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Peppermint Earns Respect in Mainstream Medicine


Newswise
Tue, 19 Apr 2011 20:08 UTC
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© Hajnalka Ardai, iStock PhotosPeppermint is now clinically proven to be an effective pain reliever for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
University of Adelaide researchers have shown for the first time how peppermint helps to relieve Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which affects up to 20% of the population.

In a paper published this week in the international journal Pain, researchers from the University's Nerve-Gut Research Laboratory explain how peppermint activates an "anti-pain" channel in the colon, soothing inflammatory pain in the gastrointestinal tract.

Dr. Stuart Brierley says while peppermint has been commonly prescribed by naturopaths for many years, there has been no clinical evidence until now to demonstrate why it is so effective in relieving pain.

"Our research shows that peppermint acts through a specific anti-pain channel called TRPM8 to reduce pain sensing fibers, particularly those activated by mustard and chilli. This is potentially the first step in determining a new type of mainstream clinical treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)," he says.
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Nuke

Health risks numerous near nuclear plant


UPI
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:01 UTC
bird, japan,nuclear
© UPI/Keizo MoriDestruction is seen as the sun rises in Iwanuma, Miyagi prefecture, Japan, on April 15, 2011. A massive earthquake and ensuing tsunami on March 11 destroyed homes, killed thousands and caused a nuclear disaster.

Tokyo-- Radiation leaks remain a health threat for areas around Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant, officials said.

The crisis at the plant resulted from an earthquake and tsunami March 11.

Some experts believe the Fukushima crisis is more serious than that resulting from an explosion at Ukraine's Chernobyl power plant 25 years ago, the Mainichi Daily News reported Monday.
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Health

Europe, Especially France, Hit by Measles Outbreak

John Heilprin
CNS News
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 18:57 UTC
Geneva - Europe, especially France, has been hit by a major outbreak of measles, which the U.N. health agency is blaming on the failure to vaccinate all children.

The World Health Organization said Thursday that France had 4,937 reported cases of measles between January and March -- compared with 5,090 cases during all of 2010. In all, more than 6,500 cases have been reported in 33 European nations.

"This is a lot of cases, to put it mildly. In past years we've had very few cases," said Rebecca Martin, head of WHO's office in Copenhagen for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization.
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Attention

Laying bare the not-so-sweet tale of a sugar and its role in the spread of cancer


American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 07:35 UTC
Scientists close in on molecular moves that let tumor cells act as stowaways in lymphatic system.

Cancer has a mighty big bag of tricks that it uses to evade the body's natural defense mechanisms and proliferate. Among those tricks is one that allows tumor cells to turn the intricate and extensive system of lymphatic vessels into something of a highway to metastasis. Yet research unveiled this week may aid in the development of therapeutics that will put the brakes on such cancer spread, and the researchers who completed the study say the findings may extend to other lymphatic disorders.

In the latest issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the team at the VA San Diego Healthcare System and the University of California, San Diego, reports an important advance in the understanding of the molecular machinery needed for lymphatic cell growth.

"In many carcinomas, lymphatic vessels grow and remodel around and sometimes within tumors. This allows tumor cells to go upstream to the lymph nodes," explains assistant professor Mark Fuster, who led the study. Once tumor cells hitch a ride to the lymph nodes, the disease can be more difficult to fight. "We were trying to understand the mechanisms that turn on the growth of lymphatic vessel cells in the laboratory."

Comment: Read Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer? to further understand how cancer cells appear to fuel themselves exclusively through glycolysis (creating energy through the fermentation of sugar in the cytoplasm). And how high-in-animal-fat ketogenic diet, which eliminates almost all carbohydrates, including sugar, helps to prevent cancer cells from spreading.

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Family

Height: Very Poor Women Are Shrinking, as Are Their Chances at a Better Life

Donald G. McNeil
New York Times
Tue, 26 Apr 2011 05:21 UTC
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© Michael Tsegaye/Bloomberg News
The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers.

Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.

"It's a sobering picture," said S. V. Subramanian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author. "It tells you the world is not getting to be a better place for women of lower socioeconomic status. For them, it's getting worse."
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Bacon

Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer?

Richard Friebe
Time Magazine
Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:12 UTC
steak
© Istockphoto
The women's hospital at the University of Würzburg used to be the biggest of its kind in Germany. Its former size is part of the historical burden it carries - countless women were involuntarily sterilized here when it stood in the geographical center of Nazi Germany.

Today, the capacity of the historical building overlooking the college town, where the baroque and mid-20th-century concrete stand in a jarring mix, has been downsized considerably. And the experiments within its walls are of a very different nature.

Since early 2007, Dr. Melanie Schmidt and biologist Ulrike Kämmerer, both at the Würzburg hospital, have been enrolling cancer patients in a Phase I clinical study of a most unexpected medication: fat. Their trial puts patients on a so-called ketogenic diet, which eliminates almost all carbohydrates, including sugar, and provides energy only from high-quality plant oils, such as hempseed and linseed oil, and protein from soy and animal products.
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Beaker

Pediatricians Seek Better Regulation of Toxins

Liz Szabo
USA Today
Mon, 25 Apr 2011 20:30 UTC
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© Greenpeace
The U.S. needs to do a better job protecting children and pregnant women from toxic chemicals, says a policy statement out today from the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The group says children's developing brains and bodies are far more vulnerable than adults' to toxins. And while pediatricians typically spend more time in the clinic than on Capitol Hill, the policy's authors say they felt compelled to advocate for patients who can't defend themselves.

"Kids don't vote," says pediatrician Jerome Paulson of Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., lead author of the statement.

The pediatrics group is the latest of a growing number of medical organizations - including the American Medical Association, American Nurses Association and American Public Health Association - to call for changes in the way that the government regulates dangerous chemicals.

Comment: Advocates such as pediatricians are valid in their concern that toxic chemical exposures are having serious effects on children. The following article is just one example of the neurodevelopmental disorders caused by industrial chemicals:

Mind Games: How Toxic Chemicals are Impairing Children's Ability to Learn
"The combined evidence suggests that neurodevelopmental disorders caused by industrial chemicals have created a silent pandemic in modern society."
By pandemic, the authors of The Lancet study mean that learning and developmental disorders are common, cut across all walks of life in all geographic regions, and are ballooning in prevalence. Changing diagnostic criteria, along with the absence of a nationwide registry, makes vexing the work of constructing precise time trends. The estimate most often cited by the medical literature is that developmental disabilities now affect about one in every six U.S. children, and most of these are disabilities of the nervous system. If accurate, this figure means that the number of children with neurodevelopmental disorders now exceeds the number of children with asthma, which is also a problem of pandemic proportion.

By silent, the authors mean that these disorders are subclinical. They don't announce themselves on an X-ray or in a pathology lab. There is no medical test to herald their increasingly familiar presence among us.


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Syringe

Vaccine/Autism Researcher and Denier Indicted on 22 Counts

Russ McAfee
The PPJ Gazette
Sat, 23 Apr 2011 08:28 UTC
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© vaccineresistancemovement.org
"But. . .didn't the CDC, FDA, AMA, WHO, and dozens of other "medical" officials tell us there was "nothing whatsoever to worry about in getting the flu shot?"

Big pharma and their hired town criers have communicated the little bit of mercury found in flu (and other) vaccines won't hurt kids or pregnant women.

Funny, I could have sworn the National Coalition of Women identified thirty-five hundred (+) women who took the "swine flu" shot had still-born babies (link). Remember how our BigPharma front-men and medical barkers rushed them and their children to the front of the line for the shots? How people trusted what the "medical authorities" told them?

Recall also how England's Medical Authorities teamed With BigPharma to pillory Dr. Andrew Wakefield publicly? And arranged to have a technical paper he published pulled from their "respected" Lancet Journal for even suggesting a vaccine-autism connection? How the Lancet, British Medical Journal, Sunday Times, CNN, and the rest of BigPharma's elite-controlled "press" had a field day - all because Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, said in his paper there might be a link between autism,MMR vaccines, and the gut?

Got to ask yourself why this doctor was publicly demonized. Can't duck the question any more.
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Bacon

Study finds eating fatty foods can help stop seizures


ABC 2
Sun, 24 Apr 2011 23:00 UTC

For decades, doctors have struggled to find a reliable way to stop seizures but now, they think they may have found a big help in an unlikely place.

It's a special diet, called the "KETO" diet.

On this diet, 90% of your food comes from fat, bacon, heavy cream, mayonnaise and you're virtually forbidden from eating starches and sugars.

Comment: Check out these articles for more information on how fat stimulates the vagus nerve and how such stimulation helps with epilepsy:

Fat fights inflammation

Vagus Nerve, Epilepsy and Drug Addiction

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Bacon

High fat diet 'can reverse kidney failure' in mice with diabetes


BBC
Sat, 23 Apr 2011 22:43 UTC
A controlled diet high in fat and low in carbohydrate can repair kidney damage in diabetic mice, according to US scientists.

The study, published in journal PLoS ONE, showed a "ketogenic diet" could reverse damage caused to tubes in the kidneys by too much sugar in the blood.

In the UK around a third of the 2.8m people with either type 1 or 2 diabetes go on to develop kidney damage.

Diabetes UK said it was "questionable" whether humans could sustain the diet.
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