Search results matching tag 'organic'

Your good health is down to you

bshubbard — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:13:00 GMT

One thing is sure in this world: only you can establish total wellness and health. Unless you want it, and are sufficiently motivated to gain it and keep it, no amount of outside support will succeed. Taking responsibility for your own health should be a prime personal objective. Succeed and you will achieve a more enjoyable and successful social and working life, irrespective of your age. Best of all, you will be reducing your dependence on medications and other medical services, whether ‘free’ or private.

Many countries are struggling to fund an expanding medical service. There is a growing mentality that ‘if the service is free, I should use it to the full and demand the latest drug or treatment that I have read or heard about’. In parallel, public and private medical professionals are increasingly rewarded in relation to the number of specific tests, treatments and prescriptions they provide, prescribe and refer to specialists. Will anyone ever dare suggest that the most successful doctors are those with a practice that has a rapidly-reducing need for their services?

As WDDTY and this website often remind us: ‘There are no free lunches to good health’, and it’s interesting that the following notice is included on vitamin bottle labels:
• These are no substitute for a balanced diet.
• Don’t exceed the recommended consumption.
• Discuss their use with your medical practitioner.

Yet there is no label on commercial non-ecological fruit and vegetables that says: ‘It is recommended that you wash and peel before consumption’, and few medical professionals have comprehensive training in nutrition, which surely has to be a fundamental basis of our wellbeing.
Last November we attended a session at the Slow Food Terra Madre conference in Turin on the topic of ‘What medications do we have to combat poor diets?’ presented by a panel of six Italian doctors. Replies to two questions from the audience were enlightening. They were along the following lines:
Q1. ‘Why has the panel not focussed on what we should eat to prevent the need for the new high-tech medications’?
R1. ‘None of us had any education on nutrition and good eating during our medical training and, like most, we have probably eaten badly during our careers. Fortunately a few hours of education are now provided to doctors in training but it is insufficient and squeezed into an overfull curriculum’.

Q2. ‘Why is a holistic health specialist not included in the panel’?
R2. ‘The organiser cannot be seen to be openly supporting alternative medicine’.

But luckily most of the conference was focussed on expanding the production and consumption of healthy foodstuffs by traditional ecological methods, and for local consumption and with the producers getting a fair reward. Unfortunately it is a struggle in many countries; in Spain, farmers are abandoning the land because the price they are paid is less than the production costs. Virtually no produce is sold locally, but instead is transported to warehouses and packing stations where they are treated in order to improve their appearance and to preserve them while they are shipped to retail outlets, often in packs labelled ‘Fresh – eat by the end of the week’.

At least if you grow your own, you have the chance to eat truly fresh food – ‘picked at their best just before consumption’.

© Clodagh and *** Handscombe Authors of ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ and ‘ Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’. Read their October article ‘ Living Very Well from our Spanish Garden’ on their website ‘www.gardeninginspain.com.
October 2009.

Beating cancer naturally

bshubbard — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:55:00 GMT

In 1991, I visited my GP to ask for advice about a large lump on top of my neck. I was told that everyone in their fifties starts to get lumps like these, and there was nothing to worry about. I was then 54.

Two year later, I asked the same GP to check out the lump as it was throbbing, and my mouth was full of blood each morning. At first told I was told I had gum problems, and I should see my dentist. I insisted that this was not so, and an appointment to have an ultrasound examination at the local NHS hospital was arranged. When I got there, the operator could not work the machine properly, and only a vague shadow about 4 by 2 centimetres showed up. He suggested that I come back the following month when he would obtain a special dye that, if injected into blood stream, would improve the quality of the image.

Not happy with that experience, I demanded that the GP refer me to a head and throat specialist at the local private hospital as I had medical insurance for 20 years, and which I’d never used. I saw a specialist within a week, who said that I should have visited him two years before. I was operated on within two weeks and a salivary gland, with a large tumour within, and some lymph glands were removed.

The tumour was diagnosed as being slow growing and was resistant to radio- and chemotherapy, and as I had been swallowing blood, it was likely to spread to the lungs rather than reoccur in the upper neck. The doctor suggested that it would be better if I had a second operation two weeks later to remove another lymph gland and flesh around the gland - and then retire early to my Spanish holiday home full time for a less stressful, Mediterranean diet and physically active lifestyle - but to come back for annual check-ups.

So, in 1994, I did as the doctor ordered and moved full time and solo to Spain and did four things: I researched what the real Mediterranean diet had been in our then self-sufficient valley and started to follow it; I started to mountain walk; I worked on the Executive Overseas project at high altitude in Bolivia for a month and then walked in Peru to build up strength in my lungs; and I developed a mountainside garden that included areas for healthy ecological herbs and vegetables, and which involved collecting tons of rocks in a wheelbarrow, and eating ecological local meats and I caught my own fish in sea.

In 1996 I met Clodagh, now my wife, on top of mountain. Clodagh then was known as ‘the Green Witch’ for her amateur knowledge of beneficial uses of herbs. She had stopped drinking coffee and tea and was instead drinking infusions of mint, rosemary, lemon verbena, lemons, ginger, rue etc.

In 1998, and by then 61, I walked across Spain via the Pyrenees from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean in 52 days – that’s 950 kilometres and up and down 33,000 metres - with Clodagh, and with heavy rucksacks and tent. As a result of seeing small communities still self sufficient in organic/ecological vegetables, and as traditional agriculture in our valley was being abandoned at a fast rate and was changing from natural to chemical methods, we took on an allotment to have the space to become self sufficient in ecologically grown vegetables, herbs, edible flowers and soft fruits. Although I’ve grown a hundred different vegetables, we focussed especially on those with high antibiotic, vitamin and mineral content.

I expanded the number of beneficial herbs in the garden, and I made both the garden and house chemical-free. I stopped going for check-ups as regular x-rays are a risk in themselves ( I suspect that dental x-rays were one of the possible causes of the cancer, and I refused the dentist’s money spinning x-rays since 1993).
In 1999, we started to write our six books on gardening in Spain, giving radio talks and talks to gardening and dinner groups plus writing articles for many newspapers and magazines..

In 2001 we walked around Cuba to see the food growing revolution for ourselves. This helped us improve some of our practices, and we started to breed chickens and quail for eggs and meat, and rabbits for a healthy meat for an AB blood group.

Last year we took over the stewardship and regeneration of an abandoned olive grove – and we started the ‘Living well from your garden’ blog for WDDTY.

This year I’m 72, and still enjoying mountain walking, physical work in the garden allotment and olive grove. I talk every week about ‘Living well from your garden’ to local gardening and embryo allotment groups which are new to Spain.

We continue to eat well, and we are looking forward to our own first cold pressings of hand-picked extra virgin olive oil in 2011.

Interestingly, the surgeon has never enquired if his advice worked or if I am still in good health!

Luckily the increase in the popularity of our latest trilogy of books ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’, ‘Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain’ and ‘Your Garden in Spain’ funds our purchase of eco wines cheeses and lamb, which we don’t home produce.

GLASS HOUSES: Cancer specialist attacks alternative therapies

enews — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 13:28:43 GMT

Everyone knows the old saying 'People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones', everyone, that is, except Prof Jonathan Waxman, a cancer specialist at Imperial College in London.

He's been throwing stones at the alternative medicine and organic foods markets, which he says do nothing to help cancer patients other than to give them false hope, and generate vast profits for themselves in the meantime.

"It is the hope of clinicians that the snake oil salesmen that peddle cures and exploit the desperate will be tipped in the cobra-filled dustbin of oblivion," he writes in a vitriolic essay in the British Medical Journal.

To that end, all alternative strategies should be reclassified as drugs - as they all claim a cure (although few to our knowledge actually do) - and legislate them out of existence, he says. "Protect our patients from vile and cynical exploitation whose intellectual basis, at best, might be viewed as delusional," upon saying which he went back into his house, made entirely from glass.

First up with his own slingshot was Dr Damien Downing, medical director with the Alliance for Natural Health, a group that is fighting to safeguard alternative medicine against a barrage of EU legislation.

Prof Waxman assumes that, in contrast to alternative and complementary medicine, conventional therapies are tested by sound science. Sadly, that's not the case, says Dr Downing. A quick visit to the BMJ Clinical Evidence website reveals that, of the 2,404 treatments surveyed, just 15 per cent were rated as beneficial, while it's not known if 47 per cent are effective at all.

Turn to Prof Waxman's own specialty of oncology and the picture worsens. A study prepared in 2004 revealed that chemotherapy achieved a five-year survival rate of less than 2.5 per cent. Dietary changes are four times as effective in treating cancer, another study revealed.

Other doctors don't seem to share Prof Waxman's confidence in the scientific basis of medicine. Writing in the same issue, Aubrey Blumsohn, a consultant at the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, says that doctors have allowed the drugs industry to sabotage medicine. "We have allowed (the drugs) industry to subvert the rules of science. We have watched quietly as governments and academics have colluded with industry to hide information critical to our patients. We have remained silent as our medical schools have churned out graduates who have no knowledge of the dilemmas and scandals of medicine. We have allowed many of our medical journals to become corrupted and timid," he writes.

Come to think of it, Prof Waxman's house isn't made of glass at all. It's constructed entirely from straw.

(Sources: British Medical Journal, 2006; 333: 1121 (Blumsohn) and 1129 (Waxman)).

Wddty E-news 30th November 2006 No.314