Author: Jo

As an alternative health care practitioner, over the last few years we have discovered some basic truths regarding health and the human experience, a bit like universal laws which when denied, bring us humbly back to the drawing board. Although some of these truths challenge current cultural belief systems, we must realise that nature has been creating life longer than human cultures have been destroying it.

Nature’s grand plan for evolution requires one thing and that is survival. A species must survive in order to grow and evolve, and survival really means; ‘capacity to adapt to the challenges of our environment’.  We would like to tell you that your body was not designed by nature to be healthy, nor was it designed to be sick, it was designed to survive. Both health and disease are both attempts to adapt and survive.

In order for natures grand evolutionary plan to manifest, a living creature or animal (yes we are one) must be able to protect itself against threats to its survival and nurture and develop itself when it is not under threat. A cat will happily sit grooming itself in front of a fire whist digesting a nice meal before having a nap, however, if a growling dog comes in the room, the cats’ behaviour may change dramatically, suddenly and automatically from development to defense.

A famous biologist Bruce Lipton, once described how when developing cells in a dish in his laboratory, he noticed that if toxic substance was introduced into the dish, the cells would sense its presence and shrink into a tight cluster at the opposite end of the dish. If nutrients were put into the dish, the cells would expand and move towards the nutrients. This is a most basic example of defense and development behaviour in life but the key point is the cells cannot move both towards and away from something at the same time. We cannot defend while we are developing and we cannot develop when we are in defense. Our bodies are families of a few trillion cells and the world is our laboratory dish.

Whilst defense behaviour in our bodies is a vital strategy to have in times of need (run or fight), our bodies were never designed to be in defense for more than about 20 minutes. When the cat has run away from the growling dog or the dog has escaped the hissing cat, the cat can go back to digesting its meal and having a nap.

If we understand what happens in the body during defense behaviour and what happens during development and we understand that they cannot occur at the same time, we uncover the foundations of health and disease.

When our being perceives the need for defense, the blood supply to the higher parts of our brain that separates us as humans from other animals is greatly reduced. As humans, we have an extra ‘brain department’ called the frontal cortex which allows a greatly advanced level or consciousness, awareness and adaptive choices compared to other mammals. Higher human brain capacity involves the ability to observe our self and our own behaviour and make modifications, to see the greater or hidden meaning in situations and events, to foresee situations and make appropriate adaptive choices ahead of time, to have an intuition or a ‘knowing’ about things without knowing exactly how we know. When humans perceive psychological stress, blood is redistributed to the older mammalian parts of our brain for reaction. Our capacity for higher human thought is diminished and our capacity to react in a more animalistic way is maximised.

This shift in the brain brings about a cascade of changes in the body including, increased heart rate and blood pressure, decreased breathing and blood oxygenation, greatly increased muscle tension especially in the spine, elongation of the spinal cord and a change in posture, decreased digestion and immune system activity. If your body can relax and shift back into development mode, we get our human brain capacity back, our muscles relax, heart and breathing activity restored, spinal posture retreats, the pressures inside the joints of our spine normalise, we digest our food properly, extract the nutrients from our food, and our bodies self-heal, self-regulate using a fully functional immune system. This is development.

For most of us, just hearing words like ‘cancer, arthritis and stroke’ evokes fear and worry. The fear is that one day, for some ‘genetic’ reason, our normal healthy body cells will suddenly malfunction and start destroying us from the inside out, leaving us dependent on drugs, surgery, chemo therapy etc. This is a fear that we have been taught to live with, but by who, and why?

The ultimate mission of medical science since ‘modern science’ began in the 15th century has been to discover how the doctor can control the behavior of your body so that you don’t have to experience disease. This assumes that you the person are powerless in controlling your own body’s behavior and must buy this control from drug companies through the doctor who is the middle man. Science’s search for what controls life, so life in turn can be controlled, led to the search for the hereditary factors that controlled cell synthesis, which led to the discovery of DNA.

In 1953, scientists unraveled the mystery of the “genetic code,” which revealed how the DNA served as a molecular “blueprint” that defined the construction of proteins (the basic building block of body tissue). The DNA blueprint for each protein is referred to as a gene. Since proteins define the character of an organism and the proteins’ structures are encoded in the DNA, biologists established the dogma known as the Primacy of DNA. It was concluded that DNA “controls” the structure and behavior of living organisms, which led to the concept of Genetic Determinism, the idea that the structure and behavior of an organism are defined by its genes.

The next step in the grand scientific mission was the Human Genome Project, the multibillion-dollar mission to identify all of the genes of a human. Once this was accomplished, it was assumed that we can use that knowledge to repair or replace “defective” genes and in the process, realize science’s mission of “controlling” the organism and therefore disease. The ‘shock discovery’ of this project was that humans have almost the same number of genes as a simple worm.

For more than fifty years’ medicine has held the illusion that our health and fate were preprogrammed in our genes. Though mass consciousness generated by drug companies and media is currently stuck with this belief, a radically new understanding is unfolding at the leading edge of science.

A few innovative scientists have now proven that the environment (external and internal), and more importantly, our perception of the environment, directly controls the activity of our genes. Genes do not control themselves. In other words, our lifestyles directly affect the expression of our genes. Lifestyle being a combination of what we eat and drink, the air we breathe, how we exercise and rest and what we think, feel and believe. Yes, all these things affect our DNA!

Even if we have certain genes that may pre-dispose us to develop certain health problems, in most cases those genes still require stimulation from outside the cell (lifestyle triggers) in order for that gene to express its damaging activity. Experiments with mice have shown that even simple dietary changes made during pregnancy can completely block the gene activity held responsible for diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity in the offspring. In these experiments B vitamins made the big difference.

There are basically two philosophies when it comes to healthcare. The first is an illness based philosophy. It assumes that the body is not very clever and not very well designed and sometimes it just goes wrong or forgets how to work properly. In this case we must go and see a doctor who has studied many years to understand all these design faults and like a good car mechanic, can fix the problem. I once took my Fiat to a garage and the mechanic said “oh all Fiats seem to have this problem.”  “Oh this is common at your age” say some doctors as you take your aches and pains in to be ‘fixed.’  Is age the cause of health problems? Why then are some old people very healthy? Are health problems the result of our design faults? Is nature such a bad designer? 

Since the majority of medical treatments include drugs or surgery, the assumption is that if you have a health problem, you must be lacking a chemical, or have a dodgy part. Ever heard someone say; “my dicky heart, bad back, bum leg, dodgy knee”? Not very endearing terms for a system that nature took millions of years developing. However, modern medicine has taught us to have a relationship with our body based on fear and distrust. The popularity of this model of thinking is that it allows the patient to be the victim and the doctor to be the saviour. It means the patient is at the mercy of the doctor.

This brings us to the second philosophy of health, a ‘wellness’ based philosophy. This philosophy states that the body is perfect and never really makes a ‘mistake’ and that nature never plans for failure. This philosophy says that the body was not designed to be healthy or sick, but was designed to survive. All activity within your body is based on a survival strategy. If you eat poisonous food and spend the whole night throwing up, this may not be a comfortable experience, but if we could not throw up, how would the poison come out. Is vomiting a sign of bad health or a survival strategy? If you have a fever, has the body forgotten what its temperature should be? Fever is a vital part of the immune response as invading bacteria and viruses cannot reproduce effectively in higher temperatures, making it more difficult for the enemy. Even cancer is an intelligent survival response, but that’s another topic in itself.

The purpose of pain is that the body wants to tell you that something physical or emotional is not working to our benefit and a change in behaviour is needed if further damage is to be avoided. Have you ever felt a part of your body hurting more when you are stressed? A health crisis often happens when we are at a crossroads in life. A great doctor once told me that when your future self will no longer tolerate who you are being, a health crisis happens. Are our symptoms our enemy or our guide?

With the predominant approach in healthcare today being an illness approach it’s not surprising that there is so much illness, mental and physical. Ok we don’t have great epidemics like the great plague anymore, instead we have AIDS, cancer, autism and depression. Where is our approach to health care really leading us? Drug companies are finding that it is leading to the continued use of their products and with drug companies virtually ruling the medical system, the ‘health care’ system itself is not very ‘healthy’. Drugs allow us to be comfortable and unaware while things are going quietly wrong. Drugs take the battery out of the smoke alarm. They teach us to look outside of ourselves for answers to all our problems. Drugs often give us more years in our life but rarely more life in our years. Is this health?

Medical practitioners in conjunction with the pharmaceutical industry have taught us that disease is the cause of bad health and we must attack the disease with the drug. The pharmaceutical industry has become a trillion-dollar industry based on this idea, without ever really addressing the question of what causes disease.

A lot of attention has been given lately to the topic of stress. It’s talked about on TV, on the radio, in newspapers and in magazines. Most every health practitioner alive knows about the negative effects of stress on health. BUT WHAT IS STRESS AND WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT.

I would like to offer a slightly different perspective on the topic. It is my opinion that stress is not the problem. In fact, a certain amount of stress is even necessary for life.

Yes, you read it correctly. Stress is the response of the body to any demand. When a demand is placed on the body, a physiologic response is generated which includes:

• Increased blood pressure
• Increased heart rate & respiratory rate
• Increased oxygen consumption (burning of fuel)
• Increased perspiration
• Increased muscle tension
• Decreased digestion
• Decreased immune system function

This is called the ‘fight or flight’ response. Its like being on ‘Red Alert.’ The safer we feel in a situation, the less the response. The more threatened we feel, the more intense the response. A decision must then be made to meet the challenge (fight) or leave (flight). Shortly after the fight or flight, full recovery of the physiology to a resting state SHOULD occur.

Any change in our environment is a potential stressor. Gravity, walking, eating a meal, meeting a new person, even falling in love can be called stressors. Classic stressors are work, family and finance which have the closest links with feelings of insecurity and fear. Our ability to successfully adapt to a change in situation with a corresponding recovery of our physiology is required for optimum health.

Stress starts to cause health problems when we fail to recover completely after each stressor in life and the fight or flight responses become accumulative. The problem is that the fight or flight response was only designed to be temporary, but accumulated stress response over time can put us in virtually constant state of fight or flight, this leads to exhaustion of the body systems, symptoms, and eventually disease. When we are in a constant state of fight or flight, we can start to react defensively to most situations in life, we can become constantly tired for no apparent reason and start to have nagging symptoms such as back pain, neck pain, headaches. We can also remain in fight or flight while we are asleep which results in us waking up feeling just as tired as when we went to bed. Sound like anyone you know?

The last few years, we have been asking more and more philosophical questions regarding our experience of life and the experiences of others. We used to think cynically of philosophy as a kind of ‘airy fairy’ abstract intellectual subject for people who wanted to avoid ‘real life,’ but then we realised that this cynicism was in itself just a philosophy on life.

We have since discovered that philosophy is the most real and practical thing that we can embrace into our life because it reflects our perceptions and beliefs about our self, life and the world, which in turn determine our values, thoughts, feelings and actions, which in turn determine who we are, what we do and what we have and most importantly, where we are going. We have discovered that people who have abundance in their professional life, personal life and health, operate on a different core philosophy than those that don’t, often without realising it. Our core philosophy is what we all should be working on.

Our basic philosophical constructs i.e.; our perceptions, beliefs, thoughts, feelings etc. can exist on both the conscious and subconscious levels. It is at the subconscious level that things can get difficult, or interesting, depending on your philosophy.

The most basic philosophical question has always been ‘why are we here,’ or ‘what is the meaning or purpose of life.’  You are here to learn, grow, evolve, and ultimately to use your unique qualities and experience to bring your unique contribution to the world and fulfil your life’s purpose. Suffering is the conscious or subconscious awareness that you are ‘off track’ in this process.

Many people are so caught up in their emotions, usually hopes and fears, that they don’t stop to ask the most important questions. The quality of the questions you ask however, will in the long run determine the quality of your life. For many it is also difficult to think ‘in the long run’. The more stressed we are, the more difficult it is for your brain to focus on anything long term. Our overloaded emotional system and stressed mind just wants to know how to get through the day week or month. As a result, long term vision is lost causing many to greatly overestimate what they can do in the short term and greatly underestimate what they can do long term, resulting in more stress, disappointment, and ultimate under-achievement in one or more areas of life.

What you think determines how you feel which determines how you act, which determines how others react to you, which determines your results. But what determines how you think!  The very wise can control their thoughts, but the masses are controlled by their thoughts. We have all had times in our life where those same thoughts just keep coming from somewhere in the back and we just wish we could switch that mind off like a TV.

The answer is in the ‘script’, ‘story’, or ‘rules’, which have been programmed into our subconscious minds by our life experience, especially as children. Because our perceptions are pure as children but we are at the mercy of often stressed and distorted adult perceptions, it is unavoidable that we will be made to feel, threatened, helpless, powerless, worthless, ashamed, guilty, unworthy, unloved at various times and in various degrees before teenage. Our response is to wall off experiences and feelings that we judge as unsafe, bad or wrong because as we grow up, we look to the adult role models around us for confirmation of and or to give meaning to our own experiences.

Low back pain is a very common complaint. Almost everyone gets low back pain at some time in their life and most people continue hurting or get often exacerbations. Chiropractic treatment, combined with some form of physical exercise, can be proved as the most effective solution to low back pain.

Your neck supports the weight and movement of your head – quite a job, since an adults head can weigh between six and eight kilos! It also contains the vast majority of nerves that reach from your brain to the rest of your body, like a pipe full of fiber-optic cables. With the amount of driving, computer work and TV watching that most of us do, it’s not surprising that we need a little chiropractic help to keep our necks doing their job properly.