May Blog 2013

Australian, Teaching, Travels & Dyslexia.

I have half heartedly  been on my way to Australia for forty years, never actually getting there… until now.

Unlike Korea and Japan, which I last wrote about in my February bonus blog, Australia is a land well-known to many British people. Since 1788 people from these islands have been travelling to the other end of the world either under duress, as in the early years under the notorious transportation system, (which I am learning all about in Robert Hughes brilliant account of those terrible convict years  in The Fatal Shore: Amazon.co.uk: Robert Hughes: Books.: Amazon.co.uk: Robert Hughes: Books. The Fatal Shore Or, thankfully, these days through emigration and travel.

This time I was invited out to attend and speak at another medical conference way up in the steamy north-east, in Cairns.

So only three months after returning from Japan, I found myself on a plane down under.

Just because so many from these crowded islands have made their homes far away on the other side of the world, where, despite the distances, so much looks and feels familiar, many of us, on not much more than perhaps a miss spent youth watching ‘Neighbours’, feel we know the place. And yet this ancient land, once part of Africa and Antarctica, with its unique flora and fauna, is indeed, underneath the familiar cultural patina, another world and as one colleague from England now living in Perth observed, perhaps it takes a generation or two for those living there to fully adapt to the deep unconscious pulls of the different geology and climate.

As well as trying to read up on the history of the country and consuming what few broadsheet newspapers I could lay my hands on to get up to speed on Australian current affairs, I was very lucky to be able to visit several friends and colleagues around the country and quiz them on their life in Australia. Of course in a few weeks one can do no more than gather impressions and passing feelings.

From  the iconic sites of  Sydney up to tropical Cairns for a busy weeks work at the conference and a quick look at the ancient rainforest and wonderful Great Barrier Reef, down to Melbourne to teach a seminar  and enjoy  the Great Ocean Road in the south, I ended up in Fremantle in the far west, on my way home.

It was a lovely mixture of work and visiting friends and exploring a few slivers of this ancient land.

Given that my paper at the conference was about the work that we do through The Sunflower Trust,  to help children with multiple learning disabilities,  it was interesting that, while having  a sunny Saturday breakfast at Melbourne’s attractive Queen Victoria Market,  I chanced upon a recent piece of research quoted in The Age, what seems to be Australia’s best paper, sadly only availble around Melbourne, calling for multiple learning disabilities tests in Schools.

The piece of research  by our own Professor Brian Butterworth, emeritus professor of cognitive neuropsychology in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, now of Melbourne University, showing that people with a learning disability such as Dyslexia are far more likely to suffer from multiple disabilities than previously thought.

It is nice to have the research data to confirm what those of us in the field have known for a long time. In fact my own paper to the conference was, in part,  about just this issue and how we have combined our skills in the area of structural, biochemical and emotional/metal aspects, to help release these children from some of the breaks that can stop them making the most of themselves. Our own work often shows this classic spread of difficulties. As Professor Butterworth says,

“Children with learning disabilities often feel stupid at school. this makes them unhappy and go off schooling altogether and it’s unnecessary because if you can identify the problems and treat them everybody will be happy and education will be more effective”.

As Butterworth says, about 10 per cent of the population is affected by ‘specific learning disabilities’. This translates to two or three children in a class. The research shows the overlap of between 33 and 45 per cent of children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder also suffer from dyslexia and 11 per cent from dyscalculia a learning disability in maths. This compares to our own clinical findings.

Nicely the article goes on to quote Professor Neil Hewson, a leading Melbourne dentist, on how it was only at university that his own dyslexia was spotted and only years later was he formally diagnosed with dyslexia. As he says,

“Because you’ve got this doesn’t mean you’re a slacker or don’t have high intelligence. People should look at it as something to overcome”.

The work that we have been doing over the last two decades both in the clinic here at Helix House and teaching other clinicians in the UK and Germany, the skills to apply these approaches, have been able to help many children, if not over come all the inherent difficulties these disabilities often involve, but for many, to see noticeable and sometimes dramatic changes in their function.

For many of them it is an opportunity to correct some of the faulty systemic signalling, whether from faulty structure, retained neonatal reflexes, the wrong food or beliefs about themselves that makes it harder for them to do and learn things.

I will end with a letter from a parent that I received last month. Not as an ego boost to me, but as a possible life line to a parent wondering what to do next to help their lost, stumbling child.

“I just wanted to say a massive thank you for everything you have done for Samuel.  He really has done so well at school, and when we look at where he was a year ago the difference is quite staggering.
 His confidence with his ability to learn, read and write has increased two-fold.  He still doesn’t enjoy doing homework but it is not the battle we used to have to get him to even sit down to look at it. 
 From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you for your time and patience, and amazing work you have done with Sam.   We will continue to recommend your practice and also the Sunflower Trust to others”.

It is this kind of thing that makes all the hard work worth it! As it happened my long flight home also brought forward a film with dyslexia at its heart.

Film of the Month

Two determined mothers, a car dealer/bartender (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and a teacher (Viola Davis), look to transform their children’s failing inner city school. Facing a powerful and entrenched bureaucracy and corruption from the teachers’ union president (Holly Hunter) and the school’s principal (Bill Nunn), they risk everything to make a difference in the education and future of their children.

Somewhere over the Indian ocean, after already watching four films back to back, squeezed into my airline seat, I came across this film in the extensive list of Emirates media choices. Like my comments above, this film tackles the thorny issue of  how some schools fail in the difficult task of dealing with the multiple learning disabilities that 10% of their children suffer from.

On the surface, in that compelling, emotional way that any good film draws one in, it deals with the drive of a single mother to get some help for her dyslexic daughter in her failing inner city school  before it is too late and she has grown up and has missed her educational opportunities. As such it was a perfect film to while away the long flight from Australia. It is well structured and beautifully acted by the cast. I really enjoyed it, even though it cast teachers unions in a depressingly grim light as the factor that was holding back the progress of the school. Only when I look into it now, does the full force of the highly politicized battles in both American and British school systems, do the more complex and nuanced challenges crowd in to cast a more thoughtful light on the film.

At different times of my life I have been a member of a teachers union, a teacher battling in a failing school and a parent of a dyslexic child driven to take my child out of a school that was not able to educate her. I am not unsympathetic to all sides of this harrowing contemporary tail.

Sadly even in the education there are, occasionally, wealthy businessmen who, perhaps with noble motives, wish to drive forward a more reactionary, value system, that may not serve our children’s future. Even well meaning efforts to shake up the, sometimes moribund, system with Academies and Free Schools are certainly not free from ideological wars. But, of course, how could they not, as schooling is inevitably,in part, about the kind of society we want to see  and encorage, in the future.

In this story we are introduced to the thorny american political issue of parent triggers, a legal maneuver through which parents can change the administration of a poorly performing public school—most notably, by transforming it into a charter school.

Anyway if you can, see the film, it is a moving experience, but leave one part of your brain alert to the way in which emotion can so easily be used to influence you down possibly, if not  false paths, at least ideological journeys’ that you may not wish to make. Product placement was just the beginning. Enjoy.

February Bonus 2013

Asian Travels January 2013

Normally these blogs have a distinct health and wellbeing theme. This month, because, as some of you may know, during January I was away in Asia working and playing, this is an un-ashamed travelogue month, when I share with you where and what I was up to. So if you could not get an appointment with me, now at least you will know what  I was doing just when you wanted me on hand! The privilege of age is getting to do things you fancy. So here goes.

Seoul, South Korea.

It all started a few years ago, on a cliff top in Cornwall. My friend Lee, suggested that he and I might enjoy exploring Vietnam together one day, being of that age that the very name Vietnam, takes us back to our stormy ’60′s youth. This suggestion was then consigned to the “one day” file and the years went by.

When I was a young man, hungry for direct experience rather than just book learning, after many years as a student, I had travelled extensively over Asia, ending up in Japan for a year, where, thanks to bit parts in films and teaching English, I was able to earn enough to take me onwards as well as touch something of the old and new life of Japan.

Did we really think those sideburns were cool in 1971?

So, when the call went out to members of the International Board of Examiners, of the International College of Applied Kinesiology, for volunteers to go to South Korea as part of an examination team in January 2013, I wasted no time in putting my hat in the ring. Here was my chance to return to my old East Asian stomping ground, forty years on, and, maybe, even fit in the Vietnam trip in as well, and, with a bit of luck, get paid for  my efforts too.

So the long months of planning rolled on and, before I knew it, the end of the year was approaching and I had arranged not only a week of examining in Seoul but a trip around Vietnam, (due to timing difficulties only crossing Lee, and his daughter’s path for a brief night in Hanoi), then back to lecture at the ICAK-Korea AGM and  on to Osaka to meet up with one of my daughters, Hanna, who was going to be working the week before organising a conference in Bangkok. From Osaka we would continue via an old friend, Katsue, in Kyoto,  and then on to Tokyo, my old home all those years ago ending with a weekend seminar for the AK community in Japan. A seven flight, three-country, five week intensive…goodie, just up my street!

January the 1st 2013 saw me flying the long flight to Seoul to join my two colleagues, Kathy from the USA and François from Quebec to start examining the eight impressive Korean Doctors for the advanced Diplomate exam. Nine hours time difference needs a little getting used to so on our first day Kathy and I, first to arrive, ventured out on a sightseeing jaunt into the -15C bright, clear, cold, sunny Seoul air to explore and enjoy the absorbing sights  of the palace of Gyeongbokgung,

Gyeongbokgung is the most popular tourist site of the city, with good reason. A key focal point of the whole country a lot of South Korea’s heritage can be gleaned from this fine palace and some of the impressive museums around about.

Clive and Kathy explore the cold city

When I was last in Korea in March 1972, I notice, re-reading my diary of that journey from Japan to Korea,  I referred to the country then as,

” sad, confused, half adapted, screwed up but open…” How things have changed! Then it was Japan, which was the shiny, new, East Asian tiger, pushing all before it.  Now its light was dimmed by crazy bank debts of trillions of Yen, while the South Korean economy, as seen by Samsung’s, fourth quarter profits going up by 76%, is racing ahead and Seoul is transformed, utterly. Nothing of the old, low-rise city, is recognisable. Down in Gangnam all is style and high-rise neon-soaked modernity. Gone is the Seoul of yesteryear. Now it is a spectacular city of wealth and vibrant energy, as fiery as the food. Only the remains of an anarchic driving style remind you how recent has been the transformation from war-ravaged dictatorship to hyper-modern, affluent democracy. Let us hope despite the adoptions of some Japanese banking styles, they will not fall down the same enormous rabbit hole that the inflexible Japanese economy has been stuck in for so long now. But it is not as if we have the wisest bankers in the world either I remind myself.

When I was first in the city, Park Chung-hee was the dominant General-turned-President-strong man, using his power and secret police to control and enrich the country. Still revered by many for his long reign and drive to turn South Korea into a modern, industrial export-driven state, Park Chung-hee is also remembered for his brutal and growing illegitimate reign, a heritage that his daughter Park Geun-hye who was elected as South Korea’s 11th and first female President and took office in February 2013, has to live with as best she can.  This transition from Japanese occupation, war torn destruction and post war instability to affluent modern democratic state is a remarkable one. And it was a pleasure to see the country, whatever its on-going difficulties and its tragic division into Stalinist, Gulag state in the north and successful democracy in the south, at least finding a better life for so many in the south.

The tragic blot on our landscape that is the DMZ between North & South Korea, still a highly armed and contested flashpoint.

After the work…comes the Karaoke. We all look surprisingly well behaved. You are not seeing the other photos of the singing in action!

If I ever wonder why I choose to travel around the world and put in such exhausting hours I am reminded of the great sense of affection and warmth that can grow up, so quickly, between those who share a passion for helping others through such medical ideas as applied kinesiology, osteopathy, chiropractic, NLP & functional medicine. We had not been in Seoul for more than a week before we felt a strong bond of shared passion and enthusiasm. So much so that, sometimes, during our translated practical exams, hearing chunks of technical, imported English, mixed in amongst the Korean, one could, in a fatigue-filled reverie, almost imagine one had mastered the complexity of Korean! Of course an illusion, and yet metaphorically we did ‘speak the same language‘ and, when this happens across the barriers of culture and language, a great affection is rapidly engendered. If this is strengthened, after all the hard work, with food, alcohol and even Karaoke (Hey Jude, is always a good one to end a long work spell with) then international friendships are made and cemented surely a good outcome. As I left our kind host and organiser the impressive Dr. Seung Lee, I was glad that I was coming back to share more with his stellar group.

Vietnam 

The still ubiquitous, Uncle Ho, father of the nation.

The flight from Seoul to Hanoi is only a few hours across China, and yet it is a long journey culturally. From a country

Not Uncle Ho

once divided and which had suffered a murderous war that laid waste to it  and killed millions, leaving it still bitterly divided to another which, with a different history, had suffered a similar meat-grinding fate, was a few decades behind in its journey to recovery and democracy, and yet which has managed, with much bloodshed, to finally throw off colonial oppression and, at unbelievable cost, has at least united its people, all be it under the increasingly corrupt waxworks of the Politburo in Hanoi.

Communist social realism still holds sway as the preferred art form in public spaces, and yet the predominantly young population, seem to accept it as mainly a quaint, out-dated foible of granddad’s generation.

I should say, at the outset, I liked Hanoi.  Therei is of course, the sad Leninist mausoleum, where Ho’s mummified corps, is still used, against his wishes, as a prop to sustain the national myths and so bolster the questionable right of a single party to hold all power to itself but even accounting for the twitchy, self-important, military scene around the large ministries of state, I have to aknowledge that we have our own, after all. The more you study the tragic history of Vietnam the more you feel inclined to cut the regime some slack, in a way that would have been unthinkable in, say, unreformed Eastern Europe, let alone the city built on lies and concentration camps, Pyongyang in North Korea. Of course this is in not inconsiderate part because the use of, old style, communist lies & coercion is much tempered and the likeable, industrious people of Vietnam seem to be able to get on with their lives and generate wealth, largely unbothered by fear of the secret police, as long, as they don’t rock the boat or want political power. I suspect eventually in some decades time a new less corrupt more democratic system will prevail. And to have achieved what they have, you can see perhaps why they needed such a ruthless political system to take on and overcome the challenges they faced in Ho’s day. This is a country that will go far and I cannot help developing an abiding affection for. The people are generally warm, approachable, the misogyny of central and southern Asia is muted, somehow out of the ashes healing seems to be occurring and all with fewer scars than anyone dared hope for.

Street food.

Many people have better things to concern themselves with, especially in their formative years, than international conflicts on the other side of the world. And then there are the International News Nerds, of which I must have been one.  I was mesmerised with admiration for the photography, and horrified by the content, of Larry Burrows brilliant war reportage from Vietnam in Life magazine throughout my teen years. Graduating to a slow burn radicalisation brought about by the quagmire of the Vietnam war (or The American war, as it is known in Vietnam) in my student years and beyond in the late 60′s and early 70′s. Marching in London and San Francisco is almost a life time away, and yet Vietnam was at the centre of a whole caldron of key issues that came to the fore at that time and have persisted to change the world since those turbulent days.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson may have been a brilliant man, but he was an uninspiring leader to young people getting the vote for the first time. And yet, decades later I hold a soft spot for Wilson in one area at least, and that is his refusal to bow to pressure from Johnson to send troops to Vietnam. My generation were right in the bulge of troop numbers of the mid to late 60′s and so, now, visiting the country that might have been my early grave, held particular resonance.

Two wheels? The whole family still has to ride together!

The first thing that strikes you about the streets of Hanoi or Saigon, (HCMC) are the sheer numbers of motor scooters that flow like beeping liquid through every street in the city. The highway code is in its infancy, and yet, after the first shock has died away one soon adapts to the nerve-wracking task of crossing the road; stepping out slowly but firmly into the stream of belching bikes, watching them flow around one in an aqueous ballet, invariable one reaches the farther shore of the opposite pavement, somehow intact.  The roaring and purpose has magically accommodated one within its big mind and one lives to explore another street. Although, of course, if you thought you were going to be safe walking down the pavement, think again, after all, where do you think those 3 million bikes are parked and where can one set up a banana fritter stall, play badminton or run a hairdressing business?

Woman cyclist in Mekong Delta village

There is something wonderful to me about reading up on a country, its people, culture and history, and then travelling there, however briefly and trying to get a feel for its life and loves. It must be the wanabe anthropologist in me, that likes to dip my toe in like this, but equally I would not make a true anthropologist, who must be able and willing to immerse oneself in a culture, its food, customs and language for years, away from loved ones. I have had a minor taste of that when young and was not that good at it. But these little amateur adventures are fun.

I was able to spend several days on my own exploring Hanoi then go on and see many of the familiar well known sights of Vietnam, including Halong Bay, and travel on the Reunification Express, (perhaps that last word is a bit of a misnomer) down to the ancient capital of Hue, on the perfumed River and on via the Hai Van Pass, via Da Nang, to Hoi An and beyond to the deep south in Saigon and the watery world of the Mekong delta. There is still something rewarding about rocking along in an old train through the night, however grim the loos, waking as the train cranks along through unfamiliar rice paddies and deposits you in the heart of a new fascinating city, in this case, the old capital Hue.

The Perfume River. In the autumn, flowers from orchards upriver from Huế fall into the water, giving the river a perfume-like aroma, hence the soubriquet.

Hue’s ancient citadel one time seat of the old Emperor and his vast retinue of mandarins, eunuchs and concubines, was much damaged during the famous Tet offensive of 1968. This attempt by the NLF and the North Vietnamese to trigger a mass uprising was a catastrophic failure in that no mass uprising was triggered and over 5000 local people in Hue alone, were murdered by the north simply because they were educated. More NLF (VC) troops were lost than the Americans lost in their whole involvement in Vietnam, during this offensive and yet, through its impact on public awareness in the USA, it became a turning point in the whole American war.

Gradually some of the old treasures of the heritage of Hue are being restored and again it is becoming something of the cultural centre in the way perhaps, Kyoto or Oxford are in their countries. Along the Perfumed river, is the famous Thien Mu Pagoda, at one time the training place of both Thich Quang Duc, famous for his anti-government protest in 1963 when sitting motionless in full lotus, he burnt himself to death as a protest against the president. Also from this Pagoda came the famous Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh who has had to live in exile in, Plum village, France for over 40 years.

Students prepare for their graduation with a photo call at the Temple of Literature, Hanoi.

It is interesting to note that while Buddhism in its quiescent, simple family temple form, is tolerated by the communist government, they are far more twitchy about anyone teaching young people to actually practice Zen, as Thich Nhat Hanh has so profoundly done over many decades. He was allowed to return a few years ago, but only under close observation from the secret police. I was most happy, through a friend of a friend in Plum village, to spend an afternoon with a young English-speaking Vietnamese, I better not put her name, and hear how it was to aspire to practice what she called, ‘real Buddhism’ in a communist country. It must be a strange assignment for an undercover cop to have to go and meditate to ensure no disloyalty to the motherland is brewing in the youth of your country!

Travelling up over the Hai Van Pass a climatic watershed between north and south, takes one to Da Nang,  and on to the attractive old trading port of Hoi An. There like many others before me I had a nice suit made to measure for me in not much more than a day, something I was glad of back lecturing in Seoul and Tokyo.

Fisherman on the beach near Hoi An

The further south we went the warmer it got. Today the tailoring business is almost out of control in Hoi An so many are there vying for your business. This is a city that hundreds of years ago was a major trading centre linking, China, Japan Vietnam and even as far away as India. Today unscathed by the destructions of the wars, it is an island of the old and small scale in a country that, especially the closer one gets to Saigon, is going the way of all, into the concrete box culture that is despoiling the world. But here in Hoi An some remnants of the old wooden buildings are still to be seen.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, at a certain point in a nation’s evolution, a big, phallic skyscraper, preferably with semi- useless attached helipad, is required to announce ones “arrival”!

Saigon, always the wild, mercantile, south to Hanoi’s more political, poetic north, comes with a blast of hot air and motorbike fumes. Vibrant, bustling, still, for some of us old romantics, with the faint whiff of the ghosts of Graham Greene, murky CIA secrets and, for those of a certain age,  there still lurk in the back of our memories those hard to  forget, iconic images of the end of the American war. Tragic shots of helicopters on roofs, as below harassed Marines fought off growing throngs of desperate, fearful, abandoned Vietnamese, trying to escape, before, after Pol Pot not long before in Cambodia who knew what horrors might come with the arrival of the feared Northern Army.

But today there is a largely young population, all born long after those chaotic times. Inward investment along with Vietnamese energy and entrepreneurial zest, is making Saigon, if not loveable, certainly a vibrant, bustling city. The new boys on the block are selling obscenely expensive handbags from glitzy Gucci shops down town, below new high rise blocks with helipads half way up, on the fiftieth floor. These sit, slightly strangely, with the straight-laced old-style, puritanism of the communist propaganda posters in the parks.

Beyond the city lies the great Mekong Delta. Rice basket of Vietnam, capable of taking three crops a year, and making Vietnam, which could not feed its own people, now the number one rice exporter in the world.

The Mekong Delta wakes up to the morning sun.

Beyond the Chu Chi tunnels and Halong Bay marvels of man and nature, perhaps the greatest marvel in Vietnam is the resilience of its people. Enslaved by the French for almost a century, then decimated by the Americans plus their own civil war armies of right and left, then almost starved to death and ground down under Marxist-Leninist Thought, the country has come back from unimaginable suffering and destruction of it people, its soil and its gene pool (through the wide scale use of Dioxins by the Americans), and somehow now in 2013, here is a country of optimistic, friendly, often English, French, or German speaking outward looking people, who, even as they try and sell you something you may not want, have a twinkle in their eye and share the whole joke with you.

Korea Again

Some of the Korean ICAK-K at their AGM, as I am introduced.

After the soft 30C warmth of my homestay in the Mekong, suddenly it is time to earn my living again and back in Seoul it has warmed up to a barmy -9C for a flying 36 hours, with my friends in Seoul for their AGM. This time there is only me to keep a hundred of these enthusiastic, intelligent and enormously over-qualified medics happy for a Sunday away from their families. Luckily the work ethic in Korea is fearsome and one can see why they have transformed their country in a few short decades.

I do my shtick. Always rewarding to share stuff you love and know well.

No one seems to take holidays, and advanced degrees seem two a penny. But again whatever divides people, when you get into your area of passionate interest and others share the same interest, you reach across all sorts of limitations and a strong bond links you with affection. I was honoured and touched to join them and share some of the things I have learnt over the years. It is always amusing to find oneself, for however brief a moment, being asked to be photographed with so many people and this seems to be the form at the end of such events in Korea and Japan.

What a great team behind me doing my Shtick!

On to Japan: The last leg of my Journey.

After eating out for weeks it was especially delightful to be at home with Katsue’s sister and her lovely family

From Seoul I moved on to Osaka to meet up with Hanna, my daughter. This was fun both to meet up on her birthday, and for me to return, with Hanna, to Japan after over 40 years. First we much enjoyed

Hanna and the owner of our lovely Ryokan in Kyoto

meeting up with Katsue an old friend who used to baby- sit for us when she was living in Oxford decades ago when  Hanna and her sisters were children. Katsue kindly took us around and spoiled us rotten as we enjoyed seeing something of Kyoto in our brief visit.

Kyoto, O Kyoto, what has happened to you? Sitting at the apex of Japanese culture, recognisedby the state department in 1945 as more than just another target city to be bombed, it was seen as a

Some special Kyoto bling!

treasure of the world and taken off the bombing target list. Surviving into the post-war world more or less intact, it was the city fathers who destroyed it and despoiled the old city with its intense charms, great temples and rich depository of ancient wooden buildings and cultural treasures. Today around the outer reaches of the city there are still many great temple complexes such as the outrageous bling of Ginkaku-ji  and many other more subtle treasures such as the 16th century monochrome, Daisen-in abstract garden inside the great Rinzai  temple complex of Daitoku-ji in north

I make a little pilgrimage to Daitoku-ji Temple complex

west Kyoto. So much of the city has suffered the fate of brutal modernisation epitomised by the outsized Kyoto tower and Station complex, obscuring the views of some of the great nearby temples.

As Alex Kerr notes in his Book, Dogs & Demons: The Fall of Modern Japan;”

“The tearing down of the old city of Kyoto was by no means limited to the 1950′s and 1960′s, when every city in the world made similar mistakes. The city’s destruction really gathered speed in the 1990′s, by which time Japan was a mature economy, with a per-capita income exceeding that of the United States. According to the International Society to Save Kyoto more than forty thousand old wooden homes disappeared from the inner city of Kyoto in that decade alone”.

For me, it was a happy pilgrimage to visit Daitoku-ji temple where my own first Zen teacher, Irmgard Schloegl came to study Zen from 1960-72. Her path in negotiating that fearsomely tough monastery life, especially as a foreign woman may have been eased by studying with Ruth Fuller Sasaki, an American woman who was already accepted as a Zen priest and ran a training temple for foreigners- the First Zen Institute of America, within a corner of the great Daitoko-ji temple complex.

Despite the endless urban sprawl between Kyoto and Tokyo, Mt. Fuji was clearly visible for once, beyond the smokestacks and concrete boxes.

So much of not only Kyoto but also the little I saw of Japan, was hard to recognise. Returning to my old street in Tokyo was interesting. Once full of old wooden houses and a local bathhouse round

Return to my old streets in Tokyo, 40 years on!

40 years on, it was hard to recognise much of Tokyo, so it was good to find my old street still intact.

the corner for all of us who did not have such facilities at home, now it was, despite the still small plots of land along the tiny streets that had remained intact, new fancy houses were abundant, often with outsized cars trying to negotiate the miniature streets.

My old station

In some ways it was good to see that the neighbourhood had gone up in the world. But there was a certain unease to witness, in Tokyo, as in Kyoto, the wholesale transformation that had occurred, leaving almost nothing of the old recognisable.

Shibuya was its intense self still, and it was fun to stop by at the world’s most profitable Starbucks coffee shop overlooking the busy street crossings of Subuya, where once I had to endure the crowds each day to and from work at Tokyo English Centre. How happy I was when I could leave the frenetic bustle of Tokyo and swap that life for a summer in the mountains near Kyoto growing vegetables and doing yoga and trying to work out where my young life was going.

While Hanna explored greater Tokyo I was due to be giving a weekend seminar. Sadly the day before I went down with a fever. But, after six months in the planning, the show must go on, so somewhat feeble and feeling distinctly not on form, I managed to call on ‘Dr. Seminar’ to boost my adrenaline, stay upright for the weekend and deliver the seminar to a charming group of Japanese enthusiasts for this work.

A great team to translate for me and keep my upright for the weekend.

They were, like their Korean colleagues, a pleasure to teach and get to know. I was only sorry that my health gave out at this crucial juncture so that, although I was able to do my stuff, I was not quite my usual effusive self! However it was with some gratitude and relief that, my job done, I was able to fly home the next day and get on with getting well.

It had been a great trip, new friends made, old familiar places revisited and updated to their current status in my mind and new cultures explored. What a great privilege to travel the world and share ones enthusiasms, teaching and learning.  It doesn’t come much better than that!

Always a good time when, work done, we can enjoy getting together for a photo!

Book of the Month:

Saigon 

by Anthony Grey published by Pan in 1982.

Of the dozen or so books I consumed, about the area, leading up to, and during, my East Asian travels in January, perhaps the one that stands out as having most impact is the now, rather forgotten, but brilliant historical novel Saigon by Anthony Grey, the one-time Reuters correspondent in Beijing, who became famous during the Cultural revolution when the Red Guards took him hostage in his flat in Beijing for two years.

Perhaps as a result of this long period alone, ~I do not know, some years after this he came out and wrote one or two, if not great works of literature, certainly engrossing and reasonably historically accurate, novels about both the Long March in China and the long battle for Vietnam.

Saigon follows the fortune of an American, Vietnamese, French and British family as their lives are intimately affected by and affect the turbulent years between 1925 when the French colonialists were still firmly in power in Indochina, up to those, above mentioned, days of collapse, when the Americans had to ignominiously leave Saigon by helicopter in the dying days of the South Vietnamese regime in 1975.

Admittedly the intertwining of these families fortunes over this fifty year period at times, stretch our credulity and yet the reader forgives any narrative licence taken with the plot because this does allows us to be at just about every key moment, from the last days of the Emperor in Hue, to the rise of Ho Chi Minh in the north in 1945, on to Dien Bien Phu in 1954 through the struggles of the American War and the denouement of the fall of Saigon in 1975. We gain a ringside seat with these characters and live and breathe the heroic and often bloody story of those crucial Vietnamese years of gaining their freedom, at least from outsiders. Today there is still some freedom to be gained from a one-party state, but that is another story.

It is clear that Grey put in a considerable amount of scholarship over a three year period in both Paris, Washington and London, when Vietnam was still closed off limits for such research, reading extensively in the archives consulting experts in the history of Vietnam in order to both paint such a vivid and exciting picture of the times, as well as maintaining the readers trust and confidence in his historical verisimilitude.

Over 750 pages the reader, as in any really good historical novel, both learns an immense amount about the country and period in question and, at the same time, gets drawn personally and emotionally into the account in a way that is more difficult in all but the best pure history.

If you have any interest in this area of the world and have time for only one book, this might be it. Even if you don’t it is a good read!

February Blog 2013

Greetings From Tokyo 東京

View of Shinjuku skyscrapers and Mount Fuji as seen from the Bunkyo Civic Center in Tokyo, January 2009, image by Morio and sourced from Wikipedia.org.

As the largest metropolitan area in the world, (32.5m) Tokyo takes some getting used to, even though it was my home for a year, forty years ago. After Seoul, (the second biggest world city, after Tokyo,) it will be good to be back in cycle-friendly Oxford where human scale still pervails. When you read this I should hopefully have been lecturing happily in these two cities and had some fun revising old haunts, making new friends and sharing my skills. I should be ready to get back to less hectic work in friendly old Oxford. Looking at this photo of Tokyo one has to wonder when it was taken, in my memory of the city, at least back then, it was very rare to be able to see much more than a grey pawl of smog let alone Mt. Fuji! I will report my findings in a later blog!

Lifestyle, social factors and survival after age 75

Another recent longitudinal study reported in the British Medical Journal identifies modifiable factors associated with longevity among adults aged 75 and older. This time, the the population was based around older people living on Kungsholmen, in Stockholm, Sweden. It is always nice to report on one of my favourite cities. Stockholm is no Tokyo, but rather a city blessed by its siting amongst so much water, half the city being built on islands so one is never far from a great big heart warming view of water; sun sparkling in the summer and perhaps thick ice you can play and walk on in the winter. Anyway back to the study. 1810 adults aged 75 or more participating in the Kungsholmen Project, with follow-up for 18 years between 1987-2005. In summary they found that;

Even after age 75 lifestyle behaviours such as not smoking and physical activity are associated with longer survival. A low risk profile can add five years to women’s lives and six years to men’s. These associations, although attenuated, were also present among the oldest old (≥85 years) and in people with chronic conditions.

When you are younger, five or six years may not seem so much, but if you are 85 plus, it can mean the difference between building and having a relationship with their grandchildren or not. This is something that might be treasured and remembered for a life-time and influence that child right up to their own grand-parenting role some 80 years on.

The researchers defined a low-risk profile as healthy lifestyle behaviours, taking part in 1 or more leisure activities, and having a rich or moderate social network. Other helpful factors seem to have been being female and having had higher education!

So get out there, keep active, don’t smoke,  learn something new and keep making new and good friends!

One Hundred Not Out: resilience and active ageing
Yvonne Roberts The Young Foundation

Baby Boomers

Over 65s are a net contributor to society amounting to between £30 billion and £40 billion a year because they pay tax, spend money that creates jobs, deliver billions of pounds of free care and contribute to charities and volunteering.

Broken down, over 65s pay £45 billion in taxes; they spend £64 billion on goods and services; they provide social care worth around £30 billion; they volunteer to the value of £10 billion and they donate £10 billion a year to charity.

This offsets the £136 billion cost of the older person’s share of the NHS, pensions and other welfare benefits.

The baby boomers are better off than their predecessors; they are better educated and they will work longer. So the net contribution to the economy and society is likely to rise to about £75 billion by 2030.

Prostate Cancer

Are you or do you know a man over 40? Perhaps this documentary on Prostate cancer and what to do and what not to do should be essential viewing for him?ANH-INTL FEATURE: Documentary on prostate cancer — essential viewing for all men over 40.

Book of the Month

“The human heart has a hidden want which science cannot supply.”

Sir William Osler M.D.

Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson OBE, scored a big hit with her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, in 1985. Written when she was only 25, ‘Oranges’ went on to win the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, became an international best seller and an award-winning BBC television adaptation. More recently after I had written this review, BBC Imagine did a very good programme inspired by this book with Jeanette, worth seeing if you can.

This was a semi-autobiographical account of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, who is meant to grow up to become a missionary, but instead she falls in love with a woman and all hell breaks loose in this dysfunctional and bizarre family.

Jeanette finally left home at sixteen, because she was in love with a woman. Her adopted mother Mrs. Winterson, the central, unhappy, and somewhat deranged key character, after the protagonist, in Oranges,’ suffered from some strange and damaging delusions and obsessions that she inflicted with casual cruelty on her adopted daughter.

The great Swiss Psychiatrist, Karl Jung, once said that he would, rather be whole than happy. Mrs. Winterson’s sad reversal of this was, why be happy when you could be normal, was the interrogative of provincial curtain twitchers across the ages. Guaranteed to kill the life and spirit in all but the strongest; Jeannette Winterson, certainly by the evidence of this book, was one of those with the strength to defy such a deadly injunction, and this is part of her tale to tell of her struggle to survive such damaging injunctions.

In this book, Winterson explores her journey through this tough and damaging upbringing in a, now hugely changed northern town, back in the 70’s when things were much as they had been for most of the century. Hard, cruel and, by our twenty first century standards, bizarre and strange, at least in the God-obsessed Winterson household. She suffered at the hands of her intolerant and fundamentalist mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster draw as she waits for Armageddon.

As it is astutely observed on the dust cover, this is fundamentally a story of a life’s work to find happiness. A book of stories, both of her strange and painful childhood, as well as her refuge in stories as she in her unschooled, intelligent, naivety, works her way through English Literature, A to Z in Accrington public library. This refuge in literature, combined with her obvious sharp intelligence, led to her escaping her unhappy childhood to read English at Oxford and a career as a successful novelist.

Compelling, horrific, both sad and amusing, this is an account of her struggles to find herself after this hard start into the world, her journey, through life, poetry and literature into her own madness and despair and out the other side as she searches for her birth mother, tries to makes sense of the pain of her childhood and put it in context so that she can go on to live a life worth living.

Always intensely readable, tough-minded astute and ultimately life affirming, this is a book you can start and finish in a day, making the journey with her, gaining from her incisive mining of her own life’s struggles and coming out wiser and better for the reading. Recommended.

And Finally…

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December Blog 2012

Happy Christmas and a Healthy New Year to you all!

Welcome to our 34th blog on all things pertaining to health, in its widest sense.

It is a great privilage to help as many people as we do, and we all thank you for having put your trust in us over the last year. While no one is able o help everyone who seeks their help, we enjoy the challenges that you all present us with and do our utmost to repay the trust put in us, so, once again thank you for a good year.

It is over three years ago I, Clive, started this little venture, sharing what I felt was interesting to me and, I hoped might be to you. Now, over 60,000 words later, it is time to take stock. First let me thank all of you who have taken the time to read some of my thoughts over the last three years, and a special thanks to all of you who have taken the time to write comments, please keep them coming. In this time of ever increasing digital bombarment with ideas, images and thoughts, it is impossible to keep up with everything one has, even a passing interest, in. Therefore I am especially appreciative of the time you have invested in reading and thinking of those slivers of the world I have chosen to draw to your attention. As those who know me well, I like nothing better than a good discussion about things that interest me, and this is another forum for that.

Crossing the arbitary rubicon of 65 this autumn (Thanks Steve for saying you had no idea I was that young, as I looked so much older!) I have decided one way to make more time for all those other things I want to cram into this life, is to turn these monthly blogs into bi-monthly blogs. So starting with this 34th edition they should come out every two months. Next month I am off on a little East Asia tour prompted by my roll on the International College of Applied Kinesiology’s International Board of Examiners. I am off to Seoul on January 1st to help run the Diplomate exam for 8 Korean Doctors who want to take the advanced exams.

Having just run this exam here in Oxford, last weekend, I am both impressed with those who put themselves throught the tough years of work and study to attain this status and somewhat amazed that I did the same some twenty years ago, and, eventually, managed to pass.

While I am back in East Asia I wanted to offer some of my own insigths in using Applied Kinesiology to help diagnose and treat, sometimes difficult to uncover, health problems. Consequently I am off to Vietnam for a short trip before returing to South Korea to lecture at their AGM and then flying over to Japan to lecture there in Tokyo the following week.

I have never been to Vietnam, a country that played such a seminal and tragic role in my generations early life and I have not been back to Japan and Korea for forty years since I lived in Japan and visited Korea as an adventurous young man keen to see the world independently. So it is with some curiosity and enthusiasm I am returning both to give back my little contributions and to see my old haunts. However I am not leaving Helix House unmanned and am confident that the team of practitioners, Susan Farwell, Andy Roscoe, Sarah Wilkinson and Kerstin will be able to handle all urgent problems, and I will be back in February as usual.

Review of the Blogging Year

Looking back over the year it is interesting, at least to me, to see what we covered. In January I explored ideas on ten ways to a happier life, looked at research from Cancer Research UK on why up to half of all cancers are avoidable. That month I reviewed Life Blood an interesting book about the battle to control one of he worlds great scourges, Malaria. Millions of people suffer from this terrible disease and Alex Perry did a great job exploring the different stratagies that are being employed to change this.

After the long dark winter months February was a good month to look at vitamin D3, the vitamin that is also a hormone that most of us are probably short on. Only last month I spent an interesting day at the Royal College of Physicians listening to one of the world experts on Vitamin D, Dr. Michael Horrocks.

I also explored more about the work we do at Helix House via the charity The Sunflower Trust, to help children with learning difficulties, and reviewed Walter Issacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs, on whose wonderful computer I am writing this. March saw thoughts about Rupert Sheldrake’s interesting ideas he expoundes in his latest work, The Science Delusion, plus a review of Jeffery Sack’s brilliant view of economics for our troubled times, The Price of Civilisation. By April I was exploring the meat eating debate and looking at why eating a lot of meat may contribute to higher rates of cancer and heart disease, and reviewed the film for Jungian fans, A Dangerous Method, all about the Freud-Jung encounter.

May saw further thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of Evidence Based Medicine and a review of the book, Dangerous Grains, and the problem that gluten can be for more of us than we used to realise. By June I had handed over to guest blogger, former Helix House shiatsu practitioner, Silvie Hylton-Potts who wrote some interesting ideas about meditation. Silvie has since moved on from Helix House but we wish her all the best in her work.

By July we were onto the key role of a Low starch diet on Ankelosing Spondylitis and took an amusing diversion into the rise of actor James Corden and his autobiography May I have your Attention? By August I was exploring the theme of the autumn, that of why we age and why, at least in part, the speed in which this natural process changes us, is very much in our hands. Dying To Be Me by Anita Moorjani was our book of the month, an interesting exploration of her remarkable Near Death Experience that triggered her recovery from a fatal cancer.

September saw the Ageing theme explored further looking at the people of Okinawa and why they are the longest living peoples in the world. After the Olympic summer and all its glories, in October we looked at the way the Olympics were used by junk food and drink manufacturers to attempt to associate their damaging products with athletic success. But then, sad as it was, we did get some money back from them to run some great games! Finally we ended that month following our theme of Healthy Ageing by reviewing Burne & Holford’s book, The Ten Sectrets of Healthy Ageing.

if you missed any of these, or the 33 other monthly blogs, they are still available to read, or share with others, just click here and select the month you want.

Film of the Month

This month I want to draw your attention to Michael Haneke’s new film, Amour. I agree with Paul Bradshaw in the Guardian that this study of the effects of ageing and dementia on a blissful married couple, ‘is intelligent film-making of the highest order.’ As Bradshaw says, ‘film-making at the highest pitch of intelligence and insight’. Haneke has made a small, jewelled, slow moving, profound and touching, masterpiece. It is no suprise that it won the palm D’Or at Cannes. To read the full review in the Guardian click here.

October Blog 2012

Big Food: the Olympic Scam     

The other week  I enjoyed the last day of competition at the Para Olympic Aquatic Centre. Like many this summer, I was surprised at how powerfully positive the whole long summer  of sport redefined, at least  for ourselves, and perhaps for  other countries who may have noticed, who we are and what we are really like in the 21st century.

The Olympics, and particularly the impressive opening ceremony, helped us see ourselves in a new and positive, multi-racial, laid-back, amusing, self-depreciating and even  happy country, that, at times, was able to party and enjoy itself without too much bombast and hyperbole. Truly a summer of Wonder. So, it is with reluctance that I raise some less than happy aspects of our modern life, where it seems the only way we can finance good things is with the money from poor quality and damaging things.

According to the United Nations, diet-related diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, pose the greatest global threat to our health; to a staggering 35 million deaths per year, dwarfing the six to eight million smoking-related deaths each year. BBC News – Viewpoint: Ban junk food sponsors from Olympic sports. Added sweeteners pose dangers to health that justify controlling them like alcohol, argue Robert H. Lustig, et al .Public health: The toxic truth about sugar : Nature : Nature Publishing Group. New York officials want to stop people on low incomes using food stamps to buy fizzy drinks as part of a campaign against obesity.  Washington now has to decide whether to give the go-ahead to the scheme.BBC News – New York campaign to ban poor from buying fizzy drinks. I will be very surprised if this gets through the army of Big Food lobbyists who control most of those on Capital Hill. And, in case we feel superior about those fat Americans, at least we can take our hat off to those New York officials trying to do something to help the poorest in their society stay alive.  We are seeing very little action from our own politicians, and  Big Food has agreements tied up nicely until 2020 with the IOC, so don’t hold your breath about sponsorship changes any time soon.

Of course the Olympic committee are willing to support and stand up for their long  association with the likes of Coca-Cola.BBC News – 100 years of Olympic sponsorship.The Coke people are not stupid, they know that all they have to do to cover the scandal with a fig leaf, is to trumpet the fact that they “sponsor more than 250 physical activity and nutrition education programs in more than 100 countries and are committed to sponsoring a program in every country where it operates by the end of 2015”.

We are supposed to think this is a good thing and shut up. Well, it is intolerable. Why not have British American Tobacco or some Mexican drug cartel sponsor the games,  that would be, from a health perspective, far safer and better for the youth of the world. But of course this would be unacceptable. We need to make the likes of Coke equally unacceptable in polite society, after all with their deadly concoctions laced with High Fructose Corn Syrup to screw up the metabolisms of our children and anyone foolish enough to still be drinking the stuff, we are already in a global epidemic on a vast scale. BBC News – Sizing it up: The facts behind global obesity.

Who can afford to sponsor the Olympics? As we now know, after our sporting summer, the only companies both making sufficient profits and  keen to try and associate their products with healthy young athletes winning medals, are the purveyors of junk food, alcohol  and sugar drinks. It is good that someone has been able and willing to put money into the games as well as us tax payers, but it is sad, indeed, that is has to be from such dubious sources.

No politicians in our own, or most other countries, seem able, or willing,  to curb the overwhelming power of Big Food in their voracious  move  to sell us junk food and try and persuade us it is healthy. This summer in particular, it was sports drinks – more highly profitable  sugar and junk we are better off without. Big Food go out of their way to illegitimately connect their dubious wares in our minds with sporting excellence and youthful strength and vigour, and try and suggest that it is primarily physical activity that will reduce our growing obesity, which is clearly not true. What will the next ‘health hype’ be?

It is encouraging to see several television programmes bravely trying to question the prevailing dominance of these, basically immoral, companies. But, until we can pressurise our politicians to really stand up off their knees and use taxation and powerful sanctions to change the dysfunctional food  and supermarket industry to put our health above profit, we are destined to continue to get wave after wave of dubious ‘non-food’ products sold to us as if they were worthy of putting into our mouths and  washing over our genes.  The best advice I can give my patients is that, if it comes in a package and it has a health claim, be very suspicious. If it is advertised, avoid it. Who can afford to advertise a cabbage?

As Michael Pollen has pointed out, see Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. | Health & Wellness from Helix House,  we are living in a dysfunctional food culture that is fast infecting developing countries around the world. Rosemary Stanton Rosemary Stanton: Big Food gluttony  observes, in her excellent short article, in the Medical Journal of Australia, the influence exerted by pharmaceutical companies — often called Big Pharma — gets plenty of publicity. But what about the power exerted by the large food corporations? In the first in a series of articles on the food and beverage industry and health — Big Food — in PLoS Medicine, the authors start with the observation that the current global food system is virtually broken.

Perhaps now is the time to look again at the role of sponsorship in sport and ask the hard questions. Clearly the London Olympics, which cost each UK tax payer about £400 to put on and ten pence each  per medal, could not have happened  in their present form without sponsorship. I, for one, felt they were well worth the effort and cost. Both for the sport, but, more importantly, for the bonding and uniting effect across all classes and colours of our Islands.

The tough question we now have to ask ourselves is, in the light of the 35 million diet related deaths  per year world wide and the almost certain steady rise well beyond that figure each year we delay, can we afford to let  Big Food get the easy pass they are getting throughout the world and in almost every high street. Just because  people, and particularly the less well off,  choose to buy and consume  and die from the stuff, should we be allowing it or, in a more enlightened but sadly obese age,  should we be doing all we can to change our food world, towards a more beneficial, healthy and sustainable one? As the Alliance for Natural Health put it so well in their recent article this is a lost opportunity to educate the nation about good nutrition. Olympics 2012: A lost opportunity to educate a nation about good nutrition. It is ultimately up to us to put pressure both on our politicians and to vote with our cash.

“While it is wise to accept what we cannot change about ourselves, it is also good to remember that we are never too old to replace discouragement with bits and pieces of confidence and hope”.

Elaine Aron

Book of the Month

The Ten Secrets of Healthy Ageing : How to live Longer,  Look Younger and Feel Great.

By Jerome Burne & Patrick Holford.  2012.

Notwithstanding the publishers irritating habit of pitching these kind of books with the spurious ‘come on’ of the  use of the word Secrets, this is  an informative, balanced and useful read for those interested in more that the usual bland platitudes about ageing. Dr. Michael Dixon, Chairman of the NHS Alliance says, “We all have choices when it comes to ageing well. This is a brilliant guide to making the right ones”. I would agree with him.

The science of Ageing is growing rapidly and it is an ever changing field of research knowledge and new breakthroughs. (Merck Manual has these rather depressing things to say about the changes we can expect with ageing, Changes in the Body With Aging: The Aging Body: Merck Manual Home Edition. Despite the great advances of modern high tech health care that have, undoubtedly added to the sum of human dignity and happiness, there is also a growing and unfortunate trend to bank all our hopes on likes of new gee-wiz poly-pills and other Big Pharma money spinners,  that will at a stroke (no pun intended) greatly reduce our risks of all sorts of nasty life shorteners such as heart disease, strokes and cancer and set us all on the road to blissful old age. This is, in my opinion, highly contentious. This book instead tells it like it is, for the great mass of us, who want to first avoid these killers, if we can, in more organic, effective and natural ways, and second want to avoid all the, often unmentioned, down sides of multiple drug cocktail  in later life.

We all die eventually of course, but this is a good guide to current thinking and evidence as to what you can do, both with lifestyle changes, food, exercise, food supplements, sleep, hormone balance etc., to stack the chances heavily in your favour of avoiding the unappetising years of disability, cognitive decline and dementia that increasingly is looking to be our lot if the likes of Big Food, and Big Pharma will have their way over our final decades.

Divided into three parts, Part one deals with the Truth about healthy Ageing and outlines a free on-line bioAge check you can do to see where you are now, Part two: the so called Ten Secrets, which are chapters about actions you can take to deal with Alzheimer’s, Joints and bones, Diabetes and Energy, Stress and Sleep, Youthful Skin, Cancer, Healthy Hearts, improving your digestion with out drugs, stopping eyesight deterioration and Natural anti-ageing Hormones. So not quite so secret after all! And Part 3 usefully goes on to outline an Anti-Ageing Action Plan and give you resources to make the kind of changes that science and our observations of longer living communities (like the Okinawans I wrote about last month), are showing may help us live at least more free from disability and  unnecessary drug-cocktail over doses late into our lives.

Two years ago Patrick Holford | Health & Wellness from Helix House I reviewed the first outing of the Burne and Holford writing team when they wrote the excellent book Food is Better Medicine than Drugs. Patrick had told me of this forthcoming book during a long, languid lunch in Southern Crete when we met by chance one holiday. He has consistently stuck his neck out over the years with many informative and iconoclastic books on food and health. Consequently, he has had the dubious privilege of much hostile blogging attention from the arch ‘sceptic’ Big Pharma loony lobby. Happily, this has not stopped him, or Medical journalist Jerome Burne, writing these interesting and informative books that are ahead of their time. Long may they have the courage, skill and scholarship to keep them coming!

September Blog 2012

New Face in the Office

This summer we welcomed Sarah Wilkinson who joined us in July  to replace Amelia Hall. We are very happy to have Sarah’s new skills and cheerful energy join our team. Sarah also runs her own practice, The Quantum Room, specialising in Past Life Regression, Future Life Progression, Reiki and Shamanic Cord Cutting.

Who cares about all this Ageing stuff?

If I had known that I was going to live this long,

I would have taken better care of myself. 

Eubie Blake

 Given my theme for late 2012, as I cross that arbitrary line into ‘pensioner’ and focus on ways we can live well long into the third age, I want to write a note  for those for whom any talk of ageing well seems utterly irrelevant.

As Maurice Chevalier is supposed to have said, ‘Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative‘. For those just trying to get through the day and pay off  their student loans  or bring up the children, considering their life in older age, inevitably seems a ‘thought too far’. And yet, just as a pension started when it seems an almost absurd waste of money with so many pressing, urgent calls on it now, it may turn out to be a prudent decision. It is also never too early to start the habits of self care that can lead to a healthier third age. So, not withstanding Woody Allen’s amusing thoughts below, hang on in there – if you are lucky, you, too, will be older sooner than you think. Then some of this ‘old man musing’ may well turn out to have some truth to it after all and if you make the changes younger, like pensions, they get easier to get used to and pay back bigger dividends in later years!

“In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way. Then you wake up in an old people’s home feeling better every day. You get kicked out for being too healthy, go collect your pension, and then when you start work, you get a gold watch and a party on your first day. You work for 40 years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You party, drink alcohol, and are generally promiscuous, then you are ready for high school. You then go to primary school, you become a kid, you play. You have no responsibilities, you become a baby until you are born. And then you spend your last 9 months floating in luxurious spa-like conditions with central heating and room service on tap, larger quarters every day and then Voila! You finish off as an orgasm!” 
― Woody Allen

Okinawa- The real Shangri-La               

“At seventy you are but a child, at eighty you are merely a youth, and at ninety, if the ancestors invite you into heaven, ask them to wait until you are one hundred…and then you might consider it”.

Ancient Okinawan proverb.

The time: June 1971, the place: Okinawa, East China Sea. The total number of American troops still in Vietnam drops to a record low of 196,700 (the lowest since January 1966). Actors David Tenant and Ewan McGregor are born.  After the break up of the Beatles, John Lennon is in New York making some interesting music, while men are driving buggies around the surface of the moon and things are going from bad to worse in Laos and Cambodia.  East Pakistan is painfully becoming Bangladesh, and George Harrison is having a concert in the Albert Hall to help raise funds for them.  The Peoples Republic of China replaces  the Republic of China, (Taiwan)  in the the UN…  and coincidentally, I found myself on a slow boat to China.

I had to stop off in Okinawa and having to sleep another night on the beach because my boat for Kagoshima (on the tip of the Japanese mainland)  left early, without me, due to a bad weather warning.  At that time, the islands were just about to be handed back to the Japanese by the Americans, who had invaded and  occupied them in 1945 at the end of World War 2, at enormous cost in life, on both sides.

I had no idea, until many decades later, that I was, briefly, in the place  were there are the most centenarians in the world. For centuries, the health and vitality of the local people was known and remarked upon by travellers. However, it is only in recent years that the outside world, and particularly science,  has taken an interest.

The 1970’s saw a flurry of interest in long living peoples around the world, from Georgia in the Caucasus’s, through the Hunzakuts in Pakistan to the Vilcabambans  in Ecuadorian Andes. However, the accuracy of the ages of the older people was gradually brought into question by the doubtful quality and veracity of birth and death certificates. In  Okinawa, however, every city, town and village has a family register system (koseki) that has been recording reliable birth marriage and death statistics since 1979. These records show more than 400 centenarians  in a population of 1.3 million – about 34% per hundred thousand – many of them still healthy, active and living independently. This compares to something around five to ten centenarians per hundred thousand  in Europe and the USA

Geographical Factors Influencing Living to 100 – The Centenarian.

Interestingly, as the website The Centenarian notes,

‘In developed nations the fastest growing segment of the population is centenarians – that is people living to 100 years of age or more! In fact, worldwide, the number of humans celebrating a century of life has multiplied dramatically from 1875 to 1950, and has just about doubled every decade since 1950. For instance, in Denmark, between 1870 and 1880, only 3 individuals on average ever celebrated their 100th birthday, as compared to 213 new centenarians reported there in 1990.

A baby boy born today in the UK on average will live to 77 and girls to 81.  According to the Office for National Statistics, the chances of living to 100 are 18.1% for new born boys; 23.5% for girls. If you are a 40-year-old male perusing this website, unfortunately your odds are somewhat worse, only about 8%.  A 40-year-old woman does a little better, her odds are almost 12% of celebrating a three-figure birthday. But what about globally? Are there places to live where you are more or likely to live to be 100 or more?

In sheer numbers the United States sports the largest number of centenarians.  According to 2005 census data over 55,000 people residing in the US were 100 or more years of age. At the centenarians current rate of expansion in The States, that number could reach over one million by the year 2050, when the first “baby boomers” reach the century mark. The large US number is mainly a function of America’s greater total population, but proportionally, the largest percentage of people living to 100 is found on the Island of Okinawa, where per capita there are almost 4 centenaries for every one living in the US’.

The Caribbean island of Barbados, while proportionally behind Okinawa, has the second highest percentage of centenarians in the world. Elizabeth “Ma Pampo” Israel, was the worlds oldest documented living person. Born in1875, she died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 128! She was a lifetime resident of the Island of Dominica – where her longevity, though record breaking, was not uncommon. The island’s total population is only around 70,000, and at least 21 Dominicans have been recorded that are currently 100 years old or more.

Well, perhaps you have no desire to live that long anyway. You may still adhere to the call of The Who in their classic 1965 number, My Generation. It is interesting to speculate how Pete Townsend, now, 67, may feel today, about the last classic youthful line he penned in 1965.

People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation) 

Just because we g-g-get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

 Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)

I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation).

Irrespectively of how long we all actually live,  the message from Okinawa is, that age can be a good rather than a bad time, if certain key factors are in place.

Sure, having good genes certainly plays a part, but only, perhaps (adding a third factor into the mix) the rest seems to depend  on the environment. The strange thing is that as long as people have good health, mobility, sufficient minimal wealth, an optimistic, non-cynical attitude  and good companionship, they seem to want to go on living, long after they officially get old. It is not so much old  age, as such, that is to be feared rather the premature decline in cognition, mobility and opportunity for that primary human need: love and connection,  as well as growth and contribution, that we all fear. With that fear, we assume that these declines are inevitable and unavoidable, rather than, in part, the end stage of decisions we have made along the pathway of our previous life. Yes, there are, of course, elements of luck in the frame, but like those pensions, prudent forethought and action can go a long way..why wait?

To learn more about the ongoing study of Okinawa’s seniors go to: http://www.okicent.org/study.html

Book of the month.

The Okinawa Way: How to Improve your Health and Longevity Dramatically by B. Willcox, C. Willcox and M. Suzuki.

This book is based on what has been learned from a 25 year landmark medical study of the world’s longest living people. To live the good life for longer, of course, the first trick is not to die. And scientists have been trying to work out why, amongst the older people of these islands, there is such a relatively low incidence of the major killers which plague the western world; heart disease, strokes and cancer.

While, for understandable reasons, there is a great emphasis on nutrition and exercise in many contemporary thoughts about healthy ageing, one of the strengths of this book is the fact that it is written by two medical doctors  – Japanese, Makoto Suzuki M.D,  and Canadian, Bradley Willcox M.D. But at the same time, Bradley’s brother,  Craig Willcox Ph.D,  who is an experienced  anthropologist. In this way, they have not only focused on the traditionally  healthy Okinawa diet, their approach to both aerobic and anaerobic exercise and flexiblity  and a successful integration of Eastern and Western healthcare, but also on the spiritual outlook  and cultural support that enable them to live in harmony with nature and each other.

An interesting read, both for its anthropological insights and for its suggestions of how we might adapt the ways of those long living Okinawan men and women. Interestingly, in view of last months Near Death Experience book of the month,  Dr. Suzuki, the lead researcher, had himself experienced a NDE which seems to have helped him live a more relaxed life and perhaps influenced his choice of this research subject.

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Woody Allen

August Blog 2012

What does Ageing look like in the twenty first century?

 This is part of my challenge to both myself and you, can we change  both the reality and the perception of age as the century advances, or are we doomed to be overwhelmed by the pressure of looking after an ever expanding cohort of older people who will need greater and greater care for longer and longer at an unsustainable cost?

I shall be asking you to support me, in aid of two of my favourite charities, in the coming months, as I try and highlight this issue with my own personal efforts to turn back the ‘age-ometer’ and leading by example, change my body composition a little to show what can be done, even  by ordinary people like us, to shift some of those markers that take us towards, or away from, premature disability.

Please watch this space in the coming months when I will outline, both my fund-raising efforts, and what we already know about simple lifestyle changes that we can all adopt, that can significantly increase our chances of a healthy, high functioning and  fun third age.

In other words, what you do matters.

How long we live and how well we live is largely in our own hands.

We baby boomers have trashed the financial system and burdened our children with mountains of debt, we owe it to them to do all we can to hold ourselves up, so that others don’t have to do it for us. To reshape and re-invent what it means to grow old. If we have messed with all the old ideas of music, jobs, shopping and sex, now we need to create a new vision of ageing. Innumerable studies, like the long running 84,000 nurses study, continually show that a few attainable strategies  result in an astonishing 83 percent reduction in the rush for major coronary events, the leading cause of death and disability. Simple steps like:

1. Not smoking

2. Consuming alcohol moderately

3. Exercising

4. Eating a healthy diet

5. Keeping your weight under control.

So as you see it is not that extraordinary. One might add to that list a stable relationship and rich social network as key protectors of our long term health.

As I am  part of the first wave of The Silver Tsunami of  baby boomers to start to hit pensionable age later this year I have a personal, as well as academic interest, in the subject. It is not so much that I fear death, if we can take anything from the findings of Near Death Experiences, like that in this months book of the month, there really isn’t anything to fear. Rather what is tragic is the number of us who, for want of a few simple lifestyle changes, choose not to hugely increase our chances of ‘rectangularising our functional curve’.

In other words, as John Bowden writes in his book:

The Most Effective Ways to Live Longer

 “If you drew a graph showing age on one axis and function on the other (function meaning everything from how well your heart performs to your ability  to have passionate sex), you’d see a depressing slope in which function decreases as age increases”.

Image from Bowden.2010.Fairwinds Press.

The goal, as Dr. Ron Rothenberg says in his book  Forever Ageless, is to maintain all functions – heart, brain, muscle, lungs, etc. – at a high level to the end and then fall apart quickly all at once. This is the ‘rectangularisation’ of the function curve. The line, instead of inexorably dipping as it crosses the page indicating a long inexorable decline into, pain, handicap, drug dependency and cognitive impairment, holds up right across  indicating a reasonable maintenance of function right into the eighth or ninth decades, with a steep and rapid decline at the end somewhere near 100.

Twenty five years ago there were 660,000 people over 85 in the UK, and this is the group, as Burne and Holford point out in there excellent book The Ten Secrets of Healthy Ageing, that is a heavy and costly user of health and other social services. That number is now doubled to 1.4 million and is set to reach 3.6 million by 2035, when I am 88.  No wonder economists and planners are having sleepless nights wondering how we might cope with the burden on society. But there are, as Bowden says, four specific processes that are unquestionably linked to the breakdown of systems within the body that contribute to ageing.

Over the coming months I plan to touch on all four and other reasons that seem to drive us either to a premature disability we often  mistake for inevitable old age, or help us enjoy a high functioning third age before we move on. Remember genes may load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger.

We will look at the things we can all do, whatever our age, (it is always easier to start young), to ensure that we stack the chances of us living healthier, happier lives, long into our advancing years. Just this summer the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference AAIC 2012 highlighted a number of studies showing how  by moving and strengthening our bodies we can protect against  premature cognitive decline  Weight Training, Walking Improve Cognition in the Elderly. So next time you go for a walk or lift some weights remember you are doing, not only your heart and muscles a favour, but also your brain!

The most useful question a Doctor can ask a patient

I am a fairly regular reader of Dr. Briffa’s interesting, mildly iconoclastic, medical blog and particularly enjoyed this one on the most useful question that a doctor can ask a patient. Briffa was interested in  ”Dr Des Spence (a British general practitioner/family physician) in this week’s British Medical Journal. He has chosen this week to lament the fact that modern medical practice has become more “tyrannical, hierarchical, controlled, intolerant, and dogmatic.” There is pressure on doctors to ‘follow the evidence’ even though the evidence may be deeply flawed and biased due to considerable conflicts of interest. Another concern is the fact that doctors are remunerated for doing certain things, which can make it difficult for them to take a truly objective stance of some of what they do.

It sounds less and less fun to be a GP these days. We all have to be careful about rejecting our patient’s suggestions as to what may be wrong with them, and not to feel threatened by such ideas. ‘Dr. Google’ may well get things wrong at times, but she deserves a hearing, at least before we scuttle off behind our professional shell. See what you think? Perhaps the most useful question a doctor can ask a patient

What are the risks?
We are often warned against the high risk of taking food supplements or worse herbal medicine, and there are those out there in the strangely fanatical sceptic lobby who would have you believe that the only safe way forward is to keep taking the drugs and rely on the veracity of the food and drugs lobbies for the truth about health and your risks of getting sick or dying.  

We all know that there are a few times when some drugs can be life saving or that a trip to hospital  is what we desperately need and are subsequently very grateful for. However as the work of the Alliance for Natural Health recently showed click here. Supplements and herbs are about 300,000 times safer than hospitals, where the risk of dying is not dissimilar from those in the armed forces  in Afghanistan. Even the risks of cycling are 1721 times greater than taking nutritional supplements. Have a look at their excellent research on these risks, it is an eye opening and well researched account.

2 years =Average time cut from your life

if you spend more than three hours a day sitting, message…stand up!” 

Time Magazine 23/7/12

Book of the month

Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing by Anita Moorjani

Near Death Experiences  (NDE’s)  seem to have occurred in all times and in all cultures. As Michael Schroter-Kunhardt observed in his encyclopedic review of Near Death Experiences:

(Journal of Scientific Exploration,Vol.7,No. 3, pp. 219-239,1993 0892-3310193 O 1993 Society for Scientific Exploration)

The large body of NDE data now accumulated point to genuine evidence for a non-physical reality and paranormal capacities of the human being.

The Gilgamesh epic, the oldest written testimony of mankind, contains a near-death experience:

“Gilgamesh… began… his search for the other world. A long time afterwards he discov-ered behind the oceans at the edge of this world the river Chubur, the last barrier before the kingdom of the dead. Gilgamesh left the world and crawled through a dark endless tunnel. It was a long, uncomfortable way… but at last he saw light at the end of the dark tube. He came to the exit of the tunnel and saw a splendid garden. The trees carried pearls and jewels and over all a wonderful light emitted its rays. Gilgamesh wanted to rest in the other world. But the sun god sent him back through the tunnel into this life”.

This new book by Anita Moorjani is in a long line of interesting accounts of NDE’s and is one to enjoy. As it reports on Amazon, “Anita Moorjani was born in Singapore of Indian parents, moved to Hong Kong at the age of two, and has lived in Hong Kong most of her life. Because of her background and British education, she is multi lingual and, from the age of two, grew up speaking English, Cantonese and an Indian dialect simultaneously. She had been working in the corporate field for several years before being diagnosed with cancer in April of 2002. Her fascinating and moving near-death experience in early 2006 has tremendously changed her perspective on life. Her life is now ingrained with the depths and insights she gained while in the other realm.As a result of her near death experience, Anita is often invited to speak at conferences and events to share her insights. She is also a frequent speaker at universities, particularly for their department of behavioral sciences, speaking on topics such as: dealing with terminal illness; facing death; psychology of spiritual beliefs etc. She is the embodiment of the truth that we all have the inner power and wisdom to overcome even life’s most adverse situations, as she is the living proof of this possibility. Anita currently lives in Hong Kong with her husband, and when she’s not traveling and speaking at conferences, she works as an intercultural consultant for multi-national corporations that are based in Hong Kong.

Divided into three parts, Moorjani sets the scene of her life and background and how this lead to her illness in the first part, then in part two she  tells us the story of her NDE while in part three she tells us what she has come to understand and learn from this experience.

Although the NDE seems so all powerful and life changing for all who go through it, that they themselves are unlikely to attach it to any rigid dogma, inevitably some, who have not undergone such a life changing experience first-hand, may want to filter such experiences through their preconceived  religious ideas. The beauty of this book, in its modest, simplicity and firm wisdom  that comes from such direct knowing, is the way that Moorjani tells us her story and lets us vicariously make some of the learnings that she, in her greater experience, has learnt from this profound journey.

Whatever we want to do with the account is  of course, up to us, but the message that she takes from this and offers to us is free of all dogma and is simply for us to know that every part of us is magnificent- our ego, intellect, body and spirit. Every aspect of who we are is perfect. there is nothing to let go, nothing to forgive, nothing to attain.

It is actually beautifully radical, as all such truths are. The only thing we need to learn is that we are already what we are seeking to attain. All we need do is express our uniqueness fearlessly, with abandon. That is why we are made like we are and that is why we are here in the physical world.

A book worth spending time with.