Earthing_ The Most Important Health Discovery Ever? Part 3

Here is what was going on: If a woman got a bed pad, the husband would get upset and say he didn't want anything to do with this, that it was just a waste of money. If the husband brought it home, the woman would say this is crazy and get it off her side of the bed.

Throughout this time, the mode of the day was to put sheets on your bed with the highest possible thread count. The buzz was 300-, 600-, 1,200-, and then 2,400-count sheets. The higher the count, the more luxurious, softer, and finer the fabric is supposed to be. This concept became very popular, but some experts think that higher thread counts simply mean a higher price tag.

Anyway, I got caught up in this. If you had anything else but high thread count on your bed, you were not in fas.h.i.+on. Then there was the issue of designer colors to match decor and color tastes. In a typical marriage, nothing goes on a bed without a woman's permission. So you couldn't put just anything on a bed-no matter what the health benefits.

I didn't need these kinds of extraneous issues. One day I decided to just make a half sheet that could be placed across the width of the bottom of the bed. You make contact with it with your feet, like putting your feet on the Earth, and this is your barefoot connection. The half sheet could also be used lengthwise on one side if a spouse didn't want to have anything to do with it.

The half sheet solved a lot of my headaches, as well as reducing the pain level for many people who slept on them.

CHAPTER 5.

A Cardiologist's Discovery: Steve Sinatra's Story As an integrative cardiologist, I use both conventional and alternative medicine to help my cardiac patients. This approach has always worked superbly for me as a doctor and, above all, for my patients, because it focuses on the metabolic operation of cells and particularly the cells in the heart muscle that pump blood throughout the sixty thousand miles of blood vessels in the body. As such, I have used many excellent nutritional supplements, like coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), carnitine, and magnesium, to boost the metabolic processes in the cells where energy production takes place.

Years ago, after a decade or so in practice, I slowly became aware of a curious pattern: increased patient complaints-notably arrhythmias and chest pain (angina)-around the time of a full moon or intensified solar flare activity. I don't remember how I actually connected the symptoms with celestial events-it may have been a patient who said something. I certainly had no real clue how to explain it. In any case, my curiosity was tweaked and I began looking for information, which led me into the amazing world of electromedicine.

The term may sound way out in left field and conjure images of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Sivana, Goldfinger, and otherworldly contraptions that snap, crackle, and pop. However, electromedicine is quite an accepted concept, most obviously for diagnostics that includes everyday medical tools such as EKGs and MRIs (magnetic resonance images). Less accepted, but gaining increased medical attention and respect, are electromagnetic treatment devices such as pulsed electromagnetic field units to address pain and musculoskeletal disorder. Pain-reducing TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) machines, utilizing low electrical voltage, have been around for many years.

My research and conversations with experts has given me a growing understanding as to how electromagnetic events going on in the heavens or right here on the planet can have a response-positive or negative-on the heart, the brain, and the rest of the body. For sure, we terrestrials are not isolated from the rest of the universe and are subject to influences ranging from galactic and solar forces down to local, man-made electricity and electronics.

All beings are conglomerations of bioelectrical energy. In essence, our bodies function-for better or for worse-as a collection of dynamic electrical circuits.

One of the primary electrical ent.i.ties in the body is the heart. Each beat is triggered by an electrical signal from within the heart muscle, activity that is recorded when you undergo an EKG in your doctor's office. Each signal, repeated nonstop during a lifetime, pa.s.ses through cardiac circuitry, causing the heart to contract and push blood through the chambers and then out into your body.

Heart disease can disrupt this normal electrical and pumping operation. For instance, problems with the electrical system-known as arrhythmias-can make it difficult for the heart to pump blood efficiently. Because of the electrical nature of the heart, it was natural for a curious cardiologist like me to be attracted to energy and electrical concepts that might affect the cardiovascular system in some beneficial way.

In 2001, I was invited to speak at an electromedicine conference in San Diego. That's where I met Clint Ober. He had just completed his second study-how grounding affected cortisol and stress-and he was interested in discussing his research with a cardiologist who had an interest in electromedicine. He looked me up at the conference. We talked awhile, and I was immediately intrigued by his concept. Afterward, we met in his RV and talked in more detail. There was another medical doctor present, as well as a researcher who had developed a cuff to measure blood vessel elasticity. The researcher had his device with him and he used it to test our individual elasticity. You want your arteries to be good and elastic. Rigid, constricted blood vessels are symptomatic of high blood pressure and arterial disease. My reading was good, but Clint's was enviously better. He was about two years older than me, so I was very impressed. I remember thinking how could this guy have a better result than me? Here I was, the big prevention doctor who wrote books and newsletters about healthy lifestyle!

Clint said in his usual soft-spoken voice that he believed the results had to do with the fact that he grounded himself all the time. He slept grounded, and he walked barefoot whenever possible.

Clint also shared with me his frustration with the medical and scientific community that had shown little or no interest in grounding. He was having a hard time getting a foot inside the door of science.

A NEW HEALING FRONTIER.

If anything, I felt like a door to a new healing frontier had been pulled open by the most unlikely of individuals. Over my decades of practicing medicine, I had heard countless inspiring talks from the greatest and most honored medical experts. Doctors. Scientists. Professors. n.o.bel Prize winners. Clint Ober was none of those. He said he was "just" a cable TV guy who had made a discovery he felt could help alleviate suffering. I was impressed by his integrity and intentions. He was somebody with a mission. I felt he was on to something very important and fundamental, with great potential not just for cardiology, but also for the healing community at large. He had just a bare beginning of scientific evidence to back up his observations. Nevertheless, as a cardiologist, it made a lot of sense to me. In addition, my intuition was telling me this was big and exciting and on the mark.

For years, I had been doing a lot of research and writing about antioxidants. In my cardiac practice, I had found that antioxidant nutritional supplements, such as CoQ10, gave a clinically significant healing boost to my patients. I was curious as to whether there was an antioxidant and inflammation connection to Clint's discovery.

Just a year or so before, Harvard researchers had published strong evidence to show that chronic inflammation was a leading cause of arterial disease that chokes off blood, nutrients, and oxygen to the heart and brain, resulting in heart attacks and stroke.

So inflammation and antioxidants were on my mind when I met Clint. I asked him about inflammation. Could grounding reduce inflammation? If it did, grounding might represent a new weapon against heart disease, the No. 1 disease killer in America, and many other common conditions linked to inflammation.

I didn't know the answer. Clint didn't know.

I asked if he could find out.

He said he would. And he did, pretty much on his own at first, and later with the help of a terrific biophysicist, James Oschman.

EARTH/BODY MEDICINE.

Clint, with his knowledge of electricity and grounding cable TV systems, now began to exhaustively study physiology and the immune system. He quickly began putting two and two together. Electrical engineers knew that the surface of the Earth is pulsating with negative-charged free electrons. Medical scientists didn't know that, but they did know that the body is electrical in nature, and that free radicals are positive-charged molecules at the core of inflammation, tissue destruction, and disease. Clint theorized that if Earthing reduces pain, it must come from reducing or neutralizing the positive-charged free radicals causing the pain during the inflammatory process. The free electrons must be putting out the fire.

Clint called me one day, excited about having found another important explanation for how grounding was working in the body. It didn't "just" normalize cortisol, improve sleep, and reduce stress, as if those weren't enough. If somebody is in direct contact with the Earth-barefoot or through one of his grounded pads-the free electrons flow into the conductive circuitry of the body and snuff out inflammation. Inflammation causes pain. People with pain who are grounded experience less pain.

For him, the connection was simple.

Get grounded.

Get well.

Get pain relief. Heal.

People talk about mind/body medicine. I've been practicing that for years. I never heard anybody talk about earth/body medicine before Clint. To me, this was another landmark finding, a major breakthrough. This was literally electromedicine from the ground up. A secret of the ages right under my feet. For me, the original anti-inflammatory and the ultimate antioxidant had been found.

SLEEPING AND FIs.h.i.+NG GROUNDED.

After meeting Clint, I had obtained one of his prototype mattress pads and started sleeping grounded. The difference was profound. My wife and I were both able to fall asleep faster. I still use that same pad to this day. I wrote about sleeping grounded in my health newsletter in 2002, and a number of my subscribers obtained a bed pad for themselves. Some took the time to give me feedback afterward and said it had made a difference in their lives.

In time, as I became involved in some of Clint's research projects and heard the feedback from people whose heart functions had improved, the exciting potential of Earthing as a tool against heart disease started to crystallize.

I travel a good deal, giving lectures and attending medical conferences, and sleeping in hotels has always been problematic. Later on, when Clint designed some portable models, we were able to sleep grounded on the road just as we did at home. Now I never leave home without my pad, and I'm always looking for opportunities to walk barefoot.

For years, I used to suffer with flare-ups of psoriasis, a common inflammatory condition of the skin. It would appear on my lower legs and elbows. I had always noticed that whenever I would go bonefis.h.i.+ng off the Florida coast-a favorite recreational pursuit of mine-the psoriasis would virtually disappear for weeks afterward. I attributed that to the healing influence of being out in the sun, the vitamin D, the minerals in the salt water, and time off from the daily stresses of a busy cardiology practice. In bonefis.h.i.+ng, you spend hours casting for fish with a fly rod while walking on white sand flats knee-deep in crystal clear water. After meeting Clint, I realized that there was another reason for the improvement of the psoriasis. I was grounded, barefoot in salt water that is highly conductive. As I was fis.h.i.+ng, I was simultaneously giving myself a treatment. Now that I ground myself at night, the psoriasis is virtually gone.

Bob Tolve, an old fis.h.i.+ng buddy of mine from Scarsdale, New York, shared an interesting story with me after I told him about Earthing. Bob is sixty-three, my age, and has been in the construction business for many years. When he started out as a young man, he worked for a while with a crew of older carpenters from Norway. He recalled them telling him that if he wanted to last in the business he should do as they do: first thing in the morning go out and walk barefoot on the wet Earth. That would take away the aches and pains of the profession, they said. Bob never forgot the story.

PART THREE.

Connecting with Science

CHAPTER 6.

The Original Anti-Inflammatory The Earth itself is the original anti-inflammatory. And the planet itself is the biggest electron donor on the planet.

What does this mean to you?

Just imagine negative-charged electrons, like a mighty unseen cavalry, galloping up through your body from the Earth and mopping up an outnumbered force of positive-charged inflammatory free radicals. Electron deficiency, created by a lack of grounding, is eliminated and a healing process unfolds.

The inflammation, sickness, and pain in your body are but a manifestation-in large part or small-of an electron deficiency. The remedy is as close as the Earth you live on.

In 2000, Clint Ober was asked by a friend if he would ground an elderly gentleman who was bedridden with advanced rheumatoid arthritis. The man's hands, elbows, and feet were grotesquely misshapen and inflamed. He was racked with pain and could hardly move and then only very slowly. He was receiving comfort and at-home support from hospice, the national organization that offers services to patients whose life expectancy is six months or less.

Ober said he would come and see what could be done. It took three people to lift the man out of the bed in order to allow a conductive bed pad to be placed on it. The pad was then connected to a ground rod outside.

About ten days later, Ober received a phone call from the man, asking if he could come over again. He said that a squirrel had eaten through the ground wire.

"How do you know that?" Ober wanted to know.

"I went out and saw it had been chewed through," the man said.

Ober was puzzled. How could a bedridden patient be up and about in his yard in a matter of a few days?

"That's what I did," he said. "I went out and saw it."

Astonished, Ober drove up again. He found the man waiting for him, leaning against the front door. He said he was feeling better. And he was right about the wire. It had indeed been chewed up by an animal. Ober replaced it.

After the elderly patient had used the bed pad for a year, Ober learned from his friend that the man was much improved. He was doing household ch.o.r.es, tending to his fireplace, and even carrying firewood into the house from outside. The swelling had gone down. He was stronger, and he moved, talked, and expressed himself with new liveliness. The friend said that the once bedridden man had told him, "I feel I no longer have disease in my body."

The man continued to sleep grounded every night for the next five years until he died.

This remarkable turnaround is nothing more than Earth energy in action. It reveals the largely unknown fact that the ground represents the biggest and best natural antioxidant and anti-inflammatory that exists.

In this chapter, we will describe the healing connection between the Earth and physical inflammation. You'll get an idea how this connection has unlimited potential to reinfuse health and defuse pain among disconnected societies in which there is increasing sickness despite all the money poured into medical research and treatments.

But before we get back to the Earth and how it snuffs out inflammation, let's first look at what inflammation is (see the inset on opposite page).

Your immune system protects you against pathogens and facilitates the rebuilding of tissue at sites of injury or surgery. When a problem develops someplace, your body does the equivalent of calling 911. The alarm sounds. White blood cells and other specialized cells rush to the site-the first responders. The white blood cells constantly cruise throughout the tissues of your body, like police patrol cars, ever on the alert for viruses, bacteria, or other alien microorganisms, as well as damaged cells created by trauma or internal irritants. As weapons, some of the cells release a shower of powerful free radicals (called an oxidative burst) that aid in the destruction of invading microorganisms and damaged tissue.

What Is Inflammation?

Everyone is susceptible to inflammation-from high-performance athletes to nonperformance couch potatoes. It's an equal opportunity hit man.

The word "inflammation" comes from the Latin inflammatio, meaning to set on fire. Inflammation is the complex biological response of the body to harmful stimuli, such as pathogens, damaged cells, or irritants. It is a protective attempt by the system to remove injurious or threatening agents as well as start the healing process for the affected tissue. In the absence of inflammation, wounds and infections would never heal and progressive destruction of the tissue would compromise survival.

Free radicals have gotten a bad rap, and you will see why in a minute, but in reality they perform an essential service to the body. Simply put, they are positive-charged molecules (short of one or more electrons) that search for free electrons to become stable. You can call them electro philes-electron lovers. Normally, these free radicals obtain their missing electrons by stripping electrons away from pathogens and damaged tissue. This activity kills the bad bugs you want out of your body and breaks down damaged cells for removal. As the remedial work winds down, excess free radicals produced during the immune response are neutralized by anti oxidants or free electrons in the body.

This response is triggered whenever you have a disease or an injury. It is called the "inflammatory response." As a result, you may feel the familiar signs and symptoms of inflammation: swelling, redness, heat and pain, and, depending where the site is, decreased range of motion.

CHRONIC INFLAMMATION=ELECTRON DEFICIENCY.

Inflammation comes in two forms: acute or chronic. The acute type takes place as an initial response of the body to harmful stimuli. It involves the mobilization of plasma (the yellow-colored liquid component of blood) and white blood cells from the blood into the injured tissue, as just described. That's okay. You want that to happen.

Then there is chronic (prolonged) inflammation. That you don't want. Chronic inflammation means a progressive s.h.i.+ft in the type of activity going on at the site of inflammation. You get simultaneous destruction and healing of the tissue, but a harmful free-radical encroachment into healthy, surrounding territory. The destruction derby continues, and it can seriously harm you.

Free radicals obviously have starring roles in the immune response, but problems arise when the process fails to wind down completely after the job is done. The good guys become bad guys on a rampage, ripping up innocent, healthy cells. Think of security dogs that snag the burglar and then go after their owner. They continue attacking and oxidize healthy tissue. The immune system gears switch into overdrive, sending in more white blood cells that produce more free radicals. This activity is why free radicals have a bad rap and why scientists unanimously agree that free-radical activity is at the basis of chronic disease and the aging process, particularly accelerated aging and limited lifespan.

We believe that normal inflammation veers out of control because of lost contact with the Earth. People are suffering from an electron deficiency-not enough free electrons on hand to satisfy the l.u.s.t of rampaging free radicals. They continue to attack the adjacent neighborhood of healthy tissue in an ever-expanding vicious cycle. The nonstop attack mode generates an autoimmune response manifesting as chronic inflammation. The immune system has run amok, attacking its owner-you.

We've simplified the scenario, but this is basically how it works. A destructive process unfolds that can continue silently and indefinitely even for dozens of years and lead to so many intractable modern diseases. Earlier we mentioned the new scientific term for this-inflamm-aging. Now you can see where it comes from.

INFLAMMATION AS A DISEASE-MAKER.

The idea that chronic inflammation could be involved in disease began to gain serious attention a little over twenty-five years ago. At that time, two Australian researchers, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, reported for the first time that stomach ulcers were not caused by stress or spicy food but by inflammation triggered during bacterial infection. This discovery earned the pair a n.o.bel Prize.

A similar kind of turning point in the road occurred recently in the field of cardiology. Back in the mid-1800s, the famous German pathologist Rudolph Virchow recognized that injured and inflamed arteries might be a source of heart attacks. His idea failed to gain traction during his time and faded away. Later, during most of the last half of the twentieth century, the cholesterol theory emerged, and since then lowering cholesterol has become a medical obsession and a multi-billion dollar business for pharmaceutical and food manufacturers. However, medical research has shown that half of all heart attacks and strokes occur among people with normal cholesterol levels. So during the 1980s, some cardiologists began to re-examine Virchow's ideas about inflammation.

A major breakthrough came in a series of important studies beginning in 2000. Evidence from a Women's Health Initiative study that monitored the status of 28,000 initially healthy postmenopausal women introduced a new cardiovascular risk factor into the spotlight: C-reactive protein (CRP), a biochemical substance indicating the presence of arterial inflammation. People with the highest level of CRP had five times the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and four times the risk of a heart attack or stroke compared to individuals with the lowest level. CRP, the researchers said, predicted risk in women who had none of the standard risk factors and was the best predictor among twelve risk factors studied, including cholesterol. Harvard cardiologist Paul Ridker, M.D., the lead researcher, said, "We have to think of heart disease as an inflammatory disease, just as we think of rheumatoid arthritis as an inflammatory disease."

Dr. Ridker estimated that approximately 25 percent of Americans have normal to low cholesterol, lulling them into complacency, but at the same time they have elevated CRP they don't know about. This means that millions of Americans are currently unaware they have an increased risk for future cardiovascular disease, heart attack, or stroke.

Think of low-grade inflammation as a silent, creeping fire, consuming arterial tissue. It leads to the weakening and eventual rupture of arterial plaques that directly trigger heart attacks and stroke. The CRP-inflammation link helps explain why so many heart attack and stroke victims have normal cholesterol levels.

Another example of a common disorder increasingly being seen as inflammation-related is diabetes. In type 1 diabetes, the kind that affects youngsters, the body's immune system attacks the pancreatic cells that make insulin. Insulin is the hormone responsible for controlling the blood sugar level and opening cell "doors" to sugar for use in energy production. Recent research also suggests that type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease and generally occurring in adulthood, begins with insulin resistance. This means that energy production stops responding properly to insulin. The reason for this, researchers believe, is an excess of inflammatory substances released from fatty tissue, particularly in the abdomen. Fat cells, once thought to be merely storage depots for energy and metabolically inert, are now known to be hotbeds of inflammation. This connection helps explain why obesity leads to diabetes. In addition, some studies suggest that eating certain foods may stoke more inflammation in the body and raise the risk of diabetes. They include foods high in sugar and other sweeteners, white flour products, trans fats, polyunsaturated vegetable oils, and processed meats.

It seems that hardly a day goes by without some new study pointing the finger at runaway inflammation as the core of some disease. Inflammatory diseases have become a global epidemic and include some of the most devastating disorders of our times. Table 6-1 lists just a few of them.

Along with the continuing flow of revelations regarding inflammation, researchers have also acc.u.mulated much evidence demonstrating that painful conditions are often the result of acute or chronic inflammation. One pain expert recently postulated that the origin of all pain is inflammation and the inflammatory response.

Many physicians and researchers wonder what has caused inflammation to become so dangerously commonplace. When asked what causes inflammation in the first place, Harvard's Dr. Ridker said this: "We are witnessing evolutionary biology in action-an adaptive response (inflammation) in the past is now maladaptive in our current modern environment."

The discovery of the relations.h.i.+p of grounding to inflammation suggests that the once adaptive response called inflammation has maybe gone sour because of an electron deficiency from loss of direct contact with the Earth. (Table 6-1) TABLE 6-1. CONDITIONS RELATED TO CHRONIC INFLAMMATION.

DISEASE.

HEALTH EFFECTS.

Allergies Inflammatory messengers stimulate release of histamine, leading to allergic reactions. Inflammatory messengers stimulate release of histamine, leading to allergic reactions.

Alzheimer's disease Inflamed brain tissues develop plaque; chronic inflammation kills brain cells.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)*

Damage to motor neurons causes the body to launch an overzealous inflammatory counterattack, killing the motor neurons.

Anemia Inflammatory messengers attack red blood cell production.

Arthritis Chronic inflammation destroys joint cartilage and inhibits the release of lubricating and cus.h.i.+oning fluid in the joints.

Asthma Inflammation leads to blocking of the bronchial pa.s.sages.