Saturday, December 20, 2014

Heart Attack World - A New Theory of What Causes Heart Attacks

Alternate title:  How heart attack science is related to love. 

I was drawn to this article, "The Real Cause of Heart Attacks" (full url below in the notes*), and its accompanying video, even though it first looked to be rather scientific and technical. As I read it, I soon discovered that, at bottom, it's anything but.**

The article starts to show why and how the true human heart — understood in a way that embraces  but radically recontextualizes everything science has to offer — is best  understood, not as the biological “aorta,” the isolated organism, but instead as the larger social-relational context (community, friendships, loves) in which the heart itself, within the complex organism of the human being, is embedded and out of which it has evolved over the course of a few million years.

Our bodies of course respond to our experiences in the world. To the extent that we experience love, our paraympathetic nervous system is supported and engaged, and this produces within us chemicals that help to nourish and develop that nervous system and its associated organs, including the heart and brain and everything else, and how they are connected and communicate with each other.

But to the extent that the world we create and experience is stressful, threatening and anxiety-producing, then we primarily engage and develop our defensive, aggressive nervous system -- the sympathetic nervous system. We experience stress because our organisms evolved in adaptation to an environment that favored the development of the parasympathetic nervous system, and gave rise to human beings as loving, playful creatures. Our experience of stress suggests that the current environment -- the socio-cultural milieu of modern life and its particular underlying assumptions -- does not suit us, the creatures we had evolved to be.

One response to a stressful environment is adaptation. A stressful environment supports the increased development of the sympathetic nervous system and the suppression of the parasympathetic. We become more aggressive, and we seek to become more capable of tolerating stress. Given enough  time, biological adaptation will favor the survival and propagation of more aggressive human beings to the extent of developing a new human species, with new and distinct traits that are more suited to the environment. This eventuality can be reinforced by a reciprocity between human beings and the environment: the human being in reaction to a hostile, threatening environment develops and enthrones assumptions, beliefs and expectations of competitiveness, aggressiveness, distrust, etc., and therefore develops and conserves habits, practices, tools and institutions that promote thriving and functioning within such an environment. These activities help to establish the undesirable environment as the basis of a way of living, i.e. establish a particular world and culture, with its assumptions and activities, as normal for  human living. It's the logic of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our western medicine (and our other institutions) are now behaving precisely in this way.  The assumption of western medicine that the body is separate from and isolatable from its environment, even though the environment is obviously a kind of extension of the organism, having co-evolved with it, is itself precisely one such reactive assumption, a response to some kind of perceived threat. In the response, the image of the threat is conserved. Western medicine is generally organized on a kind of militaristic attack model: we attack viruses, bacteria, disease on an allopathic model. Alternative medicines are arising that instead seek to promote sources of health. For instance, homeopathic medicines.

At this moment, I want to say, simply, that we have the power to shape our environment. The environment is not objectively fixed. It is partly shaped by our own assumptions and choices. Our world, our environment, is largely an artifact of human choice, and we can change it. We do not have to adapt to it. We can take leadership and influence it to create the world we want to create. We carry within us a desire for love and cooperation which can become the platform for a new kind of healing medicine.

A wise medicine would seek to treat the environment as well as the organism since the two reciprocally condition each other.  Thoughts and emotions — the health of the psyche — are primarily generated through our interactions, as biologically-whole totalities (i.e., individuals) in our social context, but medicine routinely claims, for instance, that “chemical imbalances” originating in the isolated organism at the level of the brain generate disturbed moods, thoughts and behaviors. This is upside down. The institutions, being reactive and sensitive to threat, and also infused with a dim guilt, are defensive and organized in denial.  We can develop understanding and resolute cheerfullness to speak healing words to those in denial, to those who have turned against their own loving natures in reaction to threat and in adoption to the belief in hierarhical competitive culture.

I've now strayed far from the above-named article, and many of the specifics about it that interested me. Now I would like for a moment to return to the article itself and how it brought together several strands of thinking that are of interest to me – historical, dietary, economic, philosophical. The article:

1. Suggests that diets low in fats and high in grains (starchy carbohydrates) favor aggressive human behavior (medulla, reptile-brain activating behavior) - in part because they are heart unhealthy, even though the medical establishment prescribes this high-grain diet under the claim that it is the most healthy for the heart!

2. Indirectly associates aggressive behavior with the rise of agriculture and grains, which itself has been associated with the rise of patriarchy and hierarchical socio-political patterns (in brief, with the rise of farming 10,000 years ago came the rise of fenced private fields and agricultural harvests -- a premonition of of the enclosures of the early modern period and today’s private real estate system -- and the micro-beginnings of political subsidies for the products of large-scale agriculture. The products of industrial monoculture are mostly starchy grains — perhaps not coincidentally, or at least reinforcing the system in yet another way, these starchy grains happen to be the best, cheapest fuel for keeping large-scale heavy-laboring populations alive

3. Begins to suggest how the human species could morph into a new, more aggressive strain, homo aggressans, through constant, progressively self-reinforcing environmental conditioning — bolstered by  theories and approaches favoring aggressive behavior and assuming innate aggressiveness over the loving behavior that is our heritage (a theme articulated by Humberto Maturana & Pille Bunnell)

4. Suggests that current medical practices and approach, together with industrial and dietary practices, heavily favor the development of homo aggressans — Hence the establishment promotes a high-carbohydrate, low fat diet as the most heart-healthy, even though this diet is precisely the most heart unhealthy. (A classic example of why Ivan Illich called western medicine iatrogenic.) Furthermore along these same lines, the article claims that the medicine/drug/hormone that most supports the parasympathetic nervous system (the loving, resting, imagining, creative part of the nervous system) is oubain, which while present in the environment is also produced by the body itself, in the kidneys (aside: thank you, Chinese medicine), and the production of oubain is inhibited by the #1 prescribed medication for the supposed prevention of heart-disease, statin drugs, which also inhibit sexual functioning and libido (drive towards sexual loving). 

Many pieces seem to come together here, perhaps revealing the deeply interconnected and mutually self-reinforcing spokes of the larger world system -- including the spokes of agricultural and pharmacological economics, property law, medical diagnosis, diet, moral psychology, social institutions, politics ….

I’m getting this sense that industry, technology, diet, labor, socio-political patterns, science, psychology, etc. are all being shaped by and delicately influencing one another in support of this larger “world system” that seems to have been set on its trajectory by some terrible experience in human history — one that seems roughly coincident with the rise of agriculture. Perhaps it was some “wave” rather than a single experience, and perhaps it had multiple simultaneous origins -- an experience of a threat, of aggression, of competition, to which humanity responded reactively, defensively-aggressively, in a way that has been manifesting in self-propagating and self-reinforcing socio-industrial patterns for a long time, into the present.

The bad experience I'm conjecturing about may well have been very simple and gradual, rather than any sudden apocalypse. Perhaps as agricultural societies arose on the planet, and different communities each started to expand outward looking for more land to privately cultivate -- a farm being set apart and managed within the environment very much in the way that a scientific laboratory creates a controlled space for experimenation -- human beings quite naturally reacted in a push and pull way: Drawn to new possibilities of security and wealth (and patriarchal dependency) that agriculture made possible and/or supported, but also set into competition with one another because land is finite and widening agricultural empires started to encroach on each other's territories. Accustomed to living in small face-to-face village communities deeply attached to their individual cultural heritages, speaking different languages, villages may have started to come into competitive contact. These things are new and confusing and people try to adapt and invent new practices. TPerhaps this is the story we are still working out.

Democracy in the ancient and prehistoric worlds was mostly local village or tribal democracy, where people's everyday life and activity was lived with the whole community.  Perhaps we are still trying to figure out a way to preserve all that is best of local democracy as we invent larger-scale systems.  That is something like what the Romans were trying to conceive in a Republican Empire that preserved the autonomy of confederated localities. But the Republic fell and tyranny took over.  That is what the Iroquois seemed to be working out with their democratic federal constitution that unified many tribes over a great extent of territory for hundreds of years, and influenced the American colonies. That is something like what inspired the New England village democracies to join together into a larger confederated democracy that would enhance and preserve, and not tyrannize, local individual and community and state freedoms. We are still trying to figure out how to have the benefits of widening technological-economic power while fostering and not eliminating the integrity, autonomy, respect and love among all individuals in and for their local environments.

* Here is the full URL of the article,   The Real Cause of Heart Attacks:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/12/17/real-cause-heart-attacks.aspx?e_cid=20141217Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20141217Z1&et_cid=DM62414&et_rid=766621351 )
Originary website for the article and video:  http://heartattacknew.com 

**A note on our aptitude to be put off by "technical" literature, be it in economics, medicine, politics, or other fields of activity. This somnorific effect of technical jargon, which takes the very energy out of our muscles and places us in a state of passivity and uninterest, is an important thing to notice. It is not trivial! Our modern-day development of so many diverse technical specialties each with their own jargons tends to disguise the underlying human, non-technical assumptions -- always very simple and open to ordinary human understanding, but obscured by technical details -- which give to each specialty its fated direction of activity and determine its meaning for humanity and the planet.  Hence our specializations themselves tend to keep us from reflecting on what is most fundamental and what ties our various special activities together, determining the course and consequences of our civilization.)







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