Jimi's Daily Health Articles

Guess Which Country Is Ranked Number 1 For Health Care
Guess Which Country Is Ranked Number 1 For Health Care

Here in the USA, the land of money-grabbing medicine, 50% of older females are taking five or more medications daily. 12% take ten or more meds daily!

This grotesque absurdity is called polypharmacy (I call it reckless-prescribing). Over the years between 1997 and 2012, overprescribing increased from around 18% to 60% of the older population.1

Nice one for the pharmaceutical industry but not so much for the long-suffering individual, who is being squeezed for profits.

Quite aside from the question of side-effects and dangers of taking so many drugs, where the interactions are totally unknown and uninvestigated, most of the prescriptions are inappropriate (read “waste of time” or “don’t do any good”).

The American Geriatric Society (a non-profit) Beers Criteria® for Potentially Inappropriate Medication Use in Older Adults lists a number of these (including statins, incidentally, which are dismissed as having little evidence of benefit for this population. They even went so far as to say “no clear evidence that high cholesterol leads to heart disease or death.”)

They might have gone further and said there is “clear evidence” that for people aged over 50, those with the HIGHEST level of cholesterol live longer on average, a fact which is ruthlessly suppressed by pharmaceutical reps.

Also on the worthless list are wildly popular but very dangerous proton pump inhibitors (PPIs). Risks include reduced calcium absorption, leading to increased fracture risk (which can be fatal), B12 deficiency, thyroid hormone interference, acute and chronic kidney injury and C. difficile infection (very hard to get rid of and also potentially fatal).

A 2017 study among US veterans, published in the BMJ, showed there is also increased mortality with PPIs (shouldn’t medical care be REDUCING the risk of dying!)2

Thing is, I can take this list apart for you. But you can find it online if you want to know more and at this point it’s posted for public comment, if you want to dive in!3

I’d rather look at what is being missed by this pharma-controlled “science”.

For example, if you want to live healthy and live long, my number one piece of advice has been, and always will be: stay away from doctors and hospitals!

Mediterranean diet, for example, is a great start. But it’s not just a diet, it’s a lifestyle. It includes wine and good living (usually not reported). They walk, they socialize, they dine in families, they interact (paseo, passegiata, or evening stroll).



Passegiata in Siena, Italy
Americans are probably the laziest race I have ever encountered. They don’t walk. There is no culture of walking. I walk 10 – 12 miles a week and am often irritated by the fact there are whole chunks of sidewalk missing and I have to step into the road, where cars speed past recklessly. Pedestrians are unimportant is the message.

The average American driver would rather wait to park their car, until a space opens up right by the supermarket door. They take it as a personal disaster if they have to park a few spaces over and walk to the store (no, really!)

Plus Americans are very isolationist; I don’t mean politically. I mean they don’t meet with each very much. Most people have garage remotes and drive straight into their garage, the door comes down and you don’t see anybody after that. It’s like pulling up the drawbridge! Oh yes, and don’t say why don’t you knock on the door and say hello? You can but you might get shot! Americans are so fearful they’d rather shoot someone at the door than find out what they want and they are legally entitled to do so, incidentally.

Here’s a sign we see often. Our next-door neighbors a few years back had one stuck on the front door!



Take Less Meds Live Longer

But I have spotted another significant reason why Mediterranean dwellers are so healthy and it’s not just because they don’t kill each other: I think it’s the fact they don’t take so many meds that helps them live a lot longer!

Of course there is no science behind this claim. Nobody is ever going to put up the money. But it is a good line of enquiry.

To get started, consider France—a very large country but with a definite Mediterranean border. It also happens to have one of the best healthcare systems in the world.

There the annual per capita cost of medications is $432 on average, compared to more than double that in the USA: $1,011 per capita per annum. Are the Americans more than twice as healthy? Are they hell!

In 2000 the WHO ranked France #1 in the world for health care. The USA came in at a dismal 37th!

I’m moving to France for my old age!

Seriously though, half of pharma drugs prescribed, even in France, are useless or dangerous, unnecessary and responsible for up to 20,000 deaths annually, according to a 900-page book published by two remarkable French MDs: Professor Philippe Even, director of the prestigious Necker Institute, and Bernard Debré, a doctor and member of parliament.

Among the medicines that they alleged were "completely useless" were statins. The blacklist of 58 drugs the doctors claimed are dangerous included anti-inflammatories and drugs prescribed for cardiovascular conditions, diabetes, osteoporosis, contraception, muscular cramps and nicotine addiction.

Of course they were denounced immediately by the watchdogs for Big Pharma. The Professional Federation of Medical Industrialists (drug manufacturers) declared their views were full of "confusions and approximations". "This book is helping to alarm those who are sick needlessly and risks leading them to stop treatments," it said in a blatantly pro-industry statement.

Christian Lajoux, the federation's president said: "It is dangerous and irresponsible… hundreds of their examples are neither precise nor properly documented. We must not forget that the state exercises strict controls on drugs. France has specialist agencies responsible for the health of patients and of controlling what information is given to them."

So, no change there then.

Dr. Even responded in an interview for the British Guardian newspaper, that the French consume medication worth 36 billion Euros every year. That’s about 532 Euros for each citizen who has an average 47 boxes of medicine in cupboards every year. The state covers 77% of the cost; in Britain spending on medicines is around £271 sterling ($345) per person. "Yet in the UK people have the same life expectancy of around 80 years and are no less healthy."

According to Dr. Even, the pharmaceutical industry has a get-rich-quick attitude to making medicines and said it was interested in chasing only easy profits. "They haven't discovered very much new for the last 30 years, but have multiplied production, using tricks and lies.”

What a shocking accusation! Ha ha!

Here’s to throwing ALL the pills down the drain and a better medical system for all!

To Your Health,

Jimi said:

Has Drug-Driven Medicine Become A Form of Human Sacrifice?
https://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/has-drug-driven-medicine-become-form-human-sacrifice

Click to expand...

Great article, Jimi. Sayer went out on a limb with this one, imo. No wonder they started cracking down on their social pages.



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New Test Can Help Pinpoint Which Pancreatic Cyst Will Turn Cancerous
https://www.newsmax.com/health/heal...b=DM41088_07222019&s=acs&dkt_nbr=0105027wnjco

New Discovery Points to an
Overlooked Cause of Alzheimer’s

When it comes to treating somebody who is just beginning to suffer Alzheimer’s disease, the conventional medicine folks have a big problem.

They don’t know how the disease starts. So they can’t catch it at an early stage. In fact, 20 years ago when my mother was developing dementia, her doctor didn’t know a thing about it.

Awareness is much higher now, but a doctor still can’t diagnose the condition until memory gaps become so big they can’t be overlooked. And that seems to happen only after extensive damage has already taken place in brain tissue.

What to do? Researchers have made some promising new findings about early-stage Alzheimer's. .

Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis think they’ve found the answer to what happens in the early phases of Alzheimer's disease. They say it’s linked to the behavior of the brain’s microglia – immune cells that roam the brain to help protect its neurons and keep them in good working order.

According to the Washington U. team, microglia sometimes follow a crucial pattern of activity that allows Alzheimer’s destruction to flow through neurons. Correct that activity – and there are natural ways to nudge it in the right direction – and you may stop Alzheimer’s before it becomes a serious problem.

Plaque Attack!

In the tests conducted by the Washington U. researchers on people and animals, they found that two kinds of damaging proteins begin to collect in the brain years before a person begins to show memory loss.

You won’t be surprised to hear these compounds are amyloid beta (which forms plaque) and tau (which forms tangles). Of these two, say the scientists, the tau is particularly destructive. When the tau proteins overwhelm neurons, the nerve cells start to die off. And that sets off the memory erasure and disorientation that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease.

The scientists note that plaque comes first, and that if the immune response by microglia can seal off the plaque, serious damage to the brain can be curtailed. But if these cells fail to keep the amyloid plaque quarantined, the resulting damage to neurons leads to toxic results in the brain tissue. Then, that toxic spillover spurs on the formation and spread of tau’s memory-cancelling tangles.

"I think we've found a potential link between amyloid and tau that people have been looking for for a long time," says researcher David Holtzman. "If you could break that link in people who have amyloid deposition but are still cognitively healthy, you might be able to stop disease progression before people develop problems with thinking and memory."

This tallies with what I’ve seen elsewhere – that tau seems to play a bigger role in Alzheimer’s than amyloid beta. And perhaps it accounts for why plaque-busting drugs from Big Pharma have failed so badly. A wide body of evidence suggests that plaques are not the smoking gun when it comes to dementia.

Holes in the Amyloid Beta Theory

Dr. Holtzman and his colleagues point out that amyloid plaques by themselves do not cause Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Many folks in their 70s who have amyloid plaques don’t experience any loss of memory or cognition. Long-time readers of this newsletter already know this.

What’s new here is that when amyloid plaques result in tau tangles, it DOES appear to lead to Alzheimer’s.

Now I won’t pretend there are any sure-fire ways to improve how your microglia behave. But research does point toward lifestyle measures that might help these immune cells to continue doing their jobs and thereby lower your risk of memory issues.

Making Microglia More Effective

The first measure is to get enough sleep. Research in Asia shows that when you miss out on sleep, your microglia change their function.1 This research, conducted on animals, mainly focused on how lack of sleep influences the ways microglia maintain the health of the synapses that link neurons together in the brain. While the scientists found larger effects during adolescence, their results showed that lack of sleep at any age “adversely affected short-term memory.”

Meanwhile a study at the Georgia Institute of Technology shows that getting too little sleep and not consistently going to bed at the same time each night makes it harder for older people to recall recent events in their lives.2

Another way to help out your microglia is to get more quercetin in your diet. Research shows this nutrient – a pigment found in foods like cherries, berries, apples, broccoli and onions – can protect microglia from oxidative damage.3(Quercetin is also available as a supplement.)

And tests at Johns Hopkins, also on animals, show that quercetin can be part of a program that lowers the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.4 Human studies will be required before the medical community accepts these findings (assuming they do so even then, considering it won’t lead to a new drug.)

Added to all of this, as I never tire of saying, go out and do some walking or get some other form of exercise. Researchers at Texas Christian University have found evidence that exercise may be a way to encourage microglia to clear misfolded proteins out of the brain and improve brain function.5

This Spice Heats up Your Taste Buds
and Burns Out Cancer
Are you a fan of hot spicy food that makes your mouth feel like it’s
on fire?

Personally, I love hot foods – and for once, something I like is good
for me!

Scientists are finding that hot spices are especially suited to fight cancer. Capsaicin -- the natural compound in those foods that burns your tongue -- also turns the heat up on cancer cells and helps keep them from spreading.

It’s a natural wonder, and here’s how it works. . .

Capsaicin is the ingredient that makes hot chili peppers hot, and at the same time it offers a dream list of exactly the things you would look for if you were searching for a natural substance that can cut off cancer at the knees1...

• Blocks genes that help cancer survive.
• Arrests the growth of tumors.
• Stops the extra blood supply that cancer latches onto for nutrients.
• Stymies the metastatic spread of cancer throughout the body.

Persuading cancer to kill itself

Capsaicin often induces cancer cells to commit self-induced suicide, a process called apoptosis that I’ve often discussed in these pages.

The interesting part of capsaicin’s role in this process is that it can attack cancer cells in several different ways. Each one of them has the same cancer-destroying result.

For instance, it can go after cancer cells’ mitochondria, the little organelles that supply the cells with the energy to survive. According to researchers at the University of Maryland, because mitochondria are so central to cancer cell survival – a cell without mitochondria would be like an automobile without an engine – the mitochondria are the “gatekeepers” of the apoptosis process.

So when capsaicin throws a monkey wrench into mitochondrial function, cancer cells conk out like cars ready for the junk heap.2

Added to that, capsaicin can also activate a gene in cancer cells called p53 – a “tumor suppressor.” This gene is involved in the formation of proteins that also lead to apoptosis in cancer cells.3

Keep cancer from traveling

Another important trait of capsaicin is its ability to keep cancer from traveling around the body and invading other organs. Most people who die of cancer do so because of this process – called metastasis. It’s not the cancer in the original site that kills them.

When cancer metastasizes, it becomes more resistant to treatment. That’s a big reason metastatic cancer accounts for about four out of five cancer deaths.4

"Lung cancer and other cancers commonly metastasize to secondary locations like the brain, liver or bone, making them difficult to treat," says researcher Jamie Friedman. "Our study suggests that the natural compound capsaicin from chili peppers could represent a novel therapy to combat metastasis in lung cancer patients."

A rare remedy for pancreatic cancer

Capsaicin’s ability to disable and kill pancreatic cancer cells has also drawn a great deal of attention from researchers. Pancreatic cancer is among the top five cancer killers. The survival rate after five years for this type of cancer is less than ten percent.6

So any answer to pancreatic cancer is rare and precious. Capsaicin appears to be one. It’s been shown to induce apoptosis.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine say the spice helps direct oxidative damage to mitochondria in cancer cells that makes them self-destruct.

Plus, other researchers are demonstrating that when capsaicin is combined with other “bioactive food components,” the therapeutic effect on cancers is upped considerably.

For example a study at the University of Bordeaux in France shows that a combination of capsaicin and resveratrol – an antioxidant found in wine, peanuts, grapes and blueberries – can keep cancer cells from being able to repair damage to their DNA.

When this repair mechanism bogs down, cancer cells are less likely to reproduce and they become more vulnerable to the damage that takes place during radiation therapy – the professional word for this is “radiosensitized.”7 Likewise, they also become easier to kill with chemotherapy.8

Liver protection

In today’s society, given our huge appetite for processed food and our national problem with carrying too much weight around our middles, we’re experiencing an epidemic of impaired liver function, and the fat tissue that accumulates in this hard-working organ has become a health danger.

Here too, capsaicin may help. When liver issues give way to liver cancer, research in Asia shows that capsaicin can step in and cause liver cancer cells to self-destruct because of oxidative stress.9

In addition, a lab study at the University of Wyoming School of Pharmacy demonstrates that a drug based on capsaicin can, before cancer develops, potentially make “improvements in blood sugar and cholesterol levels, insulin response, and symptoms of fatty liver disease,” according to researcher Baskaran Thyagarajan. In this drug, capsaicin is basically modified to improve absorption by the body.

The tests indicate that this version of capsaicin stimulates receptors in fat cells to burn off energy instead of stashing an ever-increasing supply within their cell membranes. And that can lead to weight loss and shrinkage of the liver’s fat cells.10

Other benefits of capsaicin include:

• Fights against triple-negative breast cancer: This aggressive malignancy is highly resistant to the most common chemo drugs. According to research in Germany, capsaicin can latch on to the receptors in these types of tumors and possibly lead to “significant inhibition of cancer cell growth and induced apoptosis.”11
• Protects against heart disease and improves life expectancy: Tests at the University of Vermont found that eating hot peppers lowered the risk of dying by 13 percent during the 19-year study.12 The improved longevity was mainly due to a decrease in the risk of heart attack or stroke. The researchers believe that chili peppers and capsaicin alter the probiotic bacteria in the digestive tract in ways that promote better cardiovascular health.

Now, anyone who has ever tasted a fiery entree spiced with hot chili peppers can testify that they contain something “unique” – and not everyone likes it. But capsaicin is not popular with cancer cells, either. I hope to see further research into how it can be used to keep cancer under control.

And meanwhile I think I’ll have a jalapeno-stuffed olive and make a reservation at an Indian restaurant.

​

Jimi said:

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE?
https://alternative-doctor.com/blog/what-happens-when-we-die/

Click to expand...

This was a great article, Jimi. Really interesting, thanks!


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Good stuff, Jimi.....!

Thank you both

at least when I am dead and gone it will always be here for anyone who needs it and that makes me feel good

The Dangers of a "Fat Free" Mentality
You cannot age well without anti-inflammatory nutrients.

Yet, very few people take the trouble to use anti-inflammatory nutrients. The best I know are omega-3s! They work like magic. Fish and seafood are prime sources (but not the only ones!) That’s why the Mediterranean diet is so good: fish!

Omega-3 fatty acids. There are two main ones, with horrendous, scary names (eicosapentaenoic acid or EPA and docosahexaenoic acid or DHA). Let’s just stick to EPA and DHA. According to an article in the BMJ (Oct 17 2018), these 2 essential fatty acids from seafood were associated with healthier aging.

All markers of aging are, essentially, inflammations: Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, diabetes, artery damage leading to heart attacks and strokes… Even cancer has a strong inflammatory element, which helps the cancer spread (orthodox doctor admit to that; for example, here: Ir J Med Sci. 2017; 186(1): 57–62. Published online 2016, May 7)

It has been shown that prolonged presence of inflammatory cells and factors in the tumor microenvironment can accelerate its growth and inhibit apoptosis (self-destruction) of cancer cells.

Nobody need doubt the health value of omega-3s; There is a MOUNTAIN of good science showing how healthy they are for us. Conditions benefitted vary from heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, autism, skin texture (wrinkles), bone and joint health, to name just a few.

Again, according to an article in the prestigious science journal “Nature”:

The mediators and cellular effectors of inflammation are important constituents of the local environment of tumors. In some types of cancer, inflammatory conditions are present before a malignant change occurs. Conversely, in other types of cancer, an oncogenic change induces an inflammatory microenvironment that promotes the development of tumors. Regardless of its origin, 'smoldering' inflammation in the tumor microenvironment has many tumor-promoting effects.


Fats are ESSENTIAL!
The truth is that the “fat free” mania started in the 1970s by US fraudulent science (paid for and controlled by the food industry cartels) and has had us all in deadly health.

We NEED fats, lots of fats, for health. We need fats to process our vitamins, and we need fats for our brains, which are over 50% fat! Heck, omega-3s are in a category of fats we call ESSENTIAL FATTY ACIDS (EFAs). Some fats are a biological necessity, almost like vitamins where, if we don’t get enough, we die.

Thank God the truth is out. 20 years ago, I was classed as an idiot, for standing out against “fat free” and statins. Yet, again I was proved right in the long term. So, for ever so many reasons, you do NOT want inflammation at work in your body. It puts you at risk and it makes you grow old before your time.


The trouble with most available omega-3 supplements, is their fishy taste and the “fish burps” that follow. However, I have a solution for that and I want to share it with you today. Imagine taking your omega-3 supplements tasting of Peaches and Mango, or delicious breakfast pancakes!

Well, the technology is here: we can have delicious flavors while getting healthy and living longer. And NO, this is not done by phoney chemical flavors, like the food industry does. This is real; from a holistic MD, in conjunction with brilliant product manufacturers! We have used essences of food, to get the taste, without the calories, without the sugar and junk, it just tastes as if it does!

To your continued health,