Dinner out last night with an old friend of ours who has struggled back from a series of health problems. Fish with assorted vegetables. Yummy, if a bit overpriced, but that is Greenwich Connecticut these days. Incredibly high noise levels, to which you can only add your own attempts to scream above the cacophony.

This is an example of what some people call 'the escalation phenomena.'

You can only be heard by screaming above the high noise level, produced by other people screaming loud enough to be heard above your screams.

Like Dean Ornish and Robert Atkins on the Larry King show in 'the old days.'

A good example of the escalation phenomena is sometimes seen in clinical medicine. It usually takes form in a clinician misinterpreting the side effects of his treatment as signs of the further progression of the disease, thereby requiring more treatment. An example of this in the last century was the use in allopathic medicine of huge doses of mercury to treat syphillis. Its use was so accepted that eventually the symptoms of mercury poisoning were included in the descriptions of end-stage syphillis.

Olga, our dinner guest, lost her husband Eric about a year ago. Once, about ten years ago, we got talking about medicine, and Eric volunteered his philosophy that 'the body has a bias towards healing.' I remember having to take a step back from this, since over the course of my life, I have never associated the word 'bias' with anything other than negative meaning.

However, I then remembered that radios were 'biased', i.e. the difference between an AM and FM radio, was simply that the AM radio was biased to receive AM frequencies, while FM radios were biased to receive FM. So to understand his meaning of the word, I had to understand that his use of the word bias was in the context of an orientation or leaning-towards.

It was so like Eric to have the ability to rescue a villified word like bias and put it back to work.

Tom Greenfield's column on blood type and osteoporosis is a must-read. Research published this year showed significant difference between the ABO blood types and the rate of osteoporosis. In a study that looked at 227 postmenopausal women. The results showed that the prevalence of osteoporosis in the proximal femur and lumbar spine averaged 2.3- and 1.7-fold higher in women with blood type AB than in those with blood type O.

This again validates the sophistication of choosing one's diet based upon the genetics of blood type. How many type O's have been lectured by dieticians and other vegetarian nutritionists that 'all that protein will give you osteoporosis.' Guess what? Doesn't happen. Type AB women on the other hand, may have a good friend in cultured dairy products, and the AB diet gives permission to use these high calcium foods.

A new study looked at the distribution of ABO blood groups in acute leukaemias and lymphomas. As I predicted in in my first book over ten years ago, in acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, there were more patients with O blood group. In Hodgkin's lymphoma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patients, there less patients with A blood group, respectively. This leads me to believe that the cellular mechanisms (T, Tn) that are found in 'A-like' cancers (breast, colon, stomach) are not a factor in lymphoproliferative diseases, which as my oncology professor many years ago quickly and frequently reminded us, 'are not true cancers.'

A study published in Acta Otolaryngol found a correlation between ABO group and noise induced hearing loss; with a significantly higher number of workers tested being blood group O.