Who would have thought that a few years ago, "health care" could bankrupt us as a nation? Now, it not only seems possible but a very real and scary possibility. It is not a matter of if but when the "health care" paradigm in this country will implode. Why has it come to this?

Well, I believe that the medical community has pretty much sold it's soul to the insurance companies and the government.  That does NOT mean there are not dedicated and compassionate folks working in medical fields.  In fact, I know many but they are restrained by their own professions to stick with the dictates of the crony capitalist at the pharmaceutical companies, the FDA, and their professional organizations.  Some brave souls venture off the reservation and are vilified and made out to be quacks and charlatans by their peers yet they are our best hope to finding true breakthroughs in how we prevent illness and disease.

The crony capitalists will go to great lengths to preserve their dominance of all things health related all in the name of protecting the citizens.  The FDA is supposed to be responsible for protecting and promoting public health but it has become corrupt beyond salvation (watch this).  This is the same FDA that allows toxic waste products from China (fluoride) to be dumped in our drinking water, mercury in our new green light bulbs, our teeth, and, yes, some vaccines.  They even allow Sally Fields to get on TV and scare folks into taking bone poison while they go in with guns drawn to shut down raw milk dairies.  Watch the ads for the latest drugs on TV and listen to all the bad things they can do to you!!  This is the best we can do? Something is seriously wrong!

Want to help do something about it?  "Implementing the free-market approaches advocated in this book could spare Medicare and Medicaid from insolvency while significantly improving the health and productivity of the American public".

 When you have collusion between government and business to the detriment of the citizens, it is crony capitalism.

OK, so if all that is correct, what are we supposed to do?

First - Take responsibility for your own well being and educate yourself.  If all you care about is the amount of your co-pay, you are part of the problem.  Ask hard questions of your health provider and keep asking why.  What causes this symptom?  Can we address the cause and not just the symptom?  If the answers don't make sense to you, get another opinion.

Think of it this way.  If a smoke alarm goes off in your house, you could just pull the batteries out of the alarm but wouldn't you want to know why it went off?  Research anything you are told.  Accept nothing as truth just because it comes from a health care provider.

Yes, this requires a lot more effort on your part but it is the kingpin of the "How Not To Die Club". I will provide a lot of resources to help you in the club.

So let's get on to My Grandiose Theory of Everything

Some version of this will eventually be standard health care and we will look back on the current paradigm as the same kind of folly as we think of blood letting.  The basic idea is find the original source and cause of the breakdown in the body's defenses that allows disease and illness to manifest instead of playing whack-a-mole medicine.  You have a symptom?  Here's a pill.  Oh you have another symptom?  Here's another pill.  Whack a doodle all day!

This not a new concept but it will revolutionize the practice of health care.  So what is it?

"Chronic stress and the resulting elevation in stress hormones (cortisol, epinephrine, noepinephrine) accelerate aging. They are major contributors to premature death from a variety of causes, mostly related to increasing to increased risk of chronic cardiovascular, infectious, and metabolic disorders".
Life Extension Magazine October 2011 pg. 31.

I would add chronic tension, artifacts of unresolved traumas, large and small,and interrupted inflammatory responses from injuries.

Or as John F. Barnes puts it:

"Science has now discovered what I have been teaching for over 30 years, i.e., symptoms, diagnostic labels, and diseases are a blockage of our bio-energy caused by a prolonged inflammatory response.  Trauma and the resultant inflammation response create Myofascial restrictions that ultimately create the symptoms of pain and disease processes." (read the full article)   
(more articles by John F. Barnes about Myofascial release can be found here)

For our purposes here, I will use the term artifacts of unresolved traumas which will include all of the above.

Human beings are magnificently designed to survive.  We have hard coded into our neural and energetic pathways coping mechanisms to deal with just about anything that comes our way including trauma.  Unfortunately, we have lost our connection with some of our basic coping mechanisms.  Why this is so is something of a mystery but I suspect it is partly cultural and partly because we are so impressed with our magnificent brains that we have lost connection with an even greater intelligence encoded in our bodies.

Over the last 100 years or so, we have increased our exposure to trauma because of the information explosion all around us.  The stuff we see and hear affects just as if it were happening to us.  Pile onto that all the synthetic compounds we are exposed to daily, the deterioration of our diet, and our hectic lifestyle and we have added a lot of stress to our systems.  The result is we accumulate artifacts of unresolved traumas in our bodies.

Here is my theory of how these artifacts are imprinted in the body.

Anything that causes us to sense a threat either on a conscious or sub-conscience level causes bioelectrical, neural, chemical, and metabolic changes almost immediately in the body.  I believe this cascade of events results from a whole body communication system.  A "a beautiful, conscious, vibrant, liquid-crystalline matrix", as John F. Barnes puts it.  Anyway, these events leave artifacts in the body and for good reason.  We may still be in danger and need to react quickly.  Some would call this a memory but I prefer the term artifact because I think it is more accurate.

I believe the mechanism for this is a phase change in the structured water on the membrane of every cell in the body.  See Water, Energy, and Life: Fresh Views From the Water's Edge, Dr. Gerald Pollack. How the actual mechanism of this works will be figured out at some point so pick your favorite theory for now.

These artifacts can occur anyplace in the body and can build up layers upon interwoven layers of information.  After all, there are a lot of water molecules in the body.  The idea that water can store information may seem a little whacky at first but whether or not this is how the artifacts are recorded doesn't really matter.  The mechanism may be something completely different.  The important thing to get is that the artifacts are somehow imprinted in our bodies.

When we feel the danger has passed and we are safe, we are supposed to discharge these artifacts.  So what happens when we pile on artifacts faster then we can discharge them and forget how to use our built in coping mechanisms?  Now we have a chronic condition of disrupted cellular communication and BAD things happen.

When cellular communication is restricted, we have set ourselves up for illness and disease to take hold and this can be years in the making.  These artifacts are acting on us 24 hours a day 7 days a week whether we know it or not.

Let's explore how this might affect us.

Our primal survival reaction mechanisms have been described as the Fight, Flight, or Freeze Responses. For our purpose here, that will do.  If you want to dig deeper into the latest thinking about trauma, I encourage you watch The Polyvagal Theory and PTSD with Stephen Porges, PhD.    Stephen Porges website.  
For a basic understanding of Polyvagal Theory - the Triune Automatic Nervous System, read this article.

THE primer for understanding trauma is Peter Levine's book "Waking The Tiger".
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences

Fight
I'm going to kill that damn tiger that keeps trying to eat me. I'm not afraid. My adrenaline is pumping and my spear is sharp. Time seems to be stretched out. People expect me to be brave and protect them. It's me or the tiger. People are cheering me on!  I'll kill him and have his liver roasting over the fire tonight! Get the sissies out of the way and let me at him!

Flight
Oh crap that's a big tiger! He's coming after me and my spear just broke ! My heart is racing. I'm running as fast as I can. I just have to keep ahead of everybody else so maybe he will eat one of them. I must be a coward. I am so afraid. I never want to face that tiger again!

Freeze
I can't out run the tiger! I feel like I'm trying to run through mud. He's going to eat ME! Absolute terror! Maybe if I hide and keep very still, he will eat somebody else. Maybe nobody will notice me. I don't want to be in my body. I want this all to go away. If I am going to be eaten, I don't want to feel it. I am withdrawing. I won't see, hear, or feel anything. I am shutting down and preparing to die. All is lost.

A single trauma may involve elements of all these.  The artifacts recorded in the body (if you survived) are a complicated jumble of emotional, chemical, neurological, bioelectrical, spiritual, and physical information.  If these artifacts are not discharged, the body never returns to feeling safe, relaxed, content and socially engaged (not withdrawn).

Picture a deer grazing in a high mountain meadow.  He's happy and calm so he recognizes any real threat that may come his way.  If a mountain lion suddenly appears and give chase, he uses the same survival mechanisms described above.  Stop for a moment and feel what that mental picture did in your body.  If the deer survives the encounter, he will literally "shake it off" and go back to eating grass as if nothing ever happened.

We don't we do that. WHY??  Is our design flawed?  Instead we go around in a hypervigilant state where everything seems to be a threat.  We are sure somebody is going to blow up the world, or at the very least, we are going to die because we didn't take the cholesterol medicine the guy on TV said we needed.  We feel afraid and powerless or aggressive and angry or we numb ourselves out.

I refuse to believe our design is flawed.  We have just lost touch with our innate abilities to discharge the artifacts of unresolved traumas recorded in our bodies.

Dr. David Berceli and John F. Barnes have come at this from different directions but as it happens, have developed synergistic methods to release these artifacts from the body.  Until trauma is resolved in the body, it is not resolved. Dr. David Berceli has developed Trauma Releasing Exercises and John F. Barnes developed his Myofascial Release method to accomplish the discharge of these trauma artifacts.  We are very lucky to have these brilliant guys around.

I hope you will join me both in learning the Trauma Releasing Exercises and being treated by a Myofascial Release therapist.  It's time to start peeling away the artifacts of unresolved traumas like layers of an onion.  Who knows, you may discover a whole new person in there!

The world needs this now - keep shaking.

You have a lot of crap information stored in your body that has real physical, emotional, hormonal, spiritual, neurological, and bioelectrical effects on your well-being.  Your body can use all the help it can get.  You are exposed to more toxic information, bad food, bad water, and toxic substances on a daily basis than mankind has ever known.  We have a brain so let's use all the tools we have.

The problem with supplements, food, "green" living etc. is that people get all wrapped up it and it becomes just another defense mechanism against the fear.  They can get very rigid that they have to do this or that or they will surely die.  The more rigid they become the less healthy they are so they chase the next great healthy food fad or magic herb.  All this is for naught as they will still die because of the artifacts of unresolved traumas.

I have tried to take a common sense approach to all this but I'm sure some will say I've got it all wrong or that I've gone way overboard - oh well.  I feel good about what I am doing. I found a path with a heart.  Hope to see you there.

"For me there is only the traveling on the paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge for me is to traverse its full length. And there I travel—looking, looking, breathlessly" Don Juan Matus

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