[BenV]

I think one of the chief ethical issues here is that in order to prove that IBT works, we must ask people to forgo all other treatment of their condition for as long as it takes for the IBT to work.  This is a nightmare, and certainly contributes to why you're finding it so difficult to get people to test it.  As I think we've said before, if the NHS could use something free like IBT, they would, but they can't stop treating people with medications that already have been proven to work in order to test one that hasn't.

I know it's frustrating, but you're going to have to take it slowly.  If more people are willing to forgo their conventional treatments and test IBT, and more of their doctors willing to write up the results, you will eventually build up the body of evidence required for a full study.

Edit - and I think you'll have some issues when making comments like

My claim is that gravity is driving the circulation!

  It's not, the heart is.  I expect gravity does have some part to play, but it's certainly not what drives the circulation.  Making bold claims like this will make it harder for people to take IBT seriously.  Try to be more modest about your hypothesis, let the results speak for you.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Ben. There are no treatments for varicose veins that work, other than surgery. This is precisely why varicose veins have been chosen to show how IBT works using gravity to change the pressure inside the veins causing them to be pulled in rather than bulging out, hence the statement that gravity drives circulation. In the case of the heart, let us remember that the heart is not formed first in a developing chick embryo. Circulation is in place before the heart forms. This is called primary circulation. A pulse is observed in simple tubular vessels long before the heart is developed. What then is driving this pulsatile circulation? Clearly it is not the heart!

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Another point is that a flat bed is used with most patients and people who are healthy. This is not taken into account with all of the other medications, and clearly does not assist varicose veins to return to normal veins.

[_Stefan_]

...hence the statement that gravity drives circulation. In the case of the heart, let us remember that the heart is not formed first in a developing chick embryo. Circulation is in place before the heart forms. This is called primary circulation. A pulse is observed in simple tubular vessels long before the heart is developed. What then is driving this pulsatile circulation? Clearly it is not the heart!

I'm tired of reading that argument. As far as I can determine from my online search, embryonic blood circulation begins with the contractions of the primitive heart. Where is the evidence that gravity, not the developing heart, is responsible for pulsatile blood circulation in early embryos? Gravity probably does affect circulation, but the key word is "circulate", for which a pump is required. You only need common sense and a basic understanding of physics to see that.

The early embryonic vascular system permits circulation through a series of incompletely fused and developing channels. Before the heart is fully formed, the flow of circulation is diffuse rather than strongly unidirectional as it is in the atrial and venous systems of later fetal development. Movement of blood through the early embryonic vascular system begins as soon as the primitive heart tubes form and fuse. Contractions of the primitive heart begin early in development, as early as the initial fusion of the endothelial channels that fuse to form the heart.

http://www.bookrags.com/research/vascular-system-embryonic-developme-wap/

The embryonic vertebrate heart begins pumping blood long before the development of discernable chambers and valves. At these early stages, the heart tube has been described as a peristaltic pump.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5774/751

[Bored chemist]

Another point is that a flat bed is used with most patients and people who are healthy. This is not taken into account with all of the other medications, and clearly does not assist varicose veins to return to normal veins.

Most healthy people (in the West anyway) watch television. So it's clear that watching television doesn't stop you getting varicose veins. Does that mean that not watching television will prevent them?
Of course not.
Yet you seem to be saying that a flat bed doesn't help so an inclined bed will help.

You have also said that your "therapy" is based on inclining the bed in the oposite direction to that which has been shown to give relieif . Do you think that makes sense?

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

You need to research some more Stefan. Primary circulation is in place long before the development of the primitive heart. No circulation = no heart developing! I have seen video footage of the primary circulation in a developing embryo. No rotation of a chick egg = no chick developing. Why do you think rotation is important to stimulate development in a chick embryo? It may also be worthwhile studying the effects of microgravity during orbit on chick development. Here is the clue! No pump is required for circulation. The oceans appear to get around this problem. So does a central heating system with a flow and return simple hot water sytem. No pump involved here. The water cycle itself appears to circulate without a pump too. How's that for a little common sense?

By using a soft walled closed loop of tube with say 5 mils of salt solution at one point. Elevating the tube so the salt solution flows down one side, we can see the wall of the tube bulging due to the pressure changes caused by the falling solute. = Pulse. In fact injecting pulses of salt solution in the closed latex tube we can see a pulsatile flow. On the other side of the tube in the return flow however we see the tube necking so one side is under positive pressure and the other side is under tension or reduced pressure.

Of course the primary circulation would appear to be defuse. Why wouldn't it? There are no circulatory pathways formed yet in the gelatinous egg. The food source being at the centre of the egg is in the ideal place for gravity influenced migration through the albumem.

Comparative Phisiology and Biochemistry
Changes in density and viscosity of chicken egg albumen and yolk during incubation
Dr. Hans-Jürgen Meuer, Christoph Egbers
Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, Zentrum Physiologie, D-3000 Hannover 61, Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract
In early stages of avian development, respiratory gas exchange takes place mainly through the blood vessels of the yolk sac membrane. Therefore, a short distance between the yolk sac membrane and the eggshell is required to ensure a sufficient oxygen supply of the embryo. In freshly laid eggs the yolk sphere is located approximately in the center of the egg, but soon after the beginning of incubation it moves to the upper pole right beneath the eggshell. The cause for this displacement is not known. To quantify the forces acting on the yolk sphere of chicken eggs during incubation, we measured the densities of albumen, yolk and subembryonic fluid and the viscosity of the liquid albumen. We found that between day 0 and day 4 of incubation the calculated buoyancy due to density differences between the egg components increases only threefold. This is probably too small to overcome the yield stress of the gel-like thick albumen that forms a capsule around the yolk sphere. A different process responsible for the yolk displacement is proposed. Under reduced gravity, the movements of the yolk are influenced substantially by the fluid properties of the thin albumen, especially yield stress. Furthermore, acceleration peaks present in a space laboratory will probably displace the yolk sphere away from the eggshell. This is strong evidence that an early chick embryo will not be able to survive in a space laboratory in ovo.
Received: 21 October 1989; Accepted: 6 December 1989

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1002/jez.1402550104  About DOI

 

...hence the statement that gravity drives circulation. In the case of the heart, let us remember that the heart is not formed first in a developing chick embryo. Circulation is in place before the heart forms. This is called primary circulation. A pulse is observed in simple tubular vessels long before the heart is developed. What then is driving this pulsatile circulation? Clearly it is not the heart!

I'm tired of reading that argument. As far as I can determine from my online search, embryonic blood circulation begins with the contractions of the primitive heart. Where is the evidence that gravity, not the developing heart, is responsible for pulsatile blood circulation in early embryos? Gravity probably does affect circulation, but the key word is "circulate", for which a pump is required. You only need common sense and a basic understanding of physics to see that.

The early embryonic vascular system permits circulation through a series of incompletely fused and developing channels. Before the heart is fully formed, the flow of circulation is diffuse rather than strongly unidirectional as it is in the atrial and venous systems of later fetal development. Movement of blood through the early embryonic vascular system begins as soon as the primitive heart tubes form and fuse. Contractions of the primitive heart begin early in development, as early as the initial fusion of the endothelial channels that fuse to form the heart.

http://www.bookrags.com/research/vascular-system-embryonic-developme-wap/

The embryonic vertebrate heart begins pumping blood long before the development of discernable chambers and valves. At these early stages, the heart tube has been described as a peristaltic pump.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5774/751

[lyner]

You've been going on about 'gravity driving the circulation' for ages now. Gravity is not a source of energy. Once something has fallen down you need energy from somewhere else to make it go up again. If you use falling salt to cause circulation then you have to get the salt back up again in order to sustain the circulation. This needs energy from somewhere else. In all your experiments YOU lifted the salt up high to provide the energy.

As far as the heart is concerned - surely you know that the blood vessels (arteries) contribute to the circulation by contracting as well as the heart muscles. Primitive systems have little more than a length of muscular pipe to provide circulation.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

BC,
Good that you mentioned sitting posture as a contributing factor. Bad sitting posture causes haemorrhoids. These are painful swollen veins. This affects most people who are confined to wheelchairs, particularly those with spinal cord injuries. The loner you sit, the greater restriction is placed on the veins and the more likely they are to inflate. That arterial pressure has to go somewhere. I suspect if you spent far too long watching tv without changing your posture as would be the case if you had paralysis, you would experience swollen veins.

If you were to modify your posture while watching tv so that your knees were at all times lower than your bottom, there would indeed be less chance of developing swollen veins. But more to the point, if you have swollen veins, then simple modifications to your posture are all that is required to rectify the problem, as shown clearly in the photographs provided by Alun.

The relief from oedema and varicose veins provided by tilting the bed head down or indeed elevating your legs is temporary, in that it shifts fluid from the affect part of the body back towards the upper part of the body, it does not draw the fluids from the surrounding tissue back into the venous return as IBT does, but offers a simple mechanical way to cause the fluid to migrate back into the body from the elevated limbs. The problem with this is that when we stand up again the fluid rapidly returns back to the lower extremities. The veins do not recover using a bed tilted this way, hence the 5-6  hundred million pounds a year spent on operations which are destined to fail miserably because operating on veins does not address the cause of the pressure that inflated them in the first place.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

WRONG! The conduits are filled with fluids, so no need to lift the salt up because it is already circulating in the body and in the tree for that matter. To cause a gravity flow and return circulation all that is required is for evaporation from the fluids laden with salts and sugars to take place. The lungs, skin, hair, eyes, respiratory tract all evaporate water. So do the leaves of a tree. So we alter the density at the top, this causes it to fall due to the direction of gravity, this causes the more dilute fluids to circulate and tension is applied to the content of the gut or indeed the roots of a tree to pull more water and solutes back in to replace the fluids lost by evaporation and urination in the case of the body.

I lifted the experiments up high to provide a visual display of what is undoubtedly taking place inside the body and inside the tree. Evaporation is the key consideration. To ignore the fact that evaporation will always result in a change in density is insanity! A leaf cannot evaporate solute free water from a fluid that contains solutes without concentrating the solutes. This is totally and utterly impossible!

You've been going on about 'gravity driving the circulation' for ages now. Gravity is not a source of energy. Once something has fallen down you need energy from somewhere else to make it go up again. If you use falling salt to cause circulation then you have to get the salt back up again in order to sustain the circulation. This needs energy from somewhere else. In all your experiments YOU lifted the salt up high to provide the energy.

[BenV]

A pulse is observed in simple tubular vessels long before the heart is developed. What then is driving this pulsatile circulation? Clearly it is not the heart!

But a gravity driven circulation system would have no pulse.

The lungs, skin, hair, eyes, respiratory tract all evaporate water. So do the leaves of a tree. So we alter the density at the top, this causes it to fall due to the direction of gravity, this causes the more dilute fluids to circulate and tension is applied to the content of the gut or indeed the roots of a tree to pull more water and solutes back in to replace the fluids lost by evaporation and urination in the case of the body.

But the vascular system in a tree is not a closed loop.  Also, the kidneys and small intestine alter blood density far more than the lungs, so wouldn't this imply that we would have circulation only as far as the kidneys?

And another point - the circulation in an adult with varicose veins is hardly comparable to that of a developing chick foetus - you cannot escape the fact that there is a bloodly great pump in the system.  Have you ever compared the rate of solute flow downwards with gravity against the rate of flow in any direction from the heart?  I haven't, so would be interested to hear how it works out - I suspect the heart vastly overpowers gravity.

[lyner]

The lungs, skin, hair, eyes, respiratory tract all evaporate water.

So if you stood on your head, it would work the other way round?

Why do we bother to have a heart if we could just use your system? How much energy does your evaporation system generate? Have you done the sums? How much energy is needed to drive the blood around the  system? Does your proposed mechanism produce enough? Without some numerical evidence, your proposed idea is just not Science. (I think I've mentioned this to you before)

[JnA]

What surprises me most is the simple fact that VV are caused by a breakdown of the very structures inside our veins that fight gravity.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Not at all Ben,
Each breath we take releases a pulse of salts down the main artery.

Renal filtration is altered in relation to gravity. Head down tilt produces urine with near water density. You can test this, I have mentioned it before. IBT provides us with much denser urine output than flat bed rest and head down bedrest.

The heart rate decreases by 10-12 beats per minute on IBT. Yet circulation is improved. So if the heart beats less and circulation increases how do you account for that?

The late Professor Hammel wrote several papers on this subject. A paper on how solutes alter pressures inside vessels. A discussion with him by phone revealed he had already observed pulses of solutes arriving at the kidneys.

Am J Physiol. 1995 May;268
Roles of colloidal molecules in Starling's hypothesis and in returning interstitial fluid to the vasa recta.
Hammel HT.
Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Indiana University, Bloomington 47405, USA.
To begin to understand the role of colloidal molecules, a simple question requires an answer: How do the solutes alter water in an aqueous solution? Hulett's answer deserves attention, namely, the water in the solution at temperature and external pressure applied to solution (T,pe1) is altered in the same way that pure water is altered by reducing the pressure applied to it by the osmotic pressure of the water at a free surface of the solution. It is nonsense to relate the lower chemical potential of water in a solution to a lower fugacity or to a lower activity of the water in the solution, since these terms have no physical meaning. It is also incorrect to attribute the lower chemical potential of the water to a lower concentration of water in the solution. Both claims are derived from the teachings of G. N. Lewis and are erroneous. Textbook accounts of the flux of fluid to and from capillaries in the kidney and other tissues are inadequate, if not in error, as they are based on these bogus claims. An understanding of the process by which colloidal proteins in plasma affect the flux of nearly protein-free fluid across the capillary endothelium must start with insights derived from the teachings of G. Hulett and H. Dixon. The main points are 1) colloidal molecules can exert a pressure against a membrane that reflects them and, thereby, displace a distensible membrane; 2) they can alter the internal tension of the fluid through which they diffuse when there is a concentration gradient of the molecules; and 3) only by these means can they influence the flux of plasma fluid across the capillary endothelium. However, the process is complex, since both the hydrostatic pressure and protein concentrations of fluids inside and outside the capillary vary with both position and time as plasma flows through the capillary.

A pulse is observed in simple tubular vessels long before the heart is developed. What then is driving this pulsatile circulation? Clearly it is not the heart!

But a gravity driven circulation system would have no pulse.

The lungs, skin, hair, eyes, respiratory tract all evaporate water. So do the leaves of a tree. So we alter the density at the top, this causes it to fall due to the direction of gravity, this causes the more dilute fluids to circulate and tension is applied to the content of the gut or indeed the roots of a tree to pull more water and solutes back in to replace the fluids lost by evaporation and urination in the case of the body.

But the vascular system in a tree is not a closed loop.  Also, the kidneys and small intestine alter blood density far more than the lungs, so wouldn't this imply that we would have circulation only as far as the kidneys?

And another point - the circulation in an adult with varicose veins is hardly comparable to that of a developing chick foetus - you cannot escape the fact that there is a bloodly great pump in the system.  Have you ever compared the rate of solute flow downwards with gravity against the rate of flow in any direction from the heart?  I haven't, so would be interested to hear how it works out - I suspect the heart vastly overpowers gravity.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

My science produces results not equations!
I point again with a finger toards Aluns photographs. 6 months of IBT and nice flat former varicose veins speak louder than a billion sums. May I also remind you of the curent banking crisis. Here the maths all made perfect sense to those who lacked common sense.

The lungs, skin, hair, eyes, respiratory tract all evaporate water.

So if you stood on your head, it would work the other way round?

Why do we bother to have a heart if we could just use your system? How much energy does your evaporation system generate? Have you done the sums? How much energy is needed to drive the blood around the  system? Does your proposed mechanism produce enough? Without some numerical evidence, your proposed idea is just not Science. (I think I've mentioned this to you before)

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

JnA good point about the valves and structures of the veins. The photographs Alun has provided us with show that damaged valves could not have been the cause of the pressure that produced varicose veins. He should have had surgery, but fortunately decided to give IBT a chance.

What surprises me most is the simple fact that VV are caused by a breakdown of the very structures inside our veins that fight gravity.

[lyner]

Akf:
Your 'Science' doesn't produce results. Some of the things you do have been associated with good effects on a few sufferers. What you have achieved may have been contributary towards benefits. That can only be good and very well done.
However, your explations for some of these phenomena are not justified by the results you quote. There is no connection.
If you think that 'equations', somehow, just don't apply to Science where you are concerned then you are clearly wrong.
Stick to recounting your successes but try to avoid indulging yourself with fanciful explanations. If your explanations were accurate then most of proven technology would not work.

[lyner]

AKF

The heart rate decreases by 10-12 beats per minute on IBT. Yet circulation is improved. So if the heart beats less and circulation increases how do you account for that?

You would expect the heart rate to decrease when you are not standing. There is less work for it to do. The blood pressure at the interfaces in the kidneys will also be affected by the attitude of the body. How do either of these facts justify your new model of the body?

Did your friendly Proff tell you that the 'pulses of solutes' he detected at the kidneys were, in any way, related to breathing rate? I hate to ask this but have you actually calculated () the change in density of the blood as it goes through the lungs due to evaporation? Surely the actual amount would be highly relevant to whether or not you were right in your theory. Perhaps that would be a bit too like hard fact for your liking.
Needless to say, the effect on circulation to the head would be in the opposite direction as the heart would need to be pumping more dense blood upwards. Did you not think it through?

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Sophie. First of all thank you for the praise. I have taken a screen shot just in case I have been dreaming it.

Give me the benefit of the doubt here.

1.Why on earth would I want to tilt a bed head up by 5 degrees unless I had a sound reason to do so?
2. Why would varicose veins shrink after only 4 weeks of titled bed rest if there is no connection with the inclined bed therapy logic?
3. Why on earth would anyone give up 15 years of their life to investigate the effects of tilting a bed on many medical conditions and then face hostility and ignorance from those who should be concerned about helping people with these conditions?

Contributing towards the effects is hardly going to explain why this is working with those that decide to try it is it?

I fail to see how maths can help to convince a person to tilt their bed by five degrees to the horizontal and watch their varicose veins deflate and eventually return to normal looking veins. Perhaps I may be missing a point here?

Believe it or not. This all began trying to understand how trees lift water and realising evaporation was providing a mechanism for altering the density of dissolved solutes in sap at the leaf.

Tilting the bed in the first place was just to see if anything would change if my wife and I avoided sleeping flat in favour of a gentle head up tilt. We too believed there might be some oedema problems but decided to give it a whirl and see.

After a mere 4 weeks of trying to analyse what if anything was happening to us. And we were convinced of improvements in energy, body temperature, sleep etc etc, A conversation with a nurse called Stephanie Ness about whether it would work for people with varicose veins made us realise that Jude’s VV had stopped aching and no longer bulged after a mere 4 weeks of IBT. This was also mirrored by the Nurse who reported her own VV had gone flat in the same period. Now this could have been a double coincidence, so Mum decided to tilt her bed and noticed her veins also greatly improved. And since then many more people have reported huge improvements in varicose veins. But no amount of me telling it how it is will convince anyone. The proof of the pudding is always in the eating. And some nice photographs go a long way and speak louder than any statistical analysis.

So here we are. A 4 week challenge to anyone who has varicose veins and / or oedema to see if IBT will produce predictable reliable results and cause the conditions to become normal and healthy.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

This is where it becomes truly fascinating. The heart rates were measured in 3 sleeping English bull terriers, 2 lads and a very tolerant wife while sleeping on an inclined bed and on a flat bed. The difference of 10-12 beats per minute was the same in all cases and later my own heart rate was tested and also shared the same reduction.

Respiration also changed by 3-5 breaths per minute reduction in all cases.

But circulation improves on the inclined bed. I.E People with cold hands and cold feet in bed find they are warm and do not stay cold as before. Also body temperature appears to be warmer too. This was tested against literature stats using same mouth temperature and we found that unlike flat bed rest the body temperature does not dip by 2-3 degrees at around 4am as it does with flat bedrest.

Any change in density will suffice to trigger this flow and return circulation. The point is where it takes place rather than by how much it takes place. This is difficult to address as relative environmental humidity, body temperature, air temperature vary so much. High humidity according to this theory would place a huge burden on the circulation, causing lethargy and in extreme cases circulatory collapse in all systems, including the nervous system and lymphatic system.

But this is what drives me on. Surely anyone here who is involved with science and has access to a hospital or university would be compelled to put IBT to the test?

Even if it is tested in the comfort of your own home, perhaps you would come back and tell us what changes you find. Remember my wife and I had no medical problems when we tilted our bed other than a varicose vein on my wife’s leg that ached of course.  So there’s nothing stopping anyone from coming back and adding their own experiences is there?

[lyner]

Your post, whilst interesting, does not advance the argument at all.

Comparison between Heart Output Power and 'Falling Salts Output Power':
 
A typical value for the power developed by the heart is around 1W, based on flow rate and pressure difference (neither quantities in much doubt, I suspect). The With about 0.1kg of blood flowing through the lungs per second and, assuming (generously) that the change in density by evaporation is 0.1%, this would mean that every second you would effectively get 10E-4kg of 'falling mass' of blood, falling by say 1m (on average to your lower body) per second. This corresponds to a 'power source' of 10E-3W.
Which power source is most likely to be the significant one?

The fact is, Andrew, that I have not (for a long while) objected to your reported observations. What does not make sense, are you explanations, most of which don't 'add up'.
For millennia, people have been making things happen in Medicine, Chemistry , technology and other fields. They have made things work despite not knowing why they worked. You can be pretty sure that Sir Isaac would have come to terms with relativity, (after a bit of grumbling, no doubt) because the sums fit reality better than his. Why can't you be the same as he would be?

It seems to me that an excellent explanation for your inclined bed success is that it subjects the veins to a small enough pressure to keep them the right shape and give them a chance to heal up in that shape.
Allowing them to collapse whist laying flat would not achieve that and keeping them under high pressure, standing up would just do further damage. It constitutes a mild bit of 'physio' for the vein walls.
There's a nice 'mechanical' explanation which doesn't fly in the face of any fundamental Science. You have to admit, it's a contender.