So Cold... So Cold...

A new study has shown that the so-called "cold shoulder" can actually feel quite chilly.

In Chinese medicine, it's understood that emotions can have a very clear physical effect. In fact, emotions are one of the three classical causes of disease (the other two being weather and external trauma - newer Chinese medical concepts include "miscellaneous qi" or "pestilential qi" which roughly correspond to bacteria and viruses).

For instance, grief is said to "consume the qi." If you've ever known someone who was in a major depression, you know this to be true (remember, qi is roughly equivalent to breath or energy). Anger makes the qi rise quickly - if you know someone with an anger problem, you know this is true. What happens? Their face gets red, they start yelling and screaming - all indications that the qi has risen quickly to the upper part of the body and needs to come out.

It should therefore come as no surprise that even other people's emotions can affect you. A particularly devastating type of ostracism put to use during China's ruinous Cultural Revolution was to be "struggled" by your comrades - you would be put in the middle of a circle and made to confess to your various sins against the revolution. To be repeatedly publicly shamed (as well as physically beaten) drove many to suicide or insanity.

The next time you feel like shooting someone an evil look, or yelling obscenities at the guy in the parking lot who just took "your" spot, take a moment to reconsider. Beware of the casual use of insults or bad manners, even if you're "just joking" or "my friends know I'm only kidding". You could really hurt someone, emotionally and physically. The traditional Chinese belief is that the universe has a circular energy - what you put out there eventually comes back to you. So be nice.

Barbed Skullcap for Cancer

Ban Zhi Lian (barbed skullcap) was recently found to have anti-cancer activity. This generated a lot of mainstream press - there was even an article in Time magazine about it.

There are in fact many herbs that are used to treat cancer in the Chinese pharmacopeia. In China, besides using the latest radiation and chemotherapy, herbs are used to directly treat cancer. Those herbs generally fall in the traditional Chinese categories of "move blood resolve stasis", "clear heat and relieve toxicity" and possibly "transform phlegm".

Here in the U.S., herbs are generally used to treat the side effects of conventional cancer treatments. Those herbs generally fall into the "tonic" category, meaning herbs that supplement and nourish the body rather than attacking and dispersing. Radiation and chemotherapy are extremely harsh, attacking and draining treatments, so Chinese herbs can be used to counteract the often vicious side effects.

As a side note, the verbs used above are translations of traditional Chinese terms for treatment principles. "Attacking", "draining", "supplementing" and "tonifying" are just a few of many ways that Chinese medicine describes how you can go about treatment. Part of the problem with modern Western medicine is that it is often too much on the attacking and draining side.

Another problem is that biomedical treatments tend to be either too exact or not exact enough. Antibiotics, for instance, kill all bacteria indiscriminately, and therefore significantly weaken the body if taken for long periods of time. I recommend all my patients to take a course of probiotics after taking antibiotics. Then again, some Western medicines get highly specific, blocking certain receptors but not others. I'm thinking here of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac and other depression medications, which can actually increase the likelihood that someone might kill themselves.

The Universe is Like a Hologram

• Stuart Kim of Stanford University wants to know: "Why can't I live as long as a whale? How hard would it be?" Do your qigong everyday, Mr. Kim, eat very little, and keep your emotions flowing smoothly...
  
• Electrical stimulation of the brain is an effective treatment for depression.
  
• Another study has come out linking phytoestrogen (found in soy products) and low sperm count. I have my doubts about these studies. If that's true, then why are the Chinese so prolific? Last time I checked, even with the one-child policy, there are more than a billion and a half Chinese people in China alone. If you count all the overseas Chinese and other nations that consume a lot of soy, that's nearly half the world's population. The lead researcher, Dr. Jorge Chavarro of the Harvard School of Public Health, says: "It's way too early to say stop eating soy foods. It's not time to worry about whether you're eating too much soy. There's not enough information to conclusively say that."
  
• What is the scientific explanation of the Northern Lights?
  

  Every so often, the Earth's magnetic field lines are stretched like rubber bands by solar energy, snap, are thrown back to Earth and reconnect, in effect creating a short circuit. This stored-up energy powers the northern and southern lights.

  
  This is fascinating stuff. Think about it - the Earth's magnetic field lines are stretched by solar energy so far that they SNAP, then they come back to Earth and reconnect.

Finally, I'd like to post a long quote from an interview with Leonard Susskind, the physicist who proved Stephen Hawking wrong about black holes.

What is the great resolution you referred to?

One result is something called Black Hole Complementarity. Let's say Alice falls into a black hole while Bob stays on the outside and watches. Nothing drastic happens to her when she crosses the event horizon [the point of no return around a black hole]. Of course she's eventually going to get it. On the other hand, there is another picture of the black hole, where every bit of information that you throw onto the horizon of a black hole gets sort of stuck on the horizon and builds up a soup of information bits. And this soup is hot, about a 100 billion billion billion degrees.

So Alice would get burned up?

We have a dilemma. One theory, based on general relativity, simply says Alice just floats past the horizon. That would be Alice's view of things. But Bob's view of things, if he believes in quantum mechanics, is that Alice falls into this soup of hot bits and her molecules are ripped apart. So, which one is correct? Alice can't both be killed at the horizon and not killed at the horizon. The answer is they are both correct.

How can that be?

These two ideas are not in conflict because to be in conflict, there has to be a contradiction. Well, nobody can see a contradiction for the simple reason that nobody can send a message from the inside of a black hole. Alice can't send a message saying, "Bob, I'm OK, don't worry about me," because the message can't get out of the black hole. Yet everything Bob sees is consistent with saying that Alice was thermalized.

It's difficult to see how both can be true.

We've had these things before in Einstein's thought experiments. Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.

There's another strange theory that's come out of this battle, isn't there?

Yes, the Holographic Principle. A hologram is a two-dimensional sheet, such as film, which codes three-dimensional information. A simple way to say it is that the black hole horizon is like a hologram. The horizon of the black hole is like the film, and the image is the stuff that falls into the black hole. It's extremely unintuitive. According to this theory, the exact description of a region of space -- no matter how big -- is like a film on the boundary, where complicated and extremely scrambled versions of that space are going on. So in that sense, the universe is like a hologram.

Enjoy your weekend...