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Under the closed group La Familia Medica (send a request to join if you like). I will use that Facebook format for information aggregating and wiki-style collaboration. I will continue to use this format for longer term analysis. 

Habits

Habit. Something we now do on automatic pilot. Something we once did due to desire or necessity. According to the 


latest research it only takes 20 days to break or develop a new habit. Drinking, coffee, smoking, chewing gum, 


over-salting food, and so many more. Do these habits suit you anymore? Do you have genuine desire or habitual 


need? Do you even know the difference? Try experimenting with dropping a habit or two (or ?) and see what is


motived by desire. The path to liberation is strewn with old discarded habits.

Instinctive Sleeping and Resting Postures

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119282/

Instinctive sleeping and resting postures: an anthropological and zoological approach to treatment of low back and joint pain

Michael Tetley, physiotherapist

27 Cunningham Hill Road, St Albans AL1 5B

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If you are a medical professional and have been trained in a “civilised” country you probably know next to nothing about the primate Homo sapiens and how they survive in the wild. You probably do not know that nature has provided an automatic manipulator to correct most spinal and peripheral joint lesions in primates. In common with millions of other so called civilised people you suffer unnecessarily from musculoskeletal problems and are discouraged about how to treat the exponential rise in low back pain throughout the developed world. Humans are one of 200 species of primates.¹ All primates suffer from musculoskeletal problems; nature, recognising this fact, has given primates a way to correct them.

The study of animals in the wild has been a lifelong pursuit. I grew up with tribal people and in 1953-4 commanded a platoon of African soldiers from nine tribes, who taught me to sleep on my side without a pillow so that I could listen out for danger with both ears. I have organised over 14 expeditions all over the world to meet native peoples and study their sleeping and resting postures. They all adopted similar postures and exhibited few musculoskeletal problems. I must emphasise that this is not a comparison of genes or races but of lifestyles. I tried to carry out surveys to collect evidence but they were meaningless, as tribespeople give you the answer they think you want. They often object to having their photographs taken, so I have demonstrated the postures.

Summary points

• Forest dwellers and nomads suffer fewer musculoskeletal lesions than “civilised” people
• Nature's automatic manipulator during sleep is the kickback against the vertebrae by the ribs when the chest is prevented from movement by the forest floor
• Various resting postures correct different joints
• Pillows are not necessary

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Some instinctive sleeping postures

Figure ​Figure11 shows a mountain gorilla lying on the ground on his side without a pillow—a position in which I have also seen chimpanzees and gibbons sleeping—and a Kenya African in a similar position on a palm leaf mattress on a concrete floor. Note how he uses his laterally rotated arm as a pillow and can listen out for danger with both ears.

Figure 1 A mountain gorilla asleep on one side (left); a Kenyan asleep in a similar position (right). (Photo of gorilla by Bob Campbell, a National Geographic photographer who was portrayed in the filmGorillas in the Mist)

When lying on one side you do not even need the arm as a pillow: when the lower shoulder is fully hunched, the neck is completely supported. I think the neck should deviate towards the ground as gravity then shuts the mouth, preventing insects from entering, and a little traction is applied to the cervical spine (fig ​(fig2,2, top). When the head is down, the vertebrae are stretched between two anchors and every time the ribs move through breathing the tension is increased, the vertebrae realign themselves, and the movement keeps the joints lubricated. Current thinking is to keep the spine straight by use of a pillow. Has anyone ever seen a gorilla shinning up a tree with a pillow? Note also the plantar flexed foot. A dorsiflexed foot rotates the knee and alters the Q angle (between the resultant pull of the quadriceps muscle and the patella tendon), producing uneven wear and, in time, pain.

Figure 2 In side lying (top) the neck is completely supported; with a slight change in position (bottom) the penis is protected from insects

Tribal people do not like lying on the ground in the recovery position while wearing no clothes as the penis dangles in the dust and can get bitten by insects. When the legs are in the reverse recovery position (fig ​(fig2,2, bottom), the penis lies on the lower thigh and is protected. In this position the Achilles tendon of the leading foot can be inserted in the gap between the big toe and the first lesser toe to help correct a bunion.

When sleeping in the open in very cold climates and when the ground is wet, humans often resort to sleeping on their shins, like the Tibetan caravaneers photographed by Peter, Prince of Greece and Denmark, in 1938 (fig ​(fig3).3). Nature has not covered the anterior border of the tibia and the medial border of the ulna with muscle, so in this position there is only skin and bone in contact with the cold ground and heat loss is reduced. The body is also folded to conserve heat; both ears can listen for danger, be it lion or terrorist; and when the head is down gravity shuts the mouth and it is impossible to snore.

Figure 3 Tibetan caravaneers sleeping on their shins

Figure ​Figure44 shows the “lookout posture,” another position using the arm as a pillow to reset shoulder, elbow, and wrist: accessory joint movement is regained because the weight of the head resting on the arm is at right angles to the line of movement, producing a lateral glide. I have seen Howler monkeys using this position in Costa Rica.

Figure 4 The lookout posture

Quadrupedal lying (fig ​(fig5)5) is ideal for stretching collagen fibre throughout the body. In the penis protect position, with the pelvis locked, the spine is rotated and flexed. With the elbows out sideways and the chest on the ground, many spinal lesions can be corrected gently using nature's automatic manipulator. Animals are clever because they use the radiant heat from the sun to encourage relaxation of their muscles when they adopt this posture. In this photograph note that the dog's sternum is in full contact with the ground but that of the human is not: this can be easily corrected by rotating the right arm medially to lower the sternum. It has been noted that guide dogs working in towns breathe the same pollutants as humans yet do not have asthma. Could this be because when they lie on their chests the kickback from the upper ribs keeps the corresponding vertebrae mobile, allowing the sympathetic system to work efficiently?

Figure 5 Quadrupedal lying

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Some resting postures

Arabs in the Sahara will sit in the position shown in figure ​figure66 for hours and it keeps the forefoot aligned on the hindfoot, as the ischia rest directly on the calcanea and the feet point straight backwards. People who sit like this do not seem to get much osteoarthritis in their knees in old age. Cross legged sitting prevents arthritic hips. A flying doctor from Kenya remarked to me that over the years as local tribesmen became more civilised he more often saw arthritis of hips and knees.

Figure 6 Sitting on the heels

The full squat, with the heels on the ground (fig ​(fig7)7) resets the sacroiliac joints; takes hips, knees and ankles through the full range; and can be very useful in treating backs. To start with, some Westerners have to hold on to a doorframe.

Figure 7 The full squat

Conclusion

Largely anecdotal evidence has been collected by “old timers” for over 50 years from non-Western societies that low back pain and joint stiffness is markedly reduced by adopting natural sleeping and resting postures. This observation must be recorded to allow further research in this direction as these primitive societies no longer exist and the great apes living in the wild are heading for extinction. All we have to do is to be good primates and use these preventive techniques.

References

1. Rosen SI. Introduction to the primates, living and fossil. London: Prentice Hall; 1974. pp. 20–21.

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Articles from BMJ : British Medical Journal are provided here courtesy of
BMJ Publishing Group

Fasting and Cancer

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120208152254.htm

ScienceDaily (Feb. 8, 2012) — Man may not live by bread alone, but cancer in animals appears less resilient, according to a study that found chemotherapy drugs work better when combined with cycles of short, severe fasting.

The study in Science Translational Medicine, part of the Science family of journals, found that five out of eight cancer types in mice responded to fasting alone: Just as with chemotherapy, fasting slowed the growth and spread of tumors.Even fasting on its own effectively treated a majority of cancers tested in animals, including cancers from human cells.

And without exception, "the combination of fasting cycles plus chemotherapy was either more or much more effective than chemo alone," said senior author Valter Longo, professor of gerontology and biological sciences at the University of Southern California.

For example, multiple cycles of fasting combined with chemotherapy cured 20 percent of mice with a highly aggressive type of children's cancer that had spread throughout the organism and 40 percent of mice with a more limited spread of the same cancer.

No mice survived in either case if treated only with chemotherapy.

Only a clinical trial lasting several years can demonstrate whether humans would benefit from the same treatment, Longo cautioned.

Results from the first phase of a clinical trial with breast, urinary tract and ovarian cancer patients, conducted at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center and led by oncologists Tanya Dorff and David Quinn, in collaboration with Longo, have been submitted for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Cancer Oncologists.

The first phase tests only the safety of a therapy, in this case whether patients can tolerate short-term fasts of two days before and one day after chemotherapy.

"We don't know whether in humans it's effective," Longo said of fasting as a cancer therapy. "It should be off limits to patients, but a patient should be able to go to their oncologist and say, 'What about fasting with chemotherapy or without if chemotherapy was not recommended or considered?"

In a case report study with self-reported data published in the journal Aging in 2010, 10 cancer patients who tried fasting cycles perceived fewer side effects from chemotherapy.

Longo stressed that fasting may not be safe for everyone. The clinical trial did not enroll patients who already had lost more than 10 percent of their normal weight or who had other risk factors, such as diabetes. Fasting also can cause a drop in blood pressure and headaches, which could make driving and other activities dangerous for some patients.

In mice, the study found that fasting cycles without chemotherapy could slow the growth of breast cancer, melanoma, glioma and human neuroblastoma. In several cases, the fasting cycles were as effective as chemotherapy.

Fasting also extended survival in mice bearing a human ovarian cancer. In the case of melanoma, the cancer cells became resistant to fasting alone after a single round, but the single cycle of fasting was as effective as chemotherapy in reducing the spread of cancer to other organs.

For all cancers tested, fasting combined with chemotherapy improved survival, slowed tumor growth and/or limited the spread of tumors.

As with any potential cancer treatment, fasting has its limits. The growth of large tumor masses was reduced by multiple fasting and chemotherapy cycles, but cancer-free survival could not be achieved. Longo speculated that cells inside a large tumor may be protected in some way or that the variety of mutations in a large mass may make it more adaptable.

But he noted that in most patients, oncologists have at least one chance to attack the cancer before it grows too large.

Longo and collaborators at the National Institute on Aging studied one type of breast cancer in detail to try to understand the effects of fasting.

While normal cells deprived of nutrients enter a dormant state similar to hibernation, the researchers saw that the cancer cells tried to make new proteins and took other steps to keep growing and dividing.

The result, Longo said, was a "cascade of events" that led to the creation of damaging free radical molecules, which broke down the cancer cells' own DNA and caused their destruction.

"The cell is, in fact, committing cellular suicide. What we're seeing is that the cancer cell tries to compensate for the lack of all these things missing in the blood after fasting. It may be trying to replace them, but it can't," Longo said.

The new study bookends research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008.

In that study, Longo's team showed that fasting protected normal cells against chemotherapy, but did not address the effect on cancer cells. The study also focused only on a single cancer and chemotherapy drug.

The new study on a range of cancers and common chemotherapy drugs extends the 2008 results by showing that fasting not only fails to protect cancer cells, but makes them more vulnerable.

Longo called the effect "Differential Stress Sensitization" to reflect the change in vulnerability between normal and cancerous cells.

Longo's interest in fasting and cancer grew from years of studies on the beneficial effects of fasting in yeast and other organisms. He showed 15 years ago that starved yeast cells enter a stress-resistant mode as they wait for better times.

By contrast, he said, the mutations in cancer cells come at a cost, such as a loss in adaptability to diverse environments. For example, Longo found that yeast genetically modified to resemble cancer cells become much more sensitive to several toxins.

"A way to beat cancer cells may not be to try to find drugs that kill them specifically but to confuse them by generating extreme environments, such as fasting that only normal cells can quickly respond to," Longo said.

Longo's collaborators were lead authors Changhan Lee, a graduate student in Longo's laboratory at the USC Davis School of Gerontology, and Lizzia Raffaghello, a researcher at the Giannina Gaslini Institute of Genoa, Italy. Other co-authors were Min Wei, research assistant professor in gerontology at USC; Sebastian Brandhorst, Fernando Safdie, Saewon Hwang and Annalisa Merlino, researchers in the Longo lab; Giovanna Bianchi, Laura Emionite and Vito Pistoia of the Giannina Gaslini Institute; and Alejandro Martin-Montalvo and Rafael de Cabo of the National Institute on Aging.

Funding for the study came from the National Institutes of Health, the Bakewell Foundation, The V Foundation for Cancer Research, the Norris cancer center, the Italian Association for Cancer Research and the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research.

Over Medicated Nation

Importance of Magnesium

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201106/magnesium-and-the-brain-the-original-chill-pill

Magnesium and the Brain: The Original Chill Pill

Learn more about this vital nutrient.

Published on June 12, 2011 by Emily Deans, M.D. in Evolutionary Psychiatry

Magnesium is a vital nutrient that is often deficient in modern diets. Our ancient ancestors would have had a ready supply from organ meats, seafood, mineral water, and even swimming in the ocean, but modern soils can be depleted of minerals and magnesium is removed from water during routine municipal treatment. The current RDA for adults is between 320 and 420mg daily, and the average US intake is around 250mg daily.
Does it matter if we are a little bit deficient? Well, magnesium plays an important role in biochemical reactions all over your body.  It is involved in a lot of cell transport activities, in addition to helping cells make energy aerobically or anaerobically. Your bones are a major reservoir for magnesium, and magnesium is the counter-ion for calcium and potassium in muscle cells, including the heart. If your magnesium is too low, you can experience muscle cramps, arrythmias, and even sudden death. Ion regulation is everything with respect to how muscles contract and nerves send signals. In the brain, potassium and sodium balance each other. In the heart and other muscles, magnesium pulls some of the load.

That doesn't mean that magnesium is unimportant in the brain. Au contraire! In fact, there is an intriguing article entitled Rapid recovery from major depression using magnesium treatment, published in Medical Hypothesis in 2006. Medical Hypothesis seems like a great way to get rampant (but referenced) speculation into the PubMed database. Fortunately, I don't need to publish in Medical Hypothesis, as I can engage in such speculation in my blog, readily accessible to Google. Anyway, this article was written by George and Karen Eby, who seem to run a nutrition research facility out of an office warehouse in Austin, Texas - and it has a lot of interesting information about our essential mineral magnesium.

Magnesium is an old home remedy for all that ails you, including "anxiety, apathy, depression, headaches, insecurity, irritability, restlessness, talkativeness, and sulkiness." In 1968, Wacker and Parisi reported that magnesium deficiency could cause depression, behavioral disturbances, headaches, muscle cramps, seizures, ataxia, psychosis, and irritability - all reversible with magnesium repletion.
Stress is the bad guy here, in addition to our woeful magnesium deficient diets. As is the case with other minerals such as zinc, stress causes us to waste our magnesium like crazy - I'll explain a bit more about why we do that in a minute.
Let's look at Eby's case studies from his paper:
A 59 y/o "hypomanic-depressive male", with a long history of treatable mild depression, developed anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and insomnia after a year of extreme personal stress and bad diet ("fast food"). Lithium and a number of antidepressants did nothing for him. 300mg magnesium glycinate (and later taurinate) was given with every meal. His sleep was immediately restored, and his anxiety and depression were greatly reduced, though he sometimes needed to wake up in the middle of the night to take a magnesium pill to keep his "feeling of wellness." A 500mg calcium pill would cause depression within one hour, extinguished by the ingestion of 400mg magnesium.
A 23 year-old woman with a previous traumatic brain injury became depressed after extreme stress with work, a diet of fast food, "constant noise," and poor academic performance. After one week of magnesium treatment, she became free of depression, and her short term memoryand IQ returned.
A 35 year-old woman with a history of post-partum depression was pregnant with her fourth child. She took 200mg magnesium glycinate with each meal. She did not develop any complications of pregnancy and did not have depression with her fourth child, who was "healthy, full weight, and quiet."
A 40 year-old "irritable, anxious, extremely talkative, moderately depressed" smoking, alchohol-drinking, cocaine using male took 125mg magnesium taurinate at each meal and bedtime, and found his symptoms were gone within a week, and his cravings for tobacco, cocaine, and alcohol disappeared. His "ravenous appetite was supressed, and ... beneficial weight loss ensued."
Eby has the same question about the history of depression that I do - why is depression increasing? His answer is magnesium deficiency. Prior to the development of widespread grain refining capability, whole grains were a decent source of magnesium (though phytic acid in grains will bind minerals such as magnesium, so the amount you eat in whole grains will generally be more than the amount you absorb). Average American intake in 1905 was 400mg daily, and only 1% of Americans had depression prior to the age of 75. In 1955, white bread (nearly devoid of magnesium) was the norm, and 6% of Americans had depression before the age of 24. In addition, eating too much calcium interferes with the absorption of magnesium, setting the stage for magnesium deficiency.
Beyond Eby's interesting set of case studies are a number of other studies linking the effects of this mineral to mental health and the stress response system. When you start to untangle the effects of magnesium in the nervous system, you touch upon nearly every single biological mechanism for depression. The epidemiological studies (1) and some controlled trials (2)(3) seem to confirm that most of us are at least moderately deficient in magnesium. The animal models are promising (4). If you have healthy kidneys, magnesium supplementation is safe and generally well-tolerated (up to a point)(5), and many of the formulations are quite inexpensive. Yet there is a woeful lack of well-designed, decent-sized randomized controlled trials for using magnesium supplementation as a treatment or even adjunctive treatment for variouspsychiatric disorders.
Let's look at the mechanisms first. Magnesium hangs out in the synapse between two neurons along with calcium and glutamate. If you recall,calcium and glutamate are excitatory, and in excess, toxic. They activate the NMDA receptor. Magnesium can sit on the NMDA receptor without activating it, like a guard at the gate. Therefore, if we are deficient in magnesium, there's no guard. Calcium and glutamate can activate the receptor like there is no tomorrow. In the long term, this damages the neurons, eventually leading to cell death. In the brain, that is not an easy situation to reverse or remedy.
And then there is the stress-diathesis model of depression, which is the generally accepted theory that chronic stress leads to excess cortisol, which eventually damages the hippocampus of the brain, leading to impaired negative feedback and thus ongoing stress and depression and neurotoxicitybadness. Murck tells us that magnesium seems to act on many levels in the hormonal axis and regulation of the stress response. Magnesium can suppress the ability of the hippocampus to stimulate the ultimate release of stress hormone, it can reduce the release of ACTH (the hormone that tells your adrenal glands to get in gear and pump out that cortisol and adrenaline), and it can reduce the responsiveness of the adrenal glands to ACTH. In addition, magnesium can act at the blood brain barrier to prevent the entrance of stress hormones into the brain. All these reasons are why I call magnesium "the original chill pill."

If the above links aren't enough to pique your interest, depression is associated with systemic inflammation and a cell-mediated immune response. Turns out, so is magnesium deficiency. In addition, animal models show that sufficient magnesium seems to protect the brain from depression and anxiety after traumatic brain injury (6), and that the antidepressants desipramine and St. John's Wort (hypericum perforatum) seem to protect the mice from the toxic effects of magnesium deficiency and its relationship to anxious and depressed behaviors (4).

The overall levels of magnesium in the body are hard to measure. Most of our body's magnesium is stored in the bones, the rest in the cells, and a very small amount is roaming free in the blood. One would speculate that various mechanisms would allow us to recover some needed magnesium from the intracellular space or the bones if we had plenty on hand, which most of us probably don't. Serum levels may be nearly useless in telling us about our full-body magnesium availability, and studies of levels and depression, schizophrenia, PMS, and anxiety have been all over the place (7). There is some observational evidence that the Mg to Ca ratio may be a better clue. Secondly, the best sources of magnesium in the normal Western diet are whole grains (though again, phytates in grains will interfere with absorption), beans, leafy green veggies, and nuts. These happen to be some of the same sources as folate, and folate depletion is linked with depression, so it may be a confounding factor in the epidemiological studies.
Finally, magnesium is sequestered and wasted via the urine in times of stress. I'm speculating here, but in a hunter-gatherer immediate stress sort of situation, maybe we needed our neurons to fire on all cylinders and our stress hormones to rock and roll through the body in order for us to survive. Presumably we survived or didn't, and then the stressor was removed, and our paleolithic diets had plenty of magnesium to replace that which went missing. However, it may not be overall magnesium deficiency causing depression and exaggerated stress response - it may just be all that chronic stress, and magnesium deficiency is a biomarker for chronic stress. But it doesn't hurt to replete one's magnesium to face the modern world, and at least the relationships should be studied thoroughly. Depression is hugely expensive and debilitating. If we could alleviate some of that burden with enough mineral water... we should know whether that is a reasonable proposition.
As I mentioned before, there are only a few controlled trials of magnesium supplementation and psychiatric disorders. A couple covered premenstrual dysphoria, cravings, and other symptoms (8)(9). Another small study showed some improvement with magnesium supplementation in chronic fatigue syndrome (10). Two open-label studies showed some benefit in mania (11)(12). There is another paper that postulates that magnesium deficiency could exacerbate the symptoms of schizophrenia. However, there is nothing definitive. Which is, of course, quite troubling. How many billions of dollars have we spent on drug research for depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, when here is a cheap and plausibly helpful natural remedy that hasn't been properly studied?
So everyone get out there and take some magnesium already!  Whew.  Well, just a few more things to keep in mind before you jump in.
There are some safety considerations with respect to magnesium supplementation. If you have normal kidney function, you do not have myasthenia gravis, bowel obstruction, or bradycardia, you should be able to supplement without too many worries. In addition, magnesium interferes with the absorption of certain pharmaceuticals, including dixogin, nitrofurantoin, bisphosphanates, and some antimalaria drugs. Magnesium can reduce the efficacy of chloropromazine, oral anticoagnulants, and the quinolone and tetracycline classes of antibiotics.
Magnesium oxide is the cheapest readily available formulation, as well as magnesium citrate, which is more likely to cause diarrhea in excess. (In fact, magnesium is a great remedy for constipation). The oxide is not particularly bioavailable, but the studies I've referenced above suggest that you can top yourself off after about a month of daily supplementation. Those with short bowels (typically due to surgery that removes a large section of bowel) may want to supplement instead with magnesium oil. You can also put some Epsom salts in your bath. In addition to diarrhea, magnesium can cause sedation, and symptoms of magnesium toxicity (again, quite unlikely if your kidneys are in good shape) are low blood pressure, confusion, arrythmia, muscle weakness, and fatigue. Magnesium is taken up by the same transporter as calcium and zinc, so they can fight with each other for absorption. Jaminet and Jaminetrecommend total daily levels (between food and supplements) of 400-800mg. Most people can safely supplement with 200-350mg daily without any problems (again, don't proceed without a doctor's supervision if you have known kidney disease or if you are elderly).
People looking for good (but not all paleo) food sources can gohere (also a good link for more information on the other formulations of magnesium - there are many!), here, and here.
Image credit (magnesium is used to make sparklers)
More articles like this one at Evolutionary Psychiatry
Copyright Emily Deans, M.D.