Friday, March 25, 2016
Colloidal minerals versus ionic minerals
I have been asked many times about the difference between ionic and colloidal minerals. In fact, the question is usually, “I have heard of colloidal minerals. What are ionic minerals and why do you sell them instead?” Without getting too far into scientific definitions and functions, here is an effort to explain. Please understand, this is a simplification.
First we'll deal with colloidal minerals, which can be thought of as a tea of suspended, extra-small mineral particles. This tea, or suspension to be more accurate, is created by soaking pulverized shale containing the desired minerals in water, allowing the minerals to leach into the water. The liquid is then filtered and bottled. The minerals are not actually dissolved, thus the term suspended.
Ionized minerals have smaller particles than colloidal minerals. Being ions, they also contain a positive or negative charge. Because they are smaller particles, ionized minerals are dissolved in the liquid instead of being suspended. Because of both the smaller size of the particle and the charge from being in an ionic state, ionic minerals can be absorbed directly through the cell membranes. Colloidal minerals require the body to go through the additional steps required to break mineral particles into the ionic forms that cells require for absorption.
This simple difference makes ionic minerals a more bio-available choice than colloidal minerals. Better absorption means that more of the mineral you ingest will end up being used by your body. We here at Greens Included use and recommend ionic minerals over colloidal minerals so that you get more nutrition for your dollar.
…
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Ghandi vaccine quote
Vaccination is a barbarous practice and one of the most fatal of all the delusions current in our time.
Conscientious objectors to vaccination should stand alone, if need be, against the whole world, in defense of their conviction.
Mahatma Gandhi
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
My stroke
Though I have always been very conscious about my diet, eating the right kinds of food (for the most part), and taking excellent supplements, I still had a stroke. It was brought on by the demands of many years of an extremely stressful job. My occupation was relatively sedentary and I don't have a regular exercise routine. However, I do have a small farm that keeps me very active.
After getting out of the hospital following a week-long stay, I was advised to just take my medications and come back in a few months. I was given no advice about diet, exercise, or given any prognosis. Sitting in my home two days later, I had a second stroke that left me sitting at the table unable to move or speak. Off to the hospital I went again, sirens screaming. Thankfully, I recovered my speech and movement in the ambulance. My strokes had occurred, not in my carotid arteries in my neck, but in the tiny arteries of the brain itself. I was offered surgery, which I was told would give me about a 20% chance for recovery. Since that was not a better chance than I had without surgery, I respectfully declined that opportunity. Again, the hospital staff seemed uninterested in my recovery beyond my compliance with their drugs, but I got very serious about improving my chances with or without their approval!
I have always used alternative health care unless there was no other alternative. I like to think things through for myself, and from a young age it just made sense to me to allow the miracle that is the human body to heal itself. I grew up the son of a very out-spoken chiropractor. His enthusiasm for his profession earned my family fire-bombed offices, general harassment, and even death threats (no kidding) from local medical practitioners. My childhood experiences definitely figured largely in my decision to use "alternative" health care as my first choice.
Because of my firm belief in giving the body a chance, I used non-allopathic practitioners and practices to help pull me back from my health crisis. Immediately, I went on a very strict diet suggested by a friend who is a health empath. This diet included drinking a mixture of juices daily, made from fresh fruits and vegetables. This was probably the most intensive part of my recovery. I spent many hours a day preparing and drinking my juice. I also regularly visited my chiropractor and my naturopath, used homeopathics, chelation therapy, and continued with natural supplements. I had to hunt high and low for a medical doctor that encouraged the use of alternative therapies. Reluctantly, I continued to use the medicines prescribed for me, as well. Within about 3 months I had lost 30 pounds. I felt weak, but happy to be doing as well as I was.
I had been scheduled for a 8 month follow-up with my hospital-assigned medical doctor. I was curious to see what results my as-natural-as-possible regimen would show. My doctor was very surprised after my CT scan. He said he had no explanation for it, but the blockage in my brain that caused the stroke was dissolving. He said he had never seen anything like that without surgery and heavy medication, but to keep doing whatever it was I was doing.
Not surprisingly, this hospital-assigned doctor did not ask what I had been doing! He was not one who acknowledged any benefit from using alternative therapies. My experiences did not fall along the lines of empirical data or come from the pages of a peer-reviewed journal, so there was no point in our talking about them. I firmly believe that those alternative therapies are what turned things around for me. Not only that, they have kept me from having the serious stroke-related issues that so many people experience, and have kept me from having more strokes.
Stay tuned for my next blog post for more.....
Sunday, February 7, 2016
This is from a local chiropractor about her first experience with homeopathy.
==========================================
As is true with all aspects of alternative health subjects, homeopathy has its share of adherents and detractors. I've been told repeatedly that homeopathy is a “pseudoscience.” What we know as “science” these days is such a closed-minded, belief-based entity, no school of thought or practical approach to health can satisfy its demands. The scientific methodology steps I learned in grade school have been co-opted by big businesses. They buy their approval from government bodies meant to safe-guard the public and stamp on any theories that are not in their best interests. Since accepted science is such a bought-and-paid-for rubber stamp of anything touted by pharmaceutical/chemical/agricultural corporations, calling the methods I use “pseudo” is more compliment than insult.
Anecdotal evidence is never used as proof of anything in pure science. In other words, my experiences and yours are of no consequence when it comes to determining the truth about a product or methodology. The only truth that counts is that which comes from a sterile lab, is repeatable and adheres to strict, double-blind standards. All variables that might influence the outcome of an experiment are to be identical except the one being tested. Neither the experimenter nor the subject of a scientific experiment is allowed to know whether they are working with the control group or the experimental group. In this way the experiment is kept free of bias, opinion and unconscious (or deliberate) skewing of the data.
Unfortunately, in real life situations one seems to always know which group one is in!
As a chiropractor, it would be impossible for me to be unaware if I was giving a real adjustment or a pretend adjustment. It would be difficult to be unaware of the indications of my patient's condition. I routinely palpate a person's musculature and spinal misalignments, touch trigger points, etc. And for my patients to not know if they were receiving a proper adjustment or not would assume that each one was fairly new to chiropractic and had not yet learned to notice the changes in their bodies that a good adjustment evokes. One really has to experience these things to understand the value of the adjustment. Therefore, chiropractic can never measure up to the strict and sterile, double-blind requirements of pure science in order to prove it's worth.
And so it is with homeopathy. My introduction to using the remedies began with my screaming child. As a six week old baby my son began to scream. And he continued to scream, almost constantly, for years. It is true that he was my first born and I knew very little about raising children, but this little guy defied the techniques of many grandmas and grandpas and professional child care providers. Neither medicine nor chiropractic could tell me what was wrong with my child.
My son did cry, tantrum and all the other normal acting-out behaviors of a normal boy, but in addition to that he screamed. Full-throated, constant, inconsolable screaming for hours on end. He screamed in the car until my ears rang. He screamed when we went to the zoo. He screamed at night when he (and I) should have been sleeping. Over several years of screaming he developed behaviors to soothe himself. If I had not known better I would have said these were vaccine-related problems. That was not the case, however. My son was stuck only once, and that was for the state-mandated PKU test.
When he was about 3 years old my child's screaming toned down a little, so that most nights we were able to get a modicum of rest. Instead of being out of bed with him 4 to 12 times a night, it became 2 or 3 times that we were awakened by his night terrors. He gained better control, so that his day-times were less volatile, too. But there was still a big, big problem. He screamed less, but he still screamed. We knew our son, and his screaming was simply not a behavioral issue. He was miserable, and so were we. I believed that my baby really disliked me. In earlier days cases like his were said to be the result of a mother who was cold to her child. In my case I felt I was the one being rejected.
I began a campaign to get help anywhere I could find it, and my quest led me to a local alternative practitioner. This man had, for years, been helping people who had given up on more accepted methods of health care. And thus began my experience with homeopathy.
I have a guiding principal in my evaluation of any health care discipline, product or method. In my way of thinking, if something works for little children and animals, neither of whom have an opinion about the efficacy of a treatment, then it is legitimate. We adults, far too often, let our suppositions and biases determine our truth. Children and animals may or may not like our decisions on their behalf, but they do not stand in the way of a procedure's benefit if it is properly applied to them. While this way of determining the benefit of health care is not the scientific method, I have found it to be reliable in the real world devoid of labs but heavily populated with variables that cannot be eliminated from our lives.
In the interest of complete honesty, I must tell you that by the time we got homeopathic help for my baby, he had suffered for 6 years. His recovery was not an overnight miracle. In fact, for the first 5 days of the new treatment his screaming and night terrors grew worse. His emotional balance was completely askew. I was fully aware that in natural treatment circles this was not an unheard-of result. In chiropractic we refer to this as re-tracing. As the body throws off the conditions that have unbalanced it's homestasis, many processes have to be actively stabilized and recalibrated in the newly changed system.
Imagine you were in a small rowboat in the midst of a storm. A heavy stone is weighing the boat down on one side, and as the waves mount around you, the tipped boat is taking on water. To allow the boat to balance properly and restabilize itself, you toss the stone overboard, creating even more waves as it's weight is taken from inside the boat and hits the water. While you have improved the boat's chances to weather the storm, you still have to ride out the waves of the storm itself and also of the sudden rebalancing. Like the rowboat, one's body has to cope with the factors causing the tempest of a disease or condition. So, too, must it deal with the sudden change in it's precarious balancing act, even when the change is for the better.
Just as I thought I could not handle another day of J's screams, I detected a slight lessening of their intensity. Slowly, day by day, his attacks of emotional upheaval were fewer and less shrill. Then there came the day that he didn't scream at all, and the night that we all slept until the alarm went off. And so, to us, the result of using homeopathy seemed magical. My son's voice remained hoarse and scratchy for several years, but eventually it was once again the sweet voice of a child. As his emotions became easier for him to regulate, his behavior was finally that of a normal child.
For giving my son his life back, for giving my family another chance at normalcy, I have homeopathy to thank. Do I always understand how it works? No, not even 30 years later. Do I know that it does work, and work without the harsh side effects of medically approved, “scientifically” accepted drugs. Yes. I know from my own experience. Do I care that the positive effects of homeopathy have not been given approval? I do not need the validation of the pharmaceutical industry to appreciate what happened for my hurting child. I do wish that homeopathy was accepted so that more people could benefit, but I can only be thrilled and grateful that we were able to get help somewhere, regardless of the method being outside the prevailing system.
I will never forget the day when I looked at my child and felt the weight of the lost years. Instead of the usual days of carefree play as a toddler and young child, he had experienced wild days and nights of terror. We had all been victims of the horrors in his head. But I was his mother. I was supposed to be able to protect him from these things. Sadly, I apologized to J, for it taking so very long for us to find the answer for him, for not being able to make him feel better sooner. A child younger than his years, and yet somehow older, as well, he looked at me thoughtfully. “I didn't know I felt bad,” he told me. “I didn't know there was any other way to feel.”
My journey into alternative health care, begun years before when I made the decision to be a chiropractor, had just begun a new chapter.
==========================================
As is true with all aspects of alternative health subjects, homeopathy has its share of adherents and detractors. I've been told repeatedly that homeopathy is a “pseudoscience.” What we know as “science” these days is such a closed-minded, belief-based entity, no school of thought or practical approach to health can satisfy its demands. The scientific methodology steps I learned in grade school have been co-opted by big businesses. They buy their approval from government bodies meant to safe-guard the public and stamp on any theories that are not in their best interests. Since accepted science is such a bought-and-paid-for rubber stamp of anything touted by pharmaceutical/chemical/agricultural corporations, calling the methods I use “pseudo” is more compliment than insult.
Anecdotal evidence is never used as proof of anything in pure science. In other words, my experiences and yours are of no consequence when it comes to determining the truth about a product or methodology. The only truth that counts is that which comes from a sterile lab, is repeatable and adheres to strict, double-blind standards. All variables that might influence the outcome of an experiment are to be identical except the one being tested. Neither the experimenter nor the subject of a scientific experiment is allowed to know whether they are working with the control group or the experimental group. In this way the experiment is kept free of bias, opinion and unconscious (or deliberate) skewing of the data.
Unfortunately, in real life situations one seems to always know which group one is in!
As a chiropractor, it would be impossible for me to be unaware if I was giving a real adjustment or a pretend adjustment. It would be difficult to be unaware of the indications of my patient's condition. I routinely palpate a person's musculature and spinal misalignments, touch trigger points, etc. And for my patients to not know if they were receiving a proper adjustment or not would assume that each one was fairly new to chiropractic and had not yet learned to notice the changes in their bodies that a good adjustment evokes. One really has to experience these things to understand the value of the adjustment. Therefore, chiropractic can never measure up to the strict and sterile, double-blind requirements of pure science in order to prove it's worth.
And so it is with homeopathy. My introduction to using the remedies began with my screaming child. As a six week old baby my son began to scream. And he continued to scream, almost constantly, for years. It is true that he was my first born and I knew very little about raising children, but this little guy defied the techniques of many grandmas and grandpas and professional child care providers. Neither medicine nor chiropractic could tell me what was wrong with my child.
My son did cry, tantrum and all the other normal acting-out behaviors of a normal boy, but in addition to that he screamed. Full-throated, constant, inconsolable screaming for hours on end. He screamed in the car until my ears rang. He screamed when we went to the zoo. He screamed at night when he (and I) should have been sleeping. Over several years of screaming he developed behaviors to soothe himself. If I had not known better I would have said these were vaccine-related problems. That was not the case, however. My son was stuck only once, and that was for the state-mandated PKU test.
When he was about 3 years old my child's screaming toned down a little, so that most nights we were able to get a modicum of rest. Instead of being out of bed with him 4 to 12 times a night, it became 2 or 3 times that we were awakened by his night terrors. He gained better control, so that his day-times were less volatile, too. But there was still a big, big problem. He screamed less, but he still screamed. We knew our son, and his screaming was simply not a behavioral issue. He was miserable, and so were we. I believed that my baby really disliked me. In earlier days cases like his were said to be the result of a mother who was cold to her child. In my case I felt I was the one being rejected.
I began a campaign to get help anywhere I could find it, and my quest led me to a local alternative practitioner. This man had, for years, been helping people who had given up on more accepted methods of health care. And thus began my experience with homeopathy.
I have a guiding principal in my evaluation of any health care discipline, product or method. In my way of thinking, if something works for little children and animals, neither of whom have an opinion about the efficacy of a treatment, then it is legitimate. We adults, far too often, let our suppositions and biases determine our truth. Children and animals may or may not like our decisions on their behalf, but they do not stand in the way of a procedure's benefit if it is properly applied to them. While this way of determining the benefit of health care is not the scientific method, I have found it to be reliable in the real world devoid of labs but heavily populated with variables that cannot be eliminated from our lives.
In the interest of complete honesty, I must tell you that by the time we got homeopathic help for my baby, he had suffered for 6 years. His recovery was not an overnight miracle. In fact, for the first 5 days of the new treatment his screaming and night terrors grew worse. His emotional balance was completely askew. I was fully aware that in natural treatment circles this was not an unheard-of result. In chiropractic we refer to this as re-tracing. As the body throws off the conditions that have unbalanced it's homestasis, many processes have to be actively stabilized and recalibrated in the newly changed system.
Imagine you were in a small rowboat in the midst of a storm. A heavy stone is weighing the boat down on one side, and as the waves mount around you, the tipped boat is taking on water. To allow the boat to balance properly and restabilize itself, you toss the stone overboard, creating even more waves as it's weight is taken from inside the boat and hits the water. While you have improved the boat's chances to weather the storm, you still have to ride out the waves of the storm itself and also of the sudden rebalancing. Like the rowboat, one's body has to cope with the factors causing the tempest of a disease or condition. So, too, must it deal with the sudden change in it's precarious balancing act, even when the change is for the better.
Just as I thought I could not handle another day of J's screams, I detected a slight lessening of their intensity. Slowly, day by day, his attacks of emotional upheaval were fewer and less shrill. Then there came the day that he didn't scream at all, and the night that we all slept until the alarm went off. And so, to us, the result of using homeopathy seemed magical. My son's voice remained hoarse and scratchy for several years, but eventually it was once again the sweet voice of a child. As his emotions became easier for him to regulate, his behavior was finally that of a normal child.
For giving my son his life back, for giving my family another chance at normalcy, I have homeopathy to thank. Do I always understand how it works? No, not even 30 years later. Do I know that it does work, and work without the harsh side effects of medically approved, “scientifically” accepted drugs. Yes. I know from my own experience. Do I care that the positive effects of homeopathy have not been given approval? I do not need the validation of the pharmaceutical industry to appreciate what happened for my hurting child. I do wish that homeopathy was accepted so that more people could benefit, but I can only be thrilled and grateful that we were able to get help somewhere, regardless of the method being outside the prevailing system.
I will never forget the day when I looked at my child and felt the weight of the lost years. Instead of the usual days of carefree play as a toddler and young child, he had experienced wild days and nights of terror. We had all been victims of the horrors in his head. But I was his mother. I was supposed to be able to protect him from these things. Sadly, I apologized to J, for it taking so very long for us to find the answer for him, for not being able to make him feel better sooner. A child younger than his years, and yet somehow older, as well, he looked at me thoughtfully. “I didn't know I felt bad,” he told me. “I didn't know there was any other way to feel.”
My journey into alternative health care, begun years before when I made the decision to be a chiropractor, had just begun a new chapter.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
My take on GMO (genetically modified organisms).
One of the big debates these days is the labeling of foods that are either wholly genetically modified or contain components that are genetically modified. I am not going to go into the whole "this person said or that person" said thing. That can be left to others. My take on the whole thing is that I want to know what is in the food, supplements, water, and so on that go into my body and those of my family, including the family pets. It is my right to know, plain and simple. Not just on the GMO front, but on everything I use. That is why I make the choice for natural and organic as often as possible.
If GMO's, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and so on are so safe, why do manufacturers want to hide their use from us? If I want to decide not to ingest things that have been touched by these or contain these, why can't I make that choice for myself? I have friends that believe that I am crazy to care so much about this issue. I don't try to force my views on them. If and when they ask, I simply state my case of garbage in garbage out and point them to readily available statistics that place the health of those in the United States below that of some third world countries.
Maybe the problem is that I look at this issue in too simplistic a way. I believe that I should educate myself and then make a decision, based on what I believe is best for me and my family. My family has the choice to do the same. I think simple foods with simple ingredients are the best thing to put in my body. Mother Nature has a good track record of creating nourishment for the inhabitants of this planet without human's help. In fact, in my opinion, our mother has done amazingly well even in the last few generations when it seems, in retrospect, that humanity has done its best to destroy this fragile home we have.
One of the big debates these days is the labeling of foods that are either wholly genetically modified or contain components that are genetically modified. I am not going to go into the whole "this person said or that person" said thing. That can be left to others. My take on the whole thing is that I want to know what is in the food, supplements, water, and so on that go into my body and those of my family, including the family pets. It is my right to know, plain and simple. Not just on the GMO front, but on everything I use. That is why I make the choice for natural and organic as often as possible.
If GMO's, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and so on are so safe, why do manufacturers want to hide their use from us? If I want to decide not to ingest things that have been touched by these or contain these, why can't I make that choice for myself? I have friends that believe that I am crazy to care so much about this issue. I don't try to force my views on them. If and when they ask, I simply state my case of garbage in garbage out and point them to readily available statistics that place the health of those in the United States below that of some third world countries.
Maybe the problem is that I look at this issue in too simplistic a way. I believe that I should educate myself and then make a decision, based on what I believe is best for me and my family. My family has the choice to do the same. I think simple foods with simple ingredients are the best thing to put in my body. Mother Nature has a good track record of creating nourishment for the inhabitants of this planet without human's help. In fact, in my opinion, our mother has done amazingly well even in the last few generations when it seems, in retrospect, that humanity has done its best to destroy this fragile home we have.
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