much the illness can be turned around. If she was born without the ability to create insulin, she will probably always need to have it supplied externally, but even in that situation, the procedures described here will help her pancreas to function more optimally.

-Donna Eden on Diabetes

The 'mouth-breather == stupid' meme always bothers me when it comes up, because I was a mouth breather for a very long time. And I always did very well on all the standardized tests. I had some reminder stickers: 'lips closed, teeth together', but they didn't help much at all.

I learned about Donna's work about 5 years ago, from a Martial Artist who'd reverse-engineered Donna's techniques to make him a better fighter. I got the book first (many libraries and most large bookstores should have a copy), and did the exercises as best I could. But things didn't really start to come together for me until I had a couple sessions with one Donna's senior TAs, someone who'd been learning with her since the 1980's, and who can also see the body's energies quite well (not as well as Donna herself, but better than all but a handful of the rest of the people on the planet). And the first thing she did with me was hold the bellybutton/third eye hookup for quite a few minutes, before moving on to other things. And now, three years later, my tongue is almost always planted at the roof of my mouth.

I've seen the video you linked to before - while it's a good overview of the daily routine, it barely scratches the surface of why the exercises are important, and when they're called for. The book covers a lot of ground, and is quite a bargain for $17. Some people really need to see the exercises performed, and for them, the energy medicine kit is a better introduction.

Glad I helped you find something interesting today.

That explains the mouth-breathing 14 year olds...

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM, 5000 year history), mouth breathing is considered indicative of the central & governing meridians being 'unhooked'. The Central Meridian runs from the pubic bone up the front of the body, while the Governing Meridian runs from the tailbone up the spine and over the top of the head. They meet where the tip of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth.

Mouth breathing is something that needs to be fixed. Donna Eden (who can 'see' the body's subtle energies, as the ancient TCM practitioners could) gives several routines: hooking up the belly button & forehead, sucking on the thumb (children do many of her exercises instinctively), etc.

Vitamin Cure

When Pigs are penned in close quarters, some become so irritable they savage their pen mates' ears and tails, a problem farmers call ear-and-tail-biting syndrome. David Hardy, a Canadian hog-feed salesman from the farmlands of northern Alberta, knew that behavior well. Years of experience had taught him something else: All it takes to calm disturbed pigs down is a good dose of vitamins and minerals in their feed.

That came to Hardy's mind one November evening in 1995 when an acquaintance, Tony Stephan, began confiding his troubles. His wife, Deborah, had killed herself the year before after struggling with manic depression and losing her father to suicide. Now two of his 10 children seemed headed down the same road: Twenty-two-year-old Autumn was in a psychiatric hospital and 15-year-old Joseph had become angry and aggressive. He had been diagnosed as bipolar, a term for manic depression, but even with medication he was prone to outbursts so violent that the rest of the family feared for their lives.

The boy's irritability sounded familiar to Hardy. I don't know a whole lot about mental illness, Hardy told Stephan, but I've seen similar behavior in the hog barn, and it's easy to cure.

So the two men set out to create a human version of Hardy's pig formula. They bought bottles of vitamins and minerals from local health-food stores, and spent nights at Stephan's kitchen concocting a mixture. On January 20, 1996, they gave Joseph the first bitter-tasting dose. Within a few days, Joseph felt better than he had in months. After 30 days, all the symptoms of his illness were gone.
 
...

-Vitamin Cure, Discover Magazine, May 2005

a scientific basis for homeopathy, faith healing and qigong, I'm unimpressed--since these things, you know, don't work.

I've had good experiences with the homeopathic approach (hot water on a burned finger -> no blister, and have had positive responses to homeopathic remedies). You may not think much of 'faith healing', but what about the 'placebo effect'? I propose that there's not much of a difference. Donna Eden's system of Energy Medicine has done a lot for me & thousands of others. Mrs. Eden had to move away from Ashland, Oregon because everyone in town knew her & what she could do, and she can't tell someone 'no' when they ask her for help.

So yes, all these things work very well. Unless, of course, you don't even give them a chance. Then you're just the equivalent of a flat-earth society member.

She sent me to an ENT, who found the root cause (allergies). Now, I keep the dust mites down in the house, take a nose spray daily, take Zyrtec and/or Sudafed when heavy allergy season hits, and have been ear-infection-free for a few years.

I'm glad that you've found something to keep the ear infections away (they suck!), but it seems to me that, since you're still taking a daily nasal spray and allergy drugs during part of the year, you haven't yet hit the core of the issue.

Allergies can be successfully resolved. Perhaps there's something in your diet - many children's ear infections can be traced back to a milk (pasteurized/homogenized) allergy. Hypnosis is one way of getting to the core of the allergy - for example, suppressed trauma from parents fighting on a picnic could've triggered an allergic response to grass; Donna Eden tells how she's dealt with allergic responses in her book. I don't recall offhand if Harold Reilly's The Edgar Cayce Handbook For Health Through Drugless Therapy mentions allergies specifically, but it's a gold-mine of natural solutions to many health problems.

Another of favorite modalities is Cranial Osteopathy/CranioSacral Therapy.

If you like being on the drugs that's fine, but there are other options too. :)

Unbearable Phantom Pain A good-looking man who had lost both of his legs in Vietnam was brought to me in a wheelchair. No one had been able to help with the pain at the end of where his right foot had been. He vividly recalled the scene of stepping on a land mine and watching the bones and flesh of his right foot explode into pieces. The pain he now had was massive. The sensations were so similar to the original shock that he could never get relief from the traumatic memories. The relentless pain also led to terrible nightmares. His left foor wasn't as painful. It sometimes itched, but it was a mild discomfort compared with the area of his right foot.

As he sat there with his friend, he cried and said, "The pain is so excruciating, and the way it keeps me tied to my past is so bad, that I sometimes think of taking a gun to my head." I could see the energy still there in both of his absent legs, and I could feel it with my hands. I followed the energy along his absent legs to the end of where his feet had been. It was palpable. My hand began to hurt terribly. I asked him if my hand was in the area of the worst pain, and it was. The most painful areas were at the sides of his feet, which happens to be at the end of the bladder meridian. I said to him, "This may sound crazy to you, but I believe I can hold some points in midair hwere your feet were and help you."

I moved my hands to the ends of his legs, where his feet had been, and held the points on the bladder meridian. As the two men watched thses strange conjurings, it must have seemed to them that I was just holding air. But I was not! I felt and saw the meridian lines as strongly as if his legs were still there. At first it was painful for him to have me touch the area of his absent right foot. After a couple of minutes, he reported that not only was the foot being relieved of the pain, but another chronic pain in his back, just above his waist, was also lifting. Interestingly, that area is also goverened by the bladder meridian.

His kidney and liver meridians were also involved, and I held those points as well. ... By the time I had finished holding his liver points, he was pain free. I showed the friend, who lived with him, how to hold points and which points to hold. The man and his friend never returned, but on my invitation they called me about once a month. The friend told me that after the session, the manbegan to lift out of his deep depression. While the phantom pain would return every now and then, they knew how to deal with it.

-pg 31-32

With respect to doctors, a similar situation has been put in place. We have basically outlawed all Chevy doctors who focus on the less expensive minor health problems (which is, in fact, all that most people have) and are forced instead to use Mercedes doctors who charge Mercedes prices even for ailments that can be fixed by people with significantly less training.

-Uncertainty and Its Exigencies: The Critical Role of Insurance in the Free Market

I suggest taking charge of your own health. You've probably been to a conventionally-trained M.D. for most of your "health care". M.D.s are trained to use drugs and surgery. For everything else they either have to refer to someone else (i.e., physical therapist, nutritionist, etc).

Doctors never, ever "fix" their patients. The body always repairs itself. Doctors might "set the stage" to allow healing to take place, but all too often they do more harm than good. For example, adverse reactions to drugs are about 5th-leading "cause of death".

Historically, Medical Doctors have been quite dismissive of anything that isn't covered in their training, though this is slowly beginning to change. For generations monopolist doctors dismissed the idea that what you eat affects your health. Now they'll acknowledge the imporance of proper nutrition, but fall back on their training when deciding what to do.

For example, when my grandmother first began cancer treatment, the doctor sent her to a nutritionist. Grandma said, "she wanted me to eat five servings of vegetables a day. She's crazy!" Grandma stuck with her microwave meals and token amounts of vegetables, and was dead in six months. Her doctor never said anything about her diet again, afaik.

There are plenty of options in the so-called "alternative" (that is, not drugs and surgery) field for your condition.

Donna Eden(Author of Energy Medicine has had some success assisting Multiple Schlerosis patients.

Also look into finding yourself a Cranial Osteopath. If your body has ever suffered any sort of trauma (car accidents, falls, unresolved birth trauma, etc.), that's probably still with you. And this kind of osteopath can help your body release whatever it's still holding onto.

You can also take up meditation/self-hypnosis/skilled-relaxation. This is especially important when you have a condition such as MS.