Move faster, science

Sometimes I believe that science moves too slowly behind the times. This opinion began to form when I had my stroke 10 years ago. First I learned I had inherited my father’s body. In his family people died early. Their hearts just stopped. Second, strokes are caused by stress. I was extremely stressed when I had my stroke. I had gone to pick up my mother at the airport and was shocked to see her so thin, white-haired, tremulous. She very obviously had serious Alzheimer’s disease. How could her doctors in Vancouver miss this? I brought her home to my house in Calamba. I had no maids. I was afraid I would not take care of her adequately. My stress level was sky high. That led to my stroke.

Third, I learned that the chemical drugs prescribed don’t really work and are terribly expensive. My recovery was slow for the first six years. Then I discovered StemEnhance, which brought my old personality back. Do medical doctors approve of StemEnhance? Most don’t. Have they tried it? No.

I took it because I saw a friend looking very good and he told me it was because of StemEnhance. I bought a bottle. It gave me energy so I liked it and continued taking it. Then one afternoon around eight months later I heard a loud noise in my head. After that I slowly realized I was back to my old self, myself before the stroke. In other words, I was healed. But the doctors still won’t believe and won’t trust the drug. Not even the FDAs because it is a natural drug. It has no chemicals. So they don’t like it.

But that’s not the only reason why I think science is behind the times. Before I discovered StemEnhance in 2009, when I could read and understand what I was reading, I bought a book titled The Heart’s Code, The True Stories of Organ Transplant Patients & What They Reveal About Where We Store Our Memories by Paul Pearshall, PhD. Basically it said that heart transplant patients seemed to experience changes in their personality that could be attributed to the donor’s personality. It reminded me of a TV movie I had watched about a lady in her 50s getting the heart of a 23-year-old boy who died in a motorcycle accident. After she recovered she went and bought herself a motorcycle and rode around enjoying it. It was a gift to her from his heart. But, Paul Pearshall wrote, doctors did not agree that the new heart had any personality traits. It was just a pump. That’s what science believes. The heart is what pumps blood through our body. It has no personality.

And yet look at the English language. It has words like heartfelt, heartwarming, heartbroken. Our language pays tribute to the heart as a feeling organ but science ignores that, which leads to medicine ignoring that. So how can you trust medicine?

One of my close friends, a foreigner, came to visit. He did not look happy. “I have a feeling I’m going to die soon,” he said. I wanted to ask why he was feeling that way but I stopped myself. Instead I said, “The last time I saw you, you said the same thing and look, you are still here.” After a month he died. That meant, to me anyway, that he was getting a message from his heart/soul/spirit. He was listening but no one else was.

Last night I watched a documentary on the heart. A bunch of Australian doctors were talking about the mysteries of the heart, the experience of heart transplant patients, the results of research. It has not moved much since Pearshall’s book written in 1998. Medicine/science is as befuddled as ever. They will talk to you about the structure of the heart, the structure of the brain, the possibility that they are connected but they don’t know precisely how yet and they are still confused over the role of feelings in science. I have news for you. All people have feelings. When is science going to honor that basic truth? What is stress if not a jumble of inextricable feelings?

I teach writing. I want my students to awaken their creative side, their right brains. I throw away all the writing rules they learned in school as useless. For many years I have suspected that the heart and the right-brain are the best of friends because they both speak of feelings but I don’t know how to prove it.

When I think about it many of the rules around us are obsolete. Why doesn’t a decent, thinking body of intelligent people study all the rules and change what needs to be changed. Then maybe that will pressure science to speed up somehow. Maybe it will begin to move as swiftly as the times.

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