As is typical of this time of year, it’s been a very active time for your humble physician-author-blogger.

January started off with a whirlwind visit out to Arizona for a daylong presentation to the Arizona Naturopathic Medical Association. This was followed by a two week intensive period of website redesign, overhauling the website of The D’Adamo Clinic in addition to the navigation system for North American Pharmacal. The Clinic website is a simple white design that I like very much and it conveys what being inside the Clinic feels like to me. I’m not normally a fan of all-white walls, but in the Clinic it works.

The NAP redesign was much more challenging. Here the issue was to present a myriad of different links and categories in a way that did not alienate or confuse visitors. I had long admired the witty way that Apple uses to showcase their Mac computers, but was unaware of anyone other than Apple who used this widget. I suspected that the bright folks over there had conjured this up themselves. Googling around the Internet, I found a lot of threads speculating on how they did it, but no one seemed to have done it. My chance came when someone mentioned that Apple appeared to have built the showcase around a package of free JavaScript libraries called ‘Scriptilicious.’ After downloading and studying these scripts it became evident just how they did it. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it turns out that Apple did make a small coding mistake on their site, which, if you notice, prohibits them from using bulleted text on pages that use the product showcase. Maybe I’ll email them and alert them to this.

One problem you come across again and again when you program for the Internet is cross-browser support. I’ve learned the hard way that a web page that works and looks good in Firefox for the Mac may not necessarily look or work the same way in Internet Explorer for Windows. Many, many times it’s been a last minute check on an outdated browser running Windows 95 that kiboshed a terrific idea.

Putting the final touches on the SWAMI software. I’ve decided to port it to two platforms. One will be the traditional SWAMI GenoType for professionals, the other will be a SWAMI Xpress that will be available online. Introduction of the SWAMIGenoType will be linked to the IfHI 2009 Conference, where Tom Greenfield, Natalie Colicci and I will have the time to take the attendees through the interface, filters and matrices. If you are a physician or IFHI certified educator planning to use SWAMI GenoType in your practice, you’ll need to attend IfHI 2009 to get the full training.

SWAMI Xpress will contain all the base programs of his more muscular brother, but is being designed for general-purpose use. SWAMI GenoType has advanced filters and controls that allow a physician to exert complete control over the client diet and is geared to practitioners who want to have a more micrometric control over things. Introduction of SWAMI Xpress will be as part of NAP’s “Do It For A Month” program.

On the lecture horizon, I’ve got a webinar with the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy on March 31 and an upcoming Grand Rounds presentation at the University of Bridgeport College of Naturopathic Medicine on February 11. After that things calm down until the IfHI 2009 Conference June 5. IfHI should be challenging. I’ve scheduled myself for something like 9 hours of lecture time, and if you could believe it I’m stressing out about not having enough time to do justice to the material. Figured out how to control my slide show from an iPhone, which is very cool. I should be able to pace around the room and use the iPhone to cue the next slide.

After completing a few movies/animations I’ll be pretty much done preparing material for the conference, leaving plenty of time to perfect the software and get the 1971 VW Camper ready.

Got lucky yesterday. Found a site that had the entire LP of the 1974 classic The Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays The Popular Classics available as a download. I certainly don’t support intellectual property theft but this album has never made it to CD and I think the original record label is now extinct. The Portsmouth Sinfonia is the ultimate ode to amateurism: Take a bunch of English art school students --who either cannot play a musical instrument or are willing to play one they are unfamiliar with-- and put them into an orchestra. The only rules being that you had to come to rehearsal and you could not purposely play the wrong notes.

What resulted were renditions of the popular classics (Peer Gynt Suite, The Blue Danube Waltz, The William Tell Overture, etc) in which the inexperience and lack of talent produces a series of acoustic near-misses that collect into this cloud-like approximation of what the proper pitch and notes should sound like. Popular classics were selected on purpose since everyone in the orchestra would know the music and could at least aspire to what the piece should resemble--or at the very minimum whether they should be sounding higher or lower pitched notes.

Here is their rendition of Blue Danube Waltz, Op. 314 (Johann Strauss)

Beethoven was supposedly fond of listening to amateur productions of his work, and I’ve often thought that this would be among the most perfect of medical education paradigms.

New research shows that sugar deposits may be the major cause of skin aging.

Skin science appears to have caught up with the humble sugar molecule. Wrinkles, sagging skin, and pigment deposits may stem less from the sun and more from one-way sugar molecules that we make as part of the aging process but cannot remove. With no small amount of serendipity, scientists call these wrong-way sugars ‘AGE molecules’ (the AGE stands for 'Advanced Glycation End-products').

AGE molecules are all around us, and often taste pretty good: Any time we brown an onion or caramelize sugar we are making AGE molecules. However, when you make these molecules under your skin, you’ll probably find much less to like about them.

Unlike most other complex sugars, AGE molecules are not easily removed from the body (Just think back to a time you tried to clean burnt sugar off of a piece of crockery!) And because they stay in place for years, the immune system can react to tissues they deposit in, causing inflammation, damage, and aging.

AGE molecules: Good on marshmallows, bad on people.


NAP recently released the next three D’Adamo Genoma Skin products, which now expands the line to four products:

The Day Light Face Crème is the original formula. We’ve has virtually 100% customer satisfaction with the product, including unsolicited comments from three users that it was the only product that worked on their facial rosacea.

To this base formula, I’ve added an AGE (Glycation inhibiting) toner, a rich night crème and a tissue cleanser that uses a few very interesting botanicals.

For the rest of the month, at my request, NAP is offering the complete set of four products at a savings of 50%. I asked that they try to do this so that as many people as possible can try the line. If you are looking for a great skin care line at an unbelievable price, either as a holiday gift for someone or even yourself, you might want to look into these products.

However, do it before December 31, 2008.

One of the features that can be of most use when GenoTyping someone is actually one of the hardest to come by: Getting the ABO blood groups of your parents.

Its importance should come as no surprise, since epigenetic changes are largely influenced by the patterns of gene activation and silencing that occur as part of

• The heritable epigenetic component (you start off with the patterns of gene expression that your parents give you)
• The prenatal environment (there are two major bursts of methylation activity in the fetus: at about 8-12 weeks, then again in the last trimester)
• The immediate postnatal environment (these are mostly related to gene expression due to hormones such as growth factors)

In fact one of the studies that got me interested in the largely unrecognized effects of blood groups as a modulator of the epigenetic environment was a study that looked at childhood ear infections and blood groups. However, unlike most epidemiologic correlation type studies, this one looked at the blood group of the child’s mother.

Maternal blood group A gave a relative risk (RR) for intervention of 2.82. The noted occurrence of an attack of acute otitis media (AOM) before the first birthday gave a RR of 6.13. When these two factors were used together, the RR climbed steeply to 26.77.

Now to understand just how strong this association is we should look at exactly what a RR (relative risk) is. Basically it is just the odds (over 1) that something will occur over it being random. An RR of 2 (about the RR of elevated cholesterol causing a heart attack) means that people with elevated cholesterol are twice as likely to get a heart attack as people whose cholesterol levels are more desirable. Thus the study is saying that if you are a kid with an ear infection in the first year of life, and you mother is blood group A, you are 26 times more likely to have a recurrence.

Here is a chart I made which compares relative risks for several common problems and factors associated with that risk. Obviously, this is a very strong association.

Are the effects of having a blood group A mother and getting ear infections the result of some sort of fetal programming? We know that some studies have linked the ABO antigens to cellular differentiation (the process where developing cells move from general embryonic 'germ' types to cells with more specific functions, like a pancreatic or epidermis cell.)

ABH antigen expression was considered as suggestive evidence for the assumption that blood group antigens could serve as early immunomorphologic markers of endothelial differentiation of mesenchymal cells, thus specifying the location of future blood vessels. Extending the conceptual framework of blood group antigens' significance we consider them as being possibly involved in the process of fetal morphogenesis.

In epigenetic terms, we may wind up being more interested in your parent's blood types are that perhaps we need be with yours.

Every once in a while, amid the junk mail, bills and catalogs, I receive a letter which surpasses all prior. In a wonderfully sycophantic endeavor this gentleman writes to ask me for a complete set of my works so he can continue on his mission to educate the Indian public about healthy living. Apparently the gentleman does it free of charge.

Sir, your books are on their way.