The Lüscher Code: The Professor who Investigated the Connections between Color, Psyche, and Health

The trite state of the medical arts and sciences and the seeming indifference of many if not most of its practitioners to this sad state of affairs has been one of the steady laments of these pages. These are not complaints that are plucked out of thin air, nor are there no laudable examples of doctors and scientists who have made huge breakthroughs in medicine in recent years.

One of those very interesting scientists to make some extremely interesting discoveries, and, as is customary in a field dominated by mountebanks, all but completely be ignored, is Professor Max Lüscher (b 1923). In his day he taught at institutes of higher learning such as Yale University's School of Medicine and the Sorbonne's Psychology Department among many others. Lüscher had been fascinated by philosophy and psychology from an early age, and was given special - and rarely given - permission to audit university courses in psychology and philosophy at the age of 16. At 18, he began to ponder what influence the perception of color has on understanding the Rorschach test. The more he busied himself with the question, the more interesting the results were that he found. Colors have clear physiological effects on humans; some shades of red, for example, cause the heart rate to pick up and other involuntary symptoms of arousal to manifest themselves, similarly some shades of blue have an opposite effect. In more medical terms, this would be equivalent to the stimulation of the sympathetic or parasympathetic nerves.

Lüscher came to understand that while everyone sees the exact same colors when presented with the same color samples, how they perceive the colors is completely subjective, and often very informative about their state of mind and their health. His research was made easier by a lucky break; a befriended doctor arranged for him to enjoy unlimited access to the patients at the hospital he directed, and to their medical records, which Lüscher used to assiduously investigate how patients perceived certain colors he had identified as particularly useful for such diagnostic purposes, and what correlations existed with their physical and psychological states. Another obvious result is that once enough patients with clear medical records had been examined to allow clear conclusions to be drawn about how health states affect the perception of colors, testing the perception of colors would allow clear conclusions to be drawn about health problems that exist, and about health problems which were likely to appear in the future, simply by measuring how people perceive colors. The obvious caveat is that these conclusions will only be as reliable as the data and common sense that is used to draw them. All the same, this is extremely interesting. Such a color test can be done in 5 minutes; rather than requiring that blood be drawn and sent to laboratories and the like, the only equipment required is a sheet of paper, a pen, and eight pages with Lüscher's copyrighted colors on them.

His discoveries were sufficiently interesting enough for him to be invited to be a speaker at the first International Congress of Psychology to meet after the Second World War, this while he was still a student. His talks there made such an impression that he was invited to lecture about his work at the Sorbonne and to the Quai d'Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, right after receiving his doctorate. To this day, Dr. Lüscher's lectures are well attended.

Lüscher's (copyrighted) color test consists of batteries of seven tests; first of all, the testee is acted to rate eight colors according to how pleasant and unpleasant he or she finds them to be, then to rate a few shapes by the same criteria, and then to identify which of four colors and then which of four shades of four colors seem most appealing, and then to rerate the eight colors. What the results can tell you is amazing.

• Personality traits are clearly reflected in the results of his test.
  

• One of the conclusions that can be drawn from some results of the Lüscher Color test is that some patients either do or don't have a predisposition to get cancer. Admittedly, in the material I've read, the likelihood of the testee getting or not getting cancer are only given for less common color preferences not indicative of overall good health, but they are strong (p<0.001.)

• A Norwegian researcher found that in a study of 4275 13 year olds who grow up to be delinquents as adults already show significant differences in their subjective perceptions of the colors compared to those who don't; they find Lüscher's strains of black to be much more pleasant and yellow much less pleasant than their peers who go on to lead troubled lives. (Lie N, Boys who became offenders. A follow-up study of 2203 boys tested with projective methods, Acta Psychiatr Scand Suppl. 1988;342:1-122.)

• Elena Schikowa wrote her 2001 dissertation at Moscow State University in which she documented that male and female asthmatics have statistically significant deviations (i.e. p<0.05)

• A predisposition to heart attacks is also reflected in the choice of colors.

• Finding Lüscher's yellow to be, in relative terms, very unattractive correlates with having a high T-lymphocyte count.
  

• A. Vegliach reports that in a sample of 25 depressives, depression could be diagnosed with p=0.00522, in other words probably with more precision than with the diagnostic checklists used today.

• I'm in the process of confirming that pregnant women and hyperthyroids also reveal themselves through their perception of colors.
  

Being a psychologist and philosopher, Dr. Lüscher not surpisingly also has some fairly interesting explanations to offer for why the different colors have different meanings, how, for example, his strain of violet, the color that results when red and blue is mixed, unites some traits associated with red and some with blue and more.

Another interesting fact is that Albert Szent-Györgyi, whose contributions to science have already been touched on in these pages, was also convinced the many colors one finds in the human body also must have some significance in the greater scheme of bodily functions. Why, he had asked his professors as an aspiring medico, was the liver brown? Their answer was that the liver is brown because.. well the liver is brown. This wasn't good enough for Szent-Györgyi, who was still pondering this in his 70s and asking his readers what the significance of oxygenated blood being the vibrant crimson is. Oxgenated blood is rich in oxygen, which is the primary source of oxidation in the body. Is it a surprise that the color of blood that powers this most important process has such an visual impact on us humans?

As the gentle reader may recall, Szent-Györgyi was convinced that semiconduction plays an important role in human biology, particularly that of cancer, and that cancer ultimately is a problem of - among other things - electron shell configurations. Since photons can change electron shell configurations, the reports that a person's color preference allows statistically very meaningful conclusions to be drawn about an individuals predisposition to cancer at the very least confirms that there is a good likelihood that Szent-Györgyi was onto something interesting. I have no idea to what all uses Dr. Lüscher's work can be put. Nevertheless...

• Could it be that routine mammograms do more harm than good in patients whose likelihood of suffering cancer during their lifetime is 0.1%, if said minority can be identified with a 5 minute color perception test?

• Could it be that people at a high risk of suffering a heart attack could be identified, and perhaps helped to reduce their likelihood of suffering a heart attack with this 5 minute test?

• Would it make sense to seek to identify adolescents who are highly likely to commit violent crimes as adults, and perhaps monitor them more extensively than people who appear to be at no risk?

• Could it be that one could identify which medications are most likely to be helpful in some illnesses with this test? I suspect so. Lüscher, in fact, says so.

• If illnesses and psychology are linked, would the competent and beneficial practice of medicine also involve identifying and instilling values and helping to order patients and society? Is this compatible with medicine by committee?
  

Unfortunately, medicine has all too often become neither an art nor a science, but rather a system of following flow charts that generally are created by committees in highly opaque circumstances. The only thing that is somewhat transparent is the flow of funding from the pharmaceutical industry to the politicians who chose those who are to regulate the industry. Thinking is deemed unbecoming; how else can one explain that it generally takes years until very serious, sometimes lethal, side-effects of "blockbuster" treatments are documented, if they ever are. For many doctors pretty much their only art is determining how to best code illness in order to maximize renumeration from the health insurances. This is an art particularly suited to mediocrities and the mediocrities among mediocrities; not surprisingly medicine today is full of such creatures. Whenever decisions are customarily made by committees, as is the wont in academia in our days, those who have better things to do than attend sempiternal committee meetings will neither thrive nor often get the acknowledgment that ought be their due.

The ancient Greeks had their priests who praised Zeus, Neptune and Hera; when they needed advice, they would consult among others the Oracle at Delphi. The Romans had priests who praised Jupiter, Saturn and the Lares. The ancient Germans had priests who praised Wotan, Thor, Freya, Odin, and others. contemporary Americans are plagued by clowns who praise the likes of Lipitor, Prozac, Vioxx, and Neurontin, and ascribe to them and all the other deities and semi-deities listed in the American pharmacopoeia magical powers that are not only not scientifically proven but sometimes even embarrassingly prove to be scientifically disproved. Every people must have its witchdoctors.

To round the buffooneries off, Americans even suffer the attentions of professional "drug czars," men rarely thought to understand much of pharmacology or medicine, but who have nevertheless taken in upon themselves to craft and enforce an American pharmacological demonology that few but the most abject of morons take even halfway serious. Curiously, the deities in this bizarre belief system all too often are under patent; the demons that must be vigorously exorcised, even publicly burned, generally have been treasured for their medicinal uses for thousands of years, and could generally be easily cultivated in your backyard were it not for these purported public servants. We are now at the point of a system of mountebanks, for mountebanks, and by mountebanks.

As long as people are accept as an article of faith that medicine by committee and insurance claim is superior to medicine practiced as an art and science between doctor and patient, and to tolerate legislation which prohibits the latter by force of law, they will get exactly what they deserve, nothing more and nothing less.


Links:

There are several pages dedicated to the Lüscher test that are online. But as they are at best rather shoddy attempts to emulate a copyrighted test, I won't link to them. Dr. Lüscher spent two years going through no less than 4,500 colors before he settled on the 43 colors and shades of gray that feature in his test. The results of his test are calibrated to his colors; any attempt to create a test that doesn't use his colors is a fool's errand.

Here is the website licensed to sell Dr. Lüscher's tests:

Ralph Moss, Electron Acceptors, and Cancer

For a few decades a few scientists, some of them Nobel laureates, have believed that antioxidants may prevent and even help to treat cancer. Some of the ideas and clinical results have been very promising, but have not received the attention they deserve. Even worse, unsubstantiated and even false claims have been bandied about by some of those who claim to know everything about the antioxidants, which has served to make anyone who touches the subject appear to be disreputable.

The scientist who probably put the most effort into studying cancer and what antioxidants can do to treat it probably was Albert von Szent-Györgyi, some of whose ideas are described in previous posts. Szent-Györgyi certainly had a colorful life. He was married four times; one marriage already troubled by his wife's increasing dominance developed, as they say, "irreconcilable differences" when he was shocked to catch his wife in bed - with another woman. He twice entered into matrimony at an age at which he would have qualified for membership in the AARP if not Social Security payments. But then again, he enjoyed excellent health, and continued working into his 90s, an achievement he attributed to his consuming sizable quantities of Vitamin C and wheat germ, which is very rich in Vitamin E, daily.

The scion of a illustrious family of doctors, Szent-Györgyi studied medicine in Budapest; his first research was of the structure of the skin around the anus; a doctor uncle of his, afflicted with hemorrhoids, had stipulated that he do so in the hope that his nephew's work might help him overcome his painful condition. During the First World War, Szent-Györgyi served with distinction, until he came to conclusion that the war was a fraud; that Europe's old men were wasting Europe's youth on their vanity. Not keen to die for a useless cause, and keen to save his talents for medical research, he shot himself in the arm, reported it as enemy action, and thus escaped from the war. After the war, he wound up at a university in Holland, where at one point his financial conditions was so bleak that he seriously mulled suicide. The tides of fortune changed; he wound up studying biochemistry at Cambridge and then teaching it in Hungary. He came extremely close to identifying the citric acid cycle now known as as the Krebs Cycle, after Sir Hans Krebs who beat him to the discovery. He was the first scientist to isolate Vitamin C from the paprikas for which Hungary is famous, a discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize.

During the 1930s and 1940s he was the rector of the University of Szeged, had some confrontations with the Hungary's pro-Nazi elements, worked as a secret agent for the British during the war, disappeared when he heard that Adolf Hitler literally wanted his head because he'd tried to broker a deal in which Hungary's would have left the war and joined the Allies, was offered the presidency of Hungary by the Russians after they possessed Hungary. After six fruitless months of trying to reach some reasonable modus vivendi with the Russians, Szent-Györgyi left Hungary for the United States, where he ultimately co-founded the National Center for Cancer Research, and spent his last decades pondering cancer as an electronic syndrome, as previously blogged.

One of Szent-Györgyi's close friends was Ralph Moss, who obtained a PhD in Classics at Stanford University before he found employment as a science writer at Sloan-Kettering. He eventually found the atmosphere at Sloan-Kettering uncongenial - science fiction was not his avocation - and left to devote his time to studying and writing about alternatives in medicine; it was on this quest that he met and befriended Szent-Györgyi, and learned about his understandings of cancer and wayward electrons. Moss wrote an excellent biography of Albert Szent-Györgyi, which is well worth reading.

Electron acceptors, which prevent electron donors from donating their electrons to other molecules, or oxidizing them, are, of course, also known as antioxidants. One of Moss's books "Antioxidants Against Cancer" is about the scientific basis for recommending, or not recommending, antioxidants to cancer patients. He's done a first-rate job of poring through myriad journals and papers and establishing which ideas about the use of antioxidants have a solid scientific basis; he references no less than 460 papers on the subject, in other words, every contention is well documented. It certainly isn't a rah-rah book; Moss carefully explains that certain antioxidants are known to worsen certain cancers; this is a field in which carelessness is particularly disastrous.

Dr. Moss's book is full to tidbits that I would desperately want to know if I were fighting cancer; for example:

• Scientists at the National Institutes of Health conducted a 1,300 patient study that looked into whether a low dose of selenium had any effect on the rate of skin cancer in people with a history of skin cancer over a span of 8 years. The results didn't reveal any significant difference in skin cancer rates; but when they looked at the rates of other cancers, the group taking selenium had a death rate from the more serious cancers such as those of lung, colon, rectum and prostrate that was half of the death rate in the placebo group! Rates of prostrate cancer dropped by 63%!
  

• In a study too small to allow any general conclusions to be drawn, one case of breast cancer went into regression when the patient dramatically increased the dosage of the antioxidant she took of her own accord. In another case, a case of liver cancer with metastases cleared up when the same antioxidant was administered. Regrettably, this phenomenon hasn't been studied in sufficient detail to allow scientists to draw any conclusive conclusions, much less make any recommendations.

• One chemotherapy medication was found to decrease cancer growth by 37%, but when given together with an antioxidant, the decrease in cancer growth was 85%.

I don't want to excerpt Dr. Moss's entire book, but I do know that if I had cancer, I would definitely want to consult his book. Dr. Moss also runs an information service through which advises interested patients about his ideas about alternatives in the treatment of cancer.



Links:


Dr. Moss's website: www.cancerdecisions.com

Dr. Moss's gives Grand Rounds at the University of Arizona.


Books:


Ralph Moss: Antioxidants Against Cancer

Ralph Moss: Albert Szent-Györgyi: Free Radical

Szent-Györgyi's Alpha and Beta States

Here's a concise summary of Szent-Györgyi's understanding of the alpha and beta states. The relevance to cancer may be apparent. Excerpted from and a synopsis of "Electronic Biology and Cancer; A New Theory of Cancer" by Albert Szent-Györgyi.


Properties of resting (ß) and proliferative (α) states in cells (scroll down; blogspot does not like tables)

α State	ß State
High D/A, low pε	Low D/A, high pε
Unbridled proliferation	Regulation of cell division
Undifferentiated, molecular dispersion	Differentiated
lack of structures	insoluble structures
Soluble proteins	Insoluble proteins
No contact inhibition	Contact inhibition
Fermentation	Oxidation
No carbonyls	carbonyls and carbonyl-biogen amine
Free SH	Complexed SH
Anaerobic reactions	Aerobic reactions
dark	photosynthesis
Dielectric	Semiconductor
Closed-shell molecules	Charge transfer complexes
molecular reactions	Free radicals, electronic reactions
Structured water	Random water
Lack of color	Colored
Fetal proteins	No fetal proteins

Is Man the Ultimate Semiconductor; Does a "Cheap, Safe," Drug Kill Most Cancers?

Lately the New Scientist has been all atwitter about the notion that a "Cheap, 'safe,' drug kills most cancers."

To quote the article:

"Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA (dichloroacetate) on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks."

and:

"Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. “The question is: which comes first?” he says."

Of course, at present we don't know if DCA works or not; we hope it does, but a few things are interesting.

If DCA works, it may vindicate the work of two Nobel Laureates who spent a lot of time thinking about cancer, but whose ideas have faded into oblivion: Otto Warburg, who first discovered that the metabolic processes in healthy cells and in cancer cells are completely different, and Albert Szent-Györgyi, who devoted the later years of his life to studying what life, and cancer is. Szent-Györgyi came to an understanding of life that is substantially more subtle than that of many people in his, and our, time.

What does this have to do with DCA? Szent-Györgyi came to understand life, and pathologies of life such as cancer, not merely as a material or molecular processes, but also as an energetic, electronic, or submolecular processes. He noted that:

• life on this planet has existed in two forms, and what he called the "alpha form" which originated in an oxygen free environment, and is anaerobic in its metabolism (the fermentation seen in mitochondria and cancer cells,) and what he called the "beta form," which evolved later, and is aerobic (that is relies on oxidation.)
  
• living substances have ESR signatures (proof of electronic activity) that are quite different from inanimate objects, and noted that comparable cancer cells do not have normal, and sometimes not even discernible ESR signatures.
• contrary to the wide-spread belief that these ESR signatures, and the free radicals that cause them, are "artifacts" of rare processes, they, and the electron transfer in various organs that they prove is happening, is central to the health and functioning of the body.
  

Szent-Györgyi believed that life is much more subtle than the textbooks of his day would have, and that the process of life also involves making changes to the configuration of the electron shells of proteins and more. In the jargon of today's computer scientists, man is a semiconductor and "quantum computer." Szent-Györgyi believed that life uses some chemicals to "dope" the proteins that make up or body, that is to allow them to more easily transfer electrons, just as silicon and germanium semi-conductors are manufactured with inherent impurities, without which the chips made from them would be useless. Interestingly enough, DCA's chemical structure is far from entirely dissimilar to that of the substance which he discussed as the primary doping agent.

If Warburg and Szent-Györgyi prove to have been correct, it will open some extremely interesting new vistas into our understanding of life, health, and the treatment of cancer.


Books: Albert Szent-Györgyi Living State and Cancer. Workshop of the Natl Foundation for Cancer Research, and Marine Biological Lab, Woods Hole, Mass