Health news this week announced that new research confirms previous studies showing that babies born in summer months are healthier on some measures than those born in winter months.
The idea that summer birth confers lifelong benefits, and winter birth is associated with degenerative stressors is nothing surprising for people who view the body as operating according to the same general principles as large bodies, like planets or stars, or others kinds of things, even rocks, sheets of metal, trees, sunlight, water, smoke, or an ice cube. These people I’m referring to are biophysicists who are thinking about the principles of non-equilibrium physics and the extent to which they can be applied to the functions of the human body. This is not meant as a metaphor, but as a genuine aid in explaining metabolism. The body is not like other systems, it is other systems, just to a limited extent. The application of physical principles shouldn’t reduce one’s thinking—simplify away its most complex features—about metabolism, but enhance it. Reductive thinking is often a mistake of fatigued minds rather than a project to commandeer disciplines for lesser scholars, though it could be a combination of both. Teaching reductive thinking is so easy and resisting it is tricky. It’s easy for academics to become distracted by their methods and forget the original problem they might try to solve.
For laymen, maybe it’s enough as an introduction to understand that in this view the body works according to thermal, luminescent, acoustic, electromagnetic and nuclear, gaseous, fluid, and other principles. The passage of time imposes short-term effects that can be at odds with long-term outcomes. You’d accustom yourself to thinking in terms of the biological effects of light, effects of radiation and electromagnetics, bioelectric fields, physical therapies, transport processes, diffusion, acid-base balance, open- vs. closed-systems, temperature, energy potential, acoustic effects, pressure, structure, oscillation, and so on. These are a tiny sample of possible types of biological investigation. The field is not young, but it is underdeveloped, especially in the United States.
Laymen have a beautiful advantage over academic biophysicists here: “And why not?” one might say. The answer to this question has to do with how new views of the body transform into entrenched, establishment views, and also the historical development of science and medicine both separately and together. It’s complicated, but it’s not difficult. These are political questions.
The people who have embraced this view have some special problems with announcing themselves to the world. The view is marginalized by establishment biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular biology because they regard this new biophysics as a “border science” at best. The new biophysicists have so much to do and so many methods to do it with, that the differing assumptions of their individual areas can be as much an obstacle to a unified view of the body as establishment marginalization. The political work of the new biophysics is to keep internal differences from blocking the bigger unity of the movement. The new biophysicists have to find each other, articulate their views, and work on how best to connect their work. This is expensive in time and money.
The name of this field isn’t settled. Most universities don’t have departments with courses in this, so few students know this exists, are learning it or doing graduate work in it directly. It is variously referred to as biophysics, the new biophysics, medical physics, physical biology, biophotonics, and still other names according to what methods are used to investigate. Fortunately, the field is not big enough to have a settled name. It’s not a new field, it is a parallel, specialized field of biophysics, biochemistry, and molecular biology while being none of these only. The beginnings of it are traced to the mid-to-late 19th century depending on what area of physics is being investigated.
Anyone who wants to study the new biophysics does this independently, without strong institutional support. Liberation from the quid pro quos of academic direction is never easy. Academic training is inherently conservative and the new biophysicians must either study established questions and break with their academic mentors, modify the presentation of their work, obscure its meaning, or break with their academic institutions. Like legislation in the congressional system, there are so many more points at which one might fail to persist than to succeed and thrive. The history of the new biophysics is peopled by interdisciplinary thinkers with the largest number of them working in Germany and Eastern Europe.
The reason this view of metabolism is important is because it is so straightforward. The body metabolizes its environment by the same tendencies and principles as ice is made from water, fissionable molecules create powerful chain reactions, or wood is burned by fire in the presence of oxygen. These are a layman’s interpretation. These are not metaphors. The beauty of this view is also political: while an expert in physical biology may apprehend and teach complex examples of biological processes, an amateur--and everyone—lives daily by the basic principles of physics. The implication is that rehabilitation of a degenerated metabolism is also straightforward and within the grasp of an interested layman.
Many people want to be told what to do to make their headaches or fatigue go away. Not everyone has the desire, confidence, or energy to tinker with their own metabolism. The drama of the medical diagnostic process and treatment has an emotional attractiveness and satisfaction to it today. Diagnostic testing is unpleasant and treatment gives some meaning to suffering in a consumer culture where the individual is valued as dollars to transfer. A bioenergetic view can say that disease and distress is fundamentally caused by one thing, poor metabolism. Metabolism becomes a general term for an organism’s interaction and identity with its environment, and disease and distress are adaptations that facilitate movement through an environment where there is too much or worse types of tension. The environment metabolizes the organism instead of the other way around.
The implication of a bioenergetic view is that improving metabolism is a matter of rate, temperature, tension, oscillation-like movement (peristalsis or Parkinson’s for example), nervous response, growth and decay, differentiation of tissues and functions, nutrition, light, and fitness between one’s body and its environment. Treatment for disease and distress would include identifying the sources of and adaptations to stress and distress. Relieving disease and distress might include identifying the most easily digestible nutrients for energy and repair, supplements that cannot be gotten readily in the diet, considerations of the fitness or adulteration of the food supply, interventions to mitigate distress, exhaustion and recuperation. It would not be unusual if a bioenergetic view stressed mineral balance, light, quiet or harmonious surroundings, easily digestible calories, social connections, and interventions that relax the body, open the mind, or even alter the consciousness.
© Celise Schneider 2015
Image: pixabay
Notes:
Hamori, Eugene, (2002) Building a Foundation for Bioenergetics. In Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education, Vol. 30, No. 5, pp. 296-302. onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Popp, F-A., and Beloussov, Lev, eds. (2003) Introduction to Integrative Biophysics. In Integrative Biophysics: Biophotonics, 1 - 115, Marco Bischof, Dordrech/Boston/London, Kluwer Adademic Publishers.
Peat, Raymond. (2009) Intelligence and Metabolism. raypeat.com
Peat, Raymond. (2015) Serotonin: Effects in Disease, Aging and Inflammation. raypeat.com