Well I am glad to be back in the U S of A. Japan was a great place to visit, and quite lovely out in the distant countryside, but Tokyo was much too big a city for me. From the top of Tokyo Tower overlooking the city in all directions it looked like 25 downtown Sacramentos all jammed together. It is difficult to describe just how different the Japanese culture is from California culture, but I certainly got exposed to many aspects of it through the 7 days of narrative given by my son who has lived there for the last 2 ½ years. I set up a picture sharing website for those of you interested in seeing a few of the prettier spots I visited (plus my son's graduation). Go here to view.
I have been thinking a lot about how to best transform my practice into a center for building happier and healthier people. Good health and a strong positive mental attitude are your two most powerful tools for successfully surviving any challenging situation, and life is challenging for many of us right now. It is during times of stress that supporting and building a strong healthy body is the most important. Building health happens on three levels... structural, chemical, and regulation. I have decided to begin the practice transformation with the last of these three levels - regulation. This has to do with the "software" that runs the body. It is something that we consciously or unconsciously add to, modify, and maintain every day of our lives.
Choosing to consciously improve our "software" daily is a huge step to building a successful life.
Blueprint Corruption?
An old Chiropractic principle is that life flows from the top down and the inside out. This refers to the animating life force Chiropractors have named the innate intelligence of the body. Other schools of thought have called this force Chi, Qi, or anima. The health of the body is determined by the tone of this life force. This force carries out the dictates of the fundamental blueprint of the human being much like movement of electrons in the computer chips in a computer carry out the directions of the operating system software. Just as we can not see the software in our computer with a microscope, we can not see this life force or innate intelligence in the body. We know it is there by what it does and causes to happen.
But what happens when that software becomes corrupted? I know that in my experience my computer starts acting really screwy. Our human blueprint gets corrupted. Eventually it gets so corrupted we die. Every day bits of our blueprint get corrupted for a hundred different reasons and causes. Every day you are either climbing uphill working to improve and maintain your self or you are sliding downhill. There is no such thing as relaxing our vigilance and taking a break, as the onslaught is continuous. In some areas you actually improve and become more effective and efficient. In other areas the best you can do is slow down the gradual degeneration.
Our job is to continuously improve the tone of our life force. We are born with a very simple but pure and effective quality of life force. As infants we have not had to face many corrupting influences yet so our simplicity is enough to keep us healthy (usually - more and more children are born challenged, as in drug babies). As life gets more complex we experience an ongoing chain on challenges - physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. If we successfully meet and overcome these challenges we become stronger, more flexible, and efficient. If we fail to overcome these challenges our system becomes corrupted and toxic. We are talking about everything from balance to social skills, from diet quality to mental agility, from disease resistance to emotional compassion.
Top down and inside out - what does that mean? It means that health issues don't happen just locally where you feel them. Let's use an example of a carpal tunnel syndrome. You want to believe that it is a problem in the wrist because that is where it hurts...not true. If carpal tunnel syndrome came from typing on your keyboard then the very first sentence you ever wrote would have caused a carpal tunnel problem. Since that is not how it ever happens then we have to look deeper for the real story. The site of the symptom is simply the end point in a long chain of events within the body. It begins in the part of the mind that creates the intention to move the muscles to type something. Normally that part of the mind keeps everything in balance in the wrist muscles, ligaments, and bones. But something even deeper causes that normal flow of information to become corrupt. When that happens the muscles become unbalanced, which allows the wrist to spread, causing a collapse of the carpal tunnel onto the nerve bundle in the tunnel producing pain. The proper flow of information from the top down and inside out becomes disrupted and illness results.
Other than the accidental bullet to the head or getting hit by a speeding bus, most every symptom we experience is the result of a complex set of factors that alter normal communication and resultant function. This is why just treating the symptom is so limited in effectiveness. We must go much deeper and we need to be handling these depths on a daily basis. We need to continuously support proper processing of our "human software" and application of the "inner blueprint" to our real life. This means growing and adapting to our environment and the regular discard of old outdated information. We need to keep the communication pathways clear and strong by resolving any conflicting or blocking messages.
We are talking about the daily process of feeling, acting, expressing, connecting, and releasing in our life. This begins with our basic skills of feeling the truth of life and ourselves and aligning with what is real and what works to get our needs and wants met effectively. Clearing our the cobwebs in this arena has mostly to do with letting go of old false beliefs and expectations and building new more effective beliefs and relationships with life. For this I created Heartflow and Gracework as healing and growth processes. When we do not continuously improve our relationships, beliefs, and expectations with life we get negative feedback from life that starts to corrupt our thinking/feeling system. These corruptions first show up as imbalances in the brain's neurochemistry and then uneven flows of energy in our acupuncture meridian system. This all happens well before any "medically" measurable changes in body chemistry, cellular metabolism, or organ dysfunction occurs.
Since most of us do not have the self introspection skills of a Zen monk or a Greek philosopher we must rely on other methods of finding our imbalances and correcting them to prevent the gradual slide down the hill into poor health and little happiness. Treatments for imbalances in our information processing and communication systems have been around for centuries - chiropractic, acupuncture, meditation, homeopathics, flower essences, prayer, herbal extracts, and so on. Modern science has added to this with new methods of improving brain neurotransmitter function. Diagnosis has always been the difficult part.
As most of you know, I stress challenge and muscle test your bodies to find what is going on in the nervous system, joints, and muscles. Over the last 50 years technology has been developed that now allows us to electronically test the body a hundred times faster and more accurately than manual muscle testing. (See a training video here.) This gives us a way to interact and support the "software" and communication systems in the body. I just recently acquired this technology. We now can test dozens or even hundreds of communication pathways in a matter of minutes for various corruptions in the flow of information that are designed to regulate the health of the body. We can even create electronic "adjustments" to this information flow to teach it how to overcome these corruptions and imprint them homeopathically into a liquid remedy. This allows us to "treat/retrain" the body daily for several weeks without having to come into the office for treatments.
I believe this technology to be significant and valuable enough to both you as my patients and me as a doctor, that I would like all of you to come in and get baseline test readings performed free of charge.
I would also like to perform two other highly valuable tests for assessing functional health as a free service for my patients - Heart Rate Variability testing (learn more here ) and the Kinesiology Blood Sugar Stability test. These tests will give us a good idea of the level of functioning of the deepest levels of health maintenance in your systems. These tests give us a snapshot of how well you are adapting to the stresses of daily living. The tests serve me because they help guide me in giving you better information in how to support your health. Combine these with the Super Health Questionnaire
I gave you in the last newsletter and I am able to get a very good idea of the level of health you currently have and the type of health problems you are presently developing.
These tests only take a few minutes and will tremendously support your future health. Please make an appointment to have these tests performed with Ellen as soon as you are able.
Last newsletter I included a survey regarding interest in evening lectures. Only a few of you took the survey so I don't really know whether there is interest or not. Please take a couple seconds to let me know if you are interested or not. Thanks
Good Journey,
David
Health Challenge #8
Use only meats, fish, dairy and poultry that are free of hormones, pesticides, and toxins.
This seems like an obvious statement, kind of like don't drink bleach, eat arsenic, or pour battery acid on your head. Unfortunately finding non-toxic protein foods is not that easy. Modern farming practices guarantee a poisoned food supply. In order to mass produce food in sufficient quantities and at competitive prices growth hormones are used to grow cows, pigs, chickens, and fish at least twice as fast as normal. The massive overcrowding in the animal "farms" and fish farms produces very unsanitary conditions so massive amounts of antibiotics have to be used to keep the disease levels down. To mass produce the food for these huge meat factories means lots of pesticides used on the grains served as food to these food sources. Just like in people, grains are not a good food for animals. The grain based feeds produce high levels of omega-6 oils and inflammation in the meat of the animals. And then there is the issue of mercury in the fish and bacteria in the animal and fowl spread in the processing plants.
So what are we to do? Fortunately these concerns have been voiced for many years now and healthier alternatives are becoming more available. Grass raised and range fed beef is now available (as is buffalo). Free range raised chicken and eggs are in most stores. Wild caught fish are healthier but you still have to be aware of the mercury concerns. (check this link for fish mercury levels)
Liquid dairy products and cheese have 8-10 times the levels of estrogens because we force our cows to produce milk all year round so limit dairy products and be sure your liver enzymes for breaking down estrogens are working well. Avoid any homogenized milk as homogenization releases a toxin that causes atherosclerosis (xanthiene oxidase). Try to find organic and healthfully raises pork products. Health food stores and specialty meat shops may carry these.
If you missed any of the previous health challenges -
