Received wisdom often isn’t. I started my book with this quote which has resonated with me lately:

I like to think about cosmology and recently at a Renaissance Weekend, I even had the privilege of attending a “flat universe” lecture by one of the scientists in this video, Dr. Lawrence Krauss.  I think he was very polite at dinner to entertain my weird questions about whether time was real and consciousness was not a form of energy. That’s why I love those weekends…

http://youtu.be/PpQdMM6Vr70

Science provides robust explanations whether we choose to believe them or not. The experts say that both the Theory of Relativity (which addresses space-time and then posits black holes and neutron stars) and the Theory of Quantum mechanics (which allows for observations to change behavior and even causation) both “explain” a lot and yet are missing a common ground of agreement.  Received wisdom says we should unite these two illogical theories and find “quantum gravity”.  But when I watched this video recommended by my patient, it had a very different ring of truth.  It suggests that electromagnetism is a much greater factor than gravity in the formation of the universe:

http://youtu.be/5AUA7XS0TvA

Another example: a friend told me a few months ago that if you breathe through the right nostril, it heats you and if you breathe through the left, it cools you. I assumed that since, as a reasonable well-educated medical doctor, I had never heard of this, it was probably not true.  I do hot yoga about 5-7 times a week and guess what?  At the start, my left nostril is closed and after warm-up, my right is blocked.  Power of suggestion?  Maybe?  Or maybe my body is just doing something it was designed to do!  At any rate, this phenomenon (or basic function) has been “known” by yogis for thousands of years:

http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/2483

What is the point of all this?  Well when I read about all these great new studies linking stress and everything else to telomere shortening, I want to tell people it’s not just an association, but is a matter of direct causation.  Bad environment, consciousness, habits, etc all act via incomplete telomere maintenance and repair to damage stem cells.  Just because no one agrees with my theory yet, that doesn’t make it untrue.  I’ll just wait here until everyone else decides to see the obvious: that there is only one disease.  They might not unify gravity and subatomic particles without more consideration of electromagnetism (and maybe even consciousness, Dr. Krauss)… but the undeniable truth about Aging and Disease being the same condition by virtue of telomere dysfunction is coming soon.  Read all about it in my book, “Telomere Timebombs: Defusing the terror of aging.”

http://telomeretimebombs.com/