Cancer Resources and Stories That Inspire

Cancer is a funny old thing. Most of us sort of assume it’s something people get, and the causes are likely to be a mix of environmental and genetic, and that doctors know best about how to treat it—surgery, drugs/chemotherapy, and radiation. Most folks find a cancer diagnosis pretty scary. But there are some inspirational people out there whose stories may challenge conventional thought. 

Following along from my last blog post about my own experience with radiation following breast cancer surgery, I’d like to share this handful of interesting and inspiring resources:

Dr Lissa Rankin

I’m currently reading Dr Lissa Rankin’s latest book The Fear Cure, in which she examines the role of stress and our response to it as a factor in chronic diseases including cancer and heart disease. While stressful events are a moderate predictor of ill health, our individual responses to those stressful events, and our overall view of the world—is it safe or dangerous?—is an even bigger predictor. She includes useful exercises and guidelines for folks who might want to change to a more health-promoting mindset. Lissa’s earlier book Mind Over Medicine is also excellent. And worth sharing is this Facebook post from Lissa on the key recovery factors identified by over 3500 individuals in the Spontaneous Remissions Project—these are all folks who defied prediction and recovered from apparently incurable, terminal conditions including cancer.

The number one most common factor from the Spontaneous Remissions Project is food. In general, a switch to organic foods—mostly fruits and vegetables—with a tight curb on sugar, meat, dairy, and processed foods was identified by many as an essential element for recovery.

Jaxon (from his website)

One Kiwi who has shared his story and enthusiasm for green juices, smoothees, and alternative treatments is Jaxon who, in 2008, at the age of 26 was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. He’s still here, and looks amazing! His website A Creeps Guide to Cancer is an inspiration.

In a similar vein, Chris Work, now 36, had surgery for stage 3 bowel cancer twelve years ago. He’s still here today, does an awesome website called Chris Beat Cancer, and he also looks amazing. Like Jaxon, he pushes healthy food hard.

The cover says “Number 1 best-selling book on cancer in the world”—this is Dr David Servan-Schreiber’s Anti-Cancer:A New Way of Life which documents his crusade to change our perception of cancer following his own diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. Observing that we all have cancer cells in our bodies, he wondered why some people develop cancer and others do not. Again, he hits nutrition hard, recognizes the role of stress, and advocates mediation. This is a wonderful personal story of survival and quest with a ton of useful information packed in. Five-star stuff.

One woman’s miracle cancer story is Dying to be Me by Anita Moorjani. This is not only a cancer survival story but also an account of a transformational near death experience. Her story is not about food but about self-forgiveness and spiritual awareness. An interesting and inspirational read.

Donna Eden’s wonderful book Energy Medicine is not about cancer or any other diseases, but about being healthy and joyous through understanding and nurturing the lines and patterns and sources of energy within and around your body. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you want to increase your understanding of how your body circulates fluid and energy, how to clear stagnant areas and strengthen meridians and chakras, and useful exercises for all sorts of problems, this book is a gold mine of wisdom.

If you’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer, the breastcancer.org discussion boards are a great place to meet up with others in the same boat and share stories, worries, tips, and learnings.

Ultimately, the most important thing you can do when faced with a cancer diagnosis--yours or for someone you love--is become educated. Don't blindly assume the cut/burn/poison routine is not only best, but the only thing you can do. Before and while you are making health care decisions, the best single resource I can recommend is Ty Bollinger's new documentary series "The Truth About Cancer: A Global Quest".  This trailer doesn't do it justice--there is just so much information here from so many health care professionals, scientists, and individual who have beat cancer about what they know, what they've learned, and what they've done. (At the moment, the documentary is being run live and for free, but I suspect after that, you'll only find snippits on YouTube and will have to buy it to see the whole series. It's not being run on television, but it should be!)

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...

Paradigm Shift: A Watershed Moment

There’s a quiet revolution going on that the average person on the street probably hasn’t noticed. It bubbled up to the surface last month, and has continued to bubble in the form of a couple of talks banned by TED.

TED, which stands for Technology Entertainment Design, is a non-profit organisation devoted to the concept of “ideas worth spreading”. Since 1990, speakers from a range of disciplines have gathered annually in California to present 20-minute talks on a wide range of topics. In 2005, the project went global, with conferences held outside the US (in addition to the American conference) and prizes were awarded to speakers with “a wish to change the world”. Recipients have included the likes of Bill Clinton, Jamie Oliver, and religious leader Karen Armstrong. In 2007, TED.com was launched, and by 2012 well over 1000 TED talks had been posted on the internet for free viewing. In 2009, TED began granting licenses to third parties wanting to organize their own TED-like events, and these became known at TEDx. Over 20,000 TEDx talks have been posted online.

Now what has just happened is interesting and important. In January (2013), British biologist Rupert Sheldrake and author Graham Hancock spoke at the Whitechapel TEDx conference under the umbrella “Challenging Existing Paradigms”, and when the TED corporation viewed the videos, they decided to pull them off the TED channel, claiming that both talks had “crossed the line into pseudoscience.” 

Sheldrake’s talk focussed around the thesis of his latest book The Science Delusion, in which he examines 10 fundamental assumptions made by the traditional scientific community that do not necessarily stand up to close scrutiny. Briefly, these are:

1.      Nature (the universe, our planet, living things, humans) operate as machines.
2.      Matter is unconscious
3.     The laws of nature are fixed (e.g.,  the speed of light)
4.     The total amount of matter and energy in the universe is forever unchanging
5.      Nature has no purpose
6.     Inheritance is material and genetic
7.     Memories are stored in the brain
8.     Consciousness is a brain activity, nothing more
9.     Psychic phenomenon is impossible
10.     Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works

      His (in my opinion excellent) 20-minute talk is here: 

In his talk (below), Hancock spoke about consciousness, the drug ayahuasca, and the role of shamanic dreaming in personal transformation.

Now the TED folks are free, of course, to publish or not publish whatever they want on their channel, but to say that these talks are inappropriate (especially given the TED vision of “ideas worth spreading”—I guess these ones aren’t!—and the conference topic “Challenging Existing Paradigms”) because they are PSEUDO science highlights a really interesting paradigm shift. (Pseudo, incidentally, comes from the Greek meaning false or fraudulent).

Maybe it’s because I’m already familiar with Sheldrake’s work with morphic resonance, and I’ve read several of Hancock’s books including Supernatural, which spans the gamut from prehistoric cave art to UFOs, to the shamanic use of ayahuasca, to DNA and DMT (dimethltryptamine), but I don’t find any of the ideas presented in these two talks uncomfortable, let alone PSEUDO: fraudulent. And I suspect a good many other folk don’t find them all that alarming either. For example, even as we acknowledge the general scientific belief that there’s no such thing as a “sixth sense” or ghosts, virtually all of us have experienced the former, and most have experience the latter or know someone whose experience we trust who has.

Well.  The banning of these two TED talks has raised a furore. On 19 April (2013) Dr Deepak Chopra (whose own TED talk in 2002 received a standing ovation but has not seen the light of day since) and a host of other RSPs (Really Significant People) wrote an open letter to the Huffington Post about the decision to remove the talks. TED responded almost immediately with “in our guidance to the thousands of TEDx organizers around the world, we ask that they steer clear of talks that bear hallmarks of unsubstantiated science.” Chopra and colleagues then offered their rebuttal to points raised by TED. One of these, physics professor Menas Kafatos, points out that science evolves because of changing paradigms, not because of defence of existing views, and goes on to say that by TED’s definition, “anyone doing research in consciousness, its relationship with fields like physics and psychology, and yes, neuroscience, should be labelled pseudo-scientist.”

  

tuatara

Here’s why I think this controversy is so significant. You know what Mahatma Gandhi said: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” It’s sort of like that. And we’re at the “fight” stage. Traditional science, founded on rational, observable, measurable scientific principles (see Sheldrake’s list for 10 of them, above), is a dinosaur. In its time, it has been  a world view  that has given us many gifts. But some of those old guard scientists still stuck in that mindset are struggling to make the transition to the new world order. Those that don’t transform, like dinosaurs, will die out. Are dying out even now. (Okay, there are still a few tuataras around, so maybe some will linger as tuataras.)

There IS more to consciousness than a tangle of neurons firing some chemicals in our individual brains. We are part of a vast web of consciousness, and it affects everything we perceive, everything we think, everything we do. It goes beyond here and now. Sheldrake and Hancock and Chopra are part of the new order that sees beyond the old ways. I’m glad there are folks like these willing to step outside of “rational science” with an open mind to explore and try to make sense of this marvellous universe that we live in, and who are brave enough to stand up and tell us what they’re thinking. Even if that thinking doesn't align with the scientific, rational beliefs we've grown up to regard as "truth".

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.

10 Tips for Making Antidepressant Withdrawal Easier

This is my third in a series of articles on this site about antidepressant withdrawal. Do seek medical advice before discontinuing your antidepressant, and unless you are on a very low dose, don’t simply quit taking it. Beyond that, here are some pointers to make the withdrawal experience easier.

     1) Don’t decide to discontinue your antidepressant if you are going through a particularly stressful period in your life. Antidepressant withdrawal can be a major stressor itself, and withdrawal symptoms seem to be more extreme if you are stressed to begin with.  And don’t enter into a stressful situation if you are in the middle of withdrawal. Just don’t go there.[i]

     2) Anticipate and assume it will go well, but be prepared in case it doesn’t. Studies suggest at least 20% of people have no problem getting off their antidepressant. Most people go through several days with mild to moderate symptoms when decreasing their dose. Physically you might feel a bit achy, dizzy, have a headache, and/or feel a bit nauseous. Emotionally you’re likely to be anxious and snappy—think PMT. You are also likely to feel tired. A few folks have a much rougher time. See my last post, and Dr Glenmullen’s checklist for a more complete list of possible withdrawal symptoms.

3) Get yourself a support team. Let your spouse/parents/kids, close friends, and possibly co-workers/colleagues know that you’re altering a medication and that you might not be quite yourself during the time it takes for your body to adjust. If you’re not going to get support for coming off the meds from someone, figure out how you want to deal with that issue before you start the withdrawal. Some folks believe that having withdrawal symptoms means you need to take your antidepressant.  It doesn’t. (That’s the same logic as saying smokers who have trouble getting off cigarettes need to smoke.)

      4) Even if you feel grotty, get out and get some exercise every day. Go for a walk, or a swim, or a bike ride, or a run. Take the dog for a walk. Shoot some baskets. Throw some snowballs at a tree. Get some fresh air and work your blood cells and heart and muscles a little bit. You will feel better for it. Promise.

      5)  Eat light and healthy. Increase your intake of vegetables and fruits to increase antioxidant levels. Don’t add a bunch of vitamins or supplements, though. Some folks have reported reactions to supplements during withdrawal. And listen to your body. If certain foods don’t agree with you, don’t eat them.

     6) Drink plenty of water. It not only hydrates your body, but also helps flush your system. I haven’t read anywhere about tea or coffee so can’t comment on whether they help or not. (If you have some experience with this, your feedback would be appreciated!) I’d say if you are a regular coffee drinker, going off coffee might give you coffee withdrawals (yup, they’re real) and that wouldn’t be good. Green tea provides antioxidants so that is probably a good choice. Follow your instincts here.

     7)  Avoid recreational drugs and alcohol during withdrawal. You probably won’t feel like drinking or doping during withdrawal anyway, but some people seek anything that might help calm them down if they get feeling agitated during withdrawal. If your emotions are bubbling, the last thing you need is something else to jerk your emotions around, and substances that loosen inhibitions can be seriously bad news if you’re a bit volatile or vulnerable to begin with. I know one ordinarily quiet and gentle person who, after several drinks during withdrawal, took off after his step-daughter’s boyfriend with a 2x4—the young man had enough good sense to run!

      8) Take up meditation, or at least learn the “Freezeframe” technique that comes from the Heart Math folks. Both are outstanding for keeping calm and lowering stress levels. Use them daily, more than once a day if you can.

      9) Laugh. Every day. Even if you have to pretend to laugh, laugh, and after a while it won’t be so “pretend”. Watch a funny movie or read a funny book. Take up laughter yoga. Laughter is good for your heart, your immune system, your blood flow, your blood sugar levels... Really, it has no downsides at all. And regular bouts of laughter WILL make AD withdrawal easier.

     10) Count your blessings. Be grateful, and be aware of being grateful. Do this every day, several times a day. When you appreciate the small, positive things in your life, you bring your attention to those things, and that helps your immune system, and helps your body to heal. Even if it’s hard to think of something positive, make the effort. Be grateful for a sunset. For the warmth and flavour in a cup of tea. For kind words from your spouse, a “well done” from your supervisor, a few hours of uninterrupted and peaceful sleep, for not feeling as dizzy today as you felt yesterday.  Really FEEL that gratitude. Don’t kneecap your gratitude by adding a codicil like “It’s about time!” or “I’m glad to feel better today than I did yesterday but I’m still sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Just focus on the good stuff.

If you haven’t read my other two posts on antidepressant withdrawal, check them out:

Antidepressant Withdrawal looks at what withdrawal effects may occur when you stop taking your antidepressant and why they occur.

How Long Does it Take to Get off Antidepressants gives tapering advice.

For more information on psychiatric drugs and alternative ways to understand and resolve a variety of mental health issues, see my new book Reframing Mental Illness.

  

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[i] Frank Streicher did. He shares his story about what happened on his website: “after about 4 days off the stuff and at the height of withdrawal, I put myself in the worst possible position. I reffed a high school basketball game between two of the best teams in the city. I was partnered with the worst ref in the league, and the game went into double-OT. Packed gym, people screaming, coaches yelling. Big mistake. The things that people say that normally roll off you, hit you like daggers when you're in withdrawal. The losing coach (who I'm surprised is allowed to work with kids) wouldn't let it go and kept at us long after the final buzzer. I'm a big enough guy to have ripped this coach in two. It took every ounce of determination I had to turn and walk away from that guy. I'm not a tough guy, but had I turned on him, I'm sure I would have killed him. I was that frayed. I went home and trashed my bedroom. I laugh at it now because it was my only opportunity to act like a 70s rock star with a valid excuse. I had to go back on the drugs before I hurt someone.” Frank’s website, quitpaxil.org, is a useful resource. Paxil (Seroxat, paroxetine) is one of the harder antidepressants to get off.

The Living Matrix: A Review

The other night I watched the 2009 documentary The Living Matrix borrowed from a dvd rental place in Wainuiomata, New Zealand. Having talked about books by energy healer Eric Pearl and biologist Bruce Lipton in previous posts (click on their names for the links), and being familiar with the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, I suspected I was already on the same page as these folks, and if you’re reading this, you might be too. (I’d also heard of scientist/journalist Lynne McTaggart and have since ordered her book The Field from the book depository in the UK[i].)

Here’s the doco trailer:

The premise of the film is that a lot of disease (and wellness) comes from the play of energy fields and thought patterns rather than genetic and/or biological and/or chemical malfunctions, and that we are often capable of self-healing without standard medical/biological interventions such as surgery or drugs. This idea, of course, flies in the face of modern allopathic medicine and what most of us have grown up believing. And because such ideas seem rather airy-fairy, it’s easy to dismiss them. The scientific, rational minds of our modern world want proof and reliable, repeatable results, not isolated cases of miraculous, inexplicable healings and the unwelcome news that we might simply be responding to a placebo effect. That’s when we think the drugs/surgery will work and so it does, even with no active intervention. I mean, who’s happy about getting well when it becomes clear the wellness (and thus the illness) may have been simply a product of one’s thoughts or belief system?

Yet I suspect the likes of McTaggart, Lipton, Sheldrake and Pearl are the forefront brigade for an emerging paradigm in our understanding of health, much of it coming from quantum physics. The ideas that biology is controlled by the flow of information in fields, some of which exist outside of the physical, visible body; that genes can be switched on and off by these information fields—they are “potentials” not “determiners”; that thoughts affect well-being; that energy can heal—these ideas challenge conventional medicine. They create uncomfortable territory for individuals, and shaky ground for those who make a living from conventional treatments (e.g., pharmaceutical companies, who have a vested interest in discrediting these emerging ideas).

Human beings are complex creatures. Illness—even the same illness—varies from one person to another in how it manifests itself, and each individual responds to a disruption of the physical body in different ways. So it’s not surprising that where one person may experience a miraculous healing, another may not. Although, that said, we’ve all experienced miraculous healings: cut your finger, and it heals, and we take that one for granted. Science can’t really explain why that happens.

I’ve always found it interesting to look at what happens at the extremes of human experience rather than concentrate on the “predictable normal” because I think we can learn a lot that way. At the beginning of this documentary, we meet young Demitrios, saddled with such severe cerebral palsy that he cannot walk, cannot unclench his fist, cannot hug his parents. After a short while with energy healer Dr Eric Pearl, he’s able to walk and run and hug and play. We don’t see this happen on screen, but are told by his mother that it has happened. Demitrios still limps a bit, and his hand is still not fully functional, but his quality of life has improved immeasurably, we are told, in spite of conventional medicine having thrown Demitrios’ condition into the “incurable” basket. If this is true, then I reckon researchers need to be trying to figure out what’s going on here and how to make these results more accessible to all, rather than shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Can’t explain it,” and then moving on to the next patient with a problem they can treat conventionally.

I think it’s exciting that a few brave souls are challenging conventional medical paradigms, and that these challenges are being documented in books and documentaries like this one. The fact that a doco like this shows up for hire in a video shop in little ol’ Wainui is a testament to the power of modern information transition and spread, and—I suspect—a general raising of human consciousness.

Last thoughts: On a star rating, I’d give this one 3 out of 5. I’m interested in this stuff, and enjoyed hearing/seeing some of the “big names” in what I’d call applied “alternative health” and “alternative biology”. It prompted me to order a book. But I suspect that many viewers would find the documentary jumps around a lot, doesn’t seem to have a core/cohesive theme, doesn’t build to a conclusion, and challenges too many conventional beliefs of rational science with one-off examples and unproven theories. That doesn’t mean these folks aren’t right, but they are breaking new ground and the soil is still hard and might not be very fertile. Yet.

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[i] A great place to buy books with reasonable prices, free shipping worldwide, and surprisingly prompt delivery—just a couple of weeks to New Zealand. I don’t know how they can afford to do this and still make a profit...

Complimentary Therapies in Hospitals: Witchcraft or Wonderful?

There was an article in the local paper the other day (Dominion Post 20/7/12, find it here), criticising the Whanganui District Health Board for deciding to trial a number of “natural therapies” at the local hospital as optional compliments to patients’ usual health care. These therapies include prayer, meditation, massage, and Reiki, and are being offered by local alternative health therapists to patients for free. 

I personally think all of these are useful as complimentary health therapies and applaud their introduction, so I find it surprising that this enrichment of hospital health care would be contentious.  Yet Victoria University professor Shaun Holt is critical, particularly of Reiki and prayer, stating there is no evidence-based research on their effectiveness. Whanganui District Health Board Member Michael Laws goes a step further calling the decision to trial these therapies in hospital “seriously stupid” and suggesting they are—and like Holt he singles out Reiki in particular—akin to witchcraft.

Contrary to the views expressed by Holt and Laws, Whanganui Hospital is simply keeping up with modern medical practice by introducing a repertoire of complimentary therapies for their patients. According to the American Medical Association, around 42% of U.S. hospitals offer a range of complimentary therapies including massage, meditation, acupuncture, and Reiki, and two thirds offer at least massage[i]. In one Cleveland study, half of their patients (over 1700) opted to receive counselling, spiritual care, touch therapy and/or music or art therapy during their hospital stay, and 93% of the patients who chose to do so reported their therapy “useful”[ii].

Regarding Reiki (what Holt and Laws imply is “akin to witchcraft”), many prestigious institutions including the University College of London hospitals and Southampton University hospitals in the UK; the Cleveland Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Cancer Centre (the largest cancer research centre in the world) and John Hopkins Hospital in the U.S.; and the CGG Clinic in Germany offer Reiki as a complimentary therapy[iii], especially for cancer patients. In parts of the U.S., learning Reiki is part of standard nurse training. Some countries include Reiki treatments in health insurance coverage. I’ve used this article as a starter for an article on Reiki on my mindwork website, so if you are interested in finding out what Reiki is, where it comes from, and how it is used, click here.[iv]

Prayer and attendance to patients’ spiritual needs is also common elsewhere. In the US, about 85% of hospitals employ chaplains.[v]  Their role in palliative care—and I can speak from personal experience here—is valuable not only for patients but also for their families, if only in offering comfort and support at a difficult time. Studies have shown that hospital based “spiritual intervention” for the chronically ill significantly increases patient well-being and is valuable for patients during the recovery process[vi].

Meditation is a real wellness powerhouse which can lower stress levels, ease pain, lower blood pressure, increase the body’s immune response, and increase a person’s ability to focus and concentrate. Many US hospitals and clinics now teach patients to meditate[vii]. If you want to know more about meditation, check out my mindwork website page on it here.

Massage, the most common alternative therapy to be found in hospitals, is useful for pain control, stress relief, reducing muscle tension, increasing blood flow, and increasing the range of motion after injury or during convalescence. Besides, it just feels good!

It seems to me that if these therapies are being offered for free, and patients are free to take advantage of them or not as they wish, and they do not impact on whatever “official” medical treatment the patient is receiving, then Whanganui should be rejoicing at the enrichment of their hospital treatment for patients. No one expects these treatments to replace modern allopathic medicine, yet as Andrew Schafer, chief physician at the Cornell Medical Centre in New York observes, “Today’s complimentary and alternative therapies could be tomorrow’s medical breakthroughs.”[viii]

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[i] http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/10/03/prsd1004.htm

[ii] http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-09-14-alternative-therapies_N.htm

[iii] http://www.reikiken.com/uk-hospitals-who-use-reiki/

[iv] You might also find this article on Reiki being used in hospitals interesting: http://www.reiki.org/reikinews/reiki_in_hospitals.html

[v] http://www.primarypsychiatry.com/aspx/articledetail.aspx?articleid=1727

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-06-07-meditate_N.htm

[viii] http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-09-14-alternative-therapies_N.htm

The Serotonin Story

Most people have a rather vague idea what serotonin is...some brain chemical that is connected to a person’s feeling of well-being. They might also know that serotonin levels are modified by the foods we eat and the drugs we take. Beyond that, most people don’t know a lot.

If you read my previous blog entry, you’ll have an idea how the belief that low levels of serotonin cause depression developed, how this belief enabled some  clever marketing gurus to generate a multi-billion dollar antidepressant industry, and why this myth continues to linger in the public psyche.

This blog entry looks at the history of the discovery of serotonin, and what it REALLY does.

Serotonin was first discovered by an Italian researcher, Vittorio Erspamer, in the 1930s while studying the gastric and sexual function of rats and rabbits, and later dogs, molluscs and octopi. He called the substance enteramine, and noted that it affected intestinal and uterine muscle movement and contractions. In the late 1940s in the U.S., a substance was identified as a blood component responsible for vasoconstriction; researchers there named it serotonin (sero-serum, tonin-tonic or toner). It wasn’t until the early 1950s that scientists tweaked to the idea that enteramine and serotonin were the same substance, and it was 1953 before it was realized, by American researcher Betty Twarg, that in addition to its hormonal function, serotonin also operated in the brain as a neurotransmitter.

A hormone is a substance produced by the body that regulates bodily functions. As a hormone, serotonin helps to regulate the digestive tract, the central nervous system, and the formation and flow or clotting of blood platelets. Approximately 80%-90% of the body’s serotonin can be found in the gut where it regulates intestinal movement. As a neurotransmitter—a chemical that transfers information from one nerve cell to another—serotonin also moderates and affects a person’s moods, sleep, memory, and learning.

The precursor to serotonin, tryptophan, is an essential amino acid derived from one’s diet. Many protein-based foods are high in tryptophan including fish, meat, poultry, dairy products, eggs, beans, peas, seeds, spirulina, oats, and dark chocolate. However, these foods are also precursors for several other (competing, if you will) amino acids. The addition of high carbohydrate foods such as whole grain breads and pasta, and fruits such as bananas, dates and tomatoes can increase the conversion of tryptophan to serotonin over some of the other amino acids, increasing the feel-good result.

Low levels of serotonin in the body may result in fatigue, impaired cognitive function, insomnia, anxiety, and/or depression. On the other hand, unnaturally high levels of serotonin (usually as a result of supplements or drugs, prescribed or otherwise, or withdrawal of drugs that affect the serotonergic system such as antidepressants or lithium) can result in what’s known as serotonin syndrome with symptoms that include agitation, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, increased heartbeat, tremors or muscle spasms, mental confusion, and/or hallucinations. Severe untreated serotonin syndrome can result in death.

As with many things, moderation seems to be the key to keeping serotonin levels balanced and functioning properly in the body and brain. Eating a well-balanced diet should provide all of the tryptophan and triggers your body needs to manufacture appropriate levels of serotonin. Regular exercise and mood-modifying practices such as meditation also encourage the body to maintain a healthy level of serotonin.

One final idea: there is a school of thought that suggests increased levels of serotonin may come from feeling good rather than the other way around. It’s the old chicken and egg argument: which came first? It seems to me that it doesn’t really matter—one is bodily material, the other is mental/emotional-ethereal. It does us well to take care of our personal well-being on both the physical and the mental/emotional level. It also does us well to remember that serotonin is just one of the many natural substances that help our bodies and minds to function properly, and that deliberately throwing one out of balance (e.g., as with taking prescribed antidepressants that affect one or more neurotransmitters—be it serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine) will undoubtedly affect the functioning of everything else in the body.

For more information on the role of serotonin and other neurotransmitters, and the drugs developed to "control" them, see my new book Reframing Mental Illness.

Belief

Our beliefs are spookily powerful. They run as sort of unconscious background programs (to use a computer analogy) in such an unobtrusive way that we are rarely even aware how much they influence our thoughts and responses to the events that occur in our lives. Paradoxically, we get our beliefs as a product of our interaction with our environment, our social situation, our culture (they aren’t “hard wired”)...and then we use those beliefs to create the filters that modify our experiences, affecting how we perceive, interpret, assess, and act on those life events.

Belief is rarely a conscious thought, but rather such a fundamental, heart-felt sense of what is right, correct and true, it is often difficult to imagine that others might not share our fundamental understanding of how the world works. Thus we have some people who believe it is best to save your money in case you need it later, and others that reckon if you’ve got it you should use it and enjoy it because you might not even be around later. You have some people who believe it is better to stand up and be noticed (be a tall poppy), while others admire those who choose to work behind the scenes without calling attention to themselves (don’t be a tall poppy). You have some that believe wrong-doers should be punished—‘’let ‘em rot in jail”—while others believe in the power of rehabilitation and redemption, and still others who stand back and refuse to judge another person’s rightness or wrongness, believing that is not their place. It’s funny stuff, this belief business.

Belief is a powerful theme in a couple of books I’m reading at the moment. I often read more than one book at a time, and sometimes I find myself surprised at how seemingly incongruous books echo similar or related themes, because I don’t intend or expect that when I pick them up. Such is the case at the moment.

Gregg Braden’s book The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits examines the nature of belief from a scientific, quantum physics level. Frequently using a computer analogy, Braden develops a serious of belief “codes” in the book. For example, Belief Code 5: “Our beliefs have the power to change the flow of events in the universe—literally to interrupt and redirect time, matter, and space, and the events that occur within them.” It’s the seemingly little choices we make in our day-to-day life, based on our beliefs, that can have implications far beyond our personal lives. We are, according to Braden, “interacting with the essence of the universe.” The old butterfly flapping its wings in South American affecting the tropical storm in Vietnam.  We see it happen all the time: one person says something that gets someone else thinking about something else and then they say or do something they wouldn’t have said or done if the first person hadn’t said something, and then it gets carried on. Sort of like Chinese whispers. And things change.

Or Belief Code 15: “Beliefs, and the feelings that we have about them, are the language that “speaks” to the quantum stuff that makes our reality.” On a health level, for example, science still puzzles (but fully acknowledges) the power of placebo: if you think something will help you get better, it probably will. In a religious sense, it may well be the power of belief that creates miracles ranging from divine healings to stigmata to levitation.

Braden’s book is easy to read and interesting, taking an almost mechanical approach to how beliefs work and how we participate in creating our own reality. For a compelling example of applied belief theory, however, I cannot more highly recommend the other book(s) I’m concurrently devouring: fantasy writer Karen Miller’s Godspeaker Trilogy. In the first book, Empress, Miller creates Mijak, a world and society so totally caught up in a culture and religion of such violence and bloodshed that even the ancient Aztecs would blanch. In Mijak, godspeakers and warriors divine the god’s will through sacrifice, torture, blood-drinking, and total emersion in a bath of blood (or a pit of scorpions), and life is very, very cheap; it is hard to imagine that we could “buy” into this world based on beliefs so incredibly different from ours, let alone accept the belief structure and thought processes of the characters, and ultimately care about those characters, but we do[i].

 In the second book of the trilogy, The Riven Kingdom, Miller presents a new cast of characters in a  completely different society in Ethrea, an island nation that seems to come out of a 16^th century fairy tale complete with princess, toymaker, old herbal wisewoman, and an evil prolate (who wants to put his nephew on the throne when the king dies and will stop at nothing to thwart our doughty princess). One could be forgiven for thinking they’d picked up the wrong book for a trilogy that started with Empress. Ethrea’s society is founded on peace, justice, sanctity of life, and separation of church and state: a belief system that couldn’t be more different from Mijak’s.

There is a connection between the two cultures, though, with the exiled warrior prince of Mijak, Zandakar, who joins the Etherean princess’s unlikely band of helpers. Zandakar’s presence in Ethrea provides the perfect vehicle for examining what happens when someone with a solidly-grounded and fundamentalist belief system comes in contact with those who have/use a profoundly different set of beliefs and values to govern their daily lives, decisions, and choices[ii].

A fantasy writer has the luxury of creating new landscapes, cultures, and social conundrums, and as readers of fantasy, we are able to take off the filtering glasses we inevitably wear in our own everyday realities and accept different paradigms and beliefs within the context of a story. It is useful to realize, however, that we DO see the world through belief glasses that filter what we perceive, how we perceive it, how we assess and judge everything around us, and that ultimately determine what we think and what actions we choose to take. It’s also useful to realize that other people wear different glasses. And although our beliefs feel “true” at any given time, and we acknowledge them as such, truth—like beauty—is generally in the eye of the beholder.  Our beliefs are just filters, and like any filters, they change and modify with time—occasionally in a dramatic fashion but more often by almost imperceptibly subtle shifts.

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[i] Many years ago, I tried my hand at writing a film script, and I chose as my subject the (true) story of Boadicea, the warrior queen of the Iceni tribe, a remarkable woman who nearly drove the Romans out of Britain in AD 60. Writing the script was an interesting and enjoyable exercise, but ultimately I could not manage to make the central character a woman one could empathize with. Her world, I decided, was just too different from our own, with a set of beliefs and values that worked then, but are not acceptable now. My hat is off to Karen Miller who manages to do so with her Mijak knife-dancing warrior empress Hecat and her entourage, at least throughout most of the first book.

[ii] In the third book, Hammer of God, the two cultures collide.