Monthly Archive for July, 2009

I’m certain all of you are aware that we’re all in a war. Yet, this war is a different that those fought in the past. There are no wounded and bleeding prisoners, no POW camps, no ration stamps, no air craft bombing raids. This war is fought on the plains of marketing, perception management, credibility, public awareness, and money. The weapons used are devastation – the media, political lynch-mobs, regulator bored witch hunts, blitzkriegs, drugs campaigns scare tactics, and a host of others.

Although no actual blood is shed, there are plenty of victims and families in ruins. You see these people every day in your offices. They’ve been taught to believe that health is an outside-in process, that drugs will do the work the body is somehow incapable of doing, the somehow people have been given too many organs and their excess needs to be removed. And no one ever questions why.
No one ever asks: “why is my body not doing what it’s designed and programmed to do?”

The result is that parents willingly subject their children to medical rituals, most of which have not been adequately tested but have nevertheless passed by the FDA and various health departments.

Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, in their new book entitled “Selling Sickness,” took a blood step in disclosing big pharma’s plan: world drug domination. For the health of the population? Think again.
Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsden, the head of Merck, one of the worlds largest during companies, told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to be more like chewing gum make Wrigley’s. it had long been his dream, he said, to make drugs for healthy people so that Merck could “sell to everyone.” Gadsden’s dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on the planet.
We know that using their domination influence in the world of science and politics, during companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that defined illness. Old conditions and health problems are expanded, new ones are created, and the markets for medication grow ever larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illnesses, and common, run-of-the-mill complaint are labeled as serious medical conditions required drug treatmentsWriting a tips article. Write a short article about any one of the countless health-related topics out there today, such as golf-specific injuries, getting a good night’s sleep, backpack misuse, ect. Many publications are interested in topics that have wide appeal among their readers. Write a press release. You can often generate media coverage by sending a well-written press release to local print and broadcast media in your area. Nearly anything you do that’s relative to your community is considered newsworthy, consider the following: Establishing yourself as an expert. Write a letter to the person who wrote the article or perhaps to the editor of the department that produced the article. In it, explain that you have specialize training or extensive experience with the topic they wrote about. Writing a letter to the editor. When you see
a health-related article in the newspaper and you want to comment, write a letter to the editor. While an occasional letter to the editor is not going to instantly get you well known, it will help give you some name recognition.there are many ways to achieve media coverage, but the four easiest include:In a 2002 survey published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, 77 Percent of national Football League trainers reported that they refer their injured players to doctors of chiropractic. Football is only one of many sports in which chiropractic plays a role in getting players back into the game. For example, there has been an official chiropractic presence on the U.S. Olympic Sports Medicine Team since the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., and baseball players have depended on chiropractic care to speed their return to the field since the days of Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.

According to a study published in the March 11, 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, misdiagnoses accounts for an estimated 40,000 to 80,000 hospital deaths per year and tort claims for diagnoses that are missed, wrong, or delayed are nearly twice as common as claims for medication errors.
In the study, David Newman-Toker, MD, PHD, and Peter Pronovost, MD, PHD, attempted to throw the blame for most of there errors on “System Failures” rather than on individual medical doctors who lack the training
or skill to make correct diagnoses.

“Moving away for a model that chastises individual physicians to one that focuses on improving the medical system as a whole could offer big payoffs for improving diagnostic accuracy as well as the cost effectiveness of care,” said Newman-Toker, assistant professor of neurology at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine and the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Because diagnostic errors can be tricky to track to their roots, Pronovost, an expert on breaking down complex medical problems, says more research is needed to understand and find patterns in the origins of such errors.
In the meantime, however, the death toll from diagnostic errors will be added to the already staggering numbers of injuries and deaths caused be medication errors, estimated at 1.5 million.

One of the most striking discoveries in recent years is the finding that the omega-3 fatty acid known as DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) is required for optimal brain development during feral and early infant life. In fact, failure for woman to establish adequate DHA nutritional status has been strongly implicated in impaired brain development of their offspring, manifestation as lower IQ and an increased propensity for learning disabilities. The problem stems from the fact the fetus is dependant u[on the mother’s body for much of its DHA requirements, after birth, infants continue to require DHA from breast milk during the first three months of life in order for optimal brain development to continue.

From a biochemical standpoint, the developing fetus can synthesize some DHA from the elongation and further desaturation if alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), which is richly supplied by flaxseed oil, and eicosapintaenoic acid (EPA), which is richly supplied by fish and fish oil. However, the fetal body and infant body (for at least the first three months of life) are incapable of synthesizing sufficient DHA t satisfy their needs for optimal brain development. Thus, it is imperative for women to ingest preformed DHA prior to becoming pregnant, during pregnancy and during their child’s first three months of life (assuming they are breast-feeding) in order to provide their children with the best opportunity to achieve ideal brain development and function.

Unfortunately, most women do not ingest sufficient amounts of DHA and there is no way to compensate once this critical time period have elapsed. Feeding the child DHA does not substantially affect brain development to the degree possible during pregnancy and the first three months of life.

Most women are not aware of the link between DHA and brain development. Thus, primary health care practitioners should alert female patients who and in their childbearing years as to the importance of regularly consuming fish (two servings per week) as well as taking an essential fatty acid supplement daily (my preference is an all-in-one that contains flaxseed, fish and borage seed oil.)

As stated above, DHA is an omega-3 fatty acid found in many fish, as well as in supplements that contain fish oil. The body can also synthesize DHA from ALA and EPA. Studies show that higher concentrations of DHA provided to the fetus and infant are associated with higher IQ scores throughout life (about six points higher on average). In addition, studies show that the first-born child generally has a higher IQ than the children that follow. This has been attributed to the fact that the first-born child gets the benefit of acquiring the DHA the woman has accumulated in her tissues over her lifetime, followed by additional DHA that is available from her breast milk.

Unless the woman adheres to a very aggressive omega-3 fat replenishment program from food and supplements, her subsequent children are much less likely to be afforded access to the same concentration of available DHA as that supplied to the first-born child. The trend is that the first-born child has a higher IQ and is less likely to manifest learning disabilities than their younger siblings.

None of this should be such a surprise to us when you consider that most of the dry weight of the brain is lipid (fat). This is related to the fact that brain activity depends greatly upon the functions provided by its outer, fatty waxy membrane to act as an electrical nerve-membrane to act as an electrical nerve-conduction cable. Compared to other body tissues, the brain content of DHA is very high. Thus, the developing brain has a very high need for DHA, which must be provided from the mother’s body.

The greatest dependence on dietary DHA occurs in the fetus during the “last third of pregnancy” and to a lesser extent in the infant during the first three months after birth. It is during this period that brain synapses are forming most rapidly, and an infant’s demand for DHA exceeds the capacity of the enzymes to synthesize it. As such, the fetus extracts DHA provided by the placenta during its development. After delivery, the infant is reliant upon the amounts of DHA available in breast milk in order to optimize development of brain structure and function. In fact, the increase in brain size during the final three months of pregnancy is threefold, and this rapid growth in brain development requires appreciable amounts of DHA. (Of note is the fact that DHA is also required for vision.)