#also I think the patent medicine shows were pretty common

[thethingything]

just found out that John A. Hamlin, the guy who made Hamlin's Wizard Oil, used the profits from his unbelievably shitty patent medicine to found the Grand Opera House in Chicago, and like wow you really could just do whatever the fuck you wanted back then, huh

#thoughts #🍬 post #history #victorian era #apparently being ill means we're once again reading about shitty victorian medicine #also admittedly this guy did advertise his products using travelling groups of performers #so him being involved in theatre related stuff isn't too surprising but even still #also I think the patent medicine shows were pretty common #like you just go from town to town doing performances to advertise the product #and then leave before anyone can realise it doesn't actually work/makes things worse

[alkaliyogi]

WE ARE CURRENTLY IN HELLS PIT OF FIRE AND MISERY…

How did we get here?

2020 is shaping-up to be quite a year; we lost Kobe an important figure to sports yes, but more importantly a role model for black fathers and especially fathers to beautiful brown skinned girls. Now we have COVID, deaths, social distancing and possibly (and I shudder at this thought) mandatory vaccines in the near future.   

Many people lack the vitality and life-force energy required to participate in a democracy. This is not by accident. It was designed this way. 

There is a long history of manipulation of the human race at the hands of the 1% of the 1%- this is what I predict will happen on the other side of COVID;

Travel will become more of a nightmare than it already is. More abuse at the hands of underpaid/overworked security personnel and undignified body searches. I worked in aviation for over 10 years- if you still believe that Arab men flew those aircrafts into the Pentagon and World Trade Towers you are ignorant of the concept of protected air space. The planet’s only Superpower had comprehensive protected air space before, during and after the “attack” on America. Military and law enforcement of this great land long adopted the motto of “shoot first, ask questions later” long before Bin Laden was a spec in his father’s testicles. Besides, who spends more on their military and the protection of their own country than the world’s Superpower?

Already, we are subjected to unnecessary liquid restrictions- you can’t even bring a tub of hummus onboard with you...pause for reaction. If you choose to believe that restricting liquids has saved your life, I invite you to watch a lighthearted episode of “Adam Ruins Everything” where they covered ‘security theatre’ designed to provide you, the average citizen, with little more than a false sense of security.  And if you look at what constitutes a ‘potential terrorist’-it’s a pretty broad net covering how you wear your baseball cap all the way to facial hair grooming standards. Seems like legalized stereotyping, unless of course you’re a polished white male in corporate America.

But perhaps in the fight against mandatory vaccines- even the average white male may find himself in the trenches with us.

Will it be vaccines passports or vaccines with hardware implanted in our bodies? Will we eventually replace handheld passports for data stored in a fingerprint, retina or swab sample? Is that where we’re headed to already? Let’s keep things in perspective, shall we? Thousands of people died on September 11th. Millions more have died at the end of a gun- but the policy makers are very selective with what tragedies they will amplify and how they’ll pick and choose (based on their own agenda) when to introduce new bills or change laws. So even though innocent children die every single year in the greatest country on earth- purchased votes by the NRA (formerly the KKK) prevent amendments to the Second Amendment. Ain’t that something? An Amendment that can’t be amended. You’d think it was written by God and not men. Illusions of grandeur coupled with idolizing the forefathers of America is the exact opposite of being Christian, spiritual, a person of faith, etc. The is the same type of fandom associated with pre-adolescent girls and boy bands.   

An inside job designed to illicit fear of a common enemy (and weapons of mass destruction) became justification for us giving away many of our personal freedoms (i.e. fingerprints scans, eye retina scans, mass surveillance by our smart phones, email providers, search engines, CCTV, etc.). Does this sound familiar? It’s happened before and millions were executed as a result. Hitler wanted complete control of his people- unwavering compliance and that’s exactly where we are headed if The Gates Foundation and the WHO have anything to say about it. China is already practicing this type of population control with their face-recognition software and social behavioural grading system that assigns citizens a credit score that impacts your ability to navigate everything in your life from career, to housing to who and how one travel. Is this what we want? Who benefits? Not you, not I. 

There is growing evidence that COVID is a man-made (military controlled) virus. To many this may seem utterly ridiculous. I would invite you to research this information as discovered by numerous holistic doctors (who have been censored on Google but are searchable on Qwant, a reliable search engine free from the prying eyes of Google surveillance. If you’re wondering why the government would allow for something like a manufactured virus to be unleased on it’s on citizens let me help you. It begins with big pharma and ends with decreasing the human population.

As it stands today over 300,000 people have died- not from COVID but from underlying health issues. Like an episode of Black Mirror- doctors and health professionals are threatened if they don’t adhere to naming COVID as the cause of death. It doesn’t take a genius to observe that the overwhelming majority of people that contracted COVID recovered because they did not have underlying health issues. The Italian Parliament recently went viral for stating this. I’ll say it again, the COVID virus does not kill. Ask any self-respecting health professional/scientist that is not on the receiving end of grants issued by big pharma.  Even the CDC has been corrupted, pick-up a copy of Marcia Angell’s book; The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. Marcia Angell was the first woman to serve as Editor-In-Chief at The New England Journal of Medicine, the most influential science journal in the world. She’s done her part to warn us of how drug companies collude not for the benefit of the public, but for their own gain. History will show unequivocally that the real tragedy was not COVID- but the mandatory vaccines that have polluted our bodies for years with unsafe levels of heavy metals, formaldehyde, MSG and more to render your well enough to stay alive and on medications until you die. Newer vaccines will also render you sterile. That is the pandemic we’re headed towards.

Big pharma is greater and more powerful than any government on the planet. And what’s more, they’ve purchased almost every single politician there is to be purchased. In medicine, the first rule is ‘Do no harm’. In Aviation the first rule is ‘if we don’t know, we don’t go’. Thousands of people have had their lives permanently changed when their once healthy children were exposed to vaccines that left them autistic, some children have even died. Unless you can prove without a shadow of a doubt that vaccines are not harmful and toxic (which they have not proven) why do we agree to subject perfectly healthy, clean bodies to foreign matter? And no, vaccines did not eradicate polio- you can still catch that shit. The difference is more people have access to clean food and water today than ever before. As more and more countries develop, more of the planet’s population can practice better hygiene. Vaccines have cured nothing. Measles, malaria, hepatitis are still around!

Fun fact: the US government actually owns more patents of the measles virus than anyone else. Something to chew on.

Are we going to roll over and pretend that the supposed benefits of a vaccine for a non-lethal virus outweighs the damage is can have to the nervous system and reproductive functions of millions of people? We’re already dying a slow death with pollution in the air, water, food and soil we’re consuming. A great portion of the population is already unable to conceive naturally- which is your body’s way of telling you your currently too sick to create new life. So, what do we do? We employee fertility specialists to implant us with embryos instead of addressing the foundational causes and habits for our body’s rejection of bringing new life to our sick planet. 

The world’s population is nearing 8 billion- very few people have died during this pandemic relative to deaths associated to lung cancer, breast cancer, heart disease, medical drug overdoses, etc. It’s sad that we lost anyone. I live in Brooklyn, New York so I’m not removed from the collective loss we’re experiencing. Let’s also take a moment to step back and take a deep breath. This was never a reason to make us anxious, depressed and fearful of each other. This is how they separate and then conquer us.  And it’s certainly not a reason to change our way of living and give away more personal freedoms (that were fought and paid for).

I’m calling on citizens of the world. Stand-up! We are many in numbers- they are few. Don’t let them violate you or anyone else in a way that is not humane.

One last interesting fact to research- the United States Supreme Court or Congress (depending on which article you come across) that vaccines are ‘unavoidably unsafe’. And the kicker? If you or a loved one are damaged from a vaccine you can’t sue the vaccine manufacturers. How’s that for democracy?! Look it up for yourselves, but not on Google.

 Stay up!

Alkali Yogi

[ereannie]

I am in need of doctors AU ereannie headcanons. Help!

Sorry this took long, actually I wanted to make sure the headcanons were accurate considering the career. lol Also there’s so many different occupations for being a doctor I had no idea which one to go with, So I went with a variety, and some patient au’s. Okay, so here are 10 Headcanons/ prompts! - @lunarcrystals​

Modern AU

Eren, as a physical therapist and Annie as an MMA coach. It’s a wild mix because Annie is constantly putting a strain on her muscles, and often complains about backaches, and cramps. Eren, being the good doctor boyfriend, helps Annie soothe away the aches and pains, not by prescribing her medication or giving her exercises, but by preparing warm baths for her, and giving her massages where she needs it, naturally he wouldn’t believe these types of things would work so well on there own, BUT, he likes the satisfied look on Annie’s face when he takes care of her. 

Annie is a thug that often gets into fights for the hell of it, she enjoys the rush of adrenaline she gets from street fights with random strangers who challenge her. She loves to show off her moves, and demonstrate her techniques to the crowd. But of course, she’s not indestructible. Annie gets wounded pretty badly for each fight she has, and often has to go the ER. Where she befriends Eren, a snarky male nurse. Annie always wins her challenges, until a fight with a certain Ackerman girl leaves her unconscious. A day later she wakes up to a certain pretty green eyed nurse who she mistakes for being an actual angel. Eren is flattered, he jokingly tells Annie he could be her guardian angel if she wanted him to be. 

After a near fatal car accident, Eren becomes an amputee patient at a rehabilitation center, Annie is assigned as his personal psychologist. She helps Eren become accustomed to the loss of his limb. She not only helps him physically, but mentally as well, since Eren is disoriented after having lost his right leg, he finds solace in speaking to Annie. Not just because she is his psychologist, but because he also finds her to be endearing, and quite cute. 

Eren and Annie are a couple that both work in the maternity ward of the hospital, Annie is an obstetrician, she helps mothers expecting with preparing for childbirth, and is there to deliver the baby when they go into labor. Eren is a pediatrician, often having appointments with the prior patents and their infants, he takes care of them thoroughly. Both of them have very busy careers, and are so often swept up in their own work, that they barely ever think about starting a family of their own. Until Eren slips up the question one day while they’re in bed, Annie tells him she needs time to think about this, but eventually, a baby Jaeger is born. 

Annie gets into a scuffle that literally knocks a tooth loose, she is forced to go see a dentist. Annie HATES dentists, having had horrible experiences with them as a kid, but she’s in pain, and has no choice. she wishes she could be anywhere else but the waiting room, but just as soon as her name is called and she gets up from her seat only to meet eyes with a tall and tan pretty boy doctor, she thinks to herself, maybe this dentist isn’t so bad. 

Eren and Annie are in-patients at a hospital, both having stayed for longer than a year. They are both terminally ill. Through-out all the other in-patients at the hospital, Eren and Annie find that they have more in common with one- another then just their illness, and soon become close friends. Annie dreads what would become of them in the future, but Eren is always there to soothe her doubts. They become each others comfort while they wait for the end results. 

Annie becomes a medical trainee under the supervision of renowned surgeon Grisha Jaeger, she aims to become a professional in the surgical field just as Grisha is. She is efficient with her studies, and hardly ever slacks off. But some long haired punk often likes to hang out around the hospital and pester Annie on her breaks. Annie isn’t aware that said punk is actually the son of the world famous Surgeon, until she actually see’s them both arrive in the same car. Soon Annie becomes used to Eren following her around like an eager puppy on her lunch breaks.

Annie is a lower-middle class single mother of a six year old child. When her child gets very ill one day, she rushes him/ her to the ER, but the ER only does so much to help, instead they send she and her child off to see a primary care doctor. When Dr. Eren Jaeger see’s the desperation in Annie’s eyes, he tries his best to calm her down, and promises her he would take care of her child. Days after that, Annie’s son/ daughter grows to like Eren, and as the months pass by Annie feels herself become attracted to the doctor, the feelings soon become mutual. 

Eren is a trauma surgeon, and Annie is one of his assistant nurses. Sometimes, a day comes by when they are unable to save the life of a patient. Eren, being a very emotional man, often takes it out on himself. Out of the group of assistants he has, Annie is always the one to bring him out of his distraught state. Annie is his shoulder to cry in, of course he never lets the other assistants or doctors see him cry. He stays calm and professional when he faces the families of the patients, with Annie by his side.

Eren and Annie are both medical school students aiming for a professional degree in medicines. Since they’re both in the same field of study, they often have the same classes. Eren, seeing that Annie is the most level-headed student of each session, and very intelligent, seeks her out to become his personal tutor since he’s been lacking in his grades.To his surprise, she actually accepts his offer, in return, she asks him to become her gym partner, since she has no one else to go with. Eren agrees. And the two hit it off from the there. 

#ereannie #ereani #annie leonhardt #eren jaeger #headcanons #au #Anonymous

[gethealthy18-blog]

351: A Parent’s Guide to Precocious Puberty & How to Slow It Down With Dr. Anne Marie Fine

New Post has been published on http://healingawerness.com/news/351-a-parents-guide-to-precocious-puberty-how-to-slow-it-down-with-dr-anne-marie-fine/

351: A Parent’s Guide to Precocious Puberty & How to Slow It Down With Dr. Anne Marie Fine

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This episode is sponsored by Everlywell, at-home lab tests that you can get without a doctor’s order! I’ve used many of their tests and I like to recommend a couple that have been especially helpful. They have an at-home allergy test for 40 of the most common allergens using the same CLIA-certified labs used by Allergists/Doctors. The labs are reviewed by an independent physician and this lab test measures IgE levels of common allergens including pet dander, mold, trees, grasses, and more. But you can do it from your own home and through a finger stick. I also really like their food sensitivity tests that test for IgG reactions. This was a big key for me in my health recovery, as there were foods that didn’t show up as an allergy that were causing inflammation. I used an elimination diet, but this food sensitivity test also filled in the missing piece of the puzzle for me. Through healing my gut, I’ve been able to remove all sensitivities except for eggs. Finding out I was highly sensitive to eggs made a huge difference for me, as I ate them often as an inexpensive protein source. I feel so much better now that I don’t eat eggs and I would never have known that without this test! I also use their at-home Vitamin D test to keep an eye on those levels. Check out all of their tests at wellnessmama.com/go/everlywell. Use code MAMA10 for 10% off orders

This episode is sponsored by Joovv, a natural red light therapy in your very own home. We may not think of light when we think of essential nutrients that our body needs, but light is absolutely necessary! This is the reason I go outside as soon as possible after waking up in the morning, and the reason I spend time in front of my Joovv. Light is energy and our bodies need light in certain forms in order to sustain healthy cellular function. Red light in particular, especially in certain wavelengths, has very specific benefits for hair, skin, and cellular energy. I like Joovv because they are third-party tested for safety and performance and use a Patented modular design which allows you easily treat your whole body in under 20 minute and lets you use anything from a small system to a larger system that you would find in a Chiropractors office. Joovv uses clinically proven wavelengths of light that provide energy to the body. They have Bundle pricing discounts which allow you to save more money when purchasing larger setups. Get free shipping at joovv.com/wellnessmama and use code WELLNESSMAMA for a free gift!

Katie: Hello and welcome to the “Wellness Mama” podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com, that’s wellnesse.com with an E on the end, which is my new line of completely natural and completely effective personal care products like hair care and toothpaste and now hand sanitizer. So make sure to check that out. This episode is a big one for any parents with preteens or kids that are getting close to that age because it’s all about precocious puberty and how we can help make sure our kids don’t go through puberty too early and what we can do to support them when they do.

Dr. Anne-Marie Fine is my guest today. She’s a doctor, award-winning researcher, and best-selling author, and the founder and CEO of IAMFINE, which is based on her personal and clinical experience with chronic disease called by environmental toxicity. And environmental toxicity is a big factor when it comes to precocious puberty. We’re gonna go deep on that today. But she also works with those with autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, brain fog, cancer, etc., and she’s done a lot of research on the rising environmental concentrations of 80,000 new chemicals in our environment and how this expresses in every phase of life, from preconception and pregnancy to precocious puberty, and even to health and hormone problems as adults.

So, a very information-packed episode that I know you will enjoy. And without further ado, let’s jump in. Dr. Fine, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Fine: Well, thanks for inviting me. I’m happy to be here.

Katie: I am really excited to chat with you about a topic that is coming up more and more with my readers and my listeners, which makes me think that it must be on the rise. And that topic is precocious puberty. And I think that there’s a lot of factors that go into this. And I think a lot of them have to do with an area of research and work that you do all the time. So, I guess, to start, for anyone who’s not familiar with that term, let’s define what the term precocious puberty is.

Dr. Fine: Precocious puberty is a label given to the fact that the boys and the girls are reaching certain signs of puberty, like pubic hair and changes in breast development, and breast budding, and genitalia. It’s really the age at which this is occurring in the boys and girls. And the problem is that the age at which this is happening has been declining pretty much globally. And so, people want to know why because there are implications for early puberty. And the other thing about precocious puberty is that the mainstream conventional medical doctors are just simply changing what’s normal to what they’re seeing in the practice. And so, now they’re saying that precocious puberty is the appearance of any sign of secondary sex characteristics in boys younger than age 9, and in girls younger than age 7.5 or 8. Whereas normal puberty in a girl is what they’re saying now is anywhere from 8 to 13 years of age, when really, 12 to 13 for a girl is, for about the last 50 to 75 years has been more of the norm, not 8 to 13 years of age.

Katie: Wow. And from what I’ve read, that change in age, and the percentage of people who are going through puberty earlier, that’s rising relatively drastically, like you said, compared to previous generations. What do you think are some of the factors in that pretty rapid change?

Dr. Fine: Well, the one that I’m not gonna talk about too much because I wanna really get into the chemical contributors like endocrine disruptors, but one of the other environmental factors involved in earlier puberty is the rise in obesity. And that has been fueling it as well. And our fat cells actually make estrogen. And so, that’s something that has been looked at as well. But there are many chemicals that I want to talk about, like pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, cleaning substances, cosmetic products, dyes, plastic solvents that are termed endocrine disruptors, meaning that they have the ability to change how our hormones work in extremely tiny doses. And this is the key, extremely tiny doses. And that’s how our own hormones work. Very tiny doses of hormones actually have large effects.

So when you have these teeny-tiny doses of chemicals in the environment, particularly at certain vulnerable ages of development, like in fetuses, for example, when certain…when your reproductive organs are actually becoming into being. They’re actually developing and the brain is developing. When you have exposure to these substances, you’re going to get something that may not manifest until puberty, or may not manifest. The breast cancer and prostate cancer increases risk. You may not see that until these people are adults. But some of the origins of these instigators are actually in fetuses. And that’s why it’s really important to do a preconception detox for women who are wanting to conceive because it starts there. We really have to look at where the baby starts.

Katie: Okay. So, let’s go, kind of, almost maybe on a timeline. Because obviously, parents who are dealing with, like, children now are worried about this phase being imminent. They don’t have the ability to go back and do preconception over. I know, I’ve read so much since I had my firstborn kids. I wish I could’ve changed things then. So I definitely want to make sure we see…you know, obviously, we’re not judging or trying…..anyone who’s not there. But let’s start there, like in a perfect world, what would we do before we even conceive to help give our kids the best hormonal start?

Dr. Fine: Before conception, the best thing to do is to see a doctor trained in Environmental Medicine who will take a very thorough history, including an environmental history to get likely exposures and where the person lives. There’s so much we can do with looking at, you know, with the internet, you can look up places by zip code and see what the main chemicals are in that environment. And then those people, and it really should be men and women, the sperm actually does carry environmental contaminant information into the new baby. Traditionally, we have focused on the mother though. And then those prospective parents need to be tested to see what contaminants, what kinds of chemicals is really high in them. And so, the program is going to be designed personally for those people.

So, it’s not… The same people don’t do the same thing. There is no reason to do, like, a heavy metal detox on somebody who doesn’t have a problem with heavy metals, right. So, you want to see what problems, what environmental exposures those people have so that you can really zero in on them and make sure that you’re doing a good detox. And then as far as some of us have already had kids, oh, wow, do I know that? Because I’m a mother too, and I’ve already had my kids. And I had them long ago before women were told anything about what to avoid, even when you’re expecting. And so, when I was pregnant, the only thing we were told was avoid alcohol and caffeine. That was it. And I have to tell you, I ate so much tuna when I was pregnant.

And, you know, that’s high in mercury. And I wound up with these kids who had ADHD, and I’m like, “I wonder what happened because, you know, I thought I was doing a good job.” But I did a course correction in childhood. I tested them for heavy metals and mercury. And when I saw it was high, I was able to go in and do some heavy metal chelation or detoxification. And I was really pleased to do that because when you’re a mother, one thing to remember, because you may have a lot of younger mothers listening right now, is when you have your children at home, that’s an ideal time to work with them. If you’ve missed something, like I most certainly did, to do the course correction and take care of it. Because once they’re 18 and leave the home, you know, your word is not the gospel anymore.

As a mother, it’s a lot harder to be able to go back and to do something. Unless of course, it’s their personal motivation, then, of course, that comes into play. So, I really feel that you made such a good point. A lot of us didn’t have that option. I certainly had never heard about it. And so, you just need to as you have children, and even in your own cells, as you grow, you always have the opportunity to make course corrections and to go back and to test and to really do a deep dive into what could be causing your particular health concerns. And then to be able to, you know, decrease your body burden of chemicals. So, it is not too late.

And also I want to say, I want to make this clear as well because this is what I see in my practice, sometimes, the mothers, they come in when they’re already pregnant. So, that’s not an ideal time, right? Or they’ve waited so long to get pregnant because of career concerns or financial concerns that now they’re concerned about, you know, getting to be too old and not being able to conceive. And they may not feel, you know, the need to take time out before they conceive to do preconception care. And so, those are some real…those are real-life issues that do crop up, but it is something that I do recommend. But, you know, it’s something that you have to, sort of, fix it in your head before the time arrives when you’re already pregnant, or you feel like, “I’m so old. I’ve just gotta get pregnant.” That’s really more important, right?

Katie: Yeah, exactly. And there’s a message of hope too, for anyone listening. I always try to remind everyone, you know, I didn’t figure out most of this stuff, sounds like you as well, until I was an adult and had autoimmune disease, and then had to undo all the damage and figure out what was wrong. And so, if we’re talking about this for our kids, even us starting when they’re children at all is an advantage over waiting until they’re adults. You know, so anytime, like the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is today. We always can start with what we know now.

And so, I would guess also, there’s kind of a spectrum. So, I think of it as like for autoimmune disease, for instance, I’ve kind of explained it that we all have a bucket and you can fill the bucket with any number of things. You could put marbles, or sand, or pine cones, or whatever it may be. But when you reach the top, it’s going to overflow. The idea being when you fill up that bucket and it gets overwhelmed, you’re gonna end up with some kind of problem and it’s gonna manifest differently for each of us. And I think of environmental toxins kind of in the same way.

The body is able to handle small amounts of these things and it’s pretty resilient. But when you reach a certain level of exposure, it’s going to bubble over. And so, you can tell me if that analogy maybe doesn’t work here, but that’s my thought with kids. And so, if we can mitigate their exposure and do things when they’re young to help them avoid filling up the bucket in the first place, that’s an advantage. Or if we can do things to help them take things back out of the bucket, that’s another advantage. And the earlier we can do that, the better. But anytime is a great time to start.

Dr. Fine: Absolutely, Katie. I so agree. We call that the rain barrel theory. And it’s true, it doesn’t matter what’s in there. Lots of things go in there, environmental toxins go in there, but also stress goes in there, and poor nutrition goes in there. And once it reaches the top, the next thing in, no matter what it is, if it overflows, that’s what’s going to trigger the disease. And so, the idea, it can be super specific if you are testing for it and looking carefully for it, but also, the pervading theory is that anything you can do to lower your bucket would be helpful, and to start at any time is helpful.

And by the way, even if you, you know, are super careful with your pregnancy and childhood, as we live and accumulate years, and our earth continues to be polluted, even when we’re careful, we are always accumulating body burden of chemicals. And so, it becomes necessary to make it a part of your daily life, but also, every now and then, to do a detox and lower that body burden before it overflows. Or a lot of people will wait until they have the actual, for example, autoimmune disease or something, and then they will go ahead and do it, or they get cancer or something like that. But it’s not a one and done. And so, it’s something that we really have to put in our toolbox and in the back of our head that this is an area that we need to pay attention to throughout life.

Katie: Absolutely. Okay. So, let’s go deeper on into chapters, especially for the subset of parents listening who are asking me these questions via email or direct message, who want to know, you know, if my kid…maybe they didn’t even expect this, my kid is at these younger ages and starting to show symptoms of potential precocious puberty. Like, what do they need to know about endocrine disrupters so explain what those are and where they are most often found when we’re talking about our kids?

Dr. Fine: Okay. So, let’s talk about specifics with the early puberty. Two of the biggest contributors to this precocious puberty are, I would say, BPA and phthalates which are plasticizers. So, the whole category of plastics is something that I’m gonna focus on here. And I’m gonna talk about them separately, but I’m gonna just tell you a few of the places where they are. Children’s toys contain phthalates, like that rubber ducky in the bath. Those rubber, soft rubber toys are phthalates. The shower curtain in your bathroom, if it’s vinyl, it’s got phthalates. And the problem with phthalates is that they’re not bonded to that underlying material. They are constantly falling off into the air. And so even your dust in your home has phthalates in it.

And so, believe it or not, Katie, this is so easy and free to do for everybody. But we need to dust more often and more carefully in our house, and that will keep environmental toxins down. You would not believe what’s in your dust, okay. And then in our cleaning products, we also have phthalates and our personal care products because phthalates are also used as incense, as scent fixatives. And so, the easy way to know that is to look at the ingredient list. And if you see the word fragrance or perfume on the ingredient list, that’s your cue that most likely those substances contain fragrances. You will never see phthalate on a label of anything. It’s just not required to be listed. Fragrances are a protected trade secret, and the word fragrance can hide up to 80 or 100 different chemicals and you don’t really know what they are, okay. So, let me just go through a few more of these and then we’ll back up a little. So, that covers the phthalates pretty well.

And then also, I wanna talk about plug-in air fresheners. Everyone listening should just after they hear this, they should just unplug them and throw them away because they contain phthalates. They contain formaldehyde, which is a carcinogen. They contain benzene, which is another carcinogen. And they are just emitting these into the air. And so you’re breathing them into your body. Phthalates can also be absorbed transdermally. So, if you have a scent emitter in your house, even those little sticks that you put in the jar of sense, if your skin is bare, and you’re…and it’s…I mean, you can’t even see it, but you are absorbing this stuff multiple different ways.

When you go to a department store and you’re walking in, and you’ve got the perfume sprayers, and I hate that. And so I always say, “No, thank you.” And I feel pretty virtuous about that. But then I discovered probably three or four years ago, that even if you yourself did not put any of it on your own skin, just walking through that cloud of perfume, every inch of your skin that was exposed you are absorbing that which means fragrance is like the new secondhand smoke. If you’re sitting in an office, for example, and you yourself don’t wear scents because you don’t want the endocrine-disrupting effects of phthalates, but let’s say you’re…the other people in the office are wearing scented…and it’s not just perfume, perfume is an obvious one, perfume and aftershave are obvious, but it’s underarm deodorant. It’s body lotion. It’s makeup. It’s hairspray. It’s many other things.

And so, if someone in your office is wearing it, you’re exposed even though you yourself did not consent. And you were educated enough to say “No,” and you’re using unscented products such as laundry detergent, dryer sheets, all of these things have phthalates. Our homes are just pumped through with endocrine-disrupting chemicals that are contributing to many things. Not just precocious puberty, they’re contributing to…they make you fat. They predispose you to diabetes and other health problems.

And also, I wanted to mention that the Endocrine Society, which is the world’s largest professional association of medical and research endocrinologists. So these are very conventional doctors, and even they have come on board and they consider reducing endocrine-disrupting chemical impacts to be one of their highest public health goals. So, when they came out with that a few years ago, you know, that was pretty profound that it’s being recognized everywhere.

So then, the other one that I want to talk about is the Bisphenols, Bisphenol A, BPA. And BPA is also part of plastic and predisposing to precocious puberty. And it’s found in the polycarbonate water containers. It’s found in thermal receipts. Thermal receipts is actually a really large source of this. And just like the phthalates, this chemical is not bound very tightly to the underlying material. And just touching it, this has been proven in studies, within seconds, if you take that person’s blood which they have, within seconds, not very many, you have BPA in the bloodstream. So, things are easily transferred, the BPA transfers from the thermal receipt onto your skin, into your body. And if you have used hand sanitizer prior to handling the receipt, you get about 10 times more BPA into your blood because the hand sanitizer contains things that are known penetration enhancers.

And that’s something to be thinking about these days because the use of hand sanitizer has increased. So, where do you find the thermal receipts? You’re going to find them in pretty much everywhere, the grocery store, the bank, the post office, if you get receipts at the gas station, you know, airline tickets. They’re pretty much everywhere, fast food places, other restaurants. But here’s the thing, we don’t have to accept them. So, just say no. Unless you are buying something that you might have to return, you know, you can just say, do you need the receipt for your restaurant meal? Take a picture of it on your phone or have it emailed to you. It’s no…it does you no good to take those things.

And then the other problem for ladies especially is when we stuff those receipts in our purses, that BPA is just coming off and touching everything in your purse. And when you stick your hand in your purse to find your cell phone, or your glasses, or your wallet, every time you put your hand in your purse, you’re just coating your hands with BPA. And so, I’ll just leave this tip here right now so I don’t forget it. But what I have my patients do is the ladies, I have them empty out their purse at home, get rid of all the receipts, take a cloth that’s wet with hot water, wipe out the inside of the purse, wipe everything off, every…the wallet, the phone, the makeup kit, everything. And then, get a Ziploc bag or something like that and put it in your purse. And if you must take a receipt, put it in your Ziploc bag segregate it from touching anything else in your purse.

Now, for the men, they’re discovering that, you know, same thing happens. The man puts it in their wallet. So, money is now contaminated with BPA and BPS. So, you know, it’s something that avoidance is really key here. You have to be really careful and aware of BPA. It’s insidious. The CDC has been tracking chemicals in our blood for decades. And at last count, it’s like BPA was in 95% of U.S. people, even though their half-life is pretty short. So, if it’s been found in 95% of Americans, that just means we’re exposed so ubiquitously that you could take our blood at any time and we would have it just because, you know, the stuff we were exposed to maybe two days ago, that’s gone. But now the stuff we were exposed to today, now that’s in there.

So, the BPA story I had…you know, I have a patient, we have to be really careful because sometimes I get patients who are looking at certain things in their environment, like the water supply and saying, “I can do better.” Yes, we can all do better, right. So, that’s good. And then they were ordering it from one of the water purification, I’m not gonna name them, who deliver it to your house on a regular schedule. And it’s purified, and then you can look up the water on their website and see what’s in it and what’s not in it. And it’s really interesting. I looked up this particular water, it actually was…it was pretty good water. But all of the containers were made of polycarbonate, BPA. And so, you don’t know how long that water, that good water, you know, about how long it’s been sitting in there touching the BPA which is coming off into it.

When they’re on these hot trucks being delivered, you don’t know how long they’re on there. You don’t know how long they sat on a shelf in the warehouse before it was even shipped to you. And what’s interesting is I called the company to talk about this, basically to ask them were they aware that this was not a good idea, and they basically said, “Yes, we’re aware that our containers contain BPA. However, we don’t feel that there is a health issue there. And so we are…you know, we’re still gonna use it.” And so, they haven’t really caught up to the science. And it’s really, unfortunately, mommas, it’s up to us to be our own FDA and to be able to be more discerning about what we allow into our homes. And so that…so, the idea of getting purified water is a good idea. There’s so much crap in the waters.

I’ve got a whole…I teach doctors environmental medicine. And one of my…one of the talks that I’ve gotten the most positive feedback on is the one that I did on, “What is in our water?” You would not believe it. But anyway, so with water, you do not want to drink bottled water of any kind, no matter how good you think the water is supposed to be on the inside. You want to have water that is in a glass bottle. And that’s really important. And that’s something that as families…and by the way, when I was a young mother, I did not know this. And so that was something that was overlooked. But thankfully, I eventually was able to get a reverse osmosis water system and not worry about that. And so, we have to just…like Katie said, you just have to start where you are. There’s no value in saying “Oh, woe is me….. I did it wrong.” No, you just start where you are. And you make the better decision and then you move forward.

Katie: Exactly. Well, and looks like I’ll just jump in on the water note because I think you’re right. And I have posts about this that I’ll link in the show notes as well at wellnessmama.fm. And I know you have resources as well. So, those will all be linked in the show notes. But when I started learning about this, getting rid of plastic can seem so overwhelming. And I’m a big fan of the 80-20 rule. So, for me personally, I figured out based on the current research, the biggest sources of exposure, like you mentioned, are inhalation via the air, and our water supply, and especially plastic water bottles, which are also horrible for the planet. So, we prioritized getting a water filter, actually a whole house filter we have at this point, and under the sink filter, and switching to using reusable metal water bottles, which is also much more eco-friendly as well. And that’s one change that makes a big, big, big difference.

And so if we can just move away from drinking out of disposable single used plastic in general, that’s a huge thing. We also put air filters in our house and don’t use air fresheners, of course, and switch to things like plastic-free in the kitchen. And I have resources to help walk people through all of that. But again, it’s like any incremental change you can make in this is a big deal, especially when we’re talking about kids. And that doesn’t mean you have to, you know, do it all overnight. This can definitely be a process, but it’s an important one to be aware of, certainly.

Dr. Fine: Yeah. And so, that’s what you wanna focus on when you have the kids at home, I think we wanna get back to how do you…what do you do with these kids who have precocious puberty? You have to look at, “Oh my gosh, I’ve gotta call out this one company.” Well, maybe not by name. But I think we have to take a really deeper look at what is in our homes because that’s where you as mothers, that’s where we make the most difference. The home is our domain. And we are the ones who are able to set it up in the way we want. And so, we really want to…like you said, Katie, we really want to root out all of the plastics, and all of the scented.

Honestly, I think the plastics and the scents in our home, those two…and to dust more, because I didn’t even talk about the flame retardants and all the other things that are in your house dust. But I believe, dusting twice a week, getting rid of plastic, getting rid of all of the scented products in your house, and eating organic, those things together are really going to be important for limiting things in your children that are endocrine disruptors. And we haven’t really talked about pesticides, but I want to add something here. The pesticides have been shown to lower children’s IQs. And in the animal kingdom, they are seeing hermaphrodite frogs, and coming about because of the feminizing effect.

We didn’t really talk about boys too much. But we have a twin problem with precocious puberty in the girls, and the feminization of boys via chemicals in the environment that act like estrogens. And so, pesticides are one of the vehicles that do this. But also, the phthalates are feminizing on the boys. And the studies are showing that the male infants are having changed male genitalia. And the way it’s changed is it’s showing a feminization of that male baby which, you know, in our audience of mothers who already have children, that may not be relevant right this minute, but I’ll tell you where it’s relevant.

Mothers, have you noticed that they are now marketing to our teenage boys? They’re marketing these products, these body scented products. And the marketing is very, very strongly suggesting, for example, that, you know, if the boys use these products, they can get not only one girl, but two girls. I mean, I have this in my slides for my doctors, it’s really wild. And these products, if you look at them carefully, they not only contain phthalates, they are so strongly scented, they have lots of phthalates in them. And phthalates are decreasing testosterone. So, you may not…that problem may not lead to a precocious puberty in a boy, but the lack of testosterone most certainly leads to abnormal male development.

And so, that’s something else that we want to consider in our homes. We want to think about the decrease in testosterone and sperm counts. And, I mean, the reproductive organs and systems in both boys and girls have been under attack for a while. And we are just now starting to see more of this. I wrote an article a couple of years ago for Thrive Global, in it where I basically…the title of it, if you want to look it up, is “The Handmaid’s Tale Becomes a Reality.” Because that is an Emmy Award-winning TV show that shows what happens when they polluted their environment with pesticides and chemicals. And they are now having trouble reproducing.

They have to get the handmaids in to be…someone who has been proven to have been able to carry a child. Basically they’re outsourcing the baby-making, right? And this show is incredibly popular. And it boggles the imagination because people act like it’s entertainment, but it’s really not because this is what we’re seeing in our patient population. We’re seeing a rise in infertility and a rise in assisted fertility techniques. And we’re seeing a rise in birth defects and a rise in, you know, developmental problems in our children. And so, all of this is stemming from these chemicals that have insidious negative implications at teeny-tiny doses, but that we’re getting those teeny-tiny doses all the time.

And that’s why, Katie, I wanna…you did say something that I do wanna kind of pounce on here. Air filters. Love air filters. 20 years ago when I started practicing medicine, I used to recommend them for my asthmatic patients. Not anymore. I think everybody should have them in their homes, in their bedrooms, in their children’s bedrooms. So, at least when you’re sleeping, you are able to filter out many of these things. We do not have good air. And the air in your home is between 5 and 10 times more toxic than your outdoor air, which is super toxic, and that’s because your home is off-gassing a lot of different things.

But that’s…we’re getting a little bit away from what we were talking about. But I wanted to bring that in too because you mentioned it. So, air filters, avoiding plastic, avoiding scented products, dusting really well, vacuuming with a really good vacuum cleaner. Most of them are just, I don’t know if you’re aware of that, they are just…you vacuum and then it’s like the dust just kind of goes out of the bag. You’re not…you’ve gotta have a good HEPA filter in there, so that when you are vacuuming you are truly getting rid and capturing the dust particles because the dust in your home is toxic. And then pesticide-free is something that you want to also focus on.

Katie: Totally agree. And I think, when it comes to endocrine disrupters and hormones in general, you know, getting rid of the bad stuff is a very important, big huge part of the equation. And then once you tackle that step, it’s then figuring out ways to support the body as well. Because I think it’s a balance when you’re talking about holistic health of removing the bad and then giving the body the good. And so, I think that’s another key area I would love to talk about and hear your thoughts. And a few of the things I’ve noticed and I do have kids in the almost puberty age, I haven’t had any, like, make that jump yet, we’re right on the cusp of it.

And so, thinking of things like supporting the body nutritionally with tons of micronutrients during that time, especially we know things like leafy greens bind to extra estrogen in the body. So, we wanna make sure our kids are getting a wide variety of different sources of micronutrients from ideally fresh local produce whenever possible. And just being cognizant of them getting enough nutrients because puberty, of course, is a time of increased demand on the body and very rapid growth. But I’m curious if you have any dietary or supplementation recommendations for both supporting kids from not going through puberty too early, which of course, you know, avoid processed foods and foods that contain plastic, like we talked about, but then also when it is the right time for them to go through puberty, how can we nutritionally support them best through that process?

Dr. Fine: I recommend, and this is kind of an area that I didn’t focus on too much before, but when I said no plastic, that includes processed foods that are packaged in plastic. Because in Puerto Rico years ago, they were finding premature puberty in female girls. They were finding little girls sprouting breasts, and getting their periods at 2, 3, and 4 years old. So, that is way worse than what we’re seeing here, right? And so, they tested these girls in Puerto Rico, what on earth is causing that? And they discovered it was phthalates, okay. And so, what they discovered, they had to kind of be detectives and say, “Well, where are the phthalates coming from?”

And one of the things they concluded was that Puerto Rico is an island, everything is shipped in, and everything is shipped in covered in plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic. So, your food being covered in plastic, your meats, your fat, fatty products like meats are being covered in plastic. You want to eat fresh. Well, okay, let’s just go back to the meat. If you’re buying meat, I recommend buying the grass-fed organic kinds of meats from the kind of place where it hasn’t been sitting there in a case wrapped in plastic styrofoam on the bottom and plastic on top. Go to the kind of store that is just sitting open in a case. And then you can wrap it, or the butcher will wrap it in a butcher paper. And then, you know, you take it home and you cook it. And then that way, it’s not just sitting in all of those wrappings of plastic for so long. So, I do recommend that.

Whole foods, fresh fruits, and vegetables for sure. I see that the children today are not really getting very many. And the problem is, as you alluded to, our detoxification systems in our bodies, they run on nutrients. The nutrients are the cofactors that…we have detoxification enzymes in our bodies, and if you are nutritionally deficient in some of them, they’re just not gonna run. And so, by saturating their diets with the micronutrients and the greens, in particular, I really like the dark leafy greens, but I really like broccoli, garlic is really good for supporting detox enzymes. I’m not a big fan of a lot of kale because kale is high in thallium, which is a heavy metal. And I’m seeing that the people who are eating a lot of green smoothies, because, of course, I test my patients, right? And so, a lot of the green smoothie eaters are coming up super high in thallium. And thallium is a very toxic heavy metal, and it’s in our organic and commercial kale now.

And why is it there? Because certain chemicals are polluting the agricultural water. And when you say a vegetable or fruit is being grown organically, those organic standards do not include the kind of water that’s being used. So, I’m having people be careful with kale right now. But I do love the isocyanides, I like the cruciferous vegetables. I like the cauliflower, the garlic, the berries are always really important, anthocyanidins and berries are really important for detox and good health. And so, your colored, I just said colored vegetables and I just realized cauliflower is white. The colored fruits and vegetables are what you really want to emphasize but cauliflower, it turns out, is a superfood, so don’t let the white color fool you. Just make sure you get plenty of other colored fruits and vegetables in there as well.

And then I have people stay away from sweetened drinks, even fruit drinks. I don’t like…I think having kids drink predominantly water is the way to go, purified water. And by the way, we need…your liver requires water to detoxify properly. And if you are dehydrated, you cannot detoxify properly. And I see a lot of people just not drinking enough water. I would have to say, most of the people I see are dehydrated. And so, let’s not forget that because that’s so simple, make your kids drink water.

So, did you have any other questions about the food? And then, of course…oh, one more thing, I do wanna say this, the food supply has gotten contaminated as well, not just with pesticides and herbicides. Do you know that the almonds are now being fumigated with propylene oxide? And I test for that. And so, I see that in my patients too. I just…it is just kind of criminal, people are eating almonds thinking they’re good, that there’s FDA requirement, that they’ve gotta be fumigated and that’s kind of a nightmare. So, you have to be…you have to really do your homework and find the clean foods.

And sometimes the animal foods are the most highly contaminated with something called POP, persistent organic pollutants like PCBs. And so, you want to make sure that even if you are a meat-eating family, you want to make sure that those meats, like if you’re gonna give salmon, it’s gotta be wild salmon because the farm salmon is the highest source of PCBs in the diet. And butter is the next one. Butter, the epidemiologists, when they go into a new area and they want to sort of get a quick and dirty idea of how much PCBs are contaminating that area, they will test the local butter. And that would be something that’s not dependent on whether or not that butter is organic. Because it’s not a pesticide, it’s something that is, even though PCBs have been banned since the ’70s, they’re in our earth’s soil and water, and the cows are eating grass off of the earth.

So, it’s not something that just getting organic butter is gonna make sure you don’t get any PCBs. So, animal products are the high…and they’ve shown this in all the…when they look at women who are vegan versus women who are not, one of the big differences they see is persistent organic pollutants. The vegans who aren’t eating animal products are really far cleaner from that one thing. So, you wanna make sure there’s plenty of plant foods in the diet. And if you’re going to eat the meat, you want to get as clean as you can with as few wrappings as you can.

Katie: Exactly. Yeah. I think those are all very, very important tips.

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Before we move on, just to kind of piggyback on what you just said. I think a couple of other areas as parents that we can focus on that are really helpful are, one area right now of emerging research is, for instance, light exposure. And this is an area people tend to maybe discount because we can’t see the immediate effects or feel them as drastically as what we can feel what we eat, but there’s all kinds of research about exposure to artificial light at certain times of day impacting hormone levels. And also lack of exposure to natural light, and how that can affect proper hormone patterns. And this is true in adults and also in children.

And so, I always try to mention this to parents because if you were talking about young children, fixing light patterns can really help their sleep quality and how long they sleep. If you’re talking about teenagers, same thing, but it can also have an impact on those hormone shifts. And then for us as adults, we can see, and eye measuring can see differences in sleep quality. So, a tip there, I say is if possible, get outside and get your kids outside for at least half an hour as soon as possible after waking up because that natural light can signal important receptors in the back of the eye that are really important for not just circadian hormones like melatonin, but also for the proper hormone cycles, whether it be in children or adults.

And the same thing with avoiding artificial light at night. So this is another form of indoor pollution that often gets ignored, but when kids are getting exposure to blue light late into the evening, it confuses their body’s natural hormone responses. So, avoiding screens, using natural forms of light that don’t have blue light after dark, that’s been another key that was really helpful to us. I’m curious if you have any tips as well for exercise because we know the stats that kids today are not moving as much as kids in previous generations, but then there’s also evidence that, you know, too much exercise too young can be harmful. So, when we’re talking about balancing hormones and supporting kids in these different ages, any advice for what types of exercise to focus on with them?

Dr. Fine: Oh, the exercise thing kind of plays right into what I said at the beginning of our talk where rising levels of fat and obesity is also contributing to precocious puberty. And so, it’s very true once they took the physical ed out of the school, and the kids got really invested in their devices. Childhood Education has really dropped off a cliff and I don’t think that’s healthy. And by the way, you know, exercise is good for…it’s good for brain development, and it’s good for so many different things. I think, one of the things I’ve seen as a mother too is that the kids who…right now I’m talking girls, most girls and boys do some sort of sport when they’re young like soccer. And what I noticed in the girls who once they hit puberty, they stopped and didn’t pick up anything else, versus the ones who stuck with it or picked up a different sport, the girls who stopped are the ones who, honestly, by the end of high school they were already kind of plumping up, right?

And if you look back over, you know, my childhood, for example, there just wasn’t…kids just played from the time…they had recess at school and then they played from the time they got home till it got dark. There was so much exercise in a day. And I believe, as human beings, we evolved on a lot of exercise. Now, it wasn’t…as you alluded to, it wasn’t like training for marathons every day, that’s too much. But it was movement. And it was outside in the sunlight because I am seeing that research on natural sunlight on our skin. And it is very important not just for vitamin D, but those that full-spectrum lighting from the sun has health benefits that we’re just now beginning to understand.

So, I’m a big advocate of kids spending a lot of time outside playing. It might not even be a sport, but you can play outside when you’re little. It could be a sport. I don’t like sports with the head injuries, like the heading in soccer. I’m not a big fan of head injuries, like, from football or soccer or things like that. But having said that, I like soccer because, you know, there’s running and kicking, I think that’s a good sport. So, I think it should…if they’re not athletically inclined, I think riding a bicycle or playing outside is highly, highly recommended. And by the way, exercise is important for detox as well. It’s part of the things that you’re increasing circulation. Hopefully, there’s some sweating and that’s how you can dump some of your toxins out. But exercise and sunlight are very, very important.

The blue light thing is really key too because the kids are staying on their devices late into the night, and then that messes up their sleep. And you’ve got to have proper sleep. At any stage in your life, you’ve gotta have proper sleep or your body doesn’t work right. Guess what’s one of the things our bodies do in sleep? They detox. There’s no…they don’t have to metabolize or digest your food. They don’t have to, like, send energy to your limbs to move. Your body is working on detox while you sleep. Your skin, your brain is detoxing while you sleep. And so, we have to naturally maximize our body’s ability to detox on its own, as well as avoid the things that we know are gonna make us go in the wrong direction. And then thirdly, we need to buckle down and just, you know, get the proper guidance to do a really good detoxification several times, I would say, in your life.

Katie: Definitely. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Are there any supplements offhand that come to mind that can help either with avoiding precocious puberty or that are helpful during puberty? And I know, I got one question from a reader. There’s an additive called inositol I think that’s used in certain teen multivitamins, and if that’s safe or recommended or not? I know my default with my kids right now is to focus on just gut health, so I give them high-quality probiotics and prebiotics. And then also, just supporting again from a nutrient perspective with as much whole foods as possible, and making sure they’re getting enough protein which supports proper hormones, but any other suggestions you would make?

Dr. Fine: You know, it’s really difficult to make a broad-spectrum recommendation for supplements. Because when I see children in my practice, it’s like they’re coming to me for a reason, and so everything I do is very specific to that one person. And so, to come up with something broad-spectrum and say everybody should take this. Really, I think, a probiotic is a good idea, Katie. I think gut health is super important. But beyond that, I’m a little bit…especially with the kids, I really like to push the good food, the nutritious food like you are. I really like to push that and not… I remember using, like, powdered greens, you know, with my kids and powdered fruit. I did use something like that. But without knowing what… I mean, the kids today are really having a lot of health challenges. And so, a lot of them could benefit from supplements. But to just say every kid, every preteen or teen needs a certain supplement, I don’t think I would be comfortable with that. Except for probiotics, I think that you could make a strong case for that. And, you know, as long as it was a really good one.

Katie: Absolutely. And I will also say one that I do with my kids, I order at-home tests for vitamin D. So, even if you’re not, can take the kids in for a full workup which I actually would recommend that as well, but I do test all of my kids for vitamin D and then make sure they’re either getting in the sun or getting vitamin D. Because we know vitamin D is actually a pre-hormone, not just a vitamin, and so that one seems extremely essential for proper hormone regulation. I’m guessing you probably see that in your patients as well, low vitamin D levels correlating with hormone issues.

Dr. Fine: Well, what I see, I’ve practiced in Arizona and Southern California for my whole 20-year practice. And I just was so shocked to see how low everybody’s vitamin D was. I just, I mean, we’re in sunny areas, I just can’t understand it, except that nobody’s outside. But, yes. Yes, I have seen that and there are other issues with low vitamin D having to do with immune status and immune health that are also very important. I’m curious with your…well, you probably don’t wanna say, but the vitamin D issue is such a conundrum because I will tell you this, in Arizona, I used to have my patients commit to 10 minutes of sun on as much skin as they could bear around noon, which is a certain time of the day when certain rays were at its highest.

And, you know, 10 minutes, that’s not a lot. And, much to my surprise, when I retested them, it didn’t really bring it up. And I just found that shocking, that the vitamin D level… So, I will say that I’ve had to supplement lots…probably most of my patients with vitamin D supplementation, even though I theoretically and philosophically would rather people get it from the sun. For some reason, I’m not seeing sunlight producing the levels of vitamin D that I would like to see in people. And I mean, I’ve seen levels as low as 17 in my cancer patients, right? You know, that’s pretty low.

Katie: Yeah, I think this is definitely something that’s epidemic. And I know it’s controversial, but I do spend time daily in the sun, not ever to burn, but just to get vitamin D. And I think healthy sun exposure is really important. And I do that with my kids as well. But I’m also, I will supplement with vitamin D, and also along with it, vitamin K at times just if their levels are low. Just because I know how important that one is for the immune system, for hormones, for so many aspects of that. And we’re getting really close to the end of our time. We might have to do a whole other episode just on precocious puberty at some point, but I know there’s a lot…the other aspect of this that’s not just specifically health and lab-related is, how can we support our kids in this age with body image and emerging from puberty with a healthy body image on the other side? And I’m curious how you navigated that with your own kids, especially since I’m still in this phase and haven’t really figured it out totally myself yet.

Dr. Fine: Oh, that’s such a good subject. Oh, that is so, so tricky, because we’re fighting media portrayals of unattainable…especially for the girls, unattainable body images. And the girls are starting to think they’re fat as young as age 8 or 9. So, I have a daughter and a son, so I got to do both. I really…how did I do it? I just never focused on…I tried to build body confidence by looking at and praising how well the body works, like “Look at you run. Look at you go. Oh, you wanna take karate?” Really praising how the body functions as opposed to how it looks. And so, there really wasn’t in my bringing up my kids, there really wasn’t…I didn’t really emphasize, “Oh, you look so beautiful today.” Right? I didn’t really talk about. I didn’t really say that. I focused on other attributes.

And I think I did it on purpose because I know that even when I was growing up, there was all kinds of body image, and anorexia, and bulimia, and all of this stuff, and it seems to start…well, years ago, it started in teenagerhood, but now it’s like preteens and young teens are starting, men and women are starting to have these unrealistic ideas of how their body should look. I think that the media today is more accepting of diverse body types than ever before. And I think that’s really a good thing. But I would just focus on body functionality, body health, you know, other things instead of, “Did you gain weight?” You know, “That dress is looking really tight on you.” I would never point that out to a girl.

Katie: For sure. I have taken the same approach with my daughters and my sons. I’m just focusing on the body being an amazing, incredible tool and like a machine that we can use to do incredible things versus how it looks. And it’s sad, but I had to realize this and learn this lesson as an adult over even the last few years, I would say is when I finally actually learned it and started to love my own body for what it can do and not just how it looks, or what I perceived as how it didn’t look, how it was supposed to. And that’s even after growing six babies from scratch in my body, and all of these other things it had done. It took me being that old and working through a bunch of trauma to get to that point where I could actually appreciate it. So, I think the mindset piece is key as well. And hopefully, giving our kids a foundation to respect their bodies and to treat them well out of respect and love, not to pry them out of lack, it’s a big key.

Dr. Fine: Yes, I agree. Good job.

Katie: Awesome. Well, our interview has flown by. I know that you have a gift that you wanna give to the subscribers which I will put in the show notes that I don’t say your email or anything out loud and that you also have a course all about detoxification for people who this is very top of mind for whether it be preconception or precocious puberty, whatever it may be. So, those links will be in the show notes at wellnessmama.fm. And I know you’re also available online and at drannemariefine.com is that right?

Dr. Fine: Yeah, drannemariefine.com, that’s my website. And, yeah, I’m offering a complimentary 15-minute call to see if this is a good fit for exploring how a personalized detox can work for you. I’m also, on my website, I just wanna point out that my…the book that I wrote and the products that I have are in the realm of clean beauty. So that’s another passion for me, and something I didn’t bring up so much with the boys and girls. But, wow, if they’re putting stuff on their face, the girls’ makeup, especially the teen makeup is very toxic. And you’ve gotta take a really strong look at that. And the boys’ products are, like I mentioned, varying into a very, very disturbing trend. And so, we have to be careful with that too.

Katie: I agree. Well, thank you so much. This has been such an information-packed episode. Hopefully, it helps a lot of parents and a lot of teenagers and preteens as well. And I’m really appreciative of your time today.

Dr. Fine: Well, thanks, Katie. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Katie: And thanks to all of you as always for listening, for sharing your most valuable asset, your time with both of us today. We’re very grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of “The Wellness Mama Podcast.”

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Source: https://wellnessmama.com/podcast/anne-marie-fine/

[munchforwellness]

7 Steps to Health and the Big Diabetes Lie by Max Sidorov Continued from The Big Diabetes Lie Part 2. Importance of Proper Nutrition       The research is out there; the studies, findings, and evidence all show that we need to redefine how modern medicine goes about treating and curing disease. What you will also realize as you read on, is that the medical establishment is not actually interested in making you healthy and does everything in their power to keep it that way. The only person who is going to make you healthy is you. Some of the findings published in the most reputable scientific journals, show that; • Dietary change can enable diabetic patients to go off their medication. • Heart disease can be reversed with diet alone. • Consuming store bought pasteurized dairy foods can increase the risk of prostate cancer and other types of cancer (raw dairy products on the other hand are very beneficial for health and can be consumed). • Kidney stones, diabetes, headaches, migraines, Lupus, and many other diseases can be reversed by diet alone. • Type 1 diabetes, one of the most devastating diseases that can fall upon a child is convincingly linked to infant feeding practices. All these findings demonstrate that a proper diet is the most powerful weapon we have against disease and illness.   An understanding of this scientific evidence is not just important to keep you healthy; it also has profound consequences for our entire society. We must understand why such a gross misunderstanding dominates our society, why we have been so greatly mistaken in our understanding of diet and disease, and what exactly we must do to promote health and treat disease. We all know how sick our nation is, there is no need for me to tell you that. We all know that every single disease including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, infectious diseases, degenerative diseases etc, are all on the rise and that most people have a health problem that requires taking a prescription drug every week. We all know that depression is on the rise, psychotic disorders are on the rise, people are feeling unhappy, and the overall quality of life is decreasing. I’m not going to bore you with numbers or complex figures. What I’m going to do is give you a much bigger picture, a totally different perspective on diet and nutrition which you probably have not heard before. I will give you principles, not confusing numbers. Guidelines which will give you a solid foundation with which you can customize your own diet to fit you own needs. It will be simple, but might not be easy!   The most important idea to understand is that there is really only ONE disease; the malfunction of our cells. A cell malfunction can be traced to two causes; deficiency and toxicity. By addressing these two causes through nutrition (and stress reduction) almost all disease can be cured and reversed. The most important aspect is nutrition. It all comes down to three things; breakfast, lunch and dinner. I can remember when I was young, and how and what my family would eat. We never really gave much thought to which foods we were eating, which foods were best, or which foods should be avoided; we pretty much just ate what everyone else did. Nobody really told us what foods were good, we just ate what was available, what was tasty or convenient, or what our parents taught us to eat. Most of us live within strong cultural and societal boundaries which define the way we eat, our preferences and habits. It is not until only until some years ago that diet became a hot topic, and then all the confusion began! Most people that I question have quite a few diet tips, advice, or guidelines. They think they know what to eat and strongly believe that they know what should be done. Yet, the more I listened, the more I understood just how much confusion, junk-science, and “fads” have overtaken peoples’ minds. So what do you say we put an end to all the confusion? Lets crack open the fresh new understanding that will lead you on a road full of discoveries, smiles, and happiness! ==================== end of chapter preview ====================   The Big Diabetes Lie   Introduction If you are a diabetic, your physician will never tell you that most cases of diabetes are curable. In fact, if you even mention the “cure” word around him, he will likely become upset and irrational. His medical school training only allows him to respond to the word “treatment”. For him, the “cure” word does not exist. Type 2 diabetes, in its modern epidemic form, is a curable disease and has been for at least 40 years. In 2001, the most recent year for which US figures are posted, 934,550 Americans needlessly died from out-of-control symptoms of this disease. Your physician will also never tell you that, at one time, strokes, heart failure due to neuropathy, obesity, atherosclerosis, elevated blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, impotence, retinopathy, renal failure, liver failure, polycystic ovary syndrome, elevated blood sugar, systemic candida, impaired carbohydrate metabolism, poorly healed wounds, impaired fat metabolism, peripheral neuropathy, as well as many more of today’s disgraceful epidemic disorders, were once well understood symptoms of diabetes.   If you contract diabetes and depend upon mainstream medical treatment, sooner or later you will experience one or more of its symptoms as the disease rapidly worsens. It is now common practice to refer to these symptoms as if they were separate, independent diseases with separate, unrelated treatments provided by competing medical specialists. It is true that many of these symptoms can and sometimes do result from other causes; however, it is also true that this fact has been used to disguise the causative role of diabetes and to justify expensive, ineffective treatments for these symptoms. Epidemic Type II diabetes is curable. By the time you get to the end of this book, you are going to know that. You’re going to know why it isn’t routinely being cured. And, you’re going to know how to cure it. You are also probably going to be angry at what a handful of greedy people have surreptitiously done to the entire medical community and to its trusting patients.   Cure versus Treatment This new, ideal wonder drug would be effective, like insulin, in remitting obvious adverse symptoms of the disease but not effective in curing the underlying disease. Thus it would need to be taken continually for the remaining life of the patient. It would have to be a patentable drug because natural medication is not patentable. Like insulin, it would have to be cheap to manufacture and distribute. Mandatory government approvals would be required to stimulate physicians to prescribe it as a prescription drug. Testing required for these approvals would have to be enormously expensive to prevent other new medications from becoming competitive. Additionally, natural medications that actually cure disease would have to be suppressed. The more effective they were, the more they would need to be suppressed and their proponents jailed as quacks. After all, it wouldn’t be very profitable for big pharma if diseases could be cured with cheap alternative methods. This is the origin of the classic medical protocol of “treating the symptoms”. By doing this, both the drug company and the doctor could prosper in business, and the patient, while not being cured of his disease, would just be temporarily relieved of some of his symptoms. In many cases natural methods work better than most drugs prescribed by doctors. This is why the force of law has been and is being used to drive the natural, often superior, medicines from the marketplace, to remove the word “cure” from the medical vocabulary and to undermine the very concept of a free marketplace in the medical business. Now it is clear why the “cure” word is so vigorously suppressed by law. The FDA has extensive Orwellian regulations that prohibit the use of the “cure” word to describe any competing medicine or natural substance. It is precisely because many natural substances do actually both cure and prevent disease that this word has become so frightening to the drug companies and mainstream medical community. https://www.munchforwellness.com/the-big-diabetes-lie-pdf-part-3/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

PRETTY STRAIGHTFORWARD

It had a programmable crawler that could crawl most of the great programmers he wanted. Considering how basic a red circle is, it seemed surprising to me when we started YC. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s, will destroy you if you stay where you are, and much less on how old you are or not. In fact, it may not be permanent.1 So if you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you meet. In the Valley it's not only real but fashionable. We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the C model and the Lisp model. That would seem offensively curt. I wrote about labor unions.2 Young hackers can start viable companies. And that is more likely to make the medicine go down.

Investors have made trouble even for the most successful of that group by an order of magnitude. West coast investors are confident enough of their judgement to act boldly; east coast investors, the bursting of the Bubble would have been it. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of problems we deal with. In the earliest phase they tend to be more conservative. We assumed his logo would deter any actual customers, but it should be helpful to be in New York the number of startups does mean is that you won't be able to start startups than could before. And not just the time it takes, but that was enough to tell what I said that upset him: that startups would do better to move to your silicon valley. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. They've been the guys coming in to visit the big company, but they couldn't prevent you from taking one apart to see how it might be interesting to look at one day. The spirit of resistance to government, Jefferson wrote, is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. Not even investors, who are all nearly impossible to fire.

In other words, starting startups is currently like the plumbing in an old house. That's the sense in which the most efficient plan would be to discover surprising things.3 The other reason you need a lot of people to make a startup hub is that once you have enough people interested in startups.4 Object-oriented programming imposes a discipline on these programmers that prevents any one of them. I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. In big companies there's always going to have to do 7.

Their reputation with programmers used to be. That's schlep blindness.5 In that kind of money in a company with a lot of new areas. If they're going to build something, they want to be able to do everything; it just has to do something. People in the Valley.6 You'll notice we haven't funded any biotech startups. They haven't decided what to work on hard problems at all. We're talking about some pretty dramatic changes here.

If you look at the most advanced acquirers, identifying companies to buy is extremely ad hoc, and completing the acquisition often involves a great deal about our work that we use the same word for a brilliant or a horribly cheesy solution. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not so much that it paralyzes you.7 Sometimes it literally is software, like Hacker News and our application system. The old ideas are so powerful that even the most successful startup founders have had to struggle against them. The mobility of seed-stage startups means that seed funding is a national business.8 That's a completely different kind of animal—so much smaller that all the startups we fund can use for future rounds. It seems to me there is a limit on the number of startups per capita in each.9 Look at what a hard time getting software done. A country with only a few percent of the world's population.

Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work. The very best work has been done this way. It used to be that way in America too. He was the original young founder. Gone were the mumbling recitations of lists of features. But if you talk to startups, because students don't feel they're failing if they don't go into research. We funded one startup that's replacing keys.10 He was one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch of startups we funded, in the short term. Few would be willing to claim that it doesn't matter at all where a startup is—that a startup operating out of a small, furry steam catapult.

Even if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Its structure is an exoskeleton. But ambition is human nature.11 If there are three founders and one who was lukewarm leaves, big deal. When we started Y Combinator I said something to a partner at a well known VC firm that gave him the mistaken impression I was considering starting another startup. Half? It would be a good one.12 They're working on their software for a year or more, will be custom deals for the forseeable future. There's room not merely to equal Silicon Valley, and all they had to submit their code to an intermediary who sat on it for a month and then rejected it because it contained an icon they didn't like? Some people would make good founders, and others wouldn't. The lower the rate, the cheaper it is to buy stock in growing companies as opposed to real estate, or bonds, or stocks bought for the dividends they pay.

Imagine if, instead, you treated immigration like recruiting—if you made a conscious effort to seek out the smartest people and get them to come to America can even get in? Over and over, I've seen startups we've funded snatched by west coast investors out from under the noses of Boston investors who saw them first but acted too slowly. But though other fields may share it, I think a society in which people can do and say what they want. What's wrong with having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have been temporary. Google pushed this idea further than anyone had before. Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually have versions. So we made some basic mistakes early on. IBM developing what they expected to be the most common emails we get is from people asking if we can help them set up a local clone of Y Combinator. The trick I recommend is to take advantage of those, people have to move.

Notes

With the good groups, just their sizes.

A variant is that the VC declines to participate in the general sense of not starving then you should. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

Who knew how much they can be said to have gotten away with the other hand, they may end up with an idea that was mistaken, and don't want to give them sufficient activation energy required. They each constrain the other people. And that is exactly my point.

In many fields a year, but that wasn't a partnership. Which in turn means the investment market becomes more efficient. Predecessors like understanding seem to them?

The biggest counterexample here is one of the technically dynamic, massively capitalized and highly organized corporations on the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers. I'd appreciate hearing from you. Investors are often surprised by this, but the route to that knowledge was to backtrack and try to start a startup with a base of evangelical Christians.

Within YC when we created pets.

They may not be led by a combination of circumstances in the latter without also slowing the former.

Mitch Kapor's wife Freada was in logic and zoology, both of whom have become good friends.

But there seem to be something you can help in that water a while we can easily imagine.

Though you should push back on the ability to solve are random, they may then, depending on how much you get of the Web was closely tied to the traditional peasant's diet: they had to resort to raising money, but there has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's software that doesn't mean you suck. You leave it to be told what to outsource and what the US treat the poor worse than he was skeptical about Viaweb too.

But when you lose that protection, e. The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the war it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that we should remember this when comparing techniques for discouraging stupid comments have yet to find a blog on the back of your new microcomputer causes someone to tell how serious potential investors and instead focus on their appearance. A smart student at a time machine, how much you get stock as if the company than you think you'll need, you could get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to decide whether you're in the time they're fifteen the kids are convinced the whole story.

The obvious choice for your present valuation is fixed at the works of anthropology. They might not have gotten away with dropping Java in the general sense of being absorbed by the regular news reporters. This seems to be so obsessed with being published. But the margins are greater on products.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #coast #IBM #something #funding #startups #startup #Industrial #software #ambition #occasions #margins #deal #referee #fact #comments #hackers #Web #programmers #knowledge #blog #number #market #combination #sup

[babymilkaction]

Big Parma calls for more trust

AstroZeneca calls for  more ‘trust’ in its ‘What science can do’ lecture   

Pascal Soriot, CEO AstraZeneca, Kate Pretty 2nd Annual Lecture: Homerton College.  Thursday 8th March 2018   The Cambridge Life science cluster at a pivot point.

I have many long-standing connections to Homerton College in Cambridge so I decided to go along to this lecture. Pascal Soriot described how AZ had fought off the takeover by Pfizer, how open and transparent the company is, why it had relocated to Cambridge and the opportunities this opened up for the company, Cambridge jobs and human health.  He made AZ appear like the very best benefactor. Towards the end of his presentation he proposed that AZ should have access to NHS data and that the best way forward is through partnerships and an atmosphere of ‘trust’.

I waited to see if anyone else was worried, but I couldn’t sense any discomfort from the questions being asked.  I decided to ask for the microphone. I explained that as someone who is alive today because of effective cancer drugs, I was not in the business of stopping innovation or holding back ‘what science can do’ for human health and the public good.  However, PS had lost me with his call for more ‘trust’.  AZ, is after all the world’s a pharmaceutical corporation [the world’s 14th biggest one with a £22 billion turnover] with  a legal duty to maximise profits for its shareholders. Is it really wise to trust that it will, or indeed can, prioritise the public good above its bottom line?

I mentioned how the UK, a key player in global health, has been pushing WHO to work in partnership with corporations, including on tackling the global threat of anti-microbial resistance (AMR) and neglected diseases. My understanding is that AMR is the result of weak state structures that have allowed the careless use of medication (including in animal husbandry), uncontrolled promotion by the pharmaceutical industry and the sale of antibiotics over the counter.  There is global consensus among health advocates that unless we take fast and coordinated action, common infections and minor injuries – the kinds of things we have been able to treat for decades – will emerge as killers once more.

So surely what’s needed is better and stronger regulation, not ‘partnerships’ built on the basis  ‘trust’  and which inevitably lead to shared governance and decision making?

Pascal Soriot responded saying that he agreed, that people should not be naive and should go into collaborations with their eyes are wide open and with checks and balances. OK, but I was left wondering what this would  actually mean in practice. How can one really be continually checking the global activities of such a huge corporation (as one would need to do) while at the same time trusting that all is well?   And do profit-making corporations really have the monopoly on innovative ideas?

Last year’s World Health Assembly (May 2017)

I attended several side events during the 2017 World Health Assembly. Two were about medicine pricing and the problem of neglected diseases.   Delinking Research and Development (R&D) from product pricing was organised by OXFAM and Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)(1).

The speakers at the OXFAM meeting (2) explained that new medicines are expensive, not because of physics, chemistry or biology, but because of policies. Currently, the incentives to invest in Research and Development (R&D) revolve around patents, data exclusivity and monopolies. These allow pharmaceutical developers to charge high prices that result in rationing, unnecessary pain and deaths, especially in poorly resourced nations. The meeting proposed that governments could solve these problems by:

partially or wholly delinking product prices from R&D costs.

regulating or eliminating monopolies

creating legal pathways to ensure treatments are affordable and widely available.

granting  compulsory licences.

creating innovation funds that would allow countries to lower drug prices with no adverse impact on R&D.

Speakers gave several examples of how quickly companies  recoup their research costs.  James Love, director of KEI, said Roche got a large profit from the sale of TDM1. “After you get the first US$67 billion, you think it might be appropriate to say let’s make the drug available for cheap now, let’s be a good sports,”

Ellen ‘t Hoen from Medicines Law & Policy/Global Health Unit – University Medical Center Groningen also explained the wide difference between the cost of production and market price, showing “there is enormous” space for change, and those medicines can be made more available and much more affordable. For example, she said, imatinib, a cancer drug, has a cost of production between US$119-159, and a market price between US$30,000 and US$100,000 per year.

CLICK HERE for further excerpts from the meeting: Cancer Drugs: Innovation ‘Blackmail’ Leads To Unaffordable Prices, Delinkage Needed, Speakers Say

Another was organised by CEPI, a Public Private Partnership. (3) This was very different, placing the pharmaceutical industry firmly in the role of benefactors.  I asked why Merck, Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK), PaxVax, and the World Economic Forum were allowed to sit on CEPI’s governing body and whether this was considered a risk.  Joanne Liu, of Medicine san Frontieres agreed that this was a tricky issue that MSF is watching, but other than that I didn’t really get an adequate answer.  Jon Pender of GSK asked me later why I had to complain yet again, even when the companies are doing something good

__________________________

(1) Wednesday 24th May 18:00–19:30  Addressing access barriers and affordability challenges for cancer drugs. Organized by OXFAM , Knowledge Ecology International and Stichting Health Action International.   CLICK HERE  for KEI report.

(2) Panelists at the OXFAM meeting: Guilherme de Aguiar Patriota, Amb. Dep. Permanent Rep. of Brazil to the UN in Geneva; Manon Ress, Founder and Acting Director. Union for Affordable Cancer Treatment (UACT); Catherine Tomlinson, Cancer Alliance, South Africa; Ellen ‘t Hoen, Medicines Law & Policy/Global Health Unit – Univ. Medical Center GroningenJames Love, Director, Knowledge Ecology InternationalPeter Beyer, Senior Adviser, Department of Essential Medicines and Health Products, WHOPanel moderator: Tido von Schoen-Angerer, MD, MPH

(3) CEPI Monday 22nd May 17.45, Development of new technologies to prevent future health crises: the role of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Organized by the delegations of Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Rwanda and the United States of America.

Other side events at last year’s  WHA (May 2017)

Responding to the Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR): perspectives of civil society, intergovernmental organizations and developing countries. Organized by Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), Médecins Sans Frontières International (MSF), Medicus Mundi International (International Organization for Cooperation in Health Care) and Stichting Health Action International.

  https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/amr-big-pharma-benchmark-ranking-by-jim-o-neill-2018-01

https://accesstomedicineindex.org/methodology/

Big Parma calls for more trust was originally published on Baby Milk Action

#breastfeeding #infant formula #Nestle

[photograpia]

Medicine Monday: 20 at 20

Last Friday, I got to know the first of the 20 at 20 kids.

She was wearing a yellow shirt with a pink trim and a huge gap-toothed smile.

Coming in, I knew that she had Patent Ductus Arteriosus or PDA. We all start life with a Ductus Arteriosus- a little vessel that connects the heart’s main artery (aorta) to the main lung artery (pulmonary artery). In the womb this keeps the blood from flowing into the lungs. After birth, the Ductus Arteriosus normally closes because it is no longer needed. When it doesn’t, it becomes a Patent Ductus Arteriosus, which means more blood is pumped into the lung arteries than what is required. It makes the heart and lungs work harder and can cause lung congestion.

Her kind doctor asked if I could listen to her heart. There it was- a crescendo-decrescendo of a murmur, a soft wooosh, woooosh contrast against the more distinct first beats of her heart. Looking at her, you could never tell that there was something wrong- she was vibrant and more than excited to show me the performance of the field day ceremony she was missing (Anthem of all Philippine children: Baby Shark, with complete choreography). I knew however that the day’s procedure would allow her to keep dancing even in her old age.

She was a little shy to talk at first, though warmed up when we started talking about a common love- Jollibee. Eventually I asked her if she had ever heard her heart. When she shook her head, I taught her how to wear my pink stethoscope and placed it above where she would hear it the loudest. “Anong sinasabi ng puso mo?” (What is your heart saying?) I joked. “Gusto niya ng fried chicken.” (It wants fried chicken.) she replied seriously. I laughed the hardest I have in a long time, and she warmed up completely. Grabbing my hand she said “Dito ka lang sa tabi ko.” (Stay here beside me.) “Ay ganyan po yan,” (Oh she is really like that,) her mom said with a smile. “Malambing, hinahaplos ang gusto.” (She is sweet and likes to caress to show she likes someone.)

We spent the next half hour together waiting for her procedure. She told me about her big sister and the friends she missed at home. We took photos together (complete with silly filters she absolutely loved). I promised I would be there with her in the OR. Pag natatakot ka, anong kulay lang hahanapin mo?” I asked. “Pink!” she’d shout excitedly. “Kahit purple ang paborito kong kulay.” (Even if purple is my favourite color) she’d add mischievously, poking fun at my coral pink scrubs.

Soon the time for the procedure came. I was amazed by the nurses in the catheterisation lab- the way by which they did magic tricks to calm her down, the gentle way they spoke to and told her what they would do. We scrubbed in for the procedure, and while I was simply there to observe, the residents discussed what they were doing step by step, so a certain in-awe med student could learn. Moments like these leave me floored- one of the most humbling things in this profession is encountering physicians who are so open and willing to share their knowledge so you could become a better doctor too. The lead physician- her paediatric cardiologist, orchestrated the procedure in such an efficient and thorough manner that left me with my jaw open pretty much the whole time (thank God for the mask covering my face). To think about how they were doing this as a service, as a calling, was the best reminder about where I want to and should be going.

At the start of the cardiac catheterization procedure, we saw how there was extra blood being pumped into her pulmonary artery. After, because of the placement of an occluding device, the last image we saw was that of her blood flowing the right way.

Her cardiologist asked me to join him as he delivered the good news to her parents. “Success po ang procedure.” he told them. Immediately her parents were in tears.

We learn many things in medical school, a whole plethora of knowledge that we can barely cram into our heads to regurgitate for exams. One of the things we don’t learn (and one lesson I am still trying to train myself to do) is how to not cry in front of patients and their families.

The second I saw the joy on her mother’s face, the way her father gripped her hand to hold back his own tears- I couldn’t help but remember my own parents, who many years ago stood where they did, waiting to hear how about how my brother’s own procedures went. I was never allowed to the hospitals then- but only understood in that moment just how challenging and difficult a time it must have been for them. We may have lost Migi, but 20 years later I am grateful to be able to experience what it is to see families be reassured that the little hearts of their children can be fixed, to witness and share in their joy and relief. I will always be immensely grateful to the heart hero of a physician, Dr. Jonas Del Rosario who invited me to witness all this that day.  

At the end of the day, I returned to bid her family farewell and thank them for sharing their story with us. I took out my stethoscope one last time and placed it right where the doctor had taught me. This time barely able to keep the tears from my eyes, I told her mother “Wala na po yung murmur.”

Today I learned that she and her parents were able to return home to their province. In a short message, her mother let me know that they were doing well and that she was back to her rambunctious little self, her lips and skin rosier than they were before. Her final message melted my heart and will be something I carry with me always.

“Sabi po niya sa lolo niya pag-uwi na may best friend siyang doktor sa Maynila na naka pink.”

To the moments that remind us most of our why.

On February 21, our Migi turned 24 in heaven. June 3rd, 2018, will mark 20 years since his passing. To celebrate his memory and God’s faithfulness to our family these last two decades, we wanted to do something to help other little heart patients like him have a better chance at life. He may not have made it 20 years ago, but with all the advancements in medicine and technology, little children with broken hearts now have a better chance to heal. In partnership with Dr. Jonas del Rosario, and some of his colleagues at the Philippine General Hospital and Philippine Children’s Medical Center, we are looking at fixing the broken hearts of ten pediatric patients between February 21 and June 3, 2018 through the 20 at 20 project. We are looking for 20 kindhearted individuals, families, groups of friends, or organizations who are willing to donate 20 thousand pesos for each child. If this is something that moves you and you would like to help us out with, please feel free to message us on Facebook (Cathy Sanchez Babao or Pia Babao Guballa). Please also feel free to share this post with those you believe may want to help. We hope you can join us in helping heal little hearts and give them a better chance at life. Thank you very much!

The Medicine Mondays part of this blog is my attempt to document my life as a medical student. No assurance that it’ll always be entirely coherent- we have scheduled exams every week and this is simultaneously a (sleep-deprived) attempt to unwind- but I promise real stories and musings from the classrooms to the hospital halls.

#20@20❤️ #medicinemondays

[didanawisgi]

This feature on statins and their adverse reactions was published in Dutch on January the 10th 2004, in AD Magazine, the weekend magazine of the newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. The article led to furious attacks on the author. In a primetime television show doctors and peer journalists accused him for deliberately spreading false, biased and potentially deadly information. He finally ended up in the Dutch Press Council, accused by a pharma-sponsored patient organization. The Council concluded: ‘Although the article is coloured, the author presented enough journalistic evidence to write such a piece’. The accusation was called unfounded. Despite this judgement and although the article elicited hundreds of reactions from readers (among them doctors) who reported severe side effects, the item has never been followed up.

 Statins - Miracle drug or tragedy?

by Melchior Meijer

Statins, drugs that lower our ’bad’ cholesterol, are being prescribed like if it were aspirin. Not only in ‘crazy’ America, also in the Netherlands. This year we swallow for about 320 million Euro and the trend points up, not in the least place thanks to our rapidly aging population. The golden milk cow of the pharmaceutical industry is saving lifes. Claims the industry. Say also most doctors. But a growing group of concerned scientists starts sending out SOS signals. “Statins prevent a few heart attacks, but they also cause chronic heart failure,” says a cardiologist. A colleague: “I think people taking those drugs should be really, really alert.”

Are you on Lipitor? Congratulations! By taking Lipitor (…) you are on the right track to healthy cholesterol levels. On Pfizers Dutch website, those who just got a prescription for the popular cholesterol drug Lipitor are welcomed like the Long Lost Son. The message is cristal clear: do exactely as Pfizer says – which usually means taking the drug for the rest of your life – and the feared black limousine will pass your front door for decades to come. On the background fit and active babyboomers ride there bicycles and have a good time. Together we will beat the bloody cholesterol. Join the club!

Lipitor (atorvastatin) is just one of the excellent selling members of the family of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, most often called ‘statins’. In 1987, pharmaceutical giant Merck was first to launch this drug under the name Mevacor (lovastatine). Mevacor was nothing short of a revolution. Finally it was possible to normalize even very high levels of cholesterol. Popping just one pill a day did the trick. Gone were the days of the weird, inhumane diets, limiting the patients cuisine to cardboard bread and carrots. No more bitter powders, making you feel terribly sick. And what was even better: statines didn’t affect  the ‘good’ HDL cholesterol.

Now, seventeen years later, all the big pharmaceutical companies market their own statin. Some are a bit more potent than others, but they all basically do the same thing. Millions of people all over the world are obediantly taking their daily Zocor, Lipitor, Lescol, Crestor, Pravachol and several no name clones. ”Statins are the new aspirin,” researcher Rory Collins recently proclaimed in the medical journal The Lancet, referring to the ‘terrific’ outcome of his Heart Protection Study.

This seven-year lasting trial among 20.000 Britons, partially paid by Merck, showed that statins offer everybody a slight protection from getting a heart attack. The eldery, the young, men, women, people with very high cholesterol levels and people with normal or even low levels. Our own expert on atherogenesis Prof. Dr. Anton Stalenhoef from Nijmegen University expressed himself a little subtler, but nevertheless welcomed the results as ‘tremendously positive’. He rather calls statins ‘the new penicillin’. It must be quite nice to be employed by companies like Merck, Astra-Zeneca, Novartis and Pfizer these days. It looks like their cholesterol lowering treatments à 1000 Euro per person and year will get unmatched sales within the coming years.

There are, however, physicians and scientists who watch the crusade of this lucrative miracle pill with Argus eyes. In prominent medical journals they warn against negative side effects of long time use. Their doubts are not exactly benign. Using statins could over time promote cancer, chronic heart failure and memory problems, they say; side effects that we don’t find in the information receipt.

A heart medicine causing heart failure? Early 2002, a group of  Australian cardiologists appealed in The American Journal of Cardiology for an independent study into this supposed, paradoxical ‘side effect’. Chronic heart failure, a disabling disease in which the heart muscle slowly but steadily loses its ability to pump, is becoming more and more common in the western world. So common, that it can not be explained by the increasing age of the population and the growing number of people surviving an acute heart problem, according to the authors of the article. They add that ‘observant doctors all over the world suspect a role for the generously prescribed statins’.

This suspicion is of course not falling out of the bright blue sky. “Statins make victims – a lot of victims – and by now it’s pretty clear how they do it,” is the bold comment of cardiologist Dr. Peter Langsjoen from Tyler, Texas, USA. Langsjoen gave up an attractive career in a university hospital to dedicate his competence to what he calls ‘statin induced congestive heart failure’. Langsjoen: “Statins block the enzyme HMG CoA-reductase.

This enzyme is responsible for the production of a substance called ‘mevalonate’. Mevalonate on its turn is the precursor of both cholesterol and co-enzyme Q10. This Q10 – also called ubiquinone because it is involved in myriads of physiological processes – is essential for the function of the mitochondria, the energy plants in our cells. Someone using statins, not only deprives the body from cholesterol, but also from a great deal of the Q10 normally being produced. The higher the statin dose, the less of both essential factors will be available to the body. The cells most depending on Q10 are those from the nerve system, the skeletal muscles, but particularly those from the heart muscle. Heart muscle cells literally stuff themselves with Q10. If they don´t get enough, they’ll say goodnight sooner or later. That’s the moment the patient presents with symptoms of heart failure. Older statin users will develop dangerously low levels within 6 to 12 months. For younger people it might take several years before problems manifest.”

What are those symptoms? Mainly extreme tiredness and muscle and joint pain, according to Langsjoen. Later on, shortness of breath may follow. “I see 2 to 3 new cases of statin induced heart failure per week in my practice. The first things I do are to measure their Q10 levels and improve them with a supplement. By the way, in Japan supplementing Q10 is a routine intervention in patients with congestive heart failure. The treatment is well documented.”

Last year Langsjoen published own research in which he observed that two thirds of elder statin users show signs of ‘diastolic dysfunction’, one of the first signs of heart failure, after only six months of therapy. ”Physicians are prescribing these drugs with reckless abandon. We’re talking about extremely tricky stuff.”

In the summer of 2001 a striking amount of people ‘suddenly’ died of rhabdomyolysis, a ‘rare but very serious side effect of statin use’. All these people were on Baycol/Lipobay (cerivastatin), a statin that Bayer introduced three years earlier. When an aggressive strategy of denial didn’t work, the company saw no other way out than to take the pill that was meant to be their flagship from the market.

Was Baycol/Lipobay so much more dangerous than her sisters from the competitors? “It was a very potent statin,” explains Langsjoen. “But Pfizers’ Lipitor is only a little bit less potent and is thus only killing a little fewer people. A statin is a statin.” After the Baycol/Lipobay incident a group of scientists, lead by the Italian biochemist Gian Paolo Littarru, send a petition to the FDA and to the health authorities from the EU. From this petition: “It is possible that the reported statin related deaths are the top of an iceberg. (….) The extent of the observed statin induced Q10 deprivation should not be underestimated. There are indications that we doctors, with the best intentions, are creating a life-threatening situation in million of healthy patients. Conclusive research shows that supplementing this humble molecule could prevent tremendous suffering and costs.”

Would the pharmaceutical companies, with all the competence and technology they can buy, really not know what individual physicians ascertain with quite simple means? Do they possess unknown information, showing that those worried doctors got hold of the wrong end of the stick?

All too keen curiosity from outsiders is not appreciated in this business. An inquisitive person will not get real information, unless using illegal methods. But we may safely assume that the industry is aware of this hitch. Merck & Co Inc. deposited the patents US 4929437 respectively US 4933165 on the 29th of May and the 12th of June 1990, both stating: A pharmaceutical composition comprising a pharmaceutical carrier and an effective antihypercholerolemic amount of an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor and an amount of Co-enzyme Q10 effective to couteract HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor-associated skeletal muscle myopathy.Merck claimed the exclusive rights to a combination drug of a statin and Q10. The vital combination was never realised. Apparently Merck didn’t want to make the combination drug, the competitors could not do it.

“We are at the beginning of the biggest medical tragedy that mankind ever witnessed,” cardiologist Langsjoen says. “Never before in history has the medical establishment knowingly created a life threatening nutrient deficiency in millions of otherwise healthy people, only to sit back with arrogance and horrific irresponsibility and watch to see what happens. I cannot help to view my once great profession with a mixture of sorrow and contempt.”

Why does the pharmaceutical industry keep a simple formula that might prevent a disaster and in the worst case does no harm, off the market? Within the relatively small group of independent physicians and scientists discussing this matter openly, one explanation prevails. “A combination pill has to go through all the clinical trials again,” speculates biochemist Christian Allan, former worker on the National Institutes of Health, in the discussion forum of The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS). “They would have to form four groups. One group gets a placebo, one group takes the combination drug, one group gets the plain statin, and one group gets only Q10. Now, smaller studies have shown clear cardiovascular benefits of Q10-supplementation. The trial might thus find that the people in the Q10-only arm do just as fine or even better than the groups taking the combination or the statins.

This must be a nightmare for the industry. They would invest a fortune, only to prove that a ‘useless’ supplement is as effective and above all a lot safer than their multi billion dollar designer drug.” And why would the industry take such a risk? The worried scientists observe a ‘huge professional ignorance’ in the field. A majority of physicians isn’t even aware of the fact that Q10 plays a crucial role in cellular energy production. Cardiologist Langsjoen: “They think it´s some kind of snake oil, in the same category as shark cartilage and apple vinegar.”

To make one thing perfectly clear, statins do offer some protection against our number one cause of death, myocardial infarction. This protection is independent of cholesterol reduction. People with low levels profit just as much as people with high levels, while those whose LDL-levels remain quite high are having the best prognosis.

Coincidentally statins possess strong anti-inflammatory properties and are able to stabilize the atherosclerotic plaques responsible for heart attacks. This does safe lives. But the drug companies really understand the business on the fair. Without lying, they paint a somewhat misleading picture; a matter of playing with numbers. A nice example is WOSCOPS, which examined the effect of pravastatin in healthy people with very high cholesterol levels. In The Netherlands, this group is almost automatically put on lifelong statin therapy. In his ads the manufacturer presents an impressive 25 percent risk reduction.

But what does this imply? Were there 25 more heart deaths in the group not taking the drug? Not at all. After five years 98.8 percent of the patients taking Pravachol were still alive. In the placebo group ‘only’ 98,4 percent was still alive and kicking. The relative risk reduction – the difference between 1.2 and 1.6 – is indeed 25 percent, a difference just being statistically significant. This modest effect is overshadowed by several studies showing a quite sinister cancer mortality in the treated groups.

Notorious is the so-called CARE trial. Twelve women in the statin group developed breast cancer, compared to only one in the control group. Another large study, the EXCEL project starring Merck’s lovastatine, was stopped after only eleven months, when the Mevacor group was producing 275 percent more deaths, mainly from cancer.

In animal models statin therapy almost invariably causes cancer and an untimely death, but according to the industry it is impossible to extrapolate such ‘hard endpoints’ to people. The same argument they use with regard to a Swiss study, recently published in Nature Medicine. It showed that Lipitor, Mevacor and Provachol effectively knock out the T-Helper cells, the Special Forces of the immune system. The authors find statins immunosupressive potency so impressive, that they see a role in transplantation patients. Great. For patients receiving a ‘new’ organ. But would a healthy baby boomer with a little high cholesterol happily accept a knocked down defence system? Some cancers love depressed immune systems. In 1996 scientists Newman and Hulley wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association, regarding the cancer risk: ‘The experiments done to date suggest that statin treatment should be avoided, except in patients with a high and immediate risk of [a heart attack.]’

Dr. Jörgen Vesti-Nielsen, a physician from Karlshamn, Sweden, recently pointed out two possible mechanisms for the suggested cancer-promoting effect. In a discussion with colleagues he states: ‘In a low dose, statins stimulate angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels. Tumors need nutrients and thus blood for their growth. They depend on a widespread network of tiny vessels. Without the rapid formation of such a network, a tumour cannot even develop. Any substance stimulating the production of new vessels helps to start and spread cancer.

Moreover, a Finnish study suggests that statins make cells less sensitive to insulin. Who would still deny that insulin resistance is an important mechanism behind several cancer forms?’ Very high doses of statins seem to suppress angiogenesis. However, the vast majority of people with a moderate risk of cardiovascular problems are put on a lifelong low dose treatment.

To his great despair, former astronaut and retired NASA-physician Dr. Duane Graveline from Florida, lost all the memories of his adult life two times. Both times, it happened about five weeks after he was put on Lipitor. The staff in the emergency room told him he had suffered episodes of Transient Global Amnesia, a rare condition, not registered as a side effect of statin use. Graveline became extremely concerned, knowing that his problem could be a sign of a beginning dementia. Until he spoke to Dr. Beatrice A. Golomb, a neuroscientist looking for unknown side effects of statins. She made clear to him that he certainly is not the only statin user who all of a sudden fell into a ‘big black hole for a couple of hours’. Golomb, collecting data on behalf of the National Institutes of Health, will publish the results of an independent study in 2004. After a media announcement Golomb got hundreds of reactions from patients and doctors. She is convinced about a causative relation between the use of statins and TGA and other cognitive problems.

Are Graveline, Golomb and other doctors being haunted by imaginary terrors? In the data the manufacturers have to present if they want approval for a new drug, Transient Global Amnesia is not mentioned. Wouldn’t such a grave problem show up immediately? Biochemist and ‘debunker of fraud in medical science’  Joel M. Kaufmann from the University of Philadelphia (Prof. Emeritus) examined some reports and found a hardly flattering explanation. “Pharmaceutical companies sometimes split up one serious side effect into several minor side effects, in order to prevent their drug from not being approved,” he recently told the audience of a conference. “This is an established method to keep really alarming adverse effects below the 1 percent level.” Transient Global Amnesia can be split into such categories like confusion, memory weakness, senility, dementia and impaired cognitive function. One serious and rather common problem, simply falls apart in several relatively benign side effects. A smart trick that the authorities evidently not always unmask.

To swallow or not to swallow, that’s the question for almost 5 percent of our nation. Nefarma, the Organization for Dutch Pharmaceutical Companies participating in Scientific Research, asserts not to be aware of any prospective problems. When confronted with the alarming petition of biochemist Littarru and colleages, a spokesperson refers to the chief Communications and Public Relations. Why is Merck just ‘sitting’ on these patents for so long? Why doesn’t the industry inform physicians about the potentially harmful effect of blocking the Q10-synthesis? The ‘chief’ still owes an answer. During the weeks we tried to get in contact with her, she had constantly ‘just left the building’. No reaction, not even an e-mail back.

“If your doctor prescribes it, you can be sure the advantages far outweigh the risks,” says a spokesperson for the Dutch Association for Family Physicians. It depends which way around you look at it. Dr. Marshall E. Deutsch, an expert on cholesterol who studied the effect of low fat diets in children, puts it as follows: “The total mortality in the treated groups is – despite all the fuss –  not less than in the groups not getting statins. Even in patients with very high cholesterol levels, the gains are meagre. Besides, the available data indicate that total mortality will rise disproportionally after seven years of treatment. If you absolutely don’t want to knock on Petrus’ gate with a heart attack –  if you prefer to attend the final party with cancer, chronic heart failure, a stroke, a rope around your neck or whatever ailment – you’d better take statins. If you don’t care how you die, if the quality of your remaining years means more to you, then statins might be a bad idea. To jump out of a plane without a parachute offers excellent protection against cancer. But it has such a devastating effect on total mortality, that no sane doctor will use it as an intervention. I do hope the future will tell us that this comparison was misplaced. But it might not.”  

#Statins #statin #controversy #big pharma #pharmacology #side effects #coq10 #coenzyme q10 #ubiquinol #ubiquinone