Tuesday 16 July 2019

Cortizol Can Cause Epigenetic Changes Which Are Inherited

This is really interesting. This video doesn't explain how it happens. Here is a BBC piece which is very readable: Can the legacy of trauma be passed down the generations? and here is a more technical discussion, but also quite readable: Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. The takeaway is that the effects of traumatic stress in a society can last for centuries. So we need to get very, very good at building stable societies that can cope with this.


I suspect that this will turn out to be just one of many instances of a general epigenetic heredity mechanism for psycho-social behaviour. See A General Strategy for Solving Problems by Analysis of Situational Logic and it might also be a mechanism for genetic evolution of psycho-social neurology:


See Lori on Loneliness for more on social media and isolation, and on sex addiction and other crises of individual personal identity, see Helena Norberg-Hodge on Healthy Personal Identity.


For another angle on opioid painkiller addiction, note the role of the endocrine system and the striatum in inflammatory response which Danna Pycher explains here:


Barbara Arrowsmith-Young has quite convincingly demonstrated that, even as individuals, we have the intellectual capacity to consciously rewire our own brains. This is an astonishing lecture! ❤️💓💕


So we have an even higher starting-point for conscious cognitive therapy, the conscious, intentional i.e. rational, psycho-social level. And note that there is nothing here that would not have been possible in societies living ten thousand years ago in rich, stimulating environments, such as tropical rainforests. See Possibilities of New Therapies Using Natural Entheogens.

Neuroplasticity is also involved in the development of chronic pain, where opioid painkillers have been crucial in effective treatments. Kate Nicholson was a civil rights attorney in the Department of Justice and for twenty years she pursued a successful career whilst taking opioid painkillers.


What she has discovered is that in the US, doctors are not taught about pain and pain management, and that the DoJ is suing doctors and imprisoning them when their patients fraudelently obtain opioid painkiller prescriptions. The result is that doctors are reluctant to prescribe opioid painkillers, but there are 100 million Americans suffering from chronic pain, so this probably results in people self-medicating, and increases the demand for prescriptions to opuoid painkillers, so the DoJ is mismanaging the whole thing, and exacerbating the problem. This is from July 2017:


Then, two months later, August 2017:


Listen to the man:


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