Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby's Total Health Newsletter #8. Week ending July 12th, 2009
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1. Big news. No, I mean BIG news!
2. The Rife Machine Revisited (free download so stay tuned)
3. I Smell Cancer Here
4. Will Rapamycin Extend Our Future?
5. I Told 'Em Is Back!
6. What's In A Word?
7. This Week's Quote (a beauty!)

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1. Big News. No, I mean BIG news!

Would you ever have thought that being overweight was healthy?

Me neither. I knew that being significantly underweight meant you lived less on average. But obesity is always associated with dying sooner, right?

Well, a recently published study (June 15th 2009 in the journal Obesity) came up with some very interesting and surprising statistics. 11,326 Canadian adults were followed over 12 years; so this is no trivial study.

What researchers found was that obese people were 36% more likely to die than normal people. But very UNDERweight people were 70% more likely to die. That's almost double the risk of dying if you are underweight. The lean and bony ideal of sexy models and 6-pack abs men is suddenly seen as dangerous, as well as silly.

But what emerged was that those who were overweight (not not technically obese) were 17% less likely to die than people of normal weight. Now don't forget the definition of "normal weight" has gone up and up over the decades, as people on average get more obese.

In this study, overweight was defined as a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 30. Over 30 was "obese". For example, a 5-foot 10-inch man weighing 181 pounds has a BMI of 26; a 5-foot 6-inch woman weighing 210 pounds has a BMI of about 34.

So maybe packing a few extra pounds as we get older isn't such a bad thing. Of course researchers were quick to insist that healthy people should not rush to put on a few pounds. Why not? Don't they believe their own research?

2. The Rife Machine Revisited (free download, so stay tuned)

Most people with an interest in alternative medicine have heard of the "Rife Machine". It's named for Royal Raymond Rife, a brilliant engineer, who built the world's most advanced optical miscoscopes (up to 50,000 diameters). He also invented an electrical machine that safely delivered a dose of radio waves that proved lethal to cancer cells. I've told the whole story in the latest edition of my book Virtual Medicine.

The machine was attacked and discredited by orthodoxy; the FDA have ruled it an illegal device and one modern manufacturer here in the US faces up to 140 years in jail.

But the story hasn't stopped there. Rife's work is alive and flourishing in modern science but under a different name! This surprises many people who keep hearking back to the past and wishing the Rife machine could be restored to its rightful place as probably the number 1 successful treatment for cancer.

It's here, now! Rife discovered that certain frequencies in the RF band (low GHz range) would cause cancer cells to burst open. It's a process called electroporation; if you type THAT into Google, you get nearly a million references!

Actually it's irreversible electroporation that is important. Non-lethal electroporation has been used for years to whallop cells and make their walls temporarily porous, so drugs like chemo could be introduced more effectively inside the cell.

But gradually scientists have been asking: "Do we need the chemo? Why not just turn up the power and actually KILL the cancer cells!" That's exactly what Rife did! But it can be done today quickly and easily with any reasonable frequency generator.

You'll be surprised how many papers are out there. I found 280 on PubMed, the US government database of medical articles. Rife's discovery is in daily use and being explored more and more. They just don't call these things Rife machines.

Anyway, I'm not going into depth here because I have prepared a white paper for you all which you can download for free from this webpage. Rife machine

3. I Smell Cancer Here!

Those of you who subscribed to my “Wholesome Living Letter” might remember an article I did called “Dr. Fido Will See You Now”.

It told of the fact that dogs were extraordinarily accurate in sniffing out cutaneous cancer cells. A number of dogs had literally saved their owner’s life by spotting very early cancers with their nose.

Now researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst say they have developed highly sensitive electronic sensors that can pick up subtle differences on the surface of a cell that indicate if it is healthy or cancerous, even whether the cancer is metastatic or not.

The team's report, published online in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the sensors have successfully distinguished between healthy and cancerous human and animal cells, even from the same individual.

The sensors use the polymer PPE, or para-phenyleneethynylene, and three gold nanoparticles that tend to bond with the surface of chemically abnormal cells. When an abnormal cell surface grabs on to the gold nanoparticles, the PPE breaks off and glows. The glowing PPE pattern helps scientists identify the cell type, as a cancer cell has slightly different proportions of biomarkers on its surface than a healthy cell.

The new method uses an array of sensors to recognize not only known cancer types, but it signals that abnormal cells are present. That is, the chemical nose can simply tell us something isn't right, without being sure what.

The researchers next hope to test the chemical nose on real animal tissue as opposed to cultured tissue and refine their ability to decipher the information the detection system gives them.

4. Will Rapamycin Extend Our Future??

Could we extend lifespan to 120 years or more using a drug called rapamycin?

No, in a word. But the science is so fascinating, I want to share it here.

Rapamycin was discovered in the 1970s during a worldwide search for new antibiotics. It is developed from a soil microbe found only on mysterious Easter Island, a remote outcrop of land far out in the southern Pacific Ocean. In animal tests, it increased life expectancy for females by a staggering 38 per cent; males a more modest 28%.

So it should be great for us, we take it and we live longer, yes? Unfortunately, rapamycin is an immune suppressant and it’s likely to shorten your life, due to cancer or infections, rather than lengthen it.

Well, that’s what the boffins say; they have to.

But in fact the experimental animals didn’t fall foul of this immune suppression. They lived way longer, period.

Around a quarter of the mice were given a normal diet, the others rapamycin. The drug increased the maximum life span of the mice from 1,094 days to 1,245 days for females, and from 1,078 to 1,179 days for males.

From the point the mice began the treatment, the drug extended the females' life expectancy by 38 per cent, and males by 28 per cent. Overall it expanded their life span by 9 to 14 per cent.

What amazed the scientists is that the drug worked even though the mice started to be given it only in middle and old age. In the study, reported today in the journal Nature, scientists tested rapamycin on nearly 2,000 laboratory mice aged around 600 days  -  roughly the equivalent to a 60-year-old person.

The drug, rapamycin, has been used for years to suppress the immune systems of organ transplant patients. It is also employed in heart operations and is being tested for its anti-cancer properties.

So, disappointing maybe. But who knows what’s just around the corner from here?

Statues on Easter Island

5. I Told 'Em Is Back!

Years ago (early 80s in fact) I was treating a condition hip doctors of the time called "tension fatigue syndrome". It's one of those diagnoses I joke about where the name is just a symptom, not a disease! (like irritable bowel)

It was clear to this small handful of doctors that a real problem existed. The outstanding marker symptom was that exercise or exertion profoundly fatigued the sufferer. We found the food allergies, Candida, chemical pollution, and in fact anything which suppressed the immune system, were major contributing factors.

Gradually we recognized that it would often follow a virus infection (not necessarily a severe one). So it morphed to "post viral fatigue syndrome". That's the term I used in my 1988 book "The Allergy Handbook". Then it became myalgic encephalitis (which is really just another "symptom label", it means painful muscles and inflamed brain). ME, as it was known, became fibromyalgia here in the US (typical: the Americans don't know anybody else's language, so they called it "fiber and muscle pain", which ignores the considerable neurological aspect of this problem).

Anyway, since then it's been called many bizarre things, such as Lyme and CEBV (chronic Epstein-Barr virus). These labels are all mistaken because we don't know any one organism that causes it (Coxsackie B was a hot favorite at one time). But there is still a disease entity.

Yet doctors have tended to dismiss the whole condition as a fraud. This is despite the fact that in the 80s the WHO ruled that ME (the term they adopted) was a real condition.

It's still proved extraordinarily difficult to study. But we have made slow progress. Research found an association between fibromyalgia and reductions in gray matter, which is clearly a pathology. Last month a study was published in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of Pain, showing dopamine release (a neurotransmitter) was reduced in fibromyalgia patients, which might explain the loss of brain cortex.

In this new study, Dr. Patrick B. Wood, of Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center-Shreveport, and colleagues used MRI scans to compare the brains of 30 women with fibromyalgia and 20 healthy women of the same age. Significant reductions in gray matter were found in the fibromyalgia patients, confirming previous findings. But there was a strong correlation of dopamine metabolism levels and gray matter density in areas of the brain where dopamine is known to control neurological activity.

What's In A Word?
A weekly look at words that are interesting or may be dying

Cleave. An old Anglo-saxon word cleofan, to cut or sunder.

We are used to this word meaning cut or divide. A cleaver is a chopping device for meat but could also separate someone from their head. Cleaver became an English surname, originally it meant a woodcutter.

"Cleavage" has the same connotation; something which separates the breasts provocatively.

But did you know that cleave also means virtually the opposite: to stick or cling to something? Very few people, I find, are aware of this reverse meaning. You would say a man "cleaved to his principles".

In the spirit of puns, I have a photograph of myself with friend Cleve Backster. He's the guy who showed that plants have consciousness, feelings and true perceptions. He found they reacted on a lie detector. They could identify their attacker. Here we are standing next to the very plant that started it all in 1968! (Dracaena, or female "dragon")

This Week's Quote:

-"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
--Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star."

(from Arthur C. Clarke's foreword in 2001, A Space Odyssey, 1968)

So, that's all for this week!

Be well; find the sacred in all you do, otherwise don't do it!

Prof.

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