I made two videos today, but one of them was so annoying to edit that i haven't bothered to upload it (it was about anatomical terms such as "superior", "inferior" and the like). Here's the other one:
This is about joint movements and the names for them. So far there are only two of them, but it's in the same series as this one:
(which is about lung volumes)
These are human biology/anatomy/physiology/medicine/whatever videos whose aim is purely educational and not particularly inspiring. However, the joint one does raise an interesting (for me) issue: how much learning is linguistic? How much learning just involves finding out what people call things so you can talk about them?
In some ways, i feel this kind of learning is less legitimate than more practical acquisition of skills. It's a bit like ornithological "twitching" (no offence to any twitchers in case i've got that wrong) or happening to know the Latin names for herbs without knowing anything about the ecology, biology, life cycle, constituents, cultural significance, real botany or uses of the plants concerned. It seems empty and anal to me. However, it's true that it acts as a stepping stone to learning, albeit mainly book learning, and it can draw an outline around something considered significant by some and as such may show something new about the Manifold - the blizzard of sensory impressions we call "the world". There are other kinds of learning though - emotional intelligence, acting, empathy, woodwork, playing musical instruments, finding your way around...
I suppose i wonder the following:
How much learning is linguistic?
What would be left if you took away the verbal stuff?
Is it overvalued in our society?
How can we tell if it's real (or does it make it real)?
That's a quote from Bill Bailey's character Manny in season 2 episode 1 of 'Black Books' when he recounts his time in the "tourist swamps" of Sumatra (or possibly Borneo) drinking his own urine. This is of course what my "secret" video is about, just here:
Our YouTube channel has long been one of those channels with one very popular video accompanied by a large number nobody ever watches. That one popular video is of course Liz drinking her urine on national television, which i have now taken down in case it violates copyright. I have now replaced it with a video of me drinking my own urine for the first time, something i did this morning.
Urine therapy is a touchy subject for me about which Liz and i have differences. My own attitude is that since the human body invests so much energy in filtering urine out of the bloodstream that it's probably a bad idea to put it back in again like i just did. I didn't find it disgusting taste-wise, although of course i did knock it back rather quickly, but the thought that there is now wee inside my stomach rather than my bladder is somewhat disconcerting, as is the facts that i could still taste it over an hour later and that it repeated on me when i burped. I've decided that if nothing untoward has happened after five hours, which is the amount of time food, but not liquid, spends in the stomach on the whole, i'll be fine.
Urea, the main nitrogenous compound in urine (it also contains ammonia), is diuretic. This suggests that if you have healthy kidneys and are not dehydrated, it could be useful for fluid retention or the excretion of compounds which are otherwise hard to shift. Unless it's the excess fluid i drank to dilute it, i can confirm that it does indeed seem to be a diuretic as i keep having to empty my bladder.
There is also the issue of "heat shock proteins", which are basically the idea that "whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger" - putting the body under a low degree of stress is good for it. Drinking urine does this of course, so maybe there's something there.
There are various suggestions by those who believe in urine therapy about how it might be beneficial. It does also reintroduce certain useful substances to the body, notably hormones. Drinking it also crosses a tabu line and in that way is probably a helpful exercise, and overcoming one's own disgust suggests mastery of one's own body, something which could be beneficial in functional disorders if generalised. Additionally, the application of urea to the external environment is recognised as beneficial in some circumstances such as skin disease because it helps hydrate it. The "external environment", incidentally, does not mean the body surface - it means the skin, surfaces of the digestive system, the insides of the lungs, sinuses and remarkably, in women the lining of the womb, uterine tubes and even the abdominal cavity! Not that urine in all of those places would be a good idea.
Therefore, i may have just "quaffed my own wizz", though nowhere near a pint, but I would consider it self-deception and rationalisation to conclude that it was actually good for me to do so. Hence the experience for me is of doing something which is definitely not a good idea but probably not particularly harmful, like getting drunk, smoking a cigarette or getting a body piercing or tattoo. I'm not planning to repeat the experience.
Just to give away the ending, i didn't do the cinnamon challenge, partly because i'm not a teenage boy any more, partly because it's no longer as popular and i'd look really out of date, and partly because, as i explain in the video, it's a fourfold overdose of cinnamon. Anyway, here's today's video (whose framing is better than the thumbnail suggests!):
The point of this is basically that the cinnamon challenge acknowledges that herbs can have a profound effect on the body. There's also a bit of a panic associated with it. It is true that it's a risky thing to do, but that's because of the physical effect of any powder - it will irritate the throat, it can be harmful if inhaled and so forth, but the same is true of flour. In larger doses, cinnamon may have direct adverse toxicological actions and the cinnamon challenge is something like a fourfold overdose compared to the maximum recommended dose of 1.2 grammes of the powder. From this very fact though, it can be seen how safe herbalism often is: you wouldn't want to take four times the maximum recommended dose of quite a few over-the-counter drugs for a start.
Cinnamon is also relevant to 'Here Be Dragons'. In ancient and mediaeval Europe, there was an idea that spices, including cinnamon, came from a vaguely defined area called Arabia Felix, which in contradiction to current climatological beliefs was thought to be a warm, humid place with tropical rainforests. In this environment lived, among many other species, the cinnamon tree with its cinnamon fruits and in its branches nested the Cinnamologus:
This was a bird whose nest was made from cinnamon and therefore could be fetched by throwing stuff at it. The cinnamon tree itself was too difficult to climb due to fragile branches.
Clearly i need to insert the Cinnamologus into 'Here Be Dragons'. As it happens, there's a happy coincidence (Coincidencia Felix?) in 'Here Be Dragons' regarding Arabia Felix. Here's a map of Eurasia in the 'Here Be Dragons' "Ancient World":
In order to accommodate the legend of Hyperborea as a warm continent in the Arctic regions, i decided to flip the planet round so that the land concerned was still "north" but largely tropical, while mainly preserving the climate of western Europe. It so happened that doing this makes Arabia a tropical rainforest. Therefore, a serendipitous coincidence enables Arabia Felix to exist as well as Hyperborea in Ancient World.
A few technical comments on the video. The framing is somewhat off because i needed to include the plate of cinnamon in the picture. I am still umming too much but am working on this. Finally, although i am now using a tripod, i have yet to take the plunge and do much proper video editing. I now have a version of Linux called AVLinux, which is specialised for multimedia applications, and am trying to pluck up the courage to use it properly. This will somewhat improve the quality of my videos but i don't want to do the excessive thing which i know i'd be tempted to do and add loads of flashy effects which do too much. Sadly, AVLinux seems to have been discontinued and this version, which was released last month, will probably be the last.
Herbalism - the maintenance and improvement of health through the use of plants. Some things are covered by this which shouldn't be, for instance you might improve health by using plants to clear the atmosphere of formaldehyde, benzene and ammonia, by creating a landscape garden or using a park as a city's "green lung", but this is specifically to do with herbalism as a narrowly medically defined approach to health.
Incidentally, this is the first video i've done using a tripod and i had endless trouble with it. Whereas the tripod itself was very useful, the batteries ran out towards the end and on editing it, Avidemux and Windows Movie Maker both screwed it up several times. Therefore, there are rather more um's and er's in this than i would ideally like, but i'm working to a tight schedule and ended up posting it as is.
My points are threefold really. One is that research has shown that most of the general public do not know that herbalists exist or what we do, in spite of strenuous efforts to remedy this, so i thought it would be helpful to do a video which went through this in detail. Another is the major discrepancy between the scepticism shown towards herbalism along with the research apparently showing that it doesn't work and my own measurable findings which occur after people consult me and i give them herbs. That's an ethical red herring and in fact there's even an argument for herbalism being a good thing if it doesn't work. Finally, there are two real ethical problems associated with herbalism which are rarely mentioned. One is that seeing someone who hoards information about health doesn't ultimately help the client, and the other is that given the fact, widely known among herbalists, that it is nearly always impossible to make a living as a herbalist, the tacit pretence that it is cannot be justified. Candidates of herbal medicine courses need to be told, before they start the course, that the chances of them being able to use their degrees professionally rather than as general degrees like English or History, are practically zero. a
