Since there has been so much alarm in the press lately about lead, I have had some women call me about the lead used in the weights in the vest. I was assured by the manufacturer of the weights long ago that there was no chance of toxicity because you don’t touch the actual lead at all, only the bags.

The reason why I used the lead shot is because it is a soft weight, meaning that it moves on impact. It is therefore much less dangerous than large lumps of metal that could cause bone problems in a fall. Unfortunately there is nothing that I can find to substitute that is as heavy as lead. Some vests from China use sand but the mass of sand for the same weight is so much larger that it would not work for women’s vests.

I know that we are exposed to a lot of lead in our daily lives in this country. It is in lipstick, in the lining of food cans, in our water supplies and in old paints and dirt contaminated with the old lead in gasoline. I also worked with lead for many years on my stained glass projects yet I never have tested high on lead in my body.

Anyway, to answer the concern and make absolutely sure the vests were safe and non-toxic, I am now packaging each weight in a heavy-duty ziploc bag, taped shut. This should alleviate all worries about the weights. If anyone who already has a vest reading this would like a set of the bags to put their weights in, please email me with your address and I will send them out to you.

Good health,
Pam

I was thinking this week about all the people who need to see "scientific studies" before they are willing to believe anything. If they only realized how slanted, inaccurate and downright devious most studies are, they would probably be surprised.

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association "proves" that diet does not help prevent recurrance of cancer. When you actually read the study you see that the definition of a good diet that the subjects were on included a recommended 20% of calories from fat. The actual participants found that hard to do, so they averaged 27% of fat. It has been well proven in Alternative Medicine that people who have cancer are better off to stay at about 10% of calories from fat. Then it has also been well-proven in the past that fresh, raw, organic food can help heal the body. There were no recommendations about that. Basically the only difference between the two groups was that one group tried to eat more veggies and fruits and tried and failed to eat less fat.

What a stupid study! If you really want to prevent the return of cancer such half-hearted attempts at diet modification are bound not to work. You have to get serious about what you put in your mouth.

Another study recently said that vitamins C and E were not helpful for health. What baloney! It turns out that the study used synthetic versions of both antioxidants. They are just useless chemicals, of course they don’t help. They can make a study prove whatever they want by the way they set it up. Drug companies are very interested in making supplements look useless. They have millions to spend on setting up these bogus studies and then trumpeting them through the media to confuse people.

I think that once people get it that allopathic medicine is in league with the drug barons to strip us of our money and our health, then we can start to do our own research and find out what works for us.

I love testimonials. I love to read about people like me who had found something that works. I know there is the possibility that they are bogus or planted. I take that risk. But, since companies are so constrained now by the FDA in what they can claim for their products, sometimes you can only tell what they do from the testimonials.

I am looking into the vibration platforms to improve osteoporosis right now. I have heard so many different pros and cons. The studies shown on the sites do not seem to be conclusive at all. But someone I trust is selling the best of them so, when finances permit, I will just go ahead and try one out. They are very expensive so it was only the testimonials from women like myself that convinced me it was worth a try.

I myself give testimonials whenever I think a product is life-changing. And it’s a joy to read the emails I get about the results of my weight-vest.

So don’t believe the headlines, they are distorted to sell the news. Last week the news was full of how many over-70 year old women were enjoying healthy sex lives. I was surprised until I read the small print and it turns out that to be called sexually active you had to have had sex once in the past year. That’s pretty funny!

Blessings, Pam

Many dentists have been noticing the connection between gum and tooth problems and bone loss. It seems that people who have periodontal problems often also have osteoporosis.

Now the link between periodontal problems and osteoporosis has been proven by a major study looking at bone-mineral density and oral health in nearly 3,000 postmenopausal women who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III. Their analysis showed a strong and direct relationship between bone loss, gum-attachment loss and tooth loss.

While many people with osteoporosis do not show signs of weak jawbones there are now ways to tell from digital dental x-rays if osteoporosis is present. In a recent study 49 post-menopausal women had their dental x-rays analyzed by a computer program and 92% of the patients with osteoporosis were identified. 96% of those who had no osteoporosis were also correctly identified.

Your dentist could get the software to analyze the x-rays and then you would be able to find out a lot sooner about the health of your bones just in the course of your normal dental check-up. You would need to follow up with a Dexa scan prescribed by your doctor.

I first found out about this from Dr Robert Rowen’s newsletter, Second Opinion. This is a great newsletter, one of the few that I still read regularly, there are so many now. Dr Rowan is usually way ahead of the crowd and often has some very unusual solutions. He is an integrative physician.

My question would be: would dentists really want to be advising their patients about their bones? Would that involve them in some kind of responsibility issues? Given their total ostrich attitude to the use of mercury in people’s mouths, which has shortened many lives, I think many would not offer the information – but it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

Pam

There has been mounting evidence for some time now that an excess of calcium supplementation can cause bone spurs and joint problems. Without sufficient magnesium to push the calcium into the bones it just floats around in the body looking for a place to go.

Now a new study of the effect of dairy products on the elderly finds that the calcium and vitamin D may be helping to cause brain damage and dementia. It does this by narrowing and stiffening the blood vessels in the brain.

When the team from Duke University in Durham, NC studied the brains of 311 subjects from 60 to 86 they found a significantly higher number of brain lesions in the people who consumed more calcium and vitamin D. Other conditions, such as blood pressure made no difference to the results.

Previously the same team had thought it was the fat in dairy that added to the brain lesions but now they have narrowed it down to calcium and vitamin D. The team reported their results at the Experimental Biology meeting in Washington, DC by study leader Dr Martha Payne.

As you probably have already read in my previous articles, I think that calcium supplements are advised for women who have Osteopenia and Osteoporosis in overly high amounts – with insufficient magnesium to balance it. Added to that is the fact that the cheap Vitamin D that is thrown indiscriminately into so many products now, is a synthetic D2, not the beneficial D3 that the bones need.

From my research I recommend 500 mgs of calcium, which you can probably get from green food, and 800 mgs of magnesium with the Vitamin D3 coming from a tablespoon a day of cod liver oil. And I strongly recommend giving up all dairy products excepting for a bit of cheese for flavoring.

I want to keep all my parts supple and strong as I age and that includes the blood vessels in my brain so I can think clearly, feel well and happy and be a benefit to others until the end of my story.

There were two items in the news today that really curled my hair! Not bone drugs this time, but still indicative of how negative the drug companies influence on doctors has become.

One was in the New York Times about psychiatrists who are increasingly prescribing dangerous drugs to teenagers for uses that have never been approved. Now that Minnesota is requiring public reports of all drug company marketing payments to doctors, a lot of interesting information is coming to light.

The article said, "From 2000 to 2005, drug maker payments to Minnesota psychiatrists rose more than sixfold, to $1.6 million. During those same years, prescriptions of antipsychotics for children in Minnesota’s Medicaid program rose more than ninefold.

Those who took the most money from makers of atypicals tended to prescribe the drugs to children the most often, the data suggest. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists who received at least $5,000 from atypical makers from 2000 to 2005 appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who received less or no money."

These drugs, in many cases, did irreparable harm to young people. The article is well-written by Gardiner Harris, Benedict Carey and Janet Roberts.

The second article was even more scary. Amgen Inc. and Johnson & Johnson are paying doctors hundreds of millions of dollars every year in return for prescribing anemia drugs which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses, the New York Times reported on its Web site on Wednesday.

The Times also cited analysts as saying that DaVita, the biggest owner of dialysis clinics in the United States, gets a quarter of its revenue from anemia drugs. In one of the articles on this same topic there was a picture of a old woman getting dialysis who may have been given an overdose of anemia drugs with the process. She probably had no clue what was going on anyway but keeping her alive and over-drugged is very profitable. These companies seem to have no moral scruples at all!

When I first started selling my vests a couple of years ago, I had to be very careful what I said about the drug companies and their distortion of the whole medical profession. Now it’s such common news that they cheat and lie their way to an exorbitant profit that I can say what I think more openly. They would love to have us all addicted to their dangerous drugs for life. They are totally uninterested in actually healing anything.

Ok, if you are still reading this, then I’m preaching to the choir, sorry for the rant.
Pam

There is more news of negative bone reactions to drugs. This time it’s the heartburn drugs, including Prilosec, Nexium, Prevacid, Aciphex and Protonix. These drugs shut down stomach acid production and are taken by millions of people for ulcers and acid-reflux disease.

The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine studied 150,000 Britons over 50  and found that the drug takers had a 44% greater risk of hip fractures. Also, the longer people took the drugs, the greater the risk.

They do not yet understand the underlying connection between the drugs and bone loss. But the elderly are most at risk and their doctors should take care to give them the smallest dose for the least possible time.

The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

It is becoming more obvious to me that the pH balance of the body is a really important factor in the health of our bones. Heartburn medication is another interference in the acid balance of the body. As we age we are able to produce less stomach acid than before and we should actually supplement our diet with hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes at every meal.

This is the opposite of the drug remedy. Which is not really surprising! I’m becoming more and more cynical about the drug industry. There are many people who believe that the evil drugmakers are intent on getting more people addicted to long-term solutions that make us sicker rather than healing us. I am shifting further over into their opinion of late. 

So if you or your mother are on any of these drugs, try to get off them and research some alternative solutions to your problems.

Certain anti-depressants, including Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil, have been found to decrease bone density and increase risk of falls. In the Archives of Internal Medicine, a recently published five-year study followed 5000 people over 50 who took these anti-depressants, called SSRI’s (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors).

Since evidence from Gillian Sanson’s book, The Myth of Osteoporosis, shows that falling is a more important factor in hip fracture than bone density, the increase in number of falls is important. It is the way you fall and what you hit on the way down that leads to fracture. So, if you are falling more, then you are increasing your chances of a negative result. My mother has fallen twice while I was out shopping with her. Once she fell right to the hard ground but got right up and suffered no injury and the other time she banged her arm on a step and fractured it.

The lowered bone density was well-documented at 4% loss at the  hip and 2.4% loss at the spine. This is a serious amount of bone loss. There are other negative effects attributed to these anti-depressants, including liver and kidney problems. I feel that they are over-prescribed, especially to women. They seem to be a general ‘get-out-of-my-hair’ answer to many legitimate complaints that women go to a doctor to treat, like fatigue and brain fog.

I am presently researching hypothyroid and adrenal exhaustion issues because I was diagnosed with them recently. (That’s the reason for no posts lately, but I’m back on board now and have a lot of things to share.)

Adrenal exhaustion is at epidemic proportions in this country and most doctors don’t know anything about it. I found that I had many of the symptoms even though I don’t have depression or brain fog. I thought I had a lot of energy also until I looked back a few years to my past levels of activity and saw how physically active I used to be. I spend so much time on the computer now with this business that I didn’t really get it that I had lower energy. I thought I was just short of time.

So my next post will deal with information on thyroid and adrenal insufficiency. Perhaps you could get off the anti-depressants that are badly affecting your bones and get your hormones checked out instead.

Good health, Pam

A recent study from Switzerland that has been published in the October issue of the Journal of American Society of Nephrology, found that potassium citrate increased bone density significantly in a period of one year.

The study was done on 189 women, average age 59, who had low bone mass. They were given either potassium citrate or potassium chloride 3 times daily. All women also took calcium carbonate and Vitamin D3. The potassium citrate was found to increase bone density up to 2% in one year. Both groups also had significant reduction in blood pressure during this time with no side effects at all.

I was excited to read about this and prepared to add another few pills to my daily regime, but then I checked my multi-vitamin bottle and found that I was already getting potassium citrate from that – 90 mgs a day. So I have been taking this all along.

This study supports my theory that the acidity in the American diet is partly to blame for our bone loss. The potassium citrate actually lowers the acidity in the body and leads to less calcium being leached from the bones. Our diet of acid producing food; grains, meats, processed foods, causes our whole body to work hard, day and night, to bring our system back into acid balance. Besides being bad for our bones because the acid takes calcium from our bones to buffer the acid, there is also the damage to our immune system. Our body gives over-acidity high priority and the healing mechanisms of the immune system take second place.

You can read the whole study at Medline. You have to register but it’s worth it.

You can test your own body pH balance by using the test strips I sell on my site and judge for yourself if this is a significant issue in you health. It is relatively easy to balance your pH and potassium citrate is one of the things you can take to do that.

May your bones be healthy,
Pam

There has been a change in the way top medical professors have seen the constant attention paid to doctors by drug reps. The drug companies presents, free seminars and free continuing education classes have been attracting attention for some time and doctors have been warned not to take expensive gifts. 

But now, according to an article in Associated Press, by DAVID B. CARUSO, Nov 2, 2006, some medical schools are teaching doctors-in-training how to ask tough questions during the slick sales presentations. Especially when a new drug is being pushed and the companies pull out all the stops to persuade doctors to use it – often instead of an older, less expensive, version that is just as good.

Stanford University in September joined a short list of institutions that have banned doctors from accepting gifts from drug industry sales reps. Others include Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania.

At Mount Sinai School of Medicine they have classes that role play how to respond to drug reps and also how to respond to patients who demand the new drugs they have seen on TV. Many doctors waste valuable time explaining why the TV drug ads don’t apply to everyone and not everyone will benefit in the ways claimed.

Unfortunately many medical school programs still believe that the gifts doctors get from drug company reps are harmless, although many studies have shown that they do affect prescription rates. Also many professors are still being paid by the drug companies in various capacities, as speakers or experts so they are loathe to bite the hand that feeds them.

One of the answers would be to turn off the tv or to turn a deaf ear to any drug ads you hear. Read some of Dr Bruce Lipton’s books and find out how 95% of our sicknesses are caused by internal stress that can be prevented. Turn to the new information about health and turn away from allopathic medicine. It has it’s place in certain circumstances but it is based on old outdated knowledge. It’s time to learn about the new breakthroughs in quantum physics and field theory that can help to heal us from the inside out.

Pam