Archives for September 2002

The point of this little story is that blindly prescribing iron to patients can be futile and even dangerous. I first reported on the dangers of excessive iron in one's diet in 1987 in Health Freedom News, the journal of the National Health Federation.

Your best defense against threats from within – viruses, bacteria, chemicals, parasites, fungi, tumors, etc. (it's a jungle in there) is a well-armed immune system.

If you have a good diet, low in carbohydrates and vegetable fats and high in animal fats and animal protein and if you supplement with testosterone as needed, exercise isn't really needed at all to maintain muscle mass and good health.

Of course, for 25 years I've been asking dermatologists, if skin wrinkling is caused by sun exposure, why, then, are old Eskimos so wrinkled when they have only six weeks of summer?

Ten years ago, I was talking with a young doctor about peptic ulcer disease. As it turned out, he had never heard that it is caused by a bacterium, even though, at that time, it had been decisively proven to be caused by the germ H. pylori.

The controversy surrounding silver amalgam dental fillings continues to rage on. Silver amalgam fillings are not silver at all, but half mercury with a little silver added, along with copper, tin and zinc.

Dr. E. Fuller Torrey posits that cats may carry infectious diseases that could cause schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Torrey thinks they may be passing along Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite in cat feces, that causes brain lesions in humans and, if he's right, schizophrenia.

1. The case in point this time is a new study on lycopene. It’s pretty much common knowledge these days that lycopene, one of the main ingredients in tomatoes, can help protect against prostate cancer. Now there’s more evidence supporting this finding. University of Illinois researchers report that eating tomatoes, rather than taking lycopene supplements, is also a preventive against prostate cancer.

2. Some medical wise men have gotten together and determined that “it’s extremely welcome news that exercise appears to be a lifestyle characteristic that women can alter to reduce their lifetime risk of breast cancer. The role of physical activity, either recreational or occupational, in reducing breast cancer risk has been studied for over a decade with generally encouraging results.”

3. And now comes some interesting news from Massachusetts General Hospital that indicates coffee (well, caffeine, but coffee’s got plenty of that) may prevent Parkinson’s disease.

4. If you live long enough, “they” say you will eventually get macular degeneration-a deterioration of the central point of your vision in the back of the eye on the retina. In other words, you will eventually go blind.

Until recently, diseases of the veins, such as varicosities (varicose veins) and lymphedema (swelling of a body part), were considered, for the most part, to be untreatable-except for surgery and physical means such as bandaging. But research has started to emerge showing that there may be safe, effective herbal treatments available for the dangers associated with varicose veins.

I think of that incredible story every time I read propaganda from racketeers like the American Cancer Society, badgering you to have annual cancer screenings. Many of us on the fringes of medical correctness have been grumbling for 30 years about the paradox of cancer testing, accurate or not, when the “cures” -radical mastectomies and prostatectomies, for example-are often worse than the disease.