You have to admit the medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex does a great job of making people FEEL good. And being in cahoots with the processed food industry, which is making people sick provides and endless cycle of customers.
I don’t recall how old I was when I became deathly afraid of becoming morbidly ill with some condition like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. I didn’t want to be on some medication just to stay alive. Now, at 74 I can knock on wood, and say so far, so good. I don’t care how long I live, just how well.
Thanks Robyn for doing what you do. This was an excellent article laying it out for anyone who cares about health.
It's all one big happy incestuous family, isn't it - Big Food provides an endless supply of customers, and Big Pharma makes sure they'll remain customer for life by keeping symptoms at bay without ever addressing underlying their causes.
By the time you get into your 70s, if you have any brains at all, you figure out that it's the life in your years, not the years in your life, that counts. I genuinely feel sorry for the hungry ghosts who want to attain immortality, rather than maximising the value of their lives in the years that they have.
Wise words. What has become increasingly obvious over past 3 yrs is how important the narrative was used to control. All interconnected....love the lifestyle diagram.
Yes, yes, yes - it's all interconnected! The scamdemic would never have succeeded if allopathic medicine had not first conditioned the public to abdicate responsibility for their own health for the past century.
Was it Hippocrates who was reputed to have said "let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food"? Whoever it was, was on the money. Get your nutrition right (and your physical activity/exercise, sleep, safe sun and low stress) and you're rounding third heading for home. Knocking on the door of the Big Seven O, I take no pharma drugs, unlike most of my close friends. Investing in your health, as nature intended, really pays off.
That said, I am a big fan of Gabapentin because it controlled my post-shingles neuralgia, which rated a 12 out of 10 on the pain scale, over a decade ago. Luckily I didn't get the 'side-effects' that can come with the the drug. It didn't actually cure the nerve pain but it did buy time for my body to heal itself pain-free. 'Good' pharma drugs, however, are in hen's teeth territory and, apart from Gabapentin and the odd penicillin, I can't recall any that have ever really helped.
That statement is indeed attributed to Hippocrates, although he's a bit like Voltaire - all sorts of pithy statements are attributed to him, with little to no certainty that he ever said them!
I'm glad gabapentin worked for you. It's handed out like jellybeans, especially to older people, and I don't see much evidence of benefit in the vast majority of them.
When considering fines from government agencies upon the pharmaceutical and investment industries, where not one person is jailed, remember that the penalties are a government's financial cut from the enormous profits generated by the companies made up of those industrial giants.
That's an excellent point. Fines are a cost of doing business for corporate behemoths, and a payoff to the government for making regulation too expensive for new players to enter the market. This is crony capitalism, not the free market.
I don't think it should be in use. It arises out of the same faulty thinking that characterises allopathic medicine - the notion that some external agent can 'fix' a disease that was caused by poor lifestyle choices and/or toxic exposures.
Recently at a gathering, I asked the question, “what is Gaviscon?” They looked at me in amazement, asking “don’t you get heartburn?” They are all much younger than me. The lack of interest / logic inherent in that question continues to amaze me.
So sad! Illness is completely normalised in our society, especially among older people, but even among the young. No one seems to bat an eyelid about children being on prescription medication, and if you're not taking them by your 50s, people treat you as a freak.
Sure a cure could be a detox regime, or a new diet or whatever. But if the end result is that the ailment has gone, THAT is a cure. Of course we need cures. And no doctor any more has any interest in helping anyone get rid of any malaise or disease for good. They are only interested in making money.
I have had four doctors in a row shouting at me because I refuse to take their toxic drugs for high blood sugar. I keep asking them why my cells are insulin resistant and suggest that we actually fix the insulin resistance rather than bully it into submission with ever increasing doses of their poisonous drugs. They go purple in the face and steam comes out of their ears. What??? Actually work out what is wrong????? What kind of idiot are you????????? Take your f******* drugs and get out of here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Well, can I use diet to keep my sugar levels low while we work out why my body is insisting on keeping my blood sugar levels high?" "No you can't you stupid woman, you will die from diabetic ketoacidosis. "But I've been doing it successfully for 12 months now, so why am I not dead??????????? "No you haven't you idiotic liar. You must be falsifying your readings." "Seriously? You do the A1C test, and I have been under the danger line for 4 subsequent tests? So are you accusing the laboratories of falsifying the results? And believe it or not, SIR, I walked in here alive today, so we have to guess that I am actually alive. So tell me, why am I not dead, SIR?" "You will be soon if you don't take your metformin, sitagliptin AND insulin.!!!!!!
Meanwhile, I am working on why my body insists on keeping my blood sugar reliably and consistently between 7.0 mmol/l and 9.5 mmol/l , before meals, after meals, early morning, late night and every single time in between. (If you don't know, that is in the pre-diabetic range, not even officially type 2.) Coritisol comes into it, and dopamine. Still working on finding the "CURE" though - the "CURE" that will reset my sugar system to 4-6mmol/l.
I think we're talking at cross purposes here on the word 'cure'. To me, it signifies some external intervention that is imposed on the ill individual. I use the word 'heal' or 'recover' to describe the activation of the body's own capacity for restoring normal function. I also caution against the notion that once "the ailment has gone, THAT is a cure", because if the cause/s of disease are reintroduced, the ailment will recur.
On the subject of insulin resistance, it is essentially the body's defensive response to prevent excess fat from entering tissues that are not adapted for fat storage. The causes of insulin resistance are not mysterious and have been known for close to a century, as I wrote in https://empowertotalhealth.com.au/beating-diabetes/.
I am not disputing anything you say except that there is no such thing as cure. And you are right, we are probably using the word differently. I am old enough to remember when the word was still in the language and how it was used back then .
I am building a thesis at the moment that ALL health is related to the interactions of our core metabolism, with the outside world. Nothing can be achieved within the body without the right inputs from outside. This goes from the obvious food, hydration and air, to light, perception of beauty, smell, grounding, toxins etc.
Providing we are born fully functional, we all have a core metabolism that might make us more vulnerable to one disease than another, but the reason we get any of those diseases is some breakdown in the interface between the body and the outside world. It is that interface that we have to manage better, and even if we recover initially, of course the ailment will recur if we have not removed the cause - fixed the faulty interface.
For example, my physiology is designed for low sun, northern climates. If I go out in the sun, my genetics mean I WILL burn. And if I stay in the sun I will continue to burn because I do not tan. Of course, I cannot recover if I continue to expose my melanin free skin to the sun. And it is not possible to "cure me" of being melanin deficient. In that context, my skin will recover from being burnt once or twice, but eventually will become cancerous. This is my interface with the outside world that I have not managed well. But if I get skin cancer, the black salve can possibly be applied to cure the skin cancer. That would be a cure. And if I am stupid enough to go back out in the sun, then I will get the same disease again.
Of course, as you illustrate in your article on insulin resistance, understanding what has gone wrong with our interface with the outside world is another story altogether. Allopathy and naturopathy work almost exclusively on managing symptoms (naturopathy just goes to one layer deeper into symptoms than allopathy) and neither get down to the level of systems, let alone the level of interacting systems.
However, I am finding good information in the sports medicine arena where systems and their interactions are now taking centre stage. It might be another dead end, but is giving me hope at the moment of resolving my symptoms, which are the end result of multiple systems interacting with the outside world and establishing a faulty balance because some part of that interface is not well managed.
The greatest issue with this approach is its complexity, and working out our intervention point. The boys are really into early morning sunlight at the moment as the trigger to re-balance ALL bodily systems, but even in that case, we still need to know what other interface interventions (food, herbs, hydration etc) would help support the healing that has been triggered by the early morning sunlight (or grounding or whatever).
At the moment I am working on my shortfall of dopamine. Will increasing my dopamine level trigger a re-balancing of my bodily systems - well it has to, but will that lead to a healing throughout my body, who knows? Only time will tell - depending on which part of my dopamine system has gone walkabout and whether the interventions I use cause it to re-balance.
The autonomic nervous system (electrical messaging) interfacing with the endocrine system (hormonal messaging) and the enzymatic system (chemical messaging) - are the new frontiers.
In writing this down I have realised that all three are different aspects of the body's messaging system. Whoaa. Now down to the next layer deep. What are all three "messengers" in unison called? And are there more messaging systems? And does an intervention in any of them trigger a response in all of them? I am guessing yes to the last question, although would have no idea how to trace that from intervention to resolution.
Sounds like you're doing a great job of keeping yourself alive, Christine! Don't torture yourself by visiting those dumb (and rude!) medicos. They don't UNDERSTAND anything except 'you have X, therefore you must take these drugs'. Medicos aren't too smart for the most part. They live in a box.
Could I hazard a guess and suggest that long-term lifestyle factors plus genetics (and epigenetics) are probably playing major parts here?
You can do all the good things for yourself, and yet you may still find yourself on this merry-go-round of blood sugar problems (or not 'ideal' levels, anyway...) for YEARS. It could literally take you a decade - or more - to reverse something that you didn't even know happened in your body!
From my observation with all my diabetic (or pre-diabetic) patients over the years, most just took the insulin (and got fat), but a few were clever. They managed their diet and were VERY good about it - for years. In one particular man, I remember that his levels completely normalised. Mind you, he never ate lollies and was strict with his diet - for life. I guess being Coeliac myself, I am also strict with my diet - for life! I don't get a choice anymore! And maybe you don't now, either. BUT that doesn't mean we can't both be healthy. I have learned what's safe, what's not, what I can eat, what I can't eat - and I stick with it. No exceptions. I'm all good now so I must be doing something right! And can I say that it's taken me about 7-8 years to get to this point?! So don't be too hard on yourself. The body needs TIME to heal. Sometimes decades. Be kind and patient with yourself whilst you figure it out :-)
Years ago when my brother was in hospital with a brain tumour, I asked his doctor a question about the efficacy of the treatment leading to a cure. He said, slowly, “oh, CURE is a very hard word”. I am far from a doctor’s ideal patient, but to keep my driver’s licence, I have to front up every year.
A hard word, all right. Within oncology, 'cure' is typically defined as surviving for 5 years post diagnosis. That's not what most people think when they hear the word 'cure'!
The most offensive misuse of language by oncologists though, is the phrase "the patient failed treatment". I pulled my son's oncologist up on this once, and asked him, "Don't you mean, 'the treatment failed the patient'?" He was nonplussed, but refused to acknowledge my point.
You have to admit the medical/pharmaceutical industrial complex does a great job of making people FEEL good. And being in cahoots with the processed food industry, which is making people sick provides and endless cycle of customers.
I don’t recall how old I was when I became deathly afraid of becoming morbidly ill with some condition like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc. I didn’t want to be on some medication just to stay alive. Now, at 74 I can knock on wood, and say so far, so good. I don’t care how long I live, just how well.
Thanks Robyn for doing what you do. This was an excellent article laying it out for anyone who cares about health.
It's all one big happy incestuous family, isn't it - Big Food provides an endless supply of customers, and Big Pharma makes sure they'll remain customer for life by keeping symptoms at bay without ever addressing underlying their causes.
By the time you get into your 70s, if you have any brains at all, you figure out that it's the life in your years, not the years in your life, that counts. I genuinely feel sorry for the hungry ghosts who want to attain immortality, rather than maximising the value of their lives in the years that they have.
Wise words. What has become increasingly obvious over past 3 yrs is how important the narrative was used to control. All interconnected....love the lifestyle diagram.
Yes, yes, yes - it's all interconnected! The scamdemic would never have succeeded if allopathic medicine had not first conditioned the public to abdicate responsibility for their own health for the past century.
Was it Hippocrates who was reputed to have said "let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food"? Whoever it was, was on the money. Get your nutrition right (and your physical activity/exercise, sleep, safe sun and low stress) and you're rounding third heading for home. Knocking on the door of the Big Seven O, I take no pharma drugs, unlike most of my close friends. Investing in your health, as nature intended, really pays off.
That said, I am a big fan of Gabapentin because it controlled my post-shingles neuralgia, which rated a 12 out of 10 on the pain scale, over a decade ago. Luckily I didn't get the 'side-effects' that can come with the the drug. It didn't actually cure the nerve pain but it did buy time for my body to heal itself pain-free. 'Good' pharma drugs, however, are in hen's teeth territory and, apart from Gabapentin and the odd penicillin, I can't recall any that have ever really helped.
That statement is indeed attributed to Hippocrates, although he's a bit like Voltaire - all sorts of pithy statements are attributed to him, with little to no certainty that he ever said them!
I'm glad gabapentin worked for you. It's handed out like jellybeans, especially to older people, and I don't see much evidence of benefit in the vast majority of them.
When considering fines from government agencies upon the pharmaceutical and investment industries, where not one person is jailed, remember that the penalties are a government's financial cut from the enormous profits generated by the companies made up of those industrial giants.
That's an excellent point. Fines are a cost of doing business for corporate behemoths, and a payoff to the government for making regulation too expensive for new players to enter the market. This is crony capitalism, not the free market.
Excellent work, Robyn! Love what you do!
Thank you, I appreciate you for reading it!
Good diagram. I am a big proponent of the idea of
"always be moving".
Physical activity is the lynchpin to good health.
I would say that diet is king, and physical activity is queen, but there is definitely disagreement about the royal rank order!
If (serious) scientists think “we can never know anything with certainty”, how come they have so much authority when dictating public policies?
I don't think any serious scientists claim that authority; only clowns that play them on TV.
Well said!!
...and let's make this all simple. Where are the CURES? It's a word that is no longer in use. CURE.
I don't think it should be in use. It arises out of the same faulty thinking that characterises allopathic medicine - the notion that some external agent can 'fix' a disease that was caused by poor lifestyle choices and/or toxic exposures.
Recently at a gathering, I asked the question, “what is Gaviscon?” They looked at me in amazement, asking “don’t you get heartburn?” They are all much younger than me. The lack of interest / logic inherent in that question continues to amaze me.
So sad! Illness is completely normalised in our society, especially among older people, but even among the young. No one seems to bat an eyelid about children being on prescription medication, and if you're not taking them by your 50s, people treat you as a freak.
Sure a cure could be a detox regime, or a new diet or whatever. But if the end result is that the ailment has gone, THAT is a cure. Of course we need cures. And no doctor any more has any interest in helping anyone get rid of any malaise or disease for good. They are only interested in making money.
I have had four doctors in a row shouting at me because I refuse to take their toxic drugs for high blood sugar. I keep asking them why my cells are insulin resistant and suggest that we actually fix the insulin resistance rather than bully it into submission with ever increasing doses of their poisonous drugs. They go purple in the face and steam comes out of their ears. What??? Actually work out what is wrong????? What kind of idiot are you????????? Take your f******* drugs and get out of here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Well, can I use diet to keep my sugar levels low while we work out why my body is insisting on keeping my blood sugar levels high?" "No you can't you stupid woman, you will die from diabetic ketoacidosis. "But I've been doing it successfully for 12 months now, so why am I not dead??????????? "No you haven't you idiotic liar. You must be falsifying your readings." "Seriously? You do the A1C test, and I have been under the danger line for 4 subsequent tests? So are you accusing the laboratories of falsifying the results? And believe it or not, SIR, I walked in here alive today, so we have to guess that I am actually alive. So tell me, why am I not dead, SIR?" "You will be soon if you don't take your metformin, sitagliptin AND insulin.!!!!!!
Meanwhile, I am working on why my body insists on keeping my blood sugar reliably and consistently between 7.0 mmol/l and 9.5 mmol/l , before meals, after meals, early morning, late night and every single time in between. (If you don't know, that is in the pre-diabetic range, not even officially type 2.) Coritisol comes into it, and dopamine. Still working on finding the "CURE" though - the "CURE" that will reset my sugar system to 4-6mmol/l.
I think we're talking at cross purposes here on the word 'cure'. To me, it signifies some external intervention that is imposed on the ill individual. I use the word 'heal' or 'recover' to describe the activation of the body's own capacity for restoring normal function. I also caution against the notion that once "the ailment has gone, THAT is a cure", because if the cause/s of disease are reintroduced, the ailment will recur.
On the subject of insulin resistance, it is essentially the body's defensive response to prevent excess fat from entering tissues that are not adapted for fat storage. The causes of insulin resistance are not mysterious and have been known for close to a century, as I wrote in https://empowertotalhealth.com.au/beating-diabetes/.
I am not disputing anything you say except that there is no such thing as cure. And you are right, we are probably using the word differently. I am old enough to remember when the word was still in the language and how it was used back then .
I am building a thesis at the moment that ALL health is related to the interactions of our core metabolism, with the outside world. Nothing can be achieved within the body without the right inputs from outside. This goes from the obvious food, hydration and air, to light, perception of beauty, smell, grounding, toxins etc.
Providing we are born fully functional, we all have a core metabolism that might make us more vulnerable to one disease than another, but the reason we get any of those diseases is some breakdown in the interface between the body and the outside world. It is that interface that we have to manage better, and even if we recover initially, of course the ailment will recur if we have not removed the cause - fixed the faulty interface.
For example, my physiology is designed for low sun, northern climates. If I go out in the sun, my genetics mean I WILL burn. And if I stay in the sun I will continue to burn because I do not tan. Of course, I cannot recover if I continue to expose my melanin free skin to the sun. And it is not possible to "cure me" of being melanin deficient. In that context, my skin will recover from being burnt once or twice, but eventually will become cancerous. This is my interface with the outside world that I have not managed well. But if I get skin cancer, the black salve can possibly be applied to cure the skin cancer. That would be a cure. And if I am stupid enough to go back out in the sun, then I will get the same disease again.
Of course, as you illustrate in your article on insulin resistance, understanding what has gone wrong with our interface with the outside world is another story altogether. Allopathy and naturopathy work almost exclusively on managing symptoms (naturopathy just goes to one layer deeper into symptoms than allopathy) and neither get down to the level of systems, let alone the level of interacting systems.
However, I am finding good information in the sports medicine arena where systems and their interactions are now taking centre stage. It might be another dead end, but is giving me hope at the moment of resolving my symptoms, which are the end result of multiple systems interacting with the outside world and establishing a faulty balance because some part of that interface is not well managed.
The greatest issue with this approach is its complexity, and working out our intervention point. The boys are really into early morning sunlight at the moment as the trigger to re-balance ALL bodily systems, but even in that case, we still need to know what other interface interventions (food, herbs, hydration etc) would help support the healing that has been triggered by the early morning sunlight (or grounding or whatever).
At the moment I am working on my shortfall of dopamine. Will increasing my dopamine level trigger a re-balancing of my bodily systems - well it has to, but will that lead to a healing throughout my body, who knows? Only time will tell - depending on which part of my dopamine system has gone walkabout and whether the interventions I use cause it to re-balance.
The autonomic nervous system (electrical messaging) interfacing with the endocrine system (hormonal messaging) and the enzymatic system (chemical messaging) - are the new frontiers.
In writing this down I have realised that all three are different aspects of the body's messaging system. Whoaa. Now down to the next layer deep. What are all three "messengers" in unison called? And are there more messaging systems? And does an intervention in any of them trigger a response in all of them? I am guessing yes to the last question, although would have no idea how to trace that from intervention to resolution.
Sounds like you're doing a great job of keeping yourself alive, Christine! Don't torture yourself by visiting those dumb (and rude!) medicos. They don't UNDERSTAND anything except 'you have X, therefore you must take these drugs'. Medicos aren't too smart for the most part. They live in a box.
Could I hazard a guess and suggest that long-term lifestyle factors plus genetics (and epigenetics) are probably playing major parts here?
You can do all the good things for yourself, and yet you may still find yourself on this merry-go-round of blood sugar problems (or not 'ideal' levels, anyway...) for YEARS. It could literally take you a decade - or more - to reverse something that you didn't even know happened in your body!
From my observation with all my diabetic (or pre-diabetic) patients over the years, most just took the insulin (and got fat), but a few were clever. They managed their diet and were VERY good about it - for years. In one particular man, I remember that his levels completely normalised. Mind you, he never ate lollies and was strict with his diet - for life. I guess being Coeliac myself, I am also strict with my diet - for life! I don't get a choice anymore! And maybe you don't now, either. BUT that doesn't mean we can't both be healthy. I have learned what's safe, what's not, what I can eat, what I can't eat - and I stick with it. No exceptions. I'm all good now so I must be doing something right! And can I say that it's taken me about 7-8 years to get to this point?! So don't be too hard on yourself. The body needs TIME to heal. Sometimes decades. Be kind and patient with yourself whilst you figure it out :-)
Years ago when my brother was in hospital with a brain tumour, I asked his doctor a question about the efficacy of the treatment leading to a cure. He said, slowly, “oh, CURE is a very hard word”. I am far from a doctor’s ideal patient, but to keep my driver’s licence, I have to front up every year.
A hard word, all right. Within oncology, 'cure' is typically defined as surviving for 5 years post diagnosis. That's not what most people think when they hear the word 'cure'!
The most offensive misuse of language by oncologists though, is the phrase "the patient failed treatment". I pulled my son's oncologist up on this once, and asked him, "Don't you mean, 'the treatment failed the patient'?" He was nonplussed, but refused to acknowledge my point.