A year ago, when chemotherapy stopped working against his leukemia, William Ludwig signed up to be the first patient treated in a bold experiment at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ludwig, then 65, a retired corrections officer from Bridgeton, N.J., felt his life draining away and thought he had nothing to lose.

Doctors removed a billion of his T-cells - a type of white blood cell that fights viruses and tumors - and gave them new genes that would program the cells to attack his cancer. Then the altered cells were dripped back into Mr. Ludwig's veins.

At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.

A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia.

For the last twenty years, veterans of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 have been complaining of a range of ailments, including pain, fatigue, and problems with memory and concentration. And for just as long, the causes have remained uncertain and there has been a tendency by the military to attribute the complaints to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now a long-term study at the University of Texas in Dallas has used a new technique to measure blood flow in the brains of sufferers and has detected "marked abnormalities" in brain function that can probably be attributed to low levels of exposure to sarin nerve gas. This abnormal blood flow has persisted or even worsened over the eleven years of the study.

"The findings mark a significant advancement in our understanding of the syndrome, which was for years written off by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a form of combat stress rather than an objectively diagnosable injury," reports the Dallas Observer.

Nerve signals control T cell responses, helping to explain inflammation and stroke.

Neurotransmitters may play a bigger role in immunity than scientists had realized. In two papers published today (September 15) in Science Express, immunologists identify neurotransmitters as key players in two previously mystery-shrouded defense mechanisms: how the nervous system body puts the brakes on an overenthusiastic inflammatory response, and the reasons behind post-stroke infections.

"These connections between the brain and immune system in both health and disease are very intriguing," said Lawrence Steinman, a professor of neurology at Stanford School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. The findings could have implications for the treatment of inflammatory disorders and stroke patients, he added.

Dr. Stephanie Seneff is a senior scientist at MIT and has been conducting research there for over three decades. However, she also has an undergraduate degree in biology from MIT, and a minor in food and nutrition. She's affiliated with the Weston A. Price Foundation and will be speaking at their November Dallas conference, and so will I. Dr. Seneff has a wealth of information in an area that many are not very knowledgeable about, and that is the importance of sulfur.

Sulfur deficiency is pervasive, and may be a contributing factor in:

• Obesity
  
• Heart disease
  
• Alzheimer's disease
  
• Chronic fatigue
  
• And more

She also believes conventional medicine is seriously confused about cholesterol, which is closely interrelated with sulfur. Furthermore, healthy cholesterol and sulfur levels are also highly dependent on your vitamin D levels! Here, she discusses the importance and the intricate relationships among these three factors.

It is an indisputable fact that humans crave fat.

"Why Can't I Stop Eating Fatty Foods?"

French fries, onion rings, donuts, and everything else that comes out of a deep-fryer. Corn chips, potato chips, Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, and all the other oil-soaked, salt-coated starches in the snack aisle. Oreos, buttered toast, salad dressing. Cheese, mayonnaise, and Alfredo sauce. The list goes on, and on.

Decades of diet propaganda, telling us over and over again that fat will kill us, have been unable to break us of our 'fat tooth'. Why do we crave fat so much?

It's because animal fat is the primary constituent of the evolutionary human diet. "Low-fat" diets just make us crave fat more keenly - and anti-animal-fat propaganda makes us binge on unsatisfying substitutes.

We have been trained to think soy products are healthy through decades-old marketing and advertising. But have soy and soy-based products and additives been proven to be safe and healthy? Some warn not to feed infant soy formula to a baby, others say it may effect fertility and hormonal problems and cause premature puberty in girls. A lot of small farmers will not feed soy to their chickens. Soy beans are genetically modified.

Last year a lawsuit was filed to stop the feeding prisoners large quantities of soy because of their health consequences. In the wake of the dietary change, prisoners began to suffer from a variety of health problems. "We have heard from over two hundred prisoners in the state of Illinois," said Sally Fallon Morell, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation. "The most common complaint is digestive disorders, including severe constipation, debilitating diarrhea, vomiting and extreme pain after eating," said Fallon Morell. "Skin problems, thyroid disorders and endocrine disruption leading to breast development are also common."

A study of more than 400 children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder has found a link between the children's routine play settings and the severity of their symptoms, researchers report. Those who regularly play in outdoor settings with lots of green (grass and trees, for example) have milder ADHD symptoms than those who play indoors or in built outdoor environments, the researchers found. The association holds even when the researchers controlled for income and other variables.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 9.5 percent of children aged 4-17 had been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2007. Symptoms include severe difficulty concentrating, hyperactivity and poor impulse control.

Although many children with ADHD are medicated, most "would benefit from a low-cost, side-effect-free way of managing their symptoms," wrote University of Illinois crop sciences visiting teaching associate Andrea Faber Taylor and natural resources and environmental sciences professor Frances (Ming) Kuo, the authors of the study.

Wobbly walking and clumsy moves are classic signs that someone's been drinking, and a new study suggests balance problems can afflict heavy drinkers for years after they sober up.

Researchers at Neurobehavioral Research Inc., in Honolulu, compared the balance abilities and gaits of diagnosed alcoholics who had been sober for several weeks, those who had been sober for an average of seven years, and people with no history of alcohol dependence.

Each participant was put through a three-part test "similar to the things that might be done in field sobriety tests," said Dr. George Fein, principal investigator for the study published today (Sept. 15) in the journal in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

The volunteers were first screened for recent drug and alcohol use, then asked to perform a series of balance tests such as standing heel-to-toe with their arms folded across the chest for 60 seconds, standing on one leg, or walking along a line. Each test was repeated with the volunteers' eyes closed.

Of the more than 200 volunteers, the 70 recently sober ones - who had not had alcohol for six to 15 weeks - performed the worst. But in tasks with their eyes closed, the 82 long-sober volunteers also performed noticeably worse than the 52 people who had never been alcoholics. (The researchers controlled for the effect of age on balance.)

"There's an 80 to 90 percent recovery, but there's still some residual effects," said Fein, the senior scientist and lab director at the company.

In seeking answers to why adolescent girls are suffering devastating health damage after being injected with HPV vaccines, SANE Vax, Inc decided to have vials of Gardasil tested in a laboratory. There, they found over a dozen Gardasil vaccine vials to be contaminated with rDNA of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). The vials were purchased in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Poland and France, indicating Gardasil contamination is a global phenomenon.

This means that adolescents who are injected with these vials are being contaminated with a biohazard -- the rDNA of HPV. In conducting the tests, Dr. Sin Hang Lee found rDNA from both HPV-11 and HPV-18, which were described as "firmly attached to the aluminum adjuvant."

That aluminum is also found in vaccines should be frightening all by itself, given that aluminum should never be injected into the human body (it's toxic when ingested, and it specifically damages the nervous system). With the added discovery that the aluminum adjuvant also carries rDNA fragments of two different strains of Human Papillomavirus, this now reaches the level of a dangerous biohazard -- something more like a biological weapon rather than anything resembling medicine.

As SANE Vax explains in its announcement, these tests were conducted after an adolescent girl experienced "acute onset Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis within 24 hours" of being injected with an HPV vaccine.

Doctors don't regularly prescribe natural remedies to patients, but a new study finds physicians and nurses are more likely than the general public to use alternative and complementary medicine for their own health ailments. The new study looking at alternative and complementary medicine use in Americans appears in the journal Health Services Research. "Nurses and doctors are reflecting current societal trends being swept up in a grassroots movement that they have resisted for the last three decades," says alternative and complementary medicine expert Guy Riekeman, DC, president of Life University, a chiropractic school in Atlanta. (He was not involved in this study.)

THE DETAILS: For the study, complementary and alternative medicine included things like acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, Pilates, meditation, use of herbs, and a vegetarian diet. Compared to the 63 percent of the general working population that taps these natural healing methods, 76 percent of healthcare workers reported using complementary and alternative medicine. Looking strictly at healthcare workers, doctors and nurses were more than twice as likely to seek treatment from a massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, or other practitioner-based alternative medicine provider compared to other workers in the healthcare industry, such as technicians, assistants, or administrators. Doctors and nurses were more than three times as likely to tap natural remedies for self-treatment (herbs, exercise, yoga, and the like). "As insiders, healthcare workers understand what's missing in our medical system. They're more educated than others about orthodox and alternative medicine," alternative medicine practitioner Joya Lynn-Schoen, MD, said in a statement from the Health Behavior News Service.

"Mainstream medicine will say, 'Here's a pill' or 'Have an operation' or 'There's nothing wrong with you, you're just tired,'" Lynn-Schoen said.