Biorhythms

Biorhythms are also known as bio-curves or bio-cycles. The energies in the body are believed to fluctuate in three cycles: a 23-day physical cycle, a 28-day emotional cycle, and a 33-day intellectual cycle. Awareness of these cycles enables one to predict human behaviour in terms of good and bad days at any given time of a person's life.

Each cycle has a positive or active phase and a negative or passive phase, and the days when this polarity changes are generally seen as important. The cycles are normally demonstrated as curves on a graph, each line rising to a peak then falling, crossing the baseline into the negative phase, and falling to a trough before rising and again crossing the baseline to start a new positive phase.

Each cycle is said to start at birth with the beginning of the positive phase so provided the date of birth is known the status of the three biorhythms can be calculated for any day of persons life. From the 1920's biorhythms were taken more seriously in Switzerland than anywhere else. Natural Scientist Dr. Hans Schwing from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich produced a treatise on biorhythms. With the assistance of government statistics and data from insurance companies he analysed deaths from natural causes and in accidents. He deduced that serious accidents were five times more likely to occur on a critical day. Considering natural death, he took only the physical and emotional cycles into account and found that death was eleven times more likely to occur on these critical days.

Researchers have differing views on which relationships between the three rhythms are most critical. Some people maintain that on a day when two curves cross in the opposite direction is more critical than when a curve crosses the baseline; others pay more attention to which rhythms are in the positive or negative phase, while others consider whether they are rising or falling to be more significant, or whether they are close to a peak or trough, which could cause a dangerous 'spin' period when the curve changes direction.

The believability of biorhythms as presently described is doubted by most conventional medical authorities. There is a lot of evidence that the actual lunar cycle can affect human behaviour patterns. However this would appear to contradict the idea of an internal 28-day emotional biorhythm which supposedly has similar effects. Is it possible that one overrides the other? Circadian rhythms definitely do exist but these are easily maintained by other daily patterns both internal and external (such as sleeping and waking, night and day). There is no obvious way of maintaining the longer cycles of 23, 28 and 33 days, which would easily slip out of synchronisation. Given that the duration of the menstrual cycle can vary erratically, why should we believe that biorhythms of comparable duration be apparently so fixed?

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