How to Put "Civil" Back in Civilization

If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend that you watch the documentary “The Social Dilemma”. It explains so much of what we’re seeing in our society, from increased rates of anxiety and teen suicide, to increased polarization and the spread of fake news.

In short, the large tech companies such as Facebook, You Tube, Google, Twitter, and such are using machine learning to continually improve on the algorithms whose only goal is to keep us engaged with our screens, thus exposing us to their advertisers. We are now experiencing the unforeseen consequences of this by-design highly addictive technology. Watch the documentary, it explains the issues so well…and even offers up some potential solutions.

But I want to talk with you today about the idea that, since every aspect of your life exerts some sort of influence upon your health, the society in which we live has a profound and often under-the-surface influence on our health. If you are trying to be healthy while living in an unhealthy, dysfunctional society, your efforts are likely to be disappointing. What can we do to improve the health of society so that we all can benefit from that?

We are living at an amazing time where several forces for change are coming to a head. The “#Me Too” movement working for fairness and equality for women, the Black Lives Matter movement working for fairness and equality for black people, and all people of color, the climate crisis where the very earth is asking for us to change. The COVID-19 pandemic where the only way we can control the spread of this virus is by all working together. Trump’s presidency with his blatant misogyny, racism, and favoritism for the ultrawealthy, combined with his disdain for science and reason, his penchant for fomenting chaos and conflict and division, sowing fear wherever anyone will listen, has shown us the kind of society we don’t want. Separatism, isolationism, and “us vs. them” thinking are not paths to a healthier society. So, what kind of society do we want? This magnitude of momentum for change is rare and we need to make the best of it.

I propose that we apply the principles of wellness that we know work so well for the individual to the society at large.

First, “health” and “wholeness” come from the same root word. This suggests that health implies wholeness. For the individual, wholeness implies having access to all of themselves: all the shameful parts, the repressed parts, the wounded parts, the shadow parts, the crazy parts. All of it. For society that would mean diversity. Just like a diverse forest, or a diverse microbiome is healthier than a monoculture, the same holds for society. Our wholeness is greater than the sum of the parts. Repressing women, repressing minorities or people who are different from us makes us all weaker, sicker.

Unconditional acceptance of themselves and of the different parts of themselves is also a critical skill that enables the individual to be healthy. In society, that would look like consensus decision-making, inclusivity, meeting people where they are and attempting to understand why they are behaving the way that they are or making the choices that they are making.

Taking good care of themselves. For the individual, this means following a healthy lifestyle: eating good quality foods in the right amounts, exercising sensibly, introspection-taking some time each day to get to know themselves better, healthy supportive relationships, and right livelihood-finding work that sustains them financially, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. For society, this would mean taking good care of each other. Making sure we all have good nutrition, housing, healthcare; that we educate our children to be humane and strong…and keep their curiosity alive; that we have equal opportunity so that anyone with the wits and work ethic to do so can advance themselves. We need to learn the lessons from history so that each generation doesn’t keep making the same mistakes.

Fostering a sense of compassion for themselves, for all they’ve been through, for all that they are going through is probably thee most important ingredient for individual health that I’ve ever observed. In society, that means having compassion for each other, for all that others have been through, for all that they are going through. Compassion, and thus compassion-informed action, are necessary ingredients for any kind of meaningful health. I don’t see any other way around it.

If we can practice these skills, especially compassion for ourselves, for others, and, eventually, for all of creation, we can put the civil back into civilization. We can make the most of this rare and powerful convergence of several forces for change. We can do this if we put our minds to it.

What Can I Do to Take Care of Myself in this Pandemic?

I was talking with my hair-cutting person this morning and she asked me what I thought was going to happen with “this COVID thing, because I don’t want to wear a mask forever.” She’s a wizard with hair and a very successful small-business person with ten employees in her hair/nail/skin salon. Her business was shut down for several months, which was very painful to her and her employees, and she’s been resistant to and resentful of wearing masks.

We talked about corona viruses being a big family of viruses, most are not that bothersome, causing colds or no symptoms at all. But viruses are constantly mutating, that’s what they do, so every once in a while, a virus manages to put together a series of mutations that make it more easily transmitted, or more able to cause serious damage to the host. And, sometimes, a virus is able to pull off both.

SARS was caused by a corona virus that was much more deadly than the cold-causing cousins, about ten percent fatality rate, but the Asian countries were able to contain it for several reasons. Its human-to-human spread was not that efficient, most people were not contagious until they had symptoms, and Asia responded with very vigorous case identification, quarantine, and contact tracing. MERS is caused by a corona virus with about a 30% fatality rate, but, again, it is spread to humans from camels, most of us don’t relate well to camels, and the human-to-human spread just doesn’t work very well.

Then along came SARS-CoV-2. This virus has it all. Its human-to-human spread is very efficient, happening through contaminated surfaces, air-born particles, and aerosols. It doesn’t seem to take a large number of viruses to cause an infection, and people can be contagious without having any symptoms. Its mortality rate is still not fully known because we don’t have a really good handle on how many people are actually dying from it (the numerator) or how many people have the infection (with or without symptoms) (the denominator). But we know that the death rate is higher than influenza and lower than SARS.

Also, a virus is usually more deadly when a population has not seen it before. We talked about the example of small pox. In Europe, it had about a ten percent fatality rate but when it was introduced to Native Americans, it initially had around a ninety percent fatality rate. So, right now, every human immune system is a newbie to this virus. After it’s been around for a few years, it probably won’t be as deadly, partly because those who are susceptible to it will have already died or survived their first infection, and partly because our immune systems will figure it out.

We talked about how there has never been a vaccine successful against a corona virus and there may be a biological reason for this. Corona viruses initially infect the cells that form the surface of your moist mucous membranes. These cells are primarily protected from infection by secretory IgA antibodies. These are not your body’s memory antibodies. They usually fade away in four to six months if they are not being continuously activated. Many kinds of food reactions are IgA mediated. That is why avoiding your reactive foods for eight to ten months usually resolves your food reactions.

But this means that if a vaccine was to be effective, it would have to stimulate IgA against SARS-Cov-2, but you would have to repeat the vaccine two to three times a year. Now, the drug companies would love this, but this is not very practical on a global scale. There are some novel strategies being tried for COVID vaccines, but only time will tell if they pan out.

We may get effective drug treatments for COVID infections. Heparin and platelet deactivators seem promising. A British company has just finished a trial using interferon beta, a specific cytokine, that looks very promising as a COVID treatment. And we may still find specific anti-virals that work, similar to flumantadine for influenza, acyclovir for herpes, or antiretrovirals for AIDS.

Just in case superman won’t show up to save us, clearly the best long-term strategy is to get on the other side of this pandemic by building herd immunity. But…we need to do this slowly, so that the healthcare and deathcare systems don’t get overloaded. In Texas, they are having to park refrigerator trucks outside the hospitals to store the dead bodies because the morgues are all full. In the hospitals, the medical staffs are maxed out and burning out.

We need to be smart about this. We talked about how the virus can hang in the air for hours. How, when you breathe in, most of the air that you breathe comes in around the edges of your mask, not filtered through your mask. So, in a sense, people who claim that wearing a mask won’t protect you, they are right. But when you breathe out, the mask catches a very high percentage of the droplets and aerosols that you exhale, so that they are not hanging around in the air for others to breathe in. But it doesn’t do this if it is not also covering your nose. So wearing your mask below your nose is like wearing your underwear below your penis. (And for those of you who don’t have penises, you get the picture.) Only much more deadly.

So that’s why we all have to work together. One contagious person, not wearing a mask, walking through a room, can contaminate that whole room for hours, potentially infecting all the others in the room who are wearing a mask. If we can decrease the amount of virus hanging around in the air and settling out on surfaces, we can decrease the spread of the virus. Wearing a mask or not is not a political issue, it is a compassion issue. You do it because you care about people who may be susceptible to the serious effects of COVID. You do it so that everyone who needs a ventilator will have one, so that people don’t have to stay in the emergency room for days waiting for a bed in the hospital.

There may be no way around reaching herd immunity without ten to fifteen million American deaths (to date, about one percent of Americans have tested positive for COVID and we have at least 150,000 deaths, so do the math. Herd immunity may be attained with fewer deaths than that because I believe there are a lot more people who have had COVID already than have tested positive for it). But, if we slow the spread, we may get a treatment or vaccine before that many people get infected, and we can make sure that people can get the medical care that they need in a timely fashion.

And, if everyone did their part to slow the spread of the virus, we could safely open many segments of the economy. So, from that perspective, people who are resisting wearing their masks, who are inconsistent with them, who are not following the advice about social gatherings and such are the people who are responsible for keeping the economy shut down.

She also asked if there was anything people could do to take care of themselves if they got COVID. When I answered her, she said that it was too bad that we weren’t talking about these things more. That is what prompted me to write this blog post. So here is what I told her.

SARS-CoV-2 seems to cause serious problems through two mechanisms: oxidative damage and increased blood clotting. Autopsy studies of people who have died of COVID have been very surprising. People who the ICU doctors thought had inflammation in their hearts based on their clinical picture didn’t have any inflammation in their hearts: their heart muscle was full of hundreds of little blood clots. When the ICU doctors thought a person was having inflammation in their brains due to their clinical picture, their brains didn’t have inflammation, they were full of little blood clots. And over twenty five percent of autopsies showed clots in the deep veins in their legs and pulmonary emboli from them.

So, putting this all together, this is what I recommend:

·         For protection against oxidative damage

o   NAC (N-acetylcysteine) 600 mg three to four times a day

o   Vit C at least 50mg/kg/day (three to five grams per day for most people)

o   Vit E as mixed tocopherols 400 IU per day

o   Selenium 200-400 micrograms per day (not to exceed 800 micrograms/day)

·         For protection against increased clotting, to help calm down your platelets

o   Fish oil, at least one tablespoon (15 ml) per day

o   Vitamin C as above

o   Aspirin 84 mg/day: that’s one baby aspirin or one quarter of an adult aspirin per day

·         As a prevention for infection, in addition to hand washing, keeping your hands out of your eyes, nose and mouth, wearing a mask, and social distancing

o   Zinc may slow viral replication if it can get into the cells. Zinc picolinate 15-30 mg/day

o   Quercetin one to two capsules per day may help drive the zinc into the cells

o   Take these two any time you plan to go out into the world

You can safely mail-order any supplements you need, pay no sales tax, get a ten percent discount, and free shipping by ordering from https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/shall1584636045

No matter what our political persuasion, let’s all work together to beat this virus.

Stay healthy out there!

Moving Forward through the Pandemic

Physical distancing restrictions are going to start relaxing soon. Businesses are going to re-open and we’re going to start gathering together in groups again. But this doesn’t mean that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 disease has been eradicated. It is still around and public health experts are worried that new infection rates will rise again.

What can you do to protect yourself? What can we do all together to protect each other?

You can do specific things to strengthen your mucosal immunity and we can all work together to reduce air pollution. Let me explain.

This corona virus gets into your body through your mucosa, those boundaries between your body and the outside world that need to stay moist all the time. These are, primarily, your eyes, nose, mouth lungs, intestines, and bladder. They are named mucosa because they make mucous when they are irritated. Your mucosa doesn't enjoy the robust physical barriers to infection found in your skin that stays dry, so your body uses most of your immune system to protect it.

If you round up one hundred random people and expose them to this corona virus, ninety of them will have no symptoms. Seven of them with have mild cold-like symptoms and three will get very ill and possibly die. Now, there are many factors that we are learning about that contribute to who ends up in which of these three categories. And some of those factors we can do something about.

You can take steps to enhance your mucosal immunity.

This is a photo of my computer screen taken during a recent webinar sponsored by Jeffrey Bland, PhD on COVID-19.

As you can see, some common-sense interventions, such as exercise and reducing stress, are important. But so are probiotics and fiber, B vitamins, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D. Flavanoids, beta-glucan and L-arginine also show up on the chart in multiple places. I wouldn’t recommend Echinacea on a regular basis as its benefits wear off after about a week. Better to save it for if any symptoms start. Naturally fermented foods, such as live-culture sauerkraut, kombucha, kim chi and such are excellent sources of probiotics. You can purchase any of these supplements through Fullscript and receive a ten percent discount, free shipping on orders over $50, and pay no sales tax. https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/shall1584636045.

As for what we can all do together, besides physical distancing, which we don’t want to have to do forever, recent research on the regions of the world with the highest death rates for the infection are also the most polluted. This makes sense. Recent research on the health effects of air pollution show that it has adverse impacts much more far ranging that we previously thought.

Nitrous oxide, a very common component in air pollution from fossil fuels, powerfully degrades mucosal immunity. This explains why asthma is much worse when pollution levels are high. So the recent lowering of air-quality standards in the US is the exact wrong thing for us to do if we want to keep more people out of the very sick category.

So, as we move forward through the COVID-19 pandemic, keep your immunity up. Get regular exercise, eat lots of fresh greens and other vegetables, take Taming the Bear: Take the Bite Out of Stress class, Fostering Resilience in Uncertain Times class (https://the7tools.com/classes/) and/or practice the Seven Tools of Healing to increase your resilience and make yourself impervious to stress, take B vitamins, Vit C and D, and a few other supplements and do what you can to keep the air clean for all of us.

Who is Your Tribe?

Let’s face it, we’re tribal beings. Our bodies, brains, minds and psyches evolved in tribes. We are hard-wired to feel safe in our tribe, to be comfortable in our tribe. We understand our tribe. We look to our tribe for support. We will do whatever is needed to support others in our tribe. We value our tribe and think it is the best one. We will fight to defend our tribe.

Not-tribe is suspect. We don’t trust it, we don’t understand it as well. We often fight most vehemently with our neighboring tribes. When you are out of your tribe, you have to be on guard, wary, vigilant.

Even in today’s large, diverse urban environments, we still live tribally. We find our niches, our circle of friends, our neighborhood. We might be in several tribes at once, like circles on a Venn diagram. But however you do it, and whether or not you know it, where you draw the line between your tribe and all that is your not-tribe determines much of your life.

Is your tribe people in your immediate family? In your extended family? Those who hold your same beliefs? Practice your same religion? People in your town? People with your skin color? Your tribal boundaries and the characteristics of your tribe determine much of how you see the world, what you value, what you will defend, and how you interpret the actions of others.

In my patients, I observe that one common consequence of them doing their healing personal growth work is that their tribal boundaries push out further and further into the world. The range of ideas that they can consider increases; the range of emotions they can feel and be fully present with increases; their tribe becomes larger and more diversified. Teaching tolerance is really about enlarging your tribe.

What tribes do you belong to? Where are their boundaries? How large and diverse can you make them? Imagine if you could make your tribe be the entire planet. If a significant number of us can pull this off, we could create world peace.

So, keep doing your healing work. Explore your tribal boundaries: what qualities of people help you feel comfortable? Which ones bring up uncomfortable feelings? That we evolved certain traits and characteristics, like tribalism, is unavoidable. Our challenge now is to use our hearts and reasoning to find the gifts in these traits and use them for our highest good. Find out who you really are in your heart of hearts, behind the veil of illusion, as your highest truest self. Practice the Seven Tools of Healing. 

Mark Bertin, MD and Your Child’s Resilience and Independence

I’m so excited about this year’s Change for Good Summit: Building Resilience in Anxious Times. In case you don't know about our summit--it's free and online so you can access it in your own time and space. This year it focuses on anxiety. Grace and I have been interviewing some really amazing people who have some really amazing information and insights to share and I can’t wait for you to get your hands on all of it!

My interview with Mark Bertin, MD has really been sticking in my mind and I’d like to tell you why. If you have kids, work with kids, or ever where a kid, you need to hear what this guy has to say.

I love hearing the stories of other physicians who, starting from a strong background in science and conventional medicine, have had the intellectual curiosity to explore ideas and modalities that are not generally included in the purview of conventional medicine and, finding them beneficial, have also had the courage to bring these ideas and modalities to their practices.

Dr. Bertin is a neurodevelopmental pediatrician (meaning he specializes in children’s developmental issues, such as learning problems, ADD/ADHD, and autism spectrum disorders) who has integrated mindfulness concepts into his practice, when families are open to them.

Dr. Bertin started studying and practicing mindfulness for himself. After personally experiencing its amazing benefits, and, as more and more studies proved its effectiveness, started offering mindfulness ideas and practices to his patients. He has written four books so far: How Children Thrive: The Practical Science of Raising Independent, Resilient, and Happy Kids; Mindful Parenting for ADHD; The Family ADHD Solution; and co-authored Teaching Mindfulness Skills to Kids and Teens.

I also really like ideas that simplify complex topics and/or bring together and show the commonality of seemingly disparate concepts, like how the Vedic model of a human integrates all the practices in body, mind, and energy medicines, or how consulting with your inner wisdom simplifies choosing the right way to eat, exercise, or treat your illness. Dr. Bertin points out another such idea that simplifies parenting and unifies many ideas in child behavior and development: Executive Function.

If you haven’t heard of executive function before or are not quite sure what it is, Dr. Bertin explains it very well:  “In essence, executive function’s job is to integrate what we encounter in life with what we know and then decide how to respond.” Excellent executive function has been correlated with improved health, wealth, happiness and success. And, just like you can do exercises to build your biceps, you can do exercises to build your (and your child’s) executive function.

Executive function can be thought of as your inner manager. It helps you manage your

·         Attention: focusing when needed, shifting when needed

·         Actions: self-control and learn from mistakes

·         Tasks: helping you organize, plan, prioritize, and manage your time

·         Information: your ability to organize, remember, and retrieve it

·         Emotions: your ability to experience them without necessarily acting on them and

·         Efforts: helping you persevere, sustain, and work efficiently.

I hope you can join us in the summit and hear what Dr. Bertin has to say about how to de-stress your parenting while improving your child’s resilience, independence…and chances for a happy, successful life. Invite your family, friends, teachers…anyone you know who has or works with children. The Summit airs in late November. Watch for the registration email in your inbox come mid-November. 

Happy New Year (and a humble suggestion for a resolution)

As you are making your New Year’s resolutions, I would hazard a guess and say that what you want most this year is to be healthy.

You see, to me, being healthy means to be happy. It means to have enough affluence to be comfortable and reasonably free to pursue your dreams. It means having deep sustaining relationships and meaningful work in the world. It means feeling fulfilled, challenged, excited to live each day. It means having a fairly good grasp on how it is that you create so that you can create a life that is pleasing to your soul. It also means having your mind/body/energy working well enough to sustain you through it all.

And who wouldn’t want that?

Now you just have to answer the question, “How do I move from my present life to my ideal, healthy life?” That is what the Seven Tools of Healing are all about.

As you may imagine, there are several steps involved.

Your mind/body/energy needs certain things. Just as you need good food for your body, you also need sustenance for your mind and energy, such as high quality ideas to think about and good sources to replenish your energy. And, just as your body needs exercise, so does your mind and energy. They also need good rest. There are practices for all these things and your inner wisdom can help you choose which practices you need that also fit with your life.

Then you need to remove the factors that wear and tear you down and replace them with factors that build you up and sustain you. Again, your inner wisdom can help you figure out what those factors are and what to do about them. Practicing the Seven Tools of Healing puts you in contact with your inner wisdom.

Finally, for your ultimate healing, you need to go deeper still. Unless you want to continue spending all your time and energy chasing around trying to change what has already appeared in your life, you need to get ahead of it by figuring out how to take conscious control over the factors that determine what you are creating as your life.

This may sound a little esoteric, but it is the most important step in order to achieve real healing. At the same time, simple, reliable, and effective ways to change the determinants of your creative flow elude most self-help programs. The Seven Tools of Healing fills this gap. Practicing the Seven Tools is the best way I’ve found to find limiting beliefs and align them with higher truth. The more your personal truth aligns with higher truth, the healthier you get.

So, please, I ask you, put “Mastering the Seven Tools of Healing” high on your list of New Year’s Resolutions. Do this and I think you’ll find that most everything else on your list pretty much takes care of themselves.

The Seven Tools are really a set of skills that you can learn and hone with practice. Then, when you apply these skills to whatever is going on in your life, healing happens. See www.the7tools.com for resources to help you master the tools.

My Journey Writing "The Seven Tools of Healing: Unlock Your Inner Wisdom and Live the Life Your Soul Desires"

I’m not a bookish person. My wife and a couple of my kids are bookish people, so I know the difference. But I felt compelled to write The Seven Tools because,

·         My whole career, I’ve witnessed people working long and hard to make lasting healing changes in their lives.

·         They spend huge sums of money and untold hours seeking these changes: workshops, on-line courses, books, meditations, seeing a wide variety of practitioners, taking tons of supplements…on and on.

·         Most of the time, they have great insights and “aha moments” and make some progress, only to later fall off the wagon and return to their old patterns, or have some new health problem crop up with a similar symbolic significance.

·         I wanted a way to help these people: to help them make inner changes that last, that truly transform, that heal their lives on deep levels. So I started studying the world’s healing traditions.

·         But, more importantly, I also listened deeply and honestly to my patients, trying to understand their experiences—especially when they did not fit the conventional medical model—to observe what worked and what didn’t.

·         I’ve been practicing integrative medicine since the mid ‘80’s and I’ve followed some people for years on their healing journey. This long perspective has allowed me to make some observations about healing that elude my colleagues with more transient practices.

·         Over many years of practice, study, and stewing about it, I figured out why deep inner change is so rare and what to do to accomplish it on a more reliable and consistent basis.

·         What I’ve learned has been helping my patients for years and now I want to share it with the world.

Coming from a background in Conventional Family Practice, I have to admit that what I learned surprised me. Our society is so deeply dysfunctional in many important ways, a truly healing path is a major diversion from the path of the herd. Many of the foundational concepts I uncovered involve how the unconscious mind and Consciousness work: not frequent topics of conversation in a doctor’s office. To many in our culture, these ideas are unexplored and unfamiliar, though they have been with us for thousands of years. It takes courage, curiosity, and trust to embark on a healing path. It is helpful to have a mentor or guide, and a supportive community.

My fervent hope is that this book can be one of your guides to make your healing journey more efficient, effective, and in alignment with the Laws of Consciousness; that many mentors will get trained in these ideas; and that small pockets of communities practicing the Seven Tools will pop up, grow, and coalesce.

How Do You Know if You are Stressed?

I saw a middle-aged women in the office this week who works at a local tech firm. She came in for her annual free preventative wellness check-up that is a part of Obamacare. Since stress either causes or exacerbates nearly every major disease in our society, and since stressors are a universal human experience, good preventative health requires an effective way to protect yourself from the adverse effects of stress. I think these preventative visits are a good time to talk about how to do that.

But she had an interesting question: how do you know if you’re stressed? She was serious. For her, personality issues with her team-mates, other teams not getting their stuff to her team on time, long work days, high-pressure deadlines, and intense learning curves were the norm. And for everyone she knows. “Isn’t that just normal?” she asked.

If by “normal”, you mean the majority of people experience it, then, yes, being chronically stressed is now normal, but it is not good. Every ten years, the American Institute of Stress conducts a major survey of Americans. Each survey for the last 30 years has shown an increasing number of Americans self-identifying as being highly stressed until the last survey, over fifty percent of Americans so identified.

Interestingly, over the same time period, surveys by the National Institute of Health have shown that the number of Americans living with chronic disease has also been increasing, until the last survey revealed that over fifty percent of Americans are now living with (and dying from) one or more chronic diseases. We don’t know if they are the same fifty percent, put there are plenty of studies linking chronic stress to chronic disease so it is really no surprise that the two have gone up hand-in-hand.

I would like to point out that this has been happening on Conventional medicine’s watch. Conventional medicine has ways to treat most of the symptoms of most chronic diseases but they are not very good at preventing or curing them. Similarly, what most of us are doing to cope with the stressors in our lives is not saving us. We need better ways to deal with the problems of chronic stress and chronic disease…and I’m here to say that we now have them.  

But I digress, back to my patient’s question. Once people develop a disease that is related to chronic stress, they often look back and say, “Yup, I guess I’ve been stressed for years.” But that is too late, it’s a lot more work to cure a chronic disease than to prevent it. A better approach would be to first notice when you are experiencing some of the early warning signs that stress is affecting you enough that it will eventually make you sick and then to act immediately and preemptively to make yourself impervious to stressors. You have to listen to your body and look at your life enough to see the early warning signs. Here are some of them:

·         Non-restorative sleep—you wake up in the morning as tired as you were when you went to bed. Also, waking up frequently and/or having trouble going back to sleep because your mind gets thinking of things.

·         Irritability—if you have a short fuse, if you fly off the handle, if you explode like a volcano, or any of those other great metaphors for losing your cool.

·         Decreased libido—too tired to make it and too tired to fight about it.

·         Tight neck, back, or shoulders—chronic tension held in your body anywhere, for that matter.

·         Bruxism—clenching your teeth in your sleep, if your dentist has recommended or given you a bite plate.

·         Headaches—most stress headaches are due to the tight muscles in your neck, but stress can cause other kinds of headaches, too.

·         Fatigue—exhausted, pooped, you only have enough energy for work with none left over for the rest of your life.

·         Digestive problems—heartburn, stomach pain, bloating, cramping, alternating diarrhea and constipation, loss of appetite.

·         Anxiety—feeling trapped in your life, or feeling like something dreadful is going to happen at any minute, or wanting to crawl out of your skin and go hide somewhere else.

·         Resignation—feeling like you just want to give up, like you’re too tired to keep going, overwhelmed.

If you have any of these signs, take the time now to learn how to make yourself impervious to stress. By the time you develop high blood pressure, obesity, arthritis, food and environmental sensitivities, leaky gut, autoimmune diseases, headaches, diabetes, cancer, ulcers, chronic back pain, depression and such, you’ve crossed the line and joined the fifty-plus percent of us living with a chronic disease.

You do not need to get sick from life situations over which you have no control. There are good answers to most of your stressors. I can help you with this in the office or check out all the resources available to you at my other website: www.the7tools.com.  

The Curious Story of Vitamin C

Vitamin C has an interesting story. It has lots of uses in your body. For one, it is an important co-factor for the enzymes that make collagen. That’s the tough, stringy protein that holds you all together. So scurvy, caused by an extreme deficiency of Vitamin C, is a disease where you are literally falling apart because you can’t make enough collagen.

The one-way valves in the perforating veins in your legs are made of collagen, so taking enough Vitamin C can help prevent their blowing out and causing varicose veins. Wrinkles and the thinning of your skin as you age is due to a loss of elastin and collagen in the skin, and adequate doses of Vitamin C over the years may slow down this loss. It is a co-factor for many other enzymes, as well.

Vitamin C is also a major player in the innate antioxidant system that is working inside all of your cells to keep their lipid layer membranes from going rancid and free radicals from damaging your DNA. Adequate levels of Vitamin C can prevent oxidative damage and possibly even prevent cancer. Linus Pauling believed that high doses of intravenous Vitamin C would be a safe and effective treatment for many cancers and he has recently been proven correct. (http://www.pyatthealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/IV-Vitamin-C-in-Cancer-Treatment.pdf).

So, what is an adequate dose? The US government set the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) for Vitamin C at 60 mg per day. This is the dose that has been found to prevent scurvy. But scurvy is a disease of extreme deficiency. What is a better recommendation for optimal wellness? Some researchers think doubling the current RDA would be enough (https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/69/6/1086/4714888), but I think Mother Nature might provide a better answer.

As it turns out, most mammals make their own Vitamin C. Cats, dogs, horses, cows, goats, and sheep, for example, make their own Vitamin C. In fact, all mammals do except for primates, guinea pigs, and some fruit-eating bats. Since we’re primates, for us, Vitamin C is an essential nutrient. We need to get it from our diets. Mother Nature is efficient, so, if you don’t need something, it goes away. That’s why fish living in caves for eons lose their eyes. Early primates lived on tropical fruits, high in Vitamin C, so they lost the enzymes needed to make their own.

If you look at how much Vitamin C other mammals make, it is surprisingly consistent across species at about 50 mg/kg/day. And, when an animal is stressed, that production can go up ten to thirteen fold to over 500 mg/kg/day. Interestingly, wild animals make more Vitamin C per kg then do their domesticated kindred. Animals who make their own Vitamin C are much less prone to heart disease and cancer than are domesticated animals and animals who don’t make their own.

A kg is 2.2 pounds. So, for a human who weighs 150 pounds, or about 69 kg, if they were a goat that weighed that much, their body would be making about 3.5 grams of Vitamin C per day, or about 58 times the RDA. And even more when they are stressed.

So, our RDA is good for the first two and a half pounds of you. And doubling that would treat five pounds of you. What about the rest? I think the RDA for Vitamin C should be set at 50 mg/kg/day. That’s the dose you would be getting if you were a monkey in the zoo. And not because the vet is a disciple of Linus Pauling’s, but because she knows that’s the dose that will keep you out of her office.

Why not treat yourself as well as a monkey? Take around three to four grams of Vitamin C every day, even more during times of stress.

There are all kinds of debates about the best form of Vitamin C and regimens for taking it to bowel tolerance and such, but these issues are splitting hairs compared to whether or not to even take the Vitamin C in the first place. I like the calcium ascorbate powder. It is buffered so the ascorbic acid (another name for Vitamin C) doesn’t bother your stomach, it’s a good source of calcium, it is inexpensive, and one-quarter tsp of powder provides 1000 mg or 1 gm of Vitamin C. Magnesium ascorbate might be even better since most people are also low in magnesium and don’t really need more calcium.

Regular daily doses of Vitamin C in the 3-5 gram range, depending upon your weight, is simple, safe, and effective prevention for many problems. (The definitive proof of this statement might not be here yet, but it’s coming. I can smell it.) Please make it part of you and your family’s wellness program today.

Choose the Best Way of Eating for You

How you eat is so important for your health that some prominent functional medicine practitioners have claimed that a good enough diet would prevent all disease. I think they’re getting a little carried away but the point is, eating in a way that is really healthy for your body is one of the primary pillars of your health. The problem is, no one can say what that best diet is. Because of different genetic make-ups and environmental demands, the best diet for you is highly personalized. “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.”

How do you find the diet that works the best for you? I suggest you choose one of two main strategies.

1.      Since most of the major diets that have gained traction on the world stage are research-based and time-tested, look at several of them and pick one that appeals to you…and then stick to it come Hell or high water. Use the Seven Tools, especially Rule Number One and the Three ‘A’s, to deal with any feelings that come up, such as deprivation or urges to emotionally eat. Recent studies trying to find the best diet for people with type II diabetes revealed that all the diets tested worked and all of them didn’t work. The determining factor was adherence. So, most any sensible diet will work for you if you stick to it. Practicing the Seven Tools of Healing is a reliable way to get to know yourself well on deeper and deeper levels. The practice also enables you to use your feelings as messengers for how you are working inside instead of as automatic determinants of your eating and other behaviors. Because of this, when you practice the Seven Tools of Healing along with your diet, your chances of sticking to it go up. Some diets you might consider include

a.      The Paleo diet

b.      The ketogenic diet

c.      The Ornish diet

d.      Weight watchers

e.      The Pericone prescription

f.       The plant paradox diet (low lectins)

g.      The Mediterranean diet

h.      The specific carbohydrate diet

i.       A low histamine diet

j.       There are many more diets designed to address specific issues. See if there is one for yours.

2.      The second strategy, and this is the one that allows you to personalize your diet as much as possible, is to learn to listen clearly and carefully to your body about what it wants you to eat and then try your best to give it that. Then listen again in half an hour to see how you feel because you ate that. Over time, this strategy helps you develop very good listening skills, which can be applied to listening to your body in the many different ways it talks to you, and it helps you develop the ability to discern your higher-interest voice from your saboteur voice. (Because they can sound very much alike.) This one skill alone can keep you out of a lot of trouble.

Please take the time to find the best way of eating for you. Your efforts will pay you dividends for years and years to come.

How Do You Raise Your Kids to be Happy and Healthy?

If we want to make the world a better place, we have to fill it with happier, healthier people. That means you and your children.

If you are already wounded, sick, angry, disillusioned, depressed, apathetic, anxious, or in any other way disempowered, know that healing is always possible. The physical, psychological, and energetic medicines are getting pretty good at what they do. You just have to search out what you need. But, despite all their combined power, prevention is still the best medicine.

To that end, good parenting is the most important job there is for making a better world. And, just as the healing professions have made a lot of progress in the last thirty years, so have the ideas and practices that make for effective, humane parenting. One of the best places I’ve found that puts the best parenting ideas and practices together is Hand in Hand Parenting (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/).

They believe in setting developmentally appropriate limits while staying deeply connected to your child. They also believe parents need good support for all they do. One resource for you is their parent club (https://ml233-db3bdb.pages.infusionsoft.net/). They offer an impressive suite of classes and services for parents and families. Much of their material is free, while one-on-one consulting, on-line, and in-person classes are very reasonably priced. They even have trained professionals in many communities around the country (and in 23 countries around the world (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/who-we-are/certified-instructors/)). For example, Michelle Pate is the local instructor here in the Seattle area (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/instructor/michelle-pate/).

I have looked over their material extensively and am impressed. Having helped raise four children of my own to adulthood and worked with families in my practice for 33 years, I know how important parenting is and also how difficult it can be to find good information and help that you can trust. How do you know that what you are doing to help your child learn to deal effectively with life is going to result in them growing up to be humane and strong? It takes a couple of generations to prove that a particular construct and resulting techniques actually work.

If you’ve ever been at your wit’s end with your kids, if you’ve ever been exhausted, worried, uncertain of how to help your child through this behavior or developmental stage, Hand In Hand parenting could be your new go-to resource (https://www.handinhandparenting.org/sitemap/). And they have over thirty years’ experience, so they know their ideas work.

Check them out. See what you think. I hope you are as impressed with them as I am. And, please, give yourself the education and support you need in order to do this most important and challenging endeavor: stewarding big souls in little bodies into adulthood.

You Can Do This!

Your healing is always possible. Think about it. It is theoretically possible for you to become happier, healthier, and wealthier. You know this at a deep level. That is why you keep looking. The question is how?

Well, it turns out that there are two keys which you can wield that make your healing much more probable, much more likely. And those keys are Truth and Kindness.

Truth is important because “you shall know your truth and your truth shall set you free.” That means that if you want to be free of anything in your life, like your chronic disease, addictions, depression, anxiety, pain, dysfunctional relationships, ring around the collar…anything at all…you need to work with your truth of it. That Law of Consciousness isn’t “you shall know your fantasy and your fantasy shall set you free.” That’s one of life’s biggest bummers because working with your fantasy is soooo much easier. But it doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked so far so you might as well admit that truth, give it up, and resign yourself to finding and knowing your truth.

And Kindness is so important because it is what actually changes things, it’s the true alchemist. Healing implies change. So, if you are at this place in your life where you need healing and you want to move to that place in your life where you are healed, something has to change. The question is what and how? Your Truth will tell you what and Kindness is how you do it. Except for a few surgical procedures, compassion is the only thing I’ve ever seen heal anyone in over thirty years of medical practice.

These keys are yours. You choose whether or not to use them. I highly recommend you choose to because that will greatly shorten your suffering. You only have so many years to live. Why not live them with as much happiness, health, and wealth as possible? Why put it off? Each year, a greater percentage of us is living with a chronic disease. A recent survey1 showed that over sixty percent of Americans are living with a chronic disease, and forty-two percent with more than one at a time. That means that what we’re doing across the board, as a society at large, to heal ourselves isn’t working very well.

It’s no big secret that our healthcare system itself is sick and needs to heal. But you don’t need to wait for that to happen. You can heal yourself right now. You are not a victim…not of other people, not of bureaucracies, not even of the environment (being victimized is a universal human experience; being a victim is a way of seeing yourself…not the same thing). You have more personal power than you realize. It’s time to step up and claim it. That is all.

Practicing the Seven Tools of Healing is the best way I’ve ever seen to accomplish all of these things. With them, you can skillfully and accurately find your truth and be kind to yourself about it. Your head can know what your heart already knows, which allows you to become comfortably ensconced in your personal power and live from your deeper knowing.

Read The Seven Tools of Healing, practice them every chance you get. Every moment holds your Truth. It is sitting right there in front of you and inside of you, ripe for the knowing. And you already have a great heart. Just learn to aim it at yourself, too. You are just as worthy of your love as anyone who has ever been born or ever will be born. I have every faith that you can do this.

https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2017/07/chronic-conditions-in-america-price-and-prevalence.html. Accessed 8/11/2018.

Doctors and Deer in the Headlights

I had an interesting experience yesterday. I went to a six hour, state-mandated training for physicians on recognizing suicide risk factors and treatment of suicidal ideation. And, even though I have mixed feelings about the legislature dictating requirements in medical education (I guess it’s inevitable, but should be kept to a minimum. I believe physicians should be able to self-regulate for the highest good of patients.) it was really quite good. Did you know that over ninety percent of people who survive their suicide attempt change their minds and live on until they die of other causes? And that most suicides are theoretically preventable? Henry Ford Health Systems, a local HMO in the Detroit area decided that the acceptable number of suicides in their patient population was zero and they did staff training and made policy and organizational changes and actually achieved a zero suicide rate for two years so far.

Anyway, what I found interesting is that when the presenter was talking about using antidepressants to treat people under 25 years of age, they are known to actually increase anxiety, agitation and suicidal thoughts. Everyone in the audience already knew this, but when it came to talking about what else to offer these young people as treatment, everyone, including the presenter, looked like deer in the headlights. All he had to offer was to educate the parents that these were known side-effects of the medications and, though they may theoretically increase the number of teen suicides, untreated depression also increases the risk of suicide.

There was no talk about that, well, if kids are getting depressed this young, maybe there is a genetic component and they should have their methylation status checked. No talk about other treatments for depression such as L-tryptophan, 5-HTP, SAMe, homeopathy, acupuncture, removing food reactions, healing the microbiome, relieving cranial restrictions…nothing like that. It was astounding. There were probably a hundred doctors in the room, all intelligent, caring people, yet they were so restricted to only pharmaceutical solutions, that they would stand by and let their patients die rather than research and recommend other options. Of course, they referred to mental health specialists for family systems or psychological problems.

I think that the take-home message for you, the medical consumer, is to know that, no matter what issue you go to them for, conventional doctors are the way they are, and protect yourself. Know that most of the advice you get from them likely comes from that pharmaceutical perspective. Know that there are always several different treatment options for any given person having a given condition. Don’t take a treatment that you are uncomfortable with until you have explored your options. Trust your gut regarding what you are comfortable with. Look into what may be offered for you by integrative medicine, functional medicine, Chinese medicine, mind/body/energy medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy, chiropractic. There are lots of options so you are very likely to find some that are effective and safe for you.

And, of course, Integral medicine has an approach to help people who are at risk for suicide. More about that later.

New Hope for Head Injuries

If you have had a head injury, or what medicine calls a “traumatic brain injury” (or TBI), medicine has had very little to offer you in the way of treatments to improve your chances of recovery…until now. Newer understanding of what goes on inside your brain and its blood vessels when it gets injured has led to the development of some very effective Functional Medicine and Physical Medicine treatments.

Normally, your brain is kept in a much protected, pampered environment. It is covered with a fine, delicate membrane closely applied to all of its convoluted surfaces, floating in a very specific fluid, called cerebrospinal fluid, and encased by a tough fibrous membrane that lines the inside of a hard, boney box called your skull. Even the blood vessels in your brain have a special lining to them that only lets in what the brain needs and keeps everything else out, especially the body’s inflammatory process. This is called the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Tensions in the membranes around the brain or restrictions in the bones of the skull can have a big influence on how the brain works.

When you hit your head, whole cascades of changes start happening. Like shoes in a shoebox when you shake it, the brain can slosh around inside the skull and bang up against the hard, bony barrier, bruising the delicate tissues. The BBB gets disrupted and inflammation can start to develop in the brain. This further breaks down the BBB and a vicious cycle gets started. This is why some people can have more brain dysfunction a month or two after a head injury than right away. It also slows recovery. With repetition and over time, these changes can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

To effectively treat head injuries and post-concussion syndrome, the injured brain needs to heal, the BBB needs to be re-established, and the tensions and restrictions in the membranes and bones need to be released. Ideally, it all needs to happen at the same time. A combination of functional medicine and Cranio-Sacral therapy can do this.

Jack was a ten year old boy who hit his head during a car accident two months before I first saw him. He was referred to me by his physiatrist because he continued to have a headache and double vision to the point where he couldn’t read to do his school work. The physiatrist had him on an excellent functional medicine protocol for head injuries that helped his memory, but the headache and double vision persisted. The optometrist was wanting to fit him with prism glasses but the physiatrist and his mother wanted to try a course of Cranio-Sacral treatment (CST) first.

We did have a working hypothesis to explain his double vision. There is a double-layered membrane inside the skull that separates your cerebrum from your cerebellum. It forms a kind of trampoline for the back half of your cerebrum to sit on. Three cranial nerves run the muscles that move your eyes. As you can imagine, their movement must be very precisely coordinated in order for your eyes to track together correctly. These three nerves come out of the brain stem and run a short distance between the two layers of the tentorium before entering the back of the eye socket on their way to their muscles. Abnormal tension in the tentorium can affect these nerves, disrupting their fine coordination and leading to eye tracking problems. Anyone with eye tracking problems deserves a good Cranio-Sacral evaluation.

After his third CST treatment, his double vision resolved and he was able to read again. His headache localized to a place in his right temple where several sutures of the cranial bones come together. Another three CST sessions got all of them freed up and his headache also resolved. Incidentally, his older sister had had four concussions over the past few years and was just living with a constant, dull headache. One session of CST resolved her headache.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), is a big problem in the US. In 2013, there were about 2.8 million emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths due to TBI (https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/index.html). Falls, moving vehicle accidents, and sports injuries were the most common causes. Sadly, in children under 4 years old, assaults are the leading cause of TBIs. TBIs can range from very mild, with no long-term adverse effects, to fatal. The more severe the TBI, the more likelihood of long term effects such as memory loss, emotional swings, learning problems, headaches, dizziness, sensitivity to light and sounds, neurological deficits, and such.

Most medical treatment of TBI is focused on treating the symptoms caused by it (http://www.msktc.org/tbi/factsheets/Emotional-Problems-After-Traumatic-Brain-Injury), but this new approach works to heal the brain and BBB so the symptoms just naturally resolve. Not all brain injury is traumatic (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/professor-cromer-learns-read/201203/after-brain-injury-the-dark-side-personality-change-part-i), and not all brain injury can be healed, so having these coping and supporting treatments can come in handy (https://www.brainline.org/people-with-TBI), but more healing is possible than we, as a society, are accessing.

Just learning to cope with the long-term changes caused by TBI isn’t your only option anymore. There is now much more hope for healing from concussions and other head injuries than the medical literature would lead you to believe. Anyone who has experienced a head injury or concussion deserves a good CST evaluation and functional medical support. This combined approach can help speed brain healing and decrease the number of long-term adverse effects of TBI (personal clinical experience). I now offer this complete service in my practice.

The combination of specific functional medicine concepts with Cranio-Sacral therapy can give you the best chance for healing. If you have had any head injuries and you suspect you may still be experiencing any effects from them, there is new hope. Please come in for an evaluation. If you know anyone who has had a head injury, spread the hope: please pass this along to them. I appreciate the chance to help them, too.

Why I Don't Support Medicare For All

I’ve been an advocate for universal healthcare since the ‘70s when I first became aware of such issues. But Medicare for all is a baaaad idea. There are better ways to achieve universal coverage and cost containment. Our federal government cannot be trusted with something as important as healthcare. A perfect example is Trump’s recent unilateral decision to stop paying insurance companies their cost sharing reduction subsidies, causing insurance premiums to soar for millions of people. Just think what he would do to a federally-run single payer system!

Even though there are government run single payer systems in other developed countries, such a system in the US would be a total disaster. Why? Those other systems work in countries where the federal government has the best interest of the people at heart. We have no proof this is the case in the US. Our federal government has the best interest of corporations at heart. (And, even though corporations are people (right?), that’s not going to help you any.)

For example, during the G.W. Bush years, he passed a law prohibiting Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for better prices. That’s pretty blatant. Drugs are so much cheaper in Canada because their medical system negotiates for better prices. (By the way, you can take advantage of that by having the prescriptions you have to pay out of pocket for filled through an on-line, mail-order Canadian pharmacy. Still perfectly legal. Bush tried to make that not so but couldn’t get it through.)

And when have you ever seen a government social program that wasn’t chronically under-funded? With the current conventional medical mindset dominating medicine, there is no way that we would not have rationing of healthcare. And the first to go would be anything conventional medicine considers alternative, the next would be the “less necessary” surgeries, such as those for pain from herniated discs. MRIs and expensive blood work would be regulated and more patients would be harmed and more physicians would get sued for missing diagnoses they couldn’t make because they couldn’t get the tests run.   

How could such a system be protected by the vagaries of whatever administration was in power? What would Regan, the Bushes, and Trump have done to such a system if it were already in place when they took office? What would happen to it if the radical right continues to gain momentum?

A single payer system would stifle medical innovation. If Ma Bell hadn’t gotten broken up, we’d all still be using rotary dialing.

Supporters of Medicare for all are also using funny numbers to support their arguments. They say that Medicare is so much more efficient than private insurances, with a 2-4% overhead compared to the 20-26% overhead for private companies. But that efficiency is achieved because they farm out most of the work to administer their plans to the private companies. And what they pay the private companies for that work is not included in their administrative overhead.

On the possible plus side, with a single payer system, it is easier to see that real wellness and prevention makes sense. It may motivate major societal changes, such as stopping the taxpayer subsidization of junk food, decreasing air and water pollution, outlawing cigarettes, taking real steps to make the workplace less stressful, expand parenting classes, and other such measures. But these advantages can also be gained by other ways to achieve universal coverage and cost containment that are not dependent upon the government. I have blogged previously about such a system.

So, please, give the matter some careful thought. If we adopt Medicare for all, we’d be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. You deserve better.

Integral Medicine as Primary Care

When you need medical care, how do you want to be treated?

·        Do you just want the symptoms treated or do you want to also get to the root causes and make meaningful changes there?

·        Do you want your health challenge treated in isolation or within the context of your whole life?

·        Do you want conventional medical treatments on one hand, getting loaded up with a shopping bag full of supplements on the other hand, or a rational, reasoned approach using the safest, most effective options from either or both camps?

·        Do you want your care determined by recipes and algorithms or do you want to be listened to and receive care carefully personalized to you?

·        Do you want to wait until a disease shows itself or are you interested in staying healthy and vital in the first place?

If you like the latter options, then you would like Integral Medicine as your primary care.

When you think about it, where do you go to get your whole self treated?  

Of all the medical specialties available, I went into Family Practice because I liked the idea of treating you as a whole person: not just a physical body, but as a thinking, feeling human being with family and social interactions, immersed in a physical and energetic environment. Every aspect of your life influences your health, so every aspect needs to be able to be evaluated when searching for the root causes of your health issues. I found out early in my career that conventional Family Practice, as broad-based as it is, is poorly equipped to treat you as a whole person.

So I kept exploring…and thinking…and trying different ways to treat my patients better and better. But when you look at all of conventional medicine and all of alternative medicine, there are so many different theories about health and disease, so many different treatment modalities, so much to know, that no one can know it all. And our time together in the office is finite. So most practitioners specialize in one area of medicine or another. Over the years, I found myself specializing, too, but not in any disease or organ system. I found myself specializing in a way of problem solving.

And this way can be applied to just about any problem anyone has come to me for help with. It turns out to be particularly helpful for chronic diseases. You see, a chronic disease resists our attempts to treat it. Otherwise, we would treat it, it would go away, and it wouldn’t be chronic. So, if you have a chronic disease, and half of Americans do (and half of them have more than one at a time), finding and treating the root causes is especially important. A chronic disease often asks us to cast a wider net and dig deeper because the root causes are often not where we think to look first. Integral Medicine is very well-suited to help you do this.

But you don’t need a chronic disease to benefit from Integral Medicine. It is also the best preventative medicine I’ve found. If you talk to a conventional doctor about prevention, they think you’re talking about immunizations. But there is so much more to real prevention. More and more, doctors are also taking into account diet and exercise. But there is much more to real prevention than even lifestyle choices. How you see yourself and the world has a major impact on the choices you make and how your body responds. Integral Medicine can help you work on this level as well as lifestyle, etc.

The main point I want to make is that you don’t have to just live with things. Healing is always possible. There is almost always an answer to your life’s problems. Let’s work together, let’s apply the Integral Medicine process to help you find your health, vitality, and real purpose in your life. Don’t give up until you’re happy with your health.

Corporate Hijinks Cost Millions of Lives

Recent evidence found in library archives proves that, in the Sixties, the sugar industry paid top-ranking nutrition experts at Harvard Medical School, to do an exhaustive literature review and prove that sugar had nothing to do with heart disease. The experts did as they were paid and the review was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967.

This review swayed the entire research community away from sugar and toward fats as the culprit. So, for the last fifty years, cardiovascular research has focused almost exclusively on the role of fats and cholesterol on the development of hardening of the arteries; and the pharmaceutical industry has focused on fat and cholesterol lowering drugs.

The food industry, meanwhile, has focused on low fat foods, often replacing the fat with sugar. Just what the sugar industry wanted.

So, now we have an epidemic of diabetes while heart disease is still the number one killer in our society with strokes, also caused by hardening of the arteries, running at third. (All cancers put together is second.)

Back in the Sixties, studies linking sugar to heart disease were starting to accumulate, that was what had the sugar industry worried. Their hijinks put off the truth for fifty years, but science, when done correctly, is self-correcting, and, finally, the truth about sugar is coming out.

What we now know is that it is the rate of change of sugar levels in your blood stream that causes the initial harm to the membrane that lines the inside of your arteries. Once injured, fats do get deposited under the membrane which then go on to form the arterial plaques. So it is easy to understand how fats could have been blamed, since they are what make up the plaque. But if the arterial lining doesn’t get injured in the first place, the plaques don’t form, no matter the cholesterol level.

Most integrative physicians and naturopaths have known about the sugar connection all along and now the conventional medical system is catching up. Many diabetes clinics now treat pre-diabetes and type II diabetes with a no GPS diet. That stands for no Grains, Potatoes, and Sugar diet. Those are the foods most likely to cause rapid swings in the level of blood sugar. They recommend filling in those lost calories with, you guessed it…fat. And they’re getting great results.

Think about all the people who developed heart disease and strokes over the past fifty year who maybe didn’t need to. Those kinds of corporate hijinks are still going on; some say more than ever. As government funding for research continues to get cut, private special interests are funding the research more and more. And they like to get what they pay for.

So, as a medical consumer, how can you protect yourself? After all, research is important. Researchers are required to reveal sources of research funding, but this is small protection. If the results of the research flies in the face of common sense, like the large study funded by General Mills that “proved” that sugar consumption has no influence on children’s behavior at school, or contradicts the ways of nature, you might be suspicious of it. You can always check in with your own deep inner knowing and trust what is right for you, no matter what the “experts” say. Research has shown that the people who do that are the ones who get better.

What to do with all these Feelings since the Inauguration

A patient asked me an excellent question yesterday. She asked, “What do you recommend people do with their feelings of angst, anxiety, anger, or fear since the inauguration?” I want to address this because I’ve seen several people whose autoimmune diseases have really flared in the last couple of weeks. I suspect that this is due to increased stress levels.

Consciousness feeds off of itself: fear begets fear, anger begets anger, and love begets love; so the first thing we want to do is not contribute to the lower vibrations. But we don’t get there by stuffing our feelings or denying that they are there. I’ll talk about what to do with these feelings in a moment, but first, I want to give some clear and practical advice.

A good response to what is happening in our country, nay, even in the whole world, is to dig deep into your center and ask yourself, “How can I do my best work in the world?” For example, if you are a teacher, your best work might be to teach with the most kindness and personal connection to your students you can muster. For me, that would be to help my patients find their true healing to the best of my ability. Not everyone can be a community organizer or political activist, but everyone has something of value to give to the world. Find your gift and figure out how best to give it.

One reason we’re in the trouble we’re in is because the rich have gotten too rich and now have the power to grab everything for themselves. You vote in elections but you also vote with every dollar you spend. As much as you can, support local economies. Buy from local farmers instead of from General Mills, buy from small shops instead of from Walmart, buy from local artists, listen to local musicians, do whatever you can to spread resources out rather than concentrate them with large international corporations. This will help to create a more diverse, robust community.

As to all those feelings that keep flooding in, first, just let them in. Feel them as fully and you can and practice being kind to yourself that you are having those feelings. Repressing, denying, rationalizing, sugar coating, or trying to change how you are feeling in any way backfires and makes those feelings more persistent. Your feelings are just the result of whatever you become aware of passing through your world view. Your feeling itself is never the problem. If there is a problem at all, it lies in whatever you are aware of, or in how you are looking at it.

If you resist your feelings, or the opposite, wallow in them, you risk contributing to the low vibrations floating around the planet. Just see your truth of however you are feeling, leave it alone, and choose to focus, instead, upon being kind to yourself that you are currently experiencing that particular truth. The kindness will change your feelings. You don’t have to force any changes on yourself.

This approach works because your creative energies flow wherever you focus your attention. Repression and denial are forms of attention. So, you want to free yourself from any of that. And you do that by fully accepting the truth of however you are feeling. Then you make a conscious choice to focus on kindness toward yourself. When you do that, your creative energy flows toward kindness, creating more of it, thus making your life, and the world as a whole, better.

Give this approach to your feelings a try. I bet you’ll be amazed at the results. Together, we can stop this backsliding of human consciousness and get it growing in a higher direction again. Here’s to a better planet moving forward.

If you like these suggestions, please share. Thanks.

The 3 Best New Year’s Resolutions to Create Lasting Change: Not your grandma’s resolutions

By Grace Porter, LCPC

Ok, maybe they are your grandma’s resolutions. Chances are I don’t know her or anything about her so who am I to say… But this a non-traditional way of looking at New Year’s Resolutions-a way that just might work!

New Years is a time of reflection as we say goodbye to one year and start thinking about ringing in the next. 2016 has been a hard year for many people and many of us are hoping for change in the coming year.

In previous years, have you tried to hold yourself accountable for creating the changes in your life by making New Year’s Resolutions? How well has it worked? The thing is, change IS possible but we often go about it the wrong way. We cannot effort our way into being different. Will power only goes so far! The process of change works differently than that. I’m not going to get into that here because you can read about it in our other blog posts but I will say this: Telling yourself you will eat better or go to the gym more often or get more sleep or cut back on alcohol or any of the other resolutions people make may work for a hot second but it won’t create the lasting change you seek.

A few years ago, I was in the habit of attending the gym regularly with two of my friends. We would grab ellipticals next to each other and gab while we ran. We joked that it was our group therapy. Well, January rolled around and we couldn’t find any machines next to each other, let alone three ellipitcals in a row. But by the 3rd week of January we were back to our normal routine because, you guessed it, all the resolution-based gym goers were gone!

Are you wanting to make changes in the New Year what might work better? Here are 3 Resolutions I suggest for the coming year (and of course I say that they work best together so maybe resolve to rock the revolution trio, okay?)

1      I will practice mindfulness. For some, this might mean meditation, either in a group setting or at home, but mindfulness is actually much more than that. It is a practice of becoming aware of what is present in any given moment. We can practice mindfulness by paying attention to our emotions, to our physical sensations, to the patterns that present themselves in our lives, to our thoughts, to the situations we find ourselves in, to what is happening in our relationships, and so much more. We cannot create change unless we know and accept where we truly are. Mindfulness is the practice of making space in our consciousness for what we are actually experiencing, and it is something we can choose to do moment by moment throughout the day or at a designated meditation or journaling time. And of course, mindfulness works best when we can be with our current truth in a kind and gentle way, and this brings us to resolution number two.

2      I will practice compassion for myself. Compassion is a practice of looking at ourselves and our situations from the heart’s perspective. It is loving kindness and gentleness. Compassion helps us hold space for our truths even when we are suffering or struggling. At The 7 Tools we call compassion “the Alchemist” because it is the transformative function. The practice of compassion puts our heart in the driver’s seat of our creative powers. Then, the thoughts, feelings, and choices that support our highest self just naturally start to flow. Our energy is freed up to be motivated by love. And love works toward our highest good.

I have found for myself and for my clients that the practice of compassion does not always change what we do on the outside (we might still choose to eat healthy food or go to the gym) but that it shifts the internal motivation from a place of self-criticism and fear to a place of love and supporting oneself.  It is the difference between not eating the cake out of fear that it will add to the waistline and not eating the cake because what the body needs in this moment is a seaweed salad. Or fully enjoying eating the cake without making justifications or self-demeaning remarks about it. Compassion breeds choices that are based in love and support, not punishment and restriction. We don’t have to try to create change when we practice compassion, it will happen on its own. The trick is to have compassion for yourself even when you become aware that you have not been having compassion for yourself.

3      I will keep showing up for myself even when things get hard. Often, when we start looking to create lasting change in our lives, we are confronted, (or maybe accosted is a more apt word), by the fears and beliefs that have kept us in our current patterns. It can feel vulnerable and scary to go to those places. I have had clients ask me if they will feel this way forever or say that they are afraid that if they look at a certain piece of their “stuff” that it will overwhelm them. The truth is that whatever you have experienced so far in your life, you have survived it. Our healing can be manageable and we don’t have to do it all at once. If we look at the piece that is in front of us and just keep on doing that, with time, we get where we need to go. But as one client recently told me, “This is hard!” And it is. It takes diligence, forbearance, and persistence (and compassion!). And it is so worth it. That same client also frequently tells me that various things are feeling better and that the more work they do, the more manageable the next piece feels. The river of sorrow does not sweep them away and they feel more courage to be themselves. As Dory has been known to say, “Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…”

So Happy New Years from all of us at The 7 Tools of Healing! If you want more info about, well, any of this, check out the other blog posts or sign up for our mailing list. We’ll see you in the New Year!