The Health Plus Letter
February 16, 2006, Vol. 4, No. 3
By Larry Trivieri, Jr. – founder & publisher,
http://www.1healthyworld.com
If you prefer to read this issue online, you can read it, along with all other back issues, at http://www.1healthyworld.com/ezine.
Table Of Contents
What’s New
Quote of the Day
Fast Fact
Medical F/r/e/edom Alert
Self-Care Remedies for Gallstones and Other Gallbladder Problems
The Dimensions of Healing: An Interview with Dr. Dolores Krieger
Recommendation
Unabashed Plug
Amazon.com continues to offer my newest book, Health on the Edge: Visionary Views of Healing in the New Millennium at a healthy discount. To order it, visit http://www.amazon.com.
What’s New
Welcome to another issue of The Health Plus Letter. This week I’m sharing self-care tips for dealing with gallstones and other gallbladder problems. I’m also sharing an excerpt of an interview I did with Dr. Dolores Krieger, co-developer of Therapeutic Touch, one of the most popular and scientifically verified methods of energy healing. The interview, which explores the dimensions of healing, is adapted from my book, Health on the Edge (see Unabashed Plug above).
As always, please continue to send me your comments and suggestions. And please spread the word about The Health Plus Letter by passing it along to your friends and inviting them to subscribe.
Quote Of The Day
“You’ll only be as happy as you are grateful.”
-- Margaret Moyer Trivieri (my Mom)
Fast Fact
"Pharmaceutical companies spend $7.3 billion every year directly marketing to doctors, which doesn't include free drug samples. There are about 90,000 drug representatives providing free lunches and so-called educational seminars to convince doctors to prescribe the latest, most expensive drugs. This equates to $13,000 a year per doctor on marketing activities, the costs of which are reflected in drug prices. These gifts drive up the cost of medications for patients, alter the prescription habits of physicians and are contrary to the professional oath and ethics of acting in the best interest of the patient."
Source: American Student Medical Association and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)
Medical F/r/e/edom Alert
Our health freedoms remain under assault by special interests that seek a monopoly on health care in this country and around the world. Please support the following organizations, which are at the forefront of those working to protect our rights:
Citizens for Health - http://www.citizens.org
Alliance for Natural Health – http://www.alliance-natural-health.org (The leading organization fighting to preserve health f/r/e/edom in England and the EU.)
Institute for Health F/r/e/edom – http://www.ForHealthF/r/e/edom.org
International Advocates for Health F/r/e/edom (IAHF) – http://www.iahf.com
Health Lobby (Monica Miller) – http://www.healthlobby.com
To see to what depraved lengths people will go to persecute practitioners of alternative medicine in the U.S., please read the following report by noted medical f/r/e/edom advocate Tim Bolen at http://www.quackpotwatch.org/opinionpieces/Suster2.htm
And to learn how corrupt and extensive Big Pharma’s monopoly is, visit http://www.pnc.com.au/~cafmr/online/research/index.html the website for the Campaign Against Fraudulent Medical Research. In particular, read their in-depth report The Pharmaceutical Drug Racket that you will find th/e/re.
Unabashed Plug
Learn the Truth about Heart Disease, Stroke and Hypertension. Most of what conventional medicine has to offer for treating these conditions is based on faulty and potentially dangerous assumptions. Discover the real causes behind these diseases and learn what you can do today to prevent and reverse them using safe and natural alternatives that have been scientifically proven to be effective. Read the critically-acclaimed eBook Burton Goldberg’s Definitive Guide to Heart Disease, featuring the contributions of Dr. Garry Gordon, Dr. Stephen Sinatra, and many other leading heart specialists. To order or to find out more about this potentially lifesaving guide, visit http://www.1healthyworld.com/ebooks/Heart-Book-Info.cfm.
Self-Care Tips for Gallstones and Other Gallbladder Problems
Gall stones and other gallbadder disorders affect the gallbladder, a small sac-like organ located beneath the liver that stores bile made in the liver. The liver sends the bile to the gallbladder through a small tube called the cystic duct. During digestion, the gallbladder contracts and delivers bile to the intestines to help break down fats contained in the food. The most common problem associated with the gallbladder is gallstones, round-shaped stones composed of cholesterol, bile, pigments, and lecithin.
Problems associated with gallstones include acute cholecystitis, an irritation and infection in the gallbladder that is caused by a gallstone becoming trapped. Symptoms of acute cholecystitis are the abdomen becoming extremely painful, even to the touch, and fever. Recurrent attacks of this are called chronic cholecystitis, which manifests the same symptoms.
The gallbladder rarely gets inflamed without the presence of stones. Gallbladder cancer is another possible disorder, but it is extremely rare, occurring in only three cases per 100,000 people each year. Gallbladder cancer usually causes jaundice (yellowing of skin) and pain in the upper-right abdominal area, but it too is sometimes present with no symptoms at all.
What To Consider
Only about 20 percent of people who have gallstones experience symptoms; the rest are unaware that they have any problem. A common symptom of gallstones is pain in the right side of the abdomen and/or pain in or near the right shoulder or shoulder blade. Pain may also occur in the center of the upper abdomen, over the breastbone. In all cases, pain, wherever it manifests, is usually constant and progresses slowly. It rises to a plateau and then gradually decreases, usually within several hours after a meal and especially after meals containing large amounts of fat. Other symptoms can include nausea, a sense of fullness, belching, heartburn, flatulence, and vomiting.
Women get gallstones four times as frequently as men, especially women over 40 years old who are fair-skinned, and overweight. Twenty percent of adults over 65 years of age get gallstones that create problems and pain. Over half a million surgeries are performed each year to remove gallbladders due to gallbladder disorders, the most common being gallstones.
Constipation, food allergies (especially to milk products and eggs), digestive disorders (especially caused by a deficiency of hydrochloric acid), intestinal diseases, an excessively low-fiber diet, dental disturbances, parasites, rapid weight loss, and stress can all cause or contribute to gall stones and other gallbladder disorders. For lasting relief of symptoms, all of these factors must be addressed if they are present.
In order to make an accurate diagnosis of gallbladder disorders, ultrasound may be required. If surgery is required, typically laser surgery is used, which does not need to cut into the abdomen, and allows healing to occur much more quickly. However, most gallbladder surgeries can be easily avoided through nutritional and natural intervention, with emphasis on identification, avoidance, and treatment of food allergies.
Self-Care
Diet: Identify and avoid all foods to which you are allergic or sensitive, especially eggs, milk, and dairy products. Also reduce your overall fat intake, keeping it below 20 percent of the total foods you eat, and eliminate all processed and hydrogenated fats. But do not cut eliminate fat completely, as this can actually increase your chances of developing gallstones. Monounsaturated fats are the best fats to include in your diet.
Be sure to eat less, as well, since overeating places stress on the gallbladder. At the same time, don’t skip meals, and especially make sure to eat breakfast. Also increase your intake of dietary fiber to improve bowel movements, and avoid refined carbohydrates, which can cause gallstone formation. Overall, eat less animal foods and move toward a vegetarian-oriented diet. In addition, if you are overweight, lose the weight, but slowly and sensibly.
Good foods to include in your diet are black cherries, pears, beets (raw and cooked), fresh beet tops steamed with spinach leaves, kale, and plain organic yogurt, as well as more raw foods in general.
Gallbladder Flush: Flushing the gallbladder of stones is a common practice of holistic physicians and is quite easy to do. For your first gallbladder flush, continue to eat a whole foods diet with almost no animal products and no processed foods. Drink plenty of raw, fresh apple juice or eat organic apples as much as possible, between meals, for six days. On the afternoon of the seventh day, have 1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil mixed with 1/3 cup of fresh lemon juice. Drink all at once and skip your evening meal. Go to bed early (no later than 10 pm), and sleep with your right knee tucked up to your side. In the morning, you should eliminate the gallstones, which will appear greenish yellow. Six months to a year after your first gallbladder flush, you can repeat the process. (Note: For best results, work with a health practitioner knowledgeable about gallbladder flushes, especially if you are considering doing one for the first time.)
Nutritional Supplementation: The following supplements can help relieve gallbladder symptoms: digestive enzymes with each meal, vitamin B complex, vitamin C, choline, inositol, lipotrophic factors, alfalfa tablets, acidophilus, lecithin, and the amino acid, L-taurine. Peppermint oil sipped in water throughout the meal can also be helpful.
He.rbs: Combine the tinctures of wild yam, fringetree bark, milk thistle, and balmony in equal parts and take one teaspoon of this mixture three times a day. An infusion of chamomile or lemon balm can also be taken regularly throughout the day.
Hydrotherapy: Apply a hot pack to your abdomen and low back for 10-15 minutes several times daily, followed by a short period of cold application.
Juice Therapy: The following juice combinations can help improve gallbladder health: carrot, beet, cucumber, radish, and fresh dandelion roots, with a clove of garlic, or grape, pear, grapefruit, and lemon.
Topical Treatment: Castor oil packs placed over the gallbladder can speed relief of symptoms.
(The above information is adapted from Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, 2nd edition, edited and co-written by Larry Trivieri, Jr.)
Unabashed Plug
Discover and Gain Control of Your Human Energy Field. Read Dr. Valerie Hunt’s Mind Mastery Meditations: A Workbook for the “Infinite Mind,” the empowering guide created by one of the world's foremost researchers into the human energy field, energy medicine, and the relationship between consciousness and health. Each of the meditations this eBook contains is designed to give you mastery of your mind and to empower you to discover the answers to why you are the way you are, your soul's needs, your unique talents and capacities, and your self-designed destiny. By practicing and mastering these meditations, you will become able to live your life with greater ease and success, speed your self-healing, and dramatically increase your ability to manifest your deepest goals. To order this life-changing guide, visit
http://www.1healthyworld.com/ebooks/Mind-Mastery-Book-Info.cfm.
The Dimensions Of Healing: An Interview with Dolores Krieger, Ph.D., R.N.
[Dr. Dolores Krieger is one of the true grand dammes in the world of holistic and energetic healing methods, and has been for many years a recognized leader in their development and practical implementation. Best known as the co-developer, along with Dora Kunz, of Therapeutic Touch, a modern-day interpretation of several ancient healing methods, Dee, as she is known to her many students worldwide, is also a registered nurse and professor emeritus of nursing at New York University. Today, more than 25 years after the birth of Therapeutic Touch, she is still actively involved in exploring all facets of the healing process and is the bestselling author of a number of books on the subject.
Originally developed in 1972, Therapeutic Touch is n.o.w taught in over 100 fully accredited colleges and universities in the U.S., and in over 75 countries, making it one of the most widely accepted holistic healing methods by the scientific community.]
Therapeutic Touch continues to gain widespread acceptance among both holistic and conventional practitioners of medicine. How do you account for that?
Well, I tell you very frankly, the reason lies with the people who are using Therapeutic Touch. They are the real heroes. They use it in such a natural way that they excite interest, and so I feel that one of the best ideas I ever had in my life was not to maintain a proprietary relationship with TT. This has allowed people to feel free to go on and add their own creativity to TT and I think that's really been the basis for the rather phenomenal growth that TT continues to experience.
Let's talk about TT in terms of its personal applications. First of all, in your estimation, is it something that is easily learned by the average person?
If you mean the average lay person, from my point of view lay people are more difficult to teach than health professionals, because health professionals, at a minimum, have actually touched people before, so they've gotten over that barrier. Secondly, invariably, they have some kind of fundamental knowledge of the biological sciences and the psychological sciences, etc., so you're working with people who have at least some knowledge of what you're trying to present.
This lack of knowedge doesn't necessarily prohibit someone from having success with TT, but it can make it more difficult for them to learn. I suggest that people go to a college or university, or a campus bookstore, and look under the sections that teach the biological sciences. What you will find there are anatomy books, usually with lots of color illustrations, that can provide them with basic information about the body and how it works. They can also find this on CD-Roms and certain television programs, of course. People who follow up on that don't have any difficulty to speak of learning TT. But it's difficult for lay people if they don't have a good understanding of how people heal. It's very easy for them to fantasize. That's the real danger. Whereas, if you have people already familiar with the healing process, such as from surgery, you know that the body has its own time and that there are things that happen before and in the middle and at the end. So you don't jump to conclusions. And in the end, you find that regardless of what you're doing, miracles are very few and far between.
It's understandable that lay people have a tendency to fantaize. It's not that they're worse at it than a health professional, but the health professional has already seen the healing process at work, so they're less likely to misunderstand what it is they are seeing. Meaning they have a more objective sense of what's happening, as opposed to perhaps a more subjective interpretation, because you don't go into the health profession unless you want to help people as well as yourself, and that does give you some kind of objectivity to begin with. But that doesn't mean that health professionals are any better. It's just that they have a different kind of diagram to work from.
What are some of the signposts that TT practitioners look for to verify that the healing process is actually taking place?
One of the things that I look for from a healing point of view is a change in attitude for whatever the illness is. I don't think that a person can be healed physically without also getting a very different psychological insight into what is going on with them. It's not like a broken stone that you're putting together. A healing is a total process. Even a cut finger has a psychological effect on the individual, and yet there's a miracle if ever there was one, happening right in front of the person's eyes. Just to be technical for a moment, from a biological point of view there are seven distinct levels of organization, or seven distinct tissues, that make up what we call the skin or the flesh. When you cut a finger, you're cutting those seven different types of tissue. Yet, when the cut heals, very frequently it heals so well that you'd be hard put to ever realize that there was a cut there if you hadn't known about it. When you think about it, essentially what's happening is that mil/lions of molecules are somehow swirling around the finger, conducting themselves to the appropriate tissues by some very exquisite kind of organizational principles that we've yet to understand. Because, as I say, sometimes it heals so well that it looks as if the skin was intact to begin with. So what we have to recognize is that the correct molecules are going to the appropriate places, and if that's not a miracle, I don't know what is. In other words, it's not random; it's not probablistic. It's exact.
To return to the psychological shift that occurs in healing, even a cold will make you miserable. (Laughs) Just imagine yourself in the throes of that. There's an old saying that it will last six days if you take medication, and half a dozen if you don't. Yet you must get to work on day two, so you try to accelerate that process and wind up feeling utterly miserable. Sometimes so much so that you take to bed with an upper respiratory infection, and when you do, you're more or less in a dependent position in that you can't jump up and down and do the kinds of things for yourself that you did a few days previously.
Then along comes a practitioner of TT who does Therapeutic Touch on you. One of the great things that happens with TT is that we get a full-blown relaxation response exceedingly rapidly. We've studied this for many years, and usually this occurs in two to four minutes. I remember being on a program with Herbert Benson in London, who coined the phrase" relaxation response," and I mentioned this to him and asked him if, in his experience, that seemed credible and he said, yes, it's possible to get a response in less than five minutes. Eliciting that response with TT one of the easiest things for us to do, to tell you the honest truth. Not only that, but from our experience, you must elicit the relaxation response first in order for the body to accept the healing. In other words, it certainly makes it easier for the body to absorb the healing effects. So, getting back to your cold, n.o.w you'll feel absolutely relaxed. And, of course, one of the things that Benson's studies have shown is that the relaxation response facilitates the immunological response, so you're already on your way home.
In addition to that, one of the other things that TT has been shown to be able to do is to ameliorate or eradicate pains. So, if you have aches and pains associated with your stuffy nose, this also will go away. And, of course, another point is that the healing has been accelerated. Within five minutes or so, you're feeling like a much better person. Your head might clear, your sinuses drain, things of that nature, and you can actually feel it happening.
This will be a very consistent outcome. It might not happen to everyone, but most people will definitely receive benefit. This is something that has high reliability. So, what happens, number one, is that you feel better. Frequently people will say, I've never been touched in this way before. Because in Therapeutic Touch, the idea is not to just make symptoms go away. Literally, TT is a transpersonal healing. To begin with, before interacting with clients, the TT practitioner goes "on center." He or she centers their consciousness. And this isn't only a case of centering and then going in and doing something else. Rather, it's a fact that what we do is center and we stay on center, meanwhile doing these other techniques. It's always seemed to me that this centering state of consciousness is the ground against which we are doing the various techniques of TT, and we maintain that state of centering until the end of the TT process.
By studying this, we n.o.w know that just being in the presence of someone who is on center and is attending to his or her inner work, has an effect on people around them. Not in any magical way, but their demeanor is different. The TT practitioner is attending to something within and by doing that becomes a model for the patient. Interestingly enough, getting back to lay people, many of them have become Therapeutic Touch practitioners because they so admired what was happening with the TT therapist who was working on them. When they got better, they wanted to help other people as they had been helped. And we do have a lot of lay people practicing Therapeutic Touch. I started with health professionals since, as you know, I'm a nurse, but in the mid-80s I did a study in which I taught husbands how to do Therapeutic Touch on their pregnant wives, and the results were so good that very frequently the husbands and wives continued doing it. Not only on each other, but also on their children after they were born. That's where some of the tremendous impetus has come from, because it went rapidly from within the family to relatives and out into the community.
One of the places that gave TT great impetus for lay people was among volunteers, particularly people who volunteered at hospices who worked with people who are dying. Dying is so little understood in our culture that mostly in the places where people are dying they'll let you do almost anything because they've sort of thrown up their hands. So, in doing that we've found what I think is one of the greatest boons of Therapeutic Touch. Many of our people do work in hospices and by being able to facilitate this very rapid relaxation response and things of that nature, they help people to die very peacefully. It's a beautiful sight to see.
We've also taught many relatives the basic skills of TT so that they can have
that time with their dying relative and many of these people have become lay practitioners of TT and have gone on to do quite a lot of good.
How is the process of going on center achieved, and from there, how does a TT session unfold?
Well you have to know what you are discussing when you talk about centering because the term itself is rather well known today and there are different kinds of centering. For instance, one of the things that has recently had quite a lot of interest is the Centering Prayer, particularly in the Catholic Church. But that's not what I'm talking about. The type of centering we do involves attending to the inner self. To really pay attention to the inner consciousness that makes you whoever you are, and to explore those facets within yourself while at the same time you are paying attention to the needs of the healee. This is important because Therapeutic Touch is a conscious process. The way you can tell somebody who really understands the TT process is that you should be able to stop them at any time during that process and ask them what they are doing and why, and they should be able to tell you. TT is not something where you close your eyes and go off on a cloud. Rather, it's a very acute awareness of, first of all, the liaison which you as a personality have with your inner self.
Secondly, as you focus or center your consciousness, what you're attempting to do during the healing process is to call upon or communicate with the inner self of the healee. It's not just a case of laying on of hands. That's hardly the beginning of it. There is a whole interior process that's going on within you that very frankly takes time to learn. You can learn the beginning techniques of TT in one day, and then learn further techniques in an intermediate workshop, but we ask people to have three years of practice before they go on to learn the advance techniques of TT because you have to learn how it's working within you. And that, of course, is why Therapeutic Touch has exploded. We've taught it in over 75 countries n.o.w, and the pull or attraction is the fact that what you learn is about yourself. That's why it's personally so attractive, because it's a never-ending story in that you know for a fact that the human being is an open system. I know for myself the reason I've been at it for over 25 years is that it has been a constant challenge, a constant exciting adventure in a very real sense.
N.o.w, the way you know that centering is not a fantasy, first of all, is obvious. Is it working? You have to use that as a criteria. Did the person get well, or was there some kind of personality transformation? There are a number of ways that an individual can get well, so you use very objective criteria. Also, you observe yourself and see your own personal growth and things of this nature. You're really learning the therapeutic functions of the vital energy field, you see, and in the process of doing that you begin to understand your own vital energy fields as well. As you do, you change. You become more intelligent in the way you use it. There is a distinct transformation that occurs, and you, yourself, are the gauge of it. Additionally, the TT practitioner, while being engaged in the process, also has the opportunity to heal his or her own self.
(To read the rest of this interview, and to learn a Therapeutic Touch exercise, see my book Health on the Edge: Visionary Views of Healing in the New Millennium. To locate a TT practitioner near you, visit www.therapeutic-touch.org.)
Recommendation
Book
The Giver by Lois Lowry. This book provides a haunting look at what happens when a society chooses to protect itself from diversity and suffering, examining the cost of perpetuating such a false utopia. Its ending will stay with you long after you finish reading it.
That’s all for this week.
Health and Blessings!
Larry Trivieri, Jr. (larry@1healthyworld.com)
Disclaimer: The Health Plus Letter is a weekly eZine published by Larry Trivieri, Jr. and Library of Health, LLC (dba www.1healthyworld.com) 1514 Genesee Street, Suite 52, Utica, NY 13502. It is made available without charge for info/rmation purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for medical care. If you are experiencing a health problem, seek prompt medical attention.
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Le/gal Notice: The info/rmation in this eZine may be f/r/e/ely and widely disseminated so long as full attribution is made as follows: The Health Plus Letter, February 16, 2006, Vol. 4, No. 3. Copyright © 2006 by Larry Trivieri, Jr. All rights reserved.
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