Healing the Broken Brain
I recently reviewed a fascinating book on adult neurogenesis: the creation of new neurons; something that was thought to be impossible until very recently. It is still thought to occur in certain specific regions of the brain, but even that may be changing.
The field is moving forward very rapidly and is important to every one of us, which is the reason for writing so much about the topic.
There is an exceptionally interesting article in the current issue of the journal Neuron. Researchers from Lund in Sweden have shown that cells generated from stem cells in an adult, diseased and damaged brain function as normal nerve cells. Not only do the new cells function like proper neurons, they also try to make connections with other neurons, indicating that they are trying to repair, or compensate for diseased or damaged parts of the brain.
This work was done in rats and is in its infancy, but it part of a global effort to learn more about how new neurons are formed, how they function and whether it is possible to help the brain heal itself after a disease or injury.
I am going to go out on a limb and say that it is possible. In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I described an individual with a severe neurological problem that responded to a novel treatment method using the subtle systems of the body. One of the goals of Integrated Medicine is to establish how best to use such methods in combination with conventional medicine not just to treat someone, but to initiate healing.
“A therapist doesn’t heal, he lets healing be.”
–A Course in Miracles (Book of Spiritual Principles Scribed by Dr. Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1975, and First Published in 1976)
Energy and Fields, Prana and Qi
I just had a kind and important letter from a correspondent:
Dear Dr. Petty,
I enjoy reading your reviews in Amazon.com. Could you allow me to ask a question here?
I saw in a couple of reviews you oppose the idea of “Everything in this world is made of energy.” Could you recommend some books which can explain this more beside Entangled Minds?Thanks & Best Regards
One of the problems that I explore in detail in Healing, Meaning and Purpose is what I refer to as “Physics envy:” the attempt by non-specialists to use physics to buttress comments about “Energy” in biology and healing. Comments that would produce apoplexy in most practicing physicists. Within the last few days I have been listening to some CDs by a biologist in which he makes the usual claim that quantum physics “proves” that the universe in made of energy and that consciousness and matter are inextricably linked. He then goes on to say that the famous equation E=MC2 proves it, despite the fact that we are still waiting for a rapprochement between quantum and relativistic theories. To his dying day, Einstein remained skeptical about quantum mechanics.
The biologist may be right. The trouble is that his evidence is not.
The loose usage of the word “energy” may make people wotking in biology and healing look foolish and ill informed, and it is guaranteed to prevent any meaningful dialogue between biologists and physicist. This is not a semantic argument but a practical one.
When someone says, “I like his energy,” or “the arrangement of the furniture has good energy,” or I got his to tap his hand and that cured his energy,” what do these statements actually mean?
According the Lawrence LeShan, the idea that “energy” is some universal substances that is the basic building block of the universe arose from a slogan created by a popularizer of science in the early 1950s. The original slogan was that the “Universe is made up of energy,” with the corollary that all solid matter was simply congealed energy. This was some years before the development of modern field theory. Journalists, broadcasters and science fiction writers commonly wrote about converting matter into energy, though this is impossible according to the current understanding of the laws of physics.
Energy is always manifested as a state of a particular field. It may be manifested as a matter-field or an energy-field. When one form of being is converted to another, its energy is passed on. I am indebted to Professor Chris Clarke formerly of the University of Southampton for an excellent metaphor: “when one form of manifest field converts into another, its energy is like a relay-runner’s baton that is passed on, but always requires a runner; though without the baton there’s no point in running. The universe is made of energy in the sense that without the energy the fields could not actualize; the universe is also made of fields, in that without the fields there would be nothing to carry the energy.”
There is only one energy and its different manifestations – electricity, the strong and weak forces, and so on – are fields.
There is an extremely interesting idea in philosophy, called “Energy monism,” that proposes that energy and consciousness are aspects of one another. This is an attractive concept about which I shall have a bit more to say on another occasion.
This concepts about “energy” as the fundamental force of the universe later became consolidated with a wonderful example of an inappropriate use of metaphor: Qi and Prana were equated with energy, though nobody schooled in Chinese or Sanskrit would translate the words that way. So many New Age ideas conflated “Energy” with Qi and Prana, and some even went so far as to claim that matter is no more than a series of vortices in the primary “stuff.”
I once termed some of the common intellectual fallacies, Petty’s Paralogia:
- The inappropriate use of metaphor
- The King’s New Clothes phenomenon
- Moving the goalposts
If you are looking for some more reading, it depends a little on the level that you are looking for.
Here are one or two that I have recently found interesting, useful and very readable:
Healing Beyond the Body by Larry Dossey
Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife
Radical Knowing by Christian de Quincey
And finally for Energy Monism, Paradigm Wars by Mark Woodhouse is excellent.
If these do not give you what you need, do let me know: I have scores of other recommendations. You may also find some of the lists that I’ve put up at Amazon may guide you, for example this one.
Acupuncture, Qigong and Fibromyalgia
As we have discussed before fibromyalgia can be difficult to treat, so any decent research indicating a new approach is always welcome.
Two recent studies have indicated that acupuncture may be helpful in the treatment of fibromyalgia. In the first, published in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, 21 patients completed the study, which consisted of 16 treatments in eight weeks. The patients all know that they were getting acupuncture, and there was no attempt to “blind” the study. The investigators used something called the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire, and found an improvement. One of the problems with the study was that there were so many measurements done in so few people that there’s always a worry that something positive will turn up by chance. This may explain an odd observation: sicker people did better and it didn’t matter how long they had been in treatment.
The second study was a partially blinded, controlled, randomized clinical trial of 25 patients and 25 controls done at the Mayo Clinic. Acupuncture seemed to be more effective in improving pain, fatigue and anxiety, than putting needles at ineffective points.
One of the biggest practical problems is that some people with fibromyalgia are so sensitive that they cannot tolerate even the mild discomfort of acupuncture, which is usually all but painless if done by an expert.
So I was interested to see a small pilot study from the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, New Jersey, of the use of external qigong in fibromyalgia. A qigong practitioner worked to stimulate the flow of Qi in people with fibromyalgia, on the principle that in traditional Chinese medicine, pain is usually conceived as a blockage of the free flow of Qi. The results were very strongly positive, thought the trial only involved ten people.
Clearly more research is needed, but these preliminary results are all very encouraging.
Cluster Headache: A New Approach
By a strange "coincidence", just a couple of days after posting about cluster headaches, the BBC is carrying an article about a woman with cluster headache who was successfully treated by a neurosurgeon who implanted a nerve stimulator attached to the greater occipital nerve at the back of the skull.
It has been known for some time that there is a type of atypical cluster headache that can be treated by blocking these nerves. Some experts feel that since cluster headache
is usually driven by the hypothalamus, headaches that can be stopped by
nerve blockade or nerve stimulation are not cluster headaches at all.
That is something for us to sort out at scientific conferences.
But for now, there is at least one person – who was featured in the BBC’s article – who has been cured after everything else failed.
But here’s the strange thing: none of the neurologists or neurosurgeons has a clue how the treatment works.
Yet anyone versed in Traditional Chinese Medicine would tell you immediately the nerve runs directly above a key acupuncture point – Fengchi, or Gallbladder 20 – that is often used in treating severe headaches. Because disturbances in the subtle systems of the liver and gallbladder are common in many types of headache.
In other words, knowledge of the subtle anatomy of the body can explain how the nerve stimulator is working, but the best of current Western neurological science cannot.
A beautiful example of how the combined approaches of Integrated Medicine can help and inform everyone involved.
And it is the patient who gets all the benefits.
Treating Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
There is an important article in this month’s issue of the journal Psychological Medicine.
Researchers from the University of Heidelberg in Germany carried out a systematic literature review concerning two treatments that are widely used in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).
They identified eight publications between 1989 and 2005 describing treatment outcomes of EMDR and CBT in active–active comparisons. Seven of these studies were investigated in a meta-analysis.
What they found was this. Both trauma-focused CBT and EMDR seemed to be equally efficacious and any differences between the two forms of treatment are probably not of clinical significance. Our main focus now should be to attempt to establish which trauma patients are more likely to benefit from one method or the other. The authors comment that it remains unclear is the contribution of the eye movement component in EMDR to treatment outcome.
This paper is interesting in light of our recent discussions concerning brain laterality and PTSD. It seems likely that part of the mechanism of both forms of therapy is to re-wire the brain. I tend to think that the eye movements probably are of importance, since they are also used in thought field therapy which appears also to be helpful to many people with PTSD.
Qigong Therapy at a Distance
I just had a very nice question from someone who had seen my article in which I commented on the way in which I had seen qigong masters treat patients without touching them.
Dear Dr. Petty,
That’s really interesting, and if it’s true, it would be very important for the future of therapy. Is that actually any scientific evidence to support what you said?
Good question, and yes, there is. But not very much of it.
A recent study from South Korea examined the effects of Qi therapy, also known as external qigong. During the study they looked at the effects – if any – of touching the patient. The researchers examined the impact of treatment on anxiety, mood, several hormones and cellular immune function. Whether or not they were touched, the patients showed improvements in anxiety, alertness, depression, fatigue, tension and cortisol levels. Treatment at a distance was just as good as hands-on treatment with one interesting exception: treatment at a distance caused the white blood count to rise slightly, while the effect wasn’t seen in people who were touched.
There is also another type of research in which qigong practitioners have tried to influence either animals or cells in culture. In one recent study practitioners directed their intention toward cultured brain cells for 20 minutes from a minimum distance of 10 centimeters. The first study seemed to show an effect on the proliferation of the cultured cells, but the second did not, showing the difficulty of doing experiments like these.
More experiments like these are underway in centers throughout the world, and I shall continue to report on both the positive and negative studies.
Qigong in the Treatment of Depression
I first started teaching T’ai Chi Ch’uan and qigong over 20 years ago, and I was always impressed by the apparent benefits for people with chronic low mood. Not so much in people with severe depression, but in people who were just chronically miserable.
During a visit to Hong Kong in 2004, I heard about some interesting research that’s just been published. Researchers from the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Kwai Chung Hospital, examined the effects of regular qigong in 82 older people with a diagnosis of depression. After just eight weeks of regular daily practice, there was an overall improvement in mood, self-efficacy and personal well-being. By week sixteen there were really quite marked improvements not just in mood, but also in activities of daily living and how people felt about themselves.
We know that there are close links between mood and the immune system, so this research fits in with a study from Tokyo in which a breathing method said to enhance Qi was shown to reduce stress and modulate the function of the immune system.
There are many studies of qigong, but they are of variable quality. Another one which supports both of these two studies comes from Korea, where something slightly different – qigong therapy – was shown to help both pain and mood in older people with chronic pain form a variety of causes.
I do not think that we have enough evidence to try using qigong alone in the treatment of depression, which is, after all, a potentially fatal condition. But I do think that Qigong is an important part of an Integrated Medicine program, and I am creating more resources for people to do the first stages of qigong on their own.
Acupuncture Points
The Pacific College of Oriental Medicine publishes a newspaper entitled Oriental Medicine, that carries a great many interesting articles mainly written by practicing acupuncturists. In the current issue there is a nice article entitled “What are Meridians and Points?” by Iona Marsaa Teeguarden a therapist who has developed some very interesting acupressure techniques for dealing with an array of problems. This is a very interesting topic to me: you may have seen some of those pictures of acupuncture points that look like tramlines traversing the body.
Over the last few years I’ve read everything about the acupuncture points that I could get my hands on. If it’s in one of the ten or twelve languages that I can read, then I’ve probably got a reprint of the paper, and people have been kind enough to send me translations of at least parts of papers in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Some of the research has been excellent, and some less so.
The first point (ha ha…), often controversial when I am talking to classically trained acupuncturists, is that although some of the large well-known acupuncture points are usually in the same place in different individuals, many of the lesser known points are not. Of the 361 main named acupuncture points only a couple of dozen seem to be fixed on the body. Most of the rest can be some way off from the pictures in books. I learned that first when I was an apprentice in London, and then during my studies in China. The top Chinese acupuncturists search for the right points to use. It’s one of the reasons why modern Chinese acupuncturists have identified over a thousand “extra points.”
Although people usually talk about “meridians” joining the acupuncture points together, the Chinese usually refer to them as “channels and collaterals.”
There does not seem to be any neurological or vascular structure at the site of an acupuncture point. Taken together with he fact that acupuncture points tend to be tender and to have characteristic electrical properties, both of which get better with treatment, suggests that they are functional rather than structural entities. Most experienced acupuncturists have noticed that the points vary not just with treatment, but also with mood, the weather and in women, during the menstrual cycle.
In the late 1930s, a French physician named Niboyet was probably the first to find indications that the main acupuncture points have lowered electrical resistance compared with surrounding skin. Some other studies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)have provided some support for these findings, although it is difficult to known precisely what to make of the finding that these areas of reduced electrical resistance can also be located on fresh but not dried cadavers. Some people have invoked some mechanism involving electrolytic fluxes along connective tissue or fascial planes of the body. But that’s all just speculation backed by some research correlating acupuncture points and fascial planes.
An additional problem for simple electrical models is that some of the acupuncture points also respond to polarized light, which would be odd if the primary mechanisms of acupuncture points were electrical.
Another set of experiments sought to exploit the phenomenon of “propagated needle sensation.” If acupuncture is done well, then this happens very frequently. It is a subjective sensation of warmth, heaviness, numbness or bursting, that moves at between 1 and 10 centimeters per second, which is much slower than a nerve impulse. This sensation moves along the proposed channels along which the Qi is supposed to flow. But this is the interesting bit: the sensations are not related to any known neurological pathways. The precise nature of this propagated needle sensation remains elusive, with reports of it being interrupted by chilling, local anesthetics and mechanical pressure, whilst it has also been shown to travel to phantom limbs in amputees.
Attempts have been made to trace out acupuncture points and their associated channels by the use of radioactive tracers and by measuring electrical propagation along the channels. 99-Technetium has been the most widely used, and it has been claimed that the tracers diffuse from acupuncture points along the classical acupuncture channels, whilst tracer injected at non acupuncture points diffuses without showing any such linear pattern. The speed of the linear migration of the tracer injected into acupuncture points was accelerated by the use stimulation of appropriate acupuncture points.
If we cannot find anything anatomical at acupuncture points, and they clearly change place and character as the person changes. Then what do the Chinese have to say about the points and the channels?
They say that the channels are there to distribute Qi, and that the acupuncture points are the control points of the channels. The traditional theory is that Qi flows in response to thoughts and emotions. Perhaps thoughts and emotions have effects on muscle contraction and that pushes the Qi along, but I thin that we have to step away from the physical body. I can well remember one of the first people whom I ever treated. I gently needled a “Liver point” on her foot, and she felt the sensation in her eye on the same side of the body. There is no known neurological connection between the foot and the eye on the same side. But in Chinese medicine, the Liver channel terminates in the eye on the same side of the body. The theory of fascial planes can also not explain that. Neither can the observation that many of us have made in the clinic. In some people, acupuncture reveals their entire acupuncture system: the channels become red.
Even when acupressure is used in the subtle systems around the body. I have seen a Chinese Qigong Master demonstrate this phenomenon in a paraplegic patient.
While the Master’s hands were three feet away for the body.
And that will be the topic of yet another research study.
Searching for the Laws of Life
In the book of Genesis, God’s fifth act of creation was to create life on earth. Of course, modern science has a different myth.
In the beginning, there was a simple soup of inorganic chemicals: water, ammonia and methane. And into this soup came a bolt of lightning that brought into being the amino acids that gradually assembled themselves into peptides and proteins and the nucleotides from which came RNA and DNA. And the DNA learned the art of becoming self-replicating and so began the ascent of life.
I recently reviewed a fine book – The Fifth Miracle, by Paul Davies – on the Amazon website. Paul points out that believing the scientific myth demands an act of faith and credulity as great as believing in the literal truth of the Biblical story. He is one of many scientists who have calculated the seemingly impossible odds of all this happening by chance. This is not some back door into intelligent design, but instead an exploration of some profoundly important ideas in biology that make us realize that there are some gaping holes in our current models.
We know that inorganic processes tend to run down and become disorganized over time: they show entropy. By contrast living processes become progressively more organized, a process that requires massive amounts of information. It is not difficult to calculate that the amount of information required for even the simplest organism far out strips the biochemical processes of an organism. Thus the implication that life requires a new fundamental law of nature that is yet to be discovered.
If this is true, and the mathematics indicate that it is, it would imply that life should exist everywhere, and wherever it is found it would march toward progressive greater and greater complexity, that would eventually lead to sentience.
The most likely candidate for this natural law is information. The book and CD series, Healing, Meaning and Purpose is dedicated to this notion that a fundamental property of the Universe is conscious awareness and that the first content of awareness is information, in its technical sense. And it is this information together with energy that generates the subtle systems that animate biochemical processes.
Long after I wrote that, I came across an important paper by someone whose work I like very much: William Tiller. In the paper he examines homeopathy as a form of “information medicine,” and comes up with some interesting mathematical modeling to support his conjecture, which I feel sure is correct.
There is also some older data that supports this idea of information. A study from Brazil examined highly diluted thyroid gland extract on the rate at which tadpoles developed into frogs. The extract increased the speed of metamorphosis of the tadpoles, despite the fact that the solutions were so dilute that there could not have been any molecules present. This work was in fact a replication of work done in 1995 in Graz, Austria.
There is a much larger literature than most people realize on this idea of information in biological systems, though most has been presented at meetings or written about in textbooks.
But I’d like to leave you with an interesting paper that is easily accessible. It has the title “Paranormal phenomena in the medical literature sufficient smoke to warrant a search for fire.” The author has done us a great service by collecting a large number of cases of phenomena – collected by physicians and other educated people – that cannot be explained within the current biomedical paradigm. He includes some splendid examples, including the well-documented cases of people being able to speak foreign languages of which they have no conscious knowledge. The most parsimonious explanation for the observations? Information transfer between individuals, even if sometimes separated by many miles.
“Disease of the body as we know it, is a result, an end product, a final stage of something much deeper. Disease originates above the physical plane, nearer to the mental. It is entirely the result of a conflict between our spiritual and mortal selves. So long as these two are in harmony, we are in perfect health: but when there is discord there follows what we know as disease.”
–Edward Bach (English Physician and Creator of the Bach Flower Essences, 1886-1936)
A Very Useful Demonstration of Thought Field Therapy
I have written several times about the tapping therapies: primarily thought field therapy (TFT) and its child: emotional freedom technique (EFT). They also play a central role in the combination of techniques that I discuss in Healing, Meaning and Purpose, and my forthcoming book, Sacred Cycles.
Andy Hunt in the UK has a very nice blog, and I found a reference to another website for the Center for Integrative Psychotherapy. This one contains a very nicely done short video demonstrating TFT.
I’ve had a lot of experience with these therapies, and despite a paucity of research, they really do seem to work with a great many people. This video is a wonderful service: it shows you what to expect from treatment.
Thank you Andy for alerting me to the site, and thank you to Mary Sise for making the video and for making it available for free.
