cutting out grains and dairy for acne?? well think again.

no time to provide detailed studies, look into for yourself, but calcium vitamin d as well as phytic acid in grains especially wheat, have all protective effects for colon cancer.

science is pointless

not entirely pointless, but here me out.

our method for studying biological systems as an attempt to apply this knowledge to medicine is somewhat justified, but does finding out alot about a disease in order to manipulate it really going to give us the answer?? it will give us treatments but that may be it.

with the exception of genetic diseases and those hard core defects, i suspect the only thing in the end that we will modify is the bacteria in the gut, the condition of our mind as it relates to our environement, and our diet. Beyond that i believe all the details are somewhat pointless and useless.

Also many studies show the mind to be a variable in disease, but its factors are immeasurable, except by you, only you know what you feel and what can make you feel better, or at least first hand anyways, this is a bit out of the range of accurate science, but i just dont see all these diseases being solved without addressing the mind. Science has found precise connectinos of the mind to the immune system, but these connections become detectable via the emotions and moods we experiance, we know what feels good and feels bad, somewhat making any scientific discovery of this connection useless unless we learn to harness it.

to scientifically reach a state of happiness would be an interesting one, a theory of happiness is what we need, then a series of steps which instill this.

A theory of happiness?? silly hey?? or an explanation as to why happiness does or does not occur.
Identifying human emotional needs as if identifying vitamins, crucial to the health of the soul and the mind.

question

from your own observations of yourself, how far can you seperate psychological distress from acne at the time of its onset or even through its course??

they seem to intertwine so intimatly, thats its hard to seperate them. They are no doubt going to go hand in hand, but you have to think that associations(when you see one, the other also appears) can oftentime look like correlations(as one increases, the other also increases or decreases) then even matters of causation (remove one, and the other is also removed).
The only way they will ever know this if they can find some way to objectively measure psychological distress, and have a set of criteria to remove it and see if the other is removed.

chronic psychological stress also affects bacterial resistance and is known to affect the bacteria in the intestine, which i believe may be why everyone can correlate diet with their acne, which diet i do not believe to be the ultimate cause.

The problem though is getting people to accurately report what they feel, is with chronic stress, you become numb to it, and you are unaware, plus when we simply ask people how they feel, how do we ever know if they are being honest?? or that they are skillfull in interpreting their own moods and feelings??? which i believe is a skill that is perfected throught life.

This may be impossible to ever prove by science and its requirement for objective observable information, but to prove which comes first, psychological distress or acne.

what do you think about this??

Your acne history and social connections

DIRECTIONS-I would like people to reveiw their own history to perhaps reveal any associations with social connections or no associations with the onset of acne.

I would like only people to respond that really took the time to remember their relationship history timelines and the acne history timelines to see if perhaps there is some correlation between the two, the most import thing as to whether there was a problem was how you felt about the relationship or how you percieved it, so its also an examination of you emotional history as well.

For the benefit of the org and the integrity of this poll, please do not respond unless you really took the time to do it right and give a most definite no, or definite yes, THANK YOU!!

SO please try to remember all your girlfriends/boyfriends and relationship history mother father guardian etc to see there may be any relationship, the key here is how you felt or even your happiness history.

supposedly acne affects most teens, and there is also alot of relationship stress to fit in and what not as well, perhaps the social connection or social stress theory can predict acne, or precedes it.




Im wondering if the actual onset of acne isnt triggered by social stress. With all genetics being considered, i want to know what helps trigger the onset of acne, although im sure the genetic component is individual. I know there is a big association between social connections and acne or when you see one you usually see the other, but it would be quite daring to consider the possibility that psychological stress actually precedes its onset, and if there is any evidence in your own history that may suggest it or refute it. this may not be perfect science by any degree, but its still science or how things may be connected in cause/effect relationships.

Biological systems, the mind and holistic "health".

for the longest time ive always wondered what the term Health, even meant at all, how is it defined, how do i improve it and what will be a detriment to it.
people talk of eating healthy or getting healthy and this whateverness. What is it we are to get and are to do to attain this "health".

one very important factor i would like to talk about is the mind and how it relates to health.

I would like to say that i do not believe in mind over matter, or that there is some absolute direct relationship with my fingernail and thinking about its growing faster, or at least i should say its not a hypothesis that i would have much confidence in, but im not against testing it, there may be a relationship but it is not a direct one. I also am not a believer that the mechanics(molecular parts) of diet itself has no effect on health, its very reall and important, but i want to talk about the mechanics or metaphysical parts (subjective/unobservable) of the mind and how it relates to biological systems, in regards to something we call "health". Or put in another way, personality and the how it affects health. So im not saying acne is all in your head, but what is in your head directly affects your entire body this includes acne.

so here it goes.

the body is general and a fear or relaxation response in one person stimulates the same or highly similar hormone release as the next person. The reasons why the fear or relaxation response is ever evoked, is many times particular and personal. These reasons are either adapted either by default, or by concious selection.


REASONS(our personal mental mechanics)-

Default(chance) Determinism(nurture of nature vs. nurture)- usually is most due to social groups and how we learned attitudes about anything in life, and even our very structure of reality or what anything "is" or means(what a particular sensory experiance signifys, stands for or represents). Very often by default we tend to respond towards things the way we see other people respond towards them as we are highly social beings. Or we respond towards things the way we believe we are expected to respond towards them, like if i want to be a part of this social group i am supposed to think drug use is "bad" or "unhealthy", as if it really is, to do otherwise would be rude or mean that i no longer recieve affection from this social group.

Stress perception may also be determined by our social status, not ideas of RANK or heirarchy, but the type, quality and quantity of relationships, this would be a form of determinism, or rather the intensity and duration of a reaction towards a stressful event is somewhat dependant upon this social foundation, this actually may be the most important factor to attaining good health for a lifetime, less depression, anxiety, stronger immune system and just plain old more fun. Fun is good for you. I think this is the most dreadful part of having acne, your social foundation seems to crumble before your eyes, im also at the point where im even investigating the possibility that one comes before the other, or some kind of social stress even precedes the onset of acne, in my own experiance the evidence seems to suggest this as a possibility.


reminders of past experiances that were undesirable. Out of sight out of mind or if it didnt even exist then it wouldnt be bothering you, so anything that was associated with those stressful undesirable experiances, will have a tendancy to remind you of them so that they are reborn again and again, against your will. So then this is in the categorie of default/determinism, or anaother reason that would trigger a general biological response from you. The mind isnt very good at differentiating between something percieved by the eyes and something being percieved by the mind, EX. in a dream your heart rate increases despite it being a synthetic experiance of your mind. Similarly memories may have a similar effect as dreams on our biology. so this would be the effet that a sensory experiance has of reminding us of something,or something kind of like pavlov's dogs, where we have associated a physiological response with a sensory stimulus.


Concious selection(by design)or by free will- we can see how everyone reacts towards things in a different way, this difference in behavior we sometimes call personality. I like to call it programming because thats what i believe it is, its either social programming or even programming that has been due to direct experiance of the world as it actually is, or how we have percieved it to be. But im not so sure people are fully aware of the extent that they can program themselves. this became apparent to me when i was studying critical thinking skills and the contsruction of arguments or reasoning, or the reasons why we believe anything to be the case or to be true. Supposedly to be a good critical thinker we are to be able to differentiate between a claim and an argument and to evaluate someones argument or probable truthfulless of their claim by what evidence they have to support it or good reasons for their claim to be true. At this moment i realized that we have the ability to program ourselves and rewire ourselves to some degree, and we choose why we believe anything to be true and we choose the reasons for becoming certain, good reasons, bad reasons or no reasons at all, we accept a new program by concious selection.

so these are the two reasons(besides any genetic component say to be more fearfull) that we may evoke an emotional response toward any sensory experience at all, either and experiance percieved by the eyes/ears/nose/touch or even by the mind through imagination or visualization. Our complex programming determines our general emotional biological response towards a sensory experiance. And this is what i call the mechanics of the mind, or the metaphysics of biology, the unobservable subjective variables that may be immeasureable by science as science is concerned about what is real and objective and what is measurable, we cant exactly see the reasons why one person is afraid of heights and another is not, or the reason why one is only somewhat afraid and another was rushed to a the hospital for a panic attack.

Damn i hope that makes some sense.

science is very concerned with mapping out the biological mechanics of what is observable, and this i great, but the mechanics of the mind or the gearing of which humans are connected to the physical world seems to me still a strange mystery, but is very important when it comes to biological systems, as our brains themselves are our biology.


EASTERN RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

So when i was studying meditation there were all these weird techniques and i tried to generalize what exactly was happening, and to practice meditation was to exert total concious control over ones biology, regardless of what sensory experiances were occuring. To be calm when we may as well logically be fearful, and so on. I called it controlling the interpretation of the meaning of events/sensory experiances. Or deciding the reasons why we should relax and be calm and that we have some sort of say in the reasons why we do this. They say the world is illusory, and what i think they mean is that we can see things as illusions with no meaning other then that we have attributed to it, or that we are to some degree, programmable by ourselves.

Think buddhism and the first noble truth that desire is suffering, if you didnt desire things, even more things then you could ever realistically have, you would feel the pain of not attaining them so then you conciously release your desire for those things, and you do not suffer for your lack of them, the lack of them brings no more self induced pain. In a way these are your own rules or socially inherited rules by default that were your reasons to feel content and at peace with yourself. The way to that peace was decided by you, the programmer.


but i also think responses that are programmed by the real reality or direct experiance are the most rational fears we have, EX. if we see a lion you are going to need the most strength and stamina and energy at an instant, so the fight or flight response is great. When we are programmed by symbols that are meant to represent the real reality or otherwise put as indirect maps- words, speech, and our imaginations these are all symbols that represent the real reality or synthetic experiances is where most of the problems occur. we are afraid of things that will never harm us, perhaps due to social programming we have adapted for someone else's political control over us EX. our parents and teachers want us to be afraid of drugs use such as marijuana, when in reality we eventually learn that legalized alchohol is more dangerous, we were programmed by symbols for reality other then the real reality itself.

Its great that humans have language and we can pass on good useful knowledge onto our children to get them to fear lions, so they never have to learn the hard way, but we can also pass on a programming that induces fears and emotions of things that will never hurt us, we can also program ourselves to be afraid and completly make up the way we experiance the world around us, and i believe this can make us sick and damage our health and theorectically make us sick.


So i guess this could be sort of a eastern meets western philosophy and what are its implications in biology, health and disease and ideas of Holism, or holistic health.



Self selection, self programming and ACNE.ORG

so then here we are on acne.org where opions and beliefs and fears run rampant and people are afraid that all this stuff is breaking them out, and some of it may very well be breaking them out, but in the process they are inducing unsubstantiated fears wherever they go, self selecting their beliefs which are also in turn having an effect on their stress levels, programming themselves and re engineering their mental mechanics or how they are connected to the world. All these experiances are self created and may make you even worse off then where you have begun.

Im not saying that there isnt any benefit in learning about diet and what food is better for you, just to be aware of this ability to self program your emotional reactions to environment and the implicatino it may have on your health by evoking stress and the fear of foods breaking you out or even guilt from eating certain foods that all may have an impact on your biology.


Lessons from the oldest living human being

This women lived to the age of 122.

Jean Calment’s Secret of Longevity
Jean Calment came from a bourgeois family and never has to work. Her husband, a cousin, was a prosperous storeowner who offered her a life of ease revolving around tennis, bicycling, swimming, roller skating, piano and opera. In later years, Calment lived mostly off the income from her apartment, which she sold cheaply to a lawyer when she was 90. Andre-Francois Raffray, who apparently relied on the actuarial table, signed a contingency contract with Calment and agreed to pay a life annuity of 2,500 francs ($500) a month under a deal to make him the owner of Calment's flat when she dies. Yet, he died at 77 and his family was still paying for more than a year unitl she died. Altogether, they paid more than 900,000 francs ($180,000), three times the value of the house.
Internationally, researchers are fascinated with Calment for both her longevity and her vitality. "She never did anything special to stay in good health," said French researcher Jean-Marie Robine. They attribute her longevity to her immunity to stress. She once saidIf you cant do anything about it, dont worry about it(as simple as this attitude sounds, it was a basic attitude towards life, and im sure she spent little time focused on "problems" and enjoyed greater health because of it even despite smoking most of her life)


Health and lifestyle
Calment's remarkable health presaged her later record. At age 85, she took up fencing, and at 100, she was still riding a bicycle. She was reportedly neither athletic, nor fanatical about her health.[7]

Calment lived on her own until shortly before her 110th birthday, when it was decided that she needed to be moved to a nursing home after a cooking accident (she could barely see) started a small fire in her flat. However, Calment was still in good shape, and was able to walk until she fractured her femur during a fall at age 114 years and 11 months, which required surgery.[3][10] After her operation, Calment became confined to a wheelchair and weighed 45 kg in 1994.[12] Calment became ill with the flu shortly before her 116th birthday.[13] She smoked until the age of 117, only five years before her death.[13][14][15] She ascribed her longevity and relatively youthful appearance for her age to olive oil, which she said she poured on all her food and rubbed onto her skin, as well as a diet of port wine, and nearly 1 kilo of chocolate eaten every week.[9] Calment is the oldest person known to have survived a hip operation.



so then it may in fact be that our mental mechanics or how we are connected to our environment, interpret the meaning of events or beliefs, personality or programming, something that may be a decision that we make whether we are aware of it or not may have an impact on our health more then we may know, and its something that we should think about when talking about holistic health.

----Also the fact that this lady has always known that she will never need money to survive has probably played a role in her biology as well as worrying about making a living can be stressfull, her attitude may have just been determined by her financial position as well, buts its all really hard to tell, she just had a good combo for her entire life i guess and all played a role.



placebo effect, and faith healing

The placebo effect to me is about relaxation and the effect that rest has on the bodies ability to heal itself, if you are always worrying about your acne or anyother health problem, you are not ultilizing this effect to your advantage, the same thing goes with your attiude or beliefs towards any other sensory experiance, you are keeping yourself from healing or even keeping yourself sick. ALthough this doesnt apply to all disease as there are definitve genetic defects that happen at birth, but some diseases states are longer such tumors that appear then go away or cancer that comes and goes and the same with acne that comes and goes.

even science's own standard for biological research involves accounting for the placebo effect, something we still do not understand yet, but i believe it is the effect of rest on the entire system itself, rest is part of healing and rest or stress is initiated on a pschological basis, one that is somewhat programmable.

medicine used to be all about faith and the mind, cocaine used to be a cure all that turned out just to be an addictive drug, and so forth. Some villages known for their longevity have no access to modern medice yet are physically active well into 100 years of age, they go to a medicine man who performs a ritual that cures many illnesses, even psychological ones, all based on placebos and in my opinion the initiation of deep rest.

implications for acne and bacterial resistance

our immune systems are responsible for fighting off bacteria, surprisingly the disease of acne involves bacteria populations and benzoyl peroxide is supposed reduce these acne populations that theoretically play a major role in acne and the inflammatory response.

stress is somewhat connected to acne, stress has been found to make acne worse, and thinking about your own acne and the implicatins i believe can just make it worse and this is where this whole post could benefit you, so you dont make you acne worse by sitting there thinking about its implication sall day long.

a reduction in stress increases our ability to fight off bacteria.


my own observations of my family members and other people i know personally that have acne, i see that it is correlated with stress so to me the connection is real. whether it is the cause or not i dont know but my acne was the worst the more stressed i got and even as i focused on fighting it more and spending more time fighting it, it got worse with a few exceptions of course, but even in my own experiance ive stopped thinking abou tit at all and was focused on life it self and completly cleared with no medication or even dietary modification.


So what can we gain from all this??

To a big degree, we are self programmable , many times we can simply decide whether things are really going to be a big deal to us or not as we have a big say in the reasons why we get upset frustrated or angry or fearfull. If we tell ourselves that the only way we can be happy is x,y,z, then that may be the only way then because thats how you programmed yourself. How you should feel about anything should be determined from a biological perspective, and this may also be secret behind saying that forgiveness heals.


See the activities of our minds from a biological perspective, spending time thinking about something that may make us fearful or angry, we can simply change our focus asap towards something that gets our mind of of anything so serious.
fear kills while faith and rest heals.


There is a real logical reaction to reality that is real, but even then we may not have to exaggerate it to any degree, we cannot expect ourselves to be completly immune to real programming, but be conciously aware that all programming is programming, you could call this the babies perspective or minmal natural programming.




i guess the complete system of holistic health would take into consideration the mechanics of the entire body as it relates to your well being, and the spiritual/metaphysical/ unobservable part of the mind and personailty as it influences health and disease and your biology may be the least understood part. after this comes excercise and diet and probiotics. Naturally this is all you can do to manipulate yourself and your life, then more extensive manipulatino can be sought with drugs and so forth and while very much still "natural" as im not sure what even defines natural but i guess that would mean anything that is the least manipulative to natural processes and least invasive or risk for damage.


a book that lets me know i may not be as crazy as i fear to be.
THE END OF MODERN MEDICINE
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ix06LOIQ4...;q=&f=false

Reinventing medicine: beyond mind-body to a new era of healing
http://books.google.com/books?id=1arGI9NZc...;q=&f=false

here is a paper that discusses similar concepts-
http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~broberts/Smith%...nd%20health.pdf

The Institute for Mind and Biology at The University of Chicago
http://imb.uchicago.edu/

Social Isolation Worsens Cancer, Mouse Study Suggests
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/...90929133115.htm


there is alot more i want to add to clarify all this so i will update it from time to time.