The Homeopathic Taste Testª
Distilled water is tasteless. That is a good thing! In fact, the only substance in nature that is described to have no taste for humans is water. Tap water, which usually contains chlorine and fluoride, and sometimes radon, arsenic, lead, and other toxic chemicals, is not healthful, but does have taste.
All water, even rainwater, contains dissolved chemicals which scientists call "salts." But not all water tastes salty. Water is fresh or salty according to individual judgment, and in making this decision man/woman is more convinced by his or her sense of taste than by a laboratory test. It is one's taste buds that accept one form of water and reject another. Fact of the matter is, we clinicians know a great majority of patients are not water drinkers, preferring such toxic beverages as coffee with sweeteners, soda pop, iced drinks, etc.
The senses of smell and taste monitor the intake into the body of all nutrients and airborne chemicals required for life. The senses should provide a warning for toxic fumes, smoke, leaking propane gas, spoiled food, and dangerous environments. Importantly, they also determine the flavor and palatability of foods and beverages, but provide a vast array of gastronomic delights and delusions. But do the senses equally monitor the day-to-day requirement of nutrients outside of sugar, fats, and proteins thus preventing starvation? The Homeopathic Taste Test proves it does not. In fact, when the body becomes deficient in vital trace minerals, it loses all sensory perceptions which perpetuates a metabolic deficiency, leading to premature aging, decreased vitality, and gravitation towards metabolic X syndrome, today's obesity pandemic.
Unlike vision and hearing, smell and taste testing is not generally performed by physicians, nutritionists, and other health care providers. This is in spite of the fact that decreased chemo-sensation, particularly smell and taste loss, can be very debilitating, placing an individual at risk of premature disease. We know that olfactory sensation loss is associated with the early stages of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, and advanced HIV infection. Taste loss, on the other hand, leads to gluttony, gastric distress and dyspepsia, hyperlipidemia, troubles of blood sugar regulation, just to name a few. Changes in taste sensations can result from various medical conditions. One reasonably common cause is acid reflux where stomach acid and odorous gases are frequently regurgitated giving a bad taste that can be described as an acid, musty, or metallic taste. This often alerts to the symptoms of reflux esophagitis, dyspepsia, hypochlorhydria, gastritis, and heartburn; today common gastric derangements. Taste loss is also associated with deficiencies of zinc, folic acid, vitamin C, potassium, selenium, calcium, magnesium, vitamin B12 (cobalt), as well as concomitant poor oral hygiene, infectious teeth, and candidiasis. In fact, ageusia, loss or impairment of the sense of taste, is one of the most unrecognized medical conditions affecting a very large population of humanity at this time. It is an unprecedented medical impairment and epidemic leading to wrong choices in food and nutriment, with its associated and concomitant litany of eating disorders.
Everything gastronomic has been tried to achieve weight loss, overlooking the fact that aguesia is the ultimate impediment to dietary reform, hormone regulation (insulin can be evil), and hygienic compliance for any successful program. So if you follow this logic, let us outline some basic physiology.
The basic tastes are the commonly recognized types of taste sensed by humans. Humans receive tastes through sensory organs called taste buds or gustatory calyculi, concentrated on the upper surface of the tongue. Scientists traditionally describe four basic tastes: bitter, salty, sour, and sweet. There have been a number of recent scientific publications about supposed new basic tastes, the most well-known being a fifth sense termed savoury (also called umami, the flavor of certain glutamates). The Chinese also recognize pungent as a sixth flavor.
Taste receptors normally respond to more than one of the taste, leading to a bouquet of submodalities; thus, taste quality is encoded as an ensemble of flavors. Taste intensity is probably encoded in terms of the total number of impulses (or frequency) discharged in all the fibers sensitive to a particular substance. Substances that taste the same tend to excite taste receptors in a similar way, thus salty flavor can be elicited by sodium chloride as well as by potassium chloride (salt substitute). Olfactory sensations are evoked by volatile substances, but primary submodalities have not been identified, as odor is quite complex. Olfactory receptors respond to a variety of odorants, and thus some kind of ensemble coding in the brain is likely for this modality as well.
Despite their close association, taste and smell we believe are anatomically and functionally distinct, although vitally interrelated. The olfactory system is vitally important in determining food flavors. During chewing and swallowing, odor-laden air is forced from the rear of the oral cavity, and evoked into the olfactory receptors in the nasal membranes, evoking many flavor sensations that people usually associate with taste but that are almost completely dependent on the sense of smell. Of course, this is impaired when people fail to chew their food properly, another factor evidenced in gluttony.
Recent studies indicate an even greater importance of the interaction between smells and tastes in food flavor - the sensitivity to an odor (almond) is actually improved when there was a sweet taste in the mouth, but not with a savory taste, for example, almond plus sweetness is experienced as cherry. This suggests there is actually a specific site in the brain where integration of taste and smell information occurs - in other words, "flavor" is greater than the sum of taste + smell, so only getting half of the sensation will give you less than half of the "flavor quality"!
Smell is 10,000 times more powerful than taste. You can smell without tasting, but your taste is greatly affected if you cannot smell. Generally, your taste sensation is overwhelmed by the smell sensation, to the extent that the taste sensation is almost imperceptible. This is how food vendors are able to sell food that is basically unpalatable, non-nutritious, and even toxic, without the use of salt, cooking oil, and condiments.
Taste and Smell Loss: Risk for Disease?
For many people with taste or smell dysfunctions, life has lost its gusto. A reduced, distorted, or lost sense of taste or smell signifies much more than a weakened zest for food -- one of humankind's greatest sources of pleasure and comfort. These deficits represent serious risk factors for heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and other illnesses that require adherence to specific dietary regimens. Changes in these senses can also lower immunity to disease, contribute to digestive disorders, cause food poisoning, or produce toxic effects of environmentally hazardous chemicals that are otherwise detectable.
The chemical senses of taste are thus easier to study experimentally because the stimuli that lead to gustatory sensations are well understood. Sour tastes are evoked by all acids in dilute solutions. Apparently, it is the hydrogen ion (acid proton) that activates taste receptors and leads to a sensation of sourness. Thus we all experience similarly the taste of vinegar, pickles and pickled food, citrus juices, etc.
Accounting for salty tastes is a little more difficult. Sodium chloride is the only substance known to evoke a purely salty taste in any concentration that is suprathreshold (above the threshold known to elicit a salty taste). With other compounds, having one of the cations, Na+, K+, Li+, Ca2+, Mg2+; and one of the anions, Cl-, Br-, I-, SO42-, NO32-, CO22-, the saltiness varies with concentration. For example, a very dilute solution of KCl, also known as salt substitute, tastes sweet and, as the concentration increases, it becomes first bitter, then both bitter and salty, and finally purely salty when it grosses out all over the palate. Both the anion and the cation are apparently involved in evoking the salty sensation.
A simple experiment illustrates this. Fill three glasses with filtered water. Drink from the first one, and it tastes fresh even though it may have some dissolved salts naturally present. Add a pinch of table salt to the second, and the water may taste still fresh or slightly salty depending on your personal taste threshold and on the amount of salt held in a "pinch." But add a teaspoon of salt to the third and your taste buds rapidly protest that this water is too salty to drink and may even bring on nausea. This glass of water has about the same salt content as a glass of seawater (35 parts per thousand of sodium) or a cup of urine.
The chemical basis for sweet and bitter tastes is not known. Sucrose is a carbohydrate, a disaccharide formed from one molecule each of fructose (a fruit sugar) and glucose. Glucose, fructose, and starch are also carbohydrates. Fructose (grape sugar) is the sweetest; glucose is less sweet than sucrose or fructose; and starch is not sweet at all. Some alcohols are very sweet. For example, xylitol is used as a sweetener in Europe and in some chewing gum in the United States. Saccharin is also sweet (and bitter), but chemically it bears little similarity to either the sugars or the alcohols. The only known commonality for all these substances is that they excite gustatory receptors on the tongue, in same region, leading to sensations of sweetness.
In the 17th century, diabetics were called "the pissing evile" because a person with severe diabetes would urinate as much as 10-15 quarts per day. Later, it became known as "the sugar disease" when physicians found diabetics' urine to be sweet to the taste. This "taste-test" became the primary check for diabetes.
The sensation of bitterness is evoked by many vegetable alkaloids, such as quinine, and by some metallic salts. Some people think that our sensitivity to bitterness may be a protective mechanism because many plant poisons are alkaloids and are bitter.
Individuals with a paternal history of alcoholism rate salty solutions as less pleasurable and sour solutions as more intense and less pleasurable than individuals with no paternal history of alcoholism. Can taste be used to predict alcoholism? Well, for sure we know alcoholics are notoriously deficiency in zinc and magnesium.
Taste-Threshold Test
This is a whole-mouth taste test used to assess ability to detect, identify, and evaluate the intensity of different concentrations of sweet, sour, salty, and bitter taste solutions, in this case, macrominerals and trace minerals.
The Zinc Taste Test is defined as: A 10-second test that uses a dilute solution of zinc sulphate heptahydrate to determine the extent of zinc deficiency based on an individual's taste sensations.
The question of the taste test is by what mechanism would a particular mineral deficiency result in ageusia, a loss of the sense of taste [gustatory anesthesia]; or dysgeusia, an impairment or perversion of the gustatory sense.
Homeopathy here provides us some insight: the method of treating disease by drugs, given in minute doses, that would produce in a healthy person symptoms similar to those of the disease (opposed to allopathy, the method of treating disease by the use of agents that produce effects different from those of the disease treated (opposed to homeopathy).
Salt as we know, is the only substance known to evoke a purely salty taste in any concentration that is suprathreshold. However, our axiom of homeopathy, proving is poisoning and poison is overdose, show us that the proving of salt leads to loss of taste. The poisoning of salt we know leads to loss of potassium and calcium through renal excretion. A deadening of the organism thus occurs through poisoning with rock salt: "The prolonged taking of excessive salt causes profound nutritive changes to take place in the system, and there arise not only the symptoms of salt retention as evidenced by dropsies and Ïdemas, but also an alteration in the blood causing a condition of an?mia and leucocytosis. There seems also to be a retention in the tissues of effecte materials giving rise to symptoms loosely described as gouty or rheumatic gout. The provings are full of such symptoms." (Boericke Materia Medica)
The overuse of table salt, we know, is epidemic. The regular salting of food leads to a loss of taste to salt, requiring the user to use more and more of it to satisfy the salt habit. Contrarily, tests prove that sodium-depleted persons (and animals) show a specific hunger for salty food. To people who are not short of sodium chloride in their body's, low salt concentrations taste pleasant and acceptable, while higher levels are unpalatable and, indeed, are likely to be toxic. In a salt-depleted person, the taste threshold of salt acceptability climbs so high that very salty foods are thought to be attractively flavored despite the fact that they would normally be inedible to those sodium balanced.
Taste sensitivity for sweets is also reduced in people who have diabetes. Refined sugar too, like table salt, is a demineralizing poison. A taste reduction becomes a serious health risk when diabetic patients compensate for a reduced sweet taste by adding more sugar to already sweetened foods or beverages. The hormone insulin is disrupted from its balance while the body is further demineralized. Diabetics are notoriously deficient in zinc and chromium and other trace minerals and vitamins.
Now, as the body becomes demineralized by excessive cravings for two notorious food addictions, salt and sweets, aguesia in its various colors begins to set in as the nerves in the gustatory calyculi become deadened. Food is sought that contains more and more condiments, salt, and sugar. Add to that one who adds coffee and a cigarette for desert, you have the perfect storm for nutritional disaster.
Why Homeopathy
The taste thresholds for minerals are in distinct homeopathic dilutions, ranging from several parts per thousand to several parts per million for some minerals. Succussion, the act of shaking violently a liquid in order to homeopathically activate the solution, is required to generate a proper taste test while at the same time conferring the cure.
Homeopathy has oft been explained by a theory of resonance. A harmonic resonance theory I present as a paradigm in which electrochemical standing waves in the suprathreshold substrate, acting as a homeopathic dose, is the principle tasting pattern formation mechanism in the stimulation of gustatory neurons. Nerve tissue deficient in potassium, for example, will resonate poorly with an oral solution of potassium ions, thus no taste.
The phenomena of resonance energy transfer can be demonstrated by using two identical tuning forks. When one fork is struck and then placed close to, but not touching, the other fork the sound vibrations produced by the struck fork will actually transfer energy to the other tuning fork causing it to vibrate sympathetically. Equally, it can pass on the vibration to other tuning forks, in this case the taste buds.
The tuning fork example, in this case the taste buds, takes on a biological perspective. Like to olfactory nerves in the nose, taste buds can become exhausted and fail to resonant in the presence of like substances. This is one reason why excessive use of salt leads to loss of taste and why diabetics with elevated blood sugar lose taste for sweets and therefore need to eat more and more to satisfy an acquired craving.
The Proof is in the Results
After years of clinical experience, the taste test for mineral deficiences is quite straightforward: identify the defiencies, then prescribe the cell salts accordingly. This method, however, is quite a slow process. It may take weeks, even months, before the taste of the mineral deficiency returns. There are several reasons for this, but most importantly, the mineral solution must be absorbed into the blood, and in the case of homeopathics, we are talking about very minute quantities.
There is one way, however, to force a large amount of ions into the body, and that process is called electrolysis. Solutions of mineral ions can be transdermally conveyed as or even more effectively as hypodermic injections. The quantity of ion delivered electrolytically into the human body depends on its electrochemical equivalent and the relative speed of the ions in relation to the power of the current. For example, iodine is 0.0013 gram per coloumb, or 0.078 milligram per milliampere per minute. This is not a small quantity. If for example, the breasts were treated with forty minutes (20 minutes each breast) with 2.0 milliampere, just enough to induce a mild tingle, it would transport directly into the tissues 6.24 mg. (624 mcg) of iodine before being whisked off into the blood stream, it being taken up by the cells, and only a few micrograms being excreted in the urine in 24 hours. It is precisely this local effect that is obtained by the author's ionic medication method. The oral route of iodine taking many days, if not weeks, as passive therapeutics. But by electrolysis, the body's cells receive charged ions, just as steel receives zinc when it is galvanized or other metals electroplated. The body's cells soak up and metabolize the iodine, the exhausted cells get recharged with electricity, germs and fungus are killed, toxins and free radicals are neutralized, old cells die off in normal apoptosis, and healthy functions are restored.
The author's iontobathª is an alternative medical treatment (a type of electrotherapy) based on the simultaneous use of water and electric current. The patient lies in a 34 degree Celsius hand or foot bath, while gentle electric current is passed through his or her body. Iontobaths are mostly used in the treatment of degenerative diseases such as inflammatory arthritis and problems with the joints. The treatment lasts about 15 minutes. In this case however, after a few minutes of immersion therapy, the subject will immediately start tasting the deificient mineral as the gustary calyculi absorb the ion from the blood stream.
WHY WATCH GRASS GROW
You can taste test for mineral deficiency, immerse the feet in 2% zinc sulfate,
electrify the solution for a few minutes, and the sensitivity to zinc will return as the ion
is electrically bonded. Argument is made that this is a new form of homeopathy (electrohomeopathy).
Dramatic and visual improvement of facial wrinkles disappearing before your very own eyes!
Transdermal Therapy
As twenty years of transdermal therapy has taught us, frequency is everything, especially if they are rife. The strurum corneum of human skin is normally quite impervious to electricity. This part of the epidermis, however, is punctured by pores, particularly those of the sweat glands, as well as those of the hair follicles, tiny organs in the skin, each one of which grows a single hair and the sebaceous glands. Electric current-mediated ion transfer occurs primarily through these pores. Recent studies have verified that electric current traverses the skin by passing primarily through sweat glands, hair follicles and sebaceous glands. And that the nutrients delivered by microcurrent stays in the skin for several days following treatment. The proves to be a boon to cosmetic therapy and dermatology. This translates into facial treatments for acne, wrinkles and disfigurements; and to the scalp for hair loss. Iontophoresis is used for facial treatments by restoring skin by encouraging elastin production with electrode stimulation while infusing the skin with vitamins (ascorbate).
The nutritive therapeutic use of iontophoresis is largely based on the penetration and distribution of ions which occurs in three ways:
1. Some of the nutrients delivered through the skin with iontophoresis are removed by the subcutaneous circulation and distributed around the body. For stomach acid-dependent minerals - Calcium; Chromium; Copper; Iron; Magnesium; Manganese; Molybdenum; Selenium; and Zinc; this is a boon to nutritional therapists.
2. Direct measurement that ions and other substances do penetrate and concentrate in the deeper tissues under the medication/nutrient electrode. Penetration is up to one centimeter. This deep cutaneous penetration is a boon to massage and physiotherapists, allowing us to relieve muscle spasms (copper, magnesium), joint aches of arthritis (boron, menthol), hardened tendons of dupuytren's contracture, trigger fingers, plantar fasciitis, carpal tunnel, peyronie's disease and other disfigurements (iodine), scars and cicatrices (iodine, chlorine, vitamin E, lavender oil); gouty arthritis and depression (lithium); hay fever (zinc); hypothyroidism and hyperthryoidism (iodide); hyperhidrosis (iodine, chlorine); etc.
3. Our studies on patients for more than twenty years have shown that the nutrients delivered by microcurrent stays in the skin for several days following treatment. The proves to be a boon to cosmetic therapy and dermatology.
So, all in one, we are treating skin conditions, applying subcutaneous therapy, while delivering micronutrients to the blood stream and lymph, thus to all the organs. As a clinical application, it has great utility, relieving pain, itch, soreness, while supplying nutrients for the condition.
Let's take an example: foot stench with nail fungus and hyperhidrosis. This is a very common condition. Foot stench is a cardinal sign of magnesium deficiency. If you will recall, the central ion in the chlorophyll molecule is magnesium, and chlorophyll, i.e. green vegetable juices, is prime therapy for body odor. Nail fungus is a cardinal sign of iodine deficiency, as this mineral inhibits fungal growth. So a foot bath composed of tincture iodine, and a sprinkle of Epsom salts (both of which you can buy at the grocery store), and a pinch of sea salt (chloride for the hyperhidrosis) makes the ideal treatment - given twice weekly for one month, you will be doing your patient a wealth of service.
A Short History of Iontotherapy
Iontophoresis is not new, the first scientific experiments relating to the mechanism of iontophoresis were performed by LeDuc in 1908. Using two rabbits placed in series, he introduced strychnine into one and cyanide into the other, each depending on the polarity. He was able to determine which ions were introduced by observing the polarity. The primary factors in iontophoresis relate to the movement of ions. In aqueous solution, an inorganic salt like potassium chloride dissociates into positively charged cations and negatively charged anions. When a direct current is passed through the body's tissues, electrolysis of our chief ions of sodium and chloride takes place. This electrolysis results in the formation of sodium hydroxide and a rise in the pH at the cathode; and in the formation of hydrochloric acid and a lowering of the pH at the anode. When the electrodes contain solutions of ions, negatively charged anions are driven from the cathode into the body. Positively charged cations are driven into the body from the anode. This effect is specific for all ions of the same polarity as the electrode. Ions of the opposite polarity are not transferred into the body.
Another primary means by which ions and other substances traverse the skin during iontophoresis is via the passage of a solvent, carrying with it other dissolved substances, through the skin under the influence of direct current. This process been termed electrosmosis.
electrosmosis: the is a transfer of liquid through a porous micro membrane under the action of an electric field.
A third, new, and exciting process is the means by which ions and other substances traverse the skin during iontophoresis is via the passage of a nutrient solvent, carrying with it other dissolved substances, through the skin under the influence of an interrupted (faradic) direct current. This process been termed by the author as electronutrition (TM).
