than 1 in 6 American adults had a massage in the past year-25 million more Americans than 10 years ago, according to AMTA’s surveys. When AMTA began commissioning these surveys in 1997, only 8 percent of adults said they had a massage  in the past year. In 2006, 18% said they had a massage in the past year.

In the past, relaxation was the leading motivator for massage, but increasingly Americans are looking to massage therapy for injury recovery, pain relief and management, headache control, and overall health and wellness.

In this year’s survey, 40% of adults said they have had a massage at some time to relieve pain. Thirty percent of people who had a massage in the past five years did it for health reasons other than stress relief. Fifty-three percent of those who discussed massage with their health care providers said their doctor recommended they get massage therapy.

Younger people indicate that massage can be a valuable part of their personal health routine. This year, 72% of respondents aged 18 to 24 disagree with the idea that massage is just a luxury. Ninety-two percent say they believe massage can be an effective way to relieve pain, while 48% have already had a massage to relieve pain.

Older Americans are increasing their use of massage as well. Annual use has tripled over the past 10 years for hose aged 55-64, from 7% in 1997 to 21% in 2006, and for ages 65 and up, from 4% in 1997 to 12% in 2006.

Ten years of data show not only that the general use of massage has increased, but also that public understanding of its benefits has grown. Americans of all ages are having massage  more often and that’s a big step.

From Hands On, Issue no. 6, The Newsletter of the American Massage Therapy Association

Craniosacral Therapy is rapidly gaining recognition as one of the most gentle and yet powerful forms of holistic healing. It is a relatively new therapy, having been developed from one of those rare quantum leaps of inspiration by its founder, William Sutherland, an osteopath. Going completely against the established teaching of his time, he recognised a subtle motion within the intricate bony structure of the skull. He called this motion ‘primary respiration’, believing it to be of far more importance to our wellbeing than mere breathing!
     During the next 100 years, more and more people were drawn to investigate this revolutionary therapy. At first, it was taught only to osteopaths, who were thought to be cranky even within their own discipline. Remember the struggles osteopaths have had to become accepted by the medical establishment and then think how difficult it must have been to establish a new science that went against even the accepted tenets of osteopathy.
     Fortunately, however, the knowledge and skill has been made available to a wider cross section of therapists during the last twenty years, and more and more people have come to realise that here is a very powerful way of bringing the body back into balance and harmony.

No movement – no life!
     How can this primary respiration be of such importance? Movement is life, and without movement there is no life. Think of the beating of the heart, the coursing of the blood and lymph through their channels, the wavelike movements of the digestive system. At the very core of the body lies the brain and spinal cord, within a bony protection and bathed in a special fluid, the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). As the subtle movements of the primary breath take place, that CSF travels along the core of the body, drawn upwards during ‘inspiration’ and flowing downwards with ‘expiration’. This movement of fluid is like the movement of the oceans and has been called ‘the Tide’. The subtle movement within the core of the body is taken up and expressed throughout the tissues and organs so that in an ideal body there would be a synchronised and harmonious rhythm within all the parts.
     Naturally, there is no ideal body! Our systems meet physical and emotional stress and challenge by contracting, and in that contraction they disturb and disrupt the flow of the tide. It’s as if the incoming tide is flowing onto a rocky shore; when it meets an obstacle, it has to find a way around. Where the body is fully resourced, the blockage is a temporary disruption: if the stresses are too frequent or the shock too great, however, the blockage becomes gradually established and can eventually lead to discomfort and pain. During our lifetime we may collect, and disperse, many different blockages; sometimes we are able to use our body’s natural healing abilities and at other times we need help. The light touch of the trained craniosacral therapist is able to detect the blockage through the restricted flow of the fluids and to reflect this information back to the body, helping it to gather the necessary resources to re-establish harmony.

Not just for babies
     There has been a great deal of publicity recently about the value of craniosacral treatment for babies and children. Their systems respond very effectively to this form of therapy, and it is extremely valuable in problems to do with suckling, hearing etc., and to problems that may relate to the birth process. What is becoming more widely accepted is the value of this therapy to all, adults and children alike. A wide variety of conditions has been found to respond to craniosacral treatment, ranging from the problems of back pain and sports injury to conditions of uncertain aetiology such as exhaustion, insomnia, learning difficulties and dyslexia.
     What usually happens during treatment is that the client lies fully clothed on a treatment table and the therapist makes gentle contact, placing the hands lightly on the body. Traditionally, the contact is from the head and the base of the spine, the sacrum; in fact, any part of the body may be held. It is important to realise that the therapist is not actually ‘doing’ anything to the client. The process is a partnership in which the therapist assists the body to find its own vitality and healing resource.
     During the treatment the client usually feels deeply relaxed. There may be tingling, shaking or a feeling of heat as structures and tissues release. Sometimes there may be emotional responses, the memories of happiness, sadness or times past, and these are valuable signposts to the process of healing. After treatment a client may feel energetic or tired, loose limbed or slightly achy but any side effects are mild and short lived. As the therapeutic partnership builds over a course of treatments, the responses will be more rapid as the body regains its innate healing abilities. It is possible for some problems to be resolved with one or two sessions, but usually more treatments are needed, for some clients require a period of a few weeks or months to reach a point where they feel different. 

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

CAROL HARADA lay on her back, eyes closed, on cushions strewn across the floor of a studio in Emeryville, Calif. Several people, some clutching musical instruments, quietly gathered around. It was her turn to receive a group healing.

One person held her feet. Another touched her head. Someone placed a hand on her shoulder. Ms. Harada, 40, then stated that her intention was to release the dull pain in her left shoulder.

"The physical touch was important, to remind me I was safe and directly connected to people doing healing work on my behalf," she wrote in an e-mail describing her experience last spring.

Then, using their voices and acoustic instruments - bowls made from crystals, an Australian didgeridoo, bells and drums - the participants gently bathed Ms. Harada in sound.

When the sonic massage ended several minutes later, Ms. Harada’s eyes fluttered open. She felt grateful, peaceful and when she stood up, found that the range of motion in her shoulder had increased.

For decades people have relaxed and meditated to soothing sounds, including recordings of waves lapping, desktop waterfalls and wind chimes. Lately a new kind of sound therapy, often called sound healing, has begun to attract a following. Also known as vibrational medicine, the practice employs the vibrations of the human voice as well as objects that resonate - tuning forks, gongs, Tibetan singing bowls - to go beyond relaxation and stimulate healing. "It’s like meditation was 20 years ago and yoga was 10 to 15 years ago," said Amrita Cottrell, the founder and director of the Healing Music Organization in Santa Cruz, Calif., and the leader of the class that Ms. Harada attended.

While many people are only just discovering it, sound healing is actually a return to ancient cultural practices that used chants and singing bowls to restore health and relieve pain. It is often introduced at mind-body or wellness festivals. Thousands of healers from almost every state and many countries have created Web sites about sound healing.

Schools for certification have sprung up too, though certification is hardly standardized. The healers include medical doctors, academics and people with no medical or scientific background at all. What they have in common is a belief in the potency of sound to not only promote relaxation, but relieve ailments, from common aches and pains to the anxiety that accompanies chemotherapy.

People who have tried sound healing say they like it because it is noninvasive and relaxing. And lying on a cushion, exercising only the ears, is decidedly easier than stretching into the downward dog pose.

But can chanting "om lam hu" or blowing into a didgeridoo really loosen a stiff neck?

No controlled clinical trials have been done to show that sound healing works, said Dr. Vijay B. Vad, a sports medicine specialist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan and a doctor for the P.G.A. Tour. But those who try sound healing may feel their pain diminish, because pain is notoriously subjective, Dr. Vad said. Some 35 percent of people with back pain find relief from a placebo, he noted.

Sound healing, like other mind-body treatments, he said, could act as a placebo, or it may distract the mind, breaking a stress cycle. "Even if it breaks your cycle for 15 minutes, that’s sometimes enough to have a therapeutic effect," Dr. Vad said.

Sylvia Pelcz-Larsen of Boulder, Colo., an acupuncturist who was suffering from excruciating back pain, tried a form of sound healing called Acutonics, which involves applying tuning forks to acupressure points on the body.

"I got a 10-minute session, and my back was about 80 percent better," she said. "It changed my life." Ms. Pelcz-Larsen now teaches classes through the Kairos Institute of Sound Healing, which is based in New Mexico but offers classes throughout the world, and has incorporated tuning forks into her acupuncture practice, along with Tibetan singing bowls, planetary gongs and chimes.

Using forks and bowls for anything other than dinner may seem to some people like New Age nonsense. But healers, sometimes called sounders, argue that sound can have physiological effects because its vibrations are not merely heard but also felt. And vibrations, they say, can lower heart rate variability, relax brain wave patterns and reduce respiratory rates.

When the heart rate is relatively steady, and breathing is deep and slow, stress hormones decrease, said Dr. Mitchell L. Gaynor, an oncologist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York and the author of "The Healing Power of Sound." That is significant, he said, because stress can depress every aspect of the immune system, "including those that protect us against flu and against cancer."

Ms. Cottrell pointed out that ultrasound, which employs vibrations in frequencies above the range of human hearing, has been used therapeutically. "When the body is sick - it could be a cold, a broken bone, an ulcer, a tumor, or an emotional or mental illness - it’s all a matter of the frequencies of the body being out of tune, off balance, out of synch," she said. "Vibration can help bring that back into balance."

Sound healing works like the cry you make when you stub your toe, said Jonathan Goldman, the director of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, and the author of "Healing Sounds: The Power of Harmonics." "Have you ever been able to stub your toe and not make a sound?" he asked. "It hurts a lot more."

The cry, he suggested, may stimulate endorphins or create resonance with the part of the body that is in pain and lessen it. Or, he said, the cry you emit may simply distract you from the pain.

Dr. Gaynor distinguishes between curing and healing. To "cure" means physically to fix something, whereas "healing" refers to wholeness, a union of the mind, body and spirit, he said. Dr. Gaynor, who has an oncology practice in Manhattan, considers sound healing integrative medicine: not an alternative to science but a complement to it.

He leads free biweekly support groups for his patients that involve chanting and playing Tibetan singing bowls. The bowls are made of several kinds of metal; when struck gently on the rim with a wood baton, they vibrate at different frequencies, making sounds not unlike church bells.

When Marisa Harris of Manhattan first saw Dr. Gaynor with one of his Tibetan bowls she thought he was going to prepare pasta. But when he began to play them, she said, it was the first time since she had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer that she could hear something other than the words "you’re going to die."

"It was as if all of a sudden there was room for possibility," she said. The sound, Ms. Harris said, penetrated her body and made her feel as if it were not only her thoughts about death that were breaking up, "but these poisonous cells, these cancer cells, were breaking up and I experienced something very healing."

More than seven years later she plays her own singing bowls every day, often chanting the names of her three children, her husband and other loved ones. The bowls, she said, helped her express feelings she had bottled up inside. Sometimes, she said, she talks to the bowls about her fears. "The sound would take them a
way," she said, "out of my being, out of my existence."

Mr. Goldman draws an analogy between sound healing and prayer. Many cultures, he said, believe that vocalizing a prayer amplifies it. By the same token, he said, expressing what you want a sound to accomplish (Ms. Harada’s wish to release the pain in her left shoulder, for example), can help you heal yourself - or someone else.

Dr. Gaynor likens sound healing to music therapy. In "The Healing Power of Sound" he cites studies indicating that music can lower blood pressure, reduce cardiac complications among patients who have recently suffered heart attacks, reduce stress hormones during medical testing and boost natural opiates.

But not everyone who partakes in sound healing is in need of medical treatment. Ms. Harada’s husband, Greg Bergere, attended the sound healing classes in Emeryville even though he had no physical ailments. They left him feeling refreshed. "It felt like I just had a really relaxing night’s sleep," he said. For some people, that alone may be worth the price of a singing bowl.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world’s best health care. It has the costliest.

In the words of Dr. Christopher Murray of the World Health Organization (WHO), “Basically, you die earlier and spend more time disabled if you’re an American rather than a member of most other advanced countries.”

The United States is just No. 29 in the WHO healthy life expectancy ranking. We lag Canada by nearly three years and Japan by nearly six.

The United States does worse than 36 countries in child mortality under age five — well behind South Korea and Singapore.

The United States is No. 1 in spending. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports the United States spent 15 percent of its Gross Domestic Product on health in 2003 compared to an average 8.6 percent in 30 OECD countries.

The United States has fewer physicians, nurses and hospital beds per person, and fewer MRI and CT scanners than the OECD average. Health Affairs reports that Americans had more difficulty making appointments with physicians quickly than people in Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, and were more likely to delay or forgo treatment because of cost.

Lack of health insurance is killing many more Americans than terrorism. As the Institute of Medicine documents, uninsured Americans get about half the medical care of those with insurance. They receive too little care, too late, get sicker and die sooner. For example, uninsured women with breast cancer have a 30 percent to 50 percent higher risk of dying than insured women. Uninsured car crash victims receive less care in the hospital and have a 37 percent higher mortality rate than privately insured patients.

Holly Sklar | Common Dreams (read more. . .)

Such studies have helped spawn grassroots opposition to fluoridation, and, since 1999, 70 U.S. communities have rejected fluoridation schemes, according to Fluoride Action Network, a watchdog group.

But fluoridation programs flourished even in the face of questions about health impacts. Kropp says the thrust behind fluoridation “is faceless. Some of the big proponents of fluoridation and some of the original experiments done, and done in faulty ways, aren’t around anymore. But you have new generations of dentists and public health officials who were taught in school that this is fine, so there’s no reason to do to the literature. It just gets passed down that way.”

Nonetheless, more and more scientists are refusing to take fluoride’s safety for granted.

Dr. Hardy Limeback, a leading Canadian expert and head of preventive dentistry at the University of Toronto, said he could not comment for this story because he is involved in a two-year review of fluoride for the National Academy of Sciences.

But Limeback, who once supported but now opposes fluoridation, has written extensively on fluoride’s health risks, and his views are shared by many in the scientific community. He has written that global cavity rates have declined mostly as a result of fluoridated toothpaste and that topical applications rather than widespread applications through community water can prevent tooth decay. Limeback and others also point out that industrial sources of fluoride contain harmful chemicals and have not been tested properly.

“Hydrofluorosilicic acid is recovered from the smokestack scrubbers during the production of phosphate fertilizer and sold to most of the major cities in North America, which use this industrial grade source of fluoride to fluoridate drinking water, rather than the more expensive pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride salt,” he wrote in a public letter in April 2000. “Fluorosilicates have never been tested for safety in humans. Furthermore, these industrial-grade chemicals are contaminated with trace amounts of heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and radium that accumulate in humans.”

Kelly Hearn | AlterNet (read more. . .)

Parents are still largely unaware that these drugs are turning kids into walking time bombs. Eight out of the last 13 school shooters were taking prescribed psychiatric drugs, and only now is the FDA investigating the fact these drugs can cause violence. Legislators are still not waking up to the need for investigation — despite the Jeff Weise tragedy in March when the teen, after being prescribed an antidepressant, shot dead his grandparents and then classmates and school officials.

Now adding to the alarm bell we have the Partnership for a Drug Free America report that teens don’t consider these drugs dangerous because they are prescribed. However, the DEA classifies them in the same category of highly addictive drugs such as cocaine, opium and morphine. At least 10 percent of teens are abusing the stimulants, Ritalin and Adderall. A “troop of drugged-out zombies” is frighteningly real. (Watch for Lawrence Bender’s latest movie, Chumscrubber: Meet Generation Rx — an accurate portrayal of the current epidemic of teen prescription drug abuse.)

The recent controversy over these drugs has also raised another important debate: that parents across America are administering them for conditions they have been led to believe are the result of a “chemical imbalance” in the brain or some sort of brain-based disorder. Yet, the medical doctors in their letter to the FDA make it clear that these “potentially harmful substances” are being prescribed for “disorders that have no neurobiological or physical cause.” Even the president of the APA, Steven Sharfstein, recently admitted that there is no “clean cut lab test” to determine a chemical imbalance can cause “mental illness.” This has prompted concerns about the FDA’s drug approval process and why it approves so many psychiatric drugs for what is essentially behavioral control rather than treatment of medical illness. (read more. . .)

The obvious model for those hoping to reverse the fattening of America is the campaign against smoking. Before the surgeon general officially condemned smoking in 1964, rising cigarette consumption seemed an unstoppable trend; since then, consumption per capita has fallen more than 50 percent.

But it may be hard to match that success when it comes to obesity. I’m not talking about the inherent difficulty of the task - getting people to consume fewer calories and/or exercise more may be harder than getting people to stop smoking, but we won’t know until we try. I’m talking, instead, about how the political winds have shifted.

Public health activists were successful in taking on smoking in part because at the time corporations didn’t know how to play the public opinion game. By today’s standards, the political ineptitude of Big Tobacco was awe-inspiring. In a famous 1971 interview on “Face the Nation,” the chairman of the board of Philip Morris, confronted with evidence that smoking by mothers leads to low birth weight, replied, “Some women would prefer having smaller babies.”

Today’s food industry would never make that kind of mistake. In public, the industry’s companies proclaim themselves good guys, committed to healthier eating. Meanwhile, they outsource the campaigns against medical researchers and the dissemination of crude anti-anti-obesity propaganda to industry-financed advocacy groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom.

More broadly, the ideological landscape has changed drastically since the 1960’s. (That change in the landscape also has a lot to do with corporate financing of advocacy groups, but that’s a tale for another article.) In today’s America, proposals to do something about rising obesity rates must contend with a public predisposed to believe that the market is always right and that the government always screws things up.

You can see these predispositions at work in an article printed last month in Amber Waves, a magazine published by the Department of Agriculture. The article is titled “Obesity Policy and the Law of Unintended Consequences,” suggesting that government efforts to combat obesity are likely to be counterproductive. But the authors don’t actually provide any examples of how that might happen.

And the authors suggest, without quite asserting it, that because people freely choose obesity in a free market, it must be a good thing.

“Americans’ rapid weight gain may have nothing to do with market failure,” the article says. “It may be a rational response to changing technology and prices. … If consumers willingly trade off increased adiposity for working indoors and spending less time in the kitchen as well as for manageable weight-related health problems, then markets are not failing.”

How can medical experts who see obesity as a critical problem deal with an ideological landscape tilted in the direction of doing nothing?

One answer is to focus on the financial costs of obesity, and the fact that many of these costs fall on taxpayers and on the general insurance-buying public, rather than on the obese individuals themselves. (To their credit, the authors of the Amber Waves article do mention this issue, although they play it down.)

It is more important, however, to emphasize that there are situations in which “free to choose” is all wrong - and that this is one of them.

For one thing, the most rapid rise in obesity isn’t taking place among adults, who, we hope, can understand the consequences of their decisions. It’s taking place among children and adolescents.

And even if children weren’t a big part of the problem, only a blind ideologue or an economist could argue with a straight face that Americans were rationally deciding to become obese. In fact, even many economists know better: the most widely cited recent economic analysis of obesity, a 2003 paper by David Cutler, Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro of Harvard University, declares that “at least some food consumption is almost certainly not rational.” It goes on to present evidence that even adults have clear problems with self-control.

Above all, we need to put aside our anti-government prejudices and realize that the history of government interventions on behalf of public health, from the construction of sewer systems to the campaign against smoking, is one of consistent, life-enhancing success. Obesity is America’s fastest-growing health problem; let’s do something about it.

When we have gained a deep understanding of the body and soul, there often follows a desire to reach out, to grow, and to change. In the Vedic texts, the second chakra, the energy center between the navel and genitals, is the seat of life and the house of change. It is a point where opposites come together in sympathy, guiding us toward a balanced existence. The choices that help us evolve are often a product of the second chakra, which, when charged with neither too little nor too much energy, rejects rigid control and embraces creativity. Associated with taste and sensuality, the second chakra or Svadhisthana (which means sweetness) can be visualized as a brilliant sunset orange. Like its element, water, the second chakra is ruled by the moon.

A weakness or imbalance in the second chakra can lead to feelings of extreme empathy, which can cause you to be ruled by the emotions of others. To fail to focus on this chakra leads to the opposite: an utter lack of emotion and dwindling passions. A balanced second chakra embraces both sides of everything, giving you a healthy understanding of your emotions as well as those of others. Nurturing it through dance, laughter, and pleasurable movement will help you embrace your own sexuality, which is the main aspect of the chakra. Stimulation of the second chakra can be achieved through the use of orris root, gardenia, or damiana incense; practicing tantra yoga; or exposing the chakra to moonstone or coral. These methods of opening and energizing the chakra can be performed individually or in tandem for greater effect.

The second chakra may appear a route to indulgence to some, because of its focus on the feelings of the body, but it is also the dwelling place of the self. A fully functioning second chakra, working in a balanced way with the body’s other chakras, is a source of self-knowledge and understanding.

From the perspective of the status quo, it was the kind of “news” that’s best ignored. So that’s exactly what most newspapers, radio, and TV outlets did—even though the revelation appeared in a respected, peer-reviewed science journal and the subject concerned the health of millions of children and young adults.

In March, the journal Pediatrics published an article titled “Calcium, Dairy Products, and Bone Health in Children and Young Adults: A Re-evaluation of the Evidence.” The scientists who did the review belong to the Washington, D.C.–based organization Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. PCRM members are often dismissively referred to as animal-rights advocates. They de-scribe themselves as “doctors and laypersons working together for compassionate and effective medical practice, research, and health promotion.”

However you view them, you can’t knock their methodology. The scientists examined 58 published studies on the relationship between calcium, dairy products, and bone health. After excluding studies that did not control for exercise, weight, puberty, or vitamin D—all things that influence bones—they concluded that there is “scant evidence” that dairy products promote bone health in children.

That conclusion contradicts everything we’re told about cow juice, first by our mothers and then by the government and dairy industry. Milk is listed as one of the four basic food groups by the Canada Food Guide, which recommends that teens have three to four milk servings a day, adults two to three. The U.S. government recently boosted its milk recommendation from two cups to three cups a day for everyone above age nine.

Milk is touted as Mother Nature’s near-perfect food. Indeed, the current B.C. Dairy Foundation ad campaign—aimed at kids and teens—features a thawed-out caveman who now drinks milk. Why? “Because, of course,” the ad says, “it’s always been survival of the fittest.” (The ads, found at drinkmilk.ca, are very clever and screamingly funny.)

But, you’ve got to wonder if milk is really essential. Physical activity and vitamin D are just as critical to building bones as calcium is. True, there are few food sources for vitamin D and it is added to milk. The main source, however, is the sun on our skin, a good reason to spend some time outdoors every day, preferably half-naked. (See Loving the Sun)

Being active and being outdoors could partially explain what’s known as the calcium paradox. That’s the puzzle of why societies that consume the most dairy also have the highest rates of osteoporosis and broken bones. People in Asia, for instance, drink almost no milk and have a very low incidence of bone fractures.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell is professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University. He headed a massive epidemiological study of the traditional Chinese diet, disease, and lifestyle called “The China Project.” From 1983 to 1990, Cornell researchers visited more than 10,000 people in 130 villages across China from the southern coast to the Gobi desert. They found a population that relied on plant-based sources such as vegetables and whole grains for their calcium. The populations also had much less heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity than North Americans. (See Campbell’s recent book, The China Study: the Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted.

“Dairy consumption in China was essentially zero for most of their history,” Campbell says during an interview from Ithaca, New York. “And, of course, according to the dogma and the assumptions that we have in the West, we would assume that, if dairy consumption is not high enough, we’re going to run the risk of osteoporosis. It certainly is not true.”

And then there’s the argument that humans, like other animals, were never designed to drink milk—especially from another species—after they’d finished their mothers’ milk. If your ancestors came from Great Britain, Scandinavia, France, Germany, or the Netherlands, you likely can drink cow milk without an unpleasant reaction. If they came from Eastern Europe, Russia, Greece, Italy, or another Mediterranean country, you may or may not be able to. But if they come from just about anywhere else on the globe, chances are you can’t consume dairy without a loud protest from your body. People who are lactose intolerant lack the enzyme needed to digest milk. Symptoms of lactose intolerance include cramping, bloating, gas, stomach pain, and diarrhea.

A few years ago, scientists identified the gene responsible for lactose intolerance. Because it is found in all lactose-intolerant people across distant ethnic groups, they deduced that it is a very old gene and is, in fact, the original form. When humans migrated north and started milking cows as a survival strategy 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the gene mutated to allow them to digest milk.

Lactose intolerance is the biological norm. No caveman ever touched cow milk.