What you eat plays a leading role in your health and well-being. When someone eats healthy, it helps to protect against many chronic diseases such as heart disease, prediabetes, type 2 diabetes and obesity. But with so many fad diets and food recommendations out there, it can be hard for patients to navigate what to eat and what not to eat.

The AMA’s What Doctors Wish Patients Knew™ series gives physicians a platform to share what they want patients to understand about today’s health care headlines and how to take charge of their health through preventive care.

*Ed’s Note: This is not an endorsement of the AKA, but I found this article to be a easy and understandable review of basic diet information.  Of interest is that most physicians know less about nutrition that their women patients!

Read the entire article here…

Ron Paul, M.D.
Abortion is the most fundamental issue involving natural rights and individual liberty. Many people wish the issue would simply disappear, but without clear and correct answers to the questions involved, the  controversy will continue, and it will be impossible to defend liberty. It’s no coincidence that today’s argument over abortion comes at a time when freedom in general is threatened in the United States, as well as in other Western countries. Nor was it accidental that genocide, abortion, and euthanasia were all practiced under Hitler, and that all three characterize totalitarian states. Abortion has become common in the U.S. only in the past 10 to 15 years, and particularly since the Supreme Court decisions of January 1973.

Continued here…

You are confronted with it unexpectedly. Your loved one has an accident and is declared ‘brain-dead’. Before this really sinks in, your dear person is rushed through the hospital corridors to the operating room. Or, if you live in the United States, your loved one may be declared ‘dead’ two minutes after cardiac arrest and is then also rushed to the operating room. The aim here is to keep the organs in good condition so that they can be donated.

In this book, the author attempts, as far as possible, to enter four worlds.

The first world is that of the grieving family. For them, the key question is whether the ‘brain-dead’ person is really dead. He or she seems more like they are sleeping. Can they still think or feel pain, and is complete anesthesia necessary? In the case of cardiac arrest, the person appears to be dead, but is two minutes enough to be certain?

The second world is that of the nurses and doctors. They do what they can professionally. However, it affects some more than others.

A third world is that of the ‘brain-dead’ person who has regained consciousness and enthusiastically recounts how he or she experienced everything. Much was said and done around the patient. He or she had felt so powerless to make it clear that ‘I am still here!’ The question arises as to what extent the ‘dead’ person is still conscious.

A fourth world is that of the recipient of the organs. The author also gives them a voice. They live in constant fear and tension about whether the organ they so desperately need will arrive in time.

For more information and/or to order the book… HERE.

Is MAGA Winning?

Trump supporters are pleased about many initiatives the Administration has taken, and certainly favor making America healthy again. But it is important not to strain at gnats and swallow camels—or to ignore the big elephant of COVID policies. Actions needed to repair damages, to uncover the causes, and to insure against a repetition with “Disease X” include:

·  Respect and honor physicians who followed the Oath of  Hippocrates and treated patients to the best of their knowledge and judgment. Many paid an extremely heavy price, including loss of livelihood and credentials. Why are they not being sought for advisory positions in government?

• • Identify and hold accountable officials in government who used their positions to suppress the use of repurposed drugs.
  • Penalize persons who violated the law requiring informed consent before administering or mandating a product with an Emergency Use Authorization.
  • Compensate those who were fired for exercising their rights.

• MAHA is “making America Healthy Again.”

To read more of the challenges to MAHA, see here.

(Ed’s note: The following article is amazing for its comprehensiveness, yet brief overview of two divergent philosphies that war against each other today.  A MUST read.)

An electoral shift to the right, or “right-wing” influence in media, education, entertainment, business, law enforcement, the military, or medicine might be deplored as a return to the Dark Ages of superstition and repression, and a rejection of the Enlightenment, which brought science, prosperity, and freedom.

It is popularly believed that, during this dark era and the “Middle Ages,” obscurantist Christians deliberately rounded up classical texts to destroy them, everyone thought the earth was flat, and scientific and technological advancement was virtually nonexistent (tinyurl.com/yf6azpsj).

The phrase “Dark Ages” was first used to describe the Middle Ages by the Italian scholar Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374 AD). He thought that classical antiquity was the Golden Age, and that he lived in an age of decline. Some historians use the term to refer more specifically to the Early Middle Ages (c. 475–c. 800 AD), from the collapse of the western Roman Empire until the rise of the Carolingian Empire, sometimes considered the first phase of the Holy Roman Empire, in the late eighth century A.D.

Article continued here…

Readers may have noticed the gap in the last two posts.  Well, hurricane Helene devasted my area (East Central Georgia), and I have been pre-occupied with dmaage and repairs from that event.  Just now getting back into the sadde.

If interested, you may want to check out this video.

This legislation is a serious threat to our civil liberties. Indeed, “this law treats American citizens as if they were the enemy,” stated George Annas, chairman of the Health Law Department at the Boston University School of Public Health (San Francisco Chronicle, 11/25/01). It must be exposed to the light of day in the next month and a half.

Under this Act, any Governor could appoint himself dictator by declaring a “public health emergency.” He doesn’t even have to consult anyone. The Act requires that he “shall consult with the public health authority,” but “nothing in the duty to consult … shall be construed to limit the Governor’s authority to act without such consultation when the situation calls for prompt and timely action.” The legislature is prohibited from intervening for 60 days, after which it may terminate the state of emergency
only by a two-thirds vote of both chambers.

Ed’s Note: While this article is dated, recent events, such as the Covid epidemic, demonstrates that such powers are still a  great danger to America’s freedoms.

See the whole article here.

by William (Bill) Davis, reviewed by Ed Payne

With the dramatic advance of medical technology, it is increasingly likely that Christians will be asked to decide whether to discontinue life-sustaining medical treatment for aged or very young family members―and possibly other loved ones involved in accidents. Christians also ought to consider what instructions to leave regarding their own treatment. Often these decisions create deep anxiety: Does God command us to take all possible steps to preserve life? Is declining treatment tantamount to murder (or suicide)? As an elder and hospital ethics consultant, Bill Davis has talked, walked, and prayed with people through more than thirty end-of-life situations. Laying a sound scriptural foundation, he argues that Christians can be strongly pro-life yet rightfully decline burdensome or ineffective medical treatments. Providing a variety of case studies and biblical, ethical insight, Davis guides readers in making difficult decisions for themselves and others, preparing advance directives, and facing new realities in American hospitals.

Available on amazon.com

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation’s children. What is going on?

Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals. (Ed: No chemical imbalances.)

Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long–term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? (What the did find was)  that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness!

This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?

By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?

In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

*Review is taken from the book’s presentation on amazon.com.)

“Hidden” sex differences in neurological reward pathways suggest opportunity for improved psychiatric therapeutics… (You cannot change God’s biology!)

A new study in the Journal of Neuroscience has discovered underlying sex differences in the molecular pathways that drive reward-related behaviors. In particular, the study found differences and similarities in the ways males and females strengthened connections between two brain regions—the hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens—involved in reward signaling.

Males and females both suffer from disorders involving these pathways, like depression and substance abuse. However, the presentation and prevalence of these conditions can differ between the sexes, and certain standard treatments are more effective on average in males or females. The new paper’s findings encourage further research to determine if the molecular differences the authors discovered may underpin differences in disease progression or medication response, which could eventually lead to more effective treatments for mental health disorders.

The full article is here…