Get it Up By Sydney Ross Singer & Soma Grismaijer

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Get it Up! Revealing the Simple Surprising Lifestyle that Causes Migraines, Alzheimer’s, Stroke, Glaucoma, Sleep Apnea, Impotence… and More!
By Sydney Ross Singer & Soma Grismaijer
ISCD Press

The work of Weston Price led us to the realization that our modern, advanced civilization that has it all figured out has forgotten how to eat. The work of Esther Gokhale led us to realize we’ve forgotten how to stand, sit and bend over. Well, it doesn’t end there. According to Singer and Grismaijer, we’ve forgotten how to sleep.

The book begins with the question of what causes migraine headaches? Conventional medicine has asked the question but, as usual, has made very little headway in coming up with an answer. Beyond the observation that migraines are a type of vascular headache, they don’t seem to know what is going on. That doesn’t stop them from rushing out a shot-in-the-dark treatment. Like all shots in the dark, it may be doing more harm than good.

The authors give us a detailed but not technically overwhelming explanation of how gravity affects the human body. During the day when most people are more or less vertical, bodily fluids collect down around the feet and drain from the head. At night when most people are more or less horizontal, the opposite occurs. The longer you remain horizontal, the more pressure builds in your head. This pressure and swelling can cause problems including migraines. If this goes too far, brain damage can result. The migraine is the body’s way of clearing out the head and saving the brain. Similar to what we have done with fevers and cholesterol, treatments that address the migraine are yet another example of modern medicine attacking the smoke alarm instead of the fire.

Space medicine is about the only branch of medicine that has looked in detail at how gravity affects the human body and it has found that one way to simulate weightlessness is to remain horizontal for long periods of time. It has been observed that astronauts in space commonly suffer the same problems of pressure and swelling in the head leading to migraines and other problems.

The answer Singer and Grismaijer arrive at, strangely, does not involve any expensive drugs or devices. The solution is to avoid sleeping on a completely flat surface. This was tested by volunteers enlisted to sleep with their upper bodies elevated to an optimum angle. There was significantly greater improvement in the treatment group than the control group. Not everybody improved but about 70 percent did. This is not a universal solution, obviously, but it seems to work for many and it can’t hurt to try. That is good enough to get my thumb UP for this book.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Summer 2013.

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