Part One<<<
THE FIRST INSIGHT:
Oxygen, Spontaneity of Oxidation in Nature, and Aging

Fresh peaches left on my kitchen table spoil within days. That happens spontaneously. That means that those peaches are pre- programmed to spoil with time and do not need any external signals. That natural process of decay is called oxidation. In scientific terminology, oxidation is a loss of electrons and energy.

I have not seen spoiled peaches become unspoiled. So spoiled peaches are not programmed to unspoil spontaneously. That means the process of spoiling of peaches (loss of electrons and energy) is unidirectional. Just as it is natural for water to flow downstream spontaneously, it is natural for fresh peaches to lose electrons and energy.

The human body is also preprogrammed to age spontaneously. Thus, aging is an oxidative process that does not require outside cues. People do not un-age. Notwithstanding the loud noises made by some in the "anti-aging industry," the notion of anti-aging is silly. A disease state, in essence, is a state of accelerated aging. The core health problem of human canaries is that they are trapped in the quicksand of dysfunctional oxygen metabolism that markedly speeds up the aging process.

What is the basis of oxidation being a spontaneous process? Here is a simple explanation: Electrons exist in atoms in spinning motion, and it is natural for electrons to spin off (fly away) unless something keeps them in place. That something is the weak pull on them by the nucleus of the atom. The electrons are forever looking to leave their nest as soon as they can break loose from that weak force.

An atom is in an eternal struggle to keep its electrons from running away. When electrons do finally break away, that is oxidation. That is the phenomenon of spontaneity of oxidation.

When an atom loses an electron, it loses energy. When a molecule loses electrons, it falls from a higher level of energy to a lower level. Every cell in every tissue in every organ is forever undergoing this loss of energy. Anything that "pushes" the electron will speed up that process of electrons running away. Many elements (such as anger, poisons, and microbial infections) increase the rate of oxidation.

We taste life in freshly squeezed vegetable juice. A stale juice is flat and lifeless. That happens because fresh vegetable juice loses electrons. That, in simple words, is the mechanism by which a flower wilts, cut grass decomposes, a fish rots, and iron rusts. That is also the mechanism by which lymph in the muscles of human canaries becomes stale and toxic. The result is muscle soreness and pain. This is a core concept, not only because it gives us the essential and fundamental theory of aging and disease, but also because it provides us a sound and scientific basis for developing our therapies.

The importance of the phenomenon of spontaneity of oxidation to issues of healthful aging and premature aging is this: Oxidation initiates itself and then feeds upon itself. Regardless of how oxidative injury begins, it fans its own fire. Thus, every moment of anger, every undiagnosed food reaction or mold allergy, every antibiotic abuse, every exposure to pesticides and industrial pollutants, and every addition to the toxic metal burden counts. All such oxidants speed up the aging process. In many cases, those oxidants turn simmering oxidative coals into leaping oxidative flames.

The opposite of oxidation is reduction, which does not happen spontaneously. That explains why an aging human does not spontaneously "un-age," why a wilted flower does not spontaneously become unwilted, why decomposed grass does not become un- decomposed, and why a rotten fish does not become unrotten. Nor can rusted iron unrust by itself. I devote the chapter, "The Oxygen Order of Life and Aging," to this subject. For additional reading, I suggest RDA: Rats, Drugs and Assumptions.

THE SECOND INSIGHT:
Oxygen and its Many Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde Roles

I have been a student of medicine for forty-two years. In medical school, I learned to hold newborns upside down and gently slap their backs if they did not begin to breathe within moments after the delivery. Of course, breathing is about oxygen. I was taught that even a minute without oxygen can hurt the delicate brain of the baby. I also learned then about the other face of oxygen. Pure oxygen can make newborns blind. Thus, oxygen is essential for life, but it is also highly toxic. Ever since, the molecular duality of oxygen has fascinated me. The more I have studied it, the more I have discovered the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde roles of this element.

Oxygen is the master Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde molecule of human existence. It is the ultimate spin master. It ushers life in. It terminates life. It drives the human metabolism. It is the currency of all human energy transactions. It is nature's most potent antibiotic, the most efficient scavenger, and the most competent detox molecule. Oxygen picks up an extra electron and becomes superoxide, a vile oxidant. It then spits out that electron and becomes an innocent bystander molecule. Then again, it picks up an electron and becomes a hormone.

Mothers pour hydrogen peroxide on the wounds of their children to clean them. The sight of the clear liquid hydrogen peroxide turning into bubbles symbolizes cleansing action. Of course, it kills microbes and that is why it is used for wounds. One way the hunter immune cells in the blood and tissues kill microbes is by producing hydrogen peroxide. But why does this clear liquid bubble when poured on wounds? How does it kill microbes? The simple answer: It liberates nascent (active) oxygen, which ruptures microbial walls by pulling out their electrons. When three atoms of oxygen dance as a threesome in a ring-around-the-rosie (ozone, as we call it in common language), they both protect us against cancer (by strengthening the immune system in the pure medical form) and increase risk of developing cancer (when in the polluted, highly toxic form). The mechanism for both effects is the same: Ozone breaks down to safe oxygen in the air as well as unsafe nascent oxygen. Whether ozone damages the DNA and sets the stage for the beginning of cancer or upregulates antioxidant defenses against the oxidative fires of cancer cells depends on many factors. I discuss this subject further in the chapter, "The Oxygen Order of Life and Aging."

We age healthfully when the body manages oxygen well. We age prematurely and often turn into human canaries when oxygen metabolism becomes dysfunctional.

This is a simple statement, but one that all students of the aging phenomenon as well as all human canaries must truly understand. The recovery of human canaries from disabling oxygen disorders literally depends on it.

THE THIRD INSIGHT:
Oxygen, Oxidative Coagulopathy, and the Absence of Health

It is one of the profound ironies of American medicine that mothers diagnose absence of health in their children long before pediatricians do. It is common for me to see children who suffered repeated ear infections and sore throats for years. Their mothers wondered why the children were always getting sick and finally concluded that something had to be wrong with the children's immune systems. And yet, their pediatricians repeatedly insist there was nothing wrong there. I have concluded following a careful review of thousands of case histories of persons with chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome that a state of absence of health preceded their chronic illnesses. It took me many years of work as a surgeon and a pathologist to see that cells and tissues do not go to bed healthy one evening and wake up sick the next morning.

A clear zone of absence of health separates
the domains of health and disease.

Below, I reproduce some text from the companion volume, Canary Two: Oxygen and Fibromyalgia, that describes one such case history in the words of the mother of a teenage fibro canary:

I told Karen's first pediatrician that she sleeps all the time and her whole body aches. The pediatrician replied, "Take it from me. I'm a mother. Karen is eleven now. She will grow out of it. Give her some Tylenol." Months later, she changed her mind and told us that Karen was making herself sick and that we should take her to a psychiatrist. Several months later, Karen's headaches became more frequent and we saw two more pediatricians. The same story. They had no clue to what made our daughter sick. Then Karen had episodes of dizziness and she passed out a few times. Her pediatrician referred us to a pediatric cardiologist. The cardiologist ordered a tilt-table test that turned out to be positive. He prescribed Florinef for six months. Initially we thought the steroid drug was helping, but that proved to be temporary. Karen's situation continued to get worse. She had abdominal cramps, cold hands and feet, and blurred vision. The eye symptoms really bothered her because she couldn't read for periods of time any more. We saw yet another pediatrician. The fourth pediatrician diagnosed chronic fatigue and said that it is something Karen had to live with and we had to cope with. And that there was no treatment for that, however she might get better on her own.

(Karen regained her health several months later after treatment at the Institute and went back to school. I saw her some years later. She was then a vigorous teenager.)

In my pathology work, I frequently diagnosed precancerous conditions. I recall clearly one particular conversation I had with an oncologist many years ago. The bone marrow biopsy I examined showed an excess of plasma cells, some with irregular features. I told him that the patient needed to be watched closely for a developing myeloma, a type of bone cancer. He replied, "Yes, I will watch him. When he develops myeloma, I will hit him hard with chemotherapy." Of course, I had heard similar comments many times before. Somehow that time his words hit me hard. I simply could not shake them off. We physicians love to pay lip service to preventive medicine. But how does one prevent disease with blocker drugs such as beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, enzyme inhibitors, and other drugs that impair or block important molecular and cellular mechanisms in the body? What drugs could he use to stop that marrow from turning malignant?

It has been years since that conversation with that oncologist. But the words often return to me. Every time I hear a fibro canary describe how antibiotics and steroids were abusively prescribed for him or her for years before fibromyalgia was diagnosed, I think of that oncologist. How can we physicians not see something that obvious? Between the state of health and a state of disease there must be a state of dis-ease (a state of absence of health) that offers us an opportunity to prevent disease. That requires that we think of nutrition, food reactions, mold and other allergies, pesticides, synthetic hormones, total body burden of toxic metals, industrial pollutants, stress and anger. But all of that, of course, is considered quackery in drug medicine. And so the opportunities for preventing fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other oxidative-dysoxygenative disorders are missed.

CONTINUE WITH PART 3 OF THIS ARTICLE>>>