500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
It might not make sense why it works. You don’t have to “believe” in it. But it works anyway. This is one of the great mysteries of medicine and probably of life. Oh, you want examples?
Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese medical practice. I’ve tried it. Friends have tried it. Many have had good results. But we don’t know why it works.
I have also been trying qi gong lately, another ancient Chinese practice that involves moving energy around by standing with your arms extended in front of your body or waving them around like a lunatic. This, too, seems to have healing effects. Don’t know why. We’re fighting off flu and colds around here. At the suggestion of my sister, a doctor, we tried something called Apitherapy Honey Elderberry Syrup. It’s basically raw honey, elderberry and some herbs like echinacea. It doesn’t make sense that it would work, but it works incredibly well. This grapey-tasting stuff that tastes agreeably like a liquid lollipop just knocks down a cold.
A friend of mine recently told me a story. He was an engineer for 10 years, and he did Kung Fu. One day he pushed too hard and tore something. He went to an acupuncturist who was Korean. There was a language barrier. My friend figured that the acupuncturist didn’t understand a word about his injury. The guy fixed it anyway.
My friend, being an engineer and used to scientific proofs, had an interesting problem. Acupuncture worked, but could not be explained. So he became a licensed acupuncturist himself, spending three thousand hours to get a masters degree in acupuncture and oriental medicine so he could practice in California.
My friend’s name is Eric Schmidt and he runs an acupuncture clinic here in Santa Monica. 
Being an amateur engineer myself I like to know why things work, so I asked him to explain acupuncture. He gave it a shot, starting by explaining about the fascia, a fibrous tissue that binds blood vessels, nerves, muscles and groups of muscles. ”These fascia work together and they communicate with each other,” Eric told me.
Fascia might be a physical expression of what the Chinese call meridians, often described as energy channels. They connect in ways you might not have considered, and they’re the reason an acupuncturist can treat frontal jaw pain by inserting a needle in the frontal part of your foot.
That’s a 6 on the scale of weird as far as I’m concerned. Shall we go to 8? When an acupuncturist inserts a needle an inch or so into the skin it touches deep nerve centers that connect to a part of the brain involved with activities not wholly under our conscious control, like digestion, respiration, and the sleep cycle. The body reacts powerfully when we stimulate these nerve centers associated with such deep regulatory processes.
“The body is launching a strong response to a trauma that’s never occurred,” Eric explained, and the curious thing is that response can be a healing force. In this way, the acupuncture needle is “tricking” the body into sending energy into a trouble zone. The body can’t tell the difference, or chooses not to perceive the difference, between real trauma and the minor trauma of an acupuncture needle.
If you’ve ever had a dream about falling and woke up breathing hard and in a cold sweat you’ve experienced how something that is “just in the mind” can be so real.
Maybe this is why there may never be a scientific response to the “reason” acupuncture works. Simply by becoming involved in it you are involved in your own healing. You’re not a passive patient, but instead a co-creator of your own wellness. Maybe we shouldn’t ask why it works, but instead, is it effective? For many problems treatable by acupuncture, the answer is a resounding “yes.” That makes the real question: Why don’t more mainstream doctors refer people to acupuncturists?
There’s a lot to be learned from something that we might not understand. But that would go to 10 on the weird scale.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema
Recently my son Dean was describing a movie he saw called “Altered States.” It came out in 1980 and starred William Hurt as a Harvard scientist who experiments with LSD while floating inside a darkened tank. As Dean talked through the movie I realized that he was telling the true story of John C. Lilly, a Harvard scientist who took LSD and developed the float tank. In a float tank you are suspended in water, in the dark, swimming in the soup of your consciousness. In that environment, Dr. Lilly said, he left his body and traveled to other universes. Going inside got him pretty far out there.
Lilly believed that dolphins were advanced beings, possibly sent from outer space or another dimension to help us. His colleagues at Harvard pretty much thought he was nuts. But, despite the controversy, certain truths of his discoveries in the dark may yet come to light.
When LSD was legal (yes, before 1966 it was legal to do scientific experiments with LSD) the elegant
movie actor Cary Grant, of all people, participated in LSD-assisted psychotherapy once a week. In his autobiography he wrote that relaxing conscious control allowed him to access dream states. “These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies … inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood.”
Enter DMT, known as the “spirit molecule.” Dr. Rick Strassman believes that this powerful psychedelic is at the root of naturally occurring psychedelic states, including psychosis and mystical experiences. He believes that when pineal gland releases DMT at 49 days after conception the event marks the entrance of the spirit into a fetus.
But before I lose you here, let’s back up a little.
Whether we think of ourselves as the human agents of higher powers or just incredible biological machines, our waking moments are pretty much ruled by one thing: A quest for dopamine. This is a chemical associated with pleasure. When your endocrine system is pumping dopamine into the bloodstream … well, in the words of James Brown, “I FEEL GOOD! Uhhh!”
So why jump out of a plane to generate thrills (and dopamine) when you can pop a pill? Why endure a 10-day silent meditation when you can do a little DMT and feel some ecstasy right now? Is the link between pharmacology and enlightenment really that simple?
Well, there could be a link altered states and healing. Roslyn Dauber is making a documentary called “Annie’s Psilocybin Therapy.” It’s about a study at UCLA. Scientists are offering psilocybin (aka “magic mushrooms”) to terminally ill cancer patents to see if the drug helps them deal with their anxiety. Researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins also have psilocybin studies. Roslyn tells me that the initial results of these studies have been very positive.
Can drugs like DMT or LSD or mescaline (found in peyote) be used in a controlled way to heal people? Got to get back to you on that. But I do know that I will try a sensory deprivation float tank in the near future and will let you know how it goes, provided that I return to the body that I am using now.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
It can be a good thing to learn from the past. (“Must remember to look behind when backing up car.”) It can be a good thing to look around the room and mentally rewind everything you see to its source. (“Where did that bag of Tostitos come from and would I want to see how they were made?”) The past is embedded everywhere.
The novelist William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”
But what if the past wasn’t serving you – would you be able to unlearn it? Let’s see.
As part of pre-production for a documentary series we’re working on, I recently went to see a researcher named John D. Riley. At his Zero Point Research lab, I sat in front of a Lifestream Generator, a device pumping out millions of volts of DC electrical energy. 
If you’ve ever seen a Tesla coil, you’ll get an idea of what this is like. He told me that as the energy passed through me I’d experience where I was emotionally blocked. Well, I sure was feeling something around my neck and left shoulder – it jerked up and back, pulled by an unseen force. In that very second, an indelible image burst on the movie screen in my mind. I saw my 40-year-old father pulling my arm as I, at age 10, tried to run away. Was this some of my past somehow embedded in me, now released? Faulkner had it right. The past wasn’t even past. I was carrying some of it around in my shoulder.
Lots of people wanting to heal themselves are looking to reprogram the embedded past. 
Go to a yoga class and see if twisting your torso will release mental crud and create more space. Maybe a hypno-therapist can rewire your mind. Maybe an acupuncturist can get life force flowing in a more balanced pattern. Stored memory is powerful, whether it involves language, images, or even body postures. Manipulating it might be the key to healing on both the macro and micro levels… perhaps right down to the level of individual cells.
That’s the focus of some promising research at Children’s Hospital Boston that suggests we will be able to press reset on a cell’s developmental clock. If disease scarred your heart or damaged your nerves or knocked out your immune system, scientists could reboot. In successful experiments, they’ve already reverted ordinary skin cells to their embryonic state. Called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) these cells can become whatever kind of cell required – blood cells, brain cells, lung cells or heart cells. That means the body would have a chance to start over. The cell’s “memory” of being sick would be erased.
Emotionally positive memories play a role in healing, but even negative memories have their usefulness. If you happen to remember that snakes with a triangular head are poisonous, you might think to back away when you see one. Still, the prospect of rewinding time, being able to reprogram ourselves, or rebooting a sick cell makes me believe that we have a shot of taking charge of our past in order to shape the future.
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This week’s Newsweek cover article is a slap at Oprah Winfrey for crazy talk about complementary and integrative medicine. Oprah does cover some fringe stuff that is wacky and sometimes wrong. But I think she’s right to do it. Here’s why.
The history of medicine is smeared with snake oil. It was once believed that drinking oil – not olive oil, but the black stuff that comes out of the ground – had healthy properties. Even today, some swear that drinking apple cider vinegar helps digestion and whacks infections, but it may actually damage tooth enamel and sear the esophagus.
Newsweek slaps Oprah for going out on a slippery snake oil limb, promoting people like Suzanne Somers and her aggressive program of hormone replacement therapy. Somers, 62, takes 60 vitamins and supplements and also gives herself a shot of estrogen directly into her vagina. Newsweek portrays her as laughable, but I agree with Oprah – Somers might be a pioneer. Self-experimenters have often advanced science. 
At the age of 22, Sir Isaac Newton nearly blinded himself by staring at the sun in a mirror because he wanted to study the after-images it left on his retinas. 
Australian physician Barry James Marshall swallowed some foul-smelling bacterial crud to show that Helicobacter pylori caused ulcers. Sir Issac ended up with marks on his eyelids; but Marshall ended up with a 2005 Nobel Prize for linking the bacterial crud, H. pylori, to ulcers. I’m not saying Suzanne Somers is going to surprise us with a treatise on gravity, but she has courage.
“Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right.” — Barry James Marshall
The line between courage and dumbness, however, can be slim. Jenny McCarthy, another frequent Oprah guest, believes that her son Evan contracted autism because he received a measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination. So far researchers haven’t found a link between vaccinations and autism. We do know, as Newsweek points out, that the vaccinations have saved the lives of thousands of children who otherwise might have died.
Facts like that don’t seem to change McCarthy’s belief. “My science is named Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.”
Speaking of belief, look at “The Secret.” Oprah led the charge for it, and it has some good stuff, reminding us that we are all fields of energy in a larger field of energy. But it also stated that all diseases can be cured by the power of thought alone. That’s going too far. Even super-Secret supporter Oprah had to caution a guest on her show who had breast cancer and who was thinking of forgoing surgery against the advice of her doctors. Said Oprah, “I don’t think that you should ignore all of the advantages of medical science, and try to, through your own mind now because you saw a Secret tape, heal yourself.”
Yet Oprah knows people can heal themselves with Qi Gong, meditation, yoga, acupuncture. She’s not afraid to promote this “new” medicine, a medicine that is actually old, embracing the best of East and West.
Newsweek is going backward, contributing to the backlash against new medicine. Oprah is going forward by supporting medical pioneers. While looking into the sun, drinking crud or shooting up in the vagina may not seem so brilliant, breakthroughs come from acts of courage or folly and sometimes both.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Disclosure: I like doing yoga. I don’t go for the workout. (I have running for that.) I don’t go for the women. (Though I met a woman in yoga whom I have married.) I go to explore the mindscape and the soulscape. That said, I have a request for all yoga teachers: Can you stop telling us to throw away the mind? You might know the type, the teacher who cranks up the volume on their shallow pop music and shouts over it, “You don’t need your brain – just listen to your feelings!” This instruction makes me want to puke, but I would have to use my brain to do that, so I guess it’s not allowed.
I’m thinking about this because I just saw a new documentary called “Enlighten Up!” It’s the story of a skeptic who tries to find out if yoga can change him. I experienced the story very much through the skeptic’s eyes because he wanted tangible proof of how yoga was working. 
I like that, because it speaks to the existential engineer in me. Seeking such proof involves the brain in the process of healing the body and the spirit. That’s good. Here’s why: You might already know that there are two parts of the brain and they work together. The left brain takes care of the sequential, analytical, logical stuff like doing your taxes and complaining about it. The right brain is non-linear, intuitive and big picture. It’s what we use to connect to the soul, interpret people’s facial expressions, dance with abandon and heal ourselves.
“The brain? That’s my second favorite organ.”
-Woody Allen
As Daniel H. Pink writes in A Whole New Mind, the left brain is bossy and tends to bully the right brain. This is why in meditation we’re asked to “quiet the mind.” It’s an oversimplified instruction – you really want to quiet the left brain — it’s analyzing how annoying it is to sit still — and try to listen to the right brain as it tells its subtle story. One great technique for this is to sit and hum loudly. It gets everything vibrating, clears the mind of extra thoughts and if you don’t go insane first or get evicted, you might discover something new.
I was amazed to learn from Daniel Pink’s book that for years scientists believed it was the left brain alone that “made us human” – our logical, analytical selves vaulted us above dumb animals who have never even attempted to write a novel. The mute, mysterious right brain was thought to be a vestige of a more primitive form of human. But as Pink points out, “We need both approaches in order to craft fulfilling lives and build productive, just societies.”
Works for me. Even when I gaze into my own past I see that my father is a lawyer whose default mode is analytical left brain rationality while my mother, who was an artist, was a devotedly holistic right brain person. Genetically, that’s my recipe. Whatever I am pursuing or pursued by these days is orchestrated by biology, biography and those two halves of the brain playing their symphony together.
