“It is time to lay to rest the notion that germs jump into
people and cause diseases.” Emanuel Cheraskin, M.D., D.M.D. in Vitamin C: Who
Needs It?
The DOCTOR YOURSELF NEWSLETTER Vol 2, No 2 November 10, 2001 “Free of charge, free of
advertising, and free of the A.M.A.”
Written by Andrew Saul, PhD. of http://www.doctoryourself.com
, a free online library of 300 natural healing articles with nearly 4,000
scientific references.
Ducks swim in water but do not get wet. This is because
they have oiled their feathers to form a natural barrier impervious to
moisture. We can do the same with our immune systems.
We live in a world full of germs. Most of them are
harmless and many are actually beneficial.
Cows, by the way, cannot really eat grass. But the digestive bacteria in the cow’s rumen can. Ultimately,
they are to thank for the milk. Helpful
bacteria in your digestive tract make you healthy, too. Some bacteria actually make vitamins for
you, notably B-12 and vitamin K. Some
bacteria help break down your food.
Some help process wastes. And yes,
some bacteria are nasty.
But if the body is healthy, bacteria, pathogenic or not,
are largely irrelevant. Consider this: horses’ guts are full of tetanus
bacteria, yet horses do not get tetanus via the gut. To consider another: wild
London sewer rats (which are always a tad hungry) live in an environment
surrounded by filth and germs. They are very hardy. On the other hand, laboratory white rats are kept nice and clean
and are lovingly overfed. They die at the
drop of a hat.
We live in a medicalized world brim-full of antibiotic
overprescription, with a resultant rise in number of drug-resistant
bacteria. I reluctantly predict that we
will soon see a dramatic increase in “Cipro”- resistant superbacteria. http://www.doctoryourself.com/germs.html
The importance of utilizing harmless natural modalities to boost the immune system
with which nature endowed us is therefore more important than ever.
Or, if you prefer, you can wreck the whole thing. It’s easy; just follow these simple,
ever-popular steps:
1. Smoke. More on this
below.
2. Drink liberal
quantities of alcohol, and let your kids drink plenty of soda pop.
3. Eat all the junk
foods advertised on TV, especially lots of meat, sugar, chemical colors,
flavors and preservatives.
4. Never exercise.
5. Worry constantly.
Just turn on TV news programs to help you with this.
6. Take powerful
antibiotics preventively.
7. Count on your daily
diet for all the vitamins and minerals that your body really needs.
8. Make excuses to not
read How to Live Longer and Feel Better, by Linus
Pauling
9. Never go to bed
before 10 pm.
10. Regularly use a wide
variety of over-the-counter patent drugs.
Nursing and medical students have a fairly high rate of
hypochondria. This is due to their
necessarily obsessive study of pathology, a topic that is enough to make anyone
feel a little sickened.
The public too, from time to time, is subjected to
media-driven obsession with loathsome diseases. This is nothing new.
Leprosy (a relatively non-contagious disease) has been widely feared
since Biblical times. The pox, the plague, polio and pertussis have all had
their day in the news, and not without reason.
But sometimes we do well to step back a bit and look at
the big picture. The question to ask is, what is the greatest preventable
danger to the greatest number of people?
Worldwide, it would be malnutrition. In the United States, it would be
smoking. Malnutrition kills thousands of Earth’s people every single day. In the US alone, tobacco kills 51 people AN
HOUR. That’s over 1,200 dead smokers’
funerals each day.
Of course, the tobacco industry spends over eleven million
dollars a day on advertising to encourage this.
Many people are familiar with this prayer: “Give me
strength to change the things I can, serenity to accept the things I can’t, and
wisdom to know the difference.” Well, smoking is something we can take personal
control over. Oppose tobacco use. Nag
someone you love to stop smoking. Do whatever it takes to save their life. Don’t
be shy; it’s that or a premature visit to the mortuary. Besides, nine out of
ten smokers say they’d like to quit, and nine out of ten who do quit used no
special technique at all: they just stop doing it.
This can work. It
works even easier if vitamin C is sprayed into the mouth and throat each time a
smoker wants a cigarette. (Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1993:337, pp 211-213.)
There’s no need to hunt for vitamin C spray. Just take plain ascorbic acid
crystals (available from any health food store, and many online suppliers) and
dissolve as much as you can in an ounce or two of water. If you do not have an
extra spray bottle lying around, you can gargle with it. Or use chewable
vitamin C. Or just take a lot of vitamin C in the usual way. All these will help you stop smoking, and
reduce food cravings at the same time.
You might not believe this last zinger of a fact, so ask your public
librarian to help get you a copy of the paper I mentioned above, and see for
yourself. HINT: because vitamin C is somewhat acidic (like salad vinegar, but
not as bad as carbonated soft drinks), I recommend you rinse your mouth with
water afterwards. You can also buy
buffered vitamin C powder, or use non-acidic chewables.
When actor and heavy smoker Yul Brenner was dying of lung
cancer, he was asked on television if he had any words to offer about
smoking. He turned to the camera,
looked straight into it, and said, “Just don’t do it.”
Advice that can save 450,000 lives a year is good advice
indeed.
Stanton Glantz, M.D., says “If you would like to help
prevent another generation of tobacco addiction and disease, go to www.SmokefreeAir.org
and send a smokefree EZ-letter to a key decision maker.”
(Dr. Glantz’s frequent email newsletter is free of charge.
You can subscribe at http://smokescreen.org/list/det.cfm?listid=2
)
A three-pack-a-day smoker once told me, “Over the last 20
years, I smoked a Porsche.”
Russell J. Bird, M.D.
Columbia, Pennsylvania
(Reprinted with permission of the author. I have somewhat
abridged the article.)
If anyone doubts that health officials (have voters’) best
interests at heart when they campaign for water fluoridation, the officials
have only themselves to blame. Their misinformation and attempts to discredit scientists
holding opposing views demonstrate an
unhealthy disrespect for voters’ intelligence.
(T)hey exaggerate the impact of fluoridation on cavity
rates. These rates have been falling for years in non-fluoridated areas such as
Utah, and 12-year-olds in many countries that don’t fluoridate water have fewer
cavities than their American counterparts. The decay rates in many non-fluoridated
countries have also dropped faster than the rates in the heavily fluoridated
United States (World Health Organization statistics).
Now a report from the Centers for Disease Control has made
it clearer than ever that fluoridation proponents were also misleading about
how the substance works. The CDC report reflects the view of most scientists
today that while there is an excellent argument for putting fluoride in one’s mouth,
the same can’t be said for swallowing it.
Just to be absolutely clear, the CDC report and every
scientist on its fluoride review panel support water fluoridation. But the
report confirmed that fluoride’s predominant effect is topical—that is, “the
overwhelming majority of its benefit” comes from direct contact with teeth,
explained William H. Bowen, a University of Rochester researcher on the CDC
panel. That’s why “swishing and
spitting [fluoridated water] is probably just as effective as swishing and
swallowing,” according to University of Iowa researcher Keith Heller, another
of the CDC’s reviewers.
Arguing about whether fluoridated water is just
million-dollar mouthwash or whether there is a benefit to consuming it might
seem a pedantic exercise to some. After all, however it works, the CDC is
adamant that it does. But if there is no benefit to swallowing fluoride, that
leaves only risks, and even the CDC acknowledges that ingesting too much
fluoridated water is not a good idea.
The CDC recommends that babies under 6 months of age
ingest no more than 0.7 milligrams of fluoride per day. But since babies that
age drink up to one and one-half liters
of water-based formula every 24 hours, they could ingest twice the CDC’s
recommended dose in a fluoridated area. (And if they are given prescription
fluoridated vitamins, they will get far more. Editor’ s Note.)
Many (fluoridation lobbyists) also downplayed the benefits
of brushing with fluoridated toothpaste, which one of the world’s most
respected pro-fluoride researchers last year told The Tribune “is as good or
better than fluoride in the water.”
You might wonder why, if swallowing fluoride yields no
significant benefits, public health officials continue to push the idea.
If public support for fluoridation is achieved with
inaccurate information, some health officials believe the end justifies the
means. It doesn’t. No matter how
beneficial fluoridated water—or any public health measure— might be, people are
entitled to the truth before deciding whether to implement it.
(Full text of the above article is to be found in the Salt
Lake Tribune http://www.sltrib.com/09302001/commenta/136140.htm
. Kirk Millson is a Tribune editorial
writer. He welcomes e-mail at kmillson@sltrib.com )
Here’s some health wisdom worth from Scott Nearing’s 1976
The Making of a Radical (Second Edition. Harborside, ME: Social Science
Institute):
“The average American has no idea what good health is or
how to go about obtaining it. When he
feels the effects of ill health he goes to a doctor, who, like his prospective
patient, knows little or nothing about health although he knows a great deal
about diseases. Suffering from disease we treat the results of bad living instead
of learning to live a good life with its normal consequences: painless
functioning of the organism. This desperately
bad situation leaves it to food cranks like us to practice health and keep
clear of disease and doctors.”
(p 222)
“The ordinary family spends from a quarter to a third of
its income for food. The family garden,
well handled, can furnish at least three-quarters of that food.” (p 226)
Scott Nearing was on to something, you know. I save a lot
of tax-free money by eating out of my garden. You can save literally hundreds
of dollars just growing your own lettuce, tomatoes, beans and ‘taters. You just
try it and you’ll see.
As a young man, I lived about 15 miles from where the
Scott and his wife Helen had their now-famous Vermont homestead. In fact, I once met with a study group in
one of the first stone structures (a house addition) that the Nearings built by
hand in the 1930’s. They did it all on vegetarian power, and did a nice job,
too.
“Health is the finally effective test of the interaction
of the human organism with its total environment.” (p 222)
You will especially like reading Helen and Scott Nearing’s
Living the Good Life. NY: Schocken Books (1970).
Chapter Five, “Eating For Health” (p 109-141), may be of
greatest interest to you, although the
chapter before it contains excellent gardening hints and composting
instructions. The easiest ways to “can” (jar) raspberries (p 131-132), bake
squash (p 140), preserve vitamin C-rich rose hips (p 137) and, incidentally,
build a house are all covered in Living the Good Life.
How is a “good life” diet a healthy one? Because economy
plus simplicity equals vitality.
Breakfast with the Nearings was fruit, and just as
frequently, nothing. “We have gone for months at a time with no breakfast at
all and maintained health and suffered no discomfort though carrying on a full
program of work.” (p 137) This work included constructing concrete and stone structures,
intensive gardening, and making maple syrup, among other activities.
Why “break” your “fast” at six, or eight, or ten o’clock
anyway? I have personally experienced, for some years now, that I simply do not
“need” a morning meal. A blast of
vitamin C powder in fruit juice or water, along with a couple of
calcium-magnesium tablets, and I am easily good for three or four hours. Add a few tablespoons of lecithin granules,
vitamin E and a multivitamin, and I am not hungry for six hours.
Lunch with the Nearings: “Two bowls of soup and all the
whole grain one wanted was a man’s meal and lasted well till suppertime.” (p
138)
And supper too was simple, natural and meatless. You
really do not have to eat meat, or to eat much, to be healthy. And it saves a
lot of time and dishes, too. I got a lot of ideas from the Nearings, one of
whom (Helen) I was in a panel discussion with in 1984.
I missed meeting Scott by about a year. He died in 1983. at the age of 100.
LOG ON: Making a wood stove hotter.
LOG OFF: Don’t add any more wood.
MONITOR: Keeping an eye on the wood stove.
DOWNLOAD: Gettin’ the firewood off the truck.
MEGA HERTZ: When your not careful gettin’ the firewood. FLOPPY DISK: What you get from trying to
carry too much firewood (if you don ‘t take enough cartilage-buildin’ vitamin
C, that is)
WINDOWS: What to shut when it’s cold outside
SCREEN: What to shut when it’s black fly season
BYTE: What them dang flies do
MODEM: What you did to the hay fields
DOT MATRIX: Old Dan Matrix’s wife
MOUSE: What eats the grain in the barn
MOUSE PAD: That’s hippie talk for the mouse hole
LAP TOP: Where the cat sleeps
As an honorary Vermonter, I do feel entitled to a rib or
two now and again. After all, you can
only be told so many times that “you can’t get there from here” before you want
your say. Thanks to one of my favorite
correspondents for the above.
Okay.
There have been quite a few papers published on reducing
intraocular
pressure with high oral doses of vitamin C. About 15 of them are discussed
in a wonderful book with the blah title of The Healing Factor,
written by
Irwin Stone. Much of
Stone’s book
is posted at
http://www.vitamincfoundation.org Part of chapter 20 deals with glaucoma. I
would also recommend a look at
http://www.cforyourself.com and the vitamin C links at the
LINKS page at
“I have heard that lecithin is high in phosphorous. Could
that cause a phosphorous overload in the body?”
Lecithin contains phosphorous in the form of highly
beneficial phospholipids
and phosphatidyl choline. Phospholipids are known to
decrease arterial
plaque and substantially reduce your risk of cardiovascular
disease.
http://doctoryourself.com/dr_rinse.html
Phosphatidyl choline is made into the neurotransmitter
acetylcholine, which
is so deficient in people with a number of neurological
diseases including
Parkinson’s. In America, we have a very high dietary
phosphorous intake from
soft drinks, from milk, and from meat. So we have elevated
phosphorous in
folks who have never even seen a lecithin supplement. Crummy
diet is the
real problem. Lecithin is a solution.
http://doctoryourself.com/lecithin.html
The DOCTOR YOURSELF NEWSLETTER DEBUNKS JUNK-SCIENCE MYTHS
ABOUT VITAMINS
Plus:
Dr. Melvyn Werbach’s TEXTBOOK OF NUTRITIONAL MEDICINE
Dr. John Mosher reviews THE POWER OF NOW
Cheap, Healthy, EASY Natural-Eating Recipes
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