I've been watching GRC for a while now... Last I heard their prototype microwave was functional, and they were taking orders. The prototype uses a vacuum chamber: fill the chamber with used tires, apply vacuum, turn on the microwave, and *poof*, out comes the hydrocarbons.
Every 20lb tire yields a gallon of diesel fuel, ~50 cubic feet of "propane" (butane and... something else), recyclable steel, and carbon black. Haven't seen anything recently, just a new patent for using microwaves to desalinate seawater...
This thing looks useful too - there's a ton of plastic warehoused in the world's garbage dumps, and it won't be long until they start getting mined.
Some people aren't vulnerable to catching the flu. Sure, they get exposed just like anyone else, but for some reason their body doesn't become a virus factory.
I think it'd be nice to do some research into what it takes to make a body more resistant, but that's probably not very profitable for the vaccine industry...
if this technique really works, you'll no doubt make it through and convince even the most skeptical of us.
There's no need to convince "even the most skeptical". All she needs to do is help a few hopeless men. Skeptics can wait for their Viagra to kick in, and feel confident about their world view.
It's mostly a waste of time to talk to skeptics. I only posted my link here because it was sorta on-topic and there are also a lot of open minded people who don't care what the "vocal" skeptics have to say.
Hey, if placebo works for you, that's great. It would probably be better if you'd go see a therapist and figure out WHY you have a psychosomatic sexual dysfunction in the first place, but pseudoscience is ok in the meantime.
I've done market research for this product. Therapists are worthless, especially when it comes to sex. You dismiss with the tired, old "placebo" slander. Didn't you read the slashdot story earlier this year about prescription antidepressants being no better than placebo?
If you don't understand something, dismiss it as fakery. That always works, right?
Now, as for your hair-loss problem, I can whip you up a batch of all-natural homeopathic medicine that will amaze you with it's ability to treat the condition*.
Apparently you have vision problems, because you obviously didn't see my full head of hair in the picture.
The stomach meridian passes right through the eyes. There are some great energy exercises for the eyes, but they only work if you do them. Would you like a quick overview?
Much in the same way someone is addicted to cigarettes, thats what its like. If you don't get it, its all you think about. It distracts you insanely until you get it. And some people need a cigarette over 20 times a day, just imagine needing a sexual release that often, and how convincing your girlfriend or wife to please you half as often as you like is difficult enough already.
There's a section in my ex-wife's Energy Viagra book about excessive masturbation. Sedating the kidney pathway can help, as can tapping on certain acupressure points. See my other post in this thread.
I chuckled, thanks. But if you want to buy blue pills, you'll have to go somewhere else.
My ex-wife will probably have a spat with Pfizer's legal department some day (because she's using their trademarked term to market her stuff), but then she'll just call her informational product something else.
The material does work very well, and I do know this from first-hand experience.
Most sexual problems have something to do with the kidney meridian. After making out for a while, my friend left for a moment to use the restroom. I sedated my kidney meridian while she was away. When we got to engaging in intercourse, I was surprised at my endurance. (the ex-wife did all her research after it'd been decided to get divorced, so this was the first time I'd used the techniques.)
When I told my friend the next morning that my ex-wife was the only other woman I'd ever been with, she was amazed.
Somehow telling my wife, "Hey, it's in my DNA, I just can't help it!" doesn't make her any less pissed off.
Sometimes you tell the wife, sometimes you don't. My ex-wife has done a lot of research into sex, and shares tidbits with me. She says people with polyamorous relationships tend to live longer....
When my divorce was almost finalized, she told me to go away for a week so she could work on her Energy Viagra project. As I was going out the door, she said, "go find yourself a sweet woman." I wasn't expecting to be successful, but a couple hours later my phone rang...
Anyways, after I got back a couple days later, I learned that while I would hear everything about my future-ex-wife's romantic interests, she was still very possessive of me. And that I shouldn't go visit my new friend until the wounds healed. I don't tell her anything about my girlfriends or prospects anymore.
People today have a tendency to come together for a time, then separate when their paths diverge. The world isn't like it used to be, where people regularly spent their entire lives in the county they were born in.
Sometimes it takes a while to find a person who's entirely compatible. And being celibate until you find your personal "special someone" isn't a good option, especially for women (who really do need to get laid semi-regularly - it helps keep their hormones balanced, lest they become an angry bitch).
Sometimes it's genes (personality type) - they love the thrill of fucking with someone new. But sometimes people really aren't all that into their partners, and genes have little to do with it.
When new dollars are created there is no new debt attached to them.
Your post is great, except for this line. The Federal Reserve use their "new dollars" to traffic in debt. They use them to buy treasury bills, or they use them to buy a member bank's IOU... But the point still stands: no debt, no money.
The only currency that is debt-free are coins... As far as I know, the Federal Reserve buys all the coins in circulation from the U.S. Mint for face value.
But we don't have "fiat" money, we have debt-based money (which is indeed a tool that enables concentration of wealth). The best explanation I've read involved money and anti-money: there is no $ without debt. Here's the quote:
A dollar is only created when it is loaned to somebody. If you take out a mortgage, the bank has just created money 'out of thin air' as some say, but they couldn't create it until the instant you agreed to borrow it. They didn't create it ex nihilo and wait for someone to borrow it - they can't do that - the loaning and creating are one atomic operation.
For every dollar created, an anti-dollar of debt must also be created. This allows the books to maintain balance.
Anti-dollars rack up interest charges, while ordinary dollars do not. You may imagine that you can invest your dollars wisely and pay back your loan, and perhaps you can, but the dollars your investments yield were created by the same process and have their own anti-dollars associated with them. So even if you can pay it back - overall - in the dollar system, everyone cannot pay back all their debts.
The structure of our system places much of this total debt on the Federal government's books. However, this debt would still be unpayable were it owed by private citizens, and would be just as large. It is an unavoidable consequence of our monetary system.
Lincoln proposed an alternative whereby the Federal government would issue 'greenbacks' directly, pure fiat money willed into existence without the need to any bank to 'loan' it to the Federal government or anybody else. And, well, they shot him. Whoever "they" were.
Fiat money is an alternative to debt money. They both have advantages and disadvantages. They're different from each other.
While I'm at it, I just read Ellen Brown's explanation of the Fed's recent Quantitative Easing 2. This should be required reading for everyone who's hyperventilating about the Federal Reserve's recent plans to buy another $600 Billion in bonds.
... the long-term process of repairing and strengthening the mind is the real way to go, I would think.
The process isn't nearly as long-term as it used to be.
Practitioners of Energy Psychology have been trying to get someone in the DOD to listen to them for the last 15 years. Earlier this year two psychologists visited congress with a soldier they cured of PTSD. All hope seemed lost, but then lady luck appeared and made some connections for them.
They say that Walter Reed is now doing a formal study of the Emotional Freedom Technique on soldiers with PTSD.
Truth-out recently featured a nice article calling on the American Psychological Association to end its ban on Energy Psychology. And Feinstein now has two papers scheduled for publication in some entirely mainstream psychology journals.
You're quite right about avoiding PTSD by not signing up, but Energy Psychology is the best way to fix the people who come home broken.
Good practitioners are able to get feedback from the body they're working on.
My high school friend's insurance company has spent well over $100,000 trying to figure out what's wrong with his kid, and they still don't have a diagnosis... All they have are guesses about what what went wrong 2 years ago - they presume it's a denovo genetic mutation, last I heard.
Furthermore, the new approach is "complementary care", where you take the best of all approaches and combine them. Oriental medicine is much more preventative than allopathic care.
In oriental medicine, the fight-flight-freeze response is governed by the "Triple Warmer" or "Triple Heater" meridian (pathway). Triple warmer's [TW] job is to keep a person alive, and whenever the fight-or-flight response gets activated, TW takes energy from all the body's other systems (except Heart), so that the body can fight better or run faster. TW directs the body to release a surge of adrenaline, concentrates blood at the reptilian brain around the brainstem (forebrain/higher thought processes aren't really needed in a fight), etc.
Some people get stuck in a continuous fight-or-flight response. Nothing in the body works as well as it should if TW's always hijacking other systems' resources. If the TW pathway is calmed down, the individual is better able to come to terms with the fear that overwhelms them, chronic health problems improve, etc.
Thanks for your reply. You are quite right about it being best to obtain one's nutrition from food. But what about people who are malnourished and are unwilling (or unable) to make changes to their lifestyle that would be more compatible with producing health?
Wouldn't it be more logical to start the corrective efforts by introducing deficient nutritional components? Magnesium and Potassium and "bicarbonate precursors" seem like a good start...
But doctors don't have time for that in an 8-minute office visit - maybe that's why they tend to jump to the drugs.
However, as it turns out, the research on whether or not Supplement ABC helps with Symptom/Condition XYZ is inconclusive.
There's an attitude in your post that reminded me of the last thread I had on/. about health. That user also complained about the lack of impeccable research into supplementation and other forms of non-pharmaceutical health technology.
I'm reminded of the old story about a man searching for his keys underneath a streetlight:
It’s night time and a man is crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for his car keys underneath a lamp post. A woman comes along and starts to help him. After they’ve been searching together for a while the woman asks the man: “Are you sure this is where you dropped them?”
The man replies: “No, I think I dropped them somewhere else.”
“Then why are we looking here?” she inquires.
“Because this is where the light is.”
Science is like shining a flashlight on a specific question. But who gets to hold the flashlight?
Did you see the post from the other fellow who responded to my original post in this thread? He found comedy to dramatically improve his blood pressure, no drugs required.
Anyways, thanks again for responding. That keyword, "bicarbonate precursors" is a goldmine for me, and I don't know that I would have found it if I hadn't re-read my links to respond to your post. Sorry that I can't respond to what you've said more directly, but I'm just not interested in doing that again. See the above-linked thread for my reply.:)
But USA health care is profit oriented, and there is more profit to be made in selling snake oil than there is in treating diseases.
There, fixed that for you. Seriously. I talked to a guy with high blood pressure recently. his doctor wants to put him on drugs, but he's not so sure.
I commented that well over 1/2 of the population doesn't get even the RDA of magnesium in their diet. high blood pressure is usually related to stress, and how can one relax if they don't have enough of the relaxation mineral in their diet?
I did some more reading, and the "life extension" people (Pearson & Shaw) say that potassium bicarbonate can help with blood pressure too.
A little Mg, KHCO3, and daily total-body relaxation will deprive the pharmaceutical complex of years of income for treating the symptom of high blood pressure. I guess I don't get why doctors refuse to treat a symptom by addressing the causes.
Allopathic health care treats symptoms, and Obamacare continues this fine tradition.
In other words, is the main problem legal/political rather than technical ?
Yes, but it's not the sort of problem you think. The politics of the situation is that bicarbonate can't be patented, so the drug companies have to hunt for something that can be.
The best thing a person can do to prevent the common cold is to keep their body's acid/alkaline levels in balance. This is best done through diet (plenty of vegetables and fruits) and exercise (which burns off acids). If you don't want to eat right or exercise, you can consume bicarbonate directly, on an empty stomach.
A box of baking soda is $0.46 at Wal-Mart, but that's likely to throw a body's sodium/potassium levels out of balance because most people get lots of sodium and not enough potassium in their diets. Potassium Bicarbonate is a good option if you don't want to eat lots of vegetables or exercise.
This is basic biochemistry - there's no need to wait a decade for some wonder-drug.
Whenever I dig deep enough into one of these alternative medicine type ideas it invariably becomes clear to me that their proponents are accepting a pretty low level of evidence...
"A pretty low level of evidence" is par for the course in medical research. Slashdot had a story about this last Friday. I like this quote from the fine article:
... This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”
Anyway, I think you are wrong about Linus Pauling being concerned with unhealthy individuals
I'm in the middle of a move, and ran across a copy of Cancer and Vitamin C. While Pauling did recommend Vitamin C for everyone, various types of diseases were focused on.
I just haven't really seen good evidence that any supplement use (even just multivitamins) is superior to diet and lifestyle modification.
Suppose that supplements were instead compared to pharmaceuticals - would this change the equation at all? Most of the people I know are incapable of performing diet and lifestyle modifications, not even to save their life.
My step father had a heart attack some 15 years ago. He has no interest in changing his diet, or adopting a rigorous exercise program. It'd be nice if there was some research to compare Plavix to Vitamin C + Magnesium + B-Complex...
But the real problem with research is that we're all so incredibly different. If you want to look into the 'gold standard' of a holistic approach to health, you need to consider what Cayce said on a given condition. Or rather, what he said about specific people who had a condition. The recommendations given were always unique, but there were common themes...
Hey, I was thinking after I hit 'submit' on my first reply to this comment that you are quite right about people needing to get their nutrients from food. So we do agree quite a bit.:)
Thanks for making my point exactly. The NIH is slowly investigating acupuncture, maybe you should start there.
from one of my recent emails:
One point should be noted: that the energy phenomena involved are as complex and variegated as are all the physical flesh-and-organ-and-chemical structures of the meat body. Different programs and different disciplines with their different traditions and histories are working with different aspects of this life force energy, so you will find descriptions as different as those coming from specialists working with the epidermis and those working with joints or those working with some aspect of the digestive tract. We know, in fact, as scientific fact that at least some of this energy is "real," because no living organism can live without chemical process and all chemical processes are electrical in nature - what's controversial there is whether those electrical processes or any field effects can be tangible.
Some people are mentally wedded to a certain philosophical overview, and reject technology which use different philosophical overviews a-priori.
Definition of A PRIORI:
1a : deductive 1b : relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions — compare a posteriori 1c : presupposed by experience
The person you responded to has deduced that there is no merit whatsoever to chiropractic or accupuncture or homeopathy based on his experiences. Others have different experiences, and find value (some a little, some a lot) to these modalities.
Plenty of research has been done on acupuncture. Most of it is positive... But it's easy to be selective about the research one pays attention to...
I think the title of your linked paper says a lot: "Vitamin C pharmacokinetics in healthy volunteers..."
Linus Pauling was concerned with unhealthy individuals.
The ideal drug would let people live how they want or need to to survive and also avoid hypertension.
Just like how the ideal automobile engine would let people never change the engine oil or radiator fluid and work perfectly forever anyways, eh? Thanks for making my point for me ("modern medicine doesn't even care about causes.")
Here's the crux of the matter, in your last paragraph:
Also many pharmaceuticals are designed to be used only after some problem has arisen and grown to become a major issue... like anything one problem leads to another, until its nearly impossible to do anything about it.
Hospice is called for in those situations. Otherwise, one can always do something to improve a problem by addressing its causes. Drugs can and should be used for the immediate survival of the patient, not for "maintenance" en perpetuity. But there's no money in that model for the oligarchy, so they train you all that "maintenance" is the best you can hope for.
All this is completely recognized by the medical profession, thats why preventative medicine is such a big deal these days.
Preventative medicine to the pharmaceutical-based medical profession is more a matter of "screening", whereby they catch diseases early but use conventional treatments.
I am fairly sure that stuff is ripoff nonsense, but maybe I just came across some bad links.
Bias helps the unconcious mind select its search terms. Here's something I found which might be a good starting point: #Mushroom_polysaccharides_and_the_immune_system FYI, I searched for "polysaccharides mushroom therapeutic" (no quotes).
Thanks for taking the time to write. You're obviously very intelligent, and I'm not nearly so eloquent with my wording. But my original point in this thread was that "Health care is another wealth-concentrator that needs to be addressed," and I haven't seen/read anything from you that opposes this point. Pharmaceutical-based medicine has more mindshare, and more $ to spend on marketing, but it produces much poorer results than non-pharmaceutical approaches to health. If people respected the results of scientific inquiry much less $ would flow to pharmaceutical companies. That's all. I think you agree, but in your own way.:)
On the other hand, supplements will only be helpful if someone has a deficiency of something in the first place.
The Daily Recommended Intake of a nutrient is the average amount that prevents a disease of deficiency. According to the guidelines, an average human needs 60 mg/day of Vitamin C to prevent scurvy.
But there is also a compelling argument that human bodies benefit from substantially more than the minimum intake. 2x Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling advocated megadoses of vitamin C to treat cancer, for example. The reasoning is that almost every other mammal synthesizes its own Vitamin C. Humans can't do this due to a genetic problem. If a human synthesized as much Vitamin C as a gorilla, the comparable figure would be on the order of 1000+ mg/day.
60mg vs 1000+ is a substantial difference. Other vitamins, minerals, amino acids, organic acids, and fats are therapetuic too. Omega 3's are commonly advised (but NOT commonly consumed). Vitamin B6 also comes to mind. A lot of research has been done about therapeutic uses of long-chain carbohydrates (polysaccharides, or "sugars that heal"), amino acids, etc.
Like I said earlier, the approach to healthcare used in the western world is more about concentrating wealth than maximizing health. I found Pearson & Shaw's life extension book (at a thrift store benefiting AIDS research - oh the irony:) in 2000 or 2001. It's a tome of information - several inches thick, iirc. They use everything - diet, supplements, prescription drugs - as long as there's a good rationale for doing so.
1: an explanation of controlling principles of opinion, belief, practice, or phenomena 2: an underlying reason
IMHO, treating "high blood pressure" with a pill that takes the blood pressure away ignores entirely the "underlying reason" the high blood pressure exists. Sure, sometimes you can't address the reason directly, but it seems to me that modern medicine doesn't even care about causes. Do you disagree? Please be specific.:)
The patent you linked to is from 1981... Doty Energy advocates essentially the same thing, except they use off-peak wind power to split the water and carbon dioxide molecules.
You'll have to be more specific so I know who you're talking about. Everyone is a marketer. Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth, et al, each spend more on a single day's television commercials than True Hope or the Life Extension Foundation could ever dream of spending in a decade of "marketing".
Not everyone believes every commercial they see/hear, but enough of us do to make pharmaceutical advertising worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been watching GRC for a while now... Last I heard their prototype microwave was functional, and they were taking orders. The prototype uses a vacuum chamber: fill the chamber with used tires, apply vacuum, turn on the microwave, and *poof*, out comes the hydrocarbons.
Every 20lb tire yields a gallon of diesel fuel, ~50 cubic feet of "propane" (butane and... something else), recyclable steel, and carbon black. Haven't seen anything recently, just a new patent for using microwaves to desalinate seawater...
This thing looks useful too - there's a ton of plastic warehoused in the world's garbage dumps, and it won't be long until they start getting mined.
Some people aren't vulnerable to catching the flu. Sure, they get exposed just like anyone else, but for some reason their body doesn't become a virus factory.
I think it'd be nice to do some research into what it takes to make a body more resistant, but that's probably not very profitable for the vaccine industry...
if this technique really works, you'll no doubt make it through and convince even the most skeptical of us.
There's no need to convince "even the most skeptical". All she needs to do is help a few hopeless men. Skeptics can wait for their Viagra to kick in, and feel confident about their world view.
It's mostly a waste of time to talk to skeptics. I only posted my link here because it was sorta on-topic and there are also a lot of open minded people who don't care what the "vocal" skeptics have to say.
Hey, if placebo works for you, that's great. It would probably be better if you'd go see a therapist and figure out WHY you have a psychosomatic sexual dysfunction in the first place, but pseudoscience is ok in the meantime.
I've done market research for this product. Therapists are worthless, especially when it comes to sex. You dismiss with the tired, old "placebo" slander. Didn't you read the slashdot story earlier this year about prescription antidepressants being no better than placebo?
If you don't understand something, dismiss it as fakery. That always works, right?
Now, as for your hair-loss problem, I can whip you up a batch of all-natural homeopathic medicine that will amaze you with it's ability to treat the condition*.
Apparently you have vision problems, because you obviously didn't see my full head of hair in the picture.
The stomach meridian passes right through the eyes. There are some great energy exercises for the eyes, but they only work if you do them. Would you like a quick overview?
Much in the same way someone is addicted to cigarettes, thats what its like. If you don't get it, its all you think about. It distracts you insanely until you get it. And some people need a cigarette over 20 times a day, just imagine needing a sexual release that often, and how convincing your girlfriend or wife to please you half as often as you like is difficult enough already.
There's a section in my ex-wife's Energy Viagra book about excessive masturbation. Sedating the kidney pathway can help, as can tapping on certain acupressure points. See my other post in this thread.
HTH.
I chuckled, thanks. But if you want to buy blue pills, you'll have to go somewhere else.
My ex-wife will probably have a spat with Pfizer's legal department some day (because she's using their trademarked term to market her stuff), but then she'll just call her informational product something else.
The material does work very well, and I do know this from first-hand experience.
Most sexual problems have something to do with the kidney meridian. After making out for a while, my friend left for a moment to use the restroom. I sedated my kidney meridian while she was away. When we got to engaging in intercourse, I was surprised at my endurance. (the ex-wife did all her research after it'd been decided to get divorced, so this was the first time I'd used the techniques.)
When I told my friend the next morning that my ex-wife was the only other woman I'd ever been with, she was amazed.
Somehow telling my wife, "Hey, it's in my DNA, I just can't help it!" doesn't make her any less pissed off.
Sometimes you tell the wife, sometimes you don't. My ex-wife has done a lot of research into sex, and shares tidbits with me. She says people with polyamorous relationships tend to live longer....
When my divorce was almost finalized, she told me to go away for a week so she could work on her Energy Viagra project. As I was going out the door, she said, "go find yourself a sweet woman." I wasn't expecting to be successful, but a couple hours later my phone rang...
Anyways, after I got back a couple days later, I learned that while I would hear everything about my future-ex-wife's romantic interests, she was still very possessive of me. And that I shouldn't go visit my new friend until the wounds healed. I don't tell her anything about my girlfriends or prospects anymore.
People today have a tendency to come together for a time, then separate when their paths diverge. The world isn't like it used to be, where people regularly spent their entire lives in the county they were born in.
Sometimes it takes a while to find a person who's entirely compatible. And being celibate until you find your personal "special someone" isn't a good option, especially for women (who really do need to get laid semi-regularly - it helps keep their hormones balanced, lest they become an angry bitch).
Sometimes it's genes (personality type) - they love the thrill of fucking with someone new. But sometimes people really aren't all that into their partners, and genes have little to do with it.
When new dollars are created there is no new debt attached to them.
Your post is great, except for this line. The Federal Reserve use their "new dollars" to traffic in debt. They use them to buy treasury bills, or they use them to buy a member bank's IOU... But the point still stands: no debt, no money.
The only currency that is debt-free are coins... As far as I know, the Federal Reserve buys all the coins in circulation from the U.S. Mint for face value.
Thanks for writing!
Fiat money is a tool for the rich to get richer.
But we don't have "fiat" money, we have debt-based money (which is indeed a tool that enables concentration of wealth). The best explanation I've read involved money and anti-money: there is no $ without debt. Here's the quote:
While I'm at it, I just read Ellen Brown's explanation of the Fed's recent Quantitative Easing 2. This should be required reading for everyone who's hyperventilating about the Federal Reserve's recent plans to buy another $600 Billion in bonds.
HTH, HAND.
... the long-term process of repairing and strengthening the mind is the real way to go, I would think.
The process isn't nearly as long-term as it used to be.
Practitioners of Energy Psychology have been trying to get someone in the DOD to listen to them for the last 15 years. Earlier this year two psychologists visited congress with a soldier they cured of PTSD. All hope seemed lost, but then lady luck appeared and made some connections for them.
They say that Walter Reed is now doing a formal study of the Emotional Freedom Technique on soldiers with PTSD.
Truth-out recently featured a nice article calling on the American Psychological Association to end its ban on Energy Psychology. And Feinstein now has two papers scheduled for publication in some entirely mainstream psychology journals.
You're quite right about avoiding PTSD by not signing up, but Energy Psychology is the best way to fix the people who come home broken.
Good practitioners are able to get feedback from the body they're working on.
My high school friend's insurance company has spent well over $100,000 trying to figure out what's wrong with his kid, and they still don't have a diagnosis... All they have are guesses about what what went wrong 2 years ago - they presume it's a denovo genetic mutation, last I heard.
Furthermore, the new approach is "complementary care", where you take the best of all approaches and combine them. Oriental medicine is much more preventative than allopathic care.
Thanks for commenting.
In oriental medicine, the fight-flight-freeze response is governed by the "Triple Warmer" or "Triple Heater" meridian (pathway). Triple warmer's [TW] job is to keep a person alive, and whenever the fight-or-flight response gets activated, TW takes energy from all the body's other systems (except Heart), so that the body can fight better or run faster. TW directs the body to release a surge of adrenaline, concentrates blood at the reptilian brain around the brainstem (forebrain/higher thought processes aren't really needed in a fight), etc.
Some people get stuck in a continuous fight-or-flight response. Nothing in the body works as well as it should if TW's always hijacking other systems' resources. If the TW pathway is calmed down, the individual is better able to come to terms with the fear that overwhelms them, chronic health problems improve, etc.
Hi,
Thanks for your reply. You are quite right about it being best to obtain one's nutrition from food. But what about people who are malnourished and are unwilling (or unable) to make changes to their lifestyle that would be more compatible with producing health?
Wouldn't it be more logical to start the corrective efforts by introducing deficient nutritional components? Magnesium and Potassium and "bicarbonate precursors" seem like a good start...
But doctors don't have time for that in an 8-minute office visit - maybe that's why they tend to jump to the drugs.
However, as it turns out, the research on whether or not Supplement ABC helps with Symptom/Condition XYZ is inconclusive.
There's an attitude in your post that reminded me of the last thread I had on /. about health. That user also complained about the lack of impeccable research into supplementation and other forms of non-pharmaceutical health technology.
I'm reminded of the old story about a man searching for his keys underneath a streetlight:
Science is like shining a flashlight on a specific question. But who gets to hold the flashlight?
Did you see the post from the other fellow who responded to my original post in this thread? He found comedy to dramatically improve his blood pressure, no drugs required.
Anyways, thanks again for responding. That keyword, "bicarbonate precursors" is a goldmine for me, and I don't know that I would have found it if I hadn't re-read my links to respond to your post. Sorry that I can't respond to what you've said more directly, but I'm just not interested in doing that again. See the above-linked thread for my reply. :)
But USA health care is profit oriented, and there is more profit to be made in selling snake oil than there is in treating diseases.
There, fixed that for you. Seriously. I talked to a guy with high blood pressure recently. his doctor wants to put him on drugs, but he's not so sure.
I commented that well over 1/2 of the population doesn't get even the RDA of magnesium in their diet. high blood pressure is usually related to stress, and how can one relax if they don't have enough of the relaxation mineral in their diet?
I did some more reading, and the "life extension" people (Pearson & Shaw) say that potassium bicarbonate can help with blood pressure too.
A little Mg, KHCO3, and daily total-body relaxation will deprive the pharmaceutical complex of years of income for treating the symptom of high blood pressure. I guess I don't get why doctors refuse to treat a symptom by addressing the causes.
Allopathic health care treats symptoms, and Obamacare continues this fine tradition.
In other words, is the main problem legal/political rather than technical ?
Yes, but it's not the sort of problem you think. The politics of the situation is that bicarbonate can't be patented, so the drug companies have to hunt for something that can be.
The best thing a person can do to prevent the common cold is to keep their body's acid/alkaline levels in balance. This is best done through diet (plenty of vegetables and fruits) and exercise (which burns off acids). If you don't want to eat right or exercise, you can consume bicarbonate directly, on an empty stomach.
A box of baking soda is $0.46 at Wal-Mart, but that's likely to throw a body's sodium/potassium levels out of balance because most people get lots of sodium and not enough potassium in their diets. Potassium Bicarbonate is a good option if you don't want to eat lots of vegetables or exercise.
This is basic biochemistry - there's no need to wait a decade for some wonder-drug.
Whenever I dig deep enough into one of these alternative medicine type ideas it invariably becomes clear to me that their proponents are accepting a pretty low level of evidence...
"A pretty low level of evidence" is par for the course in medical research. Slashdot had a story about this last Friday. I like this quote from the fine article:
Anyway, I think you are wrong about Linus Pauling being concerned with unhealthy individuals
I'm in the middle of a move, and ran across a copy of Cancer and Vitamin C. While Pauling did recommend Vitamin C for everyone, various types of diseases were focused on.
I just haven't really seen good evidence that any supplement use (even just multivitamins) is superior to diet and lifestyle modification.
Suppose that supplements were instead compared to pharmaceuticals - would this change the equation at all? Most of the people I know are incapable of performing diet and lifestyle modifications, not even to save their life.
My step father had a heart attack some 15 years ago. He has no interest in changing his diet, or adopting a rigorous exercise program. It'd be nice if there was some research to compare Plavix to Vitamin C + Magnesium + B-Complex...
But the real problem with research is that we're all so incredibly different. If you want to look into the 'gold standard' of a holistic approach to health, you need to consider what Cayce said on a given condition. Or rather, what he said about specific people who had a condition. The recommendations given were always unique, but there were common themes...
You know how throw in bait.
There, fixed that for you.
I'm done with this thread. HAND.
James Randi gets off on prostrations of the faithful, such as your own.
At least the guy in my last slashdot conversation I had was lucid and intelligent.
Good luck with living. Try to not get too sick.
Hey, I was thinking after I hit 'submit' on my first reply to this comment that you are quite right about people needing to get their nutrients from food. So we do agree quite a bit. :)
Thanks for making my point exactly. The NIH is slowly investigating acupuncture, maybe you should start there.
from one of my recent emails:
HTH, HAND.
Some people are mentally wedded to a certain philosophical overview, and reject technology which use different philosophical overviews a-priori.
The person you responded to has deduced that there is no merit whatsoever to chiropractic or accupuncture or homeopathy based on his experiences. Others have different experiences, and find value (some a little, some a lot) to these modalities.
Plenty of research has been done on acupuncture. Most of it is positive... But it's easy to be selective about the research one pays attention to...
HTH.
I think the title of your linked paper says a lot: "Vitamin C pharmacokinetics in healthy volunteers..."
Linus Pauling was concerned with unhealthy individuals.
The ideal drug would let people live how they want or need to to survive and also avoid hypertension.
Just like how the ideal automobile engine would let people never change the engine oil or radiator fluid and work perfectly forever anyways, eh? Thanks for making my point for me ("modern medicine doesn't even care about causes.")
Here's the crux of the matter, in your last paragraph:
Also many pharmaceuticals are designed to be used only after some problem has arisen and grown to become a major issue... like anything one problem leads to another, until its nearly impossible to do anything about it.
Hospice is called for in those situations. Otherwise, one can always do something to improve a problem by addressing its causes. Drugs can and should be used for the immediate survival of the patient, not for "maintenance" en perpetuity. But there's no money in that model for the oligarchy, so they train you all that "maintenance" is the best you can hope for.
All this is completely recognized by the medical profession, thats why preventative medicine is such a big deal these days.
Preventative medicine to the pharmaceutical-based medical profession is more a matter of "screening", whereby they catch diseases early but use conventional treatments.
I am fairly sure that stuff is ripoff nonsense, but maybe I just came across some bad links.
Bias helps the unconcious mind select its search terms. Here's something I found which might be a good starting point: #Mushroom_polysaccharides_and_the_immune_system FYI, I searched for "polysaccharides mushroom therapeutic" (no quotes).
Thanks for taking the time to write. You're obviously very intelligent, and I'm not nearly so eloquent with my wording. But my original point in this thread was that "Health care is another wealth-concentrator that needs to be addressed," and I haven't seen/read anything from you that opposes this point. Pharmaceutical-based medicine has more mindshare, and more $ to spend on marketing, but it produces much poorer results than non-pharmaceutical approaches to health. If people respected the results of scientific inquiry much less $ would flow to pharmaceutical companies. That's all. I think you agree, but in your own way. :)
On the other hand, supplements will only be helpful if someone has a deficiency of something in the first place.
The Daily Recommended Intake of a nutrient is the average amount that prevents a disease of deficiency. According to the guidelines, an average human needs 60 mg/day of Vitamin C to prevent scurvy.
But there is also a compelling argument that human bodies benefit from substantially more than the minimum intake. 2x Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling advocated megadoses of vitamin C to treat cancer, for example. The reasoning is that almost every other mammal synthesizes its own Vitamin C. Humans can't do this due to a genetic problem. If a human synthesized as much Vitamin C as a gorilla, the comparable figure would be on the order of 1000+ mg/day.
60mg vs 1000+ is a substantial difference. Other vitamins, minerals, amino acids, organic acids, and fats are therapetuic too. Omega 3's are commonly advised (but NOT commonly consumed). Vitamin B6 also comes to mind. A lot of research has been done about therapeutic uses of long-chain carbohydrates (polysaccharides, or "sugars that heal"), amino acids, etc.
Like I said earlier, the approach to healthcare used in the western world is more about concentrating wealth than maximizing health. I found Pearson & Shaw's life extension book (at a thrift store benefiting AIDS research - oh the irony :) in 2000 or 2001. It's a tome of information - several inches thick, iirc. They use everything - diet, supplements, prescription drugs - as long as there's a good rationale for doing so.
Rationale - lol. I just looked it up:
1: an explanation of controlling principles of opinion, belief, practice, or phenomena
2: an underlying reason
IMHO, treating "high blood pressure" with a pill that takes the blood pressure away ignores entirely the "underlying reason" the high blood pressure exists. Sure, sometimes you can't address the reason directly, but it seems to me that modern medicine doesn't even care about causes. Do you disagree? Please be specific. :)
The patent you linked to is from 1981... Doty Energy advocates essentially the same thing, except they use off-peak wind power to split the water and carbon dioxide molecules.
Those people are marketers.
You'll have to be more specific so I know who you're talking about. Everyone is a marketer. Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth, et al, each spend more on a single day's television commercials than True Hope or the Life Extension Foundation could ever dream of spending in a decade of "marketing".
Not everyone believes every commercial they see/hear, but enough of us do to make pharmaceutical advertising worthwhile.