[lyner]

Andrew, you are a master of the non-sequiter.
You had an idea. It worked. That doesn't 'prove' that your reasoning was right.
People used to plant crops at the correct time of year even though they had no idea about the structure of the solar system. Were their ideas of Cosmology correct? No, they had a system which worked. That is all you can say about ancient agriculture. That's all you can say about your idea, too.
Why do you insist on more?

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Because a varicose vein went flat 4 weeks after we tilted our bed and the same happened to a nurse 4 weeks after she tilted her bed, the opposite way around to that which the nurse had been taught.

This fitted with the idea of a flow and return driven by solutes which would alter the pressure inside the veins to draw them in over time. Again the opposite to that which was happening on a flat bed. Or indeed on a head down tilted bed. This told me that the theory fitted with the circulation system like a glove fitted with water. Eager to find more people to test this, My mother and Late Father, both who had varicose veins also began sleeping on a five degree head up angle. Again producing similar results with varicose veins among other improvements in skin temperature, skin colour, circulation, body temperature, frequency of night time urination was decreased and most of all Mum regained the use of her nerves in the left leg after many years of being unable to move her ankle and toes and feel sensitivity below the knee she found that she could and it took a mere 4 weeks. Dad’s leg ulcers healed up over many months and his skin became more normal rather than the usual raw meat looking skin we had occasionally caught a glimpse of.

But this is where it all began to get interesting. First of all not having a great deal of knowledge of physiology at the time, I began to search for a logical answer as to why Mum’s nerves had responded to such a short period of IBT. Not blessed with the Internet all those years ago, the local hospital gave me permission to study in their R&D unit. But try as I may, I could not find any logical reason in the huge amount of papers that were available why this should have happened. I did however find a wholly inadequate explanation for the circulation in the nervous system. By now I had begun to take an interest in multiple sclerosis, as this looked like a pretty good condition to see if it would respond to IBT.

Many positive reports came flooding in after giving a brief talk about 1 case of progressive (non-relapsing remitting) case that had been showing considerable promise. Roger Kirk had many medical conditions including a donated kidney that was in rapid decline, but had shown remarkable improvements using IBT. Roger being an engineer could see the logic in tilting is bed after I explained how it works by giving the circulation a boost at night. Roger explained to a large audience at Kingsteignton Branch of the MS Society how much he had improved and a small group decided to give it a try.

The results were astonishing to say the least. Two ladies regained sight after becoming registered blind due to supposedly irreversible optic nerve damage. Two ophthalmologists wrote to me within the same moth asking how tilting a bed could repair damaged nerves and restore their sight. In fact just a few weeks ago during a check-up Mr Williams, the same ophthalmologist asked how things were progressing with my research and reflected back to what had happened to a lady under his care who could not only see her computer but has completed an OU degree and can legally drive a vehicle on the road without wearing any glasses. Not bad for 2 blocks of wood. This same lady had also a dropped foot problem that occasionally would be normal in the mornings but not when the humidity was high. A dehumidifier was introduced in conjunction with IBT to see if it would rectify the dropped foot problem. It did just that! Now why do you think a dehumidifier and a sloping bed could have such a profound effect on a person with multiple sclerosis? Why does MS affect more people in river valley areas than the rest of the country? Could it be humidity? Why does humidity have such a devastating effect on human physiology? Why did the ancient Egyptians tilt their beds to the same 5 degree angle all those years ago? Why did sitting up in bed rather than laying down flat help people to survive the sweating sickness in the Tudor Period? Why is a developing chick egg dependent on polarity? Could man standing up have altered the circulation in the brain and afforded greater intelligence than primates? Does brain injury respond to IBT? These questions are just a few that require their own investigations. MS is considered to be unreliable by doctors because in the early stages it can become relapsing remitting. What about spinal cord injuries? Could IBT have any influence on a complete spinal cord injury? Yes it can!

But for now, let’s concentrate on varicose veins and oedema. After all varicose veins alone are costing the NHS 5-6 hundred million pounds a year.

[lyner]

Do you really not see the distinction between what you have experienced and how you explain it?
I can't believe that you won't conceive an alternative explanation for what you have observed. You just blah blah  with anecdotes. What have they to do with the Science?
We would still be using Alchemy and witchcraft if 'real' Scientists had your attitude.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

This is how it bloody happened. I have altered nothing.

[lyner]

It's your EXPLANATION that's dodgy. Don't you realise?
I have not once told you it didn't happen.

[Bored chemist]

BC swimming does not remove the effects of gravity. Buoyancy is not avoiding gravity any more than freefalling from an aircraft is. Solutes will move freely inside the body and they are in effect swimming in fluids. If this were the case then my experiments would not work either as the dissolved solutes within are in fact swimming in water, yet gravity does not appear to be comprimised.

Postural Orthostatic hypotension is more commonly felt when standing from laying horizontal. When horizontal, the renal function is not performing as well as it should be and salts are stored in the body rather than in the bladder (incidentally this has been proven using a simple hydrometer) IBT on the other hand allows kidney function to remove more salts and produce denser urine in the bladder. On standing after IBT there is little to no evidence of orthostatic hypotension. Research into spinal cord injury and IBT revealed this to be the case in people with complete and incomplete spinal cord injuries. Even in cases where a person would normally black out on trying to use a standing frame, the effects of hypotension were not felt following IBT. However, prolong sitting in a wheelchair did produce hypotension on standing in a frame.

AKF, you seem to have missed my point, if I had said "eating oranges" instead of " watching TV" the essence of my post would have been the same.
Just because one state of affairs doesn't stop varicose veins does not mean that a different state will.
Incidentally, if gravity drove the circulation you would die if you went swimming. In water the bouyancy essentially removes gravit's effect.
Your circulation would vary wildly as you stood up or lay down. In the real wortld postural hypotension is viewed as an unusual condition- worthy of treatment.
God help you if you were upside down (and I think that, even if we don't do it now, we all did this as children.


The single clearest evidence that the heart provides circulation rather than some strange effect of gravity is

 when your heart stops you die.
End of story.

Still missing the point the Andrew?

[lyner]

Who was right, Ptolemy or Galileo? They both saw the same thing - one of them got the EXPLANATION wrong. Get it?

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

He waits patiently for an alternative explanation for varicose veins and oedema improving on an inclined bed head up tilt of five degrees to the horizontal that does not involve placebo. Placebo cannot address the huge improvements reported relating to swollen veins and legs.

[lyner]

Actually, placebo can explain practically anything; the body is very complicated, you know. And it obeys all the laws of Physics, too.
And this has nothing to do with inclined beds. It has to do with the nonsense about gravity 'driving' the blood around.

[Bored chemist]

He waits patiently for an alternative explanation for varicose veins and oedema improving on an inclined bed head up tilt of five degrees to the horizontal that does not involve placebo. Placebo cannot address the huge improvements reported relating to swollen veins and legs.

Well stop "waiting patiently" and answer some of the points raised aboout the absurd idea that gravity produces the circulation of the blood.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

My son was monitored in Plymouth Derriford Hospital Recovery room following an operation for a broken wrist. His bed was tilted the opposite way. I was told he would not recover immediately and would probably be nauseous when he does. The nurse eventually agreed to tilt the bed the other way and a prediction was made that circulation would increase, blood oxygen level would increase, his heart rate would reduce by around 10-12 beats per minute and his respiration rate by around 3-5 breaths per minute. He would awaken with no effort and would not feel nauseous. Well, the nurse was up for a challenge and agreed because I was his dad after all.

It happened exactly as predicted!

Now why do you feel heart rate and respiration rate should be reduced in both humans and animals placed on an inclined bed and sleeping? Yet circulation increases and people have lovely warm hands and feet instead of their usual icy cold hands and feet that take around an hour or more to warm up? Why does my wife have to sleep with her feet out of the bed because they get too warm now rather than being freezing cold and numb? All of this can be tested by anyone with a second hand on a clock / watch a stethoscope or indeed by feeling a pulse when someone is asleep on an inclined bed.

Yet it does not appear to be in any literature anywhere!

A simple study would be a great way to prove all of these points. But I guess vested interests prevail where 600 million pounds in providing ineffective operations is at risk.

And no placebo cannot explain a varicose vein reducing in size as the weeks go by using IBT. But I guess you had a little difficulty coming up with an alternative explanation why these changes are taking place.

True placebo effect
http://www.patient.co.uk/showdoc/40002073/
This can only be studied if an untreated group is included along with active and placebo treated groups. However, these are relatively uncommon but it has been discovered that:

    * Placebo treatment is more effective in relieving pain compared with no treatment. To achieve this, patients need to be conscious (placebo was given to sleeping patients and no difference noted).
    * Objective clinical parameters can be changed by placebo treatment, e.g. oedema and an increase in C-reactive protein level following oral surgery.
    * Physical placebos, e.g. sham acupuncture are more powerful than simple oral placebos.3
    * Topical placebo is also more effective than oral placebo, e.g. in primary varicose veins.

[lyner]

Always a story, never an explanation in terms of Science.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Note: Placebo don't work while your sleeping in the quote on my last post. It's pretty obvious really. It don't explain how tilting a sleeping dog can reduce heart and respiration rate by the same amount as a sleeping human either but you love to ignore the difficult bits don't you?

[lyner]

There are dozens of possible detailed explanations which are worth investigating. Why do you limit yourself to the first one which takes your fancy but which is not only false but clearly so.

The whole idea of work and energy is SO well established and proved that, if you understood it, you would see where your error is. I know you will react against that idea as being typical of the establishment and that you will interpret it as a personal attack - and all the rest of it blah blah blah - but there are some things which you just can't ignore.
In this case, it just isn't necessary to offer such a barmy explanation as you are proposing.
You seem to think it somehow makes you more 'worthy' because you have no formal knowledge of this field. I'm afraid it just comes across as arrogant to dismiss the work and knowledge of so many Scientists who have successful track records.
There are far more wrong answers in Science than right ones.
Do you seriously have the temerity to question such fundamental Physical ideas? What proof do you have - apart from your particular circular argument?

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Clearly false? Operations are destined to fail because no one is addressing what is causing the excess pressure in the veins, but merely slapping a sticky plaster over the problem and hoping it will go away.
Just one trial involving 50 people with varicose veins and oedema to be regularly examined for changes and provide photographs of any changes is all that is required to test this paradigm.
Yet no such study is forthcoming. Why do you think a study is avoided? I and many others who have seen this phenomenon at first hand already know what the outcome of such a study would be!
Instead people hiding behind qualifications and often substantial financial gains from maintaining the status quo prevent this simple yet powerful healing tool from entering mainstream medicine. That said, several doctors, including my own have experimented with the paradigm and observed the positive results for themselves. Several hospitals now recommend IBT to heart patients. A chain of spinal cord injury rehab units in the USA now advise patients to tilt their beds to a five degree head up angle, and have also observed the results.
Many people with multiple sclerosis benefit from sleeping on an angle and as suggested all those years ago in a paper stating that MS is not a disease but a problem with circulation it would appear that this paper was fairly accurate after all.. http://jnnp.bmj.com/cgi/rapidpdf/jnnp.2008.157164v1.pdf Be sure to check out the xray plates in the pdf file.

I have written to Professor Paolo Zamboni, and hope he will be in a position to help test this or to advise of people who are. Perhaps moving away from the UK in order to find professional ears that are open is the only way forward.

Andrew K Fletcher
 

[RD]

Many people with multiple sclerosis benefit from sleeping on an angle and as suggested all those years ago in a
paper stating that MS is not a disease but a problem with circulation it would appear that this paper was fairly accurate after all.. http://jnnp.bmj.com/cgi/rapidpdf/jnnp.2008.157164v1.pdf Be sure to check out the xray plates in the pdf file.

Some patients diagnosed with MS experience a reduction in symptoms when they are given vasodilator medication which increases the diameter of blood vessels, this is called "relief by flush".

However this improvement is explicable as the patients being wrongly diagnosed with MS when they actually have an MS-like vasculopathic (ischemic) disorder, e.g. cerebral vasculitis.
The vasodilation temporarily increases blood flow to areas of brain which do not have an adequate blood supply because of vascular disease, (analogous to nitrate vasodilator use by a person having an attack of angina).

[BenV]

I'm paraphrasing here, but...

Sophie said: Why don't you look at the maths of the energy required for your mechanism to be correct?

Andrew said:  I know I'm right!  Scientists are inhuman greedy people who will not look into my hypothesis! Inclined Beds make people better!

This is a recurring issue Andrew.  I know nothing of the medical issues (but RD seems to be keeping you on your toes with that one), but your proposed mechanism doesn't add up.  I don't want to hear anything about treatments or how well people have recovered, I don't want to hear anything about scientists "avoiding your work".  Why not just answer sophie's question?

[lyner]

I don't think you ever read what I write, AKF.
Do you think that Energy and Work are irrelevant concepts inside the body? Do all the basic laws of Science stop working once you, personally, become involved in something?
Stop feeling sorry for yourself and try to think why you are not taken seriously.
It is so, so easy to believe it's all a big conspiracy. It is much harder to approach the matter with discipline and to use existing Science in an intelligent way.
Consider that you could, just possibly, be getting something wrong. If they were 100% right then your ideas should work elsewhere. Science aaims at being CONSISTENT - your ideas are not.

[Bored chemist]

One of his ideas is consistent, it's the idea that you don't answer questions that bring doubt on your theory.

[Andrew K Fletcher (OP)]

Read the thread title. It's about varicose veins shrinking when a flat bed is avoided by sleeping on a five degree to the horizontal slope head higher than feet. Accomplished by using bricks, blocks, a wedge. The precious books you refer to have never identified this method of reversing varicose veins! Why would they? Gravity according to literature is a force we strive to overcome. Well all life on Earth is doing a pretty good job of overcoming the force of gravity. Trees for example appear to be inspired by it rather than struggling to overcome it. An argument that gravity is an attracting force only is a rather stupid statement don’t you think? What ever happened to for every action there is an opposed and equal reaction? Water lost from the lungs with every breath we take is no exception to this rule! It is impossible not to change the density of the solutes at the lining of the lungs when water is expired unless the atmospheric humidity and temperature is equal to that in the lungs and respiratory tract. Yet Science appears to have overlooked this, just as it has overlooked the same principles of density changes at the leaf of plants and trees. However, they did attribute density changes to the oceans, which drive the Atlantic Conveyor System that powers the ocean currents and drives the World’s Weather. And we can see a simple flow and return system lifting heated water from a simple flow and return central heating boiler system. How is that for a constant? We don’t need to show an empty multiple pulling water up from the ground and filling it to show how a tree works. A tree after all grows readily filled with juxtaposed multiple conduits that each resist and oppose the pull of gravity. All we have to show is how evaporation causes the sap within to circulate and alter the pressure at the roots.
Oddly enough the same applies to the human body and indeed the giraffes long neck, something which has been mentioned before and indeed duly ignored.

When a giraffe bends its head down to drink at ground level the vessels inside the head should burst with the pressure supplied by a simple pump powerful enough to lift blood to the head. Of course this does nothing of the kind. Indeed the blood circulates meaning it does not have to lift blood to great heights, it just needs to provide sufficient pressure to effect circulation. So when the giraffe lowers it’s head it must also lower the pressures. Oddly enough the same thing happens in the Brixham Experiment. As the tubes are lowered the circulation within adjusts instantly and flow is reduced. So raising the tube increases the flow and lowering the tube decreases both the flow and pressures.

When applying work and energy to the simple tubular experiment, of course we have added sat solution to the centre of the tube and provided the lift with the pulley to raise the tube to 24 metres and of course we have added water inside the tube  initially and of course we have previously boiled the water to remove dissolved gas in order to help resist cavitation. How else could we have shown this experiment, which was designed to show how a flow and return system operates at such heights. This experiment as I have said before never was intended to represent a tree or indeed a body, but was designed to show how dissolved solutes drag water molecules around a vertically suspended single open ended tube. The giraffe does not grow as an empty multiple conduit! It grows as a multiple conduit system readily filled with blood and fluids with a pump that has been shown to be of insufficient size to raise blood to the head it’s head. Yet it does so every day without any effort. Have you ever seen a giraffe with varicose veins?

Inside a tree the motion is circulation and it is circulation that provides the leaves with sap, from which evaporation takes place, which we call transpiration. Transpired water does not contain solutes, although in some species some of the solutes are excreted onto the leaf surface. (Mangrove being one example). Atmospheric conditions regulate the amount of water evaporated and in the ocean, rivers and lakes plants also rely on external influences from the liquid that surrounds them. Any changes in density must apply.

1 grain of sugar or salt can provide circulation by upsetting the balance of suspended fluids. We do not have to show a large change in solute concentration for circulation to develop, because the tree or plant has equalised the pressures by offsetting one side against the other side as it grows. If we release 1 grain of salt down the phloem of a tree which we have concentrated at the leaf by evaporation, not only will that grain of dissolved salt pull on all of the water molecules within the phloem but the tension will follow through to the xylem and induce a pull in the opposite and equal direction. But something else will happen. The downward force will cause an equal increase in head of water in the xylem affording the tree with a mechanism to keep increasing it’s height as shown in the U tube spirit level experiment on youtube video.

It is absolutely impossible for evaporation to take place without it causing a change in density! For every action there must be an opposite and equal reaction. Why has this not been applied to a tree? Or indeed to the fluid in the lungs? You cannot alter the density of fluid at an elevated point in a multi conduit system without causing a downward flow. It is impossible! You cannot cause a downward flow without generating an opposing and equally reacting flow be it in a single tube or in a multiple conduit system.

Now back to varicose veins as a part of our own multiple conduit system. When a bed is tilted to a head up angle the solutes inside are free to migrate through the tubes in the correct direction and in doing so can alter the pressures inside the tubes. In the artery this would not make a great deal of difference due to their resistance to stretch as they were constructed to resist the pressure from the heart, but in the vein this is a completely different scenario, the vein is elasticised and does not resist internal pressure changes well. Hence the ballooning we observe when varicose veins develop. The same must also apply when the pressure inside is reduced and this is precisely what takes place during inclined bed therapy. Here the pressure changes are not only observed while on IBT but due to the length of time the veins remain deflated the veins become used to being deflated and recover some resistance to pressure changes and become less incompetent as shown with Alun’s photographs.