Italian court rules MMR vaccine did trigger autism

Posted on May 17, 2012 by andreas m

By: Staff Writer
Source: nyrnaturalnews.com

An Italian court has ruled there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.

In what may be a ground-breaking decision, the Italian Court of Rimini has ruled that causation between an MMR vaccine and the resulting autism in a young child “has been established.”

The unnamed child received the vaccine in March of 2004 and on returning home immediately developed adverse symptoms. During the next year the child regressed, receiving the autism diagnosis one year later and is now 100% disabled by the disease.

The Italian court ruled that the child “has been damaged by irreversible complications due to vaccination (prophylaxis trivalent MMR)” and ordered the Ministry of Health to compensate the child with a 15 year annuity and to reimburse the parents of their court cost.

The judgement can be found in full here and the original news report in Italian appears here. A rough Google translation appears here.

The case is expected to go to appeal as authorities are concerned it may set a legal precedent.

Not the first judgement against the vaccine

This, however, is the second recent judgement to come to this conclusion. Earlier this year a US court also ruled that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine can cause autism.

In a ruling that kept very quiet in the press, the US Court of Federal Claims has conceded that the mercury-based preservative thimerosal, which was in vaccines until 2002, caused autism in the case of one child.

The ruling was just one of 4,900 cases currently being considered for compensation payments. Health officials are concerned that it could open the floodgates for even more claims.

The ruling, made by US Assistant Attorney General Peter Keisler, was made last November, and was one of three test cases into the MMR-autism link that was being considered by a three-member panel, which Keisler chaired.

The case involved a child who received nine vaccinations in July 2000, when she was 18 months old. Two of these contained thimerosal. Within days, the girl, who had previously been healthy, began to exhibit loss of language skills, no eye contact, loss of response to verbal direction, insomnia, incessant screaming, and arching.

A diagnosis of autism was confirmed seven months later.

In its defence, the US government claimed the girl had a pre-existing mitochondrial disorder that was aggravated by the vaccine. However in his conclusion, Keisler said that “compensation is appropriate”.

Too much heat, not enough light

Both findings would appear to support the controversial findings of Dr Andrew Wakefield who, in 1998 published an article in the Lancet suggesting a link between the vaccine and autism. Official reaction to the paper was of such force and such outrage that the Lancet withdrew the paper on the grounds that it was scientifically unsound.

Wakefield has been in a battle for his professional reputation ever since and the question of the proposed link between the MMR vaccine and autism has been largely sidelined (though not solved) by bitter and very public professional rows that have done little to bring clarity to concerned parents.

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A Simple, Inexpensive Trick to Cure a Cold

Posted on May 17, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Each year Americans catch more than one billion colds, making the cold virus the most common infectious disease in the United States.

It accounts for more school absences and missed work than any other illness, and it’s the number one reason people visit their physicians — even though most physicians have little to offer in the form of treatment.

It’s a widespread misconception that colds are caused by bacteria. Colds are actually triggered by a virus, which means if your physician prescribes you an antibiotic, it will be absolutely useless.

More on this shortly, but before I delve into simple prevention and treatment strategies it’s important you know how colds are contracted in the first place.

How Do You Catch a Cold?

The most common way cold viruses are spread is not from being around coughing or sneezing, or walking barefoot in the rain, but rather from hand-to-hand contact. For instance, someone with a cold blows their nose then shakes your hand or touches surfaces that you also touch.

Cold viruses can live on pens, computer keyboards, coffee mugs and other objects for hours, so it’s easy to come into contact with such viruses during daily life.

However, the key to remember is that just being exposed to a cold virus does not have to mean that you’ll catch a cold. If your immune system is operating at its peak, it should actually be quite easy for you to fend off the virus without ever getting sick.

If your immune system is impaired, on the other hand, it’s akin to having an open-door policy for viruses; they’ll easily take hold in your body. So the simple and short answer is, you catch a cold due to impairment in your immune system. There are many ways this can result, but the more common contributing factors are:

Eating too much sugar and too many grains
Not getting enough rest
Using insufficient strategies to address emotional stressors in your life
Vitamin D deficiency, as discussed below
Any combination of the above

Vitamin D Deficiency: Another Reason You May “Catch” a Cold

It’s estimated that the average U.S. adult typically has two to four colds each year, while children may have up to 12! One reason for the widespread prevalence may be that vitamin D deficiency is incredibly common in the United States, especially during the winter months when cold (and flu) viruses are at their peak.

Research has confirmed that “catching” colds and flu may actually be a symptom of an underlying vitamin D deficiency. Less than optimal vitamin D levels will significantly impair your immune response and make you far more susceptible to contracting colds, influenza, and other respiratory infections.

In the largest and most nationally representative study of its kind to date, involving about 19,000 Americans, people with the lowest vitamin D levels reported having significantly more recent colds or cases of the flu – and the risk was even greater for those with chronic respiratory disorders like asthma.

At least five additional studies also show an inverse association between lower respiratory tract infections and vitamin D levels, and you can read about them in detail here. But the research is very clear, the higher your vitamin D level, the lower your risk of contracting colds, flu, and other respiratory tract infections.

It’s not surprising, then, that the average American gets so many colds each year, as current guidelines for optimal intake and normal vitamin D levels are far too low — and since most people do not get adequate sun exposure on a daily basis (which is what produces vitamin D in your skin) many are deficient. I strongly believe you could avoid colds and influenza entirely by maintaining your vitamin D level in the optimal range.

How Long Do Colds Last … and How Can You Make Your Cold Go Away Faster?

Most uncomplicated colds last between eight and nine days, but about 25 percent last two weeks, and 5-10 percent last three weeks. Even the most stubborn colds will typically resolve in a few weeks’ time; this is actually one of the ways you can distinguish a cold from allergies.

A cold will last, at most, a few weeks, but allergy symptoms can last all season.

How quickly you bounce back is typically defined by you and your collective lifestyle habits — and this does not mean popping over-the-counter cough and cold remedies or fever reducers. In fact, as long as your temperature remains below 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9 degrees Celsius) there is no need to lower it.

Cold viruses do not reproduce at higher body temperatures, so a slight fever should help you get rid of the virus quicker and help you to feel better much sooner.

You should avoid taking over-the-counter pain-relief medications as well, as a study showed that people who take aspirin and Tylenol (acetaminophen) suppress their body’s ability to produce antibodies to destroy the cold virus. Aspirin has even been linked to lung complications including pulmonary edema, an abnormal build up of fluid in your lungs, when taken in excess.

You should only use these medications when absolutely necessary, such as if you have a temperature greater than 105 degrees F (40.5 degrees C), severe muscle aches or weakness.

Hydrogen Peroxide: A Simple Trick to Beat a Cold

I don’t advise over-the-counter medications, but one simple treatment you can try that is surprisingly effective against upper respiratory infections is hydrogen peroxide.

Many patients at my Natural Health Center have had remarkable results in curing colds and flu within 12 to 14 hours when administering a few drops of 3 percent hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) into each ear. You will hear some bubbling, which is completely normal, and possibly feel a slight stinging sensation.

Wait until the bubbling and stinging subside (usually 5 to 10 minutes), then drain onto a tissue and repeat with the other ear. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide in 3 percent solution is available at any drug store for a couple of dollars or less. It is simply amazing how many people respond to this simple, inexpensive treatment.

So What Else Can You do to Recover From a Cold, Quicker … and Prevent One in the First Place?

As I said above, the number one way to conquer a cold (or flu) is vitamin D. Vitamin D is an amazingly effective antimicrobial agent, producing 200 to 300 different antimicrobial peptides in your body that kill bacteria, viruses and fungi. So optimizing your levels will not only help send a cold virus packing … it will help ward off cold viruses in the first place.

The best source for vitamin D is direct sun exposure. But for many of us, this just isn’t practical during the winter. The next best option to sunlight is the use of a safe indoor tanning device. If neither natural nor artificial sunlight is an option, then using oral vitamin D3 supplements is your best bet.

Based on the latest research, many experts now agree you need about 35 IU’s of vitamin D per pound of body weight. This recommendation also includes children, the elderly and pregnant women.

However, keep in mind that vitamin D requirements are highly individual, as your vitamin D status is dependent on numerous factors, such as the color of your skin, your location, and how much sunshine you’re exposed to on a regular basis. So, although these recommendations may put you closer to the ballpark of what most people likely need, it is simply impossible to make a blanket recommendation that will cover everyone’s needs.

The only way to determine your optimal dose is to get your blood tested. Ideally, you’ll want to maintain a vitamin D level of 50-65 ng/ml year-round.

For an in-depth explanation of everything you need to know before you get tested, please read my latest updates in Test Values and Treatment for Vitamin D Deficiency.

Dietary Strategies to Kick a Cold

If you feel yourself coming down with a cold or flu, this is NOT the time to be eating ANY sugar, artificial sweeteners or processed foods. Sugar is particularly damaging to your immune system — which needs to be ramped up, not suppressed, in order to combat an emerging infection.

So if you are fighting a cold, you’ll want to avoid all sugar like the plague, and this includes sugar in the form of fruit juice and even grains (which break down as sugar in your body).

Ideally, you must address nutrition, sleep, exercise and stress issues the moment you first feel yourself getting a bug. This is when immune-enhancing strategies will be most effective.

So when you’re coming down with a cold, it’s time to address ALL of the contributing factors immediately, which includes tweaking your diet in favor of foods that will strengthen your immune response. Good choices include:

Raw, grass-fed organic milk, and/or high-quality whey protein
Fermented foods such as raw kefir, kimchee, miso, pickles, sauerkraut, etc, which are rich in probiotics, or good bacteria. Scientific research shows that 80 percent of your immune system resides inside your digestive tract, so eating probiotic-rich foods, or taking a high-quality probiotic, will help support your immune system health.
Raw, organic eggs from free-ranging, preferably local, chickens
Grass-fed beef
Coconuts and coconut oil
Animal-based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil
Locally grown fruits and vegetables, appropriate for your nutritional type
Mushrooms, especially Reishi, Shiitake, and Maitake, which contain beta glucans (which have immune-enhancing properties)
Garlic, a potent antimicrobial that kills bacteria, viruses and fungi. Ideally this should be in fresh form, eaten raw and crushed with a spoon just before eating.
Herbs and spices with high ORAC scores: Turmeric, oregano, cinnamon, cloves (for more on ORAC, visit www.oracvalues.com)
Make sure you are drinking plenty of fresh, pure water. Water is essential for the optimal function of every system in your body and will help with nose stuffiness and loosening secretions. You should drink enough water so that your urine is a light, pale yellow.

And what about the old wives’ tale of chicken soup for your cold?

Chicken soup can help reduce your symptoms. Chicken contains a natural amino acid called cysteine, which can thin the mucus in your lungs and make it less sticky so you can expel it more easily.

Processed, canned soups won’t work as well as the homemade version, however.

For best results, make up a fresh batch yourself (or ask a friend or family member to do so) and make the soup hot and spicy with plenty of pepper. The spices will trigger a sudden release of watery fluids in your mouth, throat, and lungs, which will help thin down the respiratory mucus so it’s easier to cough up and expel.

Three Cold-Busting Lifestyle Strategies

Vitamin D, check! Hydrogen peroxide, check! Healthy diet, check! We’ve covered several of the primary “weapons” you should have in your cold-fighting arsenal, but there are others, too.

High-Quality Sleep, and Plenty of It Pay attention to how you are sleeping. If you aren’t getting enough sleep, or enough restorative sleep, you’ll be at increased risk for a hostile viral takeover. Your immune system is also the most effective when you’re not sleep-deprived, so the more rested you are the quicker you’ll recover. You can find 33 secrets for a good night’s sleep here.
Regular Exercise Regular exercise is a crucial strategy for increasing your resistance to illness. There is evidence that regular, moderate exercise can reduce your risk for respiratory illness by boosting your immune system. In fact, one study found that people who exercised regularly (five or more days a week) cut their risk of having a cold by close to 50 percent. And, in the event they did catch a cold, their symptoms were much less severe than among those who did not exercise.Exercise likely cuts your risk of colds so significantly because it triggers a rise in immune system cells that can attack any potential invaders. Each time you exercise you can benefit from this boost to your immune system.Ideally, establish a regular fitness program, such as Peak Fitness, now, to help you ward off colds and other illness.However, if you’re already feeling sick don’t overdo it. Over-exercising can actually place more stress on your body, which can suppress your immune system — and you don’t want that either. You might just go for a walk if you are coming down with a cold, or simply tone down your regular workout.Any rise in body temperature will be an unwelcome climate for a viral invader, though, so some exercise is likely to be beneficial.
Address Your Emotional Stress Emotional stressors can also predispose you to an infection while making cold symptoms worse. Finding ways to manage daily stress as well as your reactions to circumstances beyond your control will contribute to a strong and resilient immune system.My favorite tool for this is the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), a system that helps balance your body’s subtle energies and repair emotional “short-circuits.” EFT may even help you overcome cold symptoms.

Supplements That Send Pathogens Packin’

Supplements can be beneficial for colds, but they should be used only as an adjunct to the lifestyle measures already discussed.

Some of the more helpful options for cold (and flu) — above and beyond vitamin D — are:

Vitamin C: A very potent antioxidant; use a natural form such as acerola, which contains associated micronutrients. You can take several grams every hour till you are better unless you start developing loose stools
Oregano Oil: The higher the carvacrol concentration, the more effective it is. Carvacrol is the most active antimicrobial agent in oregano oil.
Propolis: A bee resin and one of the most broad-spectrum antimicrobial compounds in the world; propolis is also the richest source of caffeic acid and apigenin, two very important compounds that aid in immune response and even fight cancer.
A tea made from a combination of elderflower, yarrow, boneset, linden, peppermint and ginger; drink it hot and often for combating a cold or flu. It causes you to sweat, which is helpful for eradicating a virus from your system.
Olive leaf extract: Ancient Egyptians and Mediterranean cultures used it for a variety of health-promoting uses and it is widely known as a natural, non-toxic immune system builder.

Remember This Tip: Wash Your Hands Sensibly

Washing your hands frequently is one of the easiest ways to wipe out germs and viruses and reduce your chances of becoming sickened by them. Thorough hand-washing truly is an important step, as you are at far greater risk of passing on an infection by shaking someone’s hand than even by sharing a kiss.

One report even found that regular hand washing may be more effective than drugs in preventing the spread of respiratory viruses such as influenza.

When you wash up, plain soap and water will do. Do not make the mistake of using antibacterial cleansers, as their widespread use is leading to strains of resistant bacteria, or “superbugs,” which cause the ingredients to lose effectiveness for the times when they really are needed, such as for surgeons prior to surgery.

Further, the active ingredient in most antibacterial products is triclosan, an antibacterial agent that kills bacteria and inhibits bacterial growth. But not only does triclosan kill bacteria, it also has been shown to kill human cells.

Antibacterial soaps are also no more effective than regular soaps. One study found people who used antibacterial soaps and cleansersdeveloped a cough, runny nose, sore throat, fever, vomiting, diarrhea and other symptoms just as often as people who used products that did not contain antibacterial ingredients. So please avoid making the mistake of using antibacterial liquids and soaps.

Too Much Hand-Washing Can Backfire …

There is another important caveat to remember, and that is your skin is actually your primary defense against bacteria — not the soap.

So resist the urge to become obsessive about washing your hands. If you wash them too frequently you can actually extract many of the protective oils in your skin, which can cause your skin to crack and bleed.

It is rare for a germ on your skin to cause a problem — it is typically only an issue when you transfer that to your nose, mouth or an open wound like cracked skin. So obsessive-compulsive washing can actually increase your risk of getting sick by providing an entryway for potentially dangerous pathogens.

So mild to moderate washing is wise, but excessive washing, especially with harsh soaps, will actually be highly counterproductive.

Avoid the Antibiotics!

More than 300 different viruses can cause colds, so each time you have a cold it is caused by a distinct virus (i.e. adenovirus, rhinovirus, parainfluenza virus, coronavirus). A virus is much smaller than a bacteria; it is a tiny cluster of genetic material surrounded by a protein wrapper.

There are currently NO drugs available that can kill these viruses. Antibiotics, including penicillin, do not have any effect on viruses, but unfortunately have been vastly over-prescribed for this very (useless) purpose. That, coupled with the excessive use of antibiotics in agriculture, has contributed to a steep rise in antibiotic-resistant diseases.

Antibiotic-resistant infections now claim more lives each year than the “modern plague” of AIDS, and cost the American health care system some $20 billion a year!

Further, according to one meta-analysis, the health risk from over-use of antibiotics is also a very personal one, as opposed to simply raising the occurrence of antibiotic resistance in the general population over time.

Whenever you use an antibiotic, you’re increasing your susceptibility to developing infections with resistance to that antibiotic — and you can become the carrier of this resistant bug, and spread it to others.

So please, if you have a simple cold remember that an antibiotic will do far more harm than good.

When Should You Call Your Physician?

Sinus, ear and lung infections (bronchitis and pneumonia) are examples of bacterial infections that do respond to antibiotics. If you develop any of the following symptoms, these are signs you may be suffering from a bacterial infection rather than a cold virus, and you should call your physician’s office:

Fever over 102 degrees Fahrenheit (38.9 degrees Celsius)
Ear pain
Pain around your eyes, especially with a green nasal discharge
Shortness of breath or a persistent uncontrollable cough
Persistently coughing up green and yellow sputum

Generally speaking, however, if you have a cold medical care is not necessary. Rest and attention to the lifestyle factors noted above will help you to recover quickly and, if you stick to them, will significantly reduce your chances of catching another one anytime soon.

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FDA proposes bypassing doctors, selling prescription drugs over the counter

Posted on May 12, 2012 by andreas m

By: Ethan A. Huff,
Source: NaturalNews.com

When it comes to freedom of food choice, the U.S.Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considers Americans to be too stupid to make their own dietary choices. But when pharmaceuticals are involved, the FDA apparently thinks individuals should be able to completely self-medicate themselves without a prescription, having recently proposed new guidelines that would make it easier than ever for patients to access high-risk prescription drugs without even having to see a doctor.

The Washington Times reports that a new four-page proposal made by the FDA suggests that cholesterol (statins), diabetes, and asthma drugs, among others, be made available over-the-counter (OTC) to patients without a prescription. And what is the reason for this? According to the agency, too many patients are not getting their prescriptions filled, and many would-be patients are not going in to receive the treatments that their medical overlords feel they should be receiving.

The drug industry, in other words, is losing profits because many patients simply are not participating in the health care system as we know it. So to help boost participation, the drug industry’s gatekeeper, the FDA, is working on behalf of Big Pharma to make prescription drugs as easy to access as a candy bar or a pack of gum, even though prescription drugs are typically extremely high-risk and come with severe side effects.

“The FDA has not offered any evidence establishing that it is safe, or patient outcomes are improved, when patients with hypertension, [high cholesterol], asthma or migraine headaches self-diagnose and manage these (or other) serious chronic medical conditions on their own,” said Dr. Sandra Fryhofer, who testified on behalf of the American Medical Association (AMA) at an FDA-held public hearing recently.

But this has not stopped the FDA, Big Pharma, and various pharmacist groups from arguing that there are somehow too many barriers to patients accessing deadly pharmaceuticals. The FDA’s proposal, in fact, explicitly views having to see a doctor before being allowed access to prescription drugs an “unnecessary hindrance,” according to Sarah Kliff from the Washington Post.

Both sides fighting for the same goal – to maximize prescription drug use

Meanwhile, both sides of the debate appear to be concerned about one thing, and one thing only — getting as many people as possible to take their prescription drugs. Peter Carmel from the AMA, for instance, told the Washington Post that he is concerned patients will not take their prescription drugs unless they first see a doctor, while the other side says having to see a doctor deters too many patients from accessing prescription drugs.

In either case, the medical-industrial complex is primarily concerned with drug company profits rather than patient safety. And the FDA, which is also busy aggressively harassing and tyrannizing family farmers selling raw milk to willing customers, is an active co-conspirator in this drug industry scam to basically deregulate prescription drugs to boost industry profits.

You can view the FDA proposal, entitled Using Innovative Technologies and Other Conditions of Safe Use To Expand Which Drug Products Can Be Considered Nonprescription (Docket No. FDA-2012-N-0171), here:
http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=FDA-2012-N-0171-000

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Courts Slaps FDA and FTC for Unjustified Attacks

Posted on May 7, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Did you know it’s currently illegal for a food or supplement producer to tell you about their products’ scientifically proven health benefits?

As unbelievable as it sounds, a person can be thrown in jail for telling you the walnuts they grow may slow down the growth of prostate tumors, or cherries ease symptoms of arthritis and gout, even though this is truthful, accurate and helpful information for a consumer to know.

This is why a case that was recently heard before U.S. District Court Judge Vanessa L. Bryant could turn out to be a landmark event, as she ruled that the “FDA went too far” in censoring health claims related to green tea and cancer.

FDA Wording Too Strong, “Effectively Negates” Qualified Health Claims

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows food and supplement manufacturers to use a qualified health claim (QHC) when “there is emerging evidence for a relationship between a food, food component, or dietary supplement and reduced risk of a disease or health-related condition.”

However, because the evidence is still emerging, the FDA requires “qualifying language” to be included with the claim “to indicate that the evidence supporting the claim is limited.” In the case of Fleminger, Inc., which sells green tea and filed a health claim petition in 2004 to highlight green tea’s anti-cancer properties, the FDA suggested that this disclaimer be added to the health claim:

“FDA concludes that it is highly unlikely that green tea reduces the risk” of breast cancer or prostate cancer.

Obviously, this essentially contradicts the health claim.

So, in 2010 (after a petition to review the FDA’s disclaimer was denied), the FDA threatened to seize Fleminger’s products if they did not use the exact disclaimer above.

Eventually the FDA sent a revised claim, which still negated the point of the health claim:

“Green tea may reduce the risk of breast or prostate cancer. FDA does not agree that green tea may reduce the risk because there is very little scientific evidence for the claim.”

This is a major win for natural food and supplement producers alike, as the FDA is being required to revise the disclaimer so as not to negate the health claim being made. At this point, Fleminger took the case to court, where Judge Bryant ruled:

“The FDA’s language “effectively negates the substance–disease relationship claim altogether….There are less burdensome ways in which the FDA could indicate in a short, succinct and accurate disclaimer that it has not approved the claim without nullifying the claim altogether.”

Why Can’t Foods Have Truthful Health Claims on Their Labels?

This is perhaps the underlying question: why must manufacturers petition the FDA to make truthful, science-based health claims in the first place and then have them subjected to disclaimers? This is a serious waste of tax dollars – not to mention an assault on your freedom of access to information (and for the manufacturers, on their freedom of speech).

The fact is, QHCs are currently the only way that companies can make truthful health claims about natural foods or supplements. However, they are not easy to come by (the FDA approved only 12 QHCs from 1999 to 2010). Under current FDA law, if a food or natural supplement makes a medical claim without a QHC, it’s automatically classified as a drug. The Alliance for Natural Health explains:

“Outside of QHCs, food and supplements are not allowed to speak of the specific health benefits of their products because the FDA takes the position that any such statement magically turns them into drugs. And, as drugs, they would have to go through exorbitantly expensive drug trials, a cost which the manufacturer could never recoup, since food and supplements are natural products and cannot be patented. Without a patent, anyone can sell them, so paying as much as a billion dollars for a drug trial is essentially money down the drain.”

Believe it or not, the FDA recently sent a warning letter to Diamond Food for making truthful, science-backed health claims about the omega-3 fats in walnuts. But because the research cited health claims that omega-3 fats in walnuts may prevent or protect against disease, the FDA said walnuts would be considered “new drugs” and as such would require a new drug application to become FDA-approved.

The FDA’s current position is that foods such as walnuts, cherries, broccoli, turmeric, green tea and the like should be subjected to the full FDA approval process. But obtaining a new drug application, as the FDA suggests, can cost billions of dollars. And let’s face it – small food and supplement producers cannot come close to affording that!

In related news, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also suffered a loss in its efforts to hold Garden of Life, the marketer of various dietary supplements, in contempt of a previous consent order. The FTC alleged that Garden of Life violated the order by making false and baseless claims about its vitamin C and omega-3 fat based products, but the court ruled that the FTC had failed to prove that any of the challenged claims violated the consent order. It’s a small win, but it could have major repercussions for other natural supplement makers who are being unjustly attacked by the FTC or another government agency.

Experts Challenge FDA over Approval for New Dose of Alzheimer’s Drug

It’s ironic that the FDA comes down so hard on truthful health claims about green tea or walnuts, but seemingly gives drug companies carte blanche when it comes to bringing new products to market. Case in point, with its patent set to expire in November 2010, Donepezil, a blockbuster Alzheimer’s drug with over $2 billion in annual sales in the United States, submitted a new dosage for FDA approval.

Four months before the patent expired, the FDA approved the new dose, even though 5 mg and 10 mg doses were already on the market (though set to go generic soon).

The approval also went against the advice of the FDA’s own medical and statistical reviewers and was contrary to scientific evidence, which showed the drug offered “no meaningful added benefit, just more harm.” In fact, a 2010 report published in the journal Seizure found that of the 71,471 adverse drug reactions classified as convulsive events reported by the World Health Organization between 1968-2006 donepezil alone accounted for 8.4% of them, indicating that the drug is not only unsafe but that an increased dosage scheme would likely only cause more seizures in exposed populations.

Adding insult to injury, advertisements for the drug made misleading claims that the higher dose led to important clinical benefits on measures of cognition and overall function, a statement professors Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin of the Center for Medicine and the Media at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice called “stunningly erroneous.” In a BMJ commentary titled “How the FDA Forgot the Evidence …,” the professors detail the more likely reason why the 23 mg dose was approved:

“What is the difference between 20 and 23? If you said three, you are off by millions—of dollars in sales, that is—at least from the perspective of Eisai, the manufacturer of donepezil (marketed as Aricept by Pfizer).

A little context helps make the math clearer. Donepezil, the biggest player in the lucrative market for Alzheimer’s disease treatments, was a blockbuster, with over $2B in annual sales in the United States alone. But the drug, first approved in 1996, had reached the end of the road: the patent expired in November 2010.

Investors call this “going over the cliff,” an anxious reference to plummeting sales as market share is lost to generic competitors. Necessity, however, is the mother of invention. Just four months before the expiry of the patent, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a new dose for moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease: donepezil 23 mg. Is 23 an odd number? Not really, when you consider that you cannot get to 23 mg using the 5 mg and 10 mg doses that were going generic. The “new” 23 mg product would be patent protected for three more years.”

Support HR 1364 for Free Speech About Science

As unbelievable as it sounds, current law makes it illegal for natural supplement and food producers to share accurate, science-based health information with you.

Congressmen Jason Chaffetz (R–UT) and Jared Polis (D–CO) have introduced the Free Speech about Science Act (HR 1364), a landmark legislation that would allow the flow of legitimate scientific and educational information. The new bill provides a limited and carefully targeted change to FDA regulations so that manufacturers and producers may reference legitimate, peer-reviewed scientific studies without converting a natural food or dietary supplement into an “unapproved drug.” According to Rep. Chaffetz’s website, the provisions of HR 1364 do the following:

Allow dietary supplements and healthy foods to cite legitimate scientific research
Provide a clear definition of the types of research that may be referenced by growers and manufacturers
Ensure that referencing such research does not convert a food or dietary supplement into an “unapproved (and therefore illegal) new drug”
Retain the authority of FDA and FTC to pursue any fraudulent and misleading statements

According to Rep. Chaffetz:

“It is important for individuals and families to take charge of their personal health by making the right decisions to get and stay healthy. This includes accessing information so that individuals can adjust habits, eat healthfully, and take appropriate dietary supplements to prevent and even treat health conditions.

The Free Speech About Science Act helps insure their access to legitimate scientific research to make the necessary decisions to improve their personal health and the health of their families.”

Rep. Polis adds:

“Today’s science has shown that vitamins and nutritional supplements can offer successful, natural alternatives to drugs. As we begin to reform our nation’s healthcare system, supplements are an innovative way to help reduce costs.

The Free Speech About Science Act is a common sense act that will make it easier for doctors and consumers to learn about the cheaper, healthier alternatives to costly medicines that food and nutritional supplements provide.”

As of April 2012, HR 1364 was assigned to a congressional committee, which will consider it before possibly sending it on to the House or Senate. The majority of bills never make it out of committee, so we need your help.

Please lend HR 1364 your support by signing on as a co-sponsor TODAY.

Use the Alliance for Natural Health’s HR 1364 page to send a letter to your representative in support of this bill. And forward or post this article to all of your friends and loved ones who care about their health and their right to full information so they can make an intelligent choice in their health care decisions. With your combined influence we can be a powerful force for much-needed change.

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Most Recalled Type of Drug Will Surprise You

Posted on April 30, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

The most up-to-date list of recalled drugs is available on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) drug recall web site.

There you can find an ongoing list of drugs that have been removed from the market; generally these are “Class I” recalls, which means there is a “reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”

As a whole, recalls of prescription and over-the-counter drugs are surging in the United States, but a new report highlighted a trend emerging over recent years, showing that biological products and biologics, particularly vaccines, have been subject to a large, and growing, number of recalls.

More Than a Dozen Vaccine Recalls…

An in-depth analysis conducted by GBI Research looked at the number of recalls for biologics from 2007-2010.

Biologics are drugs that contain an ingredient extracted from a “biological” source, such as cells from humans, animals, or microorganisms.

As Pharmaceutical Online reported:

“Biological products and biologics have definite risks, as they are often only partially understood at the time of approval, with a highly complex production and purification process.”

From 2004-2010, GBI Research found that biologics recalls significantly increased, but those for vaccines and immunoglobulins were higher than any other drug classes.

From 2007 to 2010, 14 recalls for vaccines and 13 recalls for immunoglobulins were made, for reasons such as:

Serious adverse events
Labeling errors
Quality defects (reduced levels of potency, presence of contaminants, such as glass particles, etc.)
Manufacturing defects

Drug recalls are soaring to unacceptably high levels. As CNN reported in 2010, between 2006 and 2009 recalls kept inching upward, only to spike dramatically between 2008 and 2009, from 426 recalls to 1,742. That’s an increase of 309 percent in one year!

A single drug repacker, which has since been shut down, accounted for over 1,000 of those recalls, but even if you discount that one rotten apple, drug recalls still rose by over 50 percent. Drug companies have fiercely defended virtually every single drug ever recalled as being safe and effective — until definitively proven dead wrong, and sometimes they still wouldn’t fess up to their culpability. The same shameless, misleading strategies used for drugs are being used for vaccines. But with vaccines, the subsequent liability for the drug company has been greatly reduced or even eliminated!

When You Get a Vaccine, You Take All the Risk

From a drug maker’s perspective, vaccines may be one of the absolute “safest” products to make and sell, because civil liability is negligible to non-existent, depending on the vaccine and so profits are unlimited. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have guaranteed vaccine manufacturers a free pass in the civil court system if the vaccine they make and sell in the U.S. ends up crippling or killing a child or adult. (Pediatricians and other medical workers giving vaccines are also protected from civil liability if vaccines hurt someone they vaccinate).

Pandemic vaccines are 100 percent risk-free for the vaccine maker, because the pharmaceutical industry lobby made sure that laws were passed by Congress after 9/11 that exempted them from ANY liability for injuries and deaths caused by government-recommended vaccines used to counter “bioterrorism” or potential pandemics. And, making matters worse, these kinds of liability protection laws create a negative incentive to test vaccines for safety because if vaccine manufacturers are fully aware of the ability of their vaccine to injure or kill people and withhold that information from FDA regulators, then that is the one instance in which they COULD potentially be held legally liable for willful misconduct! It’s in their best interest to know as little as possible about the adverse reactions their vaccines might cause.

Non-pandemic vaccine injuries fall under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which is a no-fault federal vaccine injury compensation program. Two out of three vaccine injured victims are turned away for federal compensation under this program. Asexplained in this previous article, the program has been so poorly implemented since it was created by Congress that it is considered to be a sham by many parents, whose injured children are left out in the cold with no financial support after vaccine risks turn out to be 100 percent for them.

There is no system of “checks and balances” in the U.S. when it comes to vaccine safety oversight to ensure that the least toxic vaccines and the least harmful vaccine policies are being recommended by public health agencies and doctors. Vaccines are not adequately tested for safety and effectiveness using methodologically sound scientific studies before they are licensed, so all of their side effects and long-term negative health outcomes are unknown. Moreover, the effects of multiple vaccines given together or given repeatedly over time have not been adequately tested. And government health agencies or pharmaceutical companies have financed nearly all vaccine research to date, which introduces enormous bias.

So the fact that vaccine manufacturers are totally shielded from liability and accountability in civil court for vaccine injuries and deaths is alarming. Most recently, in February 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the drug companies total immunity from lawsuits — even if they could have made a vaccine less harmful!

Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Center, www.NVIC.org, explains:

“So if your child is brain injured by a vaccine that you may not have wanted your child to get in the first place, all you can do is file a claim in the federal vaccine injury compensation program. Even though the program has awarded more than $2 billion dollars to vaccine victims, two out of three plaintiffs are turned away empty handed.”

From Plastic Shrink Wrap to Pig DNA – What’s Lurking in Your Vaccines?

With all these recalls occurring, how can any health-conscious consumer trust the safety or the effectiveness of drugs and vaccines? The truth is, you have every right to know about and question the ingredients in vaccines being offered to your children, as contamination leading to recalls can and does occur.

For instance, an FDA inspection report from April 2011 of Merck’s biggest vaccine-making plant found bits of charred plastic shrink wrap in vaccine vials — and this was not a new or isolated occurrence. At least 12 reports had been submitted to the FDA from Merck regarding shrink wrap in vaccines since November 2009, and eight of these came from consumer complaints. The April report noted that the shrink wrap was reportedly not removed during a washing process and was then charred during a sterilization process. The agency also noted that health risks from the plastic in vaccines could not be ruled out.

Vaccine contamination such as this is a very real threat. In 2010, a research team discovered that GlaxoSmithKline’s Rotarix vaccine was contaminated with “a substantial amount” of DNA from a pig virus, and this was after 1 million U.S. children, and about 30 million worldwide, had already received it. At the same time, a measles vaccine was also found to contain low levels of the retrovirus avian leukosis virus, and Rotateq, Merck’s rotavirus vaccine, was found to contain a virus similar to simian (monkey) retrovirus.

It certainly makes you wonder what other “unknown” contaminants and other safety issues are lurking in vaccines, as it’s often only after significant health problems or deaths occur that a formal recall is made.

Is There a Better Way to Stay Well?

Unsafe vaccines and drugs will continue to enter the marketplace as long as drug companies are allowed to simply maintain the status quo — despite being caught lying, defrauding, even knowingly causing the deaths of people using their products, time and time again. Even under the best circumstances, every drug and vaccine carries an inherent risk of injury or death that must be weighed carefully against its purported benefits, especially by individuals, who may be at greater biological risk for suffering harm from using a particular drug or vaccine.

There is a misconception, one that is perpetuated by many pediatricians in the United States, that you need vaccines to stay well. No disease is caused by a “vaccine deficiency.” In fact, in my article featuring the top secrets of people who never get sick, vaccination is nowhere to be found.

Why?

Because, ultimately, it is the state of your immune system that determines whether or not you get sick when you’re exposed to an infectious disease.

The keys to boosting your immune system into a “lean, mean, disease-fighting machine” lie in your lifestyle habits – healthy food, stress relief, exercise, sleep, exposure to sunlight and so on. Artificially manipulating your immune system with a vaccine is not the same thing, nor does it produce the same desired disease-fighting and health-promoting result. I recommend that you not only get educated about vaccines, but also embrace these basic tenets of optimal health that will keep you well and disease-free, naturally.

Eliminate sugar, especially fructose and most grains from your diet.
Eat unprocessed, high-quality foods, organic if possible. If you haven’t reviewed my comprehensive free nutrition program, please do so when you have a moment.
Get sufficient amounts of sun exposure on large areas of your skin to optimize your vitamin D levels (or alternatively use a safe tanning bed or vitamin D3 supplement).
Consume enough high-quality animal-based omega-3 fats, such as krill oil.
Exercise regularly, including high-intensity burst exercises like Peak Fitness.

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Birth Defects are One-Third more Likely in Babies Conceived with IVF, According to Studies

Posted on April 30, 2012 by andreas m

By: J. D. Heyes
Source: NaturalNews.com

Technology is a wonderful thing in most cases, but sometimes doing things the old-fashioned way is not only better, it’s safer too.

To wit, a new study found that babies conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) – when a mother’s egg is fertilized outside her body then transplanted to her womb – are more at risk for birth defects.

According to a review of scores of studies by Zhibin Hu at Nanjing Medical University in China, babies conceived that way, or by using intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) – in which a single sperm is injected directly into the egg – are one-third more likely, or 37 percent, to be born with problems or malformations.

Researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Fertility and Sterility, could not find a logical reason why technology seemed to cause the additional incidents of birth defects, or even if technology was responsible.

Still, in examining 46 separate bodies of research on IVF, which has been available to women for more than 30 years and which has often been the subject of research, found that in terms of having “normal” babies, replacing technology with the natural child-bearing process produces more kids with more physical and mental problems and limitations.

“Children conceived by IVF and/or ICSI are at significantly increased risk for birth defects, and there is no risk difference between children conceived by IVF and/or ICSI,” the team wrote, in examining data on more than 124,000 children born through artificial insemination.

That compares with three in 100 children in the U.S. who are born with serious birth defects such as a malformed limb or organ, according to the U.S.Centers for Disease Control (CDC),Reuters reported.

Technology seems to be responsible… but why?

Crunching the numbers, a 37-percent increase would increase the U.S. rate to four in 100 children born with some sort of defect.

“(The report) confirms what most people accepted anyway, that, yes, there is an increased risk in congenital abnormality associated with assisted reproductive technology,” William Buckett, a professor at McGill University who was not involved with Hu’s research team, said.

The authors of the study said birth defects among IVF/ICSI-conceived children involved a range of bodily functions and systems, including musculoskeletal malformations, genitals, and the digestive and neurological systems.

That said, the research team could not say why technology seemed to be linked to the birth defects.

One theory is that it’s possible people who have trouble conceiving naturally and try fertility treatments may somehow be at increased risk for having children with birth defects anyway.

Another school of thought is that rough handling of the embryos during the actual process of fertilization, or the drugs involved in fertility treatments – or both – may be at fault.

Buckett said another theory is that it only appears as though birth defects occur more frequently in children conceived outside the womb because they are followed more closely by medical personnel and researchers.

“Couples who have had babies born as a result of IVF are followed up more closely, and therefore subtle abnormalities may be detected that otherwise might not have been detected,” he said.

Is there anything parents who use IVF can do to lower the risk of having a child with a birth defect?

Hu says no, but that’s because more studies are needed.

“It is really too early to find out ways to reduce the risk, because the reasons accounting for the risk are largely unknown,” he told Reuters in an email.

Higher risk of ovarian cancer

Parents desperate for children and who have no other way to conceive may find the risk acceptable.

But there are other concerns as well regarding IVF: the increased likelihood of women who conceive in that manner developing ovarian cancer.

A research team from the Netherlands Cancer Institute studied data from women who had received at least one form of fertility treatment, and 6,000 women who had not undergone IVF treatment. Of 61 women who developed ovarian malignancies, 31 had borderline ovarian cancer and 30 had invasive cancer.

Some scientists dismissed those figures as statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, the “data clearly show that ovarian stimulation for IVF is associated with an increased risk of borderline ovarian tumors and this risk remains elevated up to more than 15 years after the first cycle of treatment,” said lead researcher Flora van Leeuwen.

The risks go even higher when artificial insemination leads to multiple babies

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Culture of Corruption has become common within FDA, Big Pharma

Posted on April 29, 2012 by andreas m

By: Ethan A. Huff
Source: NaturalNews.com

When pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices are approved for use in medicine by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), their safety and efficacy are typically not the primary factors considered during the decision-making process. As pointed out by the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice (OMSJ), the FDA and the drug industry are both now dominated by cultures of corruption that put profits before patient safety in almost every instance, which means that a steady stream of deadly drugs and medical devices continues to flood the market.

Going as far back as the 1950s — and likely even much earlier than that — the FDA has made it routine practice to ignore and even deny the dangers associated with drugs and medical devices when approving them. In the case of the Up john Company, for instance, which unveiled the antibiotic drug Panalba back in 1957, the FDA ignored many years of complaints about the drug’s safety in order to protect the company’s profits.

At the time, data showed that as many as 20 percent of patients taking Panalba had suffered severe allergic reactions to the antibiotic, and yet the FDA did nothing. Even Upjohn’s own research studies on Panalba showed that the drug was less effective and less safe than alternative drugs on the market, and still the FDA did nothing, effectively sheltering Upjohn’s enormous profits from Panalba, which represented 12 percent of its overall profit earnings.

Sadly, the same is true today, as the drug industry and the FDA essentially work in tandem to get dangerous, but highly-profitable, drugs and medical devices to market. It is a win-win situation for both groups as the FDA gets kickbacks in the form of exorbitant new drug and medical device application fees, and the drug industry rakes in billions of dollars for blockbuster drug and device products that would never have been approved had science and facts been legitimately factored into the equation.

FDA’s culture of corruption promotes social irresponsibility in all areas of food and medicine

Because the FDA so easily capitulates to the demands of special interests, the food and drug industries have largely become purveyors of social irresponsibility. Back in 2009, the FDA’s own scientists came forward and admitted that they are routinely threatened by their superiors to cover up unfavorable study data, and basically promote “corrupt and distorted” information to the public — and this same type of trickle-down deception is inherent within food and drug firms as well.

A study conducted back in 1977 by researchers from Penn State University (PSU) revealed that the vast majority of people, when put in such situations by their superiors where they are expected to lie, simply cave to the pressure and comply. Embodying the scenario that has evolved at the FDA and throughout the drug industry, the report explained that:

“[...] ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

And this is the situation many lower-level workers in government and industry find themselves in today. Will they have the courage to resist the pressure to commit acts of immorality that serve the voracious greed and malice of their superiors? Or will they just defy their consciences and obey their overlords, claiming all the while that they are “just doing their jobs?”

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As Children’s Brains are being Eaten by Vaccines, Parents Urged to Ignore the Symptoms and ‘Soothe’ their Babies

Posted on April 29, 2012 by andreas m

By: Jonathan Benson
Source: NaturalNews.com

A recent study published in the journal Pediatrics suggests that administering one or more of the five “Ss” — swaddling, side/stomach position, shushing, swinging, and sucking — to babies in conjunction with their childhood vaccine regimens can help alleviate the physical and emotional stress typically brought about by this highly-invasive medical tradition.

Swaddling babies, or wrapping them in a warm blanket after they are vaccinated, as well as placing them in certain positions can help reduce their levels of anxiety, say researchers. Gently shushing them while rocking them or giving them a pacifier can also help to make the vaccination process move along much more smoothly and less painfully.

Though these measures do absolutely nothing to address the potential neurological damage caused by vaccines, researchers say they can “soothe” babies and help them to stop crying. According to Dr. John W. Harrington from Eastern Virginia Medical School and Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk, the methods serve as a “distraction” from the pain caused by the needles.

For their study, Harrington and his colleagues divided 234 two- and four-month-old babies into four study groups, two of which received the five Ss after their vaccinations. They found that those who received these interventions experienced less visible pain, grimacing, and frowning, according to Reuters, and they cried less.

But as good as it might be to effectively comfort a child who has just been bombarded with dozens of vaccine injections, no amount of physical comfort will mitigate the damage being done to babies’ brains by vaccines. The combination diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus shot, also known as DPT, for instance, is known to cause severe and permanent brain damage in some children.

All vaccines, in fact, come with the potential to cause permanent nerve damage, particularly in the brain. Going back as far as 1855, when Massachusetts passed the first law in the United States requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren, it was known that vaccines carried with them the risk of encephalitis, also known as inflammation of the brain.

Brachial neuritis, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), multiple sclerosis, narcolepsy, Opsoclonus-Myoclonus syndrome (OMS), trigeminal neuralgia, and transverse myelitis are among the many neurological side effects that can be caused by vaccines. And none of these conditions, of course, can be mitigated with a pacifier or a blanket

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The Heart Disease Scam That Generates Billions Every Year… And May Cost You Your Life

Posted on April 27, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

More than half a million Americans received an angioplasty in 2007 (the most recent year for which data is available).

This invasive procedure involves inflating a thin balloon in a narrowed artery to crush deposits; a stent (a wire mesh tube) is often then left behind to keep the vessel open.

When used during a heart attack, an angioplasty can quickly open a blocked artery to lessen the damage to your heart, and when used in this way can be lifesaving.

However, oftentimes heart disease patients receive angioplasties even though they have not had a heart attack — a decision that goes against the latest medical guidelines and the suggestion of a new study, which found people treated using other less-invasive methods fared just as well as those who also underwent angioplasty with stents.

Angioplasty Offers “No Evidence of Benefit” Compared to Less Invasive Treatment

If you have stable heart disease, research shows that your initial treatment should usually be lifestyle changes. But less than half of heart disease patients are treated using lifestyle changes prior to undergoing angioplasty. According to an analysis of eight clinical trials involving over 7,000 people, angioplasty offers no benefit compared to less invasive treatment of heart disease.

The researchers concluded:

“Initial stent implantation for stable CAD [coronary artery disease] shows no evidence of benefit compared with initial medical therapy for prevention of death, nonfatal MI, unplanned revascularization, or angina.”

As an invasive surgery, angioplasty does come with its fair share of risks, however. Among them:

Because angioplasty does absolutely nothing to address the underlying causes of heart disease, you should know that restenosis, or a re-narrowing of your arteries, is common. This occurs in up to 40 percent of angioplasties without stents, but even with a stent the risk is still around 20 percent (or 10 percent for a drug-eluting stent). And, of course, if your artery becomes re-narrowed the surgery was all for nothing.

Along with saving yourself from the potentially life-threatening risks noted above, avoiding angioplasty will save you a hefty chunk of change. As Consumer Reports noted:

“Angioplasty is also more expensive, the authors report. They said that by following current guidelines, 76 percent of patients with stable heart disease would save approximately $9,450 each in lifetime health-care costs. Other researchers have estimated such a shift would save $6 to $8 billion a year.”

Even Drugs Can Often be Avoided for Heart Disease

The alternative treatment to angioplasty noted in the study was a combination of lifestyle changes and drugs.

” … medical guidelines have for several years said that most people who have symptoms of heart problems, such as angina (chest pain on exertion), but have not had a heart attack, should be treated with lifestyle changes and drugs first. Yet less than half of patients in that situation are treated according to these guidelines before undergoing angioplasty, research suggests,” Consumer Reports states.

This may come as a surprise, but many medications commonly prescribed to heart disease patients can also be avoided. This includes statin drugs, which are taken by millions of Americans. The majority of people who use statin cholesterol-lowering drugs are doing so because they believe lowering their cholesterol will prevent heart attacks and strokes. How many of these people do you think would continue to take them if they knew these very same drugs have been linked to decreased heart muscle function and increased risk of stroke, along with hundreds of other serious side effects?

Not very many, right?

Well, you may want to reconsider your use of statins, as a study in Clinical Cardiology found that heart muscle function was “significantly better” in the control group than in those taking statin drugs! Further, keeping your cholesterol levels higher may actually help you to prevent disease, and is not actually linked to heart disease.

For the vast majority of people, statin drugs are an unnecessary health risk you’re better off avoiding — and you definitely want to avoid the trap of taking them to lower your cholesterol. Other common heart disease medications, like high blood pressure drugs and even aspirin, do absolutely nothing to address the underlying causes of the condition.

It is rare when a drug is appropriate for treatment of a chronic condition like heart disease, but that doesn’t stop pharmaceutical companies from creating more of them. Currently, researchers are working on nearly 300 new medications for heart disease and stroke … but you likely have all the tools you need for prevention and treatment at your disposal right now.

If You Have Stable Heart Disease, Lifestyle Changes Should be Your Go-To Treatment

Most chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, are largely preventable with simple lifestyle changes. Imagine the lowered death toll, not to mention costs to the economy, if more people decided to take control of their health … heart disease and cancer alone accounted for 47 percent of deaths in the United States in 2010, and there are many strategies you can implement to lower your risk of these diseases … and most of the leading causes of death in the United States.

In the case of heart disease, the healthy lifestyle strategies that follow are not only effective as prevention; they’re also useful for treatment. So what does a “healthy lifestyle” entail?

Proper Food Choices For a comprehensive guide on which foods to eat and which to avoid, see my nutrition plan. Generally speaking, you should be looking to focus your diet on whole, unprocessed foods (vegetables, meats, raw dairy, nuts, and so forth) that come from healthy, sustainable, local sources, such as a small organic farm not far from your home.For the best nutrition and health benefits, you will want to eat a good portion of your food raw. Personally, I aim to eat about 80-85 percent of my food raw, including raw eggs and humanely raised organic animal products that have not been raised on a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation). Fermented foods are also important, as they are excellent sources of probiotics and vitamin K2, which is important for preventing arterial plaque buildup and heart disease.Nearly as important as knowing which foods to eat more of is knowing which foods to avoid, and topping the list is fructose. Sugar, and especially fructose, act as toxins in and of themselves, and as such drive multiple disease processes in your body.
Comprehensive Exercise Program, including High-Intensity Exercise like Peak Fitness Even if you’re eating the healthiest diet in the world, you still need to exercise to reach the highest levels of health, and you need to be exercising effectively, which means including not only core-strengthening exercises, strength training, and stretching but also high-intensity activities into your rotation. High-intensity interval-type training like Peak Fitness boosts human growth hormone (HGH) production naturally, which is essential for optimal health, strength and vigor.
Stress Reduction and Positive Thinking You cannot be optimally healthy if you avoid addressing the emotional component of your health and longevity, as your emotional state plays a role in nearly every physical disease — from heart disease and depression, to arthritis and cancer. Effective coping mechanisms are a major longevity-promoting factor in part because stress has a direct impact on inflammation, which in turn underlies many of the chronic diseases that kill people prematurely every day. The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), meditation, prayer, social support and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium.
Proper Sun Exposure to Optimize Vitamin D
Vitamin D is essential for your heart and cardiovascular system. Even if you’re considered generally “healthy,” if you’re deficient in vitamin D, your arteries are likely stiffer than they should be, and your blood pressure may run higher than recommended due to your blood vessels being unable to relax.
It’s been repeatedly shown that by increasing your vitamin D levels, you can improve your cardiovascular health and lower your blood pressure. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are severely deficient in vitamin D. In the United States, the late winter average vitamin D level is only about 15-18 ng/ml, which is considered a very serious deficiency state. Overall, it’s estimated that 85 percent of Americans are deficient, and as much as 95 percent of U.S. senior citizens.
The important factor when it comes to vitamin D is your serum level, which should ideally be between 50-70 ng/ml year-round. Sun exposure or a safe tanning bed is the preferred method for optimizing vitamin D levels, but a vitamin D3 supplement can be used as a last resort. Most adults need about 8,000 IU’s of vitamin D a day to achieve serum levels above 40 ng/ml, which is still just below the minimum recommended serum level of 50 ng/ml.

High Quality Animal-Based Omega-3 Fats

Omega-3 fat like that found in krill oil improves endothelial function, a major factor in promoting the growth of new blood vessels, and has beneficial effects on your heart’s electrical system, preventing potentially life-threatening heart rhythm disorders.

Omega-3 deficiency may actually be a significant underlying factor in up to 96,000 premature deaths each year, including some of those from coronary heart disease and stroke. Even the FDA allows claims for omega-3 for heart disease; it is one of the few food health claims that the FDA allows — and, yes, I view omega-3 fats not as just another supplement, but as an essential foodyou need to include in your diet.

How to Determine Your Heart Disease Risk…

Before deciding on an angioplasty, it’s important to be able to accurately gauge your heart disease risk – and you should know that your total cholesterol level is just about worthless in determining this risk, unless it is close to 340 or higher.

Instead, one of the most important risk factors will be your HDL to cholesterol ratio.

I have seen a number of people with levels over 250 who actually were at low heart disease risk due to their HDL levels. Conversely, I have seen even more who had cholesterol levels under 200 that were at a very high risk of heart disease based on the following additional tests:

HDL/Cholesterol ratio
Triglyceride/HDL ratios

HDL percentage is a very potent heart disease risk factor. Just divide your HDL level by your cholesterol. That percentage should ideally be above 24 percent. Below 10 percent, it’s a significant indicator of risk for heart disease. You can also do the same thing with your triglycerides and HDL ratio. That percentage should be below 2.

If you have type 2 diabetes, you’re automatically at an increased risk so you can move ahead to my recommendations above. In fact, anyone can use the above recommendations because their only “side effects” are improved health! That’s the beauty of it. Together, these steps can drastically lower your heart disease risk and improve heart health — sometimes quite rapidly. If you’re otherwise healthy and your heart disease is stable, only after exhausting these strategies should more invasive options, like drugs and angioplasty, be considered.

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Study: Following Your Doctor’s Orders Could Endanger Your Health

Posted on April 23, 2012 by andreas m

By: Jonathan Benson
Source: NaturalNews.com

Just because your doctor might seem to have all the right answers and always pay close attention to your medical testing and diagnostic needs does not necessarily mean that you are in good hands health-wise. A new study published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine reveals that patients who report high levels of satisfaction with the services and care provided by their doctors are actually more likely to die than patients who report low levels of satisfaction.

The idea is that individuals have all sorts of varying expectations about medical care depending on their health philosophies and beliefs. Some patients who receive antibiotics from their doctors every time they go in with cold or flu symptoms, for instance, will report high levels of satisfaction because their doctors did something, while doctors who refuse medication because of its uselessness in this same situation could be perceived by some patients as providing a low level of care.

Patient satisfaction versus proper patient care are two completely different things that, based on the study’s findings, appear to have an inverse relationship. Based on an assessment of data from the national Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), patients who report the highest level of satisfaction with their doctors are 26 percent more likely to die overall compared to those who report the lowest levels of satisfaction.

Oddly enough, when patients with the poorest overall health are excluded from the statistics, the death rate percentage jumps to 44 percent. Even after adjusting the data to account for those most likely to throw off the numbers, satisfied patients are significantly more likely to die than non-satisfied patients, presumably because of over-testing, false diagnoses, drug poisoning, and other potentially harmful factors that instill false confidence in many patients that their health is being properly handled.

According to Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism, citing research by Maggie Mahar in her book Money Driven Medicine, patients typically prefer that their doctors do more, rather than less, even when doing less actually benefits them. Getting too many mammograms, for instance, which makes many women feel empowered against breast cancer, has actually been shown to cause it.

The same is true for pharmaceutical drugs, which are a go-to for many doctors whenever their patients report even the slightest pains or discomforts. Many patients report higher satisfaction from doctors who simply dispense them pills, as opposed to doctors that tell them to get more exercise and eat better. And this, of course, illustrates the problem with patient satisfaction surveys, and points to why “satisfied” patients end up dying more often than their “unsatisfied” counterparts

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Methanol Toxicity from Aspartame may cause Autism, Spina Bifida, Preterm Delivery And More

Posted on April 22, 2012 by andreas m

By: Jonathan Benson
Source: NaturalNews.com

The issue hardly gets as much attention as it deserves, but the extreme toxicity of the artificial sweetener aspartame is wrecking human health on a massive scale. And in a comprehensive study on methanol, the major alcohol component of aspartame, retired food scientist and Professor Emeritus of Food Science and Nutrition at Arizona State University (ASU) Dr. Woodrow C. Monte explains how methanol toxicity from aspartame and other sources appears responsible for causing autism, spina bifida, preterm delivery, multiple sclerosis, cancer and many other chronic health conditions.

Not tied to the processed food industry or any other corporate player that might taint or bias his findings, Dr. Monte’s interest in the subject of methanol toxicity comes purely from a genuine concern about protecting human health. And his many years of experience studying food ingredients for use in specialized health care food products has afforded him a wealth of knowledge on this important subject that rarely, if ever, gets publicized by the corporately-funded mainstream media.

Methanol, the chemical trojan horse responsible for many modern diseases

In his study entitled Methanol: A chemical Trojan Horse as the root of the Inscrutable U, Dr. Monte evaluates the role that methanol plays in human health. Since methanol is a relatively new addition to the human diet, thanks to processing methods and chemical syntheses that did not exist prior to 1800s, it is vitally important to determine how this chemical substance affects the human body.

What Dr. Monte discovered is that methanol is converted by the body into formaldehyde, a highly toxic substance known to cause cancer in humans. He also uncovered the fact that methanol metabolizes in organs of the body other than just the liver which, based on all available evidence, is directly responsible for causing what Dr. Monte has termed “diseases of civilization” (DOC).

“Methanol is particularly dangerous to humans, more so than any other animal,” says Dr. Woodrow C. Monte on his website WhileScienceSleeps.com. “When humans consume low doses of methanol it is metabolized directly into formaldehyde which is a cancer producing agent of the same level of danger as asbestos and plutonium.”

Where Dr. Monte’s research diverts from the mainstream view of methanol’s toxicity has to do with the way dietary methanol is processed by the body. Rather than dissipate as is widely believed, methanol-induced formaldehyde tends to lodge itself into certain areas of the body that avoid filtering through the liver — and these are the same areas of the body where DOCs tend to appear.

“Once methanol runs the gauntlet of first-pass metabolism, its detoxification is no longer exclusive to the liver,” writes Dr. Monte in his study. “Methanol transports its potential to become formaldehyde past normal biological barriers in the brain and elsewhere that environmental formaldehyde itself cannot usually penetrate … [formaldehyde] can then be produced within the arteries and veins, heart, brain, lungs, breast, bone, and skin.”

Aspartame, a primary source of toxic methanol in the American diet

Where is all this toxic, methanol-induced formaldehyde coming from? It turns out aspartame is one of the primary sources in the American diet today. According to Dr. Monte, every molecule of aspartame, which is also marketed under the names NutraSweet, Equal, Canderel, 951, and AminoSweet, converts into a molecule of methanol when consumed. And in its dry form, aspartame is 11 percent methanol by weight.

This means that people who regularly consume “diet” foods and beverages laced with aspartame are taking in high amounts of a formaldehyde-producing, chemical poison that is drastically increasing their risk of developing chronic illnesses.

“As aspartame eventually became a major source of methanol in the civilized human diet, the incidence of DOC gradually began to rise,” says Dr. Monte’s report. “In addition to aspartame, and canned vegetables, fruits, and their juices, a major source of the methanol entering the modern civilized human body is cigarette smoke, causatively linked to atherosclerosis, multiple sclerosis, lupus, Alzheimer’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and other DOC.”

“It is my belief that diet soda has contributed to the rise of breast cancer and multiple sclerosis that has been preceded by the use of Aspartame as a food ingredient in every country that has allowed its use.”

You can view Dr. Monte’s complete study on methanol at:
http://www.whilesciencesleeps.com/methanol/

Helpful tips for avoiding methanol

Avoiding all “diet” and “low-fat” food and beverage products that contain aspartame or any other artificial sweetener chemical is an absolute must for keeping toxic methanol out of your diet. Cigarette smoke, canned fruits and vegetables, smoked meats, and overly-ripe fruits and vegetables are also major methanol culprits that you will want to avoid

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Pharmaceutical Company spends Millions Studying How to Steal Black Cohosh Component as Potential Treatment for Alzheimer’s

Posted on April 22, 2012 by andreas m

By: Jonathan Benson
Source: NaturalNews.com

In the push to develop new drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, drug company Satori Pharmaceuticals has successfully raised $37 million in venture capital to continue studying a key compound that it believes will eventually lead to a major breakthrough in disease treatment. And according to Xconomy.com, this compound comes from natural black cohosh, a perennial plant whose extract is often used to treat menopause symptoms.

Unbeknownst to many people today is the fact that pharmaceutical drugs are largely derived from natural herbs and plants that have been chemically synthesized into patented, isolated drug formulas. And Satori’s approach with black cohosh is no different, as the company hopes to eventually conduct human clinical trials on an isolated, synthesized version of the compound in question to verify that it actually does target amyloid beta 42, the protein that many researchers believe is connected with Alzheimer’s development.

Buildup of beta amyloid proteins in the brain is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, as this process is believed to degrade nerve cells in the brain and block proper nerve function. And when secretases, which are enzymes that promote the production of beta amyloid proteins, begin to dysfunction, the body is unable to successfully break them apart and prevent them from lodging in the brain.

But the substance identified in black cohosh, which was the result of work being done at the Mayo Clinic, reportedly binds with a specific enzyme known as gamma secretase that promotes the production of beta amyloid proteins, and stops them from forming in the brain. And unlike previous secretase inhibitor drugs that blocked all amyloid-promoting enzymes, including those that performed beneficial functions, natural black cohosh appears to block just those that are harmful while leaving the others alone.

“The molecule found at Mayo is a minor constituent of black cohosh that modulates gamma secretase,” said Jeff Ives, CEO of Satori, concerning the findings. “It’s a unique chemical series.”

As good as this news is, however, it is important to note that Satori does not necessarily plan to utilize black cohosh extract in its natural form for treatment — the company will likely break it apart, patent it, and sell it as an FDA-approved drug in the future. And as we all know, whenever a natural substance is artificially synthesized and separated from its other natural cofactors, negative side effects emerge.

On the other hand, it would appear as though taking black cohosh extract as it is currently available might be an effective way to prevent or even mitigate Alzheimer’s symptoms without the need for an actual drug.

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The Dangers Of Colonoscopies

Posted on April 21, 2012 by andreas m

By: Wolverine
Source: roarofwolverine.com

The overuse of the procedure known as colonoscopies as a prophylactic for colon cancer, has not only become quite a fad in recent decades, but also a multimillion dollar industry. Every year, over 14 million perfectly healthy individuals age 50 and up, submit themselves to this invasive procedure in the hope of receiving protection from colorectal cancer. Do the benefits of this screening outweigh the risks involved?

Sometimes in this world, a treatment may be as dangerous as the disease itself. I serve as a living testament to the severity of the damages possible with this procedure. The many injuries that can be caused by colonoscopies, the anesthetics and preparation required for this procedure, is what I would like to cover in part 1 of this series.

I would like to preface this by saying that colorectal cancer is a very real, frightening and deadly disease, and I am in no way lightening that fact. But, a colonoscopy injury can be as lethal and cause as much fear and suffering as colorectal cancer itself. So, which one carries the greatest risk of actually happening to you in your lifetime? Especially between the age of fifty to sixty?

Reported in this study from 2006; “The perforation rate reported from colonoscopies was 1 in 1000 procedures, and ‘serious complications’ occurred in 5 in1000”. According The Annals Of Internal Medicine’s report on colonoscopies, an estimated 70,000 (0.5%) will be injured or killed by a complication related to this procedure. This figure is 22% higher than the annual deaths from colorectal cancer itself – the very disease the device was designed to prevent.

The average age for developing colorectal cancer is 71. The medical industry recommends screening starting at the age of 50 and as low as 45 for African Americans. So, for the first couple of decades, you are risking your life with a dangerous, invasive procedure to diagnose a disease that is far less of a risk at that age than the odds of being injured by the screening device. I could stop right there, because that should be enough to make a critical thinker forget about this barberic diagnostic tool, at least until the age of 65. But, there is more – a whole lot more to consider, which leads me to believe we should search to discover a safer and more effective tool.

Many of the related injuries associated with colonoscopies go unreported or are never diagnosed. Death from colon cancer will very rarely not be reported as the cause of death, so those are accurate predictions. But, we have no idea just how high the actual number for colonoscopy injuries and death may actually be [more]. I am living proof of that. The reason for the necrosis of my bowels was unreported because all priorities focused on saving my life, not what caused the decline. Nowhere on my medical record is the reason for what caused my organs to die reported, so I doubt that I am part of those statistics, even though I am a victim of a colonoscopy.

Typically, a patient left untreated for as long as I was will die. Had I died, the death report would say complications from necrosis of the bowels and mention nothing of the colonoscopy. Perforations and other injuries from colonoscopies can be extremely difficult to diagnose and are often of little concern when the patient is dying. We also have to consider that doctors and hospitals will rarely report an injury from a colonoscopy unless forced to. It is up to the patient to successfully prove that the procedure caused their injury or resulting infection in a civil trial before it will be reported and logged. The fact that few, if any, of these cases will see the light of day will be covered in my post “Is There Any Such Thing As Malpractice?”.

Even though statistics say that 70,000 people will be injured or killed by this procedure this year, the actual number is far greater. But even if you go by only those that have been forced to be reported, the number of injuries are still significantly higher than the incidence of colorectal cancer.

One of the more dangerous outcomes of a colonoscopy is the one I was a victim of – a perforation. Everyone considering this diagnostic procedure is required to sign a paper stating that they understand all of the injuries possible with this invasion of their organs with a mechanical device and the air pressure exerted in order to inflate the colon. The list of the horrific complications, including death, should be enough to give anyone pause. But, patients are immediately calmed when their doctors explains that these things are rare. The favorite tool of compliancy in the doctor’s arsenal is the phrase “I’m not worried about it”. They’re not the ones about to have a metal tube shoved four feet up their pooper and they also understand that by signing that paper, you have waived all rights to legal compensation if injured. Any wonder why they’re not worried? As long as your insurance checks out, they won’t break a sweat.

Other than perforations, there are other dangers, including a list of possible reactions to the general anesthesia that must be used during a colonoscopy. Though rare, they can range from deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolisms to pneumonia. No other cancer screening test requires a general anesthetic to be used. There can also be complications associated with the colon prep required for the procedure. This prep can include a 2 liter enema of synthetic laxatives administered about an hour before the procedure. This cocktail of chemicals can cause everything from deadly electrolyte imbalances (which can lead to congestive heart failure), to possible thrombosis in the mesenteric artery, to kidney damage.

If this diagnostic procedure still sounds safe to you, we will also throw in the newest discovery that has come to light in recent years. It is impossible to sterilize an endoscope! This high tech device cannot be boiled or steamed because high temperatures can destroy the sensitive electronics. There are many tiny nooks and crannies in and around the tip of the scope, which are impossible to clean, even by hand. Recent biopsies of these scopes have revealed encrustation of fecal matter, tissue, blood, and mucus imbedded from previous patients. At present, medical personnel bathe the scopes in a disinfectant solution. They’re not scrubbed. Not disassembled. Not heated. They’re rinsed in an ineffective bath of Glutaraldehyde, which if not rinsed off thoroughly, has been cited as a cause of toxic Colitis.

It is very possible, and clinically proven, that you can be infected by HPV (Human Papilloma Virus); HIV; Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Helicobacter pylori,; Hepatitis B and C; Salmonella; Pseudomonas and Aeruginosa; Flu Viruses and other common bacteria such as, E. Coli O157:H7 and Creutzfeldt- Jakob Disease. And the pathogens you may be infected with are typically going to be a hospital borne variety, which means they are strains that have been exposed to, and become immune to most antibiotics. Leading microbiologists have advocated using sterile, disposable parts for endoscopes as well as the use of a condom-like sheathes for each new patient. But, the manufacturers and health-care providers have resisted these solutions because of added costs. Isn’t that nice? These safety precautions are mandated in England, but not used here in the U.S.. The FDA even recognizes this problemhere, but acts as if their present recommendations are effective – they have been proven not to be.

Following my transplant, I was required to undergo an ileoscopy, including biopsies, weekly to check for signs of rejection. Patients are not anesthetized for this procedure because the scope is inserted into a stoma, rather than the anus, so it is painless. I was allowed to watch the procedure on a television monitor. They would fish a tool (similar to an alligator clip) through the instrument port of the scope (refer to image at the top of page), to tear off a piece of villi for a biopsy. Each time I could see a tiny injury which would begin to bleed. An open, bleeding wound near the tip of a scope encrusted with fecal matter – sounds like a real good medical practice. Each time you undergo a colonoscopy they may clip out a piece of your intestine for biopsy or snip off a polyp. There will be an open wound and mixing of your blood with whatever may be lingering on the end of that scope which has been in hundreds of other colons and is unable to be sterilized.

A few days after one of the scopes, I came down with a systemic gram negative rod infection called pseudomonas, a very deadly pathogen to immunosuppressed patients. The particular strain that I had was identified as being multi-drug resistant, meaning it was certainly a hospital borne variety. It nearly ended my life as I succumbed to septic shock and by the time the ambulance arrived at the ER, my blood pressure had dropped to 35/28 and I was given a very small chance of surviving the night. Before intubating me, they told me they would send in my wife so I could say “goodbye” to her for the last time – this is how sure they were I would never awake from the anesthesia.

It is quite obvious now that I contracted that pathogen from the scope I had just received two days before (I failed so quickly because I was so immunosupressed from the transplant). Seven months prior to that, I had been the victim of a perforation as the result of a routine colonoscopy, which ultimately cost me all of my intestines and nearly my life. That is two near death injuries on just one patient within seven months from endoscopes.

I met six other transplant patients in the last two years. Three out of those six people, adding myself (making seven), had suffered a perforation from scopes and a fourth one had suffered a perforation in a similar invasive procedure. Two of those patients died as a result of their injuries and I nearly died both times from mine. The third transplant recipient needed an emergency resection of her newly transplanted bowels because of a perforation from a scope. The baby of our transplant family, a young woman only 28 years old, is fighting a Klebsiellasepsis at this time, which was most likely transmitted via a recent scope. “Injuries and perforations from colonoscopies are rare” my ass!

Because of what happened to me and the manner in which the doctor lied to me about the rarity of these injuries is what has motivated me to study and investigate the subject for the last two years. I have discovered that perforations are not as rare as the doctors would like us to believe. But at a charge of $1,500.00 to $2,000.00 per procedure and the fact that some gastroenterologists can rush in as many as 30 -40 procedures a day, it is not hard to see a motivation to suppress the truth about the dangers and your risk of being perforated or infected by this medical fad.

From an a 2006 article in The New York Times; “… if our group is representative of an average group, you will see people (doctors) who take 2 or 3 minutes and people (doctors) who take 20 minutes to examine a colon. Insurers pay doctors the same no matter how much time they spend.” It is often about quantity, not quality and your risk of being injured increases the faster the practitioner attempts to finish your procedure, not to mention the efficiency of the cancer screening falls dramatically when hurried.

I hope that one day this killer will end up on the junk pile of quack medical devices from the Victorian Age, and I hope I can have a hand in placing it there. This will not be easy. The medical industry now has celebrities, such as Katie Couric, actively using their fame to promote this procedure as a life-saving miracle, rather than the barbaric medieval medical device it really is. They used the fact that Katie lost her husband to colon cancer and swooped in on this grieving widow and convinced her this “snake oil” medical device could have prevented it. I am sure that the fact that NBC is also owned by General Electric, a manufacturer of endoscopes, had little to do with sponsoring her televised colonoscopy and using her celebrity pitching skills to bring this killer to the forefront of common medical practices.

You may be thinking that I must have lost my mind, because after all, this procedure has effectively saved thousands of lives, or at least that’s what you’ve been led to believe by the medical industry and their advocates in the media. But is there any more truth to this than the lie that injuries are rare?

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Could this Simple Vitamin Help Treat Psychotic Disorders Better than Drugs?

Posted on April 10, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

A growing trend of drug misuse is alarming medical experts, policymakers, and patient advocates.

In recent years, there has been a massive increase in off-label use of a class of drugs called “atypical niacantipsychotics.”

These drugs, which include Seroquel, Zyprexa, Risperdal and Abilify, are only approved to treat disabling mental illnesses, but they’re being prescribed by psychiatrists and primary-care doctors to treat conditions they were never approved for, such as:

Anxiety
Attention-deficit disorder
Insomnia
Behavioral problems in toddlers, and
Dementia

Atypical antipsychotics have carried a black-box warning—the strongest warning label possible for drugs—since 2005, cautioning that use in elderly patients with dementia increases risk of death.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, antipsychotic drugs are not indicated for the treatment of dementia-related psychosis.

Yet many doctors are still prescribing antipsychotics for dementia.

According to a recent article in the Washington Post:

“Critics say the popularity of atypical antipsychotics reflects a combination of hype that the expensive medicines, which can cost $500 per month, are safer than the earlier generation of drugs; hope that they will work for a variety of ailments when other treatments have not; and aggressive marketing by drug companies to doctors and patients …

[S]erious side effects… include major, rapid weight gain… [t]ype 2 diabetes, breast development in boys, irreversible facial tics and, among the elderly, an increased risk of death.”

Skyrocketing Misuse of Dangerous Antipsychotics in Children

Most of the atypical antipsychotics were approved in the 1990′s, at which time they were reserved for a very small minority of serious mental illnesses; primarily schizophrenia and bipolar disorder—diseases afflicting an estimated three percent of Americans. More recently, some atypical antipsychotics have also been approved for the treatment of severe depression.

This class of drugs include:

Shockingly, as discussed in the featured Washington Post article, recent disclosures show that children in foster care receive a disproportionate amount of potent mind-altering drugs. Not only do American foster children receive more psychotropic drugs than other children in general; they receive more drugs than those with the most severe forms of mental illness! This is an absolute tragedy, as these children are being drugged not out of medical necessity, but primarily for the convenience of caretakers, and for the profit of those within “the system.”

Can Severe Mental Illness Be Diagnosed in Toddlers?

Children as young as 18 months are now receiving antipsychotic drugs, despite the fact that the diseases they’re designed to treat rarely develop before adolescence. So why are toddlers receiving these potent drugs? Sadly, one of the key reasons these drugs are used is because of their sedative effect. They’re typically prescribed to control “disruptive” behavior—not to treat severe mental illness.

Granted, the dubious diagnosis of “pediatric bipolar disorder” is in large part responsible for the increased use of antipsychotic drugs in young children. It is absolutely incomprehensible that there has been such an astounding increase in the diagnosis of childhood mental illness. The only rational explanation is a manipulation of the definition to justify inappropriately drugging our children.

According to the featured article:

“Between 1994 and 2003, reported diagnoses increased 40-fold, from about 20,000 to approximately 800,000, according to Columbia University researchers. That diagnosis, popularized by several prominent child psychiatrists in Boston who claimed that extreme irritability, inattention and mood swings were actually pediatric bipolar disorder that can occur before age 2, has undergone a reevaluation in recent years.

The reasons include the highly publicized death of a 4-year-old girl in Massachusetts, who along with her two young siblings had been taking a cocktail of powerful drugs for several years to treat bipolar disorder; the revelation of more than $1 million in unreported drug company payments to the leading proponent of the diagnosis; and growing doubts about its validity.”

“Inventors” of Pediatric Bipolar Diagnosis had Strong Drug Industry Ties

If you suspect foul play might have something to do with this dangerous trend, you’re probably right. Last year, the Harvard psychiatrists who invented the pediatric bipolar diagnosis were disciplined for conflicts of interestafter it came to light they’d all received millions of dollars in undeclared drug company monies. In a July 21, 2011 article, Vera Sherav for Alliance for Human Research Protection writes:

“An investigation, prompted by Sen. Charles Grassely, was conducted by Harvard University-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. It concluded that psychiatrist Joseph Biederman and two of his proteges, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens—each of who failed to disclose millions of dollars they had each received from the makers of antipsychotics, the drugs they promoted for the treatment of bipolar in children–had indeed violated the University’s/ and hospital’s conflict of interest reporting standards. The three wrote a mea culpa letter stating “we want to offer our sincere apologies…” acknowledging “our mistakes…”

However, no mention was made anywhere about the profound consequences of these psychiatrists’ commercially-driven clinical recommendations. No mention about the corruption of the scientific literature, about clinical practice that deviated from the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm,” nor was any mention made about the harm suffered by children whose doctors were misled about the safety and efficacy of highly toxic drugs. Child psychiatrists and pediatricians throughout the US were guided by these exceedingly influential Harvard psychiatrists.”

The investigation also unearthed evidence of commercially-driven corruption of the research produced by these psychiatrists. A New York Times articlerevealed that court documents showed Dr. Biederman promised Johnson & Johnson that the results of a planned study in preschool children would “support the safety and effectiveness of Risperdal in this age group.”

One Drug… A Cornucopia of Side Effects…

According to a study published last year, off-label prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs doubled between 1995 and 2008, from 4.4 million to a staggering 9 million prescriptions. In 2008, an estimated $6 billion was spent on off-label antipsychotics in the US, of which $5.4 billion was for uses based on uncertain evidence!

Taking an antipsychotic drug to treat, say, insomnia, is really like using a bazooka to rid yourself of a mosquito. It’s overkill of the highest order, or as Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman is quoted as saying in the featured article, “It’s a total outrage.”

Unfortunately, relentless advertising has helped “normalize” these drugs, so people don’t think much of taking one. Take Abilify (aripiprazole), for example. It is licensed for the treatment of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, autism, as well as major depression when taken with antidepressants. I.e. it is used to augment the effects of the antidepressants. This is because, of course, antidepressants don’t work as advertised either. Numerous studies have demonstrated that antidepressants are no more effective than a sugar pill…

Abilify is a perfect example of how dangerous polypharmacy is spreading and increasing.

The word ‘polypharmacy’ means “many drugs,” and essentially refers to instances where an individual is taking too many drugs–either because more drugs are prescribed than clinically indicated, or when the sheer number of pills simply becomes a burden for the patient. This situation used to be primarily a concern for the elderly, who generally take more medicines than younger folk. But over the past several years, even children as young as three are increasingly being prescribed four or more drugs! This is a significant problem, as the more drugs you mix together, the greater the chances of serious side effects.

People (of all ages) taking psychiatric drugs appear to be particularly prone to polypharmacy, which is particularly disturbing since each and every one of these drugs are quite potent and potentially dangerous when taken all by itself. Abilify, for example, has a staggering 75 different side effectsassociated with it, including:

Antipsychotics: Overused, Overpriced, Oversold

According to Sandra B. Goodman, author of the featured article:

“Antipsychotics are overused, overpriced and oversold,” said Allen Frances, former chair of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine, who headed the task force that wrote the DSM-IV, psychiatry’s diagnostic bible. While judicious off-label use may be appropriate for those who have not responded to other treatments for, say, severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, Frances said the drugs, which are designed to calm patients and to moderate the hallucinations and delusions of psychosis, are being used “promiscuously, recklessly,” often to control behavior and with little regard for their serious side effects.

Doctors are allowed to prescribe drugs for unapproved uses, but companies are forbidden to promote them for such purposes.

In the past few years major drugmakers have paid more than $2 billion to settle lawsuits brought by states and the federal government alleging illegal marketing; some cases are still being litigated, as are thousands of claims by patients. In 2009 Eli Lilly and Co. paid the federal government a record $1.4 billionto settle charges that it illegally marketed Zyprexa through, among other things, a “5 at 5 campaign” that urged nursing homes to administer 5 milligrams of the drug at 5 p.m. to induce sleep.”

Who Decides What Mental Illness is?

Modern psychiatry has expanded its reach to the point that even the most normal of emotions and mental states now fall under one labeled “disorder” or another. They have been able to cleverly define mental illness with the use of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This book is created by members of the American Psychiatric Association.

You would think that diseases are put in this book after evaluating carefully executed scientific trials, but nothing could be further from the truth. Additions and changes to this manual are determined by votes by its members. This categorization is NOT based on science at all!

It is well documented that psychiatric drugs in general and atypical antipsychotics specifically, are misused across the board.

The over-use and mis-use of these drugs exact a very steep price—your health. If you fall into the category of having been mis-prescribed a psychiatric drug—which today is more the norm than the exception—please understand that there are far better, safer options. And for those of you who are taking a properly prescribed drug, based on appropriate diagnosis of a mental illness, just be aware of what the potential side effects are, so that you can avoid more serious illness. By making key lifestyle changes you may be able to counteract some of the most devastating side effects, allowing you to maintain better health…

Normal Life Challenges are Now Medical Conditions

According to the featured Washington Post article:

“Wayne Blackmon, a psychiatrist and lawyer who teaches at George Washington University Law School, said he commonly sees patients taking more than one antipsychotic, which raises the risk of side effects. Blackmon regards them as the “drugs du jour,” too often prescribed for “problems of living. Somehow doctors have gotten it into their heads that this is an acceptable use.” Physicians, he said, have a financial incentive to prescribe drugs, widely regarded as a much quicker fix than a time-intensive evaluation and nondrug treatments such as behavior therapy, which might not be covered by insurance.”

Alas, you cannot push a drug unless people believe they might have a disease. At the heart of the problem is the DSM-IV(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), and its slew of newly created diseases that are dubbed in need of medical treatment (i.e. drugs). The central dilemma is that many of the “disorders” could apply to nearly any one of us at one time or another, hence any one of us, or ALL of us, can at some point justify taking a potent drug. The practice of systematically inventing disease or exaggerating minor ones in order to sell more products actually has a name. It’s called disease-mongering, and it’s a well established tool used among drug companies.

And as irrational as it may seem, any one of the following “disorders” can be “treated” with a drug:

Are you sometimes shy? Then you may have “Social Phobia.”
Are you wondering about deeper things, such as the meaning of life? Then you’ve got a “Religious or Spiritual Problem.”
Do you argue with your brother or sister? Then it’s a “Sibling Relational Problem.”
Does your child argue with adults, lose his temper, or annoy people? Then he has “Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”
If you or your teenager is uncertain about what path to take in life, what your values or career goals are, you’ve likely got an “Identity Problem.”

The Drugging of Our Children

It is bad enough to prescribe dangerous psychotropic drugs to adults, but some of the most targeted people are just barely out of diapers. In 2007 alone, half a million children and teenagers were given at least one prescription for an antipsychotic, including 20,500 under the age of 6. American children are the most medicated children in the world. For example, they get three times more prescriptions for antidepressants and stimulants, and up to double the amount of antipsychotic drugs than kids from Germany and the Netherlands.

How can we, as a society, continue to allow corporate profits to come before lives, and even before children’s lives? And why is it that so few people are willing to step up and really expose the corruption once and for all?

If you or your child is suffering from an emotional or mental challenge, please seek help, but do so from someone who does not regard psychotropic drugs as a first line of defense. It will be very helpful if you first optimize your or your child’s diet and lifestyle as this will significantly improve the likelihood of any successful natural intervention. A good starting point would be my comprehensive health planthat is free to view. There are also many wonderful tools out there to address your emotional challenges. One of my favorite ones is the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

Could a Vitamin Actually Help Psychosis?

I will be interviewing Dr. Andrew Saul later this year about his new book, Niacin: The Real Story: Learn about the Wonderful Healing Properties of Niacin. He co-wrote the book with Abram Hoffer M.D., Ph.D., who published over 600 reports and articles as well as 30 books. His early work led to the use of niacin for schizophrenia and as an cholesterol treatment. Dr. Hoffer died in 2009 at the age of 91, but he successfully treated many thousands of patients with high dose niacin for psychotic disorders.

He presented some very compelling evidence to support treating most psychotic disorders as a vitamin B3 deficiency.

Considering it is very inexpensive and has virtually no dangerous side effects it would certainly be worth a consideration for anyone who has a family member with this mental health challenge. I would also highly recommend picking up this $12 book at Amazon and learning more about its use.

Is there Hope for Change?

Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope that sensibility will return and that much-needed changes will be made to prevent most of the unnecessary drugging. According to Boodman:

Texas has announced it will not allow a child younger than 3 to receive antipsychotics without authorization from the state
Arkansas now requires parents to give informed consent before a child receives an anti-psychotic drug
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced it is summoning state officials to a meeting this summer to address the use of antipsychotics in foster care.
Senators Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) have introduced legislation that would require doctors who prescribe antipsychotics off-label to nursing home patients to complete forms certifying that they are appropriate, and
Medco is asking doctors to document that they have performed diabetes tests in patients taking the drugs

“Our intention here is to get doctors to reexamine prescriptions” [Psychiatrist David J.] Muzina [a national practice leader at pharmacy benefits manager Medco] said. “In the short term, I don’t see a change in this trend unless external forces intervene.”

I believe one of the first steps toward change is education and awareness—in this case, people need to be re-educated about drugs and disease, so they won’t fall for the lure of “the magic pill.” Doctors must also become more sensitized to the grave harm inflicted on their patients by unnecessary drugs, and focus on normalizing their patient’s biochemistry by eliminating sugars and processed foods, and considering addressing hidden vitamin deficiencies like niacin.

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Investigation of Dangerous Medical Device Implants Reveals most have Never Been Tested for Safety

Posted on April 9, 2012 by andreas m

By: Jonathan Benson
Source: NaturalNews.com

Did you know that the vast majority of medical devices on the market today have received approval from the U.S.Food and Drug Administration (FDA) without ever having been properly safety tested? A thorough investigation by Consumer Reports has revealed that the medical device approval process is a pay-for-play sham that is putting millions of people at risk of serious injury or death.

Confirming two earlier studies that were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the American Journal of Therapeutics (AJT) back in 2010, the Consumer Reports findings expose the FDA’s complete lack of oversight of the medical device industry. Rather than require that medical device manufacturers prove the safety of medical devices prior to their approval, the FDA instead extorts user fees in exchange for the agency’s seal of approval.

“For most implants and other high-risk devices brought to market, manufacturers do nothing more than file some paperwork and pay the Food and Drug Administration a user fee of roughly $4,000 to start selling a product that can rack up many millions of dollars in revenue,” says Consumer Reports. “Often, the only safety ‘testing’ that occurs is in the bodies of unsuspecting patients.”

In 1998, the FDA ruled that medical device distributors were no longer required to report adverse events, including death, to the agency, which means there is no way to know just how many people are being injured or killed by medical devices (http://www.fda.gov). And if that is not bad enough, the FDA is now trying to work with Congress to enact new laws that would make it even easier for medical device manufacturers to get their products to market without having to first prove their safety.

“Because so many medical devices are not being held to a higher safety standard, people are dying who wouldn’t otherwise die and who don’t have to die,” Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, is quoted as saying by USA Today. “People are being harmed who don’t have to be harmed” (http://yourlife.usatoday.com).

When also considering the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled back in 2008 that medical device manufacturers could not be sued for injury or death caused by their FDA-approved products, it becomes disturbingly obvious that using medical devices or getting them implanted into your body is like playing Russian Roulette with your health.

Be sure to read the entire Consumer Reports piece on medical devices here:
http://www.consumerreports.org

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Research shows Pharmaceutical Side Effects Exceed Adverse Warnings 5X

Posted on April 8, 2012 by andreas m

By: Paul Fassa
Source: NaturalNews.com

Often no matter how bad you think it is, the reality is worse than imagined. This is the case with pharmaceutical side effects. It’s so bad that even mainstream medical research acknowledges there are more adverse side effects than disclosed.

But their viewpoint still holds pharmaceuticals as the only medicine that works. Nutrition hardly affects health, if at all. Herbs are plants from which labs duplicate active ingredients for synthetic drugs that are the only effective medicines. Homeopathy doesn’t work, etc.That’s the medical monopoly mindset.

A slight crack has appeared in their medical arrogance. Researchers from Stanford Medical School created a couple of data bases that prove there are up to five times more adverse effects from pharmaceuticals than displayed or publicized.

Their research

The Stanford study was reported in the March 14th, 2012 edition of Science Translational Medicine by lead author Russ Altman, MD, PhD and his graduate student assistant Nicholas Tatonetti.

They created a dual data base system to analyze data from the FDA’s adverse event reporting system (AERS). Their premise that safety trials are conducted on the public after a drug hits the market is noteworthy (Stanford report, source below).

They also mentioned that clinical trials for obtaining FDA approval are insufficient for assuming safety for everyone within all situations. However, their viewpoint is still locked into that medical monopoly mindset mentioned earlier.

The Stanford research is an attempt to provide more knowledge for better prescription advice to minimize side effects. But there is no concession to any other modality of medical treatment. In other words, they want to clean up their act a bit, not fold up their snake oil wagons to move on and let others show their wares.

Even cleaning up their act is unlikely

The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) reported in 1998 that the fourth highest cause of death was properly prescribed pharmaceuticals. Adding those deaths by improperly prescribed drugs puts the death ranking from Big Pharma “medicine” to third place.

These statistics don’t include over the counter drugs. Instead of confronting these statistics, the FDA and AMA engage in marginalizing and suppressing other healing modalities that are safe and effective.

Dr. Ray Strand, author of Death by Prescription explained to Mike Adams in a 2005 interview that the FDA should demand adverse effect reports from medical professionals, the way it’s done in Europe and the UK, and clinical trials should be funded by the government.

Currently, reporting to AERS is voluntary in the USA. Many experts estimate that only five to ten percent of actual adverse effects do get reported. Funding for trials is provided by pharmaceutical companies who pay the FDA for their approval. The very foundation of this system is corrupt.

Oh yes, don’t forget that the USA and New Zealand are the only nations that permit direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Also consider how Big Pharma starts wooing and training MDs while they’re still in med school.

So, the Stanford study, while laudable considering it’s from within the medical monopoly system, is based on AERS data that contains a fraction of actual adverse effects. The study also doesn’t address the FDA’s financial angles and conflicts of interest with Big Pharma shills slipping through the government/corporate revolving door.

Nice try guys. It would be better to simply apply anti-trust laws to the medical monopoly, if there are still any anti-trust laws in the books. Allow “alternative” (real) medicine to come to the forefront while your field gets the “quack” flack it deserves.

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Suzanne Somers’ Stem Cell Breast Reconstruction Surgery

Posted on April 7, 2012 by andreas m

By Andreas Moritz

For many years, I have been a great fan of Suzanne Somer’s incredible courage and persistence to enlighten the people about alternative methods of treating disease, especially cancer. Before publishing her New York Times bestseller “Knockout” about cancer and the many suppressed alternative treatments for cancer, she asked me if she could quote from my book Cancer Is Not a Disease – It’s a Survival Mechanism in her new book. Given how controversial my book is in the eyes of the hardliners of conventional medicine, I felt very honored and agreed to it. While this led to a an expected defamation campaign against me, Suzanne Somers took the brunt of it; the pharma-medical establishment and hired media attacked her viciously for writing her book, which has been read by millions of people. And yet again, the undeterred Suzanne Somers, single-handedly and not taking no for answer, opened up an entire new possibility for women who have been maimed by breast surgery to regain their sense of dignity and womanhood. Bravo, Suzanne! Please share with all woman who have had breast cancer surgery.

~ Andreas Moritz

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Getting a Tuberculosis (TB) Skin test can be Dangerous

Posted on March 25, 2012 by andreas m

Hi, this is a great comment from Judy Kemecsei and she is talking about TB skin tests and warns about them and I totally agree with her on that. I will read to you her comment and make my own comment about it.

“Did you know that getting a TB skin test can be dangerous? Although it is not a vaccine, TB antigens are placed in a syringe and injected under the skin. It contains Tween 80 (polysorbate 80) as a stabilizer, phenol as a preservative. It may contain 1,4-diozane – a suspected carcinogen and a known liver and kidney toxicant. Phenol is a suspected liver, kidney, respiratory, cardiovascular and central nervous system toxicant. Many factors can influence the test results. Thus false negative and false positives are relatively common.”

And I totally agree with Judy on this because the real reason why our body actually has to breed bacteria is to protect the body and remove potential cancer cells.

We receive TB bacteria from our mothers though the breast milk. This is not by accident and this is not a mistake. TB bacteria are to be in our body in order to keep us healthy and protect us against an overgrowth of certain cells, if that has to happen because of shock, because of conflict situations which typically happens when we are under severe stress, and this is a natural protective mechanism that is built into our biology. So every person has to have TB bacteria.

To do a skin test and inject these substances and TB antigens into the system, it can create, it can completely distort the messaging system in our body, and we can have reactions that normally we would not have. It interferes with the natural balance of the immune system. So I wholeheartedly agree with you, Judy, here, and anyone who wants to take a TB test, I recommend stay away from these because they can lead to treatment of TB when you have no infection of tuberculosis at all. It’s a very risky thing to do.

If you are concerned, it’s best to expose your skin to the sunlight.

In the 1920s, anyone who had tuberculosis and came to a doctor who was well versed in tuberculosis and how the body can deal with it naturally is to take people into high altitude mountain regions in Switzerland where they would have a higher dosage of UV radiation. These patients were lying in the sun without any clothes on and within a couple of days their TB infection subsided and didn’t recur because in the presence of enough Vitamin D, TB bacteria decline or go back to the normal number of presence in the body and wouldn’t cause anyone any harm.

If there is any cancer growth in the body, eventually, the TB bacteria will assemble in that area and build up inside these cancer cells until there is a saturation point of these TB bacteria, which will then be used by the body in order to decompose, in fact, decompose these cancer cells.

So TB bacteria are part of the last line of defense the body uses in order to dispose or get rid of any cancer growth that may have occurred as a result of severe stress, conflict, trauma that may have required for the body to build extra cells which unfortunately we call cancer cells. These extra cells, they take up some of the functions or the higher demand for activity in certain parts of the body such as the lungs that may need to produce extra cells to take up the oxygen in order to supply the body with extra oxygen during stressful experiences often called the ‘fight or flight’ response.

So during stress or ‘fight or flight’ or constant ‘fight or flight’, the body has to build extra cells in order to accommodate the extra demand for energy and oxygen and nutrients, and so when that stress is over, the body will basically break down these extra cells.

In order to do that it requires infection through… with the help of candida bacteria, virus materials as well as TB bacteria – tuberculosis, and tuberculosis is not a disease, it is part of the protective, survival mechanism.

If we support the body through that, instead of fighting it and by implanting antigens, TB antigens, into the body, we are severely disturbing the process of natural healing, and can cause more trouble, more problems, that are maybe extremely difficult to remedy naturally, and therefore I am totally against using TB antigens and injecting them under the skin.

Thank you.

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Unvaccinated people a public health threat? Nope, people who take antibiotics are the real danger

Posted on March 23, 2012 by andreas m

By: Mike Adams
Source: NaturalNews.com

Vaccine pushers often resort to an interesting fear tactic to try to mandate vaccine obedience among the masses: They insist that those who are unvaccinated are a health threat to the rest of the vaccinated population because the vaccinated people might get infected by the unvaccinated disease carriers!

The quack logic of such a claim should be self-evident. If vaccines protect people from infectious disease, then vaccinated people should not be concerned at all about being around unvaccinated people. After all, the vaccine made them all “immune,” right?

But of course that’s all propaganda. Vaccines don’t really work at all. They are marketed under a blanket of disease hysteria and pimped by a cult following of medicalized quacks and needle junkies who abandoned real science long ago. After all, who needs real science when you’ve got the CDC marketing all the fear for you? The CDC is to medicine what George Bush was to the war industry — spread a little fear and the profits roll in.

The real risk to others? People who routinely take antibiotics

As it turns out, the real health risk that does exist in person-to-person exposure of infectious disease comes from people who routinely take antibiotics. Those who take the most antibiotics become drug-resistant bacteria factories, and they can spread their drug-resistant strains to others around them. Their risk of developing superbugs rises proportionally to the frequency and duration of their taking prescription antibiotics.

The most dangerous person in your family, it turns out, is not the “unvaccinated” person but the one taking antibiotics! They are human breeding grounds for bacterial mutations that can be downright deadly.

Why hospitals are so dangerous to your health

That’s why informed people know the hospital is the most dangerous place you can go, other than working in a homemade meth lab of course. Hospitals are where superbugs pass easily from patient to doctor, and then from doctor to another patient. Hospital superbugs are spread by the medical staff, mostly because they routinely fail to wash their hands before touching patients.

As NaturalNews reported in January, 2010, a whopping 247 people die every day in U.S. hospitals from medical staff failing to wash their hands.

This is like a jumbo jet falling out of the sky and killing everyone on board every single day. It’s like a 9/11 terrorist attacking happeningevery two weeks. This is one of the most alarming (and preventable) causes of death in America today and virtually no one even talks about it.

Doctors, of course, strongly contribute to the development of superbugs by handing out antibiotics as if they were Halloween candy. Someone shows up at the office with a sniffle, and the busy doctor scribbles out a prescription for some fashionable new antibiotic that earns him perks from the young drug rep whose PC database tracks every name-brand prescription he writes. The patient, meanwhile, spends a pocket fortune on a useless drug that’s actually quite dangerous. Not only does it increase that patient’s chances of developing a mutant strain of drug-resistant bacteria; it also flushes antibiotics down the drain and contaminates the environment downstream.

So if you’re walking around in public suspiciously glancing around to see who might be sniffling or sneezing, clear your head and think about reality for a second. The CDC wants you to stupidly believe all the unvaccinated people are a threat to your health, when in reality people who consciously refuse vaccines tend to be far healthier and get sick far less often than the hypochondriac dweebs who rush out to get vaccinated every few months.

Doctors and drugs are the greatest threat to your health – far greater than terrorism

The real people who are a threat to your health are not just the pill-popping antibiotics consumers, but also:

• The psyched-out grandma on psychotropic drugs barreling down the road behind the wheel of a 1978 Buick. (Driving While Medicated…)

• The teen schoolboy who was diagnosed with depression and put on SSRI drugs that make him feel violently suicidal.

• The pediatrician who wants to inject your child with chemotherapy to “prevent” cancer and insist he’s going to call CPS if you don’t let him poison your child.

• The drug addict pharmacist who, in between incorrectly filling your prescription with random deadly chemicals, snorts up his own private concoction of controlled substances in the back room.

• The oncologist who misdiagnosed you with breast cancer but wants to poison you with five rounds of chemotherapy “just to be sure.” (Oh yeah, I bet he never told you that he PROFITS from selling you the chemotherapy drugs that poison you…)

• The school bus driver with a heart condition who takes an extra dose of deadly statin drugs and suffers a fatal heart muscle breakdown while behind the wheel of a bus carrying 58 schoolchildren toward a railroad crossing.

These are the real threats to your safety… not a bunch of healthy people who deliberately refuse to be injected with hazardous vaccines.

But of course the medical establishment doesn’t want you to be aware of any risks associated with using their products. All their drugs are perfectly safe! Perfectly effective! Perfectly priced! Perfectly profitable! There’s nothing wrong with them, by God, or the FDA would never have approved them, would they?

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This Foolish Cancer “Prevention” May Only Extend Your Life by 2.8 Days

Posted on March 19, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Women over age 21 are now being dissuaded from annual PAP smears.

PAP smears screen for cervical cancer typically associated with human papillomavirus (HPV), which health officials say is responsible for most cases of cervical cancer.

The USPSTF (US Preventative Services Task Force) and the American Cancer Society are now recommending women undergo PAP screening only once every three years, beginning at age 21 and ending around age 65.

The problem with this stance is that PAP smears prevent cervical cancer deaths far more effectively than the HPV vaccine ever will.

And it’s hard to compare the potential side effects of the HPV vaccine with the potential side effects of PAP tests.

I’ve never heard of anyone dying or becoming paralyzed from a PAP smear.

Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with the recommendation to reduce the frequency of PAP testing.

As Philip Castle of the American Society for Clinical Pathology states:

“If you test every year you find a lot of benign infections that would go away on their own… You end up overscreening, overmanaging and overtreating women who are not actually at risk of getting cervical cancer.”

Side effects of overtesting may include vaginal bleeding, pain, infections, risks of pre-term delivery, and psychological impacts of facing a possible cancer diagnosis.

Why Opt for the More Hazardous Option?

What I DO question is, why are cancer groups recommending getting rid of a safe and effective screening method, which we know saves lives, while vigorously advocating the clearly risky HPV vaccine?

Since the release of Gardasil into the market in 2006, many thousands of serious adverse events have been reported to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), including 26 deaths in the past 12 months alone. Furthermore, cervical cancer is not even in the top 10 cancers that kill American women every year. The death rate from cervical cancer in the United States is about 3 per 100,000 and most cervical cancer deaths occur in older women who have had chronic, undiagnosed and untreated HPV infection for many years.

Annual Screening Doesn’t Find More Cancer than Three-Year Screening

Despite the new PAP screen guidelines, most physicians continue to recommend annual PAP screening to their patients, mostly because they (and their patients) are in the habit of doing so. Some physicians also fear their patients will not come in for annual exams and other screening if the PAP is not required every year. But doing unnecessary testing is not the best way to convince women to get regular checkups.

Evidence shows that screening women for cervical cancer more frequently than every three years does not detect more cancer. Women, who have not been exposed to HPV, are not at risk for cervical cancer. Besides, it’s important to know that the immune response of the majority of women is strong enough to clear up HPV infection within two years without any intervention—in fact, this is what happens 90 percent of the time. Even the CDC admits to this fact on their website. Only certain varieties of HPV are high-risk. Two types (types 16 and 18) cause 70 percent of all cervical cancers. But these cervical cancers are very slow growing, which is why less frequent PAP screens are still effective.

But there is more to this story than meets the eye. The driving force behind this “new and improved” PAP schedule may have more to do with vaccine marketing than kind-heartedly saving you from stepping into the cold metal stirrups every year…

Are Women Just Pawns in the Gardasil Game?

There is a good deal of evidence that the revised PAP guidelines are part of a plan to rescue Gardasil vaccine sales, which are embarrassingly low. It’s estimated that only about one in four eligible women and girls have chosen to get all three HPV injections.

The vaccine is expensive, costing between $400 and $875 for the three-shot series. Studies show that cost-effectiveness of the vaccine is questionable, especially for women over age 20. Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health conducted a study, funded by the CDC, of the cost-effectiveness of HPV vaccination. They found that the older a woman is, the less cost-effective the vaccine will be. The findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2008.

The study assumes that Gardasil provides lifelong immunity against HPV. Cost effectiveness will be worse if the vaccine were actually found NOT to be as effective after 10 years, which may very well be the case… In fact, it’s a bit surprising that they would assume the vaccine would provide lifelong immunity. According to the National Cancer Institute, the vaccine has only been shown to provide protection against persistent cervical HPV 16/18 infections for up to 8 years.

The other issue is that mass use of Gardasil could put pressure on the HPV strains associated with cervical cancer that are not contained in the vaccine to become more dominant and cause cancer. One way to make the vaccine more cost-effective is to cut costs in other areas. So, the next question is, where can costs be cut?

PAP screens would be an obvious choice, and they do appear to be the sacrificial lamb in this case. In my review of the literature, I did in fact find many “versions” of the recommendation to cut back on the frequency of PAP screening in the name of making HPV vaccination more “cost-effective.”

Are Regulators Reducing PAP Smears to Rescue a Vaccine Flop?

It seems the HPV vaccine, once anticipated as the flagship vaccine of the 21^st Century, has fallen flat on its face. The industry hyped it as highly effective AND cost-effective—and, in both cases, it appears to be neither. So now they’re clamoring for a rescue plan, as evidenced by the following several documents. The first document is a 2006 white paper discussing implementation strategies for the HPV vaccine, in which the following recommendation is made (p.44):

“In the longer term, the introduction of an effective vaccine will undoubtedly change the balance of costs and benefits for routine screening. Policymakers should seriously consider changing the nature of screening regimens for vaccinated women (Trimble 2005, Lowndes and Gill 2005). For example, they might reduce the frequency of screening—even to as little as once per lifetime—or shift from Pap smears to HPV DNA testing (Harper 2005a, Lehtinen and Paavonen 2003, Shaw 2005).”

The white paper also suggests that giving HPV vaccine at age 12 (and the vaccine is licensed for children as young as nine years old!) is a way to reduce cancer rates and lower overall health care costs (p.39). Further evidence for financial motivation behind the revised PAP screen schedule can be found in this 2007 report, which discusses the costs of establishing this vaccine worldwide. On page 13, it says:

“Cost-effectiveness analyses can help decision makers determine how to optimally combine cervical cancer screening with HPV vaccination. For example, in the United States, a cost-effective approach would be to combine HPV vaccination with screening starting at age 25, conducted every three years (Goldie et al. 2004).”

The third document is a CDC report from 2010 that details costs associated with HPV vaccine implementation. It shows the cost-effectiveness of vaccinating 12-year-old girls and the declining cost-effectiveness as girls (and women) age.

An analysis by researchers at Stanford University went so far as to use mathematical models to predict how various PAP screening schedules (annually, or every 2, 3, 4, or 5 years) would affect your life expectancy, assuming you were HPV vaccinated (refer to Figure 5 in Stanford report). They concluded that PAP testing every 4 years will increase your life expectancy and reduce healthcare costs, provided you are vaccinated. Just how much more life will this buy you?

Drum roll please…

You may live an extra 2.8 days.

Yes, by getting the HPV vaccine and having PAPs every 4years, you can perhaps add one “long weekend” to your life, compared to the current recommended schedule, according to Stanford’s mathematical model. You’ll not add 2 years to your life, mind you, but 2.8days. Hopefully you won’t spend that long weekend getting treated for seizures, paralysis, blindness, blood clots, stroke or cardiac arrest—which are just some of the adverse effects reported from receivers of this vaccine. Adding a few days to your life won’t necessarily add more life to your days.

The Stanford researchers also noted that the more often you get PAPS, the longer your life expectancy will be, but more frequent PAPS increases costs substantially. So what they’ve done is made the argument that cutting back on PAP tests will cut down on costs.

I think you can see that this “new and improved” PAP screen schedule may have arisen more out of concern for the financial bottom line—the bottom line for Big Pharma and their shareholders, that is—rather than from genuine concern for women’s health.

All of these mathematical models assume that the HPV vaccine confers long-term immunity. However, there is some evidence this is not the case. According to the National Cancer Institute, the vaccine has only been shown to provide protection against persistent cervical HPV 16/18 infections for up to eight years, but some evidence suggests the induced immunity may wane in as little as five years.

If this is true, then it’s possible that the cost-effectiveness picture may be even LESS rosy than the bean counters have predicted. But what about the possibility that the vaccine could actually increase your risk for cervical cancer?

Evidence that Gardasil May Actually INCREASE Your Cervical Cancer Risk

A study in the Lancet poses this as a real possibility:

“Vaccinations alone will not prevent cervical cancer unless their efficacy is longer than 15 years; if the duration of efficacy is shorter and efficient boostering is not organized, the onset of the cancer in women is merely postponed… if even more young vaccinated adolescents mature into women who willfully refuse cervical cancer screening, the population rates of cervical cancer will increase.”

And according to Merck (Gardasil’s manufacturer), if you have already been exposed to HPV prior to receiving the vaccine, Gardasil has been found to increase your risk for precancerous (or worse) lesions by 44.6 percent.

Gardasil: From Flagship to Flop

There is absolutely no proof and no clinical trials that demonstrate Gardasil vaccines confers long term protection against development of cervical cancer. The studies were not done prior to licensure.

Pre-licensure clinical trials did not follow young girls or women for decades to establish how long they were protected. In fact, in clinical trials Gardasil’s protection against cell dysplasia leveled off at four years, and clinical trial participants were given a fourth dose to boost the number of antibodies measured in the blood of those vaccinated. So the efficacy being reported by Merck is based on clinical trials using four doses of the vaccine, even though patients are being given only three.

And, according to Dr. Diane Harper, a lead researcher for Gardasil, its efficacy against genital warts is only two years.

In a slide presentation in October of 2009 at an NVIC conference, Harper made the point that early vaccination may only postpone, not prevent, future cervical cancers, and that we cannot eradicate HPV.

I believe one of the reasons many women and girls are opting out of HPV vaccines, in addition to the high price tag, is they are becoming educated about the potential risks versus the benefits. And given the high rates of adverse reactions, it’s reasonable to assume a fair number of women are having bad reactions after their first or second shot, causing them to not return for the third.

Can Gardasil Lead to New Kinds of Cervical Cancer?

Gardasil confers immunity to only two of the 15 HPV strains that are associated with cervical cancer. This prompts a troubling question. Could the mass use of Gardasil (and the other HPV vaccine, Cervarix) put pressure on other HPV strains to become more dominant and perhaps more virulent in causing cervical cancer

This is a very real possibility and federal health officials and Merck already know that other HPV strains not contained in Gardasil vaccine could become more dominant and continue to cause disease. In fact, this “replacement effect” was discussed in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007 following the vaccine’s licensure and recommended universal use in 11-12 year old girls in 2006.

There is historical precedent that gives plenty of evidence that mass vaccination policies put pressure on infectious microorganisms to evolve and create new strains or substitute non-vaccine strains with other strains. The “replacement” effect has happened with other infectious organisms that have developed resistance to vaccines used on a mass basis, such as pertussis (whooping cough) and pneumococcal vaccines.

In effect, the mass use of HPV vaccines in the absence of adequate scientific evidence that the vaccine is safe, effective and will not lead to vaccine-resistant HPV strains, brings up this big question: Is this an uncontrolled medical experiment on young girls and women?

It seems to me that getting this vaccine is like playing “Russian Roulette” with your health. CNN Money had it right: the vaccine is a dud. And the new recommended reduced PAP screening schedule may just be the industry’s attempt to rescue it – but at what cost to the health of young girls and women in America?

Please don’t fall for the notion that an HPV vaccine of questionable safety and effectiveness can replace getting regular PAP screens. According to one of the world’s top experts on HPV, the HPV vaccine is associated with enough serious side effects that it could prove riskier than the cancer it is supposed to prevent in women, as cervical cancer is usually entirely curable when detected early through normal PAP screenings.

For More Information on HPV & Gardasil Vaccine

The National Vaccine Information Center has more information on HPV and Gardasil vaccine, including descriptions of Gardasil vaccine reactions and links to the Gardasil vaccine product manufacturer insert.

To search the federal VAERS database of Gardasil vaccine reaction reports to the federal government, see this link.

I also urge you to sign NVIC’s “Investigate Gardasil Risks Now!” petition.

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How Honest Is Your Doctor?

Posted on March 18, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

A U.S. telephone survey found that 79 percent of Americans trust their doctor.Only 8 percent said they do not … But can your doctor really be trusted?

Doctors are human, after all, and though most would certainly expect that their doctor is being upfront when it comes to health advice and diagnoses, it’s safe to say that humans are not perfect … nor are they always honest.

Study Reveals Some Physicians Not Always Open or Honest

The Charter on Medical Professionalism, which is endorsed by more than 100 professional groups worldwide, “requires openness and honesty in physicians’ communication with patients.”

A new study in Health Affairs presented data from a survey of nearly 1,900 physicians to see how well they follow this principle … The results were less than impressive, to put it mildly:

One-third of physicians did not completely agree with disclosing serious medical errors to patients
One-fifth did not completely agree that physicians should never tell a patient something untrue
Amazingly 40% believed that they should hide their financial relationships with drug and device companies to patients
Ten percent said they had told patients something untrue in the previous year

While most of the physicians surveyed did agree that they should “fully inform patients about the risks and benefits of interventions” as well as “never disclose confidential information to unauthorized persons,” in their entirety the findings cast serious doubt about the trustworthiness of the doctor-patient relationship. As the researchers stated:

“Our findings raise concerns that some patients might not receive complete and accurate information from their physicians, and doubts about whether patient-centered care is broadly possible without more widespread physician endorsement of the core communication principles of openness and honesty with patients.”

One Third of Doctors Won’t Tell You They Made a Mistake

If your doctor prescribes an inappropriate medication or gives you an incorrect diagnosis, would you want to know about it? Sure you would, but about one-third of doctors would rather stay “mum” for fear of being sued for malpractice. This may be in the best interest of your doctor, but it’s certainly not in your best interest, especially considering how common serious medical errors actually are.

A June 2010 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, which analyzed 62 million death certificates from 1979 to 2006 (the most recent year available), found that almost a quarter-million of those deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors. In an AMA article discussing the study, one co-author was quoted as stating that “medication errors are the second-leading cause of accidental death, and the only kind of accidental death that is increasing over time.”

An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the U.S. every year, and adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in 1 of 5 hospital patients. That is nearly HALF a MILLION people who die every year that don’t have to. The costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually — greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care.

Further, an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 found that 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care (some repeatedly) and over 63 percent of the injuries could have been prevented. In nearly 2.5 percent of these cases, the problems caused or contributed to a person’s death. In another 3 percent, patients suffered from permanent injury, while over 8 percent experienced life-threatening issues, such as severe bleeding during surgery.

In all there were over 25 injuries per 100 admissions! In other words you have a one in four chance of getting injured if you are admitted to the hospital, not very good odds by any stretch. Worse still, if you do suffer from a medical error, about one in three doctors may not own up to the mistake, which means you’ll have no way of knowing if your new symptoms or health problems are actually the result of inappropriate medical care …

40% of Doctors Believe Their Ties to Drug Companies are None of Your Business …

It’s shocking that nearly half of physicians feel they should not have to disclose their financial relationships with drug and device companies to patients, even though it’s well known that these relationships can and do influence your doctor’s medical advice.

Drug reps are taught tactics specifically to manipulate doctors for industry benefit; it’s a standard part of their training because doctors are essentially their “dealers.” If you think your physician will be able to see past these persuasive tactics, think again — and it’s not about intelligence or even ethics. Your physician may be very intelligent, and he or she may have every intention of NOT listening to a drug rep’s sales pitch. I can tell you from personal experience when I was practicing and actually seeing drug reps, my intention was to be impartial but it was very easy to have my prescription writing patterns influenced by their interactions.

But maybe they just want to take advantage of the free samples they’re handing out to offer them to her patients. And there the rep gets a foot in the door, and even if he doesn’t say another word is able to keep a certain drug’s name upfront in this physician’s mind. And maybe they’ll drop off a few pens and pads of paper, also with the drug’s name, in case it starts to wear off.

Some physicians are even on the drug industry payroll, and make extra money providing lectures to other physicians to recommend, prescribe, and dispense their medications. An ongoing investigation by ProPublica revealed that 12 drug companies paid $761.3 million to physicians for consulting, speaking, research and other expenses in 2009, 2010 and, for some, the beginning of 2011 — and that represents only the disclosed payments. In all actuality, this figure is probably far too low.

Despite the commonality of this practice, I suspect many Americans would be surprised to learn that many thousands of doctors (and researchers and other medical experts) — some of whom you probably depend on to provide unbiased information and advice pertaining to your health care — receive large amounts of supplemental income from drug companies. And it turns out that many doctors would prefer to keep this information quiet as well …

Medicare Fraud Caught on Tape

Some health care providers may not only withhold information, but may be involved in downright fraud. An undercover investigation by ABC News revealed a case where an active 82-year-old woman was diagnosed with medical conditions she did not have, and even labeled as homebound, presumably so the physician and home health care company could bill Medicare for thousands of dollars for (unnecessary) home health care services.

In reality, the woman was healthy, aside from hypertension and arthritis, exercised regularly and even enjoyed line dancing on occasion — far from the frail, homebound senior she was portrayed as on the paperwork sent to Medicare.

Money can be a powerful motivator when it comes to physicians’ decisions regarding patient care. In her book “ Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer,” Shannon Brownlee explains that spinal fusion surgery for low back pain is one such example, often recommended as it’s one of the “more lucrative procedures in medicine” — even though the best success rate for spinal fusions is only 25 percent!

Angioplasties and certain types of chemotherapy with similar low success rates are just as prone to be ordered, Brownlee says, because that’s where hospitals’ investments lie. You see, they have all this equipment and they need to use it to get a return on it – but they also need to get you out of there as quickly as possible, so they can get the next patient in. What ensues is a type of aggressive patient therapy that can end in disaster: according to the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services, 1 in 7 Medicare recipients will be harmed every year as a result of the medical care they received in the hospital.

10% of Doctors Lie to Their Patients …

Even if you give the physician the benefit of the doubt, and assume the lies were “white lies” meant to soften the blow of bad news or give a patient hope, it’s hard to excuse this behavior. The study’s lead author, Dr. Lisa Lezzoni, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, told ABC News that while some doctors lied for self-protection, others did so for the “patient’s benefit.” ABC News reported:

“MDs might spare an anxious patient from hearing about the slightly abnormal results of a lab test, for example, if it has no impact on the patient’s health. Conversely, the doctor might exaggerate a health result in hopes of motivating a patient to take better care of himself. Doctors who sugarcoat patients’ prognoses may do so to soften the blow of bad news and help them remain hopeful about their potential recovery. Also, short office visit times may preclude the long and emotional discussions that accompany the delivery of difficult medical news, so doctors may say what they can to avoid causing the patient pain.”

Still, even if well intentioned, health care is not an area where people want fibs and half-truths … Not to mention, being fully informed is an essential part of taking control of your health … ABC News continues:

” … as well-intentioned as their fibs may be, other studies consistently show that patients prefer the truth, and would rather hear harsh news than remain ignorant about a dire medical condition. Being fully informed is a way that patients can cope and prepare for whatever might occur.”

Your Doctor is Your Guide, but You’re in Control of Your Health

When making health care decisions, you should certainly get your physicians’ advice — that’s what you’re paying them for, after all. Hopefully you have chosen a health care provider who has similar philosophies about health as you do, and whose expertise you can trust. But remember that ultimately it’s important that you, as a medical consumer, be your own advocate when it comes to health care decisions.

You can do this by:

Asking questions when your doctor orders tests: what is each test for? Who will do the test? Are there any side effects? What if you don’t get the test – how necessary is it to your care? Is the test “just to be sure,” or is there a proven, scientific reason for doing it?
If your doctor wants to do a procedure after the tests come back, ask the same questions all over again, including: Do you have a definitive diagnosis justifying the procedure? Are there any negative effects that I need to know about this procedure? What is the success rate of this procedure? What is the worst-case scenario if we simply don’t do it?
If you go ahead with the tests and procedures, and your doctor wants to do a surgery or other type of intervention as a result, ask the same questions once more, and then:
Ask, do I NEED these tests/procedures/surgery, or do you simply suggest them – and if so, for what reasons? And, what if I don’tget this test/procedure/surgery? Are there alternatives?

I admit some of these questions seem repetitive. But they need to be asked each and every time, for every single test performed on you. Remember, it’s not only YOUR decision whether to get any or all of these tests and procedures, but your RIGHT to seek a second opinion somewhere else if you don’t feel comfortable with the options you’re given.

It’s your body and your decision if you want to opt for less medical intervention while choosing a more natural way of healing your body. Ideally, seek a health care practitioner who will help you move toward complete wellness by helping you discover and understand the hidden causes of your health challenges … and create a customized and comprehensive — i.e. holistic — treatment plan for you, one that involves lifestyle changes that empower you to promote health and healing naturally.

If your physician is not open to such options, and only recommends drugs or surgical solutions again and again, it may be time to find one who is. You trust your physician with the most important asset you have — your health — so it’s crucial that you establish an open and honest relationship from the start.

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He Murdered a Friend After Taking This Best-Selling Drug

Posted on March 13, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

A Canadian judge has ruled that a teenage boy murdered his friend because of the effects of Prozac.

The ruling will not be appealed.

The decision has revived the debate regarding the widespread prescription of antidepressants to young people.

Justice Robert Heinrichs ruled that the 15-year-old boy was under the influence of the medication when he stabbed and killed a close friend.

He was sentenced to 10 months on top of the two years he had already spent in jail.

“Prozac is meant to curb the effects of depression, but Justice Heinrich concluded it set off a steady deterioration in the young murderer’s behavior,” CCHR reports.

“He had become irritable, restless, agitated, aggressive and unclear in his thinking,” the judge said.

“It was while in that state he overreacted in an impulsive, explosive and violent way. Now that his body and mind are free and clear of any effects of Prozac, he is simply not the same youth in behavior or character.”

Should Antidepressants Carry Black Box Warning for Homicidal Tendencies?

In 2004, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided SSRI antidepressants must carry a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal tendencies. But what about violence and homicidal tendencies? Despite mounting evidence that antidepressants and certain other drugs can induce violent behavior and has led to the tragic death of spouses, family members and friends, the FDA has done nothing to warn or curb the use of such drugs.

According to CCHR:

“It is well documented that psychiatric drugs, particularly antidepressants, can cause a host of violent side effects including mania, psychosis, aggression, violence, and in the case of the antidepressant Effexor, homicidal ideation … [P]eople with no prior history of violence (or suicide) became homicidal and suicidal under the influence of antidepressants. … However, despite all the documented violence-inducing side effects of these drugs, the FDA has never issued black box warnings on antidepressants causing violence or homicide despite the fact that at least 11 recent school shootings were committed by kids documented to be on or in withdrawal from psychiatric drugs.”

The expert testimony in this case was supplied by Dr. Peter Breggin, an outspoken critic of psychiatric drugs. The featured article quotes him as saying:

“These drugs produce a stimulant or activation continuum… That continuum includes aggression, hostility, loss of impulse control … all of which are a prescription for violence.”

Other still feel the link between antidepressants and homicide is thin, but I can’t help but wonder if that’s just because they’re refusing tolook at the evidence and give it the attention it deserves. The CCHR website includes a helpful search feature, allowing you to search for all sorts of reports and research relating to psychiatric drugs and their side effects. It took 13 years before the FDA finally agreed SSRI’s can cause suicidal thoughts and behavior. How many decades-worth of evidence will have to mount up before the apparent link to uncontrolled violence and homicide is addressed?

Your Genes May Predispose You to Homicidal Side Effects of Antidepressants

Interestingly, in related news, a 2011 study published in Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine has found that certain genes may predispose you to homicidal behavior following exposure to antidepressants. Both sudden withdrawal from antidepressants and continuing to take them was found to worsen the problem. According to the study’s authors:

“… The results presented here concerning a sample of persons given antidepressants for psychosocial distress demonstrate the extent to which the psychopharmacology industry has expanded its influence beyond its ability to cure.

… [T]he Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (Star *D) study … found that antidepressants were only marginally (2.7%) more efficacious compared with placebos. The same meta-analyses documented profound publication bias, inflating their apparent efficacy as well as bias in failing to report the negative results … The authors argue for a reappraisal of the current recommended standard of care of depression.” [Emphasis mine]

What they discovered is that many people being treated with antidepressants can’t metabolize them due to common genetic mutations, which can cause severe drug interactions and akathisia (a movement disorder characterized by a feeling of inner restlessness). Some researchers and physicians believe that akathisia is the chief symptom that triggers impulsive violence in certain individuals who take antidepressant drugs. This is thought to be an extreme form of akathisia. Homicidal impulses and murderous behavior due to akathisia is now being called “homicidal akathisia.”

Forensic psychiatrist and lead author of the study, Dr. Yolande Lucire, is now campaigning to introduce ways of minimizing over-prescription of antidepressants by taking genetics into account. Of 129 subjects, more than 120 of them were diagnosed with akathisia/serotonin toxicity caused by psychiatric medications. The authors further explain:

“They were tested for variant alleles in CYP450 genes, which play a major role in Phase 1 metabolism of all antidepressant and many other medications. Eight had committed homicide and many more became extremely violent while on antidepressants. … All those described [in the paper] were able to stop taking antidepressants and return to their previously normal personalities.”

Antidepressants Top List of Most Violence-Inducing Drugs

It’s certainly worth paying heed to drug interactions such as violence and homicidal leanings, both as a patient and as a concerned parent, family member or friend. According to a 2010 study published in the journal PLoS One, half of the top 10 drugs disproportionately linked with violent behavior are antidepressants:

Varenicline (Chantix): The number one violence-inducing drug on the list, this anti-smoking medication is 18 times more likely to be linked with violence when compared to other drugs
Fluoxetine (Prozac): This drug was the first well-known SSRI antidepressant
Paroxetine (Paxil): Another SSRI antidepressant, Paxil is also linked with severe withdrawal symptoms and a risk of birth defects
Amphetamines: (Various): Used to treat ADHD
Mefoquine (Lariam): A treatment for malaria which is often linked with reports of strange behavior
Atomoxetine (Strattera): An ADHD drug that affects the neurotransmitter noradrenaline
Triazolam (Halcion): This potentially addictive drug is used to treat insomnia
Fluvoxamine (Luvox): Another SSRI antidepressant
Venlafaxine (Effexor): An antidepressant also used to treat anxiety disorders
Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq): An antidepressant which affects both serotonin and noradrenaline

Is Usage of these Drugs Ever Appropriate?

Depression, or more accurately, un-repaired emotional short-circuiting, can absolutely devastate your health and life. However, using antidepressants as the primary (or only) treatment option is simply not advisable, especially if the one suffering from depression is a child or teenager. Whereas severe depression can indeed progress to suicide if left untreated, antidepressant drugs have been shown to CAUSE both suicidal and homicidal thoughts and behaviors. As mentioned in the featured report, at least 11 tragic school shootings were done by children who were either on antidepressants, or going through withdrawal…

I believe this is an enormous price to pay for what amounts to highly questionable benefits.

Studies have found that up to 75 percent of the benefits of antidepressants could be duplicated by a placebo. So not only do these drugs not work as advertised, but the evidence is quite clear that most of these drugs do in fact increase your risk of suicide and violence. Since depression can be a terminal illness, why take a drug that will actually increase your risk of killing yourself—or someone else?

Please understand that I am not seeking to diminish the impact of mental illness. It is massively pervasive and responsible for tens of thousands of deaths every year and needless suffering in millions of others.

My clinical experience leads me to believe that the only appropriate use of these dangerous medications is as a last ditch effort when the patient is at a serious risk to themselves or others. (And, of course, they must be closely monitored for lethal side effects such as suicidal and/or homicidal thoughts and tendencies!) The drugs should be continued until the condition is under control and they are out of harm’s way, and then carefully weaned. This is a very similar strategy to going to the ER and seeing an orthopedic surgeon for a cast when you’ve fractured a major bone.

You don’t use that cast the rest of your life. You use it until your bone is healed.

The REAL tragedy is that most of the drug companies do NOT view antidepressants this way. There are enormous marketing efforts to classify normal behavior as aberrant or diseased, which then requires lifelong therapy with their drug solution.

How to Address the Root Cause of the Problem

I strongly believe that energy psychology is one of the most powerful tools for resolving emotional issues—specifically a technique called EFT—and I’ll be talking more about that in a moment.

But diet and general lifestyle are clearly parts of the “root” that must be healed if you want to resolve mental health issues. For example, mounting evidence tells us that having a healthy gut is profoundly important for both physical and mental health, and the latter can be severely impacted by an imbalance of intestinal bacteria. I strongly recommend addressing the following lifestyle factors if you’re suffering from depression or any other mental health problem.

Dramatically decrease your consumption of sugar (particularly fructose), grains, and processed foods. (In addition to being high in sugar and grains, processed foods also contain a variety of additives that can affect your brain function and mental state, especially MSG, and artificial sweeteners such as aspartame.) There’s a great book on this subject, The Sugar Blues, written by William Dufty more than 30 years ago, that delves into the topic of sugar and mental health in great detail.
Increase consumption of probiotic foods, such as fermented vegetables and kefir, to promote healthy gut flora
Get adequate vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 deficiency can contribute to depression and affects one in four people.
Optimize your vitamin D levels, ideally through regular sun exposure. Vitamin D is very important for your mood. In one study, people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were found to be 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels.

The best way to get vitamin D is through safe exposure to SUNSHINE. Remember, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is a type of depression that we know is related to sunshine deficiency, so it would make sense that the perfect way to optimize your vitamin D is through sun exposure, or a safe tanning bed if you don’t have regular access to the sun.

Get plenty of animal-based omega-3 fats. Many people don’t realize that their brain is 60 percent fat, but not just any fat. It is DHA, an animal based omega-3 fat which, along with EPA, is crucial for good brain function and mental health⁷. Unfortunately, most people don’t get enough from diet alone. Make sure you take a high-quality omega-3 fat, such as krill oil.

Dr. Stoll, a Harvard psychiatrist, was one of the early leaders in compiling the evidence supporting the use of animal based omega-3 fats for the treatment of depression. He wrote an excellent book that details his experience in this area called The Omega-3 Connection.

Evaluate your salt intake. Sodium deficiency actually creates symptoms that are very much like those of depression. Make sure you do NOT use processed salt (regular table salt), however. You’ll want to use an all natural, unprocessed salt like Himalayan salt, which contains more than 80 different micronutrients.
Get adequate daily exercise, which is one of the best-kept secrets to preventing and overcoming depression.
Get adequate amounts of sleep. You can have the best diet and exercise program possible but if you aren’t sleeping well you can easily become depressed. Sleep and depression are so intimately linked that a sleep disorder is actually part of the definition of the symptom complex that gives the label depression.

New Research Shines Light on the Benefits of EFT

Additionally, it’s imperative to address any underlying emotional issues. I have been a fan of energy psychology for many years, having witnessed its effectiveness in my medical practice and in my own personal life. EFT, as opposed to drugs and supplements, hits at the root of the problem—even if you don’t know exactly what that is. This is the beauty of energy medicine in general—and anyone can learn to apply EFT to themselves, even a young child.

In the following videos, Julie Schiffman, a licensed EFT practitioner at my Center for Natural Health in Chicago, guides you through how to tap for headaches and other pain. As you will see, by simply altering your statements you can use this tapping technique to address virtually any ailment you may be experiencing at any point in time.

Unfortunately, studies have been few and far in-between as science has been trying to “catch up” with clinical experience. But all of that is changing now!

Before I go any further, I want to stress the importance of getting professional help if you suffer from depression, and that includes seeing a qualified EFT therapist. Although you can learn how to do EFT in a few minutes it can take years to apply it effectively. The best therapists are typically those with conventional psychological training who have studied this in addition to conventional methods. There are times where hospital admission may be necessary to prevent a suicide attempt and untrained therapists will not be able to discern this danger.

If the first therapist can’t help you, I recommend seeking out another. Getting a second opinion is pretty standard when it comes to medicine, and this is no different. The connection between you and your doctor or therapist can have a great influence on the success of your treatment or therapy.

As for the success rate of EFT, several studies have recently been published, demonstrating just how safe and effective EFT really is. For example, the following three studies show remarkable progress in a very short amount of time for people with a history of trauma:

A 2009 study of 16 institutionalized adolescent boys with histories of physical or psychological abuse showed substantially decreased intensity of traumatic memories after just ONE session of EFT.
An EFT study involving 30 moderately to severely depressed college students was conducted. The depressed students were given four 90-minute EFT sessions. Students who received EFT showed significantly less depression than the control group when evaluated three weeks later.
A study of 100 veterans with severe PTSD (Iraq Vets Stress Project) showed an astounding reduction of symptoms after just six one-hour EFT sessions. After completing six sessions, 90 percent of the veterans had such a reduction in symptoms that they no longer met the clinical criteria for PTSD. Sixty percent no longer met PTSD criteria after only three EFT sessions. At the three-month follow-up, the gains remained stable, suggesting lasting and potentially permanent resolution of the problem.

[The Iraq Stress Project is still recruiting veteran volunteers. If you are a veteran and interested in participating, you can get more information here.]

Operation Emotional Freedom

In a new documentary film entitled Operation: Emotional Freedom, directed by Eric Huurre, a number of Veterans and their families went through intensive therapy using EFT. The results were truly astounding. EFT developer Gary Craig, along with other EFT practitioners worked very closely with Veterans who recently returned home from war. They were all suffering from PTSD, depression, anxiety and a few were suicidal.

At the end of treatment, each one of them describes a new feeling of peace and hope that there is help and they were able to overcome emotional traumas experienced in combat.

This film is a close look at the current state of health care for combat veterans diagnosed with PTSD. The film is about examining the myths and misconceptions surrounding the medical/chemical approach to treating emotional conditions and why drugs are not “the answer” that pharmaceuticals promise. Instead, the story follows this group of volunteer Vets and their families on a journey from the hell of their post-war experiences through a newer vision of health and recovery for PTSD and trauma.

Visit the official website www.operation-emotionalfreedom.com to learn more about efforts to assist veterans and their families through energy psychology.

Clearly, energy psychology beats pharmaceuticals HANDS DOWN as a safer, more effective, longer-lasting treatment for stress and emotional problems. And there have been EFT successes with a wide range of other issues—both emotional and physical. EFT is easy to learn, no matter what your age—children included—so I encourage you to add it to your stress-busting tool kit.

In closing, please remember that your emotional health is intimately connected with your physical health, which is largely controlled by diet and lifestyle choices and your reactions to stress. These daily habits have enormous impact, whether you want to overcome depression or just continue enjoying great health. So please, actively investigate and consider the natural treatments I’ve suggested above, ideally with the support and guidance of a knowledgeable natural medicine friendly healthcare practitioner.

Important Concluding Thoughts…

I want to make something abundantly clear before I leave you. I know firsthand that depression is devastating. It takes a toll on the healthiest of families and can destroy lifelong friendships. Few things are harder in life than watching someone you love lose their sense of joy, hope, and purpose in life, and wonder if they will ever find it again. And to not have anything within your power that can change things for them. You wonder if you will ever have your loved one “back” again.

It’s impossible to impart the will to live to somebody who no longer possesses it. No amount of logic, reasoning, or reminders about all they have to live for will put a smile back on the face of a loved one masked by the black cloud of depression.

Oftentimes you cannot change your circumstances. You can, however, change your response to them. I encourage you to be balanced in your life. Don’t ignore your body’s warning signs that something needs to change. Sometimes people are so busy taking care of everybody else that they lose sight of themselves.

There are times when a prescription drug may help restore balance to your body. But it’s unclear whether it is the drug providing benefits, or the unbelievable power of your mind that is convinced it is going to work.

If you have been personally affected by depression, my heart goes out to you.

A broken body can be easier to fix than a broken mind. Depression is real. It is my hope that you don’t feel judged here, but that you are encouraged and inspired by those who have been there.

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How FDA and Big Pharma Mislead Millions into taking Dangerous Anti-Depressants

Posted on March 7, 2012 by andreas m

By: Paul Fassa
Source: NaturalNews.com

The anti-depressant fraud toothpaste is out of the tube, at least partly. A Harvard Medical School psychologist, Irving Kirsch, who has been studying placebo effects for three decades, recently came up with the documented conclusion that pharmaceutical anti-depressants don’t work.

This is big news for many Natural News readers and writers. But this conclusion had the prescription-pad psychiatrists and FDA crying foul, loudly. Why? Kirsch’s conclusion was featured in a national CBS 60 Minutes television report.

Even more importantly, Kirsch’s conclusion was evidence based on documents from obtained using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Those documents were trial results from drug companies that were not published and presented to the FDA.

Drug companies pay the FDA for approving their drugs. But the FDA doesn’t do the trials or reports. They simply take them from the drug companies who all do their own trials and decide which reports to publish and submit.

Kirsch discovered that most anti-depressant trials showed no proof of efficacy. Those results were simply hidden from view. So if 12 tests were done, and only two showed any efficacy at all, those two would be submitted to the FDA, and the FDA would essentially say “pay your fee and go to market.”

After analyzing the results of all the tests he was able to procure via FOIA, Kirsch concluded that anti-depressant drugs had only a placebo effect on patients with mild to moderate depression. In other words, a sugar pill would suffice. He went public with this conclusion.

CBS did a limited hangout

A limited hangout is intelligence spook speak for letting out just enough information to appease investigations or grass roots suspicions. But only part of the picture is revealed, not the whole big picture.

CBS did not reveal the horrible side effects from anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs. They did interview a British medical official who was part of a UK commission that banned anti-depressant use on mild to moderately depressed patients.

He reasoned that since most moderately depressed patients can be handled by talk therapy and physical exercise, why expose them to the risk of adverse effects. Sixty Minutes didn’t follow up on that angle.

Here in the States, where pharmaceuticals are advertised in newspapers and magazines, radio, and especially TV, anyone seeing happy actors proclaiming how and an anti-depressant changed their lives can almost demand that drug from even a primary care physician, and usually get it.

Even Medscape lists these side effects from SSRI and SNRI anti-depressants: Abnormal bleeding, hepatitis, headache, hyponatrenia (potentially deadly low sodium), toxic epidermal necrolysis (potentially deadly skin death), impotence, abnormal sensations, mania and suicide.

These are not your normal mild nausea or mild rash side effects. While some quit those drugs in time, the last few side effects especially have led to a very high rate of suicides and homicides among anti-depressant pill poppers.

As Heidi Stevenson of Gaia-Blog said, “Can we finally put to rest any claims from psychiatry that what they do is based on evidence, especially the so-called gold standard of placebo-controlled double blind studies … Please?”

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FDA admits Statin Drugs cause Diabetes, Memory Loss

Posted on March 5, 2012 by andreas m

By: Jonathan Benson
Source: NaturalNews.com

All those doctors and medical experts who have expressed support for handing out statin drugs like candy or adding them to drinking water supplies may want to take a gander at new safety data published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to the agency’s website, the FDA has issued new labeling guidelines for statin drugs warning users that the medications can cause memory loss, elevated blood sugar levels, and type-2 diabetes, in addition to muscle damage and liver disease.

Patients taking Altoprev (lovastatin extended release), Crestor (rosuvastatin), Lescol (fluvastatin), Lipitor (atorvastatin), Livalo (pitavastatin), Mevacor (lovastatin), Pravachol (pravastatin), Zocor (simvastatin), Advicor (lovastatin / niacin extended-release), Simcor (simvastatin / niacin extended-release), and Vytorin (simvastatin / ezetimibe) will want to be aware of these potentially life-altering side effects, which are receiving little attention from the mainstream media.

“The reports about memory loss, forgetfulness and confusion span all statin products and all age groups,” writes the FDA on its website. And concerning diabetes, the FDA writes that “raised blood sugar levels and the development of Type 2 diabetes have been reported with the use of statins.”

Being careful not to offend its Big Pharma overlords, though, the FDA was quick to reassure the public that the new guidelines are not all that serious, and that patients should still keep taking their medications. And yet out of the other side of its bureaucratic mouth, the FDA is basically admitting that statin drugs are high-risk drugs, which most obviously precludes implementing any of the asinine recommendations made in recent months that everyone, including healthy individuals, should take statin drugs.

Back in 20’0, for instance, so-called experts out of Imperial College London openly proclaimed that statin drugs should be handed out to customers at fast food restaurants for free. This recommendation was made, of course, in spite of the fact that statin drugs harm far more people than they supposedly help, and have a long history of causing liver damage, kidney failure, and other serious conditions.

“The number of patients needed to be treated (with statin drugs) to reduce one death in three years is over ’00,” write Kenneth W. Thomas, ‘on Gilbert, and Gerd Schaller in their book Side “ffects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel. “This means that 99 people take [statins] for several years and get absolutely no benefit.”

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The Liver Flush and Medication

Posted on March 4, 2012 by andreas m

By Andreas Moritz

Hi, this is Andreas Moritz and today I would like to discuss whether medication can interfere with liver flushes, and I have written in my book that it is advisable not to do liver flushes unless you are off medication, and the reason for that is because medication, any kind of medical drug, pharmaceutical drug, interferers with the liver’s ability to remove toxins.

While doing the liver flushes the body is enhancing that ability, so the liver is relaxed, the bile ducts are relaxing, the liver is increasing the bile secretion in order to get rid of any accumulated stones that inhibit the bile flow and make it more difficult for the body to digest food and to eliminate toxins and waste products.

When you take any mediation such as high blood pressure medication or even an insulin injection or anything that interferes with the body’s natural functioning, by suppressing some of these functions, like an immune suppressant in order to reduce inflammation in the body, an anti-inflammatory drug, steroid hormones, hormonal drugs, antibiotic, anything that suppresses something in the body will also suppress the ability of the liver to detoxify the blood, to remove waste products from the blood stream and from the tissues in the body, indirectly though, because when the liver is not able to remove toxins from the blood stream, then the body is also not able to remove toxins and waste products such as lactic acid, uric acid, urea from the tissues that are basically caused or produced by the cells in the body, the so-called metabolic waste products.

So when you take medication while you are also doing a liver and gallbladder flush, you may find that you are not secreting or passing a lot of stones, and in addition, you might become nauseated or feel sick and throw up the oil mixture that you are ingesting. So I tend to be hesitant in recommending that you do liver flushes while you are still also taking medication.

The other problem with medication is that if you are dependent on a certain dosage to keep your blood pressure suppressed for a certain length of time, if you are doing a liver flush, you might find that the liver is reducing or removing that dosage from the blood stream by becoming more efficient, you may suddenly find that the medication is no longer working as designed and this can create fluctuations that shouldn’t happen so quickly, suddenly you might find that the blood pressure is going up rapidly, and that is something I don’t recommend.

If you are weaning yourself off any medication, it should be done very, very gradually and not as quickly, as it could happen if you do a liver and gallbladder flush.

The liver and gallbladder flush can eventually clear up high blood pressure and related issues simply by decongesting the body, by removing contaminants, and therefore the body no longer has to have high blood pressure in order to push the required amount of nutrients and oxygen through the blood vessels into the cells.

So if there is an abnormal blood pressure, medication is not the best answer to control that, you can control it but it does not really deal with the root causes of the high blood pressure which is progressive or prolonged congestion in the body, so it’s better to deal with the underlying congestion, open up the ducts and channels of elimination and circulation in the body that include the colon, the bile ducts in the liver of course, the blood vessel walls which can become more narrow by eating certain foods such as animal proteins, which can cause thickening of the basal membranes of the blood vessel walls, which then can lead to inflammation in the blood vessels, and when inflammation occurs, there could be blood clots that are formed, and in order to protect the heart from any blood clots moving into the heart and causing heart attack, the body will produce more cholesterol that can be attached to these lesions and wounds to prevent blood clots form being released into the blood.

So the body is very, very careful in always protecting some of the most important organs, most vital organs such as the heart and the kidneys from causing severe damage that the person may not be able to recover from.

So when the body is raising the blood pressure it is actually better to allow the body to do that than artificially reducing the blood pressure, which can damage the kidneys, can cause liver damage, and cause more problems than it can actually resolve.

So, I am very careful, there is actually studies to show that people who take high blood pressure medication are not any better off than those who don’t take high blood pressure medication for their high blood pressure; and in fact, taking high blood pressure (medication) eventually leads to chronic heart failure, congestive heart failure, which is a very slow death process that I would not want anyone to experience.

So, once again, if you are attempting the liver flushes, I recommend you don’t take any medication, particularly during the preparation period and during the actual liver and gallbladder flush, the Day Six of the preparation. If you can wean yourself off, that is the best way, I obviously cannot make such a recommendation to anyone, you need to consult with your medical doctor, it’s always good to do that under supervision and not do it yourself, but in my opinion, medications are not necessary, there are alternatives, decongesting the body, cleansing the body, nourishing yourself better, exposing your skin to the sun on a regular basis which takes care of 67% of the health problems that most people suffer from according to the latest research, including heart disease, cancer, joint problems such as arthritis, osteoporosis and many others.

So it’s better to take recourse to natural means to further your health, than unnatural means which always interferes with the functions of the very important organs including the liver, heart, brain and nervous system, and the kidneys and the intestines.

This is my advice, if you are doing a liver flush and you are taking medication, you might have to deal with undesirable consequences, that’s why I am very, very cautious about recommending liver flushes while you are on medication.

Thank you.

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Vaccines for Everything: Researchers now on Brink of Developing Salmonella Jab

Posted on March 2, 2012 by andreas m

By: Ethan A. Huff
Source: NaturalNews.com

The vaccine industry is currently hard at work trying to churn out a vaccine for salmonella, a typically food borne pathogen that thrives on factory farms and in other unsanitary settings. CBS 13 News in Sacramento reports that researchers from the University of California, Davis, have been tasked with developing a vaccine that supposedly prevents salmonella, which these researchers say they are on the verge of completing in the very near future.

Rather than attempt to address the root causes of salmonella, which include filthy animal living conditions on industrial farms and the overuse of synthetic antibiotics in conventional livestock, just to name a few, mainstream science is busy concocting new ways to jab people with toxic chemical cocktails that could permanently injure them.

Funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Stephen McSorley and his team of international researchers believe that by closely studying the immune response to infection in mice, they will be able to arrive at a solid vaccine protocol for “curing” salmonella. And their findings thus far, which were recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, seem to indicate that the project is moving forward as planned.

Not surprisingly, Big Pharma is behind this ludicrous endeavor to develop a vaccine for an illness that is largely preventable through improved hygiene, small-scale agriculture, and naturally-boosted human immunity. Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and the Novartis Vaccines Institute for Global Health are both collaborators on the project, which is expected to soon move into human clinical trials.

The development of this new salmonella vaccine appears to also align directly with the vision of a group of researchers in the U.K. who last summer called for the development of 20 new vaccines in the next decade. Their paper, which was published in the journal Lancet, seeks funding for the development of vaccines “beyond classic infections,” including for things like diabetes, degenerative diseases, and even cancer.

So by the looks of it, there could soon be vaccines for virtually everything — a headache, an upset stomach, a paper cut, you name it. Anything mainstream medicine can identify that is a consequence of a underlying condition rather than a cause of it is open game for vaccine development because there is a whole lot of money to be made utilizing this approach to so-called medicine.

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Why Are More than One in Ten Americans at Risk for Suicide?

Posted on February 19, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Thoughts of suicide are disturbingly common among Americans, which is detailed in the report, the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), newly released by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

While one in five Americans experienced some sort of mental illness in the past year (rising to nearly 30 percent among 18-25-year olds), 8.7 million contemplated suicide.

Approximately 2.5 million people took their suicidal thoughts a step further and made plans to carry out the suicide, whereas 1.1 million actually attempted it.

Suicide is a Leading Cause of Death

It’s estimated that a person commits suicide every 15 minutes in the United States, and each day just over 100 people take their own lives.

For each of these suicide deaths, an estimated 8-25 people made suicide attempts.

Taken together, the latest preliminary 2010 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists intentional self-harm, or suicide, as the 10th leading cause of death in the United States.

In all, nearly 37,800 suicide deaths were reported in 2010, a number the CDC notes is likely underestimated.

Suicide deaths can occur at any age, but young people, especially those between the ages of 18 and 25 are most likely to have suicidal thoughts, according to the NSDUH report. If you have watched or read any news lately, it is likely you have heard some of the tragic stories about young people committing suicide.

Lately, media focus has been drawn to children killing themselves as a result of being bullied, which has sparked numerous debates and new anti-bullying legislation in a number of states. But bullying is only one factor…

This is also a primary age range of military personnel, another subset of the population that has alarmingly high rates of suicide. Since the start of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, more than 1,100 soldiers have taken their lives, including a record 301 in 2010 alone. In July 2011, the Army reported 32 soldiers had committed suicide, which is the highest monthly suicide toll yet reported. In the case of soldiers, many have clearly suffered emotional trauma from the experience of battle, but other youth are struggling with their own feelings of desperation and despair.

It is truly disheartening that so many of our youth feel hopeless enough to take their own lives. It makes it doubly tragic that so many parents must endure the mental anguish of losing a child—especially losing a child to suicide. So what is behind this tragic epidemic?

More Than 90 Percent of People Who Commit Suicide Suffer From This…

If you have a family history of suicide, have been exposed to suicidal behavior (such as from other family members or friends) or have suffered/witnessed physical or sexual abuse or domestic violence, your risk of suicidal behavior increases.

However, the primary risk factor is the existence of another mental condition, such as depression, often in combination with substance abuse. It’s estimated that more than 90 percent of those who end up taking their own lives fit into this category. Depression can indeed progress to suicide if left unaddressed, but the knee-jerk conventional treatment for the condition is almost exclusively prescription antidepressants.

Every year, more than 253 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled in the United States, making them the second most prescribed drug class in the United States (second only to cholesterol-lowering drugs). This includes use among children, where in the U.S. kids are getting three times more prescriptions for antidepressants and stimulants, and up to double the amount of antipsychotic drugs than kids from Germany and the Netherlands.

But how effective are antidepressants in alleviating the symptoms of depression?

Antidepressants are Often Ineffective and May Increase Your Suicidal Tendencies

Studies continue to show antidepressant drugs are no more effective than a placebo, and in some case less effective. A study published in the January 2010 issue of JAMA concluded there is little evidence that SSRIs (a popular group of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft) have any benefit to people with mild to moderate depression. Researchers stated:

“The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo… may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms.”

SSRIs were found to be 33 percent effective, just like a sugar pill—but with far more adverse effects, including violence and suicidal thoughts and actions. There is much evidence that antidepressants intensify violent thoughts and behaviors, both suicidal and homicidal, especially among children. And, since the late 1980s, there have been frequent reports of increased violent behavior, including homicides and suicides, among individuals taking antidepressant drugs.

A newly published study provides a plausible theory about how a genetic mutation in the CYP450 gene family can cause a metabolic disturbance resulting in uncontrollable violent impulses and behaviors, including suicide, in some individuals taking these drugs.

So if you or your child are taking an antidepressant drug, it’s important to be aware that suicidal thoughts may be a side effect. But they are not the only drugs to watch out for. Other medications also linked to increased suicide risks include:

The stop-smoking drug Chantix
Accutane, an acne drug
Singulair, an allergy drug
Certain epilepsy drugs
Tamiflu, a flu drug
Cholesterol-lowering drugs

Emotional Factors to be on the Lookout For

While the role of medications (particularly antidepressants) in suicide cannot be ignored, neither can the emotional component. Mental and emotional problems exact an extreme toll on family units and in some cases extended circles of friends. I’ve personally been a witness to the struggles of two people near and dear to me who suffered from deep chronic depression for a number of years that actually resulted in multiple suicide attempts.

Interpersonal conflicts are often a core problem behind suicidal behaviors and depression (which is the number one contributing factor to suicide if left untreated).

For instance, it is a fact that suicide rates rise as the economy worsens, and in the elderly social isolation is a factor (especially among elderly men who have recently lost their spouse). Situational stress, such as bullying or gender identity issues, is a major risk factor among youth (for instance, LGBT teens (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) are far more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers). And one review of 37 studies from around the world, which explored bullying and suicide risk, concluded that children who are victims, perpetrators, or even witnesses to bullying have an increased risk for suicidal thoughts.

Below are listed other examples of extremely stressful life situations that may increase the risk of suicide (this is certainly not a comprehensive list):

Loss of a significant relationship or death of a loved one
Diagnosis of a terminal illness
Loss of financial security or livelihood
Loss of home or employment
Abuse, rape or other serious emotional trauma

If someone close to you has recently endured a hardship, or you have noticed a change in their behavior, how can you tell when ordinary stress or sadness has progressed to a potentially suicidal level? Besides straightforward or “sideways” comments about not wanting to live any longer, some of the red flags that a person has a high risk for self-harm include:

If you think someone is suicidal, do not leave him or her alone. Most suicide attempts are expressions of extreme distress, not harmless bids for attention. A person who appears suicidal needs immediate professional help. Help the person to seek immediate assistance from their doctor or the nearest hospital emergency room, or call 911. Eliminate access to firearms or other potential suicide aids, including unsupervised access to medications.

Long-Term Strategies for Improving Your Mental Health

If you are feeling desperate or have any thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a toll-free number 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or call 911, or simply go to your nearest Hospital Emergency Department. You can’t make long-term plans for lifestyle changes when you are in a crisis!

First let someone help you through the crisis—then you can deal with your depression later, when you’re feeling more resourceful. Before I delve into the lifestyle strategies that can support optimal mental and emotional health, please understand that I am not seeking to diminish the impact of mental illness, nor belittle those of you who feel you have been helped by antidepressant drugs.

My intention is to increase your awareness of the risks of these drugs, as well as highlight the fact that they are not usually the best solution. My clinical experience leads me to believe that the only appropriate use of antidepressant drugs is as a last ditch effort when the patient is at a serious risk to themselves or others. The drugs should be continued until the condition is under control and the person is out of harm’s way.

This is a very similar strategy to going to the ER and orthopedic surgeon for a cast when you are in an accident and fracture a major bone. You don’t use that cast for the rest of your life. You use it until your bone is healed.

The REAL tragedy is that most of the drug companies do NOT view antidepressants this way. There are enormous marketing efforts underway to classify normal behavior as aberrant or diseased, which then requires lifelong therapy with their drug “solution.”

That said, my top tips to support positive mental health are as follows:

Energy psychology is one of the most powerful tools for resolving emotional issues—specifically a technique called EFT. The effectiveness of any energy psychology technique will be significantly improved if you combine it with the tips that follow.
Dramatically decrease your consumption of sugar (particularly fructose), grains, and processed foods. (In addition to being high in sugar and grains, processed foods also contain a variety of additives that can affect your brain function and mental state, especially artificial sweeteners.)
Adequate vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 deficiency can contribute to depression and affects one in four people.
Optimize your vitamin D levels, ideally through regular sun exposure. Vitamin D is very important for your mood. One study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels.The best way to get vitamin D is through exposure to SUNSHINE, not swallowing a tablet. Remember, SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is a type of depression that we know is related to sunshine deficiency, so it would make sense that the perfect way to optimize your vitamin D is through sun exposure, or a safe tanning bed if you don’t have regular access to the sun.
Plenty of animal-based omega-3 fats. Omega-3 fats are crucial for optimal brain function and mental health, and most people don’t get enough from diet alone. So make sure you take a high-quality omega-3 fat, such as krill oil.
Evaluate your salt intake. Sodium deficiency actually creates symptoms that are very much like those of depression. Make sure you do NOT use processed salt (regular table salt), however. You’ll want to use an all natural, unprocessed salt like Himalayan salt, which contains more than 80 different micronutrients.
Adequate daily exercise. Exercise is one of the best-kept secrets to preventing depression.
I have been educating the public about the underreported, adverse effects associated with lowering cholesterol through drugs like statins for many years, but what many still do not know is that low cholesterol is linked to dramatically increased rates of suicide and parasuicide, as well as aggression towards others.

This increased expression of violence towards self and others may be due to the fact that low membrane cholesterol decreases the number of serotonin receptors in the brain (which is approximately 30% cholesterol by weight). Lower serum cholesterol concentrations therefore may contribute to decreasing brain serotonin, which not only contributes to suicidal-associated depression, but prevents the suppression of aggressive behavior and violence towards self and others.

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Whitney Houston Yet Another Victim of Pharmaceutical Drug Industry

Posted on February 14, 2012 by andreas m

By: Mike Adams
Source: NaturalNews.com

The regretful passing of an American entertainment icon — Whitney Houston — marks yet another sad milestone in the devastating body count of the prescription drug industry. TMZ is now reporting that Whitney Houston was found not with illegal drugs, but prescription drugs that may have killed her or caused her to drown in the bathtub.

Houston had “a plethora of sedatives including Lorazepam, Valium, Xanax, and a sleeping medication that was found in her hotel room,” reports Radar Online.

“The prescription drugs were officially taken into custody by the Beverly Hills Police Department,” the website reported. An autopsy has yet to be performed, and it will reportedly provide more conclusive information about the actual cause of death.

Whitney Houston was also taking Xanax, a psychiatric anti-anxiety drug

According to Fox News, Houston’s family members said she was taking Xanax, a powerful psychtropic drug. As NaturalNews has reported many times, mind-altering drugs are known to cause erratic behavior and suicidal thoughts.

Although Xanax is not an SSRI drug, its side effects include:

• Aggression
• Rage and hostility
• Twitches and tremors
• Mania, agitation

An overdose of Xanax may cause:

• Dizziness
• Fainting
• Coma
• Death

Xanax is widely promoted throughout that DSM-IV, the “bible” of modern psychiatry which promotes the use of prescription amphetamines to children (among other bizarre chemical recommendations).

Whitney Houston showed clear signs of pharmaceutical adverse effects

“[Houston,] who struggled with drug and alcohol abuse in her later life, made a bizarre appearance just two evenings before,” reports US Magazine.

At a pre-Grammys party at Tru Hollywood Thursday evening, the beloved Grammy-winning singer seemed “wasted” and “moody” as she exited the club past midnight, according to a witness. “She reacted angrily to the security guards trying to get her into her car…and started cussing them out.”

Although the superstar smiled when fans approached her for autographs, “she would get moody again in a split second,” the observer says. “It was sad because her fans noticed that she was really shaky as she left the venue. She definitely was not in control of herself.”

This is the behavior of a person who is using either prescription psychiatric drugs or recreational drugs (or perhaps both in combination). That this was observed with Houston on multiple occasions is very strong evidence that these drugs were altering her brain function and thereby radically altering her personality and behavior.

Heath Ledger was also killed by pharmaceuticals

You may recall the death of beloved actor Heath Ledger, who was killed by prescription medications in 2008.

Remember: for every celebrity death caused by prescription drugs, there are hundreds of thousands of deaths of everyday people from prescription drugs, too. In fact, according to published scientific statistics:

Prescription drugs kill over 200,000 Americans every year – even when taken as directed and not abused!

The number of people killed by prescription drugs absolutely dwarfs the number killed by alleged acts of terrorism (9/11 in particular). And while America has gone crazy with “security checkpoints,” TSA agents reaching down your pants, nullification of the Bill of Rights and other outrageous government encroachments on your freedom to fight the so-called “war on terror,” the government does absolutely nothing to address the holocaust of prescription drug deaths happening every single day.

Whitney Houston is just one of countless Americans who are victims of Big Pharma, an industry that cares far more about corporate profits than it does about the lives of real people. And today, we have lost yet another iconic American artist whose life was cut short by addiction, prescription drugs and the entire “medication culture” that exists in America today.

Whitney Houston will be missed. May her death serve as an urgent call for ending the scourge of mind-altering psychotropic drugs and ending the failed “War on Drugs” that tries to criminalize drug addicts rather than helping them heal.

Learn more about the dangers of psychiatric drugs at:
www.CCHRint.org

Read more about the failed War on Drugs at:
www.NORML.org

See Alex Jones’ comments on Whitney Houston’s death via prescription drugs (he’s right on target, covering the same angles as NaturalNews, on the same day!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqeGDDAu3yw

It’s time to start helping drug addicts rather than throwing them behind bars

NaturalNews calls for the decriminalization of recreational drugs followed by the treatment of drug addicts and abusers through health-oriented support services (including nutrition) rather than the criminal justice system.

It is time to empty the prisons of non-violent drug offenders and compassionately offer them addiction treatment programs. As written today, our laws would condemn Whitney Houston as a felony criminal rather than someone who was only guilty of being caught up in a cycle of substance abuse and prescription drug dependence.

It is time to stop treating addiction as a criminal offense and start helping people rather than throwing them behind bars. If society’s response to drug addiction and abuse were based more in health and compassion rather than revenge and punishment, Whitney Houston might very well still be alive today, along with countless other victims of the pharmaceutical and recreational drugs industries.

Even famous singer Tony Bennett echoes this call. In an urgent and outspoken plea made last night, Tony Bennett called for the decriminalization of drugs so that drug addicts can seek help legally and compassionately, without being thrown behind bars and marginalized by society. “First it was Michael Jackson, then Amy Winehouse, now, the magnificent Whitney Houston,” said Bannett (Hollywood Reporter). “I’d like every person in this room to campaign to legalize drugs.”

This doesn’t mean that NaturalNews or Tony Bennett supports the recreational use of such drugs. I am 100% against recreational drug use, and I don’t use such drugs myself. But I also understand that drug use is a behavioral and chemical addiction, not a criminal act. The solution is found in decriminalizing drugs, regulating their distribution like alcohol, and offering treatment, addiction recovery and nutritional consultation programs for those suffering from drug addiction.

Drug users are not criminals! They are people who need medical help, counseling, nutrition and compassion. Calling them “criminals” only becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that keeps the police state in power while doing nothing to end drug addiction.

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Kills More People Than Heart Disease or Cancer (But Hardly Anyone Knows)

Posted on February 14, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

The latest data on the leading causes of death in the United States has been released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The report, which is based on 2010 data, lists the 10 leading causes of death as follows:

Diseases of the heart
Cancer
Chronic lower respiratory diseases
Cerebrovascular diseases (stroke)
Accidents (unintentional injuries)
Alzheimer’s disease
Diabetes mellitus
Nephritis, nephritic syndrome and nephrosis (kidney disease)
Influenza and pneumonia
Intentional self-harm (suicide)

In an analysis, 24/7 Wall St. determined that the costs to the economy for these top 10 causes, including not only direct medical care but also the indirect loss of productivity, amounts to a whopping $1.1 trillion!

However, there is one leading cause of death that was left off of this list, and when that is factored in the costs to the economy, and the death toll itself, is actually even higher.

The CDC Left Conventional Medical Care Off of Their Death List — It Should be #1

Over a decade ago, Professor Bruce Pomerance of the University of Toronto concluded that properly prescribed and correctly taken pharmaceutical drugs were the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S. More recently, an article authored in two parts by Gary Null, PhD, Carolyn Dean, MD, ND, Martin Feldman, MD, Debora Rasio, MD, and Dorothy Smith, PhD, describes in excruciating detail how the modern conventional American medical system has bumbled its way into becoming the leading cause of death and injury in the United States.

From medical errors to adverse drug reactions to unnecessary procedures, heart disease, cancer deaths and infant mortality, the authors took statistics straight from the most respected medical and scientific journals and investigative reports by the Institutes of Medicine (IOM), and showed that on the whole, American medicine caused more harm than good.

In 2010 (the same year from which the CDC data came), years after the original article was written, an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine piqued my interest – as the researchers found that, despite efforts to improve patient safety in the past few years, the health care system hasn’t changed much at all.

Instead, 18 percent of patients were harmed by medical care (some repeatedly) and over 63 percent of the injuries could have been prevented. In nearly 2.5 percent of these cases, the problems caused or contributed to a person’s death. In another 3 percent, patients suffered from permanent injury, while over 8 percent experienced life-threatening issues, such as severe bleeding during surgery.

In all there were over 25 injuries per 100 admissions! In my update to the original Death by Medicine article, you can get an idea of just how deadly the conventional medical care system actually is:

In a June 2010 report in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, study authors said that in looking over records that spanned from 1976 to 2006 (the most recent year available) they found that, of 62 million death certificates, almost a quarter-million deaths were coded as having occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors.
An estimated 450,000 preventable medication-related adverse events occur in the U.S. every year.
The costs of adverse drug reactions to society are more than $136 billion annually — greater than the total cost of cardiovascular or diabetic care.
Adverse drug reactions cause injuries or death in 1 of 5 hospital patients.
The reason there are so many adverse drug events^v in the U.S. is because so many drugs are used and prescribed – and many patients receive multiple prescriptions at varying strengths, some of which may counteract each other or cause more severe reactions when combined.

How Many Deaths by Medicine are Disguised as Other Causes?

Another issue is just how many “accidents” or “suicides” are actually the result of accidental drug overdoses. Prescription drugs are now killing far more people than illegal drugs, and while most major causes of preventable deaths are declining, those from prescription drug use are increasing — and this is according to the CDC’s own data.

In 2009, there were nearly 4.6 million drug-related visits to U.S. emergency rooms nationwide, with more than half due to adverse reactions to prescription medications – most of which were being taken exactly as prescribed.

Further, between 2001 and 2008, there was a 36 percent increase in hospital admissions, and a 28 percent increase in emergency room visits, among children 5 and younger who had accidentally ingested medication. ER visits for ingestion of prescription opioid painkillers, such as Oxycodone, increased 101 percent! So it is unclear how many deaths from accidental drug overdose are classified as accidents or suicides.

The 9th and 11th Top Killers Might Also be Linked to Medical Care

The 11th leading cause of death according to the CDC is septicemia (sometimes called blood poisoning), which is bacteria in your bloodstream that is often caused by an infection in your body — an infection that is often acquired in the hospital! A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that sepsis and pneumonia caused by hospital-acquired infections killed 48,000 patients and ramped up health care costs by over $8 billion in 2006. The study also found that 20 percent of people who developed sepsis died; 11 percent of those who developed pneumonia died.

Pneumonia is the 9th leading cause of death, and in some cases may again be related to the high risk of acquiring an infection should you enter the hospital.

A different study in 2006 showed that “central-line-associated” bloodstream infections^xi caused by catheters placed directly into veins resulted in a $26,839 loss for each patient that came down with this type of hospital-acquired infection. This same study estimated that 2 million people come down with hospital-acquired infections of any type in every year, and that approximately 100,000 die from those infections. Despite their high death toll, hospital-acquired infections make no appearance in the CDC’s report.

Most of the Leading Causes of Death are Preventable

Most chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, are largely preventable with simple lifestyle changes. Even infectious diseases like the flu can often be warded off by a healthy way of life.

Imagine the lowered death toll, not to mention costs to the economy, if more people decided to take control of their health … heart disease and cancer alone accounted for 47 percent of deaths in the United States in 2010, and there are many strategies you can implement to lower your risk of these diseases … and most of the leading causes of death in the United States.

The added bonus to this is that the healthier you are, the less you will need to rely on conventional medical care, which is a leading cause of death. So what does a “healthy lifestyle” entail?

Proper Food Choices

For a comprehensive guide on which foods to eat and which to avoid, see my nutrition plan. Generally speaking, you should be looking to focus your diet on whole, unprocessed foods (vegetables, meats, raw dairy, nuts, and so forth) that come from healthy, sustainable, local sources, such as a small organic farm not far from your home.

For the best nutrition and health benefits, you will want to eat a good portion of your food raw. Personally, I aim to eat about 80-85 percent of my food raw, including raw eggs and humanely raised organic animal products that have not been raised on a CAFO (confined animal feeding operation).

Nearly as important as knowing which foods to eat more of is knowing which foods to avoid, and topping the list is fructose. Sugar, and fructose in particular, acts as a toxin in and of itself, and as such drive multiple disease processes in your body, not the least of which is insulin resistance, a major cause of accelerated aging.

Comprehensive Exercise Program, including High-Intensity Exercise like Peak Fitness

Even if you’re eating the healthiest diet in the world, you still need to exercise to reach the highest levels of health, and you need to be exercising effectively, which means including not only core-strengthening exercises, strength training, and stretching but also high-intensity activities into your rotation. High-intensity interval-type training boosts human growth hormone (HGH) production, which is essential for optimal health, strength and vigor. I’ve discussed the importance of Peak Fitness for your health on numerous occasions, so for more information, please review this previous article.

Stress Reduction and Positive Thinking

You cannot be optimally healthy if you avoid addressing the emotional component of your health and longevity, as your emotional state plays a role in nearly every physical disease — from heart disease and depression, to arthritis and cancer. Effective coping mechanisms are a major longevity-promoting factor in part because stress has a direct impact on inflammation, which in turn underlies many of the chronic diseases that kill people prematurely every day. Meditation, prayer, social support and exercise are all viable options that can help you maintain emotional and mental equilibrium.

Proper Sun Exposure to Optimize Vitamin D

We have long known that it is best to get your vitamin D from sun exposure, and if at all possible, I strongly urge you to make sure you’re getting out in the sun on a daily basis. Vitamin D plays an important role in preventing numerous illnesses ranging fromcancer to the flu.

The important factor when it comes to vitamin D is your serum level, which should ideally be between 50-70 ng/ml year-round. Sun exposure or a safe tanning bed is the preferred method for optimizing vitamin D levels, but a vitamin D3 supplement can be used as a last resort. Most adults need about 8,000 IU’s of vitamin D a day to achieve serum levels above 40 ng/ml, which is still just below the minimum recommended serum level of 50 ng/ml.

High Quality Animal-Based Omega-3 Fats

Animal-based omega-3 fat like krill oil is a strong factor in helping people live longer, and many experts believe that it is likely the predominant reason why the Japanese are the longest lived race on the planet.

Avoid as Many Chemicals, Toxins, and Pollutants as Possible

This includes tossing out your toxic household cleaners, soaps, personal hygiene products, air fresheners, bug sprays, lawn pesticides, and insecticides, just to name a few, and replacing them with non-toxic alternatives.

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This Common Medical Mistake Speeds Your Aging and Chills Your Sex Drive

Posted on February 13, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Dr. Stephanie Seneff is a senior scientist at MIT where she’s conducted research for over three decades, and has published hundreds of papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

She also has an undergraduate degree in biology from MIT, and a minor in food and nutrition.

I’ve previously published two articles detailing Dr. Seneff’s groundbreaking views on sulfur andcholesterol—both of which are important in relation to the discussion in this segment about statin drugs.

If you missed the previous two segments, I highly recommend reviewing them now in order to get a more complete picture of how vitamin D, dietary cholesterol, and statin drugs work in tandem to affect your health, for better or worse.

What makes Dr. Seneff uniquely qualified to talk about statins is not clinical experience but rather her expertise in mining and evaluating the available research to reach conclusions about health.

Why it’s So Difficult to Learn the Truth about Statin Drugs…

One of the papers Dr. Seneff wrote was on the detrimental impact of low cholesterol and statin drugs on Alzheimer’s disease.

“I was very interested in the connection between Alzheimer’s and low cholesterol… and statins in particular because they lower cholesterol, [which is] going to make that problem worse,” she says.

Her paper was summarily rejected.

“Part of the grounds of rejection had to do with the mention of statins,” Dr. Seneff explains. “So we took out all the mentions of statins and resubmitted the paper to a different journal, and then it got accepted. You can read this paper in the European Journal of Internal Medicine.”

This is a classic example of what’s wrong with the current paradigm. The pharmaceutical industry effectively controls the entire health care system, from research to publication to education.

“I think many people are aware that they cannot get their paper published in one of the high end journals if it mentions something negative about statins,” Dr. Seneff says. “It’s extremely difficult to get such papers accepted by these journals because of the influence of the statin industry on the journal. I think that’s a very serious problem.”

Many Doctors are Shockingly Ill- or Misinformed about Statin Risks

Shockingly, one in four Americans over the age of 45 is now taking these drugs, and few are properly warned about the related health risks. Part of the problem is that many doctors are not even aware of all the risks. Needless to say, this is not entirely surprising when you consider how difficult it is for any researcher to publish negative findings about this class of drugs!

A study published last spring highlighted this dilemma.

Most disturbingly, the researchers found that physicians were lacking in awareness of the teratogenic risks (ability to cause fetal malformations) of statins and other cardiovascular drugs they prescribed for their pregnant patients. The study followed an earlier report, which had concluded statins should be avoided in early pregnancy due to their teratogenic capability. An even earlier 2003 study had already established that cholesterol plays an essential role in embryonic development, and that statins could play a part in embryonic mutations or even death…

Indeed, it’s difficult to look at these facts and not reach the conclusion that the pharmaceutical industry is quite willing to sacrifice human lives for profit. Statins are in fact classified as a “pregnancy Category X medication”, meaning, it causes serious birth defects, and should NEVER be used by a woman who is pregnant or planning a pregnancy.

“It disturbs me greatly that they are prescribing statins to women in their reproductive years and the doctor doesn’t even bother to tell the woman that statins are class X for pregnancy, just like thalidomide,” Dr. Seneff says. “[Statin drugs] cause severe damage to the neural tube in the embryo—likely leading to a miscarriage if you’re lucky, because otherwise you’ll have an extremely disabled child. I don’t understand why they’re not making this clear to women!”

Cholesterol is Essential for a Healthy Pregnancy

Besides the direct harm caused by the drug, it’s also important to understand that cholesterol sulfate is essential for babies in utero, and this is one of the reasons Dr. Seneff states that you do not want your cholesterol levels to be too low.

A woman has about 1.5 units of cholesterol sulfate normally in her blood. When she gets pregnant, her blood levels of cholesterol sulfate steadily rise, and it also begins to accumulate in the villi in the placenta—which is where nutrients are transferred from the placenta to the baby. At the end of pregnancy the cholesterol sulfate in the villi rises to levels of about 24 units—a dramatic rise! This is also why it’s especially important to get plenty of sun exposure before and during pregnancy, to make sure you’re optimizing not only your vitamin D levels, but also your sulfur levels, as the two are connected.

Did You Know? Statins Can Also Cause Diabetes and Heart Failure…

Another discovery is that statins can cause diabetes. One of the most recent pieces of evidence for this came from a meta-analysis published in September last year.^v The analysis looked at 72 trials which together involved close to 160,000 patients. It found that statin treatments significantly increased the rate of diabetes and liver damage.

But that’s not all. Dr. Seneff also points out that statins make you age faster in general, causing muscle weakness, arthritis, mental decline, and even heart failure. It’s worth noting that “heart failure” is a different disease category from “cardiovascular disease,” despite the fact that both involve your heart.

“That’s why I think they keep talking about cardiovascular disease,” Dr. Seneff says. “They’re careful to use that term… which is very convenient because then people don’t realize it’s the statins that are causing the heart failure!”

Indeed. Few would assume that a drug taken to prevent cardiovascular disease would be a major cause of heart failure, but that’s exactly what appears to be happening. Considering the fact that conventional medicine has been telling us that heart disease is due to elevated cholesterol and recommends lowering cholesterol levels as much as possible, Dr. Seneff’s claims may come as a complete shock:

“Heart disease, I think, is a cholesterol deficiency problem, and in particular a cholesterol sulfate deficiency problem,” she says.

Heart Disease More Likely Caused by Cholesterol Deficiency Rather than Excess!

Through her research, Dr. Seneff has developed a theory in which the mechanism we call “cardiovascular disease” (of which arterial plaque is a hallmark) is actually your body’s way to compensate for not having enough cholesterol sulfate. To understand how this works, you have to understand the interrelated workings of cholesterol, sulfur, and vitamin D from sun exposure.

Cholesterol sulfate is produced in large amounts in your skin when it is exposed to sunshine. When you are deficient in cholesterol sulfate from lack of sun exposure, your body employs another mechanism to increase it, as it is essential for optimal heart- and brain function. It does this by taking damaged LDL and turning it into plaque. Within the plaque, your blood platelets separate out the beneficial HDL cholesterol, and through a process involving homocysteine as a source of sulfate, the platelets go on to produce the cholesterol sulfate your heart and brain needs. However, this plaque also causes the unfortunate side effect of increasing your risk of cardiovascular disease.

So how do you get out of this detrimental cycle?

Dr. Seneff believes that high serum cholesterol and low serum cholesterol sulfate go hand-in-hand, and that the ideal way to bring down your LDL (so-called “bad” cholesterol, which is associated with cardiovascular disease) is to get appropriate amounts of sunlight exposure on your skin.

She explains:

“In this way, your skin will produce cholesterol sulfate, which will then flow freely through the blood—not packaged up inside LDL—and therefore your liver doesn’t have to make so much LDL. So the LDL goes down. In fact… there is a complete inverse relationship between sunlight and cardiovascular disease – the more sunlight, the less cardiovascular disease.”

What this also means is that when you artificially lower your cholesterol with a statin drug, which effectively reduces the bioavailability of cholesterol to that plaque but doesn’t address the root problem, your body is not able to create the cholesterol sulfate your heart needs anymore, and as a result you end up with acute heart failure…Backing up this theory is the fact that in the first decade statin drugs were on the market, from 1980 to 1990, the incidence of heart failure doubled. And heart failure keeps going up right along with the increased use of statins…

“It is very clear to me that statins are causing heart failure,” Dr. Seneff says.

Statins Impair Numerous Biological Functions

Statin drugs also interfere with other biological functions, including an early step in the mevalonate pathway, which is the central pathway for the steroid management in your body. Products of this pathway that are negatively affected by statins include:

All sterols, including cholesterol and vitamin D (which is similar to cholesterol and is produced from cholesterol in your skin)
All your sex hormones
Cortisone
The dolichols, which are involved in keeping the membranes inside your cells healthy
Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which is critical to the energy generation in the Krebs cycle in the cell

Why You MUST Take a CoQ10 Supplement if You’re on Statin Therapy

The depletion of CoQ10 is particularly troublesome, and may be one of the primary driving mechanisms behind many of the more horrific side effects of statins. CoQ10 is used by every cell in your body, but especially your heart cells. Cardiac muscle cells have up to 200 times more mitochondria, and hence 200 times higher CoQ10 requirements, than skeletal muscle. So if you take a statin drug, taking a CoQ10 or ubiquinol (the reduced version) supplement is absolutely imperative in order to limit the damage. As mentioned by Dr. Seneff, premature aging is a side effect of statin drugs, and it’s also a primary side effect of having too little CoQ10. Deficiency in this nutrient also accelerates DNA damage, and because CoQ10 is beneficial to heart health and muscle function this depletion leads to fatigue, muscle weakness, soreness and, again, heart failure.

As for dosage, Dr. Graveline, a family doctor and former astronaut, made the following recommendation in a previous interview on statins and CoQ10:

If you have symptoms of statin damage such as muscle pain, take anywhere from 200 to 500 mg
If you just want to use it preventively, 200 mg or less should be sufficient

In my view it is medical malpractice to prescribe a statin drug without recommending one take CoQ10, or better yet ubiquinol. Unfortunately, many doctors fail to inform their patients of this fact.

If You’re Over 25, the Reduced Form of CoQ10 May be Better

If you’re under 25 years old your body is capable of converting CoQ10 from the oxidized to the reduced form. However, as you age, your body becomes more and more challenged to convert the oxidized CoQ10 to ubiquinol. Aside from aging, numerous other factors can also impact this conversion process, including:

If you’re over 40, I would highly recommend taking the reduced form of coenzyme Q10 because it’s far more effectively absorbed by your body. Some reports say your CoQ10 level decline becomes apparent as early as your 20′s, however, so I generally recommend it from age 25 and beyond. If you’re younger than 25, your body should absorb regular CoQ10 just fine.

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Drug Firm Agrees to Pay One Billion Dollars in Major Scandal

Posted on February 12, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

A nearly decade-long civil investigation into the fraudulent marketing of Johnson & Johnson’s antipsychotic drug Risperdal may soon be coming to a close, with the drug giant agreeing to pay more than $1 billion to the United States and individual states to resolve the matter.

Negotiations over a criminal plea are still ongoing, and individual states may choose to pursue their own cases rather than join in to the federal government’s settlement.

This means J&J may be liable for far more money… considering the state of Texas alone is asking for more than $1 billion over Risperdal marketing.

In most cases, a billion-dollar (or more) fraud settlement would be a death-sentence for a business, but for the drug industry, it’s just another cost of doing business.

J&J Markets Drug for Unapproved Uses to Boost Profits at the Expense of Patients’ Health

At the heart of the latest settlement is J&J’s, and particularly their Janssen unit’s, attempt to market Risperdal for bipolar disorder, dementia, mood and anxiety disorders, when it had only been approved, initially, for psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.

Of course, only so many people have schizophrenia, so marketing the drug for the slew of conditions noted above boosted their customer base tremendously. Never mind that it wasn’t approved for those conditions …

J&J’s Janssen sent out an army of salespeople to doctor’s offices, nursing homes, Veteran’s Administration facilities, and jails to tout Risperdal as a proverbial miracle drug for mental illness and dementia. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told the company to stop the false and misleading marketing claims not once, not twice, but three times from 1994-2004, but the company reportedly continued to include marketing the drug for unapproved uses right in their business plan. In the years to follow, the FDA did eventually approve Risperdal for bipolar disorder and autism symptoms, but it was never approved for dementia (even though it was heavily marketed as a dementia drug).

In 2006, research showed that up to two-thirds of prescriptions for Risperdal were for unapproved uses that had little or no scientific support. Worse yet, elderly dementia patients who were prescribed Risperdal for off-label uses were found to increase their chances of death by 54 percent within the first 12 weeks of taking it!

Other research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found Risperdal is no more effective than a placebo, and is associated with a long list of potentially devastating side effects.

The study included 123 veterans with PTSD who received Risperdal, and another 124 who received a placebo. After six months of treatment, about 5 percent of the participants in both groups recovered, and between 10-20 percent in each group reported minor improvement. According to the lead author, Dr. John H. Krystal, who is also the director of the clinical neurosciences division of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD:

“We didn’t find any suggestion that the drug treatment was having an overall benefit on their lives.”

So it appears in many cases the joke is on the patient — who takes a drug for no benefit, and is exposed to serious risks of side effects, some of which may be permanent, including:

And all the while, Johnson & Johnson is laughing all the way to the bank. More serious side effects include:

Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome, which can be fatal
Hormone disruption (including breasts producing milk and breast development in males)
High blood sugar and diabetes

Drug Companies are the Top Thugs of the Medical World

Johnson & Johnson is no stranger to being slapped with billion-dollar lawsuits. You probably don’t need to be reminded of all the recalls this company has had over the years with its pain products, specifically Motrin, Tylenol and Fentanyl (pain killer patches). The fact that Johnson & Johnson has paid out over $1 billion in the last few years in fines and judgments alone probably comes as no surprise either.

But did you know that in May 2011 the company pleaded guilty to illegally promoting its epilepsy drug Topamax for psychiatric purposes, and in so doing, settled a civil lawsuit in the case for $75 million? You probably didn’t realize, either, that last January the U.S. Department of Justice accused Johnson & Johnson of paying tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks to Omnicare Inc to buy and recommend Johnson & Johnson drugs.

This latest scheme is the subject of a federal lawsuit that has 18 states suing not just Omnicare, but 14 other major drug companies, alleging that they ran this scheme together.

The bottom line is this: pharmaceutical companies – the same ones you trust to safely manufacture medications that could alter your very life – are the top corporate criminals on the planet, and this is not unique to only Johnson & Johnson. A large number of pharmaceutical companies are guilty of fraud, cover-ups of fatal side effects, and huge kickbacks paid to doctors.

Charges run the gamut from international price-setting, illegal marketing, false claims, hiding serious problems with their drugs and, in one case (Ortho, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson), obstruction of justice and eight counts of persuading employees to destroy documents in a federal investigation.

Yet toxic drugs designed, manufactured, and peddled by these top criminals are what the medical industry and government health agencies try to pass off as the “best” route to good health … despite the fact that pharmaceutical drugs, taken as prescribed, are also directly responsible for the death of at least 125,000 people annually, on top of everything else.

What Common, Illegal Drug Company Practice Earned the Most Penalties from the U.S. Government in the Last 20 Years?

Off-label drug promotion! By scouring through comprehensive databases of all major criminal and civil settlements between federal and state governments and pharmaceutical companies occurring between 1990 and 2010, the Public Citizen’s Health Research Group made some sobering discoveries.

For example, they revealed the illegal practice that has earned the largest amount of financial penalties levied by the U.S. government:

“Of the 165 settlements comprising $19.8 billion in penalties during this 20-year interval, 73 percent of the settlements (121) and 75 percent of the penalties ($14.8 billion) have occurred in just the past five years (2006-2010).

… The practice of illegal off-label promotion of pharmaceuticals has been responsible for the largest amount of financial penalties levied by the federal government over the past 20 years. This practice can be prosecuted as a criminal offense because of the potential for serious adverse health effects in patients from such activities.

Deliberately overcharging state health programs, mainly Medicaid fraud, has been the most common violation against state governments and is responsible for the largest amount of financial penalties levied by these governments. This type of violation is also the main factor in the considerable increase in state settlements with pharmaceutical companies over time.”

I have also done some of my own research into the biggest wrong-doers. The chart below shows the type of criminal activity, lawsuits and fines or judgments I was able to find for six drug companies. Keep in mind that these are conservative numbers as many records are not available without a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Also, many are not readily available online unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, and what year.

What We Can Learn From How Doctors Choose to Die

What is perhaps most poignant of all of this is not the fact that corporations could be engaged in so much fraud and deception – it is the fact that so many have embraced the products of these deceptions as veritable life lines.

In the face of illness, we are taught, often from a young age, that pharmaceuticals are the answer. In reality, your own body has healing potential that is, in many cases, far superior to that offered by synthetic drugs, provided it is given the proper tools to harness its healing potential. Yet, those who are at the front lines – the doctors themselves – will often choose to forgo these “solutions” because, quite simply, they’ve seen the cycle before. Oftentimes, drugs only serve to create more problems – new symptoms and serious, sometimes deadly, side effects with little or no measurable benefit.

In fact, in the face of death, many doctors will choose to skip drugs and medical interventions entirely, choosing, instead, to die naturally. Ken Murray, MD, a Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC, said it well in a recent essay:

“It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

… To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.”

The truth is, you cannot trust that the companies making your medications have your best interest at heart. Their behavior is among the most criminal on the planet! The only way to avoid all risk, including death, from prescription drugs is to not take them at all. It is your body, not your doctor’s and not your pharmacist’s, so it is up to you to make the decision of what drugs to take, if any. Be SURE you are aware of the risks of any medication prescribed to you, and weigh them against any possible benefit. Then you can make a well-informed decision of whether it’s a risk you’re willing to take.

Of course, of paramount importance is also taking control of your health so you can stay well naturally, without the use of drugs or even frequent conventional medical care. If you adhere to a healthy lifestyle, you most likely will significantly reduce your need for medications in the first place.

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Even Pediatricians want Suicide Warning Placed on ADHD Drugs

Posted on February 5, 2012 by andreas m

By: Alexander Frantzis
Source: NaturalNews.com

Both ADHD’s diagnosis and treatment with mild altering psychiatric drugs have been frequently contested topics. Much of the vague criteria for diagnosis is highly subjective, as many of the symptoms associated with the “disorder” are obvious consequences of forcing young children inundated with fast past entertainment to sit still in a boring class room. Equally, many other causes linked to the condition (food dyes and sodium benzoate for instance being major dietary culprits) are excluded from conventional discussions on the disorder.

Like many other psychiatric conditions ADHD has been medicalized with treatments centering around drugs of dubious safety or efficacy. Diagnoses of ADHD have skyrocketed in recent years, with 3-5% of the global population now carrying the label. A harsh class of psychiatric drugs has in turned follow to address this epidemic.

Ritalin for instance, an amphetamine shown to be more potent than its pharmacological cousin cocaine, is prescribed to roughly 75% of those diagnosed with ADHD here; with the US accounting for 86% of global consumption. Beyond enriching the pockets of pharmaceutical executives, Ritalin has been linked to suicide, increased blood pressure, cancer and brain damage. Unfortunately it is but one of many drugs prescribed for the condition.

Focoalin, another common FDA approved ADHD medication has a known history of exacerbating psychosis and documented cases of creating suicidal thoughts. On January 30th an advisory panel of pediatricians recommended the FDA to mandate Focalin contain a warning label against the suicidal thoughts.

Drawing upon the available evidence the panel also recommended changes on Focalin’s label to reflect the risk of anaphylaxis, an allergic reaction, and angioedema, a type of swelling beneath the skin. The FDA often follows the advice of its advisory panels, so the recommendations of these brave pediatricians carries actual weight.

Focalin and Ritalin unfortunately are just the tip of the iceberg. Suicidal side effects are strongly correlated to a wide range of psychiatric medications. Anti-depressants for instance, such as the SSRI’s like Prozac, have ironically been repeatedly linked to both suicidal thoughts and actual suicides. Worse still a wide range of violent, psychotic behavior has been observed from individuals on these medications.

Case in point: Virtually every US school shooting has been conducted by individuals on Prozac.

Sadly, firearm availability rather than the mind altering properties of these widely prescribed medications has consumed the focus of all mainstream discussion on the topic.

By FDA estimation, Focalin is currently prescribed to 1.8 million children, and approved for children 5 and up. For drugs that are used by children, the agency is required to hold regular advisory meetings to review their safety, and monitor for conditions not discovered by industry submitted research.

Novartis (Focalin’s manufacturer) has agreed to comply with the request and will help the FDA investigate if enough evidence of suicidal thoughts exists to merit changing the label.

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Statins Increase Diabetes in Postmenopausal Women by Seventy Percent

Posted on February 5, 2012 by andreas m

By: John Phillip
Source: NaturalNews.com

The result of a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine finds that statin use in postmenopausal women significantly increases the risk of developing diabetes. In spite of this damning evidence, researchers do not recommend that the American Diabetes Association guidelines for primary and secondary prevention should be changed. Statins account for hundreds of billions in pharmaceutical sales each year, and there is scant evidence they do anything to promote cardiovascular or overall health. In addition to contributing to muscle wasting and metabolic imbalance, this research provides yet another reason to avoid this energy-sapping class of drug. Health-conscious individuals avoid pharmaceuticals at all costs, and there is now compelling research to suggest that everyone should seriously question taking statins to prevent an unnecessary risk of diabetes.

Dr. Annie L. Culver and her team from the Rochester Methodist Hospital, Mayo Clinic in Minnesota analyzed data from the national, multi-year Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) to garner results for this study. Researchers analyzed data to include 153,840 women without diabetes with an average age of 63 years. Statin use was assessed at enrollment and again in year three. At the outset, 7 percent of the women reported taking a statin medication.

Statins shown to dramatically increase diabetes incidence in postmenopausal women

The scientists found 10,242 new cases of diabetes and determined that statin use was positively associated with an increased risk of diabetes. The association remained after adjusting for other potential variables, including age, race or ethnicity and body mass index, and was observed for all types of statins. Dr. Culver noted “The results of this study imply that statin use conveys an increased risk of new-onset DM (diabetes mellitus) in postmenopausal woman.”

A deeper analysis of the data found that diabetes incidence increased in this cohort of postmenopausal women by 71 percent. Amazingly, the result of this study has received no media attention. The scant coverage that has been published fully discounts the additional risk burden and continues to tout the ‘heart-healthy’ benefits of statin use. The real truth is that statins are anti-energy by core means of operation. Any time you reduce the energy function of a cell you reduce the ability of that cell to burn calories as fuel.

Low cellular energy function creates metabolic inefficiency and insulin resistance, with increased fatigue and eventually type 2 diabetes. Statins are a recipe for metabolic disaster, yet millions of unsuspecting women and men continue to blindly swallow these ‘magic pills’ in the belief that they can continue to consume a poor diet and have full immunity against heart disease and a host of other chronic illnesses ascribed to statin use. The evidence is in and it couldn’t be clearer for those individuals with the will to listen and the desire to dramatically lower their risk of becoming diabetic.

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Children’s Medicines Coated with Brain-Damaging Aluminum

Posted on February 2, 2012 by andreas m

By: S. D. Wells
Source: NaturalNews.com

Aluminum Lake food coloring, used to heavily coat liquid medicines for children, contains dangerous amounts of aluminum and harmful synthetic petrochemicals. These “petrochemicals” are carcinogens containing petroleum, antifreeze and ammonia, which cause a long list of adverse reactions. Aluminum poisoning can lead to short and long term central nervous system (CNS) damage, such as memory impairments, autism, epilepsy, mental retardation, and dementia.

Research shows that just 4ppm of aluminum can cause the blood to coagulate. This is what causes Alzheimer’s Disease and has been documented to inhibit learning. Aluminum consumption can also be associated with the development of bone disorders, including stress fractures.

Also known as tartrazine, FD&C Yellow Aluminum Lake is a chemical concoction derived from coal tar. It is known to be a reproductive toxin. All artificial colors contain Aluminum Lake, so when your child gets to pick between red, blue or green medicine, they’re really choosing which poison they get to consume. Several chemically enhanced food colorings contain ammonia and therefore produce compounds proven to cause various cancers in animal studies, according to CSPI, the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Most widely used food colors and their damaging actions:

•Blue #1: Research shows it causes kidney tumors in mice.

•Blue #2: Research shows even higher incidence of tumors, specifically gliomas in male rates (a type of tumor that starts in the brain or spine).

•Red #2: Toxic to rodents,even at modest levels, and causes tumors of the bladder.

•Red #3: FDA recognized it in 1990 as a cause of thyroid cancer in animals. It was banned in cosmetics, but still allowed in food and medicine.

•Red #40:Most popular dye of all. Debilitates the immune-system in mice. Allergic reactions common.

•Green #3: Causes bladder and testes tumors.

•Yellow #5: Affects behavior and induces severe hypersensitivity reactions.

•Yellow #6: Causes adrenal tumors in animals.

The following is taken directly from FDA’s Regulatory Process and Historical Perspectives: “Color additives are important components of many products, making them attractive, appealing, appetizing, and informative. Added color serves as a kind of code that allows us to identify products on sight, like candy flavors and medicine dosages.” Really?! Decoding medicine dosages on sight?

There has been a 55% increase in U.S. toxic food dyes just since the year 2000. There are over 15 million pounds of dyes put in foods, drinks, candy and medicine every year, and the FDA does nothing to protect consumers from the colorful barrage of poison.

Studies reveal that children have consumed as much as three pounds of dye by the age of twelve

Here are some popular product and “brand” names you may mistake as exempt products: RD&C dyes and colors in baked goods, beverages, candy, cereal, drugs, pet food, personal care products, cosmetics, cough syrups, NyQuil,Tylenol, Robitussin,Jello, gelatins, Cheetos, Skittles, Fruity Pebbles, Marachino cherries, sausage, Mountain Dew, Doritos, chewing gum, and powdered drink mixes.

American companies doing business in Europe currently have to change their products to natural colorings to meet European Union strict regulations. The FDA’s rationale is that because artificial food colorings are used mainly in foods and medicines of low or no nutritional value, that the American public should “already be aware” of health implications, so it doesn’t matter if other toxins are added.

What are your options as opposed to poisonous medicines? Consult a naturopath (ND) for advice on ingredients in food and medicine.

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Is Nerve Damage The Rule, Not the Exception With Cholesterol Meds?

Posted on February 1, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Spending on cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins increased by $160 million in 2010, for a total spending of nearly $19 billion in the U.S., the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics reported in their Use of Medicines in the United States: Review of 2010.

In all, more than 255 million prescriptions were dispensed for these drugs in 2010, making them the most commonly prescribed type of medication in the United States.

Unfortunately, this excessive use is an artifact of a medical system that regards prescribing pills to lower cholesterol as a valid way to protect one’s heart health — even though the low “target” cholesterol levels have not been proven to be healthy … and cholesterol is actually NOT the underlying culprit in heart disease.

Worse still, these drugs, which are clearly not necessary for the vast majority of people who take them, are proven to cause serious and significant side effects, including, as new research shows, definite nerve damage.

Are You Taking Drugs You Don’t Need … and Getting Nerve Damage as a Result?

It must be understood that any time you take a drug there is a risk of side effects.

Oftentimes, these risks are not fully understood, especially when multiple drugs enter the equation, and appear only after a drug has already been taken by millions of people.

Even once a drug has been FDA-approved, you are depending on a limited number of clinical trials to dictate a drug’s safety … but it’s impossible to predict how a drug will react when introduced into your system, in a real-world setting.

Not to mention, the accuracy of medical research is dubious at best.

In many ways, any time you take a drug YOU are the guinea pig, and unforeseen side effects are the rule, rather than the exception. In terms of statin drugs, side effects are already clearly apparent; at GreenMedInfo.com you can see 304 conditions that may be associated with the use of these drugs, and this is likely only the tip of the iceberg. Among one of the more well-known risks is harm to your muscles and peripheral nervous system with long-term use. Indeed, new research on 42 patients confirmed that:

” … long-term treatment with statins caused a clinically silent but still definite damage to peripheral nerves when the treatment lasts longer than 2 years.”

If You Take Statins for Two Years or More, Nerve Damage Appears to be the Rule

What does it mean when you sustain damage to peripheral nerves? As reported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS):

“Symptoms are related to the type of affected nerve and may be seen over a period of days, weeks, or years. Muscle weakness is the most common symptom of motor nerve damage. Other symptoms may include painful cramps and fasciculations (uncontrolled muscle twitching visible under the skin), muscle loss, bone degeneration, and changes in the skin, hair, and nails.”

At GreenMedInfo.com you can see 88 studies on statin-induced neurotoxicity (nerve damage), with 12 studies further statin drugs directly to neuropathy, including chronic peripheral neuropathy. As explained by NINDS:

“Peripheral neuropathy describes damage to the peripheral nervous system, the vast communications network that transmits information from the brain and spinal cord (the central nervous system) to every other part of the body. Peripheral nerves also send sensory information back to the brain and spinal cord, such as a message that the feet are cold or a finger is burned. Damage to the peripheral nervous system interferes with these vital connections. Like static on a telephone line, peripheral neuropathy distorts and sometimes interrupts messages between the brain and the rest of the body.

Because every peripheral nerve has a highly specialized function in a specific part of the body, a wide array of symptoms can occur when nerves are damaged.

Some people may experience temporary numbness, tingling, and pricking sensations (paresthesia), sensitivity to touch, or muscle weakness. Others may suffer more extreme symptoms, including burning pain (especially at night), muscle wasting, paralysis, or organ or gland dysfunction. People may become unable to digest food easily, maintain safe levels of blood pressure, sweat normally, or experience normal sexual function. In the most extreme cases, breathing may become difficult or organ failure may occur.

Some forms of neuropathy involve damage to only one nerve and are called mononeuropathies. More often though, multiple nerves affecting all limbs are affected-called polyneuropathy.”

One of the more disturbing implications of this finding is that since statins damage the peripheral nerves, it is also highly likely that they damage the central nervous system (which includes the brain), as well. One study published in the journal Pharmacology in 2009, found statin-induced cognitive impairment to be a common occurrence, with 90% reporting improvement after drug discontinuation. There are, in fact, at least 12 studies linking memory problems with statin drug use in the biomedical literature, indicating just how widespread and serious a side effect statin-induced neurological damage really is.

Lower Your Cholesterol and Increase Your Diabetes Risk by Nearly 50%

As mentioned, neurological damage is only one potential risk of statins. They are also being increasingly associated with increased risk of developing diabetes.

Most recently, a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine revealed statins increase the risk of diabetes for postmenopausal women by 48 percent! Statins appear to provoke diabetes through a few different mechanisms, the primary one being by increasing your insulin levels, which can be extremely harmful to your health. Chronically elevated insulin levels cause inflammation in your body, which is the hallmark of most chronic disease. In fact, elevated insulin levels lead to heart disease, which, ironically, prevention of is the primary reason for taking a statin drug in the first place!

As written on GreenMedInfo:

“The profound irony here is that most of the morbidity and mortality associated with diabetes is due to cardiovascular complications. High blood sugar and its oxidation (glycation) contribute to damage to the blood vessels, particularly the arteries, resulting in endothelial dysfunction and associated neuropathies due to lack of blood flow to the nerves. Statin drugs, which are purported to reduce cardiovascular disease risk through lipid suppression, insofar as they contribute to insulin resistance, elevated blood sugar, and full-blown diabetes, are not only diabetogenic but cardiotoxic, as well.”

A separate meta-analysis has also confirmed that statin drugs are indeed associated with increased risk of developing diabetes. The researchers evaluated five different clinical trials that together examined more than 32,000 people. They found that the higher the dosage of statin drugs being taken, the greater the diabetes risk. The “number needed to harm” for intensive-dose statin therapy was 498 for new-onset diabetes — that’s the number of people who need to take the drug in order for one person to develop diabetes.

In even simpler terms, one out of every 498 people who are on a high-dose statin regimen will develop diabetes. (The lower the “number needed to harm,” the greater the risk factor is. As a side note, the “number needed to treat” per year for intensive-dose statins was 155 for cardiovascular events. This means that 155 people have to take the drug in order to prevent one person from having a cardiovascular event.)

The following scientific reviews also reached the conclusion that statin use is associated with increased incidence of new-onset diabetes:

A 2010 meta-analysis of 13 statin trials, consisting of 91,140 participants, found that statin therapy was associated with a 9 percent increased risk for incident diabetes. Here, the number needed to harm was 255 over four years, meaning for every 255 people on the drug, one developed diabetes as a result of the drug in that period of time.
In a 2009 study, statin use was associated with a rise of fasting plasma glucose in patients with and without diabetes, independently of other factors such as age, and use of aspirin or angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors. The study included data from more than 345,400 patients over a period of two years. On average, statins increased fasting plasma glucose in non-diabetic statin users by 7 mg/dL, and in diabetics, statins increased glucose levels by 39 mg/dL.

Side Effects Often Don’t Show Up Immediately …

Often times statins do not have any immediate side effects, and they are quite effective at lowering cholesterol levels by 50 points or more. This makes it appear as though they’re benefiting your health, and health problems that develop later on are frequently misinterpreted as brand new, separate health problems.

Again, the vast majority of people do not need statin drugs, and if you are one of them, taking them is only going to expose you to serious, unnecessary risks!

If your physician is urging you to check your total cholesterol, please be aware that this test will tell you virtually nothing about your risk of heart disease, unless it is 330 or higher. HDL percentage is a far more potent indicator for heart disease risk. Here are the two ratios you should pay attention to:

HDL/Total Cholesterol Ratio: Should ideally be above 24 percent. If below 10 percent, you have a significantly elevated risk for heart disease.
Triglyceride/HDL Ratio: Should be below 2.

To understand why most people don’t need a statin drug, you first need to realize that cholesterol is NOT the cause of heart disease. Your body NEEDS cholesterol — it is important in the production of cell membranes, hormones, vitamin D and bile acids that help you to digest fat. Cholesterol also helps your brain form memories and is vital to your neurological function. For more information about cholesterol, and why conventional advice to reduce your cholesterol to ridiculously low levels is foolhardy, please listen to this interview with Dr. Stephanie Seneff.

Urgent Information: If You Take Statins You Need CoQ10

It’s extremely important to understand that taking a statin drug without also taking CoQ10 puts your health in serious jeopardy. Unfortunately, this describes the majority of people who take them in the United States.

CoQ10 is a cofactor (co-enzyme) that is essential for the creation of ATP molecules, primarily in your mitochondria, which you need for cellular energy production. Organs such as your heart have higher energy requirements, and therefore require more CoQ10 to function properly (cardiac muscle cells have up to 200 times more mitochondria, and hence 200 times higher CoQ10 requirements, than skeletal muscle). Statins deplete your body of CoQ10, which can have devastating results.

As your body gets more and more depleted of CoQ10, you may suffer from fatigue, muscle weakness and soreness, and eventually heart failure. Interestingly, heart failure, not heart attacks, is now the leading cause of death due to cardiovascular diseases. Coenzyme Q10 is also very important in the process of neutralizing free radicals. So when your CoQ10 is depleted, you enter a vicious cycle of increased free radicals, loss of cellular energy, and damaged mitochondrial DNA.

If you decide to take a CoQ10 supplement and are over the age of 40, it’s important to choose the “reduced” version, called ubiquinol. The reduced form is electron-rich and therefore can donate electrons to quench free radicals, i.e. function as an antioxidant, and is much more absorbable, as nutrients must donate electrons in order to pass through membrane of cells. In other words, ubiquinol is a FAR more effective form — I personally take 200 mg a day since it has such far-ranging benefits, including compelling studies suggesting improvement in lifespan.

How to Optimize (Not Necessarily Lower) Your Cholesterol Without Drugs

Seventy-five percent of your cholesterol is produced by your liver, which is influenced by your insulin levels. Therefore, if you optimize your insulin level, you will automatically optimize your cholesterol! By modifying your diet and lifestyle in the following ways, you can safely modify your cholesterol without risking your health by taking statin drugs:

Reduce, with the plan of eliminating, grains and sugars in your diet, replacing them with mostly whole, fresh vegetable carbs. Also try to consume a good portion of your food raw.
The average American consumes 50% of their diet as carbs. Most would benefit by lowering their carb intake to 25% and replacing those carbs with high quality fats.
Make sure you are getting enough high quality, animal-based omega 3 fats, such as krill oil.
Other heart-healthy foods include olive oil, palm and coconut oil, organic raw dairy products and eggs, avocados, raw nuts and seeds, and organic grass-fed meats, as described in my nutrition plan.
Exercise daily.
Avoid smoking or drinking alcohol excessively.
Be sure to get plenty of good, restorative sleep.

The goal of the tips above is not to necessarily lower your cholesterol as low as it can go; the goal is to optimize your levels so they’re working in the proper balance with your body.

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Repeat Business? FDA Approves New Cancer Drug to Treat Toxicity Caused by Another Cancer Drug

Posted on February 1, 2012 by andreas m

By: Ethan A. Huff
Source: NaturalNews.com

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a new cancer drug that allegedly treats the deadly side effects caused by another popular cancer drug. The new drug, Voraxaze (glucarpidase), is said to expel methotrexate, a commonly prescribed and highly toxic chemotherapy drug, from the body. But Voraxaze comes with its own set of harmful side effects, which shows that approving drugs to treat the side effects of other drugs is an endless, but highly profitable, cycle of toxicity.

Methotrexate’s known side effects include kidney and liver destruction, skin rashes, mouth sores, damaged intestines, and death. The drug often lingers in the body following cancer treatments, as weakened organs become increasingly incapable of expelling it from the body. So to “fix” this problem, the FDA has decided to approve another drug that it says breaks down methotrexate and eliminates it from the system.

But Voraxaze, which is made from genetically-modified (GM) enzymes, carries with it harmful side effects of its own, including hypertension, arrhythmia, allergic dermatitis, nausea, and vomiting. And these are just the short-term side effects observed among a small clinical trial group of just 290 patients, which is the only trial that has been conducted evaluating the safety of Voraxaze.

Worse, Voraxaze received “fast-track” approval from the FDA based on a single clinical study of just 22 patients, which allegedly evaluated the drug’s effectiveness. By all reasonable scientific standards, a single study with this ridiculously small amount of participants can hardly be considered a valid indicator of a drug’s efficacy.

Contrast this with mainstream medicine’s rejection of at least 24 separate studies, all with much larger sample sizes, that have identified a clear and definitive link between fluoride consumption and disease in recent days. “Further research” is always necessary when the issue involves proving fluoride’s toxicity, or proving the benefits of an herbal or dietary supplement. But when a new drug is up for approval, one small, industry-funded study is enough for regulators.

So thousands of cancer patients who become poisoned by methotrexate, which is also used to treat psoriasis and arthritis patients, will also now receive an intravenous dose of GM enzymes that have never been definitively proven either safe or effective. Leave it to the FDA to once again pander to Big Pharma at the expense of public health.

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Breaking News: Cancer Drugs Make Tumors More Aggressive and Deadly

Posted on January 19, 2012 by andreas m

By: S. L. Baker
Source: NaturalNews.com

When natural health advocates warn against mainstream medicine’s arsenal of weapons used to fight cancer, including chemotherapy and radiation, their concerns often revolve around how these therapies can weaken and damage a person’s body in numerous ways. But scientists are finding other reasons to question some of these therapies. It turns out that while chemotherapies may kill or shrink tumors in the short term, they may actually be causing malignancies to grow more deadly in the long term.

For example, NaturalNews previously reported that scientists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Comprehensive Cancer Center and UAB Department of Chemistry are currently investigating the very real possibility that dead cancer cells left over after chemotherapy spark cancer to spread to other parts of the body (metastasis). And now comes news that a little-explored specific cell type, the pericyte, found in what is called the microenvironment of a cancerous tumor actually may halt cancer progression and metastasis. And by destroying these cells, some anti-cancer therapies may inadvertently be making cancer more aggressive as well as likely to spread and kill.

A study just published in the January 17 issue of the journal Cancer Cell concludes that anti-angiogenic therapies (which shrink cancer by cutting off tumors’ blood supply) may be killing the body’s natural defense against cancer by destroying pericyte cells that likely serve as important gatekeepers against cancer progression and metastasis. Pericytes cover blood vessels and support their growth.

For the new research, Raghu Kalluri, MD, PhD, Chief of the Division of Matrix Biology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), investigated whether targeting pericytes could inhibit tumor growth in the same way that other antiangiogenic cancer drugs do.

Dr. Kalluri and his research team worked with mice genetically engineered to support drug-induced depletion of pericytes in growing tumors. Next, they removed pericytes in implanted mouse breast cancer tumors, decreasing pericyte numbers by 60 percent.

Compared with control animals, there was a 30 percent decrease in the size of cancerous tumors over 25 days. But there was a serious catch to these results. Contrary to conventional mainsteam medical wisdom, the scientists discovered the number of secondary lung tumors in the engineered mice had increased threefold compared to the control mice, indicating that the tumors had metastasized.

How cancer drugs can spread cancer cells

“If you just looked at tumor growth, the results were good,” Dr. Kalluri said in a press statement. “But when you looked at the whole picture, inhibiting tumor vessels was not controlling cancer progression. The cancer was, in fact, spreading. This suggested to us that without supportive pericytes, the vasculature inside the tumor was becoming weak and leaky — even more so than it already is inside most tumors– and this was reducing the flow of oxygen to the tumor.”

That change, he explains, makes cancer cells more mobile, so they can travel through those leaky vessels to new locations. It also makes cancer cells behave more like stem cells, so they are better able to survive.

Because cancer therapies such as Imatinib, Sunitinib and others are known to decrease pericytes in tumors, the scientists next carried out the same experiments in mice with primary tumors. Only this time, they used the chemotherapy drugs Imatinib and Sunitinib instead of genetic programs to decrease pericyte numbers. Both Imatinib and Sunitinib caused 70 percent pericyte depletion — and they also increased metastasis threefold.

In order to see if their findings are relevant to human patients, the research team examined 130 breast cancer tumor samples of varying cancer stages and tumor sizes and compared pericyte levels with prognoses. The result? The samples with low numbers of pericytes in tumor vasculature correlated with the most deeply invasive cancers, distant metastasis and five to ten year survival rates less than 20 percent.

“These results are quite provocative and will influence clinical programs designed to target tumor angiogenesis,” Ronald A. DePinho, president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said in a press statement. “These impressive studies will inform and refine potential therapeutic approaches for many cancers.”

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ECG/EKG and EEG – High-Tech Diagnostic Tools That Can Be Grossly Unreliable

Posted on January 19, 2012 by andreas m

By Andreas Moritz

The categorization of disease begins with its diagnosis. Depending on the particular symptom of discomfort or pain a person may be experiencing, a visit to the doctor will most likely result in the diagnosis of a disease, which the physician knows by its name and description. However, before you are given the certainty of diagnosis, you may have to undergo a series of routine examinations. There is the stethoscope, which has become a symbol of the healing profession; a measuring device to take the blood pressure; counting of the heart beat through feeling of the pulse; blood and urine tests; perhaps x-rays, EEG, EKG and more… In total, there are over 1,400 test procedures available that the modern doctor can use today to monitor and measure virtually every bit of your body.

Although in some cases, the use of these methods of diagnosis is justified and can save a person’s life, in the vast majority of cases it is unjustified, misleading and potentially harmful. In theory, high tech diagnostic tools seem to be impartial and yield correct results, but in reality, they are grossly unreliable and can be as dangerous to health as some of the riskiest drugs and surgical procedures. It is therefore important that they are not applied routinely, but much more selectively and, if possible, only during emergency situations.

One of the instruments most frequently used to monitor heart activity is the Electrocardiogram or ECG/EKG. Repeatedly conducted tests have shown that at least 20 percent of diagnoses made by ECG/EKG experts were false. In addition, 20 percent of all ECG/EKG readings turned out to be different when the same person was tested a second time. When ECG/EKG measurements were taken on people who had suffered a heart attack, the machine detected an abnormal heart function in only one-quarter of the patients, no sign of a heart attack in the second quarter, and indecisive results in the remaining half. A sudden ‘abnormal’ curve in the ECG/EKG reading, caused by a jet flying over the hospital, can put a person into the group of those ‘at risk’ for suffering a possible heart attack.

One 1992 report published in the New England Journal of Medicine proved that ECG/EKGs could not be trusted. When these tests were performed on a group of perfectly healthy people, over 50 percent of them showed an extremely abnormal heart condition. In other words, if a healthy child or adult goes through a highly recommended health check-up and is diagnosed by an ECG/EKG expert as having an abnormally behaving heart that requires urgent treatment, the chance that this diagnosis is a false-positive is an astounding 50-50. To avoid being treated unnecessarily with potentially harmful drugs, it is necessary that additional methods of diagnosis be employed to verify the correctness of the ECG/EKG readings. Having a second or third ECG/EKG reading at another hospital is also highly recommended, just to be on the safe side.

The Electroencephalogram (EEG), which is used to measure brain activity and detect brain tumors and epilepsy, often gives highly unreliable diagnostic results, too. 20 percent of people who suffer from epileptic seizures produce normal readings. What is even worse, 15-20 percent of healthy people produce an abnormal EEG. To show how unreliable the EEG machine can be, when it was once connected to the head of a doll, it showed that the doll was alive. In order to avoid costly and potentially risky treatment programs, one should not rely solely on the diagnosis produced by the EEG.

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This is an excerpt from my book TIMELESS SECRETS OF HEALTH & REJUVENATION

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As Bad as Cocaine and Amphetamines – Will Authorities Now Force This Drug on Your Child?

Posted on January 19, 2012 by andreas m

By: Dr. Mercola
Source: Mercola.com

Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has issued controversial draft guidelines that could put parents’ right to choose whether or not to medicate their children with ADHD at risk.

There are clearly many superior alternatives for addressing ADHD than potentially dangerous psychiatric drugs that often contain different formulations of methylphenidate, a powerful psychostimulant drug that is in the same class as cocaine and amphetamines …

But if a parent decides not to use them, their child could be taken away by child protective services, according to the guidelines.

Could Your Child be Taken Away if You Refuse ADHD Drugs?

The guidelines, created by an NHMRC expert working group, state:

“Consideration should be given to the ability of the child/adolescent and their caregivers to implement strategies.

As with any medical intervention, the inability of parents to implement strategies may raise child protection concerns.”

The problem with this guidance, as pointed out by anti-ADHD medication campaigner Martin Whitely in The Australian, is that the “strategies” being referred to are medications. He told the paper:

” … the only possible medical interventions are ADHD drugs and the implied threat that a parent’s refusal to allow their child to be ‘medicated’ with amphetamines may see their child put in care.”

Whitely is calling for the statement to be removed to protect parents’ rights. In the United States, certain states have already enacted legislation to protect against this very issue, and prevent schools and child protection officials from forcing parents to give their children drugs. Unfortunately, it happens more often than you might think. More and more, we’re seeing courts siding with misguided government officials in closed family-court proceedings. Parents are increasingly cut out of the decision-making process about what’s in their child’s best interest with regard to their health.

In the case of Australia’s NHMRC, the committee’s guidelines are already mired with controversy, as its original chairman, Daryl Effron, reportedly resigned because he was affiliated with drug companies that produce ADHD drugs!

Two-Thirds of Children Diagnosed with ADHD are Given Drugs – But Many are Misdiagnosed!

Medicating children with ADHD is a double-edged sword, not only because of the steep health risks posed by the medications themselves, but also because many kids labeled with “ADHD” actually do not have ADHD at all. Diagnosing ADHD really comes down to a matter of opinion, as there is no physical test, like a brain scan, that can pinpoint the condition. There’s only subjective evaluation, and, for better or worse, teachers can play a significant role in this evaluation.

Along with inattention and hyperactive-impulsive behavior, the two “hallmarks” of the disorder, children may also show the following symptoms:

Of course, many of these “symptoms” could describe most children at one time or another! Only those who struggle with serious inattention and hyperactive or impulsive behaviors around the clock are candidates for the ADHD label, but it is frequently given to many other children as well.

A study published in the Journal of Health Economics determined that about 20 percent of children have likely been misdiagnosed. That’s nearly 1 million children in the United States alone. The study found that many of the youngest children in any given grade level are perceived as exhibiting “symptoms” of ADHD, such as fidgeting and inability to concentrate, simply because they’re younger and being compared to their older, more mature classmates.

In fact, the youngest students were 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest in the same grade. And when you take into account the maturity level, and in large part normal behavior, of a 6- versus a 7-year old, you can easily see why. Given that two-thirds of children diagnosed with ADHD are prescribed medication — in some cases whether the parents agree with it or not — receiving an ADHD diagnosis unnecessarily can be very harmful to a child.

After all, is it not common sense that ADHD is not caused by a lack of a drug, so how can medicating a child be anything other than slapping a chemical band-aid on the problem? It would seem that profit and control is at the root of the ADHD diagnosis epidemic, and that if the underlying factors that cause the unruly behavior associated with ADHD were addressed, namely, poor nutrition, any dysfunctional family aspects, societal and school dynamics, and chemical exposures, to name but a few, the real solution – having nothing to do with prescriptions – could be identified and implemented.

The Most Commonly Prescribed ADHD Drug Can Cause Sudden Death

Drugs prescribed for ADHD are not “mild” by any means. These are hard-core, “class 2″ narcotics, regulated by the Drug Enforcement Agency as a controlled substance because they can lead to dependence. The majority of kids diagnosed with ADHD will be prescribed these potentially dangerous drugs, the most common being Ritalin.

By definition, Ritalin stimulates your central nervous system and may certainly interfere with the delicate and complex workings of your brain and personality. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), side effects include:

There are reports of children committing suicide while taking the drug, and the long-term effects are unknown. Recently, researchers revealed that Ritalin appears to delay puberty, an effect that was previously unknown.

Non-Drug Options are Highly Effective at Treating Behavioral Problems Like ADHD

Drugging children with narcotics to treat behavioral problems should be a very last resort, only implemented after all other options have been exhausted — if they are regarded as an option at all. This is what makes Australia’s threat to parental rights to choose alternatives to drug so outrageous and downright dangerous to the well-being of their children! Other options exist that are far safer, and involve no drugs whatsoever!

So before you consider drugs, please consider implementing the following strategies first, in addition to making sure that your child is assessed in an age-appropriate manner before labeling him or her with ADHD:

Eliminate most grains and sugars from your child’s diet. Grains and sugars both tend to cause allergies in sensitive individuals. Even organic, whole grain can cause problems in many children so it would be wise to give them a grain holiday and see if their behavior improves. A 2006 study showed that ADHD is markedly overrepresented in those with untreated celiac disease, indicating that wheat may be an especially problematic grain worth eliminating as a precaution.
Replace soft drinks (whether diet and regular), fruit juices, and pasteurized milk with pure, clean non-fluoridated water.
Increase omega-3 fats by taking a high quality animal-based omega-3 fat such as krill oil. Research has confirmed that animal-based omega-3 fat can improve the symptoms of ADHD more effectively than drugs like Ritalin and Concerta.
Consider a natural drug alternative such as the pine bark extract known as pycnogenol. It is one of over a dozen natural substances that have been studied to reduce the symptoms of ADHD in children.
Minimize your use of nearly all processed fats, especially trans fats as they disrupt nerve cell intercommunication.
Avoid all processed foods, especially those containing artificial colors, flavors and preservatives, which may trigger or worsen symptoms.
Clear your house of dangerous pesticides and other commercial chemicals. Pesticide exposure has been linked with ADHD.
Avoid commercial washing detergents and cleaning products used on clothes, and replace them with naturally derived cleaning products with no added perfumes, softeners, etc. Permanent press or stain-resistant products also contain chemicals that can initiate ADHD-like reactions in sensitive individuals.
Spend more time in nature. Researchers have found that exposing ADHD children to nature is an affordable, healthy way of controlling symptoms.
Investigate sensory therapy and emotional wellness tools. Instead of looking for a quick fix, encourage ADHD sufferers to talk, and find out what emotions are causing issues. You may want to consider the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to improve emotional coping and healing. Stress is the frequently unappreciated and overlooked variable that can easily worsen ADHD. If the parents are having trouble in their relationship this can easily influence the child’s behavior.

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Study – Statin Drugs Linked to Higher Diabetes Risk

Posted on January 13, 2012 by andreas m

By: Elizabeth Walling
Source: NaturalNews.com

A new study confirms a dangerous statin drug side effect: diabetes. Researchers at Harvard Medical School report women over the age of 45 are much more likely to develop diabetes if they’re taking a statin drug.

The study followed more than 153,000 postmenopausal women who enrolled in the Women’s Health Initiative study in the 1990s. At the time they enrolled, none of these women had diabetes. Researchers followed up with the women in 2005, and found that nearly 10 percent of women taking statins developed diabetes, compared to only 6.4 percent in women who did not take statin drugs.

Some experts are calling this a “slight” or “modest” increase. However, crunching the numbers reveals a different result: this is a whopping 50 percent increase in the risk for developing diabetes! Because statin drugs are the darling of the medical community, this risk is being played down. But with millions of Americans taking statin drugs, a 50 percent increase really adds up.

This is hardly the first study to turn up the link between statins and diabetes. In fact, there have been several studies demonstrating the same results. For instance, statins were also shown to increase diabetes risk in a randomized controlled study in 2008. More reports about the connection between diabetes and statin drugs were published in The Lancet in 2010 and yet again in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2011.

Although statins are supposed to be helping our hearts, they may be doing just the opposite. The link between diabetes and heart disease is frighteningly strong. The official website for the American Heart Association says, “Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to have heart disease or a stroke than adults without diabetes.”

Statins: The scourge of modern medicine?

Unfortunately, diabetes isn’t the only serious health problem connected with statins. These drugs have previously been linked to liver damage, kidney failure and cataracts. Statins are also associated with memory loss and depression. It’s time to start taking these risks seriously and stop glorifying the use of statin drugs.

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Many Common Pills are Coated with Toxic Phthalates

Posted on January 12, 2012 by andreas m

By: Tara Green
Source: NaturalNews.com

The coatings of many common drugs and supplements often contain phthalates according to a recent study reported in Environmental Health Perspectives. This family of plasticizer compounds has been linked in previous studies to hormonal and reproductive problems as well as fetal brain damage.

Plastic-coated pills

Phthalate coatings on capsules and pills are used to help regulate the timed release of drugs or to deliver active ingredients to specific areas in the digestive tract where it is most useful for them to be absorbed. Given the concern over the potential health hazards of phthalates, many people would prefer not to swallow them. Unfortunately, it may be difficult to know which drugs have this type of coating. Companies may categorize the use of phthalates in drug delivery systems as trade secrets, and the FDA does not require disclosure of the recipe for such secrets.

The research team, including scientists from both Harvard School of Public Health and Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center, identified drugs containing phthalates through several means. They began with a list 450 drugs categorized as not safe to crush or chew because of their special coatings. They also reviewed newsletters for information about new drugs, performed internet searches and even spent time reading labels in drugstore aisles. In addition, they contacted manufacturers with questions. Their search comprised between 500 and 1,000 prescription and over-the-counter supplements and drugs. Of these, they found that more than 100 containing forms of phthalates linked in previous studies to a variety of health problems.

The research team found phthalates in a wide range of both prescription and over-the-counter medications. Laxatives, antibiotics, blood pressure medications, anti-inflammatory medications, muscle relaxers, dietary supplements and many acid-reducing medications were among the substances coated with the plasticizer compounds.

Avoiding phthalates

Consumers seeking to avoid phthalates may want to read the list of inactive ingredients on a drug label, suggest the researchers. Also, look for terms such as “delayed-release,” “controlled-release,” “time-release,” “targeted-release,” or “enteric coatings” which can point to the presence of phthalates. Also, epidemiologists recommend that people receiving a prescription medication, especially over the long-term for a chronic condition, may want to investigate whether the drug they receive has this type of coating, and if so, whether there is phthalate-free alternative version of that medicine.

Phthalates are present in many places — toys, shampoos, perfumes, deodorants, wall and floor coverings and even IV tubes. Although early research focused on the danger of phthalates to infants and children, recent evidence suggests there is also a link between these compounds and cancer in adults. Minimize your toxic load as far as possible; being careful about the coatings on any pills you may take.

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