Hiding

Today is the first day of my wearing of contact lenses. My eyes have not adjusted to them, thus most things I look at are blurry to various extent. I decided that I no longer wanted to wear eyeglasses after 30 some odd years of wearing them. It's a part of my evolution as a human. I have not had a haircut in three years and thus have a ponytail down my back. I wanted to see what I looked like with a pony tail and it really isn't too bad. I decided I no longer wanted to shave, so I grew a gray beard. It is neat and close to my face, not one of those bushy type beards you sometimes see from men from the North Pole. Then I decided to cut the glasses. Some people wear glasses to "soften" their faces. That is what I was told by the first Optician that fitted me with glasses back in the 1970"s. My face needed to be softened, whatever that means. Well, no more, my face is now going to be in its full hard glory! No more softening for me! I've softened through my various careers and now intend to be myself.

Some people wear eyeglasses as a fashion statement. I've never thought of eyeglasses as a fashion statement, but I suppose the young generation do. They even wear "fashion eyeglasses" with just glass lenses without corrective lenses. That seems to me to be a bit desperate for attention. People do what people do, I guess.

Then there are people like my 83 year old father. They wear glasses only because they have to. Their generation never thought of them as "fashion statements" or to "soften" their faces, they wore them to see. Every few years he would go to the ophthalmologist to get his eyes checked and get a stronger pair of lenses. That is simply what glasses were needed for; to help you to see.

A final group of people wear glasses in order to "hide". Some people may be shy, or timid, or have phobias and they use their glasses to hide behind. Like the people who wear sunglasses all the time, indoors and outdoors. It makes them feel safe. It may make them feel a little important but I think it is mainly to feel safe. By wearing glasses there is an barrier between your eyes and the other persons eyes. The eyes open to the soul, and people who know how to read the eyes can see into others souls and know what type of person they truly are. They will know the person; not the person we try to project. I know at times in my life I felt confident that my eyeglasses were on to protect me from someone who seemed more in tuned to life. I felt it helped hide me. So I think many people use glasses for hiding from others. They may be insecure, may have hurt someone and are afraid others might find out if you see into their souls. It is in my opinion an act of survival for some of these people with eyeglasses.

Former Secretary of State Marilyn Albright has written a book entitled "Read my Pins", in which she wears lapel pins based on her mood, what her dominant personality that day is, or what she hopes to accomplish that day. I think some people wear eyeglasses the same way. They wear different ones for different moods, what they are trying to express on a subconscious level. It is a sense of hiding. I don't like hiding. I refuse to hide. If I am mad at someone I should let that person know. If I am distrustful of someone, why hide it. Be yourself. Put yourself out there and read the world and be read. It will help make you a more honest person.

Some might say, my growing a beard is in a sense of hiding, but it is not. I am not hiding my eyes...come look into my soul...tell me what you see. Growing a beard is simply me being me. In my life I have had a beard four times: once in College before graduating, again after I got out of the Navy (my wedding pictures have me with a beard), third, when I quit my corporate career, I celebrated by growing a beard, and now this one. So it is actually a part of my growth in life. I feel myself growing after six years of severe head trauma stagnation, and I think I'm coming out and thus want to let my beard come out also.

It's funny what little things can tell about a person.

2008, NO reported deaths from vitamins, supplements. How many died from Pharmaceutical Drugs?

So all the M.D.'s. researchers and Pharmaceutical liars keep telling the public how dangerous vitamins, minerals, amino acids or herbs are to the poor unknowing, useless eating public. Here is an article from the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service which states in 2008, there were NO DEATHS from the use of vitamins, supplements, amino acids or herbs in the US. No interaction with pharmaceutical drugs.

These numbers come from 154 million people taking these vitamins and supplements equating a total of 56 billion doses by Americans in 2008, and NO DEATHS.

I wonder how many people died from taking their M.D. prescribed Pharmaceutical poisons in 2008. The last count was 100,000 people died of medicinal drugs and the count is rising. Statistics, anyone?

No Deaths from Vitamins, Minerals,
Amino Acids Or Herbs
Poison Control Statistics Prove Supplements' Safety
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service
1-20-10

(OMNS) -- There was not even one death caused by a dietary supplement in 2008, according to the most recent information collected by the U.S. National Poison Data System. The new 174-page annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, published in the journal Clinical Toxicology, shows zero deaths from multiple vitamins; zero deaths from any of the B vitamins; zero deaths from vitamins A, C, D, or E; and zero deaths from any other vitamin. Additionally, there were no deaths whatsoever from any amino acid or herbal product. This means no deaths at all from blue cohosh, echinacea, ginkgo biloba, ginseng, kava kava, St. John's wort , valerian, yohimbe, Asian medicines, ayurvedic medicines, or any other botanical. There were zero deaths from creatine, blue-green algae, glucosamine, chondroitin, melatonin, or any homeopathic remedies. Furthermore, there were zero deaths in 2008 from any dietary mineral supplement. This means there were no fatalities from calcium, magnesium, chromium, zinc, colloidal silver, selenium, iron, or multimineral supplements. Two children died as a result of medical use of the antacid sodium bicarbonate. The other "Electrolyte and Mineral" category death was due to a man accidentally drinking sodium hydroxide, a highly toxic degreaser and drain-opener. No man, woman or child died from nutritional supplements. Period. 61 poison centers provide coast-to-coast data for the U.S. National Poison Data System, which is then reviewed by 29 medical and clinical toxicologists. NPDS, the authors write, is "one of the few real-time national surveillance systems in existence, providing a model public health surveillance system for all types of exposures, public health event identification, resilience response and situational awareness tracking." Over half of the U.S. population takes daily nutritional supplements. Even if each of those people took only one single tablet daily, that makes 154,000,000 individual doses per day, for a total of over 56 billion doses annually. Since many persons take more than just one vitamin or mineral tablet, actual consumption is considerably higher, and the safety of nutritional supplements is all the more remarkable. If nutritional supplements are allegedly so "dangerous," as the FDA and news media so often claim, then where are the bodies? Those who wonder if the media are biased against vitamins may consider this: how many television stations, newspapers, magazines, and medical journals have reported that no one dies from nutritional supplements? Reference: Bronstein AC, Spyker DA, Cantilena LR Jr, Green JL, Rumack BH, Giffin SL. 2008 Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers' National Poison Data System (NPDS): 26th Annual Report. Clinical Toxicology (2009). 47, 911-1084. The full text article is available for free download at http://www.aapcc.org/dnn/Portals/0/2008annualreport.pdf . Vitamins statistics are found in Table 22B, journal pages 1052-3. Minerals, herbs, amino acids and other supplements are in the same table, pages 1047-8. For Further Reading: Download any Annual Report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers from 1983-2008 free of charge athttp://www.aapcc.org/dnn/NPDSPoisonData/AnnualReports/tabid/125/Default.aspx Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information:http://www.orthomolecular.org The peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service is a non-profit and non-commercial informational resource. Editorial Review Board: Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. Damien Downing, M.D. Michael Gonzalez, D.Sc., Ph.D. Steve Hickey, Ph.D. James A. Jackson, PhD Bo H. Jonsson, MD, Ph.D Thomas Levy, M.D., J.D. Jorge R. Miranda-Massari, Pharm.D. Erik Paterson, M.D. Gert E. Shuitemaker, Ph.D. Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D., Editor and contact person. Email: omns@orthomolecular.org

Suicide and the Soldier

Suicide And The Soldier
By Gary Kohls, M.D.
1-22-10

Smarthealthchoices blogspot is a concrete anti-war website secondarily to health articles. As a child of the 1960's, during the VietNam war was a poster I had which said simply:

War is not healthy to Children and other Living Things

I have never changed my position on war. It is stupid, it is ignorant, it settles nothing-only makes more enemies, destroys innocent lives and soldiers lives and bankrupts countries. As the singer for the group WAR (Edwin Starr) bellowed in their song entitled "WAR" in the early 1970's , "WAR, Humph, what is it good for? Absolutely, NOTHING!" It is as true to day as it was then.

The author of this article is a doctor who pretty much explains what is happening to our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read it closely, every word. Understand what he is saying because it is true. Remember the wars our government have lined up to fight in the near future include: Iran, Jordan, Yemen, Pakistan, Nigeria and perhaps Saudi Arabia. These clown leaders we keep electing have nothing but was in their minds for pulling the economic system out of bankruptcy and to keep the opium supply flowing into the US from Afghanistan, and capture oil and gas fields for their Texas buddies.

Please understand that "War is not healthy to children and other living things". Period.

Nine years ago, the Cheney/Bush/Rove/Rumsfeld administration started, by a series of treasonous lies, its so-called endless wars on the nebulous "terrorism", much of which was provoked by decades of anti-Muslim/pro-Israeli US foreign policies. According to the US Department of Defense more US military personnel have taken their own lives since 2001 than have been killed in action (KIA) in either Iraq or Afghanistan. In 2009 alone, more than 330 active servicemen and women have committed suicide - more than those KIAs in Afghanistan and Iraq. And this number doesn't count the veterans who have killed themselves following their discharge. The suicide rate in the US military, prior to 2001, was lower than that for the general US population. In the years since 2001, the suicide rate for active duty personnel is nearly double the national average. When military campaigns result in suicide numbers that exceed those killed by enemy combatants, there should be a massive hue and cry demanding to know the reasons why. And the reasons behind the secret decisions to send our previously mentally healthy soldiers "into harm's way" to become unnecessary mental health casualties must be questioned. It needs to be pointed out again that the official Pentagon figures only keep track of completed suicides that occur in active duty personnel but these numbers are artificially low and always have been. Indeed, many Vietnam vets say that there should be another Wall in DC just to honor and/or lament the ones who died after that atrocious war ended. Likewise, the numbers of suicides are just as deceptively low as are the KIA count, which does not number as KIA those who died after clearing Iraqi or Afghani air space en route to military hospitals in Europe. Also not included in Pentagon figures are the large numbers of veterans who take their own lives following discharge. These are veterans who "come home crazy", justifiably angry, understandably hopeless about the endless struggle to return to normalcy, instead finding a toxic, nearly bankrupt nation (largely because of consistent and excessive military spending over the decades) where life does not have the same meaning for them compared to what they experienced in the camaraderie of the combat zone. Those soldiers, who all-too-frequently have gradually become psychologically and spiritually damaged, return to civilian life totally changed. They return to unsuspecting and unprepared loved ones, who are often secondarily traumatized by the soldier. Those loved ones often can't understand (and sometimes don't want to hear about) the painful hellish realities that their soldier almost didn't survive. On top of the underestimation of completed suicides among active duty soldiers and discharged veterans, the Department of Defense apparently makes no attempt to measure the incidence of suicidal thinking or unsuccessful suicide attempts. The exact figures are obviously not known, For an estimate of such suicidality, it has been suggested that one might just multiply the incidence of successful suicides by 5 or 10. One PTSD-related study of Vietnam-era veterans showed that 20% of that study group were chronically plagued by a preoccupation with suicidal thinking. An example of this sobering reality is Tim O'Brien, the honored author of a number of award-winning novels about the Vietnam War, including "The Things They Carried", "Going After Cacciato" and "In the Lake of the Woods". O'Brien still suffers from intermittent suicidal thinking. As another indication of the hidden consequences of being in a kill-or-be-killed warzone, many historians estimate that there may have been as many as 200,000 Vietnam veterans who committed suicide after they came home from the war. The KIA/MIA number in that war was "only" 58,000. There are obviously plenty of reasons to build another Wall or two. It should come as no surprise that the suicide rate among demobilized veterans from the Gulf Wars may now be as high as four times the national average! And it is apparently climbing. The US Department of Veteran Affairs calculates that over 6,000 former service personnel (from all wars) commit suicide every year. What is this saying about what will probably go down in history as another of the many useless, senseless and nation-bankrupting wars? Many of these discharged men and women came home understandably depressed, sleep-deprived, irritable, malnourished, angry, demoralized and, on top of all that, perhaps even feeling guilty about the gruesome sights, sounds and smells that they had seen or been responsible for. Only the most ethical soldiers refused to obey illegal orders under fire, perhaps saving their souls in the process. An alarming number of combat soldiers are being given brain-altering psych drugs to numb their emotional pain, artificially stimulate their understandable low mood, quell the equally understandable nervousness or produce a chemically-induced semi-coma that might simulate sleep. Along with these prescription drugs, these troubled soldiers might be, like their civilian counterparts back home falsely-labeled with a mental illness diagnosis or two and be told that they need to stay on drugs for the rest of their lives! In reality civilians and soldiers alike may only be experiencing a situation of "overwhelm" of known etiology that is likely to be temporary and therefore treatable without brain-altering drugs. Many psychiatric drugs are known to actually increase the incidence of suicidal thinking and usually cause many other adverse effects that can be misinterpreted as mental illness symptoms. These widely used psych drugs, whether legal or illegal, are also well known to produce various degrees of altered thinking (called "spell-binding" by psychiatrist Peter Breggin in his recent book titled "Medication Madness"). These drug effects include altered impulse control, rage reactions, worsening depression, drug-induced mania, insomnia or irrational behaviors such as criminal or antisocial behaviors. Many psych drugs can cause dependence and addiction, so that serious withdrawal symptoms can occur when a patient tries to cut down or quit the medication, good for the pharmaceutical industry but very bad for patients and their brains. These withdrawal symptoms are often misdiagnosed as a "relapse" of the patient's "mental illness" whereas the symptoms may have never been seen prior to the use of the drug. How crazy-making must it be for physically and spiritually-wounded veterans, who thought that they were defending their country, being willing to die for democracy, and then finding out too late that they had actually been fighting and killing and dying for thousands of corporate war profiteers like Halliburton, Gulf Oil, Blackwater, the big financial institutions, the weapons-makers, the gun-runners and the reflected glory for ChickenHawk politicians and talking heads like Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Rove, Limbaugh, Hannity and numberless others who never experienced the horrors of war themselves? So now we are saddled with tens of thousands, in dramatically increasing numbers, of seemingly expendable, increasingly unpatriotic and very angry young men and women who are newly haunted by unseen demons, coming home to a country that is said to be undergoing what is euphemistically called a "jobless recovery" by guilty Wall Street cheerleaders who, for the benefit of their satisfied investors, went along with another highly profitable war that changed forever the lives of the duped soldiers. And now they can find no work, may not be able concentrate well enough to handle college and may have finally tumbled to the fact that they had been deceived by their military recruiters who had promised valuable work experience in the military, a college education but made no mention of the psychological costs of going to war. Often these soldiers came back to find out that their homes had been repossessed by a corrupt banking industry that had been rescued of their reckless, unethical and criminal activities by multi-billion dollar bailouts ­ with no bail-outs for the grunts who worked so hard doing what they thought was their patriotic duty. Too often they returned to find their marriages on the rocks and their family on food stamps. Is it any wonder that many ex-soldiers have simply lost the will to live? It seems to me that any ethical person who is still thinking, who is trying to read between the lines, who cares about the survival of his faltering nation and perhaps has sworn to defend the US against its domestic enemies, knows that it is time to stop the hemorrhage that is bleeding the US dry at a rate of $450,000,000 per day (450 million dollars a day!!) down a seemingly bottomless Pentagon pit, a pit that is also "disappearing" thousands of previously healthy young uniformed American men and women, many of whom look like they might wind up permanently disabled in body, mind and spirit. Most Americans don't think continuing these useless and senseless wars is worth the huge costs we all will bear ­ costs that are known and unknown, current and future - whether the wars are ultimately declared "won" or "lost". Most Americans in their heart of hearts know that we can't afford to continue spending massive amounts of money that our nation doesn't have on destructive wars when so many human needs are being left unmet. It's time to cut our losses, declare victory and bring the troops home before more damage is done to them and our nation. Dr. Kohls is a recently retired physician who practiced holistic mental health care and came to understand the importance of psychological and spiritual trauma (and the mostly neurologic disorder called posttraumatic stress disorder (and its variants) as a major root cause of what are most often instead called "mental illnesses of unknown etiology". If the reader is interested in exploring those realities, a number of videointerviews on the topic are available online at www.iHealthTube.com. Many of the videos are also on YouTube.

Vioxx and the danger to humans

January 20, 2010

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimates that Vioxx may have contributed to 27,785 heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths between 1999 and 2003. The estimate is based on the number of prescriptions issued for Vioxx between 1999 and 2003.

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David Graham, the associate director for science in FDA's office of drug safety, made the estimate based on 92.8 million U.S. prescriptions for Vioxx between 1999 and 2003. It's part of a study Graham conducted in cooperation with Kaiser Permanente.

Merck pulled Vioxx, a popular pain reliever widely used by arthritis patients, off the market in September, saying it was "putting patient safety first" but the Wall Street Journal reported earlier that company officials had fought for years to protect the highly profitable drug and to keep news of the health risks quiet.

Vioxx was a big moneymaker for Merck, generating about $2.5 billion in yearly sales.

In his study, Graham's team examined records for 1.39 million members of Kaiser Permanente, including 26,748 who took Vioxx and 40,405 who were on Pfizer's Celebrex, another COX-2 inhibitor.

The study found that high doses of Vioxx, or rofecoxib, tripled risks of heart attacks and sudden cardiac death. Graham planned to present the findings at an epidemiology conference Aug. 25, but his supervisors said the results were "too preliminary" and recommended that the study be submitted first to a medical journal so it could undergo peer review or be presented at the conference with an alternative FDA opinion.

When the study was presented Aug. 25, the abstract said, "[T]his and other studies cast serious doubt on the safety of rofecoxib ... and its use by physicians and patients" at doses exceeding 25 milligrams. "When Graham submitted a revised, final version to FDA on Sept. 30, FDA's announcement of the study's release did not mention specific data on cardiovascular risks.

About 20 million Americans had taken Vioxx by the time Merck withdrew it.

The company responded to the latest report by saying there is "no reliable way to estimate the actual events."

"Because heart attacks and strokes occur in the general population, one cannot say that if someone had an event while taking Vioxx, that Vioxx caused it," a Merck spokesman said.

Read more: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/vioxx_estimates.html#ixzz0ct7f6UOz

Clinic Floor collapses under weight of dieters

Weight Watchers clinic floor collapses under dieters

The floor of a Weight Watchers clinic in Sweden collapsed beneath a group of 20 members of the weight loss program who were gathered for a meeting.

Published: 7:35PM GMT 14 Jan 2010

As the dieters queued to see how many pounds they had shed, the floor beneath them in the clinic in Växjö, in south-central Sweden, began to rumble, according to a report in The Local, Sweden's English-language newspaper.

"We suddenly heard a huge thud; we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air.

"The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls," one Weight Watchers participant told the Smålandsposten newspaper.

Soon, the fault lines spread around the room, and other sections of the floor gave way.

Luckily, all of the dieters escaped uninjured and managed to move the scales to the corridor, which was not damaged in the accident, and were able to complete their weekly weigh in.

The cause of the floor's collapse remains under investigation.