Nano-Pollution and Morgellon's Disease

I have been thinking about about the environmental and medical effects of nano-pollution. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes – soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 60 carbon atoms, nanotubes the thickness of a hair, among others.

These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effects of exposure to environmental nanotechnology.

Nanotechnological pollution is on the horizon. Fortunately, at least one group is looking into it. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) is trying to put together a multi-disciplinary collaborative network to establish guidelines for safely handling nano-materials.

We don’t have very long to get the guidelines and some procedures in place. An emerging illness called Morgellons Disease is quite possibly the earliest indication of what we can all expect from nano-pollution.

“Morgellons disease” is the name given to a cluster of symptoms that includes skin lesions, often with small fibers in the lesion. Fascinating stuff. Right now the medical profession is pooh-poohing it as a symptom of mental illness – Delusional Parasitosis. The folks at the Morgellons Research Foundation have posted as much information as is available on their web site.

The medical profession as a whole is particularly unscientific when it comes to identifying and treating new illnesses. Have you noticed? You can buy a lot of time if you pass the patient off to a psychiatrist.

It is possibile that some, if not all, cases of Morgellons are the result of exposure to tiny bits of nano-technology. These objects may lodge almost invisibly in the skin, causing unexplained lesions. Larger nanotubes or groups of smaller ones may appear to be fibers. According to a recent article in Popular Science, many of these objects are so small that when inhaled they can be carried directly into the brain using the same pathways as smells do.

Reading the Morgellons information reminded me of the few times I’ve come in direct contact with fiberglass insulation. You can’t see it, but it is painful and itchy. What if the fibers were microscopic? Would they still cause discomfort? I don’t know.

The dangers of asbestos were ignored for decades while thousands of workers died of the lung cancer it is now known to cause. I hope we don’t repeat the story with BuckyBalls.

Technorati: Morgellons+Disease nano-technology nano-tubes nano-pollution asbestos nanotube+modeler buckminsterfullerene buckyballs

Waking the Dead

UPenn’s Center for Resuscitation Science

Interesting web site. It’s about how we define the moment of death. They are turning Emergency Medicine on its head.

If you have advance directives, a living will or a DNR order, it’s because you don’t want to wind up a vegetable after a medical emergency or because you have an incurable, fatal condition. Advanced directives are NOT intended to force the ER doctors to let you die when medical treatment can easily fix you right up. With the exception, of course, of folks whose religion forbids medical treatment.

When I was a whitewater rafting guide I had to be certified in Advanced First Aid and Life Support. This program took four weekends to complete. It was hard for me to put in that kind of sustained effort, now that I think about it, but it really helped my confidence on the job. The point of the course was to enable the guides to stabilize someone injured on the river until we could get real medical help. And it wasn’t a far stretch to consider CPR in case a guest had a heart attack on the river.

Read the UPenn web site. Look at the powerpoint presentations. Read the doctors’ curriculum vitae.

Again: it’s about how we define the moment of death.

So.

Google “cellular reperfusion injury” and read a few of the articles that come up.

Your cells don’t die right away when you die. When oxygen-deprived they go into a kind of stasis and even after several hours a doctor can still extract undamaged, living cells. They haven’t stopped, they’ve just slowed down. You don’t fade out in that first magic 5 minutes. You fall into a deep coma, then actual cell death takes hours – or longer.

This is completely different than what the public and most of the medical profession believes at this time. The current belief is that no pulse equals death. Which really sucks for a few folks who have temporary a artificial heart that whirrrrrs instead of beating. But I digress.

So if you want to define death in terms of brain activity as monitored on an Electroencephalogram (EEG), well, the EEG can only measure down to about 0.5 Hz. This is a limitation of our technology. As you fall asleep brainwaves slow from 30Hz maximum down to around 4Hz. If you go into a deep coma, they slow down even more. No brainwave equals death, then. Except that our technology has serious limitations. Well, it turns out that brain cells go into stasis too.

Now here’s where it gets weird.

Think about what they do in the ER. It’s all about reperfusion, getting oxygen back into the brain as quickly as possible. Jump-start the heart, pump oxygen into the lungs, get a cold patient warm. Well, it turns out that if you pump too much oxygen into a cell that’s in stasis, it self-destructs. That magic 5 minutes isn’t the time that it takes the cells to die. The magic 5 minutes is the time it takes for some of the cells to go into stasis, that is, enough that the self-destruction, or apoptosis, causes wide-spread damage to the body on reperfusion. The heart seems to be the most susceptable organ.

The gist of the web page I linked to is that if someone is brought into the ER suffering from cardiac arrest, they have a better chance at survival if the ER doctors immediately cool them down and add some chemicals to prevent apoptosis before beginning slow reperfusion. The Resuscitation Medicine department at the U of P is working on establishing a new set of protocols.

Where it gets scary is here:

If they bring you in after the magic 5 minutes, present ER protocols can’t save you. Not without massive, permanent damage to the heart and to the brain. They declare you, and that’s it. The body is sent to a funeral home and cremated or injected with preservatives, sometimes long before the several-hour deadline (so to speak) is up.

No wonder the Irish hold wakes. The British, after discovering that an unsettling number of people had been buried alive – used to attach bell cords to the wrists of folks they buried. Saved by the bell.

IRL your family can decide to keep your brain-dead corpse alive despite anything you said in life. Witness what poor Terri Schaivo’s parents did to keep her mindless body alive long after her spirit was gone.

I’ll be watching the Rescusitation Medicine story with great interest.

Rescusitation Medicine apoptosis Emergency Medicine cellular reperfusion injury EEG cardiac arrest moment of death

What Mad Pursuit

‘J.B.S. Haldane was once asked what the study of biology could tell one about the Almighty. “I’m really not sure,” said Haldane, “except that He must be inordinately fond of beetles.” There are thought to be at least 300,000 species of beetles. By contrast there are only about 10,000 species of birds.’

Nobel Laureate Prof. Francis Crick
in “How I Got Inclined Towards Atheism,” an excerpt from What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery

Remission in Bipolar Disorder

If someone figures out how to “cure” genetics, let me know. You can’t exactly pick up a bottle of Grecian Formula for Brain at the local pharmacy.

Remission is another thing altogether. That simply means that you are having an extended symptom-free period. Given that the DSM-IV bipolar criteria only require that the patient have ONE episode of mania or hypomania, some folks may remain in remission for the rest of their lives even without meds.

Science *is* empiricism. I would like to suggest that a large percentage doctors are not particularly careful in their application of the science of medicine. If they were scientific, they’d test and retest the bipolar patient’s continued need for meds instead of following the bizarre rule of thumb that once you’re on meds you need them forever. The killer is that as long as the illness is masked by drugs, it is impossible to practice “evidence-based medicine” as they disparagingly call it.

None of us on meds is being treated in an scientific manner. It isn’t scientifically valid to say that bipolar disorder causes cognitive deficits if a large percentage of the patients in the study were on meds. Antipsychotics have been *proven* to reduce the IQ by affecting the short-term memory. They aren’t the only drug to cause cognitive deficits. Lithium makes you feel as if your brain is wrapped in cotton wool.

I don’t believe that it is scientifically valid to say that bipolars must be on meds for life. If the patient stops the meds and experiences a return of symptoms… well, you’ve rewired the brain. The drugs themselves create a continued need for themselves by reconfiguring the brain’s neurons to need higher levels of serotonin in the synapses. The symptoms are bound to return, and much worse than before the drug did its damage.

Another thing about remission is that so many things besides bipolar disorder cause mood swings. Bipolar disorder has periods of remission. Things like the personality disorders, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, PTSD and any of a hundred organic illness all cause mood swings. But they don’t necessarily have periods of remission, and in many cases remission just doesn’t occur.

Here – this is my particular manifestation of bipolar disorder. Three-year cycles. They come no matter what, but fortunately the meds attentuate the episodes. On the other hand, until I was on meds the cycles didn’t seriously impact my salary.

I think that it’s important, if a bipolar isn’t having remissions, to figure out why. Ultra-rapid cycling could be caused by an antidepressant, particularly in women. Newly-diagnosed bipolars often experience a great deal of fear or anxiety that might be better treated with therapy than with additional meds. Antipsychotics may ruin the patient’s ability to effectively manage the illness by dumbing them down. Sometimes it isn’t the illness, it is the meds that make bipolars disabled.

Are your drugs masking periods of remission?

Sometimes I get tired of the reverse stigma that I get for taking fewer meds so that I can continue to have a life. Isn’t that the purpose of treatment? If not, what is?

Most bipolars have the so-called milder varieties of the illness, and many of them are unfairly overmedicated and isolated from society for no good reason. It is unbearably sad to see that happening. So if I can tolerate psychosis instead of trying to medicate away every little nuance of mood or emotion, does that make me somehow inferior? I don’t f*cking think so. It isn’t pathological until it has a negative effect on my life.

dDaylight/dt

The Autumnal equinox is in a couple of weeks, and during this time the days are getting shorter at the fastest rate they will all year, with the biggest change right on the day of the equinox. This graph is intended to compare the rate of change of the number of hours of daylight at two times during the year. At the Summer Solstice, light blue, there are a few days when the length of the daylight changes very little. But at the Autumnal Equinox, shown in dark green, the slope is very steep, showing that the amount of sunlight we get in a day is falling quickly. This has great implications for anyone with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder).

I used Juergen Giesen’s Daylight Applet to generate the numbers and graphed them in Excel.

Update 10/28/2006:
Juergen has since added a graphing function to his Daylight Applet. Do go take a look at it.
Thanks to Saheli Datta for adding a blue dimension to the topic.

TFTD – on appearing normal

In appearing normal to others, one becomes a habit-ridden plaything of social pressures and expectations.

Jessica Wants an MRI

This is an expansion on a comment I left on The Zucchini Patch.

I think they use PET scans for what you want to do. An MRI isn’t capable of telling the difference between a live brain and a dead brain. It can, however, spot a shrunken hippocampus or amygdala or anomalies in the blood vessels.

An fMRI can see more. They can use tagged glucose or neurotransmitters, whatever they want to study. The fMRI shows where the substance concentrates in the brain, where it is used the most. The NIMH has information about this.

It’s all still under investigation, though. The fMRI is not ready to be used to diagnose.

Did you know that in ADHD, the harder the person tries to concentrate, the more the prefrontal cortex shuts down? Oddly enough, motor areas of the brain work harder at the same time. Can’t we just find a way to teach these kids that will fit with that kind of brain response? Running around in circles shouting out calculus problems, perhaps?

Apologies to my friends of the hyperactive persuasion.

Somewhere in this computer I have a letter I wrote to one of the scientists in the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know!?” who works down at Penn. I met him at the preview and asked him a few questions to correct some of my assumptions in writing the “Putting the Genie Back Into the Bottle” article. The study I was interested in was over, unfortunately. (Yes, dogs and cats *do* have Broca’s and Wernickes areas – it’s not just defined by function, it’s a physical location.)

I have an MRI of my head hanging on the wall next the the desk to remind me that I have a brain – you can see it, the small pea-sized thing in the center of the glob of mush. Several years ago I made an animation out of the scan through the layers. Where the hell did I put that?

Oh, here. I see that this one is from after I had my sinuses repaired in uhhhhh 1996 or thereabouts. Refresh the page to see the animation. My favorite part is the eye stalks. We must have had crustacean ancestors.

When did they decide that the Rorschacht test and the MMPI diagnose bipolar disorder? Bipolar isn’t a personality disorder, it’s a mood disorder. My last psychologist told me that when they modified the inkblot test, it was not longer useful in diagnosing borderline personality disorder, either. I question the whole thing at this point.

I took one years ago. The psychologist took my money out of pocket twice a week for over a year and wasn’t able to catch the bipolar disorder. When we did the inkblot test, I thought about what I’d been reading in the psychology books and created a mindset before we started. He had seascapes all over the walls so I picked an undersea theme – so that undersea pictures would be the first thing to pop off the paper at me. Dancing crabs, an octopus in a Jester’s cap. That sort of thing. The MMPI and the Thematic Apperception test were similarly transparent. And drawing pictures of my house and my family and myself. It might have been easier if I didn’t read so damn much. I read a lot more then than I do now.

Anyway, that’s what you want, a functional MRI rather than a plain old MRI.

Natural Terror

Natural Terror | The Zucchini Patch

Update 9/22/2007: Jessica retooled her blog over the summer. Do be sure to check it out. Here’s the new link to the post above.
Natural Terror | The Zucchini Patch

A quick search for the toothmark photo below turned up a couple of interesting blog entries using the same photo. I include them here to bore the disinterested:
Who, or What, Killed the Australopithicine? – which added the phrase “Osteodontokeratic industry” to my already useless vocabulary.
IIDB > IIDB Philosophical Forums > Evolution/Creation > The wiring of the eye: Is it poor design? to which I answer, no, not a poor design but the prototype for the real thing – if we can evolve it before the Creationists destroy the world – to prevent it from happening, I suppose?
IIDB > IIDB Philosophical Forums > Evolution/Creation > Early Humans on the Menu

One of Jessica’s recent posts reminded me of Paul Shepard’s eye-opening book, “The Others: How Animals Made Us Human.”
Dr. Shepard was a Professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology and wrote a number of books on our complex relationships with the earth and her other inhabitants.
In “The Others,” Dr. Shepard’s focus is on the topic of domesticating animals. Originally our relationship with other species was simple. Either we ate that species, or we were eaten by it. Simplistic as it sounds, that has a profound impact on our central nervous systems, specifically the limbic system.
As an aside, domestication changed some species into status symbols, and it is possible to determine the social status of extended family members by whether they slept nearer or farther than the livestock.
In “Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence,” Dr. Shepard briefly discusses the neurotransmitters. Prey animals are hypervigilant, always watching and waiting for some unknown something to startle them into flight. Predators’ neurochemistry, however, mandates focus: moving slowly, with patience and determination, toward the object of their attention. What kind of animal can display both kinds of attention? It must require a wild mood swing to instantly change a creeping hunter into someone who is running at top speed from a predator. It is a huge shift from one neurochemical pathway to a completely different pathway, releasing a neurotransmitter and simultaneously inhibiting another. I believe that the ability to switch contexts was an important factor in our evolution.
No matter how much we have evolved both psychologically and culturally, the old systems are still wired in and still affect us. We are not a separate act of creation.
I’m sure that our protohominid ancestors were eaten by all manner of frightening creatures. Miss Bugs tells me that her ancestors, the sabre-toothed tigers, used to sneak up on our tiny Australopithecine ancestors, grab them by the head, and drag them home for the kittens to play with. Lower teeth puncture the back of the head, unwieldy canine teeth pierce the eyes. Physical anthropologists have found quite a few Australopithecus skulls with these puncture marks, as evidenced by the wonderful photo at right. Update 9/22: This early hominid skull was found in a cave at Swarkrans in the late 1930s. It wasn’t for another 30-some years that someone paused to reflect on the odd indentations in the skulls. We’ll leave the question about the skulls having indentations resembling early hominids’ stone tools for another time. This pausing to reflect takes a lot of effort!

“The Others” is worth reading if only for the chapter on teddy bears as psychological bridges between the wild and the civilized. (I think housecats serve that purpose adequately.)

“Except possibly his soul, man prizes his mind above all else. His mind is a product of its ecology — the same ecology. Nothing that evolves persists unless sustained by those same creative forces. Like a ball at the top of a fountain, the human head pivots on its animal backbone, the mind a turning knot of thought and dream on the end of a liquid spear of living animals.”
– Paul Shepard, “Thinking Animals”

Paul Shepard mood swing sabre-toothed tiger Australopithecus evolution limbic system anthropology neurotransmitters protohominid social status

Update 9/22: osteodontokeratic industry cat food

Linear vs. Global

Linear-sequential means like a mathematical proof. We know “A”. So “B”. Then “C”. Which demonstrates “D”. Linear-sequential can be manipulated to prove “E” if it behoves you to ignore “D.” Exercise: Create a Venn Diagram.

I mean that a perfectly logical progression can take you to an incorrect conclusion if you ignore some of the facts. If you over-simplify. That happens a lot in the White House. And in our criminal justice system.

Combine that with the “A” – “not A”, black and white thinking of a lawyer. Manipulate the grey areas so that they seem to support your point of view.

Global thinking is different. We know “A”. We also know “5″. Plus we know “banana.” These are related by some non-obvious factor, like a fruit stand at 5th and A. Something else only has two of the factors, maybe a fruit stand at 7th and A. But maybe the question we want to answer might be “What color is the roof?”

LOL!!! Are you confused yet? When the global thinker comes up with the correct answer, the linear-sequential people ask if it was intuition. Intuition???? I don’t fucking think so! You call it intuitive because you can’t see the connections. By the same token, if you tried to take me through a linear proof, I’d be frustrated to tears when you wouldn’t tell me additional information that isn’t in the path you took. Especially if it’s quite clear that you haven’t considered an important factor that will rule out your carefully manipulated primrose path. As a child I learned to hate the words, “Don’t get ahead of yourself. Do you understand that *X*?” Another one was, “We’ll discuss that next week.”

Of course, once you have a usable answer, you can go back and Prove it in a linear-sequential manner. In fact, scientists often unconsciously influence the outcome of their experiments, then devise a linear-sequential justification. You expect that from lawyers and fundys, but not from folks who claim to be objective.

Inductive vs. deductive… means theoretical vs. empirical. Using theory to predict the specifics vs. generalizing based on observation. Not quite the same axis as linear vs global.

Linear-sequential is necessary during new tasks. When you’ve learned several procedures pertaining the the task, you start to see how to solve problems that aren’t handled in your procedures. That’s global thinking.

School was just fun. I often took classes out of sequence to keep from being bored. I’d go back and take the more basic courses on “down” semesters.

“It is intuitively obvious that…” That is how math and physics teachers skip a few steps to fit the info into an hour. It means you go to the library and find someplace where they tell you the whole thing because you *know* it will be on the test.

I had a calculus textbook at GWU that had me howling with laughter. At one point the author wrote, “The proof is left as an exercise for the astute reader.” The author was referring to a theorem that required diff-eq to prove, so publishing the proof would have been irrelevant.

I guess you had to be there.

As The Worm Turns

A Worm a Day Keeps the Doctor Away.

“We believe that this research will lead us to develop a new ways of preventing and treating asthma and anaphylaxis, which can then be extended to treat inflammatory bowel disease and arthritis,” says Dr Fallon.

I’ve heard other reports of intestinal parasites helping keep common immune disorders under control. Let me know how it works out for you.