Germs first. More specifically, the microbes that we can’t live without. Michael Pollan offers another fascinating read in Some Of My Best Friends Are Germs. Further confirmation that grandma knew best.
Between the combination of the western diet that includes a high percentage of food-like substances and our modern-living through chemistry, we’re killing off all the good germs with the bad. Or the good germs are collateral damage of “our way of life.” (Leading one man with severe allergies to seek an extreme “cure”. Gross but only a bit more so than the fecal transplant treatment being done by a few physicians in special situations.)
Now on to Dirty Medicine by Katherine Eban in “Fortune.” Did you know that:
…More than 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients for all U.S. drugs now come from overseas, as do 40% of finished pills and capsules.
I didn’t. Is it reasonable to assume that those drugs are as safe as crayons and girls jewelry from China (both tainted with lead)? Or baby formula and dog food with melamine? (The black market for US produced baby formula is strong in China.)
The US FDA is no more equipped to oversee the food and drugs grown and manufactured around the globe than the IRS is able to manage a flood of scam 501(c)(4) applications. Just at the floodgates to “free trade” began opening in the 1990s, this country also streamlined government by cutting back on all those pesky bureaucratic regulators. But who cares when we can consume more and more because everything is now so much cheaper? Well, everything except healthcare which despite all the cheap generic drugs that we can now get, the total cost just keeps going up.
Big Pharma, Dr. Big Brother and the Insurance Gang plus Big Food/Big Agriculture (bad food), ably assisted by the Government Media Complex.
A formidable foe.
But…a certain suspension of disbelief is necessary if one is going to be fleeced and controlled by this particular group. That’s media’s task and they have been doing a damned good job of it for over 50 years.
Step away from the media with your brains in the air.
Y’all would be better off.
I am.
Bet on it.
I use herbal medicines, good dietary approaches (mostly organic, heavy on the veggies and whole grains), alternative medicine when necessary (mostly traditional Chinese) and vitamin supplements, and I am burning!!! I haven’t taken a mainstream medicine (except an occasional Advil if I have some sort of minor pain that is getting in the way of my working life) nor seen a mainstream doctor for 20+ years, and that one was a serious mistake. Before that? Another 20+ years free of those vampires.
Check it out. If you dare. And if not? Fear has its own rewards.
Bet on that as well.
Step away from the media with your brains in the air.
Please!!!
AG
Guessing that you didn’t bother reading either Pollan’s or Eban’s articles. Fascinating stuff on many levels.
Good health and a long life is multi-factorial. And a lot of good luck. A dear artist friend of mine was making similar claims to yours back in the late 1960s when he was in his mid-thirties. Then he developed ALS. No known family history of it and both his parents lived well into their nineties.
The diet Pollan recommends is exactly what I’ve consumed my entire life thanks to a mother that could cook and always bought fresh and in-season. But thanks to Jonas Salk, polio isn’t around to cripple or kill us.
You’re probably wasting your money on those herbal and Chinese medicines and vitamin supplements, but the placebo effect might make it worth it.
Bullshit.
I suffered from a variety of nasty little illnesses throughout my early life, topped off by an attack of hives so severe in my mid-20s that I could no longer play my instrument. I went the mainstream medicine route for all of them…a susceptibility to bad colds, frequent debilitating migraines from late adolescence; three (Count ’em. Three!!!) incompetent, quack-produced tonsillectomies from the age of about three through eight. And so on.
Then I met one of the earliest full M.D.s who opposed the whole Big Med scam, Dr. James Hawley Stephenson. In the space of about a week he completely cured me of the hives that mainstream doctors had been “treating” with drugs for almost a year. I was convinced. And I remain convinced. He taught me how to stop a migraine dead in its tracks with a very simple meditation and also taught me how to avoid them in the first place as much as possible. He taught me how to stop a “common cold” dead in its tracks as well, and when I catch one in its early stages it is as good as gone now. I have a mild one maybe once every two years now instead of 2 or 3 or 4 a year. My Chinese doctor…Dr. Stephenson is long gone now…cured my son of very bad allergies and she helped me with a lingering and quite nasty fungal infection as well.
I love that “Oh, it’s all a placebo effect!!!” routine. If the placebo effect was so damned strong, why didn’t the mainstream medical treatments I first tried do any good? I “believed” in them as well.
I got yer “placebo effect.”
Right here!!!
Please!!!
The leftiness world is so lame sometimes.
Sigh.
WTFU.
AG
That could be one source of your illnesses. Not the three or that they were all botched, but that you had a tonsillectomy at all. (When I was eight and the doctor said that a tonsillectomy might be in order because of my earaches, I had the good sense to say no.) They don’t do them except in rare circumstances these days.
If you are satisfied that whatever remedies you take work well for you, then fine. No need to post an obscene reply because someone else doesn’t accept your anecdotal evidence as scientific proof.
You must have had pretty progressive parents for them to listen to you about what medical treatment you should receive when you were eight.
Since my parents were Russians from Latvia, they didn’t trust American doctors, and took me to a Russian doctor when I had a lot of colds, and he just took my adenoids out (without anesthesia).
If doctors rarely do tonsillectomies these days, I wonder why they still do routine neonatal circumcisions, another American effort to improve upon nature.
She lies. No child of 8 in any culture is given that freedom. Hell, in any culture where that is permitted, the kids would choose lollipops over any kind of effective treatment. End of said culture.
Bet on it.
AG
I don’t lie.
It’s the wording, Marie. “I had the good sense to say no.” There is not a child on earth nor ever has been that would say “yes” to such a proposition if they had an inkling of what was going on. Ain’t about “sense,” it’s just about childhood. Your parents made the decision. You were lucky. It wasn’t your decision to make. If it was, then your parents were at fault for taking the decision of a child about such things as valid. 8 years old? Give me a break. I have raised children. An 8 year-old makes “decisions” based on very childish desires. My kids could “decide” at that age about certain things, but not whether or not they went to school, ate their broccoli, went to the dentist or had some sort of medical procedure. Please.
AG
They listened and the doctor agreed to wait. Either fear of an operation or I was outgrowing the earaches saved my tonsils.
Lemme tell you something, Marie2. Obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, just as is beauty. A system that promotes unhealthy food, dangerous drugs and useless medical practices is “obscene” to me. You make your own choices. You bet your life on those choices, as do I. Best of luck in the game.
AG
Do you grab your cock when you do your jazz performances? If not, why not? It couldn’t be because that’s obscene, could it?
The sexuality…the “obscenity” as many uptight cultures interpret it…of the blues (the root of all real jazz) frightens many.
Deal wid it.
Or go down kicking.
I really don’t give a damn.
AG
And I was correct wasn’t I — you didn’t bother to read either article?
Your standard comments to whatever the topic is do get tiresome in that they don’t promote discussion or thinking.
No Marie…you were not correct. Not only did I read them, I knew about the information that they contain beforehand and I knew much more on those subjects as well. They are not “news” to me. In fact, my avoidance of mainstream medicine has a great deal to do with what those articles are saying. The natural microorganisms that colonize our bodies have been with us for eons. Modern medicine so overprescribes antibiotics that the whole balance of nature is thrown off by mass microorganism kills, and not just in our bodies but in the whole body of life. The mainstream agriculture business with its chemical fertilizers and highly drugged livestock is doing the same thing on a massive scale and so is the mainstream food industry with its additives.
Dirty drugs? The whole Big Pharma system is “dirty,” and not just in India. It’s a scam, Marie. If the massive amount of money that is made by that system didn’t buy a huge amount of protection from the government the contents and manufacture of those drugs, their long-term side effects and the lack of real oversight in the testing stages would be a scandal that might topple the whole economy. Bet on it. Big Med, Big Pharma and Big Insurance plus Big Agriculture and Big Food? Multiplied by Big Media and Big Advertising? What percentage of the U.S. economy is predicated on those industries? 20%? 30%? 40% or 50%? More? Probably. It’s the Big Lie, and you are in it up to your vaccination marks and further.
My “standard comments” don’t promote discussion or thinking? More bullshit. You just don’t think much. Proof? Sure. The articles you cite are news to you. Hell Marie, that’s not “news.” Not to me and not to millions of others who have opted out of the mainstream healthcare world over the preceding 50 years of so. It’s old news. Wake the fuck up.
The placebo effect? The entire American medical system is based on a placebo effect. People are trance-mediaed into believing in that system despite its obvious shortcomings. It just ain’t so, Marie. It just ain’t so.
Dr. Kildare is full of shit, and so is the AMA.
Bet on it.
WTFU.
AG