Saturday, December 31, 2022

The end of inflammation? New approach could treat dozens of diseases.







This is very encouraging. If we can properly learn how to manage inflamatiln a whole range of diseases may actually mostly go away.

Of course, been vitimin C saturated is lilkely you best freind until we can do a lot better.

The key take home is that our current practise is encouraging chronic inflamation.  Not good.  Part of our best practise is allowing vitimin C deficiency to be sustained over most of oyur lives. .


The end of inflammation? New approach could treat dozens of diseases.

Cancer, aging, and severe COVID-19 have all been linked to damage from inflammation. Now scientists are flipping their focus to find new drugs that may revolutionize treatments.


RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS

Bilateral X-ray of the hands and wrists of a 54 year old patient with rheumatoid arthritis. On the right hand (left), there is arthritis in the wrist joints. There is a loss of bone space and the bones are beginning to fuse. On the left hand (right), there are bony growths in the left fi...IMAGE BY ZEPHYR, SCIENCE SOURCE

BYCONNIE CHANG

PUBLISHED MARCH 4, 2022


https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-end-of-inflammation-new-approach-could-treat-dozens-of-diseases?

Growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, Lauren Finney Harden had always had allergies. But after she moved to New York City for her first job in 2007, inflammation “just exploded” throughout her body.

“I had insane full-body rashes and strange gastro issues. I’d get massive burps that made me feel like I needed to throw up, but nothing would come up but air,” she says. Eventually, she was diagnosed with lupus, a disease in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues and organs. She was put on a drug called prednisone, a corticosteroid that tamps down inflammation.

But the cure, at times, felt worse than the disease. “I looked four months pregnant all the time,” Finney Harden says, “and I’d get cold sores every other week; my body could not fight off anything.”

Finney Harden’s experience is unfortunately a common one with traditional autoimmune treatments like prednisone. A broad immunosuppressant, prednisone works by disabling the production of pro-inflammatory molecules that are crucial for the body to mount an immune defense. So while prednisone—and drugs like it—are adept at quickly snuffing out inflammation, they leave the body vulnerable to any bug it encounters, and they can come with toxic side effects.

“Simply stopping inflammation is not enough to return tissue to its normal state,” says Ruslan Medzhitov, a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine. This approach ignores the other side of the inflammation coin: resolution. Resolving inflammation is an active, highly choreographed process for rebuilding tissue and removing the dead bacteria and cells. When that process is disrupted, inflammatory diseases arise.

In the early 2000s researchers began to recognize the role of inflammation in conditions as varied as Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, prompting them to recast inflammation as the unifying explanation for a myriad of ailments, including those we develop as we age. Even aging itself, and its associated pathologies, is driven by persistent inflammation.


“Until relatively recently, we believed that inflammation just stopped,” says Molly Gilligan, an internal medicine resident at Columbia University who studies how the immune system impacts cancer development. Immunologists thought that products of inflammation—molecules that trigger it and dead cells and tissue—are eventually metabolized, or spontaneously dissipate on their own.

The reality is more complicated, and recognizing that could have game-changing effects on how we treat a wide swath of diseases.

Why is inflammation dangerous?

Inflammation evolved to serve an important function: It rids our bodies of stuff that doesn’t belong, including foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses, tumor cells, and irritants like splinters.

“A classic example of inflammatory onset is the bee sting—the site becomes hot, red, swollen, and painful,” says Derek Gilroy, a professor of immunology at University College London. This response comes from a series of biological changes: blood vessels dilate to deliver white blood cells to the site of injury, making tissues turn red. Fluid also floods the site, causing swelling. The molecules that trigger these vascular transformations precipitate the itching, pain, and fever associated with inflammation.

White blood cells, the body’s first responders, then swarm and kill the invaders. Under normal circumstances, this carnage is contained, with the initial inflammatory response subsiding within 24 to 48 hours.

When inflammation becomes chronic, though, the chemical weapons deployed by front-line immune cells often damage healthy tissue, and our bodies become collateral damage. The price exacted includes worn joints, damaged neurons, scarred kidneys, and more. Autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, characterized by pain and worsening disability, have long been associated with persistent inflammation.

In extreme cases, such as the cytokine storms associated with sepsis or severe COVID-19, inflammation can destroy and disable multiple organs, leading to catastrophic system failure and death.

What happens after inflammation?

Medzhitov likens an infection to a broken pipe that has flooded an office with water. Fixing the pipe might stop water from streaming in, but it doesn’t restore the office to its previous, functional state. Similarly, inflammation has a clean-up phase known as resolution, and it proceeds in a series of highly coordinated steps.

Like inflammation’s onset, its resolution is orchestrated by an army of signaling molecules. Among the most intensely studied are the specialized pro-resolving mediators, or SPMs, which were discovered in the 1990s by Charles Serhan, a professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School. Serhan was inspired by his postdoctoral mentor, Bengt Samuelsson, who uncovered how fatty molecules called lipids trigger inflammation. Serhan was searching for similar molecules when he identified lipoxin. But to his surprise, rather than inciting inflammation, lipoxin seemed to hamper it.

Over the next several years, Serhan and his colleagues identified additional SPMs. These molecules are derived from essential fatty acids such as those omega-3s famously found in cold-water fish like salmon and sardines. But they are difficult to study in the lab. “One of the main challenges is that they have short half-lives, so the body metabolizes them very quickly,” Gilligan says. Because of this, researchers who work on them often turn to synthetic versions of the molecules, or mimetics, which are simpler, more stable, and cheaper to produce.

Catherine Godson, a professor of molecular medicine at University College Dublin, has long been interested in diabetes, given its impact on global public health as the most common cause of kidney failure. When she learned of SPMs, she was excited by the idea of encouraging resolution to treat diabetics, a “population with a particularly high risk for infection.”

In mice with diabetic kidney disease, scarring from kidney inflammation gradually destroys the organ. Her team is testing the therapeutic potential of a lipoxin mimetic in these and other animal models. They’ve also looked at the mimetic’s effect in human tissue in lab cell cultures taken from patients with atherosclerosis, an inflammatory disease of the blood vessel wall. In both cases, inflammatory factors plummeted when the mimetic was introduced; for the mice, the kidneys recovered their function in a stunning reversal of established disease.


Gilroy notes, however, that the story on SPMs is incomplete. “While lipoxins are present at levels in the body that indicate that they’re important in resolution, other SPMs such as resolvins require more evaluation,” he says.

Manipulating macrophages

Scientists speculate that one way lipoxins and other pro-resolution molecules work is by interacting with immune cells called macrophages.

Because they’re so abundant during inflammation, macrophages have traditionally been thought of as pro-inflammatory cells, says Gerhard Krönke, an immunologist and rheumatologist at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. “But a paradigm shift in the last decade or so suggests that macrophages are pivotal players in the resolution of inflammation.”

Gilroy agrees, calling macrophages “linchpin cells at the juxtaposition of inflammation and resolution: It can go one way if we’re healthy and the other way if we’re not.”

Initially, when the danger posed by invaders is at its peak, the macrophages drawn to the area are inflammatory—secreting pro-inflammatory cytokines and amping up production of antimicrobial agents. But this balance shifts as the tide of the confrontation turns. After the number of viruses declines, the debris left behind—viral remnants, dead immune cells, and other waste—must be collected and cleared away before it sparks another cycle of inflammation. That’s when the macrophages switch gears.

Attracted by “eat me” signals expressed on the surface of dying cells, macrophages readily engulf and clear cellular corpses from the environment. But it’s not just about clearing the wreckage—this act also flips a genetic switch, reprogramming macrophages to restore balance to the system and heal the tissues.

“Macrophages start to produce factors that tell the local tissue, Don’t recruit any more inflammatory cells here, or, Let’s proliferate and start repairs there,” says Kodi Ravichandran, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on how dead cells are cleared from the body.

Clearing away cellular debris

Now consensus is building that many of the illnesses attributed to inflammation—both chronic and acute—can be traced to a failure in resolution. Often that translates into a failure to clear away dead cells.

“If you knock out receptors in the macrophages of mice that recognize dying cells, for example, they become incapable of eating up these cells, resulting in a lupus-like disease,” with symptoms such as arthritis and skin rash, says Krönke.

A similar mechanism is at work in older people, says Gilroy. As we age, the body loses a protein that recognizes dying cells; this blocks macrophages’ ability to find and eat debris. Locked in a pro-inflammatory state, these macrophages continue to produce molecules that amplify the inflammatory response early on.

Perhaps COVID-19 has been more severe in older populations “because they’ve lost some of the pro-resolution pathways with age,” suggests Luke O’Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College Dublin. He notes that COVID-19 has also been problematic for people with genetic differences that impact immune function, resulting in overactive inflammatory responses or underactive pro-resolving ones. His group and others have demonstrated that macrophages primed for inflammatory action play a significant role in critical COVID-19 cases, and they are currently testing pro-resolving strategies to combat this effect.

Cancer’s course, too, is affected when inflammation fails to resolve. The soup of toxins, growth factors, and other inflammatory by-products that accompany inflammation spurs cancer’s growth and spread. Many conventional treatments end up exacerbating the problem, according to Dipak Panigrahy, an assistant professor of pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

“Chemotherapy and radiation are like sledgehammers,” Panigrahy says. “They may kill the tumor, but the debris they create stimulates inflammation, which feeds circulating tumor cells that survive the treatment.”


A decade ago, Panigrahy was puzzling over this conundrum when he met Serhan at a conference on lipids in Cancún, Mexico. “I had just presented my research on cell death in cancer and how there’s no way to clear the resulting debris when I heard Serhan’s talk about how he discovered these lipids that eliminated debris,” he says. The two Boston-based researchers have shared a close collaboration ever since.

In proof-of-concept experiments conducted on mice, Panigrahy’s group was able to prevent tumors from recurring after surgery by dosing the animals with mimetics of resolvin, one of the pro-resolving mediators discovered in Serhan’s lab. Phase one clinical trials for pancreatic, brain, and colon cancers will begin this year, says Panigrahy.

Long COVID and inflammation

Although much work remains to decode its secrets, “long COVID likely results from a catastrophic failure of appropriate immune response and resolution,” Gilroy suggests.

Meg St. Esprit is part of a large cohort of COVID-19 survivors who continue to suffer symptoms months after the virus has passed. She and her family contracted the disease in November 2020, and for seven days the mother of four in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was beset by a high fever and severe headaches. Debilitating fatigue, vertigo, and brain fog soon followed. But while her husband and children recovered, St. Esprit’s symptoms lingered, and new ones emerged.

Since her bout with COVID-19, she has developed blood clots and myocarditis—dangerous consequences of inflammation. It’s also as if her entire body has gone haywire. “Different parts of it regularly flare up now,” she says. “My thumb joints swell to twice their normal size, my knee puffs out like a grapefruit, and I’ve had hives more times than I can count.”

Drugs to tweak the natural inflammatory process would thus be a powerful tool in our arsenal for long COVID as well. Even now the hunt is on. O’Neill and colleagues, for example, are testing molecules in clinical trials that push macrophages to be pro-resolving. SPMs are being tested extensively in animal models of diseases like cancer and sepsis, and more modestly in small patient trials studying eczema and periodontal disease.


But Gilroy cautions that the answer may be more nuanced than anti-inflammatory versus pro-resolution, and that drugs targeting both approaches may be needed.

“It’s like driving a car at full speed,” he says. “In order to stop, you take your foot off the accelerator, which would be like dampening inflammation’s onset. And then you apply the brakes, or in other words, promote its resolution.”

World's largest aircraft engine is fully operational and ready to test





















Sooner or later we will have actual gravity ships which will not have to use aerodynamic lift.  However, we will still want jet engines to push us around the atmosphere in those football sized arks.  Before all that it turns out that bigger means more fuel efficient.

So yesr we will see somewhat larger long haul craft, but that easily doubles capacity ove our best today.

I have also thought about wormhole tech and do think that the need for short hop vector changes may make long haul impractical and this keeps large ships aloft simply because they do long haul really well.  Understand as well, hydrogen airships are practical today if operated as drones.

So yes those big engines are around for a long time.


World's largest aircraft engine is fully operational and ready to test


December 22, 2022

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/rolls-royce-ultrafan-test/?

Hi, I'm your biggest fan ... The Rolls-Royce UltraFan is the biggest turbofan in history, and it's expected to


December 22, 2022



Hi, I'm your biggest fan ... The Rolls-Royce UltraFan is the biggest turbofan in history, and it's expected to deliver huge advantages in fuel economy, weight, noise and emissions
Rolls-Royce


Rolls-Royce says it's finished building the first demonstrator for its massive UltraFan engine, which will eventually hit the skies in airliners to be developed in the 2030s. Testing begins soon, with expectations of a 25% leap in efficiency.


Airliners will continue to burn hydrocarbon fuels into the foreseeable future – there's no clean alternative yet that can give you anywhere near the range and endurance of current long-haulers. So Rolls-Royce is continuing to develop its next-generation UltraFan engine.


This giant blue-bladed turbofan is the first of what will become a whole family of engines for narrow- and wide-body aircraft, ranging from 25,000 lbf to around 110,000 lbf of thrust. Its 140-inch-diameter (3.56 m) fan is nearly 5% bigger than the one in the General Electric GE9X – currently the biggest engine in the airliner class. With a small increase in diameter, though, comes a pretty decent increase in swept area.

The lightweight, large-diameter fan, high-bypass design, power gearbox and high-speed compressor all add up to significant fuel savings

Rolls-Royce

The UltraFan makes use of Rolls-Royce's new robot-controlled 3D composite manufacturing process, which is now capable of producing the complex shapes needed for the aerodynamics of fan blades. Titanium is still the engineers' pick for the leading edges of the blades, but the rest is carbon composite. This makes it much lighter than the full-titanium fans used in Rolls-Royce's Trent-class engines. This lightweight fan is the key reason why Rolls-Royce has been able to build an engine this big – but on smaller versions, it'll basically free up weight for extra payload and passengers.


The UltraFan also runs a planetary power gearbox between the fan and the compressors at the back, so the fan can run at its optimal slower speed while the compressors run at their optimal higher speed. In earlier testing, the gearbox handled some 65 megawatts (87,000 hp) of power, another aerospace record.

While the fan has an enormous diameter, the turbines within are kept fairly compact, and Rolls-Royce's engineers have made sure a large volume of air goes around the compressor core and straight out the back of the engine, as opposed to being channeled through the core of the engine to drive the compressors. This creates a high bypass ratio, which helps cut down noise by an impressive 35%, and gives the engine a significant boost in fuel efficiency.

Moving the UltraFan test demonstrator into the Testbed 80 facility

Rolls-Royce

Rolls-Royce says the UltraFan will use about a quarter less fuel than its own first-generation Trent engines, making them cheaper to run, longer-range and better for the environment. They capture NOx emissions more efficiently, too, dropping these by around 40% and more or less eliminating particulate emissions altogether. It's designed to run on 100% sustainable aviation fuel to begin with, but Rolls-Royce is also looking into hybrid electrification and hydrogen combustion in the drive toward full decarbonization.

Now that the first tech demonstrator is fully assembled, it's gone to the company's brand new, US$108 million Testbed 80 facility in Derby, UK – the "largest and smartest" test facility in the world, designed and built specifically around the needs of the UltraFan test program, where the team will start putting it through its paces as development continues.

Rolls-Royce | UltraFan Test Programmes

Source: Rolls-Royce

The Critical Importance of Deep Knee Bending






The Critical Importance of Deep Knee Bending

Conventional fitness wisdom about bending knees or toes doesn't hold up in research or practice

Jun 26 2022


One bad study can lead to decades of bad advice. That's what happened with guidance on whether we should bend our knees past our toes. (Prostock-studio/Shutterstock)


Being able to sit down on the floor and stand up from that position without using one’s hands can indicate a person’s potential longevity, according to a 2012 study published in the European Journal of Cardiology.

If a person can stand up from the floor with the help of one hand or one knee, the study found, they wouldn’t live quite as long as those who can stand up without using their hands or knees, but they would live longer than someone who needed both hands or both knees to stand.


When I read about this study, I immediately incorporated standing without the use of hands into the yoga classes of all ages that I teach.

In all variations of this movement, at least one knee must bend beyond the toes to make the transition possible. Conventional wisdom in athletic training has condemned exercising with knees over toes, despite the fact that it’s necessary for sitting on the floor, not to mention climbing stairs.

“Contrary to popular belief, evidence only exists showing that the more ability you have with your knees over your toes, the less chance you have of knee pain and surgery,” writes Ben Patrick on his Medium page. Patrick is a knee-strength coach who’s extensively researched knee injuries, having had three surgeries by age 18 and suffered multiple torn ligaments.

He points to a 2016 study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise that followed people after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction and found that step-down and quadricep training improved performance six months after surgery.

But the training world has been fixated on the dangers of allowing the knees to extend beyond the toes ever since a 1978 Duke University study claimed that more pressure is put on the knees when they go over the toes.


Meanwhile, knee and hip replacements continue to rise. There are about 500,000 knee replacements and 175,000 hip replacements annually in the United States. Hip replacements are expected to increase 174 percent, while knee replacements are expected to go up 673 percent, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons 2006 data.

Patrick and other trainers are attempting to shift the narrative in line with what they are experiencing in real time—that people can strengthen their joints by challenging their range of motion at the ankles and gaining a deeper squat. Not only is this possible, but anyone can do it, taking into consideration past injuries and other limitations.

A review published in Sports Medicine in 2013 looked at 164 relevant studies over a two-year period and found deep squats don’t contribute to an increased risk of injury and, in fact, a deep squat done with the right form can prevent degenerative changes in the joints.

Knees Over Toes for Seniors

Older adults who desire to maintain their flexibility, mobility, and strength for decades are jumping on the bandwagon.

Patrick’s mother, Celia, had a chance to personally test the notion that intentionally exercising with the knees past the toes could allow her to bend over and squat down without pain or assistance.


Despite being active her whole life, she woke up one morning with persistent pain and stiffness in her hips. She was very concerned when it became difficult to pick things up from the floor, so she reached out to her son, who scaled his exercises for her.

Now age 68, Celia can lower to her knees in “hero” pose, sit in “easy” pose, and hold a low squat with ease and no pain. She demonstrated all three a year ago in a video for Patrick’s YouTube channel.

In the video, in seconds, she transitions through sitting postures that are more commonly seen on a blanket of toddlers at a park playdate.

“Kids do this all the time,” Celia says as she squats, her buttocks resting on her heels. “I’m going to be doing this in my 90s. Watch.”

She also highlights Patrick’s signature exercise—split squats—which she credits with strengthening and building flexibility in her ligaments, tendons, muscles in and around her feet, ankles, knees, hips, and lower back.

“This one in particular is going to allow me to ride into my 70s, 80s, and 90s pain-free and mobile,” Celia says in the video, demonstrating three different levels used to ease into the exercise.

“The hip pain and stiffness went away entirely never to return—ever.”

Patrick’s program is highly rated by many people in their golden years who are seeking functional exercises to help them either to avoid surgery or to improve their quality of life. But he’s hardly the only one.

Cindy Ward, a CrossFit Level 1 and American Council on Exercise (ACE)-certified personal trainer, reminds her clients constantly that if their goal is to stay out of the nursing home, then it’s important that they can get on and off the toilet without assistance. That means strengthening the knee at the 90-degree mark, which means building flexibility at every angle above and below that.

“Your body is meant to move. Your knee isn’t a 90-degree only joint,” Ward said.

Nine out of 10 of her clients tend to naturally stop any attempt to squat at that point, which actually puts even more pressure on the joint and can make it more prone to injury. Ward coaches all ages and body shapes from the standpoint of functional fitness.

The Origin Series, an organization that certifies fitness coaches, is debunking the knees-over-toes myth and encouraging teachers to follow studies like one from 2003 in The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research that found limiting the natural deep bend of the knees could actually put more stress on the hips and lower back.

The ACE says that “don’t let your knees go beyond your toes” could be good advice in a group exercise class when erring on the side of caution, but it’s a disservice in one-on-one training.

It points out research from 1994 that Olympic weightlifting has a lower incidence of injury than many other competitive sports, and those athletes’ knees always extend beyond their toes. Training for flexibility in the joints, as weightlifters do, can strengthen the body and prevent harm.

Why Knees Over Toes Matters

I recognized many of the movements that Patrick recommends from my husband’s work hardening, an intense rehabilitation program he was required to complete in order to return to his physically demanding job. He needed reconstructive surgery for his ACL and medial collateral ligament in 2019 after a workplace accident. In his therapy, he did a lot of backward movement and deeper squats in four-hour daily workouts.

His recovery was stellar, something his physician and nurse commented about, and there’s no doubt the deep flexion and functional rehabilitation made all the difference. Flexion is the act of bending a joint or limb by using flexor muscles.

Naturally, rehabilitation after surgery doesn’t start with this kind of activity. My husband was non-weight-bearing for six weeks and then entered several weeks of physical therapy, much of it to reverse muscle wasting. Before taking it to the point of knees over toes, he needed to strengthen his quadricep muscle and the surrounding tendons. It required consistent hard work.

Patrick’s program begins with exercises to build up the range of motion of the ankle joint as a foundational requirement to deepen the squat and support the load. When the patella and femur are at 90 degrees of flexion, the knee carries an estimated force of 6 1/2 times the body weight.

Form is critical always but especially after injury or surgery to any lower body joint. Squats, for instance, must involve the hips lowering straight down, not back, and with an even distribution of weight between the hips and the knees.

What motivates Patrick isn’t much different from what motivates Celia—living a pain-free life doing the things he loves. For him, it’s playing basketball and being able to dunk from a stationary position. For his mom, it’s getting on the ground pain-free to play with her grandson.

Celia said: “I want to be able to swim and climb and ride bikes and roller skate and skateboard. … If he’s chasing me, I’m going to be able to run. See ya! You can’t catch me!”
Basic Exercises

It’s always best to work with a trained expert and be certain of correct form, especially when you are coming off an injury. When it comes to knee health, here are some of the exercises commonly found in Patrick’s and other certified trainers’ content:


Lean with your back against a wall and take a step out.

With both feet together and without bending your knees, flex your feet and lift your toes up.

If it’s too challenging, step in or take off your shoes.

To make it more challenging, take another step out.


Split Squat


Split Squat Beginner Level (Prostock-studio/Shutterstock)

Start at a beginner level without weights using a sturdy bench or surface about 2 to 3 feet tall.

Place one foot on the bench with the back leg extended behind you in a lunge. Bend the front knee so it extends over the toes.

Straighten and re-bend the front knee to a comfortable depth in repetitions of 10.

Find a surface about a foot tall for the next level.

Elevate the back heel on a weight plate or door stop as you let the hips sink lower as tolerated.

Sled Pulling


Sled Pulling Backwards (lunamarina/Shutterstock)



Five days a week, Patrick recommends 200 meters of pulling a sled, or a Tank sled, backward.

Alternatives are 400 meters of backward walking on an incline or five minutes backward walking on a treadmill that’s turned off (or broken).

World’s brightest x-rays reveal COVID-19’s damage to the body



This is the greatest imaging revolution yet.  We can finally get down to scale for micro capillaries.  We have now discovered that COV19 is a vascular disease. and hugely awful.  At best it will cause deep scarring and if you survive, the body will need to rebuild the vascular system itself and this obviously takes a lot of time.  

I am completely convinced that my vitimin C saturation strategy has held this monster at bay.  I also do not think i was so lucky as to avoid contact.  the nasty may well have been lodged in my sinus for around four months until it disapated.  Anything that got away was stopped by the vitimin C which is every cells first line of defense.

as we all get older, we suffer from low level scurvy which we do not even notice, but is the prime cause of circulatory disease.  Now tell me I am wrong.  doctors heading for Wuhan all packed plenty of vitimin C, but likely not enough.  Since i want saturation i consume six or more grams every day with no side effects.

This also explains the early onset of skin wrinkling.



World’s brightest x-rays reveal COVID-19’s damage to the body

A new scanning technique delivers exquisitely detailed images—and could revolutionize the study of human anatomy.

BYMICHAEL GRESHKO
PHOTOGRAPHS BYLUCA LOCATELLI ANDESRF, HUMAN ORGAN ATLAS
PUBLISHED JANUARY 26, 2022
• 20 MIN READ

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/worlds-brightest-x-rays-reveal-covid-19-damage-to-the-body


When Paul Tafforeau saw his first experimental scans of a COVID-19 victim’s lung, he thought he had failed. A paleontologist by training, Tafforeau had been laboring with a team strewn across Europe for months to turn a particle accelerator in the French Alps into a revolutionary medical scanning tool.

It was the end of May 2020, and scientists were anxious for a better view of the ways human organs were being ravaged by COVID-19. Tafforeau had been tasked with developing a technique that could make use of the powerful x-rays generated at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. He’d pushed boundaries on high-resolution x-rays of rock-hard fossils and desiccated mummies as an ESRF staff scientist. Now, he was dismayed by a lump of soft, squishy tissue.

But when his colleagues caught their first glimpse of the lung scans, they felt something else: awe.





The Human Organ Atlas project, an international team including ESRF staff scientist Paul Tafforeau, has used HiP-CT to scan the organs of COVID-19 victims, including their brains. HiP-CT scans can zoom in from a whole-organ scan to provide a cellular view of regions of interest.






This HiP-CT scan reveals the vasculature within a lung lobe from a 54-year-old male who died of COVID-19. HiP-CT scans show that in severe COVID-19 cases, the lungs’ blood vessels are severely damaged: Here, airspaces are colored with cyan, open blood vessels are c...


The images presented them with richer detail than any medical CT scan they’d seen before, allowing them to bridge a stubborn gap in how scientists and doctors can visualize—and make sense of—human organs. “In anatomy textbooks, when you see, This is the large scale, and this is the smaller one, they’re all beautiful hand-drawn images for a reason: They’re artistic interpretations, because we have no images for it,” says Claire Walsh, a senior postdoctoral fellow at University College London (UCL). 

“For the first time, we can make the real thing.”


Tafforeau and Walsh are part of an international team of more than 30 researchers that has created a powerful new kind of x-ray scan called hierarchical phase-contrast tomography (HiP-CT). With it, they can finally go from a complete human organ to a zoomed-in view of the body’s tiniest blood vessels and even individual cells.

The technique is already providing fresh insights into how COVID-19 damages and reshapes the blood vessels of the lungs. And while its long-term promise is hard to define, because nothing quite like HiP-CT has ever existed before, researchers excited by its potential are enthusiastically dreaming up new ways to understand disease and more rigorously chart the terrains of human anatomy.

“What is perhaps a surprise to most people is we’ve been studying the heart anatomically since hundreds of years ago,” says UCL cardiac anatomist Andrew Cook, “but there isn’t a consensus about the normal structure of the heart, particularly the muscle cells, and how it changes as the heart beats.”

A technique with HiP-CT’s promise, he says, is something “I’ve been waiting for my whole career.”




UCL senior postdoctoral fellow Claire Walsh, one of HiP-CT’s co-creators, monitors the control cabin of BM05, the ESRF facility where the Human Organ Atlas’s first scans were carried out.






This HiP-CT scan of a heart from a 94-year-old female donor is made of 3D “voxels” just 25.08 micrometers to a side.

Needing a bigger magnifying glass

The HiP-CT technique got its start as two German pathologists raced to track the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s punishing effects across the human body.


As soon as news of unusual pneumonia cases began trickling out of China, Danny Jonigk—a thoracic diseases pathologist at Hannover Medical School—and Maximilian Ackermann, a pathologist at University Medical Center Mainz, were on high alert. Both had expertise in lung disease, and right away they knew COVID-19 was unusual. The two were especially concerned about reports of a “silent hypoxia” that left COVID-19 patients awake but caused their blood oxygen levels to plummet.

Ackermann and Jonigk suspected that SARS-CoV-2 was somehow attacking the lungs’ blood vessels. As the disease spread through Germany in March 2020, the duo began conducting autopsies of COVID-19 victims. They soon tested their blood-vessel hypothesis by injecting tissue samples with resin and then dissolving the tissues in acid, which left behind faithful casts of the original vasculature.

Using this technique, Ackermann and Jonigk compared the tissues of people who hadn’t died of COVID-19 with those who had. They immediately saw that among COVID-19 victims, the smallest blood vessels in the lungs were distorted and reshaped. These landmark results, published online in May 2020, showed that COVID-19 wasn’t strictly a respiratory disease but a vascular one—one that could affect organs across the entire body.

“If you go through the human body and you take all the blood vessels in one line, you come up with [60,000] to 70,000 miles, double the distance around the Equator,” says Ackermann, who is also a pathologist at Wuppertal, Germany’s HELIO Clinics. If just one percent of these blood vessels gets attacked by a virus, he adds, the blood’s flow and ability to absorb oxygen can be impaired, with potentially devastating consequences across entire organs.

As soon as they recognized COVID-19’s vascular effects, Jonigk and Ackermann realized that they needed a much better view of the damage.

Medical x-rays such as CT scans can provide a view of an entire organ, but they weren’t high-resolution enough. Biopsies can let scientists study tissue samples under a microscope, but the resulting images are only small bits of a whole organ and can’t show how COVID-19 progresses across an entire lung. And the team’s resin technique required dissolving tissue, which destroys the sample and limits further study.


“At the end of the day, [the] lung is oxygen in, carbon dioxide out—but for that, it has thousands and thousands of miles of blood vessels and capillaries that are so finely and nicely arranged … it’s almost a miracle,” says Jonigk, the founding principal investigator of the German Center of Lung Research. “So how could we actually assess something as complex as COVID-19 … without destroying the organ?”

Jonigk and Ackermann needed the unprecedented: a series of x-rays, all done on the same organ, that would let researchers zoom into portions of the organ down to the cellular scale. In March 2020, the German duo reached out to a longtime collaborator of theirs, Peter Lee, a materials scientist and chair of emerging technologies at UCL. Lee‘s specialty is studying biological materials with powerful x-rays—so his mind immediately went to the French Alps.




 
A donated brain undergoes conservation in the ESRF’s biomedical sample preparation lab, where the Human Organ Atlas’s donated human organs are stored for research purposes.






2:01

This video shows a 3D reconstruction of the complete brain of a 69-year-old female donor. Researchers made this x-ray scan with a new technique—called hierarchical phase-contrast tomography, or HiP-CT—that relies on the world’s brightest X-ray source, the Europ...
Getting the scans to work

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility sits in the northwestern corner of Grenoble on a triangular plot of land where two rivers meet. The facility is a particle accelerator that makes electrons travel at nearly the speed of light around a half-mile-long circular track. As these electrons careen round and round, powerful magnets along the track bend the particle stream, which causes the electrons to emit the world’s brightest x-rays.


This powerful radiation lets the ESRF peer into objects at the scale of micrometers, even nanometers. It is frequently used to study materials such as alloys and composites, check the molecular structures of proteins, and even reconstruct ancient fossils without having to separate rock from bone. Ackermann, Jonigk, and Lee wanted to use this huge instrument to perform the world’s most detailed x-ray scans of a human organ.

Enter Tafforeau, whose work at the ESRF has stretched the limits of what synchrotron scans can see. His impressive bag of tricks previously let scientists peer inside dinosaur eggs and virtually unwrap mummies, and almost immediately, Tafforeau confirmed that the synchrotron could, in theory, make a good scan of an entire lung lobe. But actually scanning a whole human organ posed a grand challenge.

For one, there’s the issue of contrast. Standard x-rays make images based on how much radiation gets absorbed by different materials, with heavier elements absorbing more than lighter ones. Soft tissues are mostly made of light elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on—which is why they don’t show up clearly in a classic medical x-ray.

One of the ESRF’s great benefits is that its x-ray beams are very coherent: Light moves in waves, and in the ESRF’s case, its x-rays all start out with the same frequency and alignment, undulating in unison like the marks left behind by a zen garden’s rake. But as these x-rays move through an object, subtle differences in density can cause each x-ray’s path to deviate slightly, a difference that gets more detectable the farther the x-rays propagate once they exit the object. These deviations can reveal the slight density differences within an object, even if it is made of light elements.

But stability is another challenge. To pull off a series of zoomed-in x-rays, a given organ would have to be immobilized in its natural shape so it wouldn’t flex and shift by more than a thousandth of a millimeter. Any more wiggle than that, and successive x-ray scans on the same organ wouldn’t align with each other. Needless to say, though, organs can be quite floppy.


Lee and his team at UCL rushed to devise containers that could withstand the synchrotron’s x-rays but also let through as many waves as possible. Lee also juggled the project’s overall organization—such as the finer points of shipping human organs between Germany and France—and recruited Walsh, who specializes in huge biomedical datasets, to help work out how to analyze the scans. Back in France, Tafforeau’s jobs included refining the scanning procedure and figuring out how to keep the organs still within the containers that Lee’s team was building.





The heart of the ESRF, the synchrotron, produces x-rays 100 billion times brighter than the ones used in hospitals with high-energy electrons that race around the ESRF’s storage ring, an 844-meter-long circular tunnel.







The ESRF—the home of HiP-CT and the Human Organ Atlas—traces a silvery circle into the northwestern corner of Grenoble, France. Synchrotrons such as the ESRF provide unique glimpses into matter’s structure and behavior at the molecular and atomic levels.


To preserve the organs from decay and make the scans as sharp as possible, Tafforeau knew that they would need to be treated with several rounds of ethanol-water solutions. He also knew that he needed to stabilize the organs in something that exactly matched the organs’ density. His working plan was to somehow embed the organs in an ethanol-rich agar, a jelly-like substance derived from seaweed.


However, the devil would be in the details—and Tafforeau, like much of Europe, was stuck at home in lockdown. So Tafforeau relocated his research to his home laboratory: a former secondary kitchen that he had spent years decking out with 3D printers, basic chemistry equipment, and the tools used to prepare animal skeletons for anatomical study.

Tafforeau used supplies from a local grocery store to work out how to make his agar. He even collected rainwater runoff from his recently cleaned roof to obtain demineralized water, a standard ingredient in lab-grade agar recipes. To practice packing organs in agar, he got pig entrails from a local slaughterhouse.

Tafforeau got permission to return to the ESRF in mid-May to perform the first test scans of a pig’s lung. As May turned to June, he had prepared and scanned the left lung lobe of a 54-year-old man who had died from COVID-19, which Ackermann and Jonigk had shipped to Grenoble from Germany.

“When I saw the first image, the email I sent to all the people on the project was, I apologize: We failed, I was not able to have high-quality scans,” he says. “I just sent them two pictures that, for me, were bad, but for them were excellent.”

For UCL’s Lee, the images were awe-inspiring: an organ-wide view like a standard medical CT scan, but “with one million times the information.” It was as if the researchers had spent their lives studying a forest by either flying over it in a jumbo jet or hiking along one trail. Now they were soaring just above the forest canopy, like birds on the wing.

“The first time we saw the middle resolution … It was just like, silence,” Walsh says.
Tackling future challenges

The team published its first full description of the HiP-CT method in November 2021, and the researchers also have published a detailed look at how COVID-19 affects certain kinds of blood circulation in the lungs.

The scans also yielded an unanticipated bonus: helping the researchers convince friends and relatives to get vaccinated. In severe COVID-19 cases, many of the lungs’ blood vessels look dilated and bloated, and at smaller scales, abnormal bundles of tiny blood vessels form.


“When you see the structure of lungs of people who die from COVID, it does not look like lungs—it’s a big mess,” Tafforeau says.

Even in healthy organs, he adds, the scans were revealing subtle anatomical features that had never been documented because nobody has ever seen a human organ in this level of detail before. With more than a million dollars in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative—a nonprofit founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and physician Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife—the HiP-CT team is now creating what it’s calling the Human Organ Atlas.

So far, the group has released scans of five types of organs—the heart, brain, kidneys, lungs, and spleen—based on donated organs from Ackermann and Jonigk’s COVID-19 autopsies in Germany and healthy “control” organs from LADAF, a Grenoble-based anatomy lab. The team has made the data, as well as fly-through movies based on the data, freely available online.

The Human Organ Atlas is rapidly growing: Another 30 organs have already been scanned, and 80 more are in various stages of preparation. Lee says that some 40 different research groups have contacted the team to learn more about the method.





This HiP-CT scan depicts the left kidney of a 94-year-old female do
nor, down to a resolution of 25.08 micrometers.IMAGE BY ESRF, HUMAN ORGAN ATLAS






Thanks to HiP-CT, researchers can trace the complex vascular system of the 94-year-old’s kidney at high resolution.


Cook, the UCL heart specialist, see enormous potential in using HiP-CT to understand basic anatomy. And Joe Jacob, a UCL radiologist who specializes in lung disease, says that HiP-CT will be “invaluable for understanding diseases,” especially in 3D structures such as blood vessels.

Even artists are joining the fray. Barney Steel, of the London-based experiential art collective Marshmallow Laser Feast, says that he is actively researching how to explore HiP-CT data in immersive virtual reality. “We’re basically creating journeys through the human body,” he says.


But for all HiP-CT’s promise, there are also considerable challenges. First, Walsh says, HiP-CT scans generate a “terrifying amount of data,” easily several terabytes per organ. For clinicians to make real-world use of these scans, the researchers hope to develop a cloud-based interface to navigate them, like Google Maps for the human body.

They also need to turn the scans into workable 3D models with greater ease. Like all CT scanning techniques, HiP-CT works by making many 2D slices of a given object and stacking them together. Even today, much of this process is manual, especially for scans of abnormal or diseased tissues. Lee and Walsh say that a major priority for the HiP-CT team is to develop machine-learning techniques that can lighten the load.

These challenges will scale as the Human Organ Atlas expands—and as researchers’ ambitions grow with it. The HiP-CT team is using the ESRF’s newest beam facility, called BM18, to continue scanning the project’s organs. BM18 produces a much bigger x-ray beam, which means scans take less time, and BM18’s x-ray detector can be placed up to 125 feet (38 meters) away from the object being scanned, which makes its scans far sharper. The BM18 results are already so good, Tafforeau says, that he has re-scanned some of the the Human Organ Atlas’s original samples on the new system.

BM18 also has the space to scan very large objects. Thanks to the new facility, the team’s vision is to scan an entire torso of a human body in one fell swoop by the end of 2023.

In exploring this technique’s immense potential, Tafforeau says, “we are really at the very beginning.”

Friday, December 30, 2022

Forget Oil. Now They Are Coming for the Cows




\This is so outrageous.  There is plenty wrong about agricultural agricultural practises, but simply turning it off is criminal absurdity.

This blog continously covers these issues and i am fully aware that best practise will take literally decades to change in.  Not least because we have to train the farmers and recycle the hardware.

Any other method entails genocide and atrocious damage.  To say nothing about a population collapse of our farm animals..



Forget Oil. Now They Are Coming for the Cows


LEE ESTO EN ESPAÑOL

12/19/2022

Doug French

https://mises.org/wire/forget-oil-now-they-are-coming-cows


First, they came for the oil, now they're coming for the cows. Environmentalists have no shame or sense and farmers around the world are, forget the pitchforks, “setting hay bales ablaze and dumping manure on motorways,” report April Roach, Tracy Withers, Jen Skerritt, and Agnieszka de Sousa for Bloomberg.




Never mind that food prices have spiked around the world. For instance, grocery prices are up 13 percent in the US this year. The Dutch government said it would buy out as many as three thousand of the biggest emitters (farmers) in a voluntary one-time offer. While the weather turns cold and gas supplies become scarce the green gang in Holland is setting aside €24.3 billion ($25.6 billion) to fund the transition. “Those who refuse will be forced out of business,” reports Bloomberg.




Bloomberg’s quartet of reporters doesn’t say what the government will do with the land once they seize it, but you can detect their point of view with this, “Intensive farming—and decades of official inaction—have devastated biodiversity in the Netherlands, forcing the government to impose drastic measures.”




“Devastated biodiversity?” This is food we’re talking about. Something humans require. Mother nature deals farmers enough bad hands, what with droughts, floods, fires, and pests. Now, the heavy hand of government believes it must get rid of cows because, well, they fart and urinate.




“From farm to fork, the food system generates about 31 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions,” the Bloomberg quartet explains. “Cows and sheep emit planet-warming methane simply by digesting food; their manure and urine are a source of nitrogen oxide which, in large volumes, throws ecosystems off kilter.”




Having millions of people go hungry sounds more “off kilter” to me. “If action isn’t taken fast, researchers estimate that food-related emissions alone would push the Earth past 1.5C of warming that world leaders set as a target in the 2015 Paris Agreement.” Oh no.




In heavily farmed New Zealand, where agricultural exports account for half the country’s exports, the government passed a law in hopes that net agricultural emissions will be reduced 24 per cent by 2050, with farmers being forced to cut emissions 10 percent in just three years, when the emissions levy comes into force.




“The so-called ‘fart tax’ will be reinvested in the industry through incentives, research and technology so New Zealand can reposition itself as a leader in ethically produced, higher-value food, a market that’s growing as consumers become more climate and health conscious,” Bloomberg reports.




Bryce McKenzie has reduced his herd by 50, but that’s not enough. “We don't want a country planted in pine trees and then not be able to grow food,” says McKenzie. “We want food security for the future.”




Farms produce about a third of greenhouse gasses in Ireland and farmers are expected to cut emissions by a quarter, compared with three-quarters percent targets for electricity and by half for transport. In Canada, farmers expect to lose $8 billion in foregone output this decade to comply with government mandates. “We’re being asked to do something to benefit all of society yet we're the ones left with the bill,” says Chuck Fossay, who farms with his brothers on 3,600 acres outside of Winnipeg that’ve been in the family since the early 1900s. “We have to do what we can, but it has to be achievable, and it has to be fair.”




Back in the Netherlands, that government’s issue with cow urine has politicians requiring farmers to slash emissions by as much as 70 percent. And the closer a farm is to one of the country’s 160 protected natural areas, the tighter the limits.




To meet government mandates, “livestock numbers must shrink by a third overall. If the government gets its way, the biggest polluters will be closed by this time next year.”




Dutch ecologists claim cow urine will kill all the trees, while farmers claim it's an unwarranted government land grab. Caroline van der Plas, leader of the populist Farmer-Citizen Movement says farmers are “ordinary people but they feel treated like criminals. Everything farmers do is bad; poison sprayers, environmental polluters, mistreatment of animals.”




Sadly, ordinary grocery shoppers will blame the grocery store as food prices continue upward and environmentalists pat themselves on the back and are feted as heroes in the mainstream media.

Topical Black Seed Oil Beats Tylenol for Pain Relief in Osteoarthritis





What is finally happening is actually evolutionary.  The thousands of known medically indicated plants are been subjected to extensive application of science such as this example.  In this case, they need to run it out on a thousand patients over a full year.  There will then be a lot learned and plenty of practise.

I do like the five minute massage application which should be standard anyway.

right now first indications are wonderfully positive.  And has any of those pharma things ever been tested the way i just described?.

Most folks can do this as well.


Topical Black Seed Oil Beats Tylenol for Pain Relief in Osteoarthritis

https://greenmedinfo.com/blog/topical-black-seed-oil-beats-tylenol-pain-relief-osteoarthritis
Posted on: Tuesday, December 20th 2022 at 8:00 am

Written By: Sayer Ji, Founder

This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2022


The tiny black seed strikes again! Even orally administered Tylenol can't compete with the topical application of this potent healing oil to reduce symptoms of one of the most common health complaints of our time

Recently, over-the-counter "pain killing" drugs like ibuprofen and Tylenol have been found to have a battery of serious adverse side effects, some even life-threatening. Even aspirin, commonly believed to be a life-saving cardioprotective agent, has come under scrutiny as perhaps doing far more harm than good. Even more astounding is the recent discovery that some of these drugs have soul-numbing properties not unlike psychotropic medications.

Due to the growing concern about both the physical and psychological harms of these pharmaceutical agents, interest in natural, evidence-based alternatives has been exploding. In order to satisfy the demand for scientifically validated alternatives to drugs GreenMedInfo has accumulated hundreds of abstracts on the topic, which can be viewed on our various related database pages, such as Pain, Aspirin Alternatives, and Ibuprofen Alternatives.

Why is Everyone Using NSAIDs and Tylenol?

The reality is that because millions suffer from pain and inflammation on a daily basis, the promise of popping a pill to relieve discomfort is an ever-present temptation. It doesn't help that the US is one of three countries that permit drug companies and pharmacies are allowed to advertise these medications directly to the consumer through television and other mainstream media channels.

But is it logical to expect a potent chemical to positively alter symptoms that aren't caused by a lack of that chemical? If poor diet, lifestyle, chemical exposures, and a suboptimal mindset are the basis of most chronic health issues, then shouldn't the focus be on addressing and reversing these underlying variables instead? This would be the goal of so-called "root cause resolution" medicine. Instead, palliative medicine -- where the goal is to suppress symptoms -- is the default approach; but it's not sustainable and the collateral damage to one's health is often not worth the risk of the intervention.

When Food (Applied Topically) Is More Powerful Than Pharmaceutical Medicine

A recent clinical trial titled, "Effect of Topical Application of Nigella Sativa Oil and Oral Acetaminophen on Pain in Elderly with Knee Osteoarthritis: A Crossover Clinical Trial," compared topical black seed oil with oral Tylenol on pain in elderly osteoarthritis patients.



Study participants were divided into two groups of 10:

One group received 1 milliliter of black seed oil applied on the knee joint 3 times a day every 8 hours for 3 weeks.


One group was given 1 tablet of 325 mg acetaminophen also 3 times a day every 8 hours for 3 weeks.

This study was performed on 40 elderly patients, average age 77, 18 (45%) men and 22 (55%) women.

The criteria for inclusion in the study included the following common symptoms related to knee osteoarthritis:


"Age over 65 years diagnosis of knee osteoarthritis, according to American College Rheumatology diagnostic criteria, included 1) knee pain on most days of the last month; 2) crepitus (joint sound in active motion); 3) morning stiffness less than 30 minutes; and 4) inflation in the examination of the knee bone, respectively (15)."

The promising results of the intervention were reported as follows:


"Study results showed that topical application of Nigella sativa oil and oral acetaminophen reduced pain in elderly with knee osteoarthritis; after using Nigella sativa oil, the reduction of pain was higher (p=0.01)." [emphasis added]

The researchers concluded:


"This study showed that topical use of Nigella sativa oil can be more effective in reducing knee pain in elderly patients than acetaminophen, which is typically used as a safe supplement for the elderly." [emphasis added]

What Gives Black Seed Its Remarkable Power?



Unlike pharmaceutical agents which are comprised of either singular chemicals or simple combinations of them, black seed is a complex food which contains a wide range of nutritional and phytochemical components. These all act in concert to produce complex physiological responses in the human body. The study described some of the known constituents of black seed as follows:


"Nigella sativa oil is composed of 30% by weight of p-cymene, which is the most original composition, and 61.48% of the weight is composed of the volatile oil. Nigella sativa seeds contain fat, vitamins, minerals, proteins, essential amino acids, and carbohydrates (8). Nigella sativa seed is a rich source of essential fatty and unsaturated acids. The main unsaturated fatty acids are linoleic acid and oleic acid. There are also other compounds in seeds, such as phospholipids, carotene, calcium, iron, and potassium (9)."

One of the reasons why the pharmaceutical industry and mainstream medicine will not invest in food-based solutions for preventing and treating disease is because these common foods and spices do not lend themselves to being easily understandable, nor patentable. We may never know exactly why the relatively infinitely more complex concentrate of a food like black seed oil produces superior effects when compared to drugs like Tylenol. But knowing how something works should be of secondary importance to the fact that it does work, shouldn't it?


"Mother Nature's formulas are proprietary, but she does not grant patents." ~ Sayer Ji

The primary reason why we will never see conventional physicians prescribing food as medicine is because the FDA defines anything that "prevents, cures, diagnoses or cures disease" as a "drug," and FDA drug approval can cost up to 11 billion dollars per drug. Can you imagine a walnut company investing that much money in order to prove the obvious: namely, that its product has health benefits? Chemicals, on the other hand, are ideal for this kind of commercialization, even if they almost invariably carry debilitating and deadly side effects.

Closing Comments

This study illustrates the power of natural, food-based alternatives for reducing symptoms in a way that does not produce the risks associated with drug-based interventions. In fact, given that pain killers such as Tylenol actually increase the risk of serious diseases such as asthma, and black seed oil has been shown to reduce asthma, the superiority of black seed oil over conventional drugs like Tylenol may be far more profound than overtly discussed in this study.

For more information on the "side benefits" of black seed oil, please visit our Black Seed database which contains research on over 100 health conditions that it has been studied to have potential therapeutic application in improving. Also, please use our extensive Osteoarthritis database to learn more about natural and/or integrative approaches to treating the condition.

It should also be noted the highly therapeutic ritual of massaging the oil into the knee may have played a significant role in producing the observed positive outcome. Here is the specific method used:


"In the first stage, for the first group about 1 ml Nigella sativa oil was applied on the knee joint three times a day every 8 hours for 1 week. The massaging method was done with the entire palm in a way that continued for 5 minutes, massaged in a clockwise direction at the front and sides of the knee joint. It should be noted that the Nigella sativa oil used was owned by Barij-e-Kashan; for all subjects, it was maintained away from sunlight and at ambient temperature."

Consider also that 1 millimeter is only about 1 gram. That's a very small amount of oil. One teaspoon would have about 5 grams, or 5 servings worth of black seed oil.

Black seed oil is clearly a perfect example of an ancient healing substance which has undergone a modern day Renaissance of scientific validation. As the old world drug-based paradigm of symptom suppression continues to be proven inadequate, especially outside of the emergency setting (where drugs can sometimes have life-saving applications), interest is growing in evidence-based natural alternatives like black seed. Black seed is only the tip of a massive iceberg of thousands of science-backed natural compounds that could be used to alleviate human suffering. Please use the GreenMedInfo.com Research Dashboard to search over 10,000 health topics and share your findings with friends, family, and practitioners who may be interested in this topic.