This is a article I found from Forbes.com entitled “NBA Draft: Is Being 7 Feet Tall The Fastest Way To Get Rich In America?” written by a Dan Diamond and posted in 6/27/2013.

Interpretation: This type of article that is posted for the website of one of the most foremost magazines on fortune, business, and the professional life does make me and the other people who come to this website take a step back from our endeavor to see just how even the extreme high end of height is good for you, even if there are inconveniences like increased likelihood of heading one’s head and airplane seats not having enough leg room.

The Issue Over Winning the Genetic Lottery…

Sometimes I get frustrated with people who feel somehow bad that they were so lucky to win the genetic lottery and feel like they don’t deserve what they have and did not work hard for. There are billions of people who would kill to be in the position they are in, however they were unlucky. The most famous speech ever made by a person is probably Cameron Rusell who got a disproportionately large applause to her rather weak speech on TED.tv.

In a rather famous YouTube video where the writer Neil Strauss tries to develop rapport with Jessica Alba in the Jimmy Kimmel Show (HERE) he states to the rather oblivious Jessica “In LA everyone’s beautiful. If you are beautiful you come to LA to try to make it, right? ….So you are beautiful, so what? so you got lucky in the gene pool, so what?…”

This technique is he doing is to make Alba start to qualify herself to him and reverses the values of each other’s roles. A rather classic pick up artist strategy where the NLP technique of reframing the situation is done.

I think Jessica misses the main point. If we remove the idea of of a omnipotent god who used intention and had a specific reason to create us, humans, and don’t believe in anything that is associated with the idea of intelligent design, then the factor that would be the biggest determinant in detemining the quality of the life of existence is randomness and PURE DUMB LUCK. The fact is that while Strauss may try to use words to negate the major factor, which is that Jessica Alba got lucky on the genetic lottery, if we look at the situation completely objectively we can see that being physically attractive is going to get most girls very far in life, even if they lack a substantial amount in the other areas of life like intelligence, personality, etc. If Alba was born as a girl in some remote tribe in the Amazon, she will not have the type of fame and money she has now. If Alba was born in some village in Bangladesh she probably would have been a mother at 15 and be forced into a life of being a farmer. If she was born with osteogenesis imperfecta she will never get the main role in a romantic comedy movie, no matter how great her personality was.

My main point is, the cold hard fact is that winning the genetic lottery is probably the only thing that matters in any of our lives.  If you got lucky and won, then your life is set. If you are unlucky and go the short end of the straw, there is really very little you can do to change anything, even if you work your ass off. That is how life is. Life is very unfair.

Here is the article he wrote below…

Every year, I watch the NBA Draft and its parade of young men who appear to have won the genetic lottery, or at least a sweepstakes for overactive pituitaries. And every year, I come away with the same conclusion: Thanks to pro basketball, being 7 feet tall is the world’s shortest path to becoming a millionaire.

These newest, lankiest pro players have worked hard to develop elite basketball skills, of course. But they’ve also benefited from a years-long, worldwide search to identify and maximize talent unlike any other industry.

And as a result, a disproportionate number of the planet’s tallest men already work in the NBA, with players like Nerlens Noel, Alex Len, and Cody Zeller poised to join them tonight.

The extraordinary advantage of being 7 feet tall

Drawing on Centers for Disease Control data, Sports Illustrated‘s Pablo Torre estimated that no more than 70 American men are between the ages of 20 and 40 and at least 7 feet tall. “While the probability of, say, an American between 6’6″ and 6’8″ being an NBA player today stands at a mere 0.07%, it’s a staggering 17% for someone 7 feet or taller,” Torre writes.

(While that claim might seem like a tall tale, more than 42 U.S.-born players listed at 7 feet did debut in NBA games between 1993 and 2013. Even accounting for the typical 1-inch inflation in players’ listed heights would still mean that 15 “true” 7-footers made it to the NBA, out of Torre’s hypothetical pool of about 70 men.)

Many 7 footers also profit by getting into basketball relatively early. While scouts canvas the globe for super-sized warm bodies – “I’ll check up on anyone over 7 feet that’s breathing,” NBA scouting director Ryan Blake told Torre in 2011 – they usually haven’t slipped through the cracks. In a nation like China or Germany, a 10-year-old who shows extreme growth potential will be recruited into a national basketball academy; in the United States, clumsy young giants are often funneled into the sport thanks to some variation on the following conversation: “Do you play basketball? If not, you should.”

There’s a clear reason why extreme height is so prized in basketball: At worst, it’s still an unteachable asset. Even a relatively unskilled 7 footer can simply stand near a basket and alter an opponent’s shots just by his presence.

And given the market need for players who can protect the rim, there are extra rewards for this extra height. The league’s median player last season was 6 feet 7 inches tall, and paid about $2.5 million for his service. But consider the rarified air of the 7-footer-and-up club. The average salary of those 35 NBA players: $6.1 million.

(How much does one more inch matter? The 39 players listed at 6 feet 11 inches were paid an average of $4.9 million, or about 20% less than the 7 footers.)

And once a 7 footer has made it to the league, his height offers tremendous job security — the basketball equivalent of tenure. A tattered reputation didn’t stop Eddy Curry (more than $70 million in career earnings) or Jerome James ($44 million) from getting huge, multi-year contracts. A lack of skill didn’t stop Ryan Hollins ($10 million in career earnings) or Keith Closs ($6.2 million) from carving out a lucrative niche as backups.

Extreme height also induces teams to take flyers on marginal players who would otherwise never warrant a second look. Back in the 1990s, 7 foot 1 Matt Wenstrom, who averaged 1.6 points per game in his college career at North Carolina, somehow played two seasons in the NBA – which was two seasons more than Donald Williams, who was Wenstrom’s college teammate and the most outstanding player of the 1993 NCAA Final Four.

Even though NBA teams are starting to get a little smaller, with the rise of non-traditional lineups often used by the Miami Heat and Oklahoma City Thunder, the NBA Draft is paradoxically expected to grow a bit bigger this year. At least seven players who are listed at 7 feet or taller are projected as first round selections on Thursday night, which would break a five-year-old record.

Whether or not this draft is historically huge, the annual parade of young giants like Noel, Len, and Zeller will be a powerful visual reminder: While being incredibly skinny doesn’t make you a model, and being unusually short or fat doesn’t get you much at all, being tall – like, off-the-growth-charts tall – can make you very rich while very young.

Most people who have done any type of research on the possibility of trying to grow taller from using hypnosis, neuro linguistic programming and anything related would have heard of the legendary story of how the late great hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson managed to get a supposed 20 year old man to grow 12 inches taller in one year from using a specific type of visualization technique.

I have written about and referenced at least two post about this unique case. The original post was  “Milton Erickson’s Legend of 12 Inch Height Increase“. The subsequent posts like about praying, wishing, NLP, hypnosis, and hypnotherapy, this specific case was referenced multiple times to show that maybe there is something to hypnosis.

I remembered back to this specific case and wanted to do some research to find out whether this story was true or not and find the exact origin of where this story came from.

The first clue I got was from the article I had originally published about Milton Erickson. There was the title of a certain book which I didn’t even realized I had copy and pasted in the 1st post. It was entitled “Ericksonian Approaches“. I checked Amazon.com and found that the title referred to a specific reference manual on Erickson’s methods. It is “Ericksonian Approaches: A Comprehensive Manual”. The cost of it was 26 British Pounds.

I searched for a free PDF copy of the book looking on Google and found none so I spent $35 of my own money to buy the Kindle Version of the book. I set up a Kindle Reader for my Mac OSX and Apple computer and started to search through the entire book trying to find the exact passage of the original. It would turn out the passage does exist.

Exceptional Growth

Erickson recognized the importance of healthy body imagery. He used hypnosis to help at least two young women allow their breasts to grow in response to their own hormones. They had previously inhibited such interaction, considering themselves unfeminine and unattractive (Erickson and Rossi, 1980b, p. 183–5).

In 1960, he told me about a 20-year-old man who grew 12 inches in height in the span of one year. In hypnosis, at the start of therapy, this stunted young man looked out on his world as though unwilling to grow, a modern-day Peter Pan. For example, he described a room as though he were standing beneath a table. Similarly, a cow on his farm was visualized as though it were ten feet tall; his eyes were on a level with cow’s udder. Growth began to take place when Erickson encouraged the man to hallucinate his world as though he were standing part way up a staircase. I said, “Why have you kept this report out of the literature?” Erickson smiled and said, “No respectable editor of a scientific journal would publish such an impossible thing.” “Dr. Erickson,” I answered, “You are the editor of a respectable journal.” He smiled again and said, “I would like to keep my job.” (Cheek, 1982, p. 282.)

Erickson did some things that bordered on the unbelievable!

I. Posthypnotic Behavior

Me: I am not sure which page it is on but the passage is there. What is most important is the fact that the exact passage is referenced and it points at another book on Erickson’s Methods. The reference is…

Cheek, D.B. (1982). Some of Erickson’s contributions to medicine. In J.K. Zeig (ed.), Ericksonian approaches to hypnosis and psychotherapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel.

• Study/Article Author: Cheek, D.B.
• Article Title: Some of Erickson’s contributions to medicine
• Year the article was published: 1982
• Book Name: Ericksonian approaches to hypnosis and psychotherapy
• Book’s Author/ Editor: J. K. Zeig

Currently I am outside the USA and the place I live in does not get any type of packages. Even if I buy the book, I will never be able to receive it. I would like to request one of the readers of this website to kindly pay the $6 to get it from Amazon and tell me what exactly is on page 282?

The link below is an Amazon Associates link so if you buy from the link, I do get a small commission fee of roughly 25 cents. That’s right, I am get a nice quarter for all of my work on this research.

Click HERE! –> Ericksonian Approaches to Hypnosis and Psychotherapy – Editor: Jeffrey K. Zeig – Cost: $6

Conclusion:

I can not continue any further with the research because I can not get any copy of the book entitled “Ericksonian Approaches to Hypnosis and Psychotherapy“. It seems that Google Scholar and Google Books does not have a copy of this body in electronic or PDF form yet. Can Anyone help in seeing just how valid is the idea of increasing height from using hypnosis really is? The story have been validated to be true since it is in a professional manual written. Traced back a little further, it seems that the real origin of the book is from another Ericksonian Techniques Manual or Guide.

The other day I was walking on the streets and noticed a person who walked by me in a posture that was crooked and had their leg extended out in an angle. My first guess was that the person was suffering from Celebral Palsy since I have met a few people in my life who had a abnormal gait pattern from having Cerebral Palsy. The way that this person was walking made me wonder just what other types of disorders and conditions might cause a person to walk in a slanted way causing their posture to be non-erect.

I thought back to the disorders I had learned when I was doing research on Vitamin D deficiency which can lead to rickets, a disorder which causes the limbs to develop abnormally leading to bones that are often curved inwards which lead to the other name for the condition, bow legs for toddlers and knock knees in young kids.

I am assuming that the curved nature of, say the femur, would mean that the bones are not completely straighten out, and than means that the skeletal structure is not as straight it should be resulting in lost height of upwards of even 4-5 inches.

I have not done any research on the condition of rickets except read what is written in Wikipedia. The Mayo Clinic website does not seem to help much either since the article on rickets is very short. It seems that rickets actually makes the bones softer and weaker in children that are still developing. The vitamin known as Vitamin D has the function of absorbing the elements of calcium and phosphorous from the gastrointestinal tract. The disorder however states that even if a child is afflicted with rickets, it might be reversed and the curvature of the bone is removed if the child can get enough vitamin D into their diet.

From the website by the National Institute Of Health (NIH) on the pathology/disorder known as rickets, it states that the absorption of calcium and phosphate minerals from the bone inorganic (and organic) matrix by the blood is caused by a drop in calcium and phosphorous levels in the blood. Since the blood is essentially the transportation system of the huma body transporting vital glucose, sugars, proteins, water, and minerals from one area of the body to the other, it is more physiological vital that the homeostasis of the blood is kept in balance as compared to the bone. This means that if the blood is missing certain minerals, it will take it from the bones.

It seems that Vitamin D is obtained either from food and produced by the skin which get sunlight. The people who get rickets are often the people to stay indoors too much, work indoors, or live in climates which don’t get a lot of sunlight. As for diet, the dietary causes for the development of rickets seem to be from being either lactose intolerant, being vegetarian, and not drinking enough milk or milk derived products (like cheese yogurt). From the NIH website it also suggest that supposeddly babies who are fed only breastmilk are most likely to get rickets since the milk from the mother does not have enough Vitamin D. Dark skinned babies have a higher chance of developing rickets.

Overall, the incidence of this disease is rare in developed nations since milk and vegetables both have enough Vitamin D. There is also a type of genetic disorder that leads kids to develop rickets since it causes the Liver from not being able to convert Vitamin D into its active form.

So if a kid was suffering from bow legs, would they end up shorter than if they were not?

I suspect that it would be the case. Due to how at least the leg bones align together, vertically,  a misalignment or curvature of any of the long bones would cause the the distance between the hip joint epiphysis and the distal end of the tibia to be decreased. The effect on the overall height would be decreased subsequently.

So the obvious question asked then by a concerned parent would be “would straightening and correcting bow legs (or knock knees) lead to a height increase?”

It would but not as much as some people might think. For most children who suffer from rickets, the curvature that results is not as serious as some may think it is. While some people might get an image of a kid who has their legs splayed out like a spider, the actual more likely result is a noticeable curvature in the knees, at least for people in the developed countries.

When the curvature is fixed through a better diet with the necessary amount of Vitamin D, the curvature is supposed to go away since it seems that there is some type of feedback loop mechanism between the growth plates and the length of the bones. From studies I have read, if one leg is longer than another, the growth plates of the shorter leg actually sort of go through an elevated level of longitudinal growth to compensate for the difference, through a phenomena known as “catch-up growth”. Inversely, if surgeons tried to stretch out one growth plate of a limb to make it grow thicker and faster than normal, it triggers a mechanism in the other growth plates of the same limb to grow at a much slower rate, to compensate for the difference that were externally induced.

The amount of increase in height ultimate is usually just up to 1 inch for the least severe types of knock knees and bow legs. 2 inches of height increase from any type of bow leg correction means that there was a more severe level of deformity. 3-4 inch of increase in height from bow leg correction usually implies that the legs had even more serious curvature and problems.

Of course I am assuming that what we are talking about is a surgical method of bow leg correction, where certain surgical method of osteotomy or bone bridging is created to align the sides of the bone to be at even level. When I am talking about bow leg or knock knee correction, I am referring to children with open growth plates which have their growth surgically manipulated to have even growth on both sides of the long bones in their lower limbs.

Let’s also remember that because the child does not have enough vitamin D, the amount of osteogenic material or deposition at the bottom of the growth plate would be much less. Remember that endochondral ossification, the actual process in which bones get longer and get formed longitudinally is the result of a cartilage AND bone tissue process. The bone tissue process is where new bones is formed where cartilage used to be. If there is not enough Vitamin D, there might be a lot of calcium in the blood that is waiting to be absorbed, but they can’t get carried by the Vitamin to the ossification region, then the bone area would not get longer, since there is no mineral building block available in the diaphyseal region to be used for the additional bone volume formation.

Plus, even if the growth plate has the highest number of of chondrocytes and have good proliferation rates and hypertrophy to be big, if there is no calcium being transported to the calcification region, the cartilage would not turn into bone tissue, and due to the loading on the cartilage, it can’t get longer so the long bones stay the same length which is just stunted growth.