...almost every medical and mental health condition seems to be linked in one way or another.
It’s refreshing to hear a doctor of modern American medicine who has the imagination to think outside of the box say what practitioners of alternative medicine have always postulated. I have just finished reading Sleep Interrupted by Steven Y. Park, M.D. I heard about his theory of a cause of GERD from reading the comments section of one of Dr. Mike Eades’s posts.
But his theory goes way beyond just GERD. It encompasses snoring and sleep apnea, panic attacks, heart conditions, depression, hormone problems, migraines, tinnitus, and even mononucleosis. There used to be a television show called Connections with James Burke. In this and other science documentaries that he did he would connect various seemingly disparate items and tie them all together in a spellbinding story. I loved that show and I hope that by the end of this post I will have made clear to you how the four things in my title connect and you may be surprised that the connection is not what you think.
Basically, Park deduced that one possible cause of all the disorders I mentioned is lack of sleep or interrupted sleep. OK so far, but he goes further to state that the sleep problem is due to narrowed airways caused by things like enlarged tonsils, flimsy nostrils, and tongue collapse. And he acknowledges the work of Weston Price who discovered significant jaw structure narrowing in people who ate a western type diet. The jaw narrowing creates crowded teeth and may be the reason almost none of us has room for our wisdom teeth any more. But more about Price later.
Park’s GERD theory is that when we relax in a deep sleep, our tongue may sink back in our throat enough to block the airway completely causing a vacuum that sucks up the acid from our stomachs. He also mentions a condition called LPRD (laryngopharyngeal reflux disease) which is mostly silent causing throat clearing, post-nasal drip, hoarseness, cough, etc. This happens when the acid reaches the throat. For those of us with the type of insomnia that causes early morning awakening (3 or 4 AM), his explanation is that at that time of the night, we are in REM sleep and not such a deep sleep as earlier, and the obstruction of our breathing naturally wakes us up. Sometimes we awaken so briefly, we are not aware of it. Other times, we wake completely and have trouble getting back to sleep. Do you dream anymore? If not, this may be an indication that you are not getting enough REM sleep.
Dr. Park’s remedies include sleeping on the left side instead of the back, dietary changes, relaxation techniques, following your circadian rhythm and many others we have heard before. Alas, he also offers expensive tests, devices, and of course surgery.
Although I started reading Park’s book because I wanted to find out more about his theory of GERD, I ended up being more fascinated by the connection I found to Buteyko breathing techniques which I have had to go back to recently due to contracting walking pneumonia. The pneumonia infection set off my asthma which caused me to return to my breathing exercises and to re-read Dr. Paul J Ameisen’s book Every Breath You Take finding new connections and ideas there.
Buteyko was a Russian doctor who discovered that a major cause of asthma and other breathing related disorders was over-breathing or hyperventilation. This chronic hyperventilation is not enough to cause panic attacks, although it can, but it does cause the body to defend itself by closing down the airways with inflammation and mucous discharge. Why such a defense? Buteyko believes that our bodies actually need more CO2 not more oxygen, that life formed when the Earth’s atmosphere had much more CO2 in it than it does now. Through evolutionary changes that took place as the atmosphere lost its CO2, our bodies adapted by retaining CO2 in the avioli of the lungs. When we over-breathe, the balance is upset and our body reacts to slow down our breathing to retain the CO2 by blocking the airways. Furthermore, through the Verigo-Bohr Effect lowered CO2 levels can cause the oxygen in our blood to get more “sticky” and actually deprive the cells of oxygen!
Oxygen enters the lungs, goes into the blood and is trapped by the haemoglobin molecule. How easily it is released, to feed the body cells, depends on the levels of carbon dioxide.
I haven’t been able to corroborate Buteyko’s thesis about the need for more CO2, but if he is right, this has implications for a number of diseases and many of them the same ones that Dr. Park mentions—asthma, emphysema, allergic rhinitis, sleep apnea, hypertension, angina, anxiety, and eczema.
One reason for this over-breathing that Ameisen doesn’t mention are the narrowed passageways that Dr. Park does describe, specifically narrow jaws that are the result of our parents and grandparents consumption of refined wheat, sugar, and processed foods. Who can forget the before and after pictures that Price shows in his classic book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration showing native peoples with wide mouths and straight teeth (and no periodontal disease) when they consumed their traditional diets, compared with the children of those natives who were born after the introduction of western foods. Narrowed jaws, besides other problems, forces us to let our tongue sit too far back in the mouth thereby partially obstructing our throats. My theory is that this causes us to feel oxygen-deprived and as a result to over-breath to compensate.
And that’s also my connection to wheat. I picked wheat out of all the other foods that cause Price’s description of physical degeneration because, to me, it seems to be the worst offender. If you select wheat on Dr. William Davis’s blog, you will find that he has nothing good to say about wheat.
Another dentist who has written about this subject is Raymond Silkman, D.D.S. Silkman offers one easy remedy for those of us who suffer from this problem and it again involves the tongue. Silkman states that the proper placement of the tongue is up and forward with the tip of the tongue just behind the front teeth. A narrow jaw specifically a narrow upper palate and crowded teeth will prevent the tongue from resting in its proper location. I tested myself for the tongue blockage that Park described and found that while lying on my back and with my tongue up and forward, I could breathe more easily. When I let my tongue go back to its normal position for me, which is about half-way back, my throat was blocked partially. If I relaxed my tongue completely, then my throat was blocked completely.
The most important orthodontic appliance that you all have and carry with you twenty-four hours a day is your tongue. People who breathe through their nose also normally have a tongue that postures up into the maxilla. When the tongue sits right up behind the front teeth, it is maintaining the shape of the maxilla every time you swallow. Every time the proper tongue swallow motion takes place it spreads up against maxilla, activating it and contributing to that little cranial motion, that cranial pumping that we discussed earlier. Individuals who breathe through their mouths have a lower tongue posture and the maxilla does not receive the stimulation from the tongue that it should.
So to put it together, I was born with a narrow jaw (the dentist gives me a child's toothbrush as a parting gift) with some crossed teeth due to my mom eating wheat (and other processed foods), which causes my tongue to sit too far back in my mouth, which causes me to mouth breathe and over-breathe, which is one source of my asthma, and have total tongue collapse at night which causes me to wake in the early AM and not get as much sleep as I would like and may be the cause of my GERD as well. Remedies: Buteyko breathing, i.e. light, shallow breathing, taping my mouth shut at night to keep it closed thereby forcing me to breath through the nose, sleeping on the left side, consciously moving my tongue up and forward, and oil pulling. Yes, oil-pulling. I’ll have to explain that last connection in another post. This one is long enough.
The very high surf and tides of the morning were coupled with very low, slightly negative tides in the afternoon during my recent trip to the Morro Bay area. How lucky can you get? So on the second day of hiking at Montana de Oro State Park, I climbed down the steps into Corallina Cove to check out the tidepools. It was weird looking back towards the cliffs from the beach because all of it had been underwater in the morning.
Walking out on these rocks was not easy. The rocks formed ridges and on top were wet seaweed, aggregating anemones, and tar, all of which were very slippery. The marine animals tended to embed themselves in the ridges, too, making photographs difficult.
True to its name, the cove had an abundance of coralline algae. There was also an abundance of black turban snails. In fact, there was a general abundance of sea life. Everywhere you looked, there was something.
All of my old friends from Abalone Cove were there including the aforementioned aggregating anemones, ochre sea stars, and sea urchins. At first, I thought there were no urchins but when I took a closer look at my photos, I saw them hiding deep in the crevices of the rocks. Perhaps they were hiding from the sea otters which now range along the California coast from San Francisco to Santa Barbara County. This large anemone is a giant green anemone (Anthopleura xanthogrammica) that lives in the cooler waters of Central and Northern California. It does not have the radial lines on the center disk that the starburst anemone does.
I did find one bat star all by itself close to the shoreline. There were probably others, hiding.
For most of the afternoon, I was by myself although several small groups of people came and went while I was there. Many birds joined me as well and they came quite close to me. (Except for the photo of the Oystercatcher which is a smaller bird, none of these photos has been cropped.) They seemed to know that I couldn't move very fast on those rocks and they were hungry. They probably had been waiting for low tide all day and I was just an inconvenience. Above is one of several Snowy Egrets that came to feed.
This one Great Egret I had found in the morning clinging for dear life to a rock when the surf was crashing all around it. Later it was up on the mesa searching for something to eat in the grass. And finally, here it was down on the rocks at low tide. This is probably the real reason it hung around the shore.
A few other birds showed up that we do not often see in Southern California. One was this Glaucous-winged Gull and another was the Black Oystercatcher below. Here's a fascinating photograph of the Western, Thayer's, and Glaucous-winged Gulls clearly showing the differences between them. In fact, this site has an amazing number of photos showing gulls in their various phases (it takes the larger gulls four years to mature and every year they look different making identification very difficult).
The Oystercatchers were very noisy, making screeching sounds as they flew. That fluorescent red-orange bill and eye is unmistakable.
