Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Literatus: Highway to the stomach By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T. Breakthroughs
AN ancient Greek lyric poet wrote this beautiful line on infatuation: “When I look on you a moment, then I can speak no more, but my tongue falls silent, and at once a delicate flame courses beneath my skin, and with my eyes I see nothing, and my ears hum, and a wet sweat bathes me, and a trembling seizes me all over.”
Not only a channel of the “delicate flame” of infatuation, the skin, recent scientific evidence indicates, is the highway to his stomach, itself the proverbial highway to a man’s heart.
This discovery came up when Egyptian researchers, led by Ahmed Shafik, decided to see if heat stimulation of the skin has some effect on the movements of the stomach. Shafik is a researcher at the Department of Surgery and Experimental Research at Cairo University.
The team tested 33 health volunteers using a barostat system consisting of a balloon-ended tube connected to a strain gauge and air-injection system while the skin temperature was increased in increments of 3C (i.e. degrees centigrade) up to 49C. They have also tested the effect of heated skin into an anesthetized stomach as well as anesthetized skin.
In a report published in the April 14 issue of the World Journal of Gastroenterology, the researchers observed that an increase in the skin temperature, from 37 degrees Centigrade (37C), by three to 12C, the tone of the stomach wall decreased from 40 to 83 percent (61.2 percent average). The effect on the stomach wall occurred within an average of 25.6 minutes.
Stomach tone declined more in men than in women, although the difference as well as between younger and older volunteers was not significant, something that may be better observed had the volunteers have been more.
One interesting outcome was that anesthetization of either the skin or the stomach with two percent lidocain has not as much effect on the gastric tone as with heat application on the skin.
While this investigation is still a basic study and has not used heat on irritable conditions of the stomach such as irritable bowel syndrome, stomach pain, diarrhea, or perhaps indigestion, the findings make a promising and very interesting line of study in the future that could cut on the use of drugs in managing stomach problems.
Victor Hugo though insightfully observed: “Indigestion is charged by God with enforcing morality on the stomach.” Will heating the skin then be a resistance to God’s enforcement order on Nature? That is something to reflect on, not subject though to scientific investigation.
