Monthly Archives: May 2016

Nutrients and Lifestyle for Pain

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Your muscles ache, your joints scream in debilitation, and your head feels like it is about to explode.  What is the path to relief?  It may be a visit to your doctor and drugs.  But this is not the long term solution.  The long term solution is nutrition with an adequate amount and correct type of protein, fats, vitamins, plant enzymes, and minerals, and a change in lifestyle eliminating processed foods, sugar, flour, and toxins. It is only through faith, hope, forgiveness, and courage that this can be achieved. The tangled web of information that we now receive about health, can be very discouraging.

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Pain is a symptom of an injury, chronic disease, acute disease, allergies, and many other maladies.  It can present itself as excruciating and debilitating pain or simply as an itch.  The medical profession uses a scale of one to ten to describe pain.  This is not a very effective method unless the doctor questioning you has a full history of prior pain.  For example, when I had a ruptured appendix, the pain prior to the rupture was an eight on my pain scale.  A bruised coccyx bone from a farm injury was a ten at that time.  Now, my spinal cord being compressed seventy percent in the lumbar region ranks is a ten.  My ten is unlike anything you have ever experienced because it was severe and continuous.  I suffered some form of chronic pain for three decades because of degenerative disc disease.  This now makes the ruptured appendix a four on my pain scale. 

Pain can become an enemy of health as it causes a disruption of your nervous system as well as an effect on mood and hormone production.  This is the reason that many people with chronic severe pain decide to put an end to it all.  This is not the path.  The path to health is through proper nutrition and life style. The problem with our present medical system is that they treat the pain with meds and not necessarily the disease that is the origin of the pain.  This is especially true for chronic disease.  Our food system is poor because foods that are processed are not always healthy for our body.  The most destructive are sugar, flour, and artificial sweeteners as these things totally disrupt your endocrine system. Of course there are always the many toxins that are in our foods and water supply like lead, fluoride, bromide, mercury, glyphosate, pesticides, organics from plastics, and bactericides (chlorine or chloramine) in our public water supply.  The average person consumes pounds of pesticides and of herbicides each year from our food.

The vitamins and minerals needed to reduce and prevent pain are not to be considered as one vitamin or one mineral. They work synergistically in the body to maintain homeostasis. Vitamins and minerals along with the macronutrients are the foundation of health.  Macronutrients include: water, oxygen, protein, carbohydrates, light, and fats. Our medical profession points to drugs for healing instead of nutrients first. If the effort and research that we have done over the last one hundred years had been pointed to our food system and nutrients, we would be an extremely healthy population.  The major error in our research is specialization without considering the whole body first. This specialization of one drug or a multiple of drugs for an illness leads to side effects that are very destructive to health. Recent news has stated that medical misadventure is now the number three cause of death.

When was the last time you went to a doctor about a chronic disease and he asked you about your eating habits?  Oh, he may ask you if you use tobacco or drink heavily, but that is about it. This leaves you on your own to decide if your lifestyle is causing your pain.  The doctor’s solution through government fiat is to recommend pain meds and/or other drugs.  The doctor’s hands are tied and he cannot practice medicine as an art.  The faux science has been egregious in its efforts to maintain the medical economy.  The physician can only practice medicine through drugs, radiation, and surgery as required by our medical insurance and Health and Human Services and the many departments under that umbrella. The good news is we are slowly moving toward holistic and integrative medicine.  There have been many schools that have opened in the last three decades specifically to train doctors in these methods.

It has taken me twenty years and about ten thousand hours of reading to determine what works for me.  Doctor have saved me from many acute experiences with disease and pain.  However, it is only when I started to get enough of the correct nutrients that my body healed. This is now a constant and ongoing process as I age.  What worked for me when I was fifty is now different at sixty-five. I just don’t think that the average person has the capabilities, curiosity, resources, hope, and faith to continue the effort required for health. I have been blessed with all of these.  Also the understanding that much of what you read my just lead you down the wrong path.  Our institutions have contributed to this misadventure by specialization as stated earlier, and ignoring the science that we have if it is not economically acceptable.  This science has been paid for through your tax dollars and ignored by institutions and especially governments.  It can be a hard decision to make if improved health of the population sends us into economic depression that has its own social ills like starvation. Certainly with our many think tanks, we should be able to work our way through this tangle of decisions.  However, if you are the one in pain, it just makes you disturbed that your doctors cannot make you well.

Of course death is the ultimate outcome of your life.  Death should come with only a few months of debilitation, not decades of pain and despair. See post on morbidity: Looking Good, Feeling Better We are meant to live a healthy life.  With our resources in medicine, science, and art, there is no reason that we should not have this luxury. Getting an adequate amount and correct type of proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals is a tangled web of lies that is difficult to overcome.  Don’t despair, there are resources that are available, but you have to have the will, courage, and hope to pursue them on your own. There is relief from pain–be your own researcher and depend only on those that you can trust. I am living, happy proof of a pain free life–Pandemic Survivor
©2016 Mark Pegram

Fish Swimming in a School – The Vitamin D Revolution

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What do fish swimming in a school and the vitamin D revolution have in common? Through signaling a direction (quorum sensing), the school swims together as one group.  It is very difficult for one fish to cause a change in direction of the school.  So imagine a school made up of the medical industry, medical insurance industry, and government all swimming together. To be more accurate, fish swimming together for social reasons are defined as shoaling.  The social reason that the stated institutions swim together is about the health of the medical economy and not about the health of the population.  From Wikipedia, “The oddity effect posits that any shoal member that stands out in appearance will be preferentially targeted by predators. This may explain why fish prefer to shoal with individuals that resemble themselves. The oddity effect would thus tend to homogenize shoals.” Schools are usually fish of the same species while shoals are made up of fish with similar goals. I will simply use schools for this discussion.

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Does the invisible hand act as a predator to the oddity effect?

 

I once asked a scientist in the Vitamin D revolution how change in the medical industry could be brought about to improve the health of the world’s population.  His answer was simple, “It will take leadership.” Leadership is one of those words that is hard to define in social groups.  We often mistake management for leadership.  This brings to mind a business consultant’s description of the difference in leadership versus management.  A group was asked to build a road across an island to the other side.  The bush clearers did their job extremely well.  The road builders followed in a coordinated manner. The guards spent their time keeping the predatory alligators away.  At some point the manager climbed a tree and told the group what a great job they were doing and that they were about half way across the island.  The leader climbed up a tree next to the manager and looked about.  “Wrong island,” he stated simply.

This is the state of the present medical industry.  The medical professionals are doing a great job with allopathic medicine.  This island is the wrong island.  Gradually we are approaching an island of holistic health, but no leader in government has stepped up to take on the responsibility of making the course change happen.  The fear is that the health of the population would decimate the medical economy and could even cause a worldwide recession.  The school of allopathic medicine for economic reasons has been the dominant school since the intervention of funding for this purpose that started in the early 20th Century. The reason the US is the leader in allopathic medicine is for the economy which commands more than eighteen percent of GDP.  That is, groups not working together in a great conspiracy of keeping a sick population that uses large amounts of money for everyone involved, but action as a group for economic purposes for each institution.

At some point the realization must come that the economy would be better with a healthy population.  If holistic instead of allopathic medicine is practiced, the population would be able to produce more than a population that is ill.  Dollars spent on healthcare could be directed to more beneficial efforts for the population like building the infrastructure. This of course would take a great deal of training as the jobs lost in the medical industry in the US could exceed eight million.

Our leaders in government are focused on elections and the money needed to stay in power.  Their empathy for the illness of the population is amoral. This is defined as evil in M. Scott Peck’s book “People of the Lie.”  When an institution acts for the purpose of maintaining the institution instead of concern for the individuals that it serves, the institution’s acts are evil.

It has now been sixteen months since the IOM’s error in the average amount of vitamin D required for bone health.  The IOM (renamed the National Academy of Medicine–most likely for fear of liability, since it is not a government agency it can be sued) stated that individuals only need 600 IU of vitamin D3 per day.  The error was discovered by the University of Alberta and later confirmed by UCSD and Creighton University.  The correct amount should have been over 7,000 IU of vitamin D3 per day.  The number of deaths because of this error since 2010 is in the millions.  Victims of the medical economy have suffered pain and died simply to maintain the medical economy.  Governments and the medical industry continue to ignore the science.

In a recent article, I wrote about pain in the population.  This great amount of pain is being treated as a symptom with pain meds. The cause is a lack of nutrients.  This lack of nutrients and the associated diseases could be treated using holistic medicine.  That is “food has caused our illness, it is food that will heal us.”  Dr. P. R. Raghavan.  I take a significantly larger amount of vitamins and minerals than is recommended by our institutions.  Through this higher intake, I have recovered from degenerative disc disease, severe sleep apnea, high blood pressure, three decades of pain, and a heart that was failing.  Doctors were telling me I didn’t know what I was talking about.  This included the eleven members of the medical profession in my own family.  After my cartilage healed and my metabolic processes reached homeostasis, I was free of pain and happy.

Presently, the school of allopathic-medicine fishes are swimming in the strong currents of the Niagara River.  As a group, we are headed toward the falls.  As leaders try to announce to the group of the danger, they are picked off one-by-one.  If the group tries to change direction, the strong currents of the economy works against their efforts.  Will we plunge down the falls into the abyss, or will we be strong enough to overcome the strong currents of the economy.  Truly, a strong leader is needed.  One of position and power that can overcome the “quorum sensing” of the economy and who can avoid the oddity effect.  Swimming against the currant and pointing to holistic healing –Pandemic Survivor

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Does intelligence displace morality?