Monthly Archives: February 2014

Deeper Sleep, Reduced Pain, Better Daytime Performance

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Sleep requirements, including quality, depth, and length of sleep are extremely important to health and a normal active day.  Stress is the major detractor of sleep in its many forms.  Whether it is stress from play, work, relationships, or physical pain, a downward spiral begins when stress is not relieved.  Of course the best mental stress reduction is to pray continuously or to meditate throughout the day for brief periods.  But what about the physical stress of pain?  Is there something simple that I can take that is safe that will allow me better sleep?  An absolute yes! GELATIN!

In the industrialized world, our diet has changed so that we are consuming primarily muscle meat protein.  It turns out that approximately fifty percent of the protein in the body is contained in collagen or in the cooked form, gelatin.  There has been such a push on reduced fat for heart health that many people confuse fat with gelatin.  They separate it from the cooked meat instead of making protein rich gravy as it was done fifty years ago on the typical American table.  It was always one of my favorite things as a child to feast on the rich gravies that my mother made.  It did not make any difference what type of meat we had.  There was always gravy. White flour gravy with chicken was just the right touch to savor with conversation after Sunday diner.  Dark brown gravy that accompanied the roast beef with the evening meal on a work night was fantastic.  After the meal, sleep came on with splendid ease.  Red eye gravy that we mixed with the grits for breakfast seemed to always make the day go much easier.

You have a cold that just want go away and your mother wraps you up in nice warm blankets and prepares a hot bowl of chicken soup.  Ah, how relaxing a mother’s love and chicken soup that seem to make the cold evaporate as vapors leaving with the morning sun.  What did that chicken soup have that was never associated with health benefits?  It was of course the chicken stock collected from cooking down remains of the last meal prepared with chicken.  The stock of course was collected from the pot that cooked down skin, bones, and chicken carcass. This stock was rich in peptides, amino acids, and proteins or from shorter to longer, the building blocks necessary for health.  And let’s not overlook the fats that are a part of the rich drippings that are necessary for the formation of hormones in the body as well as many other functions.

Let’s not forget the multiple arrays of gelatin deserts and punch mixes.  Fruit gelatin was a great desert that was not filled with added sugar or artificial sweeteners.  One of my favorites was cherry gelatin made with fresh ripe red cherries in early June.  Ah, the punches were just unbelievable for special occasions.  Ginger ale mixed in equal parts with pineapple juice with a pack of lime Jello added is just unbelievably good – mmmmmahhhh!  There is much sugar in this punch, but it was only served on special occasions.

It is bedtime and you have had a terrible day.  Go find that pack of gelatin without sugar added and wet the powder out in a small amount of cold water.  After the powder is wetted and dispersed, you can then further dissolved it in hot water with a sleepy time tea or other hot drink like warm milk.  Just plain gelatin does not have much taste.  I know one person that just mixes a whole packet of gelatin or about a tablespoon full with water.  She then slugs it down just before bed and claims an extremely restful evening and much clearer thinking the next day.  It seems the right amount of gelatin for relaxation is about one teaspoon for each fifty pounds of body weight.  In the morning, you can sprinkle gelatin on your oatmeal or put it in your favorite smoothy.

Let’s not forget the ladies in the farm neighborhood where I grew up that took gelatin to relieve joint pain.  Yep, that’s right, just plain old gelatin.  Their claims were that it would make their joint pain just disappear in a matter of hours after consuming gelatin.  But then again, they also ate lots of dark leafy greens that seemed to be the other part of this formula for joint relief.

So you don’t believe me and you want to mess up my pleasant memories of childhood with messy science that most likely has been manipulated for profit?  Then you are on your own, but if you have that bent, it is some extremely interesting reading.  See further reading below.  From your laid back and relaxed, healed from back pain, and sleep apnea with great enjoyment of life from appropriate micronutrients and the love of God and others; feel your stress dissolve and your pain fly away as you go to sleep little baby – Pandemic Survivor

Gelatin from Wikipedia
Gelatin, Stress, and Longevity – Ray Peat
GABA and Glycine
Vanilloid receptor-1 (TRPV-1)-dependant activation of inhibitory neurotransmission in spinal gelatinosa neurons of mice –
TRPV1; on the road to pain relief 
The effects of glycine on subjective daytime performance in partially sleep restricted volunteers 
TRPV1 from Wikipedia

Emotional Recovery from Pain

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Pain stabs you in the emotions as well as the physical body.  When suffering long periods of chronic pain, emotions are on edge at best.  At worst, you are the vilest person in the universe.  Care should be taken when suffering chronic pain to not allow your emotions to overcome you.  The anxiety, anger, and other associated emotions will make the pain worse.

What happens if you don’t collapse the motions and allow them to take over?  I think that Dr. Joe Dispenza, “What the Bleep” fame, describes it best with what he calls a shortened refractory period.  An emotional refractory period is the time it takes to free yourself of an emotion.  If you don’t shorten the refractory period for anger as an example, others may say you are in an angry mood.  If you allow the anger to continue, they will say you have a temperament.  If you continue in anger, it becomes a personality trait and you are off to anger management. 

I had my own issues after several decades of illness and chronic pain.  It took a long time, but I finally got there through prayer.  After I discovered what was happening with allopathic medicine, I became very angry.  How could an engineer figure out what supplements to take without a medical professional or dietician urging a recommended approach that would work?  I was in severe pain from degenerative disc disease and was about to die from central sleep apnea that had been improperly diagnosed as obstructive sleep apnea.  It was so bad that I would find myself holding my breath when fully awake.  Of course, the proper supplements allowed me to recover from all the diseases.  You can just imagine the negative emotions during this period that had to be overcome.

Whatever method you use, prayer or meditation, the feeling of the emotion is unavoidable.  The triggers in the environment will set it off when you least expect it. The key is to collapse the emotion as quickly as possible.  I found that when anger set off, I would first try to move into the thought of love, joy, and peace.  This typically led to forgiveness.  From there, I would allow the anger emotion to further collapse into sadness which I held for as brief a period as possible.  I would then translate the sadness into empathy and passion for all the hurting people.  This in turn would stimulate me to act.  To do more research or to write.  Obviously the writing of this blog was very helpful.  The other side of this process is to hold the positive emotions, love, joy, peace, hope, faith, and optimism, as long as possible.

This does not happen overnight, but can happen very quickly practice.  As you continue to practice, you will find your refractory period continue to shorten.  The key is to make the feeling of a negative emotion just a brief stimulus to turn into a positive emotion and action.  Do not act on negative emotions which you can see from this blog I have done many times.  This was not helpful as who wants to read an angry writer.  If you have to talk about it, do it with a professional, your minister, or a close friend.  Don’t wear out your friend.

You may want to borrow from the emerging field of neuroscience and set a trigger for positive emotions.  It may be a bell, a snap of the fingers, a closing of the eyes while turning the head slowly from side to side or moving your eyes from side to side, slowly rubbing your palms with the tips of your fingers, a word that you say softly to yourself, or any other trigger that is convenient to you.  Obviously, you don’t want to appear ridiculous when around others.  Mark Robert Waldman describes the states of being with the following hierarchy: Reality, (perceptual) instinctual, habitual, (subjective) intentional, creative, (spiritual) self-reflective, transformational.  As you release your trigger, you can go up this ladder very quickly from brief prayer/meditation to awareness or mindfulness and a new reality.

Whatever your emotion, whatever you goal, whatever your illness, seek love, joy, and peace first – Dr. Alex Lloyd.  Pray and meditate that you will be filled with truth and light. The pain is unavoidable, but don’t make yourself and everyone around you miserable.  In Spirit and truth – Pandemic Survivor

Pain Reduction with Vitamin D3

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Pain is a horrible terrible monster that can take your life away both emotionally and financially from your inability to work.  It can destroy relationships and leave you desolate without friends.  My back is filled with searing pain and my friends have deserted me, David complains in Psalm 38; the NIV is the best for this understanding.  Pain is not new.  It is the result of evil in its many different forms whether physical or spiritual. 

Vitamin D3 has shown significant properties in its ability to moderate physical pain levels.  I did a post several years ago about a pharmacist that used vitamin D to reduce a patient’s pain meds by fifty percent.  I am sure we do not understand the mechanisms at work to relieve pain with vitamin D, but should we care?  The answer of course is no unless you are trying to develop an analog that you can patent and sell for large amounts of money.

It is particularly important that you supplement with magnesium when supplementing with vitamin D3 or spending time in the sun for that matter.  Your body’s biological processes tend to increase when you increase your serum level of vitamin D.  If you don’t supplement with magnesium you could see some serious side effects like heart arrhythmias and muscle cramps.  Magnesium is responsible as an ion for the production and use of over 350 enzymes in the body.

Multiple papers have been published recently from many different studies confirming the significant effect of vitamin D3 on pain.  I suspect that it works at many different levels to control pain in all states of disease.  I know it was a paper from Saudi Arabia in 2003 that really got me going on vitamin D to relieve the issues in my back.  That paper’s conclusion was that 95% of the people in the study had reduced back pain.  Yes, that’s right, ninety five percent.

Serum vitamin D or 25(OH)D normal levels have been 20ng/ml to 100ng/ml since the 1970’s at least.  The Endocrine Society suggests a minimum of 30ng/ml when treating disease.  I believe the best level is 60 to 80 ng/ml.  As different people respond differently to vitamin D, it is not how much you take, but where you maintain your serum level.  The effect most likely will not be immediate, but long term there is nothing safer or more effective for pain.

I cannot help you with your spiritual pain except to tell you to put love, peace, and joy first in all that you do and to pray often.  I suspect this will help your physical pain as well. – Pandemic Survivor

War on Cancer to End? A Promising Cure for Cancer!

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There is some exciting news happening in the world of cancer research.  The possibility exist that a cure will be implemented in clinical practice within the next two to three years.  Chemo therapy and radiation will go down the road of bleeding in the nineteenth century.  This exciting new treatment works by blocking the antibody that tumors put out to prevent the body’s natural immune system from destroying the tumor. This treatment process is called anti-CD47.  Clinical trials are to begin at Stanford within the next several months.  Here is a short You Tube video of how this treatment works. 

Of course, to make this exciting treatment work, the immune system must be working at an optimum level.  In the past, with chemo therapy and radiation treatments, the immune system gets depressed.  The other part of this equation, to boost the immune system, is being researched by Sloan Kettering.

As you can see, these types of treatments do not include the natural boosting of the immune system.  Long in the history of the war on cancer are natural substances that boost the immune system without any danger to the health of the person being treated.  These include, vitamin D3, vitamin C, vitamin A – not beta carotene, magnesium for cellular energy, zinc for T-cell response, and iodine for cellular energy and cellular apoptosis or programed cellular death.  And of course, there is the necessity of eliminating immune system depressing foods with the leader among these – sugar and other carbs that raise the glycemic index.  In recent news –“Promising cancer therapy treatment: Vitamin C” LA Times

Since the separation of allopathic medicine and holistic medicine at the beginning of the twentieth century, these natural treatments have been suppressed.  This article, Natural Cancer Treatment, from Dr. Mercola will give you a summary of this issue including over an hour documentary video of the various suppressed treatments. 

It will be interesting to observe the actions of Health and Human Services and its various organizations on the course of clinical trials and how this opportunity plays out.  It is an opportunity for allopathic medicine and holistic medicine to come together for healing the population of this dread disease.  What is in opposition of the cure for cancer?  It is the medical economy as the largest sector and the loss of jobs that may result.  Will our government decide that the economy is more important than the health of the nation and the benefits from a healthy nation?  Only time will tell.  Health and Human Services will have to decide if the economy is more important than your health.  Will it put an end to “Markets before Mandates” at a higher level in priority than to “Value Life?”  HHS PRINCIPILES. 

President Obama – it is now time for you to act to assure that your agencies do not block these protocols that include natural substances and you will have a long lasting positive legacy.  All I can do is pray for an end to the suffering – Pandemic Survivor.