Luca Turin is a biophysicist with a brilliant mind that has the wonderful ability to think out of the box. Luca Turin is not only a scientist with creative ideas but also a parfume reviewer of the New York Times. So, he has not only got a special mind but a special nose too!
Scent is known as an ancient sense developed in all mammals with high similarities.
But how does smelling work, how do the receptors in our nose process the signals they receive from myriads of molecules, and what does it mean if things smell the same even if they are made out of the most different matter and even if they look so very different as if they had nothing in common.
Luca Turin works on the proof of a new theory of scent based on the vibration frequencies of molecules. He is so to speak analyzing our nose spectroscope 
. His scientific oeuvres is based on the work of Wright and Dyson who brought up this idea first.
In this post I would like to come back to the problem of exercising and racing respectively in the heat. Also this text refers to a publication on the blog of »The Science of Sport«.
Especially in exercise science over-heating is primarily outlined as induced by the environment: bright sunshine with high temperatures, high humidity and dehydration. All documented reports account for other reasons than environmental ones. Even though the view that heat stoke is a cause of hot weather is prevailing doggedly. Just recently when I have been at the triathlon world championship in Kona on Big Island, Hawaii, heat and humidity has been the big issue. It has become a major topic of the pychological warfare taking place around this tough race.
Nobody can doubt that the environmental conditions there are extreme, nevertheless heat stroke is not a common problem among the athletes. To raise your doubts concerning the well accepted scientific concept of heat stroke and temperature regulation I want to draw your attention upon the fact how different various people perceive temperature. There are those who dress with short sleeves and a sleeveless jacket even if the temperature is a good deal below 10°C and there are others who feel chilly if the thermometer displays comfortable 20°C and above. And moreover, it is common sense that our feeling for temperature is not a stable constant condition but changes depending on our body’s condition. His ability to regulate and adapt the weather situation is only one variable and obviously not of such crucial importance (the fact of heat loss, production and storage is certainly there, e.g. evaporization, radiation and convection)
I think when it comes to thermoregulation in the cold insulation becomes central, nevertheless excessive endogeneic heat production and »heat stroke« may be possible. Of course, we won’t use this term, but the phenomenon remains the same, I suggest.
But now back to the article of Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas. Thermoregulation they state is a far more complex physiological phenomenon than a simple balance between heat loss and heat production.
John Francis has been walking the Earth and kept silent for 17 years.
Since many weeks I did not find, did not want to find the time to listen to a TED talk. I was too busy, too noisy, too blithering… Here is somebody I think we can learn a lot from in times of overwhelming noises, sounds, words, pictures of all kinds moving or still… take a breath and listen…
One day in 1983, John Francis stepped out on a walk. For the next 22 years, he trekked and sailed around North and South America, carrying a message of respect for the Earth. During his monumental, silent trek, he earned an MA in environmental studies and a PhD in land resources. Today his Planetwalk foundation consults on sustainable development and works with educational groups to teach kids about the environment.
»Part of the mystery of walking is that the destination is inside us and we really don’t know when we arrive until we arrive.« John Francis
Those who visit my blog on a regular basis and those who already touched base with biestmilch know probably that biestmilch is a stress modulator and therefore a remedy in the most different diseases, occasions and conditions. Now, I just bumped into an article on the American Scientific’s website about the implications of stress on the immune system, a publication that cites two studies. Here is an excerpt.
Ohio State University psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her partner, Ronald Glaser, an OSU virologist and immunologist, have spent 20-odd years researching how stress affects the immune system. They worked with caregivers for years, a job that definitely brings up a lot of stress situations.
In one experiment, Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues administered flu vaccines to caregivers and control subjects and compared the numbers of antibodies that the two groups produced in response. Only 38 percent of the caregivers produced what is considered an adequate antibody response compared to 66 percent of their relaxed counterparts, suggesting that the caregivers’ immune systems weren’t doing their jobs very well—and that the stress of caregiving ultimately put them at an increased risk of infection.
The immune system steers healing processes
This an essential aspect that athletes should pay attention to. Many of them who suffer from injuries, or undergo operations don’t take into consideration that an intact immune system is pivotal for recovery which is identical with healing. The two above named researchers were also able to demonstrate how stress affects the healing process. Immune responses are responsible for healing, Thus, if immunity is impaired, then it should also affect how well the body heals itself. In one particularly study the scientists afflicted a group of caregivers with small arm wounds using a tool dermatologists use to perform skin biopsies. The caregivers’ wounds took 24 percent longer to heal than wounds that they had afflicted to non-caregivers.
They performed yet another experiment in which they produced tiny lesions in the mouths of—quite appropriately—11 dental students at two different points in time. Once was during their summer vacation, when they were relaxed, and once was during the fall, several days before a difficult exam. The lesions done before the exam took from two to eight days longer to heal than the summer wounds. For some subjects, the exam wounds took nearly twice as long to get better.
In her most recent study, Kiecolt-Glaser found that when people are under lots of stress—for instance, when they are forced to deliver a speech or do difficult math problems on the spot—their allergies worsen over the course of the next day.
Stress and its regulation by the stress system (nervous system, immune system and hormones) is essential for our well-being. Stress are all stimuli that endanger our body’s balance. There is a lot more to say, if you feel for reading more then go to the American Scientific about Stress or to our Biest-Magazine.
This post refers back to the one from yesterday that outlines the scientific approach to proove a cause by a »post-hoc assumption of a cause-effect relation«. Conclusions drawn like this are fairly arbitrary and result in data that drift and seem incorrect as soon as the standpoint of observation changes.
Under whatsoever extreme environmental conditions heat stroke is a rare event that funnily enough occurs under conditions that would never let us assume it to happen. The proof of concept is easily performed by a mathematical equation that should not be applied to real life, to real persons, because of its over-simplification.
But mathematics clearly shows that heat loss even in extreme situations like hot temperature over 35°C, no wind, high humidity, bright sunshine and low running efficiency exceeds heat storage.
The example:
Theoretically this runner cannot experience a heat stroke, no, he is even able to evaporate more heat. To keep his body temperature exactly the same, he would have to evaporate 1.5 L of sweat per hour. The calculation also reveals that it would be possible for him to evaporate 1.6 L of sweat per hour. This means that he has no problem loosing the heat he produces, and should not develop heatstroke
But the story of real life turns out to be completely different:
This runner, running in these conditions, was pulled out of the race after only 16 minutes, with a rectal temperature of 40.8°C! Therefore, despite the fact that there were no limitations in the environment, and the fact that he COULD have lost all the heat he produced, he failed. And the result was that he developed heat stroke after less than 4km of running!
Read whole article on www.sportsscientists.com
Results of studies in sports science, exercise physiology or medical science are often controversial. A very good example is body temperature and heat stroke. I found an excellent argumentation on the sportscientist’s blog. It is recommended to all athletes who do believe so much in science and its methods. Take a look out of the box. The following is an excerpt of an article that fits perfectly well biestmilch’s philosophy and scientific approach.
Calvin (the young boy, for those who haven’t discovered Calvin and Hobbes) asks his father a seemingly simple question, and gets an absurd answer. Yet incredibly, this is how exercise scientists have approached certain problems for many years – fatigue and temperature is the most obvious of them! So we study what happens at failure (exhaustion) and then infer the cause backwards from there! For example, when studying fatigue, many exercise physiology studies make runners or cyclists exercise at a fixed workload until they are absolutely exhausted and then measure things at the point at which they stop, assuming them to be the cause.
Experience tells another story
Regardless of the air temperature, humidity and windspeed, your body temperature will regularly hit about 39 degrees celsius, with no ill effects whatsoever – it’s a controlled “hyperthermia”, and you’re halfway to heat stroke without ever even realising it! It’s actually amazing to consider how exercise makes the “abnormal” feel normal. Take a physiological snapshot of yourself during a 10-mile tempo run and your heart rate is 175 beats per minute, your breathing rate 54 breaths per minute, your body temperature is 39 degrees celsius. A doctor presented with those statistics would likely admit you to an ICU, yet you feel absolutely perfect during exercise!
How you feel is not necessarily the same as how you are are.
A similar concept applies to exercise. And the point of all this is to introduce the issue of heatstroke to you. Your body is a remarkably designed machine, capable of losing far more heat than you might realise. Yet it chooses to allow you to gain heat and you become “hyperthermic” during exercise even on cold days.
Whole article on www.sportscientist.com
Standimprovisation
Vier Jahre reisen wir bereits regelmäßig nach Baden-Baden zur Medizinischen Woche. In diesem Jahr war es ein enttäuschender Ausflug. Wahrlich handverlesen waren die Besucher bei unserer eigenen Veranstaltung. So einen Vorfall könnte man ja noch eigenem Versagen zuordnen und nach Verbesserung streben. Nein, es war so: Ganz allgemein waren auch bei den anderen Workshops, Vorträgen, Symposien – man mag es nennen wie man will – nur wenige Besucher zu erspähen.
Die Kongressorganisation scheint diese Tatsache gelassen hinzunehmen. Es werden nach wie vor unzählige Parallelveranstaltungen angeboten, zwischen denen die Besucher mehr ferngesteuert und willenlos als zielgerichtet interessiert umherdriften. Es fällt ihnen offensichtlich schwer zu entscheiden, wohin sie sich wenden sollen.
Schon im letzten Jahr hatten uns Zweifel befallen, ob wir diese Veranstaltung noch besuchen sollten. Nun ist es Gewissheit. Ein Kongress, der einen sehr guten Ruf hatte, ihn auch immer noch hat, denn der Ruf hält ja meist länger vor, verspielt langsam seinen Bonus.
Biestyabody am Pier, Hawaii
Für mich stellt sich jedenfalls die grundsätzliche Frage, wie ein kleines und innovatives Unternehmen wie Biestmilch Seven mit Therapeuten ernsthaft und nachhaltig kommunizieren kann. Unser Vortragsthema, die Allergie einmal jenseits der eingefahrenen Geleise zu betrachten, nämlich als einen Aktivitätszustand unseres Organismus und die Allergene aus der Schusslinie zu nehmen, hätte eigentlich eine interessante Diskussion ergeben und neue therapeutische Wege beleuchten können.
Wir werden alles überdenken müssen, so auch unser Standkonzept. Biest ya’ body ist unser Motto für 2009 
