Nerve Damage Quotes

I brought out the most powerful tool I had in my arsenal. "If you resist," I said into Reyes's ear, "I'll be forced to Taser you." He looked at what I had in my hand. "That's a phone." "I have an app. You'll probably experience nerve damage. Slight memory loss.

But now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.

When I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.

absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird

Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird.

It is not your passing thoughts or brilliant ideas so much as your plain everyday habits that control your life....Live simply. Don’t get caught in the machine of the world— it is too exacting. By the time you get what you are seeking your nerves are gone, the heart is damaged, and the bones are aching. Resolve to develop your spiritual powers more earnestly from now on. Learn the art of right living. If you have joy you have everything,so learn to be glad and contented....Have happiness now.

After my mom died she ate my father up completely. She would have hated it. Every minute of his life since then has been marked by her absence, every action has lacked dimension because she is not there to measure against. And when I was young I didn't understand, but now, I know, how absence can be present, like a damaged nerve, like a dark bird. If I had to live on without you I know I could not do it. But I hope, I have this vision of you walking unencumbered, with your shining hair in the sun. I have not seen this with my eyes, but only with my imagination, that makes pictures, that always wanted to paint you, shining; but I hope that this vision will be true, anyway.

[Y]ou are not ashamed of your sin [in committing adultery] because so many men commit it. Man's wickedness is now such that men are more ashamed of chastity than of lechery. Murderers, thieves, perjurers, false witnesses, plunderers and fraudsters are detested and hated by people generally, but whoever will sleep with his servant girl in brazen lechery is liked and admired for it, and people make light of the damage to his soul. And if any man has the nerve to say that he is chaste and faithful to his wife and this gets known, he is ashamed to mix with other men, whose behaviour is not like his, for they will mock him and despise him and say he's not a real man; for man's wickedness is now of such proportions that no one is considered a man unless he is overcome by lechery, while one who overcomes lechery and stays chaste is considered unmanly.

Sometimes I can feel my darkness, like a fragment of nerves inside of me somewhere, sparking my hate. I picture it moving throughout my body, the other cells letting it pass by, yielding to its master. It moves to my tongue when it wants me to spew beautiful, damaging words, it moves to my hands when it wants me to feel all it can take away, and it moves to my eyes to blind me from truly seeing the destruction I’ve done.

The strangest thing was that I felt it, I felt everything. Normally I feel nothing but itching, discomfort, tightness, soreness. The surface of my skin is dulled by scars, lots of it is numb -- nerve damage, apparently. When he touched me, I felt everything. It was like having new skin.

I suffer from severe nerve damage in the hands, arms, legs and spine. My right leg is numb all the time and there are times when I cannot move either of my legs. In addition to this my C-T-L spine has severe disc herniation. I have Fibromyalgia, asthma, severe allergies, heart problems, bleeding ulcers and I eat maybe once every two or three days. I maintain body weight by drinking an average of 36 Pepsi’s per day.

The bottom line is this: environmental toxins are all around us, and they stimulate the production of free radicals, which can cause axidative damage to any kind of cell, be it muscle, nerve, liver, kidney,, heart, brain, and so on, and cause autoimmune disease.

I point out that Tiny Cooper had about 11,542 girlfriends freshman year, and then Tiny punches me in the arm in a way that he thinks is playful but actually causes permanent nerve damage.

He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not. On the question you raised, the effects of wounds vary greatly. Simple wounds which do not break bone are of little account. They sometimes give confidence. Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else."-Interview for the Paris Review, 1956

Your body-budgeting regions can therefore trick your brain into believing that there is tissue damage, regardless of what is happening in your body. So, when you’re feeling unpleasant, your joints and muscles might hurt more, or you could develop a stomachache. When your body budget’s not in shape, meaning your interoceptive predictions are miscalibrated, your back might hurt more, or your headache might pound harder—not because you have tissue damage but because your nerves are talking back and forth. This is not imaginary pain. It is real.

The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but your rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush.

Is the clue to be found in the nerves, or in the brain itself? To produce insanity, what must first be damaged, and how?

Look at it this way: there are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100%, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex.

Are you reading porn?” The low voice in my ear has me pulling my Kindle so hard against my chest, I fear I may crack the screen. I drop my chin, inspecting the front for any signs of damage while the man behind me breathes an amused laugh. No cracks. Oh, thank God. I settle my nerves before replying blindly, “I don’t think you can read porn. You watch porn.” I

What date was the car brought in, again?” “August thirty-first,” she says. “August thirty-first.” I repeat. My skin prickles, every nerve twitching. Ezra tilts his head. “Why do you look like you just swallowed a grenade?” “Because we came in from LA the night before that. August thirtieth, remember? The hailstorm. The night Mr. Bowman was killed in a hit-and-run.” Nobody says anything for a second, and I tap the paper Mia is holding. “Front of vehicle damage due to unknown impact?

The way that led from the acute mental tension of the last days in camp (from the war of nerves to mental peace) was certainly not free from obstacles. It would be an error to think that a liberated prisoner was not in need of spiritual care any more. We have to consider that a man who has been under such enormous mental pressure for such a long time is naturally in some danger after his liberation, especially since the pressure was released quite suddenly. This danger (in the sense of psychological hygiene) is the psychological counterpart of the bends. Just as the physical health of the caisson worker would be endangered if he left his diver's chamber suddenly (where he is under enormous atmospheric pressure), so the man who has suddenly been liberated from mental pressure can suffer damage to his moral and spiritual health. During this psychological phase one observed that people with natures of a more primitive kind could not escape the influences of the brutality which had surrounded them in camp life. Now, being free, they thought they could use their freedom licentiously and ruthlessly. The only thing that had changed for them was that they were now the oppressors instead of the oppressed. They became instigators, not objects, of willful force and injustice. They justified their behavior by their own terrible experiences.

A dear friend best expressed, in a few words, the aim of this book. When she reflected on my recovery from Alzheimer symptoms she stated: “You came back to life.” She was right. For me, losing the ability to think, talk, and feed and clothe myself would be the same as dying. If you (or someone you know) suffer these symptoms, I want to bring you back to life.” “Avoiding certain foods can reverse the many conditions caused by nerve damage—including damage to the nerves of the brain. The nerves of the brain can recover from years of abuse.

Yes. You see, the whole nature, shape and even the modern blue pigment of the TARDIS is so deeply unfamiliar to the primitive mind that, although the optic nerve registers its presence, the brain cannot decode what it is seeing. The primitive visual cortex is unable to relay information about it consciously to the viewer. In effect, even though her chameleon circuit is still damaged, she’s as good as invisible. She’ll be just fine.

The average American now eats about 160 pounds of sugar every year, or slightly more than 7 ounces a day.

Fat doesn’t make you fat; carbohydrates make you fat.

(Though she was never correctly diagnosed in her lifetime, neurologists now believe she had a syndrome called Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a hereditary disorder that damages the nerves to the arms and legs.) Christina

It has done much damage that many reluctant Germans in high places spoke and wrote to Englishmen after the solution of the Czech question. The Fuehrer carried his point when you lost your nerve and capitulated too soon.

Is he dead? Blue asked, staring down at the prostrate body. kitterick shook his head.'No,but he will remain in a coma for several hours.And there will be a substantial headache when he wakes up. And tremors.Something of a limp.Blurred vision.Impaired hearing.A few facialtics.Some nausea,loss of appetite, occasional hallucinations,flatulence,a weakness in the back. The nerve damage will repair itself in a few years.Providing he rests of course.

In spite of the terrible pain I was in, I tried to help name the hot sauces. For the allegedly mild one, which tasted like nuclear fall-out, I suggested Hot as Fuck. For the medium one, which tasted like seven lit cigarettes applied firmly to the tongue, I suggested You'd Have to Be an Idiot to Try This, and for the Scorpion sauce, which was so hot I think it gave me permanent nerve damage, I suggested Lawsuit Followed by Complete Financial Collapse. She ignored all my suggestions...

But they were clean breaks, so the marrow regenerator should seal them pretty fast. Same goes for his cracked ribs. Then it’s just all the nerve and tissue damage from the force field, and—” “Uh, I don’t think this is making her feel better,” Dex warned. And he was right.

Metabolically speaking, if sugar has an evil twin, then "drinking alcohol" can become the demon spawn. This is because sugar converted to booze converts to ethanol plus carbon dioxide, and if you imbibe--do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go straight to the liver.

Very well. Now, if you stimulate those damaged places in your brain again, you run the risk of opening up the old wounds. I mean, that if you get nerve-sensations of any kind producing the reactions which we call horror, fear, and sense of responsibility, they may go on to make disturbance right along the old channel, and produce in their turn physical changes which you will call by the names you were accustomed to associate with them—dread of German mines, responsibility for the lives of your men, strained attention and the inability to distinguish small sounds through the overpowering noise of guns.”   “I

Learn to be fast now. You can learn to be good later.” In the OR, everyone’s eyes are always on the clock. For the patient’s sake: How long has he been under anesthesia? During long procedures, nerves can get damaged, muscles can break down, kidneys can fail. For everyone else’s sake: What time are we getting out of here tonight?

the following supplements are recommended specifically for MS. They’ll help reduce pain and protect your myelin sheath as you heal from EBV: EPA & DHA (eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid): omega-3 fats to help protect and fortify the myelin nerve sheath. Be sure to buy a plant-based (not fish-based) version. L-glutamine: amino acid that removes toxins such as MSG from the brain and protects neurons. Lion’s mane: medicinal mushroom that helps protect the myelin sheath and support neuron function. ALA (alpha lipoic acid): helps repair damaged neurons and neurotransmitters. Also helps mend the myelin nerve sheath. Monolaurin: fatty acid that kills virus cells, bacteria cells, and other bad microbes (e.g., mold) in the brain. Curcumin: component of turmeric that reduces inflammation of the central nervous system and relieves pain. Barley grass juice extract powder: contains micronutrients that feed the central nervous system. Also helps feed brain tissue, neurons, and the myelin nerve sheath.

Every year in this war and that, even in our own cities, countless children are killed, while those who spray the bullets—or plant the roadside bomb, authorize the use of nerve gas, send the drone with the Hellfire missile that strikes the wrong target—shed not a tear, referring to those tender deceased as mere “collateral damage,” if they acknowledge

The conscience leads a person away from that which is harmful, and toward what is beneficial. Nerve endings in a person's fingers help prevent their fingers from getting seared; however, if those endings are damaged and a person has no sensitivity to heat, their fingers could catch on fire without the person being aware. In the same way a person's conscience can be seared so that it has no more sensitivity.

Remember those cocaine addicts whose dopamine receptors (the tiny hands that grab neurochemicals) decreased after repeated drug use? Cocaine blasts the reward circuitry so that it pumps out massive amounts of exciting dopamine. This accounts for the high. Then two things happen simultaneously. First, the high begins to fade as the brain disposes of the extra dopamine. Second, because so much excess dopamine can damage or kill nerve cells, the cells protect themselves by reducing the number of dopamine receptors (little “hands”) on their surfaces. If a thunderstorm rolls in, you close all the windows and wait for it to pass. That’s what the cells do, except they assume that another storm is on the way, and stay closed up for a while. The addict has lowered her sensitivity to dopamine—a substance that helped give her the high. Now our addict feels rotten. She has two choices: Take more cocaine to jack up her mood artificially by saturating the remaining dopamine receptors, or suffer withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal symptoms arise when the reward circuitry is starving for dopamine. Whether you have too few receptors for dopamine, or too little dopamine circulating around the nerve cells, you get the same result. Your reward circuitry batteries are low, leaving you with an acute desire to feel normal again.

The only veggies allowed when trying to become keto-adapted are: red leaf lettuce, cabbage, celery, zucchini and cucumbers. I know this sounds crazy, but even non-starchy vegetables may hold you back while trying to become keto-adapted. I used to be more passive in my office and tell clients to take “baby steps” but not anymore. People want results. Rip that band-aid off! Whether you are dealing with inflammation showing externally where people can see it (weight gain, acne, eczema, and rosacea) or internally (heart disease, joint pain, nerve damage, high blood sugar), the faster you can get to be keto-adapted the better. Once adapted or near your weight loss and healing goals, you can begin to re-introduce other low starch veggies. When in maintenance, you can find your bodies threshold for carbs by introducing psyllium breads and nut flours and monitoring your weight (typically 30-50 grams of total carbs per day).

EBV is a virus that chronically inflames nerves. Most strains of EBV are mild and less aggressive, but its multiple sclerosis varieties eat away at the myelin sheath, which is what creates the distinct set of symptoms associated with this disease. (As for your immune system, not only is it innocent of any wrongdoing, it’s your primary defense against MS. When your immune system gets what it needs, recovery is possible—and within reach.) Something else that distinguishes MS from other forms of EBV is that it’s accompanied by a unique combination of bacteria, fungi, and heavy metals. Specifically, if you have MS, you’ll typically have the following EBV cofactors in your system: Streptococcus A and Streptococcus B bacteria H. pylori bacteria (or at least a previous case of H. pylori) Candida fungus Cytomegalovirus The heavy metals copper, mercury, and aluminum—these metals weaken the immune system’s ability to protect the body from viral nerve damage

It’s been uneventful around here (unless you count Keefe’s skill lessons—and Fitz waking up). I’m also working with Livvy to change the strategy. The new elixirs and balms have some nasty ingredients, but we’re onto something. FOURTH UPDATE: Had to change out the bandages and wow, was there a lot of ooze! Also got a better look at Sophie’s hand, and it’s definitely swollen. But the bones have set, and these new balms and compression wraps might mean she can go home by the end of the week! FIFTH UPDATE: Ro and Keefe insisted on being at the next bandage change (or “the Great Fitzphie Ooze Fest”), and it was even stinkier than the last one. But Sophie’s hand was back to normal size! Time to focus on the nerve damage and rebuilding strength. SIXTH UPDATE: After a special mineral soak and a little more strength training, Sophie regained feeling in her hand and could FINALLY get out of bed! (!!!) SEVENTH UPDATE: Fitz went home yesterday, and Sophie’s mood seemed a little low.

The other major hormonal player in your cycle is progesterone. It helps to prepare the uterus for implantation with a healthy fertilized egg and supports pregnancy. If no implantation occurs, progesterone levels drop, and another cycle begins. Progesterone receptors are highly concentrated in the brain. Progesterone can support GABA, the brain’s relaxation neurotransmitter; acts to protect your nerve cells; and supports the myelin sheath that covers neurons. I like to think of progesterone as the “feel-good hormone.” It makes you feel calm and peaceful and encourages sleep. It’s like nature’s Valium, but better, because instead of making your brain fuzzy, it sharpens your thinking. It has also been shown to help with brain injuries by reducing inflammation and counteracting damage. It is so much more than a sex hormone. Progesterone increases during pregnancy, which is why many pregnant women often feel great. Some women with hormonal issues, in fact, feel so much better during pregnancy that they will

Rayna does not get sick on planes. Also, Rayna does not stop talking on planes. By the time we land at Okaloosa Regional Airport, I’m wondering if I’ve spoken as many words in my entire life as she did on the plane. With no layovers, it was the longest forty-five minutes of my whole freaking existence. I can tell Rachel’s nerves are also fringed. She orders an SUV limo-Rachel never does anything small-to pick us up and insists that Rayna try the complimentary champagne. I’m fairly certain it’s the first alcoholic beverage Rayna’s ever had, and by the time we reach the hotel on the beach, I’m all the way certain. As Rayna snores in the seat across from me, Rachel checks us into the hotel and has our bags taken to our room. “Do you want to head over to the Gulfarium now?” she asks. “Or, uh, rest up a bit and wait for Rayna to wake up?” This is an important decision. Personally, I’m not tired at all and would love to see a liquored-up Rayna negotiate the stairs at the Gulfarium. But I’d feel a certain guilt if she hit her hard head on a wooden rail or something and then we’d have to pay the Gulfarium for the damages her thick skull would surely cause. Plus, I’d have to suffer a reproving look from Dr. Milligan, which might actually hurt my feelings because he reminds me a bit of my dad. So I decide to do the right thing. “Let’s rest for a while and let her snap out of it. I’ll call Dr. Milligan and let him know we’ve checked in.” Two hours later, Sleeping Beast wakes up and we head to see Dr. Milligan. Rayna is particularly grouchy when hungover-can you even get hungover from drinking champagne?-so she’s not terribly inclined to be nice to the security guard who lets us in. She mutters something under her breath-thank God she doesn’t have a real voice-and pushes past him like the spoiled Royalty she is. I’m just about aggravated beyond redemption-until we see Dr. Milligan in a new exhibit of stingrays. He coos and murmurs as if they’re a litter of puppies in the tank begging to play with him. When he notices our arrival he smiles, and it feels like a coconut slushy on a sweltering day and it almost makes up for the crap I’ve been put through these past few days.

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on. They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats. And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?" In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always requires the right environment. Now, if you're a gardener you know that. If you are growing plants in your backyard and you want them to grow into healthy, functioning beings, botanical beings, you want to provide them with the right nurturing, the right nutrition, minerals, water, sunlight and so on. So the real question is how do we provide the conditions for further development for people whose development was impaired in the first place? Now we know how to do that. We are just not doing it.

The Hum-bird paused, a long needle sliding out of the hole in its beak. It bent quickly, poking the needle into Scarlett's face. Its head popped back up and then repeated the motion in three more spots on the Jordan's face before hopping to the other side and starting over. It hopped back and forth a few more times, pausing now and then with its injector, plumping skin and filling the fine lines in Scarlett's face. After examining its works, the needle withdrew and another one protruded, glistening pink in the dimmed light. This time the Hum-bird hopped around, paralyzing any damaging nerve clusters that over time would be bound to cause wrinkles in the skin.

I don’t like to use this word,” he said, “because I’m a man of science and I don’t believe in it. But what happened to your mother today was a miracle. I never say that, because I hate it when people say it, but I don’t have any other way to explain this.” The bullet that hit my mother in the butt, he said, was a through-and-through. It went in, came out, and didn’t do any real damage. The other bullet went through the back of her head, entering below the skull at the top of her neck. It missed the spinal cord by a hair, missed the medulla oblongata, and traveled through her head just underneath the brain, missing every major vein, artery, and nerve. With the trajectory the bullet was on, it was headed straight for her left eye socket and would have blown out her eye, but at the last second it slowed down, hit her cheekbone instead, shattered her cheekbone, ricocheted off, and came out through her left nostril. On the gurney in the emergency room, the blood had made the wound look much worse than it was. The bullet took off only a tiny flap of skin on the side of her nostril, and it came out clean, with no bullet fragments left inside. She didn’t even need surgery. They stopped the bleeding, stitched her up in back, stitched her up in front, and let her heal. “There was nothing we can do, because there’s nothing we need to do,” the doctor

Bach-y-Rita developed a program for people with damaged facial motor nerves, who could not move their facial muscles and so couldn’t close their eyes, speak properly, or express emotion, making them look like monstrous automatons. Bach-y-Rita had one of the “extra” nerves that normally goes to the tongue surgically attached to a patient’s facial muscles. Then he developed a program of brain exercises to train the “tongue nerve” (and particularly the part of the brain that controls it) to act like a facial nerve. These patients learned to express normal facial emotions, speak, and close their eyes—one more instance of Bach-y-Rita’s ability to “connect anything to anything.

One of the most extraordinary examples of adaptation to immaturity in contemporary American society today is how the word abusive has replaced the words nasty and objectionable. The latter two words suggest that a person has done something distasteful, always a matter of judgment. But the use of the word abusive suggests, instead, that the person who heard or read the objectionable, nasty, or even offensive remark was somehow victimized by dint of the word entering their mind. This confusion of being “hurt” with being damaged makes it seem as though the feelings of the listener or reader were not their own responsibility, or as though they had been helplessly violated by another person’s opinion. If our bodies responded that way to “insults,” we would not make it very far past birth. The use of abusive rather than objectionable has enabled those who do not want to take responsibility for their own efforts to tyrannize others, especially leaders, with their “sensitivity.” The desire to be “inoffensive” has resulted in more than one news medium producing long lists of words, few of which are really nasty, that reporters should avoid using for fear of “hurting” someone. Obviously there are some words that are downright impolite if not always hostile and disparaging, but making everyone sensitive to the sensitivities of others plays into the hands of those who feel powerless.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

If we want to sum up the value of the priestly existence in the shortest slogan, we could at once put it like this: the priest is the person who alters the direction of ressentiment. For every suffering person instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering, or, more precisely, an agent, or, even more precisely, a guilty agent sensitive to suffering — in short, he seeks some living person on whom he can, on some pretext or other, unload his feelings, either in fact or in effigy: for the discharge of feelings is the most important way a suffering man seeks relief — that is, some anaesthetic — it’s his involuntarily desired narcotic against any kind of torment. In my view, only here can we find the true physiological cause of ressentiment, revenge, and things related to them, in a longing for some anaesthetic against pain through one’s emotions. People usually look for this cause, most incorrectly, in my opinion, in the defensive striking back, a merely reactive protective measure, a “reflex movement” in the event of some sudden damage and threat, of the sort a decapitated frog still makes in order to get rid of corrosive acid. But the difference is fundamental: in one case, people want to prevent suffering further damage; in the other case, people want to deaden a tormenting, secret pain which is becoming unendurable by means of a more violent emotion of some kind and, for the moment at least, to drive it from their consciousness — for that they need some emotion, as unruly an emotion as possible, and, in order to stimulate that, they need the best pretext available. “Someone or other must be guilty of the fact that I am ill” — this sort of conclusion is characteristic of all sick people, all the more so if the real cause of their sense that they are sick, the physiological cause, remains hidden (—it can lie, for example, in an illness of the nervus sympathicus [sympathetic nerve], or in an excessive secretion of gall, or in a lack of potassium sulphate and phosphate in the blood, or in some pressure in the lower abdomen, which blocks the circulation, or in a degeneration of the ovaries, and so on).

But the action of the tendon organ’s synapse onto its corresponding motor neuron is not the same as that of the spindle; it is its complimentary opposite, The action of the anulospiral receptor upon its motor nerve is excitatory: When the spindle is suddenly stretched beyond a pre-determined “normal” resting length—as in the knee jerk reflex test—it excites the alpha motor nerve so that a contraction immediately follows which quickly re-establishes the desired “normal” resting length. 7-14: A Golgi reflex arc. In the spinal cord, its effect upon the alpha motor neurons is the opposite of that of the spindles: The Golgi afferent impulse inhibits the muscle fibers associated with it, and excites antagonists. The two kinds of arcs form complementary reflex devices. The tendon organ, on the other hand, has an inhibitory effect upon its alpha motor nerve: When the tension developed upon a tendon exceeds a pre-set “normal” limit, the Golgi inhibits the motor nerve, reducing its level of stimulatory firing and thus relaxing the tension back down to its “normal” resting value. The simplest and most basic function of this inhibitory reflex arc is to prevent the contractile power of the muscles from damaging the tendons and the bones. Many of our muscles are capable of generating enough pull to rip themselves loose from their own moorings, and even the smaller ones which do not have such brute power are in danger of being torn by the uncontrolled pulling of the larger muscles around them. When the Golgi organ senses, due to the increasing tensional distortion of the tendon’s fibers, that a strain or a tear is imminent, its signal becomes powerful enough to inhibit the alpha motor neurons that are stimulating the contraction. Tension is reduced instantly, and the damage is avoided.

Linda Bacon exposes some of the rarely mentioned side effects of weight-loss surgery in Health at Every Size, listing a shocking eighty-two symptoms, including lifelong vitamin deficiency, loss of bowel control, consistent vomiting and excruciating pain after eating, hormone imbalances, infection, kidney and liver failure, nerve and brain damage, and often, weight regain. Bacon cites further studies that found that 4.6 percent of bariatric surgery patients died within a year. She argues that weight-loss surgery “would be more appropriately labelled ‘high-risk disease-inducing cosmetic surgery’ than a health-enhancing procedure.

Gluten, a major component of wheat, barley, and rye, is a composite of two different proteins, gliadin and glutelin. Gluten is what gives bread its stretchiness and elasticity, qualities most folks enjoy. But gluten also makes some people seriously ill. It is estimated that about 1 percent of the population is gluten intolerant, though most are unaware of it. If gluten-intolerant individuals eat gluten grains, they develop what’s known as celiac disease. Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition in which the gliadin protein in gluten grains generates an antibody-mediated immune-system attack against the intestines, leading to chronic diarrhea, fatigue, stunting of growth, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, anemia, nerve damage, and osteoporosis. Furthermore, those with celiac disease have higher rates of cancer, schizophrenia, and a whole host of autoimmune illnesses (Jackson et al. 2012; Rubio-Tapia and Murray 2010), suggesting that the body’s response to gluten affects more than just the intestines. And, on the flip side, almost every chronic autoimmune disease we know of is associated with a significantly increased risk of celiac disease (Cosnes et al. 2008; Rousset 2004; Rodrigo et al. 2011; Song and Choi 2004).

Visual agnosia is the inability of the brain to make sense of or make use of some part of an otherwise normal visual stimulus and is typified by the inability to recognize familiar objects or faces. This is distinct from blindness, which is a lack of sensory input to the brain due to damage to the eye, optic nerve, or the primary visual cortex. Visual agnosia is often due to stroke affecting the posterior occipital and/or temporal lobe(s) in the brain. The specific dysfunctions vary depending on the type of agnosia. Some sufferers are unable to copy drawings but are able to manipulate objects with good dexterity. Commonly, patients can name the object, here a tea cup, categorize it, but cannot describe its function; or the reverse, be able to drink from it appropriately but not know its name or describe its uses. Lesion studies clearly demonstrate that even crystallized objects, your left foot, or here a tea cup, are not “things” in long-term memory but are concepts constructed from multiple brain modules at the moment of perception (Farah, 1999).

The constellation of behaviours we call addiction is provoked by a complex set of neurological and emotional mechanisms that develop inside a person. These mechanisms have no separate existence and no conscious will of their own, even if the addict may often experience himself as governed by a powerful controlling force or as suffering from a disease he has no strength to resist. So it would be more accurate to say: addiction may not be a natural state, but the brain regions in which its powers arise are central to our survival. The force of the addiction process stems from that very fact. Here’s an analogy: let’s say the section of someone’s brain that controls body movements — the motor cortex — was damaged or did not develop properly. That person would inevitably have some kind of physical impairment. If the affected nerves managed nothing more than the motions of the little toe, any loss would hardly be noticeable. If, however, the damaged or undeveloped nerves governed the activity of a leg, the person would have a significant disability. In other words, the impairment would be proportional to the size and importance of the malfunctioning brain centre. So it is with addiction. There is no addiction centre in the brain, no circuits designated strictly for addictive purposes. The brain systems involved in addiction are among the key organizers and motivators of human emotional life and behaviour; hence, addiction’s powerful hold on human beings.

The body concentrates vitamin C around brain and nerve cells specifically to protect them from oxidation and free-radical damage, because vitamin C is one of nature's most powerful antioxidants.

He's following us at a distance," she said, annoyed. "Like a guardian angel," Helen said. Dr. Gibson snorted. "Did you see the way he felled that thing? His fists were as quick as thought. Like a professional fighter. One has to question how such a man appeared out of nowhere at just the right moment." "I think he did far less damage to his opponent than you did to yours," Helen said admiringly. "The way you took that ruffian down with your cane- I've never seen anything like it." "My aim was a bit off," Dr. Gibson said. "I didn't connect squarely with the ulnar nerve in his wrist. I shall have to consult with my fencing-master about my technique." "It was still very impressive," Helen assured her. "I pity anyone who makes the mistake of underestimating you, Dr. Gibson." "My lady, the sentiment is returned in full.

According to the American Heart Association, people with type 2 diabetes are two- to four-times more likely to have a stroke and two- to four-times more likely to die of heart disease. Type 2 diabetes can also lead to kidney damage or kidney failure, diseases of the eye and loss of vision, and nerve damage.

There comes a time in every story when the hero finally gets everything they ever wanted. And that's usually when the music swells and the credits roll or the last page turns or we just flip the channel. I believe there's a reason for that. We don't want to spend too much time with somebody once they've gotten everything they've ever wanted. They become insufferable. They become unsympathetic. They start using words like whom properly in a sentence. There's no more mountain left for them to climb, so we're out. We're underdog people. Get out of here with your all my dream already came true nonsense. Just take your football and go home, Rudy. Go live your happy life and let us be. We're already on to the next unlikely story. But what if success was where the real trouble began? What if we got everything we ever wanted, only to find out it doesn't change a thing about not liking this skin we have to do life in, this dirt still caked under our fingernails. That once we go home and tuck ourselves between the cool cotton sheets, where it's just us and the darkness settled in, it hasn't changed a thing about how easily we can lay our head down and fall asleep at night. ... The hero, it turns out, is flawed. Deeply, deeply, deeply flawed. And no amount of success is going to undo that. No relentless pursuit of more is going to erase what was missing. It's going to take digging in and doing the hard work of healing if there's any hope of changing all that. but how do e you gather up the nerve when it already feels so damaged? And is that the kind of story anybody will ever care about? ... We don't really make movies about what happened after someone got everything they ever wanted. About what happens when the hero at last has to come face-to-face with what no amount of success will ever fix. But that's the story we're living now.

As one prone to depression, I find comfort in remembering that Jesus went through the most depressing state possible: being separated from God the Father on the cross. When the nerve damage in my arms is unbearable, I think about the nails that pierced Jesus’s arms right through the nerves. When I go through difficult family circumstances, I recall that Jesus’s family didn’t believe he was Lord. When I miss my friends who live half the world away from me, I remember that Jesus left his throne in heaven to come to earth. When money is tight, I remember that Jesus was poor and didn’t own more than the clothes he wore. When I am facing endless temptation, I know Jesus can sympathize with my weaknesses because he was tempted just like we are. Friend, Jesus knows.

Blood glucose instability is a huge problem that affects the moods of millions of people. The brain accounts for only about 2 percent of body weight, but requires 25 percent of all blood pumped by the heart (up to 50 percent in kids). Therefore, low blood sugar hits the brain hard, causing depression, anxiety, and lassitude. If you often become uncomfortably hungry, you’ve got a serious problem and should solve it. Eat high-protein, nutrient-dense meals, and snack enough to keep your blood sugar up, but not with insulin-stimulating sweets or starches. Remember that hunger kills brain cells, just like getting drunk. Be careful of caffeine, which causes blood sugar swings, and never crash diet. Food sensitivities are common reactions that are not classic food allergies, so most conventional allergists underestimate the damage they do. They play a major role in mood disruption, much more frequently than most people realize. They cause chemical reactions in the body that destabilize blood sugar and wreak havoc upon hormonal and neurotransmitter balance. This can trigger depression, anxiety, impaired concentration, insomnia, and hyperactivity. The most common sensitivities, unfortunately, are to the foods people most often overconsume: wheat, milk, eggs, corn, soy, and peanuts. The average American gets about 75 percent of her calories from just 10 favorite foodstuffs, and this narrow range of eating disrupts the digestive process and causes abnormal reactions. If a particular food doesn’t agree with you and commonly causes heartburn, gas, bloating, water weight gain, a craving for more, or a burst of nervous energy, you’re probably reactive to it. There are several good books on the subject, and there are many labs that test for sensitivities. Ask a chiropractor, naturopath, or doctor of integrative medicine about them. Don’t expect much help from a conventional allergist. Exercise and Mood Dozens of studies indicate that exercise is often as effective for depression as medication, partly because it increases production of stimulating hormones, such as norepinephrine, and also because it increases oxygen flow to the brain. Exercise can, in addition, help relieve and prevent anxiety, creating a so-called tranquilizer effect that persists for about 4 hours after exercising. Exercise also decreases the biological stress response, which dampens the automatic fear reaction. It is also uniquely effective at causing secretion of Nerve Growth Factor, one of the limited number of substances that cause brain cells to grow. Another benefit of exercise is that it increases endorphin output by about 500 percent and decreases the incidence of major and minor illnesses. For mood, the ideal amount is 30 to 45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise daily. Studies show that exercising less than 30 minutes or more than 1 hour decreases mood benefits.

LI-14 Chinese Point name: Bi Nao;14 English translation: “Upper Arm;” Special Attributes: It is the intersection point of the Large Intestine Meridian, the Stomach Meridian, and the Yang Linking Vessel. This point is bilateral; Location: On the upper arm near the insertion of the deltoid muscle; Western Anatomy: Branches of the posterior circumflex humeral artery and vein, the deep brachial artery and vein, the posterior brachial cutaneous nerve, and the radial nerve are present; Comments: Strikes to this point can cause damage to the shoulder joint. They are best if the wrist of the attacked arm is acquired. Energetically, it is a good target due to the three intersecting meridians. TW-13 Chinese Point name: Nao Hui;15 English translation: “Upper Arm Convergence;” Special Attributes: It is an intersection point of the Triple Warmer Meridian and the Yang Linking Vessel. This point is bilateral; Location: On the posterior border of the deltoid muscle about three inches from the tip of the shoulder; Western Anatomy: The medial collateral artery and vein, the posterior brachial cutaneous nerve, and the radial nerve are present; Comments: Strike in same manner as LI-14. SI-10 Chinese Point name: Nao Shu;16 English translation: “Upper Arm Point;” Special Attributes: This is an intersection point for the Small Intestine Meridian, the Yang Linking Vessel and the Yang Heel Vessel. This point is bilateral and extremely difficult to strike in a combative situation. This point is bilateral; Location: In the depression of the inferior of the scapula when the arm is raised; Western Anatomy: The posterior circumflex humeral artery and vein, the suprascapular artery and vein, the posterior cutaneous nerve of the arm, the axillary nerve, and the suprascapular nerve are present; Comments: A strike, if possible, should be directed towards the center of the body on a 90-degree angle. This is an important point because of the major energetic intersection, but is extremely difficult to strike.

The implants were removed, via the nasal cavity, from the nerve centers of the brain - some of her nerves were damaged in the process. This nerve damage resulted in a near-death experience following which, when she

Resolve painful joints. Stop the bleeding before going any further. You now know that working through joint pain means that you are actively fraying connective tissue fibers and damaging nerves. It’s not OK to work through joint pain. Toughing it out is dumb. Plain and simple. So before worrying about your beach body or how you will deadlift 600 pounds, work on establishing a baseline of pain-free movement capability.

And this is the exact fear that fuels neuroplastic pain. When we’re in pain, we naturally conclude that there’s a physical cause. Maybe we believe it’s inflammation or scar tissue or arthritis. Maybe we think it’s a disc problem, or a nerve issue, or a curved spine. Maybe we suspect it’s poor posture or muscle weakness or a vitamin deficiency. Regardless of the specifics, at a core level, all chronic pain patients have the same fear: “There has to be something going on in my body that’s causing this.” And when the brain believes that the body is damaged, it responds with pain. But when you can embrace a different belief—that the pain is due to your brain making a mistake and that your body is fine—then the fear goes away. And soon after, the pain fades.

Technically, “inflammation” describes how the immune system first reacts after it detects a harmful pathogen, something noxious, or a damaged tissue. In most cases, inflammation is rapid and vigorous. Whether the offenders are viruses, bacteria, or sunburns, the immune system quickly launches an armada of cells into battle. These cells discharge a barrage of compounds that cause blood vessels to dilate and become more permeable to white blood cells that swoop in to destroy any invaders. This extra blood flow brings critically needed immune cells and fluids, but the swelling compresses nerves and causes the four cardinal symptoms of inflammation (which literally means “to set on fire”): redness, heat, swelling, and pain. Later, if necessary, the immune system activates additional lines of defense by making antibodies that target and then kill specific pathogens.

the craft was already within the Moon’s gravitational sphere of influence making it harder to ‘reverse’. The engine could also have been damaged in the explosion and restarting might cause an even worse disaster. So Mission Control opted for a ‘free return’, essentially using the Moon’s gravity to hitch a ride and slingshot them back towards Earth. First, Apollo 13 needed to be realigned; it had left its initial free return trajectory earlier in the mission as it lined up for its planned lunar landing. Using a small burn of the Lunar Module’s descent propulsion system, the crew got the spacecraft back on track for its return journey. Now they started their nerve-shredding journey round the dark side of the Moon. It was a trip that would demand incredible ingenuity under extreme pressure from the crew, flight controllers, and ground crew if the men were to make it back alive. More problems The Lunar Module ‘lifeboat’ only had enough battery power to sustain two people for two days, not three people for the four days it would take the men to return to Earth. The life support and communication systems had to be powered down to the lowest levels possible. Everything that wasn’t essential was turned off. The drama was being shown on TV but no more live broadcasts were made.

Not only does turmeric reduce oxidative stress via its antioxidant effects, it reduces inflammation in osteo-cartilaginous tissue.69, 70 And animal models demonstrate that curcumin can help regenerate damaged nerves after injury.

Genetically modified or transgenic mice expressing defective T cells develop a mouse version of MS that begins with paralysis of the tail. The mice avoid this fate if they are treated to a gnotobiotic life, but develop paralysis if they are transferred to cages in which mice with normal guts had been housed and had defecated. Formation of a normal gut microbiota leads to nerve damage. The immune system of the germ-free mice is defective, but, in this case, the faulty defenses do not stimulate disease as long as bacteria are excluded. Another interesting observation is that the severity of the autoimmune response is responsive to the types of bacteria that colonize the gnotobiotic gut. This raises the possibility of treating inflammatory and autoimmune diseases by changing a patient’s diet or through probiotics. We

      Before that first three weeks I was on over 100 units of insulin per day, and in three weeks I was taking no insulin.       In about a month, I was once again in my doctor’s office, watching as they looked at my numbers in utter amazement. When they asked me what I did, I told them I had adopted a completely plant-based diet. They didn’t seem surprised at all and told me that plant-based diets were helping to reverse diabetes. When I asked why they had not suggested it, they told me “because it is not practical.”       There I was, morbidly obese, taking nine drugs, shooting insulin into myself multiple times per day, suffering nerve damage and severe pain, and yet they thought that changing my diet in a fairly easy way would be less practical?

People who don’t know our military very well sometimes seem amazed whenever men like Jordan Haerter and Jonathan Yale make the headlines. On April 22, 2008, those two enlisted Marines were standing watch at a checkpoint outside a joint U.S.-Iraqi barracks in Ramadi when a large truck began accelerating toward their position. Their checkpoint controlled entry to a barracks in the Sufiyah district that housed fifty Marines from the newly arrived First Battalion, Ninth Regiment. They were alert to the VBIED threat and quickly and accurately assessed the situation before them—all the more impressive given that the level of violence in the city generally wasn’t what it had been a few years earlier. Both Marines opened fire immediately, Haerter with an M4 and Yale with a machine gun. Still the truck rushed toward them. Nearby, dozens of Iraqi police fired on the truck as well—but only briefly before their instincts for survival kicked in. Expecting a huge blast, they fled the area. But those two Marines stood their ground, pouring fire into the truck until it coasted to a halt in front of them—and exploded. Later estimates pegged the size of that IED at two thousand pounds or more. The blast damaged or destroyed two dozen houses and knocked down the walls of a mosque a hundred yards away. An Iraqi who witnessed the attack, interviewed by a Marine general afterward, choked back a sob and said, “Sir, in the name of God, no sane man would have stood there and done what they did. No sane man. They saved us all.” Lieutenant General John F. Kelly, who investigated the incident to document the Navy Crosses they were to receive, said, “In all of the instantaneous violence Yale and Haerter never hesitated. By all reports and by the recording [of a security camera nearby], they never stepped back. They never even started to step aside. They never even shifted their weight. With their feet spread shoulder-width apart, they leaned into the danger, firing as fast as they could work their weapons.” Yale, from Burkeville, Virginia, and Haerter, from Sag Harbor, New York, were decorated in 2009 for their steady nerves and heroism in the last six seconds of their lives, saving at least fifty people living

I must have fallen asleep on a rock. It’s digging into my shoulder blade. I scrunch up and start to roll over, but then freeze. It’s not just a single rock. It’s a giant one. Like concrete. I go numb as I realize what this means. It can’t be…I ease open my eye, and then in an instant I’m sitting upright and looking around. And all I see are cars. And people in blue jeans. And street signs. And I smell smog and I hear radios crackling in the passing cabs. I close my eyes for at least ten seconds and then open them again, but it’s all still there. The twenty-first century. I can’t stop my face from falling. I’m back. Just when I’d realized I don’t want this at all, I’m back. My shopping bags are strewn around me. I’m wearing jeans. A T-shirt. My heels. I glance back to realize the Prada shop is still a few yards behind me, just where I’d left it. I’m sitting in the exact spot I’d fallen down. I never left at all. I stay put for a few moments as a pounding headache fades. Alex. Emily. Even Victoria. They were all make-believe. Some figment of my banged-up brain. That means the kiss…God, I made it all up! Every single thing! I want to lie back down, close my eyes, and go back. I want horrible soup and stiff corsets and lump mattresses. I’ll trade it all to see Alex again. To go to Emily’s wedding. A man trips on my foot and then has the nerve to glare at me, even though he basically kicked me in the shin. Yes, I’m definitely in the twenty-first century. I scramble to my feet and wipe the dirt off my jeans and lean over to pick up my bags. And then I notice them. My heels. My beautiful, damaged heels. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, the Prada shop is definitely still behind me. I’ve gone maybe four steps from the door. Nowhere near enough to ruin the heels like this. They’re scuffed, dented, and scratched. I gather up the rest of my bags, my grin in full-force. It wasn’t fake. It wasn’t make-believe or a dream or anything. It happened. As sure as the mud on the heels, it happened. There’s even a dent where the front door of Harksbury bounced off the toe. I don’t know how or why or anything, but somehow, I was there. I danced with Alex and helped Emily. I played a piano for a duke and a countess, and I ate more exotic animals than I ever wanted to. But it happened. I don’t understand it; I only know that the last month was real, and it was the best of my life. I sling the bags over my shoulder and practically skip down the block. No matter what happens next, no matter what happens for the rest of my life, I have something no one else will ever have. An adventure to rival Indiana Jones. A crazy month that can never be replicated.

Among other things, these nerves give power to the muscles and give sensation to the skin. It is through the spinal nerves that you can direct movement and feel temperature, pressure, and pain. These sensations are not just normal parts of life; they also provide a natural alarm system: they warn you that a bodily structure is about to sustain some damage or has already been damaged.

I cannot pretend he escaped unscathed. The extended period of low blood pressure damaged an optic nerve and left him essentially blind in one eye. He didn’t get off the respirator for days. He was out of work for months. I was crushed by what I had put him through. Though I apologized to him and carried on with my daily routine, it took me a long time to feel right again in surgery. I can’t do an adrenalectomy without thinking of his case, and I suspect that is good. I have even tried refining the operative technique

The four officers had been zealous in their work, using their batons to break Rodney King’s cheekbone and ankle and eleven bones at the base of his skull, damaging his facial nerves and knocking the fillings out of his teeth. Each blow, said Rodney King, felt like “when you get up in the middle of the night and jam your toe on a piece of metal.” But the four cops were nonetheless now walking free. Freed by a jury in Ventura County, about an hour’s drive north of Florence and Normandie. Freed in Ventura’s Simi Valley, a then semirural, overwhelmingly white community, with a black population of 2 percent. Known as Cop Heaven by the cops themselves, Simi Valley, along with its sister city Thousand Oaks, had a population of about 4,000 active police officers, many of whom were part of the LAPD’s 7,900-member force. The

What causes cardiovascular disease is the sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in your diet. As

It’s not necessarily a question of vision,” Amy says. “It’s about perception. Like, for example, if I touch her on her left arm, notice how she doesn’t really respond, even though her nerves are working fine. She just doesn’t perceive that I’m touching her. She ignores any stimuli on her left side.

I regard high voltage electricity as one of the most toxic forms of electricity. Few people that come into contact with it survive. The higher the voltage, the less likely it is the person will survive. Those that do survive are typically maimed for life. Losing limbs is common, as are extensive burns, nerve damage and scarring. Having studied it, I will no longer work with it for safety reasons.

Sometimes it takes courage and more nerve to shy or run away for the sake of peace and minimum collateral damages. Pacifists at times demonstrate bigger heart than violent aggressors.

He had a bullet in the arm—the nineth or tenth wound of his life—which had damaged the main nerve; but he seemed to rise above it. After a lengthy and painful operation, with only local anesthetics, he found it difficult to sleep, even with morphia;

Increase your BDNF. Until recently, it was thought that no new brain cells could be grown. That changed with the discovery of a protein called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor). When activated through epigenetics, neurons grow, as do connections between the nerve cells to repair damaged cells. Many things can stimulate the expression of BDNF, including: Aerobic exercise, weight lifting, and regular walking. Quality time in the sun. A traditional Mediterranean diet and foods high in polyphenols and flavonoids, including blueberries, green tea, olive oil, black pepper, turmeric, chocolate, and omega-3 fatty acids. Prebiotics (insoluble foods that good bacteria feed on), such as garlic, lentils, mustard greens, onions, tomatoes, bananas, asparagus, barley, and leeks.

A stem cell treatment is an advanced medical innovation that helps repair and renew damaged nerves, muscles, cartilage, and other tissues. Stem cell therapy in India has been shown to work quickly and safely, and it works well.

At the age of 52 I damaged the ulnar nerve in my right arm during a 2 hour altitude test at 9,200 feet. I was left with a numb little finger and a weakened right hand.

LV-14 Chinese Point name: Qi Men;8 English translation: “Cycle Gate;” Special Attributes: It is an intersection point for the Liver Meridian, the Spleen Meridian, and the Yin Linking Vessel. It is also the alarm point of the Liver. This point is bilateral; Location: Two ribs below the center of the nipple; Western Anatomy: The sixth intercostal artery, vein, and nerve are present; Comments: This point is of considerable value to the martial artist. Strikes to this point should be toward the center of the body on a downward 45-degree angle. Forceful strikes can shock or damage the liver. An interruption of the energy core of the body can result. The additional benefits to strikes to this location are the serious implications of the intersection with the Yin Linking Vessel at the sensitive Alarm point of the Liver. Strikes to this point can inhibit the ability to correct energy imbalances of the Liver caused by martial attacks. CV-22 Chinese Point name: Tian Tu;9 English translation: “Celestial Chimney;” Special Attributes: this is an Intersection Point of the Yin Linking Vessel and the Conception Vessel. It is listed as a Vital Point in the Bubishi; Location: On the centerline of the body at the center of the suprasternal notch. That structure is the commonly referred to the “horseshoe notch” at the base of the throat; Western Anatomy: the jugular arch and a branch of the inferior thyroid artery are superficially represented. The trachea, or windpipe, is found deeper and the posterior aspect of the sternum, the innominate vein and aortic arch are also present; Comments: This point is of particular importance the martial artist as it is the intersection point of the Yin Linking Vessel and the Conception Vessel. The interrelationship between these two vessels will be covered in detail later in the book. Additionally, the structure of the suprasternal notch is an excellent “touch point” for situations when sight is reduced and you find yourself at extremely close range with your opponent. CV-23 Chinese Point name: Lian Quan;10 English translation: “Ridge Spring;” Special Attributes: Some Traditional Chinese Medicine textbooks state that this location is an intersection point for the Yin Linking Vessel and the Conception Vessel; Location: On the centerline of the throat just above the Adam’s apple; Western Anatomy: the anterior jugular vein, a branch of cutaneous cervical nerve, the hypoglossal nerve, and branch of the glossopharyngeal nerve are present; Comments: Strikes to this point should directly inward, or slightly upward, to bust the structure of the Adam’s apple and disrupt the energy flow to the head. Generally, any strike to the throat area will activate a number of sensitive acupuncture points and attacks the structural weakness of this part of the human body.

GV-3 Chinese Point name: Yao Yang Guan;6 English translation: “Yang Pass;” Location: Just below the fourth lumbar vertebra on the centerline of the body; Western Anatomy: The posterior branch of the lumbar artery and the medial branch of the posterior ramus of the lumbar nerve are both present; Comments: Martial attacks to this point, and the majority of the Governing Vessel points on the back, are limited to situations when you are at your opponents back. Strikes to these areas will have to be forceful given the protective nature of the Yang surface of the back. If an opponent is prone on their stomach, after they have been dropped by another technique, then utilize heel stomps to the Governing Vessel to disable them. The hard stomping action will not only shock the energy core of the body, but might also cause structural damage to the spine.

But if you are unable to hypothesize it, the facts that I actually experienced will in the end be no more than a hallucination of the incoherent decadence of a poet whose central nerves are damaged by morphine addiction.

The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure; as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: Can you feel this? Can you say these words? Can you repeat this sentence? They’re constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back off so as not to damage it. Therapists delve into a mind rather than a brain, and we can see from the subtlest gesture or expression if we’ve hit a nerve. But unlike neurosurgeons, we gravitate toward the sensitive area, pressing delicately on it, even if it makes the patient feel uncomfortable.

After Kim started swimming in the cold waters of the bay, she noticed a change in her severely nerve-damaged right leg: it had more feeling in it. She had a theory that she ran by her physicians in those early days. “All the blood is sucked from your extremities to protect your organs when you get in that cold water,” she explains, in her lilting New Zealand accent, during one of our marathon phone calls after work one evening. (When she’s not training or traveling the world for swims, she has until recently been working as a director of community engagement for Adobe, the software company.) “Couldn’t it be possible that when the blood rushes back into those extremities after you warm up again, that you’re getting a kind of oxygen therapy? That there’s a higher rate of it being flushed around your body?” Her doctors said they could see the validity in it, with oxygen circulating at a much faster rate than if Kim were sedentary or even exercising on land. The result: her nerves were regenerating at a swifter pace relative to that of the previous two years.

The sheer numbers associated with chronic disease, the magnitude of the medical and financial iceberg, make a mockery of this approach. The toll of the seven most common chronic diseases, in costs and lost productivity, was $4.2 trillion in the United States in 2012, up from $1.3 trillion in 2003.4 Chronic diseases account for more than 65% of corporate health-care costs. In a single year, there were almost 0.5 million new diabetes diagnoses for Americans ages twenty to forty-four, and 1 million new diabetics aged forty-five to sixty-five. Those are just the people who felt bad enough to see a doctor. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 79 million Americans are pre-diabetic, which means their bodies are teetering on the edge of a disease that leads to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, and limb amputations if it isn’t controlled.5 Those people can be pulled back from the brink to some kind of normal future if they decide to make some significant changes in their lives. Unfortunately, 65% of employers in a large 2011 survey cited the difficulty of motivating employees to change their behavior as their top health-care challenge.

Hidden hearing loss Some people have typical audiogram results, yet have trouble hearing in certain situations. Others have more trouble understanding than expected for a certain type of hearing loss. This is known as hidden hearing loss. People with hidden hearing loss usually have trouble understanding speech in environments with a lot of background noise but can hear sounds — even someone whispering — in a quiet room. Historically, experts have focused on damage to hair cells or nerves in the ear as a potential cause of hidden hearing loss. The thinking is that this hearing loss is caused by the aging process and exposure to loud noises. But other, bigger issues may be at play: Loud noises can cause a loss of connections between inner hair cells and the auditory nerve (synapses). Audiograms are performed in quiet rooms, and only a few synapses are needed to hear in this situation. But if there is a lot of competing noise, the ear must try to process the sound by activating certain synapses. When these synapses are lost, signals may become more muddled, leaving the brain to struggle to understand the message.

My high altitude injured right hand is recovering. The hand itself is not injured, it is the injured nerve in the arm that is causing muscle wasting in the hand. It seems to be bruised. Injured nerves can take 1-2 years to recover. Given that it has shown an extensive recovery already, I expect it may fully recover in a year or so. The damaged nerve was an occupational hazard of being an altitude researcher!

A series of altitude tests I had done in a day on Hawaii island damaged my right ulnar nerve. I had been to view the volcano at night at 4,000 feet. It was freezing cold up there!

It’s human nature to be rigid in your long-held beliefs; it’s scientific to challenge them.

the Chinese, almost three thousand years ago, saw the fungus sprouting from the exploded bodies of caterpillars and thought they had chanced upon a magical metamorphosis. A creature that was an animal in summer and a mushroom in winter! They prized Cordyceps as a treatment for heart disease and impotence, the distilled essence of life itself. Later generations found that the fungus could grow through damaged nerve tissue and partially repair it. There’s a prevailing theory that these medicinal uses of the fungus were the precursors to the hungry plague—the doorway through which Cordyceps infected human populations.

If your fruit smoothie seems too tart, add a bit of salt and taste it again—it will be sweeter. •​Brush your teeth. I have a patient who found this really helped. I’ve told other patients about it and they swear it works. •​Try taking supplements of the amino acid L-glutamine (this isn’t the same thing at all as MSG). Glutamine is an essential part of the complex process that tells your body your blood sugar has dropped

The link between sucrose and obesity, with its compounding symptoms of high blood pressure, high blood glucose, high cholesterol, as well as ancillary conditions such as migraine headaches, carpal tunnel syndrome, gallbladder disease, irritable bowel syndrome, reflux disease, and other chronic health issues, is irrefutable.

Robert Lustig, pediatric endocrinologist and professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, simply calls sugar poison.

In addition to this, chronically high levels of pressure upon nerve trunks is itself detrimental to their electrical activity, apart from such general circulatory complications. Some researchers have estimated that five pounds of pressure for five minutes on a nerve trunk can reduce its transmission efficiency by as much as forty per cent. In time, the results of these pressures can be the sharp ache of sciatica generated by the rotator muscles of the hip, numbness or tingling sensations in the hands from the neck muscles clamping down on the brachial plexus, chronic pains in the face and the head from pressure on the trigeminal nerve, and so on. And of course, since the nerve supply to internal organs can be similarly effected, such chronic constrictions can bring along a wide range of organ dysfunctions in its train of events as well—organ dysfunctions that can be extremely difficult to diagnose and treat because no “disease” state exists and no observable damage has been done to specific organ tissues. Indeed, the complications for circulation and neural transmission which follow in the wake of chronic muscular contraction present some of the gravest potential dangers for the health of the nervous system, and of the body as a whole. Loss of neural efficiency means a less and less vivid reception of the messages that the nerves convey, both from the sensory endings and to the motor units. And areas of the body that are not adequately irrigated stagnate precisely like the choked and swampy backwaters of a sluggish stream, creating septic situations that are ripe for discomfort, disease, and decay. Nor should we forget the facts that increasingly constricted capillaries require higher and higher blood pressure to make them function at all, and that once they either collapse from the muscles squeezing them or burst from increased blood pressure, they will be replaced with scar tissue and not by new capillaries, thus making the local loss permanent.

The left strap was torn from the pleated bodice but did not appear to be otherwise damaged, it should be easy to mend. More difficult would be the long jagged tear in the skirt, upward from the hem on a bias. She could hear still the shriek of the delicate fabric as if her very nerves had been ripped out of her flesh.