Fibromyalgia and Childhood Abuse
There is a small and growing literature about a link between fibromyalgia and a history of abuse, primarily in childhood or early adolescence.
A new study has shown that people with fibromyalgia who had experienced physical abuse in childhood did not have the normal daily fluctuations in the stress hormone cortisol. They also had sudden surges in the hormone as soon as they were woken up, which can be a good stressor. People who had been sexually abused also had this odd cortisol response on being awakened. These findings suggest that severe traumatic experiences in childhood may be a factor in causing hormonal disturbances in people suffering from fibromyalgia. This adds to the growing body of evidence that in women having pain early in the day, there is a high likelihood that the entire stress hormone system does not function normally.
Colleagues from the Department of Psychiatry, UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School in Newark, New Jersey have reported that women who have been raped are ten times more likely to experience chronic pelvic pain as well as generalized pain.
Another study has found close correlations between childhood abuse and the subsequent development of chronic pain. The link between rape and the subsequent development of fibromyalgia seems to be mediated by chronic stress, in the form of posttraumatic stress disorder.
What this means is that professionals need to consider this:
- It is important careful to inquire about any history of past or present abuse or other severe trauma
- That empathy and constructive validation of disease and suffering can be very helpful
- That dysfunctional pain behaviors and personality traits may be a consequence of abuse together with a lack of resilience
- That multidisciplinary treatments including psychotherapy may be the best approach to helping people. Using the methods of Integrated Medicine is often far better than reliance on potentially habit-forming medications.
If we remember that there is more and more evidence of inflammation and other physical problems in fibromyalgia, and that stress and maltreatment in early life can alter the structure and function of specific regions of the brain, what this all shows us is that abuse in childhood can have a long term impact on the way in which both the body and the brain functions.
Restless Legs Syndrome and Integrated Medicine
In the last entry we looked at RLS: what it is, and some of the conventional approaches to treating it. I now want to spend a moment talking about some of the other approaches that we have tried. For most of these there is very little evidence, so we use them in conjunction with conventional medicine.
If you want to try any of them, discuss them with your health care provider, so that he or she can guide you toward the best ways of putting treatments together.
- Diet: A low sugar diet helps some people, and it is always worth keeping a food diary for a week to see if there’s any association between something that you’ve eaten and a worsening of your symptoms.
- If you like juicing, there have been a number of anecdotal reports of the use of carrot, celery and spinach juices helping some people. (I am writing this while we are still in the middle of the spinach/E. coli scare, so leave this one out until the FDA has given us the all clear.
- There have been publications about the use of vitamins E and B and folic acid in RLS. Vitamin E can cause a GI upset in some people and if used in too high a dose (above 800IU/day) may elevate blood pressure; folic acid has to be used with caution in people on anticonvulsants. If you try these options, bear in mind that no supplement is likely to work unless it is taken for at least a month.
- Acupuncture sometimes helps: there are three acupuncture points in the legs that come up in the prescription: Urinary bladder 57, Spleen 6 and Stomach 36.
- Homeopathic remedies have been reported to help, and I’ve had some success. The precise remedy always depends on the precise characteristics of the individual, but the most common ones have been Rhus Toxicodendron, Causticum, Tarentula Hispanica and Zincum Metallicum. If you live in a place in which there are good homeopaths available for consultation, it’s another option.
- Several herbal remedies have been reported to help: Passion Flower, Cimicifuga, Valerian, Black Cohosh and Piper Methysticum. Just remember that some of the herbs sold in health food stores don’t contain what they should, and Valerian and Black Cohosh have recently been associated with liver toxicity in some people.
- Here is an old trick from China: take a one inch piece of fresh ginger root and grate it into a bowl of warm water. Then soak your feet in the water for about ten minutes. I’ve never seen that one work myself, by some people whom I respect have.
I also think it important not to neglect the psychological aspects of this problem, and sometimes some psychotherapy can be a helpful adjunct.
Finally, ask yourself what the RLS is trying to teach you.
These are all options that have been tried and have helped some people. If you are not having success from conventional medicine alone, or if you don’t care for conventional medicine, then discuss these options with a professional, use your intuition, and let us know if you have success.
Integrated Medicine and Cancer
There’s a very interesting and important piece of research from the School of Social Work at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
The title of the paper is “Patient-physician communication regarding use of complementary therapies during cancer treatment,” and it discusses something with which I’ve been very involved for many years.
The paper uses the terms “complementary and alternative medicine,” though the same principles apply to the far more sophisticated and comprehensive approaches of Integrated Medicine.
Studies from the United Kingdom, Germany, Holland, France and the United States have estimated that as many as 80% of adult cancer patients use at least one form of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) during or after conventional treatment. I’ve discussed before the pitfalls of trying to use unorthodox medicine in place of conventional medicine. In Europe some of the practices of Integrated Medicine, particularly acupuncture, homeopathy and massage, are used to help people cope with the rigors of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, rather than to treat the tumors themselves. Many people claim that they can use homeopathy or some herbal remedies as the sole treatment for different types of cancer. But I won’t endorse them unless they can show me some data.
We already know that patients frequently do not tell their oncologists about their use of unorthodox medicines and physicians consistently underestimate the numbers of their patients using them. The purpose of this study was to assess newly diagnosed cancer patients’ and oncologists’ communications with regard to unorthodox medicines. They looked at people with two types of cancer: 106 had breast cancer and 82 had prostate cancer. All the patients in the study were receiving regular conventional medical treatment.
In line with previous research, 84% reported that they were using at least one unorthodox therapy. The most popular were exercise, vitamins, prayer, and nutritional supplements.
But here was the surprise for the investigators: The oncologists surveyed were generally enthusiastic and supportive of patients’ use of these therapies. In addition to those therapies popular with patients, at least half the physicians supported massage, journal writing, support groups, acupuncture, biofeedback, and art therapy.
This was no surprise to me at all. I spent most of my clinical career in tertiary referral centers, and I’ve worked with the best of the best. The vast majority was extremely supportive of anything that would help. Every one of them was a skeptic who would say, “show me.” But once they had been shown, they would be very helpful. After all, who doesn’t want to help people get better?
It has always been so noticeable that the biggest critics, not skeptics, but critics, have been people who were less secure. Often not the “Best of the best,” they would carp and complain that “we don’t do things that way,” and “I don’t see how it could work, so I’m sure that it doesn’t.”
What this new piece of research showed was that discussions the use of unorthodox medicine were relatively rare and were most likely to be initiated by the patients. When the topic was discussed, both patients and doctors said that it usually enhanced their relationship.
What do I take away from this study?
If you, a friend or loved one has cancer, or any other type of illness for that matter, consider using something else in addition to your regular medical care. Not as a replacement, but in addition. The regular treatment will be helping the physical side of the illness, but you also need help with the psychological, social, subtle and spiritual aspects of what is going on in your life.
And guess what? Chances are that if you have a good oncologist, or any other type of conventional clinician working with you, he or she will probably be very supportive of anything that you do.
I once said at a very large meeting that if I needed to put a bone through my nose and do a dance to get someone better, I’d do it.
And I’m not the only one.
What Integrated Medicine does is to put all the cards on the table from the very beginning. We tell people that we are going to be helping guide them toward physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual health. They need to be able to derive meaning and purpose from what’s happened to them, rather than just cussing at their misfortune.
And then using the experience to grow as individuals and to help others.
The Integrated Practitioner will also be working with the way in which this person’s challenge is changing them. If a practitioner is not changed by the person in front of him or her, they are working only as a technician and not as a healer.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but everyone needs to be clear about what the practitioner is bringing to the table, and what their expectation is for the person who has come to see them with a problem.
For now, if you are not working with an Integrated Practitioner, do tell your health care provider if your are doing something else to help yourself.
Chances are that he or she will be very supportive.
Psychiatric Illnesses and Fibromyalgia
There’s an interesting and important article in last month’s issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, by a group of investigators from the University of Cincinnati.
They have shed important new light on fibromyalgia. We’ve recently learned how it is linked to disturbances of the serotonin transporter, as well as anti-inflammatory proteins, and that is may respond best to the kind of comprehensive multi-leveled approaches that we use in Integrated Medicine.
The new research compared people with fibromyalgia with people with rheumatoid arthritis, and it found that fibromyalgia, but not rheumatoid, may be associated with a range of psychiatric illnesses:
- Major depressive disorder
- Bipolar disorder
- Comorbid anxiety disorders including panic disorder, social phobia, posttraumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Eating disorders and
- Substance abuse
What was particularly important in this study was that the psychiatric problems usually preceded the onset of fibromyalgia. So it wasn’t that people were developing psychological problems because they were in chronic pain.
It’s beginning to look as if fibromyalgia is part of a larger group of disorders that all share common etiologies or causes. Family studies have indicated that fibromyalgia and mood disorders share some of the same – perhaps genetic – determinants.
The study also confirms what we have said before: fibromyalgia is not only associated with some psychiatric problems, but also with other medical disorders, several of which may also co-exist with the same psychiatric problems. They include:
- Chronic fatigue syndrome
- Irritable bowel syndrome
- Interstitial cystitis
- Multiple chemical sensitivities and
- Migraine
Not only does this research highlight the need to check people with fibromyalgia to see if they might also be struggling with a psychiatric problem, but it is helping us home in on some of the mechanisms linking these apparently separate problems.
This particular study was done mainly in white women, and the investigators knew who had fibromyalgia, so there’s more work to be done.
But if you or a loved one is struggling with fibromyalgia, it is good news to know that we are making rapid progress in unraveling this horrible illness.
The Ethics of Complementary, Alternative and Integrated Medicine
In my recent item about ethics I mentioned that Paul Root Wolpe from the University of Pennsylvania is interested in the ethics of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), and, by extension, its offspring, Integrated Medicine. This caused some raised eyebrows, but it shouldn’t.
Using unorthodox therapies carries a number of ethical and moral responsibilities.
When I was still on faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, on one occasion I caused outrage amongst many friends using natural medicine, when I pointed out on a TV show that just because something’s natural doesn’t mean it’s safe. Think arsenic, deadly nightshade and hurricanes! But there is more to the ethics of CAM than just the safety of the treatments involved.
Just a few months ago I was asked to look at a study by someone claiming to debunk one of the tapping therapies. Neither the investigator nor the practitioners and patients inveigled into the “research,” understood the principles of informed consent. This is important: one of the many consequences of the Holocaust was a re-consideration of what to do with medical “data” collected by Nazi doctors in the most unprincipled ways imaginable. Should the data be kept, so that people would not have died in vain? Or should it be destroyed, because information from unethical experiments was tainted. After a great deal of heart searching, it was decided that any information obtained under those circumstances was likely to be junk. This is one of the reasons for the absolute insistence on informed consent. I shall say something else about consent in just a moment.
Let’s have a look at the ethical issues involved in CAM, because much of the criticism of the emerging models of healthcare has come from people genuinely concerned about patient welfare.
- If we do anything with or for an individual, there has to be informed consent. Informed consent includes full disclosure not just of the chances of efficacy, but also of the possible toxicity of a treatment and an agreement of what we hope to achieve. A therapist may want to balance your Qi and stop you getting sick in the future. You may just want to be rid of your headaches. When we ask about the chances of efficacy, we all run into the problem of positive bias. I was once planning some research with a very well known practitioner in the UK, who told me that he cured every single person he saw, whether they had cancer, schizophrenia, heart disease or anything else. I was astonished, and asked him for something to backup what he said. He flew into a rage! “How dare I question him?” he said.It soon turned out that although he probably was a genuine healer who got a lot of people better, he had no evidence at all. It was like a study in the medical arena in which the investigators decided that anyone who did not come back for treatment was cured! Not a common reaction if someone fails to turn up for an appointment!
- People often say to me that there can be no harm in giving someone a homeopathic remedy. And of course, from a purely physical and psychological perspective, that’s probably true. Though I once participated in an experiment in which I took the homeopathic remedy Pulsatilla, that is prepared from the Passion Flower. I had what is known as an exacerbation, and was unable to function for several hours. But we also need to think about some of the other things that can follow from using treatments that work at the level of the subtle systems. One of our biggest objections to people who believe that they can do acupuncture after a weekend course, is that acupuncture, homeopathy and the rest are powerful medicines. Putting a needle into the wrong part of a person’s anatomy may not just cause physical harm, but can do extraordinary things to a person’s subtle systems. A fact that is exploited in some martial arts. In the Jet Li movie Kiss of the Dragon, Jet uses acupuncture needles to do some extraordinary things. The filmmakers used little artistic license: with one exception I have personally seen all of the things demonstrated in the movie.
- I mentioned that informed consent includes full disclosure about the chances of efficacy and toxicity of a treatment and agreement on therapeutic goals. We can find ourselves in a real ethical dilemma when patients have unrealistic expectations for an untested remedy. Sometimes people don’t inform their patients realistically, and they rationalize it as either choosing not to remove hope or as providing support. But we have to be sure that we are not supporting potentially dangerous or harmful decisions. The problem is not necessarily the treatment itself. Using an untested treatment in place of something that we know can be effective can also lead us into difficult ethical waters. Regular readers will remember a sad case that I highlighted a few months ago.
I’m all for holistic therapy: the less invasive the better. I’ve spent the last 35 years helping develop new and better ways of integrating treatments.
But it’s really important to be realistic, to use what we know works and if we don’t know if a thing works, then to be totally honest with the individual, and keep meticulous records of why we want to use an untested remedy in combination with the conventional.
In the 1980s, the Research Council for Complementary Medicine began to train complementary practitioners in the basics of research, so that they could be better at obtaining informed consent and monitoring the effectiveness of treatments that they were using. We had some success, and it is high time that we helped practitioners in other parts of the world do the same thing.
Religion and Health
I have written and spoken about the association between spiritual and physical health in my books and CDs, and on this blog.
There is yet more confirmation of this link in a paper that just came across my desk. This was an analysis of the published data on religious activity and health.
This was what they concluded:
“Religious intervention such as intercessory prayer may improve success rates of in vitro fertilization, decrease length of hospital stay and duration of fever in septic patients, increase immune function, improve rheumatoid arthritis, and reduce anxiety. Frequent attendance at religious services likely improves health behaviors. Moreover, prayer may decrease adverse outcomes in patients with cardiac disease.”
Since they were looking only at religious interventions rather than spirituality in general, the investigators did not pick up a lot of research into psychiatric illnesses, pain and cancer. That does not detract in any way from this important publication.
As I’ve said before please don’t ever lose touch with your spirituality. It is essential to your health and well-being.
Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Neurological Disease?
For more than a century, there’s has been a puzzle in rheumatology. Why is it that so many people with inflammatory arthritis get symmetrical involvement of their joints? It is very common for people to get exactly the same joints involved in both hands or in both feet.
Sometimes joints get affected by arthritis because they have already been subjected to a lot of wear and tear: that’s thought to be one of the reasons why gout most often affects the big toe. But the symmetrical pattern of arthritis is far more difficult to understand. There has been speculation for at least 30 years that this symmetry indicates neurological involvement in the disease, and there was a stimulating paper on the topic seventeen years ago, and it has been known for some time that artificially induced arthritis in one joint produces inflammatory changes in the same joint on the other side of the body.
Now investigators from the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine have published an important discovery. Rheumatoid arthritis drugs work better, at least in arthritic rats, when delivered into the central nervous system. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a disease in which there is chronic inflammation, leading to joint pain and destruction. Pain and inflammation in the joints are constantly monitored by the central nervous system, and we have known for many years that the nervous system can regulate inflammation and immune responses. It was demonstrated in the 1960s that damage to certain regions in the hypothalamus of the brain could impair the work of the immune system. The scientists from San Diego focused on a protein called p38, which is involved in a number of cellular processes critical to the development of RA. Several substances that block the action of p38 are effective in animal models of arthritis and are currently being tested in clinical trials in patients with RA.
Pain and inflammation activate p38 in the brain and spinal cord, and blocking it by introducing medicines directly into the central nervous system reduces inflammation in joints.
This is important research, because it opens up new possibilities for treating an illness that can often be very difficult to treat. It may also help explain another observation. Some patients with rheumatoid arthritis who are treated with acupuncture get a reduction in joint symptoms and sometimes even repair of some of the damage to the cartilage in their joints. Experienced acupuncturists see this in about a third of patients whom they treat, so it was a surprise to see a review claiming that acupuncture did not help RA. If we see a disconnect between clinical observation and a research study, there are two options: either clinicians are deluding themselves or there’s something wrong with the research method. Interestingly, there’s recently been a great deal of discussion about the kind of research methodology that produced this negative result, prompted by a very interesting and challenging paper.
My conclusion? Acupuncture may indeed be a valuable adjunctive treatment for RA. But whether it will work on its own remains less certain.
And the best approach of all is to address the physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual dimensions of a person with RA. In other words, the new form of Integrated Medicine that I describe in Healing, Meaning and Purpose.
The Epigenetic Code
In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I reveal some of the extraordinary changes that are occurring in our understanding of genetics and inheritance. Even if you are currently learning genetics in college, it is quite likely that some of what your professors are teaching may already be out of date. I say that with the greatest possible respect: I find that in some of my fields of expertise, I am often having to update my teaching materials every week.
One of the remarkable discoveries that is generating huge amounts of new information is what we call epigenetics. This is the study of a form of inheritance that can occur without fundamental changes in gene sequences. This has to do with the idea that there is a second layer of programming on top of our DNA. A code that can change over our lifetimes in response to environmental change. Diet, hormones, chemicals in the environment, stress and even thought, emotion and behavior, can all change the ways in which our genes are expressed. Some of these epigenetic changes can be passed on to other generations. In other words, there can be an inheritance of acquired characteristics. Something that has been denied for over a century.
Let me give you a simple example. Studies of a particular species of mouse have shown that maternal diet has an effect on the coat color of the offspring. This was the result of what is known as methylation that altered gene expression. These changes in coat color were carried on to the next generation: the grandchildren of the mouse given the special diet. This created quite a stir, because it had been thought that epigenetic changes in cells are erased each time that a cell divides. Obviously that was not happening. We now have many examples of epigenetic changes being passed on to the next generation and the next. There are literally hundreds of scientific papers on the subject.
As I have written before in my last book and CDs, in articles and in reviews at Amazon and elsewhere, the traditional view of genetics has been one of genetic determinism. That we are all little robots whose entire lives are dedicated to nothing more than passing our DNA from one generation to the next. And the genes even dictated how we did that. I still know many gene jockeys who are convinced that the whole of human behavior will ultimately be explained by our genes, and that free will is therefore a myth.
I’m just as sure that they are wrong.
Let me give you an example. Identical twins have identical DNA, yet we have known for fifty years that one twin may get a genetic illness that the other does not. And the brains of identical twins, though they start out identical, quickly become quite different from each other because of the impact of the environment. Twin studies of mental illness have been going on at the Institute of Psychiatry in London since 1960. Every patient coming to the hospital is asked by the clerical staff if he or she is a twin. And there has been groundbreaking research on mentally ill twins at the National Institute of Mental Health for decades. And what have we learned? Though there may be a genetic component in schizophrenia, when we look at people with schizophrenia who have identical twins, only half of the twins have the illness, despite having the same DNA. The key difference is at the epigenetic level.
Marcus Pembrey from the Clinical and Molecular Genetics Unit at the Institute of Child Health, part of University College, London, has been at the forefront of the work on epigenetics. Marcus has had the opportunity to study the unusually detailed historical medical records of the isolated northern Swedish city of Overkalix. He and his colleagues found something astonishing. The grandsons of men who experienced famine during mid-childhood went through puberty earlier and had longer life spans, while the grandsons of men who were well fed in early childhood had an increased likelihood of diabetes. For females, the effect was similar but it was tied to the grandmother, rather than the grandfather. Presumably these responses are designed to adjust our early growth and reproduction to be ready for unpredictable changes adverse events in the environment. I would call this epigenetic resilience.
In a separate study done in Bristol in England, Marcus studied two generations of families, and found that fathers who had started smoking before age 11 had sons who were significantly heavier than average. There was no similar effect on daughters.
There is already some evidence that epigenetic factors may play a role in the development of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Many of us are becoming excited about the potential benefit that may flow from a better understanding of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms in major psychiatric disorders.
There is a new journal called, appropriately, Epigenetics that contains a treasure trove of important information. The editor is Moshe Szyf, form McGill University in Canada, and he recently pointed out that one single gene could have as many as 700 epigenetic programs associated with it.
His own research has linked epigenetic change to social interactions: the way in which we behave toward one another can lead to a change in how our genes operate.
Rats whose mothers groom and lick them when they are young grow up to be much calmer than rats whose mothers neglected them. There is, of course, nothing surprising about that. We all understand the importance of good child rearing. But what was surprising was the finding that epigenetic changes are the cause. By nurturing their young, the rat mothers activated a gene that suppressed the creation of cortisol, one of the stress hormones.
Pups who were neglected did not have that gene activated, so they produced more cortisol and were therefore more stressed out.
Knowing this, the researchers were able to increase the well-nurtured rats’ stress by injecting them with methionine, an amino acid commonly found in food supplements.
Here we have proof that the link between food and mood is not just due to transient chemical changes in the neurotransmitters of the brain, but that a chemical in our diet could cause fundamental changes in the way in which our genes work. In this case a rat’s emotions and state of mind. The implications for all of us are extraordinary.
Since 2003, a consortium of public and private firms in Europe has been working on the first Human Epigenome Project (HEP), and it hopes to have completed 10% of the map by the end of this year. As you can see, it is a lot more complicated than mapping the human genome, and epigenetic codes are constantly moving targets. The first reports from HEP have indicated that at least 20% of the genes studied so far can have their behavior modified by the environment. The food that we eat, the chemicals that we ingest and the attitude of our parents and peers can all change the way in which our genes function.
As Marcus Pembrey has said, “Child care has a whole new meaning.”
This is all crucially important, because one of our most important discoveries has been that human beings have been undergoing extremely rapid physical as well as psychological and social change, and that is one of the reasons why the Laws of Healing have been changing over the last century.
Cycles
“Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to the same mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player.”
–Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)
My next full-length book will be entitled Sacred Cycles. I am in no doubt that an essential key to healing, and to finding and following the meaning and purpose of our lives, is learning to understand the cycles at play in our lives, relationships and in society as a whole is.
You may want to achieve some aim, you might want to follow the advice of a motivational speaker, but if your planets are not correctly, unless this is the right time in your life to follow through, chances are that you will be disheartened rather than being enlivened by the attempt.
All things experience cycles. Some are obvious: the rotating earth causes day and night; our moon generates the ebb and flow of the tides and the seasons’ change. Our energy levels rise and fall in concert with the cycles of the Universe. The geniuses who created homeopathy and Ayurvedic and Chinese Medicine all understood the profound importance of watching when symptoms appeared or changed. It is extremely useful to get in the habit of paying close attention to your energy and noticing when it is going up or down. We want to harmonize with the powerful cycles of the Universe, and it is always much easier to surf the crests of the waves than to try and swim against them.
During periods of low energy, our natural tendency is to try and use some artificial energy booster: a cup of coffee, a soda or a candy bar. Unfortunately, that approach ultimately leaves you more exhausted. It is usually better to be aware of the low energy point and use the time to take a short break and to do get up and stretch, if possible go outside and drink some fresh water. If you ignore your body’s needs for movement, breaks and sleep, it is inevitable that you will not be able t function at your best, and your productivity in all areas of you life will plummet.
The economist Edward R. Dewey was prompted to initiate a life-long study of cycles as he pondered the depredation of the Great Depression that began in 1929, and carried on through much of the 1930s. In 1941, Dewey established the Foundation for the Study of Cycles now based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. (There are three short but interesting free downloads on their website and some extraordinary lists of cycles, many of which have been confirmed over time.).
Over the years the work has branched out in kinds of different directions. There is more and more evidence that many of the major cycles that dominate our bodies, minds, relationships, society and the economy, are largely predictable.
I have known some people who strongly resisted the idea of cycles. It seems to contradict the notion of free will to learn that your life and indeed the whole universe vibrates in a series of regular and predictable rhythms caused by forces that may be unknown and uncontrollable. In fact if you can understand the nature of these cycles you will develop a remarkable degree of personal mastery.
I’m going to spend some time in the coming months explaining how an understanding of the cycles at work in your own life can dramatically improve your health and your sense of control.
“In all things there is a law of cycles.”
— Publius Cornelius Tacitus (Roman Historian, Writer, Orator and Public Official, A.D.56-c.120)
Probiotics: Caveat Emptor
You may well have heard the advice that we all need to keep the bacetria in our intestines healthy. Countless experts have recommended that, as long as we are not lactorse intolerant, we should regularly take some live yoghurt to "re-colonize" our intestines with nice friendly bacteria.
There has just been a briefing in London to warn the public that as many as half of the "probiotic" or "friendly bacteria" products on sale in the United Kingdom could be ineffective and some may even be harmful.
The experts on the panel included Professor Glen Gibson from the University of Reading who is an expert in food microbiology, and recommended sticking to products made by major manufacturers. Too many of the other productsmight not contain the numbers of bacteria advertised, and the icrobes might not survive long enough in the intestines to do much good.
The evidence that probiotics help is still far from settled, as discussed in a recent review. But there are enough reports to think that probiotics may be helpful for irritable bowel syndrome and perhaps inflammatory bowel disease.
An even newer area or interest in the use of "prebiotics:" short-chain carbohydrates that alter the composition, or metabolism, of the intestinal organisms in a beneficial way.
Make sure that if you are using a product, it comes from a reputable manufacturer, and that it contains at least 10 million bacteria. And as I said in my title, "Caveat Emptor," "Let the buyer beware."
