Body Parts

Ooops, the flu!

I've been going through another round of the flu, which has sapped my energy. I've been working sporadically on my other blogs. I am reading Obama's Audacity of Hope (certainly audacity of some kind!) and will review it when finished.

Holding, Being Held, and the Social Life of A Man's Body

My back blew out nearly two weeks ago. I went horse-back riding the previous day, a two-hour long trail ride. I hadn't ridden horses for twenty years. My back let me know it was not pleased with the experience. I spent four days in bed on my back, trying not to move. My Pilates teacher, concerned about my injury, arranged for me to have an appointment with an osteopathic physician, whom she brought regularly to her studio to work with several of her clients who needed medically knowledgeable attention. I have not had any osteopathic or chiropractic therapy since I was a young child, so I did not know what to expect and took the appointment only because I trusted the advice of my Pilates instructor, who was a professional dancer and is a brilliant teacher. Though I did not realize I needed medical attention--my back has gone out regularly since a major blow-out eighteen years ago--, she could tell, from my posture and Pilates workout, that I did.

The hour-long osteopathic therapy was a revelation to me. The physician, another brilliant woman who had been a professional dancer herself (The Joffrey Ballet), diagnosed my problems, which involved a weakened left side due to an inguinal hernia surgery last Winter, misaligned pubic symphysis, sheared sacrum, and twisted lower vertebrae. For an hour, she manipulated bones and muscles, realigning my lower body. Bones audibly popped into correct position. Muscles recovered extension and range of motion they hadn't had for days. The relief I felt was instantaneous, as was my gratitude. I had had no notion of the destructive contortion of my body or of the benefits of medical manipulation.  At the conclusion of the session, the physician gave me a hug. She was pleased that I had been so obviously improved. I don't think she intended the embrace as part of the therapy, only as a gesture, but for me, with a history about which she did not know, it was.

I have always enjoyed, and more, longed, to be embraced. I have envied women's sociability, which involves frequent hugging. Women have a range of embrace, from the casual hug which involves one woman putting her hands on another's shoulders, leaning forward, without body contact, though perhaps a brief kiss, to the intimately supportive embrace, in which one woman holds another who has collapsed against her and is being held up. Such demonstration of emotion is largely denied to men.

There is a history to my need. I was epileptic when a child, a brain malady that I outgrew only in the mid teen years. I had both petit mal and grand mal seizures. I have written about this condition previously, but here I can mention the need it generated in me for embracing. Grand mal seizures are exhausting. While I didn't directly experience the seizures, because I was of course unconscious, I knew upon regaining consciousness that I had undergone a seizure. I would feel weak, confused, maybe (but not usually) frightened, and vulnerable. Sometimes the seizures were quite extended. I would wake for a few minutes and then fall back into seizure. When a seizure took place at school (the seventh grade), my mother, upon being called by the school, called her brother, who had an ambulance service, to retrieve me, while she summoned the family physician. I remember waking briefly from the seizure to realize my uncle was picking me up, and later, waking again, he was carrying me slung across his shoulder like a sack of corn. On other occasions, it was my mother's other brother who held me. In each occasion, being held was greatly comforting to me. What was distressing was to be separated, to be, for instance, confined to bed rest, away from people, and not embraced. My mother, being out of my room while I recovered, created anxiety in me.

As a consequence of these profound experiences, I grew up longing for the physical comfort and security of being held. I loved my uncles and their protective embrace was a deep part of my psychology. I transferred this emotion to my childrearing. I loved to embrace my daughter and son, hold them in my arms, rock them to sleep as infants or comfort them when they hurt from scrapes and illnesses as young children. As I grew up, I transferred my love for my mother and my need for my mother's comforting hug at these moments of personal crisis to the women I loved.

It was disconcerting and confusing to me, as an adult, knowing as I did my own needs for physical affection through embracing, that I married women who did not easily or often give such affection. A woman friend who knew my first wife described her as "one up-tight chick". My wife now is similarly unable to express her love for me through casual affection. Some grotesque episodes in her childhood injured her in such a way that prevents her from easily giving or receiving casual touching and embracing. Her capacity and enthusiasm for the emotions and mechanics of physical love were, happily for us both, undamped by her past; our love life has been gratifying and exciting.

I don't have psychoanalytical insight as to why or how I chose, or allowed myself to be chosen by, women who did not share my need or capacity for sharing physical comfort through hugging. Not simply my wife, but also women I dated had this quality. One girl friend, whom I dated between my marriages, said in despairing confidence, that her brain wanted to express this affection, but her body wouldn't let her.

The needs unsatisfied in me, because of the asymmetry of my emotional relationships with the major women in my life, have been reinforced by the prohibition in our society again casual embrace of men and women. Even men who are close friends should not hug one another. This rule is so notable, that exceptions, as when a Marine in Iraq loses a buddy in combat and is, in his grief, consoled in an embrace by another Marine, make the national television news.

The social rule is surely harmful. An illustrative episode was provided when we took in my nephew, who was an addict and delinquent at fifteen. The boy's behavior alienated his father against him, which greatly added to his problems. In our home, I tried to treat him as I would my own son. We genuinely cared for him. I tried to express affection to him, to embrace him, to let him know that his difficulties did not set him aside from us. This affection frightened him. I took him to psychological counseling weekly, sharing some of the session, with a gifted counselor, with him. In one session, he expressed his great discomfort with being hugged by me, because he thought I was making homosexual advances toward him. It took a lot of talk and reassurance from the counselor and me to get him to understand that I was not and that physical expression of affection between a father and son through embracing was a healthy part of a loving relationship, which this boy desperately needed. Part of the discussion involved my medical history of epilepsy and its consequences.

The rule against men and women embracing who are not married to each other is so inviolate, so rigid, as to make our society look like Orthodox Judaism or Islam, which prohibit contact between unmarried men and women. As a result of these taboos, I seldom get hugs of any kind. Sometimes in my life, I have felt isolated like a leper, shunned and outcast as undesirable.

The feeling of isolation can be so powerful as to induce paranoia. Is there something wrong with me? This sense probably originated with my childhood epilepsy. There actually was something wrong with me. In my home village, everybody knew my condition. Its expression was completely public. It's acknowledgment undoubtedly recognized in the privacy of kitchen and dining rooms. Many of my childhood acquaintances did shun me. In sports, no one wanted me on a team; it probably was not even safe for me to engage in most sports. When I was a teenager and tried to date, few girls would have anything to do with me. Epilepsy set up a psychological-social dynamic that reinforced itself and was not easily discarded as I entered adulthood and outgrew the epilepsy. No doubt, men who have suffered other diseases, such as severe psoriasis or congenital disfigurement, have experienced similar social estrangement and physical isolation.

Whatever the cause or reason, isolation as severe as leprosy in ancient times intensifies the need for contact. The longing for physical social contact, for comfort, for acceptance, never extinguishes. The prohibition against casual affection between men and women who are only acquaintances never seems less than rude and abrasive. When an embrace comes, spontaneously, as following my session with the osteopathic physician, it's value rises to grace.

Has Pasteurized Milk Consumption Caused Asthma and Allergies Epidemic?

The University of Basel, Switzerland, has completed a study of 14,893 children across Europe. They found that children who drink unpasteurized milk (presumably cow's milk) have far fewer allergies and less asthma than children who drink pasteurized processed milk. The strong relationship holds across farm/nonfarm, urban/suburban categories. This study puts to rest the spurious simple correlation between children who live on a farm and fewer allergies and less asthma. City resident children who drink raw milk also have fewer allergies and less asthma than city children who drink pasteurized milk. (The Stockman Grass Farmer, August 2007, p. 6.)

This evidence concerning processed milk coincides with the evidence of the benefits of the paleolithic diet which excludes milk altogether. Cow's milk is implicated in a variety of diseases. A recent study by a Swedish university found a paleolithic diet (which excluded dairy) was better for dealing with Type 2 diabetes than a Mediterranean diet.

As a personal note, when I obtained alternative medical help for my allergies and asthma, which were severe and chronic, my physician radically changed my diet, including the elimination of all cow's milk products as directly or indirectly as an ingredient in foods. (My physician permitted me to consume goat milk and goat milk products, which I did.) Within a month, my asthma was gone and my allergies were 95% gone, including my most severe allergy to cats.

Homeopathic Eye Drops

About a week after my surgery to repair a hernia, my eyes became inflamed--red and itching eyeballs, puff bags under my eyes. I thought that it was an infection. I used some prescription antibiotic eyedrops that were in the medicine cabinet from a previous eye infection for several days. The prescription was for a three-day treatment; but the medicine did no good. Indeed, I thought my eyes looked more inflamed. I then hypothesized that the inflammation was due to allergies. I used several OTC brands of eyedrops for allergy treatment. Each treatment worked for three or so hours, removing the red and relieving somewhat the itching. But the puffiness wasn't reduced.

About this time, I had a regular checkup appointment with my naturopathic physician. He examined my eyes and said that the inflammation was due to a weakened immune system due to the recent surgery. He said that I should avoid using antihistamines. He confirmed my suggestion that I did not have a bacteria infection. He said the inflammation would pass once the immune system had recovered from the surgery. In the interim, he recommended a black tea wash to fight off any possible infection.

I dutifully brewed black tea and applied (after cooling!) the tea liquid to my eyes with an eye wash cup and by eye droppers. The tea reduced the itching and redness for several hours; but the conditions returned.

After a month of this annoying condition, I decided to try a homeopathic remedy. I went to a local nutrition store that carries homeopathic remedies. There I found a half dozen brands of herbal and homeopathic eye drops for various conditions, including allergy eyes. I decided to buy a treatment for allergy eyes. The profusion of products, new to me, on the shelf confused me, however, and I inadvertently picked out a homeopathic treatment for dry eye relief, rather than allergy eye relief. It was not until I got home that I realized I had picked out the wrong remedy. But the dry eye relief indicated that it reliefed dryness, itching, and redness in the eye and inflammation, so I decided to try it, rather than taking the time to return it for homeopathic allergy eye drops.

The eye drops relieved the itching completely after one day. After three days of treatment, the redness had decreased by 2/3s. Puffiness also started diminish. Now in the fourth day of treatment, the redness is nearly entirely gone. I count this treatment a success. I have now removed my last antihistamine treatment from my health regimen. Two years ago, I was taking antihistamines in several forms daily.

(The eye drop packages reads: "Similasan" "Healthy Relief/TM" dry eye relief. Homeopathic. Active ingredients: Belladonna 6X, purpose-dryness, redness; Euphrasia 6X, purpose-redness, inflammation,; Mercurius sublimatus 6X, purpose-dryness. Manufactured by Similasan AG, Switzerland and made in Switzerland.)

Out of Commission - Surgery

I've been out of blogging action for a few days, as I recover from surgery to fix a hernia. Sitting at a table to write on the pc and putting my laptop on my lap in bed were both too uncomfortable, so I gave up working at the machine for the interval and have been reading in bed. In several days, I read and thoroughly enjoyed the agricultural diary of travels in Japan, China, and Korea by F. H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries (1911, reprint Rodale Press), a classic of the organic farming movement. Enthralling. Really.

Discouragement and Optimism in the New Year

Ten days before Christmas, I contracted a sore throat, an obnoxious contagion sweeping through the community as children carried it home from schools for the holiday. It wasn't a cold, I know, for want of a single symtom. Colds do not generate in me a malaise; the flu does, but this sickness was not apparently a flu. Whatever the proper diagnosis, I spent the week prior to Christmas in a slough of discouragement with myself and my life. In my mind, I rationally recognized the discouragement as a symptom of the sore throat and struggled against the mood; alas, to no avail. Only as my health improved did the mood ebb. By Christmas day, I felt better and my normal mood of optimism prevailed.

While I moldered with my sick throat, frequent coughing and hacking prevented me from focussing my mind on any task. Even my morning reading of our daily newspapers--a ritualistic occasion shared with my wife in which we voice back and forth across the breakfast table our favorite rants--was distracted and desultory. I absorbed little. The flecks of the nation's changing political mood, blowing in the media winds, blew past me unobserved. Somehow, I filtered out the premature posturings of new elevated Democratic Party committee chairpersons, as they flexed their party's agenda, much as, I suppose, my brain filters out my vision the shadows on my retina cast by the floating specks of debris from the disintegrating irises and other matter of my eyes.

As I--and we, the nation--slouch toward the new year, the national mood begins to show itself. If you read the NIH guidelines for the emergence of clinical depression, as distinguished from situational depression, you get guidelines for watching for evidence of the new mood. It persists longer than two weeks. You wake earlier than normal in the morning thinking blue thoughts. The mood spreads like a gel into the pores and interstices of the news, institutional events, and bureaucratic processing. Normality is being infected. The national sore throat appears in the voices of Democratic Party influentials, such as Senator Biden, who cough and hack their intentions before the cameras and microphones. The Democratic Party is preparing to reprise its shameful theatrics of the early 1970s. Then, the party forced abandonment of the nation's fight against Communism in southeast Asis, with murderous consequences that followed for a decade; now it will force abandonment of the fight against Islamic totalitarianism. Murderous consequences will follow for another decade, probably another generation.

Churchill's metaphor for the successive failures of democratic Europe to confront Nazism in the 1930s was the gathering storm. What America is experiencing now is not, however, a gathering  storm. It is an emerging mood disorder, a mood illness, a spreading infection that will disable us, weaken us, and ultimately threaten the nation. A nation imbued with discouragement and malaise cannot confront, cannot defeat, a nation, such as Jihadist Islam, imbued with optimism and self-confidence.

As with other illnesses, our growing national mood disorder shall have to endure a crisis before course of treatment and correction shall occur. We will have to endure pain and loss, before we will be in a situation where the illness of our mood disorder reveals itself to ourselves. That crisis will be, of course, another major strike against us. When it shall happen of course we don't know, in 2007, or 2008, or 2010, or 2015. Many doctors--the expert analysts, such as Kissinger--say a massive military strike against the homeland is inevitable. But in the insular delusion created by our mood of discouragement, even the words of doctors, such as Daniel Pipes, are ignored by the patient. I pray, selfishly, that my family in New York will survive what is to come, that we will get our haven in out of Southern California created in time to provide a haven for them and us.

(Revised.)

One Year Later

As readers of my blog know, a year and a half ago, my daughter convinced me to seek alternative medical therapy for my asthma and allergies. These life-long afflictions were modestly, but not severely, disabling. I thought of them as entry-level chronic diseases, not in the same league as big time disabilities, but enough to give me a peek at what being really crippled would be like.

In addition to the asthma and allergies, I also asked my alternative physician to help me with acid reflux disease and chronic stomach and intestinal discomfort.

In June of last year, I began a new medical regime, in which I:

• ceased treatment with two steroids for my asthma and allergies
• ceased taking antihistamines, decongestants, and nasal sprays
• started taking homeopathic remedies and supplements
• started taking dietary support and supplements

My physician said that my asthma and some of my allergies were probably due to immune reaction to food sensitivities. He requested that I take the Al-Cat food sensitivity test. Sure enough, two dozen foods were identified as causing me problems. I began a four-day rotational diet that eliminated, among other foods:

• baked goods made with baker's yeast
• barley (eliminating most commercial flour products and beer)
• grape (eliminating wine--I had figured out that I have a sensitivity to grapes several decades ago and ceased drinking grape/wine products then)
• cane sugar
• white potato

My physician also asked me not to consume any cow milk dairy products or foods with cow's milk in them. I could, however, eat as much goat milk products products as I wanted. I began the new rotational diet in August (of last year).

At the recommendation of my wife, and my new alternative physician, I took up pilates to help me with physical exercise. I had been walking regularly. Now I began to do interval jogging and walking for 2.3 miles a day. The pilates has helped with all the physical issues associated with regular exercise.

What have been the results of the new diet and exercise regimes and my alternative medical therapy. Actually, pretty spectacular:

• Asthma is gone--No tightening of the chest, no breathing difficulties
• Allergies minimal--controlled without conventional medicines by alternative medical remedies
• My allergy to cats, which was truly life-threatening, has disappeared
• Stomach and intestinal disorders sufficiently gone for us to focus on a remaining issue
• Reflux disease--I've been going off prilosec generic for six weeks and should be off completely in two more weeks. This is my second attempt. So far, none of the problems that showed up last year when I tried unsuccessfully to go off prilosec have reoccurred
• Rheumatism--I thought I was developing rheumatism in my knees and ankles. These aches and pains disappeared two weeks after going on the rotational diet and starting pilates.

How do my health markers look?

• Total cholesterol has dropped from 240s to 130s (individual cholesterol indexes just as good)
• Blood pressure has dropped from 240s/90s to 90s/60s
• Weight has dropped from low 150s to 140
• Prostate test (PSI) has dropped from 560 to 390s (non-indicative and normal for my age)
• Tests for all kidney, liver, and thyroid functions are in normal range

What's up for the future? My goal is to put myself in sufficiently strong health and physical condition that I can take up the strenuous farm work that my wife and I are planning to do in a few years, when we retire to a farm. In pilates, I am focussing on upper body strength. My goal is to be able to lift repeatedly and  carry 80 lbs of weight--a bale of hay, a heifer, a goat, etc.

Now, to keep this up into elderhood!

Pilates Is Re-sculpting My Body

After a year in the pilates studio, taught by a wise and wonderful teacher, my body has been re-sculpted from linebacker to modern dancer. From periphery to center. All lean sinew, ropey muscles. My neighbor said, lord, you are losing weight. You look so thin, you're scrawny. I held up my arms for a pat-down. Go ahead. Feel me, I challenged her. That ain't scrawn, it's brawn.

PSA Continues to Drop

After a year of alternative medical treatment for my dietary and digestive problems, my PSA score continues to drop. It rose steadily after 2001, until 2005, after starting treatment, when it dropped by 30%. In July 2005, it was 3.94. This July it is 3.91, well within normal for a man of 63. Thanks, Dr. A. Mohrdar.

Not Like A Sleeping Cat

In another lifetime, when I was very young, I was enthralled by the romantic freedom of A. S. Neill's school for children, described in Summerhill. I recall a passage in the book, where Neill is telling a visitor that the children should be as natural and relaxed as, pointing to a sleeping cat, that cat. Notice its belly, relaxed, gently rising and falling with each calm breath, he advised. I couldn't breath like that. Chronic asthma made my breathing, most of the time, a labored affair, with my over-developed intercostal muscles doing the heavy lifting. My abdomen was hardly involved. Over the past year, in Pilates training, a good third of my time has been devoted to learning to breath all over again. With my asthma now gone, thanks to my naturopathologist and integrative medicine, I am trying to rebuild my body. Emphasis on, trying. Sometimes my form during the complicated Pilates exercises is less than superb, as it was earlier this week in a chair exercise. Concentrating on stretching my spine, I forgot about the stages of breathing, the use of my abdominal side muscles, and simply started breathing with my belly. My teacher spotted this infraction immediately. I received a one minute correction and a two-minute review of breathing. I was not supposed to look like a cat. Neill had no idea what he was talking about. I couldn't look back to Summerhill.