Back to top

"THE CHEMICAL SOCIETY" by Pamir Kiciman

This article didn't want to end. There's so much more information available that is highly significant and paradigm-shifting. Take your time with this one. It's long and parts of it are worthy of detailed consideration.

We're surrounded by chemicals. Household cleaning products, personal care items, our foods, and medicine in particular are routinely chemicalized. Heavy metals and dioxins (by-products of industrial processes) from herbicides and pesticides have increased 300-400 times at cellular levels compared to when first measured. Every year 100s more chemicals are added to the existing 80-100,000 in our environment. Of course some of these chemicals exist in Nature. What seems to be missed is that our physical body and brain is the greatest, most sophisticated chemistry lab there is. More significantly, we are an "information network" (a term coined by MIT's Francis Schmitt).

Other dangerous factors in a chemicalized society are that not all natural chemicals are supposed to be in our bodies, such as mercury. One-third of U.S. mercury emissions come from coal-burning electric-utility plants. Mercury emitted by coal-burning plants has been found unexpectedly in the bodies of Bicknell's thrushes, whereas before the primary source of mercury toxicity was seen primarily in fish and fish-eating birds.¹

On the other hand, synthetic chemicals have widespread side-effects and interactions. As has recently been in the news, approved medications with the proper research behind them, have been pulled from the market for unforeseen harmful effects, only to be put back on the shelf. The arthritis drugs Vioxx and Celebrex were shown to increase risk of heart attack and stroke. Kaiser Permanente banned Bextra "until the FDA and Pfizer can provide substantiated evidence to support its cardiovascular safety." Antidepressants now come with warnings for teenagers and adolescents that they may cause suicidal tendencies. North Americans use double the prescription drugs as the next largest consumer market, Germany!

There's a pervasive notion that we can improve on Nature with man-made chemicals. Apples will be redder and more perfect looking with wax on them, no matter that they were picked too early to reach full taste. Sex will be better with a pill, no matter that a man could have a four-hour erection (ouch)! You'll be happier if the chemistry of your brain is altered with a designer drug to make you a well-adjusted member of society.

Medication saves lives, admittedly. It also makes millions in profits for the company that manufactures it, especially when you're supposed to take it "for the rest of your life." Have you noticed that the majority of a TV drug ad is spent on disclaimers, rather than the benefits of the drug?

"Doctors are easily persuaded to prescribe antidepressants--often unnecessarily--when patients mention having seen them in television advertisements, researchers reported Tuesday. "In an unusual experiment in which actresses posed as patients, doctors were five times more likely to write them prescriptions after the patients inquired about a specific antidepressant, Paxil. The actresses pretended to have a mild form of depression, a condition that does not require antidepressants. "The study, published in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., suggests that direct-to-consumer advertising--on which pharmaceutical companies spend roughly $3 billion a year--can trump medical need in influencing how doctors prescribe drugs…. "In the study, led by Dr. Richard Kravitz, a professor of medicine at UC Davis, the actresses played the role of a 45-year-old divorcee who had recently lost her job and was suffering from stress, fatigue and back pain. Those are symptoms of adjustment disorder, a form of depression that usually recedes with counseling and the passage of time." --Los Angeles Times (online), April 27, 2005

We have a society of addicts. People are actually addicted to such drugs as pain medication (totally legally of course). Another type of addiction is the mental programming imposed on consumers that their meds are their only lifeline-"I have to take it." (This article doesn't discuss the use of street and recreational drugs; although the havoc these play on the body's natural chemistry is equally significant.)

CANDACE B. PERT, Ph.D.

Candace Pert reveals the "…economics of medicine: Since the natural substances are not patentable, there is no incentive for the drug companies to study their benefits, and so the vast majority of M.D.s, who get their information about drugs from the drug companies, don't even know about them!" This is also true for the substances our body and brain produces naturally, which work so intricately to keep us healthy in every way: Medical advice always seems to favor an external-to-internal action.

Pert is a research scientist best known for her discovery of opiate receptors and the actions of receptors, and it's her continuing research into neuropeptides (short chain of amino acids) that has given us scientific insight into our emotions and mind-body communication.

Faith in the power of medication is somewhat understandable when it's considered that such a premise is based on a separation of body and mind, and the supposed nonexistence of an overarching intelligence. Even though there's hard evidence that unifies body and mind, with a unique intelligence that guides the entire operation, such facts aren't readily accepted.

"Originally we scientists thought that the flow of neuropeptides and receptors was being directed from centers in the brain….Then…we found that the flow of chemicals arose from many sites in the different systems simultaneously--the immune, the nervous, the endocrine, and the gastrointestinal--and that these sites formed nodal points on a vast superhighway of internal information exchange taking place on a molecular level. We then had to consider a system with intelligence diffused throughout, rather than a one-way operation adhering strictly to the laws of cause and effect, as was previously thought when we believed that the brain ruled all over."2

This is significant because health is better preserved and improved by allowing our mind-body's natural substances to function properly, rather than an unquestioning over-reliance on medications. When these information substances function unimpeded, we operate in exactly the way we were designed to over centuries of evolution.

REAL-LIFE EXAMPLE

I have a client who is now Reiki Level I trained and she is the impetus for this article. I was shocked and horrified when she told me that she's prescribed Methadone for fibromyalgia. Not being in a position to have an opinion as to the medical reason, I was greatly relieved when an anti-addiction advocate suggested that she lower her usage of Methadone. For those who may not be familiar:

"Methadone is a rigorously well-tested medication that is safe and efficacious for the treatment of narcotic withdrawal and dependence. For more than 30 years this synthetic narcotic has been used to treat opioid addiction. Heroin releases an excess of dopamine in the body and causes users to need an opiate continuously occupying the opioid receptor in the brain. Methadone occupies this receptor and is the stabilizing factor that permits addicts on methadone to change their behavior and to discontinue heroin use." --Office of National Drug Control Policy (USA)

Fibromyalgia is one of those conditions for which allopathic medicine has few solutions. Yet there are reams of anecdotal evidence from those who live with this condition that complementary/alternative care significantly manages this condition, with Reiki being at the top of the list. On this Pert says, "…from my research with the endorphins, I know the power of touch to stimulate and regulate our natural chemicals…"

Endorphins are our own painkillers, produced internally.

When it comes to alternative/complementary care, Pert has this pearl to offer: "The argument that they are untested, and therefore can't be taken seriously, is not valid. So much of mainstream medicine itself is totally unproven--yet we do it anyway. I'm afraid that we are holding alternative therapies…to a higher standard than we apply to mainstream medicine."

My question is, why aren't alternative/complementary therapies studied more vigorously, and furthermore, why isn't consistently repeated anecdotal evidence also investigated? As another client recently pointed out, if a method has lasted thousands of years (touch healing in this case) it must work, otherwise it would've disappeared. For instance, the practice of bloodletting flourished well before Hippocrates' time, but was eventually declared quackery.

DESCARTES

Although Rene Descartes has become a punching-bag for the mind-body split that has dominated science and Western thought since the 17th century, he is nevertheless the founder of modern medicine. To get the bodies he needed for dissection, he actually had to make a deal with the Pope to leave anything to do with soul, mind and emotions to the jurisdiction of the church. Cartesian thought as it has come to be known since then, is a reductionist approach, where life is understood by studying the minutest piece and from there extrapolating an all-encompassing view of the whole; and the piece studied is always matter or physical, even when attempting to explain nonphysical phenomena. Much has been written and actually witnessed through the years about the pitfalls of this method, and fortunately there's some hope on the horizon.

This hope comes from quantum and information theory, and multitudes of lay people who against all odds have stuck with age-old spiritual and holistic principles. Looking at the science, we see that information isn't static but changes with the observer and the mindset of the observer at the time. And information isn't confined by space and time, it exists regardless. In this regard, perennial wisdom and information/quantum theory converge: that consciousness is primary or exists before matter or the physical realm. Information allows us to unify the Cartesian mind-body split, because it's independent of both mind and body, but touches both.

INTENTION

The one common thread that runs through almost all complementary/alternative therapies and worldviews is intention. It's with intention that you are on a treatment table whether it's massage, chiropractic or Reiki. It's with intention that you sit for meditation. It's with intention that you choose an herb or homeopathics over synthetic medications. It's with intention that you switch to a plant-based diet. All of these ways are ways in which to enter the informational flow that is already happening in our mind-body.

Rather than introducing a chemical, or worse a combination of chemicals with various contraindications and interactions, into an intricately designed system with a host of informational substances intelligently communicating with each other, we can intentionally and consciously join the network.

"In the old paradigm, we saw the body in terms of energy and matter. Hardwired reflexes, caused by electrical stimulation across the synapse, ran the body in a more or less mechanical, reactive fashion, with little room for flexibility, change, or intelligence. With information added to the process, we see that there is an intelligence running things. It's not a matter of energy acting on matter to create behavior, but of intelligence in the form of information running all systems and creating behavior….But, classically, there is no such thing as an intelligent organism, and to say so is heresy to the old guard who cling to a concept of the body as unintelligent, a bundle of mass and matter stimulated by electrical impulses in a predictable way…."3

Remember that YOU as the observer can change the information with your own consciousness, and that the information is nonlocal, in other words it isn't localized only in the tissues of the heart, liver or brain.

"Neurocardiologists have found that 60 to 65% of the cells of the heart are actually neural cells, not muscle cells as was previously believed. They are identical to the neural cells in the brain, operating through the same connecting links called ganglia, with the same axonal and dendritic connections that take place in the brain, as well as through the very same kinds of neurotransmitters found in the brain. "...in other words, there is a "brain" in the heart, whose ganglia are linked to every major organ in the body, to the entire muscle spindle system that uniquely enables humans to express their emotions. About half of the heart's neural cells are involved in translating information sent to it from all over the body so that it can keep the body working as one harmonious whole. And the other half make up a very large, unmediated neural connection with the emotional brain in our head and carry on a 24-hour-a-day dialogue... "The heart responds to messages sent to it from the emotional brain, which has been busy monitoring the interior environment of dynamic states such as the emotions and the auto-immune system, guiding behavior, and contributing to our sense of personal identity. The emotional brain makes a qualitative evaluation of our experience of this world and sends that information instant-by-instant down to the heart. In return, the heart exhorts the brain to make the appropriate response...." --Joseph Chilton Pierce, author of "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg"

Your consciousness plays an active part in your wellness. Consciousness animates us. Consciousness and matter dance together to create life. Matter without consciousness finds itself inert. Consciousness without matter finds it difficult expressing itself. It's finely balanced and harmonized, and health is the capacity to maintain this natural order.

¹Audubon Magazine, May-June 2005
²Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Pert, Candace B., Ph.D. New York: Scribner, 1997.
³Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine. Pert, Candace B., Ph.D. New York: Scribner, 1997.

A must-buy: Molecules Of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine by Candace B. Pert. Ph.D.

This is an eye-opening book for anyone who thinks that people with medical degrees act more civil or are more altruistic than the rest of us, though Pert also shows that some do rise above the fray. Pert offers mainly an account of her journey from a conventional scientist to one who also embraces complementary and alternative medicine. The journey is long and not without price. She was passed over for the Lasker and Nobel prizes for her work on opiate receptors while colleagues were recognized; she believes that her development of a potential AIDS drug was thwarted owing to scientific dirty pool as well as her being a woman in a man's world.