MEDICAL TREATMENTS: GOOD. BAD. HARMFUL?
Excerpts from Dr. Bruce West‘s Health Alert Newsletter
Your doctor recommends a statin (cholesterol) drug, even though you do not have heart disease. Or he recommends antibiotics for sinusitis or an ear infection. Or a PSA test for prostate cancer prevention. Or a mammogram for breast cancer prevention. Or warfarin (a blood thinner) instead of aspirin. And you are confused. The drug must be good for you, or he would not recommend it. But could it harm you? And will it really help you? And just what are the odds that it will do any good versus the potential damage it could cause? These are all the questions for which answers will not be forthcoming from your doctor.
What you really want is the math. For example, with the statin drug, what is your risk of having a heart attack now, and how much of that risk will be lowered by taking a statin? What are the odds that you will be damaged by the drug? And how long will you have to take the drug to derive any benefit at all? Finally, what is the number of people needed to be treated (nnt) with this statin to statistically show any benefit?
Once you get these numbers, you will be shocked as this reality hits—there are very few medical treatments that provide meaningful benefit without serious side effects, which are often worse than the condition itself. And even though established medicine does not want you to have this data, it is now yours for the asking.
Simply log on to http://www.thennt.com/ and search for your condition and drug treatment. Click on it and instantly get the real statistics that are brief, simple, and easy to read and comprehend for anyone. An example is antibiotic therapy for childhood ear infection (otitis media)—the universal medical treatment. You will immediately find out that for those taking antibiotics:
• 100% had no benefit with reduced serious complications like meningitis or hearing loss (the reason most doctors tell you that your child needs the drug).
• 100% had no benefit with reoccurrence of ear infection.
• 100% had no reduction in pain in 24 hours.
• 6% had reduced pain in 2-7 days (less than the percent of those taking no drugs).
• 11 % were harmed by the drug.
Or here's a fast, simple, understandable summary: None had fewer complications, none had fewer reoccurrences, none had reduced pain in 24 hours, 1 in 16 had less pain in 2-7 days, and 1 in 9 were harmed. Pick yourself up off the floor after you realize that, despite these facts, millions of doses of antibiotics are prescribed each year for children's ear infections.
You can also plug in lots of other conditions to finally get real, true, accurate, unsullied, untainted, and sobering statistics. With all the medical garbage on the Internet, this site is refreshing indeed. It will make you rethink most everything you "know" about medicine. And it will confirm most everything that we have written in Health Alert.
It will also make you rethink your feelings about the propaganda against "health care rationing," and "death squads." God forbid we ever consider less medical care. This would be cruel. But is it? Statistics do not lie. When I was young there were doctor strikes several times in the New York metropolitan area. Each and every time, the death rate dropped because of reduced medical care.
When you peruse the http://www.thennt.com/ site you will find ample evidence to support the hypothesis that if our country had a 50% reduction in medical treatments, we would all be better off. And that most of the propaganda against "health care rationing" comes from the medically brainwashed, the ignorant, and the well-entrenched medical special interests who simply like things just the way they are. These special interests don't want anything to change—even if it financially breaks the back of our nation.
Do We Have the Best Healthcare in the World?
The views of people who rail against "health care rationing" to support their own agenda—like so many politicians and talk show hosts—should be scrutinized. These folks constantly harp that the U.S. has the best health care and the greatest longevity in the world. If that were so, statistics would prove it. However, there are nasty little facts that prove just the opposite. For example:
• We have the most expensive—not the best-health care in the world. The World Health Organization rated the U.S. 37th in health outcomes in the world—on par with Serbia! In the 2000 rankings, the U.S. was near the very bottom of the top 40 nations, below Columbia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Dominica, and just above Slovenia, Cuba, and Croatia. And it is worse today.
• Our medical schools are absolutely the most extensive. But they are primarily dominated by a fundamentalist orthodoxy of prescription drugs and surgery for everything and nothing but prescription drugs and surgery for anything.
• Statistics from the year 2000 that show that we live the longest, are manipulated and misleading. In the rankings of all developed countries, the U.S. placed near the very bottom in life expectancy among people at age 60.
U.S. health care has transformed itself into a growth industry, consuming ever-greater sums of money while our health and medical services steadily deteriorate. The next time you are recommended to have thousands of dollars in tests and treatments, some of which might harm or kill you and most of which will not help you, remember http://www.thennt.com/ .
The truth is that when you need a good doctor or treatment, it is priceless. And we can thank medical research for the essential treatments that we may need in our life. And when it comes to doctors, most are very smart, altruistic, and well-meaning people. But because medical education has become a prescription-drug-and-surgery brainwashing machine that ignores alternative therapies, too many of these wonderful folks get "educated out of the brains they were born with."
But you need to be smarter.
Fluoride depletes iodine in the body, causing hypothyroidism and immune deficiency
Fluoride is getting a lot of bad press these days, and for good reason: it is a toxic molecule that wreaks extensive, often irreversible, havoc on the body. The thyroid is particularly affected by fluoride exposure because its store of iodine is depleted. Iodine deficiency depresses the thyroid's metabolic and immune functions, resulting in hypothyroidism and lowered immunity.
Fluoride and iodine are both halogens. Fluoride, the negative ion of the element fluorine, easily displaces iodine in the body because it is much lighter and therefore more reactive.
Lack of iodine shuts down production of thyroxine, the thyroid prohormone that controls metabolism, and, in one way or another, impacts every aspect of health. The resulting hypothyroidism causes weight gain, cold intolerance, dry and prematurely aged skin, depression, constipation, hair loss, memory loss, irritability, increased cholesterol levels, heart disease and loss of libido.
But the action of iodine in the thyroid is not limited to metabolism; it also has an important immune function. Blood circulates through the thyroid once every 17 minutes in what has been called the '17 minute passage'. Secretion of iodine, a potent germ killer, into the blood stream as it is passing through the thyroid weakens invading organisms, allowing them to be more easily eradicated. If the thyroid is deficient in iodine, this critical step in immunity will be reduced or eliminated.
Unlike iodine, which the body cannot store long-term, fluoride is a problematic and persistent toxin. Its effects are systemic and only about half of what is ingested can be excreted; the rest is stored in bones and tissues, blocking access to other elements, like iodine.
Fluoride exposure can come from multiple obvious and not-so-obvious sources. In addition to dental hygiene products and drinking water, many breakfast cereals, juices from concentrate, soda and other processed foods contain alarming levels. Fluoride containing pesticide use means that the environment is being flooded with fluoride by conventional agriculture (http://www.fluoridealert.org/f-pest...). Also, many antidepressants contain large amounts of fluoride and are widely prescribed, often for a lifetime of use.
Conventional medicine's response to hypothyroidism typically ignores causes and prescribes synthetic thyroxine hormone in an attempt to balance out the health equation with another unnatural substance; this is nothing new. But hypothyroidism is a national epidemic, affecting roughly 10% of the female population in the US and in no way sparing men. It has created a stable, ever-expanding market for these cash cow thyroid drugs (the leading thyroid drug was number 7 on JAMA's list of 'most commonly prescribed' in 2006; one year later it was number 4).
One might assume then that fluoride's role in depressing thyroid function is a new discovery, that government fluoride programs simply lack this vital information. Yet research has been taking place since the 1930s, when fluoride was used to treat individuals with overactive thyroid. The relationship is well established, and old.
Which leads inevitably to a difficult question: How could government allow fluoride addition to drinking water, approve fluoride-containing drugs and pesticides, and fail to test for fluoride content in food when there is a known connection with serious thyroid complications?
Perhaps the cash value of the fact that millions of Americans take thyroid drugs, and most likely will take them the rest of their lives, can suggest an unbiased, honest answer.
CDC and ADA Now Advise to Avoid Using Fluoride
A new study in the Journal of the American Dental Association finds once again that, contrary to what most people have been told, fluoride is actually bad for teeth.
Exposure to high levels of fluoride results in a condition known as fluorosis, in which tooth enamel becomes discolored. The condition can eventually lead to badly damaged teeth. The new study found that fluoride intake during a child's first few years of life is significantly associated with fluorosis, and warned against using fluoridated water in infant formula.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is of a similar opinion. According to their website:
"Recent evidence suggests that mixing powdered or liquid infant formula concentrate with fluoridated water on a regular basis may increase the chance of a child developing ... enamel fluorosis."
It was 2007 when the American Dental Association (ADA) first warned that parents of infants younger than a year old "should consider using water that has no or low levels of fluoride" when mixing baby formula, due to concerns about fluorosis.
Now the Journal of the American Dental Association has published a study that found increased fluorosis risk among infants who were fed infant formula reconstituted with fluoride-containing water, as well as used fluoridated toothpastes.
The United States is one of only eight countries in the entire developed world that fluoridates more than 50 percent of its water supply. It is added under the guise that it helps prevent and control tooth decay …
This is in spite of the fact that there never been any demonstrated difference in tooth decay between countries with fluoridated and non-fluoridated water, and no difference between states that have a high or low percentage of their water fluoridated.
"In a remarkable turnabout, federal health officials say many Americans are now getting too much fluoride because of its presence not just in drinking water, but in toothpaste, mouthwash, and other products, and it's causing splotches on children's teeth and perhaps more serious problems."
The Associated Press, Jan 8, 2011
In what can only be determined to be an insult to common sense, U.S. health experts now admit, after more than 50 years, that fluoride is a health problem and that the amount in water must be reduced! Biochemists and true health experts have known this since the 1950s. But the money trail involved in allowing a toxic, industrial poison to be pumped into municipal water supplies rather than delivered to a toxic waste dump has been just too great. It has caused politicians and public health officials to dupe and brainwash the public, medical and dental practitioners, and municipal officials for half a century.
Actually fluoride is so toxic that no level is safe. So just how did we get duped into mandating the toxic chemical, hydrofluorosilicic acid—a waste product from chimney scrubbers and the phosphate industry—for medicinal use? How did we get duped into having this toxic acid, defined by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as "an extremely hazardous waste" added to two-thirds of our public water systems? How did we get duped into having this chemical, which is so toxic and radioactive that it can't be legally dumped into any body of water including the ocean, used in our mouths by dentists? And how did we get duped into having this extremely toxic waste sold as pills and dental treatments and added to toothpastes, mouthwashes, sodas, bottled water, and more, as a remedy to stop tooth decay?
Simple. Follow the money. The sale of this poison has turned some corporations' financial red ink into profits. Their industrial waste is sold unrefined to be diluted and dumped into municipal water supplies with no real scientific evidence of its safety or effectiveness in preventing tooth decay. And for the record, for those who claim that the natural mineral fluoride can harden teeth and prevent cavities., you must understand that the mineral found in nature has no relationship to the poisonous hydrofluorosilicic acid produced by industry and sold as fluoride.
And also for the record, if you have dental fluorosis, you also have skeletal fluorosis (bone changes). Even the EPA has determined that fluoride damage to the skeleton can lead to brittle bones, fractures, and crippling bone abnormalities. And just how many fractures occur in women in this country? You guessed it—millions. So everyone is now clamoring to lower the allowable fluoride limits. I guess they are all suddenly catching on to reality.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, the new "safer" fluoride limit in drinking water would be .7 parts per million (ppm). And eleven EPA unions, including ones representing the agency's scientists, pleaded with the EPA to reduce the permissible level of fluoride in water to zero, citing research suggesting that it can cause cancer!
So what does the EPA do? It is mulling the idea of lowering its acceptable "safe" level of 4 ppm to "who knows." The present 4 ppm level is almost 6 times greater than what is now considered "safe." And it is thousands of times too much for those real experts who want to eliminate added fluoride from drinking water altogether. We know today, that 2 ppm (half the EPA's currently suggested "safe" level) can cause severe fluorosis!
This is why the only real solution is to stop the archaic practice of water fluoridation in the United States.
I could go on, but simply know that the whole fluoride scam is an insult to your intelligence. It is selling the public health by forcing medical treatment on you, me, and everyone for a profit. Be smarter. Don't wait for the government to protect you. Instead, get the fluoride out of your own water supply—especially if you have kids. The best way is by using a reverse osmosis water purifier, but any good quality filter that helps remove fluoride is an improvement.
And don't buy any of the fluoride garbage— whether it is toothpastes, sodas, or bottled water. Eat a whole-foods diet and get the mineral fluoride as nature provides it—from your food. Do not get or have your kids get fluoride treatments from your dentist. During and after these treatments, fluoride is not only swallowed in large quantities, but also absorbed directly through the linings in your mouth into your bloodstream. And for goodness sake, do not take or give your kids fluoride supplements!
The Fluoride Action Network is a good resource for further education, and they're doing a lot to pressure the US government for change. In addition, I highly recommend getting a copy of Dr. Connett's new book, "The Case Against Fluoride", for more information on the bad science and political agendas that got this toxic chemical in our drinking water and is, at least for now, keeping it there.
Until next time, stay healthy and happy
JD Roma
The information on this blog is provided for educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical care, and medical advice and services are not being offered. If you have, or suspect you have, a health problem you should consult your physician (preferably a Naturopath).
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