ADDING HEALTH vs Fighting Disease

ADDING HEALTH vs. Fighting Disease

In the video below, Terry Wahls, MD describes her experience with MS. As an MD she was able to access the latest and best therapies for MS, but her disease remained unabated, following its usual course of progressive degeneration.

Dr. Wahls realized the limits of medical treatment and delved into her own research. She found “that brains afflicted with MS, Huntington's chorea, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's shrank with time,” consistent with the fact that their mitochondria (the power houses that manage the energy supply of the cells) did not work well. With ongoing research and self-experimentation, she took mitochondria-protective supplements (omega 3 fish oil, creatine, and co-enzyme Q) resulting in a slowing of her decline.

With continued research she discovered other nutrients vital to optimal mitochondrial/brain health and function and added them to her growing list of supplements. Then she had an epiphany, that she could “get all of these and possibly hundreds, maybe thousands, of other compounds that science had yet to name and identify that would be helpful to my brain and mitochondria.” Interestingly, she states that the medical and food science texts that she consulted were of no use in pointing her in the right direction as to where, in the food supply, to get these vital nutrients.

She goes on to demonstrate that the typical American diet is starving the body of vital nutrients necessary for the complex biochemical reactions that keep us healthy (let alone, consuming a myriad of processed toxic chemical foods), setting the stage for most chronic diseases.

Ultimately, Dr. Wahls found the Paleolithic diet, the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. You see, our genes have not changed in 43,000 years and are consistent with those of our Paleolithic ancestors; meaning that our DNA has the same genetic requirements for health (in terms of diet and exercise) now, as it did then.

The Paleolithic hunter-gatherer diet consisted of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, meats, and water. Note the absence of diary and grains, especially wheat and corn (not to mention processed chemical concoctions masquerading as food). These were all foods that were added with the beginning of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. Our genes have not caught up with these foods and, as such, these foods create food allergies that are responsible for a host of misdiagnosed, undiagnosed, unrecognized, and therefore mis-treated, health problems people suffer.

The short of it is that Dr. Wahl was successful in restoring her health and reversing the effects of MS. At this point, when I tell this to patients, they all respond: “Wow!”

1.      While this kind of progress would not be seen in everyone, this diet clearly needs to be incorporated into the healing regimen of everyone…i.e.: to change the paradigm from fighting disease to adding health through diet, exercise and stress control.

2.      While it is amazing that Dr. Wahl was able to reverse her MS, know that the body is hardwired for survival, to be self-regulating and self-healing…that health is nature’s default. Therefore, if we give the genetic blueprint what it requires in a pure form and sufficient quantity, and stop poisoning it…it will invariably make us healthier. How far back it can bring us is influenced by how much damage was done, how long we have had it, age, etc.

3.      What is more amazing, that most of us don’t see, is the everyday occurrence—the 350 pound person eating a diet of processed chemical foods, smoking cigarettes, living a sedentary life, popping a cocktail of prescription drugs. Their body is so hardwired for survival, while at one and the same time it is being deprived of the essential ingredients for health and being consistently poisoned, it still manages to keep this person alive, the best it can—trying to buy time until the person changes their habits—until it can no longer do so. And only then, systems failure begins…and the ravages of chronic disease progress. Now, that’s amazing!

Sadly, we have been trained to be so focused on fighting disease that we have lost sight of how to nurture our birthright of health.

Men's Brains vs Women's Brains

Well Done and funny!

Understanding The Brain

Understanding the Brain

Over the past several years I have read many fascinating books about the human brain, including: The Brain That Changes Itself, The Accidental Mind, Evolve Your Brain, Mapping the Brain, The Other Brain, The Mind and the Brain, Phantoms in the Brain, The Synaptic Self, and more. But, there is no better, more comprehensive, and concise summary of the structure and function of the human brain than that given here.

My Journey Into LENS Neurofeedback

My Journey Into LENS Neurofeedback

In December of ’09 I began investigating LENS (Low Energy Nerve Stimulation) Neurofeedback by going to LA to shadow my friend, Dr David Dubin. He has been working with neurofeedback for over four years, and LENS, specifically, for the past two. His enthusiasm and stories of dramatic and fast results in treating patient with significant problems piqued my curiosity. And so, my journey into LENS began.

I followed-up my first trip with a second. Between trips I read two books, The Healing Power of Neurofeedback and The Symphony in the Brain. I also downloaded and read everything I could find on LENS. The more I read the more intrigued I became. I recall saying aloud; ‘If half of this is true, it is incredible.” The results far surpasses any medical, psychiatric, psychological and alternative treatments for conditions that are difficult to treat at best, and often remain refractory to all care; all, without drugs and barely with any active participation on the part of the patient.

How could that be?

On both trips I interviewed Dr Dubin’s patients. It was hard to believe, but 100% reported positive improvement in a very short time with problems that had been longstanding and resistant to a whole spectrum of lifetime therapies. I also interviewed two psychotherapists who referred patients for LENS. One even caught herself saying; “I guess I could say that I lost a long-term patient to David, as he got better.”

So, here I am in LA to begin my training, with Len Ochs, PhD himself (the creator of the technology) to become a certified LENS Neurofeedback practitioner. I really could not be more excited about the possibilities I will have to help people improve their lives by reclaiming their health.

This seems like a natural next step for me as my interest and reading, for the past 2-3 years has been focused primarily on the brain. And, while I am in awe of the human body as a whole, the brain is, perhaps, the most wonderful and extraordinary achievement of evolution.

While it is astonishing and fascinating for instance, that the stomach specializes in digestion and the lungs in oxygen exchange, the mechanisms are easily understood in terms of anatomy and physiology. The brain, on the other hand, composed of over 100 billion neurons with trillions and trillions of connections is far from easily understood, It is essentially ‘a three pound gelatinous hunk of thinking, conscious, loving, dreaming meat,’ the source of our humanness.

The brain undergoes a miraculous embryological development in only 9 months to a level of structural and physiological complexity that boggles the mind. Combined with its role in basal survival mechanisms, its capacity for limitless conscious and sub-conscious interpretations of its interactions with the environment and other beings, and its vulnerability to injury, it is nothing less than amazing that we’re not all dysfunctional. Perhaps we are, but to varying degrees.

As such, we can all benefit from LENS.

Brain Renewal (Guest Column)

Brain Renewal: A NewApproach

David Dubin, MD

Is it possible to renew the brain? We used to believe that the adult brain’s ability to change was very limited; that we were born with a set amount of neurons and once we reached adulthood that number did not change. Over the last ten years, however, this view has changed dramatically.

We now know that there is no time in our lives when substantial renewal cannot occur. Not only can we increase the connections among the existing brain cells and form new pathways, but we are able to actually grow new neurons.

This changing of neurons, the organization of their networks and function via new experiences is called neuroplasticity. However, most efforts demonstrating neuroplasticity have required a great deal of time and effort: extensive rehabilitation after a stroke, acquiring a new language or learning a musical instrument.

But there is an exciting new way the brain can renew itself without prolonged exertion, called LENS (Low Energy Neurofeedback System). In fact, with LENS you hardly have to do anything at all. LENS is a passive system, where the participant does not try to change any brain wave and does not feel or know when the incredibly short neurofeedback session is even being given. Other than closing her eyes, the patient does not do anything at all.

Over the last ten years, this new system has been helping with all types of difficult health problems. With a few sensors, we feed back to the brain the very same brain waves that various areas of the brain are emitting and adding the slightest amount of change, called an offset. Then, over a number sessions (averaging between 10 and 20, with a typical session lasting half hour or less), the brain self-regulates and minimizes its dysfunction.

It is as if someone pushed the brain’s restart button, getting it out of stuck patterns and allowing the brain to begin anew. That translates to thinking better, feeling better, and sleeping better. Anxiety, panic attacks and post traumatic stress decrease or disappear entirely; depressive thoughts lighten up; foggy, cloudy thinking gets clearer; headaches are reduced or eliminated. Even emotional issues may be brought to the surface and released, freeing the person in that dimension. Neurofeedback is as effective as Ritalin for ADD and currently the single most effective treatment for traumatic brain injury.

So, to answer the question asked in the first sentence of this article, the brain is able to renew itself, and in truly profound ways.

*Dr. Dubin is one of only a few hundred LENS practitioners worldwide.

THE BRAIN

THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,

The one the other will include

With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,

For, hold them, blue to blue,

The one the other will absorb,

As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,

For, lift them, pound for pound,

And they will differ, if they do,

As syllable from sound.

Emily Dickinson (1830–86)

The Human Brain: Use It Or Lose It

The Human Brain:

Use it or lose it

Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a wonderful article: When Our Brains Short-Circuit. The article describes how our brains “systematically misjudge certain kinds of risks.”

Above all else, evolution has programmed us for survival. One basic survival mechanism, hardwired into the most primitive part of our brain, is our instinctive surveillance for, and recognition of, immediate threats. However, perhaps evolution’s greatest achievement, the neocortex, our thinking brain, “is not equally hardwired to respond to dangers that require forethought.”

Kristof gives wonderful examples such as our intense fear of snakes verses our nonchalant response to global climactic change with the potential catastrophic consequence of ending life on the planet as we know it.

This short circuit in our brains explains why so many of us fail to plan for our futures, especially in terms of our long-term health. The evidence for this abounds.

A mother scolds her obese four year old for running into the street, seeing the immediate threat to her child’s life, but not the long-term health consequences of obesity.

Food poisoning at a fast food chain claims eight lives nationally, forcing a government re-call and plant shut-down, while the public continues to eat massive quantities of the untainted, but none-the-less, lethal fast foods that are killing them slowly and by the millions.

Swine flu claims a total of 127 lives in one year, creating a national panic and a run on the Tamiflu vaccine. Meanwhile, the largely preventable lifestyle-related chronic degenerative diseases of heart attack, diabetes, obesity and stroke kill an estimated 2.5 million lives each year yet we reject known and simple preventive and curative measures such as exercising more and eating natural, healthy foods.

An ache or pain has us immediately and unquestioningly reach for an advertised drug, in spite of our awareness of its long list of disabling, life threatening or even lethal potential adverse effects.

The pharmaceutical industry capitalizes on our fears of disease and death with the false promise of drugs that further derail our personal responsibility to commit to a lifetime, lifestyle for health.

And on and on.

The miracle of humans is that we are so much more than the hardwiring of the primitive parts of our brains. Our neocortex, or new brain, gives us the ability to think, reason, learn and remember to further increase our chance for survival. Sadly, while the brain is hardwired for instinctual adaptation mechanisms for survival, there is no natural instinct to protect us from our own stupidity.

However, do not despair. Ultimately, the only deterrent for long-term risks is thinking.