Search This Blog

22 December 2011

27-Year-Old Adelaide Woman Dies Weighing 12Kg with scoliosis, Parents Arrested for Murder


Note from Dr Kevin Lau: 
This is a sad story I read in the newspaper the other day and certainly harks back to my understanding of how important nutrition is to the development of not only the spine for a child but their health it self. Even though most parents of scoliosis sufferers are not neglecting their children health, in this modern society we living in we are malnourished by the modern diet that we are living on. Please read Your Plan for Natural Scoliosis Correction and Prevention and feed your children well.
By Arlene Paredes | December 21, 2011 12:38 PM EST
A 27-year-old disabled woman died at home weighing only 12kg, prompting the police to arrest her parents for murder by neglect, as they may have deliberately left her uncared for at their home.
The parents, both teachers, were arrested by police Monday morning at their home in the suburb of Brighton North, southwest of Adelaide, reported the Herald Sun.
REUTERS/Ismail Taxta
A woman holds her malnourished child on arrival at Banadir hospital in Mogadishu July 7, 2011. The United Nations says 2.8 million people in Somalia need emergency aid after the worst drought in 60 years hit the Horn of Africa region. In the worst-hit areas, one in three children is suffering from malnutrition.
The death was reported on March 19, and Adelaide detectives started an investigation as it seemed the woman had wasted away to weigh just 12kg at the time of her death.
The woman was reportedly bedridden, and she suffered a number of disabilities, including scoliosis.
The family's neighbours had told The Adelaide Advertiser they did not know the woman lived at the address.
The woman's parents, aged 56 and 55, lived with at least one other relative at their home, the Herald noted.
The couple will appear in court on Tuesday to face police allegations that they deliberately caused the death of their daughter by neglecting to adequately feed and care for her. 
To contact the editor, e-mail:editor@ibtimes.com


14 December 2011

Should Boys Be Given the HPV Vaccine? The Science is Weaker than the Marketing


Merck’s promotion of Gardasil, its vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV), has a complicated history. First there was the exuberant claim about its reputedly great effectiveness in preventing cervical cancer. Now comes the recommendation last month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that all 11- and 12-year-old boys should be given the vaccine.
Of Science and Truthiness
The vaccine for boys is important, say advocates, because reducing HPV in boys will reduce transmission to girls and women—only 32 percentof whom have been getting the shots to date. Giving the shots to boys, they say, promotes gender equity. As a bonus, the vaccine may protect against oral and anal cancers in men who have sex with men.
Since a key part of the rationale for vaccinating boys is to protect girls, it’s worth a moment to examine the claims about reducing cervical cancer deaths. Merck won approval for Gardasil from the Food and Drug Administration in June 2006. On May 10, 2007, Merck published the results of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that claimed an astounding 98 percent efficacy in preventing changes in the cervix used as a marker for cervical cancer.
But that statistic begs closer examination.
To achieve the 98 percent efficacy claim, Merck excluded from analysis anyone who “violated” the study protocol. In other words, all real-world problems that arose were excluded from analysis. Problems like girls who refused to take a second or third shot after they became sick and (correctly or incorrectly) blamed the vaccine. Or doctors who incorrectly gave the vaccine to someone who shouldn’t have received it.  While it’s worth knowing how effective the vaccine is when it’s used exactly as it should be, for a public-health decision, it’s not as relevant as its real-world effectiveness.
To Merck’s credit, they reported that when all women in the study were analyzed, the vaccine’s efficacy dropped to 44 percent. Still, 44 percent might be considered a smashing success when you’re talking about saving lives. Except for one thing: the numbers get worse. The 44 percent benefit included only those women with the two specific cancer-causing HPV strains found in the vaccine. But when the researchers looked at negative cervical changes from any causes, they found that changes occurred in unvaccinated women at a rate of 1.5 events per 100 person-years, while vaccinated women had 1.3 events—dropping the benefit to 17 percent.
Moreover, most of the cervical changes tracked by the researchers weren’t even indicative of cervical cancer in the first place. Most were innocent cellular abnormalities that either disappear entirely on their own, or never progress to cancer. In fact, when they looked more closely at advanced cervical changes most likely to progress to cancer versus more innocent changes that go away spontaneously, it was the innocent changes that accounted for the decline.
Whether Gardasil will reduce cervical cancer deaths in real-world conditions has simply never been answered. It might—but that would take a long-term study, and one that should be donebefore it’s widely promoted.
A Cure in Need of a Disease
Now, come the boys. If cervical cancer prevention and gender equity don’t have you jumping out of your seat to grab every preteen boy to get a shot, what about the claim that Gardasil might prevent anal and oral cancers men may get from having sex with other men?
Merck says that in males, the vaccine is 89 percent effective against genital warts and 75 percent effective against anal cancer. On closer inspection, some of the numbers don’t just deflate, they evaporate. First off, let’s define the problem: The annual number of deaths from anal-rectal cancer among all men in the U.S. is 300. And how did Merck get its happy statistics on efficacy? Once again, they reported an idealized benefit by excluding from analysis 1,250 study violators out of 4,055 total test subjects. When the real-world analysis was conducted, the numbers plunged—right down to plum nothing. After evaluating tissue changes in male genitalia that were suggestive of a cancer precursor, Merck reported that vaccine efficacy against such lesions “was not observed.”
Given this, is it worth the risk of exposing millions of youth to the as yet uncertain harms of the vaccine? The CDC states that in rare instances, some vaccines may trigger the potentially fatal and paralyzing condition Guillain-Barré, and Nizar Souayah, MD, of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, says he and his colleagues found “clear evidence from our database of an increased incidence of Guillain-Barré syndrome in the first six weeks, especially the first two weeks, after [HPV] vaccination.” Guillain-Barré is very rare, even among people who are HPV vaccinated, but the problem is emblematic of the downsides of subjecting millions of people to any medical treatment.
Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money, Mo’ Money
So how did the HPV vaccine become a multi-billion-dollar winner for Merck? Well you might not be surprised to hear that the company happily lavished money on doctors, professional societies, and over 100 legislators. Of course, there is no tie between the recipients of this largesse and their promotion of the vaccine, say beneficiaries like presidential candidate and current Texas governor Rick Perry. In 2007, Perry signed an executive decree mandating that all girls in Texas receive the vaccine. The $28,500 Perry received was minor compared to his other connection to Merck: Perry’s chief of staff, Mike Toomey, became a lobbyist for Merck, championing the HPV vaccine. Once in that position, announced his plans to raise over $50 million for Perry’s presidential campaign.
In any case, the marketing certainly doesn’t seem to have hurt the adoption of Gardasil, which has been administered to millions of girls around the country. Caught up in the joy, some 41 state legislatures have initiated bills to promote or mandate the shots for all girls. With the CDC’s new recommendation for boys, one can imagine that promotion or mandates for them might come next.

This Simple Supplement Can Cut Your Risk of Dying in HALF


Taking vitamin D supplements in order to overcome a deficiency in the vitamin could cut your risk of dying by more than half. An analysis of more than 10,000 patients found that 70 percent were deficient in vitamin D -- and those who were, were three times more likely to die from any cause.
However, once the deficiencies were corrected by supplements, the risk of death dropped by more than half.  In addition, the researchers found that patients with low levels of vitamin D were more likely to have diabetes, high blood pressure, and diseased heart muscle.
According to the study:
“In conclusion, vitamin D deficiency was associated with a significant risk of cardiovascular disease and reduced survival. Vitamin D supplementation was significantly associated with better survival, specifically in patients with documented deficiency.”

Sources:


13 December 2011

Exposing the hidden epidemic of crippling, painful neurological adverse effects of antibiotics

(NaturalNews) The adverse reactions from a certain specific class of antibiotics resemble the crippling adverse reactions of the vaccine injured. But there is much less notoriety among these agonized and debilitated victims of the Medical Mafia, except for one PBS Nightly News special from June 16th, 2011. (PBS, source below)

Most antibiotic victims are adults with no one to look after them. Unlike unfortunate autistic or paralyzed vaccine injured kids who have parents dedicated to taking care of them. Thanks to social networking and internet forums, these victims have some support.

Unfortunately, most of them are locked into the Medical Mafia system of harmful drugs and brain washed medicine. Their complaints are often disregarded as delusional, or they're misdiagnosed for rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, or MS. And that's because their symptoms are similar, and worse. They often suffer from the constant pain of extreme neuropathy.

Very few adverse event reports make it to the FDA's Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS). It's estimated by even the FDA that less than ten percent of actual adverse events make it into this system. It's not advertised to patients as the complaint department of choice, and doctors tend be averse to reporting adverse events from drugs they've prescribed.

So the forums and social network systems such as a facebook "wall of pain" containing personal stories and photos of current victims are their sole recourse and support. Most of them are motivated with the desire to warn others and curse the FDA. They don't have ambulance chasing attorneys - yet.

The most troublesome antibiotics

Fluoroquinolone antibioticsappear to be the most pernicious class of antibiotics causing the worst adverse effects. They are prescribed and sold asCiprofloxacin (Cipro), Levaquin, Avelox, and Tequin. Apparently enough adverse event reports have gotten through, causing the FDA to issue a black box warning for Levaquin specifically and fluoroquinolones in general.

The black box is the FDA's most severe warning, but it goes only to whoever is prescribing the drug. It's up to physicians and pharmacists to sound the alarm for their patients and customers. But usually those alarms don't get sounded, even, according to many victims, when queried about their safety.

Fluoroquinolone antibiotics seem to be popular. They are dispensed for minor infections when they should be used only for extremely serious infections, though there could be problems there too. At least the ratio of benefit to risk would be closer then. A professor of pharmacology at Indiana University was quoted as saying "you don't use big guns to kill mosquitoes."
Monday, December 12, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) You might be reassured to learn that the buttery flavor in microwave popcorn typically comes from a chemical actually found in butter, but you shouldn't be. This chemical, calleddiacetyl, is so toxic that it commonly destroys the lungs of workers in microwave popcorn factories, afflicting them with the crippling and irreversible disease known asbronchiolitis obliterans. Bronchiolitis obliterans is so rare outside of this context that it has become more commonly known as "popcorn lung," after the primary cause of the disease.

Regulators and health professionals have known of this risk for decades, but always assumed that it would only affect people breathing in especially high concentrations in factory settings. Then in 2007, a man who regularly ate two bags of microwave popcorn every day was diagnosed with popcorn lung, indicating thatdiacetylenters the air and lungs when microwave popcorn is cooked. Anxious to reassure consumers, most microwave popcorn companies phased out diacetyl -- only to replace it with chemicals that have the same effects.

Today, you can still finddiacetylin many flavored snack foods and even in some so-called "natural" foods. Make sure youread the ingredientsof any food you intend to consume, and make sure it contains no diacetyl (and no "yeast extract" for that matter, either).

Sources:
http://www.naturalnews.com/024460_p...
http://www.naturalnews.com/023771_p...
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/artic...
Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/034386_microwave_popcorn_diacetyl_lungs.html#ixzz1gOVmQVda

About Dr Kevin Lau

Dr Kevin Lau DC is the founder of Health In Your Hands, a series of tools for Scoliosis prevention and treatment. The set includes his book Your Plan for Natural Scoliosis Prevention and Treatment, a companion Scoliosis Exercises for Prevention and Correction DVD and the innovative new iPhone application ScolioTrack. Dr Kevin Lau D.C. is a graduate in Doctor of Chiropractic from RMIT University in Melbourne Australia and Masters in Holistic Nutrition from Clayton College of Natural Health in USA. In 2006 I was awarded the "Best Health-care Provider Awards" by the largest Newspaper publication in Singapore on October 18 2006 as well as being interviewed on Primetime Channel News Asia as well as other TV and Radio. For more information on Dr Kevin Lau, watch his interviews or get a free sneak peek of his book, go to: http://www.hiyh.info.

6 December 2011

Vitamin D Cuts Flu By Half: Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Randomized Trial


Vitamin D is a highly effective way to avoid influenza. A study documents that children taking low doses of Vitamin D3 are 42% less likely to contract influenza.
Nicknamed the sunshine supplement because we can synthesize it from sun exposure on our skin, Vitamin D3 has been anecdotally linked to flu prevention on many occasions. This study provides strong evidence of the validity of the observations.

The Study

Performed by Mitsuyoshi Urashima and colleagues from the Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, the study was randomized, double blinded, and placebo-controlled. 430 children aged 6-15 were enrolled and followed between December 2008 and March 2009. Half were given Vitamin D3 and the other half received a placebo. The dose was 1,200 IUs a day. 334 of the children completed the study.
Nose and throat swabs were used to diagnose influenza Types A and B. 18 of the children taking Vitamin D, and 31 in the placebo group, came down with influenza Type A, indicating a 42% reduction of risk from taking Vitamin D. Type A influenza includes all the serious flu epidemics, including seasonal flus and the swine flu fake pandemic.
Type B influenza was unaffected by Vitamin D. This is not a great concern, as Type B influenzas are generally very mild. Type C influenzas have never been associated with epidemics and are even milder, with only cold-like symptoms.
Some reports claim that the study shows Vitamin D outperforms flu vaccinations. While it’s certainly a far healthier and safer way to avoid influenza, the truth is that the study did not make any comparison with vaccination. However, in light of the fact that there is No Value in Any Influenza Vaccine, as documented in a Cochrane Collaboration study, it is certainly a fair assessment that Vitamin D outperforms flu vaccines—and does so without the dangers.

Study Used Low Dose of Vitamin D

While the study is certainly indicative of the benefit of Vitamin D in preventing flu, it might have shown an even greater effect if the authors had used more adequate doses. As Dr. Mercola has noted in Canada Looks at Vitamin D for Swine Flu Protection, 1,200 IUs of Vitamin D is adequate only in the youngest children.
Canada’s Public Health Agency notes that they’ve done a study showing that children below age 5 should take 35 IUs/day per pound of weight, children aged 5-10 should take 2,500 IUs, and adults should take 5,000 IUs/day. These figures are, of course, typical standardized doses, and are not necessarily adequate for individuals, nor are they necessarily needed by everyone.

Conventional Medicine Still Doesn’t Get It!

When one considers the risks inherent in flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, the prevention of influenza through Vitamin D’s immune system boosting is certainly far superior to vaccination.

7 Foods Many Experts Won't Eat


Wake Up World has assemble a list of foods that are avoided by people who know the facts.  Here are a few examples:
GMO FOODS:  Not only do GMO foods encourage the massive spraying of insecticides, but studies have shown that pesticide-producing genes in these foods transfer to your intestinal flora. GMO foods come with a staggering environmental, political, economic, and social cost.
CANNED TOMATOES:  Food can lining contains bisphenol-A (BPA), a synthetic estrogen that has been linked to many illnesses.  The problem worsens when the cans contain acidic food such as tomatoes, which leach BPA into the food.
CORN-FED BEEF:  Cattle evolved to eat grass rather than corn.  But modern cattle are fed so as to fatten them up faster, not to keep them healthy.  The result is beef that is much less nutritious.
MICROWAVE POPCORN:  Chemicals that line the bag, such as PFOA, have been linked to infertility in humans and various forms of cancer in animal tests.
To see the rest of the list, you can click on the link below.

Sources:


26 November 2011

10 Things You May Not Know About Your Weight


Most of us have the basics ingrained in our brains. Eat less, eat healthy and exercise more. If only it were that easy. Having the right knowledge can make a big difference in how you act and react when it comes to your weight. Here are 10 things you may not know (but should) about your weight. 

1. Some People Just Have More Fat Cells 
And the range is enormous, with some people having twice as many fat cells as others have, says Kirsty Spalding, PhD, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Even if you've lost a few pounds (or gained some), your fat-cell count remains, holding tight to the fat already inside and forever thirsting to be filled up with more. (To add insult to injury, the fat cells of overweight and obese people hold more fat too.) 

New fat cells emerge during childhood but seem to stop by adolescence. Those of us destined to have a lot of these cells probably start producing them as young as age two. The cells' rate of growth may be faster, too-even if kids cut way back on calories. 

Strangers have written to Spalding, telling her how depressed they are by her research. But she says her news isn't all bleak. You're better off with more fat cells, she says, than with fewer fat cells that become overstuffed and enlarged. (New research suggests that the overstuffed group are more vulnerable to obesity-related health complications.) So while you can't reduce your total number of fat cells, there are things you can do to keep them small. (See next point.) 

2. You Can Change Your Metabolism 
Another Scandinavian team looked into what happens at the cellular level when you gain weight. Kirsi Pietiläinen, PhD, an assistant professor of nutrition at Helsinki University Central Hospital, studied sets of twins where one was fat and the other thin, and learned that fat cells in heavier twins underwent metabolic changes that make it more difficult to burn fat. Pietiläinen's team suspects that gaining as little as 11 pounds can slow metabolism and send you spiraling into a vicious cycle: As you gain more fat, it becomes harder to lose it. 

How to get back on track? "The more I learn on the job, the more I'm convinced we need physical activity," Pietiläinen says. Once a chubby child herself, she now runs regularly and is at a healthy weight. 

3. Stress Fattens You Up 
The most direct route is the food-in-mouth syndrome: Stressful circumstances (your bank account, your boss) spark cravings for carbohydrate-rich snack foods, which in turn calm stress hormones. (When researchers in one study took away high-carb food from stressed mice, their stress hormones surged.) 

Stress hormones also ramp up fat storage. For our prehistoric ancestors, stress meant drought or approaching tigers, and a rapid-storage process made sense; we needed the extra energy to survive food shortages or do battle. Today we take our stress sitting down-and the unused calories accumulate in our midsection. 

To whittle yourself back down to size, in addition to your usual workout routine, make time for stress relief-whether it's a yoga class or quality time with family. 

4. Mom's Pregnancy Sealed Your Fate 
A mother's cigarettes increase the risk of low birth weight, and alcohol can damage her baby's brain. So why wouldn't unhealthy foods wreak similar havoc? A growing body of science suggests that sugary and fatty foods, consumed even before you're born, do exactly that. A Pennington study on rodents reports that overweight females have higher levels of glucose and free fatty acids floating around in the womb than normal-weight ones do. These molecules trigger the release of proteins that can upset the appetite-control and metabolic systems in the developing brain. 

What's true for mice is often true for humans too. Doctors from State University of New York Downstate Medical Center compared children born before their mothers had gastric bypass surgery with siblings born later. Women weighed less after the surgery, as expected, but their children were also half as likely to be obese. Because siblings have such similar genetic profiles, the researchers attributed the weight differences to changes in the womb environment. Moms-to-be, take note: You can give your kids a head start by eating well before they're born. 

5. Sleep More, Lose More 
When patients see Louis Aronne, MD, past president of the Obesity Society and author of the forthcoming book The Skinny, they're as likely to have their sleep assessed as their eating habits. If patients are getting less than seven to eight hours, Dr. Aronne may prescribe more shut-eye rather than the latest diet or drug. With more sleep, he says, "they have a greater sense of fullness, and they'll spontaneously lose weight." 

Why? University of Chicago researchers reported that sleep deprivation upsets our hormone balance, triggering both a decrease in leptin (which helps you feel full) and an increase of ghrelin (which triggers hunger). As a result, we think we're hungry even though we aren't-and so we eat. Indeed, sleep may be the cheapest and easiest obesity treatment there is. 

6. Your Spouse's Weight Matters 
When Jodi Dixon's six-foot-two, 360-pound husband lost 125 pounds, she had mixed feelings. She was the one who always watched her weight and exercised; she was always the one trying to get her husband to be more active. Mort, a medical sales rep, was always the life of the party, says his wife, a 43-year-old mother of two in Freehold, New Jersey. But when he lost the weight, it was different. 

"Men and women would flock to him, drawn to his charisma," she recalls. "I felt jealous." Dixon comforted herself with food and gained 20 pounds before she decided to take action. She began biking with her husband and enrolled in a diet program. Eventually she trimmed down, too, shedding 30 pounds, and has her sights on losing more. 

Dixon credits the weight gain, and the loss, to her jealousy. But research shows that weight gain and loss can be, well, contagious. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that if one spouse is obese, the other is 37 percent more likely to become obese too. The researchers concluded that obesity seems to spread through social networks. 

As in Dixon's case, slimming down seems to be catching, at least within the family: When Dixon launched her weight-loss plan, her eldest daughter, also overweight, followed her mom's healthy habits and lost 40 pounds. 

7. Cookies Really Are Addictive 
While food is not addictive the way cocaine or alcohol is, scientists in recent years have found some uncanny similarities. When subjects at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia were shown the names of foods they liked, the parts of the brain that got excited were the same parts activated in drug addicts. It may have to do with dopamine, the hormone linked to motivation and pleasure, say researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. If obese people have fewer dopamine receptors, they may need more food to get that pleasurable reaction. 

8. Ear Infections Can Taint Your Taste Buds 
For years, the team at Linda Bartoshuk's taste lab at the University of Florida wondered why people who tasted food less intensely than others seemed more likely to be fat. Researcher Derek Snyder had a theory: Could an ear infection, which can damage a taste nerve running through the middle ear, be the missing link? After tabulating 6,584 questionnaires, the team discovered that those over 35 who had suffered several ear infections had almost double the chance of being obese. 

Responses to additional questions provided clues as to why. Former ear-infection patients were a little more likely to love sweets and fatty foods-perhaps because the damaged nerve causes them to have a higher threshold for sensing sweetness and fattiness. Even a small increase in calories from bad food choices adds up over time. 

Childhood ear infections are as hard to avoid as the colds that tend to bring them on, but limiting passive smoke seems to drive down incidents of ear infection. If you're an overweight adult who suffered a severe ear infection as a child, it may be worth paying attention to the taste and texture of your food. Simply finding healthier substitutes, such as fruit instead of candy, or olive oil instead of butter, may help drive you toward eating better and weighing less. 

9. Antioxidants Are Also Anti-Fat 
Free radicals are now blamed not only for making you look old but also for making you fat. Zane Andrews, PhD, a neuroendocrinologist at Monash University in Australia, says these oxidizing molecules damage the cells that tell us we're full. Free radicals emerge when we eat (something even the keenest dieter must do to survive), but they're especially prevalent when we gorge on candy bars, chips, and other carbohydrates. With every passing year, these fullness signifiers suffer wear and tear-causing the "stop eating!" signal to get weaker and appetites (and possibly our stomachs) to get bigger. The best way to fight back? Avoid the junk and load up on colorful, antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables. 

10. You Can Be Fat and Fit 
A growing body of literature suggests that size doesn't matter when it comes to your health. A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine surveyed 5,440 American adults and found that 51 percent of the overweight and almost 32 percent of the obese had mostly normal cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, and other measures of good health. 

Further defying conventional wisdom, the article also reported that 23.5 percent of trim adults were, in fact, metabolically abnormal-making them more vulnerable to heart disease than their heavier counterparts. 

The latest U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report corroborates what our doctors have said all along: You need about 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity five days a week for health. And you don't even have to do your exercise in one fell swoop-ten-minute stints of walking are just as effective. That means if you forgo the elevators for the stairs, get off one train or bus stop earlier, and park your car a few blocks away, chances are you'll be good for the day. 

Remember Steven Blair, the self-described short, fat, bald guy? At age 69, his blood pressure is in check, his cholesterol levels are normal, and his heart is strong. What's more, he may have even more positive vital signs, according to his recent study in the journal Obesity: Men who are fit (determined by their performance on a treadmill) have a lower risk of dying of cancer than out-of-shape guys, regardless of their body mass index, waist size, or percentage of body fat. 

The news is heartening, says Blair: "We don't have great tools to change people's weight, but we know we can change their fitness levels.


ShareThis