Dr. Claus Volko, Dr. Uwe Rohr, Prof. Dr. Adolf Schindler (2013)
Dr. Claus Volko, Dr. Uwe Rohr, Prof. Dr. Adolf Schindler (2013)
It was already obvious in my childhood that I would eventually become a computer scientist one day. However, I still followed my parents' wish and studied medicine after graduating from high school. I never identified myself with the profession of a doctor, but I was interested in scientific research and longing for contributing to it myself. When I met Dr. Uwe Rohr in 2013, I was happy that he accepted me as a member of his research group, thus fulfilling one of my greatest dreams. As Uwe died in 2016, I am actually his only intellectual heir, as the others who worked with him have mostly switched to other focuses. Despite not working as a physician, I feel obliged to keep up the memory of Uwe's (and my) scientific theories, since they are not standard knowledge yet. That is why I have decided to write an easy-to-comprehend general introduction to our research. Note that what follows is not only about Uwe's beliefs but also about my own extensions to his original suggestions.
According to my paper "The Synthesis of Metaphysics and Jungian Personality Theory" (2018), the human organism can be divided into three components:
PSYCHE - NEUROENDOCRINE SYSTEM - BODY
The neuroendocrine system is the interface between the material world (body) and the immaterial world (psyche). My main theses (I developed them after Uwe Rohr's death) are:
This goes well beyond science and enters the realm of metaphysics, and as said, I developed these theses after Uwe Rohr's death. I will talk about what Uwe himself believed in the next chapter. As you will see, Uwe's beliefs are firmly rooted on scientific ground. Nevertheless I decided to start this article with my own metaphysical extensions of Uwe's theory.
Stress is what we call when the body is put under pressure to display an unusually high level of physical performance. As a reaction to stress, the connection between the neuroendocrine system and the body is temporarily strenghtened, while the connection between the neuroendocrine system and the psyche is temporarily weakened. That is why although we are able to perform extremely well physically as a reaction to stress, our psyche is weakened and thus chronic stress can induce severe mental diseases.
By contrast, infectious diseases and cancer trigger the immune system, which appears to have the opposite effect to stress. As a reaction to such disease, we are temporarily unable to make full use of our body, while the psyche is strenghtened.
After the Second World War, an American businessman named Walter Wainright lived in Eastern Asia and learned that there were a lot of people aged hundred years or even older. He was immediately curious to understand what allows people in this region to live to such a high age. His attention was turned to the diet of these people, which among other things involved high doses of fermented soy. Wainright was fascinated and began to import fermented soy to the United States, where he sold it among fellow members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
When Wainright met Dr. Uwe Rohr, a German pharmacist and medical scientist by training, at a conference in the 1990s, he asked Uwe to scientifically investigate the workings of fermented soy. As Uwe had had a couple of years of specialist training in gynecology and gynecological endocrinology, he was quick to suspect the effects of fermented soy to be related to the hormone system.
Nowadays it is a well-established fact that the isoflavones contained in fermented soy, such as daidzein and genistein, have similar effects on the human body as the adiols (androstanediol and androstenediol), steroid hormones that are produced by the organism itself. This includes anti-inflammatory and anti-androgenic effects.
What distinguishes Uwe Rohr's beliefs from what is already considered established science is that Uwe believed isoflavones would not directly exert their effect; rather than that, he believed that isoflavones would exert their effect indirectly by leading to an increase of the concentrations of the adiols in the human organism. This increase of concentration would be compensated for by a decrease of other steroid hormones. Uwe believed that some steroid hormones were related to stress reactions (he called them "stress hormones") and some others were responsible for boosting the immune system (he called them "immunity hormones"). So his view was that soy isoflavones had their positive effect on the immune system by converting stress hormones into immunity hormones.
There is plenty of evidence suggesting that indeed, people exposed to stress have an imbalance of steroid hormones, some hormones which Uwe considered stress hormones being elevated and some other hormones having a diminished concentration. Uwe and I published a paper on that in 2016, with the title "Model approach for stress induced steroidal hormone cascade changes in severe mental diseases".
As some earlier publications from Uwe's group show, soy isoflavones have shown to have a beneficial effect not only in severe mental diseases, but also in cancer (see e.g. "Can Plants' Ability for DNA Repair and Stress Defense be Used against Patients' Circulating Tumor Cells?", from 2015). Uwe also told me he had observed positive effects on wound healing.
Uwe also believed that soy isoflavones had the potential to convert cancer cells into healthy functional tissue. We published an article about that in a German magazine for gynecologists, called "Paradigmenwechsel in der Krebstherapie. Was lehrt das invasive und außergewöhnlich rasche Wachstum von Trophoblast bzw. Plazenta?" (2014).
I have recently extended this to a new paradigm of medical treatment, which I called Symbiont Conversion Theory. This paradigm not only encompasses cancer treatment but also treatment of infectious diseases. Basically it postulates that diseases caused by agents supposed to be parasites, no matter whether these are microorganisms such as bacteria or malformed body's own tissue such as cancer, can be treated by converting these parasites into symbionts instead of killing the parasites.
More about Uwe Rohr, including his list of publications, can be found at the website "In memoriam Dr. Uwe Rohr".
Claus D. Volko (May 10th, 2018)