The Importance of Sleep

The importance of a good night's sleep can't be overstated. We need sleep like we need air and water. Some of our modern American torture techniques include sleep deprivation, which when prolonged can lead to hallucinations and irritability. According to a recent study, night-shift workers have an increased incidence of cancer, possibly due to the disruption of the natural sleep cycle.

The pineal gland secretes melatonin, which is thought to play an important role in regulating sleep cycles. The Chinese medicine explanation for sleep involves blood circulation, the Heart and the Liver. During the day the 神 Shen, or spirit, resides in the Heart, giving us the spark of life that connects us to the outside world. At night the Liver is said to "store the blood", and the Shen goes with the blood to the Liver.

Insomnia can be due to a number of factors, including stress, constitutional deficiency, overeating or eating too close to bedtime. In TCM diagnosis this may correspond to Liver Qi Stagnation, Liver or Heart Fire, Liver Blood Deficiency, or Food Stagnation.

Another cause of poor sleep could be sleep apnea. If the soft tissue in the rear of the throat collapses and closes during sleep, your breathing will be obstructed, there could be very loud snoring, and you won't get adequate oxygen. In this case you may need a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, which covers your mouth and nose at night and helps to keep your airways open. While not an ideal solution for the long-term, a CPAP machine can greatly improve the quality of your sleep. To determine if you need a CPAP machine, you may need to stay overnight at a sleep center, where they will observe you while you sleep.

Insomnia is one of the things that acupuncture and Chinese medicine are most effective at treating. If you have occasional or chronic insomnia, go see your local acupuncturist.

Also on the web:
Daytime Lullaby by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times
Sleep-deprivation.com
Effect of sleep deprivation on driving

No Drugs Down The Drain Week

It's official, folks. There is a week-long celebration in the state of California dedicated to NOT dumping your pharmaceutical drugs down the toilet. Your BCP's and Viagra now join the likes of pet alligators and paper towels.... Just don't do it.

Why is it so important? Why are we focusing for an entire week on Drugs Down the Drain, when there is only one day dedicated to all of the presidents of the United States combined? Because that stuff can end up in your drinking water, that's why!!

Forget about saving the environment, and all that stuff about polluting the rivers and killing innocent plants and animals.... think about your internal environment!! Pharmaceutical drugs are nasty, they are meant to be nasty. They are designed to be pervasive and work really well at what they do, which is destroy their target micro-organism/chemical pathway/physiological process. Because they are so good at what they do, they sometimes do things that drug-makers and researchers had no idea they would do until after they'd been in use for a while. The pharmaceutical drug industry is still very young, beginning with the advent of penicillin in the 1930's. This revolution in health care has saved a lot of lives, but it has also bred a lot of super drugs that now threaten our ability to utilize them as useful tools, as well as threaten our own immune systems with their potency.

Here's a more eloquent quote from the book, The Lost Language of Plants, by Stephen Harrod Buhner:

Many excreted pharmaceuticals and their metabolites are not biodegradable and go on producing chemical effects forever. Most that do biodegrade are regularly replenished by the need for continual dosing or by new prescriptions for new people. As pharmaceuticals are excreted in pure and metabolized forms they also intermix in the waste streams that flow into the environment in ways that cannot be predicted, with effects that are not understood. Researchers have found that metabolites, chemicals produced as by-products of pharmaceutical interaction with the body, tend to be more persistent in the environment, and are sometimes more powerful in their actions, than the drugs from which they are derived.

The mixing of chemical compounds in the environment is like mixing your drinks; if you start the night with a fine wine and end it with plastic-bottle vodka and whisky, you're going to regret being alive the next morning. But unlike alcohol, which does metabolize and degrade in our bodies and in the environment, these synthetic compounds do not.

So, remember, when your hands reach for that bottle of pills you no longer need, and you feel the temptation of the shiny white porcelain, think of yourself for a minute. You don't want to drink that in your water later, do you?

Book Review: Molecules of Emotion

I first read this book during my former life as a researcher in endocrinology. Back then it inspired me and gave me hope that unadulterated science and a sincere search for truth could really benefit the world and its inhabitants. After four years of early mornings, late nights, and weekends spent in a laboratory, I emerged from that valuable experience feeling like money, and the marriage of money to politics, will always win out in the end.

I just finished reading this book again, now in my final year of studies in a completely different paradigm, and I have to say that it remains a very inspirational book. It is accessible to those without prior knowledge of science, but still presents enough information to learn from it and understand the scientific community. If you can get past some of the writing in the first chapter (Jonah's a pretty harsh literary critic), this book on science turns into a really engaging story.

The author, Candace B. Pert, goes through several transformations in her career, from graduate student to Principal Investigator with tenure at the National Institutes Health to the private sector and back to a professorship at a university, all the while delving deeper into the world of holistic health care. She eventually becomes the token scientist at events like the annual National Wellness Conference, and explores her own health and healing through yogic breathing and stretches, meditation, touch therapies, and emotional release.

The most interesting part about the book is how science confirms everything we know in Chinese medicine about qi, emotions and health. The author doesn't talk much about Chinese medicine, but I think that if she learned more about the theory, she'd discover more connections between that understanding of the human body and her research.

For instance, I recently had a talk with my friend Prathap, a fellow science geek and current medical student, about how Chinese medicine views the human body and physiology versus the dominant allopathic biomedical design. One topic lead to another, and we got to talking about ADH or anti-diuretic hormone. ADH is released by the posterior pituitary and acts on the collecting ducts of the kidneys. The exact same molecule is also referred to as vasopressin. ADH is the moniker used in regards to the renal system, whereas vasopressin is used when discussing constriction of the arteries in the cardiovascular system, with the regulatory receptors in the brain. The two systems are rarely discussed together.

In Chinese medicine, the brain is considered a "sea of marrow," containing the thick yin essences of the body under the governance of the Kidney system. The Kidneys are also responsible for the movement and distribution of fluids in the body, serving as the "water" that controls the "fire" of the Heart. When blood pressure is low, or the fire of the Heart is relatively subdued, the Kidneys then control the reabsorption of fluids, thereby increasing blood pressure. The blood vessels also constrict in response to the same chemical signaling, and the fire of the Heart is relatively enhanced.

ADH is currently being studied for its role in social behavior. ADH is increased in the body during sexual activity, and is thought to induce male-on-male aggression in response to the threat of another encroaching upon "his" female. In Chinese medicine, the Kidneys govern both the yin and yang of sex: the sexual fluids, eggs/sperm, libido and activity. The Kidneys are also the house of Will, the drive to live, and is associated with the emotion of fear. The same chemical messenger that regulates water and blood pressure is also involved in sexuality and survival, and the emotion of fear is a direct stimulus for aggression and possessiveness. It is possible to see the connections between the emotions, sexuality, and survival in the context of the biochemical reactions going on in the body when viewed under the Chinese medical metaphor. All of these processes belong to different departments of science under the allopathic model, but in Chinese medicine they all belong to one system that is unified with all the other systems of the body to create one functioning vessel.

Since the overwhelming majority of scientific experiments require the formation of a provable hypothesis, study of the Chinese medical theory may give the new-era science researchers some insight as to how to direct their holistic medical research. New "discoveries" can then be made to further elucidate just how much Chinese medicine makes sense.

Going back to Molecules of Emotion, the take home message that I got from Candace Pert was that free flow of emotions is the most important aspect of wellness, and that expression of emotions is the key to healing: be it anger, fear or sadness; joy, courage or hope.