Saturday, April 29, 2006 is World Tai Chi & Qigong Day . The day is going to be celebrated in 60 countries around the world as well as all fifty states. The event has been recognized by the United Nations World Health Organization, and proclaimed officially for 17 US states by their governors, as well as senates, legislatures and mayors of various countries.
I taught Tai Chi and Qigong for several years, and had the privilege of studying with teachers in China and Malaysia whose methods were part of an oral tradition. Much of this material has still not been published. I recently reviewed a very nice book at the Amazon.com website. One of the things that impressed me about the book is that it contained exercises and techniques that I had been taught by Chinese Masters, but which to my knowledge have never been published anywhere else.
I thought that it might be a good moment to review the world literature on the medical effects of Tai Chi and Qigong. My search has turned up over 2,200 published reports, of which about a third are the reports of clinical trials. I have been able to analyze the data in about a half of those trials. The data now suggests that Tai Chi is genuinely useful for:
No, this is not a term of abuse. But I’m not sure whether I should tell you about some research from South Africa that seems to give lazy teenagers a ready made excuse.
A new study in the journal Nature reports that laziness exists outside the bedrooms of American teenagers. The research involved the subterranean Damaraland mole-rat, a small burrowing little creature native to the Kalahari Desert. It turns out that these little fur balls have an interesting social structure, in which only one female (the Queen) and one or two males reproduce. The technical term for this is a “eusocial organization.” You will be familiar with it in ants, termites and some bees and wasps. But this kind of social setup seems to be unique amongst mammals.
Dr. Michael Scantlebury and Professor Nigel Bennett from the University of Pretoria studied the energy demands of these little critters.
In a mole-rat colony, there are industrious animals that are active all year round and perform more than 95 percent of the work, including digging barrows, looking for food and raising the offspring. Meanwhile, up to 40 percent of the colony is fat and lazy. This slothful group does virtually no work, but requires food from their comrades. The lazy moles in fact are not degenerating or living an unhealthy lifestyle.
They are waiting.
“For what??” may you ask. Well, they have been busy at something else: building up of their fat stores. It does not rain much in the Kalahari, but when it does the energy expenditure of the previously fat and lazy mole-rats skyrockets. Now digging is easier and there are new opportunities to disperse and reproduce. So the lazy mole-rats are on standby, ready to invade new territories when the opportunity arises and snaffling food during the lean times. As one of my colleagues put it: “So you’re telling me that the layabouts are actually contributing to the survival of the species?” Sad to say, that seems to be about it.
Indeed Michael Scantlebury had this to say: “Imagine the infrequent workers are like teenagers. They do nothing around the house and they eat all your food. Yet you tolerate them because they are your only way to spread your genes into the wider world.”
Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t blog about this study…
You may also be interested to know that Nature is now publishing a weekly podcast discussing papers published in the journal this week. You can find it here.
I thought that title might attract your attention!
But before you think that I am being rude or self-referential, I’m referring to a report from the BBC, about a tiny hamlet in the Yorkshire Dales that does indeed rejoice in the name of Crackpot.
I have previously reported that I am directionally challenged. I am speculating about whether I need a GPS system in my own house. But now I discover that some of the electronic marvels aren’t all that they are, ahem, cracked up to be.
It turns out that a satellite navigation system is directing strangers on to a steep unclassified road that is normally impassable, and boasts a 100 foot drop on one side. Because everyone has assumed that the electronics are infallible, delivery men, sales people and minibus drivers have ignored a sign saying that there is no through road, and have, lemming-like, even opened a five bar gate so that they can continue in the direction indicated by the silicon spy in the sky. Local farmers have not been amused by having to rescue vehicles that have got stuck on the road to Crackpot.
I’m no Luddite, but I think that it may just be safer to use a map and do without these newfangled electronic things. And it’s an interesting example of people trusting technology more than themselves….
In this month’s edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, a team from the University of Michigan has published a very interesting report. Every one of us has made a mistake at some stage in our lives, whether it is something trivial like dropping the groceries, or something more serious, like deleting a crucial computer file. What the researchers did was use functional MRI (fMRI) to peer inside the brain at the instant of making a mistake. While in the scanner, people were forced into making an error that carries consequences – for instance, losing money. When that happened, a particular part of the brain called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, or rACC, became much more active when the person realized that he or she had erred and there was a penalty attached to the mistake. This part of the brain is involved in deciding what kinds of emotional responses are appropriate.
What is so interesting about this work is that in a previous study on a small group of people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), the same team has shown that the rACC region of the brain became much more active in response to a no-penalty error in the brains of OCD patients, compared to people without the condition. One of the characteristics of OCD is fear and anxiety about errors or failures in certain aspects of everyday life. As a result, many begin repetitive patterns of behavior to ward off or to prevent such events.
So it looks as if people struggling with OCD have a hyperactive response to making errors, after which they begin to get more and more worried that they may have made a mistake. OCD can be a terribly incapacitating condition. We think of mild cases like Melvin Udall in As Good as it Gets, or Adrian Monk, but in reality it can cause much suffering.
I was once asked to see a seventy five year old man who had suffered from a bizarre case of OCD since the age of fourteen. He had traveled the country trying to get help, and it was an extraordinary tribute to him that despite his problem he had built a successful business and family life. He came to see me for acupuncture, but left with a prescription for a medicine that was at the time relatively new. His improvement over the next few months, as we used medication, psychological and social work and then some energetic techniques was just extraordinary.
Research like that from the University of Michigan may well bear important fruit in the future.
When I hear the continuing arguments about climate change, I often fancy that I can in the far distance hear Nero playing his lyre while Rome burns. In March the BBC reported faster than expected warming of the Antarctic over the last 30 years. This report was based on a paper in the journal Science by a team from the British Antarctic Survey.
Gradual climate change is drawing particular attention in Europe, where the climate is exquisitely dependent on the Gulf Stream. In some places records have been kept for centuries, and there seem to have been genuine changes in a short space of time. A few years ago I was in Stockholm in the week before Christmas, and it was so warm that I was able to walk around in my shirtsleeves. That made it the warmest December in almost 800 years. People notice things like that, and governments and populations are eager to do something before the Arctic is reduced to a puddle.
Even if we are just seeing a natural climatic cycle, the consequences could be disastrous. Leaving aside the obvious matter of a rise in sea level, there is also the impact of global climate change on health. Earlier this year the BBC reported a speech by Professor Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, to the Society of Applied Microbiology at the Royal Society in London. He pointed out that global warming, with hotter summers and more frequent and heavy rainfall and storms, would create the right conditions for an increase in food poisoning and other gastrointestinal upsets caused by microorganisms.
Global warming could also create conditions favorable for a return of malaria to the United Kingdom. Professor Hunter has published papers on this important topic before. He is no alarmist, and his work underscores the way in which our environment and we are closely interlinked, and even small climatic changes may have major effects on illness.
We could discuss this topic in a great deal of detail. Suffice to say that it is more important than ever for all of us to get into the habit of washing our hands, ensuring the cleanliness of food, and even more so of the water that we use, and that we do all that we can to build our resilience.
There is also another matter of equal importance, and that is the dwindling supply of fresh water around the world. The number of us is growing fast and our water use is growing even faster. A third of the world’s population now lives in water-stressed countries, and it is expected that this will rise to two-thirds by the year 2025. The cruelty of the situation is that there is altogether more than enough water available for everyone’s basic needs. The water is in the wrong places and much of it is unusable.
The United Nations recommends that people need a minimum of 50 liters of water a day for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitation. Global water consumption rose six-fold between 1900 and 1995 - more than double the rate of population growth - and goes on growing as farming, industry and domestic demand all increase.
As important as quantity is quality - with pollution increasing in some areas, the amount of useable water declines. Each year, more than five million people die from waterborne diseases, which is 10 times the number killed in wars around the globe. Most of the victims are children.
Seventy percent of the water used worldwide is used for agriculture. Much more will be needed if we are to feed the world’s growing population, which is predicted to rise from about six billion today to 8.9 billion by 2050. And consumption will further increase as more people expect Western-style lifestyles and diets. Here is a useful statistic: one kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic meter of water, while a kilo of cereals needs only up to three cubic meters. Many futurists are already predicting that water will become as much of a strategic issue as oil is today, with wars being fought over the water supply.
As of today, we should all start thinking about ways in which we can reduce our own water consumption and make provision to collect and purify water ourselves.
“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.”– Charles Dudley Warner (American Author, 1829-1900)
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