If you take a step
and hear a “click” under your foot, stop and think what is about to happen
next, before you take an irreversible action.
It may take great
wisdom and personal discipline to find your way through today’s complex
minefield of bad advice from board-certified medical professionals, quacks,
charlatans, profit-motivated liars and sales people. (See Pervasive Pill Pushing Quacks). When you see
an advertisement for a product or service, realize that the people who paid for
the ad probably have an economic incentive to get you to do something that you
would otherwise not be interested in doing if you had not seen the ad (unless
it is altruistic public information).
Sometimes, the very
best certified medical professionals unintentionally or unknowingly make deadly
mistakes (See Iatrogenic Deaths Caused By M.D.s).
After heart disease and cancer, iatrogenic mistakes made by licensed medical
professionals may be the number three cause of death in America. Thousands of
unnecessary deaths are caused each year by elective surgery, prescribed by
those who profit greatly from it.
The April 2, 2003
issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association reported a 7-year
study of 909 patients who were admitted to hospitals for drug toxicity. The
study clearly documented the fact that most of these admissions occur shortly
after the improper prescription and administration of a drug that is well known
to cause drug-to-drug interactions. Most of these damaging toxic drug
interactions could be avoided by competent physicians, IF they would pay more
attention to readily-available information.
Frequently,
young-and-old doctors do not have good answers to complex age-related questions
and life-shortening common diseases (especially those with long feedback cycles).
Medical doctors are in “practice” (because much of medicine is an “art,” not a
“science”. Very few M.D.’s are effective investigative scientists.
All of us
(including doctors) try to learn from our mistakes. Doctors take the “Hippocratic
Oath” to do no harm, but iatrogenic mistakes and oversights clearly do great
harm to millions of unique individuals. There are valid actuarial reasons that
malpractice insurance is very expensive today. The number of people injured by
medical doctors increases every year. Obviously, malpractice must be rampant,
but what alternative options do we have to the best medical knowledge available
anywhere, and millions of people honestly trying to make us as well as
possible? Putting a cap on valid malpractice claims is being considered, but it
would be far better if we could find a way to limit that actual death and
injury being caused by board-certified medical professionals.
Nothing on
this entire website is intended to diagnose or treat any individual’s specific
medical problems. If
you have any medical problems, write down your detailed symptoms, questions,
concerns and related medical history, and see a licensed physician who
understands your problems and has time to get to know your unique characteristics.
When multiple doctors are involved in your healthcare, make sure that they know
about the findings and treatments recommended by others. It will be rare that
general practitioners, various medical specialists and board-certified
healthcare professionals will agree about precise diagnosis and “best”
treatment for many diseases. Ultimately, YOU must sort out the conflicting
professional opinions and decide on who’s advice you will follow. Sometimes,
the choices determine the difference between life and death.
Humans are at
least as different and unique as our fingerprints. A treatment that is effective for one may
kill another. What worked for you when you were younger (like consuming sugar,
iron supplements, etc.) may be a deadly thing to do when you get older.
You must
communicate what you know about yourself, your medical history, and current
status with those who provide your medical care. Be sure that your doctor knows
about any allergies you have and history of disease in your family (and those
you have been intimate with). Doctors must know any medications you are taking,
including over-the-counter drugs, vitamins, special diet, dietary supplements,
physical activities, aches, pains, questions and concerns. Writing it all down
and keeping a file of blood test, etc. is much better than merely talking about
it with a busy physician (you will forget many details, and so will they).
Ultimately, YOU
must also sort out the conflicting advice of multiple specialists with widely
varying training and experience in treating others (who are not exactly the
same as you). Remember that the “majority opinion” among medical doctors has
often been proven to be incorrect by those who dare to disagree with obsolete
ineffective “business as usual” medical (mal)practices. When the first
recommendation of medical doctors is not working, dig much deeper and learn
what you can about the issues for yourself.
General
information offered freely on this site is an attempt to help you ask better
questions of the specific healthcare professionals who help care for you. Our research materials and the comments
that we discuss about particular lifestyle choices, foods, drugs, supplements,
exercises (mental and physical) consist of broad overviews that cannot possibly
include every detail and exception known to mankind.
None of this
material applies equally to everyone. Much of it (like low fat versus low
carbohydrates) is extremely controversial with strong and valid professional
opinions on both sides (that can NOT possibly both be true for everyone). Much
of such information will change next year and beyond, as new research is
published.
If licensed
physicians offer you no hope of any treatment for your specific problems, you should very carefully consider introspection,
meditation, fervent prayer and alternative approaches, but proceed with
great caution and skepticism, since much of alternative medicine involves
unregulated areas with many extremely-complex (chaotic) interacting unknowns
that are unique for different individuals.
Sometimes,
regulation inhibits innovation and exploration. Everything that is common,
regulated, “good practice” today, was at one time unknown, unregulated, and
viewed by many as the wrong thing to do.
Advice from a
research scientist: Introduce new things that you ingest (eat, breathe or apply to your skin) slowly
– one at a time. If you have an adverse allergic or toxic reaction, it may
be easier to identify the reason and take rapid action. Cause-and-effect is
often very difficult to understand (especially for lifestyle changes that have
long feedback cycles). Things interact in unique individuals in complex ways
(sometimes in multi-step, cascading, interrelated biological processes). What
helps one, may eventually injure or kill another through
difficult-to-understand mechanisms. If you introduce new things slowly, in
isolation, it should be easier to understand the cause-and-effect (of things
with shorter feedback cycles).
For example,
suppose you are having joint pain or nerve pinches in your lower back. There
are several over-the-counter food supplements that may be effective for you. I
have found that glucosamine sulfate is effective for me, but it may not work
well for you, since it is made from shellfish. Suppose you try glucosamine and
within a week you develop a minor skin problem. You may be allergic to
shellfish. If you had failed to read about glucosamine, and you did not know
that some people are allergic to it, you might not have noticed the connection
between it and your skin problem. When an allergic reaction develops, you
should discontinue the use of new product(s), and investigate alternatives. In
the case of glucosamine, you may find that hyaluronic acid is more effective,
with less chance of allergic reaction. Do your research. Investigate
alternatives. Evaluate them carefully – you life, heath and happiness are at
stake!
It may be possible
that a new product conflicts with another (less beneficial) product or food that
you are taking. It may be a good idea to discontinue the use of a
less-effective product that you have used for a long time, in order to receive
the benefit of the new product. This issue can be very complex.
One of the more
serious drug / food interactions is between common (otherwise beneficial)
grapefruit. This powerful antioxidant is known to interact negatively with over
200 prescription and over-the-counter medications, including caffeine and:
Anxiety - Xanax, Buspar, Versed, Halcion
Depression - Luvox, Zoloft
Allergies - Allegra
Antihistamines - Terfenadine and many other prescription and over-the-counter medications
Antiviral - Saquinavir
Abnormal Heart Rhythm - Cordarone, quinidine
Heart Disease, Stroke and Blood Clots - Coumadin and other blood thinners
Immunosuppressent - Cyclosporine
Epilepsy - Tegretol
Cancer - Cyclophosphamide, etoposide, ifosfamide, tamoxifen, vinblastine, vincristine
Cough - Dextromethorphan (found in many over-the-counter cold medicines)
HIV - Agenerase, Crixivan, Viracept, Norvir, Fortovase
Prostate Enlargement - Proscar
Heart Disease, High Blood Pressure and calcium channel blockers - Adalat, Calan, Cardene, Cardizem, Coreg, Covera, Felodipine, Nifedipine, Nimotop, Plendil, Procardia, Sular, Verapamil, Verelan
Erectile Dysfunction - Viagra, Cialis
Asthma and Emphysema - Theophylline
High Cholesterol (Statins) - Lipitor, Lescol, Mevacor, Zocor
Pain - Codeine, Alfenta, Duragesic, Actiq, Sufenta
Infection - Biaxin, Sporanox, erythromycin, troleandomycin
Hormones - Estradiol
Stimulants – Caffeine, ephedrine, ephedra and other similar natural and laboratory-made stimulants
If you ever eat grapefruit, please take the time to read
about it in our material on antioxidants.
Drug and food
interactions can involve very complex genetics and biochemistry. If you take
several new products during the time frame when an allergic reaction develops,
or you have made changes to your diet, environmental exposures, etc., you may
not have a clue about what may have caused your reaction (since skin reactions,
drug overdoses, etc. may be caused by a great many different environmental, ingestion,
genetic and disease sources). Lack of cause-and-effect knowledge may make you
to do something that makes your problem much worse, like applying a skin cream to
an allergic rash, which further increases the problem complexity.
Ask, read and study
when to take new things (before/after/during meals, empty stomach, morning,
bedtime, etc.). For example. Calcium should be ingested in an acid environment
(NOT in an antacid). The body normally needs vitamin D and magnesium to
regulate calcium metabolism. Calcium plus magnesium are a mild muscle relaxant,
which should therefore be taken just before going to sleep. Potassium and
sodium are also linked to calcium and magnesium metabolism, since they use the
same intake channel. They all influence water retention and systolic blood
pressure. Simply popping calcium supplements because “they are good for you” is
an overly simplistic view of important nutrition decisions.
Keep medical
records for your various healthcare providers. Modern pharmacists now have computer
systems that can catch potential drug interaction problems that overworked prescribing
physicians frequently overlook. However, if you use more than one pharmacy,
they may not realize what you have purchased from others. The pharmacy
computing systems usually do not know what food you are eating (like
grapefruit), food supplements or over-the-counter drugs you are taking, what
allergies you have (and may not be aware of yet), etc. Ultimately YOU know more
about yourself than others who prescribe and deliver medications to you. YOU
are the one who will suffer if they make a mistake, or you fail to tell them
about yourself and you lifestyle, nutrition, drugs, allergies, etc.
Do your
homework. Read readily
available up-to-date information from multiple reliable sources on the
Internet, etc. Changes in life such as pregnancy, menopause, out-of-range blood
tests, disease diagnosis, or other physical changes should be carefully
researched by the patient or loving caregivers, and then discussed with
licensed physicians and healthcare providers.
Do NOT rely on
doctors alone, since they often miss details or make a variety of human errors.
Doctors seldom inform you of all of the risks, contraindications, drug / food
interactions, and potential adverse reactions of the treatment (pills, therapy,
surgery, etc.) that they prescribe.
You should read
what is available about any new drug, food, or food supplement that you add
to your diet. Pay close attention to all information given to you by your
pharmacist. As you read information from the Internet, remember that pill-pushing quacks are a biased information
source, ESPECIALLY late night cable television infomercials.
Independent sources
(who are not paid by product vendors), clinical trials, etc. (although often
biased by funding) can offer different points of view. You need to understand
all concerns about the things you ingest, when they should be taken (time of
day, with-or-without certain foods, synergies-or-adverse-interactions with other
drugs, foods, activities, etc.).
Here are a few basic
resources to jumpstart your important study effort:
Important Drug, Herb and Food Supplement Information, Concerns, Interactions, etc.
Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) - Home Page
Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) for Nutritional Supplements
Take minimum
amounts of food
supplements, especially to start off. (This is generally a good practice, but
NOT always, as in the case of antibiotics that REQUIRE a minimum level dosage
and duration to be effective. Taking too little of such medications or stopping
before the prescribed time can be dangerous.)
Profit-motivated
companies want you to buy and consume more of their product than the minimum
that may be sufficient for you. Some products may be beneficial if taken only
once or twice a week. Excess quantities of many products can become toxic
(especially oil-soluble products, like vitamin A, and minerals, like iron, that
may accumulate to harmful levels over time).
Sometimes, tissue
levels of food supplements can become overloaded and adverse toxic reactions can
take place. Beta-carotene is one such example. In natural food levels, it
prolongs life. In some food supplements, the large amount of beta-carotene has irrefutably
shortened the life of studied individuals.
When natural foods
fit into our busy lifestyles, natural foods are often better sources of
essential nutrients. For example, the complex antioxidants in fresh
blueberries in season are thought to be more beneficial than blueberry (or bilberry)
extract, (except for the fact that beneficial food extracts like bilberry and
grape seed usually have less sugar than natural fruit). Some natural foods like
beta carotene should NOT be taken in concentrated form, whereas there is no
evidence that foods like bilberry and grape seed extract cause problems for
people who are not allergic to the natural fruit. It import that you read about,
and understand, any food supplements that you chose to consume.
Some helpful
products (like the natural melatonin sleep aid) are typically marketed in very
high doses (like 3mg). One tenth of that amount (300mcg) is often quite
effective and life-improving, whereas too much of some food supplements may
negatively impact the liver, etc. and have a cascading, age-accelerating
impact.
Super sizing your
bad nutrition fast food (soda, pizza, cheese burgers, french fries, etc.) is
very unhealthy, and no bargain at all. So too, mega doses of drugs, vitamins
and food supplements. For example, too much vitamin A or iron can be deadly, in some cases.
Never take any food supplement until you have studied when to take it, the minimum effective amount, the maximum amount that can be tolerated, and potential negative side effects to watch for. Pay close attention to allergic reactions like skin rashes, etc.
Self-medicating
with over-the-counter natural hormone products (DHEA, HGH, steroids, etc.) is extremely
dangerous without proper informed blood level monitoring. Prescription
steroidal hormones (like cortisone), and natural products that enhance steroid
production or uptake, can cause the body to sense the excess and shut down
normal production (making health problems much worse). This can trigger
uncontrolled life-shortening inflammation, painful joints, etc. throughout the
entire body, which makes the naive consumer very addicted to the harmful
product.
Taking some things
(like multi-vitamins supplements containing iron
or products like bread with iron supplements, etc.) can unknowingly damage many
internal organs (if your iron levels are already too high, as in some men over
40, some post-menopausal women, and people with inherited genetic traits that
trigger “hemochromatosis”).
Regular blood
tests and good biofeedback monitoring are essential to determine individual
different requirements. Buying
a product that advertises a broad general solution to “tired blood” may
actually do great damage in some sensitive individuals. Do NOT take a product, just
because someone advertises it, or a friend tried an advertised product and
coincidentally got better. The actual cause and effect is often difficult to
understand.
Study the issues.
Confirm what you find from multiple reliable unbiased sources (where possible).
Try to find sources with little financial bias to sell you a particular product
or service, which may be difficult to do. Do NOT believe anyone who offers
“snake oil” that solves all problems for everyone.
Popular talk show
host Larry King wrongly endorsed Saint John’s Wort for depression for a long
time. The natural over-the-counter, uncontrolled product has a seldom-mentioned
side effect of an irritating skin rash in many individuals. Eventually, studies
were published showing that Saint John’s Wort had essentially no reduction of
depression in research subjects (other than a psychosomatic “placebo effect”,
which Larry King apparently suffered from).
Another similar
study documented that a diet including salmon every day often performed better
than prescription antidepressant medications (a big surprise that continues to
be ignored by pill-pushing medical doctors).
Antidepressant
prescription drugs plus alcohol have been implicated in many tragic unnecessary
deaths (including the tragedy of Phil Hartman and his wife).
Many qualified
professionals believe that psychotropic antidepressants are badly abused and over
prescribed by misguided medical doctors and psychiatrists. Their usage and high
expense have expanded rapidly in recent years. Many informed individuals and
high profile people like Tom Cruise call for banning addictive psychotropic drugs
altogether, especially for innocent children.
Do NOT take our
word for it (or any other single source). Research important issues on your own
and confirm what you discover. You might never understand these things if you
listen only to pill-pushing pharmaceutical company advertisements, profit-motivated
quacks, medical doctors and psychiatrists. Independent study of the literature
and “digging for diamonds” can be extremely valuable to you, and the health and
happiness of those you care for. Lifelong
Learning can bring you a happier, longer life.
Read food labels
and ingredients. Carefully
study and learn to recognize the things that should always be avoided or
minimized within known limits (like trans fatty
acids, saturated fats, excitotoxins, sugar, simple carbohydrates, sugar
substitutes, high-fructose corn syrup, etc.). Learn to recognize the good
things that you should add to your grocery basket. Learn what was seriously
wrong with the 1992 USDA Food Pyramid and
what you need to do to customize the latest 2005 nutrition guidelines to your
individual age-dependent nutrition needs.
Do not mix
similar drugs (like
nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) including aspirin (in a great many
products), ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, Nuprin, others), acetaminophen (paracetamol,
Tylenol and many other over-the-counter and prescription drugs), naproxen (Aleve, Naprosyn, Naprelan, Anaprox, others), ketoprofen
(Orudis KT, Orudis), indomethacin (Indocin), etodolac (Lodine), nabumetone
(Relafen), oxaprozin (Daypro), piroxicam (Feldene), sulindac (Clinoril),
tolmetin (Tolectin), and others; warfarin (Coumadin); ardeparin (Normiflo); dalteparin
(Fragmin); danaparoid (Orgaran); enoxaparin (Lovenox); heparin).
A great many people
try one product for a headache and then try another, while the other is still
in their system. This common bad practice seriously injures thousands of
Americans every year – most have no idea why they are suffering (from their own
avoidable self-medication mistakes).
Do not overdose
on pervasive products (like
acetaminophen, which appears in many different prescription drugs and
over-the-counter home remedies for colds, aches and pains). Overdoses and
interactions do very serious internal damage. READ THE LABELS CAREFULLY. Ask a
qualified pharmacist or healthcare professional if there are conflicts or
interactions with other prescriptions and OTC’s you are taking. Your life is
in your own hands. You may unknowingly be playing with deadly fire
when you purchase an indiscriminately advertised popular product (like pain
killers, cold remedies, vitamins with iron supplements, etc).
Be careful about
mixing drugs and food supplements in general. Unless drugs are specifically known to be synergistic (they work well
together like calcium + magnesium + vitamin D, or glucosamine + MSM). You
should NOT take several at the same time in one handful (or in a little cup in
the hospital from a nurse’s aid that you are seeing for the first time). It is
often (but not always) better to take two lower dose food supplements, spread
out over the day, than one large mega dose pill (which causes a high and low
bioavailability swing in the blood stream throughout the day).
Prescription drugs
are for the most part only clinically tested in isolation. When you take a
new drug, you may be among the first few people to unknowingly test how it
interacts with other drugs, foods and genetics in your unique body. Drug
vendors are obviously reluctant to report a small number of serious problems,
until AFTER overwhelming cause-and-effect information is well documented (which
is difficult to do for long-term feedback cycles).
Thousands of men
have already died within a few hours of taking the world’s most popular new
prescription drug, but the rich vendor of the profitable product has no
incentive or legal requirement to advertise this fact on television (even if an
ex-senator / presidential candidate did endorse it).
There have been
many cases of two different drugs chemically crystallizing in the liver and
killing patients. Two different popular diet drugs interacted and caused
permanent heart damage, etc. Just because something makes some people
(temporarily) lose weight, does NOT mean that it is a good thing to do.
Stomach viruses
clearly make people lose weight. Should we therefore prescribe stomach viruses
for millions of obese Americans? (Absolutely NOT!) Diuretics and laxatives can
cause temporary (unhealthy) weight loss and lowering of systolic blood pressure.
Diuretics are currently sold over-the counter in “weight loss” categories to
unknowing customers who are sadly accelerating dehydration, and thus the aging
of every cell in their body. Should we dehydrate overweight people to make them
weight less? NO! Should doctors commonly prescribe powerful diuretics to lower
systolic blood pressure? Is the treatment worse than the disease?
You should
probably separate new drugs and take them at least an hour apart, unless you are specifically told to take
them together by a qualified medical professional (that you literally trust
with your life). Be sure you tell your prescribing physician about ALL
over-the-counter things and food supplements that you are taking. In some cases
(like grapefruit) you need to tell them about foods that you like. Write down everything
you need the doctor to know, and hand the list to your doctor, to make sure
that it is in your medical history file.
Medical Doctors
(M.D.’s) are NOT trained on most over-the-counter products. They may ask you to
stop taking all vitamins, etc. *since they do not understand them), until the
possible interactions can be sorted out. This may be a complex good-and-bad
process with complicated analysis and results, which very few doctors are
willing (or take the time) to do.
If you must go to a
hospital, be very careful that you recognize and understand every medication
you are given and medical procedure that is performed. Talk to the busy staff
members on every shift. Make sure they understand your particular situation and
concerns. Important information is often lost from shift to shift. Nurses make
deadly mistakes ever single day. Be pleasant and always treat them with
respect. Statistically, hospital and nursing home patients who constantly
complain receive poorer treatment, but remember that iatrogenic errors made by
certified medical professionals kill about a quarter million Americans every
year, and needlessly injury millions. The pervasive iatrogenic problem IS
serious and well documented in multiple medical journals. Do NOT assume that
the treatment you are given is what was prescribed, or that it was prescribed
correctly.
Pay very close
attention to hospital (and nursing home) hygiene. Hospitals are well known to be a dangerous
place for a sick or unconscious person to be. Where possible, take
responsibility for confirming details that should be done for you and the
medicines you are given. Remember that the porous skin of a hospital attendant
can transfer disease from one patient to another. Direct skin contact is the
most common way that many contagious viruses are unknowingly transferred from
one person to another. A nurse with a cold is an obvious hazard, but a virus
can be transferred long before its symptoms are manifest. The likelihood of
this happening in a hospital is elevated.
Think twice
about the risk of unnecessary cosmetic surgeries. Take aggressive control of your nutrition and exercise, rather
than having weight-reduction surgery.
Monitor your weight regularly on an accurate scale. Keep managing what
you eat and refining your diet until you learn what works for your unique
metabolism.
We truly love,
appreciate and applaud every medical professional who has dedicated their life
to sincerely helping others, but every last one of us does make (small or
large) mistakes almost every day of our lives. Where possible, we should strive
to avoid unnecessary risks and dependency on other people to never make any
mistakes that might adversely impact us. There has never been, and never will
be, a flawless medical profession who never makes mistakes. Disease prevention
is far superior to hospital treatment for an avoidable disease.
When we are forced
to turn complete control of our life over to flawed medical professionals, we
can merely pray that they do not make the common mistakes that we know do
happen almost everyday in almost every hospital.
We highly
recommend that you do your own literature search and use multiple sources to confirm
anything you read or are told,
before you decide what to do. Try to filter out the strong bias of those who
will clearly profit if you believe what they say, whether it is buying a
product or having elective surgery.
Be aware that a lot
of bad advice comes from biased, profit-motivated insurance, pharmaceutical and
nutriceutical companies. Pharmaceutical companies in particular heavily
advertise and promote new, patented, unnatural medications, when there may (or
may not) be a set of natural foods or lifestyle behavior changes that may be
adequate, safer and cost much less.
Not all medical
doctor recommendations are good. Not all alternative medicine recommendations
are good either. There simply is no single source available for critical
lifestyle choices, anywhere. For difficult problems, seek multiple
source opinions before making irreversible decisions, but be aware that for
every important new piece of critical knowledge, at one point in time, there
was only one person on earth who discovered it and understood it.
Sometimes a
minority opinion is superior to widespread conventional medical practices. Many
FDA-approved drugs have had to be withdrawn from the market AFTER killing or
injuring many naive patients who trusted what their friendly family doctor
prescribed. The hints and clues about the underlying risks were often available
as small statistics in the early clinical trials and product contraindications
that were ignored or misunderstood. Nutriceuticals like beta carotene and St.
John’s Wort have been found by clinical trials to be ineffective,
counterproductive and even deadly, but they are still widely marketed to
consumers who have failed to do their own literature study and make wise
decisions.
No human knows
everything about anything. You are unique. General rules and desired lifestyle
change responses may or may not apply to you at a particular point in time.
Sometimes, doctors are forced to make decisions based on partial information,
before expensive, time-consuming, lab tests are complete.
YOU are ultimately
responsible for all important lifestyle decisions that impact your joy,
productivity and longevity. Gather the best information you can from multiple
sources on multiple topics, and then CHOSE WHAT YOU DO WISELY as an informed
consumer.
When you realize
that a previous decision was wrong, make the necessary effort to change your
habitual behavior, based on the best-available information, all things
considered. Do not be surprised to learn that what was thought to be good
medical practice today is found to be harmful tomorrow. Be open minded and able
to change your previous decisions (which were based on incomplete or inaccurate
information).
EMBRACE LIFELONG LEARNING
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