Saturday, February 28, 2015
Heart Consciousness and the Body: Transforming the Physical Body to Higher Frequencies of Matter
In5D February 19, 2015 Spiritual Awakening
Heart consciousness fully unites the soul with the body in pure harmony through the spirit. Through a heart-centered consciousness, our infinite and eternal being can be expressed within the physical body on Earth. It is the fullness of love and creativity unhindered by the duality density of incarnate life.
We awaken, transform, and evolve to the higher consciousness of the true self in Divine unity by the intentional choices of the soul through the heart and mind. While the interior consciousness of dimensions beyond the physical is the initiator and catalyst for all change in human consciousness, there are very real changes to the physical body. The body receives a harmonic upgrade of its vehicle. All systems of the body must be able to relay the information and consciousness of the multidimensional and beyond dimensional soul while expressing through the incarnate body. This is the importance of understanding the human energy field, chakras, heart, brain, nervous system, and endocrine system. We learn of the importance of the heart’s nervous system and electromagnetic field, and all of the brain’s systems in mediating the consciousness of the soul in the body. While the body is the vehicle for expressing the nonlocal and infinite soul, it forms a unity with the soul and spirit during incarnate expression of the soul’s evolution of its eternal cosmic and Divine being. Therefore, even though the soul transcends its physical organization as body, its being is one with the body for experience on Earth and other interdimensions of incarnation.
The fear-based consciousness of conflict, control, and separation has dimmed awareness of the multidimensional self that is peace, joy, love, and creativity. The lower 3D duality consciousness has conditioned disharmonic blockages throughout the energy system of the body. The result has been a conflict oriented frequency of matter that enables disease, separation, and disharmony. Under this level of egoic 3D consciousness, the body is not able to be in resonance and carry the higher dimensional information of the heart and the full capabilities of the higher Divine mind, i.e., peace, joy, love, unity, intentional creativity, telepathy, harmonic cellular regeneration, and teleportation.
While incarnate, the heart is the center of life for multidimensional consciousness and how the soul experiences consciousness within the body. In order to anchor in the fullness of heart consciousness, all restrictions of the bodymind throughout all chakras must be healed and released. In choosing the practices that resonate for us which may include meditation, prayer, energy healing, introspection, self-observation, experiencing feelings and emotions, and service along the pathways of the many spiritual, metaphysical, esoteric, and scientific traditions, we open to the awareness of the higher self and Divine unity. All of these practices and paths are intended to be guides for our inner intentional consciousness in choosing to live our heart-centered unity of love and creativity.
It is only from this awareness and intention that the restrictions are healed, heart consciousness is anchored, and the higher mind capabilities restored. Throughout the entire process, the physical body is changing in order to receive and transmit the harmonic frequencies of the higher mind in the heart. From within this aspect of evolving consciousness, we see the transformation of DNA, the easing of the nervous system, coherence of the electromagnetic frequencies of the heart, increased frontal lobe brain activity, and entrainment of the pituitary gland, hypothalamas, thalamas, and pineal gland. Therefore, all of the physical changes are part of evolution and ascension, but they must be understood from the level of the soul and spirit that is enabling the change.
|
Thus, the frequencies and harmony of the physical body are critical for our Divine expression of love and creativity while our soul is incarnate. Our key context becomes the seeing of the physical body not from a linear 3D mechanisitc awareness as organizing consciousness with density, but as the vehicle for expression of consciousness, and even as consciousness itself vibrating along a continuum of frequency. When the body is understood from the centrality of consciousness from the infinite soul and mind beyond the physical, then the physical changes to the density of the body and the workings of the heart, mind, and brain fit well into the ascension process.
In awakening to unity consciousness of the heart, the bodymind restrictions are primarily released by the emotional work of integrating the false self defenses of the shadow and by forgiveness. All this must be done with the clear intent to live a life of love and creativity. In this process, the conditioning of the fight or flight trauma response and the improper use of the 3D thinking mind is changed. These nervous system changes are necessary to open the heart by quieting the inharmonious noise of the 3D thinking mind. Practices that are helpful here are the many types of meditation, harmonic sound frequency resonance of soul and body with 432Hz, and Divine energy transmissions such as the Oneness Blessing and Oneness Meditation. They quiet the lower mind and move activity to the frontal lobes where frequencies of the higher unity mind are expressed.
All of these are preparatory steps of fully anchoring the organization of heart consciousness, and the evolution of the body to a less dense frequency of matter. This will be a change to either a refined carbon structure or a shift to a more crystalline silicon structure. All of these changes involve the Divine energy and soul evolving both the information sent to DNA and a transformation or activation of the DNA itself.
This brings us to the role of certain systems of the physical brain that transduce and mediate the higher mind in its support of the central consciousness organization of the heart. The purely resonant properties of these physical systems are necessary for the fully harmonic functioning of the third eye and crown chakras through the pituitary, hypothalamas, thalamas, and pineal gland. A highly functioning nervous and hormonal system is key to resonance tuning for heart consciousness in expressing all its capabilities in the body.
The fully awakened heart supported by the higher mind through the fully functioning brain is vitally important for our interdimensional communication, remembering who we are, our mission, and our soul evolution while we are incarnate in the body on Earth. May we continue to progress in our understanding of our Divine Being as spirit and soul, and the role of the physical body in our ascension to a fifth dimensional and beyond consciousness.
After Reading This You Will Never Throw Out That Old Sprouted Garlic Again
FEB 28 • HEALTH, NATURAL RELIEF, VIDEOS • 110 VIEWS • COMMENTS OFF
by PAUL FASSA
“Sprouted” garlic — old garlic bulbs with bright green shoots sprouting from their cloves —is commonly thought to be past its prime and routinely gets tossed into the garbage bin without a second thought.
How to Treat Eczema With Herb Remedies
BY MR.VELJAN MITREVSKI · JANUARY 22, 2015
eczema
Eczema is a skin disorders which has affected many people. There are certain factors which may cause eczema such as varicose veins, nutritional deficiencies, allergies, faulty body metabolism, cold and dry weather and failure of the system to excrete toxins from the body. Some common symptoms of eczema are redness on skin, itching, dry and flaky skin, itchy blisters, rough and thickened skin, inflammation on the skin, and small bumps on forehead, neck and cheek.
There are many natural ways of treating eczema which are simple to follow and safe to use. Some of the popular home remedies for eczema which have been used since a very long time and have proven to be effective are:
- One of the most effective home remedies for eczema is the use of unrefined virgin coconut oil. It is rich natural
oil with a good smell. All you need to do is apply virgin coconut oil on the affected area.
- One of the most effective home remedies for eczema is the use of unrefined virgin coconut oil. It is rich natural
oil with a good smell. All you need to do is apply virgin coconut oil on the affected area.
- Turmeric is also considered to be one of the effective home remedies for eczema. Just take one tablespoon of
turmeric powder and neem leaves powder each. Mix them together to form a paste and then apply it on the affected area.
turmeric powder and neem leaves powder each. Mix them together to form a paste and then apply it on the affected area.
Coconut-Oil
- Oat meal can also be used to treat eczema. All you have to do is take some oatmeal and water and make them into a paste. Apply this paste on the affected area of your skin. Or you can try using oatmeal soaking products for warm baths.
- Take an iron vessel and add 200 grams of mustard oil in it. Now boil it and then add fresh leaves of neem (50 grams) in it. Continue boiling till the neem leaves turn black in color. Allow this mixture to cool down and then apply this oil on the affected area four times daily. Using this method continuously for one year will totally eliminate any chances of eczema from happening again.
- In order to reduce the inflammation, pain and redness caused by eczema, you can try using a paste of raw
strawberries on the affected region of your body.
strawberries on the affected region of your body.
- Take one third cup of cold compressed sunflower oil and half cup of apple cider vinegar. Add them to your bath water and soak your body in this water. This is one of the most effective home remedies for eczema.
- Almond leaves can also be used to treat eczema. All you have to do is mash some almond leaves in water. Now apply this mixture on your eczema.
These were some of the most effective home remedies for eczema which are simple, cost-effective and easy to use.
These were some of the most effective home remedies for eczema which are simple, cost-effective and easy to use.
- See more at: http://thetreatmentherbs.com/how-to-treat-eczema-with-herb-remedies/#sthash.4WINbCau.dpuf
10 Popular Foods That Drain Energy and Add Extra Pounds
February 07, 2014 | 325,810 views
By Dr. Mercola
For an activity that most people do multiple times each and every day, eating is embroiled in confusion and controversy. Or rather, not the act of eating, but the choice of what to eat. With each meal and snack, you have an opportunity to give your body adequate and even extra nutrition. But many fall short of this goal.
To be honest, the cards are very much stacked against you. Food advertising is everywhere and it promotes the most profitable products, which are typically not one in the same with the healthiest food choices.
Processed foods in particular are literally designed to addict you and keep you eating more. At the same time, even public health guidelines on nutrition are entirely misguided – causing most people to shun healthful foods, like saturated fats, in favor of grains (which most eat far too much of).
The end result is nothing less than a nutritional disaster, evidenced by some of the most popular foods eaten by Americans on a daily basis. Worse still, many have been lead to believe that these foods are healthy when, in fact, they're only going to drain your energy and make you fat.
Ditch These 10 Popular Energy-Draining, Weight-Boosting Foods
The first step to eating better is knowledge – knowledge of which foods you're better off "breaking up with" starting today. Personal trainer and weight loss coach Traci Mitchell recently shared 10 such foods on Get Fit Chicago,1 and you know what? They're right on track.
Take a minute to review your typical daily diet, and if the following 10 foods make more than a very occasional appearance, it's time to do some major tweaking. These are 10 major food offenders that will only zap your energy and make you fat. You can eat better, get healthy, and feel great, and doing so starts with ditching these 10 popular foods.
1. Bagels
Bagels are nothing more than a very large serving of bread. One bagel can contain 45 grams or more of refined carbohydrates, which quickly break down to sugar, increase your insulin levels, and cause insulin resistance, which is the number one underlying factor of nearly every chronic disease known to man, including cancer and heart disease.
2. Specialty Coffee Drinks
Coffee drinks are typically loaded with syrups and sugar, while the "skinny" versions will contain artificial sweeteners. While a cup of black coffee is an acceptable, even healthful, way to start your day, a medium mocha coffee drink from one popular chain can contain 35 grams of sugar. That's nearly nine teaspoons before your morning is over.
3. Cereal
Most cereal is a combination of high-fructose corn syrup, sugar, and genetically modified (GM) corn, and cereals marketed to children are the worst offenders. However, even "healthy" adult cereals are better off avoided, as they're nothing more than refined carbohydrates. I don't recommend eating cereal, even if it doesn't have any added sugars.
4. Soda (Diet or Regular)
Most sodas contain far too much sugar, or even worse, artificial sweeteners. For instance, the chemical aspartame, often used as a sugar substitute in diet soda, has over 92 different side effects associated with its consumption including brain tumors, birth defects, diabetes, emotional disorders, and epilepsy/seizures. Plus, each sip of soda exposes you to:
- Phosphoric acid, which can interfere with your body's ability to use calcium, leading to osteoporosis or softening of your teeth and bones.
- Benzene. While the federal limit for benzene in drinking water is 5 parts per billion (ppb), researchers have found benzene levels as high as 79 ppb in some soft drinks, and of 100 brands tested, most had at least some detectable level of benzene present. Benzene is a known carcinogen.
- Artificial food colors, including caramel coloring, which has been identified as carcinogenic. The artificial brown coloring is made by reacting corn sugar with ammonia and sulfites under high pressures and at high temperatures.
- Sodium benzoate, a common preservative found in many soft drinks, which can cause DNA damage. This could eventually lead to diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver and Parkinson's.
5. Commercial Yogurt
Traditionally fermented yogurt is chock full of healthful bacteria (probiotics). In ancient times, food preservation was accomplished through lacto-fermentation, a process that adds a host of beneficial micro-organisms to food. This makes them easier to digest, and increases the healthy flora in your intestinal tract.
But don't expect to be able to pick up the real deal in your local supermarket. Pasteurized yogurts in most supermarkets will not provide you with these health benefits, as the pasteurization process destroys most of the precious enzymes and other nutrients.
Further, most commercial yogurt contains added sugar or artificial sweeteners. For healthier yogurt, try plain raw yogurt and add in your own flavoring, such as stevia, cinnamon, or fresh berries.
Further, most commercial yogurt contains added sugar or artificial sweeteners. For healthier yogurt, try plain raw yogurt and add in your own flavoring, such as stevia, cinnamon, or fresh berries.
6. Submarine Sandwiches
Large submarine sandwiches are heavy on bread (more refined carbs) and typically contain processed-meat lunchmeat that may contain sodium nitrite and other additives like MSG, high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives, artificial flavors, or artificial colors. While sub sandwiches are often viewed as a healthier alternative to fast-food hamburgers, they're virtually just as bad.
7. Orange Juice
Some orange juice contains high-fructose corn syrup, added sugar, and artificial flavors and colors. But even natural brands contain far too much fructose without any of the fiber, antioxidants, and health-promoting phytochemicals found in whole fruit.
Previous studies have already clearly demonstrated that drinking large amounts of fruit juice dramatically increases your risk of obesity. Even freshly squeezed fruit juice can contain about eight full teaspoons of fructose per eight-ounce glass, which will cause your insulin to spike and may counter the benefits of the antioxidants. If you suffer from type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, or cancer, you'd be best off avoiding fruit juices altogether until you've normalized your uric acid and insulin levels.
8. Muffins
Most muffins are high in sugar and refined carbs and low in nutrition. This is true even if they're "low-fat" or contain healthy-sounding elements like bran or carrots. Eating a muffin is no different than eating a bagel or plate of pancakes. It will cause your blood sugar and insulin levels to spike, followed by an energy-draining crash. This is true of any food high in refined sugar and carbs, so you'll want to avoid doughnuts,
9. Potato Chips
Potato chips are nothing more than refined carbs and unhealthy fats, tossed with too much processed sodium. Plus, when carbohydrate-rich foods like potatoes are cooked at high temperatures, as all potato chips are, acrylamide -- a tasteless, invisible chemical byproduct -- is formed. Animal studies have shown that exposure to acrylamide increases the risk of several types of cancer, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer considers acrylamide a "probable human carcinogen."
10. Fruit Smoothies
Fruit smoothies are often touted as a convenient strategy to boost your fruit and veggie intake. Unfortunately, they too contain excessive amounts of fructose, and perhaps even added sugars on top of that. While it's possible to make a healthful fruit smoothie at home, provided you go easy on the fruit and add in healthful additions like spinach and coconut oil, store-bought smoothies are virtually always high-sugar nutritional disasters.
Energy Drinks Won't Give You Lasting Energy Either
Among the functional beverage category, the energy drink segment has experienced the largest volume growth and increased annual sales, both in the US and abroad.2 This should give you an idea of just how many people are turning to energy drinks to give them the boost they need to get through their day.
There are the risks from over-consuming caffeine, of course (and other risks, like the fact that drinking energy drinks has been compared to "bathing" teeth in acid because of their impact on your tooth enamel3), but above and beyond is the plain and simple fact that this is artificial energy (often with other questionable artificial ingredients added, too).
As soon as the boost from the caffeine wears off, you'll likely be more depleted than before you imbibed and you'll be looking for another fix. And wouldn't you rather just wake up fresh, ready to go, with energy and enthusiasm for your day? The lack of energy and fatigue state is not a natural one. Rather, it's much more likely a result of certain lifestyle choices, such as not enough healthy food, too much processed foods and sugar, and not enough exercise and sleep, plus an overload of stress.
Your Diet Is Key for Boosting Energy Levels and Fat-Burning
There are two fuels your body can use, sugar and fat. The sad reality is that our ancestors were adapted to using fat as their primary fuel, and over 99 percent of us are now adapted to using sugar or glucose as our number one fuel source. Because most are primarily burning carbs as fuel, afternoon fatigue is typically related to post-lunch hypoglycemia. By switching your body from using carbs as its primary fuel to burning fats instead, or becoming "fat adapted," you virtually eliminate such drops in energy levels. Overall, being adapted to burning fat instead of carbs has a number of benefits, including:
- Having plenty of accessible energy on hand, as you effectively burn stored fat for energy throughout the day. One way to tell if you're fat adapted or not is to take note of how you feel when you skip a meal. If you can skip meals without getting ravenous and cranky (or craving carbs), you're likely fat-adapted.
- Improved insulin and leptin sensitivity and decreased risk of virtually every known chronic degenerative disease.
- Effectively burn dietary fat for your energy, which leads to less dietary fat being stored in your adipose tissue—hence, the weight loss benefits associated with fat adaptation.
- Being able to rely more on fat for energy during exertion, sparing glycogen for when you really need it. This can improve athletic performance, and helps burn more body fat. As explained by Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint, if you can handle exercising without having to carb-load, you're probably fat-adapted. If you can work out effectively in a fasted state, you're definitely fat-adapted.
To Increase Energy and Burn More Fat, Replace Your Carbs with Healthy Fats
This is an important step to getting the energy you need from your food while also optimizing your weight. Keep in mind that when we're talking about harmful carbs, we're only referring to grains and sugars, NOT vegetable carbs. You need very little if any of the former and plenty of the latter. In fact, when you cut out sugar and grains, you need to radically increase the amount of vegetables you eat since, by volume, the grains you need to trade out are denser than vegetables. You also need to dramatically increase healthful fats, which include:
|
Olives and olive oil (for cold dishes)
|
Coconuts, and coconut oil (for all types of cooking and baking)
|
Butter made from raw grass-fed organic milk
|
|
Raw nuts, such as almonds or pecans
|
Organic pastured egg yolks
|
Avocados
|
|
Pasture-finished meats
|
Palm oil
|
Unheated organic nut oils
|
A reasonable goal will be to have as much as 50-70 percent of daily calories from healthy fat, which will radically reduce your carbohydrate intake. Fat is far more satiating than carbs, so if you have cut down on carbs and still feel ravenous, it's a sign that you have not replaced them with sufficient amounts of healthy fat. Most people will likely notice massive improvement in their health and overall energy levels by following this approach. To help you get started on the right track, review my Nutrition Plan, which guides you through these dietary changes one step at a time.
Are You Eating These 10 Healthiest Foods?
We've covered the basics of what to eat for energy and fat-burning, along with 10 foods to avoid. Now you may be wondering what types of foods are ideal to consume. The 10 healthful foods that follow are among the best. Remember, these are general recommendations. Not everyone will do well with these foods, but the vast majority will have health improvement by regularly consuming them. As always, it is important to listen to your body and let it guide you in making that determination.
- Fermented vegetables
- Fermented beverages, like kefir
- Kale
- Sardines and wild Alaskan salmon
- Whey protein
- Organic eggs
- Coconut oil
- Avocado
- Raw organic butter
- Pomegranate
Global Health Problems Reflect Our Disconnection from the Earth
February 28, 2015 | 116,507 views
Story at-a-glance
+
By Dr. Mercola
“Fire is what set us apart. But that fire is on the verge of burning us.”
Living in the modern world is making us sick. That’s the conclusion drawn by Dr. Pedram Shojai, OMD after many years of treating patients for the same lifestyle-induced illnesses, over and over again. This realization inspired him on a four-year mission to produce a film that might help “wake us all up.”
Dr. Shojai partnered with South American filmmaker Mark van Wijk to produce the documentary “Origins,”1 a broad exploration of the intrinsic connection between our health and the vitality of our planet, and how our modern lifestyle is out of synch with our DNA.
The film features 24 great minds in the fields of anthropology, medicine, ecology and health, including David Wolfe, Jeffrey Smith and Sara Gottfried, M.D. Not only is it very informative but also beautifully filmed. “Origins” takes us back to our human roots when we lived as one with the earth.
Plugging Back into the Earth
“The bushman lives his life in nature... the earth, the sun, the wind. This is a wilderness person who respects nature. This is where we make our lives in order to live together with nature.” -!’Aru Ikhuisi Piet Berendse, Bushman and Activist
While we were developing as a species, we lived in tune with the earth, but that connection has been all but lost. Once we plugged into technology, we unplugged from our planet.
Most people feel profoundly different when they leave the city to spend just a few days in nature, gaining an appreciation of just how disengaged they’ve become. This is why grounding is so powerful.
We are besieged by constant messages that in order to be happy, we need more stuff, but in reality, we have only four basic human needs: water, fire, food, and shelter.
The modern world wants to brainwash you into thinking you need much more than that, but in reality, the rest are only “wants.” All of this “stuff” has weakened your relationship with the earth.
The Native Americans were highly attuned to nature. They took care of the earth and it took care of them. They lived symbiotically with the planet instead of as parasites upon it, with reverence rather than disregard.
They would sit in one spot listening to the noises the birds were making, sensing the direction of the wind, atmospheric changes and so on, and this mindfulness informed them of what their next move should be.
As Above, So Below
What allowed us to pull to the head of the pack was fire, making it possible to grow bigger brains that gave us tools, then eventually science and technology. Our ability to wield fire put us into orbit and gave us the internet and all its benefits.
We became Top Dog—but also Top Bully. The unfortunate corollary to humanity’s greatness has unfortunately been tendencies toward arrogance and shortsightedness.
Technology has vastly outpaced our common sense, and we’ve developed a dangerous disregard for long-term consequences for ourselves and the ecosystem in which we live. Both are sounding alarms, and it’s questionable whether we’re hearing them.
Greek philosopher Hermes Trismegistus had a famous axiom: “As above, so below.” This can be applied to the relationship between humans and the earth—microcosm and macrocosm are reflections of each other. What we see on a large scale will inevitably show up on a small scale, and vice versa.
Our ailing bodies, ailing soils, disappearing species and their habitats are all symptoms of one pervasive problem: a planet that’s becoming more toxic with each passing day. Ignoring its warning calls may place humans next in line for extinction.
Humanity and Earth Cry Out... But Is Anyone Listening?
The US is now producing and importing 74 billion pounds of chemicals each day—that’s 250 pounds per person, per day. And that figure doesn’t even include pharmaceuticals, pesticides, fuels, and food additives. Most of these chemicals have never been tested for their effects on human health, yet we consume them daily. What on earth are we doing to ourselves?
In 2013, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization (WHO), deemed air pollutants a class 1 carcinogen.2 It’s projected that air pollution will be the number one cause of death globally by 2050, largely because of our dependence on fossil fuels.
Six billion pounds of bisphenol-A (BPA) is produced each year, leaving our planet literally choking on plastics. BPA, phthalates, and other pseudo estrogens are hijacking our hormones, disrupting the endocrine function of our entire species.
The average baby is now born with 287 chemicals in their body—before they even takes their first breath. We’ve reached the point at which the signals from endocrine disrupting chemicals in our children’s bodies are louder than the signals they’re getting from their own natural hormones.
We used to be naturally lean and strong but have become progressively more obese and weaker. Our bodies are so busy detoxifying that they frequently lack adequate resources to perform basic biological processes. Is it any wonder that humanity has become so sick?
When a species is healthy, nature rewards it with fertility, but studies show that human fertility is waning. One of every four couples worldwide is unable to conceive due to problems with conception and miscarriage. Fertility is a leading indicator for the health of an organism, so the fact that one in eight of us are not healthy enough to reproduce is a major clue.
Your Inner Ecosystem: The Interface with the World
There is no more poignant illustration of your connection to the world around you than your microbiome, or “inner ecosystem.” The long tube running through you from your mouth to your anus is the interface between you and the outside world, and the seat of your immunity—health and disease start in your gut. But this vital system is being severely disrupted by our modern lifestyle.
Infants are literally bathed in beneficial microorganisms during childbirth, which they receive from their mothers as they pass through the birth canal—it’s a baby’s “first inoculation,” potentially providing lifelong immunity.
However, babies born by C-section do not receive this natural inoculation. Kids who were deprived of a vaginal birth are showing all kinds of diseases, including asthma and autoimmune disorders. Infants receive another microbial boost from breast milk, but of course those fed infant formula miss out on this too.
Making matters worse, infants and children are prescribed antibiotics periodically throughout childhood, are discouraged from playing in the dirt and then doused in hand sanitizer. This “sanitized childhood” prevents kids from developing natural immunity, and their bodies fail to populate with the beneficial microbes that grow into an army of protection from illness. Antibiotics have essentially led to the “mass extinction” of our beneficial gut flora, resulting in dysbiosis (an imbalance in your microbiome) and all of the health problems that accompany it.
Your DNA Is Largely Controlled by Your Gut Flora
An abnormal microbiome is a factor behind inflammation, food cravings, obesity, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and many of the other chronic diseases seen today. When your gut flora is unhealthy, leaky gut syndrome can develop whereby food particles leach into your bloodstream where they can trigger allergic and inflammatory responses. An abnormal microbiome can also lead to depression and other emotional and physical problems, because your gut bacteria provide a significant source of your amino acids, vitamins and other important compounds. Three major ones are ATP, tryptophan and serotonin.
Beneficial bacteria also play an enormous role in your genetic expression—continuously helping flip genes off and on as you need them. Your genetic expression is 50 to 80 percent controlled by how you eat, think and move, and your genes change daily—if not hourly. You may be surprised to learn that 140 times more genetic influence comes from your microbes as from the DNA in your own cells. Your genes control protein coding, which determines your hormones, weight, fertility, mood and others.
Which Do You Choose—Food or 'Edible Manufactured Products?'
Our biology adapted to a diet of wild plants and animals—wild vegetables, berries, nuts, roots, and game, which were MUCH higher in nutrients than our foods today. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors consumed nearly 100 grams of fiber every day, compared to the eight to 15 grams now consumed by the average Westerner. Food can be medicine or poison... the processed foods found lining grocery store shelves are not the foods we were designed to eat. Ninety percent of the average American diet is fake food out of a box, can, jar, or tube.
The foods many react adversely to are relatively new in our food supply—soy, gluten from hybridized wheat, corn, sugar, and highly pasteurized dairy, for example. These modern foods are foreign to your body, so it’s common to have problematic reactions, including inflammatory and autoimmune responses, which can lead to allergies, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and the list goes on and on. One of every four Americans now has type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes.
Americans have shunned fats for the last 40 years after being told they cause heart disease, when the real culprit is sugar. The epidemic of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and the like are evidence of what happens when your brain is starved of beneficial fats while being bombarded with toxic insults over time. Your brain is made up of fat, so it’s no surprise that low-fat diets have been linked to depression and suicidal or homicidal behavior.
We have outsourced the making of our food to corporations that have cut corners, added chemicals, and altered the genetic makeup of what we eat—it’s not food anymore but rather “edible manufactured products.” Our children pay the heaviest price, becoming biochemically enslaved to sugar. This is not an exaggeration as studies have shown sugar to be eight times as addictive as cocaine. Would it be okay if the government began marketing and subsidizing cocaine? Of course not, but that’s exactly what they’re doing with sugar with their subsidization of the corn and fructose industry and manipulative marketing campaigns.
Adding a sedentary lifestyle to a massively unhealthy diet creates the perfect storm for “diabesity.” Our ancestors were in constant motion, hunting, building and carrying things, escaping from predators, etc. Today, people barely move. Sitting for more than eight hours a day is associated with a 90 percent increased risk of type 2 diabetes. For optimal health, you need to move near-continuously throughout the day, or at least avoid sitting down for more than three hours a day. And, to keep your body strong, you hunter-gatherer genes want you to exert an all-out effort occasionally, such as high intensity exercises, but few of us actually do this.
Your Health Depends on Soil Health, and Our Soils Are Dying
Just as your gut houses a microbiome that’s critical for your health, our soils contain a microbiome critical to the health of the planet. Your health is directly related to the quality of the food you eat, and the quality of your food depends on the health of the soil in which it’s grown. As above, so below. In the rhizosphere, microorganisms form nodules on the roots of plants to help them take up minerals and other nutrients from the soil. Unfortunately, modern industrial agriculture (monoculture) destroys much of the soil’s microbiome. Heavy agrichemical use and GE crops rapidly destroy once-fertile soils that took centuries to develop. Removing the stress on a plant by dousing it with chemical fertilizers and insecticide cocktails causes it to become weak, producing less of the natural phytochemicals so vital for your health.
Although arrogant molecular biologists believe they know, the reality is that we really don’t know what effects tampering with the genetics of our food supply will have on your health and your children’s health over the long run. I expose their fraud in my fascinating interview with Steven Druker, slated to be published next month. Many experts believe GE foods are contributing to the growing chronic disease epidemics seen today. Despite what industry says, GE foods are not the answer to world hunger. On the contrary, sustainable agriculture that works in harmony with nature instead of against it has been proven to double crop yield.
The United Nations published in a study in 2010 concluding that if the world were switched to agroecological techniques, on the same farming footprint existing today, we could double world food production in about 10 years and begin to heal many of the insults of the chemical era. We must rekindle our relationship with food, go back into our kitchens and start cooking again. In 1900, only two percent of meals were eaten outside of the home, but today it’s more than half.
Your Future Depends on Your Choices Today
Many inroads have been made improving access to local and sustainable foods, but we still have a long way to go. Building a food system that relies heavily on locally grown foods is the answer to many of our global problems, from environmental destruction to hunger and disease. The most powerful tool you have for change is your fork—you vote with your fork three times a day! Are you going to support the companies that are poisoning you and your children, or will you support the people who are raising food in a way that’s a win-win for you and the earth and everyone?
Real food may seem more expensive, but it’s your primary health care, and cheap food isn’t cheap when you consider the risk of extinction. As you’ve seen, nature isn’t “out there”—it’s in your own body, in your own home and all around you. All life on earth is inextricably linked. Every time you make a choice, you’re changing the world and influencing our future. The goal isn’t to abandon technology and return to ancient times, but rather to harness technology for the betterment of all and proceed with mindfulness and reverence. As stated in the film, “The wisdom of the ancients is the medicine of the future.”
|
Using Pure Water to Detox Heavy Metals
Using Pure Water To Detox Heavy Metals
I always kind of just assumed that clean water was clean water. I know I’m very lucky to have access to drinking water every day of my life, and whether that water was bottled, filtered or from the tap, it all seemed to be fair game to me – especially in the New York City area, which I’ve always been told is home to some of the cleanest drinking water available. But that all changed about a month ago.
I began seeing an incredible (arguably magical) natural doctor in Brooklyn. Upon scanning my entire body, she made a couple of really incredible discoveries – and one of these was that an overload of aluminum and lead were taking a toll on some of my systems.
So, how was I to clear these heavy metals from my body? First: Stop using conventional deodorant, which almost always contains aluminum. Well, I’ve already been making my own natural deodorant for almost a year (see the recipe here!), so that was taken care of. Second: Take a supplement that aids in detoxing metals, like chlorella. Again, something I was already doing. Third: Trade in my aluminum pots and pans for glass and ceramic cookware. Okay, easy enough. Fourth: Switch your water filter. My WHAT?
As it turns out, the seemingly trusty water filtration system I’d been using for years wasn’t actually filtering heavy metals out of my water. Couple that with the lead pipes bringing it into my home, and we’ve got a recipe for a heavy metal overload – especially for someone who drinks as much water as I do.
According to my doc (and a handful of other natural doctors I’ve seen), reverse osmosis water is the prime choice. During the process of reverse osmosis, tap water is pushed through a semi-permeable membrane, removing 90-99% of dissolved inorganic solids, like salt and heavy metals. The only issue here is that these systems can be pretty pricey. And although I do believe good health shouldn’t really have a price tag, some things are just simply not feasible for those on a tight budget.
My doc recommended this brand, which she believes is the cost-effective next best thing to a reverse osmosis filter. I ordered my filter right away, and was psyched to see that it actually came with a TDS meter, which allows me to test the level of dissolved solids in my water. Tap water levels generally range from 0 to upwards of 300 ppm (parts per million), and seem to vary from region to region. As you might guess, the closer to 0, the better.
I decided to do a little comparison of levels: tap water vs. filtered water (using my previous filter) vs. bottled water vs. filtered water (using my new filter).
Here were my results:
Holy cow. Now, I have to admit that on this particular day, my previous filter was a few weeks old, so it wasn’t at its prime. But still. The level of that water was alarmingly close to plain tap water. And the water using the new filter had a reading of 0. Zero! That’s even better than the bottled water. I did this test a bunch of times on different days using different batches of water, and each time yielded similar results.
For any of you skeptics – don’t worry, I feel you. This meter came with the water filter. It could totally somehow be rigged. (Also keep in mind that these levels just measure dissolved inorganic solids, so we’re not looking at bacteria or viruses here.) But I’ve always preferred to be a believer.
When I saw my doctor a few days later, she reported that my body had already made noticeable improvements in the way of heavy-metal detoxing. And one week later, I was totally detoxed. Done. No more excess lead, no more excess aluminum. All because I changed my water filter and took a break from aluminum pots and pans.
Since I’m also detoxing some other things at the moment, I can’t report on my own observations of how this detox has changed by body just yet, but I’ll keep you guys posted.
For now, I’ll just be happily sipping on this here purified water.
+ Have any of you ever done a heavy metal detox? How’d it go?
**I just want to add that this is a recount of my own experience. This post isn’t intended to help diagnose or treat any illnesses. If you think you may need to detox from metals or anything else, I’d recommend finding an awesome natural doctor to help create a treatment plan that’s right for you!**
Source(s):
blog.freepeople.com
Friday, February 27, 2015
Richard Moskowitz, M. D. – The Case Against Immunizations
Richard Moskowitz, M. D. – Image source DoctorRMosk.com
For the past ten years or so, I have felt a deep and growing compunction against giving routine vaccinations to children. It began with the fundamental belief that people have the right to make that choice for themselves.
But eventually the day came when I could no longer bring myself to give the shots, even when the parents wished me to. I have always believed that the attempt to eradicate entire microbial species from the biosphere must inevitably upset the balance of Nature in fundamental ways that we can as yet scarcely imagine. Such concerns loom ever larger as new vaccines continue to be developed, seemingly for no better reason than that we have the technical capacity to make them, and thereby to demonstrate our right and power as a civilization to manipulate the evolutionary process itself.
Purely from the viewpoint of our own species, even if we could be sure that the vaccines were harmless, the fact remains that they are compulsory, that all children are required to undergo them, without sensitivity or proper regard for basic differences in individual susceptibility, to say nothing of the values and wishes of the parents and the children themselves.
Most people can readily accept the fact that, from time to time, certain laws may be necessary for the public good that some of us strongly disagree with. But the issue in this case involves nothing less than the introduction of foreign proteins or even live viruses into the bloodstream of entire populations. For that reason alone, the public is surely entitled to convincing proof, beyond any reasonable doubt, that artificial immunization is in fact a safe and effective procedure, in no way injurious to health, and that the threat of the corresponding natural diseases remains sufficiently clear and urgent to warrant the mass inoculation of everyone, even against their will if necessary.
Unfortunately, such proof has never been given; and even if it could be, continuing to employ vaccines against diseases that are no longer prevalent or dangerous hardly qualifies as an emergency.
Finally, even if there were such an emergency, and artificial immunization could be shown to be an appropriate response to it, the decision would remain at bottom a political one, involving issues of public health and safety that are far too important to be settled by any purely scientific or technical criteria, or indeed by any criteria less authoritative than the clearly articulated sense of the community about to be subjected to it.
For all of these reasons, I want to present the case against routine immunization as clearly and forcefully as I can. What I have to say is not quite a formal theory capable of rigorous proof or disproof. It is simply an attempt to explain my own experience, a nexus of interrelated facts, observations, reflections, and hypotheses, which taken together are more or less coherent and plausible and make intuitive sense to me. I offer them to the public in large part because the growing refusal of some parents to vaccinate their children is so seldom articulated or taken seriously. The fact is that we have been taught to accept vaccination as a kind of involuntary Communion, a sacrament of our participation in the unrestricted growth of scientific and industrial technology, utterly heedless of the long-term consequences to the health of our own species, let alone to the balance of Nature as a whole. For that reason alone, the other side of the case urgently needs to be heard.
1. Are the Vaccines Effective?
There is widespread agreement that the time period since the common vaccines were introduced has seen a remarkable decline in the corresponding natural infections; but the usual assumption that the decline is attributable to the vaccines remains unproven, and continues to be seriously questioned by eminent authorities in the field. The incidence and severity of whooping cough, for example, had already begun to decline precipitously long before the pertussis vaccine was introduced, [1] a fact which led the epidemiologist C. C. Dauer to remark, as far back as 1943:
If the mortality [from pertussis] continues to decline at the same rate during the next 15 years, it will be extremely difficult to show statistically that [pertussis immunization] had any effect in reducing mortality from whooping cough. [2]
Much the same is true not only of diphtheria and tetanus, but also of TB, cholera, typhus, typhoid, and other common scourges of a bygone era, which began to disappear toward the end of the Nineteenth Century, largely in response to improvements in public health and sanitation, but in any case long before antibiotics, vaccines, or any specific medical measures designed to eradicate them. [3]
Reflections such as these led the great microbiologist René Dubos to observe that microbial diseases have their own natural history, independent of drugs and vaccines, in which asymptomatic infection and symbiosis are much more common than overt disease:
It is barely recognized, but nevertheless true, that animals and plants, as well as men, can live peacefully with their most notorious microbial enemies. The world is obsessed by the fact that poliomyelitis can kill and maim several thousand unfortunate victims every year. But more extraordinary is the fact that millions upon millions of young people become infected by polio viruses, yet suffer no harm from the infection. The dramatic episodes of conflict between men and microbes are what strike the mind. What is less readily apprehended is the more common fact that infection can occur without producing disease. [4]
Yet how the vaccines actually accomplish these changes is not nearly as well understood as most people like to think it is. The disturbing possibility that they act in some other way than by producing a genuine immunity is suggested by the fact that the corresponding natural diseases have continued to break out, even in highly immunized populations, and that in such cases the observed differences in incidence and severity between immunized and non-immunized populations have often been much less dramatic than expected, and in some cases not measurably significant at all.
In a recent British outbreak of whooping cough, for example, even fully-immunized children contracted the disease in large numbers, and their rates of serious complications and death were not reduced significantly. [5] In another recent outbreak, 46 of the 85 fully-immunized children studied eventually contracted the disease. [6]
In 1977, 34 new cases of measles were reported on the UCLA campus, among a population that was supposedly 91% immune, according to careful serological testing. [7] In 1981, another 20 cases were reported in the area of Pecos, New Mexico within a few-month period, and 75% of them had been fully immunized, some quite recently. [8] A survey of sixth-graders in a well-immunized urban area similarly revealed that about 15% of this age group are still susceptible to rubella, a figure essentially identical with that of the pre-vaccine era. [9]
Finally, while the incidence of measles has dropped sharply, from about 400,000 cases annually in the early 1960’s to about 30,000 by 1974-76, the death rate has remained exactly the same, [10] while among adolescents and young adults, the group with the highest incidence at present, the risk of pneumonia and liver abnormalities has increased quite substantially, to well over 3% and 20%, respectively. [11]
The simplest explanation for these discrepancies would be to stipulate that vaccines confer at most partial and temporary immunity, which sounds reasonable enough, inasmuch as they consist of either live viruses, rendered less virulent by serial passage in tissue culture, or bacteria and bacterial products that have been killed by heat and/or chemical adjuvants, such that they can still elicit an antibody response without initiating a full-blown disease. In other words, the vaccine is a “trick,” in the sense that it simulates the true or natural immunity developed in the course of recovering from the natural disease, and it is therefore reasonable to expect that such artificial immunity will in fact “wear off” in time, and even require additional “booster” doses at regular intervals throughout life to maintain peak effectiveness.
Such an explanation would be disturbing enough to most people. Indeed, the basic fallacy in it is already evident in the fact that there is no way to know how long this partial, temporary immunity will last in any given individual, or how often it will need to be restimulated, since the answers to these questions presumably depend on the same individual variables that would have determined whether and how severely the same person, if unvaccinated, would have contracted the disease in the first place. In any case, a number of other observations suggest equally strongly that this simple explanation cannot be the correct one.
In the first place, one careful study has shown that when a person vaccinated against the measles again becomes susceptible to it, even repeated booster doses will have little or no long-lasting effect. [12]
In the second place, the vaccines do not act merely by producing pale or mild copies of the original disease; they also commonly produce a variety of symptoms of their own, which in some cases may be more serious than the disease, involving deeper structures, more vital organs, and less of a tendency to resolve themselves spontaneously, as well as being typically more difficult to recognize.
Thus in a recent outbreak of mumps in supposedly immune schoolchildren, several developed atypical symptoms, such as anorexia, vomiting, and erythematous rashes, but no parotid involvement, and hence could not be diagnosed without extensive serological testing to rule out other concurrent diseases. [13] The syndrome of “atypical measles” can be equally difficult to diagnose, even when it is thought of, [14] which suggests that it may not seldom be overlooked entirely. In some cases, atypical measles can be much more severe than the regular kind, with pneumonia, petechiæ, edema, and severe pain, [15] and likewise often goes unsuspected.
In any case, it seems virtually certain that other vaccine-related syndromes will be described and identified, if only we take the trouble to look for them, and that the ones we are aware of so far represent only a very small part of the problem. But even these few make it less and less plausible to assume that vaccines produce a normal, healthy immunity that lasts for some time but then wears off, leaving the patient miraculously unharmed and unaffected by the experience.
2. Some Personal Experiences of Vaccine Cases.
I will now present a few of my own vaccine cases, to give a sense of their variety, to show how difficult it can be to trace them, and also to begin to address the underlying question that is seldom asked, namely, how the vaccines actually work, i. e., how they do whatever it is that they do inside the body, and how they produce the results that we see clinically in the patient.
My first case was that of an 8-month-old girl with recurrent fevers of unknown origin. I first saw her in January 1977, a few weeks after her third such episode. These were brief, lasting 48 hours at most, but very intense, with the fever often reaching 105˚F. During the second episode she was hospitalized for diagnostic evaluation, but her pediatrician found nothing out of the ordinary. Apart from these episodes, the child appeared to be quite well, and growing and developing normally.
I could get no further information from the mother, except for the fact that the episodes had occurred almost exactly one month apart, and from consulting her calendar we learned that the first one had come exactly one month after the 3rd of her DPT shots, which had also been given at monthly intervals. At this point the mother remembered that the girl had had similar fever episodes immediately after each injection, but that the pediatrician had dismissed them as common reactions to the vaccine, as indeed they are. Purely on the strength of that history, I gave her a single dose of the ultradilute homeopathic DPT vaccine, and I am happy to report that she had no more such episodes, and has remained entirely well since.
This case illustrates how homeopathic “nosodes,” or medicines prepared from vaccines or their corresponding diseases, can be used for diagnosis as well as treatment of vaccine-related illness, which, no matter how strongly they are suspected, might otherwise be almost impossible to substantiate. Secondly, because fever is among the commonest reactions to the pertussis vaccine, and the child seemed perfectly well between the attacks, her response to it has to be regarded as a relatively strong and healthy one, disturbing because of its recurrence and periodicity, but also quite simple to cure, as indeed it proved. But I keep wondering what happens to the vaccine inside those tens and hundreds of millions of children who show no obvious response to it at all.
Since that time, I have seen at least half a dozen cases of babies and small children with recurrent fevers of unknown origin, some associated with a variety of other chronic complaints, like irritability, temper tantrums, and increased susceptibility to tonsillitis, pharyngitis, colds, and ear infections, which were similarly traceable to the pertussis vaccine, and which likewise responded beautifully to treatment with the homeopathic DPT nosode. Indeed on that basis I submit that the pertussis vaccine is an important cause of recurrent fevers of unknown origin in this age group.
My second case was that of a 9-month-old girl who presented acutely with a fever of 105˚F., and very few other symptoms. She too had had two similar episodes previously, but at irregular intervals, and her parents, who were ambivalent about vaccinations to begin with, had so far given her only one dose of the DPT vaccine, but her first episode occurred a few weeks afterward.
I first saw her in June of 1978. The fever remained high and unremitting for 48 hours, despite the usual acute remedies and supportive measures. A CBC showed a white-cell count of 32,000 per cu. mm., with 43% lymphocytes, 11% monocytes, 25% neutrophils (many with toxic granulations), 20% band forms (also with toxic granulations), and 1% metamyelocytes and other immature forms. Without giving any history, I showed the smear to a pediatrician friend, and “pertussis” was his immediate reply. After a single dose of the homeopathic DPT vaccine, the fever came down abruptly, and the girl has remained well since.
This case was disturbing mainly because of the hematological abnormalities, which fell within the leukemoid range, together with the absence of any cough or illness with distinctive respiratory symptoms, all suggesting that introducing the vaccine directly into the blood may actually promote deeper or more systemic pathology than allowing the pertussis organism to set up typical symptoms of local inflammation at the normal portal of entry.
The third case was a 5-year-old boy with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, whom I happened to see in August of 1978, while visiting an old friend and teacher, a family physician with over 40 years’ experience. Well out of earshot of the boy and his parents, he told me that the leukemia had first appeared following a DPT vaccination, that he had treated the child successfully with natural remedies on two previous occasions, when the blood picture improved dramatically, and the liver and spleen shrank down to almost normal size, but that full relapse had occurred soon after each DPT booster.
It was shocking enough to think that vaccinations might be implicated in some cases of childhood leukemia, but the idea also completed the line of reasoning opened up by the previous case. For leukemia is a cancerous transformation of the blood and blood-forming organs, the liver, the spleen, the lymph nodes, and the bone marrow, which are also the basic anatomical units of the immune system. Insofar as vaccines are capable of producing serious complications of any kind, the blood and immune organs would be the logical place to begin looking for them.
But perhaps even more shocking to me was the fact that my teacher’s remarkable success in treating this boy did not dissuade his parents from revaccinating him at least two more times, and that the connection between the vaccine and the disease was not generally known to the public or seriously considered by the medical community. It was this case that convinced me of the need for frank and open discussion among doctors and patients alike, about our collective experience with vaccine-related illness. While careful scientific investigation of these matters will hopefully ensue, the level of public commitment required even to frame the question properly seems far away.
I will now present two cases from my limited experience with the MMR vaccine.
In December of 1980 I saw a 3-year-old boy with loss of appetite, stomach ache, indigestion, and swollen glands for the past 4 weeks or so. The stomach pains were quite severe, and often accompanied by belching, flatulence, and explosive diarrhea. The nose was also congested, and the lower eyelids were quite red. The mother also reported some unusual behavior changes, extreme untidiness, “wild” and noisy playing, and waking at 2 a.m. to get in bed with her.
The physical examination was unremarkable except for some large, tender posterior auricular and suboccipital lymph nodes, and marked enlargement of the tonsils. That piqued my curiosity, and I learned that the boy had received his MMR vaccination in October, about 2 weeks before the onset of symptoms, with no apparent reaction to it at the time. I gave him a single dose of the highly-dilute homeopathic rubella vaccine, and the symptoms disappeared within 48 hours.
The following spring, the parents brought him back for a slight fever, and a 3-week history of intermittent pain in and behind the right ear, as well as a stuffy nose and other cold symptoms. On examination, the whole right side of the face appeared to be swollen, especially the cheek and angle of the jaw. He responded well to acute homeo-pathic remedies, without requiring the mumps nosode, and has remained well since.
This boy exhibited some interesting features that I have learned to recognize in other MMR cases. At an interval of a few weeks after the vaccine, which is roughly the same as the incubation period for the corresponding diseases, a nondescript illness develops, which then becomes subacute and rather more severe than rubella in the same age group, with abdominal and/or joint pains and marked adenopathy, but no rash. Usually the diagnosis is suspected because of enlargement of the posterior auricular and suboccipital nodes, for which rubella and a few other diseases have a marked affinity, and confirmed by a favorable response to the homeopathic rubella nosode.
Furthermore, his second illness, and especially the parotid enlargement, may well have represented continuing activity of the mumps component of the vaccine, although it cleared up so promptly that I never needed to test that hypothesis by using the homeopathic mumps nosode. Either way, it strongly suggests the possibility that a variety of “mixed” or composite syndromes may occur, representing the patient’s responses to two or perhaps all three of the vaccine components, either more or less simultaneously, or one by one over time, as the next case illustrates:
In April of 1981 I first saw a 4-year-old boy for chronic bilateral enlargement of the posterior auricular nodes, which were also somewhat tender at times. The mother had noticed the swelling for about a year, during which time he had also become more susceptible to various upper respiratory infections, none of them very severe. Over the same period of time, she had also observed recurrent parotid swelling at irregular intervals, which began shortly after the MMR vaccine was given at the age of 3.
At his first visit, the boy was not ill, and the mother was about 2 months pregnant; so I decided to observe him but if possible do nothing further until the pregnancy was over. He did develop a mild laryngitis in her third trimester, but it responded well to bed rest and simple acute remedies. The following spring he came down with acute bronchitis, and I noticed that the posterior auricular glands were once again swollen and tender, so I decided to give him a dose of the homeopathic rubella nosode at that point. The cough promptly subsided, and the nodes regressed in size and were no longer tender. But two weeks later, he was back, this time with a hard, tender swelling on the outside of the cheek, near the angle of the jaw, and some pain on chewing or opening the mouth. One dose of the homeopathic mumps nosode was given, and the child has been well since.
What was particularly noteworthy about this case was its strong pattern of chronicity, with an increased susceptibility to weaker, low-grade responses, in contrast to the vigorous, acute responses typically associated with diseases like the measles and the mumps when acquired naturally.
3. How Do the Vaccines Work?
It is dangerously misleading, and indeed the exact opposite of the truth, to claim that a vaccine renders us “immune” to or protects us against an acute disease, if in fact it only drives the disease deeper into the interior and causes us to harbor it chronically instead, with the result that our responses to it become progressively weaker, but show less and less of a tendency to heal or resolve themselves spontaneously. What I propose, then, is to investigate as thoroughly and objectively as I can how the vaccines actually work inside the human body, and to begin by simply paying attention to the implications of what we already know. Consider the process of falling ill with and recovering from a typical acute disease, such as the measles, in contrast with what we can observe following administration of the measles vaccine.
We all know that measles is primarily a virus of the upper respiratory tract, both because it is acquired by susceptible persons through inhalation of infected droplets in the air, and because these droplets are produced by the coughing and sneezing of a patient with the disease. Once inhaled by a susceptible individual, the virus undergoes a prolonged period of silent multiplication, first in the tonsils, adenoids, and accessory lymphoid aggregations of the nasopharynx; later in the regional lymph nodes of the head and neck; and eventually, several days later, it passes into the blood and enters the spleen, the liver, the thymus, and the bone marrow, the “visceral” organs of the immune system. [16] Throughout this “incubation” period, which lasts from 10 to 14 days, the patient typically feels quite well, and experiences few or no symptoms of any kind. [17]
By the time that the first symptoms of measles appear, circulating antibodies are already detectable in the blood, and the height of the symptomatology coincides with the peak of the antibody response. [18] In other words, the “illness” that we call the measles is simply the definitive effort of the immune system to clear this virus from the blood. Notice also that this expulsion is accomplished by sneezing and coughing, i. e., via the same route through which it entered in the first place. It is abundantly clear from the above that the process of mounting and recovering from an acute illness like the measles involves a general mobilization of the immune system as a whole, including inflammation of the previously sensitized tissues at the portal(s) of entry, activation of leukocytes, macrophages, and the serum complement system, and a host of other mechanisms, of which the production of circulating antibodies is only one, and by no means the most important.
Such splendid outpourings indeed represent the decisive experiences in the normal physiological maturation of the immune system in the life of a healthy child. For recovery from the measles not only protects children from being susceptible to it again, [19] no matter how many more times they may be exposed to it, but also prepares them to respond promptly and effectively to any other infections they may encounter in the future. The ability to mount a vigorous acute response to infection must therefore be reckoned among the most fundamental requirements of health and well-being that we all share.
By contrast, the live but artificially attenuated measles-virus vaccine is injected directly into the blood, by-passing the normal port of entry, and sets up at most a brief inflammatory reaction at the injection site, or perhaps in the regional lymph nodes, with no local sensitization at the normal portal of entry, no “incubation period,” no generalized inflammatory response, and no generalized outpouring. By “tricking” the body in this fashion, we have accomplished precisely what the entire immune system seems to have evolved to prevent: we have placed the virus directly into the blood, and given it free and immediate access to the major immune organs and tissues, without any obvious mechanism or route for getting rid of it.
The result is the production of circulating antibodies against the virus, which can in fact be measured in the blood; but this antibody response occurs as an isolated technical feat, without any overt illness to recover from, or any noticeable improvement in the general health of the recipient. Indeed I submit that exactly the opposite is true, that the price we have to pay for these antibodies is the persistence of viral elements in the blood for long periods of time, perhaps permanently, which in turn carries with it a systematic weakening of our capacity to mount an acute response, not only to the measles, but to other infections as well.
Far from producing a genuine immunity, then, my suspicion and my fear is that vaccines act by interfering with and even suppressing the immune response as a whole, in much the same way that radiation, chemotherapy, corticosteroids, and other anti-inflammatory drugs do. Artificial immunization focuses on antibody production, a single aspect of the immune process, disarticulates it, and allows it to stand for the whole, in much the same way as chemical suppression of an elevated blood pressure is accepted as a valid substitute for genuine healing or cure of the patient whose blood pressure has risen. It is the frosting on the cake, without the cake. The worst part of this counterfeiting is that it becomes more difficult, if not impossible, for vaccinated children to mount a normally acute and vigorous response to infection, by substituting for it a much weaker, essentially chronic response, with little or no tendency to heal itself spontaneously.
Furthermore, excellent models already exist for predicting and explaining what kinds of chronic disease are likely to result from long-term persistence of viral, bacterial, and other foreign proteins within the cells of the immune system. It has long been known that live viruses, for example, are capable of surviving for years within host cells in a latent form, without necessarily provoking acute disease, simply by attaching their own genetic material (DNA or RNA) as an “episome” or extra particle to the genome of the host cell, and replicating along with it, allowing the latter to continue its normal functions for the most part, but adding new instructions for the synthesis of viral proteins as well. [20]
Latent viruses of this type have already been implicated in three distinct types of chronic disease, namely,
1) recurrent or episodic acute diseases, such as herpes simplex, shingles, warts, etc.; [21]
2) “slow-virus” diseases, i. e., subacute or chronic, progressive, and often fatal diseases, such as kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, possibly Guillain-Barré syndrome, and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a rare complication of measles; [22] and
3) tumors, both benign and malignant. [23] In all of these varieties, the latent virus “survives” as a clearly foreign element within the cell, which implies that the immune system must continue to try to make antibodies against it, insofar as it can still respond to it at all. But because the virus is now permanently incorporated within the genetic material of the cell, these antibodies will now have to be directed against the cell itself.
The persistence of live viruses and other foreign antigens within the cells of the host therefore cannot fail to provoke auto-immune phenomena, because attacking and destroying the infected cells is now the only possible way to remove this constant antigenic challenge from the body. Since universal compulsory vaccination introduces live viruses and other highly antigenic material into the blood of virtually every living person, it is not difficult to predict that a significant harvest of auto-immune diseases will automatically result.
Sir Macfarlane Burnet has observed that the various components of the immune system function as if they were collectively designed to help the organism to distinguish “self” from “non-self,” i. e., to help us recognize and tolerate our own cells, and to identify and eliminate foreign or extraneous substances as completely as possible. [24]
Lending further credence to this hypothesis are the acute response to infection, as we saw, and the rejection of transplanted tissues or organs from the same species, i. e., homografts, both of which accomplish complete and permanent removal of the offending substances from the body. If Burnet is correct, then latent viruses, auto-immune phenomena, and perhaps cancer could be regarded as different aspects of the same basic reality, which the immune system can neither escape nor resolve. For they all entail a certain degree of chronic immune failure, a state in which it becomes increasingly difficult or impossible for the body either to recognize its own cells as unambiguously its own, or to eliminate its parasites as essentially foreign.
In the case of the attenuated measles virus vaccine, introducing it directly into the blood might continue to provoke an antibody response for a considerable period of time, which of course is the whole point of giving the vaccine, but eventually, as the virus achieves a state of latency, that response would presumably wane, both because circulating antibodies normally cannot cross the cell membrane, and because they are also powerful immunosuppressive agents in their own right. [25]
After that, the effect of circulating antibodies would be in effect to imprison the virus inside the cell, i. e., to continue to prevent any acute inflammatory response, until such time as, perhaps under circumstances of an emergency or cumulative stress, this precarious balance breaks down, antibodies begin to be produced in large numbers against the cells themselves, and frank auto-immune phenomena, including necrosis and tissue damage, are likely to appear. In this sense, latent viruses are like biological “time bombs,” set to explode at an indeterminate time in the future. [26]
Auto-immune phenomena have always seemed obscure, aberrant, and bizarre to physicians, because it is not intuitively obvious why the body should suddenly begin to attack and destroy its own tissues. They make a lot more sense, and perhaps should even be regarded as “healthy,” to the extent that destroying chronically infected cells is the only possible way to eliminate an even more serious threat to life, namely, the foreign antigenic challenge persisting within the cells of the host.
According to the same model, tumor formation could be understood as simply a more advanced stage of chronic immune failure, inasmuch as the longer the host is subjected to enormous and constant pressure to make antibodies against itself, the less effective that process will likely become. Eventually, under stress of this magnitude, the auto-immune mechanism itself could break down to the point that the chronically infected and genetically transformed cells, no longer clearly “self” or non-self,” begin to free themselves from the normal restraints of “histocompatibility” within the architecture of the surrounding cells and tissues, and begin to multiply autonomously at their expense. A tumor could then be described as “benign,” if the weakening of histocompatibility remains strictly localized to the tissue of origin, “malignant” if the process spills over into other cell types, tissues, and organs, even in more remote areas, and not necessarily rigidly or permanently one or the other, since they differ primarily in degree and therefore might or might not even change back and forth into each other in due course.
If what I am saying turns out to be true, then all we have achieved by artificial immunization is to have traded off our acute epidemic diseases of past centuries for the weaker and far less curable chronic diseases of the present, with their suffering and disability paid out little by little, rather than all at once, and amortized over the patient’s lifetime. Perhaps even more, I fear that in doing so we have opened up limitless possibilities for new diseases in the future by in vivo genetic recombination within the cells of the race.
4. The Individual Vaccines Reconsidered.
I will now consider each of the vaccines individually, in relation to the natural diseases from which they are derived.
The triple MMR vaccine comprises attenuated, live measles, mumps, and rubella viruses, administered in a single intramuscular injection at about 15 months of age. Subsequent booster doses are no longer recommended, except for young women of childbearing age, in whom the risk of Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS) is thought to warrant it, even though the effectiveness of such boosters is at best questionable, as we saw.
Before the vaccine era, measles, mumps, and rubella were classified as “routine diseases of childhood,” which most schoolchildren acquired before the age of puberty, and from which nearly all recovered, with lifelong immunity and no complications or sequelæ. But they were not always so harmless. Measles, in particular, is devastating when a population encounters it for the first time. Its importation from Spain undoubtedly contributed to Cortez’ conquest of the mighty Aztec empire with only a handful of soldiers: whole villages were carried off by epidemics of measles and smallpox, leaving only a small remnant of cowed, superstitious warrior to face the bearded conquistadores from across the sea. [27]
In more recent outbreaks among isolated, primitive peoples, the case fatality rate from measles averaged 20 to 30%. [28] In these so-called “virgin-soil” epidemics, not only measles, but also polio and many other epidemic diseases take their highest toll of death and serious complications among adolescents and young adults, seemingly healthy and vigorous people in the prime of life, and leave relatively unharmed the group of school-age children before the age of puberty. [29]
The evolution of a disease like the measles from a dreaded killer to a routine disease of childhood presupposes the development of non-specific or “herd” immunity in young children, such that when they are finally exposed to it, it activates defense mechanisms already in place to receive it, resulting in the prolonged incubation period and usually benign, self-limited course described above.
Under these circumstances, the rationale for vaccinating young children against it is limited to the fact that a very small number of deaths and serious complications have continued to occur, chiefly pneumonia, encephalitis, and the rare but dreaded subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a slow-virus disease with an incidence of 1 per 100,000 cases. [30] Pneumonia, by far the commonest of them, is also benign and self-limited in most cases, even without treatment, [31] and even in those rare cases when bacterial pneumonia supervenes, adequate treatment is currently available.
By all accounts, then, the death rate from measles is very low in the developed world, the risk of serious complications is very low, and the general benefit to the child who recovers from it, as well as his contacts and descendants, is very great. Even if the vaccine could be shown to lower the risk of death and serious morbidity still further, these small achievements would hardly justify the high probability of auto-immune diseases, cancer, and whatever else may result from the harboring and propagation of latent measles virus in human tissue culture for life.
Ironically, what the vaccine certainly has done is to reverse the historical or evolutionary process to the extent that measles is now once again a disease of adolescents and young adults, [32] with a correspondingly higher risk of complications, and a general tendency to produce more illness and disability than it does in grade-school children.
As for the claim that it has helped to eliminate measles encephalitis, even in my own relatively small general practice I have already seen two children with major seizure disorders that the parents clearly traced to the measles vaccine, although they would never have been able to prove the connection in court, and never even considered the possibility of compensation. Such cases therefore never make it into the official statistics, and are duly omitted from conventional surveys of the problem, in spite of the fact that injecting measles into the blood would naturally favor a higher incidence of visceral complications affecting the lungs, liver, and brain, organs for which the virus has a known affinity.
The case for immunizing against mumps and rubella seems a fortiori even more tenuous, for exactly the same reasons. Mumps is also essentially a benign, self-limited disease in children before the age of puberty, and recovery from a single attack likewise confers lifelong immunity. The major complication is meningo-encephalitis, mild or subclinical forms of which are relatively common, but the death rate is extremely low, [33] and sequelæ are rare. The mumps vaccine is prepared and administered in much the same way as the measles, almost always in the same injection, and the dangers associated with it are also comparable. It too is fast becoming a disease of adolescents and young adults, [34] age groups who tolerate it much less well. With them he main complication is epididymo-orchitis, which occurs in 30-40% of affected males past the age of puberty, and usually results in atrophy of the testicle on the affected side, [35] but it also shows a definite affinity for the ovary and pancreas, and may attack these organs as well.
For all of these reasons, the greatest favor we could do for our children would be to expose them to the measles and mumps when they reach school age, which would not only protect them from contracting more serious versions after puberty, but would also greatly enhance their immunological maturation with minimal risk, as was the rule before the vaccine was introduced.
The same discrepancy is evident for rubella or “German measles” as well, which in young children is a disease so mild that it frequently escapes detection, [36] but in adolescents and adults is much more likely to produce arthritis, purpura, and other systemic indications of greater severity. [37] The main impetus for marketing the vaccine was certainly the recognition of Congenital Rubella Syndrome (CRS), resulting from intrauterine damage to the embryo when the mother acquires the virus in her first trimester of pregnancy, [38] and the unusually high incidence of CRS during the rubella outbreak of 1964. Here again, we have an almost entirely benign, self-limited disease made over by the vaccine into a considerably less benign one of adolescents and young adults of reproductive age, precisely the group that most needs to be protected from it, while the easiest and most effective way to prevent it would likewise be to expose kids to the disease in elementary school. Re-infection does sometimes occur after recovery, but much less commonly than after vaccination. [39]
The equation looks rather different for the diphtheria and tetanus vaccines. First of all, both natural diseases are serious and sometimes fatal, even with the best treatment. This is especially true of tetanus, which still carries a mortality of at least 10-20%. Furthermore, these vaccines are not made of live organisms, but only of certain toxins elaborated by them.
These poisonous substances are responsible for all of the death and destruction wrought by these diseases, and remain highly antigenic even after being inactivated by heat. Diphtheria and tetanus “toxoids” thus do not protect against infection per se, but only against the systemic action of these poisons, in the absence of which both infections are of minor importance clinically. It is therefore easy to understand why parents might want their children protected against diphtheria and tetanus, if safe and effective protection were available; and both vaccines have been in use for a long time, with a very low incidence of serious complications reported, so that there has been very little public outcry against them.
On the other hand, both diseases are readily controlled by simple sanitary measures and careful attention to wound hygiene, and both have been steadily disappearing from the industrially developed countries since long before the toxoids were introduced. Diphtheria now occurs only sporadically in the United States, often in areas with significant reservoirs of unvaccinated children.
But the claim that the vaccine is protective is belied by the fact that, when the disease does break out, the supposedly “susceptible” kids are no more likely to develop it than their fully-immunized contacts. In a 1969 outbreak in Chicago, for example, the Board of Health reported that 25% of the cases had been fully immunized; another 12% had received one or more doses and serologically were fully “immune;” and another 18% had been partly immunized, according to the same criteria. [40]
So once again we are faced with the likelihood that diphtheria toxoid has not produced a genuine immunity to diphtheria, but rather some sort of chronic immune tolerance to it, by harboring highly antigenic residues somewhere within the cells of the immune system, presumably with long-term suppressive effects on the immune mechanism generally. This suspicion earns further credence from the fact that all of the DPT vaccine components are alum-precipitated and preserved with Thimerosal, an organomercury derivative, to preserve them from being metabolized too rapidly, so that the antigenic challenge will continue for as long a time as possible. The fact is that we do not know, or even seem to care, what actually becomes of these foreign substances once they are inside our bodies and those of our children.
Exactly the same questions haunt the seemingly favorable record of the tetanus vaccine, which almost certainly has had some impact in reducing the incidence of tetanus in its classic acute form, yet presumably also persists for years or even decades as a potent foreign antigen within the cells of the immune system, with long-term effects on the immune mechanism that for the present are invisible and therefore impossible to calculate.
Much like diphtheria and tetanus, “whooping cough” began to decline as a serious epidemic threat, as we saw, long before the DPT vaccine was introduced. Moreover, the pertussis vaccine has not been particularly effective, even according to its proponents, and the incidence of known side-effects is disturbingly high. Its power to damage the Central Nervous System or CNS, for example, has received growing attention since Dr. Gordon Stewart and his colleagues reported an alarmingly high incidence of encephalopathy and severe convulsive disorders in British children that were traceable to the vaccine. [41]
My own cases, a few of which were cited above, suggest that hematologic disturbances should also be investigated, and that the known complications represent at most a small fraction of the actual total.
In any case, the pertussis vaccine has become controversial even in the United States, where medical opinion remains almost unanimous in favor of vaccines generally, while several other countries, such as West Germany, have discontinued routine pertussis vaccination entirely. [42] The disease pertussis is also extremely variable clinically, ranging in severity from asymptomatic, mild, or inapparent infections, which are not uncommon, to very rare cases in young infants less than 6 months of age, where the mortality is claimed by some to reach 40%. [43] In children over a year old, however, the disease is rarely fatal, or even that serious a threat of future difficulty, despite its intensity, while antibiotics play a very small part in the outcome. [44]
Most of the pressure to immunize at present thus seems attributable to the higher death rate in very young infants, which has led to what to me seems like a terrifying practice of giving this most clearly dangerous of the vaccines to tiny infants, beginning at 2 months of age, when their mothers’ milk would normally protect them from all infections about as well as can ever be done for this age group, [45] and its effect on the still-developing blood and nervous systems is most apt to be catastrophic. For all of these reasons, routine pertussis immunization should be discontinued as quickly as possible, until more studies are done to assess and defray the cost of whatever damage it has already done.
Poliomyelitis and the polio vaccines present an entirely different situation. The standard Sabin vaccine is trivalent, consisting of attenuated live polioviruses of each of the three strains known to produce paralytic disease, and administered orally, the same way the infection is acquired in Nature. Thus allowing the recipient to develop something resembling a natural immunity, by sensitizing cells of the digestive tract at the normal portal of entry, could represent a considerable safety factor. On the other hand, wild-type polio viruses produce no symptoms whatsoever in well over 90% of the people who contact them, even under epidemic conditions; [46] and of those who do become ill, the vast majority suffer nothing worse than a typical gastroenteritis that is more or less indistinguishable from any other of the common summer diarrheas in children. Only 1 or 2% of them ever progress to the full-blown picture of paralytic “poliomyelitis,” with its typical lesions in the motor neurons of the spinal cord and medulla oblongata. [47] Poliomyelitis thus also requires peculiar and unusual conditions of susceptibility in the host, indeed an anatomical susceptibility, since the virulence of the poliovirus is so low for most people, even under epidemic conditions, and the number of cases resulting in death or permanent disability was always comparatively so small. [48]
Given the fact that polio viruses were ubiquitous before the vaccine was introduced, and could be found routinely in samples of city sewage wherever it was looked for, [49] it is evident that effective natural immunity to them was already as close to being universal as it could ever be, and a fortiori that no artificial substitute could ever equal or even approximate that record. Since the virus was of such low virulence to begin with, it is difficult to imagine what else further attenuation of it could possibly accomplish, other than perhaps to abate the full vigor of the natural immune response to it. For the fact remains that even the attenuated virus is still alive, and that the people who were anatomically susceptible to it before are still susceptible to it now. This means that at least some of these same people will develop paralytic polio from the vaccine, [50] and that all or most of the others may still be harboring the virus in latent form, perhaps within these same target cells.
The only advantage of giving the vaccine, then, would be to expose the population to the virus when its virulence is lowest, [51] i. e., when they are still infants, but this benefit might be more than offset by weakening the immune response, as we have seen. In any case, the whole matter is clearly one of considerable complexity, and also illustrates the hidden dangers and miscalculations inherent in the almost irresistible temptation to try to beat Nature at her own game, to eliminate a problem that cannot be eliminated, the susceptibility to disease itself.
So even in the case of the polio vaccine, which appears to be about as safe as a vaccine ever can be, the same basic dilemma remains. Perhaps the day will come when we will be ready to face the consequences of deliberately feeding live polio viruses to every living infant, and admit that we should have left well enough alone, and addressed ourselves to the art of healing the sick when we have to, rather than the technology of eradicating the possibility of sickness, when we don’t have to, and can’t possibly succeed in any case.
- See more at: http://vaccineimpact.com/2015/richard-moskowitz-m-d-the-case-against-immunizations/#sthash.n4NxNv4e.dpuf