In a year, one county filled enough prescriptions for 150 doses of painkillers per resident.

Manchester, Kentucky —This economically depressed city in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains is an image of frozen-in-time decline: empty storefronts with faded facades, sagging power lines, and aged streets with few stoplights.

But there is one type of business that seems to thrive: pharmacies.

Eleven drug stores, mostly independents, are scattered about a tiny city of 1,500 people. Many have opened in the past decade—four in the past three years. And prescription pain drugs are one of the best-selling items—the very best seller at some.

Most pharmacies here and in surrounding Clay County (population 21,000) lack the convenience-store trappings of national chains like CVS or Walgreen's. They sell few items over the counter, focusing on prescriptions and little else.

On this episode of The Health and Wellness Show we are joined by Dr. Mark Sircus of drsircus.com. He is the Director of the International Medical Veritas Association, an acupuncturist and Doctor of Oriental and Pastoral Medicine and the author of several books on natural allopathic medicine including Treatment Essentials: Practicing Natural Allopathic Medicine, Sodium Bicarbonate: Nature's Unique First Aid Remedy, and Iodine - Bringing Back the Universal Medicine. Join us as we discuss natural (and inexpensive) ways to boost your health and well-being with magnesium, iodine, selenium, sodium bicarbonate and more!

Running Time: 01:11:16

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s alone, the likelihood of having a classmate with a food allergy increased by 20 per cent in the United States. In fact, over the past five decades, the incidence of all allergies and autoimmune diseases - caused by your body attacking itself - has skyrocketed. What could explain our sudden hypersensitivity to our surroundings and ourselves? Since evolution operates on the timescale of millennia, the culprits lie not in our genes but somewhere within our environment.

One thing that has changed in public health is our awareness of germs and how they spread. In response to that insight, over the past half-century our implementation of hygiene practices has spared us from debilitating infections and enormous human misery. But the new vigilance might have altered the development of our immune system, the collection of organs that fight infections and internal threats to our health.

The idea that too clean an environment might be harmful has been dubbed 'the hygiene hypothesis'. The concept has been perverted by some to suggest that the less clean the environment, the better. But its meaning is different: it is not dirt that we are missing but exposure to certain microbes that normally contribute to the development of our immune system. 'It's not that we aren't exposed enough to microbes but that we're not exposed to the right types of microbes,' says the immunobiologist Ruslan Medzhitov at the Yale School of Medicine, also head of the Food Allergy Science Initiative at the Broad Institute.

So what has changed? In short, it's the standard for what constitutes a good microbe versus a bad one. 'Take bacterial species that increase nutrient absorption from food,' Medzhitov says. These were immensely beneficial at a time where you had to go days without eating. Today in the parts of the world with an overabundance of food, having such bacteria in your intestine contributes to obesity. 'Microbes that cause intestinal inflammation are another example of what we call bad microbes because they induce [detrimental immune] responses. But in the past, these microbes could have protected you from intestinal pathogens,' he adds.

A rare bacterial outbreak in New York City linked to rats has infected three people, one of whom died, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Three people in one city block in the Bronx were diagnosed with leptospirosis within the last two months, after they had become severely ill, the department reported yesterday. One of the infected people, a man in his 30s, died.

"The Health Department has identified a cluster of three cases of leptospirosis on one block in the Concourse area of the Bronx," officials from the New York City Health Department said in a statement yesterday. "Leptospirosis is a bacterial infection that is most commonly spread by contact with rat urine and is very rarely spread from person to person. This illness can be serious, but is treatable with readily available antibiotics."

Two of the patients were diagnosed in December and one was diagnosed in February, the department said, after they were hospitalized with acute liver and kidney failure.

With all the hype from Big Pharma, federal and state health agencies and medical doctors regarding vaccines as being 'safe' with no adverse health problems from them, especially neurological, e.g., Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), the peer-review medical journal Frontiers in Psychiatry published on January 19, 2017 ^[1] some rather implicating study results titled "Temporal Association of Certain Neuropsychiatric Disorders Following Vaccination of Children and Adolescents: A Pilot Case—Control Study."

The study has five authors: one from the Department of Public Health Sciences, Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine and four co-authors from Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine. One can't get more mainstreamed than that!

However the study results are not being lionized by the medical establishment. Interesting? Of course, because the researchers found implicating facts medicine and vaccinology do not want to own up to.

A new study shows that women who spend a longer time breastfeeding during their lifetimes may be able to lower their risk of metabolic syndrome and related disorders included elevated blood pressure, glucose, and triglyceride levels. Life-long breastfeeding of 12 months or longer was associated with a lower risk of metabolic syndrome, as reported in Journal of Women's Health.

The article entitled "Association Between Duration of Breast Feeding and Metabolic Syndrome: The Korean National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys" describes a study of more than 4,700 Korean women aged 19-50 years in which the risk of developing metabolic syndrome or its component disorders was assessed based on life-long duration of breastfeeding, divided into four groups: < 5 months, 6-11 months, 12-23 months, or > 24 months. Coauthors Se Rin Choi, Yong Min Kim, Min Su Cho, So Hyun Kim, and Young Suk Shim, Hallym University, College of Medicine (Seoul, Korea), report the duration of breastfeeding found to be associated with decreased risk of individual components of metabolic syndrome, such as blood pressure, blood glucose, and cholesterol.

The ability of small intestine cells to absorb nutrients and act as a barrier to pathogens is "significantly decreased" after chronic exposure to nanoparticles of titanium dioxide, a common food additive found in everything from chewing gum to bread, according to research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Researchers exposed a small intestinal cell culture model to the physiological equivalent of a meal's worth of titanium oxide nanoparticles—30 nanometers across—over four hours (acute exposure), or three meal's worth over five days (chronic exposure).

Acute exposures did not have much effect, but chronic exposure diminished the absorptive projections on the surface of intestinal cells called microvilli. With fewer microvilli, the intestinal barrier was weakened, metabolism slowed and some nutrients—iron, zinc, and fatty acids, specifically—were more difficult to absorb. Enzyme functions were negatively affected, while inflammation signals increased.

"Titanium oxide is a common food additive and people have been eating a lot of it for a long time—don't worry, it won't kill you!—but we were interested in some of the subtle effects, and we think people should know about them," said Biomedical Engineering Assistant Professor Gretchen Mahler, one of the authors of the paper.

Letters from an EPA toxicologist to the EPA official in charge of assessing whether glyphosate, the active ingredient of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, causes cancer, reveal accusations of 'staff intimidation' and 'political conniving games with the science' to favor pesticide corporations, writes Carey Gillam. Could this be a game-changer for cancer-suffering plaintiffs?

Now it's getting interesting.

A new court filing made on behalf of dozens of people claiming Monsanto Co.'s Roundup herbicide gave them cancer includes information about alleged efforts within the Environmental Protection Agency to protect Monsanto's interests and unfairly aid the agrichemical industry.

The filing, made late Friday by plaintiff's attorneys, includes what the attorneys represent to be correspondence from a 30-year career EPA scientist accusing top-ranking EPA official Jess Rowland of playing "your political conniving games with the science" to favor pesticide manufacturers such as Monsanto.

One vaccine on the schedule for pre-teen and teenage boys and girls in the USA is the HPV (human papillomavirus vaccine) of which there are three brands: Gardasil, Cervarix and Gardasil 9. Both Gardasil vaccines ^[1-2] are the proprietary properties of Merck and Company (USA), while Cervarix ^[3] is owned by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in the UK.

Originally, the HPV vaccine was promoted and pushed as a 'cervical cancer preventive' vaccine in girls and then a few years later, those same HPV vaccines morphed into prophylactic vaccines for boys, who don't have a cervix! Interesting?! However, Big Pharma is never at a loss to spin pseudoscience to its financial benefits so it was able to convince the U.S. HHS/CDC/FDA that boys, too, had to receive the HPV vaccines, with equally devastating results as girls who received HPV vaccines have experienced.


Those vaccine adverse horrors are tracked by S.A.N.E. VAX, whose website lists the horrible side effects of HPV vaccines as reported to the CDC's VAERS reporting system. As of December 2016, 300 deaths were reported; 14,063 emergency room visits; 4,445 hospitalizations; and the list goes on and on.

If you think the jury's still out on whether cell phones can be dangerous to your health, then you might want to take the time to listen to this video from the Environmental Health Trust (www.ehtrust.org). Dr. Devra Davis, author of "Disconnect - The Truth About Cellphone Radiation," has been researching the safety hazards of radiation emanating from your cell phone.

Like many people, Dr. Davis just didn't believe the possibility of cell phones being dangerous - until she studied it. And now, with the toxicological and epidemiological evidence to back up her claims, she's trying to get the word out that cell phone radiation is not only dangerous, but can be downright lethal.

In her lecture, Dr. Davis explains how the biological impact of your cell phone is not related to its power, which is quite weak, but rather to the erratic nature of its signal and its ability to disrupt resonance and interfere with DNA repair. This is now believed to be the most plausible theory for understanding the wide array of health impacts discovered, which includes cancer...