Madam Lichtenstein's Cosmic World

Don't Just Avoid the Virus - Defeat it by Strengthening Your Immunity

I found this valuable article on Medium.com regarding how we can boost our immunities to help fight the virus. Thank you Amory B. Lovins and Eric Rasmussen MD  Do your own research but find out if this advice is helpful to you.

 

Why do most people who catch the new virus have mild symptoms and some have none, while others, chiefly the old and sick, develop fatal pneumonias? Because people differ in “immune competence” — their ability to fend off and overcome infection. Proven methods can strengthen that ability. Yet amid debates about how quickly and strictly we must keep apart and stay home, this powerful complement to avoiding exposure and treating infection is being largely ignored. We’re striving to keep the virus away from people and cure them if they get sick, but without also strengthening our natural defenses. This is a serious omission, and you can help fix it.

Isolation, distancing, handwashing — all the effective ways to avoid exposure to the virus — remain absolutely crucial to avoid catastrophic overwhelm of healthcare. But that exclusive focus obscures a second powerful tool: strengthening our immune and body-repair competences can slow contagion too. Both these strategies buy time to find and isolate outbreaks, surge test kits and ventilators, improve and deliver therapies, and develop vaccines.

Stronger immune competence also makes COVID-19 and other more ordinary infections milder and briefer. Reducing the risk of fatal pneumonias — especially for the old, sick, and poor — creates “virtual ven­tila­tors” to augment scarce real ones. Milder, briefer illness saves suffering and cost, makes working from home more productive and unexpected excess parenting less challenging, and helps us adapt to these strange new circumstances. And an “im­­­munity mission” — boosting our overall immunity within our communities — could engage our pent-up yearning to protect each other by cultivating health.

Yet individual and community immunity aren’t on the CDC or WHO websites, nor in great articles from The Atlantic, Washington Post, New Yorker, and Vox. We’re told to avoid exposure, but not to reduce “host hospitality” (us being hospitable to the virus) by making ourselves more resistant to viral infection. Slowing the spread and flattening the curve will take both.

On March 10 (though not in later pathfinding articles), The New York Times broke the silence, endorsing five of eight standard immune-boosting methods: sleep, calm/hope/de-stressing (yes, meditation may help prevent colds), nutrition, exercise, and reducing alcohol (an immune suppressant). Next, add hydration, nontoxicity, and physiological balance. All are vital: your health and immunity depend on what you eat, drink, breathe, do, and feel.

The article also edged more controversially toward two of the half-dozen supplements that can boost immunity — vitamin D and zinc. Otherwise, news organizations’ standard advice is “skip unproven supplements” that “probably won’t help, and may harm” — notably vitamin C, a “myth” and “fallacy” that doesn’t protect. So our best newspapers say supplements can’t boost immunity. Maybe they’re not reading the research right.

Meanwhile, one to six grams per day (g/d) of a certain substance was proven to shorten the use of a ventilator for 471 patients needing more than ten hours of ventilator support, by an average of 25% (even more for the sickest patients). That reduction in patient requirements is like discovering a lot of unused ventilators. An average of about 2 g/d of the same substance shortened ICU stays by 8.6%, equivalent to a lot more ICU beds. A day’s dose costs 58¢ (top quality, retail price), so there is now good evidence we can spend a few dollars to reduce an ICU stay that costs thousands.

Well-controlled trials found the same substance could prevent and help treat pneumonia. When sepsis or influenza A pneumonia caused life-threatening respiratory failures, tens-of-g/d intravenous doses of the same substance proved safe and effective. The Shanghai Government Medical Association and a top Xi’an hospital use and recommend it for COVID-19, with three clinical trials underway (one already posted). Fifty tons of it just got shipped to Wuhan, where success has now led many New York hospitals to adopt this therapy in severe COVID-19 cases, with encouraging results.

What’s this mysterious substance? The same vitamin C that mainstream media dismiss as having little or no benefit against viral respiratory infections! Based on modern studies and recent rigorous evaluations, vitamin C is far more than just a “vitamin”; it is a foundational molecule that protects and regulates every cell, and actually seems to be the most effective antiviral agent known. So why do some say to take none a day?

The medical evidence cited (also by NIH) as supposedly debunking the use of vitamin C in respiratory illness — the 2013 Cochrane Review of 64 clinical trials — actually found consistent curative value, especially at higher doses and in children. Its senior author concluded that “all 21 placebo-controlled studies published since 1970” using at least one gram per day of vitamin C reported milder or shorter colds. He also wrote the papers cited above on ventilator and ICU savings, and the citations above on pneumonia prevention and mitigation. “[I]nertia and prejudices against vitamin C” persist, as his excellent review paper explains, based largely on outdated and poorly performed studies demolished decades ago. Indeed, his Cochrane Review recom­mended that “consistent effect of vitamin C on…duration and severity…and low cost and safety” may make it “worthwhile for common cold patients to test on an individual basis whether thera­peutic vitamin C is beneficial for them. Further therapeutic… [trials] are warranted.” That’s hardly a description of a myth.

Doubts whether vitamin C can also help to prevent colds confuse evidence of absence with absence of evidence: NIH rightly found “not enough evidence,” and a Danish review agreed the clinical trials available by 2010 (nearly all even today) are “largely irrelevant.” Why? Evidence-based medicine requires large, controlled, usually randomized and double-blind, clinical trials — but industry and govern­ment won’t fund their high cost for unpatent­able over-the-counter supplements. Such trials are especially difficult to perform rigorously for vitamin C. Further, that Cochrane Review rested on deeply flawed clinical trials. Nearly all doses were far too small or infrequent to trigger the threshold effects that practitioners claim and science predicts. Unreport­ed quality of the vitamin C used may have made doses severalfold less effective. Outcomes were linked to whether subjects took any C, but only rarely to how much or how often. And decisively, “none of the iden­ti­fied controlled trials directly test[ed]” the preventive claims that the Review supposedly refuted.

With no better evidence, then, what should we do? Cochrane Review, NIH, and CDC agree vitamin C is generally safe (minor exceptions are clear). Even top-quality C (fully buffered, fully reduced l-ascorbate, described and sourced in a medically vetted lay user’s guide) is cheap and ubiquitous. Seventy-odd years’ unrefuted observations, buttressed by hundreds of basic-science papers, show that at least 3–5 grams per day, spread through the day, largely protects against known viruses. That’s equivalent to about 40–70 medium-sized oranges per day. Taking more, nearly to stool-loosening level, is even better. (A 2018 trial with 1,444 Korean Army recruits given 2 grams three times a day found 20–40% fewer colds.) Therefore:

• Even if no supplement worked, we should take better care of ourselves in all other ways that boost immune and repair competence. Public-health strategy should combine reducing exposure to the virus with making any infections fewer, shorter, and milder.
• The Cochrane Review found that even little and infrequent vitamin C did make colds shorter and milder. Various viruses, including corona­viruses, cause colds, so taking vitamin C should make COVID-19 illness shorter and milder too, and the pandemic less severe, even if vitamin C doesn’t prevent infection. It may still make the course of the illness less severe, reducing the burden on our healthcare system.
• So shouldn’t at least healthcare, EMS, grocery-store, pharmacy, delivery, and other frontline workers, and groups most at risk of severe illness (old, sick, poor, homeless, refugees, prisoners), be encouraged and helped to start using this safe, cheap, easy, and available substance now?
• Simple question: Is it riskier to take enough high-quality vitamin C that may keep you well and seems to help cure you if you get sick, or to take none?

With or without supplements, stronger community immunity is a low-risk, equity-enhancing, socially mobilizing way to do no harm, do much good, and buy precious time. Immunity will become even more vital if no universal-vaccine miracle emerges and if this single-strand RNA virus’s rapid mutations outpace specific vaccines. Not hedging that bet may soon look negligent.

Thirteen years ago, when Lovins co-keynoted the annual meeting of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement for its founder, Harvard Med’s Don Berwick MD MPP (later head of Medicare and Medicaid), Dr. Berwick rephrased the medical dictum primum non nocere — “first, do no harm” — thus: “When harm is underway, proceed urgently to learn how to stop it, and act urgently on the learning.”

Let’s roll.

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The Power of Tumeric

There are many foods and spices out there that seem to have powerful healing properties. Tumeric is a spice most commonly found in Indian cuisine.

"They call it the spice of life," says P. Murali Doraiswamy of Duke University, commenting on the potential of Turmeric , a common ingredient of Indian curries, to combat arthritis, Alzheimer's and cancer. In fact, "doctors trained in Ayurvedia medicine, a traditional medical system in India," have used "turmeric to treat inflammatory diseases such as arthritis" for centuries. Western researchers are now arriving at similar conclusions, as a new study published in a journal called "Arthritis & Rheumatism" reveals that turmeric, when injected into rats "almost completely prevented the onset of arthritis."

Not only that, but "rates of Alzheimer's in India are about four times lower than in the USA," according to Gregory Cole of UCLA. It's believed that "curcumin" is the "powerful substance" in turmeric "that might protect the brain from damage that leads to Alzheimer's." A "test-tube study" by UCLA researchers at UCLA in October "showed that curcumin could help clear the human brain of toxic protein deposits thought to cause the memory loss and confusion of Alzheimer's." In addition: "A study of more than 1,000 older men in Singapore last year found that those who ate lots of curry-spiced food did better on memory tests than those who rarely ate the spice." Bharat Aggarwal of the University of Texas-Houston meanwhile advises that it's too early to conclude that curry is a cure for cancer, but says evidence is mounting.

"The curcumin in curry seems to shut down genes that trigger the development and spread of breast cancer" in animals. "And a preliminary human study suggests curcumin supplements might -- in a handful of cases -- be able to stabilize pancreatic cancer ... Epidemiology studies in humans also have linked frequent use of turmeric spice to lower rates of breast, prostate and colon cancer," according to Dr. Aggarwal. It's possible to buy OTC supplements that contain curcumin, but why not go to the source and give Indian food a try. Darci Jayne, who started eating Indian food once or twice a week to help her arthritis, noticed an additional benefit -- her joints not only felt better but she also lost weight, finding that a hearty Indian meal made her less prone to nibbling on late-night snacks.

 

Life Review Experiences

There is some agreement that life can flash before your eyes close to death. According to Fox News...

The idea that our lives flash before our eyes in the moments before we die may sound close to mystical, but neurologists at Hadassah University in Jerusalem say the phenomenon—or at least some version of it—appears to be quite common.

They found, however, that "life review experiences," or LREs, don't play out as Hollywood movies might suggest: The images that bombard the brain aren't chronological. In fact, time itself seems to be distorted as memories, often acutely emotional, rush back simultaneously, the researchers report in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

As a post at New York puts it: LREs are "a super-concentrated version of mental processes that happen every day." To investigate, the scientists conducted in-depth analyses of seven accounts of people who reported having LREs.

Participants described time playing out differently, i.e.: "There is not a linear progression, there is lack of time limits. ... A moment, and a thousand years ... both and neither." Another common feature: People said they experienced emotions from the perspective of loved ones: "I could individually go into each person and I could feel the pain that they had in their life," says one.

"I was seeing, feeling these things about him [my father], and he was sharing with me the things of his early childhood and how things were difficult for him." So what's going on? Researchers say more study is needed to figure what is happening in the brain at such times, but one theory is that things start going a little haywire in areas where memory is stored as oxygen diminishes.

A great book on life review experiences is Love Only: Lessons from my Near-Death Experiences, Past Life Reviews, and Aftereffects

What Your Credit Scores Say About Your Love Life

Who would have thought that your credit score could predict your love life? Get ready for Valentine's Day, spendthrifts. You know who you are....

According to Kiplinger, a new working paper from the Fed examines the link between credit scores and committed relationships, and it turns out there’s a strong one. Economists analyzed data from Equifax, the credit reporting agency, on 12 million consumers over more than 15 years. They found that people with higher credit scores are more likely to form committed relationships in the first place and then to stay together. As much as they could, the authors controlled for demographic, socioeconomic and other factors.

They found that for every 93-point increase in a couple’s initial average credit score, the likelihood of separation in year two of the relationship fell by 30%. After two years, the probability that the couple would call it quits during years three or four dropped 37%. Couples in the sample with the lowest initial scores were two or three times more likely to separate than couples with the highest average scores.

Of course, low credit scores can indicate financial distress, which often leads to relationship distress. But even beyond the financial implications, credit scores seemed to indicate an underlying skill that people bring to life and relationships, says coauthor Jane Dokko, now a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “That skill might be trustworthiness,” says Dokko, who says credit score data correlates with trustworthiness measures in surveys outside the financial arena.

But wait, it’s a little more complicated. (Isn’t it always, when it comes to our love lives?) Researchers also found that people entering into a relationship tend to have similar scores, and that their scores converge over time. But if initial differences exist, they loom large. For example, an initial 66-point difference in scores implies a 24% increase in the likelihood of separation during the relationship’s second, third or fourth years, and a 12% increase in the chance of breaking up in the fifth or sixth year. Raising the higher score—and thus, the couple’s average score—didn’t help. In other words, two people with bad scores might be more compatible over time than people with a big disparity in their scores. “It might be easier to work through issues if you have walked in those shoes yourself,” says Dokko.

Money secrets. That assumes you even know that your partner is struggling. Your sweetheart might well be hiding a financial skeleton in his or her closet. A recent survey from insurer Haven Life found that one in five Americans have secret debt their partner doesn’t know about. A similar number have either a secret savings stash or a secret checking account. Moreover, money remains a taboo topic far longer than it should. One-third of those surveyed are willing to discuss financial matters only when a relationship has become exclusive, and 22% wait until after getting engaged.

It’s vital to be on the same page about finances before your relationship reaches the point of no return—even if part of the agreement is about what you’ll keep private. So keep the romance alive by sharing your credit score. And here’s more advice for Valentine’s Day, courtesy of the Federal Reserve: Don’t overspend on flowers, dinner or a gift. Make sure you can pay those bills on time. And spend the evening with someone who can do the same.

Is New Technology Helping to Bring in the New Age?

I am not sure if having access to everything new age on the internet is helping or hurting our efforts. There are some gems to be found that give true enlightenment but there is also a lot that is false, poorly offered or misleading. So I found this article that talks about this situation. 

Read the full article here

Here is an excerpt of a very dense article:

Close your eyes, and envision a glowing crystal suspended in infinite space. Now breathe in slowly, counting backwards from 10. Energy pulses along the interstices of the crystal. Exhale, and imagine a second crystal, precisely like the first – then a dozen, a hundred, 100,000 crystals multiplying into an infinite void. And 100,000 dream catchers. And semiprecious stones inscribed with chakras. And ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers, Alex Grey posters, Tibetan prayer flags, wellness magnets, and ionising Himalayan salt lamps.

Now open your eyes and imagine how much they all cost.

It’s easy to scoff at the totemic kitsch of the New Age movement. But it’s impossible to deny its importance, both as an economic force and as a cultural template, a way of approaching the world. The New Age is a powerful mixture of mass-market mysticism and idealistic yearning. It’s also, arguably, our era’s most popular ex novo spiritual movement, winning adherents with a blend of ancient wisdom traditions, post-Enlightenment mysticism and contemporary globalisation that is as nebulous as it is heady.

Even scholars who have spent years studying the New Age movement disagree about what precisely it is. I would argue that if there is one thread that binds together the various New Age movements, it is that they represent a resurgence of magical beliefs in a modern world supposedly stripped of them.

 

A solemn Englishman wearing a faux silver circlet, a green cape and a white knight’s doublet beats out a martial rhythm on bongo drums. He stands in a circle alongside a dreadlocked youth with a guitar and an older woman leaning on a wooden staff. At the center of the circle, a regal, snowy-haired environmental activist and former biker named Arthur Uther Pendragon anoints a kneeling man wearing face paint. The members of the circle welcome the newest druid of 2014.

It’s the summer solstice at Stonehenge, one of the epicentres of the Neo-Druid movement. The robed crowds that gravitate to Stonehenge on important dates in the lunar calendar see themselves as upholding ancient, pre-Christian rites. Despite a falling out with the leaders of the Druid Council, Arthur Pendragon remains one of the movement’s most charismatic leaders. (Not long ago, he anointed Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols as a bard of his breakaway order, the Loyal Arthurian Warband.)

In Pendragon’s earlier life, he was a working-class lad called John Timothy Rothwell from Yorkshire. After stints in the British Army and as the leader of an outlaw biker gang known as the Gravediggers, he experienced a spiritual awakening in the early 1980s and changed his name by deed poll in 1986. Pendragon began to regard himself as the reincarnation of King Arthur, even going so far as to buy the sword used as a prop in the film Excalibur (1981). A self-declared ‘English eccentric’, he and his former colleagues in the Druid Council proudly lay claim to a tradition of pagan practice that stretches back five millennia.

 

Folklorists and anthropologists have long sought to reconstruct pre‑modern magical practices – Gaelic charms, prayers to mother goddesses, bacchanalian rites – that resonate on an emotional and spiritual level, even if many of their details remain contested. Perhaps the value of these claims to unbroken tradition lies not in their factual accuracy, but in their ability to instill a sense of empathy with the deep past.

 

As the historian Paul Kléber Monod has pointed out in his book Solomon’s Secret Arts (2013), the Enlightenment was obsessed with the occult. From Isaac Newton (whom the British economist John Maynard Keynes called ‘not the first of the age of reason’ but ‘the last of the magicians’) to the secret societies of the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati, we find a culture simultaneously obsessed with attaining a perfect mastery over nature and the universal patterns pervading all spiritual traditions. Monod told me that he believes there is a ‘direct link’ between these occult movements of the late Enlightenment and the New Age movements of the present day.

But tracing that link takes us into shadowy territory: the vast metropolis of Victorian London, a hub of empires that pulled a variety of spiritual seekers into its fog-shrouded orbit. The figures involved in the creation of a more formalised New Age movement – people such as Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky and George Gurdjieff – rarely saw eye to eye. But one thing they had in common was a mystical conviction that the world on the cusp of the 20th century was about to undergo an epochal change. They were right.

The members of the Theosophical Society that Blavatsky co-founded in New York in 1875 regarded their work as another manifestation of the march of scientific and technological progress, but they also believed they were tapping into supernatural realms of experience. ‘There is a hidden side to life,’ wrote Annie Besant and C W Leadbeater, both members of the Society, in their book Thought-Forms (1901). ‘Each act and word and thought has its consequence in the unseen world which is always so near to us, and that usually these unseen results are of infinitely greater importance than those which are visible to all upon the physical plane.’ Although they were writing here of invisible auras produced by music or emotional states, the authors could just as easily have meant Sigmund Freud’s notion of the subconscious, or a young PhD student named Albert Einstein’s work investigating the invisible medium of the ‘luminiferous aether’.

Science and technology went hand in hand with the dawning of the New Age. It’s no coincidence that beliefs about alternate worlds and invisible forces coalesced at the same time that telegraph cables and radio waves began to encircle the globe. Late Victorian London was the centre of this global technological network, but it was also the home to an emerging group of bohemians who tapped into these new technologies even as they reacted against them.

 

Is the New Age a mere cultural fad, a set of aesthetic signifiers and intellectual fashions that will fade as a societal force? Certainly, one breed of New Age aficionado seems destined to age out of 21st-century society. These are the types that the English novelist Edward St Aubyn assembled for his satire On the Edge (1998), which narrates the adventures of 12 spiritual seekers on the road to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, with a blend of bemused horror and empathy. The hapless protagonists – Crystal, Krater, Stash, Jean-Paul, and the rest – are undoubtedly modelled in part on St Aubyn’s mother Lorna, an Anglo-American heiress who retreated from family tragedy by converting her French château into a New Age institute. But if the crystals-and-auras guise of the New Age has begun to take on a distinctly vintage character, this does not tell the whole story.

Take Silicon Valley in California, which began with the skinny-tie IBM engineer aesthetics of the 1950s but began to acquire its contemporary contours thanks to the LSD-inflected eclecticism of the 1970s. From Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog to the holistic take on computing promulgated by an India-roaming psychedelic enthusiast named Steve Jobs, elements of the New Age counterculture have been encoded in the DNA of Silicon Valley almost from the beginning.

 

Already in 1941, when T S Eliot versified in Four Quartets about Londoners who try ‘To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits/ To report the behaviour of the sea monster/ Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry… fiddle with pentagrams/ Or barbituric acids’, the line was blurring. The esoteric fringes of modern science were becoming entanged with ancient traditions such as astrology and the Tarot. For Eliot, a former dabbler in Blavatsky’s Theosophism who by this time associated true religious profundity with the Catholic tradition, these magical practices were all manifestations of a superficial spirituality, the ‘usual/ Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press’.

Eliot was on to something in that final phrase. Technologies of mass communication allowed the various beliefs that coalesced under the New Age banner to establish themselves as popular alternatives to traditional religion. With such metrics of allegiance to organised religion as churchgoing and tithing in decline, New Age eclecticism (amplified by radio, newspapers and eventually the internet) emerged as a kind of modern magic. Weber might have been right that the rise of modernity required the death of the enchanted world. But in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?