I'm embedding some more discussions, and I think it's important for me to add a few comments that will relate to the content in the videos. I can't offer medical advice, and I, obviously, want to recommend, strongly, that people discuss any of these or similar issues with their doctors. But it's noteworthy that, in my view, the habit of drawing the immediate conclusion that a person who discusses events in his or her life that appear to have not been real (and that the person appears to have perceived in a hallucinatory state or the like) is, potentially, a very dangerous and otherwise-problematic practice. It's profoundly unscientific and seems as though it can, in many cases, partially be rooted in this sort of fear, on the part of the person who's being presented with the "account," that one is helpless to understand or do anything about the problem. Aside from that aspect of the issue, one has to consider, in my view, that large numbers of people have reported, for example, very similar accounts of alien "abduction" experiences or the like. One's inability to understand a technological or nontechnologically-based-but-"mechanistically-complex" mechanism that might account for those types of experiences implies nothing about the extent to which anyone might be or not be making use of those mechanisms, such as in the context of his or her use of some sort of technology.
Another issue is that many of the types of "algorithmic" reasoning that are employed in the context of psychiatry are not based in anything resembling scientific evidence, and there's a danger that certain groups of people will, given the frequency with which this type of thing has occurred in recent decades, come out on the short end of the stick, so to speak, when it comes to their being diagnosed with one condition or another. In the case of the absurd overdiagnosis of bipolar disorder that is, in my opinion, occurring these days, there's the potential that young women and also women of any age will wind up being diagnosed with with bipolar disorder with greater frequencies than men might be diagnosed with bipolar disorder (I'm referring to any of the various subtypes of the disorder). The authors of this book, for example, discuss some of the various endocrinological abnormalities that can produce symptoms or disease states that someone might misconstrue as being evidence that a person who is experiencing those symptoms is "bipolar" [Klonoff and Landrine, 1997: (http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=LG9ctTVMOlUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=misdiagnosis+bipolar+glucocorticoid+OR+addison%27s+OR+Cushing%27s&ots=jA_SlSSgHv&sig=oamwBxy21gvWALS8bxMPLCZWknw#v=onepage&q=bipolar&f=false)]. To say that a woman is "getting moody" or that she is "up and down" (these are not actual quotes from any texts but are representative of the types of phrases I've seen people use to describe women who supposedly "are bipolar") and "just all over the ballpark, you know, just all the f#$& over the place, for Christ's sake" is basically analogous to saying that she's suffering from "hysteria" or something and that she's just irrational because she's a woman or something. I used those phrases to communicate the kind of hatefulness that can be sort of latent in a lot of these comments that, for example, the significant others of women who have been diagnosed with bipolar have made, in various texts or articles or the like. I remember seeing at least two research articles that have reported the finding that young boys are twice as likely as young girls to be diagnosed with ADHD, and yet the "true" ratio between genders is thought to be 1:1. It stands to reason that some of those girls might go on to have difficulties from ADHD symptoms and to then be misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and be given medications that are very unlikely to be appropriate for the treatment of their symptoms. One can say that the ADHD medications are not so terrific, but, in my view, many of the drugs used in bipolar disorder have more potential to cause problems.
Anyway, even though I understand that people are unlikely to be intentionally misdiagnosing or persecuting people, the point is that it's a very, very dangerous thing to stamp a person with a label that cannot be removed and that proclaims that their statements about their experiences have no validity whatsoever and that no one should believe the things the person says. No one's going to do that to me, given that I can do scientific work and the like and can sort of "assert" my credibility in a multitude of ways, but many people aren't likely to be so fortunate.
[url for above video on youtube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCULfqlQ7s8)]
[url for above video on youtube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC8lZbVhfBA)]
[url for above video on youtube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpBKFCNtueI)]
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Shock-Induced Formation of Timelike Manifolds; Conceptual Similarity to "N-dimensional" Magnetic Reconnection and Issues in Mathematics
In this mp3, I talk a little about the notion that one can divide a region of space into infinitely many subregions, and, in my opinion, one cannot do that in the way that most people think about the process of "division."
[The download url is this: (http://www.divshare.com/download/13170940-b8b)]
This is actually really interesting and covers some important issues [Sattig, 2003: (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~tsattig/Research_files/TP-final.pdf)], but the author makes a distinction between time and space. As a human would perceive events to be in the past or future of his or her life, those past or future events are, in any concept of spacetime that is consistent with reality, in my opinion, at least partially intact, physically, in regions of spacetime that are not completely "contained" within one's sensory "sphere" of perception. I don't know precisely what a human's perceptual region should be defined as being, but one way to think about it is to say that sheets of spacetime extend out of the brain and form a kind of thin and dynamic "coating" of one's immediate surroundings but that one experiences memories, in part, as a result of the spacetime manifolds, connecting one's mind to other regions of spacetime that one perceived in the past, becoming unstable or not as robustly-maintained as they might be. But to say that one can divide a region into infinitely many sub-regions [some of the problems with this assumption are hinted at by Morriston, 2002: (http://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.html#_edn)] is, essentially, to say that one can keep going farther and farther inward, into a region that is smaller and smaller, and that one can keep "entering" this region, zooming in and zooming in, for an infinitely-long interval of "perceptual time." If this were the case, then one would, basically, be saying that this infinitely-small region is, in fact, infinitely large and that the supposedly-infinitely-small subregion has "broken out" of the region whose boundaries one initially defined as being finite. It's possible to illustrate this concept by looking at graphs in Gaussian coordinate systems. I think this image was used in a wikimedia commons article on antialiasing in computer graphics. It shows the way in which the division of a region into vast numbers of smaller regions could give the region so much depth as to cause the sub-regions to become "distant" or to "be" distant (in the sense that it requires the sub-regions, as their numbers increase without boundary, to become distant and to roll away, out of the scope of visible perception):
(This photo is in the public domain and is from Wikimedia Commons: (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reconstruction-Gaussian-Zone.png)]
This point is actually very important in the context of extradimensional or non-Euclidean spacetime geometry and physics, and it's important for understanding the formation of shock-induced "break-out" manifolds (similarly, one can envision open magnetic field lines, formed by the type of magnetic reconnection in which magnetic flux lines "break out" of an existing flux loop or current loop and reconnect at sites that may be very distant from the site at which the breaking out occurred, as being timelike magnetic field lines, for example) [see Somov, 2009, p. 18, Figure 10, discussed on pp.17-18: (http://arxiv.org/pdf/0901.4697)] at sites of nuclear detonations or, as discussed in the mp3, at the sites of shock-induced particle accelerations in pulsar-wind nebulas, etc.
[The download url is this: (http://www.divshare.com/download/13170940-b8b)]
This is actually really interesting and covers some important issues [Sattig, 2003: (http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~tsattig/Research_files/TP-final.pdf)], but the author makes a distinction between time and space. As a human would perceive events to be in the past or future of his or her life, those past or future events are, in any concept of spacetime that is consistent with reality, in my opinion, at least partially intact, physically, in regions of spacetime that are not completely "contained" within one's sensory "sphere" of perception. I don't know precisely what a human's perceptual region should be defined as being, but one way to think about it is to say that sheets of spacetime extend out of the brain and form a kind of thin and dynamic "coating" of one's immediate surroundings but that one experiences memories, in part, as a result of the spacetime manifolds, connecting one's mind to other regions of spacetime that one perceived in the past, becoming unstable or not as robustly-maintained as they might be. But to say that one can divide a region into infinitely many sub-regions [some of the problems with this assumption are hinted at by Morriston, 2002: (http://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.html#_edn)] is, essentially, to say that one can keep going farther and farther inward, into a region that is smaller and smaller, and that one can keep "entering" this region, zooming in and zooming in, for an infinitely-long interval of "perceptual time." If this were the case, then one would, basically, be saying that this infinitely-small region is, in fact, infinitely large and that the supposedly-infinitely-small subregion has "broken out" of the region whose boundaries one initially defined as being finite. It's possible to illustrate this concept by looking at graphs in Gaussian coordinate systems. I think this image was used in a wikimedia commons article on antialiasing in computer graphics. It shows the way in which the division of a region into vast numbers of smaller regions could give the region so much depth as to cause the sub-regions to become "distant" or to "be" distant (in the sense that it requires the sub-regions, as their numbers increase without boundary, to become distant and to roll away, out of the scope of visible perception):
(This photo is in the public domain and is from Wikimedia Commons: (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reconstruction-Gaussian-Zone.png)]
This point is actually very important in the context of extradimensional or non-Euclidean spacetime geometry and physics, and it's important for understanding the formation of shock-induced "break-out" manifolds (similarly, one can envision open magnetic field lines, formed by the type of magnetic reconnection in which magnetic flux lines "break out" of an existing flux loop or current loop and reconnect at sites that may be very distant from the site at which the breaking out occurred, as being timelike magnetic field lines, for example) [see Somov, 2009, p. 18, Figure 10, discussed on pp.17-18: (http://arxiv.org/pdf/0901.4697)] at sites of nuclear detonations or, as discussed in the mp3, at the sites of shock-induced particle accelerations in pulsar-wind nebulas, etc.
Friday, November 12, 2010
Nonequilibrium and Timelike Neutrino Oscillations in Nuclear Chain Reactions; Problems and Hope for the Study of Magnetohydrodynamics of the Desert Ocean
These diagrams show some of the mechanisms by which the collisions of cosmic rays with the nuclei of the atoms of gas molecules in the upper atmosphere (or at the shock front/Rayleigh-Taylor instability surface of the nuke, etc.) produce muon and electron neutrinos that then oscillate in a manner that "gets going" and gets some momentum, in terms of oscillations between the different time frames or "event frames" in which the detonation occurs and that surround the detonation site, in my opinion, and that are brought together at the detonation site, when the site is viewed as being a complex hyperbolic point/saddle point. In this context, the detonation site can be viewed as being a complex X-point, meaning a site of magnetic reconnection (at which the "center of the X" is the saddle point). I made these diagrams of neutrino oscillations because it's one way of looking at spacetime dynamics, and a lot of the research on neutrino physics is very important for understanding or for getting a sense of the dynamics of the geometry of spacetime. There's an excess of neutrino density that's created at the detonation site, and one can take a rigid and "classical" view that the timelike propagation of electron antineutrinos (shown as v(subscipt)e, with a dash over the v) (and muon antineutrinos and other flavors of antineutrinos), backward in time across some short time interval, and localized excesses of neutrino densities [at the detonation site(s) in different time frames] can, paradoxically, produce a kind of "neutrino vacuum" by simultaneously "drawing down" the flavors of neutrinos that are less abundant and by sending antineutrinos backward in time, thereby setting up timelike and "radially-rolodexed," or radially-oriented, neutrino oscillations. It's similar to a mass action effect in chemical kinetics, meaning that nonequilibrium conditions are persisting in the system and exerting a push and pull effect on the dynamics of neutrino oscillations and decay rates and rates of formation, as a result of nuclear chain reactions produced by the detonation. The detonation site, in that vein, is like a branch point in a complex set of metabolic pathways, such that the system in question (the set of metabolic pathways or, in this case, the different event frames) is not at equilibrium.
In this article [Schillaci, 2009: (http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/sharpe/486/schillacif.pdf)], the author discusses some of the problems that exist in physics, in relation to things such as, even, the most basic definition of what a magnetic field line actually means or actually "is." Even with the significant problems with those types of "definitions of what things actually are" in physics, the study of magnetohydrodynamics is in a very promising state, these days. There are also all of these subtypes of the different forms of magnetic reconnection. For example, there are relativistic and nonrelativistic forms of Sweet-Parker reconnection, in which the process occurs slowly and occurs through "collisional" mechanisms. Then there are different types of shock-associated, fast reconnection, and so on. The whole notion of the rate being a distinguishing characteristic is questionable, in my opinion. Anyway, the author of this document [Falthammar, 1997: (http://plasmauniverse.info/downloads/LifeAlfven.pdf)] discusses the work of Hannes Alfven in plasma physics and in the 'birth' of the field of magnetohydrodynamics, in which electromagnetic field dynamics in space plasmas (and in the spacetime that the plasmas consist of) are similar to the dynamics of ocean waves, etc.
In this article [Schillaci, 2009: (http://www.phys.washington.edu/users/sharpe/486/schillacif.pdf)], the author discusses some of the problems that exist in physics, in relation to things such as, even, the most basic definition of what a magnetic field line actually means or actually "is." Even with the significant problems with those types of "definitions of what things actually are" in physics, the study of magnetohydrodynamics is in a very promising state, these days. There are also all of these subtypes of the different forms of magnetic reconnection. For example, there are relativistic and nonrelativistic forms of Sweet-Parker reconnection, in which the process occurs slowly and occurs through "collisional" mechanisms. Then there are different types of shock-associated, fast reconnection, and so on. The whole notion of the rate being a distinguishing characteristic is questionable, in my opinion. Anyway, the author of this document [Falthammar, 1997: (http://plasmauniverse.info/downloads/LifeAlfven.pdf)] discusses the work of Hannes Alfven in plasma physics and in the 'birth' of the field of magnetohydrodynamics, in which electromagnetic field dynamics in space plasmas (and in the spacetime that the plasmas consist of) are similar to the dynamics of ocean waves, etc.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Rayleigh-Taylor Instability Surfaces, Hyperbolic Geometry, Ghost Condensates, & Three-Dimensional Magnetic Reconnection in Nuclear Physics
I put up some mp3 files from some videos in which I'd discussed some of my thoughts related to spacetime, but I took those down and will upload some of them again, as soon as I can, here. I'll link to more of the pictures, as I find the relevant ones from public-domain sources. I should be able to collect most of them. I've also linked to some segments of youtube videos.
Youtube videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taM3mzpzw1Q [Operation Snapper: Dog Shot; May 1st, 1952; Shows transient darkening effect of spacetime distortion and so-called ghost bubble, above the detonation site, shortly after detonation; See articles on ghost bubbles, ghost radiation, ghost images, ghost emissions, etc., in relation to the astrophysics of black holes and in relation to string theory and so forth: (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ghost+%22black+hole%22+OR+quasar+OR+pulsar+OR+astrophysical+OR+Arxiv+OR+galactic&btnG=Search&as_sdt=100000001&as_ylo=&as_vis=0)]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJdMcrJ4uA [Operation Hardtack: Shot Umbrella; Shows Rayleigh-Taylor instability "fingers," forming a jagged, teeth-like pattern, shortly after detonation; See articles on Rayleigh-Taylor fingers in magnetohydrodynamic models of supernova events and in chemical reactions, etc.: (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22Rayleigh+taylor%22+teeth+OR+fingers&btnG=Search&as_sdt=100000001&as_ylo=&as_vis=0)]
This diagram shows a simplified depiction of some aspects of three-dimensional magnetic reconnection and represents different regions of spacetime as consisting of sheets, as in "world sheets," and the diagram shows the tendency for the dynamics of spacetime turnover/replication to be maximally divergent, as a consequence of the hyperbolic geometry of spacetime. Neither neutral-magnetic-flux regions (three-dimensional regions) nor the "two-dimensional" surfaces that define the regions' geometries is a region or surface that exhibits no magnetic flux. The magnetic flux lines are just organized in complex ways that can "balance out" and produce a relatively-stable (and, to some extent, symmetric, at least along some "axes") region of spacetime that isn't just a jumble or "mess" of magnetic flux lines and patterns of spacetime curvature. The "semi-neutral" regions I should note that some 3D reconnection regions are referred to as being quasi-separatrices or quasi-separatrix layers, and this means that there are sharp or "sudden" transitions or boundary surfaces between different parts of the 3D reconnection region that exhibit magnetic flux along opposing or considerably-different directions [see Aulanier et al., 2005: (http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/aa/full/2005/48/aa3600-05/aa3600-05.html); (http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2005/48/aa3600-05.pdf)]:
Youtube videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taM3mzpzw1Q [Operation Snapper: Dog Shot; May 1st, 1952; Shows transient darkening effect of spacetime distortion and so-called ghost bubble, above the detonation site, shortly after detonation; See articles on ghost bubbles, ghost radiation, ghost images, ghost emissions, etc., in relation to the astrophysics of black holes and in relation to string theory and so forth: (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ghost+%22black+hole%22+OR+quasar+OR+pulsar+OR+astrophysical+OR+Arxiv+OR+galactic&btnG=Search&as_sdt=100000001&as_ylo=&as_vis=0)]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbJdMcrJ4uA [Operation Hardtack: Shot Umbrella; Shows Rayleigh-Taylor instability "fingers," forming a jagged, teeth-like pattern, shortly after detonation; See articles on Rayleigh-Taylor fingers in magnetohydrodynamic models of supernova events and in chemical reactions, etc.: (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22Rayleigh+taylor%22+teeth+OR+fingers&btnG=Search&as_sdt=100000001&as_ylo=&as_vis=0)]
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| [Photo from NASA, via Wikimedia Commons (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Sarychev_Volcano.jpg); (http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1397.html%29] |
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| View of "caging" effect, by magnetic field lines and the dynamics of the equatorial electrojet or "electron fountain," of an equatorial nuclear detonation. |
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| [Eruption of the Sarychev volcano, on the Kuril Islands in Russia; The photo is from NASA, via Wikimedia Commons (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Sarychev_Volcano.jpg); (http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1397.html%29] |
This diagram shows a simplified depiction of some aspects of three-dimensional magnetic reconnection and represents different regions of spacetime as consisting of sheets, as in "world sheets," and the diagram shows the tendency for the dynamics of spacetime turnover/replication to be maximally divergent, as a consequence of the hyperbolic geometry of spacetime. Neither neutral-magnetic-flux regions (three-dimensional regions) nor the "two-dimensional" surfaces that define the regions' geometries is a region or surface that exhibits no magnetic flux. The magnetic flux lines are just organized in complex ways that can "balance out" and produce a relatively-stable (and, to some extent, symmetric, at least along some "axes") region of spacetime that isn't just a jumble or "mess" of magnetic flux lines and patterns of spacetime curvature. The "semi-neutral" regions I should note that some 3D reconnection regions are referred to as being quasi-separatrices or quasi-separatrix layers, and this means that there are sharp or "sudden" transitions or boundary surfaces between different parts of the 3D reconnection region that exhibit magnetic flux along opposing or considerably-different directions [see Aulanier et al., 2005: (http://www.aanda.org/index.php?option=com_article&access=standard&Itemid=129&url=/articles/aa/full/2005/48/aa3600-05/aa3600-05.html); (http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2005/48/aa3600-05.pdf)]:
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| Simplified view of three-dimensional magnetic reconnection, between a pair of two-dimensional, neutral-sheet surfaces, to form a neutral-sheet manifold that is shown as containing a pseudoscalar surface in a transverse plane of the manifold. |
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| Polar (and, here, "redshifted") jets of a black hole, shown ejecting plasma blobs (i.e. buoyant bubble or "big blue bump," etc.) that could be viewed as being "entangled," in some manner, with ghost bubble in the same jets. |
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| Post-Lightning Runaway Electron Acceleration and Dynamics of "Turnover" Waveforms Between Two Regions of Spacetime (As In "Intercloud Magnetohydrodynamics," etc.). |
Here are some references on post-lightning runaway electron acceleration [Inan and Lehtinen, 2005 (see Fig. 2, p. 3 of pdf): (http://www-star.stanford.edu/~vlf/publications/2005-10.pdf); Kikuchi, 2005: (http://piers.mit.edu/piersonline/pdf/Vol1No6Page732to735.pdf); Lehtinen, Inan, and Bell, 2000 (see Fig. 3, p. 3 of pdf and p. 1097 of article): (http://nlpc.stanford.edu/nleht/Science/articles/Lehtinen+2000_Trapped_10.1029_1999GL010765.pdf)]. This new layout of the blogger software is giving me some trouble.
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| View of the detonation known as Operation Plumbbob: Priscilla (Photo is from the archives of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Nevada Site Office: (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/Operation_Plumbbob_-_Priscilla_2.jpg); (http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/PhotoLibrary/57-052.jpg)] |
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| This picture and the one below are on wikimedia commons. This picture shows a "ghost condensate" type of spacetime distortion, oriented vertically, with respect to the ground. The browser, actually, isn't letting me link to the pages to get the url to the U.S. government site [the archives of the National Nuclear Security Administration's Nevada Site Office: (http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/PhotoLibrary/57-052.jpg)]. I'll get those darn pages loaded at some point. They're big ones, I know, but I'll load 'em. It's the same source of public-domain images that I cited on the other picture(s). |
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| [Shows the column of the mushroom cloud become invisible, transiently. Image from wikimedia commons and: (http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/PhotoLibrary/57-052.jpg)] |
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| [This image, showing the jagged, irregular pentagonal geometry of the main jet of M87, was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and is from NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) (www.hubblesite.org): (http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2000/20/); (http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2000/20/image/a/); (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/M87_jet.jpg)] |
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
More on the Potential Relevance of Adenosine Monophosphate to the Adjunctive Management of Depression: Competition Among Nutrients for Excretion
I was just going to briefly discuss some issues that could be relevant, in my opinion, to the potential for the use of purine nucleotides and L-methylfolate, a reduced folate that is available by prescription (with the brand name of Deplin) or over-the-counter (as L-methylfolate, with the trade name of Metafolin, etc.), as adjunctive strategies, used under a doctor's supervision, for dealing with depression. The most basic thing is that the use of adenosine 5'-monophosphate (AMP) is likely to allow for more flexibility in dosing, over the long term, than the use of adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP) disodium is, primarily because the hydrolysis of ATP, by a variety of ectonucleotidase enzymes (and also intracellular nucleotidase enzymes, in the intestinal epithelial cells) and esterase enzymes in the luminal fluid of the small intestine, supplies significant amounts of inorganic phosphate. I don't like to mention brand names on here, and I have no financial ties whatsoever to any supplement or pharmaceutical manufacturer or to any other company or commercial interest. The Bluebonnet nucleotide complex is, in my opinion, still the only over-the-counter supplemental source of AMP that provides a meaningful amount of AMP [(http://www.google.com/products?q=nucleotide+bluebonnet&hl=en&aq=f)]. The phosphate is likely to be absorbed more rapidly than the phosphate that is derived from the hydrolysis or, rather, phosphorolysis of polyphosphates that are present in meats, for example. In my most recent postings on the nutritional aspects of phosphate, I was trying to convey that the use of supplemental sources of phosphate has the potential to be problematic, especially but not only when the supplementation continues for more than a few weeks. And I think that supplementing with any source of phosphate without close supervision by a doctor (this would be of absolutely crucial importance and would include the use of blood tests, every couple of weeks, to monitor serum phosphorus, and the use of urinary phosphorus tests to monitor urinary phosphate excretion) has the potential to be extremely hazardous. Sources of supplemental phosphate can elevate serum phosphorus in very unpredictable ways, and the key point is that AMP provides one third as much phosphate as ATP does. Some of the articles I cited in past postings show that the serum phosphorus levels can rise slowly, over many months, and then suddenly increase exponentially, with potentially devastating consequences to kidney function or to the functioning of any tissue, in which the precipitation of calcium phosphate can cause serious damage. This includes any tissue in the body. So I wanted to reiterate and strengthen my warnings about the significant potential for danger that can accompany any use, whatsoever, of a source of supplemental phosphate. Some ATP disodium supplements also contain calcium phosphate binders and silicates, and these excipients can supply significant amounts of calcium that could, in my opinion, either prevent or augment the adverse effects that excessive phosphate intakes can produce, and the effect (prevention or augmentation) would be expected to depend on the dosage and the timing of the administration/intake of the excipient. Messing around with that stuff and worrying about supplements that are loaded up with calcium doesn't sound very good to me, for reasons I've discussed, at length, in the past.
Part of the point with this is that the use of supplemental gluconate, glutamine, creatine, citrate, or adenosine or inosine or other supplements that supply organic anion substrates can, in my opinion, significantly limit the amounts of oral AMP that one can tolerate, and this can become very problematic and puzzling. I've mentioned this in the past, but I want to emphasize that it's very important, in my view, to consider the fact that many nutrients and drugs compete with phosphate and with bile acids, for example, for transport by nonspecific organic anion transporters, in the kidneys and liver. In essence, there tends to be a limit to the total supply of "organic anion transporter (OAT) substrates" (these transporters are very numerous and include the ATP-binding cassette family of transporters, and that family of transport proteins includes the multidrug resistance transport proteins, as in mdr1, mdr2, etc.) that one can ingest, and it can become necessary to "decide" which nutrient one wants to supplement with and to limit the dosages of the other OAT substrates. I've been aware of this for a long time, and many articles discuss the crucial importance of this in the context of liver disease or in relation to kidney-related pharmacology. But it took me a long time to realize that, for example, the dosages of magnesium gluconate, creatine, and glutamine that I'd been taking had been causing me to be unable to use dosages of AMP that I'd wanted to use, in relation to antidepressant augmentation, under my doctor's supervision. The dosages of the individual supplements were not high and were actually fairly low (well, I'd been taking 24 grams of glutamine and about 800 mg of creatine monohydrate, but the amounts of gluconate from magnesium gluconate are likely to have been excessively high), but the total "mass" of OAT substrates (this "mass" includes all of the citrate and glutamate and whatnot that glutamine is metabolized into, and it includes creatinine and other degradation products of creatine and also includes the extra phosphate that can accumulate intracellularly, in response to exercise, in a person who's taking creatine, given that the extra creatine phosphate can, in my opinion, tend to "dump" more phosphate during exercise) was high and was causing me to be unable to tolerate enough AMP. I was noticing that my plasma volume or, less specifically, extracellular fluid volume was high, and this was most obvious during exercise. One manifestation of this can be "water retention" that is obvious at the end of a workout, etc. Uric acid (urate) and other purines that are derived from AMP (and from the guanosine 5'-monophosphate in that nucleotide supplement) also compete with phosphate and with bile acids for transport. I've reduced the dosage of glutamine to 4-8 grams per day and reduced the dosage of creatine monohydrate to about 400 or 500 mg per day (I may reduce this further) and have been able to tolerate more AMP, etc. I also stopped taking magnesium gluconate. If one were taking a small dose of magnesium gluconate, this might not be an issue. But what's a small dose. To supply 30 mg of magnesium, one has to take in something like a gram of gluconate (derived from the magnesium gluconate, after one has ingested it).
This is a very important issue, in my opinion, because AMP is, in my view, probably the most "important" over-the-counter compound that could, in my view, be of sigificance in relation to adjunctive antidepressant strategies that researchers could test and that one could discuss with one's doctor. Methylfolate, for example, has the potential, in my view, to gradually contribute to the decreases in the intracellular purine nucleotide levels that can result, in my opinion, from the use of any number of medications that produce any sort of excitatory effect, whatsoever, on neurotransmission. On a personal level, I've found that none of the antidepressant augmentation strategies, such as Deplin (prescription L-methylfolate), has been nearly as useful, in the long term, without the concomitant use of AMP, but that's just been my experience. It's important to remember that the accumulation of uric acid, produced by purine degradation, can become problematic in the long term and could, in my opinion, contribute to soft tissue calcification, and the safe way to go would be to monitor one's urinary uric acid levels and not just to monitor serum uric acid (serum urate) levels with blood tests. The "excitation-induced decrease in purine nucleotide concentrations" in neurons and astrocytes is a general phenomenon and could even occur in response to the pathological, stress-induced increases in the firing rates of noradrenergic neurons in the locus ceruleus or other adrenergic cell groups (i.e. the A1, A2, and A3-A6 and C1, etc., adrenergic cell groups in different parts of the medulla oblongata). I'll try to put up some better references, but here are some of the countless articles discussing the neuronal-excitation-induced increases in extracellular fluid adenosine levels [Latini and Pedata, 2001: (http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/specialarticles/jnc607.pdf); Rosenberg and Li, 1995: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8548307); Schubert et al., 1997: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9369970); Matsumoto et al., 1982: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1352728); Hagberg et al., 1987: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3585332); Frenguelli et al., 2007: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17459147)(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1920548/pdf/jnc0101-1400.pdf); Hagberg et al., 1986: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2875423)]. When there's the kind of excessive noradrenergic transmission that can lead to the derangements and "decreases" in noradrenaline (norepinephrine) "levels" that have been associated with the worsening of depression or of anxiety disorders, there is the distinct potential, in my opinion, for increases in glutamate release, by glutamatergic neurons that provide synaptic inputs to the noradrenergic or dopaminergic or serotonergic neurons, to also occur and to have the potential to contribute to the excessive increases, as can be induced by stress, in the firing rates of the noradrenergic neurons or other groups of neurons.
The point is that, in my opinion, exogenous AMP, for example, has the potential to replenish some of these losses, even if the effect is not as great as one would like it to be (as it would be in response to intravenous inosine, for example, or an adenosine prodrug or source of intravenous adenosine that would release adenosine very, very slowly into the bloodstream). But I can't make any statements about the efficacy or safety of any of these supplements, and I definitely wouldn't expect any of the supplements to be effective by themselves, without conventional prescription medications, in the treatment of depression or anything else. I'll reiterate the extreme importance of discussing these details and concepts with your doctor.
Part of the point with this is that the use of supplemental gluconate, glutamine, creatine, citrate, or adenosine or inosine or other supplements that supply organic anion substrates can, in my opinion, significantly limit the amounts of oral AMP that one can tolerate, and this can become very problematic and puzzling. I've mentioned this in the past, but I want to emphasize that it's very important, in my view, to consider the fact that many nutrients and drugs compete with phosphate and with bile acids, for example, for transport by nonspecific organic anion transporters, in the kidneys and liver. In essence, there tends to be a limit to the total supply of "organic anion transporter (OAT) substrates" (these transporters are very numerous and include the ATP-binding cassette family of transporters, and that family of transport proteins includes the multidrug resistance transport proteins, as in mdr1, mdr2, etc.) that one can ingest, and it can become necessary to "decide" which nutrient one wants to supplement with and to limit the dosages of the other OAT substrates. I've been aware of this for a long time, and many articles discuss the crucial importance of this in the context of liver disease or in relation to kidney-related pharmacology. But it took me a long time to realize that, for example, the dosages of magnesium gluconate, creatine, and glutamine that I'd been taking had been causing me to be unable to use dosages of AMP that I'd wanted to use, in relation to antidepressant augmentation, under my doctor's supervision. The dosages of the individual supplements were not high and were actually fairly low (well, I'd been taking 24 grams of glutamine and about 800 mg of creatine monohydrate, but the amounts of gluconate from magnesium gluconate are likely to have been excessively high), but the total "mass" of OAT substrates (this "mass" includes all of the citrate and glutamate and whatnot that glutamine is metabolized into, and it includes creatinine and other degradation products of creatine and also includes the extra phosphate that can accumulate intracellularly, in response to exercise, in a person who's taking creatine, given that the extra creatine phosphate can, in my opinion, tend to "dump" more phosphate during exercise) was high and was causing me to be unable to tolerate enough AMP. I was noticing that my plasma volume or, less specifically, extracellular fluid volume was high, and this was most obvious during exercise. One manifestation of this can be "water retention" that is obvious at the end of a workout, etc. Uric acid (urate) and other purines that are derived from AMP (and from the guanosine 5'-monophosphate in that nucleotide supplement) also compete with phosphate and with bile acids for transport. I've reduced the dosage of glutamine to 4-8 grams per day and reduced the dosage of creatine monohydrate to about 400 or 500 mg per day (I may reduce this further) and have been able to tolerate more AMP, etc. I also stopped taking magnesium gluconate. If one were taking a small dose of magnesium gluconate, this might not be an issue. But what's a small dose. To supply 30 mg of magnesium, one has to take in something like a gram of gluconate (derived from the magnesium gluconate, after one has ingested it).
This is a very important issue, in my opinion, because AMP is, in my view, probably the most "important" over-the-counter compound that could, in my view, be of sigificance in relation to adjunctive antidepressant strategies that researchers could test and that one could discuss with one's doctor. Methylfolate, for example, has the potential, in my view, to gradually contribute to the decreases in the intracellular purine nucleotide levels that can result, in my opinion, from the use of any number of medications that produce any sort of excitatory effect, whatsoever, on neurotransmission. On a personal level, I've found that none of the antidepressant augmentation strategies, such as Deplin (prescription L-methylfolate), has been nearly as useful, in the long term, without the concomitant use of AMP, but that's just been my experience. It's important to remember that the accumulation of uric acid, produced by purine degradation, can become problematic in the long term and could, in my opinion, contribute to soft tissue calcification, and the safe way to go would be to monitor one's urinary uric acid levels and not just to monitor serum uric acid (serum urate) levels with blood tests. The "excitation-induced decrease in purine nucleotide concentrations" in neurons and astrocytes is a general phenomenon and could even occur in response to the pathological, stress-induced increases in the firing rates of noradrenergic neurons in the locus ceruleus or other adrenergic cell groups (i.e. the A1, A2, and A3-A6 and C1, etc., adrenergic cell groups in different parts of the medulla oblongata). I'll try to put up some better references, but here are some of the countless articles discussing the neuronal-excitation-induced increases in extracellular fluid adenosine levels [Latini and Pedata, 2001: (http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/specialarticles/jnc607.pdf); Rosenberg and Li, 1995: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8548307); Schubert et al., 1997: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9369970); Matsumoto et al., 1982: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1352728); Hagberg et al., 1987: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3585332); Frenguelli et al., 2007: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17459147)(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1920548/pdf/jnc0101-1400.pdf); Hagberg et al., 1986: (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2875423)]. When there's the kind of excessive noradrenergic transmission that can lead to the derangements and "decreases" in noradrenaline (norepinephrine) "levels" that have been associated with the worsening of depression or of anxiety disorders, there is the distinct potential, in my opinion, for increases in glutamate release, by glutamatergic neurons that provide synaptic inputs to the noradrenergic or dopaminergic or serotonergic neurons, to also occur and to have the potential to contribute to the excessive increases, as can be induced by stress, in the firing rates of the noradrenergic neurons or other groups of neurons.
The point is that, in my opinion, exogenous AMP, for example, has the potential to replenish some of these losses, even if the effect is not as great as one would like it to be (as it would be in response to intravenous inosine, for example, or an adenosine prodrug or source of intravenous adenosine that would release adenosine very, very slowly into the bloodstream). But I can't make any statements about the efficacy or safety of any of these supplements, and I definitely wouldn't expect any of the supplements to be effective by themselves, without conventional prescription medications, in the treatment of depression or anything else. I'll reiterate the extreme importance of discussing these details and concepts with your doctor.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Another Poem
Remember
You look
Around
And
Write your notes and
Walk around
And
Are
In and out
Before
I can see
Your eyes,
Under the lights,
Seeing,
The way you see
DVDs,
Alone,
On any of the quiet days
That we've been
Far away from each other.
I can never
Reach you
Or
See you,
Even though I try
So hard to remember
Your face.
I don't think
Anyone
Can memorize
A fire
And picture every arc and spiral
And whisper of the
Hottest mystery
That consumes the things
That
I remember
And that were
There
In the beginning
And that
I don't want to
Forget.
You look
Around
And
Write your notes and
Walk around
And
Are
In and out
Before
I can see
Your eyes,
Under the lights,
Seeing,
The way you see
DVDs,
Alone,
On any of the quiet days
That we've been
Far away from each other.
I can never
Reach you
Or
See you,
Even though I try
So hard to remember
Your face.
I don't think
Anyone
Can memorize
A fire
And picture every arc and spiral
And whisper of the
Hottest mystery
That consumes the things
That
I remember
And that were
There
In the beginning
And that
I don't want to
Forget.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Poem
Magic Key
In the Fall,
I remember the empty bench
That you
Took a picture of
And asked me to
Wait to sit on
With you
Because you couldn't
Help
Falling
In love with me.
All the leaves
Look sickly,
And all
The bright and busy bees
That buzz around in the Spring
Are gone.
And all
The golden colors
Of the Fall
Are gone
And piled up in rotting bags,
Ready to be burned
Into nothing.
Every
Thing
You
Are
Is
Magic.
In the Fall,
I remember the empty bench
That you
Took a picture of
And asked me to
Wait to sit on
With you
Because you couldn't
Help
Falling
In love with me.
All the leaves
Look sickly,
And all
The bright and busy bees
That buzz around in the Spring
Are gone.
And all
The golden colors
Of the Fall
Are gone
And piled up in rotting bags,
Ready to be burned
Into nothing.
Every
Thing
You
Are
Is
Magic.
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