An Australian researcher has finally uncovered the actual physiological link between stress and disease. Although regular medicine has talked for decades about stress related illness and naturopathy has both known about and dealt with it for centuries, modern scientific medicine has finally isolated a biophysical mechanism by which stress can be proven to do the damage we regularly observe.
Since everyone has been talking about stress related illness for so long it probably comes as quite a shock to many to hear that this link has just been discovered. So be shocked if you like, but don’t be stressed, it’s bad for your health.
I was not surprised but admit to uttering a little groan when the professor who made and announced the discovery said that it was hoped the discovery would lead to development of a "pill" to remove the damaging effects of stress. Please spare me!
Of course one reason you may feel stressed is being overworked. I thought only Australians worked incredibly hard all the time but not so. It seems there’s one overworked American named Jim. In a recent forum post I read, he told it in the form of this rather amusing tale.
"I’m so tired!" He writes:
"For a couple years I’ve been blaming it on lack of sleep and too much pressure from my job, but now I found out the real reason: I’m tired because I’m overworked.
"The population of this country is 237 million. 104 million are retired. That leaves 133 million to do the work. There are 85 million in school, which leaves 48 million to do the work. Of this there are 29 million employed by the federal government, leaving 19 million to do the work. 2.8 million are in the Armed Forces, which leaves 16.2 million to do the work. Take from the total the 14,800,000 people who work for State and City Governments and that leaves 1.4 million to do the work. At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals, leaving 1,212,000 to do the work. Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons. That leaves just two people to do the work. You and me.
"And you’re sitting at your computer reading jokes."
Well good for you Jim. Now if Jim gave you at least a decent grin with his story that’s a start. See if you can track down something seriously funny so you can have a few minutes of really good laughter. That will be quite therapeutic and can help to undo the effects of your stress without waiting for or resorting to a pill.
Sometimes one can feel a little lonely, as if one were merely a lone voice speaking out about the follies of modern medicine and the errors of a society duped by lies upon lies. Sometimes the enemy is clear; the many individuals in the pharmaceutical industry, medical profession and political or public office who deliberately maintain and promote the deceipt. They may be motivated by a desire for the status quo due to self-interest or they may indeed be quite malignant personalities. I have certainly dealt with both types.
Sometimes it is sad to see that the enemy is the complacency, timidity or even plain non-thinking and ignorance of many in those same positions listed above. They may intend no harm, but they condemn themselves and choose their side by their silence.
However, once in a while along comes a reminder that many others share my views and are courageous enough to speak out. I both appreciate and respect such people. It appears that one of them is Dr Guylaine Lanctot who wrote as follows.
"The medical establishment works closely with the drug multinationals whose main objective is profits, and whose worst nightmare would be an epidemic of good health. Lots of drugs MUST be sold. In order to achieve this, anything goes: lies, fraud, and kickbacks. Doctors are the principal salespeople of the drug companies. They are rewarded with research grants, gifts, and lavish perks. The principal buyers are the public – from infants to the elderly – who MUST be thoroughly medicated and vaccinated…at any cost! Why do the authorities forbid alternative medicine? Because they are serving the industry, and the industry cannot make money with herbs, vitamins, and homeopathy. They cannot patent natural remedies. That is why they push synthetics. They control medicine, and that is why they are able to tell medical schools what they can and cannot teach."
I hope you get something from this statement by Dr Lanctot. I know I certainly did.
If you read the detailed reports relating how DuPont has been knowingly contaminating consumers’ blood by deliberately selling toxic products that contact foods, you would know that the FDA doesn’t exactly come up smelling like roses. Of course the worst of that saga may have been committed by FDA officials of 20 and more years ago. So is the FDA squeaky clean now?
Only the profoundly naive or completely stupid could believe so. A certain amount of built-in "error" is part of every organization. Consider it the human factor, representing or reflecting the darker side of human nature that always surfaces in any organizational setting. It isn’t simple or innocent incompetence, it reflects personal political machinations, quite deliberate and calculated manipulation of due process for some form of personal gain or aggrandizement.
Let’s just consider a more recent review of the FDA. It was performed by no less that the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
There is a drug commonly called Plan B, a so-called morning-after pill used to avoid pregnancy after unprotected sex. The drug has been available in the U.S. with a prescription since 1999. In December 2003, an FDA advisory committee voted 23 to 4 to recommend that availability of the drug be changed to over the counter (OTC). But according to the GAO report, two top officials at the FDA told staff members that the application would be rejected before the completion of a scientific review of the application.
The report described this sort of involvement by top officials as "very, very rare," and characterized the choice to ignore both the advisory committee recommendation and the scientific review as "unprecedented."
Over the past decade, the FDA has reviewed 23 applications to change a drug’s availability from prescription to OTC. The FDA decided against the advisory committee’s recommendation only once: in the case of Plan B.
Whatever the clinical, wider social and health and even moral arguments for or against this drug mat be, there is a very important issue here that purely relates to the FDA official’s behavior. Their extraordinary willingness to tamper with a drug’s approval process should be viewed with some concern, i fnot alarm.
If political pressures can overrule science and due process, do friendships within the drug industry achieve the same? Do drug company contributions to political campaigns also play a role in the process? There are many questions to pose. Important ones are, just who watches the watchdog, and do they have sufficient powers to deal with corruption when it is found?
I have never considered the dollar cost of medical technology to make sense. It seems that any product or service that includes "medical" in the description commands a ridiculous price premium. This largely unjustified profiteering costs communities in untold ways.
There is the problem of opportunity cost. With vast sums of money going to pay for anything medical there is that much less money available to pay for other things. You can easily think of what they are yourself, but don’t forget all those things that will help to ensure better health in the first place so we can help to eliminate the causes of disease, rather than continue to waste money on treatment (especially when that treatment is overpriced, doesn’t work very well and frequently itself causes many additional problems).
For example, improving the nutritional quality of foods and better protecting our food chains. Improving the quality of water including removing the alarming number of largely unreported contaminants. Dealing with air quality by implementation of better policy and new technology. Clearly, even in so-called advanced economies, there are better ways to spend dollars to achieve personal and population health.
As a passionate advocate for Primary Health Care (PHC) I strongly support the principles that ensure we utilize the strictest minimum of technology consistent with achieving health goals. Indeed, I have elsewhere said:
Unfortunately there is a perceived association between use of high-technology and high levels of knowledge, skill and power (and of course, the status, prestige and hopefully income that go with these). This can mean that people who want to practice PHC still want to maintain the association and therefore promote the view that PHC is as much about high-technology as any other approach to health care.
The fact is that the use of any technology in PHC must pass three tests.
-
The technology must be appropriate, that is, no more than is needed and no less than is needed and it must actually perform the function for which it is employed at a satisfactory level. -
The technology must be acceptable, that is, its users and consumers must have a choice in whether or not it will be used and they must approve its use.
- It must also be affordable. If the country or community cannot afford it then it simply cannot be considered. PHC promotes living healthfully within one’s means and recognises that when affordability is breached then overall everything else suffers, making the use counterproductive.
Note here that PHC is not anti-technology, it merely requires that the above tests be applied before technological solutions are implemented. Frankly, a great deal of waste and harm could have been avoided if these tests were required for the use of technology generally in health care.
So it is particularly disturbing to see the regular reports of suffering, resulting from the harm and even unnecessary deaths, caused by the overuse and abuse of medical technologies. Just today the FDA MedWatch program has reported another example. Consider the following report.
MedWatch – The FDA Safety Information and Adverse Event Reporting Program
Mallinckrodt, Palatin Technologies and FDA notified healthcare professionals of postmarketing reports of serious and life-threatening cardiopulmonary events following the administration of NeutroSpec [Technetium (99m Tc) fanolesomab],a radiodiagnostic agent consisting of a murine IgM monoclonal antibody formulated to be labeled with technetium,indicated for scintigraphic imaging of patients with equivocal signs and symptoms of appendicitis who are five years of age or older.
Onset of these events generally occurred within minutes of injection and included two deaths attributed to cardiopulmonary failure within 30 minutes of injection. Additional cases of serious cardiopulmonary events including cardiac arrest, hypoxia, dyspnea and hypotension required resuscitation with fluids, vasopressors, and oxygen.
Any patient who receives NeutroSpec should be closely monitored for at least one hour following product administration. Resuscitation equipment and appropriately trained personnel must be readily available during this time.
Patients with underlying cardiopulmonary conditions may be at higher risk for serious complication. NeutroSpec administration to these patients should only follow careful consideration of the known and potential risks and benefits, including the possibly higher risks.
So what is this saying? It says that doctors are seriously injuring and even killing people by using advanced radiologic imaging technologies. To do what exactly, just why are these techniques being used? Astonishingly, it is to make diagnosing appendicitis easier in cases where they have difficulty confirming that is the real problem!
What is going on here? Are they all mad? Diagnosing appendicitis has never presented much of a challenge as far as I’m concerned; it’s really quite straight forward. Could it be that doctors are now so poorly trained? Or could it be just another way of justifying exhorbitant medical bills? Do they use the technology simply because they can? Is it more prestigious?
I’m certain that the reasons are many and complex. I’m just as certain that they are unacceptable. I have no sympathy for the doctor who has to tell parents that their child who was thought to possibly have appendicitis is now in intensive care, or dead, because the doctor decided to use an advanced, expensive, dangerous and totally unnecessary technology to clarify the diagnosis. My sympathies are entirely with the parents.
The real costs of medical technologies are therefore many. There are opportunity costs to consider, measurable in financial, lifestyle and health outcome terms. Importantly, there are costs in terms of increased suffering and death that result directly from the use and abuse of medical technologies. In my view, the use of medical technologies simply must not be left so largely in the inadequately policed hands of the medical profession.
I recently posted an interesting report on the extent of the toxicity we experience simply living in our modern world. It was written by Dr Nugent and I presented it in three parts. You can use this link to find Part 1.
With that report fresh in mind I was intriqued to read some material provided by the Organic Consumers Association. Do read the following carefully as it contains many lessons.
PRESS RELEASE NOVEMBER 16, 2005 CONTACT: Environmental Working Group Mike Casey/Lauren Sucher, 202-667-6982
Former DuPont Top Expert: Company Knew, Covered Up Pollution of Americans’ Blood for 18 Years
Documents: Company Couldn’t Find Safe Level of Exposure in 1973 to Chemical that Never Breaks Down, Clings to Human Blood
Study Results Show Company Found Safer Ways to Coat Food Packaging But Shelved Them to Save Money
WASHINGTON – November 16 – Glenn Evers was a DuPont employee of 22 years, one of the company’s top technical experts and the chairman of an invitation-only committee of its 40 best scientists and technical experts. He holds six patents, and his work has, to date, made the company an estimated $250 million in after-tax profits. Evers was, by his description, a dedicated "company man."
He was also the company’s top chemical engineer involved with designing and developing new uses of grease-resistant, or perfluorinated, chemical-based coating for paper food packaging.
Breakdown chemicals from these coatings and related sources are now in the blood of 95 percent of Americans, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has spent the last several years trying to determine how they get there.
DuPont has claimed that it does not know how the chemicals got there and that they are not aware that their product is responsible.
"If we had any reason to believe that [there] was a safety issue for fluorinated telomers-based product, we wouldn’t have commercialized them," DuPont Director of Planning and Technology Robert Ritchie told the Wilmington News Journal (11/23/03).
Today, however, Glenn Evers told in detail how his former employer hid for decades that it was polluting Americans’ blood with a hyper-persistent chemical associated with the grease-resistant coatings on paper food packaging.
Environmental Working Group (EWG) has obtained and today made public a set of internal company documents that support Evers’ story. Combined, the Evers story and EWG’s documents present a startling chronology of DuPont’s actions:
Evers describes how, in the mid-1960s, the company negotiated with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a weak standard for how much of the paper chemical coating, which is applied to give packaging grease or liquid resistance, could contaminate food. The FDA at the time normally required a two-year study for chemicals it wasn’t familiar with, but agreed to base DuPont’s approval on a 90-day test with a 1,000-fold safety factor added.
Evers explains how that standard, which remains in effect today, was based on the premise that the chemical would leave the body quickly. He explained that as a company expert, he saw that the company knew, at least by 1981, that another class of perfluorinated chemicals, such as PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid), accumulates in people. It is unclear whether or not the company ever provided the FDA this information, but Evers explained how the company continued to worry about this information throughout the 1990s.
A company document shows that DuPont conducted a toxicological study in 1973 in which it was unable to find a safe level of exposure in lab animals, and that the chemicals were toxic to the kidneys, liver and blood.
A 1984 internal company memorandum raises the question of which of these crucial findings, if any, from the 1973 study were provided to the FDA.
A key document shows that in 1987, DuPont’s Dr. Richard Goldbaum found that the company’s marquee paper packaging coating chemical, Zonyl RP, could contaminate food at over three times the federal safety standard, while two effective alternatives contaminated food at half the federal maximum level.
Evers describes how he and others copied on the results of that study knew they were "devastating." Evers approached Goldbaum, and then Goldbaum’s superior, Gerald Culling, telling each of them that the results were an enormous problem and that it would be unethical to continue selling the product. Both men told Evers not to worry, and that they were "taking care of it."
Evers realized with time that the company had not ordered a standard, internal process hazards review to find out why the chemical was above FDA approved levels. The company did not provide the information to customers, federal health officials and the public. DuPont did not recall the faulty product, did not stop its production, shelved the safer alternatives, and continued to make Zonyl RP, effectively producing for another 18 years the chemicals that would lead to the contamination of consumers’ blood.
Evers says that one of the reasons the company stuck with the problematic Zonyl RP was that it had adopted the practice of blending substandard batches in with better batches and selling the blended versions to its industrial customers.
Evers describes how DuPont’s "Document Retention Program" required researchers to label all hard copy files to time their destruction. Company managers could audit employees to ensure compliance, and other staff went through employees’ hard copy files to ensure documents were destroyed. A master computer program at the company deleted files from company hard drives after a certain period of time.
Evers tells of how 3M, DuPont’s competitor, rapidly abandoned the $150 million per year business using perfluorinated chemicals on paper food packaging when it realized in 2000 that the chemicals were producing byproducts accumulating in human blood and that those chemicals were harmful to developing lab animals.
Despite what it knew from the 1987 results by Dr. Goldbaum and the persistence and toxicity of its own chemicals, DuPont moved quickly to sell its similar chemistry to 3M’s former customers. EWG today sent the documents to the FDA’s acting commissioner, as well as the inspector general of its parent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), requesting the officials act on the new information. The group is also referring documents to relevant EPA officials.
"These documents indicate a failure to disclose critical public health information about a toxic chemical that never breaks down, that gets into our bodies and stays there," said EWG Senior Scientist Tim Kropp. "If we ever needed a reason to reform the nation’s toxic chemical laws, every American now has one, courtesy of DuPont."
Evers’ appearance and EWG’s document release comes just a week before a potentially significant date in the civil suit the Bush administration’s EPA has pursued against the company for suppressing health studies on PFOA, which is used in the production of Teflon pan coatings. Bush EPA political appointees could seek the maximum possible fine of $314 million, but they have shown little appetite for pursuing such a penalty. The next court date for the civil suit was negotiated to fall on Wednesday, November 23, the day before the Thanksgiving holiday and the busiest travel day of the year. "DuPont thinks it has the right to pollute your blood with chemicals, but it doesn’t," said Evers. "Someone could get a fine for dumping trash if he threw a used tire into the creek behind my house. This company continues to pollute the blood of the American public with a toxic chemical and what is it going to end up paying?"