One of the principles of integrated medicine is that anything that is really good for you should impact more than one system of the body. So for example omega-3 fatty acids will, in moderation, help your cardiovascular system, brain, mood and skin.
There is a good example of this in a study published this month in the Journal of Urology. The research was orchestrated by the Harvard University School of Public Health in Boston, and involved 22,086 American men followed over fourteen years. The findings confirm the importance of lifestyle choices to the risk of developing erectile impotence. Some of the same things that are bad for the heart also dramatically increase the risk of developing impotence. Men who were obese at the beginning of the study were 90 percent more likely to develop erectile dysfunction (ED) than were normal-weight men. Similarly, smokers had a 50 percent greater risk than non-smokers of developing ED. On the positive side, regular exercise appeared to protect against erectile problems. Men who reported the highest exercise levels at entry into the study’ were 30 percent less likely than their inactive peers to develop ED over the next 14 years.
The reason for these associations is primarily to do with blood flow. Anything that impedes blood flow increases the risk of ED, and anything that improves it will likely have a beneficial effect. We already know that people with diabetes mellitus and hypertension are far more likely to develop ED.
The message is very straightforward. If we ever needed any more evidence that smoking and obesity are bad for you, this is it. Stopping smoking, losing weight and taking regular exercise will all reduce your risk of developing ED. And if stopping smoking is a problem, not only do we have new medicines coming along, but I’ve also had some good results with homeopathy and the tapping therapies.
Regular readers will know that I’m very interested in gender differences. More and more evidence is confirming what most of us have always known: men and women tend to think and behave differently. Some of the differences are clearly neurological and some social. It is sometimes difficult to sort out which is more important: some research findings on gender differences have produced mixed results because of some of the assumptions of male investigators!
But notice that I emphasize the word “tend” to think differently. We are always dealing with statistical differences. My Y-chromosome should enable me to navigate from A to B without difficulty. In fact, I am seriously directionally challenged: I should probably have a GPS system with me when I go down to the shops!
I have spoken about my admiration for the work of Deborah Tannen, and I have also written about Christina Robb’s marvelous book, in which she charts the development of new insights into gender differences in psychology.
This weekend I was at the annual meeting of the National Speakers Association in Orlando, and I learned something very interesting that fits in with all of our previous discussions. I learned it from one of the speakers, named Julia Hubbel. I already knew that women tend to be more relational in their interactions and men are more transactional. Most women tend to spend a lot more time on the maintenance and development of relationships and most men are more interested in the bottom line: What is the solution? What’s the deal going to be? What I did not know is that there is some data to indicate that non-White males tend also to emphasize relationships over transaction. As soon as I heard that, I was sure that it was right: I have had a lot of dealings with people from the Indian subcontinent, and most would consider it very rude to get straight down to business before we had taken tea or eaten something while discussing family and other personal matters. Julia teaches networking skills that integrate gender and ethnic considerations.
As she was explaining her insights and methods, I was reminded of the work of the anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward T. Hall, who wrote a series of excellent books on cultural factors and thought.
Gender and cultural differences in communication are of such importance that I plan to return to the topic in the near future. In the meantime, you might be interested in a book by Richard Nisbett, entitled The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why. After multiple trips to Japan, during which I learned a lot about cultural differences, I gave a copy to a friend who is a Canadian in a senior management position in the Japanese affiliate of a US-based company. He told me that he was astonished by the accuracy of the insights.
Some of the political misunderstandings that you see on the news every morning are often a consequence of different thinking styles. Learning how men and women and people in different cultures think and operate is not just interesting.
It is essential.
“Skill in the art of communication is crucial to a leader’s success. He can accomplish nothing unless he can communicate effectively.” – Norman Allen (American Playwright, Recipient of a Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play)
“All will happen as you want it, provided you really want it.” –Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj (Indian Spiritual Teacher and Exponent of Jnana Yoga and Advaita Doctrine, 1897-1981)
“The spirit is life. The mind is the builder. The physical realm is the result.” –Edgar Cayce (American Healer, Mystic and Psychic, 1877-1945)
In Healing, Meaning and Purpose, we discuss manifesting: the art of flowing with the Universe to achieve your perfect outcomes. We talked about the limiting beliefs that can prevent us from fulfilling our potential. Do not try and put limits on the help that may come to you. Too often people tell me that they are not seeing any meaningful coincidences or that their prayers are not being answered. The problem is usually that they have decided on the form in which the sign will appear, or of the way in which help will arrive, instead of having an open mind, and remembering that “God works in mysterious ways.”
I have the privilege of delivering hundred of speeches, lectures and workshops each year, but earlier today I was in the unusual position of being in the audience for a really great speech. I was reminded of an old story that appears in Chapter 11 of my forthcoming book Sacred Cycles:
A priest is stranded in his house as the waters of a nearby river are rising rapidly. He can still see out of his first floor window when a rescue boat rows up to his house.
“Get in says the rescuer.”
“No” says the priest, “I’m praying and waiting for God to save me.”
As the floodwaters rise, he moves to the second floor, when he hears the sound of a motorboat containing two rescuers.
“Get in, they say, it is getting worse.” “No” says the priest, “I’m praying and waiting for God to save me.”
Finally the waters have driven him onto the roof of his house when he sees a helicopter hovering above him.
“Let us winch you to safety,” says the winch man.
“No” says the priest, “I’m praying and waiting for God to save me.”
Finally the helicopter is forced to leave and sadly the priest perishes.
When he arrives in the next world he is angry with God, and says,
“Why didn’t you save me? I prayed with all my might!”
To which he hears this response: “Three times I tried to save you: I sent a rowboat, a motorboat and a helicopter, and you rejected all the help that I sent to you.”
Please do not ever make that mistake. I have had more than one person feel guilty about seeing a physician and taking medications, feeling that they should have been healed by faith alone. Then they have realized that their prayers may indeed have been answered by the provision of medications and a person with the skills to use them.
Before asking for Divine assistance, ask yourself what you can do to help yourself and others: rather than trying to command God and the Universe to do your bidding, try reporting for duty!
“God manifests himself in what is hidden.” –Thomas Merton (French-born American Trappist Monk and Writer, 1915-1968)
Physical, psychological and spiritual health are all inextricably linked. We are plagued by ill-defined illnesses whose origin lies not just in our genes, but arise from our spiritual disconnection. And on some level we all know that.
Thirty million Americans describe themselves as spiritual seekers. Why is it that so many are seeking but not finding? The answer to that is more subtle than you may think and also far more satisfying. The information that we need is all lying out there in plain sight. It’s just that most of us has never learned how to access it.
The writer Doris Lessing once observed that we now all have access to thousands of books and other documents that were once hidden or available only to a select few. Some of the most sacred texts are now either available on line or on inexpensive CD-ROMs. Most of these thirty million seekers can probably teach us about prayer, karma, chakras or spirituality. Why do so many people feel spiritually disconnected and why is it that most people are either unwell or not as well as they could be? So very few are able to achieve their full potential because of physical or psychological difficulties? So what’s the problem?
The trouble is that many of the ancient books and manuscripts on which our knowledge is based were written on several levels. Yes, they contain information about our spiritual nature and our subtle anatomy. But that is only level one.
They also contain other levels of knowledge and sophistication: keys and solutions that have until now only been taught to a few.
Textual analysis and interpretation, scriptural exegesis, and numerological research have all been going on for millennia. People were trying to find hidden codes in the ancient manuscripts of India and China two thousand years before the birth of Christ. And for more than four hundred years there have been people poring over the strange quatrains of Nostradamus to find auguries of the future. You may also have heard of modern attempts to find secrets in the Bible using numerical codes. I’m a bit skeptical only because most mathematical analyses have so far failed to confirm the existence of these hidden codes.
But there is another method of penetrating into the mysteries of the Universe, using books and manuscripts handed down over the centuries. It is known as the Concentric Key method and has been in use for centuries. If you do a Google search for those words, you will find no more than a dozen or so entries. The reason is straightforward: the techniques have been handed down in a largely oral tradition. But the time is right for the techniques to be made more widely available.
It has been claimed that some of the works of Shakespeare were written using the code. There is a book – The Secret Doctrine – that is widely regarded as being a bit odd and eccentric. Yet there is a problem with that evaluation. This massive tome, which runs to almost 1500 pages, contains page after page of extraordinary insights. They are not always obvious at first reading, but if you follow a specific set of methods, you can start getting amazing intuitive insights about the nature of reality.
The book was transcribed by a highly controversial person called Helena Blavatsky, who taught a small number of students to use it for enlightenment, and they in turn passed on the secrets. If you just read the book like a textbook or novel, it can look rather silly and disorganized. That is until you realize that there are other levels of meaning that need a lot of brain stretching. But as you understand them you begin gradually to change for the better. It is like the basic proposition of Dan Brown’s novel, the Da Vinci Code: if you know where and how to look there is a treasure trove of information there. But unlike the novel with its rather implausible ideas, studies using the Concentric Key have generated highly reproducible results.
The point of the story is this. There really are diamonds under our feet: insights and revelations hiding in plain sight in books that you may have on your own bookshelf. As a youngster I used to read a great many books, and usually quite quickly. It took time and some very patient teachers to show me that there are some books that repay quiet, slow, contemplative study.
Try and spend a few minutes every day with a spiritual quotation or a paragraph from a favorite spiritual work. If you would like me to post daily quotations, I would be delighted to do so: I have thousands which may be new to you.
And if your intuition draws you toward it, then the next stage is to start working on texts in detail using the Concentric Key technique. I shall post a great deal more about this if you are interested.
Back when the world was new, I cut my teeth in migraine research, and migraine and other headaches were the topic of my first book. So I’ve always kept an eye out for new developments.
There’s an interesting case report from India, about a nineteen year old who developed mild mania as part of the aura or warning of his attacks. This sort of case is interesting for what it might be able to teach us about each illness. It is also good for us to know that bipolar disorder is highly co-morbid: it is associated with many other illnesses apart from migraine: 1. Anxiety disorders 2. Substance abuse disorders 3. Attention deficit disorders 4. Personality disorders 5. Impulse control disorders 6. Eating disorders 7. Insulin resistance 8. Obesity 9. Diabetes mellitus 10. Cardiovascular diseases 11. Pain disorders
This is why diligent clinicians are always on the lookout for bipolar disorder: if it is missed and remains untreated, it can cause havoc: suicide attempts, damaged relationships, substance abuse and general misery.
Migraine is one of the vascular headaches that is occasionally associated with an array of other vascular problems, like Raynaud’s phenomenon, ischemic heart disease and stroke. But the aura is something else altogether. For many years it was thought that the migrainous aura was a result of a reduction in blood flow to regions of the cerebral cortex. Almost 25 years ago that was shown to be inaccurate. It is due to a release of witches’ brew of excitatory and inhibitory amino acids in the cortex. It is highly likely that the release of excitatory amino acids is the explanation for the manic symptoms.
Migrainous mania is evidently rare, but apart from visual disturbances, I’ve seen all sorts of strange auras: sudden food cravings; intense sweating; extreme irritability and many other things besides.
The treatment of migraine still revolves around avoidance or modulation of triggers, pain relief and prophylaxis. The big change in recent years has been the increasing amount of experience and small amount of evidence indicating the value of non-pharmacological approaches like spinal manipulation, temporomandibular joint adjustment, acupuncture, the tapping therapies and homeopathy.
To an integrated practitioner, the key is to understand the problem as more than just headache: we can guide a person to see the problem in its broader context, as a challenge designed to find a path toward inner wellness. We also see it as a process that has meaning and purpose and is a Divinely inspired invitation to grow spiritually and as an individual.
That may sound a lot for a headache, but it is the best possible way to triumph over the problem!
“The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole.” –Plato (Athenian Philosopher, 428-348 B.C.E.)
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