Category Archives: medicine

Drug Resistant Tuberculosis on the Rise

Posted on November 6, 2011 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

Are we healthier?  Disease such as gonorrhea and tuberculosis continue to plague mankind.  Antibiotics are just about played out and real medicine focused on healing is needed.  Herbal medicine, homeopathic medicine, nutrition, emotional and spiritual healing approaches are all needed.  The following article addresses the need to bring back sanatoriums to help heal tuberculosis.  For more info on sanatoriums.  Vaccines are on the rise primarily to boost profits of a failed medical approach.

Diseases are made up,  such as shift work sleep disorder and medicine that makes you sicker than what you originally had are offered as treatment.  I heard a commercial for this medication and the side effects are numerous.  How can we call this medicine?

Read on about the continuing rise of tuberculosis.

A call to bring back sanatoria to help deal with the growing threat of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis

A viewpoint published Online First by The Lancet calls for new-age sanatoria to be created in countries with a high burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis, in order to deal with the growing threat of extensively-drug resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). The Viewpoint is by Professor Keetan Dheda, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Professor Giovani Miglori, WHO Collaborating Centre for TB and Lung Diseases, Tradate, Italy.

Sanatoria were used across many countries up to the 1970s to help isolate people with tuberculosis from the general community, but were gradually dismantled as living conditions improved, and vaccination and drug treatments arrived, leading to huge falls in infection rates especially in high-income countries. However, years of using the antibiotics rifampicin and isoniazid has led to some half a million cases of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) globally. Of these, between 25,000 and 50,000 cases are XDR-TB. In high-burden countries such as South Africa, MDR-TB and XDR-TB treatment eats up around half of the TB drug budget, despite only representing a small proportion (1-2%) of total cases. Large numbers of treatment failures occur in XDR-TB cases, and also in many MDR-TB cases, but such patients can survive for months or even years, exposing the community to potential infection. These cases are not responsive to any known treatment (many of them are completely drug-resistant). The authors say that once again, after 60 years, we are faced with TB patients for whom there is no effective treatment.

The authors ask: “How should we deal with these people who are living with failed treatment and who still have the capacity to transmit disease…Is the discharging of these patients, who often live in a single room with many other family members, into impoverished communities justifiable?” They add that the lack of or restricted palliative care facilities means there is nowhere for patients to die in dignified surroundings while infection control in ensured.

This is not just a problem for high-burden, resource-constrained countries. In high-income countries, XDR-TB patients are usually treated in isolation rooms in respiratory or infectious disease departments. But this can mean extremely long hospital stays with no guarantee of successful treatment. Furthermore, soon to be published data from five reference centres in the European Union* show that infection control procedures are far from ideal, exposing other patients and health-care workers to risk of contracting XDR-TB.

The authors advocate for facilities where state-of-the-art palliative care and laboratory facilities can be provided to dying patients in a safe and dignified setting; there, destitute people for whom treatment has failed could voluntarily reside on a long-term basis with social, educational, and recreational facilities, and receive good nutrition and care from support groups and a multidisciplinary team within an infection-controlled setting, thereby reducing transmission within the community and to family members, including children.

They conclude: “The time for rebuilding so-called new sanatoria under a new vision has come and is overdue…We have now come full circle and once again there are large numbers of patients for whom there are no effective antituberculosis drugs. The pool of untreatable cases is accumulating and will need swift action to avoid a human catastrophe.”

###

The 5 EU Countries cannot be disclosed as per ECDC policy, but they include 2 central European EU countries, 2 western EU countries at low incidence, and 1 western EU country at intermediate incidence.

Posted in medicine, wellness

Tagged , ,

Expensive Health Care, Producing Poor Results

Posted on June 24, 2010 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

What an interesting report! Although the United States spends more on health care, the results are not coming through. IMHO it could have something to do with a need for including holistic medicine in the health care system. Health is also about the whole person. However, a few American hospitals are enlarging their scope to be more inclusive (click here) of holistic approaches in health care. Let’s hope more come on board.

US ranks last among 7 countries on health system performance

Affordable Care Act holds promise for US performance; focus on information technology and primary care vital to achieving high performance

New York, NY, June 23, 2010—Despite having the most expensive health care system, the United States ranks last overall compared to six other industrialized countries—Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom—on measures of health system performance in five areas: quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability to lead long, healthy, productive lives, according to a new Commonwealth Fund report. While there is room for improvement in every country, the U.S. stands out for not getting good value for its health care dollars, ranking last despite spending $7,290 per capita on health care in 2007 compared to the $3,837 spent per capita in the Netherlands, which ranked first overall.

Provisions in the Affordable Care Act that could extend health insurance coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans have the potential to promote improvements to the United States’ standing when it comes to access to care and equity, according to Mirror Mirror On The Wall: How the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally 2010 Update, by Commonwealth Fund researchers Karen Davis, Cathy Schoen, and Kristof Stremikis. The United States’ low marks in the quality and efficiency dimensions demonstrate the need to quickly implement provisions in the new health reform law and stimulus legislation that focus on realigning incentives to reward higher quality and greater value, investment in preventive care, and expanding the use of health information technology.

“It is disappointing, but not surprising that, despite our significant investment in health care, the U.S. continues to lag behind other countries,” said Commonwealth Fund President and lead author Karen Davis. “With enactment of the Affordable Care Act, however, we have entered a new era in American health care. We will begin strengthening primary care and investing in health information technology and quality improvement, ensuring that all Americans can obtain access to high quality, efficient health care.”

Earlier editions of the report, produced in 2004, 2006, and 2007, showed similar results. This year’s version incorporates data from patient and physician surveys conducted in seven countries in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

Key findings include:

On measures of quality the United States ranked 6th out of 7 countries. On two of four measures of quality—effective care and patient-centered care—the U.S. ranks in the middle (4th out of 7 countries). However, the U.S. ranks last when it comes to providing safe care, and next to last on coordinated care. U.S. patients with chronic conditions are the most likely to report being given the wrong medication or the wrong dose of their medication, and experiencing delays in being notified about an abnormal test result.

On measures of efficiency, the U.S ranked last due to low marks when it comes to spending on administrative costs, use of information technology, re-hospitalization, and duplicative medical testing. Nineteen percent of U.S. adults with chronic conditions reported they visited an emergency department for a condition that could have been treated by a regular doctor, had one been available, more than three times the rate of patients in Germany or the Netherlands (6%).

On measures of access to care, people in the U.S. have the hardest time affording the health care they need—with the U.S. ranking last on every measure of cost-related access problems. For example, 54 percent of adults with chronic conditions reported problems getting a recommended test, treatment or follow-up care because of cost. In the Netherlands, which ranked first on this measure, only 7 percent of adults with chronic conditions reported this problem.

On measures of healthy lives, the U.S. does poorly, ranking last when it comes to infant mortality and deaths before age 75 that were potentially preventable with timely access to effective health care, and second to last on healthy life expectancy at age 60.

On measures of equity, the U.S. ranks last. Among adults with chronic conditions almost half (45%) with below average incomes in the U.S. reported they went without needed care in the past year because of costs, compared with just 4 percent in the Netherlands. Lower-income U.S. adults with chronic conditions were significantly more likely than those in the six other countries surveyed to report not going to the doctor when they’re sick, not filling a prescription, or not getting recommended follow-up care because of costs.

Methodology

Data are drawn from the Commonwealth Fund 2007 International Health Policy Survey, conducted by telephone in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States; the 2008 International Health Policy Survey of Sicker Adults, conducted in the same seven countries plus France; the Commonwealth Fund 2009 International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians, conducted in the same eight countries plus Italy, Norway, and Sweden; the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Health Data 2009; and World Health Organization mortality and population statistics for 2002-03. The 2007 Commonwealth Fund survey focuses on the primary care experiences of nationally representative samples of adults ages 18 and older in the seven countries. The 2008 survey targets a representative sample of “sicker adults,” defined as those who rated their health status as fair or poor, had a serious illness in the past two years, had been hospitalized for something other than a normal delivery, or had undergone major surgery in the past two years. The 2009 survey looks at the experiences of primary care physicians.

###

The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation supporting independent research on health policy reform and a high performance health system.

Posted in Health, health care, medical news, medicine

Tagged ,

Why No Cure for Heart Disease?

Posted on February 15, 2010 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

Former President of the United States Bill Clinton received quadruple bypass heart surgery in 2004. Four blocked arteries were propped open by inserting tubing, know as stents, into blocked arteries. According to cardiologists this is par for the course. This procedure is not a cure, it is a fix; a patch. Seen as a progressive disease it is treated by surveillance. There is no attempt to heal the body from what may be the underlying causative factors.

Is this the best in health care can offer?
Hereditary factors? Lifestyle factors? Heart disease? medication? Heart Bypass surgery? angioplasty, this is a rather typical progression. The costs for the procedures escalate.
Prices for these varied procedures can range from $7,000 to in some cases over $100,000. The care is invasive. There is no such thing as minimally invasive surgery. It is still major and intense. The public is involved in a game of wait and see, as people in need of healing, deteriorate and then told surgery is their only option.

A heart attack or myocardial infarction occurs when a plaque ruptures, allowing a blood clot to form. This completely obstructs the artery, stopping blood flow to part of the heart muscle, and that portion of muscle dies.

The cost of stents
Balloon Angioplasty with Stent Placement for Coronary Artery Disease

Actually there are “cures” for heart disease. There always have been. That does not mean that an individual may not eventually die because of heart failure. But it is possible to live in health without balloons, or mesh or the advanced options using mesh with stainless steel – inserted into your arteries to prop them open. Start now, avoid waiting until the prognosis is poor.

The physical heart resides in the chest cavity, but it is not in a vacuum. When you are comfortable with your heart, that joy translates throughout your life.

The public can let the medical profession that we want healing, not management. The public can let the medical profession that we want healing, not lifetime prescriptions drugs.

Posted in Health, health beliefs, health care, heart, heart attack, medicine

Chris Rock – Doctors and Drugs

Posted on January 13, 2010 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

A comedic view of conventional medicine in America. True of false?
Be forewarned, the language is a bit raw.

Posted in humor, medicine, prescription drugs, thoughts

Research: Inexpensive Method for Stroke Detection

Posted on September 23, 2009 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

Is this the kind of innovation that American health care needs?
– Small study demonstrates possibilities of reducing unnecessary MRI tests and improving safety

September 18, 2009-In a small “proof of principle” study, stroke researchers at Johns Hopkins and the University of Illinois have found that a simple, one-minute eye movement exam performed at the bedside worked better than an MRI to distinguish new strokes from other less serious disorders in patients complaining of dizziness, nausea and spinning sensations.

Results of the study of 101 patients , who were already at higher than normal risk of stroke because of factors including high blood pressure or high cholesterol, were published online ahead of print on Sept. 17 in Stroke. The patients were all seen at OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill.

The project, spearheaded by a Johns Hopkins neurologist in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Illinois in Peoria, found that the quick, extremely low-cost exam caught more strokes than the current gold standard of MRI, suggesting that if further research on broader populations confirms these results, physicians may have a way to improve care and avoid the high costs of MRI in some cases.

“The idea that a bedside exam could outperform a modern neuroimaging test such as MRI is something that most people had given up for dead, but we’ve shown it’s possible,” says David E. Newman-Toker, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Dizziness is a common medical problem, Newman-Toker says, responsible for 2.6 million emergency room visits annually in the United States. While the vast majority of dizziness complaints are caused by benign inner-ear balance problems, about 4 percent are signals of stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA, a condition that often warns of impending stroke in the coming days or weeks). Because more than half of patients with dizziness who are experiencing strokes show none of the classic stroke symptoms — one-sided weakness, numbness, or speech problems — emergency room physicians are estimated to misdiagnose at least a third of them, losing the chance for quick and effective treatment.

“We know that time is brain, so when patients having a stroke are sent home erroneously, the consequences can be really serious, including death or permanent disability,” says Jorge C. Kattah, M.D., chairman of neurology at OSF St. Francis Medical Center, who co-led the study.

The study of eye movement tests was suggested by previous research showing that people experiencing a stroke have eye-movement alterations that correlate with stroke-damage to various brain areas and that these are distinct from eye-movement alterations seen with benign ear diseases. Some patients, for example, can’t immediately adjust their eye position if their heads are quickly turned to the side, or they experience jerky eye movements as they try to focus on a doctor’s finger when looking to either side.

Newman-Toker and his colleagues at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria wondered whether testing eye movements in dizzy patients might help them sort out which ones were having a stroke from those with other problems.

All of the patients in the current study were seen after complaining of severe dizziness that had lasted for several hours continuously, and all had at least one risk factor for stroke. The researchers selected them to increase the chance that they would find strokes in this population. None of the patients had a history of previous dizzy spells and more than half sought care at the Peoria medical center’s ER, though some were inpatients at the hospital or were transferred from other area hospitals.

The researchers gave each patient an exam comprised of three eye-movement tests: looking for inability to keep the eyes stable as patients heads were rotated rapidly to either side, looking for jerkiness as patients tracked a doctor’s finger to look right and left, and checking eye position to see if one eye was higher than the other. Each patient then received an early MRI, the highest-quality neuroimaging test available to confirm stroke in dizzy patients. Patients with eye tests suggesting stroke but without stroke on the first MRI scan underwent a repeat scan.

In the end, 69 patients were diagnosed with stroke and 25 with inner-ear conditions. The remainder had other neurological problems. Using only the three eye-movement tests, the researchers had correctly diagnosed all of the strokes and 24 of 25 with inner-ear conditions. By contrast, initial MRI scans were falsely negative in eight of the 69 stroke patients, who were later correctly diagnosed with follow-up MRIs.

Though the researchers emphasize the need to verify their results in a larger and more general population of patients with dizziness, Newman-Toker says the initial findings are “incredibly promising.” If they hold true, he adds, testing eye movements could have several advantages over MRI beyond reliable diagnostics. For example, while the wait time for an MRI can be several hours or more, physicians can perform all three eye-movement tests in a minute or less. Also, the eye-movement tests are “basically free,” compared to $1000 or more for an MRI, Newman-Toker says.

“In an era where cost containment is butting up against issues of quality in health care delivery, there’s tremendous potential for bedside approaches like ours that could reduce costs while improving quality at the same time,” says Newman-Toker.

For more information, go here

Posted in adverse events, brain, brain research, Health, holistic medicine, integrative medicine, medical news, medicine, stroke

Tagged , ,

Enter the “Polypill” to reduce heart problems, hbp and stroke

Posted on March 30, 2009 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

The “miracle” of modern medicine has led to bizarre side effects such as a treatment for restless legs, that has caused compulsive gambling. A medicine for Parkinson’s has a similar problem for some. Sleep drugs that cause people to stumble out of their home and drive. Fertility drugs that lead to multiple births. Hallucinations are a “rare” side effect of some ADHD medications. These are the considered a-typical, but the typical side effects are no fun either.

Help for High Blood Pressure

Enter the Polypill.  Researchers want to create a pill a 3 in one that can reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke and high blood pressure in one.  article here
Truth is it has been created or should I say they have been. When we eat whole foods, contained therein is a synergistic blend of vitamins, proteins, amino acids, flavonoids, solar and lunar energy and maybe even (hopefully) love from the gardener. We cannot get this from a pill.

Run This Way

Instead of running from nature, run to nature. Nurture yourself with learning how to live in balance. It’s free. It’s the healthiest choice for yourself and the planet. Give it a try. Polypill? Try basking in the sun, or hugging a dear friend, cook yourself a meal with a big dose of love in it…you’ll be glad you did, for benefits no Polypill could ever provide.

At Continuum Wellness we offer homeopathic care and wellness coaching to promote wholeness, health and well-being.

Posted in adverse events, alternative medicine, baby boomers, behavior, cholesterol, complementary medicine, healing, healing philosophy, Health, health beliefs, health benefits of food, health care, healthy body, healthy eating, healthy mind, heart, heart attack, holistic, holistic medicine, integrative medicine, kindness, medications, medicine, men, prescription drugs, self-care, self-healing, thoughts, tips, wellness, Western diet, women, women's health

Tagged ,

Why you should read the drug package inserts

Posted on March 4, 2009 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

If for some reason you need to take pharmaceutical drugs, protect yourself and loved ones by reading the package inserts. According to this research adverse drug events happen to the the tune of $3.5 billion dollars, and those are the reported incidents.

The new Food and Drug Administration drug package insert: implications for patient safety and clinical care.

Watson KT, Barash PG.
Department of Anesthesiology, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8051, USA.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the scientific, regulatory, and public health agency that regulates many products, including food products, drugs, medical devices, radiation emitting devices, and cosmetics for the federal government of the United States. The FDA’s mission is to assure that consumer products made and sold in the United States are safe, effective, and pure. The purpose of the package insert (also known as prescription drug product insert or professional labeling) is to provide detailed drug information compiled and distributed by the drug manufacturer, after FDA review and approval.

In 2006, the standard format for the package insert was changed in an attempt to make it more user-friendly and a more efficient resource tool for practitioners.

According to the Institute of Medicine, in-hospital adverse drug reactions occur at a rate of 400,000 per year and incur $3.5 billion of extra hospital expense. It is expected that the new package insert format will enhance rapid access to important pharmacologic information and improve patient safety by decreasing medication errors.

Posted in children, drugs, family, FDA, girls, Health, health care, medications, medicine, prescription drugs, women, women's health

Tagged , , ,

Reducing Drug Dependence Can Save the Planet

Posted on January 27, 2009 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

The following article has a definite slant against the pharmaceutical industry. Read it and see if it makes sense to you. The article highlights the huge downside of the way drugs are produced and the impact of its processes. The creed “do no harm”, should extend itself through the whole process of healing including the medicinal substances.

India’s Waterways A Toxic Stew of Pharmaceutical Chemicals Dumped from Big Pharma Factories
Monday, January 26, 2009 by: Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor
http://www.naturalnews.com/025415.html

(NaturalNews) Many of the pharmaceuticals consumed in the United States are made in India, where labor is cheap and environmental laws are lenient on powerful corporations. U.S. drug companies are exploiting this situation to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses of high-profit pharmaceuticals in India, where ingredients purchased for a few cents can be re-sold to U.S. health patients for hundreds of dollars (the markup on some drugs is literally over 500,000%).

There’s something else Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about its drug operations in India: Big Pharma’s manufacturing facilities dump millions of doses of toxic pharmaceutical chemicals directly into India’s waterways.

Researchers were recently stunned to discover that 100 pounds of a powerful antibiotic called ciprofloxacin was being dumped into a local stream every day! That’s a quantity of antibiotics that could treat an entire city of 90,000 people every day.

But that’s not all: The same waterway contained an astonishing 21 pharmaceutical chemicals reports the Associated Press, some at levels that were 150 times the highest levels of contamination found in U.S. waterways. (And even the levels found in the U.S. were quite alarming.)

Big Pharma as a major chemical polluter

These findings are now added to the revelations of pharmaceutical contamination unveiled by the Associated Press last year, which found that the public water supplies in virtually all U.S. cities tested were contaminated with pharmaceutical chemicals.

What’s emerging from these disturbing discoveries is a picture of Big Pharma as a global corporate polluter that’s dumping chemicals into the world’s sensitive waterways, polluting villages, cities and aquatic ecosystems around the world.

Under the Bush Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency outright refused to regulate pharmaceuticals as environmental hazards. With Obama in the White House, it remains to be seen whether the new administration will clamp down on pharmaceutical pollution.

Big Pharma now has something in common with Exxon, Cargill, Alcoa and Chevron: The outrageous pollution of the environment with toxic chemicals. But in many ways, Big Pharma’s chemicals are far more dangerous. HRT drugs, for example, are toxic at parts per billion, and they’re now being found in public water supplies around the world.

Municipal water treatment facilities, by the way, don’t remove pharmaceutical chemicals from the water! Whatever HRT drugs, psychiatric drugs or other chemicals that exist in the water are passed right through the water treatment centers which unwisely add yet more chemicals (fluoride and chlorine, typically) to the toxic brew. Citizens drinking public water supplies in India, the U.K., Canada and the United States are now verifiably participating in a grand experiment involving the mass medication of the population with low levels of utterly untested pharmaceutical combinations.

How long will this be allowed to continue before the environmental protection authorities clamp down on pharmaceutical dumping?

So far, environmental regulators have done nothing to stop the dumping of drugs into public water supplies. This is true even in America, where hospitals routinely dispose of drugs by simply flushing them down the toilet (injecting them directly into the water supply consumed downstream).

Consumers also need to realize that the drugs you swallow are also environmental pollutants. Many drugs pass right through the human body unaltered, where they are flushed back into the water supply that’s consumed downstream. (Yes, the toilet water from one city becomes the drinking water of the next city down the river. If you didn’t know this, you have a LOT to learn about the water supply, and you probably won’t like what you learn… especially if you live downstream…)

Big Pharma is contaminating our planet.

It’s becoming quite clear that the pharmaceutical industry is now directly contributing to the mass chemical contamination of our planet. By allowing factories to dump drugs into local waterways, by tolerating a “flush it” mentality at hospitals and pharmacies, and by drugging consumers with an endless brew of vaccines, medications and toxic substances such as chemotherapy agents, the pharmaceutical industry has “achieved” the distinction as a major world polluter.

Those who take pharmaceuticals are, in fact, directly contributing to the chemical contamination of the planet. That’s why getting off medications is not only good for your health; it’s also good for the planet.

You can’t be “green” if you’re taking medications. Consuming pharmaceuticals is simply incompatible with sustainable life on Earth. And the more drugs are manufactured and consumed, the worse this problem will become.

Let me put it this way: The survival of our planet depends on the demise of Big Pharma.
Which would you rather have around for future generations? Living oceans, blue skies, clean water and healthy species? Or sterile oceans, dwindling aquatic life, mutant human babies and widespread cancer, infertility and shortened lifespans?

It’s your choice: Mother Nature, or Big Pharma. The devastating long-term effects of this chemical contamination of our world’s waterways have yet to be truly understood at all. The chemicals being dumped into our environment by Big Pharma today may pollute our planet for hundreds of years, destroying aquatic ecosystems, killing fish populations and causing widespread physical deformities across many species. Combine this with all the pesticide runoff already being used across the planet and it becomes quite clear that the human race has set itself on a path of self destruction.

How’s that? Because humans don’t exist in isolation from the natural world. When we destroy or disrupt the planet’s delicate ecosystems through chemical contamination, we unleash a backlash of effects that put the entire human race in jeopardy: Outbreaks of infectious disease, plummeting fish stocks in ocean waters, rising risks of superbugs across the population and even long-term disruptions in the food supply due to pharmaceutical contamination of food crops and soil microorganisms. (Irrigation water being sprayed on crops is now also contaminated with pharmaceuticals…)

Stated bluntly, what’s happening is that the pharmaceutical industry is poisoning our world — and it’s doing it for profit. While their factories in India are dumping millions of doses of antibiotics (and a brew of twenty other drugs) into the water supply each year, they’re importing those drugs into the U.S. and selling them at monopoly prices to gullible consumers, all while pretending they’re on some sort of humanitarian mission to help people.

The truth is that Big Pharma is committing crimes against Nature, and we’ll all end up paying the price for allowing these crimes to continue under our watch. Every living thing in our world is interconnected: You can’t poison the waterways with a toxic brew of dangerous chemicals and expect to be insulated from the effects of that forever.

Sometimes I stand back in sheer astonishment at how short-sighted human civilization truly is. Today our population demonstrates a striking lack of understanding about the web of life on our planet combined with an outright abandonment of ethics and morals. Companies (and many people) simply do whatever benefits them at the moment, regardless of the long-term consequences. The pharmaceutical industry exemplifies this destructive philosophy best, as it actually works to trap people in a cycle of disease treatment, all while raking in obscene profits for poisoning the people and the planet.

What a shameful business model. It’s beyond shame, really. It’s a crime. And it’s time we put an end to these crimes against the People and against the planet.

Once again, I call for the arrest and prosecution of Big Pharma CEOs and executives for their role in planning and executing these crimes against humanity and Nature. In the U.S., this must be pursued by the Dept. of Justice, since the FDA, EPA and FTC remain in a tight conspiracy with the drug industry and will do nothing to bring their protected corporations to justice.

You can help support the effort to bring these criminals to justice (and end the chemical contamination of our planet by Big Pharma) by contacting your elected representatives (in any country) and let them know your thoughts about the widespread chemical pollution caused by the pharmaceutical industry.

Posted in drugs, medicine, Pandora's box

Tagged , ,

More Americans Turning to Herbs

Posted on January 19, 2009 by continuum wellness| 2 Comments

Sour Economy Sweetens Americans on Herbal Meds
The choice between $75 prescription sleeping pills or a $5 herbal alternative is a no-brainer for Cathy and Bernard Birleffi, whose insurance costs have skyrocketed along with the nation’s financial woes.

The Calistoga, Calif., couple seem to reflect a trend. With many Americans putting off routine doctor visits and self-medicating to save money, use of alternative treatments is on the rise — even though evidence is often lacking on their safety and effectiveness.

Climbing sales of herbal medicines have paralleled the tanking economy, according to an Associated Press review of recent data from market-watchers and retailers.

One prominent example: Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Market Inc. says its stores nationwide have seen an increase in sales of nutritional supplements and herbal products in the past several weeks. That’s “noteworthy” given the retail industry’s financial slump, said Whole Foods spokesman Jeremiah C. McElwee.

While winter is usually a busy time for herbal medicine sales because it’s the season for colds and flu, “more people are value shopping” now because of the economy, McElwee said.

Cathy Birleffi says she’s among them.

“The doctors are so much higher (in cost), the insurance isn’t paying as much,” said the 61-year-old self-employed bookkeeper and notary. Her husband, a retired dispatcher, has high blood pressure and seizures. Recent changes in their health insurance coverage resulted in $1,300 in monthly premiums, double what they used to be.

Until they tried herbal alternatives, including valerian for insomnia, “every time I turned around, it was $50 here, $75 there” for prescriptions, Cathy Birleffi said.

Among data reflecting the trend:

For the three months that ended Dec. 28, nationwide retail sales of vitamins and supplements totaled nearly $639 million, up almost 10 percent from the same period in 2007. That includes a nearly 6 percent increase in sales of herbal supplements alone, according to Information Resources Inc., a Chicago-based market research firm. Its numbers do not include Wal-Mart or club stores.
Nationwide herbal and botanical supplement sales totaled $4.8 billion in 2007, when the recession began, up 4.3 percent over 2006. That was a marginally higher increase compared with the previous year, according to Jason Phillips of the Nutrition Business Journal, an industry-tracking publication. Sales of animal oil supplements — mostly fish oils — were up 29 percent from 2006. While that was a decline from the previous year, both categories continued to show strong growth in a faltering economy.
A government survey released in December said concerns about the cost of conventional medicine influenced Americans’ decisions to try alternative remedies. “Nonvitamin, nonmineral natural products,” including fish oil and herbal medicines, were the most commonly used alternatives, taken by almost 18 percent of Americans in 2007, the report said. Among those users, roughly a quarter said they delayed or didn’t get conventional medical care because of the cost.
Report co-author Richard Nahin of the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine offered cautionary advice on the topic.

People taking herbal and other supplements should let their doctor know what they’re using, said Nahin, acting director of the center’s branch that oversees outside research the agency funds.

Copyright AP

Posted in alternative medicine, baby boomers, children, complementary medicine, culture, economy, family, folk remedies, Health, health care, herbal therapy, herbs, home remedies, life, medications, medicine, men, people, prescription drugs, self-healing, women, women's health

The NIH is Targeting Stress Related Illnesses

Posted on December 16, 2008 by continuum wellness| Leave a comment

It appear that the approach taken is analytical using a segregative approach in search of “active components”. Most likely to produce drugs. The methodology of a holistic approach is that all of the components of a root or an herb, etc. work in a synergistic way, together to produce the healing effect. To read about the research products see below for the article.

New Complementary and Alternative Medicine Research Centers Target Stress-Related Illnesses, Obesity, Cancer, and Other Conditions

The National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has added four new Centers of Excellence for Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CERCs) to its research centers program. The new centers will add to knowledge about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) approaches and their potential in treating and preventing diseases and conditions that are common among Americans.

In NCCAM’s CERC program, highly accomplished researchers across a variety of disciplines apply cutting-edge technology to projects in CAM. The new centers and their projects are as follows.

Wisconsin Center for the Neuroscience and Psychophysiology of Meditation
Principal Investigator: Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D.
Institution: University of Wisconsin, Madison
Dr. Davidson’s team will examine the impact of two forms of meditation — loving-kindness/compassion meditation and mindfulness meditation — on the brain and body, focusing on the regulation of emotion and on emotional reactivity. Potential applications in health include biological and behavioral processes linked with emotions and/or stress, such as recurrent depression.

Metabolic and Immunologic Effects of Meditation
Principal Investigator: Frederick M. Hecht, M.D.
Institution: University of California, San Francisco
Dr. Hecht and his colleagues will study a program combining mindfulness meditation, mindful eating (the practice of awareness and attentiveness in the present moment while eating), and a diet and exercise program, for use in obesity and metabolic syndrome. They will test whether this program helps alter participants’ hormonal responses to stress and helps enhance and maintain weight loss. Metabolic syndrome involves a cluster of abnormalities–including increased cholesterol, high blood pressure, and insulin resistance–that increases one’s risk for developing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

CAM as Countermeasures Against Infectious and Inflammatory Disease
Principal Investigator: Mark A. Jutila, Ph.D.
Institution: Montana State University, Bozeman
This center will study biologically based CAM therapies and their effects on immune system function in infectious and inflammatory diseases. One project focuses on effects of botanical extracts — from apple polyphenols, which are concentrated in apple skins, and from yamoa, which comes from the bark of an African gum tree — on white blood cells, using models of infection and inflammation of the intestinal mucosa. A second project examines two compounds in licorice root — glycyrrhizin and 18-glyrrhetinic acid — for their potential antiviral effects in models of influenza and stomach virus. A third project will focus on bacterial products to see how they treat autoimmune diseases, like arthritis, which may also help build understanding of probiotics’ action.

Center for Herbal Research on Colorectal Cancer
Principal Investigator: Chun-Su Yuan, M.D., Ph.D.
Institution: University of Chicago
Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer and the third leading cause of cancer-related death. Dr. Yuan and his colleagues will examine the anti-tumor effects of different preparations of the herbs American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) and notoginseng (Panax notoginseng). They will seek to learn more, through laboratory and animal studies, about how these herbs act upon cellular and molecular pathways of the mechanisms of cancer inhibition.

“The new CERCs, all based on strong preliminary work, apply natural-product and mind-body CAM approaches across a range of health conditions that affect the American public,” said Josephine P. Briggs, M.D., NCCAM director. “Their multidisciplinary, collaborative structure increases opportunities for improving health and discovering insights into important aspects of human biology.”

The grants provide five years of support and bring the total number of CERCs to 11. To learn more about NCCAM’s research centers, go to nccam.nih.gov/training/centers/.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine’s mission is to explore complementary and alternative medical practices in the context of rigorous science, train CAM researchers, and disseminate authoritative information to the public and professionals. For additional information, call NCCAM’s Clearinghouse toll free at 1-888-644-6226, or visit the NCCAM Web site at nccam.nih.gov.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) — The Nation’s Medical Research Agency — includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It is the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting basic, clinical and translational medical research, and it investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit the NIH

Posted in alternative medicine, complementary medicine, healing, healing philosophy, Health, health care, holistic, holistic medicine, medicine, meditation, stress

Tagged , , , ,