Inside This Issue

Nature vs. Nurture

Using Color As Medicine

Fluoride linked to Bone Loss

Improving Memory

Angel of the Water

Displayed in New York City’s Central Park is a symbol of healing. Healing of the body, mind, emotions, and spirit is the explicit aim of the ancient healing science of India--called Ayurveda ( pronounced AH YOUR VAY DAH). As a symbol of social healing it is also a symbol of hope. Hope springs eternal as does the knowledge of life.

 

This favorite landmark of New York City's Central Park--The Angel of Water--

 

 

 

 

Nature vs. Nurture

 

Recently research findings involving identical twins were published in JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine, which showed that your genetic inheritance is less important for determining what diseases you will end up with than how you live your life. Diet and lifestyle, including mental and emotional factors, are seen as about twice as important as your genes for determining future health tendencies.  Geneticists have determined that an estimated 3000 diseases have some genetic link, but these findings now seem to pale in the light of new research with identical twins. Ayurveda, it seems, favors this view of life, too. The doshic theory holds that the energetic properties of our food, lifestyle, and feelings, determine how the bio-chemistry of physiology will be guided. This means, in a nutshell, that you are or will become a physical expression of what it is you eat, how you play and work, and so on.

 

Using Color As Medicine

 

UNITED KINGDOM, JANUARY 20, 2002: Speaking of the bright reds and purples painted in a abstract design on the walls in the hydrotherapy room at a London hospital, Jane Duncan, artist in residence at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, said: "I wanted to use color to achieve a dynamic environment for the patients in the hydrotherapy room, to encourage them to move and exercise. I also wanted them to feel cheerful." But according to researchers at Leeds University, the color's Ms. Duncan used in her mural were exactly the kind of colors they found make people feel dynamic and positive.

 

Only the Leeds researchers used mathematics, with complicated equations and numbers, to describe how people responded positively to different colors. Dr James Nobbs, from the Color Chemistry Department at

Leeds University, said: "Until now, how people responded emotionally to color was the domain of artists and designers who could not substantiate their claims in scientific terms. But now it's proven. Color affects our emotions." Dr. Nobbs and his colleagues at Leeds University have been working with scientists in Japan, Hong Kong, and Thailand, to create what they call color emotions scales, a result of analyzing the response people had to different colors through word pairs. Hindu mystics have long held the knowledge of color, especially in regards to the human aura which when seen psychically, is filled with many colors which are reflections of the thoughts and emotions active in the nervous system and change according to one's state of mind.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1756000/1756024.stmx

 

Fluoride Does Increase Risk Of Hip Fractures

  

2-24-2000

              NEW YORK - Fluoride in drinking water increases the risk of hip fractures in women, according to an October 1999 American Journal of Epidemiology study. This corroborates several studies revealing a positive fluoride/hip fracture association. Furthermore, other studies dismissing a fluoride/fracture link may be flawed because they weren't gender or hip-fracture specific, report authors Kurttio, et al. A recent Lancet study showing no fluoridation/hip fracture link was not gender specific between high and low fluoride areas.

Kurttio and colleagues studied over 144,000 elderly rural Finnish people admitted to hospitals with their first hip fracture, who lived at the same address from 1967 to 1980. They found that women aged 50-64 years old exposed to natural water fluoride levels greater than 1.5 mg/liter had significantly more hip fractures than similar women least exposed to fluoride at 0.1 mg/liter or less.

            "These results suggest that fluoride may be associated with some gender-dependent mechanisms or risk factors for hip fractures," report the research team.         

"The scientific evidence clearly shows that fluoride damages bone even at levels added to public drinking water," says Dr. John R. Lee, physician and authority on fluoride and its bone effects.

              The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets maximum contaminant level for fluoride of 4 parts per million (ppm) or 4 mg/liter to prevent crippling skeletal fluorosis. However, crippling skeletal fluorosis, common in India, has been reported even in areas naturally fluoridated at 1 ppm -- the level a majority of Americans consume from their fluoridated water supply.

The union of scientists and other professionals (NTEU Chapter 280) at U.S. EPA Headquarters opposes fluoridation, "based on the scientific literature documenting the increasingly out-of-control exposures to

fluoride, the lack of benefit to dental health from ingestion of fluoride and the hazards to human health from such ingestion," says EPA scientist William Hirzy, Ph.D., NTEU Senior Vice President.

Organized dentistry used a public relations scheme in the 1940s that "sold" fluoridation to America as a safe and effective method to reduce children's tooth decay. Little attention was given to what fluoride's long-term bone effects would be. Now we're finding out. Fluoride may make bones more dense, but more brittle.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 1996, there were approximately 340,000 hospital admissions for hip fractures in the United States. Women sustain 75 percent-80 percent of all hip fractures. Medicare costs for hip fractures were estimated at $2.9 billion in 1991. "About one-half of the people with hip fractures end up in nursing homes, and in the year following the fracture, 20 per cent of them die," reported Harold Slavkin, Director of Nation-al Institute of Dental Research (JADA, 1999).