What’s In the Air Welcome, sulphur dioxide Hello, carbon monoxide The air, the air is everywhere Breathe deep, while you sleep, breathe deep It’s been a while since the musical “Hair” expressed its fragment of the sixties’ zeitgeist. And as much as its message of peace, love, and happiness appears dated in our present political […]
New Approaches to Combatting Cancer (11/7/12)
Cancer as An Information System The very word cancer scares us. The definition of cancer involves “uncontrolled, unregulated growth.” It’s as if the cells that sustain and give us life intimately betray us. They turn our bodies into a deformed version of ourselves. Heretics are more frightening than pagans, especially when the heretics take over […]
How Much Exercise is Enough? (10/31/12)
Lots of people ask me how much they should exercise. First I have to ask them what they think “exercise” is. What Is Exercise? Any use of voluntary muscle. The body is an information processing unit which considers and takes account of innumerable elements of which we are not consciously aware – like how physical […]
How You View Your Body Changes Your Body (10/17/12)
Thought As Action Ideas change the world. They also change your body. In the early nineteenth century scientists worked eagerly to discover the fundamentals of chemistry. Using progressively more accurate equipment they measured the ratio of oxygen to hydrogen in water, of oxygen to carbon in what we now call carbon dioxide. The ratios they […]
The New Age of Anxiety (10/9/12)
The Future? One of my patients recently told me “I don’t worry about the future. I don’t see a future.” We have been living through a new Age of Anxiety. It does and does not resemble the times W.H. Auden wrote about in his 1948 Pulitzer Prize winning poem of that name. Auden had written […]