Scurvy is a disease most commonly associated with sailors who didn't realize their teeth were falling out because they weren't consuming enough vitamin C. But this disease, thought to be from another age, may be on the rise.

Scurvy, once called "the scourge of the sea," may be returning simply because modern diets don't always contain enough vitamin C, aka ascorbic acid, a crucial nutrient to maintain healthy skin, bones, teeth, tissues and blood vessels.

Vitamin C is also required to absorb iron and produce collagen, a major component of connective tissue.

From the Latin term "scorbutus," scurvy has been an affliction for which the cause was unknown for possibly thousands of years, such as in ancient Egypt and Greece. Until recently, scurvy had been thought of as quite rare, but this seems to be changing.

'Scourge of the Sea' Was a Sailor Killer

In the 18th century, scurvy killed more sailors on long-distance runs than enemy combat. In 1747, a British voyage had the "sailor's bon voyage" for 1,300 scurvy victims from a crew of 2,000 in just 10 months (indicating how serious this disease really is).

A doctor who conducted what may have been the first scurvy trials described the usual diet of seals' livers and fat in his journals. Sailors suffered from ulcers, blackened skin and gum disease so severe their breath smelled rotten and their teeth fell out. They also had a terrible craving for citrus fruits.

The study involved 12 test subjects who were paired up and given either cider, acid, seawater or lemons along with their rations. Those given lemons recovered miraculously, while the others got worse.¹ Finally, someone had put two and two together, as a BBC News article noted:

"When they reached land, it was celery, cabbage and plants which helped them recover. Future voyages carried dried vegetables, fruit and palm wine and sauerkraut to help ward off the dreaded scurvy and in 1752 a Scottish doctor, James Lind, found proof that citrus had a rapid beneficial effect."

While it's now common knowledge (to most) that vitamin C intake is the way to prevent this dreadful disease, there are still areas of the world — including highly developed countries — where people don't think of scurvy in relation to themselves

The media continues to propel the Zika virus hysteria (the Zikasteria), despite all of the things that just don't add up.

Florida has reported five new cases of the Zika virus, and one in Pinellas County 265 miles North of Miami. The other four cases were found in an area of Miami that had already been sprayed with the pesticide Naled. (You know, the pesticide that ironically causes babies to be born with reduced brain sizes.)

Why does this seem to be such a surprise?

A mosquito bites someone with Zika... flies away... bites someone else... BINGO... they pass on the disease

However, that isn't exactly how it's being portrayed.

Why does Big Pharma hate coffee enema therapy? The answer is that coffee enemas are a powerful liver detoxification tool, a pain relieving therapy, and a therapy for cleansing and healing the colon. Retention coffee enemas are a key part of successful alternative cancer treatment protocols, because they rid the body of toxins that cause cancer and eliminate the toxins released by dead and dying cancer cells. Coffee enemas do all this and more without side effects and at minimal cost.

Coffee is More than a Beverage - It can be a Healing Herb

When coffee is used in an enema it has powerful healing effects.

Definition of a retention coffee enema: Two or more cups of a coffee/water mixture are introduced into the colon/bowel through a tube placed in the rectum, and held in place for a period of time while the coffee herb stimulates the liver, reduces pain, and increases the process of eliminating toxins through the intestine.

We've all had those lazy Sundays when the couch's gravitational pull is too strong to escape — but as binge watching becomes a bigger part of the cultural landscape, some people are finding it even harder to break free.

There's not a lot of hard clinical data on binge watching to date. Most psychologists and researchers haven't had time to do long-term surveys. But as with any new form of obsessive entertainment, there's a schism forming among researchers. Some experts, like Dr. Pamela Rutledge, a media psychologist and faculty member at California's Fielding Graduate University, say they see benefits in the hobby — and take issue with the term "binge watching."

"What I think is very interesting about this phenomenon is we call it 'binge watching,' which is a social pejorative," she says. "We don't say we're binge reading if we tuck ourselves away with a Dickens novel, but we call it binge watching because we couldn't do this before. ... There are actually lots of positives in watching media. It allows you to experience emotions, it can be cathartic and it allow you to see models of different sorts of behaviors."

But the number of experts and studies arguing the opposite position is bigger, as is often the case in the early days of an emerging trend. And they can be fairly alarming. Here's a look at some of the reported downsides facing people who take binge watching too far.

After years of growing concern, the California state auditor has produced a damning report describing how the state's 79,000 foster children are being drugged with psychotropic medications at abnormally high rates.

The report found that nearly 12 percent of kids in California's child welfare system were prescribed psychotropic medications - including antipsychotics, antidepressants and mood stabilizers - during 2014-2015. This compares to a rate of 4 to 10 percent for non-foster kids.

Some of these vulnerable children were drugged "in amounts and dosages that exceeded state guidelines," with no follow-up by the county to ensure these prescriptions were appropriate. Some counties also violated the law by failing to obtain court or parental approval for psychotropic medications.

California spent $226 million on psychotropic medications for foster kids over the last decade, which amounts to almost 72 percent of total drug spending for foster youth.

The report slams the state and counties for a failure of oversight that has allowed child welfare centers to resort to drugging to control behavior, which can have devastating effects on brain development and health condition.

In what can only be described as paradigm-shattering research on drug prices, the Journal of the American Medical Association has officially recognized why drug prices skyrocket in America. Big pharma is granted a monopoly by the State which effectively eliminates their competition and allows them to charge any price they want — so they do.

The new paper, published on August 23, "The High Cost of Prescription Drugs in the United States: Origins and Prospects for Reform," set out to "review the origins and effects of high drug prices in the US market and to consider policy options that could contain the cost of prescription drugs."

What the paper's authors, Harvard Medical School doctors Aaron Kesselheim and Jerry Avorn, and jurist Ameet Sarpatwari, found and subsequently admitted, shatters the very assertion that government regulation in the market is needed to keep medical care costs low. In fact, their findings were quite to the contrary.

It's official. The Miami Dolphins NFL football team has announced that this fall before every home game massive chemical pesticide spraying will be conducted to supposedly combat Zika virus, the totally benign virus which just recently (last year in 2015) was recreated by the mainstream media and turned into a scary killer virus which supposedly causes microcephaly in newborns.

This is mass genocide any way that you look at it as there is no such thing as a "safe" pesticide. Even worse than that is the precedent that someone at a very high level made this decision without approval from we the people:

The Miami Dolphins aren't messing around when it comes to the Zika virus and the health of their employees and fans.

As a means to combat the virus, the organization has been aggressively using EPA-approved chemicals in and around the newly dubbed Hard Rock Stadium, where the Dolphins play their home games.

A teen has reportedly died after getting a love bite from his girlfriend that caused him to have a stroke .

Julio Macias Gonzalez started having convulsions at the dinner table with his family in Mexico City after spending an evening with his girlfriend.

Paramedics were dispatched to the scene but the 17-year-old could not be saved.

It is thought that the suction of the love bite - also known as a 'hickey' - caused a blood clot that travelled to Julio's brain and caused him to have a stroke.

His 24-year-old girlfriend has now disappeared and the boy's parents are apparently now blaming her for his death.

Monsanto is one of the most hated companies on the planet. ...Unless you ask FORTUNE Magazine, that is. In that case, it's apparently one of the world's most admired companies. But if you actually ask real human beings then it ranks right behind BP and Bank of America as the third most hated company in the world.

Strange, then, that Monsanto's reputation in the scientific literature is so squeaky clean. Apparently it's just a bunch of science-hating neanderthals who dislike Monsanto's products and all of those squeaky clean couldn't-tell-a-lie, couldn't-hurt-a-fly scientists know better.

Of course, as readers of this column will know, this seeming conundrum isn't so strange after all. Scientists aren't angels and the things they study (as well as the results they get) are all too often influenced by who's paying for their research. And in the case of the peer-reviewed GMO safety literature, it isn't hard to tie a lot of it back to the biotech companies themselves, Monsanto foremost among them.

If any more proof of this insidious influence were needed, it just arrived. A set of emails obtained under a freedom of information request has exposed the types of tricks that Monsanto does to keep "problematic" studies out of the literature.

First, some background. If you haven't seen it already (or even if you have) go back and re-watch or re-read my (award-winning) 2013 report on the Seralini Roundup toxicity study, "Genetic Fallacy: How Monsanto Silences Dissent" and last year's follow-up, "Study Linking GMOs and Tumors Vindicated Yet Again...MSM Stays Silent."

Elite tennis players have an uncanny ability to clear their heads after making errors. They constantly move on and start fresh for the next point. They can't afford to dwell on mistakes.

Peter Strick is not a professional tennis player. He's a distinguished professor and chair of the department of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute. He's the sort of person to dwell on mistakes, however small.

"My kids would tell me, dad, you ought to take up pilates. Do some yoga," he said. "But I'd say, as far as I'm concerned, there's no scientific evidence that this is going to help me."

Still, the meticulous skeptic espoused more of a tennis approach to dealing with stressful situations: Just teach yourself to move on. Of course there is evidence that ties practicing yoga to good health, but not the sort that convinced Strick. Studies show correlations between the two, but he needed a physiological mechanism to explain the relationship. Vague conjecture that yoga "decreases stress" wasn't sufficient. How? Simply by distracting the mind?

The stress response in humans is facilitated by the adrenal glands, which sit on top of our kidneys and spit adrenaline into our blood whenever we're in need of fight or flight. That stress response is crucial in dire circumstances. But little of modern life truly requires it (especially among academic scientists). Most of the time, our stress responses are operating as a sort of background hum, keeping us on edge. Turn that off, and we relax.

"It might explain why certain sensations we find very relaxing or stressful."
For a long time, it has been understood that the adrenal glands were turned on and off by a couple discrete pathways coming from the brain. "Folks said there was one particular cortical area, perhaps two, that controlled the adrenal medulla," Strick explained.

Randy Bruno, an associate professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, further explained that "the way people usually think about the cortex, it's very hierarchical." That is, perceptions come in from the world and get sent from one part of the brain to the next, to the next, to the next. They go all the way up the chain of command to the frontal cortex. That sends some signals down to create motor actions.