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Originally written by Synergy67:

Has it changed that we still treat disease with knives and drugs by vast proportion?

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Tell me the dominant attitude and perspective of this country isn't

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Originally written by Kelandon:

What I ended up doing, after that, was telling him that I thought that a bunch of what he had just said was idiotic, and then he unzipped his pants, pulled out some New Age buzzwords, and started waving them around.

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Originally written by Synergy67:

The quote on the ionizing nature of medicine I can find no further elaboration upon in my notes, and it is one thing I am not personally more familiar with. There was a greater context from which it originated, but I don't have that, so I'll gladly strike that comment as one on which I can't qualify or explain further. I may have written it down poorly or wrongly in some way. The discussion was not about radiation. Is not the general idea of an ionic particle that it is charged and has the ability to split other molecules to form new molecules? I believe it was addressing an aspect of this kind of interaction. But I can't provide any more context, so I will strike it.

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If basic concepts are offensive or seem wrong to anyone's system of thought and belief, fine. It takes a hell of a lot of information and typically also years of gradual shift in thinking for many people to shift perspective. In reality, it usually takes something personally experiental for people to have significant paradigm shifts in their thinking and consideration.

I know plenty of people who have no trouble discussing ideas on the level I converse here without getting irate about the fact that it is not being conducted as a scientific dissertation in a science publication. That degree of nuts and bolts detail is great to read on one's own when one is more interested in the full argument.

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So, if I appear to make less than fully qualified statements, it's because I never intended to in the context of how I care to discuss ideas. I' m not trying to change anyone's belief. I don't believe it really ever happens through this level of dialog. That would be rather naive to expect. I present ideas and bits of informations and perspectives in the interest of dialoging with those who might be open and familiar with the topic. I really have zero interest in proselytizing the unbelieving and uninterested. The fact that I offer such things in a very young environment where the preponderance of partcipants are a rather geekily skewed lot suggests I might be wasting any effort to have such dialog here. The friendly or familiarized voices to some such alternate viewpoints are few and far between. I'm not even a glutton for punishment. So when it quickly bogs down into intractible and impossible positions, I won't waste my time futher. If something resonates, great. If not, that's fine. It's not my mission or ability to convince you.

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I can mention one source for some of the basic dialog I have been referencing on genetics, if anyone is actually interested. Bruce Lipton, who began as a cell biologist at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine and later performed pioneering studies at Stanford University's School of Medicine. He has a book titled, "The Biology of Belief" which elaborates on how what we can term "perception" is our genetic determinant. How you take in and perceive information from your environment through your senses and processing is determinant in the genes that are activated and selected in your body.

I'd be about ten times more interested talking with people here about concepts of approaches to health another decade or two into their life. It is a very different experience discussing things with people who have lived longer, who are more steeped in experience than in collegiate knowledge. There is a very different mindset one cannot have till one has a longer-reaching perspective and experience of life. People get more interesting the older they get, at least potentially. They also tend to have greater capacity to mellow out, lighten up, expand, or let go of things. There's a reason our soldiers and Hitler's brownshirts are teens and twenty-somethings. There's nothing wrong with being any age. I'm just commenting that I'll wager the arguments and perspectives coming out of many mouths here will sound startingly different in even another decade.

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I love details and explanations, and they are important to me and in my process for deciding how viable a thing is for consideration. I am not here to dig deeply into any one of them., Others have done he work and have commented on it 100 times better than I will ever be able. I am not a scientist, and I don't need to be to be concerned, interested, capable, and informed beyond a certain degree to make reasonable observations and decisions for myself. We all have a threshold of burden of proof upon which we ally with a perspective.

These things are worthwhile to discuss with people who have arrived at a place where they are interested in other paradigms. It is not worthwhile to serve as proof or argument for the fixed skeptic, It might as well be arguing religion or politics.

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As a one with a philosopher's musing upon things, I am looking at the bigger picture I perceive, which is the nature of what we believe and choose to embrace, whether science or mysticism. I observe the behaviors and parameters of various approaches to life and systems of believing or requirements for proof, and there is much that can be said on that process.

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So, if we can be so humble, let's recognize, that when it comes down to it, at some point we have made a decision to invest our faith in some person, some system, some organization, some dogma, some theory, becase we were not there, we did not investigate the matter or personally create the "proof." We are trusting in the integrity, sincerity, infallibility, and accuracy of someone else who has gone before us. We can examine what goes into the decisions human beings make in whom to trust. How we do things is in many ways more significant than the mere what we do. Every person has surrendered faith to someone else at some point. It's just a general point to ponder when it comes to the things we have gravitated toward and may come to deeply invest ourselves and our belief system within.

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qb[]What amuses me about the scientific sort, is so often they like to describe themselves and what they do in objective, mechanistic, seemingly superhuman terms. They seem to have little acknowledgement of human nature and fallibility in the processes of science, as if by virtue of having a scientific attitude, they are above the pitfalls of being human. I don't buy the scientists as gods assertion. They are just as riddled with ego, limited insight, fallibility, dogmatism, selfishness, even fraudulence, as any other kind of human being. It's beyond me why we choose to trust the scientists and their institutions more than politicians or lawyers, who are also very sincere in their belief that they do what they do is for truth and the betterment of humanity. [/qb]

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Alec, if you actually demonstrated a shred of the compassion and respect for your fellow human being you appear to value in your views in some fashion, your words, argument, and perspective might have some actual weight. You fail to come across as someone who really cares about sick or starving people in Africa, when you can't even treat the people around you in your own country with respect or dignity.

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I call that fraudulent. You attack in others on a large scale (the cold-hearted and selfish behavior of the pharmaceutical industry, let's say,) what you do not demonstrate on even a small scale in your own environment.

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I have also noted, Alec, that you continually lump me in with persons, beliefs or categories I have not mentioned. I am not a proponent of homeopathy, for instance, but you keep refering to me as such. In your mind, evidently, certain categories of people all get lumped together automatically.

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Again, that kind of accusatory and derisional systematic categorization of your fellow human being betrays your real attitude toward others. It's not fair. It's not really interested in nuance or actuality. It's interested in gross labeling and mockery. Whatever, dude. It's tired, and it only wins support from the similarly discriminatory and hateful. You disrespect me by categorically lumping me in with some perceived belief system you carelessly equate with any number of other things.

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If anyone wants one more basic, simple, but vital example of what we should be doing to maintain our health? Walking. The lymphatic system, unlike the circulatory system, has no heart to pump its fluids. The calf muscles pump the lymp fluid through your body, which affects the functioning of your immune system. If you want to be optimally healthy, walk regularly and walk more. The more sedentary we get, the sicker we are going to become.

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As to the point that we are living longer than ever, this may be true for many reasons. We are are living in a generation where it seems virtually every American child has allergies. A generation back, when I grew up, a child with allergies was a relatively rare exception.
Something is changing. We have been eroding the constitutional integrity of our bodies for three generations now with a toxic diet of processed food and other modern factors which are new. The human species is very resilient and it takes a lot to kill a person. It's been said that it takes three generations to erode the healthy constitution. I predict we are not going to see the same kind of longevity in the next three generations.

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Far more importantly, Alec, you seem to equate quantity with quality, which speaks a lot once again to a person's value system. Which is more important? How many years you live, or the quality of the years you do live? We are dying of a lot of diseases we did not used to suffer from in any significant number. I can't look around me and see that we are enjoying a better quality of life and health overall. I have seen a notable decline in immune function alone in my lifetime.

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I am sorry you have a deadly allergy to peanuts. Of course I have great compassion for anyone in that boat. I'm not going to try to predict how or why you wound up with that ailment. I have no way of knowing specifically. Generally, we wind up with such compromises to our immune function through the passing on of systemic conditions and weakness from the environment (and therefore genes) of our parents and the generations before them. Maybe your mother encountered something toxic and damaging during her pregnancy which damaged or compromised a part of your fetal development. Who can say? It's happned to all of us in some fashion.

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It's not about blaming you or those who went before. So much occurs in ignorance, and at times, things beyond our control like coming into contact with destructive toxins. The point is, we who have so much knowledge and awareness are the ones who can make choices to change behavior to get the pendulum swinging the other way.

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It might or might not be possible for you specifically to overcome your allergy in your lifetime. The choices you make with your health, attitudes, and lifestyle will affect the genes you pass on to the next generation, if you choose to have children, and I seem to recall you stating you have no such intention. We can give our offspring a step up or a step down from our own lot, and we have more ability to change even our own lot than our current culture has given us credit for. We are still steeped in victim and deterministic mentality, even if science is moving beyond it.

What we do with our health is ours, as we decide whether to live in harmony with how our bodies optimally thrive, or against it. All our choices have consequences, whether we are aware of them or not, whether we care or not. The body is not forigiving of either our ignorance or willful disregard. Tragic, yes.

The laws of nature are not moral. They do what they do. If you want to spend your life ingesting soda and saturated fats and simple carbohydrates against the requirements of your body for optimtal health and functioning, it's not about right/wrong/blame/deserve. Your body will manifest the degree of health you have furnished it. We can't control what we are handed by birth and much of what we are given or taught in childhood. We can control what we do in adulthood for the rest of our lives.

-S-

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