What do you do?

Who should you call?

Call Momma! She can administer a decades-old home remedy of sorts known as the “mother’s kiss”. It’s a lot less scary or invasive than some of the tools and techniques used in emergency rooms.

“Mother’s Kiss” was first described in 1965. It doesn’t need to be Momma, of course, any parent or loving relative could do it in an emergency.

The parent or caretaker places their mouth over their child’s mouth while holding the unaffected nostril closed with one finger.

The parent or caretaker blows into the child’s mouth. It’s a bit like “the kiss of life”, except you don’t hold the nose and block it; you allow the air to come through the plugged nostrils.

The breath may force the object out.

If it doesn’t, don’t blow harder or go find the local bagpipe player.

Just go to the ER.

I have set the date and time for the first of these workshops as Saturday, 13^th October. Since I am back in California, I’ll be on Pacific time (PDT) and I feel that 10.00 am PDT will cover the most people live (those in Oz and New Zealand will have to listen to the recording).

The first discussion will be a huge one: Connectedness and my contention that, if everything is connected, as the gurus say, then you are part of the Nazi party, remote galaxies, time past, time future, people you have never met, tribes around the globe, Ancient Greece, Atlantis, space aliens out there…

Wow! That would be a huge concept and almost terrifying to live with. Do they really mean EVERYTHING is connected?

How can that be?

Let me walk you through some of the most exciting discoveries of recent years and how it is all beginning to pan out. I promise you that—far form being overwhelming—it’s the most inspiring concept of all.

It’s new scripture in the making!!

HERE’S WHERE YOU GO TO ATTEND:

Title: New Thought Horizons Workshop

Time: Saturday, October 13th at 10:00am Pacific (1.00pm EST, 6.00pm UK)

Listening method: Phone + Web Simulcast

To attend, visit:

http://InstantTeleseminar.com/?eventID=34172553

Phone In Number: (206) 402-0100

Pin Code for Phone In: 633162#

Make sure you take time out to attend live! Recordings are great but I don’t want to be talking to the ether. I want real people on the call!!

There’s a feast of good health data up there, ALL FREE!

Why don’t you go catch some audios at “Ask Doctor Keith”? Now I have remembered this resource, I’ll be adding lots of tracks, so it’s something you should get familiar with.

http://www.askdoctorkeith.com

I especially recommend the one about the 19818 flu. You’ll be amazed!

But what about true blondes? Flaxen hair is a genetic thing, of course. But apparently, not all “blonde genes” are the same. It depends where you are born.

The genetic variant that causes many dark-skinned people from the Solomon Islands to have blonde hair is different from the gene possessed by blonde Europeans, the study found. Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine found that this particular variant is absent in the genomes of Europeans.

This proved a bit surprising, because most studies in human genetics only include participants of European descent. That’s pretty lame, scientifically, but we’ll let it pass.

The frequency of blonde hair in the Solomon Islands is between 5 percent and 10 percent (those sailors, they get everywhere!)

Actually, it may not be visiting Europeans impregnating the women. Many locals have assumed their blonde hair was the result of sun exposure or high fish consumption. The study authors, however, sought to determine if there was a unique genetic basis for this characteristic.

To settle the matter, researchers looked for the genes associated with blonde hair, then selected 43 of the most blonde and 42 of the darkest-haired Islanders from the samples collected, and looked for differences in the frequency of genetic variants between the two groups.

The authors noted that the genetic variant that leads to blonde hair among people in the Solomon Islands is not found in the genomes of Europeans.

“Within a week we had our initial result,” the study’s co-first author, Eimear Kenny, said in the news release. “It was such a striking signal pointing to a single gene — a result you could hang your hat on. That rarely happens in science. It was one of the best experiences of my career.”

“The human characteristic of blonde hair arose independently in equatorial Oceania,” she said. “That’s quite unexpected and fascinating.”

So, it wasn’t the sailors, after all!

French composer Claude Debussy liked blondes. He wrote an evocative piece called The Girl With The Flaxen Hair (La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin). You may know it; if not go here and listen on YouTube, played by Joshua Bell. Now there’s a guy with a violin IQ of 200!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4XgxduIv_0

[SOURCE: Stanford University School of Medicine, news release, May 3, 2012]

More correctly, it’s known as feces (to Americans) or faeces to those who still know and understand our Greek heritage!

In fact collective sh*t (oops, said it again), or raw sewage, is home to the most diverse collection of viruses ever documented. Literally thousands have been discovered, some of which could be a threat to human health, according to a new study published in mBio, the journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

All told, we have learned to recognize around 3,000 distinct viruses worldwide. According to this study, published online Oct 4th, 2011, researchers found the genetic signature of 234 of these known viruses present in raw sewage in North America, Europe and Africa. That’s a hefty percentage of the recognized total.

This total includes known human pathogens, such as human papillomavirus, which can cause genital warts and cervical cancer, and norovirus, which causes stomach flu.

There were also viruses associated with rodents and cockroaches, viruses from plants and viruses that prey on bacteria. Not all bad, that’s for sure.

But fascinatingly, most of the genetic signatures belonged to as-yet undiscovered viruses, many of which play unknown roles in human health and environmental processes.

This focuses yet again on the emergence in recent years of the vast scale of the human microbiome: the collection of genes from microbes present in and on our bodies, which outnumber our own genes by 150:1.

You’ll learn more about the human microbiome when my new book “Fire In The Belly” is finally brought forth!

The subject of hyperventilation is of considerable importance to many allergics. Opinions seem to divide doctors into two distinct groups: those who believe that hyperventilation – and not allergy – is the real cause of the patient’s symptoms and those who think that allergies trigger hyperventilation, which then leads to symptoms, but that allergies come first.

What Is Hyperventilation?

The word means over-breathing: that is, breathing in excess of physiological requirements. It can result from a psychological state such as a panic attack, from a physiological condition such as metabolic acidosis, or can be brought about by lifestyle risk factors or voluntarily as in certain yogic practices.

In the normal course of events air is drawn into the lungs. Oxygen is removed into the blood and, at the same time, carbon dioxide is given off as a waste product in the exhaled breath. We call this process respiration or, more correctly, external respiration.

The uptake of oxygen need not concern us here. The oxygen is tightly bound to hemoglobin (the red blood pigment) and remains at a fairly constant level provided the lungs are working normally. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, dissolves directly into the plasma. A simple chemical reaction takes place, which may be represented by the equation:

CO₂ +       H₂O    =       H₂CO₃

Carbon dioxide         +       water  =       carbonic acid

Carbonic acid dissociates into H + ions and HCO₃ – (bicarbonate) ions and this affects the acidity of the blood (the blood’s pH, for those with scientific knowledge).

Both the kidneys and the lungs control bicarbonate levels, the kidneys by selective excretion and the lungs by blowing off extra carbon dioxide. There are chemicals called buffers present in the blood that are able, to a certain extent, to ‘mop up’ excess acidic and alkaline ions, but there is a limit to how much they can regulate the body’s acid-alkali equilibrium.

You will now readily see that over-breathing will lower the carbon dioxide levels excessively, which will deplete blood bicarbonate and will in turn upset the body’s acid-base equilibrium enough to cause symptoms in susceptible patients.

Of course, we are talking about un-conscious involuntary over-breathing now, not something indulged in temporarily to order to play the bagpipes or some similar act. It is a bad habit that has become elevated to the status of a disease process.

Symptoms of Hyperventilation

The brain is susceptible even to tiny drops in carbon dioxide levels. When the brain is disturbed, almost any symptoms becomes possible.  It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of subjective symptoms can be produced, as well as objective responses.

Hyperventilation can, but does not necessarily always cause symptoms such as numbness or tingling in the hands, feet and lips, lightheadedness, dizziness, headache, chest pain, slurred speech, nervous laughter, and sometimes fainting. For a fuller list of hyperventilation symptoms, see the accompanying post link below).

Some quasi-religious practices, I note, are basically hyperventilation to hallucination: Osho’s is the most obvious example of this. It’s not even slightly spiritual; it’s the effects of severely altered biochemistry! To be fair, I have argued that maybe legitimate experiences follow on from disrupting metabolism. But it’s not “spirit” that starts it, but low partial pressure of carbon dioxide.

I have made a list of symptoms potentially attributable to hyperventilation and that’s a separate post, attached to this one:

Common symptoms that may be attributable to hyperventilation.

This post should be read and used after my other post on hyperventilation.

For each category score 1 point for each symptom even if only one symptom within the category applies to you. Do not increase your score if you suffer from more than one of the symptoms in a category.

Mental States from Hyperventilation

Sensation of floating (feeling ‘spaced out’, ‘unreal’ or ‘distant’)

Difficulty with memory

Difficulty concentrating

Mental confusion (‘racing thoughts’)

Tension

Anxiety

Panic attacks

Fear of crowds, shops, queues, stuffy places, artificial lights, lifts, trains, underground trains, etc. Feel physically ill, tight-chested, prone to collapse when faced by the above situation

Temporary delusion

Seeing things that are not there (hallucination)

Quick temper

Quick/easy tears

Coma, stupor or convulsions-if hyperventilation is severe

Sleep

Vivid/frightening dreams

Waking in morning feeling ‘drugged’/headachy/fatigued/lethargic/with aching muscles

Waking in the night choking/breathless/panicky

Waking repeatedly soon after going to sleep

Eyes

Blurred or double vision

Distortion of perspective (‘the room tilts away’)

Sensitivity to bright lights

Ears

Vertigo (dizziness)

Tinnitus (ringing/buzzing in ears) which varies from hour to hour

Sounds seem distant or unusually loud

Sensitivity to loud noises

Nervous System

Lack of co-ordination/bumping into things/clumsiness ‘Tension headache/thick head/hangover-like state for large part of many days

Headache during ‘attacks’/caused by exercise

Migraine attacks

Numbness/’deadness’/tingling in extremities, limbs, lips, face, tongue

Feeling ‘electric’ – but not the electric shock one can get by making contact   with an object

Unpleasant sensations in skin/just below surface of the skin

Cold/burning/aching/ ‘creeping’ feeling, commonly in the thighs/buttocks/ feet but maybe other parts of body

Autonomic Nervous System

Emotional sweating/sweaty palms/armpits

Easily blushing or going very pale

Cold hands/feet (when rest of body is warm)

Raynaud’s disease

Respiratory System

Unreasonable breathlessness/air hunger/feeling of restricted chest

‘I do exercises to improve my breathing’

‘I do not breather enough/breathe deeply enough’

‘Sometimes I stop breathing/have to remember to breath’

Frequent sighs/yawns

Cigarette smoke provokes other symptoms listed on this chart

Singing voice becomes off-key/tuneless/husky

Speaking/singing loudly provokes symptoms listed on this chart

Speaking voice goes husky/feels strained

Throat dry/’rough’/sore

Asthma attacks now/in the past

Heart

Rapid, slow or irregular heartbeat

Blood-pressure changes easily

Dull pain/ache in center of chest

Angina/ coronary pain, but medical investigations prove negative

Profound/ frequent fainting spells

Muscles

Weakness/fatigue

Exercise has to stop due to sudden unreasonable exhaustion

Sudden loss of strength

Hard exercise improves symptoms

Muscles feel stiff or ‘in spasm’

Muscles ache (feeling ‘beaten up’ or as if ‘been in a fight’)

Tense jaw muscles (may cause headache)

Muscle tremors

Muscle twitching

Tightness around eyes/mouth

Throat

Globus (sensation of pressure or lump in throat or at root of neck)

Sensation of restricted throat

Difficulty swallowing

Gastrointestinal System

Excessive belching, swallowing air

Discomfort/tension/sinking feeling/distress just below tip of breast-bone

Distended stomach

During attacks of other symptoms: urgent/uncontrolled bowel movement

Urinary Tract

Frequent need to pass urine

Discomfort at neck of bladder

Severe urge to pass urine/incontinence, when accompanied by any of the other symptoms in this table

Reproductive System

Orgasm during cult activities (‘unusual’ sexual practices)

Premature ejaculation

Sex provoking prolonged exhaustion

Sex improving all symptoms for a few hours

Interpretation of Hyperventilation Symptoms list

Less than 15: Unlikely to be due to overbreathing

15-20: Symptoms may be caused by hyperventilation

Locked-In Syndrome

I recently read an amazing book: The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by Jean-Dominic Bauby. It is very moving indeed. Bauby was the Editor-In-Chief at Elle, the fashion  magazine in Paris, France. He was witty, rich, sought after by women, worldly and handsome. He had it all.

Then, at the age of 42, he had a devastating brain stem stroke which left him totally paralyzed, unable to speak and move, yet fully conscious. We call this “locked-in syndrome”; the person is there, fully aware, but is unable to move and can’t communicate normally. [here’s the film trailer from YouTube]:

It is a quite horrifying end for anyone but especially for Bauby, an intellectual and a socialite.

There was just one saving grace. Fate left him with the ability to blink his left eye. Pretty soon he was using this to communicate. He gained a kind of a life.

Eventually, Bauby was able to dictate an entire book about his experience. Somebody would read out the letters of the alphabet and he blinked when the right letter was spoken. The entire 130-page book was thus assembled one letter at a time.

Bauby likened his condition to living under a heavy weighted diving bell at the bottom of the sea. But his spirit was like that of a butterfly, light and wanting to be free. Hence the title he chose.

It could have been a grim book but in fact it is littered with humour and penetrating insight. It’s one of the best books I ever read. I repeatedly laughed out loud. I highly commend it.

The book was an instant best-seller and a movie was made of it, which I can also recommend. It is brilliantly done. Julian Schnabel won the Best Director prize at Cannes, a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

Sadly, Bauby died just ten days after the book was published. He died of a fatal urinary infection, one of the risks of needing a catheter.

A Diet Factor?

What mesmerized me about Bauby’s story was that he had gone on a diet just one week before his paralytic stroke.

If you know my work you will know that I stand more than anything for the catastrophic effects foods can have on people. This goes beyond what we used to call food allergy. Genetic intolerance plays a part; actual toxins in food; hormonal, neurological and inflammatory pathways; immune system overload and many other complex mechanisms.

I have written often that there is no such thing as a safe, healthy diet. Whatever eating plan you can conceive, somebody, somewhere, will be allergic to the allowed foods. We all have to work out for ourselves what our own safe foods are and stick to them.

I have no doubt in my mind that the switch in eating habits is what precipitated Bauby’s stroke at such a young age. Something he was eating was toxic to him and set up severe inflammation in his body. The food might be perfectly well tolerated by the majority of us.

This is the whole theme of my book “Diet Wise”: find and eliminate your own toxic foods. [www.dietwisebook.com]

My Patient

I had a kind of locked-in case, which I described in “Diet Wise”. Angela was 18 years old when I met her. She had a condition called cerebral palsy girl, which meant she couldn’t speak and had immense difficulty moving purposefully.

Long story short: she had food allergies, I found and neutralized them, and within 3 weeks she spoke for the first time. I don’t mean she learned to speak; I mean she started talking off the bat.

Angela’s first words were: “Mummy, I love you”. Her delighted parent nearly fell through the floor. It was only a matter of days before she was chatting away and said “I want to go to the pictures (movies).”

Angela had been locked in and written off by the doctors as no good. No one even thought of trying to communicate with her. Yet all the time she could hear and had feelings; she understood words, language and concepts. Angela was “brain damaged” in the motor sense and doctors had made the unwarranted assumption that she was also damaged in the consciousness sense as well.

What had happened was that her neural pathways were OK but inflammation, due to toxic foods, had caused them to malfunction.

His First Communication Caught On Film

What prompted me to write this piece was not just the Bauby book but a recent BBC program, investigating brain death, in which a man’s very first communication was caught live on camera. It was an amazing moment.

Richard Rudd had been horrifically injured when a motorcycle slammed into him at high speed. He might have been OK, with skilled surgery. But eventually an overwhelming infection attacked his body and he slipped into a coma. The brain damage caused by the infection left Rudd totally paralyzed. He ended up on a life-support machine.

He came to in a locked-in condition. No-one knew. The decision had been made to switch off his life support machine. But Rudd was able to blink and begged for life. This heart-wrenching moment was captured by a BBC crew making a documentary about patients with serious brain injuries.

Rudd has two daughters Bethan, 14, and Charlotte, 18, and that must have been part of his will to live.

Since the filming and before the program aired, Rudd learned to move his head an inch either way, smile and grimace. However, he is unlikely to ever come off his ventilator. Sadly, locked-in syndrome is usually fatal. Studies suggest that, within four months, nine out of ten people with locked-in syndrome die (Bauby lasted 16 months).

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1294373/The-incredible-story-paralysed-man-blinked-stay-alive-life-support-machine-turned-off.html#ixzz0tfhOQY2B

Fiction

All this sounds like one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, “Premature Burial”, which is about the horrors of being buried alive.

There have been many urban legends of people being accidentally buried alive. Legends included elements such as someone entering into a coma, only to wake up years later and die a horrible death. Other legends tell of coffins opened to find a corpse with a long beard or corpses with the hands raised and palms turned upward. Robert E. Lee’s mother started what has become a legend about the premature burial of Ann Hill Carter Lee, the wife of Henry Lee III.  On his deathbed in 1799, George Washington made his attendants promise not to bury him for two days.

It reminds me also of a TV program I saw as a kid. I think it was Hitchcock, or maybe “The Twilight Zone”: a man involved in a car crash was paralyzed with the exception of his little finger. The doctors all thought he was dead and were going to perform an autopsy on him the following morning. The paralyzed man thought that all he needed to do was to wiggle his little finger once the doctors arrived to start the autopsy and he’d be saved, however during the night an attendant had moved him so the hand with the movable pinky was now hidden underneath him and couldn’t be seen.

As the doctors were about to cut him up the man began to cry and the doctors saw his tears and so, in the end, he was saved.

What You Need To Do To Avoid Locked In Catastrophe

Stay healthy

Don’t engage in any “living will” notions, asking not be left on life support. You don’t know how you will feel when the fateful moment of doom is upon you. At least three cases I have laid before you were very glad of life, even in unbelievably awful conditions.

Here’s a worry: bad behavior as a kid has been linked to early death in men.

The findings are from a study that began following 411 South London boys who were 8 to 9 years old in 1961. Among those who at age 10 displayed antisocial behavior (such as skipping school or being troublesome or dishonest) and who also were convicted of a crime by the age of 18, one in six (16.3%) had died or become disabled by the time they turned 48.

That’s nearly seven times higher than the one in 40 (2.6%) death or disability rate among men who stayed out of trouble when they were young, the study authors noted in their report in the December issue of the Journal of Public Health.

What was surprising is that the increase was not limited to substance abuse or other mental health problems known to be linked with an antisocial lifestyle, but included premature death and disability from a wide variety of chronic illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease and cancer.

It’s not too surprising. The life of a young gangster must be pretty stressful, always trying to stay out of the hands of the police. We know stress raises cortisol levels and cortisol is behind most aging mischief.

[SOURCE: Journal of Public Health, news release, December 2009]

So there is the pretense of science. People are fooled into believing they are being “scientific”, when in fact they are just resorting to personal opinions, at variance with the proven facts.

As an example consider this new study from Spain, showing that alcohol reduces death by heart disease by up to 54%–and that’s from HEAVY drinking. Yet they still insist that nobody should drink and “other studies” show alcohol kills. Why shouldn’t people adopt alcohol? If their science is worth a spit, drinking saves and enhances lives, for heaven’s sake.

This fanatical onslaught against alcohol continues, despite all common sense and scientific method. Spain and France, both very heavy drinking countries, where a bottle a day per person is almost the norm, do not have higher death rates than the rest of civilization. On the contrary, you have probably heard of the “French paradox”—meaning that the French drink HUGE amounts of alcohol and yet on average do not die younger than the rest of us.

Thousands of studies have shown that alcoholic drinks have an ameliorating effect on dietary excesses and seem beneficial. Papers on resveratrol and other polyphenols in red wine are coming out at the rate of about one a month. Yet born-again critics (many of whom I suspect are recovered drunks, from their ridiculous language) still rant against drink.

Most so-called alcohol deaths are from drink driving and alcoholism: in both cases anti-social and psychotic behavior is the problem, not the alcohol. If I drink a bottle of wine and DON’T go out on the roads and kill somebody but another person does go out and kill somebody, in what possible sense can the alcohol be the real cause of the second instance?

It’s just not logical.

Roaring drunks like Oliver Reed and Judy Garland had deep-seated psychological problems. Their self-destruct pathways killed them; alcohol was just the tool. Sometimes, like Mary Tyler Moore and Larry Hagman, the person doesn’t die physically but their life comes off the tracks and they are “dead” career-wise.

Well, with all that off my chest, let me talk more about this interesting Spanish study. Dr. Larraitz Arriola, MD, a researcher at the Public Health Department of Gipuzkoa, San Sebastian, evaluated 15,630 men and 25,808 women ages 29 to 69, all free of heart disease at the beginning of the study, following them for a median of 10 years (half longer, half less). That’s 41,000 people in all: a MAJOR study.

Dr. Arriola considered a “drink” as an alcoholic beverage with 10 grams of alcohol, the U.K. standard [In the U.S., a standard drink is equal to 13.7 grams of alcohol, according to the CDC].

The study’s definition of drinking levels was not scientifically-based and just made up “off the wall”. But she chose to set it as follows:

• Light drinking was up to 5 grams a day — or about one glass of wine, one and one-half beers, or less than a half glass of hard liquor.
• Moderate drinking was 5 to 30 grams a day, or about two glasses of wine, two or three beers, or a half to one glass of hard liquor.
• High and very high levels of drinking were 30 to 90 grams a day, or about five or more glasses of wine, seven or more beers, and one to one and a half glasses or more of hard liquor.

What Dr. Arriola found was that:

• Light drinking reduced risk by 35%
• Moderate drinking reduced risk by 51%
• High and very high levels of drinking reduced risk by 54% and 50%.

Even former drinkers had a 10% risk reduction. As I keep pointing out, teetotalers don’t do so well on life expectancy. That might be counter-intuitive but it is an uncontestable fact.

One of the things that frustrates me with studies on alcohol is they rarely distinguish the types of drink. In my opinion (I’m labeling it an opinion) wine is far safer and more natural than either spirits or beers. So when all drinks are lumped together, it often masks the benefits of wine, which are quite clear when it is examined alone.

But in this study, I note that all drinks were counted and the conclusion was that beer, wine, or hard liquor all reduced the risk of heart disease in men by up to 50% or more.

The benefits showed up mainly for men. The researcher found no statistical benefits for women drinking alcohol but Dr. Arriola concluded this may be because of the relatively low number of women in the study who developed heart disease. That in turn could be because the drinks benefitted them greatly. But it cannot be stated as fact; we just don’t know on these figures.

Cheers!

[Source: Arriola, L. Heart, online, November 2009].