JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Dr Cuanang invited us to the opening of the Complementary Medicine Service at St Luke’s in Bonifacio Global City. According to the US National Institute of Health website, “Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is the term for medical products and practices that are not part of standard care.” Examples: acupuncture, yoga therapy and ventosa, all of which are now on offer at St. Luke’s.

St Luke’s medical director Dr Joven Cuanang at the Complementary Medicine center. Those extraordinary floral arrangements are lotus flowers, Buddhist symbols for purity. These beautiful flowers only grow in dirty water.

The guest of honor at the launch was our walking Rizal app, historian Ambeth Ocampo. According to Ambeth, our national hero Jose Rizal did research on traditional Filipino medical practices, including herbal treatments and bewitchment. As in mangkukulam.

“To the Tagalogs, bewitchment varies in intensity according to whether it is caused by a mangkukulam or a manggagaway. The bewitchment that befalls children when a stranger becomes too fond of them, and is called uhiya, does not deserve to be included in this chapter, for it can be caused by anybody in the most innocent manner.

“The bewitchment that comes from a mangkukulam is the most mysterious and hence the most terrible, though fortunately rare. In general, a mangkukulam is a man who is born with this power, though some believe that it is a sickness which is acquired, endowing the patient with terrible and fabulous powers. They say that during the frigid period of the fit, the mangkukulam sheds tears of real fire and his gaze has such potency that it paralyzes small animals, even flying birds. It is believed that the sickness which a mangkukulam can cause has no cure; and on account of the terror that it inspires and its oddity very little is known about the nature of this bewitchment. The mangkukulam turns out to be a terrible hypnotizer or charmer, a kind of very unfortunate and involuntarily malevolent fakir. He must not be confused with the magol of whom we shall speak elsewhere…”

Read a summary of Jose Rizal’s The Treatment of the Bewitched here.

After Ambeth’s speech one of the guests recounted a story told by one of Rizal’s students during his Dapitan exile. Every day after lunch they were required to take siesta. During siesta hour they would sneak under their teacher’s hut and spy on Jose Rizal doing it with Josephine Bracken. “That’s not likely,” Ambeth said, “as Josephine Bracken had (a social disease).”

Massage therapy room

That’s a shower.

I asked Dr Cuanang, whose field is neurology, whether zombies can exist. “Of course,” he said. “I’ve seen patients whose prefrontal lobes had been removed, and they behaved in a zombie-like fashion.” Perhaps the pain receptors in zombie brains are not functioning (they are undead), which is why they keep on going until they are decapitated or burned.

Zombies and mangkukulam, another typical day at work.

In Dante’s Inferno falsifiers are condemned to itch for all eternity. Illustration by Gustave Doré.

Read the case of the woman who scratched an itch through her scalp all the way to her brain by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. Thank you Boing Boing.

Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience. In Dante’s Inferno, falsifiers were punished by “the burning rage / of fierce itching that nothing could relieve”:

Though scratching can provide momentary relief, it often makes the itching worse. Dermatologists call this the itch-scratch cycle. Scientists believe that itch, and the accompanying scratch reflex, evolved in order to protect us from insects and clinging plant toxins—from such dangers as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, transmitted by mosquitoes; from tularemia, river blindness, and sleeping sickness, transmitted by flies; from typhus-bearing lice, plague-bearing fleas, and poisonous spiders. The theory goes a long way toward explaining why itch is so exquisitely tuned. You can spend all day without noticing the feel of your shirt collar on your neck, and yet a single stray thread poking out, or a louse’s fine legs brushing by, can set you scratching furiously…

Itchy and Scratchy

X-Men Popart courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox

We have always loved the X-Men. How could we not? It is the ultimate outsider fantasy: You mock me, you persecute me, but secretly you fear me. In your darkest hour, only I can save you.

If I feel like it.

Read my column at interaksyon.com, the Channel 5 news site.

Kiwi orchard, Mount Manganui, New Zealand. Photo by JZ.

You want to be a vegan? Fine. You want to follow a macrobiotic diet? Fine. You choose to subsist on nuts and berries or air and mesclun, good for you. Bravo, you are a stronger person than I. But never attempt to lecture me about my choices. Do not try to convert me to your dietary regimen. Such a move would be more dangerous to your health than eating a whole cow at each meal. You know how werewolf hunters pack a silver bullet? I carry a special bullet made of lard and gristle, and I won’t hesitate to use it on you.

At one time or another many of us have sworn to abide by some health regimen that will allow us to live forever. Apart from the over-promise, these regimens fail because they are too difficult to stick to. A radical overhaul of your lifestyle and habits is not easy to do, no matter what talk show hosts and motivational speakers say. (I suspect that many of them remain in business because no one has stuck with their programs long enough to debunk their premises.) So the wonderful health regimen remains a statement of intentions.
(more…)

David Eagleman photo from NYT

“Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing?

Excellent profile of the neuroscientist and writer (Sum) David Eagleman by Burkhard Bilger in TNY.

As always the comments on youtube are a smorgasbord of stupidity.