Case Studies

Introduction and Context

Some example Case Studies are provided here and are the current “truth” from the perspective of The Maclean Institute. These case studies are for you to consider as to their relevance to you, and to map against your knowledge and experience, and to decide whether they inform and update your current “truth” and your beliefs. The Maclean Institute continues to refine and update and occasionally completely change its “truth” in line with the philosophy outlined across the whole of this website.

Case Study 1 - Generic Health Condition

Our individual health is just that - individual to each of us and depends upon a myriad of complicated and inter relating factors eg the genes we each get from our parents, the environment in which we were conceived and then brought up, the fuel that we consume, the level of physical and mental stress in our lives, our level of movement in our lives, and some evolutionary “random” factors which cause minor changes in the workings of our body and our mind, as random chance seeks to slowly establish our body’s optimum working parameters for species survival.

We all seek to address any perceived and/or potential frailties in our “health” in different ways, and with a myriad of often conflicting sets of advice from relevant interested parties, from family and friends who hopefully want the best outcome for us, from our medical advisors who also hopefully want the best outcome for us (affordable by the state), and from organisations who want to sell us a path to improved health who may be less driven by what is best for us.

So how do we navigate through these conflicting data sources, in the manner being espoused by this website?

We leave this up to you to use your knowledge and experience, and your trusted sources, as per the basic website tenets, to consider your path through this challenge.

Do you implicitly follow the exact advice of your doctor, recognising that when you have engaged with your doctor, your health may already have degraded to an irrecoverable worse state than is good for you?

Do you regularly interrogate the internet and utilise the recommendations of any influencers, in an attempt to shorten the time between the first symptom which causes you concern and any medical intervention, or even engage in interventions in advance of a health situation which worries you?

If you truly wish to be in control of your own health, then you will do a combination of these things.

The Maclean Institute’s current “truth”, in a generally applicable first order answer to such an individually different question, is offered here for your consideration and comparison with your answer to our questions to you above:

Case Study 1 - Our “Truth’s” Generic Answer

0n assessing all inputs we have found from weighted levels of “trusted” sources and using our knowledge and experience, we derive the following attempt at a first order “generic” answer.

To most benefit a human being‘s health (especially that for a human being with a highly Westernised lifestyle), there are a few really simple things to concentrate on, which are relatively obvious and which are very difficult to do:

1. Get the best sleep that you can - ideally around 7 hours - not much less and not much more (though more is better than less) - can be in two tranches of 3.5hrs or so at any point during your day, but it is best if it is at the same times every day. Sleep is when your body and mind repair themselves the most, and your body responds best to regularity of timings as it starts to anticipate what is coming to make the best of it.

2. Drink more water - as we are all made up mostly of water (50 to 70%), and our busy lives often mean forgetting to drink water, and when we drink, it is often coffee which can be a diuretic if drunk too frequently. Around 2 to 3 litres of water per day is a good amount and note that we will get some of our water from our food.

3. Reduce your stress as much as you can - by whatever means works best for you - stress causes your system to always be in a “fight or flight” mode which disables your repair mechanisms from working and does further damage to your body and mind.

4. Increase your fibre intake a lot - this feeds your gut microbes which form most of your immune system which will then be at best efficiency and this will also minimise situations where your immune system turns on your healthy body (eg arthritis). Fibre intake, in immediate advance of sugar intake, also slows the absorption of glucose into your bloodstream and therefore helps limit sugar crashes which cause further damage to your body.

5. Reduce your intake of sugars, especially man made sugar additions to your food, as consistently high and continuous levels of sugar absorption cause insulin to flow regularly through our blood vessels, and this insulin masks the messages from our body which tell us that we have reached our optimum level of energy fuel reserves (with the sugar converted by our liver into fat cells and then stored around our body to be used when we hit a period of famine, potentially around 60 days worth of fuel). So our body thinks we have not yet eaten enough food and causes us to continue to strive towards our optimum level of stored energy as fast as we can.

6. Engage in regular moderate physical exercise, which ensures that we don’t lose the ability to move around - also provides a feel good factor about doing something positive for our health, and is often an excellent component of our stress relief strategies.

7. Engage in regular moderate mental exercise, which ensures that we don’t lose our conscious selves too early in our lives eg into dementia, whilst our body is still functioning reasonably healthily.

Case Study 2 - Die as old as is possible and still with all your mental faculties

Case Study 2 - Our “Truth’s“ Generic Answer

This is our proposed order of priority, for you to re-order if you disagree (and can articulate why to yourself)

Sleep as well as you possibly can, in order to repair and build back stronger
Maintain grip strength
Maintain balance
Exercise your brain and body, in order to repair and build back stronger
Socialise slightly more than you are comfortable with
Eat within a time restricted window
Eat for fuel to nourish your brain, your bones, your microbiomes, and your muscles, sinews and tendons
Ensure your fuel is getting to where it needs to ie a healthy blood circulation, especially to your brain
Purposely eat occasional treats as rewards when you decide that you have earned them
Recognising that we all need a level of challenge in our lives (which is markedly different for different individuals eg an extreme athlete versus a 10000 steps walker, or a Chief Executive versus a Care Worker - and yet these apparently different levels of challenge/stress can have exactly the same high level of physiological impact on the relevant individual), a mission and some goals to give us our essential sense of purpose, minimise the length and severity of periods of stress where the challenge slips into “out of our perceived control” - easier said than done.

Case Study 3 - There will always be Wars & Pestilence

And within some level of reason, Wars & Pestilence are ”good“for our species, but of course inherently bad for all of the individuals caught up in them

For the species to survive, evolution used to weed out the weak
Today “weak” does not necessarily mean lack of strength but more often means lack of guile and cunning, driving one definition of “higher intelligence”
Technological advancement has meant that individuals who would not previously have survived can now do so, accelerating our world population increase, such that at some point in out future, the Earth will not be enough, so….
We need to get off the Earth, and until we do, the only relief valves are Pestilence and War, to slow down our population expansion
We could try rationalising and negotiating with the population for a voluntary reduction in baby creation across the world, but we believe this to be unlikely as an effective mainstream mechanism for population reduction
So we need to recognise this “truth” and plan accordingly, and also recognise that nature will introduce increasing levels of existing and additional “pestilence” to try to rebalance the Earth’s environment, as our increased numbers destabilise it more and more
As a result, we must all prepare to defend ourselves with whatever survival strategies we can adopt, both individual, in local groups, and in larger groups - at some point in the future, someone else will want to take our resources - food, shelter, fuel, children
What can we do?
Positive and truly collaborative engagement with each other across the world - revitalise and make more real the United Nations - isolating if required the one or two “superpowers” who wrongly believe they can be truly self sufficient in all things - where the new improved UN recognises that separately we will poison everyone’s Earth, and only together can we avoid or at least minimise War and Pestilence. The smaller nations must rise up and control, contain, or at least minimise the “superpowers” destructive imperative
We must build some level of resilience and self sufficiency to moderate hopefully minor bumps in the long term road, ideally with the mutual assistance of our more local groups
Can we get off the Earth? Perhaps for a select few
If we could solve the Nuclear Fusion conundrum (or find a similar level of clean energy which doesn’t destroy our planet’s ability to sustain us) to give us a chance to effect the necessary changes to our way of living without descending into the Wars and Pestilence zone
Somehow, through education or fear or both, could we change all of our behaviour, such that we collectively start to live within our collective means? We don’t believe this is a realistic possibility, knowing humanity as we do - imagine selling the idea to a Western worker that they should take an effective pay cut so that their opposite number in the East can have a standard of living consistent with the (reduced) level in the West - we believe War will be their preferred choice

We hope we are wrong, but evidence to this effect is required, as we are now beyond the remit of blind hope. The stakes are now too high. Who will lead us, and why? Perhaps a time for a new religion?