Medical Health

Just a short note to say that my earlier post where I explained that consumers should refrigerate Emu Oil was “published” in the 84th Carnival of Healing.

You may submit your best blog entries to a variety of sites and subject areas listed on blogcarnival.com.

A quote from John Updike’s book Seek My Face, page 48:

Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth. The only virtue left in this day and age is courage before the hopeless.

He means your courage best serves the hopeless.

I sent this to CTV News:

Comment re. your 27 April 2007 piece about cancer rates

During the 20th and 21st centuries, we spent a lot of money on war — World Wars I and II, to name just the big ones. If we had spent all that time, energy, money, and life on life-extension, we would have discovered the key to immortality by now.

Maybe someday our enemies will see the light.

Universities should act quickly and institute compulsory courses in ethics and human kindness. We can show a substantial number of people that goodwill provides positive benefits.

I hate to say this, but when you provoke people, it is then pretty easy to run around saying that they might be a danger to you or someone else.

In Vancouver during 1982, Professor Wolf Wolfensburger, Syracuse University, New York, argued that thousands of mentally handicapped people die in North American prisons and psychiatric institutions from massive doses of mind-altering drugs, or when emergency or intensive-care treatments are withheld, or due to society’s mistreatment of them: Hard proof is often unavailable: “If Germany had won the war,” he said, comparing the present to the past, “we’d never have seen the evidence.”

Yes, and with Wolfensburger’s statement in mind, many of us would like to see the health-science industry allocate a tiny bit of its wealth to the creation and maintenance of a not-for-profit depository for patients’ narratives, perhaps something similar to the Kenneth Donaldson Archives for the Autobiographies of Psychiatric Survivors (see http://www.successfulschizophrenia.org/kdarch.html).

I have not investigated the Donaldson depository. Al Siebert, a co-founder of the archive, writes, “One day there will be archives of psychiatric abuses similar to the archives that now document Holocaust atrocities. This Archives exists to provide psychiatric survivors with a place to preserve for future generations the unpublished autobiographies of their experiences. The Archives was founded in 1980 when Ken Donaldson, author of Insanity Inside Out and Al Siebert, author of Peaking Out: How My Mind Broke Free from the Delusions in Psychiatry, discovered that many psychiatric survivors have written manuscripts about their experiences but are rarely successful in getting their books published.”

I have noticed that some stores offer to refill your small bottles of emu oil for a discount. They usually dispense the “new” oil from a large bottle they keep at room temperature under the counter. But the emu-oil manufacturers say, “For extended storage refrigerate unused portion.”

Emu oil is a fat, and fats go rancid at room temperature. If you use emu oil to treat inflammatory skin conditions, such as minor burns or psoriasis, you will find that your non-refrigerated oil quits helping.

Just keep your emu oil in the fridge, and then when you need some, let it warm on your kitchen counter for 15 minutes before you try to pour it from the bottle. That’s why the stores give you rancid refills: they want to dispense it on demand; they don’t wait while the refrigerated supply liquifies.

Yes, the anti-inflammatory drug prednisone makes it difficult to sleep–that’s one of the side effects–but not only that, it takes my sense of time back to a childhood level: time slows down (so to speak), days seem longer, not as rushed.

As we age, we say that the years just keep going by faster and faster, and perhaps it’s age-related inflammation of the brain that makes us think that way: we feel like time has shortened or accelerated.

If you are unable to eat milk products or if you are taking a medication such as prednisone, you should definitely take calcium supplements — at least 1000 mg of calcium per day, divided into 2 to 4 doses. Never take more that 500 mg of calcium at one sitting during the day: your body has a hard time utilizing more that 500 mg at a time. And I have heard that among people supplementing with calcium, cranberry juice causes kidney stones. So avoid cranberries.

You might want to take a look at EZorbOnline.com. EZorb is a “new generation” calcium supplement — it has a very high absorption rate. I believe that I can feel the effects of EZorb on my muscle tone and skeletal strength.

The manufacturer states that “EZorb does not need participation of Vitamin D or magnesium for better calcium absorption,” but I still take 1000 IU of Vitamin D every day, and I continue to include old-style calcium-magnesium-zinc supplements in my daily regimen.

Recent research shows that while supplementing with calcium, you should take 1000 IU of Vitamin D every day. The old standard was 400 IU, but now it’s 1000 IU.

We cannot assert that all ecologists and environmentalists are arrogant, but I have encountered quite a few who would have made stronger contributions had they attended compulsory courses in ethics and human kindness. In fact, I believe that many of our professional conservationists have retarded our fight against global warming. If we had replaced them long ago, we would have made more headway in our attempts to introduce preemptive environmental measures.

For example, once when I was discussing the fact that as part of one of my research projects, a rather large group of Seventh Day Adventist fishermen contributed logbooks detailing their catches of salmon, a prominent Ecology professor told me, “Those guys are perverts, the type who climb telephone poles and peep through windows at trailer parks.”

I guess that Ecology professor thought of himself as a fighter. But all he was doing was shooting himself in the foot.

A pharmacist once told me, “You have to do it for the next guy.”

A doctor once told me, “You are their movie and they want you to be the bad guy.”