Health & WellnessS


Health

Adaptogenic herbs: A little may go a long way

Alexa Erickson
Collective Evolution
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
adaptogenic herbs
If you want to find something "bad" about something "good," you just have to search hard enough on the Internet. While there will always be an opposing opinion, or study, it's important to consider all sides. This is particularly true for trends.

You will find headlines that tell you what to eat, and what not to eat, every single day, sometimes even about the same food. Adaptogens have been on the good list as of late, but there's some information the trend-driven articles informing the masses are leaving out.

Adaptogens are herbs considered to help the body adapt to stress and to exert a normalizing effect upon bodily processes. Among the most well-known are ginseng, holy basil, and licorice root.

The wellness world has been buzzing with talk of these powders for some time now, recommending adding them to your daily smoothie to experience an array of health benefits. But like anything that the general population comes to learn about and love, everyone wants more. Maca, for instance, has been touted for its ability to improve sex drive. So should you add heaps of the powder to your recipe? No, and this is where people really need to pay attention.
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Health

7 alternative therapies for depression that won't give you suicidal thoughts

Mark Sisson
Mark's Daily Apple
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
depression
As I discussed last month, depression is the yin to anxiety's yang. Between these two troublemakers, they've got dark clouds hanging over both the past and the future, making the present moment complicated at best (and for some people unbearable). Taken as a human composite, it's an unfortunate trade-off for being cognitively complex. As individuals, however, we naturally just want a solution.

The problem is, there's just so many confounding factors surrounding depression that it's hard to know where to start. Your mind is an infinitely complex latticework of moving parts; one which continues to baffle and divide the scientific community. How does a practitioner prescribe suitable treatments for a problem they don't fully comprehend? And, yet, medical science often (and perhaps inevitably) works with incomplete information.

Comment: Contrast the results of these natural therapies with those of pharmaceutical antidepressants:

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Life Preserver

10 easy tips for boosting your serotonin levels

Mark Sisson
Mark's Daily Apple
Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00 UTC
serotonin drawn on board
Serotonin is a major regulator of mood and depression risk. These are important, vital roles, to be sure. Your mood describes how you experience and interpret the world. If it's consistently bad, you're going to have a rough time. Yet, serotonin is much more than the "feel-good hormone." It also influences sexual desire and helps us remember. It's the precursor to melatonin, the neurotransmitter that allows us to sleep.

Although we mainly think of serotonin as a neurotransmitter acting on the brain, our guts are the biggest producers of serotonin. About 90% of the serotonin in our bodies is produced in the gut, where it helps trigger the contractions that push food through the GI tract and initiates nausea and vomiting (when necessary). That's not the focus of today's post on brain serotonin boosters, but I thought you'd all find it interesting.

Okay, so how can someone with inadequate serotonin levels boost the available serotonin in their brains?
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Black Magic

Why the FDA shouldn't be in charge of regulating a darned thing

Christina Sarich
Waking Times
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
FDA not approved
"New dietary ingredients" are the government's code phrase for supplements, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to prohibit your access to all-natural, health-supporting herbs and food ingredients which have been used as medicine for centuries.

These "new dietary ingredients" aren't new, despite the FDA's lingo. They've been tested over time by award-winning chemists, doctors, indigenous healers, and lay people alike. So, why is the FDA tying to regulate the supplement industry with such renewed vigor?

The FDA often attacks specific, natural, herbal supplements when they compete with a chemical drug needing approval through drug trials. For instance, when Eli Lilly recently put the drug Solanezumb, meant to treat Alzheimer's, through its final drug trial phase, it was projected to bring in more than $7.6 billion by 2024 for the drug company. In direct competition with this drug were any supplements containing picamilon. Many natural herbs are neuroprotective.

Comment: The corrupt, ass-backward and generally toxic FDA seems, by design, to be an agency that is structured and maintained to keep people ill and diseased; a sampling of their long track record:


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Biohazard

Crypto contamination in swimming pools is on the rise

Dr. Mercola
mercola.com
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 17:19 UTC
kids in pool
Sometimes the evening news reveals something that causes you to worry about that which you never worried before. Such may have been the case when news emerged recently of a huge uptick in the number of diarrhea outbreaks after people went swimming in a public pool and inadvertently swallowed the water. But that was just the beginning of their problem.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC's) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)1 noted that when they sought medical attention, the diarrhea sufferers learned the pool water they ingested contained parasites and that the parasites, known as cryptosporidium, or crypto, now resided in them.

Can it get worse? Well, yes: The diarrhea outbreaks have doubled in just a few years, as there were at least 32 known outbreaks due to crypto contamination in pools or water parks in 2016, while there were only 16 cases in 2014, the CDC reported. That's not 32 people infected; that's 32 outbreaks that affected multiple individuals. Reuters added:
"Arizona last year reported that 352 people became sick with Cryptosporidiosis from July through October, compared with no more than 62 cases per year from 2011 to 2015. Ohio reported 1,940 infections in 2016, compared with no more than 571 in any one year from 2012 to 2015."2
The Skinny on Crypto

Crypto is the most common cause of such diarrhea outbreaks, made worse because the parasite can survive for as long as 10 days even in chlorinated water and is "notoriously difficult to kill." It hasn't been just in the last handful of years that this problem seems to be multiplying. Since 2004, crypto cases have actually tripled. The CDC reports that the parasite is found in every region of the U.S. and throughout the world."3
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Health

CBD oil treatment saves life of girl stricken with infection-related epilepsy syndrome

Rachel Blevins
The Free Thought Project
Sun, 04 Jun 2017 14:42 UTC
Annalise and Maryann Lujan
Annalise and Maryann Lujan
A 12-year-old girl from Arizona has become the latest example of the healing power of cannabis, after her family discovered that CBD oil was the answer to combatting a rare brain syndrome.

Annalise Lujan was diagnosed with infection-related epilepsy syndrome, or FIRES, in April. The rare disorder came on suddenly, and caused Lujan to have continuous seizures. The condition, which has been known to lead to brain injury or even death, prompted doctors to put Lujan in a medically-induced coma until they found a method to prevent the seizures.

"One day, she was just a healthy young lady, going to school, participating in her community and her gymnastics, and the next day—fighting for her life," Maryann Lujan, Annalise's mom, told the NBC affiliate in Tucson.

After 18 days on a ventilator at a local hospital, Annalise was airlifted to Phoenix Children's Hospital, where doctors suggested using cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive extract of cannabis, to treat her seizures.
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Info

Stem cell therapy: The innovations and potential to help repair and regenerate your body

Andrew Mercola
Mercola
Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
stem cells
Kristin Comella,1 named No. 1 on the Academy of Regenerative Practices list of Top 10 stem cell innovators, has been a stem cell researcher for nearly two decades. In this interview, she discusses the enormous regenerative potential of stem cell therapy.

Comella, who holds degrees in chemical and biomedical engineering, began working with stem cells in graduate school, using a technique called magnetic cell sorting, which involves tagging nanoparticle magnets onto cells and then separating the cells based on the proteins they express.
"What we've learned over the years is that stem cells express different proteins than other kinds of cells in your body," she explains. "That began my career in the field of stem cells."
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Magic Wand

Witch Hazel: Your skin's best friend

Dr. Weil
drweil.com
Mon, 29 May 2017 23:17 UTC
witch hazel
Witch hazel has a long, impressive history as an anti-inflammatory, topical extract useful for skin toning, cleaning, calming and healing. The first successful mass-produced American skincare product, debuted in 1846, was "Golden Treasure," later renamed Pond's Cold Cream. It was based on wild-harvested witch hazel, which company chemists learned about from Native Americans in New York state.

Today, witch hazel's many uses make it the most popular topical botanical in the world. It is part of the base used in toners, cleaners and makeup removers made by large skincare companies including Revlon, Neutrogena, L'Oreal and Estée Lauder.

The North American shrub known as witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) grows abundantly in the eastern and Midwestern U.S., and in southern Canada. It is characterized by a brilliant orange or yellow blossoms that resemble exploding fireworks, and a unique, aggressive method of propagation: its seed capsules erupt explosively in autumn, flinging seeds up to 30 feet.

Apart from its medicinal uses, the Mohegan tribe taught English settlers how to use witch hazel saplings for dowsing - the sticks, Native American lore has it, bend downward to indicate underground water sources.
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Attention

Re-Evaluated: Opioid addiction plus other doctor-induced health problems

Catherine J. Frompovich
Activist Post
Mon, 22 May 2017 22:47 UTC
meds
© free thought project
The opioid addiction problem in the U.S. is growing dramatically and urban areas are having a hard time trying to cope with both sides of the issue. For a few days, all news talk radio KYW 1060 reported on those problems in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the fifth largest U.S. city [3], not very far from where I reside.

According to Philly.com, statistics are frightening:
Drug overdose deaths in Philadelphia surged to 900 last year — nearly a 30 percent increase in a single year — as the nation continued to grapple with an epidemic of opioid use and abuse. [1]

A 30 percent increase in a single year!
According to the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health, data every year since 2004, with 358 deaths, have risen year-after-year until in 2016, 900 deaths! However, Philly is not an anomaly; opioid addiction/deaths are a national problem, as the CDC indicates. Nationally in 2015, opioids contributed to 52,404 deaths per the CDC's "Drug Overdose Death Chart" listing state-by-state [2].
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Alarm Clock

Dr. Kelly Brogan: That naughty little pill

Kelly Brogan
madinamerica.com
Fri, 08 Feb 2013 22:23 UTC
birth control
It was early in my actualization as a feminist-minded, righteous post-adolescent that I began to think of birth control as a woman's right (who was anyone to tell me that I couldn't assault my hormones with synthetic imposters). It would be years before I would learn about the nuanced considerations of tacit permissiveness toward reckless unprotected sex, the wholesale delegation of contraception to the female counterpart, and the fundamental divorce of a woman from the very feedback systems that fire up her reproductive age vitality.

These concerns would begin to color my perception of this gift from Pharma, well before I began to learn about functional biochemical concerns surrounding the metabolism of synthetic hormones. With over 100 million women using this form of hormonal suppression worldwide, I have to wonder how many of them have any exposure to information about the Pill's subtle but important perturbations to the system, not to mention the consensus risks of thromboembolism, hypertension, cerebrovascular events, gallstones, and cancer.

As notorious as our hormones are for wreaking havoc, they are what pop us into high relief - they excite us, move us, drive us and enliven us. The highly non-linear relationships between sex hormones, thyroid hormone, and adrenal hormones is like the magic of 3-D glasses: if you cover one lens, things just don't look as exciting.

Comment: The Health & Wellness Show: Keeping it Rill About the Pill

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