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Field experiment: Walkabout For Proto-Health

An exploration of the effects of walking without a goal on vegetative ease

and a medical experiment on baseline dehydration.

This medical exploration project follows on from previous theoretical work (see introduction in home page presenting a Ph.D. research thesis), from the experimental result presented in a medical case report (relative to baseline hydration), and explores in practice the notion of 'proto-health' (introduced in  the thesis), which comes down to vegetative ease of bodily functions and maintenance.

The implications are very practical and derive from a modelling method introduced in this independent research. This visual method validates the usefulness of various  'basic options' that we keep neglecting, presenting them in terms of topologic properties (topology is a moving geometry; the method  uses topologic properties, and describes our conventional methods as part of a 'nexial' form of topology) - there is another form). This approach translates, when it comes to the body and health, into basic means and spontaneous behaviours (see  overview and book  of Ph.D. thesis) that stop the deployment of stress/strain, of critical states, as opposed to our habitual ways of compensating for their occurrence (adaptive strategies), correcting their consequences (appearance  of damage or disturbance), hiding their negative effects (nor not seeing their counter-productive effects).  More crucially, they also prevent the deployment of counter-productive effects.

This walkabout experiment will explore directly the effects of one of these basic means, walking, to observe the physical expression but also the alterations of critical states and modifications of boundary phenomena. This project will  test the notion of physical 'rehabilitation to the wild' for a human body (a term taken from wildlife caring - not  the romanticised 'return to  Nature' or to the 'savage state'  naked and without use of any technology), restoring effective spontaneous bodily functions as wildlife carers rehabilitate animal bodies from injury or stress to living conditions without  human pressure, man-made processed food or sophisticated housing. Making use of some adequately chosen modern medical options can support hydration level and water distribution, breathing,  effective absorption of nutrients, electrolytes et osmolytes, and using a certain way of eating  (see below) can alter  brain-central operations.

This walkabout may bring a new view of how health problems arise in relation to other forms of individual and collective difficulty, including 'diet and lifestyle' related problems, as well as the problem of health decline and fast ageing in menopausal women, and a new practical approach to them and their origin. The perspectives on 'natural disasters' and  aid, as well as the fundamental problems of societal living, ignore certain grounded aspects to focus on conventionalised approaches to the humanitarian emergencies and survival difficulty that occur, without seeing the mostly man-made source of their negative effects, or using certain options that could be used to meet the most basic needs. [Opinions vary on what these needs actually are, but the help always aims to deployment.] This experiment focuses on how one of these needs arises plays out into many other needs, mediated by the water metabolism of the body (see Baseline hydration page), starting with the simplest function of osmosis.

The notion of 'walkabout'

A 'walkabout’, in Australia, is a behaviour that was observed in Aboriginal people during early European settlement, and which did not make a lot of sense to the Western mind.  Nowadays, the word has been appropriated to mean a male adolescent rite of passage lasting weeks or months, with a goal of spiritual 'journeying' or to designate a shorter interruption of a man's working life in the 'white Australia' world, without notice (of either going or coming back) and undertaken for various reasons. Because a walkabout is not seasonal or repetitive, it is not an aspect of a 'nomadic' lifestyle. In common parlance, to be 'gone walkabout' means disappearing without warning to an unknown location, sometimes in order to get away from pressures. A walkabout was a wandering in the bush (land uninhabited by humans), 'just walking' without a particular destination, goal, set direction, or an end timing. The traditional image of the walkabout also includes going away without the comforts and contraptions of civilisation, and in the old days, even without Western style clothing or a survival kit (in the 'outback)'. The accepted rationalised explanations or motivations for a walkabout, either planned or suddenly decided, may hide something more basic, an instinctual impulse which, if heeded, can stop counter-productive effects of pressure.

In the present case, the walkabout will be a lone walking into the bush, lasting some weeks, without a support team, hotels or fund raising, with as little civilised resources and processed foods as feasible, and as much flexibility as needs, a weak physical condition, and organisation will allow. (see below)

The aim is a medical experiment in an undirected, unplanned exploratory mode, related to hydration, posture, and 'directed activation' (withhout discerning external behaviour of person from internal brain-mind behaviour). This exploration investigates in part the effect of not being submitted to these conditions and the 'Human Pressures' that go with them, so it requires 'naturalistic' conditions that cannot be achieved in societal conditions.

Who

I will be going on this walkabout, alone. There will be no support team or fund raising gravitating around this walkabout, in order to evade the societal deployments and interactions that are associated with them (emotional, social, cultural, especially media, financial, and chronic use of machines), because they would alter the 'basic' conditions, and would distract from observation.

When        

This walkabout will last some months (duration not set strictly). The walk will have no planned itinerary and will allow for rest any time it is needed to reduce the stress of pain.  

Where

The walkabout will take place in the bush in Queensland. 'The bush' may not necessarily mean true 'wilderness'. The walk will take remain in natural or wild  or forest landscapes, sometimes in agricultural areas, and will follow small tracks rather than roads. The most crucial element is that the walking  will be done on reasonably flat ground, to avoid the strong efforts of walking in mountainous regions (this is not a survival hike).  It may use state forests or national park trails, the Bicentennial National Trail for horse riders, stock routes. The geographic itinerary would ideally not be set at all, but given the circumstances described in this page, it will have to be limited.  

In particular, a basecamp shelter has turned out necessary. The current 'El Nina' rains and flooding conditions in Australia have made a basecamp necessary to shelter from bad weather. Walking will still take place without particular goal, but more locally.

How: Walking 'at ease', for 'proto-health' rather than for conventional 'health' or survival extremes

How: Walking at ease, for ‘proto-health’ rather than ‘health’             

The point is not to reach a destination or achieve any goal, and especially not within any set time frame. or distance The itinerary will be partially planned, and for a longer distance than the actual walk, to allow for the flexibility of going further or not. There will not be any particular purpose of restoring particular aspects of the body, its functions, structures, or organs, or its resistance, fitness,  endurance, or resilience, although some proto-health effects may change these. The point is to observe topologic properties and any aspects that become salient: this is an exploratory project (see below), particularly aimed at the sharp decline of  vegetative functions after menopause. In daily life parlance, the aim is to see how the counter-productive effects of the 'survival mode' can or cannot be undone, how this occurs (topologic properties), how long it may take. Since 'surviving' is a mode of great effort (albeit a very common mode of life for much of humanity), the underlying guiding principle of this exploratory project is to reduce 'directional activation' - for example, need  to cope and effort to compensate, to the point where activity (walking, standing, breathing, physiological / vegetative functions...) no longer feels like hard work, require constant maintenance (e.g by 'exercise') or conscious control (e.g. drinking more water or setting sleep habits to counter agitation). In such a health condition, involving much muscle loss and various pains, one cannot just get up and go, and travel as light as a young person would (for whom the same activities are still  not felt like effort). Neither is it practicable to be on the go all the time, setiting up camp daily in different places. The research design I use ('local-case' design) means that observations are made 'locally' and in large part of a topologic nature.

A second aspect will be a medical experiment: testing the use of oxytocin (see medical case report) and of a special hydrating drink (see below) in altering the way a fast brain drives the 'survival mode' (with all its existential consequences) and drives an even faster ageing than that related to menopause. [See the Water Stress Hypothesis blog.]

Forms of long walks

There are various degrees of effort in long walks. Extreme forms of long walks are forced ‘marches’ in harsh ‘survival conditions’ (life-threatening) for the soldier, the war or hunger refugee, the political militant, the explorer of the ends of the Earth, the hiker pushing himself, and for sorting out troublesome adolescents. Ritual forms of the long walk include the spiritual student’s travels and medieval trade artisan’s walk around his country to learn from masters, the adolescent’s rite of passage journey, the pilgrimage. The cultural habit of seasonal nomadism is grounded in a cyclical world view and perception of the physical environment of humans. The reactive or compensatory form of walkabout as an escape from pressures is culturally attributed to a ‘primitive’ desire or habit, and has drifted into the yearly escape ‘adventure holiday’, a well-planned venture (nowadays becoming an expensive privilege). Nevertheless, it appears that the need for the extended walk runs deep in human nature, although it is suppressed by the urban and farming lifestyles, and attracts, in itself, little academic interest.

There are less patterned forms. It is a modern tradition for youngsters coming out of home to go travelling the world for a while, without making plans or organising finances or social contacts ahead of time. The hunter’s or gatherer’s wandering is not aimless, but is not planned. The Alzheimer’s disease patient who walks off and gets lost, and the two or three year old child who fearlessly wanders off to explore his world, are not organised or focused: they just ‘walk off’. These less patterned forms tend to be associated with risks to the person, or physical danger. The last two are even considered negative in normal culture, partly because they are difficult to control by reason. Yet to some degree, as non-patterned activity that is not a directive drive, they are also sound: walking helps breathing, a dire need in the elderly, especially women, and curiosity denotes less fear conditioning and less containment in a child, and is useful to healthy expressions of development. These are important elements in the walkabout as an instinctual or spontaneous behaviour (not an impulsive urge), a ‘basic’ inclination.

Menopausal women and walking

Menopausal women and walking

There is another situation in which this basic impulse is active. Some women approaching, reaching  or past menopause, feel the widespread counter-productive effects on their health, of the efforts to keep up – the physical ‘hormonal decline’ that affects every aspect of physical function and triggers hot flushes and sweats. This is often accompanied with a falling back into the living hell of puberty-like emotional uproars. Medicine sorts out the problem for most, increasingly so for men as well, but for a few, this becomes a free-fall, physical, mental, cognitive, and socio-professional. Socio-emotional uproars can be a lifelong problem, only exacerbated by menopause. Some younger women escape it simply by adopting a diet more nutritionally effective, physical activity, and regular habits. Some, less apt to benefit from habit, or less prone to it, deal with this problem, early in the decline, when still reasonably healthy, through renewing with youthful travels in the form of hiking holidays, taking a break alone to stop stress and walk, or by taking long walks, all of which have global effects.  Think, for example, of the women who walked across the Australian desert, the Tibetan plateau, up on mountains, etc. They are some of the few who resolve youthful trouble, or correct pre-menopause related chronic conditions, by long hikes that restore breathing, sanity and soundness. Few get the chance to do it in youth, when one can still push one's body and benefit from the physical survival mode. Why not after menopause as well? But by then, the powerful survival mode has run out of steam and needs to stop being used, instead, hence the idea or walkabout, and the cart that can solve practical hindrance from a weakened body.

It appears that the basic option of the walkabout is of particular value to women, whose hypothalamus is a source of trouble and struggle more than for men. For anyone, this could be a useful option when more targeted medical treatments have too much side-effect, and it might eliminate the necessity for culturally condoned entrainments that become constraining. But this option is often culturally suppressed, impaired by modern lifestyles, and made economically inaccessible, even though it is less costly in resources of all kinds than our habitual ongoing corrective and adaptive strategies, with their long-term and wide-ranging consequences. This basic option is also systematically neglected in the circles that devise the theories, develop the practices, and organise the resource uses and land use that run our lives.

Pursuing my work with the modelling method of nexial topology, and my current health situation, form the basis for this project. I have always wanted to go walkabout, tried several times. Given the state of the world and our collective survival behaviour, it now seems important to do it, and to find out whether this inclination for the walkabout turns out to provide fundamental benefits for physiological and personal behaviour. (Topologic distortion could model sex differences according to orders of deployment; deploying is a capacity not equally shared among people.) Many of our problems often arise from counter-productive effects of self-centred, societally enacted, survival behaviours. Could this basic means to stop these effects, then, give us an uncostly option in the face of our global problems and personal difficulties? 

Not mad or crazy, just menopausal

I put this statement as a bumper sticker on my car: people come up to me  with a smile to say, 'I like it'. Women who feel invalidated by medicine and culture. Men who have to put up with the menopausal consequences on their wife and support them as best as they can, in a culture that neither understands nor helps those who 'for some reason' do not benefit from conventional hormonal and herbal treatments.

Menopause is, in short, running out of steam in keeping up with the modern speed of life, and reaching a point where reserves become exhausted because they are no longer replenished sufficiently or fast enough.  The adaptive capacity runs out, has to work very hard and raise much hormonal power , yet for only marginal effects and waning benefit.

This adaptive capacity is what ‘raising’ a child produces, through adrenarche and menarche.  Adrenarche* is the name given to the increase in adrenal activity/ androgen production just before puberty, which brings on secondary sexual characteristics, and is now occurring at an increasingly early age between 6 and 9 (there is no medical explanation for this). Chinese medicine calls this ‘mature kidneys’. The adrenals, also named suprarenal glands, sit on top of the kidneys, and the brain-kidneys axis is also altered, involving hormones that can also act as neurotransmitters and produced in the hypothalamus. The sex drive is a related term. In females, the raising also involves menarche, the onset of menstruation, an energy draining  blood loss initiated by the periodic destruction of the uterine lining, which then has to be reconstructed monthly to avoid the loss of fertility and maintain sufficient health for pregnancy. (This is usually presented as a body ‘preparing for possible pregnancy’). Each menstruation re-activates hormonal processes, repetitively (and this has consequences such as fibrocystic breast disease, which attracts only palliative treatment for pain because it is considered benign, as many signs of ageing). A ‘lack’ of these hormonal powers is invoked in many chronic conditions, in both Western and Eastern medicines, and treatments generally aim to reactivate these processes. This ability to raise compensatory functions to rebuild the body’s structural and functional resources (tissues  as material and energy ‘reserves’) , the ability to 'heal', is lost at menopause and more progressively through andropause, with degenerative ‘ageing’ consequences that also involve a dire worsening of baseline hydration.

The primitive or primary language of a person’s ‘ill talk’, for example ‘running out of steam’, ‘too much pressure’, ‘spinning’, being 'wound up', or ‘just surviving’, often reflects a nexial and topologic language [some examples are collected into a long table in the thesis and book that present the method]. This method provides a less complex and fragmented understanding of what activating and reactivating do, and so of the relation between ‘raising’ the child and the senile ‘falling back’ into infancy and susceptibilities of many kinds. What many call, in daily life, the 'survival mode' or ‘struggle mode’ is, from a health viewpoint, a technical physiologic strain and a human stress state, which entrains the adaptive brain or mind into using the ‘internal resources’ of the body to cope with ‘external stressors’. It is what we call normal ‘health’, an adaptive-compensatory and costly state, made necessary by the requirement to cope with survival situations that are often societal, or man-made. The raising and falling are another way to formulate it. They exist in many areas, including in the ‘ups-and-downs of normal life’, or the activations and reactivations that entrain the adaptive capacity to compensate and establish adaptive patterns of activity. This state is ruled by the directional activities of the brain, mind, and person (and stirred up emotions**). This walkabout will start from this baseline of normal health and exhaustion of the ‘reserves’ it uses. If it brings the state of ‘proto-health’, in which the body is not used chronically as ‘internal resource’, it may bring a different practical approach to menopause not relying on psychology and medicine.

An exploratory project:

Although some hypotheses will be validated or invalidated in this project, no particular expectations or results will be actively sought, in this project and any unexpected occurrence will be explored, suspending any judgement and evaluation.

This project is part of an unusual exploratory research program, and is certainly not as narrow the ‘evidence based’ medicine that involves the statistics of normal health that neglects certain aspects of health and certain types of individuals. The program involves observations of a different nature than the objective facts and subjective 'storying' that are collectively accepted in conventional sciences: no physical measurement (sensory or instrumental) or counting, no record of constructive re-storying of experience or sensate expressions. The properties to be observed are primarily topologic and observation is guided by the modelling with the method of 'nexial topology', especially inversions and reversals. Rather than regular or systematic recording of objective and subjective elements, it is significant events that are recorded both internal events are significant (physical and cognitive) and external, as they arise and alter the shaping of the situation.

Survival mode versus human 'rehabilitation to the wild'

Survival mode versus human ‘rehabilitation to the wild’

One aspect of this project aims to explore the idea that living, for a time, under no pressure, in non-critical conditions, could stop the counter-productive developments due to the 'survival mode' struggle. Facing on an ongoing basis various high and low stressors has counter-productive consequences: the effects of acute and chronic pressures. Nutritional science relates this mode, in its physical expressions, reactive and sometimes extreme, to reduced breathing, or mal-/under-nutrition, which maintain a habitual physiological struggle that sometimes flares up into extremes (acute phases) – the essential manifestation of stress-related and low-grade syndromes, which are often deemed ‘not well understood’ in the medical literature. The medical case report on this website relates all these to the threshold of the ‘hypothalamic osmostat’, and therefore to a low baseline hydration level that initiates its reactions, in particular to gravity effects on posture, circulation, and reduced breathing.

The practical notion of ‘survival mode’ can be approached through nexial topology modelling, independently of the physical or human expressions. As a ‘limit’ state of critical pressure (at various levels), it initiates directional activity and operates through boundary phenomena. But that is exactly what pressure also is, a directional motion (with a pressure gradient). An internally ‘wound up’ state reacts to an external and environmental pressures and, in the process of winding up, or ‘raising’ energy for this reaction, it compounds it. The survival state is both cause and effect (two symmetric views on the same situation, one internal, the other external).

For example, we do this collectively: by ‘stepping up’ our efforts to monitor the planet and to counter our destructive habits (‘raising’ awareness, ‘raising’ funds), we ‘wind up’ the situation more. In particular, we increase the ‘speed of life’, the brain speed required for increased complex learning, the complexities of normal daily life in society, with computer use and complex trade and consumerism patterns, the energy requirements, both external and internal. Apart from plundering the planet, these increase the ‘allostatic load’ of stress, in chronic and acute phases, damage health, our humaneness, and ultimately impair our capacity to care for the world and the body (e.g. ‘self care’ and immune ‘self defence’). Very simply, it plunders the body’s ‘reserves’, for no good or actual reason. We end up exhausting the resources, external, and internal, in particular those of the body, which are crucial and necessary to access the adaptive capacity. Ultimately, we are making ourselves and our children sick, degenerating the health of our species altogether, turning advancement in years into a pitiful and painful ‘ageing’, and creating an urban world that turns natural extreme events into humane ‘natural’ disasters (man-made). Not only this, but we squander the very adaptive capacity we may need to cope with climate change events. We compound the problem.  Instead, we could be adapting our lifestyles and settlement patterns to support wild food and clean water supplies, and mutual help, and could restore our bodies to some degree of ‘rehabilitation to the wild’, in preparation for potential situations in which civilised comforts might be unavailable.

The ‘Sur-Vival’ struggle mode ('struggling to survive') re-deploys a global situation, based on pressure,  ...by raising pressure (!), and this compounding keeps worsening the situation, which is not yet critical. The net result is to trigger counter-productive effects that make it critical for many, and a constant struggle. The instinctive inclination to go walkabout may be viewed as a means to stop counter-productive developments and this compounding effect (this is not about merely ‘unwinding stress’ by relaxing the mind or reconditioning the body). Sports, exercise-based and medical treatments of stress use extreme effort, adaptive work, and ‘resistance’ or compensatory reaction (e.g. notions of pushing to the limits, fitness workout, and endurance) and make health a difficult thing to keep. If the walk keeps to a non-reactive, non-targeted deployment of activity, could it change this 'limit' state of survival mode, altogether? This walkabout may settle the question in one case at least: can the walkabout alter how the threshold of the hypothalamic osmostat operates and the survival mode?

* Adrenarche: The phenomenon of adrenarche is unique to human beings and to some Old World primates, and a reversal of adrenarche appears to occur in the ageing process. Premature and exaggerated adrenarche can be indicative of future onset of adult diseases, thus increasing the clinical relevance of adrenarche. The physiological triggers of adrenarche and the role(s) of DHEA-S remain speculative.

** Emotion: 1570s, "a (physical) moving, stirring, agitation," from M.Fr. emotion, from O.Fr. emouvoir "stir up", from L. emovere "move out, remove, agitate," from ex- "out" + movere "to move" (see move). Sense of "strong feeling" is first recorded 1650s; extended to "any feeling" 1808.

 - Website of Dr marika bouchon -