Alternative Medicines - an angel or a demon?

Last week, as I was surfing through the news papers for more reviews on Sachin’s wonderful performance against Australians, I came across a perturbing article –

“National Health Service (not mentioning the country) decided to pay for “Magnet Therapy” to help prevent chronic ulcer.”
Wow – another breather for the Alternative medicine proponents.
While the proponents are hailing this news, I miss to understand the simplest “point” – who on earth are the backroom boys to these agencies? How a government could spent millions (not to forget the tax payers agony) on something as stupid as “Magnetic Therapy”?

Please don’t get me wrong - I don’t intend to sabotage any belief system, rather, explain my vista and prejudice experience!

A couple of months ago, my Aunt (Who suffers from acute arthritis) underwent something similar (Magnetic Therapy). All that she had reduced was 20grants from her savings!
I was keen on this topic since then and had done a couple of cross reference to understand this therapy, their hypothesis and the underlining facts that prove these therapies wrong.

I know the alternative medicine proponents are gonna raise an eyebrow or two to the above statement, but common guys – are we all so gullible?

Magnetism is a very well understood field of science. I haven’t come across 2 scientists with postulates that contradict each other. And this is one concept that our science text book publishers can boast on being dead right about :)

“Magnetic Therapy” was a hypothesis since the usage of Magnets. And recently – over the past decade, exposure to this filed exploded, with many companies selling braces / bracelets / wraps for both sports performance and healing process.

The alternate medicine folks base the magnetic therapy on the hypothesis that magnetic fields help increase blood flow.
According to these proponents, magnets create a whirlpool effect within the iron in our blood effecting better blood flow.
These magnetic effects also replace the protons from affected areas (injury spots); thereby relaxing painful regions.

I did take some quick breaks of laugh while typing those things down :)
These people seem to know less about the basic aspects of irons in our body.

I am gonna break my discussion into 2 separate topics

1> Being exposed to heavy magnetic fields can be harmful!
Let us throw some light on the usage of irons in our body:
Irons are mainly used in human body for the production of new red blood cells (recycled from old red blood cells)
Fact – Anemia is caused by iron deficiency in blood
But since irons are free donors and acceptors of electrons; their free form in body can catalyze the conversion of hydrogen peroxides (used as an antiseptic and anti-bacterial agent for many years due to its oxidizing effect) into free radicals, causing dangerous diseases like “Cancer”.
To prevent this, irons in our body are bound with proteins to avoid their ionic effects.
-- imagine, using a highly powerful magnet on your body to free these irons.

2> Does these bracelets really work?
To prove my theory, I used one of the bands my Aunt used and placed them with the wrapper on an iron piece; I couldn’t even find any repulsion or attraction between the magnet and the iron metal. Hmm, looks like the magnetic effect is drown by the wrapper itself.
--Now consider this same magnet force penetrating through the layers of skin, fat tissues and finally the protein cover to reach the iron (which evidently is feebly ferrous compared to a nail) – doesn’t it break you into a laugh as well?

It is true our nervous system is electrical - and magnetic field can induce electric current just like electric current can induce magnetic fields. In fact our brain produce magnetic field and there are instruments [magneto encephalogram] that can detect the magnetic field generated in your brain.
But these fields are so feeble, that, you would need a high inducting device to work with them. And such heavy inducting devices would cause havoc to a body, than curing any diseases!

These are purely my views on "Magnetic Therapy" - do let me know if you believe otherwise; and the bases of your dogma :)

Alien Abductions and Demonic visitations

Great – my account is locked out again and I need to wait on a network administrator to get it resolved. I hate when things screw up in the middle of something important!

The bright side is that, I can peacefully take out some time to work on my blog again. Speaking of which, it’s been almost 2 months since I last worked on this! I guess it tells you how busy I am or at least that blogging hasn’t been my first priority for a while.

Yes that’s true; blogging hasn’t been my first priority for a while now. Over the past couple of days, I was investing my time in alien abductions and demonic visitations.
Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Yes, it fascinated me too. I heard a couple of stories and read a couple of articles on self descriptions of abductees and their experience. As I was going through these documentations, I came across a very interesting syndrome or rather condition called “Sleep Paralysis”.

Many skeptics feel that most abduction stories are rather, just a hallucination exemplified by humans - who either have strong emotional background or are effected of “Sleep Paralysis”
I am not a literate, nor a skeptic to talk about alien abductions and demonic visitations. To add on, I love sci-fi and horror movies; so let the fiction and horror stay on :)

However, I surely would like to talk more on “Sleep Paralysis”
As I previously mentioned – Sleep paralysis is a condition; characterized by temporary paralysis of body, shortly after waking up or shortly before falling asleep. In more descriptive words – the brain awakes from a sleep, but the bodily paralysis exists; where the individual is fully aware but not mobile.
When this state is accompanied by hypnagogic hallucinations, the mind goes for a complete spin off – and all that you have is - an awoken mind seeing nightmares and presuming it to be happening to them in real life!

I know, I know! You are probably searching details on “hypnagogic hallucinations”
A hypnagogia or hypnagogic sensation is an experience of fear, awareness of a presence, chest or back pressure or inability to breathe, falling or tripping sensation – or sometime just a sensation of joy.
Thus when your brain is active and goes through this phase, it’s very difficult for oneself to differentiate our nightmares from real life – causing a confused mind deriving conclusions from the most feasible explanations – being alien abduction (that you saw/read in a sci-fi movie/ books) or ghost phenomenon (from horror movies/ books)

Yes, the next very important question – Why do we have our brain inflicting sleep paralysis?
And the answer to that is very simple:
Sleep paralysis occurs during REM**; whereby the motor neurons are not stimulated – avoiding body muscle movements. This keeps us from enacting our dreams!
-- preventing an individual who is dreaming of running, from actually running while sleeping!

And to conclude - Yes it’s true; a human mind can spin tantrums and have us believe things we would have otherwise never believed in!
The more I understand human evolution, the more I appreciate the "Intelligent Designer"
Cheers

**rapid eye movement sleep: a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements lasting around 25% of the total sleep – where the summed activity of brain is quite similar to that of waking hours.