Category: civil rights

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Other fringe topics revealed the connection between our health and that of the environment

Recently I wrote about a quote regarding investigative reporting and mainstream media. According to the quote investigative reporting is the job of fringe investigators, rather than a job for mainstream media. [Fringe Reports]

Vitamin D and hormone D metabolism has been an my self assigned Don Quixote project but I have also written about other health topics in the past that had seemed to be suppressed or ignored by the mainstream media at the time.

Ignoring or suppressing worrisome events in the news may seem more comfortable in the short term but not addressing unspoken anxieties can lead to greater fear and worse problems over time. Not addressing problems also wastes time that could have been used to develop and implement improved strategies. Worrying by itself is not helpful but worrying that leads to improved procedures can save time, money and health over the long run.

I’m going to summarize some other fringe topics from my archives as a review of what we may not have heard much about over the last few years.

Fracking – I learned about the hydraulic fracturing technique used in the petroleum industry in a round-about way. Over the years I had noticed that the pets and pet farm animals of a family I knew living in the north east area of Ohio that seemed to have roughly a 25% cancer rate – whenever I talked to the family it seemed like at least one of the family’s animals had cancer. It was a hobby farm so there weren’t chemicals being sprayed on their own land but they did live within a farming community. What I discovered when I started searching for information about cancer prevalence in the area was that children in the area also had been having an increased rate of cancer. [1]

However the types of cancers varied among the children and the types of contaminants found in the ground water supplies that were tested varied from area to area – no specific culprit or toxin could be named or held accountable – except that coincidentally hydraulic fracturing techniques had been used in the area since approximately 1965. [2, includes an interactive map of Ohio marked with locations where fracking incidents have occurred. Governor Kasich’s policies in Ohio have allowed for expansion of the fracking industry in the state and have even allowed waste water from fracking operations taking place in other states to be stored, treated and dumped into Ohio rivers  – per the information on this link by Earthjustice, a legal defense oriented environmental nonprofit group.]

The increased rate of cancer found in children living in the northern area of Ohio was never officially blamed on fracking or on any other industry.

The technique that became known as ‘fracking’ pumps extremely large amounts of water deep underground under high pressure. The water has a mixture of unidentified and corporate protected chemical solvents added before being injected underground in order to help dissolve tiny deposits of oil from the shale rock. The water picks up more contaminants while it is deep underground and the waste water that returns to the surface has to be collected and treated as a toxin. I learned that unfortunately for our clean water supplies, during Dick Cheney’s administration businesses using hydraulic fracturing techniques were exempted from being required to follow Clean Water Act standards.

The waste water that returns to the surface may be stored in open ponds that can flood during rainy seasons and, even worse, in some places the waste water has been sprayed on dirt roads to reduce dust or even used to irrigate farm crops. [5] And wastewater has been allowed to be injected directly into underground clean water aquifers in the state of California even though there is a severe multi year long drought occurring in the state. [6]

Articles on fracking from my archives – 1 & 2 are brief with a single link, 3 is a long series of old posts copied onto one page and the formatting is wrong, sorry, many links though: [1, 2, 3]

Citizens of Oklahoma and Texas and elsewhere have also been experiencing earthquakes almost daily in some places. The earthquakes may be due to the quantity of fluid that is being pumped deep underground either during the initial fracking process, or afterwards, as a way to get rid of the contaminated waste water. The citizens of Oklahoma are expected to just get used to rattling around on a regular basis as the fracking process was protected at the state level there even though the increase in earthquakes has been associated with the hydraulic fracturing techniques. [4]

I will continue this summary of other fringe topics in a series of posts.

/Disclosure: This information is provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of fair use. While I am a Registered Dietitian this information is not intended to provide individual health guidance. Please see a health professional for individual health care purposes./

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Fringe reports; Elevated hormone D levels and irritability

I found an interesting article about mainstream media while looking for the source of a quote by Ted Koppel. I didn’t find the source of the quote but it is included towards the end of the article “A citizens guide to understanding corporate media propaganda techniques,” by George Orwell for earthblognews, Jan. 9, 2010:

“People shouldn’t expect the mass media to do investigative stories. That job belongs to the ‘fringe’ media.” – Ted Koppel – (American broadcast journalist, best known as the anchor for Nightline) [1]

A book that also included the quote by Ted Koppel also states that most newspapers do take his “advice seriously,” and the chapter continues with a quote by politician Donald Rumsfeld which may suggest that sensible people in positions to know things also know enough not to talk to the media. And on the next page a quote by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the U.S., gives the impression that a lack of information in newspapers has been a concern for many years: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” [3, from the first two pages of Chapter Six of “Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk,” By Satyajit Das]

So news may not become news in the mainstream media until the subject is already being talked about by enough members of the public to suggest to the mainstream media that there will be plenty of viewers who are interested enough in the news story to be willing to sit through paid advertisements. Commercial advertisements and product placement fees are what pay for salaries and supplies for the news industry. Cigarette commercials were banned from television when the negative health risks became clear but it took decades for the change to occur. Cigarettes were advertised with physician endorsements and images of beautiful people in beautiful places – smoking was represented as sexy and smart by the popular media for many decades before the health risks became overwhelmingly clear.

Direct to consumer advertising for prescription medications is only allowed in two nations, in New Zealand since 1981 and in the United States since 1997. There is some concern that commercials for prescription drugs may lead to their being over prescribed to consumers who may not need the medication but who became worried enough by the ad to ask their physician for a prescription.  [4] I would also be concerned that allowing ads for prescriptions might have led to changes in the programs as well. Producers might encourage writers to incorporate more prescription drug references within TV shows in order to sell more commercial time to the companies who market the prescription medications.

The use of the non-euphoric cannabidiol oil (CBD) that can be extracted from some strains of medical marijuana has been found very effective for some children with severe types of epilepsy. Children may have seizures non-stop for hours regularly for years and may have tried many prescriptions that may cause their own negative side effects. More parents and young adults are speaking out about the effectiveness and safety of the CBD oil for seizures. Parents can lose custody of their children for helping the child use medical cannabis products and parents may also lose custody if it becomes known that they are using medical marijuana for their own health condition. One of the parents  in the following article lost custody of her child when it became publicly known that she was using medical marijuana to help control her Crohn’s Disease, which is an autoimmune inflammatory bowel condition. [2] THC, the euphoric part of medical marijuana has been found helpful for suppressing inflammation which might be helpful for autoimmune conditions with inflammation such as colitis. [3]

Crohn’s Disease was one of the autoimmune conditions listed in yesterday’s post as a disease that may be caused by an infectious bacteria that may be able to survive within human cells and cause elevated hormone D levels.

As a high risk nutrition counselor I have learned professionally about the difficulty patients suffer from Crohn’s Disease. It is an inflammatory bowel disease that can greatly shorten lifespan and can be so devastating to quality of life that patients may not leave their house much in order to stay near a bathroom. During flair ups a patient may have explosive diarrhea randomly throughout the day many times. Severe weight loss and multiple nutrient deficiencies due to poor absorption in the intestines can occur. Shortened lifespan is common, patients may not make it to their fifties. So if Benicar, antibiotics, and avoiding vitamin D could help patients with Crohn’s Disease go from a disease flair up into a state of remission, then I think most patients with Crohn’s Disease would really like to know about the treatment earlier in their lives rather than suffer many uncomfortable years first.

But health professionals can’t really legally/ethically make recommendations to patients about an alternative protocol until it becomes accepted by the mainstream medical industry. Until a therapy is widely accepted as the standard of care it would be considered potentially dangerous for a health professional to recommend and therefore unethical for them to recommend. A health professional would be less at risk legally or ethically if they simply were providing information to a patient so the patient could look into it and learn more about it on their own.

So according to the quote by Ted Koppel reporting on the news is the job of fringe investigators – and so my work may fall into that category too. In the last post I tried to share what could be life saving information about autoimmune disease and the complicated interaction of vitamin D, hormone D, calcium and magnesium .)

So is there something in it for me? Not directly — talking about topics that aren’t mainstream can be dangerous for one’s career. Fact checking the work of the fringe is probably part of the job of the mainstream and it can be common to try to discredit alternative information with the publication of negatively slanted stories. [1]

But to me it would be great if more experts and more individuals did become interested in looking into the information and maybe add further understanding and research, and then maybe sooner than later we would  develop a national blood and organ supply that is tested for intracellular infectious pathogens; and develop clear guidance about the importance of measuring both hormone D and vitamin D levels in order to clearly see which patients are actually deficient in both the vitamin and hormone forms and would therefore need to increase their sun exposure or their intake of vitamin D and which patients actually have elevated hormone D levels instead of being deficient. Low vitamin D levels with elevated hormone D levels may suggest the person has an underlying infection with an intracellular pathogen and that person would actually benefit more by limiting their sun exposure and their intake of vitamin D – and they might be able to treat the underlying infection with Benicar and antibiotics.

I’ve written about this topic for several years because I know from my own illness how uncomfortable it is to have even moderately elevated levels of hormone D. It causes increased loss of calcium from the bones and can lead to osteoporosis over time, and excess free calcium in soft tissue can cause muscle cramps and headaches in the short run and lead to calcification of soft tissue over time, such as atherosclerosis, a type of hardening of the arteries. Elevated hormone D can also affect the mood and may cause extreme irritability – I learned about this directly one summer when I tried tanning booths for the first time. It was before I had learned about the Marshall Protocol or had my own vitamin D and hormone D levels checked. I got a nice all over tan but that summer I was irritated at everything, like silly minor things like rattling-silverware-noise or seconds-too-slow-wait-service, things that I wouldn’t normally be annoyed about. I recognized the feelings weren’t real anger and did my best not to let my internal irritable mood leak out to others.

I learned about the vitamin D/infection theory later that year and after sharing the research with my family physician I was able to follow the Marshall Protocol with his help. I took medications for the treatment for a year and a half and since then I haven’t had the severe migraines that I’d been having regularly for over a decade. I’ve continued to avoid having much sun exposure though and avoiding vitamin D sources since and my autoimmune thyroid condition is currently in remission, thank goodness and thank search engines which had led me to the medication protocol in the first place.

The Marshall Protocol was first developed for treating sarcoidosis but has been used successfully for a variety of conditions. It is still not widely accepted in the medical industry but progress has been made; the FDA did approve use of the blood pressure medication for use with the antibiotic protocol, making it easier for physicians to order for patients who want to try the protocol. [See the last post for more information about the Marshall Protocol and vit.D]

Note/ Updates added at 2 and 3 pm. The save Draft feature hasn’t been working well and Publish is a different software feature that allows edits after posting.

/Disclosure: This information is provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of fair use. While I am a Registered Dietitian this information is not intended to provide individual health guidance. Please see a health professional for individual health care purposes./

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Babies have dignity too; Magical Child Matures, a book review

Babies should have the right to human dignity too. The recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage was based on a human right to dignity. The decision has brought up the question of whether polyamory, marriage between more than two people, should be the next human rights question to discuss. [2] Before broaching that topic I would suggest that the infant’s and birth mother’s right to a good delivery and breast feeding experience need to be clarified legally. The legalization of same sex marriage may lead to an increase in the number of infants born to surrogate mothers or other contracted parenting arrangements which may not allow for a normal amount of time for breast feeding. Ideally an infant would nurse for at least 3 to 9 months and in nature primate species tend to nurse their infants for two to three years. Research into artificial womb incubators also exists which might greatly impact the infant’s right to a dignified (ie close to natural) prenatal and birth experience.

I found the book Magical Child (1977) by Joseph Chilton Pearce to be very helpful during my first pregnancy. It is the precursor to the book Magical Child Matures, (E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1985, New York), which I had mentioned in a previous post and again in my last post where I mentioned that it is now selling used for one penny. I posed the question of whether it is worth a penny and answered that, yes, to me it is worth it specifically because of the third chapter which is titled “Bonding and Attachment.”

The author has written twelve books in all and has focused on child development and the importance of the child-parent bond and breast feeding relationship and also on topics of spirituality and the heart-mind connection or  the “compassionate mind.” [1]

In the third chapter of the book Magical Child Matures labor is described from the infant’s perspective. The stress of delivery causes an increase in an infant’s stress chemicals and establishing a breast feeding relationship as soon as possible after delivery helps bring the levels back down to normal levels.

The chapter titled Bonding and Attachment (1985, page 24-40) first describes an ideal delivery experience for the infant and then describes how disturbing delivery could be in an over-crowded and rushed hospital in the 1970s. The baby and mothers from the over-crowded setting are described as black people receiving care at an inner-city hospital and my impression is that he included the information because he’s not racist, because he felt that #Blacklivesmatter and that all mothers and infants deserve a low stress delivery with a positive bonding experience. Bringing up traumatic history reminds us to investigate routine practices and evaluate them for fairness, effectiveness, and safety risks. He includes in the chapter that the old practice of holding a baby upside down and smacking it on the bottom to stimulate their first breath may also have caused some infants to have internal bleeding in the upper spinal column and die prematurely from silent crib death (found in 80% of autopsies of infants who had died of silent crib death in one study) (Magical Child Matures, 1985, page 35).

He also described a practice that may have been commonly used to save time after delivery in some busy hospitals. The medical professional would just yank the laboring mother’s placenta out by the umbilical cord instead of allowing her body to progress through the final stage of labor at her own pace.

Never discussing uncomfortable history may be more comfortable for us but it doesn’t promote learning from our mistakes or lead to our making changes in routine practices. Holding a baby upside down and smacking it always seemed like a horrible practice to me so finding information that suggests it might indeed have caused traumatic injury was disturbing and revealing. We do many things each day because that is just the way things have always been done but if we never stop to evaluate procedures for their effectiveness or safety then we may be causing harm on a routine basis without realizing it.

Having a baby, for me, was painful and amazing and euphoric and joyful and beautiful, and kind of sweaty and gross, and just as wonderful as the author describes for the well bonded, good delivery experience.

So is the book Magical Child Matures worth a penny (plus shipping and handling)? Yes I think so. The author discusses development of consciousness during the different stages of the lifespan along with his interpretation of how thinking might occur in a triune brain but that speculative discussion of consciousness could be skimmed and the reader may find the developmental information helpful on its own. The author also describes some personal experiences with psychic phenomenon and meditative practices. So that might be a reason for some potential readers to avoid the book or it might be a reason to seek out the book because they are topics that are infrequently discussed.

I’m expecting my first grandchild this month so I made a copy of the chapter on bonding and attachment for the expectant parents just in case they also would find it helpful. However the discussion of bonding and attachment may also be helpful for any age person to read because early childhood experiences might impact our behavior throughout life – a well bonded infant may grow up to be a more trusting adult while a stressed out infant may have more delayed development during early infancy and grow up to be more focused on collecting things and being dominating within relationships rather than being trusting.

The newborn’s first lesson in life is trust. The fetus had warmth and a constant swishing heartbeat and soothing amniotic fluid and suddenly they are forced out into a cold bright noisy world. Newborns certainly don’t deserve to be held upside down and smacked as their first experience in life whatever their skin color may be. And mothers deserve time to labor at their own pace, rather than have the process rushed for the convenience of the medical professional. Hormonal changes occur for the infant and mother during different phases of labor and delivery, rushing the process may interfere with the infant’s health and development and with the development of the mother’s mammary glands and ability to make an adequate supply of breast milk.

Growing a baby isn’t rocket science – it’s much more complicated than that – but worth it. Thanks for sharing your experience in Magical Child Matures, Joseph Chilton Pearce.

/Disclosure: This information is provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of fair use. While I am a lactation educator and Registered Dietitian this information is not intended to provide individual health guidance. Please see a health professional for individual health care purposes./

 

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Consciousness discussed without zombies, aliens, or frogs; a link

Consciousness may be more non-verbal than we realize. Our verbal mind may have significant input from our nonverbal mind in order to save us time in life threatening situations. A team led by Ezequiel Morsella of San Francisco State University published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences about their idea regarding consciousness called the “Passive Frame Theory.” Consciousness is suggested to be a frame for directing and constraining the action of the skeletal muscles for productive output but the direction may be more passive than previously theorized.

Time.com: [Why You’re Pretty Much Unconscious All the Time, June 26, 2015]

The zombies, aliens and frogs were in my last post that was about consciousness and nonverbal behavior patterns. Passive Frame Theory sounds much more scientific but I did find the list of nonverbal behavior patterns very helpful for understanding group and individual behavior. The second book in the list from that post used the term “module” to describe behavior patterns – driving the car module, playing tennis module, sweeping the floor module – we don’t think verbally about how we do much of our daily activities and yet somehow we function.

2. Thomas R. Blakeslee, Beyond the Conscious Mind: Unlocking the Secrets of the Self, (iUniverse, Inc. An Authors Guild BackinPrint.com Edition, 1996, 2004, Lincoln, NE), This book is written for the average reader and is not very long. Personally though, I found it so helpful that I followed a reference in it to find the complete list of nonverbal behavior patterns by Paul MacLean in the book: 1. Editor: Harold Harris, Astride the Two Cultures, Arthur Koestler at 70, (Random House,1976, New York) and in the text: 4. Paul D. MacLean,  The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions, (Plenum Press, 1990, New York) National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

I happened on the book by David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, (Pantheon Books, 2011, New York), by chance but was glad to find the explanation about Paul MacLean’s work in the more recent book because I had been disappointed not to find more about his work online, so it was an explanation at least.

3. Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child Matures, (E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1985, New York) – This one is an odd book that sells for a penny used on Amazon – Is it worth a penny? to me the chapter on Bonding and Attachment is worth the price of three sets of copies at least but that is a longer discussion for another post.

 

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Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and the information is provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of fair use. While I am a Registered Dietitian this information is not intended to provide individual health guidance. Please see a health professional for individual health care purposes.