Over the Counter Natural Cures (14 page)

Charles was following doctor's orders. After a few minutes of
explaining how he was short of breath during late-night panic attacks, how he felt tightness in his chest and a sense of dread, the doctor had handed him a prescription for Xanax (alprazolam), an antianxiety drug in the benzodiazepine class.

He didn't tell him that Xanax can be as addictive as heroin. Each visit to the doctor was met with more prescription and drug cocktails. The pill popping didn't last, nor did his life. Charles' three-year-old daughter still asks, “Why didn't Daddy wake up?”

This is not a rare case. Over the past decade, following doctor's orders has killed and injured more than ten million people in America.
⁷⁹
Drugs purported to help with anxiety and depression are among the top culprits in the epidemic. There is a better way—valerian.

Valerian switches off our ability to react to and suffer from excess anxiety and stress. While it may not get our job or spouse back, valerian can help us cope without suffocating our nervous system or handcuffing us to an addiction. This benefit of valerian arose in England during World War II. Valerian was given to civilians and troops to relieve stress during air raids.

If valerian works with bombs raining down, Charles could have used it as a first line of defense to his anxiety. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan could also benefit from valerian rather than blindly taking the dangerous and addictive prescription drugs that are being doled out to relieve anxiety and battle stress.

 

 

 CHAPTER 6 

As a drug chemist, I used to fear going to work in the lab. I risked numerous health hazards—like being exposed to cancer-causing reagents. I naively assumed that these were necessary risks for making so-called lifesaving drugs. I was wrong.

Outside of emergency medicine, prescription drugs can be just as deadly as the reagents used to make them. Commonly used antibiotics and vaccines are a perfect example. Some argue that this arsenal of antiinfectious agents is a cure. This is almost true. They make us feel better and can even save us from the perils of death in an emergency. But using them outside of an emergency puts us at risk for severe side effects while enabling stronger and deadlier infectious agents—superbugs like flesh-eating, methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
(MRSA).

Drugs aren't your first line of defense against illness. In this chapter, you'll learn that the innate genius of your immune system is your first line of defense. Your body is blessed with a fire wall that protects you from infection around the clock. And if that fails, nature provides potent weapons against biological nasties.

THE ANTIBIOTIC FALLACY

Greeting her mom with her usual morning kisses, eight-year-old Jennifer insisted that her ear felt like it was “going to explode.” Worried, her mom rushed her to the family doctor. Impatiently listening to the symptoms, he instantly prescribed an antibiotic for Jennifer's ear infection. Out the door they went.

Ten days after her prescription was filled, Jennifer asked, “Why are my eyes yellow, Mommy?” A few weeks later, Jennifer lost liver function and then her life to antibiotic use. Rather than the usual morning kisses, Jennifer's mom wakes up to depressing silence and a burning question: “Did my daughter even need that antibiotic?”

Natural ways of protecting ourselves from infection have been lost in today's prescribing frenzy. The advent of man-made antibiotics has given rise to a host of prescription drugs hailed as miracle cures. First came the sulfa drugs and then the beta-lactams, to which penicillin belongs. Today, a stockpile of more than a hundred types of drugs exist. For a brief moment, it appeared as though we would never be at risk again for infection. In the beginning, the use of antibiotics saved us from deadly infections.

Today, antibiotics are being prescribed for any discomfort imaginable, including the occasional sniffle, cough, or earache. In 1954, two million pounds of antibiotics were produced in the United States. That production now exceeds 50 million pounds.
⁸⁰
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that more than 30 percent of antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary, which equates to more than 50 million overdoses.
⁸⁰
And like Jennifer, many sufferers are wrongly prescribed antibiotics after diagnostic testing to confirm bacterial infection is bypassed. A grim reality has emerged: antibiotics aren't miracle cures.

Antibiotics also put 142,000 people into the hospital each year. Those between the ages of fifteen and forty-five are most at risk. Kidney and liver failure—along with allergic reactions, intestinal discomfort, and psychological disturbances—are common outcomes.
⁸²

ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE

Eventually, the event that scientists fear most arises: antibiotic resistance occurs. Antibiotic resistance happens when bacteria that are supposed to be wiped out by the synthetic weaponry simply aren't. The flagrant use of antibiotics breeds superbugs that are resistant to all antibiotics. The resistance is the outcome of “survival of the strongest.” Any population of bacteria naturally has variants with unusual traits—like the ability to resist the attack of a particular antibiotic. When you follow a doctor's order and swallow any commonly used antibiotic, you are enabling those with the resistant trait, the strongest.

This is the biggest downfall of antibiotics. While antibiotics kill less resistant bacteria, the renegade bacteria multiply, increasing their numbers by a million-fold in a day. Passing the point of no return, resistant bacteria become the predominant biological nasty in your body.

This frightening outcome has become all too common. In a ground-breaking report in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, researchers sounded the superbug alarm. In 1994, they identified bacteria in patients that resisted all currently available antibiotic drugs. Pneumonia is quickly learning to outwit antibiotics. Between 1979 and 1987, only 0.02 percent of pneumonia strains were penicillin resistant. In 1994, that percentage shot to a walloping 6.6 percent.
⁸³
In 2009, the scientists writing for the
New England Journal of Medicine,
insisted that “we have come almost full circle and arrived at a point as frightening as
the pre-antibiotic era: for patients infected with multidrug-resistant bacteria, there is no magic bullet.”
⁸⁴

Jennifer and her family learned these horrific facts the hard way. Antibiotics are not the wonder drugs they were initially hailed to be. Patients need to be keenly aware of this to prevent accidental death and antibiotic resistance.

Parents of lost children don't cope. They survive. Jennifer's parents feel that if others can learn of the risks associated with antibiotics from her tragedy, then not all is lost. They want others to know that antibiotics are a last resort and that, as they have discovered, safer ways exist to ward off infection.

What about vaccines? Are they a preventive jab or risky stab?

THE VACCINE FALLACY

Vaccines are purported to work by triggering immunity. Experts think that exposing our immune system to weak or dead infectious agents, such as measles or a flu virus, creates the appropriate immune defense. This is true. The only problem is that the immune system only responds weakly to stabs and jabs.

At best, vaccines only temporarily boost our defenses. Our immune system was programmed to recognize foreign invaders coming through our biological front door—our nose, mouth, and eyes—not via our back door, which is through our skin with a needle. Therefore, most vaccines fly below our immunity radar, rendering many of them ineffective. Vaccine history proves this in shocking detail.

Polio is the most feared childhood illness. It has caused paralysis and death for much of human history. The world experienced a dramatic increase in polio cases beginning in 1910. Frequent epidemics became regular events. They were the impetus for a great race toward the
development of a polio vaccine. It was developed in 1953 and an oral version soon after.

But the vaccines came too late. Polio infection plummeted before the vaccines were introduced, thanks to better sanitation and nutrition. Good thing, because both forms of vaccine were a total failure. They caused the same infection they were supposed to prevent—polio. Medical journals around the world were discussing “the relation of prophylactic inoculations [polio vaccines] to the onset of poliomyelitis” as far back as 1951.
⁸⁵
The trend continued.

In a 2007 article entitled “Nigeria Fights Rare Vaccine-Derived Polio Outbreak,” Reuters News showed how polio vaccine programs ignited outbreaks among children in Nigeria, Chad, Angola, and Niger. Vaccine programs continued, thanks to hype from Bruce Aylward, MD, MPH, director of World Health Organization's polio-eradication campaign. He insisted that “recent advances against polio in some of its most stubborn strongholds mean it may be possible to wipe it out worldwide by the end of 2009.”
⁸⁶

The polio virus still exists today. But few of us suffer from it. Our protection resides in the same things that were responsible for its decline: a healthy immune system, courtesy of proper sanitation and nutrition. That highlights what third-world countries really need—food and sanitation.

This same scenario was repeated in the case of the whooping cough (pertussis) vaccine. Between 1900 and 1935, mortality rates due to whooping cough dropped by 79 percent in the United States. Yet, the vaccine (DTP and DTaP) wasn't introduced until 1940. Today, those most susceptible to whooping cough are the “immunized.”

In 2002, researchers with the CDC publicly stated that “the number of infants dying from whooping cough, once a major killer of children
in the United States, is rising despite record high vaccination levels in the nation.”
⁸⁷
In 2009, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
recognized the trend, too. In the article “Whooping Cough Vaccine Not as Powerful as Thought,” the publication highlighted a recent cluster of eighteen whooping cough–infected students. Seventeen were properly immunized with five doses of DTaP vaccine.”
⁸⁸

The measles vaccine is no different. In 1957, the MMR vaccine became widely used in an effort to eradicate measles, mumps, and rubella. Rather than preventing measles, it elicited a widespread epidemic. Between 1983 and 1990, there was a 423 percent increase in measles cases among those vaccinated. Today, the World Health Organization actually warns that vaccinated individuals are fourteen times more likely to contract this disease than the unvaccinated.
⁸⁹
“The importance of vaccine failure has become increasingly apparent,”
⁹⁰
stated the Mayo Clinic in response to findings on the immune response to measles vaccination.

The CDC insisted that the MMR vaccine would also eliminate mumps in the United States by the year 2010. Then in 2006, the largest mumps outbreak in twenty years occurred. Among those who suffered from mumps, 63 percent were “immunized.”
⁹¹

From its inception to now, the flu vaccine has proven just as worthless. In 2007, the CDC reported that the vaccine had “no or low effectiveness” against influenza or influenza-like illnesses. The analysis of data showed that the flu vaccine protected no more than 14 percent of vaccine participants.
⁹²
This is a repeat of all previous and future years. “The influenza vaccine, which has been strongly recommended for people over sixty-five for more than four decades, is losing its reputation as an effective way to ward off the virus in the elderly,”
⁹³
insisted the
New York Times
in 2008.

Considering the overt failure of vaccination, the idea of mainlining an ineffective and dangerous vaccine into ourselves and our vulnerable
children is chilling. Regardless, Big Pharma is hell-bent on pushing more—usually with the regurgitated quote, “Vaccine benefits outweigh the risk.” Be forewarned: each and every vaccine will follow the same ineffective trend because the stab works
against
our immune system, not with it. The raging controversy surrounding vaccines will continue. Stay up to date by visiting this website: www.thinktwice.com.