Factory Farms used 29 MILLION POUNDS of antibiotics in 2009

A quick quote from Dr. Mercola's newsletter today:

According to the first-ever report by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on this subject, factory farms used a whopping 29 million pounds of antibiotics in 2009 alone. Back in 2001, a report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that the non-therapeutic livestock use of antibiotics accounted for 70 percent of the total antibiotic use in the United States, and when all agricultural uses were considered, they estimated the share could be as high as 84 percent! Their report revealed similar statistics, estimating that nearly 25 million pounds of antimicrobials are used in swine, poultry and cattle production for non-therapeutic purposes, whereas 3 million pounds were used in human medicine.

So why are we surprised when antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria develop??

Of course we're entitled to it, it's our money!

Can someone tell me why Social Security and Medicare are disparagingly called an "entitlement" programs, as if that is somehow a bad thing? In point of fact, those monies were paid in by every single working person with every paycheck they've ever received. OF COURSE we are entitled to our own money plus interest accrued! It's a collective investment in our future. Brilliant, actually. Since most folks don't have the common sense or perhaps the know how to invest on their own, we as a nation decided to make sure everyone has a minimum social net. Why? Because it's much nicer to live in a country where people have the means to take care of themselves. So why are these programs being disparaged?

It was social programs like these that made and kept America strong, that kept our old folks from starving and dying without medical care, that keeps the disabled from starving to death on the streets. Go to any third world nation, and that is what you see, everywhere: people begging, starving, dying right there in front of you on the streets. These social programs are precisely what created the living standards that have made America the envy of everyone else in the world. Perhaps no longer . . .. When social programs are gutted, we will become like Russia and China, nations that throw away those who are no longer productive.

I know I don't want to live in a nation that doesn't value every single human life. Aren't we ALL God's children, after all? The poor, the feeble, the sick, the mentally ill, as well as the elderly? Of course we are! Now, stop your spoiled brat bellyaching and do what's right. Rich folks, pay your taxes. And while you're at it, why don't you offer to pay extra, just for the privilege of living and making gobs of money in free country? If you're so hot on American values, then support this country, don't cut it off at the knees. Refusing to pay higher tax rates is going to destroy the very fabric of this nation, our infrastructure, our social structure.

IF YOU LOVE AMERICA, THEN QUIT YER BELLYACHING AND PAY YER TAXES, IN FACT, PAY MORE THAN YOU'RE ASKED TO PAY. And if you don't want to give it to the government, then give it to charity. Where are all those vaunted Christian values, eh? Pay up, or get out.

Illness and Pain - an Effective Teaching Tool

I'm not a big Luo practitioner. I do Longitudinal Luos when I find them, and they relate to the health issue a patient is concerned about. Back in school days, I found the Luos kind of overwhelming. I am embarrassed to say that I got my worst grade in my Daoist Master's area of specialty, the Luos Vessels. So when I graduated, I decided to focus on Divergent, Sinew and Eight Extra Meridians in my private practice, all of which I feel very competent to practice.

But then, for the past few weeks, I've been getting joint aches all over, which is not usual for me. When I had fibromyalgia, I had pain all over but it was in the connective tissue, not the joints. So I searched of Jeffrey Yuen class notes to try to determine what meridian system would be the best to resolve my problem. After a few hours spent reading through various class notes, I ended up doing a Longitudinal Luo tx for chronic digestive problems, beginning with ST-40, then the Yang Luo related to the signs & symptoms (for me, PC-6), finishing by harmonizing blood with SP-3, the Source point of the ST Luo's sister meridian. Sure enough, my joint aches of the past several weeks were gone within 5 minutes. Wow! This stuff truly works, even when you are just learning how to use it. It's really kind of thrilling to see something work so perfectly. It feels almost like I am seeing a miracle occur right before my very eyes. But of course, it isn't a miracle at all, it is the result of having access to a profound and effective system of medicine. With no side effects, no less!

I sometimes wonder whether those of us who have chosen healing as a profession perhaps get an illness or health issue as a way to teach us, a presentation of a challenge, a test case for us to solve. Every time I treat myself, the problem gets fixed, but even more important than that, I have opened the door to a whole new area of medical understanding. Illness forces me to go back to my notes to research what the possible treatments are (which meridian system is most suited for this particular situation?), and then I am always amazed to see the problem resolve, usually immediately.

Is this stuff the bomb or what? I can hardly believe my luck. I am so blessed to have found Chinese medicine, and Daoist medicine in particular. It is almost unbelievable at times.

More Healthcare Means Less Health

We are a nation of druggies. We have come to believe that whenever something in our bodies is off-balance, we can simply take a drug to cover up the uncomfortable symptom(s) of that imbalance. This is not only foolish, it is very dangerous. Here are some statistics from Dr. Mercola's article on the subject of over-medicating by U.S. physicians:

The average American, aged 19 to 64, now takes more than 11 prescription drugs, according to the latest statistics from the Kaiser Health Foundation. Not even children are spared from excessive drugging, and seniors are taking a downright frightening number of medications.

The average annual prescription rate for children and seniors in the United States is now:

Almost 4 prescriptions per child (age 0-18)
More than 31 prescriptions per senior, aged 65 and over

This is the product of a medical system that offers little in the way of disease prevention and non-drug alternatives, and is challenged to think beyond drugs when a person comes in with a medical complaint. That is why the new report Principles of Conservative Prescribing, by Dr. Gordon Schiff, associate director of the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, is a breath of fresh air in a drug-saturated medical paradigm.

Here is the link to this article on Dr. Mercola's website: New Study Finds Doctors are Massively Overprescribing Drugs.

My own mother is an example of this overprescribing. I did a complete evaluation of her health when she turned 80. In Chinese medicine, we do a complex evaluation of the body's various pulses to determine the health of various bodily systems and organs. She had the pulses of a 40 year old. I was very happy for her. She did have some health problems (osteoarthritis, hayfever, migraines), but compared to most people her age, she was in great shape.

Two years later, she is feeble, and may lose a foot because of poor circulation. What is the difference? She is on 9 medications now. Her doctors are prescribing at least six drugs to prevent conditions she doesn't even have yet! That is more than ridiculous, it is bad science, and I am considering suing them for malpractice. There is no justification for that kind of overmedication. When someone is sick, their body is struggling. Instead of discussing with patients how they can support their body's built-in healing processes, physicians throw powerful drugs at the body, further challenging the body. Where is the logic in that? "Hit them while they're down." What kind of medical ethics is that? It boggles the mind.

One reason for many MDs' lack of interest in true healing is due to simple laziness. They no longer want to treat people by spending time with them, counseling them on how to maintain or regain their health. It is much quicker and less "dirty" than having to delve into a person's life and what might be causing their health problems. Just write a prescription, SO much easier!

Or perhaps it is because MDs have so little training (as in "none) in how to work with people to resolve their health problems through diet, lifestyle changes, etc. I am fairly certain that most physicians no longer even consider how the body works to right its own ship. They have completely forgotten to take into consideration how the homeostatic mechanisms built into the human body work to restore health when something has challenged the body. If you work against the body's natural methods of regaining its balance, of course you are going to make a person's health problems worse, much worse. That is only common sense.

I'm not the only one who believes this. Here is the abstract from a research study done by physicians at Harvard Medical School and the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine and College of Pharmacy:

Judicious prescribing is a prerequisite for safe and appropriate medication use. Based on evidence and lessons from recent studies demonstrating problems with widely prescribed medications, we offer a series of principles as a prescription for more cautious and conservative prescribing. These principles urge clinicians to (1) think beyond drugs (consider nondrug therapy, treatable underlying causes, and prevention); (2) practice more strategic prescribing (defer nonurgent drug treatment; avoid unwarranted drug switching; be circumspect about unproven drug uses; and start treatment with only 1 new drug at a time); (3) maintain heightened vigilance regarding adverse effects (suspect drug reactions; be aware of withdrawal syndromes; and educate patients to anticipate reactions); (4) exercise caution and skepticism regarding new drugs (seek out unbiased information; wait until drugs have sufficient time on the market; be skeptical about surrogate rather than true clinical outcomes; avoid stretching indications; avoid seduction by elegant molecular pharmacology; beware of selective drug trial reporting); (5) work with patients for a shared agenda (do not automatically accede to drug requests; consider nonadherence before adding drugs to regimen; avoid restarting previously unsuccessful drug treatment; discontinue treatment with unneeded medications; and respect patients' reservations about drugs); and (6) consider long-term, broader impacts (weigh long-term outcomes, and recognize that improved systems may outweigh marginal benefits of new drugs).

And here is the link to this abstract, which you can print or email to your own physician for comment: Principles of Conservative Prescribing.

And here is a link to an article published in the Archives of Internal Medicine entitled, "Less is More: How Less Healthcare Can Result in Better Health": http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/170/9/749 Please print a copy of this article and give it to your doctor. You can be certain she or he has no idea of the harm they are doing.

Let's all do our best to usher in a new era of natural healthcare!

Witty comments from some great minds on the unnaturalness of most medicine

I have always appreciated the wisdom and wit of the doctor, poet and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes. Here is his comment on medicine:

I firmly believe that if the whole material medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be better for mankind--and all the worse for the fishes.

Another famous quote about using natural methods to achieve or maintain health comes from the inventor, Thomas Alva Edison:

The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.

Or how about this lovely quote from Florence Nightingale:

We know nothing of the principle of health, the positive of which pathology is the negative, except from observation and experience. And nothing but observation and experience will teach us the ways to maintain or to bring back the state of health. It is often thought that medicine is the curative process. It is no such thing; ... nature alone cures. ... And what [true] nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

Ben Franklin was another genius who commented on the unnaturalness of what passes for medicine:

He's the best physician that knows the worthlessness of most medicines.

The Hippocratic Oath is traditionally sworn to by medical students upon finishing their studies and becoming a doctor. Here is the relevant passage from that document:

I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.

The other great Greek doctor/philosopher that is considered one of the founders of Western medicine is Galen, and he is famous for saying,

First do no harm.

. If you expect to try to heal the body, you cannot use methods that work against its own healing mechanisms, at least not without doing enormous harm to the patient. That seems obvious, right? And yet the whole of modern Western medicine now consists almost entirely of drugs and surgical procedures that interfere with or even completely destroy the body's own healing mechanisms. What is UP with that?

It is my fervent hope that more and more doctors will tire of not being able to make anyone well, that they will tire of merely prescribing more and more medications and surgery, never seeing their patients get better, always seeing them get worse and worse. I know there are doctors who feel frustrated by their inability to make a real difference, but their training has given them nothing else to offer. Many of them went into the profession because they wanted to heal people, and instead they find themselves merely contributing to their patients' health problems.

I saw earlier today that Representative Barney Frank from Vermont proposed a new system of funding medical research. Rather than allowing corporations that produce medical products to run the show for their own profit at the expense of patients, there will be a fund made up of a certain percentage (0.05% I believe he suggested) of the GDP, which would amount to something like $80 billion, and that fund would underwrite scientific research. The fund would buy patents at a good price, so researchers are motivated to do research, but instead of big corporations getting the profits, the government could give the patents away and drug companies would be free to produce them at much lower cost. I thought it was a first step away from a medical system run by corporations for their own profit (bad medicine!).

Tylenol shown to double the risk of developing a blood cancer

From Dr. Mercola's newsletter today:

A new study involving researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle revealed that 9 percent of their study participants who used large amounts of acetaminophen developed blood cancer, compared to 5 percent of those who took the drug and did not get sick.

Statistically speaking, this means chronic acetaminophen users had nearly twice the risk of developing blood cancer.

The risk was small -- chronic, "high" acetaminophen use raised the cancer risk from about 1 percent to 2 percent -- but still significant enough to raise serious safety concerns. Further, the definition of "high" use was using acetaminophen at least four times a week for at least four years -- an amount that numerous Americans could easily exceed without even realizing it. A large part of what makes acetaminophen so dangerous is that it's found in so many products; it's actually the most widely used painkiller in the United States.

My advice is to avoid not only prescribed medications at all costs, but also all OTC medications. They are not benign. I doubt taking one pill a month would hurt you significantly, but most people take them several times every week, or even several times every day! That is an enormous exposure to something that has been proven to double your risk of blood cancers.

When there are such good natural alternatives, why bother with painkillers that harm you?

First Aid . . . for Pets!

I was reading an article online this morning and a caption caught my eye: "If your dog was choking, would you know what to do?" No, despite getting trained regularly in First Aid and CPR as a healthcare professional, I wouldn't know how to stop a dog from choking. Dogs do have a habit of eating like wolves, that is, gulping down whole chunks of food without chewing. Choking would not be a hard thing to imagine.

I clicked on the link and it took me to the American Red Cross website where they were selling books, one on First Aid for dogs and another for First Aid for cats. As a lifelong pet owner, I realized that I didn't know how to do the Heimlich Maneuver on a pet. Now I do.

So for those of you whose family includes a beloved furry-faced, four-pawed member, you might want to read up on pet First Aid.