6 Books That Changed How I Think About Health: Part 2

Discover how unresolved trauma may influence the autonomic nervous system, cortisol, immune function, mitochondrial activity, and other measurable physiological processes.
Understand why Dr. John believes environmental factors such as electromagnetic fields deserve more attention when thinking about chronic stress and cellular health.
Learn how Gerald Pollack’s work on the “fourth phase of water” offers a different way to think about hydration, cellular energy, sunlight, and the body’s internal environment.

About the Expert

John Nieters, LAc, DAOM, CFMP

Dr John Nieters

Dr John Nieters has been teaching and practicing the combination of Functional Medicine paired with Traditional Chinese Medicine for several decades. He has been practicing Tai Qi, Qi Gong and meditation for 50 years.He has hosted over 500 call-in talk radio shows on "The Balancing Point." He currently lives in Alameda, CA with his wife, Jenny and son, Johnny. His wife, Jenny, is the acupuncturist for the 49ers football and St Mary's Rugby team.He has authored the book "The Sweet Spot," on how to read your blood work and plans to have two additional books published this year.Dr John's patients, staff and listeners call me the "Story-teller".

If you have 15 minutes of anger, your immune system will be greatly depressed the next day. I mean, the first day, too, but the second day it will still be depressed.

And that's why a lot of professional athletes, like football players, tend to get sick on Mondays. They go out and beat each other on Sundays. It's a very cerebral game, actually, football, and massively physical.

Then there are certain immune functions that almost shut down, so they're very vulnerable at the beginning of the week. Hi and welcome to The Balancing Point.

I'm Dr. John Needers and I am here to make traditional Chinese medicine, functional medicine and integrative health simple, practical and fun so you can restore balance, boost vitality and enjoy a healthier life every single day.

Hi, this is Dr. John. I wanna thank you for joining me here on another episode of The Balancing Point. And today we're going into the second part of our six book recommendations for the fall and into winter.

The first book I'm gonna talk about is called The Biology of Trauma by Amy Apigian. They don't know if I pronounced her name correctly. Apologize if they didn't.

Amy is a medical doctor and this book was recommended by Catherine Black. And so Amy's statement is that trauma lives in the body as a biology, not just a memory.

Now most of us are quite aware, if you're listening to this podcast in particular, that you can have particular areas of the bodies worked on or even touched and particular memories will come up.

That's because the mind and the body are not separate. So in the West, they've come up with this kind of ludicrous idea that the Body and The Mind are separate entities.

Well, you can't have a thought that doesn't affect your body. That is why lie detectors work. You can have the feeling in your Body that does not affect the brain.

It's not possible. In fact, in Chinese medicine, The term for the heart is xin, X-I-N in Pinyin. And that is most properly translated as the Heart-Mind, because the hear and the mind have huge, huge connection.

So Amy, not coming from a Chinese medical perspective, as far as I know at least, bridges psychiatry and physiology by showing how unresolved trauma literally, literally alters the autonomic nervous system.

Also, your hormone signaling, you mitochondrial function. We know from cell danger response that the mitochondria can almost completely shut down and produce one-fifteenth as much energy in some people, particularly after trauma.

It also controls immune regulation. And these are all measurable physiological states. That's kind of one of the main points that she's making is that these can all be measured.

We measure them all the time, by the way. we do it with tongue, we deal with pulse, but we also do with a ton of different Western medical testing, a lot.

I've been doing that for over 25 years, testing for certain immune functions to see how trauma was affecting people. By the way, we know that if you have 15 minutes of anger, your immune system will be greatly depressed the next day.

I mean, the first day, too, but the second day it will still be depressed. And that's why a lot of professional athletes, like football players, tend to get sick on Mondays.

They go out and beat each other on Sundays. It's a very cerebral game, actually, football, and massively physical. Then there are certain immune functions that almost shut down, so they're very vulnerable.

at the beginning of next week. or irregular cortisol patterns, dysregulated, blunted oxytocin levels. Oxytotin is kind of the love hormone which bonds mommy to baby and so you'll have blunted oxytocin which means your relationships will suffer.

You'll have dysregulated vagal tone. And about a year and a half ago, I don't know who started talking about, but practically every patient that came in said, Hey, can you work on my vagus nerve?

And I just laughed. I said I can't not work. On your vagous nerve because so much of Chinese medicine is based upon that. Um, so. You actually then get altered gene expression, which is fascinating.

And Amy goes into how that occurs, making trauma a treatable medical condition with lab guided protocols. That's really great news. So, you know, people think they have to spend a lifetime on a couch talking to a psychiatrist.

Now I'm not saying that's not helpful. It is often. But if you treat it on the physiological level, You can get far faster results. I know our number one most treated group of patients are therapists that's because they're sitting thirty four hours thirty or forty hours a week having to work with people that have severe trauma so they get traumatized from that and what so we refer to quite a few therapists And to a person they say, if my patients are doing acupuncture while I'm treating them for anxiety, depression, whatever it is, they get well in about half the time.

And I found the same thing. If they're going to good therapist while we're treating for them anxiety or depression they will get much faster. It's just a complete circle of healing that way.

And so Amy points out how to do these recoveries. Many of them you can do on your own. Some of require medical intervention. And Stanford University has done several studies on stress, on chronic stress and the effects.

Depending on the study, They show that between 50 and 90 percent, depending on how you judge it, of all medical visits have their root in stress. Think about that, 50 to 90%. And the last couple were higher, around 90%, and what's the cause of this?

What causes the illness? Well, you get immune disruption. While short-term stress can temporarily boost immune defenses, prolonged or chronic stresses really, really depletes them.

You also get cardiovascular damage because you elevated blood pressure certainly while you're under stress. Also, you get elevated levels of epinephrine and norepinephrin, which affect how the heart pumps.

But you'd get diminished levels at many other chemicals that would protect the art. One test that I've been doing over 25 years is secretory IgA. Secretory IGA is every few cells lining your mucous membrane from top to bottom in your body is secreting secretory IgA.

So that's an immunoglobulin. There are several different types of immunoglobulins. Ig A is specifically on the mucous membranes. And so what it does is multi-fold.

It's a antibody defense and it's a special protein made by your body, but it is really kind of a mucosal shield. So, your mucus membranes are lined with mucos, which is why they are called muxosals.

But every few cells, as I said, secretes secretory IgA which will go out into the hollow spaces and grab offending viruses, whatever is not supposed to be there, bacteria, etc., and will guide it out of your system.

Now, stress affects IgA, but the cortisol release lowers Ig A. Immune suppression, high cortisol supports the, I mean… tells your immune cells to slow down production, it lowers defenses, and it's an infection risk.

And the side effects are frequent colds, gut issues, microbe imbalance. So if you have any of those, you want to think about secretory IGA, which means you wanna think of your stress levels.

Stress affects everything. Next book I want to talk about is The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Furstenberg. Now, really the first four books that I mentioned, although they've got some relatively powerful and new ideas, there's not anything really controversial.

I mean, this is all well proven in the scientific community. This next book is deliberately unsettling. That's what the author was gunning for, I'm sure, and that's the point, right?

He's talking about electromagnetic radiation. And he says it's accompanied every major wave of disease in modern history. Whenever a new type of electromagnetic field is introduced, he said we get a wave a particular illnesses.

That's a controversial position. By the way, Dr. Becker wrote a book called The Body Electric, where he says the same things, but he couches it much less unsettling terms.

If you want something that's little harder to read, more difficult in the languaging, a little calmer, you might do Beker's book. He talks about telegraphs, radar, radio, mobile networks.

I live in a condominium, and when I go to turn on my Wi-Fi, I have a choice of about 20 different networks that come up immediately. And if my computer's picking it up, my body is picking up.

The body speaks, the cells talk to each other. That's not controversial, we know they do. We actually know the frequencies at which they talk each to other, so anything that disrupts that communication is going to cause problems.

You know, after smart meters came in, in my area, I had a wave of people coming in that were suffering from unusual conditions that kicked in. And so I'd ask them, did you get a smart meter put in?

And I asked them because I was seeing so much of it. and they would say, i don't think so. I said, go look. They looked and then they installed a Smart Meter because the city didn't tell people.

The electric company didn' tell. People, they just went out and installed them. In fact, if you don' want a SMART meter, you have to pay extra. Now, there are ways you can protect yourself even from those.

But anyway, this book is pretty deliberately unsettling. And the other book that I thought about mentioning instead of that is an older book called Healing is Voltage by Jerry Tennant.

There he makes the whole case. He shows great diagrams of how the body is essentially a battery. As long as we know, until maybe 150 years ago, people were in contact with the earth most of the time, right?

They slept on hay, on the ground. So they were contact the with ground and now there are people that go their entire years without grounding out. They're wearing shoes with rubber and leather soles, they're on homes that have wood floors, et cetera.

And so they are not grounding and that's extremely unhealthy. Now, I'm not recommending that you go get a grounding pad. There are some pluses and minuses about those, but I am recommending you get out barefooted, somewhere that is safe, just sit in a chair if you want, under your favorite tree, and put your feet bare footed on the dirt.

It's amazing the difference that can make. And so, going back to Healing is Voltage, he argues that all the organs of the body have different voltage readings.

And that's been really pretty well proven. We have another scanning device that we use and it can tell the voltage of your organs. It's pretty astonishing.

And so he outlines, Jerry does, how chronic disease is fundamentally a state of low voltage. These studies started in the 50s with Dr. Voll in Germany where he did 10,000 studies on voltage and how to balance it out to make people healthy.

So just think, you know, if you use sensitive enough instruments, The voltage of the heart, the electrical energy of heart actually, can be measured up to 10 feet.

Now I've had other people say it was farther than that, but the studies that I have seen have proven upto about 10ft. You can feel the electromagnetic field of your heart.

We're surrounded by other electromagnetic fields. And as you know, you get interference. They won't interfere with each other. So the great book is The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Furstenberg.

Our sixth book, and probably the most fun in my estimation, is the Fourth Phase of Water by Gerald Pollock. Again, this one was recommended by Catherine.

The book's fascinating, but what I found even more fascinating. I've got it written down here. He did a 2013 lecture called The Fourth Phase of Water on TEDx.

So if you see the demo, it's even fun because he actually shows how our ideas of water are totally untrue. Well, not totally. There's a fourth phase that he talks about, which makes all of the rest of it have sense.

bugs, insects, et cetera, skimming along the water. And they said that was from surface tension. But yeah, but what is that? What's causing that. What is the dynamic?

And in Furstenberg's book and in his videos, he goes into some pretty compelling evidence for this fourth phase of water and Water is structured and in our bodies it's structured in a particular way because it has positive and negative charges.

And so those will line up in particular ways in nature and our body. So we have what are called hydrophilic surfaces, that means they love water, and hydrophobic surfaces that mean they hate water.

When these forces get balanced out you get what's called an exclusion zone with unique electrical, optical, and energetic properties. It's amazing and it really behaves more like a liquid crystal than our concept of what water is.

And so easy water, is what he calls it exclusion zone, Is the engine of cellular energy. and sunlight recharges it. That's why it's so critical to get sunlight on your skin every day without sunscreen.

Did you know that sunscreen wearers have higher rates of cancer? Yeah, and now it's not the sunscreen per se. It's what they put in the sun screen that causes the problems.

But go out, cover your face. You don't want to get too much sun there. Maybe cover you hands, but try to as much exposure. Wear shorts. Go out without a shirt if you can.

And get the Sun exposure because it directly charges cellular energy. it also directly charge your mitochondria. Is the best mitochondrial charging tool.

Now, when people are at my clinic, I can't send them out in the sun while we're treating them, but we put them on red light and infrared light beds, which recharge their mitochondria.

And it's fascinating. They not only lower blood pressure, they increase energy. Now that's a tough combo to do. And so he reframes how we understand hydration, reframe how understand disease, how reframed how he understand healing.

Now these techniques have been used by the East Asian medicine for at least 2,000 years and in Ayurvedic medicine probably 5,00 years. We're just now proving how it works, not that it work, we've known that works.

but we're proving how. So I'd say get the book, The Fourth Phase of Water, and definitely go on YouTube and find The fourth Phase Of Water by Dr. Gerald Pollock.

That concludes our six book recommended reading list. You could do one a month and that'll take you almost through winter. And so you'll see that the body's far more interconnected far more intelligent and environmentally responsive than we are led to believe.

And there are reasons we're led not to belief that. So read the books, check them out, leave a comment. Love to hear from you. Thank you very much. Have a wonderful, wonderful fall season.

Feeling out of balance? Most approaches just manage symptoms. Here we get to the root. So real healing, real clarity and balance can begin. Visit alamedaacupuncture.com.

That's alamedaacupuncture dot com to learn more, explore our supplements or book a call. We'd love to hear from you.

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6 Books That Changed How I Think About Health: Part 2

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Alameda Acupuncture

Ancient medicine for our modern world

6 Books That Changed How I Think About Health: Part 2

About the Expert

Recent Posts

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Interested in knowing if we are the right fit for you and your condition?