Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
If by 'dumping a bunch of chemicals into the body' you mean correctly treating asthma with preventative and symptom treating medication, then my problem with the your point of view is exactly what I feared. Medication like salbutamol has saved many lives and has no known side effects (well, quickened heart rate and CNS stimulation maybe, but not harmful long term ones). The chemicals happen to be concentrated and measured into an accurate dose, and they also happen to save and improve lives on a daily basis. Some chemicals are good for us in certain circumstances, others aren't. Asthma drugs are truly chemicals a lot of people (myself included) can be thankful for.
It's not that I don't believe that certain chemicals under certain conditions can provide us with a healthier and happier life. Certainly they can. But if the option is there to avoid eating certain foods that seem to provide us with the same benefits, then that's most likely the safer, more natural way to go.
If, in some cases, the asthma is triggered by certain foods or impurities in certain foods then is it not better to remove the cause of the probem than to use chemicals to mask the symptoms of the problem?
When you speak of "accurate doses" and "correctly treating" you indicate a level of faith in today's medicine that I do not share with you.
As an example, should you go to a doctor suffering arrhythmia or tachycardia, the "correct treatment" in the western United States is some form of digitalis whether it be a synthetic such as Lanoxin or a derivative of foxglove containing non-synthetic digoxin. In many eastern states the "correct treatment" is an IV containing magnesium, (start there and move on to something else if the magnesium doesn't eliminate symptoms and diagnostic signs). The digoxin/Lanoxin treatment is by far the most toxic to the system and should you be prescribed such a treatment it will come with a long list of things you should avoid and warnings concerning the toxicity of the drug. On that list you will find warnings to avoid calcium, magnesium and potassium which are quite possibly the three electrolytes which are out of balance and leading to the problem to begin with. The reason the "correct treatment" varies isn't because people's physiology changes when they cross the Mississippi. It's a matter of medical standards which are set for particular areas. Any doctor who deviates from these, regardless of whether the doctor happens to know that one treatment is superior to another, is leaving him/herself open to a law suit. The medical review boards who, like it or not, have more or less put politics ahead of medicine, won't support any doctor who deviates from the medical standards they set. You'll find this at every level of medicine today. Try calling an EMD center for a friend or family member who is suffering a severe rectal hemorrhage. Know what they'll tell you to do? Treat for shock, (fine), and place a clean cloth over the point of the hemorrhage and apply direct pressure. Both you and I know that you're not going to be able to reach the point of hemorrhage in most cases and attempting to do so certainly isn't going to help control the hemorrhage. In most cases the dispatcher is probably aware of that too, but... that's the medical standard set for Emergency Medical Dispatchers. They have to follow those instructions or face the possibility of a law suit without support of NAEMD or whom ever has supplied them with the standards to follow.
A friend of mine found themselves being prescribed Digitalis for arrhythmias. After a week they found that they felt sluggish, slightly dizzy and not at all well. They returned to the doctor who ordered a blood test. They were suffering from a build up of digoxin. Their dosage was lowered and they were sent home. The symptoms of digoxin toxicity leveled for a time but then began to get worse again. A subsequent blood test showed that they were still suffering from digoxin building up in the tissues and effectively bringing the dosage above the proper level. Since the dosage they were then taking was the minimum available, another drug, the name of which I don't recall, was prescribed to counter the effects of the digoxin. It was the classic, "take this drug for the disorder and this other drug to counter the problems that the first drug will cause." All the while a check of electrolytes and a simple magnesium, calcium or potassium suppliment might well have corrected the problem and done so with 24-hours.
And, no, this is not the only occurence of this I'm personally aware of. I know of a second person who followed pretty much the same routine except they waited so long that they were barely able to get to the doctor's office due to severe bradycardia caused by digoxin toxicity. They lost faith in the prescribed treatment by the doctor, picked up a $12 bottle of calcium/potassium/magnesium suppliments and by the next day found that their symptoms were gone. They tossed the Lanoxin they had been prescribed into the garbage. That was 4 years ago and the symptoms have not returned.
I know a third person who began to suffer arrythmias and mentioned it to me. I suggested they see a doctor but, as additional information, I mentioned the possible electrolyte imbalance and the suppliment treatment for it and left the decision up to them. They picked up a bottle of calcium/magnesium/potassium suppliment that evening from the local health food store and by the next day had noticed that they had not felt a single obvious arrhythmia. I still talk to this person from time to time and they never did go see a doctor. The problem is gone and they never had to take digoxin or any synthetic that mimics digoxin.
Almost every aspect of medicine today follows these "standards of medical treatment". It's designed to see that the worst doctors out there provide the same level of care as the best doctors, but as with anything that targets such designs, it falls well short of that goal and provides a number of problems in the process. Remember thalidomide, DDT and cyclamates... smoking?
How about that little purple stamp the USDA used to place on meats to assure that it was prime, properly processed and healthy? Know why it went away for a number of years? If you don't, it was because the dyes used to stamp the meat as safe and healthy were found to be carcinogenic. Are you familiar with aspartame, the negative affects on health and the way it managed to get past the FDA? If you'd like a hint, Donald Rumsfeld, then working for Searle corporation, made 12 million dollars off the deal and the head of the FDA was removed and replaced with someone more willing to allow aspartame into the grocery stores.
How about the surgery which became a popular treatment for angina back in the 1950s? The surgery involved the opening of the chest and ligation of the mammary artery. The idea was to increase the blood flow to the heart by restricting blood flow through the mammary artery. Then in the 1960s the American Journal of Cardiology published the results of a study which showed that the success of the surgery was nothing more than a placebo affect. The same was then published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Seventeen patients were scheduled for the surgery. Eight of those received the surgery, the rest received anesthetic and an incision but nothing more. The patients receiving the fake surgeries had the same rate of success as those who received the actual procedure. The procedure was abandoned but not until grotesque numbers of people had undergone a pointless and useless surgery. You can't blame the doctors. They were following the "correct treatment" of the day.
http://www.worldchiropracticalliance.org/tcj/2002/sep/sep2002kent.htm
Certainly medicine, doctors and surgery have a well-earned place in our lives. However, it's important to remember that the final responsibilty for our welfare lies with ourselves. Too much faith can be a bad thing. I often suggest to people that the difference between "faith" and "blind faith" is 5-letters.
Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
An interesting point. What about using organic and biodynamic sources of meat?
Not a bad idea but one must understand more about the steps in the chain followed by these toxins. Pesticides are necessarily not water soluble. If they were, they'd wash off the crops with the first rain and the whole, expensive procedure of re-applying these chemicals would have to be repeated. Therefore the compounds are made to be fat soluble instead. This avoids the problem with rain washing them away and also makes them more effective since most, if not all, forms of life contain some sort of fat-based tissues. If you want a chemical to kill something, it's best to see that the chemical binds well with the body tissues.
So you have your tiny grasshopper - part of a destructive mass of insects set upon destroying crops before they can be harvested. The bug comes along, lands upon a wheat plant and begins to chew away at the pesticide treated plant. The grasshopper dies and the plants live to maturity. The grain is then harvested and 80% of it is used to feed livestock. (The actual figure varies a little from wheat to barley to oats to corn, etc. but 80% is an accurate all-round figure for the United States.) All of this grain contains traces of the original pesticides which are designed to be very stable compounds. They don't break down quickly when subjected to sunlight, rain, etc. The grain is taken to a feedlot and poured into the rows and rows of feeding troughs and the cattle, (for example), happily munch away. Each mouthful adds a tiny portion of these pesticides to the fatty tissues of the animal. By the time the cow has consumed 16 pounds of grain, it has put on another 1 pound of beef. That one pound of beef contains almost all of the pesticide residues contained in the 16 pounds of grain. Day by day the cow continues to feed upon the slightly tainted grain and pound by pound the pesticides build up in the cow's tissues. Eventually, that animal is taken to slaughter, it's body is sliced into various pieces and these pieces of the cow make it to your refrigerator still containing all of the accumulated residues. Dinner time comes around and you consume this piece of the cow's body. The pesticide residues then transfer into your body tissues and begin to build up -- day by day, meal by meal. In speaking of animals that eat other animals, (fish for example), there are more links in the food chain and the problem is even worse. Tests in the U.S. show 99% of mothers milk contains significant levels of DDT. Only 8% of vegetarian women showed significant DDT contamination in their breast milk. The Environmental Defense Fund estimates that, on average, each (non-vegetarian) American now has 1.5 grams of DDT in his or her body. The use of DDT was banned in the United States in 1973. This speaks for the stability of the compound. It has a biological half-life of 8-years and an environmental half-life of 15-years. It may have been banned over 30 years ago but the meat in today's grocery stores are still contaminated with it as well as pesticides currently in use.
Pesticide residues aren't the only problem of course. There are antibiotics which are routinely fed to animals in feedlots. Steroids help to make the animals grow faster and waste products found to increase the rate at which the animal gains weight are also mixed into the grain. Some of the waste materials commonly used include; sawdust, bark, newspapers, cardboard scraps, poultry litter, feathers, and industrial sewage. According to the USDA, cement dust may become a feed additive in the future because it produces a 30% faster weight gain than regular feed. Even the roughage which is so necessary to the digestion of ruminants has been replaced with plastic pellets (85% ethylene / 15% propylene), which are then separated from the animals waste, cleaned and re-used. And of course we are all now familiar with the practice of using offal, (slaughterhouse waste), as yet another food additive. This is another practice once considered "correct" and safe before the emergence of BSE, (mad cow disease).
Common sense might suggest that feeding a natural vegetarian parts of other animals is bound to have some negative affects. But who would have guessed that these negative affects might be passed to those further up the food chain? Perhaps in reality, we have the food chain upside-down. The first animals to suffer in cases of drought and those that suffer the most are those at what we call the top of the food chain.
Of course you asked about organic and biodynamic sources of meat and I have deviated from that question so I'll address that side of the topic now.
These meats are commonly referred to as "free range" and labeled as such in the stores. Government standards require that an animal be allow free range for a minimum of 20 minutes per day before it can be labeled "free range". The rest of the time, most of the producers of free range meats are treating the animals in the same ways as factory farms with all the same chemicals and additives. You will, however, pay far more for these meats.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Factory-farmed animals contain as much as 30 times more saturated fat than yesterday's free-range, pasture-raised animals. Americans also now eat twice as much meat as they did 50 years ago.
The common cold, as well as allergies to dust, cats and pollen, are more likely to go away when milk is taken out of the diet. No other mammal in nature drinks milk after weaning, nor drinks the milk of other species, as do humans. [Don't Drink Your Milk Frank A. Oski, Teach Services; 9th edition (August 1992)]
There are 20-30 thousand animal drugs currently in use. As many as 90% have not been approved by the FDA. Fifteen million pounds of antibiotics are used in animal production every year. In 1988, animal drug sales came to 2.5 billion dollars.
The U.S. is the only completely industrialized country to still allow the implantation of hormones into beef cattle today. Because of the routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock, European countries have banned nearly all imports of American beef.
Fish are magnets for toxic chemicals, often containing pollutants more than 70,000 times more concentrated than in the waters around them. According to an article in the February 1992 issue of a very reputable consumer magazine, a notable incidence of unacceptable levels of PCBs and mercury were found in some species of fish that were tested. Today, half the world's fish catch is fed to cattle.
Organo-Halogens (such as DDT) are man-made compounds which disolve in fats but not water. Fish with more than 5 parts per million of these compounds can't be sold for food. Anything over 50 ppm must be specially labelled, treated and disposed of. These compounds build through the food chain, increasing levels by approximately 10-fold for each ascending level. Orcas commonly contain 400 ppm, balooga whales, about 600 pmm and bottle-nose dolphins as high as 6,900 ppm.
No law in the U.S. requires seafood inspection. The FDA is for the most part, the only regulator over the fishing industry at all. Only 1,604 fish were checked by the FDA in 1989.
Four different surveys of the U.S. milk supply were conducted by independent researchers between 1987 and 1989. The studies found between 63 and 86 percent of milk samples to contain sulfa drugs, tetracycline, and other antibiotics.
The USDA does not inspect for trichinosis in pork, and it is widely known that pork must be thoroughly cooked before eating. Still, about 4% of Americans have trichinella worms in their muscles which periodically cause flu-like symptoms.
Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
How about restricting yourself to peer reviewed literature, and just providing links?
Not all of the material is available on the web. I often do include links when they're available but I often don't do web searches when I already have the material at hand in book form. As you can see from reading to this point, it's a complex subject and even skimming the surface of an explanation is a long, wordy process.
Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
No, I didn't require research data when I was old enough to read. I would require good evidence to go to the trouble of making radical changes (I don't consider my own 'feel' over a 1 month period to be a good test - what if I happen to catch a virus, or get rid of one). And actually, my diet has radically altered in certain respects. For example, I now eat substantially more carbohydrate (40-60g/hour) when engaging in aerobic exercise, and I make sure to eat 1-1.5g/kg body weight of carbohydrate and some protein after long or intense exercise. It's not too hard to find good peer reviewed sources for this stuff, it's recommended by the AIS, and almost all leading experts in sports science and medicine. That justifies a change. What you are suggesting has substantially less clear literature behind it, and doesn't enjoy such wide ranging support. Not to say you don't make some interesting points, but that's the way it is.
To be totally honest, it was a completely unfair question for me to ask. I appreciate the straight-forward demeanor in your answer. My only point was that we often just accept things as being correct because our parents did and we pay little attention to the wisdom or lack thereof in many common practices. When those practices are challenged we want proof, data, statistics and references that we never required from our parents, nor they from their parents.
"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing." - Mark Twain
The process described by Mr. Clemons applies to more than just religion and politics. I've learned the hard way that people are immediately defensive when the topic of chosen diet is approached.
Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
Um... I used to think eating during exercise made you soft... I used to think lots of things...
We all used to think a lot of things. The more poignant point being that most of us still do think a lot of things, or perhap more accurately, fail to think about a lot of things because we've just accepted them from childhood and nothing ever suggested to us that they may be as inaccurate or inappropriate as those who assumed the world to be flat. "Looks fairly flat to me, must be flat. I wonder where the edge is." We look at that as being silly today but for the knowledge and culture of the time, it was perfectly logical.
Such inaccurate misconceptions still exist today. We just don't know about them partially because we lack other pertinent information and partially because we quickly ridicule anyone who challenges long-held beliefs. Galileo spent the last 9 years of his life under house arrest for opposing the church and claiming that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He had data the church lacked and didn't want to see let alone admit that it had validity. He was convicted of heresy and only escaped with a sentence of "house arrest" because he agreed to publicly denounce his own findings. Again, the point must be made that such stringently held, though inaccurate beliefs still exist today and we're little more receptive to them now than we were hundreds of years ago, myself included.
"If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him." - Mark Twain
Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
It's not that you're totally wrong, it's that pushing dietary change is a very odd approach with Asthma (in most cases - try a strict elimination diet under medical supervision if your doctor thinks this is a good idea), and suggests that you have a far wider belief about diet that colours your view with respect to Asthma. You present one study about veganism and asthma, potentially explained away by dairy allergen reaction. Try salbutamol... now there's a solution...
Simply posting the findings, though vague, of one study doesn't constitute, "pushing dietary change", to my mind. The point should be made that dietary changes should not be made under the supervision of a medical doctor. If supervision is sought it should be from a qualified nutritionist. Doctors, (in the U.S.) are not trained in nutrition. They're trained in the treatment of diseases and disorders, usually, as you've choose yourself, through drugs and/or surgery.
At the 69th annual meeting of the American Medical Women's Association, one doctor drew knowing laughs when she told the audience about her lack of nutritional training.
"We had one lecture -- on a Saturday morning -- and it wasn't compulsory. I don't remember what was in the lecture, because I didn't go."
Only 30 of the 125 medical schools in the United States have a single required course in nutrition.
[Kapleau, Phillip, To Cherish All Life, Harper and Rowe, San Francisco, 1981, page 59]
A Senate investigation revealed that the average physician in the United States received less than three hours of training in nutrition during four years of medical school.
[McDougall, John Dr., The McDougall Plan, New Century Publishers, 1983, page 7]
Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
Also, I think most people find disrupting and changing their eating patterns reasonably difficult, not the easiest solution in the world.
I certainly can't argue with you there. People tend to think with their tongues more than their brains. I've had many encounters and many debates with many people over many different forums and I always see the same resistance to the information provided. No one wants to make changes to some part of their life that they enjoy and, unfortunately, to some degree, people enjoy eating to tremendous proportion. (wink) Sorry, thought that was humorous for a moment. Anyway, the debate almost always ends the same way and it doesn't matter whether it takes hours, days or months to come to some sort of conclusion. The closing statement on the meat-eating side is almost always, "sure tastes good".
Just look at the number of people willing to undergo stomach stapling, (restrictive or gastric bypass surgery) or shortening the digestive tract, (malabsorptive surgery) rather than limiting their food intake. As much as this may be the case that doesn't make it preferable in my opinion, and people should know of several options before making a choice that will affect their health. Such surgeries can be life threatening and it seems shameful to me to choose such options when there are simple, natural remedies available.
Years ago I lost a friend to asthma. He had spent many months of his life in hospitals due to chronic, severe asthma and at the age of 18 was accepted to receive surgery which held some promise for him. He died on the operating table. No one can say for sure what other options he may have had but I think it's difficult to say that a month or two... even a year of experimenting with food choices would have been time well spent.
Quoted post said:Originally posted by Roadie_scum
I was incorrect in saying it was made up (actually I didn't say that, I just suggested it was a possibility given how you'd gone quiet), which I have already acknowledged. I was not incorrect in challenging the validity of your views.
You haven't actually addressed the methodological points made about the ONE study you have thus far presented.
I've addressed what information I was able to find numerous times. I wish I could find more for you and anyone else with an interest, particularly those that stand a chance, even a small chance of benefiting from the information. As it is, they'll have to make their own decision. If medication is their first preference, so be it. If they prefer to explore other means, which to my mind are far less radical and come with other health benefits, then so much the better.
http://64.106.220.190/nutrition_book/d/asthma/
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/pveg1.htm
http://www.all-creatures.org/murti/tsnhod-14.html
I wish to close with an apology to those who started this thread. A great deal of space has been utilized in debating one tiny side-issue. Although I'm not sorry that I made the original post, I would have preferred that it be left for what it was. Perhaps in the overall scheme, the additional information I've been prompted into posting may yet help someone looking for options.
Good luck and good breathing.
🙂
