Over the Counter Natural Cures (16 page)

Prescription antibiotics don't rev your immune system. They work against it. Taking the shotgun approach, they destroy healthy bacteria in your gut that play an integral role in innate immunity by disarming
foreign invaders. Without the healthy bacteria, you become an infectious stomping ground.

THE OVER-THE-COUNTER NATURAL CURE

After two days of downing various concoctions of crushed garlic, “The Phenom Mom” was on her feet. Pregnant, and mother of our four-year-old daughter, the successful beauty salon owner, athlete, wife, and organic chef to the entire family was back in action. And a few weeks later, she gave birth to our son at home. But she admitted that garlic cloves sucked.

As a tincture, in food, or simply chewed, garlic cloves can be hard to choke down. So I took her to our local organic grocery store to buy a garlic supplement. It's not easy to find the right one. You might be wasting your money—or worse, missing out on the health benefits of garlic if you're not keen on how to pick the right supplement.

Chemists started playing with garlic in 1944. The first ingredient isolated was allicin. They found it to be stinky and unstable. Instability intrigues chemists because it teaches us that other medicinal compounds might be at work. Rigid chemical analyses followed. They showed that allicin was the product of alliin. This is the active ingredient you want to remember in choosing the right supplement. Garlic doesn't technically contain any allicin, and neither do supplements. It's all about alliin, which has to be chopped or chewed to obtain the immune-boosting ingredient allicin.

As garlic research continued, it became apparent that allicin wasn't the only player. Chopping, chewing, cooking, and stomach acid give rise to many other garlic- and allicin-derived molecules. Whether garlic is studied for immune boosting, anticlotting, or even cancer fighting, these chemical discoveries boil down to what the ancient Egyptians knew: eating whole garlic cloves is damn healthy.

A dizzying array of garlic supplements are available. Scanning the Great Wall of garlic Supplements, you might see “odorless,” “aged garlic,” “allicin-rich,” “standardized,” “allicin potential,” or “allicin-amount” listed on the labels. Confusing, right? Keep it simple. You want something that best mimics chopped garlic cloves. You don't want heated extracts. You don't want gobs of unnecessary ingredients or coloring.

You want a garlic supplement to be powdered or dehydrated. Powdered garlic supplements are sliced and dried at low temperatures (less than 65 degrees Fahrenheit) to preserve garlic's natural state. This allows them to have the highest quantity of the medicinal precursor alliin. “Aged garlic” products have very little alliin, although they can have other benefits besides immune boosting. I found the commercial brand Solaray from The Vitamin Shoppe to fit the criteria. Using this product daily would cost you about $4.00 per month!

Solaray Garlic is manufactured under FDA-approved good manufacturing practices, and my independent lab analysis showed it to be active for alliin—the precursor to the immune-boosting compound allicin—and have no fillers or adulterants. This can be verified with the certificate of analysis found at my website, www.overthecounternaturalcures.com.

Don't worry about toxicity. Nobody ever died from garlic over-dose. But if you take too much, you will get a stomach ache and diarrhea. Your spouse may try to avoid the stench of your breath, too. If you're taking a blood thinner like Coumadin (warfarin), garlic may increase its activity, causing your blood to become too thin really fast. Otherwise, garlic protects from the toxicity associated with most other medications.

MAKING OVER-THE-COUNTER NATURAL CURES BETTER

Most of us are too busy to get sick. The best way to a speedy recovery is to combine garlic with andrographis. While not required, this combination puts the immune system into overdrive. Busy professionals won't miss a single minute at the office or talking on their cell phones. Parents can use it to help their children recover quickly, too.

Andrographis was first known for its success in treating snakebites and overcoming malaria and dysentery. It's considered to be especially effective in clearing heat from the body and blood and is commonly used in treating heart conditions that include infection in the lungs, urinary tract, and throat—think strep throat.

Within the halls of Big Pharma, modern research has proven andrographis to be beneficial at removing blood clots, stopping the spread of multiple types of cancer, and increasing the number of immune-enhancing white blood cells. Its active ingredients have been identified as andrographolides.
The Journal of Ethnopharmacology
recently showed andrographis to be more effective than well-known astragalus and echinacea for warding off the flu. When used to fight off respiratory tract infections and acute diarrhea, andrographis has been shown to be effective 75 percent of the time. Its direct antibiotic activity was shown to be effective at beating whooping cough and fever-inducing legionellosis, which produces pneumonia.
⁹⁷

Andrographis is readily available at most health-food stores. Look for it as its Chinese name Chuan xin lian or a 4 percent to 6 percent standardized extract. It's fairly inexpensive, costing around $10.00 per bottle. A general dose is about 500 to 100 milligrams after each meal. Taking it on an empty stomach can cause cramping, so be sure to take it on a full stomach. Women should not use it if pregnant or attempting to become pregnant.

 

THE PEOPLE'S CHEMIST'S SIX ACTION
STEPS FOR GETTING BETTER FAST

I recently got sick two weeks before being featured in a documentary titled
Cut, Poison, and Burn
. I freaked out. Being on camera in front of an entire film crew and speaking about complex matters is nerve-racking for me. Being sick wasn't an option. It could have totally ruined my chances of making it past editing.

To overcome the infection fast, I quickly began putting all of the above teachings into practice. Today, I call my approach
The People's
Chemist Six Action Steps for Getting Better Fast
. Adhering to it, I was
better in a matter of days.

1. Take high-dose, immune-boosting garlic cloves and andrographis (do not take this supplement if pregnant) after each meal.
   
2. For pain, drink white willow-bark tea or Organic Throat Coat by Traditional Medicinals to soothe a sore throat. It's loaded with licorice, which will stomp out the pain of a sore throat fast. And it's healthier and more effective than lozenges loaded with sugar and artificial flavors.
   
3. Sleep as much as you can for two days. No exceptions. Otherwise, you can be sick for twice as long, which will result in days of lost productivity.
   
4. One meal per day should consist of homemade chicken broth or soup.
   
5. Eliminate the “Immune Busters” from your diet:
   
   1. Select prescription drugs that weaken immunity, like Enbril
      
   2. Sugar
      
   3. Artificial flavors
      
   4. Monosodium glutamate (MSG)
      
6. Get some sunshine to boost vitamin D levels.
   

Don't let the simplicity fool you. Remember, innate and adaptive immunity involves an intricate dance of multiple cellular functions, organs, and specialized cells. All of the complicated inner workings will be finely tuned with these six action steps.

Surprisingly, the interviewer for the documentary was ill. After my shoot, we walked two blocks to a local health-food store and I found him the right garlic supplement, as well as andrographis. He followed the action steps and was blown away at how fast he recovered. “Shane, I'm feeling great. I've never been able to recover so fast. Thanks so much,” he wrote to me in an email.

A few weeks later, the producer contacted me. His son suffered from the Epstein-Barr virus, commonly referred to as “mono.” Lethargic, depressed, and unable to compete in sports, his son was missing school. “What did you give Louis? Would it help my son beat mono?” the producer asked. I insisted that the six action steps were his son's first line of defense and that if we could boost his immune system, the viral symptoms could be eradicated faster than by doing nothing or playing prescription-drug roulette. I got a thank-you note shortly thereafter stating that his son was back to normal in no time, thanks to
The People's Chemist's Six Action Steps for Getting Better Fast
.

IMMUNITY IS A CHOICE

With the rise of prescription drugs and the ease with which they are prescribed, most of us face a quandary that modern man epitomizes. Should we rely on Mother Nature's immune immune-boosting breakthroughs? Or should we rely on the stockpile of prescription drugs? Such a choice could be the difference between life and death. The answer is neither.

You should rely on your immune system and do everything in your
power to preserve it and boost it naturally. The wonders of this fire wall have been all but forgotten, but it's real, and it's your first line of defense. If it fails, and illness becomes life threatening, prescription drugs can be a savior. But outside of this, their toxic risks and ability to enable deadly bacteria outweigh the benefits. This has been a hard lesson for people like Jennifer's family to learn. Hopefully, it will be an easy one for you.

 

 

 CHAPTER 7 

One day you wake up, and you're fifty years old. It's not a day accompanied by fanfare. You stopped celebrating birthdays after age forty-five because, at that pivotal time in your life, you felt as though taking another step toward the grave was no longer cause for revelry.

To make matters worse, you notice that you've been waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Previously, you slept an uninterrupted eight hours. You also notice that you try not to be far from a restroom at any given time and have recently been avoiding the golf course and long road trips. Commercials on TV hint that it's time for a prostate checkup.

Concerned, you decide to get that prostate checkup you've been postponing. Your doctor confirms that you have benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), or in laymen's terms,
an enlarged prostate
. After determining that you also have a urinary tract infection caused by the enlarged prostate, your doctor suggests antibiotics as the first course of action. He puts you on the debilitating drug Proscar (finasteride), manufactured by Merck & Company. From there, it's all downhill.

Within three weeks of starting the medication, you experience constipation (from antibiotics); sore and aching muscles starting from the neck and going down your back; and blood pressure lowered to danger levels with occasional heart palpitations. After three months, you begin to notice breast enlargement and genital shrinking, decreased sexual ability, and blurred vision with coldlike symptoms. You reminisce… if only you just had an enlarged prostate. Women, pay close attention so you can help the man in your life.

Does any of this sound inviting? I didn't think so. But the above scenario is an increasingly common experience for millions of American men after they pass the half-century mark of their lives. Each year, as many as 12 million American men suffer from symptoms of prostate enlargement so uncomfortable that they're forced to seek medical treatment. Another 18 million live their lives unaware that this condition may be causing some of the uncomfortable symptoms they're experiencing.
⁹⁸
Fortunately, BPH sufferers don't have to resign themselves to the drastic outcomes described above. Nature has given us a natural remedy to support good prostate health. You'll find out what it is at the end of this chapter. But first, let's find out why prostate enlargement occurs as we age.

WHAT IS THE PROSTATE AND WHAT GOES WRONG WITH IT?

The prostate is a walnut-sized organ that provides the fluid that carries sperm during ejaculation. It is situated at the bottom of the bladder. Urine collects in your bladder until it gets full and you get the urge to pee. But as your prostate swells when you get older, the urge to pee comes prematurely and feels more urgent due to the pressure that comes from a swollen prostate. There are two reasons for this: