Mental Health Drugs are Big Business

Pharmaceutical companies are big corporations, and they are obligated by law to serve their shareholders and investors by selling as much product as they can, to as many people as they can, for as long as they can, and for as much money as they can. Individuals who may be suffering from some mental discomfort are a ready market for these products.

documentary film

“The corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing in its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits [for the corporation and her shareholders] outweigh the costs.” –Joel Bakan, “The Corporation”

But it’s complicated, and here’s why. Individuals suffering mental distress are encouraged to see a doctor. The underlying assumptions are that mental distress is a physical condition that can be fixed, or at least treated and mediated, by physical/chemical means, and/or that, as individuals, we are incapable of coping with the slings and arrows of life’s misfortunes without professional help.

Doctors, meanwhile, are busy people. They almost always have their patients’ best interests at heart, but their time is limited and doctor visits are expensive. Typically, patient/doctor contact time might be just ten or fifteen minutes. In that time, the patient needs to explain the problem, the doctor needs to consider treatment options, and then there is just enough time to make a recommendation to the patient. Clearly, there isn’t enough time or expertise allocated here to fix the patient’s stressful job, broken relationship, grieving heart, financial crisis, victimization/abuse, or spiritual emergency (all conditions that often appear at the core of mental distress). But there is time enough to write a prescription, which the patient can fill in his or her own time and take without further ado. Even if the pills don’t work, or are only marginally effective, the placebo effect means the patient is likely to feel better. After all, they came with the doctor’s recommendation, didn’t they? And we trust our doctors.

Pharmaceutical companies are pretty canny. They know doctors are short on time, so they make it easy for doctors to want to promote their drugs by providing supportive literature for their products, free samples for patients to try, advertisements in medical journals, and copies of research studies that demonstrate the benefits of their products. Many even provide quick checklist questions for doctors to use with patients to determine if a particular drug is appropriate. And keep in mind they want their drug(s) to be found appropriate—they are in sales after all. (Unlike other diseases, there are no physical tests that can be run for mental illnesses.)

Further support for drug treatment over therapy or counselling comes from insurance companies and government bodies, corporate-type organizations who also want quick, cheap treatments. And let’s face it, pills are cheap to make and quick and easy to prescribe. So quick and easy and cheap, in fact, that about 20% of the folks in the western world are taking one or more psychiatric medication.

Available at Amazon

There’s a lot more to this story, including a fascinating history of how and why we ended up (as a society) believing in bio-medical causes and cures for psychiatric illness, and indeed, how we define psychiatric illness to begin with. Just how do we diagnose this stuff anyway?  (And thereby hangs an interesting tale of commercial evolution!) And do chemical cures work? I have explored those themes in more depth in my new book Reframing Mental Illness, where I also offer some alternative perspectives for both the problem and the “cure”.

If you find this topic of interest, read the book!

Other articles I’ve posted in this blog on the topic of mental health include

What is the Difference Between Anxiety and Depression?

Antidepressant Withdrawal

Psychiatric Med Use Continues to Rise

Where did Prozac (fluoxetine) Come From

It All Started with Antidepressants

It all started with antidepressants about ten years ago. Oh, I wasn’t the one taking them, but several close friends and family were. And the funny thing I noticed was that not only did the antidepressants not seem to be helping, but they seemed to make things worse! The users claimed they helped and said they felt better, but I observed yawning and tiredness nearing exhaustion in one, self-harming behaviour in another, and a complete inability to cope with normal, everyday stresses in a third. And then, within two weeks of a dose being doubled, two consecutive suicide attempts. Alarm bells went off.

It got worse when one of these people decided to quit taking the antidepressants. Following advice to decrease slowly, pills were quartered. The first drop (1/8^th of the prescribed dose) resulted in increased anxiety, unexpected mood changes, irritation and anger over inconsequential events, and physically, nausea and vomiting. This passed in a couple of weeks. A month or so later, and another quarter of a pill drop. The same result, only withdrawal symptoms were more marked. The third ¼ pill drop a month after that brought on intense, irrational anger coupled with thoughts of suicide. He remarked (and I wrote this down), “Why should I be so angry she wants to spend some ridiculous amount of money on that? It’s a stupid thing to want to do, but why should that make me want to kill myself? This is bizarre!”

And this wasn’t the “suicidally depressed” response you imagine, where someone is so down and out they see no possible future. This was a volatile suicidality coupled with anger that appeared seemingly out of nowhere, materializing in less than a day, sparked by a minor and relatively impersonal event, and clearly linked to the lowered dose of the antidepressant. Even in the midst of feeling suicidal, he recognized the absurdity of the feeling even while acknowledging its intensity. In a few days, the suicidal inclination had passed, but it was seriously scary while it occurred.

And so began my research and mini-crusade on antidepressants. When asked if we’d be willing to share our experience with researcher Rachel Liebert, then a student at the University of Auckland, Simon (not his real name) and I agreed. I was so impressed with Rachel’s project—which culminated in her thesis Medicate Me Into Madness—that I was inspired to return to university and do something similar. (The above link to Rachel's thesis is not direct, but you can apparently access her thesis through a New Zealand library.)

My master’s thesis, CollateralDamage: A Mixed Methods Study to Investigate the Use and Withdrawal ofAntidepressants Within a Naturalistic Population, was published in 2010. Several people who read it, including my advisor, encouraged me to develop and publish the first portion of the thesis, on the history of antidepressant use and development, as a book or part of a book for a more popular (less academic) audience.

My new book

Reframing Mental Illness is the result of that suggestion. In it, I have gone beyond the antidepressant story to look at treatment of/for the mentally ill in general, and how that has developed historically. For many folks, the realization that psychiatric drugs are developed and marketed not so much to solve people’s problems as they are to grow a market and increase sales and profits for corporate shareholders is an eye-opener. (For more on this, see my post Mental Health Drugs are Big Business.)

And it’s not as if anti-depressants and anti-psychotics and ADHD meds like Ritalin--which may or may not work--are harmless placebos either, although side effects may not be a problem for everyone. The astonishing thing is, though, we as a society have bought the story of brain-chemicals-gone-amuck to explain our mental dis-eases and dis-comforts with no scientific evidence whatsoever to back up the theory (although the pharmaceutical companies trot it out regularly).

The second part of the book considers alternative viewpoints (frames) for understanding mental dis-ease (and that’s dis - ease as in “without ease”) and suggests a whole range of useful approaches to resolve the many problems we tend to throw in the mental basket. From practical techniques borrowed from  EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), hypnosis, and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) to understanding body energy, quantum energy fields, priming, emotional intelligence and our three brains (head, heart, and gut), this is a book designed to get you wondering about why we are so quick to throw up our hands crying “victim!” and hand our mental health care decisions to our doctors who, while well-meaning, are mostly likely to pull out the prescription pad and send us home with a bottle of pills because its cheap and quick.

This is my first book, and I’m pretty pleased with it. I’ve published through Amazon with CreateSpace and Kindle, which means I didn’t need to find a publisher, I’ve had full control over design, layout and editing, and I earn a somewhat higher royalty rate on sales than I might do with a traditional publisher. CreateSpace and Kindle make it amazingly easy to publish.  The downside is it is also up to me to do my own promotion for the book. So this post is a bit of a promotion.

If you are interested to read the full story, with a look at why we use psychiatric drugs (20% of us do), what they are really, how they are regulated, what problems they cause, and why/how they are pushed, and then have a chance to examine mental dis – ease from alternative perspectives that open up a range of options for “treatment” (and I use that term loosely because it implies “illness”, which may not be a useful frame)—read the book.

Click here to zap to Reframing Mental Illness at Amazon. I’ve kept the price as reasonable as I can, US$11.99 for the paperback version, and just $5.99 for the Kindle (electronic) version. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download a Kindle reader for your PC or a free Kindle app for other electronic devices at Amazon, and of course the book is available worldwide through Amazon.

Lastly, once you’ve read it, if you could post a review at Amazon, that would be awesome! Your reviews help to “up” my profile on their site. Thank you!

For more information on antidepressant withdrawal, see my posts Antidepressant Withdrawal, How Long Does it Take to Get Off Antidepressants, and Ten Tips for Making Antidepressant Withdrawal Easier. 

Therapy for Mind, Body, Energy and Spirit

For more information on Mindwork, see here.

I like models that shed some light on who we are as human beings and help to explain what we do and why. At the back of my well-thumbed and annotated book Integral Psychology by Ken Wilber there is a collection of charts that compare levels or stages of human development as hypothesized by a variety of psychological and spiritual leaders. It is as fine a summary as I know, collected into a single resource. 

What isn’t there, however, is a model which clarifies the relationship between mind, body, energy and spirit, and how/why a particular “therapy” applies better in one situation than another when dis-ease arises. (Dis, of course, is a Latin prefix meaning “apart from” or “against”, and ease means comfortable. Thus dis-ease is against or apart from comfort.)

I recently read Idris Lahore’s book The Three Secrets of Reiki Tao Te Qi, and there I discovered a succinct and insightful clarification of this issue that seems to me simple and very helpful. If you think of each of us as made up of several “layers” or “levels” of different densities, beginning with solid and ending as very ethereal, and the appropriate “treatment” for “dis-ease” at each of these layers, you have something like this:

At the densest layer, is the body itself: structural, physical, cellular. When there is injury or dis-ease that originates at this level, the most appropriate treatment is biomedical, biochemical, and/or physical therapy. In short, if you break your leg on the ski slopes, see your doctor.

Emotional dis-ease exists as a less dense layer of self without physical presence (you can’t see it, or weigh it) but often there are strong physical symptoms. For example, think about how you would feel before speaking to a large group of strangers, or standing on a high bridge before launching into a bungee jump. For most people, just the thought can bring up the sensation of butterflies in the stomach and a shortness of breath. For most of us, these are unusual events and not worth “treatment,” but for those prone to emotional trauma on a regular basis (say, someone with arachnophobia—fear of spiders, or someone who suffers from chronic anxiety or depression), treatment may be appropriate.

Intellectual or cognitive dis-ease, caused by disruptive or disturbing thoughts, habits, or dreams is, in a way, less “solid” than emotional dis-ease. Physical symptoms are likely to be less clear-cut than those caused by emotional dis-ease, and the “problem” may not even be regarded by a person as a dis-ease, or even a problem. Yet someone suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) who can’t stop checking the door ten times to be sure it is locked, or someone who cannot stop thinking about or dreaming about some event in the past is not at ease. For both emotional and cognitive dis-ease, some form of psychotherapy is the most appropriate therapy or treatment.

Energetic dis-ease is caused by some disruption or distortion in the body’s energetic centres or energetic pathways. Mainstream Western allopathic medicine tends to dismiss the body’s energy system as not worthy of consideration and treatment, but Eastern tradition takes this body essence very seriously. Energy imbalances sometimes manifest in the body as headaches or backaches or tiredness or other chronic manifestations that have no obviously physical cause. Energetic health and treatment modalities such as yoga, massage, qi gong, Reiki, and acupuncture can help the body’s energy centres and pathways remain strong and clear when practiced regularly.

Lahore calls the next layer “relational systemic” and suggests dis-ease at this level is generated by one’s relationship with family members, social groups, work colleagues, or with the ancestors—one’s place within a system. The concept that one’s social relationships can contribute to psychological dis-ease is well accepted by psychologists and counsellors, and is also well understood in many cultures where one’s role and acceptance or rejection by others is acknowledged to have significant implications. In addition, from our parents and family we learn our value systems and many patterns of thought and behaviour that impact on our life choices. As with cognitive and emotional dis-ease, psychotherapy and family constellation work are useful to resolve issues here.

The final and most ethereal layer in Lahore’s model is that of spirit or spiritual essence. Dis-ease here—rarely identified by an outsider, but rather something felt from the inside—can be addressed with a wide variety of spiritual practices that may include yoga, meditation, shamanic journeying, travel, writing or journaling or other creative practice in art or music, and religious or solitary retreats.

Lahore points out that the most effective therapy occurs at the primary source of the dis-ease, which is almost always the most subtle layer at which it occurs. Thus the prescribing of antidepressants (biochemical treatment) for a patient who is in the middle of a messy divorce (relational systemic level) is not likely to resolve his or her divorce issues, just as stomach stapling surgery for a person with emotional eating issues may not be the best-choice “fix”.

Ken Wilber, in the aforementioned book, supports that observation. He writes, “Therapy at one level will usually acknowledge and even use all of the therapies from lower levels, but rarely from any higher.” Wilber, of course, goes into this in much more depth and from a somewhat different perspective. And thereby hangs another tale...

Creating Head Heart Coherence

I’ve been a fan of the Heart Math folks for some time now. The Institute of Heart Math, founded by Doc Childre in 1991, is a non-profit research and educational organisation established to help people understand and harness the energy of the heart. Childre and colleague Howard Martin wrote the book The HeartMath Solution over a decade ago in which they shared the research and outlined several simple techniques for creating health and well-being by aligning the brain and heart centres.

There is a good article on this topic here 

Most of us assume we are run by our brain, that amazing super-computer in our heads. Fewer of us realise that the heart, too, consists of a vast network of sensory neurons that process information, learn, remember, and make functional decisions, and may be the emotional powerhouse of our psyche.  Indeed, after conception, the heart is the first bodily organ that begins functioning, even before the brain.

The heart plays an important role in synchronizing the body. It also has direct-line communication with the brain. When you are feeling emotional upset, anxious,  or stressed, or feel in need of a little inner harmony, HeartMath recommends using the Quick Coherence Technique (similar to the Freeze Frame process advocated in the book). It’s just three quick steps and only takes about a minute to do, but can be really helpful.

Step 1: Focus your attention on your chest/heart area. It may help your focus to put your hand there if you’re new to this technique.

Step 2: Breathe deeply but normally, and feel as if the air is coming in and going out through the heart area—keep your attention focussed there. Just focus on your breathing for several breaths, until you feel like it’s taken on a comfortable, natural rhythm.

Step 3: While remaining focussed on your chest/heart area and breathing, recall a time when you felt really good, perhaps a time when you were with friends or family or a pet you love, or when you were in a favourite place, or simply a time when you felt a great sense of gratitude or appreciation.

This simple process can bring your brain and heart into an energetic alignment and coherence that will enable you to feel better, think more clearly, and make better decisions. It’s a simple technique I teach to almost all of my coaching clients during their first visit, because it’s so easy and so useful.

The HeartMath organisation is interested in more than just personal health and wellness gains that can be achieved through their techniques. Research suggests that the electro-magnetic fields produced by our hearts extend beyond our bodies and interact with fields of others within our vicinity. You are energetically affecting—and affected by—those around you. Furthermore, our personal and group electro-magnetic fields may affect, and be affected by, the earth’s magnetic field. They’ve just put out a new video explaining the important and relevance of these understandings for our future. 

If this stuff interests you, I highly recommend a browse around the HeartMath website, where you can find plenty of free articles, research, e-books, downloads, a free stress test, and more...plus a few plugs for their products.

Do Antiperspirants Cause Breast Cancer?

This morning someone flicked an article about the connection between antiperspirants and breast cancer onto my Facebook page, along with this illustration. 

I stopped using antiperspirants some years ago (except for those occasional social events where sweaty armpits would be likely, and definitely not considered a social asset), after my mother’s lymph nodes were removed as part of her breast cancer treatment. It just didn’t seem to me a natural, sensible thing to go clogging up the pores that Mother Nature so carefully provided for my body. So my natural response to this little Facebook post was to click the thumbs up and hit “share”. And then I thought this would be a good topic for a post here.

Now, I don’t post stuff on this blog—unless it’s about personal experience--without doing a bit of research on the subject first. That’s my science training coming to the forefront. So I set out to discover (as much as one can in a couple of hours): Can antiperspirants cause breast cancer? And this is what I found out.

The short answer is: we don’t have any proof that antiperspirants cause breast cancer. But, on the other hand, we don’t have any proof that they don’t either. The truth is, there isn’t enough research into this question to give us a definitive answer.  Here’s what we DO know:

The lymph nodes located in the tender area under the arms are connected to the breast tissue, and in the case of breast cancer are often surgically removed along with breast tissue. Lymph nodes, which as you can see in the diagram on the left, occur all over the body and operate as part of the body’s immune system, filtering, trapping, and destroying bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, including cancers. Cleansed fluid from the lymph nodes is then released into the blood stream. But the lymph glands are not sweat glands, they are not directly linked to the skin surface, and they probably are not directly affected by antiperspirants. Sweat glands, on the other hand, are.

Most antiperspirants contain aluminium, which blocks the body’s sweat glands where it is applied. Sweat is a salty liquid excreted by the eccrine glands in response to stress (which can be physical, like exercise or heat, or psychological). It has little or no odour[i], but develops a smell with the presence of bacteria, or sexual pheromones[ii].  

Blocked sweat glands do not cease producing sweat, they simply are unable to expel that fluid to the skin’s surface—as they are designed to do--because the duct has been blocked. Besides causing the disruption of a natural bodily process, the aluminium in antiperspirants is a concern for another reason.

Aluminium is a toxic metal that has been linked to cancers, including breast cancer[iii]. One recent study shows changes in human mammary cells indicative of tumour and pre-tumour stages caused by exposure to aluminium chloride[iv], and another recent study showed elevated levels of aluminium in the nipple duct fluid of breast cancer patients compared with that extracted from healthy women[v]. Earlier studies noted the disproportionate number of breast tumours occurring in the upper outer quadrant of the breast, closest to the underarm area where antiperspirants are applied, and where the concentration of aluminium is highest[vi]. None of this research is adequate for “proof” that the aluminium in antiperspirants causes breast cancer, but there does appear to be a correlation. And obviously, breast cancer can be caused by other things as well.

Among those “other things” are parabens, a group of man-made preservatives commonly used in antiperspirants, deodorants, shampoos, and other skin and body products. Parabens can mimic estrogens in the body. Although the female body naturally produces estrogens during the reproductive years, high life-time levels of estrogens are correlated with an increased of risk of breast cancer[vii]. In one recent study where they collected and examined malignant breast tissue following mastectomies, 99% of the samples revealed the presence of parabens[viii]. Not all of the women in that study had used antiperspirants (although they may have used other products containing parabens), but of those who did, the greatest concentration of parabens was found in tissue samples taken from the outer, upper quadrant of the breast.  This doesn’t mean that the parabens caused the women to develop breast cancers, it just suggests there is a correlation. In spite of these concerns, there have been no modern toxicology studies examining the safety of parabens.

Back to the underarm lymph nodes:  It seems unlikely that the substances in your antiperspirant actively affect your lymph glands. Lymph glands deal to infections and undesirable biological organisms like bacteria, but they don’t clean out toxic metals or play with artificial hormone mimics. It seems likely that cancers that develop in the breast area migrate TO the underarm lymph glands from the breast rather than the other way around, and that the lymph glands are trying to mitigate the cancer cells. Nevertheless, research DOES suggest that using antiperspirants containing aluminium and/or parabens may increase your risk of developing breast cancer because of their effect on sweat glands and through skin absorption.

For another good summary of these issues, see Dr Mercola’s article on parabens, aluminium, and the breast cancer link. For the “official” story, the American Cancer Society reports “no link between breast cancer risk and antiperspirant use”. You can read their debunking of this “myth” here.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to use soap and water and forgo spraying or smearing chemical concoctions under my arms.

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[i] That’s what the literature says. I DO think the foods you eat play a part. I know some foods, like garlic and curry, make me smell a little pongier than usual the day after I’ve eaten them. Just my personal observation.

[ii] http://dermnetnz.org/treatments/antiperspirants.html

[iii] http://www.infowars.com/new-study-reveals-how-aluminium-promotes-cancer-growth/

[iv] Sappino, A.-P., Buser, R., Lesne, L., Gimelli, S., Béna, F., Belin, D. and Mandriota, S. J. (2012), Aluminium chloride promotes anchorage-independent growth in human mammary epithelial cells. J. Appl. Toxicol., 32: 233–243. doi: 10.1002/jat.1793 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jat.1793/abstract;jsessionid=82FFF75E0138F8E3F80056B9EA064379.d03t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

[v] Mannello, F, Tonti, GA, Medda, V,Simone, P, Darbre, PD. (2011), Analysis of aluminium content and iron homeostasis in nipple aspirate fluids from healthy women and breast cancer-affected patients. J. Appl. Toxicol., 31:262-269. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21337589

[vi] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16045991

[vii] http://www.cancercompass.com/learn/cancer-information/breast-cancer/causes/estrogen-and-breast-cancer#connection

[viii] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jat.1786/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

The Memory of Water

Water is pretty interesting stuff.  It’s made up of two gas molecules that, when combined, become a liquid. When “condensed” into a crystalline solid, it takes up more space than it does as a liquid. Our bodies are made up of something like 70% water. And some folks reckon water is able to encode a sort of “memory”.

I’m currently reading Lynne McTaggert’s book The Field—a landmark book, by the way—and have just finished Chapter 4 in which she talks about how water seems to have the unexpected and remarkable property of “remembering.”  She tells the extraordinary story of Frenchman Jacques Benveniste and his team and their discovery that even when allergy antibodies were diluted down in water to solutions ranging from 1 x 10² up to 1 x 10³⁶, so dilute that no molecules of the antibodies were likely to be in the water at all, the subsequent product still produced positive reactions.  The conclusion that Benveniste and his team came to is that the water must somehow retain a sort of “memory” of the active substance.

His research was published in the science journal Nature in 1988[i] and—no surprises here, given it wildly defies conventional belief—was rubbished within days, putting the good name of the journal under question. Nature sent in a team to their laboratory to—in Benveniste’s words—prove the work fraudulent. On the 3-man team: fraud-buster Walter Stuart, magician and paranormal skeptic James Randi, and the then-editor of Nature John Maddox.  Not, it is interesting to note, any other researchers. It’s an extraordinary story, worthy of Hollywood.

Here’s a 10-minute clip of Benveniste talking about his experiments and the subsesquent Nature investigation.

Although they continue to be debunked by orthodox science and medicine, homeopathic treatments—which use curing agents diluted down to these sorts of nothing-left-of-the-active-agent doses—have been used for about two centuries as an alternative to orthodox medicine and continue to be popular with many people. 

A few years after the Nature debacle, inspired by magician James Randi’s offer of a million dollars to anyone who could prove that homeopathy works, the BBC program Horizon took on the challenge of replicating Benveniste’s results and establishing scientific credibility for the concept of memory in water.  Here’s the excellent documentary they made, which explains pretty clearly what homeopathy is and how it works, documents their experiment, and reveals their results.

SPOILER AHEAD:  Although their scientific team was unable to score the million dollars, the puzzle of why water titrated down to the point it likely has no molecules of the active substance left  yet still seems to have an active effect on the recipient remains. Some scientists put it down to the placebo effect, but that doesn’t account for its popularity and apparent success with veterinarians, farmers, and pet owners. Cows, after all, can’t logically be affected by placebos.

In spite of two trial “failures”, I think the jury is still out on homeopathy. Perhaps the double blind trials where the technicians’ lack of awareness of which water samples had come from the homeopathic origins and which were of just distilled water made a difference. If consciousness affects results—the idea that the observer cannot help but affect the results is a well-accepted principle of quantum physics—then perhaps simply “knowing” that an active substance has been in contact with the water does the trick. Or perhaps, as McTaggart hints at in her book and based on Benveniste’s later studies, there was someone associated with the research that “scrambled” the memory signals through personal electromagnetic radiation. Randi, for example, was associated with both of the double blind studies that failed to produce significant results.

Leaving that story aside, you may have heard of Masaru Emoto, the Japanese researcher who photographed water crystals and observed that water from different places crystallized into different forms.  Further experiments showed that crystals formed in the presence of music varied with the music, and that even words could alter the form the crystals would take: words of peace and affirmation produced “beautiful” crystals, while words of anger and hatred produced deformed crystals. He believes that “damaged” water can be “healed” with prayer and meditation. For a quick summary of Emoto’s work and a selection of his water crystal photos, click here. It follows on from his work that if music, words, thoughts, and intentions can influence water’s coherence, then the implications for us as humans—with our random mishmash of uncontrolled emotions—is that we have not only may have the power to heal, but are capable of inadvertent harm. Remember, something like 70% of each of us is water.

I’d like to end this blog entry with another youtube find regarding water and memory. This one is just a couple of minutes long, and provides more food for thought on water, whether water has “memory”, and how our quantum universe might be working.

And a last thought, on a purely biological level:  If water is so sensitive to substances, and if the stuff that goes into water “imprints” itself, what sort of messy water are we creating with our effluent?

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[i] http://bioresonans.ru/downloads/nature333-30-1988.pdf