CEO Newsletter 2008 - Number 2

Contents
1. Why Americans Should Ingest More Excrement.
2. Back Pain Linked to Brain Changes

1. Why Americans Should Ingest More Excrement. By Kent Sepkowitz
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2007, at 2:53 PM ET

Thot you might find this interesting.
Reminds me of my younger days growing up on the farm.
Sandwiches would be brought out to the field so that we could continue field work with less downtime. There were no sinks in the field so we ate with hands that had touched the steering wheels of the tractors that we drove after handling the animals or cleaned the pens or what ever. I very rarely missed a day of school or work from sickness. Imagine that! We are far too obsessed with cleanliness these days. Much to our detriment!
Dr. Jim Aldridge

One year ago, the now-famous E. coli outbreak arising from contaminated spinach rattled the natural-food industry and gave carnivores a moment of schadenfreude. The story had the heartbreaking elements we have come to dread: A young child eats something mundane and dies a horrid death. Boom, gone. I have (unsuccessfully) treated one such case and rate it as perhaps the most chilling moment of my career.
Since then, the United States has seen at least four additional food-borne outbreaks: salmonella in peanut butter and in spinach, botulism in canned chili, and the current Topps Meat Co. recall of 21.7 million pounds (40,000 cows' worth) of E. coli-tainted ground beef. Those with an insatiable interest in E. coli O157:H7 (along with the lawyers who traffic in this corner of the human misery market) can keep up-to-date here.
With every outbreak, the same question sounds: Why can't we keep the food chain clean? The annual numbers aren't small, nor are they decreasing. By one estimate, about one-fourth of Americans get "food poisoning" of some type each year, 300,000 are hospitalized, and a few thousand die. The perps remain the same—E. coli, listeria, salmonella, and all the rest. Why is this public-health problem so difficult to solve? This is America, after all, replete with wondrously harsh chemicals that can kill anything. Why can't we scrub away the bacteria our guts don't get along with?
Maybe we are taking the wrong approach. Rather than trying to make our food and water ever cleaner, we should focus instead on making sure it's dirty enough to assure our good health.
Here's why. Our struggle to purify food and water has been ongoing for thousands of years. Ask any expert to name mankind's greatest public-health advance, and the answer will be not vaccines, or antibiotics, or disposable diapers, or refrigeration, or mosquito netting. Though wondrous, each is dwarfed by the greatest invention of them all: plumbing. Why did the Romans successfully rule the world? The Cloaca Maxima, ancient Rome's elaborate sewer system, a structure so effective that Pliny the Elder considered it the "most noteworthy" accomplishment of the empire. And why does the West still run economic circles around the developing world? Because we don't ingest each other's excrement. At least not that often.
The triumph of Western civilization is, first and foremost, a triumph of pipes and valves and the fact that water runs downhill. Aqueducts bring fresh water in, cobblestoned underground tunnels move used water out, and, presto, our world is clean.
But here is the problem: We have become victims of our own success. Ever wonder why your dog can gobble, lick, and gnaw all he wants along the glorious buffet of a city street and (almost) never get sick? Your dog is used to eating shit. Americans, on the other hand, grow up eating almost no shit at all. Our food is hosed and boiled and rinsed and detoxified and frozen and salted and preserved. Recently, we have begun to irradiate it, too—just in case. As a result, when our bodies encounter the occasional inevitable bug, they're unhappy. Our centuries-long program of winnowing out all the muck has turned us into sissies and withered the substantial part of the immune system mediated by our intestinal tract.
Kids have it worse than adults. Even with today's near-sterility, adult intestines have learned enough tricks to ward off major trouble, albeit clumsily. In contrast, modern kids are near-bubble babies. Our mammalian disaster plan is a good one: A child receives antibodies against countless infections from his mother through the placenta and then from breast milk. With that protection, the infant can take his time to develop his own antibodies. But these days, mothers have scant immunity because they too were raised in America the Hygienic. (Also, breast-feeding may be skipped.) So, kids have zero experience with routine gut infections, and when they encounter one that has slipped past our pipes and filters, the result can be catastrophic.
The best response to E. coli and the other pathogens that cause food poisoning is to recognize, humbly, that we can get the food supply almost perfectly clean, but never completely. There's just too much crap out there: human crap, horse crap, cow crap, pig crap. In the feces of these and other animals are trillions of infectious agents (bacteria, viruses, fungi, worms, and everything else that upsets the stomach). Try as we may to contain the mess, we can never win. Pig dung fouls rivers; cow crap seeps into water tables; human shit kicks back every time heavy rains overwhelm a sewage system's filtration capacity.
Furthermore, the closer to nature we get, the likelier we are to eat more shit. That's a growing problem now, as more people seek a less processed, more flavorful diet. To make matters worse, the alliance of natural foods with big-league distribution systems has guaranteed that people across the country can all simultaneously eat the same E. coli-laden spinach or meat grown by the same farm. The two key aspects of a healthy diet—nutritious food and safe food—seem irrevocably at odds with each other. How can we have what we want and still feel safe?
Maybe we can't. Observant Jews long ago sided with safety over taste by boiling, boiling, and then boiling some more. Cholent is the Yiddish word for food that is prepared in advance of the Sabbath, when ovens cannot be lit. Cholent cooks on a hot plate for 18 hours or more, pushing the food to within an inch of its life. Without ever sampling it, you can imagine its perfect non-ness, not even a hint of taste. But oh-so-safe.
Failing the mainstreaming of McCholent, what other options do we have? We can't just put all the crap back into our diet—we would suddenly see infant mortality rates that rival those of Angola. But we will never remove it all, either. So, here's a suggestion: Rather than frantically throwing money at new ways to eradicate the pathogens that reside in shit, we should fund the boring scientists who focus on untangling the intricacies of the gut's immune system. Labs, answer this: How much shit can we safely eat and, as importantly, how much must we eat to remain healthy?

Editor’s notes: As I continue to add years to my life I notice that we seem to be getting sicker and sicker. (Hey, if Kent Sepkowitz can use the term “shit” in his article, I think I can get a pass on “sicker”). Asthma once rare in kids when I was in school,l is now everywhere – I wonder what the rates are in Afghanistan and India? My bet - a lot lower ratio than in the ultra clean western society. I received the following from a friend who knows that I enjoy wine.
To paraphrase Ben Franklin, “In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria.”
In a number of carefully controlled trials, scientists have demonstrated that if we drink 1 liter of water each day, at the end of a year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of Escherichia Coli (E. coli) – bacteria found in feces!
In other words, we are consuming 1 kilo of poop.
However, we do NOT run that risk when drinking wine and beer (or tequila, rum whiskey or other liquor) because alcohol has to go through a purification process of boiling, filtering and/or fermenting.
Remember Water =Poop, Wine =Health. Therefore, it’s better to drink wine and talk stupid than to drink water and be full of shit.

Armed with the information about Poop laced water boosting the immune system, you might be tempted to add a little water to your wine. DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!!!!
No need to thank me for this valuable information, I’m doing it as a public service.


2. Back Pain Linked to Brain Changes
Chronic back pain is linked to physical changes in the brain, according to researchers in Germany. Story from BBC NEWS: - Published: 2007/02/18 00:05:42 GMT
A team found patients with the condition also had microstructural changes in the pain-processing areas of their brains.
A major problem for patients with chronic pain is making their condition believable to doctors, relatives and insurance carriers Dr Jurgen Lutz
Chronic back pain can cause misery to sufferersThe scientists said the work provided evidence that the condition was real and it could aid treatment research.
The research was presented at the Radiological Society of North America's annual meeting, in Chicago.
To study the condition, the researchers used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to look at the differences between sufferers' and healthy volunteers' brains.
They discovered the brains of patients with chronic back pain had a more complex and active microstructure compared with the healthy volunteers' brains.
The changes occurred in regions of the brain associated with pain-processing, emotion and stress response.
Cause or result?
Lead researcher Dr Jurgen Lutz, a radiologist at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, Germany, said: "A major problem for patients with chronic pain is making their condition believable to doctors, relatives and insurance carriers. DTI could play an important role in this regard.
"With these objective and reproducible correlates in brain imaging, chronic pain may no longer be a subjective experience. For pain diagnosis and treatment, the consequences could be enormous."
However, the researchers said more research would be needed to determine whether the physical changes were a cause or result of the pain.
Co-author Gustav Schelling, from the Department of Anaesthesiology at Munich University, said: "It's difficult to know whether these are pre-existing changes in the brain that predispose an individual to developing chronic pain, whether ongoing pain creates the hyperactivity that actually changes the brain organisation, or if it is some mixture of both. "DTI may help explain what's happening for some of these patients, and direct therapeutic attention from the spine to the brain."
Dr Alison McGregor, a back pain expert from Imperial College London, said: "Eighty percent of the population suffer from back pain at some point in their lives, and quite often you cannot find a physical cause for that."
She said the study added to a growing body of research that revealed chronic pain was associated with physical changes in the brain. "We are gradually getting more of an understanding on whether the central nervous system is involved in back pain - however we are not really sure what the physical changes mean."
Editor’s notes: This will be the start of several articles relating typical conditions seen in Chiropractic offices and the latest information linking them to brain function challenges. Dr. Ken Vinton continues to keep me informed as the amount of information on the relationship between brain function and health challenges streaming into public domain needs an army to keep up with all the reading.
While attending the Karl Parker Seminar in Las Vegas last week end I noted that there were 5 display booths for Chiropractic that directly related to brain function. We are coming of age. If you are still presenting Chiropractic from a bone on nerve root position you are not only archaic in understanding but limiting the great potential of Chiropractic to a narrow scope of benefits. What was so interesting was that every one of the other brain approach groups made their way to the CGS/InVision booth. You should ask “Why”!?The answer is because they recognized that what the InVision did was validate their product’s application. They saw the benefit of the InVision “Stress Response Evaluation” in two ways – 1. being able to apply their product more effectively and 2. being able to prove that their care/treatment actually changed the neurophysiology.
PhDs, research scientists, and other professionals are stunned by the InVision and want it used in other clinical applications. Chiropractors, get on board or you will be left standing at the station.


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CEO Newsletter 2008 - Number 1

Contents
1. Studies Show Yoga has Multiple Benefits
2. The Medicated Child

1. Studies Show Yoga has Multiple Benefits By C. Vidyashankar, MDFriday, Dec 28, 2007 9:44PM UTC CHANNAI, India (Reuters Health) -
Yoga induces a feeling of well-being in healthy people, and can reverse the clinical and biochemical changes associated with metabolic syndrome, according to results of studies from Sweden and India. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of heart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure, obesity and high blood sugar. Dr. R.P. Agrawal, of the SP Medical College, Bikaner, India, and colleagues evaluated the beneficial effects of yoga and meditation in 101 adults with features of metabolic syndrome. In the study, 55 adults received three months of regular yoga including standard postures and Raja Yoga, a form of transcendental meditation daily, while the remaining received standard care. Waist circumference, blood pressure, blood sugar, and triglycerides were significantly lower, and "good" HDL cholesterol levels were higher in the yoga group as compared to controls, Agrawal's team reports in the journal Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice. In the second study, published online December 19 in BioMed Central Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Dr. Anette Kjellgren from the University of Karlstad, Sweden and colleagues evaluated the beneficial effects of yoga-like breathing exercises on healthy volunteers. Fifty-five adults were advised to practice "Sudarshan Kriya," which involves cycles of slow normal and rapid breathing exercises. The exercises were practiced for an hour daily, six days a week for six weeks, while 48 controls were advised to relax in an armchair for 15 minutes daily. At the end of the study period, feelings of anxiety, stress and depression were significantly lower and levels of optimism significantly higher in the yoga group compared to the control group, Kjellgren and colleagues report. Yoga induces a "relaxation response" associated with reduced nervous system activity and a feeling of well-being probably due to an increase in antioxidants and lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, they suggest. Yoga not only helps in prevention of lifestyle diseases, but can also be "a powerful adjunct therapy when these diseases arise," co-investigator Dr. Faahri Saatiglou, from the University of Oslo, told Reuters Health. "We do not emphasize this point enough in our Western health care." SOURCES: Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, December 2007, BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, online December 19, 2007.

Editor’s notes: Interesting outcomes but it would have been better if they had some other methods of measuring the benefits. The subjective responses of “feeling better” sounds like Chiropractic before we could measure neurological responses.
Over the Christmas break I found myself in a discussion about the benefits of meditation with a 30 year practitioner who became very defensive when we started talking about being able to measure the brain wave state. Her response was, “How do you know that the brain frequency is the right one for me”? What it really came down to was the challenge we face every day – fear of learning that what you believe to be the truth, just isn’t so. What really got her fired up was my suggesting that we monitor her brain activity during her meditation to see if she was really in a low Alpha wave pattern. The unspoken dread of, what if I’m not in the true meditative state, prompted her reaction. Never mind that the brain wave patterns have been documented for 50 years; she “knew” that she was doing it right. The discussion prompted me to want to learn more about “Meditation” and the universe (in this case being Dr. Ken Vinton, who must of picked up on my conversation from 2000 miles distant) provided, when I arrived back in the office in January, I found several e-mails from him all about - you guessed it – “Meditation” There are times when Ken can be very scary – in a nice way mind you. So thanks Ken! I discovered that there was much more to meditation than sitting in a lotus position and doing some breathing exercises. While I have been focused on the brain wave patterns and frequency responses, there are other consideration as well. I’ll share some of these in the newsletter articles.
In our quest for healing, especially within the natural approach associated with Chiropractic, we will be directed to varied approaches such as: yoga, exercise, supplements, etc. In my experience the profession applies so many other alternative concepts that the adjustment tends to be lost. Our position has always been that the Adjustment is the singular most effective approach in calling the nervous system into action. I compare the adjustment to hitting the default button on a computer. The more specific the adjustment, the less wasted energy the body generates in the healing process. With this in mind, add other healing activities to the mix – first the specific adjustment (specific in direction force and intent), then re-training of the nervous system into a new (corrective) neural response. This retraining could be anything from massage to biofeedback, including yoga, breathing exercises, neuromuscular reintegration, speech therapy etc. The point I’m making here is that “We” can use all the information and benefits of other healing methods in practice; however, there are two very important concepts to remember: 1. Before we just start recommending a particular therapy, we must first must study about what we speak and 2. The Chiropractic adjustment is still the most powerful method of resetting the neurological response!

2. THE MEDICATED CHILD Tuesday, January 8, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBSFRONTLINE examines why more than 6 million American children are taking powerful psychiatric drugs www.pbs.org/frontline/medicatedchild
In recent years, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of children being diagnosed with serious psychiatric disorders and prescribed medications that are just beginning to be tested in children. The drugs can cause serious side effects, and virtually nothing is known about their long-term impact. “It’s really to some extent an experiment, trying medications in these children of this age,” child psychiatrist Dr. Patrick Bacon tells FRONTLINE. “It’s a gamble. And I tell parents there’s no way to know what’s going to work.”
In The Medicated Child, airing Tuesday, January 8, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), FRONTLINE producer Marcela Gaviria confronts psychiatrists, researchers and government regulators about the risks and benefits of prescription drugs for troubled children. The biggest current controversy surrounds the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Formerly called manic depression, bipolar disorder was long believed to exist only in adults, but, in the mid-1990s, bipolar in children began to be diagnosed at much higher rates, sometimes in kids as young as 4 years old. “The rates of bipolar diagnoses in children have increased markedly in many communities over the last five to seven years,” says Dr. Steven Hyman, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “I think the real question is, are those diagnoses right? And in truth, I don’t think we yet know the answer.”
Like many of the 1 million children now diagnosed with bipolar, 5-year-old Jacob Solomon was initially believed to suffer from an attention deficit disorder. His parents reluctantly started him on Ritalin, but over the next five years, Jacob would be put on one drug after another. “It all started to feel out of control,” Jacob’s father, Ron, told FRONTLINE. “Nobody ever said we can work with this through therapy and things like that. Everywhere we looked it was, ‘Take meds, take meds, take meds.’”
Over the years, Jacob’s multiple medications have helped improve his mood, but they’ve also left him with a severe tic in his neck which doctors are having trouble fully explaining. “We’re dealing with developing minds and brains, and medications have a whole different impact in the young developing child than they do in an adult,” says Dr. Marianne Wamboldt, the chief of psychiatry at Denver Children’s Hospital. “We don't understand that impact very well. That’s where we’re still in the Dark Ages.”
DJ Koontz was diagnosed with bipolar at 4 years old, after his temper tantrums became more frequent and explosive. He was recently prescribed powerful antipsychotic drugs. “It is a little worrisome to me because he is so young,” says DJ’s mother, Christine. “If he didn’t take it, though, I don’t know if we could function as a family. It’s almost a do-or-die situation over here.” DJ’s medicines seem to be helping him in the short run, but the longer-term outlook is still uncertain. “What’s not really clear is whether many of the kids who are called bipolar have anything that’s related to this very well-studied disorder in adults,” says Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute for Mental Health. “It’s not clear that people with that adult illness started with what we’re now calling bipolar in children. Nor is it clear that the kids who have this disorder are going to grow up to have what we used to call manic-depressive illness in adulthood.”
While some urge caution when it comes to bipolar in children, FRONTLINE talks with others who argue that we should intervene with drug treatments at even younger ages for children genetically predisposed to the disorder. “The theory is that if you get in early, before the first full mood episode, then perhaps we can delay the onset to full mania,” says Dr. Kiki Chang of Stanford University. “And if that’s the case, perhaps finding the right medication early on can protect a brain so that these children never do progress to full bipolar disorder.”
FRONTLINE’s 2001 documentary Medicating Kids can be watched online at www.pbs.org/frontline/shows/medicating
The Medicated Child is a FRONTLINE co-production with RAINMedia, Inc. The writer and producer is Marcela Gaviria. The co-producer is Will Cohen. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation. FRONTLINE is closed-captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers and described for people who are blind or visually impaired by the Media Access Group at WGBH. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. The executive producer of FRONTLINE is David Fanning.
pbs.org/pressroom
Press contactsDiane Buxton (617) 300-5375 diane_buxton@wgbh.org

Editor’s notes: Perhaps we are sending the wrong drug pushers to jail – How about we free all the marijuana pushers and jail all the real criminals - the drug lobbyists, drug executives, drug sales people and MD pushers responsible for inflicting this crud on the kids!

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Richard G. Barwell, DC,
Chiropractic Equity Offices Inc.,
#503 - 188 Pinellas Lane, Cocoa Beach Fl, USA – 32931
Phone 321 868 5690
E-mail: tequityc@aol.com