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Alternative Medicine in the News
September 2010 edition 89
published weekly
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FDA Approves New Bone Drug which may Lead to Bone Death
(NaturalNews) In a jaw-dropping and perhaps literally jaw-killing
decision, the FDA has just approved a new bone drug for women that may
lead to worse bones and even cause bone death. Yes, you read that
right: Amgen's newly approved bone drug Prolia, which is designed to
lower the risk of fractures in post-menopausal women, may also carry a
significant risk of actually causing bone death of the jaw and weaker,
more brittle bones that it was designed to prevent. And that isn't all
of the bad news.
The new drug is designed to address bone resorption and bone formation, which is a natural
and essential process that rebuilds bone structure by removing old bone
components (resorption) and replacing them with new ones via bone
formation. High estrogen levels in post-menopausal women frequently interfere with the body's ability to form new bone material. As a result, such women often have weak, brittle bones and higher susceptibility to breaks and fractures.
Prolia
is a so-called monoclonal antibody - a lab-produced antibody that
inactivates the body's bone-breakdown mechanism. Like biophosphate bone
drugs, Prolia targets the body's ability to break down bone components. Prolia does this by targeting a chemical signal in the body
called RANK ligand, which is an essential part of the body's natural
process for breaking down bones. The idea is that by slowing the
process down, bones will lose less bone mass and be less brittle. While
the idea looks good on paper, it can be fraught with danger in actual
practice.
A WebMD article
described the way Prolia works: "The drug slows the bone-breakdown
process -- but also slows the entire bone-remodeling process. Over the
long term, it's not yet clear what this will mean."
The problem is that suppression of bone breakdown may lead
to bone formation outstripping bone breakdown, as has happened with
Fosamax and other biophosphate bone drugs. With the other bone drugs,
new bone formation often produces unnatural bone growth and results in
bones that are actually more susceptible to fractures and
abnormalities. Even worse, the bone drugs have caused even more
dangerous conditions, including bone death of the jaw and spinal paralysis.
There
appear to be no assurances that Prolia will not lead to similar
problems. As the FDA's own press release warns, "Prolia causes
significant suppression of bone turnover and this suppression may
contribute to the occurrence of osteonecrosis of the jaw, a severe bone
disease that affects the jaw, atypical fractures, and delayed fracture
healing."
Osteonecrosis, which literally means "bone death", is one of the more severe side effects
that have been reported for other bone drugs. And, as if bone death of
the jaw were not enough of a concern, several disconcerting side
effects were observed in Prolia's clinical trials.
As WebMD reported, "In clinical trials, women taking Prolia had a higher risk of serious infections
leading to hospitalization, including heart infections. Skin reactions
such as dermatitis, rashes, and eczema also were reported."
Some of the other side effects included:
Back pain
Pain in the extremities
Musculoskeletal pain
High cholesterol levels
Urinary bladder infections
Prolia may also cause lowered levels of calcium, an essential mineral for healthy bones.
So there you have it: the FDA
has approved and trumpeted yet another unnatural Big Pharma drug whose
side effects may far outweigh the benefits. What the FDA won't likely
approve or trumpet are the many safer and less expensive natural ways
that women can beat and avoid osteoporosis.
See for example:
"How to Beat and Prevent Osteoporosis Naturally"
http://www.naturalnews.com/026841_o...
and
"Calcium Alone is not Enough for Healthy Bones"
http://www.naturalnews.com/028776_c...
Sources included:
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsr...
http://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/n...
http://hsibaltimore.com/2010/06/22/...
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Osteoporosis: The effective way of treating it without drugs
Women who want to strengthen their bones, especially after menopause,
should supplement with potassium citrate for 12 months. It's proven to
improve bone mineral density, and it's a great way of countering the
acid-producing effects of the standard Western diet.
A group of
161 postmenopausal women supplemented with potassium citrate, and there
was a significant improvement in bone mineral density in the neck and
hips.
Potassium citrate is an alkaline compound that stops the
leaching of calcium from bones. Aside from supplements, you can also
counter the worst effects of the standard diet by eating more fruits
and vegetables.
(Source: Townsend Letter, 2008; 294: 53).
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Mainstream media now citing ridiculous junk science to discredit omega-3s
(NaturalNews) A study out of the Netherlands has put the mainstream
media in a mindless tizzy about the health effects of omega-3 fatty
acids. Because a group of people fed four teaspoons of omega-3-enriched
margarine a day for more than three years did not experience a
reduction in heart events, many media outlets are foolishly reporting
that omega-3s are not as beneficial as commonly believed.
Margarine, as many people now know, is a synthetic, hydrogenated food product that is actually not a food at all. It is a product composed of synthetic trans-fatty acids that are highly toxic and harmful to health.
Margarine is exactly the type of substance that causes heart attacks
and cardiovascular illness, making it ridiculous to include as part of
a health study.
"[T]rans-fatty acids not only increase the
likelihood of a variety of metabolic disorders including arthritis and
cancer, but also contribute to heart disease," explains Paul Pitchford in his book Healing with Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrition. "In the United States, 95 percent of trans-fatty acid ingestion is from eating margarine and shortening."
So just because a toxic food product is enhanced with low levels of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids does not mean that it will help people to avoid a heart attack.
But it is precisely this flawed methodology that the media has preyed
upon in an effort to debunk the true health-promoting benefits from omega-3s.
Ironically,
a study conducted several years ago found that women who consume four
or more teaspoons of margarine a day are 66 percent more likely to
develop cardiovascular disease
than women who consume less than one teaspoon a month. In other words,
margarine is directly responsible for causing heart disease.
But
these facts have not stopped the media from initiating what appears to
be a misinformation campaign designed to deceive the public into
thinking that omega-3s are not all that great. Do not be fooled.
Foods and oils naturally rich in omega-3 fatty acids, and balanced in terms of omega-6 fatty acids, will do wonders to promote health and prevent disease. These include foods like hemp and flax oils, wild fish and chia seeds.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.time.com/time/health/art...
http://www.naturalpedia.com/C/Cardi...
http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?...
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Grapefruit's bitter taste could be the key to reversing diabetesig
01 September 2010
The bitter taste of grapefruit and other citrus fruits could hold the
key to fighting type II diabetes, the lifestyle disease that can lead
to heart problems, without needing powerful drugs.
Naringin is an antioxidant in the fruits that causes the bitter flavour
- and scientists think it can help the liver break down fat while
increasing insulin sensitivity, thus reversing diabetes.
The antioxidant also mimics the actions of powerful anti-diabetes
drugs, but without all the possible side effects.
In initial tests,
researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have discovered that
naringin has the same positive benefits to the liver as a long fast.
During fasting, the liver eventually starts to break down fatty acids
instead of carbohydrates.
(Source: PLoS ONE, 2010; 5: e12399).
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Disease names like diabetes and osteoporosis are misleading and misinform patients about disease prevention
(Natural News)There is a curious tendency in conventional medicine to name a set of
symptoms a disease. I was recently at a compounding pharmacy having my
bone mineral density measured to update my health stats. I spotted a
poster touting a new drug for osteoporosis. It was written by a drug
company and it said exactly this: "Osteoporosis is a disease that causes weak and fragile bones." Then, the poster went on to say that you need a particular drug to counteract this "disease."
Yet the language is all backwards. Osteoporosis isn't a disease that causes weak bones, osteoporosis is the name given to a diagnosis of weak bones. In other words, the weak bones happened first, and then the diagnosis of osteoporosis followed.
The drug poster makes it sound like osteoporosis strikes first, and
then you get weak bones. The cause and effect is all backwards. And
that's how drug companies want people to think about diseases and symptoms: first you "get" the disease, then you are "diagnosed" just in time to take a new drug for the rest of your life.
But it's all hogwash. There is no such disease as
osteoporosis. It's just a made-up name given to a pattern of symptoms
that indicate you've let your bones get fragile.
As another example, when a person follows an unhealthy lifestyle that results in a symptom such as high blood pressure,
that symptom is actually be assumed to be a disease all by itself and
it will be given a disease name. What disease? The disease is, of
course, "high blood pressure." Doctors throw this phrase around as if it were an actual disease and not merely descriptive of patient physiology.
This may all seem silly, right? But there's actually a very important point to all this.
When we look at symptoms and give them disease names, we automatically distort the selection of available treatments for such a disease. If the disease is, by itself, high cholesterol,
then the cure for the disease must be nothing other than lowering the
high cholesterol. And that's how we end up with all these pharmaceuticals treating high cholesterol in order to "prevent" this disease and lower the levels of LDL cholesterol in the human patient.
By lowering only the cholesterol, the doctor
can rest assured that he is, in fact, treating this "disease," since
the definition of this "disease" is high cholesterol and nothing else.
But there is a fatal flaw in this approach to disease treatment: the symptom is not the cause of the disease. There is another cause, and this deeper cause is routinely ignored by conventional medicine, doctors, drug companies, and even patients.
Let's take a closer look at high blood pressure. What actually causes high blood pressure? Many doctors would say high blood pressure is caused by a specific, measurable interaction between circulating chemicals in the human body.
Thus, the ill-behaved chemical compounds are the cause of the high
blood pressure, and therefore the solution is to regulate these chemicals. That's exactly what pharmaceuticals do -- they attempt to manipulate the chemicals in the body to adjust the symptoms of high blood pressure. Thus, they only treat the symptoms, not the root cause.
Or take a look at high cholesterol. The conventional medicine approach says that high cholesterol is caused by a chemical imbalance in the liver,
which is the organ that produces cholesterol. Thus the treatment for
high cholesterol is a prescription drug that inhibits the liver's
production of cholesterol (statin drugs).
Upon taking these drugs, the high cholesterol (the "disease") is
regulated, but what was causing the liver to overproduce cholesterol in
the first place? That causative factor remains ignored.
The root cause of high cholesterol, as it turns out, is primarily dietary. A person who eats foods that are high in saturated fats and hydrogenated oils will inevitably produce more bad cholesterol
and will show the symptoms of this so-called disease of high
cholesterol. It's simple cause and effect. Eat the wrong foods, and
you'll produce too much bad cholesterol in the liver which can be
detected and diagnosed by conventional medical procedures.
Yet the root cause of all this is actually poor food choice, not some bizarre behavior by the liver. If the disease were to be accurately named, then, it would be called Fatty Food Choice Disease, or simply FFCD.
FFCD would be a far more accurate name that would make sense to
people. If it's a fatty foods choice disease, then it seems that the
obvious solution to the disease would be to choose foods that aren't so
fatty. Of course that may be a bit of simplification since you have to
distinguish between healthy fats and unhealthy fats. But at least the
name FFCD gives patients a better idea of what's actually going on
rather than naming the disease after a symptom, such as high
cholesterol. You see, the
symptom is not the disease, but conventional medicine insists on
calling the symptom the disease because that way it can treat the
symptom and claim success without actually addressing the underlying
cause, which remains a mystery to modern medicine.
But let's move on to some other diseases so you get a clearer picture
of how this actually works. Another disease that's caused by poor food
choice is diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the natural physiological and metabolic result of a person consuming refined carbohydrates and added sugars in large quantities without engaging in regular physical exercise that would compensate for such dietary practices.
The name "diabetes" is meaningless to the average person. The disease should be called Excessive Sugar Disease,
or ESD. If it were called Excessive Sugar Disease, the solution to it
would be rather apparent; simply eat less sugar, drink fewer soft drinks
and so on. But of course that would be far too simple for the medical
community, so the disease must be given a complex name such as diabetes
that puts its solution out of reach of the average patient.
Another disease that is named after its symptom is cancer. In fact, to this day, most doctors and many patients still believe that cancer is a physical thing: a tumor. In reality, a tumor is only a side effect of cancer,
not its cause. A tumor is simply a physical manifestation of a cancer
pattern that is expressed by the body. When a person "has cancer," what
they really have is a sluggish immune system. And that would a far better name for the disease: Sluggish Immune System Disease or SISD.
If cancer were actually called Sluggish Immune System Disease, it would seem ridiculous to try to cure cancer by cutting out tumors through surgery and by destroying the immune system with chemotherapy.
And yet these are precisely the most popular treatments for cancer
offered by conventional medicine. These treatments do absolutely
nothing to support the patient's immune system and prevent further
occurrences of cancer. That's exactly why most people who undergo
chemotherapy or the removal of tumors through surgical procedures end
up with yet more cancer a few months or a few years later. It's also
another reason why survival rates of cancer have barely budged over the
last twenty years. (In other words, conventional medicine's treatments
for cancer simply don't work.)
This whole situation stems from the fact that the disease is misnamed.
It isn't cancer, it isn't a tumor and it certainly isn't a disease
caused by having too strong of an immune system that needs to be
destroyed through chemotherapy. It is simply a sluggish immune system
or a suppressed immune system. And if it were called a sluggish immune
system disease or a suppressed immune system disorder, the effective treatment for cancer would be apparent.
There are many other diseases that are given misleading names by western medicine.
But if you look around the world and take a look at how diseases are
named elsewhere, you will find many countries have disease names that
actually make sense.
For example, in Chinese medicine,
Alzheimer's disease is given a name that means, when translated,
"feeble mind disease." In Chinese medicine, the name of the disease
more accurately describes the actual cause of the disease, whereas in
western medicine, the name of the disease seems to be intended to
obscure the root cause of the disease, thereby making all diseases
sound far more complex and mysterious than they really are.
This is one way in which doctors and practitioners of western medicine
keep medical treatments out of the reach of the average citizen.
Because, by God, they sure don't want people thinking for themselves about the causes of disease!
By creating a whole new vocabulary for medical conditions, they can
speak their own secret language and make sure that people who aren't
schooled in medicine don't understand what they're saying. That's a
shame, because the treatments and cures for virtually all chronic
diseases are actually quite simple and can be described in plain
language, such as making different food choices, getting more natural sunlight,
drinking more water, engaging in regular physical exercise, avoiding
specific food toxins, supplementing your diet with superfoods and
nutritional supplements and so on.
See, western medicine prefers to describe diseases in terms of
chemistry. When you're depressed, you aren't suffering from a lack of
natural sunlight; you are suffering from a "brain chemistry imbalance" that can only be regulated, they claim, by ingesting toxic chemicals to alter your brain
chemistry. When your bones are brittle, it's not brittle bones disease;
it's called osteoporosis, something that sounds very technical and
complicated. And to treat it, western doctors and physicians
will give you prescriptions for expensive drugs that somehow claim to
make your bones less brittle. But in fact, the real treatment for this
can be described in plain language once again: regular physical
exercise, vitamin D supplementation, mineral supplements that include
calcium and strontium, natural sunlight, and avoidance of acidic foods
such as soft drinks, white flour and added sugars.
In fact, virtually every disease that's prominent in modern society -- diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, clinical depression, irritable bowel syndrome and so on -- can be easily described in plain language without using complex terms at all. These diseases are simply misnamed.
And I believe that they are intentionally misnamed to put the jargon
out of reach of everyday citizens. As a result, there's a great deal of
arrogance in the language of western medicine, and this arrogance
furthers the language of separation. Separation never results in
healing. In order to effect healing, we must bring together the
language of healers and patients using plain language that real people
understand and that real people can act upon.
We need to start describing diseases in terms of their root
causes, not in terms of their arcane, biochemical actions. When someone
suffers from seasonal affective disorder or clinical depression, for
example, let's call it what it is: Sunlight Deficiency Disorder.
To treat it, the person simply needs to get more sunlight. This isn't
rocket science, it's not complex, and it doesn't require a
prescription.
If someone is suffering from osteoporosis, let's get realistic about the words we use to describe the condition: it's really Brittle Bones Disease. And it should be treated with things that will enhance bone density, such as nutrition, physical exercise and avoidance of foods and drinks that strip away bone mass from the human body.
All of this information, of course, is rather shocking to
old-school doctors and practitioners of western medicine, and the
bigger their egos are, the more they hate the idea of naming diseases
in plain language that patients can actually comprehend. That's because
if the simple truths about diseases and the causes of health were readily available to everyday people, that would lessen the importance of physicians and medical researchers.
There's a great deal of ego invested in the medical community, and they
sure don't want to make health sound attainable to the average person
without their expert advice. It's sort of the same way that some
ultra-conservative churches don't want their members talking to God
unless it all goes through their priest first. Doctors and priests all
want to serve as the translators of "truth" and will balk at any attempts to educate the public to either practice medicine or talk to God on their own.
But in reality, health (and a connection with spirit) is attainable by
every single person. Health is easy, it is straightforward, it is
direct and, for the most part, it is available free of charge.
Don't believe the names of diseases given to you by your doctor. Those names are designed to obscure, not to inform. They are designed to separate you from self-healing, not to put you in touch with your own inner healer. And thus, they are nothing more than bad medicine masquerading as modern medical practice.
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Medical Disclaimer:
The information contained within does not take the place of medical diagnosis or
prescription. See your health care provider in case of sickness.
Editorial Disclaimer: Publication of these articles are to promote food for thought. The opinions expressed in these articles may not be the opinion of editors.
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