The Health Plus Letter
April 6, 2006, Vol. 4, No. 6
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
New This Issue
Quote of the Day
Fast Fact (Big Pharma’s Link to Illicit Drug Use)
Medical F/r/e/edom Alert: The Latest Big Pharma Attempt To Curtail Natural Therapies
Self-Care Remedies for Fibrocystic Breast Disease
The Media At It Again: More Faulty Reporting About Nutrients
Reader Feedback – More On Adverse Drug Reactions
Recommendations
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.
New This Issue
Welcome to another issue of The Health Plus Letter. This week I’m sharing self-care tips for dealing with fibrocystic breast disease, and focusing more attention on the abuses of the public trust committed by the pharmaceutical industry, with the help of various government agencies and the mainstream media. I also want to call your attention to new steps you can take to protect your health freedoms. So please be sure to read The Media At It Again, along with this week’s Health Freedom Alert and Recommendations sections.
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
If you want to stay healthy, stay away from doctors.
-- Bea Moyer, my maternal grandmother, who lived into her 90s by following her own advice.
Fast Fact
Because the pharmaceutical industry used its lobbying force to persuade Congress to overturn the DEA’s plan to halt the spread of the highly addictive illegal drug crystal meth for nearly two decades, the United States in n.o.w. facing a nationwide epidemic of drug abuse related to a drug that can only be manufactured using active ingredients that are also used by Big Pharma for over-the-counter cold remedies.
Source: PBS Frontline, April 4, 2006 (For more on this story, see Recommendations below and visit the Frontline website that is listed there.)
Medical F/r/e/edom Alert: The Latest Big Pharma Attempt To Curtail Natural Therapies
Once again (they nev.er stop) Big Pharma is attempting to extend its monopoly on health care. This time they (specifically Wyeth) are petitioning the FDA to compounding pharmacies, which supply bioidentical (natural) hormones to physicians. In recent years, sa/les of synthetic hormones, which Wyeth manufactures, have declined, in large part due to findings that they increase the risk of cancer and other side-effects. In the same time period, increasing numbers of health consumers and their doctors are choosing to use natural, bioidentical hormones instead, because, overall, they are safer, and are better accepted by the body, compared to synthetic hormones.
What follows is an Action Alert from Citizens For Health that explains the situation. Please make your voice heard on this matter by following the recommended step below.
Action Alert from Citizens For Health
Please Email The FDA Today To Stop Wyeth From Shutting Down The Compounding Industry. Your comments due to the FDA by April 4.
Wyeth is attempting to severely undermine natural health through an FDA Citizen’s Petition to eliminate natural health options for women, specifically bioidentical hormones. The duplicity has been noted by physicians and women’s groups around the nation who are actively organizing to derail this attempt to limit competition at the expense of women’s health.
Learn more now on this subject from 13 leaders in the natural health movement—including doctors, advocacy organizations, patient advocates, a compounding scientist, a former Congressman, the leader of a major compounding industry association, a leading D.C. regulatory lawyer and a retired Major General of the U.S. Army, who talks about the importance of freedom. Hear all points of view from experts who are close to the ground working selflessly in the interest of patients’ health and for democracy in health care in this country.
Please take action n.o.w! He.re are two steps you can take that together— cumulatively among all of us—can make a big difference in preserving our rights to choose our care, doctor’s rights to prescribe what in their judgment is the best care and that will spare women from having to buy their compounded hormones from other countries.
1. Read The 13 Leaders Uprising Re. Natural Hormones (available at http://www.citizens.org/node/445 )—email to everyone you know so the facts are understood on this issue.
2. Contact FDA at http://www.citizens.org/preserve-access-to-bhrt and tell them to stop Wyeth now.
(While visiting the sites below, you can also learn about how the FDA allowed the artificial sweetener Splenda (sucralose) to come to market without properly investigating it, leading to numerous negative side-effects for people who consumed it. – LT)
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
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Self-Care Tips for Fibrocystic Breast Disease
Fibrocystic breast disease is a condition characterized by benign (noncancerous) changes in the tissues of the breast and many times appears as a breast cyst. The term "disease" is actually misleading since the condition is so commonly found in normal brea.sts and is present in an estimated 80 percent of women who have not entered menopause. Other names for fibrocystic breast disease include "mammary dysplasia," "benign breast disease," and "diffuse cystic mastopathy."
Symptoms of Fibrocystic Breast Disease
Symptoms of fibrocystic breast disease include the following:
A dense, irregular, and bumpy "cobblestone" consistency in the breast tissue
Breast discomfort that is persistent or intermittent
A feeling of “fullness” in the brea.sts
Dull, heavy pain and tenderness in the brea.sts
Premenstrual tenderness and swelling
Changes in nipple sensation and itching
Note: Symptoms may range from mild to severe, and typically peak just before each menstrual period, and improve immediately after menstruation.
Also be aware that a lump in the breast can be a sign of breast cancer. Typically, lumps that are painful to the touch are most likely benign cysts, as most breast tumors are usually not painful to the touch. To be safe, however, it is advised that you seek medical attention if you discover changes in your breast. To rule out breast cancer, diagnostic tests such as ultrasound or thermography may be necessary. Another test, known as aspiration biopsy, in which a needle is inserted into breast lumps to withdraw fluid, may also be required.
While conventional physicians may recommend a mammogram, be aware that mammograms are usually ineffective in detecting breast lumps. Moreover, exposure to the radiation emitted during mammography can actually contribute to cancer.
Causes of Fibrocystic Breast Disease
The cause of fibrocystic breast disease is not fully known nor understood, but health experts believe it is associated with ovarian hormones since it usually subsides with menopause, and can vary in consistency during the menstrual cycle. Imbalances in the ratio of estrogen to progesterone are typical co-factors (with estrogen levels being higher than normal). Other potential causes are poor diet and nutrition, and diets that are high in saturated animal fats.
Self-Care
Aromatherapy: Massaging one or more of the following essential oils into the brea.sts and chest area can often help reduce cysts in the brea.sts: bergamot, chamomile, eucalyptus, juniper, lavender, and sandalwood.
Detoxification Therapy: Enemas and/or colonics can help to remove toxins, as well as excess estrogen buildup within the intestinal tract. Such detoxification measures also help to detoxify the liver, which in turns can help the body regulate estrogen production more efficiently.
Diet: Avoid all sugars, refined carbohydrates, sodas, processed foods, preservatives, artificial sweeteners (especially aspartame), corn syrup, alcohol, white bread and white flour products, pastries, red meats, saturated fats, and hydrogenated and trans-fatty oils. Consume dairy products sparingly, if at all, and also eliminate all foods which may cause you to suffer allergies.
Drink plenty of pure, filtered water throughout the day. Emphasize organic, fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as organic grains such as amaranth and quinoa, as well as organic, free-range poultry and wild-caught fish. Limit your intake of oils to unrefined flaxseed, olive oil, sunflower, and walnut. Overall, your diet should primarily be vegetarian and one that is low in fat and high in fiber.
Herbs: Helpful herbs for fibrocystic breast disease include chasteberry, dandelion, Echinacea, goldenseal, her.bal squaw vine, mullein, parsley, pau d’arco, poke root, and red clover.
Juice Therapy: The following juice combinations can help to relieve symptoms: apple and carrot; cranberry; carrot, celery, parsley, and spinach; carrot, beet, and cucumber (for added benefit, add garlic or onion juice); and watermelon juice.
Lifestyle: Various aerobic and stretching exercises performed regularly can help to relieve symptoms. An excellent exercise choice for fibrocystic breast disease is bouncing on a mini-trampoline (rebounder) for 10 to 20 minutes each day. This will aid your body’s ability to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the brea.sts via the bloodstream, as well as help to eliminate waste buildup in the lymphatic system.
Natural Hormone Replacement Therapy: Applying natural progesterone cream to your brea.sts between the 15th and 25th day of your menstrual cycle can relieve symptoms and in many cases cause breast cysts and lumps to completely disappear.
Nutritional Supplements: Useful nutrients include vitamin A, beta carotene, vitamin B-complex, vitamin B6, vitamin C, vitamin E, essential fatty acids (omega-3 oils, evening primrose oil, flaxseed oil), magnesium, organic iodine tablets, and the amino acids choline and methionine.
Topical Treatment: Apply castor oil packs to the brea.sts and upper chest for the first two weeks of each monthly menstrual cycle.
(The above information is adapted from Alternative Medicine: The Definitive Guide, 2nd edition, edited and co-authored by Larry Trivieri, Jr.)
Unabashed Plug
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The Media At It Again: More Faulty Reporting About Nutrients
Last month, the Wall Street Journal joined the chorus of major media outlets warning readers about the so-called dangers of nutritional supplements. In an article entitled The Case Against Vitamins (WSJ, March 20, 2006), the Journal left no doubt about the tack the piece would take, beginning it with the following subtitle: Recent studies show that many vitamins not only don’t help. They may actually cause harm. This is spurious journalism at its worst yet, to me at least, hardly surprising. As a result of my many years of covering natural approaches to health and healing, I am well aware of the various forces that are marshaled against holistic health approaches.
I have met doctors whose personal and professional lives have been destroyed by unwarranted attacks on them by the medical establishment. Some have even been jailed on trumped up charges because they chose to use safe, natural therapeutic approaches to help their chronically ill patients, instead of toxic and often useless pharmaceutical drugs. Others, like the esteemed Jonathan Wright, have actually had their medical offices raided by SWAT teams at the behest of the FDA and state and national conventional medical associations. (In Dr. Wright’s case, the raid was staged because local law officials in the state of Washington were told by the FDA that he was a drug dealer. Their charge was based on the fact that Dr. Wright was importing vitamin B12 from Europe that was of a higher quality than B12 products manufactured in the United States. The sheriff who authorized the raid of Dr. Wright’s office at gun point based on what he was told be the FDA later publicly stated that he was lied to and that he would nev.er cooperate with the FDA again.)
In recent years, the war against the growing holistic health movement has increasingly been joined by an ongoing string of media stories claiming that various alternative therapies and, most especially, nutritional supplements are dangerous. Such stories pass my desk at least every two weeks, and often much more regularly than that. In the vast majority of cases, reading beyond the headlines shows how uninformed the writers and reporters of such pieces are. In the stories about supplements, in almost every case a variation of the following statement is made: The FDA has no authority over supplement manufacturers and is therefore unable to take regulatory measures against them. This statement is patently false, as any high school journalism student could quickly determine, since the DSHEA Act passed by Congress in 1994 specifically grants the FDA authority to take action against any supplement manufacturer that makes false claims about its products, or makes products that are proven to be harmful. (As an aside, due to an email list I am part of overseen by attorney Marc Ullman, I am also regularly privy to warning letters sent by the FDA to supplement manufacturers warning them about possible actions against them due to claims made about their products in company literature, web sites, and product labels. A frequent gambit of the FDA in this regard is to state that such claims transform the supplements into “drugs.” This le/gal sleight of hand – controlling the definition of specific words – strikes me as truly Orwellian “doublespeak,” but that is an issue for me to write about at another time.)
Why is it that such readily available facts as the FDA’s authority under DSHEA are so often ignored or misstated by journalists, and why is it that we are n.o.w seeing such an increase in media stories critical of nutritional supplements? My fellow health freedom advocate Tim Bolen states that media placement of such stories is due to PR firms doing all they can to plant these stories at the behest of their client, Big Pharma. I believe that he is right about this. (For more about Tim, visit his website, http://www.bolenreport.net.) In other words, in many cases, the so-called journalists and reporters of such anti-supplement stories are simply trumpeting press releases spun by Big Pharma’s media agents. Some of these reporters are possibly actively complicit in seeing that such stories reach the public. However, it is more likely that the majority of them are simply acting like stenographers, just as they do when covering other areas of public discourse these days, such as so-called news stories originating from our government. Add the fact that few journalists and reporters have a background in health issues and therefore are not trained to ask probing ques.tions or spot potential falsehoods or exaggerations that are passed on to them and you wind up with the piss-poor media coverage of supplements and other natural healing approaches that passes for news today.
Recently, I’ve presented talks about this issue in my local community. And I concluded them with this simple rule of thumb you can use for determining if the news you are reading about health care issues is true or not. If the stories trumpet pharmaceutical drugs or new procedures for serious illnesses such as cancer, most likely they are hype or outright falsehoods. And if the stories come down against supplements and other natural health approaches, most likely they are hype or false, as well. When it comes to health stories in the media, nev.er has the adage to not believe everything you read (or watch) been more apt!
If you are interested in finding out the truth instead of the alarmist nonsense published by the Wall Street Journal about vitamins, I recommend that you visit the following websites: http://blog.healthfreedomusa.org and http://snipurl.com/oslt. The first link will bring you to Dr. Rima Laibow’s rebuttal of the WSJ article; the second will bring you to an equally important rebuttal by health journalist Bill Sardi. I highly recommend both of them.
Reader Feedback – More On Adverse Drug Reactions
In response to my Fast Fact entry last issue, Dr. Philip Rudnick rightfully took me to task for not supply a source for my claim, writing:
<< Re: Fast Fact: According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), for every report that it receives regarding an adverse drug reaction (including death caused by properly a prescribed drug), between ten to one hundred more go unreported. Reported annual deaths in the United States due to properly prescribed drug use totals more than 100,000."
To a professional person, facts such as this without references are worthless.>>
To which I replied:
Dear Dr. Rudnick - Thank you for your email. I absolutely agree with you and normally I do reference my sources for the Fast Fact section of my newsletter, as well as everything else I write that requires documentation. In this case, I was relying on memory of a report that I read on the FDA's website a few years ago. It was an internal memo that was written in the late 1990s. I will see if I can relocate it for you.
In the meantime, he.re are other references that support my claim, and actually show it to be conservative -indicating that 20 to 100 ADRs (adverse drug reactions) occur for every one that is reported:
Dickinson, JG Dickinson's FDA Review, March 2000 7 (3):13-14
Bates, DW "Drugs and adverse drug reactions: how worried should we be?" JAMA Apr 15, 1998, 279 (15):1216-7. (Both reports above state that only 5 percent of ADRs are ever reported. The next two place the figure at one percent.)
Moore, TJ, et.al. "Time to act on drug safety" JAMA, May 20, 1998, 279 (19):1571-3.
Kessler, DA "Introducting MedWatch: A New Approach to Reporting Medication and Device Adverse Effects and Product Problems." JAMA 1993, 269: 2765-68.
JAMA also reported the fact that there are at least 100,000 deaths annually caused by ADRs in the US when the drugs are properly prescribed, while over 2 million people using medication require hospitalization due to ADRs. The research compiled in the report Death By Medicine, written by Drs. Gary Null and Carolyn Dean, challenge these figures, showing that the total number in both areas is likely much higher. You can obtain a fr.ee copy of this report at Gary Null's website (www.garynull.com) and Dr. Dean has followed up on it by writing a book with the same or similar title. The report is extensively referenced.
For additional information and documentation I also suggest the book Over Dose: The Case Against the Drug Companies by Jay S. Cohen, MD.
Again, thank you for taking the time to write to me and for challenging my assertion.
Recommendations
Book:
Radical Healing by Rudolph Ballentine, MD. Published in the mid-1990s, this book still stands up as an excellent resource for anyone interested in creating an truly holistic self-care health regimen that draws from best of healing traditions all around the world. I highly recommend it.
Magazines:
I have three very important magazine articles to recommend to you. The first, The AIDS Machine by Celia Farber, appeared in the March 2006 issue of Harper’s, and provides a scathing look at how financial interests and shoddy research have corrupted science, resulting in the unchallenged mainstream acceptance of the HIV=AIDS formula that has resulted in skyrocketing pro.fits for Big Pharma, and led to the deaths of many healthy people who took drugs said to halt the progress of HIV. Celia Farber was one of the first mainstream journalists to challenge the HIV=AIDS hypothesis, based on the fact that no conclusive evidence exists that ever confirmed it as true. When she began her work, she and everyone else who questioned the HIV/AIDS link was pilloried by the mainstream. Today, more than 2,300 scientist, including Nobel Laureates are on record that they too challenge it.
In this same issue of Harper’s, you can also find a telling piece entitled Viral Marketing: The Selling of the Flu Vaccine by Harvard graduate student Peter Doshi, which makes clear that the basis behind both the media coverage of the flu and the flu vaccine are largely based on PR campaigns by the flu manufacturers in collusion with government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Then, there is The Drug Pushers by physician Carl Elliott, which appears in the April 2006 issue of Atlantic, and makes clear how the practice of medicine has been subverted by drug company reps who will do almost anything to persuade doctors to prescribe drugs that are not necessary and often fatal.
Website:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth- Earlier this week I watched a gripping Frontline investigation on the dramatic increase on the spread of the illegal drug crystal meth across the United States. What astonished me the most was the direct role Big Pharma has played in this issue due to its decades’ long unwillingness to cooperate with the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in terms of monitoring purchases of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, without which the drug cannot be made. All because of Big Pharma’s lust for pro.fits. As the Frontline piece makes clear, had Big Pharma, and specifically Pfizer, not objected to the DEA’s strategy, crystal meth, the most highly addictive drug in the world, would ne.ver have been able to reach the epidemic proportions it n.o.w has in this and other countries, destroying countless of lives in the process, and costing local, state, and federal agencies untold amounts of time, mon.ey, and diminished social quality of life. I urge you to visit this site, where you can watch the entire report online, and read much supporting material.
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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