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The latest views about children with autism is that it is a multifactorial problem, due to a combination of vaccination, heavy-metal exposure and even to microwaves, as generated by mobile phones. Typically, a child exhibits gut conditions, problems with detoxification and heavy-metal
poisoning. Here are a few basic ways to regularize these symptoms.
- Make sure your child receives good supplements of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, including trace minerals such as zinc and selenium.
- Remember, gut health can be enhanced with probiotics and digestive enzymes.
- Fix any Candida problems (see The Candida and ME Handbook. London: WDDTY, 2001).
- Supplement with glutathione and products that boost its uptake, which helps with mercury detox. Children exposed to thimerosal have lower cellular levels of glutathione (NeuroToxicology, 2005; 26: 1–8). A number of companies offering such support suggests that the products should be sodium benzoate-free to support clearing of metals and other toxins.
- Support the rebuilding of gut cellular barriers with the use of glycosaminoglycans. These gut-protective barriers are often impaired when a child is exposed to the MMR shot or heavy metals.
- Chelate heavy metals naturally or with homeopathic methods. One such agent is zeolite, a natural volcanic mineral that claims to chelate heavy metals more gently than do chemicals such as DMSA.
- Keep your home free of wireless and mobile-phone radiation, and consider using equipment that minimizes such radiation.
The full story, 'Hiding behind junk science', is in the April issue of WDDTY.
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All of us rest easy in our beds at night in the belief that someone, somewhere, has our best interests at heart. That sense, that there are scientists sitting in lofty institutions who make decisions, however ultimately flawed, from a sense of right so permeates our psyche that even so jaded a science reporter as I was rattled when sifting through the evidence of a possible link between vaccination and autism. According to documents acquired by concerned parents through the US Freedom of Information Act, in June 1999, a group of 51 top scientists and health officials from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and representatives of various vaccine manufacturers, met at the Simpsonwood Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia, to listen to the findings of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist. He had found alarming evidence in the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Database of a strong association between neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, and thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative used at the time in many US vaccines, and still present in many vaccines used in Europe. In the ensuing years, the CDC withheld these findings, held off removing thimerosal until 2002 and eventually ‘lost’ the data. When it resurfaced, the agency handed it over to a private company, America’s Health Insurance Plans, thereby placing it out of the reach of any researchers or journalists who attempted to access it under the Freedom of Information Act. The CDC then launched a worldwide campaign to court foreign researchers with data, no matter how flawed, that would support evidence that vaccines do not cause autism, while discrediting honest scientists like gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Wakefield, the first to publish evidence that MMR caused gut problems that eventually can lead to autism. Meanwhile, no one was willing to ask the most obvious question of all: do more vaccinated children have autism than unvaccinated ones? Since 1991, after recommendations by the CDC for three additional vaccines containing the preservative to be given to children virtually at birth, cases of autism increased 15-fold—to one in every 166 children. The CDC consistently refused to carry out such a study. Generation Rescue, a self-funded group of 350 parents, raised more than $200,000 to provide an answer. It recruited SurveyUSA, an independent opinion-research firm, to carry out a telephone survey in nine counties across two states involving some 18,000 children, comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children of the same gender. This methodology deliberately mirrored that used by the CDC to establish the prevalence of ADHD and autism. The study found that boys who were vaccinated had a 155-per-cent greater chance of having a neurological disorder like ADHD or autism than unvaccinated children. When one unusual county’s results were left out of the analyses, vaccinated boys were 146-per-cent more likely to have autism and 279-per-cent more likely to have ADHD. The first court decision to link autism to a vaccine (see the April issue of WDDTY) has done more than place on trial the current vaccination schedule—presently some 34 vaccines before US children even go to school. It has also exposed egregious error in science, deceit in government, and collusion by what used to be called ‘the fourth estate’. Many journalists have decried this publication many times for promoting so-called ‘junk science’. The history of the vaccine-autism story reveals to what extent junk science could lie at the very heart of fundamental decisions on health care.
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Recently, homeopathic hospitals across Britain have had their funding withdrawn because of the claim that homeopathy lacks the proof of modern ‘evidence-based medicine’. I’ve turned my usual column over to master homeopath and naturopath Dr Harald Gaier for his response.—Lynne McTaggartThe bedrock of modern conventional medicine is the principle of causality, the idea that if we fully know the present, we can then predict the future. Yet, causality has been challenged by Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’, which says that, as you can’t truly define all aspects of matter on a subatomic level, the law of causality doesn’t hold. This is in accord with one of the most basic tenets of naturopathy: that disease is only possible if a combination of preconditions is present such as impaired resistance, diminished vital energy, the presence of toxins, parasites or nutritional imbalances, dietary or other abuses and psychogenic stress. As Professor Stuart Close, the eminent philosopher of homeopathy, explained, “The fatal tendency in . . . medical research to focus attention and effort upon one cause to the exclusion of all others inevitably leads to error and failure . . . Any successful method of treatment must be able to meet all the conditions arising from any existing combination of the causes.” So how does Orthodox Medicine arrive at the cause or, more important, its ‘evidence-based’ medications? Conventional medicine believes that it is possible to generalize the responses of more than one patient, as individual unpredictabilities will then cancel each other out if a large-enough group is analyzed. So, the higher the number of patients in the generalization, the more broadly established it becomes. That is the rationale behind medicine’s ‘gold-standard’ randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial. Nevertheless, such an approach is fundamentally flawed. When testing drugs, medicine obliterates the causal elements in patients by submerging them in a sea of other people, all of whom are being collectively tested. From these data, medicine derives a generalized, homogenized result. But this result, by definition, is inexact for any given individual. When a broadly tested agent is dispensed to an individual patient, laden with diverse unpredictabilities (as individuals always are), doctors are then surprised by the individual response, which can vary to a little or large extent from the expected, published and statistically significant, generalized and homogenized one. In short, orthodox evidence-based medicine takes individual patients with their idiosyncrasies, places them in a crowd of other patients to obliterate these differences, and hopes to obtain a lowest-common-denominator’ result. When it does, it then uses this result to treat each idiosyncratic patient, who is far removed from the ‘lowest-commondenominator’ patient—who is, after all, a fiction created solely by clinical methodology. Any naturopath worth his salt would call this inappropriate prescribing. Naturopaths treat individual patients, not disease categories. This difference in approach calls into question the very foundations of conventional medicine—the concept of ‘best practice’, based as it is on the vagaries of medical science’s flawed experimental models. So, to put it most simply, the questions that need to be asked are not only where’s the evidence in the standard medical model, but where’s the evidence that so-called evidence-based data offer any genuine proof of effective treatment? Harald GaierDr Gaier, also an osteopath and herbalist, practises at The Allergy and Nutrition Clinic, 22 Harley Street, London, and the Irish Centre of Integrated Medicine, Co. Kildare (www.drgaier.com).
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In the 1970s, computed axial tomography (CAT), or CT, scans revolutionized diagnosis, offering pictures ith up to 20 times the detail of ordinary x-rays, particularly of bones, blood vessels and soft tissues of the body. It has made it possible to scan for diseases of the abdomen, lungs, heart, liver and pancreas, and even for early osteoporosis.
Adapted from an image-processing system developed for the Apollo moon landings, CT scans take a 360-degree series of crosssectional x-ray images from multiple angles—up to 30 shots—by passing a pencil-thin beam through a particular portion of the body, usually with the use of a contrast agent. An X-ray tube on a moveable ring revolves around your body, taking individual slices of images; this nformation is then passed through a computer, which reconstructs the slices into a three-dimensional mage on a video screen.
The problem is, now that your doctor has such a computerized diagnostic toy at his disposal, he’s more ikely to want to play with it. Indeed, the CT scan is now the special province of the ‘worried well’—perfectly healthy people who are convinced that an annual scan will catch something dreaded like cancer before it strikes. Although Japan leads the world in per capita CT-scan use, some 62 million CT scans are now carried out every year in the US—a 20-fold increase in just 25 years. Even in the UK, the number of CT scans has doubled in the last decade, and is set for a massive increase
with the purchase of £20 million’s worth of new equipment.
While no doubt CT scanning represents the height of 20th-century technology, it also poses far more isks than most other tests, blasting you with far higher doses of radiation than ordinary x-rays.
This month’s issue of WDDTY exposes just how much more. The latest estimates are that one standard course of CT scans exposes you to more radiation than the citizens of Hiroshima or Nagasaki received when the atomic bomb was dropped on their cities.
Shockingly, the carnage from these hyper-x-rays can only be estimated, as a large-scale study into their safety has never been carried out. Nevertheless, David Brenner, a leading radiologist from Columbia University in New York, has finally gone public to admit that they are likely to account for some 29,000 new cases of cancer every year in the US. Worse, CT scans could be causing 100,000 new cases of cancer per year across the globe.
But this might be worth it if CT scans are accurate and could in any way prevent future illness. However, the latest evidence is that CT scans can be wrong up to 75 per cent of the time in trauma injuries, and almost one-third of the time in early-stage diagnoses.
The bottom line is that the diagnostic revolution promised by this state-of-the-art gadgetry has failed to materialize. Although all the early evidence showed that CT scans would reduce diagnostic time, reassure doctors of their diagnosis or treatment plans and preclude the need for other tests, very few studies have proven that this knowledge has in any way reduced illness, shortened hospital stays or prevented death. And it now appears that CT is simply killing perfectly healthy people.
There is virtually no disagreement in medical circles that ionizing radiation is damaging. “Medical irradiation is by far the largest man-made contribution to the radiation burden of the population of developed countries,” once wrote Richard Wootton, professor and director of medical physics at Hammersmith Hospital in London, in a textbook on the subject. The only thing that has changed is the degree—every CT scan magnifies that risk 500 times.
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Running is undoubtedly hard on your lower limbs. A year-long Australian study found that distance-running injuries were the second most common sports injury seen at a sports clinic. (Clin J Sport Med, 1997; 7: 8–31).
Runners commonly suffer from overuse injuries of the lower limbs, including stress fractures, and soft-tissue injuries such as shin splints, Achilles tendonitis, knee pain and other problems, ranging from simple inflammation to structural degeneration (Scand J Med Sci Sports, 1996; 6: 222–7).
The best preventative for such injury is to slow down, cut down the duration, add stretching and/or warm-ups and cool-downs to your routine, and change or improve your running shoes (Cochrane Database Syst Rev, 2001, 3: CD001256).
But even walkers have to walk with care, so here are a few useful tips:
- Walk with your abdominal muscles tightened, and roll back your shoulders, lift your chest, keep your head up and your arms in a rhythmic swing
- Push off from the toes and land squarely on your heels with each step, then roll from heel to toe
- Make each stride a comfortable length
- Wear good-quality, well-fitting walking shoes and replace them regularly.
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Nothing makes my blood run cold so much as hearing about a new variety of ‘preventive’ medicine. This alarming notion aims to stop disease in its tracks by treating the patient with a just-in-case remedy while he is still healthy. Yet, medical preemptive strikes don’t have a good track record. They’re usually at the heart of every bright idea gone bad, leaving carnage in its wake. Hormone replacement therapy, claiming to stave off not only menopause, but also heart attacks and cancer, turned out to increase the very diseases it was meant to prevent. Diethylstilbestrol (DES), the miracle drug taken to prevent miscarriage, caused cancer and infertility among an entire generation. The list goes on and on. The most pervasive preventative of our generation is aspirin. Since the mid-1990s, this no-frills non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) has been served up to patients as a cheap and safe means to prevent heart attacks and strokes and, lately, to reduce cancer. But new evidence shows that, far from preventing death and strokes in the elderly, aspirin brings them on. Oxford University researchers who examined data from the last quarter-century’s worth of aspirin preventative use found an astonishing sevenfold increase in bleeding in the brain—intracerebral haemorrhagic stroke—among elderly patients. Aspirin and other NSAIDs have long been known to cause stomach bleeding—despite attempts at buffering these effects. However, the latest evidence, detailed in the January 2008 edition of WDDTY, finally places the damage in bold relief. Aspirin kills 20,000 Americans and puts another 100,000 in hospital every year through aspirin-induced GI haemorrhage. Doctors have had numerous warnings that aspirin isn’t the magic bullet as once thought. The 1994 meta-analysis that launched aspirin as a cardiac preventative medicine was based on faulty conclusions. The Antiplatelet Trialists’ Collaboration (ATC), which pooled together smaller studies, concluded that a few weeks of antiplatelet therapy could halve the risk of deadly blood clots in high-risk patients (BMJ, 1994; 308: 235–46). However, the Thrombosis Research Institute uncovered a laundry list of errors—including the shabby quality of the individual studies pooled, mistakes in reporting results, even basic errors in arithmetic and in the recommended dosages. The TRI concluded that the review did not provide adequate evidence to support the widespread use of aspirin to prevent stroke (BMJ, 1994; 309: 1213–7). There is also an increasing incidence of what the medical community has chosen to call ‘aspirin resistance’. Lately, doctors have discovered that many people who religiously take aspirin in the hopes that it will save them go on to develop blood clots that result in heart attacks and strokes (Am Heart J, 2005; 149: 675–80). This led doctors to wonder whether aspirin’s effectiveness is hit and miss. But, as the Oxford evidence shows, aspirin not only fails to stop the thief in the night—it is itself the thief, responsible for haemorrhagic stroke. The Oxford researchers now believe that aspirin has outstripped high blood pressure as the leading cause of stroke in the elderly. Ever on the look out for some quick fix to the catalogue of suffering they witness every working day, doctors uncritically embraced aspirin as a modern-day magic bullet: open to all to manufacture, within reach of the poorest of patients. But it’s now clear that aspirin is just the very latest in a long list of drugs that causes the very condition it is intended to prevent.
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 Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took the unprecedented step of requesting that pharmaceutical companies take a list of cold remedies for children off the market. Rarely has such a sweeping and categorical ban ever occurred, but the evidence surfacing regarding deaths related to these drugs has become difficult to ignore, even for an agency as fond of Big Pharma as the FDA. We can only hazard a guess as to the damning nature of the evidence that would prompt so sanguine a federal body as the FDA to take such action. But it’s long overdue. As the Special Report in our latest issue reveals, many of the types of drugs routinely given to adults—antibiotics, asthma drugs, painkillers, cold and cough medicines—are highly dangerous to children and, more shockingly, have never ever been tested in any basic way to ensure that they are either safe or effective for this age group.
How could such a situation arise, considering all the regulatory bodies in the US and Europe? The answer lies in the medical model of children. Until recently, doctors operated under the assumption that a fetus, a baby, even a young child, wasn’t yet human—not in the fully formed sense of the word. In this view, as babies and young children don’t develop certain nerve receptors until age seven, they don’t, for instance, feel pain. We now know that idea to be completely fallacious—a fetus is as exquisitely sensitive as you or me. However, that mindset—that a child isn’t yet a proper human being—has enabled medicine to deny children the most basic regulatory protection.
Besides assuming that children don’t suffer as much pain or even side-effects as adults, medicine also assumes that children have ‘paradoxical’ effects with drugs, so that a drug with adverse effects in adults (such as amphetamines) can actually ‘improve’ children.
Astonishingly, doctors often don’t consider the basic fact of scale. Because a child may not, in their view, react to a drug in the same way an adult would, they often administer a drug dosage appropriate for a full-sized adult to a person one-third that size. Years ago, we reported on the shocking death of nine-year-old Lexie McConnell, who was given steroids at a dosage even higher than would be administered to adults (WDDTY vol 4 no 8).
As adverse drug effects aren’t tested in children, doctors operate with impunity. A hospital can insist on administering these drugs to children without having to ask for their parents’ permission, and many parents who resist emergency drug treatments risk losing custody of their children on a temporary basis. And because doctors haven’t the slightest idea what a drug can do in children, if it all goes wrong, they look elsewhere—usually at the parents.
Dr Mohammed Al-Bayati, a Los Angeles pathologist and toxicologist, is often called upon as an expert witness for the defence when parents are accused of killing their children. In virtually all the cases he’s handled, babies and children have died as a result of some cocktail of drugs: vaccines, antibiotics, steroids and even over-the-counter preparations.
For instance, Ezbjörn Hahne was convicted of killing his 40-day-old daughter Nadine, based on evidence that she died from old and new intracranial bleeding. However, Al-Bayati’s investigation discovered that the intercranial bleeding was likely to have been caused by the three doses of antibiotics prescribed by the hospital doctors.
At the moment, because no one considers deaths in children to be drug-related, we have no idea of the scale of the problem. But the FDA’s move is the most important first step in recognizing that current paediatric medicine is nothing but a house of cards.
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 Doctors fail to conquer disease, in the main, because they are not taught to think globally. They usually consider each system in isolation. A heart attack is due to clogged pipes feeding the central engine. A pain in the arm must originate in the arm.
Two strong counterpoints to the medical model have recently come to light—both involving breathing problems. Medicine has always regarded run-of-the-mill breathing disorders like snoring and mouth-breathing as quirks that affect no one other than the person sharing the snorer’s bed.
However, startling new evidence has come to light that problems with breathing appear to have profound effects on the developing brain, and a diminished oxygen supply may be an important cause of attention and memory deficits, hyperactivity and learning disorders. So basic and central is oxygen to the brain’s ability to process information that the effects can be permanent if the breathing problems aren’t sorted early.
This would make perfect sense to anyone with a systems approach to biology. Any diminution of the central supply of nourishment will affect every part of the whole.
The reason that the tools of modern medicine so often don’t work is that medical scientists have yet to develop perfectly targeted drugs. Most medicine itself is systemic: it doesn’t only affect the area of the body the doctor wishes to treat, but scatters its effects into every cell. As with everything else in the universe, the components of our body exist only in relationship. Until doctors are able to think big, they will continue to be blind to obvious causes of certain diseases and the disastrous effects of their medical ‘solutions’.
You can read about these new discoveries in your trial issue of What Doctors Don't Tell You. Just click here to order your free copy.
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 The gold-standard treatment for asthma rests on the assumption that asthma is an inflammation. Consequently, doctors usually treat it with steroids, the main drug for inflammation. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, steroid use for asthma had more than tripled in the US to 41.4 per cent.
So convinced is medicine that its model of asthma as local inflammation is correct that researchers failed to subject the idea to much scrutiny—until recently. New evidence, detailed in the October issue of WDDTY, shows that steroids are making things in the lungs worse. After analyzing the medical records of nearly 200,000 asthma sufferers, Denver epidemiologists noticed a clear association between steroid use for asthma and the incidence of pneumonia.
What’s more, they found that, by using steroids, patients who developed pneumonia had a 50-percent greater risk of dying from the disease.
By inhibiting the body’s ability to react to foreign invasion, steroids lay it open to life-threatening infection.
And because it regards asthma as a problem starting and ending with the lungs, medicine has ignored new evidence that people with asthma have increased levels of a certain type of white blood cell—the chief fire-fighters of infection and allergy throughout the body. This suggests that, although asthma shows up in the lungs, it is simply a manifestation of a bigger problem—a global allergy.
Indeed, doctors such as John Mansfield have amassed an enormous body of clinical evidence to show that asthma can be caused by a coterie of dietary allergens, and not simply airborne ones that affect the lungs.
Related content:
Asthma Factsheet
11 alternative treatments for asthma
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