The Beginnings of mine with Holistic Medicine  
Alternative medicine is everything that lies outside Western conventional allopathic medication. I can't possibly create on such a breadth of alternate health, or am I qualified. My experience as well as education is as a logical rational trained research scientist, a world where anything of value needs to be established by double innured experimentally sound scientific studies.  
In 1991, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. This's quite strange to have at age 50, as this condition, or maybe Manic Depression as it's likewise called, typically doesn't strike beyond the age of forty. I was in clinical depression when the wife Marcia of mine dragged me into Manhattan from our house on Island which is long about an hour and a quarter drive by vehicle. A pal of hers, the insurance agent Jerry of ours, suggested that the Atkins Center might help. Robert Atkins M.D. died a few years ago, but back in 1991 he had a five or even six storied building that had been devoted to what he termed Complementary Medicine. Complementary meant the good Dr. Atkins was incorporating certain holistic health-related methods to his internal medicine cardiology traditional instruction. Upon arrival early in the morning, I was given a 5 hour blood glucose tolerance to determine whether I was sometimes hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) and hyperglycemic (possibly diabetic), blood was withdrawn for a variety of analyses, stool samples were other, food, and collected allergies have been analyzed.  
By the conclusion of the day I had a bag filled with vitamins, was informed that I'd yeast in the intestinal tract of mine, and I went on the Atkins high protein, low carbohydrate diet. In that same year Marcia also dragged me to our first alternative medical conference in Manhattan. Not one of the techniques provided, including the orthomolecular psychiatry at the Atkins Center, relieved the medical depression although it did start me on a trip with holistic medicine. Today, I practice my personal brand of complementary medicine purely for myself and for any person else who wants to listen. In 1991 I did not understand that when I returned to Stony Brook Faculty in August of 2000 to once Get more information take up the professorial duties of mine following a 5 year long term disability leave of absence from Bipolar Disorder which I will offer an eight hour course on health medicine for the dental students. Most of what I have gleaned I put into this course on nutrition. I discuss a very small bit of it here.  
  
sugar and Migraines  
When I was twenty seven and returned to Toronto from Israel with my Ph.D. found Biophysics, my headaches that I had virtually all the life of mine turned into migraines which I thought I'd today have all my life. The migraines were much worse and my pain took on a brand new dimension of intensity. I had learned to tolerate pain since age four but this particular pain was excruciating. Migraine headaches are vascular in nature wherein one first triggers the vasoconstriction or perhaps squeezing of blood vessels in the head and neck accompanied by the vasodilation or even development of blood vessels. Of the second vascular phase, the blood vessels expand way past where they originally started and the poor migraine sufferer thinks the horrific throbbing of the migraine. I do not know about giving birth but you can't visualize what the pain is like until you're a migraine sufferer yourself.  
After years of experiencing this physical discomfort, I read a book by a South American physician in the early eighties on the connection of sugar to migraines. I can't recall his name or perhaps the name of the book, however, I do remember exactly what the doctor wrote. He said that sugar triggered a migraine in specific people who were prone to the biochemical changes initiated by sugar. My science background made it possible for me to see what the doctor was suggesting and I was searching for any explanation for the migraines of mine as I was desperate. I'd gone to the Headache Clinic at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, New York and no such reason was offered. Essentially, table sugar or the disaccharide sucrose gets divided to the monosaccharides, fructose and glucose, in the human body and causes insulin to be released by the pancreas.  
The insulin is needed to transport the glucose breakdown sugar of the sucrose in our cells for energy, for work in our muscles, and also for producing triglycerides in our fat cells. A complex biochemical procedure happens and there's an exchange of specific ions like magnesium and calcium across cellular membranes that can cause transformations in the bioelectric character of the cells. If too much sucrose is categorized to sugar, the pancreas will secrete an overabundance of insulin. The insulin action could really lower the blood sugar levels to also lower levels than commonly observed in an individual's blood, sometimes to a level that's considered hypoglycemic. The decrease in blood sugar triggers the body to secrete the stress hormones, epinephrine (adrenaline) as well as norepinephrine (noradrenaline), to result in the breakdown of glycogen stored in our cells to be able to elevate as well as rebalance our blood glucose levels. Blood sugar levels are in fact the blood sugar of ours but use of the term sugar is in fact a misnomer because if we say sky-high sugar, we usually mean sucrose although it is the breakdown product of sucrose that is glucose. In any case, the secretion of norepinephrine and epinephrine can be a problem in many migraine affected individuals whose blood vessels are susceptible and sensitive as these hormones or neurotransmitters, aside from that to decaying glycogen that is a string of sugar molecules, cause vasoconstriction of the skin blood vessels in the head, shoulders and neck. The direct result is that the migraine is going to commence and becomes difficult to arrest.