This is not breaking news but many will find it surprising.  According to a study at the University of Auckland in New Zealand reported by the BBC, the conventional wisdom of supplementing with calcium has been found to increase the risk of heart attacks.  The group studied was postmenopausal women, a segment of the population that has long been relying upon the belief that they should take 1000mg or more a day to prevent osteoporosis, among other things.

While it’s not part of mainstream thinking, it is widely known that the primary cause of mineral loss is an imbalance of the body’s pH – being too acidic.  That’s why I’ve been telling clients for a long time: you need to alkalize, alkalize, alkalize.  While the chemistry is a bit complex to cover here, suffice to say that when you are losing minerals to excess acidity, you’re like a leaky bucket.  And to simply supplement is to throw up one’s hands and say, “oh well, nothing to be done about the leak; let’s just pour more water in”, whereas alkalizing the body is more akin to patching the holes in the bucket.  Much more elegant, less expensive and more effective in the long run.  That way you don’t have to figure out just which minerals you’re losing and in what proportion.  Just keep what you’ve got!

Eating more alkaline foods like fresh salads is a great solution.  One of the very best tools is alkaline ionized water which is why I’ve used this powerful tool for over a year since I discovered how effective it is.

This is very timely because it involves someone we all felt we knew, if not personally.  And it focuses the harsh light of public scrutiny on Western medicine, or the medical-pharmaceutical complex, as some have dubbed it.  In an excellent article in Natural News Western Medicine Fails Tim Russert, Byron Richards (Board-Certified Clinical Nutritionist, nationally-renowned nutrition expert, and founder of Wellness Resources) says if Russert were able, he himself would be asking some tough questions about why he died.

So far, his doctor has not shared details of how Russert was being treated.  The same doctor was surprised that the autopsy revealed clogged arteries or that his heart was enlarged, despite his having been obese for years.  Was Russert, a diabetic for years, on Avandia, a drug known to significantly increase your chances of having a heart attack?  Was he being treated with statins (cholesterol-lowering drugs) whose chronic use caused a weakening of the heart?

This is a reminder that Western medicine all too often fails to improve one’s chronic health conditions; at best it will slow the rate of decline, postponing what they deem to be the inevitable.  Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) offers a much better record in many cases and without much of the expense, risks or detrimental side effects.  Please read the article for the number of good points it raises but a big point it makes: This should be a real wake-up call to men (and women) who think they can continue to neglect their health, let their weight continue to rise, eat poorly, not get enough exercise and think the good doctors and his pills will save you – from yourself.

A recent piece posted on Mike Adams’ Natural News serves as a reminder that the form of contraception you choose can indeed aggravate your candida issue.  (Numerous sources echo this including this FDA consumer bulletin.)  Of course, the primary focus of the article – the way BCPs lower libido – is also a strong incentive to look into alternatives that are perhaps not as convenient but whose side effects may be more acceptable in the tradeoff.

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For an industry that has a lot to hide, this still may come as a surprise. A statistic called Numbers Needed to Treat (NNT) was devised to figure out how many people have to be treated with a drug to avoid one incidence of a medical issue (such as a heart attack). If a cancer drug has an NNT of 100, that means only 1 person avoided having cancer for every 100 people who were given the drug. Sounds bizarre, doesn’t it, that we have drugs allowed on the market by the FDA with NNT numbers higher than 250?! 

Mercola.com posted a very informative article on this recently.  In it they cite a Business Week study done on Lipitor specifically attempting to decipher what an NNT of 250 means for that drug.  Referring to an ad by Lipitor’s manufacturer, Pfizer, the article said:

Upon first glance, the ad boasts that Lipitor reduces heart attacks by 36 percent. But there is an asterisk. And when you follow the asterisk, you find the following in much smaller type:

“That means in a large clinical study, 3% of patients taking a sugar pill or placebo had a heart attack compared to 2% of patients taking Lipitor.”

What this means is that for every 100 people who took the drug over 3.3 years, three people on placebos, and two people on Lipitor, had heart attacks. That means that taking Lipitor resulted in just one fewer heart attack per 100 people.
 

So, just to be clear, Pfizer is saying that if you give 100 people at risk of heart attack a sugar pill for more than 3 years, 3 of them would have a heart attack.  Give 100 others at risk of heart attack Lipitor for the same time period and 2 of them would have a heart attack.  So 99 of 100 have spent a lot of money and risked a lot of unpleasant side effects – for nothing!  That’s not just a dirty secret; that’s a dirty rotten shame.

This is one more reason why I strive to find solutions that avoid the use of drugs and are more effective.

I welcome your comments!