The underlying idea behind P.A.C.E or Peak 8 is similar, in terms of engaging in short bursts of high intensity activity, interspersed with rest periods. This form of alternating high and low levels of activity actually provides benefits which are not generally obtained from more typical longer endurance cardio exercises, which can even produce more detrimental effects than positive. As some have explained, our ancient physiology would not have been built for running for extended periods of time under normal circumstances, unless we were under a severe degree of stress, and running for our lives from a sabre-tooth tiger.

The form of Peak 8 prescribes a brief warm up period of about 3 minutes to start, and then 8 repetitions of the following pattern : 30 seconds of high intensity cardio, followed by 90 seconds of a resting pace. The exercise itself can be anything of your choice, depending on what you like, and what equipment or terrain you have access to. The key idea is to pick anything which you enjoy, which will get your heart and breathing rate up for a period of time.

This form of exercises is just about the only way of increasing your natural human growth hormone (HGH), which is critical for maintaining strength, and contributing to longevity. A lack of exercise during the adult years will contribute to a serious decline in this hormone.

Doing this a couple of times a week, as well as your Slow Burn routine about once per week will maximize all of the positive benefits from exercise you can get, and only takes about 90 minutes per week to do a sufficient amount of all of these exercises.

If you have been away from regular exercise for any length of time (or in fact, for most of your life!), then it is a good idea to work with a personal trainer for a period of time to help you get started at a pace and intensity which is appropriate for you, and which you can gain progressive “wins” from as you work up to a state of being more in shape, and ready to manage your fitness routine yourself.

Speaking from my own personal experience, I only started taking regular exercise seriously in the last few years, and it is truly amazing how much more energy and general feeling of health I have when I am in a regular exercise routine. It can be really hard to take the first step, but every step towards more regular exercise builds momentum, and it gets easier and easier as you go.

In Slow Burn, a series of exercises are done which effectively target all of the different muscle groups in sequence. Leg lefts, and  arm curls will not be new to anyone who has worked out, but it is the form and technique of Slow Burn which makes it different — the basic idea for each of the different muscle group exercises is to work each muscle group with very slow movements, to the point of complete muscle fatigue, when you literally can’t move that muscle another inch. The amount of weight for each exercise is adjusted so that this point of total fatigue is reached between 3 and 4 repetitions, and between 60 and 90 seconds. A metronome set to 60 beats per minute (1 per second) is suggested, to count out the seconds, so that you can easily count 10 ? 12 seconds for each movement on its way up, and then another 10 ? 12 seconds as you’re returning back down. The goal is to achieve a slow, steady, and smooth movement, without any jerking, straining, or grunting as you go.

To complete the full set of the Slow Burn routine takes less than half an hour, and to achieve the maximum benefit, it is only necessary to do once every 7 to 10 days. Avoiding exercise with the “not enough time” excuse suddenly disappears in light of Slow Burn. It is also much safer than the conventional form of strength training, and is a more thorough workout, as it works through all 3 layers of muscle (fast twitch, medium twitch, and slow twitch), which regular weight exercises cannot do.

So, what are the benefits of journaling, if examined through a Heilkunst lens?

• Growing and unfolding your inner world, in contrast to the highly outer-oriented consciousness we tend to have during this “cancer” stage of human consciousness.
• It is a parallel activity to what happens inside the consult room, which provides the same degree of confidentiality, and space within which to discharge one’s emotions in a safe way.
• As a tool in healing from specific shocks or traumas, in parallel with your current Heilkunst time line remedy. The inner content of such events often begs to be expressed before it is fully healed.
• To sort out the deeper questions and mysteries about yourself, such as clarifying what your desire function is, and what might be the practical steps you can take to get to connect to more of it.
• As a forum in which to play out some of your more significant life conflicts, where the other party is either not available to participate in the conflict (if they are deceased, for example), or it is not necessary or appropriate to play out the conflict “in the flesh” with them. The proverbial “letter” written, but not actually sent can be done in a journal.
• To track daily and weekly ups and downs, in order to keep track of the cycles of healing reactions provoked by the remedies in Heilkunst treatment, in order to better assist in raising your self-knowledge, as well as to help the practitioner to understand what sort of changes may be applicable moving forward.
• Noticing re-emergent themes over time, which may represent deeper issues that wouldn’t have been noticed in the normal day-to-day flow of life and experiences.
• To clarify, and bring much more precision to how you understand yourself and your core issues, and your ability to express them.
• As a means for turning the flow of life’s mundane events and experiences into an object of meditation. Likewise, this can help in the development of a greater objectivity, applied to increasingly heated degrees if inner content, which then may carry forward into real-time scenarios. Ultimately, this tool of self-reflection can increase the objectivity that you may have about your self.
• As a place to develop your imagination, as you may wish to apply towards forming the qualities and parameters of your desired future, or to go back in time and “revise” previous events to turn out with better endings.
• To help you disentangle your three distinct streams of thinking, feeling, and willing.

One of the areas of nutrition that I advise patients in is in the “Eat Right 4 Your Type” blood type diet. This app includes some general information about each blood type, as well as very detailed food lists of “Highly beneficial”, “Neutral”, and “Avoid” foods. It also integrates into a grocery list, which is very useful for quickly cross-referencing which foods are suitable for different family members, all together in one app. The only thing it doesn’t do is tell you what your blood type is.

For couples who use natural family planning methods, there are a number of apps to help track all of the important variables indicating high and low points of fertility. There are many apps that offer much of the same functionality, including this one. Knowledge of the method, of course, is a prerequisite to effectively using the app, which is simply offering a quicker way to track than pen and paper.

For many reasons, journalling can be a very useful adjunct to your Heilkunst treatment — from tracking the cycles of remedies and their healing reactions, to getting more in touch with your true desire function, to simply having an outlet to express emotions which don’t fit into the 9 ? 5 workday world. There are numerous journalling apps available for the iphone, but “Day One” is an app which is particularly pleasing aesthetically. It also syncs with a Mac desktop companion app, which makes it much easier to journal wherever you are, whether with your Mac, or just your iPhone. This is the electronic version of the leather-bound paper journal, with a fountain pen.

Sunrise Sunset! — The inclusion of this app has a bit of an unexpected reason to it — in working on restoring your vision with natural methods, one of the techniques involves “sun gazing”, which means to stare directly at the sun for a certain number of minutes each day. Before you panic, there are actually safe times to stare at the sun, namely the first hour after sunrise, and the last hour before sunset. Not only is staring at the sun for small intervals during these times safe, but very nourishing for your eyes, as well as your hormonal and immune systems.

A significant part of health is education, and for those of you who regularly follow health websites (such as Arcanum Wholistic Clinic’s), a good RSS reader is invaluable for organizing the incoming feeds of all new articles from your favourite sites. Reeder overlays on top of your Google Reader account, and has a pleasing and efficient interface to work through your feeds on your iPhone, or Mac Desktop.

Which other smartphone, tablet, or desktop apps do you use to keep your health on track?

Much about health involves the active engagement of our will power, and specifically to make or break long-term habits. There are many ways to set and track goals, including any number of “don’t break the chain” (fashioned after Jerry Seinfeld) apps are helpful for achieving daily goals.

• Don’t Break The Chain! – This is a very simple interface, where you simply mark a big “X” on the calendar every day that you fulfill your daily commitment to do, or not do a specific behaviour. Once you get a good “chain” going, it becomes that much harder to miss a day! I have such a chain running from July 1, 2011 for completing one writing session per day for my book The Vaccination Myth, for which I haven’t missed a day yet!

The two primary forms of exercise I recommend are Slow Burn and PACE. Here are some helpful apps to assist in your exercise:

• Metronome – Normally, of course, this is used by musicians, but I use it to properly pace my Slow Burn weight exercises. Set the metronome to 60 beats per minute, which maps to 1 click per second. 10 ? 12 seconds on the way up for each exercise, and then 10 ? 12 seconds on the way down completes one of your 3 or 4 reps you’re aiming for with each muscle group, before reaching the point of total muscle fatigue.
• Intervals App – For doing cardio in PACE style, or its variant Peak 8, an interval timer is most useful. I set mine for 30 seconds of peak activity, and then 90 seconds of resting activity which is all repeated 8 times in total. Any form of cardio can be done this way.
• Run 5k – I used this “Couch to 5K” runners training program to get my cardio system in shape last Spring. It takes you on a progressive program where each week you are running for longer intervals of longer distances, until you reach the end goal of running 5K straight. You can use your own iTunes playlist to inspire yourself with your favourite music. I used this for a one-time goal, and now I focus more on PACE or Peak 8 style intervals when I do running.
• Nike+ – This is another running app which I started to use after I completed the Run 5K program, as it designed to be flexible to whatever kind of run you want to do, whether based on time, or distance. Using the iPhone’s GPS, it also maps out exactly where you ran, and shows you with a heat map style where you ran the fastest and slowest.

Which apps help you to keep your health on track?

So, why am I bringing this up? As a means of introducing a bit of an unusual idea, which I haven’t generally heard in other areas of healthcare. Of course, every serious modality of healthcare will have some form of education and certification as I mentioned above — in other words, we collectively recognize that it is important that healthcare providers are properly qualified. But by an interesting turn of perspective, in Heilkunst we also assert that the patient needs to be qualified to be treated.

Let me explain — I’m not talking about turning people away, because they fail some sort of entrance exam in my waiting room, on the basis that they have failed to spend thousands of hours educating themselves about the topic of healthcare. I mean that the patient needs to be qualified in a couple of different ways, which I’ll outline below.

The first sense of this term I have previously touched on in my blog series about the three jurisdictions of Heilkunst (Regimen, Medicine, and Education), where each jurisdiction, in a sense, becomes a “qualifying” threshold the patient needs to go through before being able to fully benefit from the next jurisdiction of treatment. A simple example of this is the threshold between regimen and medicine — the effectiveness and speed of action of the homeopathic remedies is greatly slowed down in a case where someone’s regimen (diet and lifestyle) is a complete mess — the bulk of therapeutic energy and focus in such a case needs to start with cleaning up the patient’s regimen, in order to properly qualify them for homeopathic medicine. There’s a germ of truth to the saying “Let food be your medicine”, which partly applies to the idea of being able to cross this threshold. There is also a threshold of qualification to pass from the jurisdiction of medicine into the ultimate jursidiction of treatment, which is what we call Therapeutic Education.

Beyond these specific meanings of the term ‘qualified’, to pass from one jurisdiction of treatment to the next, there is a much more general sense of this term which is implied. That is, that for a patient to be fully qualified to benefit from Heilkunst, there needs to be a certain type of willingness to participate in the process of treatment, as well as in their life as a whole. The conventional medical system has unfortunately done a good job at training patients to expect to be treated like cars at the mechanic, who are the passive recipients of medicine or other therapeutics. While the therapeutic modalities of Heilkunst are powerful in themselves, their potential is most fully realized through such well qualified patients, whereas a limit or glass ceiling of efficacy is reached in patients who are passively waiting to be “fixed”. The meeting of the qualified Heilkunst practitioner with the properly qualified patient is truly a match made in heaven, as are all activities driven by resonance (self-love).

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’d like to point out the next health issue worth considering for your dental health. The reasons we brush our teeth include hygiene, as well as the prevention of tooth decay or cavities. Leaving aside the dietary factors contributing to greater or lesser health of our teeth, the issue of what we put on our toothbrush can also be a contributing factor to cavitation.

A common ingredient in just about every brand of toothpaste, natural, or non, is glycerine. In itself, it is not toxic, and otherwise not worthy of our attention regarding our general health. However, when glycerine is spread over the surface of our teeth, it leaves a film or residue which does not easily come off — it can take somewhere between two and three dozen rinsings of the mouth to completely remove it. I think it would be a safe bet to say that everyone reading this blog does not rinse their mouth that many times after brushing their teeth.

So, what is the concern with having this glycerine film on our teeth? The thing is, that our teeth are neither static or solid, as we tend to imagine them, and they are continually in a process of flux of demineralization and remineralization. Elements such as calcium and phosphorous, amongst others, are continually flowing out of our teeth, through the bloodstream to other parts of the body, while a new influx is continuously flowing back into the teeth. Imagining this very living process certainly adds more weight to the role of proper nutrition, as our whole body is constantly in a state of rebuilding or repairing one thing, or another.

The film of glycerine residue from toothpaste which coats our teeth blocks this natural demineralization / remineralization process, and therefore creates the conditions of accelerated tooth decay or cavitation in our mouths. Even when someone’s diet and oral hygiene habits are “perfect” for having healthy teeth, this issue with the glycerine-based toothpastes can be enough to create very undesirable and unexpected results in the mouth.

There are a variety of commercial alternatives to toothpaste available, such as tooth soap (your mother always threatened to wash your mouth out with soap!), or tooth powders, such as “Theraneem Naturals” which was recently stocked at The Feel Good Store here in Saint John. These are all glycerine and fluoride free, and you can explore the variety of textures and flavours as suit your taste the best.

In one of my previous blog series, I delineated the difference between the three grand jurisdictions in Heilkunst, of Regimen, Medicine, and Education. While constitutional treatment primarily falls within the jurisdiction of regimen, in a strange way, it straddles all three jurisdictions. It may be tricky to see this at first, as it would appear that treating the constitution is primarily a function of medicine, as we treat it with a homeopathic remedy the same way we treat every disease. The constitution, however, is not a disease, but instead it represents an aspect of our state of health, and treating it is an act of re-balancing, rather than the usual destructive role that medicine plays in terms of a disease. If you understand this point clearly, you’ll see that identifying a state of health is radically different from identifying a state of disease, as they are not a simple continuation of one another.

As a side note, this is a critical distinction which has been systematically missed by classical homeopathy, which confusingly defines the constitutional remedy as the one which encompasses the greatest totality of symptoms and characteristics of the patient, all lumped together into one single remedy, which is supposedly ideally unique to each individual. One problem with this definition is that it does not clearly distinguish between the concepts of health and disease, but instead attempts takes aim at an amorphous lump of “imbalance”, or “total symptom picture”, which is actually an abstraction and cannot be effected by a remedy in any real way. Another practical issues is that this leaves many patients waiting indefinitely for “their” unique remedy to be proved, which is not likely to happen within their lifetime. If you thought the organ donor waiting list was long, it’s nothing compared to this list!

So, the treatment of the constitution appears to fall within the medical jurisdiction, because a remedy is given, but it is actually taking effect within the regimenal jurisdiction, which is all about treating imbalance rather than disease. The crossover of the constitution into the third jurisdiction (Therapeutic Education), is where the education of the patient about their constitution is a first step into raising their consciousness about what they are made of, and who they are at an essential level. New patients are often surprised at how I can seem to know so much about them after having just met them, before they learn that their constitutional characteristics are of a type, and relatively easy to identify quickly.

On the other hand, many patients breathe out a metaphorical sigh of relief when learning about their constitutional typology, and realize that they are not alone, and that there is an explanation rooted in nature for the way the tend to think, feel, and behave in the world. Likewise, parents feel this relief when constitutional knowledge of their child helps them get a handle on parenting where they may have been struggling before.

All of these benefits come from a knowledge and treatment of the constitution, and this is even before we hit the big league operation of tackling all the layers of disease! My next upcoming blog series on the Phenotype constitutions will be a bridge between this realm of Genotypes (healthy types) and full-fledged disease.

Christopher Bryson’s book The Fluoride Deception is a thoroughly researched and well received book. It is available both in traditional book format, as well as in the Kindle e-book format. In case you don’t know, you don’t need a Kindle device to read a Kindle book, but a regular computer, smart phone, or iPad will do the trick.

If you’re not the type to want to commit to reading a whole book, you can catch the author in this Youtube series:

part 1:

part 2:

part 3:

And finally, for those of you who would like to explore a variety of resources on the topic, the best site on the web is The Fluoride Action Network, which has articles, videos, as well as point-form lists outlining the key issues.

-Oscar Wilde

There is an important function to pleasure which should periodically override any strict adherence to a nutritional regimen or program. Certain forms of rigid “perfection” are some of the most harmful things we can do to our health. However, the fact is that most people don’t actually feel pleasure from their “guilty pleasures,” but more guilt and conflict than anything else. The attempt to change one’s lifestyle or diet is often begun by steeling the will power to stop eating everything that is liked, and instead to force oneself to eat everything that is supposedly “good” for us. This sets up a very difficult dynamic, with the total breakdown only being a matter of time.

Given a more moderate relationship to lifestyle modification, a much more healthy and pleasurable relationship to food can be established, without living in such an extreme tug-of-war with oneself. In fact, it usually doesn’t take very long for a patient to actually begin to feel a genuine pleasure for the foods in their regimen, and even a loss of interest in what was previously considered a “can’t live without it” food.

When there is a craving in this context, it can actually provide very valuable clues about one or more underlying health issues in the patient. The first and most obvious level to potentially interpret a craving is in terms of nutritional deficiencies. If we are lacking a certain vitamin or mineral in our diet, it will show up in the form of cravings sooner than later. Addressing such a deficiency can quickly restore the system to balance.

The next obvious layer to look at in terms of cravings relates to the dominant glandular type of the patient. Our dominant gland is naturally our strongest, yet is also the first one we tend to weaken from overuse. It’s kind of like being right- or left-handed, and potentially taking on too much of a burden on our strong side. When this dominant gland starts to become weakened, it cries out with characteristic cravings, which are usually well known by the patient in terms of their typical comfort foods. Working with appropriate gland-strengthening foods and strategies, including homeopathic gland balancing remedies, the root of such cravings can be overcome relatively easily.

Another interesting layer of meaning to examine in some cases of cravings is in their underlying emotional meaning. The study of the homeopathic materia medica reveals many characteristic food cravings, and the homeopathic remedy which contains them. Natrum Muriaticum, for example, which is one of the most primary remedies uses for sadness and grief, has a very characteristic craving for salty food. As someone is working through various emotional layers of their time line, it is not at all uncommon for them to take a detour through a few bags of chips when the next layer for them to work on relates to a grief event. In this case, it is this homeopathic remedy that they need, and not necessarily any special glandular support.

As I said at the beginning, there is definitely a healthy function for pleasure, however, many instances of cravings don’t actually lead to a true pleasure, but to reveal a deeper need that the patient has which is not being met.

What are your most typical food cravings, and what do you think they mean?