(NaturalNews, September 2009)
At first glance, a study . . . published in the August 19th [2009] edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) is yet another whitewash job about the safety of the quadrivalent human papillomavirus recombinant vaccine –better known as Gardasil, the genital human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Licensed in June of 2006 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for girls and young women between the ages of nine and 26, the enormously hyped and advertised vaccine is designed to prevent infection with four types of HPV: types 16 and 18 can cause cervical cancer and types 6 and 11 are the most common types of genital warts.

The JAMA report says that the Gardasil adverse events reported have been mostly consistent with data gathered before the vaccine was considered safe enough to be widely administered to young girls. But a close reading shows some disturbing additional facts.

Just as NaturalNews has consistently reported, (July 2009 article on Gardasil-linked deaths) the vaccine has caused an extraordinary number of adverse side effects . And now comes word from the JAMA report that the HPV vaccine has unexpectedly caused episodes of fainting and life-threatening blood clots. In fact, in a statement to the media, these events were called “disproportional” — meaning these side effects are anything but rare. What’s more, among the 12,424 adverse reaction reports about the HPV vaccine, 772 (6.2 percent) were serious and included 32 reports of death.

Other problems caused by the vaccine include local site reactions, skin rashes, nausea, dizziness, headaches and even Guillain-Barre syndrome (a disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks part of the peripheral nervous system sometimes causing paralysis) and anaphylaxis (hypersensitivity reaction that can cause sudden death). As just reported by CBS news, the teenage daughter of physician Scott Ratner and his wife was one of the unfortunate girls who became severely ill with a chronic autoimmune disease, myofasciitis, after her first dose of Gardasil. Dr. Ratner told CBS his daughter was so ill with the neurological problem “..she’d have been better off getting cervical cancer than the vaccination.”

One the lead researchers for Gardasil has also gone public this week, telling CBS news there is no data showing that the vaccine even remains effective beyond five years. That means that if a ten-year-old girl is given the vaccine and subjected to possibly serious and even life-threatening side effects, the vaccine may offer her no protection at all when she hits her teens or young adulthood.

What makes the debate about Gardasil crazy to begin with is that studies have shown 70 to 90 percent of people with HPV naturally clear the virus from the body within two years of infection — with no help from drugs or vaccines. So the most effective protection from problems caused by HPV is to avoid being infected by the multiple strains of HPV by not engaging in promiscuous, unprotected-by-condoms sex (the virus is transmitted sexually and condoms do not offer 100 percent protection), and by keeping your body’s immune system strong and healthy through good nutrition, exercise and exposure to sunlight.

In an editorial accompanying the JAMA study, Charlotte Haug, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association in Oslo expressed her concerns about the aggressively promoted Gardasil vaccine: “Whether a risk is worth taking depends not only on the absolute risk, but on the relationship between the potential risk and the potential benefit. If the potential benefits are substantial, most individuals would be willing to accept the risks. But the net benefit of the HPV vaccine to a woman is uncertain. Even if persistently infected with HPV, a woman most likely will not develop cancer if she is regularly screened…”

For more information:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009…
http://www.naturalnews.com/025613_c…

In a study designed to isolate the root causes of violent behavior, Harvard Medical School researchers found that young teens who witnessed gun violence were more than twice as likely as non-witnesses to commit violent crime themselves in the following years. The study [appeared]  in the May 27 [2005] issue of Science.

“Based on this study’s results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, the best model for violence may be that of a socially infectious disease,” says Felton Earls, MD, HMS professor of social medicine and principal investigator of the study and of the the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods.

“Preventing one violent crime may prevent a downstream cascade of ‘infections’. And the lessons learned in Chicago should be broadly applicable. Generalizing this to any large city should be valid,” Earls said.

The study, a five-year project that included interviews of over 1,500 children and teenagers from 78 Chicago neighborhoods, used statistical advances and extremely detailed information about the study subjects to go beyond the correlations and associations typically used by social scientists to determine violent behavior. “We have a broad range of factors, and a long course of study, so we can tease out the causal mechanisms,” said first author Jeffrey Bingenheimer, currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan who will be joining the Harvard School of Public Health in September as Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar.

Previous work has shown that a large network of factors pushes or pulls young people away from or into violent crime. Researchers suspected that exposure to violence in the community played a role, but many argued that a common factor, perhaps in family structure or personality, might be the common cause of both exposure to violence and later acts of violence. Demonstrating cause and effect with a controlled experiment, deliberately exposing some children to mayhem, would be ethically impossible. But by grouping together and comparing teens with similar likelihood of exposure, some of whom were and some of whom were not actually witnesses to violence, the researchers were able to isolate the independent contribution made by seeing gun violence. And it turned out to be large, swamping other single factors like poverty, drug use, or being raised by a single parent.

The researchers studied the subject teens at three points in their adolescence. Initially they and their caregivers were intensively interviewed and data was collected about their families, personalities, neighborhoods, school performance, and many other factors; this allowed the researchers to group the teens by their propensity to witness gun violence. Two years later, the subjects were interviewed to see which of them had actually seen someone being shot, or shot at. Finally, almost three years further on, they were interviewed again to determine who had participated in gang violence or other violent actions.

After finding that witnessing violence more than doubled the risk that teens would violently offend, the team looked at their statistics to check whether an unknown factor could be hiding from them. They found that something significant would have to be at work to change the findings substantially, and it would have to be uncorrelated with the factors they did examine. “And honestly, it’s very difficult to think what we might have left out,” Earls said, pointing to the 153 variables that were embraced in the study.

There is no shortage of medical ways to view urban violence, but the challenge for social medicine researchers is to choose the best one-–is violence a product of families, akin to a hereditary disorder? Or is violence like an environmental contaminant, lurking in some communities and leaving others unscathed? Based this study’s results, showing the importance of personal contact with violence, Earls feels the best model may be an socially contagious disease.

From the perspective of the status quo, it was the kind of “news” that’s best ignored. So that’s exactly what most newspapers, radio, and TV outlets did—even though the revelation appeared in a respected, peer-reviewed science journal and the subject concerned the health of millions of children and young adults.

In March [2005], the journal Pediatrics published an article titled “Calcium, Dairy Products, and Bone Health in Children and Young Adults: A Re-evaluation of the Evidence.” The scientists who did the review belong to the Washington, D.C.–based organization Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. PCRM members are often dismissively referred to as animal-rights advocates. They de-scribe themselves as “doctors and laypersons working together for compassionate and effective medical practice, research, and health promotion.”

However you view them, you can’t knock their methodology. The scientists examined 58 published studies on the relationship between calcium, dairy products, and bone health. After excluding studies that did not control for exercise, weight, puberty, or vitamin D—all things that influence bones—they concluded that there is “scant evidence” that dairy products promote bone health in children

That conclusion contradicts everything we’re told about cow juice, first by our mothers and then by the government and dairy industry. Milk is listed as one of the four basic food groups by the Canada Food Guide, which recommends that teens have three to four milk servings a day, adults two to three. The U.S. government recently boosted its milk recommendation from two cups to three cups a day for everyone above age nine.

Milk is touted as Mother Nature’s near-perfect food. Indeed, the current B.C. Dairy Foundation ad campaign—aimed at kids and teens—features a thawed-out caveman who now drinks milk. Why? “Because, of course,” the ad says, “it’s always been survival of the fittest.” (The ads, found at drinkmilk.ca, are very clever and screamingly funny.)

But, you’ve got to wonder if milk is really essential. Physical activity and vitamin D are just as critical to building bones as calcium is. True, there are few food sources for vitamin D and it is added to milk. The main source, however, is the sun on our skin, a good reason to spend some time outdoors every day, preferably half-naked. (See Loving the Sun)

Being active and being outdoors could partially explain what’s known as the calcium paradox. That’s the puzzle of why societies that consume the most dairy also have the highest rates of osteoporosis and broken bones. People in Asia, for instance, drink almost no milk and have a very low incidence of bone fractures.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell is professor of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University. He headed a massive epidemiological study of the traditional Chinese diet, disease, and lifestyle called “The China Project.” From 1983 to 1990, Cornell researchers visited more than 10,000 people in 130 villages across China from the southern coast to the Gobi desert. They found a population that relied on plant-based sources such as vegetables and whole grains for their calcium. The populations also had much less heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity than North Americans. (See Campbell’s recent book, The China Study: the Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted.

“Dairy consumption in China was essentially zero for most of their history,” Campbell says during an interview from Ithaca, New York. “And, of course, according to the dogma and the assumptions that we have in the West, we would assume that, if dairy consumption is not high enough, we’re going to run the risk of osteoporosis. It certainly is not true.”

And then there’s the argument that humans, like other animals, were never designed to drink milk—especially from another species—after they’d finished their mothers’ milk. If your ancestors came from Great Britain, Scandinavia, France, Germany, or the Netherlands, you likely can drink cow milk without an unpleasant reaction. If they came from Eastern Europe, Russia, Greece, Italy, or another Mediterranean country, you may or may not be able to. But if they come from just about anywhere else on the globe, chances are you can’t consume dairy without a loud protest from your body. People who are lactose intolerant lack the enzyme needed to digest milk. Symptoms of lactose intolerance include cramping, bloating, gas, stomach pain, and diarrhea.

A few years ago, scientists identified the gene responsible for lactose intolerance. Because it is found in all lactose-intolerant people across distant ethnic groups, they deduced that it is a very old gene and is, in fact, the original form. When humans migrated north and started milking cows as a survival strategy 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the gene mutated to allow them to digest milk.

Lactose intolerance is the biological norm. No caveman ever touched cow milk.

http://watoxics.org/chemicals-of-concern/phthalates

by Dave Gabriele

http://www.NaturalNews.com/z025057_acupuncture_placebo_changes.html
See all articles by this author
Email this author

(NaturalNews) Is acupuncture nothing more than a dressed-up placebo effect? Not according to a recent joint MIT-Harvard Medical School clinical study. The study, published in the November 2008 issue of the peer-reviewed science journal Behavioural Brain Research, utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to examine the effects of acupuncture in relieving pain.

The effect of manual acupuncture in 12 healthy “acupuncture-naive” subjects (6 male, 6 female) was observed by monitoring fMRI of the brain and [11C]diprenorphine PET. [11C]Diprenorphine is used with PET to measure endogenous opioid release. Endogenous opioids have a morphine-like action in the body. Currently, “…there is strong evidence that acupuncture analgesia is mediated at least in part by opioid systems” (Dougherty, et. al. p.1).

The Study

The randomized study separated subjects into a real acupuncture group and a placebo acupuncture group. The placebo treatment used a validated sham acupuncture needle (Streitberger placebo) so that the sensation was as close to real acupuncture as possible. Using a placebo is generally believed to eliminate any psychological effects, such as expectation or belief, which may corrupt a study.

During the course of four sessions, the researchers induced pain in the subjects by using heat in varying degrees of intensity. The heat pain, which was issued to the right forearm of each subject, was administered before and after a 29-min treatment of either real or placebo acupuncture at acupoint Large Intestine 4 (LI-4).

The fMRI was used to indentify changes in neural activity by measuring blood flow in the brain. The [11C]diprenorphine PET scans looked for binding decreases which is associated with greater opioid release.

The Results

By comparing the two treatments, the study concluded that “… the reduction in pre- and post-treatment pain ratings was significantly greater in the acupuncture group when compared to the placebo group” (Dougherty, et. al. p.3).

“We found more brain changes during true acupuncture than during placebo acupuncture,” commented Darin D. Dougherty, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Neurotherapeutics at Massachusetts General Hospital. “fMRI showed changes in the orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and pons during true acupuncture when compared to placebo acupuncture.” The PET scans detected [11C]diprenorphine binding changes during real acupuncture that were very different than the binding changes that occurred during placebo treatment.

The right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was the only brain region that showed a common change in both types of scans. During real acupuncture, the right OFC demonstrated increased activity (as determined by fMRI) and increased opioid release (as determined by PET). There were no common fMRI and PET changes during placebo acupuncture.

The data suggests that real acupuncture affects the brain differently than placebo acupuncture and is more effective than a placebo in reducing the experience of pain. When asked whether acupuncture is more than a placebo effect, Dr. Dougherty responded, “Yes, the study does show more changes in the brain during active acupuncture than during placebo acupuncture. Therefore, acupuncture certainly entails more than placebo effect.”

NCCAM

This study was funded by The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The NCCAM is the American Government`s lead agency for scientific research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). It is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

SOURCES

1) http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc…

2) http://ecam.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/…

3) http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc…

4) http://www.anesthesia-analgesia.org…

5) http://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc…

About the author

Dave Gabriele, R.Ac, is a registered acupuncturist helping people in the Greater Toronto Area (Ontario, Canada). He has been a practitioner and a teacher of Chinese martial arts since 1997. In 2006, he received a B.A. from York University and he is currently studying at TSTCM to become a doctor of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

From time to time, to remind ourselves to relax, to be peaceful, we my wish to set aside some time for a retreat, a day of mindfulness, when we can walk slowly, smile, drink tea with a friend, enjoy being together as if we are the happiest people on Earth. This is not a retreat, it is a treat. During walking meditation, during kitchen and garden work, during sitting meditation, all day long, we can practice smiling. At first you may find it difficult to smile, and we have to think about why. Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned into forgetfulness. This kind of smile can be seen on the faces of Buddhas and bodisattvas.

I would like to offer one short poem you can recite from time to time, while breathing and smiling.

Breathing in, I calm my body.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is a wonderful moment.

‘Breathing in, I calm my body.’ This line is like drinking a glass of ice water-you feel the cold, the freshness, permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel the breathing calming my body, calming my mind.

‘Breathing out, I smile.’ You know the effect of a smile. A smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face, and relax your nervous system. A smile makes you master of yourself. That is why the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas are always smiling. When you smile, you realize the wonder of the smile.

‘Dwelling in the present moment.’ While I sit here, I don’t think of somewhere else, of the future or the past. I sit here, and I know where I am. This is very important. We tend be alive in the future, not now. We say, ‘Wait until I finish school and get my Ph.D. degree, and then I will be really alive.’ When we have it, and it’s not easy to get, we say to ourselves, ‘I have to wait until I have a job in order to be really alive.’ And then after the job, a car. After the car, a house. We are not capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. Now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive at all in our entire life. Therefore the technique, if we have to speak of a technique, is to be in the present moment, to be aware that we are here and now, and the only moment to be alive is the present moment.

‘I know this is a wonderful moment.’ This is the only moment that is real. To be here and now, and enjoy the present moment is our most wonderful task. ‘Calming, Smiling, Present moment, Wonderful moment.’ I hope you will try it.”

Craniosacral Therapy is rapidly gaining recognition as one of the most gentle and yet powerful forms of holistic healing. It is a relatively new therapy, having been developed from one of those rare quantum leaps of inspiration by its founder, William Sutherland, an osteopath. Going completely against the established teaching of his time, he recognised a subtle motion within the intricate bony structure of the skull. He called this motion ‘primary respiration’, believing it to be of far more importance to our wellbeing than mere breathing!
During the next 100 years, more and more people were drawn to investigate this revolutionary therapy. At first, it was taught only to osteopaths, who were thought to be cranky even within their own discipline. Remember the struggles osteopaths have had to become accepted by the medical establishment and then think how difficult it must have been to establish a new science that went against even the accepted tenets of osteopathy.
Fortunately, however, the knowledge and skill has been made available to a wider cross section of therapists during the last twenty years, and more and more people have come to realise that here is a very powerful way of bringing the body back into balance and harmony.

No movement – no life!
How can this primary respiration be of such importance? Movement is life, and without movement there is no life. Think of the beating of the heart, the coursing of the blood and lymph through their channels, the wavelike movements of the digestive system. At the very core of the body lies the brain and spinal cord, within a bony protection and bathed in a special fluid, the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). As the subtle movements of the primary breath take place, that CSF travels along the core of the body, drawn upwards during ‘inspiration’ and flowing downwards with ‘expiration’. This movement of fluid is like the movement of the oceans and has been called ‘the Tide’. The subtle movement within the core of the body is taken up and expressed throughout the tissues and organs so that in an ideal body there would be a synchronised and harmonious rhythm within all the parts.
Naturally, there is no ideal body! Our systems meet physical and emotional stress and challenge by contracting, and in that contraction they disturb and disrupt the flow of the tide. It’s as if the incoming tide is flowing onto a rocky shore; when it meets an obstacle, it has to find a way around. Where the body is fully resourced, the blockage is a temporary disruption: if the stresses are too frequent or the shock too great, however, the blockage becomes gradually established and can eventually lead to discomfort and pain. During our lifetime we may collect, and disperse, many different blockages; sometimes we are able to use our body’s natural healing abilities and at other times we need help. The light touch of the trained craniosacral therapist is able to detect the blockage through the restricted flow of the fluids and to reflect this information back to the body, helping it to gather the necessary resources to re-establish harmony.

Not just for babies
There has been a great deal of publicity recently about the value of craniosacral treatment for babies and children. Their systems respond very effectively to this form of therapy, and it is extremely valuable in problems to do with suckling, hearing etc., and to problems that may relate to the birth process. What is becoming more widely accepted is the value of this therapy to all, adults and children alike. A wide variety of conditions has been found to respond to craniosacral treatment, ranging from the problems of back pain and sports injury to conditions of uncertain aetiology such as exhaustion, insomnia, learning difficulties and dyslexia.
What usually happens during treatment is that the client lies fully clothed on a treatment table and the therapist makes gentle contact, placing the hands lightly on the body. Traditionally, the contact is from the head and the base of the spine, the sacrum; in fact, any part of the body may be held. It is important to realise that the therapist is not actually ‘doing’ anything to the client. The process is a partnership in which the therapist assists the body to find its own vitality and healing resource.
During the treatment the client usually feels deeply relaxed. There may be tingling, shaking or a feeling of heat as structures and tissues release. Sometimes there may be emotional responses, the memories of happiness, sadness or times past, and these are valuable signposts to the process of healing. After treatment a client may feel energetic or tired, loose limbed or slightly achy but any side effects are mild and short lived. As the therapeutic partnership builds over a course of treatments, the responses will be more rapid as the body regains its innate healing abilities. It is possible for some problems to be resolved with one or two sessions, but usually more treatments are needed, for some clients require a period of a few weeks or months to reach a point where they feel different.

The obvious model for those hoping to reverse the fattening of America is the campaign against smoking. Before the surgeon general officially condemned smoking in 1964, rising cigarette consumption seemed an unstoppable trend; since then, consumption per capita has fallen more than 50 percent.

But it may be hard to match that success when it comes to obesity. I’m not talking about the inherent difficulty of the task – getting people to consume fewer calories and/or exercise more may be harder than getting people to stop smoking, but we won’t know until we try. I’m talking, instead, about how the political winds have shifted.

Public health activists were successful in taking on smoking in part because at the time corporations didn’t know how to play the public opinion game. By today’s standards, the political ineptitude of Big Tobacco was awe-inspiring. In a famous 1971 interview on “Face the Nation,” the chairman of the board of Philip Morris, confronted with evidence that smoking by mothers leads to low birth weight, replied, “Some women would prefer having smaller babies.”

Today’s food industry would never make that kind of mistake. In public, the industry’s companies proclaim themselves good guys, committed to healthier eating. Meanwhile, they outsource the campaigns against medical researchers and the dissemination of crude anti-anti-obesity propaganda to industry-financed advocacy groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom.

More broadly, the ideological landscape has changed drastically since the 1960′s. (That change in the landscape also has a lot to do with corporate financing of advocacy groups, but that’s a tale for another article.) In today’s America, proposals to do something about rising obesity rates must contend with a public predisposed to believe that the market is always right and that the government always screws things up.

You can see these predispositions at work in an article printed last month in Amber Waves, a magazine published by the Department of Agriculture. The article is titled “Obesity Policy and the Law of Unintended Consequences,” suggesting that government efforts to combat obesity are likely to be counterproductive. But the authors don’t actually provide any examples of how that might happen.

And the authors suggest, without quite asserting it, that because people freely choose obesity in a free market, it must be a good thing.

“Americans’ rapid weight gain may have nothing to do with market failure,” the article says. “It may be a rational response to changing technology and prices. … If consumers willingly trade off increased adiposity for working indoors and spending less time in the kitchen as well as for manageable weight-related health problems, then markets are not failing.”

How can medical experts who see obesity as a critical problem deal with an ideological landscape tilted in the direction of doing nothing?

One answer is to focus on the financial costs of obesity, and the fact that many of these costs fall on taxpayers and on the general insurance-buying public, rather than on the obese individuals themselves. (To their credit, the authors of the Amber Waves article do mention this issue, although they play it down.)

It is more important, however, to emphasize that there are situations in which “free to choose” is all wrong – and that this is one of them.

For one thing, the most rapid rise in obesity isn’t taking place among adults, who, we hope, can understand the consequences of their decisions. It’s taking place among children and adolescents.

And even if children weren’t a big part of the problem, only a blind ideologue or an economist could argue with a straight face that Americans were rationally deciding to become obese. In fact, even many economists know better: the most widely cited recent economic analysis of obesity, a 2003 paper by David Cutler, Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro of Harvard University, declares that “at least some food consumption is almost certainly not rational.” It goes on to present evidence that even adults have clear problems with self-control.

Above all, we need to put aside our anti-government prejudices and realize that the history of government interventions on behalf of public health, from the construction of sewer systems to the campaign against smoking, is one of consistent, life-enhancing success. Obesity is America’s fastest-growing health problem; let’s do something about it.

When we have gained a deep understanding of the body and soul, there often follows a desire to reach out, to grow, and to change. In the Vedic texts, the second chakra, the energy center between the navel and genitals, is the seat of life and the house of change. It is a point where opposites come together in sympathy, guiding us toward a balanced existence. The choices that help us evolve are often a product of the second chakra, which, when charged with neither too little nor too much energy, rejects rigid control and embraces creativity. Associated with taste and sensuality, the second chakra or Svadhisthana (which means sweetness) can be visualized as a brilliant sunset orange. Like its element, water, the second chakra is ruled by the moon.

A weakness or imbalance in the second chakra can lead to feelings of extreme empathy, which can cause you to be ruled by the emotions of others. To fail to focus on this chakra leads to the opposite: an utter lack of emotion and dwindling passions. A balanced second chakra embraces both sides of everything, giving you a healthy understanding of your emotions as well as those of others. Nurturing it through dance, laughter, and pleasurable movement will help you embrace your own sexuality, which is the main aspect of the chakra. . . .

The second chakra may appear a route to indulgence to some, because of its focus on the feelings of the body, but it is also the dwelling place of the self. A fully functioning second chakra, working in a balanced way with the body’s other chakras, is a source of self-knowledge and understanding.