Felitti, a specialist in preventive medicine, was trying out a new liquid diet treatment among patients at a Kaiser Permanente clinic. And it worked really well. The severely obese patients who stuck to it lost as much as 300 pounds in a year.
"Oh yeah, this was really quite extraordinary," recalls Felitti.
But then, some of the patients who'd lost the most weight quit the treatment and gained back all the weight — faster than they'd lost it. Felitti couldn't figure out why. So he started asking questions.
First, one person told him she'd been sexually abused as a kid. Then another.
"You know, I remember thinking, 'Well, my God, this is the second incest case I've seen in [then] 23 years of practice,' " Felitti says. "And so I started routinely inquiring about childhood sexual abuse, and I was really floored."
More than half of the 300 or so patients said yes, they too had been abused.
Felitti wondered if he'd discovered one of the keys to some cases of obesity and all the health problems that go along with it.
That possibility made him very curious: What if having a bad childhood could affect health in other ways?
The idea that childhood abuse and neglect could affect adult health was a revelation to Felitti. But a poll released Monday (from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) finds that the public widely believes this to be the case today.
How To Measure The Troubles Of Childhood
As he continued to explore the idea in the 1990s, Felitti got together with an epidemiologist named Dr. Rob Anda, who at the time was on staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They came up with a set of questions to trace, in a larger group, how tough childhood experiences might affect adult health.
They called their work the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACE.
You can take the ACE quiz here.First developed in the 1990s, the 10 questions of the Adverse Childhood Experiences test are designed to take a rough measure of a difficult childhood.
The 17,000 or so patients in this study were mostly middle-aged white people, upper- and middle-class, from San Diego. Felitti and Anda asked them to think back to their childhoods and list how many of 10 different types of adverse childhood experiences they'd had, including sexual, physical or emotional abuse; neglect; loss of a parent due to death, divorce or incarceration; mental illness in a parent; and drug or alcohol abuse by a parent.
The researchers wanted to get a sense of how being exposed to these different categories of adverse experience early in life might affect long-term health. So, on Felitti and Anda's score sheet, having undergone any one of those different categories of trauma or neglect before age 18 would add one point to a person's ACE score. Whether someone had been sexually abused one time, or dozens of times, the experience would count as one point in their study. Being habitually abused, and losing a parent to death, would add up to an ACE score of 2.
Even though Felitti and Anda were just getting a rough measure of the severity of the patients' experiences, when Anda's team at the CDC crunched the numbers, he was shocked.
One in 10 of the patients surveyed had grown up with domestic violence. Two in 10 had been sexually abused. Three in 10 had been physically abused.
"Just the sheer scale of the suffering — it was really disturbing to me," Anda remembers. "I actually ... I remember being in my study and I wept."
And then came the part where he found out what happened to all those people when they grew up: "very dramatic increases in pretty much every one of the major public health problems that we'd included in the study," he says.
Cancer, addiction, diabetes and stroke (just to name a few) occurred more often among people with high ACE scores.
Now, not everyone who'd had a rough childhood developed a serious illness, of course.
But, according to the findings, adults who had four or more "yeses" to the ACE questions were, in general, twice as likely to have heart disease, compared to people whose ACE score was zero. Women with five or more "yeses" were at least four times as likely to have depression as those with no ACE points.
When ACEs Are Very High
Carol Redding, one of Felitti's patients, answered yes to every single ACE question, and she ended up with an ACE score of 10. Ten out of 10.
Today Redding lives in a tidy, peaceful house outside San Diego. The walls of her home office are lined with degrees and certificates — at age 58, she's working on a Ph.D. From the outside, she's a success.
But inside — in her body as well as her mind, Redding says — she has been battling all her life.
She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of those childhood experiences. "I had the flashbacks," she says, "the depression, the anxiety — Oh, my lord! Anxiety, like ... if it were a tangible thing living in the house with me, I'd need another room just to house that."
In childhood, she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. In adulthood, she had a thyroid condition and has survived three different types of cancer: leukemia, breast cancer and lymphoma.
Learning about the ACE study and her own results made Redding wonder if all of that — maybe even the cancer — might be partly connected to her troubled childhood. After so many years, all of a sudden, "all those very confused, very scattered puzzle pieces of my life just locked together in one big, amazingly clear picture," she says.
This revelation meant so much to Redding that she started a newsletter about the ACE study and later worked for the CDC, publicizing the study's results.
And she did all that because one big question kept nagging at her: Why didn't more people know about this research?
Medical Community Initially Skeptical
Anda says that when he and Felitti first published their results in the late 1990s, the response from the medical community was frustrating.
"I thought that people would flock to this information," Anda says, "and be knocking on our doors, saying, 'Tell us more. We want to use it.' And the initial reaction was really — silence."
In fact, it took a long time to even get the study published. A number of top medical journals rejected the article, Anda says, "because there was intense skepticism."
Sarah Floud, an epidemiologist at Oxford University in England, says she understands that skepticism and thinks it may still be warranted.
"An association doesn't necessarily mean that one thing causes the other thing," says Floud. She thinks doctors and patients should take care not to overinterpret an ACE score — it's not a crystal ball that predicts health or illness.
Rather, Floud says, this rough indicator of a difficult childhood is just one risk factor in the mix with lots of others, such as your genes, your diet, whether you drink heavily or smoke, for example — factors known to be strongly related to some illnesses, like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
Comment: Diet is probably the biggest risk factor. Bad genes can thrive on a good diet, but when you combine a bad diet (high in carbohydrates) with any other risk factor, that's a recipe for suffering.
So if you're otherwise healthy, not a smoker or a drinker, and not obese, can childhood trauma alone increase the likelihood of diseases like cancer and heart disease?
"I don't think there's quite so much evidence for that," Floud says. "But that's not to say that it might not be true. It's just that ... that seems to be harder to prove."
Now, 15 years after the ACE study came out, some scientists are trying to connect the dots — to get a clearer picture of what exactly adverse childhood experiences do to the body and why the study results came out the way they did.
"Well, you've reshaped the biology of the child," says Megan Gunnar, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota who, for more than 30 years, has been studying the ways children respond to stressful experiences. "This is how nature protects us," Gunnar adds. We all become adapted to living in "the kinds of environments we're born into."
And if you have scary, traumatic experiences when you're small, Gunnar says, your stress response system may, in some cases, be programmed to overreact, influencing the way your mind and body work together. Research in animals and people suggests that the part of the mind that scientists call "executive function" — thought, judgment, self-control — seems to be most affected, she says.
"Over time, especially when you're young, experiences of neglect and abuse and stress impair those circuits," Gunnar says. "You're less able to tell yourself not to eat the ice cream, or smoke the cigarette, or have that additional drink. You're less capable of regulating your own behavior. And that seems to be terribly important for linking early experiences with later health outcomes."
This growing body of research indicates that, right now, the health of millions of children is being shaped by abuse and neglect. As they grow up, these children will be more likely than other children to use behaviors like smoking, drinking and overeating to cope with stress.
Preventing childhood trauma in the first place, Felitti, Anda and their proponents now believe, is one of the biggest opportunities to prevent disease — and save billions in health care costs. It's an opportunity, they say, that American medicine and the health care industry still seem to be missing.
In 1896, the young psychiatrist Sigmund Freud presented the first major paper he had ever written to his colleagues at Vienna's Society for Psychiatry and Neurology. Freud considered that his paper, entitled "The Aetiology of Hysteria," was of the utmost importance, since it proposed what he believed to be an irrefutable cause for the neuroses suffered by many of his patients. Quite simply, when listening sympathetically to his women patients, Freud had heard that as children they had suffered sexual assaults, and he believed that it was these acts of violence which had led to the victims' mental illness later in life.
The point of the paper was that sexually abused children, many of whom had come from "respectable" middle class homes, displayed significant "hysterias" later on in life—an observation that today would pass as obvious to the point of banality, but something that in 1896 provoked a backlash among Freud's older colleagues.
All the strange conditions under which the incongruous pair continue their love relations—on the one hand the adult, who cannot escape his share in the mutual dependence necessarily entailed by a sexual relationship, and who is at the same time armed with complete authority and the right to punish, and can exchange the one role for the other to the uninhibited satisfaction of his whims, and on the other hand the child, who in his helplessness is at the mercy of this arbitrary use of power, who is prematurely aroused to every kind of sensibility and exposed to every sort of disappointment, and whose exercise of the sexual performances assigned to him is often interrupted by his imperfect control of his natural needs—all these grotesque and yet tragic disparities distinctly mark the later development of the individual and of his neurosis, with countless permanent effects which deserve to be traced in the greatest detail.
In fact, as author and former Freud Archives Director Jeffrey Masson discussed at some length in his controversial bestseller The Assault On Truth: Freud's Suppression Of The Seduction Theory (1984), the pressure that was brought to bear on Freud was strong enough to make him change his mind completely about the validity of the sexual assault theory. In a dramatic about-face, he formulated his "seduction theory," in which children themselves became the seducers rather than the victims.
Freud's inaugural paper, "The Aetiology of Hysteria" was singled out from all the other papers presented in Vienna in 1896 as the one paper that was not published in the "Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift," the peer journal for the newly forming school of psychoanalysis. Unlike all the other papers delivered, there was no summary and no discussion of Freud's work.
According to Masson, Freud wrote a letter to his close friend Wilhelm Fliess that,
"A lecture on the etiology of hysteria at the Psychiatric Society met with an icy reception... and from Krafft-Ebing the strange comment: It sounds like a scientific fairy tale. And this after one has demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand year old problem, a 'source of the Nile.'"
According to Masson,
"The prospect of being ostracized by medical society was negligible in the face of his knowledge that he had discovered an important truth."
At this point Freud believed what his patients were telling them, namely that they had been sexually assaulted, usually by their fathers, but sometimes by their mothers, and were living in shame and pain and self-loathing.
ALL OF FREUD'S FAMILY WERE TALMUDIC JEWS & SO WERE HIS PATIENTS:
"THE ORTHODOX JEWISH TALMUD IS ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD”!
The official unabridged Soncino Edition of the Talmud published in 1935 was "Translated into English with Notes, Glossary and Indices" by such eminent Talmudic scholars as Rabbi Dr. I. Epstein, Rabbi Dr. Samuel Daiches, Rabbi Dr. Israel W. Slotki, M.A., Litt.D., The Reverend Dr. A. Cohen, M.A.', Ph.D., Maurice Simon, M.A., and the Very Reverend The Chief Rabbi Dr. J.H. Hertz wrote the "Foreword" for the Soncino Edition of the Talmud. The Very Reverend Rabbi Hertz was at the time the Chief Rabbi of England.
The world's leading authorities on the Talmud confirm that the official unabridged Soncino Edition of the Talmud translated into English follows the original texts with great exactness. It is almost a word-for-word translation of the original texts. In his famous classic "The History of the Talmud," Michael Rodkinson, the leading authority on the Talmud, in collaboration with the celebrated Reverend Dr. Isaac M. Wise states:
"THE TALMUD IS ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD. During the twenty centuries of its existence...IT SURVIVED IN ITS ENTIRETY, and not only has the power of its foes FAILED TO DESTROY EVEN A SINGLE LINE, but it has not even been able materially to weaken its influence for any length of time. IT STILL DOMINATES THE MINDS OF A WHOLE PEOPLE, WHO VENERATE ITS CONTENTS AS DIVINE TRUTH..."
SANHEDRIN, 55b-55a: "What is meant by this? - Rab said: Pederasty with a child below nine years of age is not deemed as pederasty with a child above that. Samuel said: Pederasty with a child below three years is not treated as with a child above that (2) What is the basis of their dispute? - Rab maintains that only he who is able to engage in sexual intercourse, may, as the passive subject of pederasty throw guilt (upon the actual offender); whilst he who is unable to engage in sexual intercourse cannot be a passive subject of pederasty (in that respect) (3). But Samuel maintains: Scriptures writes, (And thou shalt not lie with mankind) as with the lyings of a woman (4). It has been taught in accordance with Rab: Pederasty at the age of nine years and a day; (55a) (he) who commits bestiality, whether naturally or unnaturally: or a woman who causes herself to be bestiality abused, whether naturally or unnaturally, is liable to punishment (5)."
This "divine truth" which "a whole people venerate" of which "not a single letter of it is missing" and today "is flourishing to such a degree as cannot be found in its history" is illustrated by the additional verbatim quotations which follow:
SANHEDRIN, 55b: "A maiden three years and a day may be acquired in marriage by coition, and if her deceased husband's brother cohabits with her, she becomes his. The penalty of adultery may be incurred through her; (if a niddah) she defiles him who has connection with her, so that he in turn defiles that upon which he lies, as a garment which has lain upon (a person afflicted with gonorrhea)."
(footnotes) "(2) His wife derives no pleasure from this, and hence there is no cleaving. (3) A variant reading of this passage is: Is there anything permitted to a Jew which is forbidden to a heathen. Unnatural connection is permitted to a Jew. (4) By taking the two in conjunction, the latter as illustrating the former, we learn that the guilt of violating the injunction `to his wife but not to his neighbor's wife' is incurred only for natural but not for unnatural intercourse."
SANHEDRIN, 69b "Our rabbis taught: If a woman sported lewdly with her young son (a minor), and he committed the first stage of cohabitation with her, -Beth Shammai says, he thereby renders her unfit for the priesthood (1). Beth Hillel declares her fit...All agree that the connection of a boy nine years and a day is a real connection; whilst that of one less than eight years is not (2); their dispute refers only to one who is eight years old.
KETHUBOTH, 11a-11b. "Rabba said, It means (5) this: When a grown up man has intercourse with a little girl it is nothing, for when the girl is less than this (6), it is as if one puts the finger in the eye (7), but when a small boy has intercourse with a grown up woman, he makes her as `a girl who is injured by a piece of wood' ".
(footnotes) "(5). Lit., `says'. (6) Lit., `here', that is, less than three years old. (7) Tears come to the eyes again and again, so does virginity come back to the little girl under three years."
KETHUBOTH, 11a-11b. "Rab Judah said that Rab said: A small boy who has intercourse with a grown up woman makes her (as though she were ) injured by a piece of wood (1). Although the intercourse of a small boy is not regarded as a sexual act, nevertheless the woman is injured by it as by a piece of wood."
(footnotes) "(1) Although the intercourse of a small boy is not regarded as a sexual act, nevertheless the woman is injured by it as by a piece of wood."
ABODAH ZARAH, 36b-37a. "R. Naham b. Isaac said: They decreed in connection with a heathen child that it would cause defilement by seminal emission (2) so that an Israelite child should not become accustomed to commit pederasty with it...From what age does a heathen child cause defilement by seminal emission? From the age of nine years and one day. (37a) for inasmuch as he is then capable of the sexual act he likewise defiles by emission. Rabina said: It is therefore to be concluded that a heathen girl (communicates defilement) from the age of three years and one day, for inasmuch as she is then capable of the sexual act she likewise defiles by a flux.
SOTAH, 26b. "R. Papa said: It excludes an animal, because there is not adultery in connection with an animal (4). Raba of Parazika (5) asked R. Ashi, Whence is the statement which the Rabbis made that there is no adultery in connection with an animal? Because it is written, Thou shalt not bring the hire of a harlot or the wages of a dog etc.; (6) and it has been taught: The hire of a dog (7) and the wages of a harlot (8) are permissible, as it is said, Even both of these (9) - the two (specified texts are abominations) but not four (10)...As lying with mankind. (12) But, said Raba, it excludes the case where he warned her against contact of the bodies (13). Abaye said to him, That is merely an obscene act (and not adultery), and did the All-Merciful prohibit (a wife to her husband) for an obscene act?"
Of the "sacred" Talmudic teachings of the "Sages," preserved since 500 A.D. and taught more widely today than ever before in Talmud-Torah schools in the U.S.A., perhaps nothing better illustrates "fools" with "reprobate minds" than the teaching in the Talmud book of Yebamoth that spittle on the top of the bed curtain proves that a wife has been guilty of adultery, as only lying down face upwards could she have spit up on it. Spitting several feet straight up! The Talmud states: "When a peddler leaves a house and the woman within is fastening her sinnar [breech-cloth] … . If spittle is found on the upper part of the curtained bed she must, said Rabbi, go." Footnote: "Even if there were no witnesses that misconduct took place." Further footnote: "Only the woman lying face upwards could have spat on the spot. Intercourse may, there fore, be suspected."
NO ONE IS PREPARED TO MAKE THE CONNECTION BETWEEN TALMUDIC JUDAISM & CHILD SEX ABUSE IN JUDAISM!
YES!
There are pedophiles everywhere, but Talmudic Judaism teaches it:
HOW PEDOPHILIA CAME TO HOLLYWOOD
BY BILLY WILDER
Screenwriter and director, Billy Wilder, has had an enormous impact on the public, as substantiated by his numerous Oscars and other film awards. Responsible for famous films like Hold Back the Dawn, Five Graves to Cairo, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina and The Apartment, Wilder's cinema successes were granted him as he was just another pawn who was utilized with satanic acumen to help abolish society's established code of ethics. His own authorized biographer who worked closely with him, Maurice Zolotow, wrote:
"Of course, I did not know what I was getting into when I had started this. It became, as all such journeys have become, a journey to find out the secret springs of this most devious and perverse of Hollywood's personalities."
Wilder loved to transport the viewer into the depravity of his own heart and did this by tricking the censors who sought to enforce the old Hollywood Production Code of Hollywood's "Golden Age." Wilder recalls, "We had to operate cunningly to outwit the censors and this made us write more subtly." What subtleties did he scatter throughout his films? Perversion. In his movie, The Major and the Minor, Wilder admits that the motif was child sexuality, stating:
"Ray Milland falls in love with Ginger as a twelve year old child. We had here the first American movie about pedophilia. The Major is sexually aroused by her. He can't help himself. I was worried that audiences would be shocked by this story, but it seems that they were not."
This goes to show that if a story is entertaining and "cute," it can bypass the normal reaction to such filth and translate into apathetic disregard on the slippery slope of corruption. Where did this movie minister of perversion receive his material? Wilder was given his creative material by another supernatural force. In addition to stating that he is "demonically possessed and slightly crazed," Zolotow reports of Wilder:
"He could not stop his creative machinery from functioning. He was enslaved by his art...One sometimes felt as if one were moved by powerful invisible forces. I forgot to tell you that Wilder never starts a new screenplay without typing two words on the first page: Cum Deo ('With God'). He has a pantheistic feeling about the universe."
Demon possession leads many from the truths of God to the pantheistic lies of the New Age movement because Satan uses those who will serve him most faithfully in preparing humanity to embrace him as the god of this world. Wilder's responses upon completion of his show make it readily apparent which god he aligned himself with. Scientologist screenwriter of the Sound of Music, Ernest Lehman, recalls:
"He looked at the heavens and screeched F--- you!" It was...a victory cry, as if he were calling out to God and saying, 'I completed this picture despite everything you did to make me surrender.'"
Dr. Lycurgus Starkey rightly announced on the NBC network: "His movies have overturned all the sexual mores, glorified promiscuity, glamorized prostitution and elevated adultery to a virtue." Dr. Starkey was prophetically right in predicting the social effect and outcome of Wilder's films that we currently face in our day. The atheist author of communism, Karl Marx, explains the reasons why this is so:
"The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production."
The gross immorality in Hollywood that makes its way on the screen and thus influences the masses reflects the lives of those who operate within it. An intimate friend of the late Steve McQueen related:
"He'd kill for a part in a movie...he'd suck anyone's [expletive]...he'd get f----- or f--- anyone who'd get him a part in a show...then he'd wish-he'd pray- that person would have a heart attack or a stroke and die, and then there would be no way for anyone to know how McQueen had got the part."
This disgusting ambition is what keeps the infamous casting couch warm and desirous hopeful actors willing. Hollywood insider, Phyllis Diller, clarifies this fact:
"The casting couch is the name of the game in Hollywood. I know there are stars, especially women, who have made a career from sexual favors."
Would you invite a person whom you knew to be ethically bankrupt and an absolute moral degenerate into your home to influentially instruct your wife, your husband, and your children or loved ones? These are the very ones that America invites into their home every night via the television to submissively share their lives with.
Biblically condemned spiritual conundrums regularly occur in Hollywood. Faye Dunaway said that the ghost of Joan Crawford is haunting her. Actress Jean Seberg believed that her "devils" kept her from ever being free.
She stated:
"The devils will stop that sort of stuff in a second. They ride right here. (Touching her collar bone with her fingers) Sitting here and here. There's one on each side...these are both unfriendly influences. They tell me to run my car into other cars, or drive off a cliff."
A friend later reflected on her life and pin pointed the cause as the "acting classes at Columbia Studios...[which] had the power to influence Jean's devils." Like countless others in the Hollywood movie star system, this lead to psychiatric hospitals and suicide. Actor Sal Mineo was in regular contact with psychics and spoke of the "vibrations" of James Dean's spirit that haunted him, stating, "I've got to get him off my back because I don't want to join him down there." Mineo was murdered under mysterious circumstances. Is fame worth the extorted fees that Satan demands of his servants of the silver screen?
As Alan Alda declared:
"There's plenty of money to be had...But you also lose your soul."