We use a lot of antibiotics. For coughs, cuts, urinary tract infections, and many times "just in case." You could be considered reckless or ignorant if you opted to not use them. "But you could die of a deadly infection that could kill you!" chants the choir of voices entrained by a system that sees dangerous enemies lurking behind every life experience.

What may surprise you is that the real danger could lie in assaulting your body with an "anti-life" (the actual meaning of the word!) chemical that could very well be a Russian Roulette of unintended harms. Some of these harms are so significant that they could change the course of your entire life as you know it. Given that, I bet that if you knew that there were effective, safe "alternatives," you'd seriously consider them.

To make your own decisions about health, you must inform yourself. Informed consent around medical interventions involves exploration of the risks, benefits, and alternatives. In our reactivity, however, we are accustomed to focusing only on the promise - knock that infection out and feel better quick! - without any meaningful information around the full breadth of scientifically-evidenced risks and treatment options.

Parents in France will be legally obliged to vaccinate their children from 2018, the government has announced.

French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said it was "unacceptable" that children are "still dying of measles" in the country where some of the earliest vaccines were pioneered.

Three childhood vaccines, for diphtheria, tetanus and polio, are currently mandatory in France. Others, including those against hepatitis and whooping cough, are simply recommended.

Announcing the policy, Mr Philippe evoked the name of Louis Pasteur, the French biologist who made breakthroughs in disease research and developed the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax in the 19th century.

The world spent over $100 billion a year on cancer drugs in 2015, a year in which the world's highest paid CEO made his killing from cancer patients. Much of this is spent on chemotherapy, which is well-known to weaken patients, sacrifice their immune systems and make them susceptible to co-infections, diseases and other complications.

In addition to these side-effects, it has now been discovered that while chemotherapy does kill cancer cells, it can also trigger cancer cells to disperse throughout the body triggering more aggressive tumors to develop in the lungs and other vital bodily systems.

A new research study conducted by Dr. George Karagiannis of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York explains how this works. Entitled, Neoadjuvant chemotherapy induces breast cancer metastasis through a TMEM-mediated mechanism, Dr. Karagiannis' study focused on breast cancer patients, looking at the unintended consequences of chemo.

Mounting evidence suggests that the richer and more diverse the community of microbes in your gut the lower your risk of disease. Diet is key to maintaining diversity and was strikingly demonstrated when an undergrad student went on a McDonald's diet for ten days and after just four days experienced a significant drop in the number of beneficial microbes

Similar results have been demonstrated in a number of larger human and animal studies.

Your gut microbiome is a vast community of trillions of bacteria that has a major influence on your metabolism, immune system and mood. These bacteria and fungi inhabit every nook and cranny of your gastrointestinal tract, with most of this 1kg to 2kg "microbe organ" sited in your colon (the main bit of your large intestine).

We tend to see the biggest diet-related shifts in microbes in people who are unhealthy with a low-diversity unstable microbiome. What we didn't know is whether a healthy stable gut microbiome could be improved in just a few days. The chance to test this in an unusual way came when my colleague Jeff Leach invited me on a field trip to Tanzania, where he has been living and working among the Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer groups in all of Africa.

...despite the obvious vital importance of feelings to the human condition, little can be found on the subject in modern and medical psychology textbooks. We are being held back by a structure that is ill-suited to our needs. What is needed is the energy and vision to support the emerging paradigm...It is clear that, as doctors, we need your help. - Dr. Robin Kelly, The Human Hologram

What Happened to the Doctors?

Something is drastically wrong with medical education as it currently stands, and the effects flow into the professional arena. For decades medical students have been notorious for having abnormally high rates of illness, both physical and mental compared with the rest of the population. Depression is one problem that is well known. Dr Robert Mendelsohn stated in Confessions of a Medical Heretic (1979) that he saw a higher rate of illness in first year medical students than any other subgroup. At the time his book was published, medical students' suicide rates in the US were reportedly second only to American Indian children who were sent away from their reservations to attend high school.

The sheer physical separation of many college/university students from their families and friends leaves them much more vulnerable to the adverse influence of teachers with agendas, toxic peer influence, and of course the pharmaceutical industry which controls medical education.

Problems in medicine are not restricted to medical students, however.

A vaccine blocking the euphoric effects of heroin could soon be on the way after it proved effective during trials in rhesus monkeys. Researchers hope to test the potentially revolutionary vaccine on humans.

Developed by The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in California, it's the first vaccination against an opioid to pass this stage of preclinical testing, offering hope to the millions of addicts worldwide.

Clean, pure water — in sufficient amounts — is one of the most important foundations for optimal health, but is becoming far more difficult to come by with each passing year.

Environmental policy changes ensure ground water will suffer greater contamination with chemical pollution;¹ water treatment plants don't have the resources to remove drugs and other small particles from the water before dumping into rivers and oceans;² and in some cases, sewage is dumped directly into the environment.^3,4

Most tap water is far from pure, containing a vast array of disinfection byproducts, fluoride, radiation, heavy metals, agricultural runoff, pharmaceutical drugs and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a chemical used in the production of Teflon and flame retardants.⁵ And that's the short list. What's worse, more than half of the 300-plus chemicals detected in U.S. drinking water are not even regulated.⁶

Every year new stories are released about toxic drinking water across the U.S. The World Health Organization estimates nearly 25 percent of all global deaths result from an unhealthy environment.⁷ The 1972 Clean Water Act8 regulates discharges of pollutants into U.S. waterways and sets quality standards for surface waters.


It was supposed to ensure clean water for swimming and fishing, yet after more than four decades of clean water regulation, our waterways are in serious jeopardy.It should come as no surprise, then, that you may want to carefully consider avoiding any drink that comes from the tap while flying.

Your digestive system is sensitive to dietary changes, and the health of your gut microbiome may predict your overall health and contribute to the formation of your stool. When bacteria and viruses invade your digestive system, problems may occur, the most common of which is diarrhea.

Although the condition typically doesn't last more than a few days, some bacterial infections may cause it to persist for a few weeks, increasing your risk of potentially serious complications. Factors that determine the length of time you experience diarrhea include your level of stress, the bacteria triggering the condition, your immune health and the health of your gut microbiome.

Diarrhea occurs when your body releases more water than normal with your stool, flushing the food and fluids rapidly through your digestive tract. Although the time food takes to digest varies from person to person, it normally takes between six and eight hours from the time you eat food until it reaches your small intestines. From there it travels to the large intestines and is finally eliminated. The average transit time is between 33 and 47 hours, depending upon age, sex and the type of food eaten.¹

Although uncomfortable and sometimes messy, diarrhea has a specific function. In the past, scientists believed it was a method of flushing out unwelcome bacteria from your gut more quickly, and thus lessening the symptoms of illness you may suffer. Researchers have sought to determine the biological mechanism. Study lead contact Dr. Jerrold Turner, from Brigham and Women's Hospital, commented:

"The hypothesis that diarrhea clears intestinal pathogens has been debated for centuries. Its impact on the progression of intestinal infections remains poorly understood. We sought to define the role of diarrhea, and to see if preventing it might actually delay pathogen clearance and prolong disease."

Vaccines: Are they safe? Are they effective? To help answer those questions is Neil Z. Miller,¹ a medical research journalist and director of the Thinktwice Global Vaccine Institute.

Miller has investigated vaccines for three decades and written several books on the subject, including "Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective?," "Vaccine Safety Manual for Concerned Families and Health Practitioners" and, most recently, "Miller's Review of Critical Vaccine Studies: 400 Important Scientific Papers Summarized for Parents and Researchers."

"Miller's Review," published in 2016, is a magnificent piece of work. In it, he reviews the concern about vaccine safety and efficacy raised by 400 peer-reviewed published studies. The book doesn't review studies that support vaccination (almost all of which are funded by the industry and the government, by the way) as those studies are available on the CDC website.

"I got started when my own children were born ... over 30 years ago ... When my wife was pregnant, I felt I had to do due diligence about vaccines. I have to be honest, though. Before I even started to research vaccines, my wife and I pretty much knew intuitively that we were not going to inject our children with vaccines.

When I give lectures, I often tell people, 'How can you expect to achieve health by injecting healthy children with toxic substances?' I intuitively knew that ... but still felt an obligation to do my due diligence and to do the research," Miller says.

"The thing is that when I do things, I do them pretty thoroughly ... I was doing my research at medical libraries. I was gathering everything and I started to collate it and coordinate it ... People started to find out about the information I had organized. They were asking me about vaccines even way back then. I organized it into a booklet. I started to share that with people. Everything snowballed from that first booklet."

Researchers have found the first direct evidence that autoimmunity -- in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues -- plays a role in Parkinson's disease, the neurodegenerative movement disorder. The findings raise the possibility that the death of neurons in Parkinson's could be prevented by therapies that dampen the immune response.

The study, led by scientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, was published today in Nature.

"The idea that a malfunctioning immune system contributes to Parkinson's dates back almost 100 years," said study co-leader David Sulzer, PhD, professor of neurobiology (in psychiatry, neurology and pharmacology) at CUMC. "But until now, no one has been able to connect the dots. Our findings show that two fragments of alpha-synuclein, a protein that accumulates in the brain cells of people with Parkinson's, can activate the T cells involved in autoimmune attacks.