and in May 1998: Perspectives on health

again please note that this is an old paper

—nothing recommended, nothing for sale

just ideas

Perspectives on Health

Article prompted by e-mail

Dennis Argall May 1998

During the week, my doctor, discussing my approach to this illness, focussed his thoughts on the question why some people succumb to illness, while other people, subjected to all sorts of stress and to abusive lifestyle, swim on without a problem.

I said in reply that while his book had been savagely criticised by his own profession, Peter Kramer's 1993 book Listening to Prozac contained a very interesting thought, that psychiatry, having muddled its way to its present ideas on categories of mental illness, may find that the next great field needing understanding was 'sensitivity' as a variable in the human condition (with Prozac reducing sensitivity, or vulnerability to sensitivity, in his view, as an idea distinct from its manipulation of 'depression').

My doctor, on the other hand, is attracted to the idea articulated by Deepak Chopra that what matters is not so much our substance as the energy in the great spaces between our atoms (and one might fiddle at that level with the question of whether it is energy between subatomic particles or is the energetic states that may be represented as particles that one can talk about, but the precise physics may not be the point) and the 'attitude' (my word, not Chopra's) of that energy. [Deepak Chopra, various titles, see especially Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, or if you find the self-help genre irritating, Return of the Rishi Boston 1988 provides an autobiographical account of his turn from the Western medicine in which he followed his father’s career and values, back to re-discover the Ayurvedic medicine practised by his grandmother.] So somewhere, somehow, we either arrive with (genetically or by antenatal experience) or slip into categories or states of sensitivity or 'attitude' (as in "He's got Attitood"!) which fundamentally impact on our physiological and psychological performance. Hence the importance at his practical clinical level as a sports medicine doctor attracting patients with diagnosis difficulties, of the whole armory of approaches including homoeopathy, aromatherapy, goal-setting, visualisation, positive thinking, etc.

We also discussed the major problem of pain management, both of us aware that I have managed to get myself away from that (at the moment, at least), both aware that for many people it is the unavoidable preoccupation

This article was drafted in response to a note in which someone wrote to me:

"If you or Ray Peat or anyone else has that written down in clear, easilycomprehended & one-size-or-treatment-fits-all-regardless-of-who-you-aretext, I'd really, *sincerely* want to read it.  Even if it works for some& not others, maybe I can glean something from it that will help me. But,so far, I don't think anyone has come up with a surefire, long-term fixjust yet.  *Please* post it in it's entirety if I'm wrong."

I find that I am taking very seriously as a route to well-ness the sorts of things I am doing now, and I am faced with a further conundrum. I am myself agnostic in perspective, distrustful of my own as well as other people's ideas. Regularly, in developing my own ideas, I subject them to what feels fairly harrowing self-criticism. At the same time, however, I would agree with Edward O Wilson [On Human Nature, Cambridge, Mass, 1978] that religion is endemic in homo sapiens and is thus part of our genetic pattern. Thus it seems to me that while I feel obliged to subject my ideas, or others, to sceptical review, they will not work unless I believe in them - that is, unless I feelsome connection between them and my health, unless I have faith in their validity.

How to deal with that conundrum?

Two other bits of reading seem useful, or have been recently useful to me.

Richard Lewontin in his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Massey Lectures 1991 [R.C. Lewontin, The Doctrine of DNA, Penguin Books 1993] criticises [chapter 3] the ideological prejudice in modern biology particularly as relates to causes, or rather the tendency to seek THE cause of an effect. This he says is "nowhere more evident than in our theories of health and disease". In discussing pursuit of the 'cause' of cancer he runs through the history of cancer research, pursuing a viral cause, an environmental cause and more recently in the human genome project, of which he is sharply critical. He asks (or, in 1991 asked, but the question remains valid):

"Why, then, do so many powerful, famous, successful, and extremelyintelligent scientists want to sequence the human genome? The answer is inpart, that they are so completely devoted to the ideology of simple unitarycauses that they believe in the efficacy of the research and do not askthemselves more complicated questions. But in part, the answer is a rathercrass one. The participation in and the control of a multibillion-dollar,30- or 50-year research project that will involve the everyday work ofthousands of technicians and lower-level scientists is an extraordinarilyappealing prospect for an ambitious biologist..." [p.51]

I am attracted to these views because I am not attracted in any sense by single cause; indeed, as I think you feel too, the single labels of this kind of disregulation are pretty shonky and reflect the desire for legal or other reasons to label cases, or the comfort of sufferers in actually feeling that there is a 'church' of like people to which they belong, reducing the terrible isolating aspects of the illness.

I have also recently been reading Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, Doubleday New York, 1996, an argument for a new paradigm, an advance from mechanistic thinking inherited from Galileo, Descartes and Newton. In advocating 'deep ecology' he notes:

"The whole question of values is crucial to deep ecology; it is, in fact,its central defining characteristic. Wheras the old paradigm is based onanthropocentric (human-centred) values, deep ecology is grounded inecocentric (earth-centred) values. It is a worldview that acknowledges theinherent value of non-human life. All living beings are members ofecological communities bound together in a network of interdependencies."[p.11]

I had had been given by a friend one of Capra's earlier books, The Tao of Physics, when I was disablingly sick in the mid 1980s, and while the ideas there seemed important, I could not relate them to my perplexing and preoccupying state of confusion and pain. Now I relate that quote from his latest book to a major factor in my thinking about my health, in the role of mitochondria, as central factor in health and exemplars in my perspective.

The issue is this. Biology and medicine, not to mention politics, economics and religion, assume that homo sapiens is to be dealt with as homo sapiens and if there is any thought in relation to the mitochondria in all our cells it is the unconscious attitude of possession and control that slave owners have presumably had in naturally slave owning societies.

But... the realisation that in fact these microorganisms are responsible for the two major factors in life - energy production and the manufacture of the basis of our steroidal hormone system - really raises in my mind very interesting questions about who is in charge here, what is the centre.

The anthropocentric confidence, global command, greatness and brutality of homo sapiens all reflect our sense of being in command.

On the other hand one major thing to come out of my illness, is in the shift from a sense of being in command to a certainty of not being in command (of my body, of the direction of my life, etc, etc). I have only recently, and in the context of the kind of paradigm shift of which Capra is speaking and to which I had been heading with my thoughts on mitochondria, ceased regarding this 'lack of control' as a terrible loss. Yes, I want to get more direction in my life if I can, but also I realise I can only do that if the mitochondria and the other microorganisms on board (somewhere I saw the figure of 10% dry weight) on board me body are 'happy' too, in a cooperative, rather than 'control' manner.

A major underpinning of contemporary approaches to medicine and medical science was Antoine Lavoisier's eighteenth century demonstration that respiration is a special form of oxidation "and thus confirmed the relevance of chemical processes in the functioning of living organisms." [Capra p.20]

What Lavoisier did not know is that it is the mitochondria that do the respiring for us. In the analytical pursuit of what individual chemical reactions and cell parts may be, contemporary research has lost sight of what may seem a shocking or ego deflating fact that actually we don't respire at all, it's done for us.

But is it done for us? Were I the brightest and most colourful feather on a peacock’s bottom, I might well think that the peacock strutted for me, but the strength of my belief would not really be the point in deciding whether the peacock wagged the tail or the tail wagged the peacock. While we regard feathers on peacocks bottoms as part of the wonder of nature rather than its fundamental rhythm, we may be a bit more perplexed if asked to consider whether all our complex cultural evolution may not be an ephemeral biproduct of the constant struggle, ever since the bacteria ruined the planet's atmosphere by making it oxygen rich, of the mitochondria to maintain a decent existence safe from that atmosphere. If I think that - that I may be here for the mitochondria, not they here for me (and if you follow the principle that if there is a choice between a simple explanation or a complex explanation for something the simple one is probably right, then the mitochondria win hands down), then I come to a these positions:

[1] I am far from the mainstream of human self-infatuation, and dialogue

with it is hard.

[2] I can be scared or I can rejoice in such an interesting relationship

with nature, it can add to pain, or it can help me be well

[3] I have to accept, as I suggested above, that I will only be happy, my

physiology and psychology will only have the right vibes, if my mitochondria

are 'happy', abundant and effective.

At the end of the 1980s when I got myself back into work I found I had some responsibility for advice relating to the buzz term of the time, 'ecological sustainability'. And that led me into trying to set up a small organic farm because I tend to believe things if they work (of course, my health has confounded the project, but we do have a little place in the country to go to, though its rather overgrown now). I did a lot of reading and rejected a lot of conventional agricultural production ideas, which I realise now have a startling resemblance to modern medicine - the measurement of soil and plant tissue deficits and the prompt correction of these with chemical inputs; the identification of disease and pest and war against these.

I moved to seeking to ensure a diversity of macro and microbiotic life inthe soil (the principle that the weight of organic life under the ground has to exceed the weight of crop or livestock above the ground), to recognising that pest and disease attack on plants and animals said more about the health of the plants than the virulence of the pest. I was moved by ideas such as these:

"That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land isto be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields acultural harvest is a fact long-known, but latterly often forgotten"

Aldo Leopold, A Sand Country [Wisconsin] Almanac, quoted in Charles

Steinhacker and Susan Flader, The Sand Country of Aldo Leopold, Sierra Club

1973,

and

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but thecultivation and perfection of human beings"

Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution, Rodale Press 1978

... but I did not really apply these to my own health, other than by the simplistic short-circuit of wanting to eat organic food, wanting the farm to be a healthy refuge (which was not always the case, it's damn hard work, too).

While it may look in my April ‘hypothesis’ as though I am wanting to advance one particular medication approach, or to identify one area of correction, I hope it's getting clear from the foregoing that I have moved away from thinking of things to tinker with and monitor, to a framework of thought which is really a long way from that. I used to tinker with oodles of substances and notions of correction, and have pharmacy and healthfood store deficits to prove it. My success rate with that was at best temporary, when it was perceptible, when treatment did not take me frighteningly backwards.

I think it useful here to quote Fukuoka on farming - but please as you read, paraphrase in terms of approach to health and medicine, dropping the word ‘medicine' or 'health' in, in place of the word 'farming':

"...among natural farming methods two kinds could be distinguished: broadtranscendent natural farming, and the narrow natural farming of the relativeworld [the world as understood by the intellect - footnote in text]. If Iwere pressed to talk about it in Buddhist terms, the two could be calledrespectively Mahayana and Hinayana natural farming."Broad, Mahayana natural farming arises of itself when a unity existsbetween man and nature. It conforms to nature as it is, and to the mind asit is..."Narrow natural farming, on the other hand, is pursuing the way of nature;it self-consciously attempts, by 'organic' or other methods, to follownature... [This view] says that it is good for the farmer to apply organicmaterial to the soil and good to raise animals, and that this is the bestand most efficient way to put nature to use. To speak in terms of personalpractice, this is fine, but with this way alone, the spirit of true naturalfarming cannot be kept alive. This kind of narrow natural farming isanalogous to the school of swordsmanship known as the one-stroke school,which seeks victory through the skillful, yet self-conscious application oftechnique. Modern industrial farming follows the two-stroke school, whichbelieves that victory can be won by delivering the greatest barrage ofswordstrokes."Pure natural farming, by contrast, is the no-stroke school. It goes nowhereand seeks no victory. Putting 'do-nothing' into practice is the one thingthe farmer should strive to accomplish... The ultimate goal of farming isnot the growing of crops but the cultivation and perfection of human beings"[Masanobu Fukuoka, The One Straw Revolution, English translation RodalePress 1978, pp.118-9]

When you look in detail at what Fukuoka did on his farm it was neither lazy nor inactive, and depended much on observation.

I would hope that my approach, in my April paper, might be seen in this same light, not as sword strokes against illness, but as adjustments of diet - to reduce toxic contributions - and minor (below 'normal' human production levels) supplementation of normal, basic, body chemical building-blocks, so as to stimulate the same, not to replace them, and to enhance 'normal' and healthy processes, for my mitochondria and their host cells.

Several people have written saying that they will discuss pregnenolone with their endocrinologist. I don't think even the average endocrinologist will have experience of pregnenolone use, unfortunately, and many doctors don't know the difference between progesterone and progestins, and it would be a rare doctor who knew of new research into the relationship between triiodithyronine [T3] and neurotransmitter substances, the prospect that high neurotransmitter levels interfere with thyroid function and that T3 may be more effective for things for which excitatory anti-depressants are currently prescribed. I rely on Ray Peat's evidence to say that pregnenolone is a substance which will not harm, I have checked his claims in relationship to saturated oils (which seem outrageously against the advice of women's magazines and the Heart Foundation) and found them consistent with what medical undergraduates are taught but seemingly discard [ ref www.efn.org/~raypeat/ ]. I have taken ideas and information about mitochondria from various places, notably Lyn Margulis, Microcosmos, NY 1986. I am still researching the thyroid-nervous system issue, and sugar-insulin issues and others.  But I have embraced these changes and am pursuing further lines of research,  not for new medication, but as support for and in the context of the different perspective as above.