In my opinion, most allergies are the result of feeding babies such foods as cereals, meat, whole cow’s milk, etc., before they reach the age of 10-12 months. Before that age, babies lack proper enzymes needed for the digestion of these foods, which causes allergic reactions. Babies raised on mother’s milk alone (provided mother is healthy) until the age of at least 8 months, most likely will not develop allergies later in life, unless subjected to severe malnutrition or an extremely toxic environment.
Another common cause of allergies is today’s processed foods loaded with thousands of chemical additives, many of which are powerful causes of allergy. Those who have allergic sensitivities should avoid all foods that might possibly contain chemical additives or residues, and eat only organically produced foods free from man-made chemicals.
Dietary considerations
The Airola Diet with emphasis on whole grains, seeds and nuts and raw fruits and vegetables, all organically grown. Avoid milk (or ice-cream) and wheat, if patient is allergic to them. Yogurt and other soured milks are usually well tolerated. Goat’s milk is also well tolerated. Those suffering from allergies are usually deficient in manganese. The diet should include an abundance of manganese-rich foods: buckwheat, nuts, beans, peas, blueberries.
The most common allergens (according to Dr. Coca) are: eggs, wheat, white potato, milk, and oranges, in this order of frequency. To determine foods to which the patient is allergic, we advise using Dr. Coca’s “Pulse Test”.
Biological treatments
Fasting is an excellent way to remedy allergies. Repeated short juice fasts will eventually result in better tolerance of previous allergens.
After the juice fasting, the patient can try a mono diet: only one food – vegetable or fruit – such as watermelon, carrots, grapes, or apples, should be consumed for one week. After that, one more food is added to the diet. One week later, the third food is added, and so on. After four weeks, the protein foods can be introduced, one at a time. As soon as the patient notices an allergic reaction to a newly-added food, it should be discontinued and a new food tried. This way all real allergens can be eventually eliminated from the diet.
Note: If the patient is using antihistamine drugs regularly, they should not be withdrawn abruptly, even during fasting, but discontinued gradually, replacing them with vitamin С in large doses (which acts as a natural antihistamine), up to 3,000 mg. daily.
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Muscles are important contributors to joint function and stability. They serve as stabilizers and protectors of joints in addition to being the source of power for all movement. As you might expect, muscles provide the strength required to allow movement to take place at the joint. Combinations of muscles acting in unison can result in a wide range of motions. This is how we can use the same joint (the shoulder) to reach behind our back, across our chest, and over our head. We do so by activating different muscle groups.
In addition to movement, the muscles also provide stability for a joint in a given position. For instance, if you raise your arms to comb your hair, certain muscle groups contract to lift your arms above your head. After your arms are raised, the muscles continue to work to keep your arms elevated while you use your hands and wrists to comb your hair. Similarly, when you are standing in line without moving, your muscles are contracting to allow your body to stand erect without collapsing at the hips or knees. Even without movement, then, muscles are critical: they allow us to retain the stationary position of our joints.
Lastly, the muscles automatically protect the joints during movement without requiring conscious thought on our part. As an illustration of this property of muscles, recall the last time you unexpectedly missed a step while walking down a set of stairs. Your muscles did not expect or prepare for the missed step and your knee or hip felt the jolt of unprotected movement. If the step had been anticipated, the appropriate muscles would have contracted, acting much like a shock absorber on a car to protect the joints for the step. This automatic protection function of the muscles results in a reduction of the impact on the joints in the course of daily living.
Muscles are attached to bone by tendons, which are similar to ligaments except that they connect muscle to bone instead of bone to bone. Because the tendons are located at the end of muscles, they move when muscles tighten, or contract. To demonstrate this to yourself, “make a muscle” by bending your arm at your elbow. At the same time, feel the area on the inside of your elbow for a ropelike structure at the end of the biceps muscle. This is a tendon.
The tendon is surrounded by an envelope known as the tendon sheath, in which the tendon slides back and forth. This sheath has a lining (similar to the synovial membrane) which permits easy gliding. When muscle tendons are in good health, they provide excellent support for the joint, much as ligaments do. Tendons and their tendon sheath can become inflamed, however, from overuse (producing a condition called tendinitis) or from RA (producing a condition called tenosynovitis).
Another structure located near the joints which help the tendons and muscles move smoothly over bone is the bursa. Bursae are sacs located between or under muscles which help the muscles slide without resistance or friction. If these structures become inflamed they can become filled with fluid, a condition known as bursitis.
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Both Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous hold meetings of recovering addicts and alcoholics – sometimes in church halls, sometimes in hospitals or clinics, occasionally in homes or social-service offices. Just wherever the rent is cheap!
If you decide you want their help, all you have to do is ring their number and they will put local members in touch with you, or tell you where the nearest meeting is.
Meetings vary in format, but a fairly typical NA meeting will usually have a secretary who runs the meeting, and a speaker. Often this speaker will say something about his addiction and how he recovered from it. Other NA members then join in, perhaps adding their comments or telling something about their own experience. Newcomers are not expected to speak at the meeting – though if they want to, they can. Alcoholic’s Anonymous meetings are run in the same way.
Starting your own NA meeting-You can start your own Narcotics Anonymous meeting. All you need to do is to contact NA headquarters and they will help with advice.
It’s probably best to start a new meeting with the help of another recovering addict. If you have been to local AA meetings and have met an AA member who used to use drugs as well as drink, ask if he or she will help. Many AA members have a history, if not of illegal drugs, then of being dependent on prescribed drugs like tranquillisers.
You should look out for a sympathetic member who is sober and can give support. If possible, it should be somebody who has been sober for at least a year.
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In a larger scheme of things, the notion of the culturally molded mind, introduced by Vygotsky and Luria, leads to a very important corollary for our understanding of the biological machinery of the mind: The brain comes pre-wired for certain kinds of pattern recognition but not for others. This means that the brain must have some capacity, in fact huge capacity, to store information about various facts and rules, whose nature is not known in advance but is acquired by learning through personal experience or derived from culture. How can this be done?
Evolution solved the problem through the judicious application of the principle that “less is more.” The “old” subcortical structures are preloaded with hardwired information representing the “wisdom of the phylum,” and so are the cortical regions directly involved in processing sensory inputs: vision, hearing, touch. Motor cortex is also to a large degree “pre-wired.”
But the more complex cortical regions, the so-called association cortex, have relatively little pre-wired knowledge. It has, instead, a great capacity to process any kind of information, to deal in an open-ended way with any curve ball the circumstances may throw at the organism. In a seemingly paradoxical way, the more advanced certain cortical regions are and the more recently they developed in evolution, the less “preloaded with software” they are. Instead, their processing power is accomplished increasingly by the ability to forge their own “software” as required by their survival needs in an increasingly complex and unpredictable outside world. This ability to forge “software” in the form of increasingly complex attractors is in turn accomplished by endowing these new brain regions with an open-ended capacity to deal with complexity of any nature. In contrast to the inborn, pre-wired processors, like the angle-specific neurons of the visual cortex, the pattern-recognition capability of these most advanced regions of the cortex is called “emergent,” because it truly emerges in the brain, which is very complex but also very “open-minded.”
This leads to a conclusion that is quite profound: The evolution of the brain is dominated by one grand theme, a gradual transition from a “hardwired” to an “open-ended-open-minded” design. As a result, the functional organization of the most advanced heteromodal association cortex does not resemble a quilt consisting of little regions each in charge of its own narrow function. To use the technical parlance of neuroscience, it is not modular. Rather, it is highly interactive and distributed. The heteromodal association cortex develops along the continuous distributions, called gradients, that emerge spontaneously, as dictated by brain geometry and neural network economy, and not by some preordained, genetically or otherwise, content-specific order. In the association cortex, functionally close aspects of cognition are represented in neuroanatomically close cortical regions. This congruence between cognitive metric and brain metric is exactly what one would expect as an “emergent property” in a self-organizing brain. I term this emergent principle of neo-cortical organization the gradiental principle. By contrast, attaining such congruence between cognitive metric and brain metric through genetic programming would have amounted to a tremendous, and unnecessary, waste of genetic information. Mercifully, this wasteful approach was rejected by evolution. Instead, evolution carved out in the brain design a space for a tabula rasa, but one powered by an exquisite neural capacity for processing complexity of any kind and filling itself with any content.
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