It’s 3 AM and your body aches in relentless agony.  You’ve already had twelve hundred milligrams of ibuprofen and the pain continues.  Hot baths, cold baths, and nothing seems to give you relief.  The emotional pain begins as you realize that you will not be able to work and your family needs your income to survive.  As emotional pain and physical pain dance around your central nervous system, despair becomes your state of being.  The remedy is not prescription pain meds or street drugs.

Recent headlines screamed that the leading cause of death for persons under fifty is pain med abuse.  Having lived with pain since the late 1970s before overcoming it in the 2000s, I would say the leading cause of all death is PAIN.  Is it that opiates are being abused, or is it that there is so much pain that humans will do almost anything to relieve themselves of pain?  The signal that your body needs repair becomes worse than the underlying condition. As the pain continues the natural response of our body is to start shrinking the brain and other neural tissue. As the quality of life fails, emotional turmoil leads us into a state where death seems to be better than life.  Why have we come to this stage of pain?  Pain is the number one ailment in the US with 100 million people in some form of pain.

The cause of pain in the US has been the result of trying to maintain the largest segment of the economy as the medical industry.  To accomplish this feat, it has been necessary to manipulate society in many different areas. 

• The food supply has been changed so that there are many artificial chemicals that our bodies cannot handle. How food is processed is another abuse to our food supply that the body does not respond well to. This prevents our bodies from achieving the normal healing processes provided by food. When we don’t heal, chronic pain is the result.
• We have been scared from the sun for over the last fifty years.  Vitamin D will damage your body and UV radiation will give you cancer.  This lie has led to much of our pain.  Not only does UV light provide many beneficial compounds when proper solar exposure is maintained, but also the other side of the visible spectrum or near infrared provides many healing benefits. This includes energy to our mitochondria for cellular healing.
• Around the beginning of the Twentieth Century, funding for universities that taught patent medicine while not funding natural healing technologies became the way of American medicine.  This led us to find drugs sourced from natural compounds. To understand this, consider the natural anti-inflammatory salicylates that were modified to make aspirin or salicylic acid. Natural compounds were modified to make drugs and our bodies do not respond well to them.  Also, treating chronic pain with drugs instead of vitamins and minerals is just stupid. Congress even went as far as to say that you cannot advertise anything that is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease without going through the FDA’s drug process.  If you don’t drink water you will die.  According to the FDA, if you advertise that water will prevent death, it is a drug.
•  Now as congress battles over healthcare, it is not about health, but sustaining the medical sector economy.  There is some ethics involved as failure of the economy could lead to pain.  One medical practice decided to start treating their patients with vitamins and minerals based on the huge amount of medical research.  The result for eight thousand patients was a reduction in office visits from four per patient per year to one visit per patient per year.  It does not take an accounting genius to determine that this was huge reduction in income.  Imagine the decline in the US economy if the entire population was given an adequate intake of vitamins and minerals.  With almost twenty percent of our economy in the medical sector, the US would plunge into recession.  Our congressmen are now having to balance the health of the economy with the health of the population.  What would you do?  Poor policy decision over the last century has put us into a very sad position.  If we modeled our health policies like the rest of the modernized countries, there would be a loss of over five million health insurance jobs and many medical and pharmaceutical jobs.  Congress has consistently decided in the past that the ill health of the population is better that a loss in the economy. The policies of Health and Human Services can be defined in three simple words: Markets before mandates.

In the decades of my chronic pain, I only survived, through the grace of God, by being able to read medical research papers on nutrition for health and apply the findings to my health.  Does everyone have this capability?  We have put our trust in institutions because we are told that America is the greatest country in the world.  It is a great country, but it has some very bad policies for health.  I have a friend that went into medical practice in the 1970s. He constantly complained that he had no solution for the aches and ill health of the aged.  Obviously, he had not been trained in nutritional solutions.  This is the general course of the medical practice today.

With the new development in research for mitochondrial (cellular energy) health, our understanding of how processed carbohydrates lead to poor health has increased significantly.  It seems that our ancient ancestors had a better understanding of how food heals us than our institutions of today.  If you wait until this becomes common practice of using foods for health, you most likely will be dead.  It will take many decades for our system to change. Over the last half century, we have been scared from the sun, told to use fats that were not healthy, substituted sugar for fats, and continued the use of drugs instead of vitamins and minerals.   

To begin our journey of recovery, please consider eliminating flour from grains and all processed sugar that includes high fructose corn syrup.  Find a source from someone that has studied this for decades.  I have found Dr. Mercola to a have a firm grasp of nutrition for health.  His new book, Fat for Fuel, is very enlightening.  You may also want to subscribe to his daily newsletter. Don’t be alarmed as it is very complicated because of the constant barrage of bad information from our institutions. The Whole30 diet plan may be a good place for you to start. Here are the Whole30 rules. Here is what to expect in the first thirty days as you recover from processed foods. There are many other sources for diet like the paleo diet. Pick one and embrace it for your health.  –Pandemic Survivor