If you are a woman with a chronic health condition, there’s about a 1 in 3 chance that part of your problem has to do with your thyroid gland. (Men have this problem as well, but less than 10% of those with chronic health problems are thyroid-related).

By “chronic health problem,” I mean being tired, digestive problems, low sex drive, poor sleep, weight gain (or can’t lose weight), depression, anxiety, memory or concentration problems, and many more.

A sluggish thyroid gland can give you vague symptoms that are so common you might not realize they aren’t normal. You might feel less energetic than you remember being, especially feeling sluggish in the mornings. Losing your hair, or dry, brittle, thin hair could be from your thyroid. If you’re losing words and can’t remember the way you used to, or have some problems concentrating this might not just be “getting older.” Anxiety is a common thyroid symptom, as is low to zero sex drive. Slow, steady weight gain and not being able to lose weight is another common thyroid symptom. Cold hands and feet, intolerance to cold, PMS or infertility, muscle cramps, pain or weakness, constipation, and “sag and droop syndrome” are all possibly caused by a slow thyroid.

How to know you’re at risk:

1. If you complain to your doctor about not feeling right and are told that nothing is wrong, it’s all normal, and you should learn to live with it.
2. You just aren’t right and are having an increasingly difficult time convincing yourself that you are healthy.

There are two big problems with having a sluggish thyroid:

1. Only about half of thyroid cases get diagnosed. There are many ways your body can hide thyroid insufficiency from showing on a blood test.
2. Of the diagnosed and treated patients, the majority get little symptom relief from the only class of drugs commonly used for treatment.

Your conventional doctor is looking for a specific blood test, TSH, to be over 5.0 to diagnose you. Since this only happens with about half of thyroid patients, this “yes or no” approach isn’t workable. Further, if you do get diagnosed, there is little chance that the treatment offered will help you to feel better.

The real problem isn’t getting a correct diagnosis, because if you do get diagnosed, the treatment usually doesn’t work.

What treatments for thyroid problems work?

1. First, test to find out what is happening: Blood tests that show not just TSH, but T3, T4, and autoimmune antibodies would be the first step. Metals are important to test. Adrenals and thyroid affect each other, so an adrenal workup is essential, as is basic allergy testing. Mineral deficiency testing is also required.
2. Help the body reduce inflammation. 90% of sluggish thyroid cases are from an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s. The first step in helping the body to control autoimmune is to get the inflammation under control. Often we will eliminate food allergies permanently as a method of getting inflammation under control and improving the health of the gut. Diet changes factor in here also.
3. Test for and resolve nutritional problems using supplementation and dietary improvements.
4. In 25 years and many thousands of thyroid cases, we’ve found that interference with the thyroid system of the body by humanmade toxic chemicals is always a significant part of the problem. Called “Endocrine Disruptors” or “Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals,” these toxins can directly interfere with the hormones of the body. One of the most vulnerable body systems to this interference is the thyroid. We treat this problem using a proprietary acupressure treatment called “System Balancing Technique,” which helps the body to stop treating the Endocrine Disrupting Toxins as if they were natural hormones.

The most important thing:

The most important thing is YOU GETTING RESULTS.

The biggest threat to your results is anyone believing that they know more than your body about what treatment or help you need.

Should the thyroid be treated just because blood tests indicate that it is sluggish? 99+% of the health care world thinks the answer to this question is, “of course!” But what if your body needs your adrenals, or sex hormones, or digestion improved before it could heal the thyroid? In this case, the treatments for the thyroid would be completely ineffective! You’d be attempting to build the roof before you made the walls.

The Evectics^SM system tests for and addresses health problems in the order the body needs to heal. This approach is the best insurance possible for your results.

THE SOLUTION TO CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS is to assist the body so that it continues to heal and become healthier and more resilient, finally achieving a good quality of life and stable health with labs showing normal ranges.

Find Out More

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

 

Watch this video for a seven-minute explanation of how to assist your body in healing itself.

Health Care is Failing Worldwide

“Six in ten adults in the US have a chronic disease, and four in ten adults have two or more.” CDC

How many people (including yourself) do you know with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity, and depression… to name a few.

Control of chronic diseases by medical treatment or alternative / holistic techniques have been failing for decades. Nothing is working. 60% of the population is affected, and this is increasing.

I have a third, unique approach that has been solving these problems for 25 years.

Point-and-Shoot Health Care

Health care has always been about solving the problem that the patient wants fixed. This was probably true with the Egyptians: Amon visits the Healer’s dwelling with a spear wound, and the Healer treats the gash.

Roll forward 5,000 years: Andy is at the doctor’s office with a broken finger, and the doctor treats the finger.

Problem—Solution. Point and shoot. Fix what the patient wants, which is the basis of all commerce since time began.

It was all good until our environment became toxic, the food supply deteriorated, and emotional stress went through the roof. All these have contributed to an epidemic of chronic health conditions.

The CDC says that 6 in 10 people in the US have at least one chronic health problem and that chronic conditions cost 75 cents of every health care dollar. Chronic disease has become an out of control situation.

We need a new approach to the treatment of chronic conditions, but the health care system insists on using the popular, accepted “treat the problem that the patient wants fixed” model.

Here’s How Conventional Medical Care Works:

When you show up at your doctor, no matter what problem you complain of, it will be treated with a drug to “fix the problem” by reducing or eliminating your symptoms (medically, the symptoms are your problem).

• High blood pressure headaches? Drugs long-term or for the rest of your life to control this.
• Depression? Same solution.
• Irregular, painful cycles? Same solution.
• Hot flashes and night sweats? Same.
• Arthritis and joint pain? Same.

In all cases, drugs are a partial solution at best in that the symptom may improve (although it usually won’t disappear altogether). However, the drugs have side effects, and the underlying cause of the problem which isn’t being addressed at all by a symptom-suppressing drug will worsen. The result is what we have all observed: deteriorating health, more prescriptions and diagnoses, and a lower quality of life.

Medical treatment for chronic conditions isn’t the same as splinting a finger; the “solution” continues for the rest of your life; the problem never leaves, usually worsens, and your health deteriorates.

The Alternative or Holistic Solution

Just read the internet, and you’ll find a thousand references about alternative or holistic treatments: “Don’t treat only the symptom, get to the root of the problem!”

As encouraging as this sounds, in almost every case the holistic doctor is still treating the complaint. He’s still using the point-and-shoot, fix-the-patient’s-problem approach.  But with a significant difference: no drugs.

• High blood pressure? Blood pressure-reducing herbs, less stressful diet, yoga or other calming practices, acupuncture.
• Depression? Herbs, diet, more yoga.
• Irregular, painful cycles? Herbs, diet, acupuncture, yoga.

I’m not critical of this at all. Sometimes this is successful, the person recovers and isn’t on drugs for the rest of their life.

But we’re at 60% of the population with chronic diseases. If these holistic techniques were genuinely effective, if they were the solution, enough people would be using them to make this number reduce (it’s currently increasing every year).

The burden of chronic diseases is rapidly increasing worldwide. World Health Organization website

A Third, Practical Approach to Resolving Chronic Conditions

For 25 years, I’ve been researching solutions to chronic health conditions. What I’ve seen that’s effective is quite different from the usual “treat the problem the patient complains of” approach.

Here’s what I have found:

1. HEALTH is a continuous scale from poor to good. Everyone is somewhere on this scale.
2. A person in excellent health has a robust immune system and plenty of resources in their body to overcome stress and heal damage.
3. A person in poor health will generally take on more damage their body can’t fix and get worse.
4. HEALTH can’t be measured by symptoms only or lack of symptoms, as bodies hide symptoms and only show them when stress becomes overwhelming.
5. Any person with health problems could dramatically improve by becoming increasingly healthy until their body could handle the stress and heal.

This Third Approach is very different from your previous health care experiences.

Rather than look for ways to reduce your symptoms, I test for where your body is hanging up in its healing process. Then I assist your body past the stuck point and return it to healing. When it hangs up again, I test to find out why and assist it to continue healing.

I continue testing and assisting until you have reached a stable, healthy condition, and your symptoms are no longer a problem in your life.

The Chart to Health & Wellness

This chart shows a person’s progress from poor health (at the bottom) to maintaining wellness (at the top). The columns show the techniques that assist the body beyond stuck points in its healing progress.

Chronic health problems start with your body taking on more damage from your environment than it can repair. At some point, this damage builds up to become more than your body can hide, and you develop a symptom. You might go to the doctor and suppress this symptom with a drug, but you’ve done nothing about the damage that is causing it. As even more damage occurs, you can develop additional symptoms until you can honestly say that you’ve lost your health.

Chronic problems come from the body becoming unable to keep up with needed repairs, not from a specific cause of damage. There’s no spear wound or broken finger to treat. The doctor can no longer just solve the patient’s problem.

THE SOLUTION TO CHRONIC HEALTH CONDITIONS is to assist the body so that it continues to heal and become healthier and more resilient, finally achieving a good quality of life and stable health with labs showing normal ranges.

Find Out More

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Stress and Your Life

Fact: Your life is going to present you with mental and physical stress*, probably very frequently!

*Stress is a mental or emotional strain or physiological disturbance or damage.

How you decide to deal with this inevitable stress can make a huge difference in your life and the lives of your family and friends. If you can make decisions based on the merits of your choices without worrying about whether you are “up to dealing with all this stress,” you will be happier and much more productive.

If you look for ways to avoid stress because you don’t think you can handle it, you may find that you feel less engaged with life and much less happy than you should be. Or, if you charge ahead into the stress and your body takes a hit, you can be fatigued, foggy-headed, irritable or sick as a result.

Neither of these options is even close to ideal. Continuing to muddle through and not attempting to solve your stress problem will prolong your suffering. It’s only going to worsen.

Stress Is Not Your Problem

The first fact to know if you are going to escape the stress trap is that stress alone isn’t your problem. We live on planet Earth— stress is going to happen.

Your problems with stress are most likely rooted in health problems with your body.

It works like this:

1. You get hit with some stress in your life.
2. Your body isn’t physically up to dealing with this, and the stress causes symptoms (such as sleep problems, anxiety, racing heart, digestive problems, headaches, fatigue, etc.).
3. The symptoms of reactions to stress cause more
4. This causes the symptoms to worsen.

With this cycle repeating, damage to your health continues, and the whole problem worsens. Also, you can develop many other health problems not directly related to stress.

The Solution That Isn’t

A standard error in attempting to deal with stress reactions is to take drugs. If you feel terrible and tell your doctor about it, you are going to get a prescription.

Drugs for sleep, anxiety, digestion and pain are all symptom-reducers. There are no drugs that help with the reasons behind these symptoms. It’s like biting your cheek after a trip to the dentist: your mouth is numb from novocaine, so you can’t feel the pain. But after the drug wears off, you’ll have to deal with the damage you inflicted on yourself.

After a year of taking drugs, you may be much worse off than when you started on them.

But, when you start on drugs there can be a moment where you are so, so grateful for them. Finally, there is a bit of relief; finally the edge comes off just a little. It’s easy to get stuck in this feeling and keep trying to repeat it with new drugs once the first ones quit working.

Best advice? Just tough it out (or do something effective about your health). Drugs will almost always make it worse.

What Causes Stress Symptoms?

Many people assume that since the adrenal glands have the job of responding to stress, most problems from stress would be from adrenal exhaustion. But often the cause is some other body malfunction that is severely overtaxing the adrenals. In this case, supporting the adrenals may not work at all. More information from Harvard Medical School

The thyroid can create many stress symptoms, as can sex hormones and blood sugar problems.

As you can see, this can get very convoluted very quickly. Your chances of trial-and-error success using diet changes and vitamin shops are not good.

A Way Out

First, I recommend that you knock off doing things that will never help you:

Stop doing nothing, stop guessing and trial and error (“Dr. Google”), and stop using dead-end drugs.

The solution to having your life held hostage by stress has three parts:

1. Get your body tested to discover the first step it needs to begin recovery, and what help it needs to take this first step.
2. Find knowledgeable, competent, experienced assistance to help you with this first step.
3. Repeat 1 and 2 for the remaining steps until you have stable, good health, and your problems have gone for good.

The Evectics^SM system works by finding where your body is hanging up in its healing process and helping it to continue healing by doing only what the body wants. By continuing to help the body to improve past a series of stuck points, it can be returned to a condition of health and being able to deal with stress and damage from your environment.

This approach could help you (and therefore your family and friends) to have a happier, more productive life.

Watch this short video for a better understanding of how you could change your life permanently.

Stress and Your Life

Fact: Your life is going to present you with mental and physical stress*, probably very frequently!

*Stress is a mental or emotional strain or physiological disturbance or damage.

How you decide to deal with this inevitable stress can make a huge difference in your life and the lives of your family and friends. If you can make decisions based on the merits of your choices without worrying about whether you are “up to dealing with all this stress,” you will be happier and much more productive.

If you look for ways to avoid stress because you don’t think you can handle it, you may find that you feel less engaged with life and much less happy than you should be. Or, if you charge ahead into the stress and your body takes a hit, you can be fatigued, foggy-headed, irritable or sick as a result.

Neither of these options is even close to ideal. Continuing to muddle through and not attempting to solve your stress problem will prolong your suffering. It’s only going to worsen.

Stress Is Not Your Problem

The first fact to know if you are going to escape the stress trap is that stress alone isn’t your problem. We live on planet Earth— stress is going to happen.

Your problems with stress are most likely rooted in health problems with your body.

It works like this:

1. You get hit with some stress in your life.
2. Your body isn’t physically up to dealing with this, and the stress causes symptoms (such as sleep problems, anxiety, racing heart, digestive problems, headaches, fatigue, etc.).
3. The symptoms of reactions to stress cause more
4. This causes the symptoms to worsen.

With this cycle repeating, damage to your health continues, and the whole problem worsens. Also, you can develop many other health problems not directly related to stress.

The Solution That Isn’t

A standard error in attempting to deal with stress reactions is to take drugs. If you feel terrible and tell your doctor about it, you are going to get a prescription.

Drugs for sleep, anxiety, digestion and pain are all symptom-reducers. There are no drugs that help with the reasons behind these symptoms. It’s like biting your cheek after a trip to the dentist: your mouth is numb from novocaine, so you can’t feel the pain. But after the drug wears off, you’ll have to deal with the damage you inflicted on yourself.

After a year of taking drugs, you may be much worse off than when you started on them.

But, when you start on drugs there can be a moment where you are so, so grateful for them. Finally, there is a bit of relief; finally the edge comes off just a little. It’s easy to get stuck in this feeling and keep trying to repeat it with new drugs once the first ones quit working.

Best advice? Just tough it out (or do something effective about your health). Drugs will almost always make it worse.

What Causes Stress Symptoms?

Many people assume that since the adrenal glands have the job of responding to stress, most problems from stress would be from adrenal exhaustion. But often the cause is some other body malfunction that is severely overtaxing the adrenals. In this case, supporting the adrenals may not work at all. More information from Harvard Medical School

The thyroid can create many stress symptoms, as can sex hormones and blood sugar problems.

As you can see, this can get very convoluted very quickly. Your chances of trial-and-error success using diet changes and vitamin shops are not good.

A Way Out

First, I recommend that you knock off doing things that will never help you:

Stop doing nothing, stop guessing and trial and error (“Dr. Google”), and stop using dead-end drugs.

The solution to having your life held hostage by stress has three parts:

1. Get your body tested to discover the first step it needs to begin recovery, and what help it needs to take this first step.
2. Find knowledgeable, competent, experienced assistance to help you with this first step.
3. Repeat 1 and 2 for the remaining steps until you have stable, good health, and your problems have gone for good.

The Evectics^SM system works by finding where your body is hanging up in its healing process and helping it to continue healing by doing only what the body wants. By continuing to help the body to improve past a series of stuck points, it can be returned to a condition of health and being able to deal with stress and damage from your environment.

This approach could help you (and therefore your family and friends) to have a happier, more productive life.

Watch this short video for a better understanding of how you could change your life permanently.

Detoxification: A Very Different View

Detoxification is one of the most cherished tools used by many holistic or alternative healthcare practitioners. It’s an easy to understand concept: we live in a toxic environment, eat toxins in our food, slather toxic personal products on our skin and often take (very) toxic drugs, both for recreation and by prescription.

All this nasty stuff must build up and cause stress, malfunction and disease. Therefore, taking special supplements while eating and drinking specific foods over some period of time for the purpose of purging toxins from the body seems like a no-brainer.

Maybe It’s Not That Simple

There are two opposing schools of thought about detoxification:

Traditional, Scientific Medical View: “Detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.” (theguardian.com)

Holistic, Alternative View: “Health isn’t possible with a toxic body, specific detoxes such as liver and colon cleanses are necessary.”

It’s been my experience that, as usual, both viewpoints have truths and falsehoods.

If detoxing was as simple as “eat this way and take these supplements to flush out these toxins,” then labs could be done to measure toxic loads before and after the detoxes to show how efficient the process was. Sadly, I have seen no credible information that “before and after” toxicity has ever been conclusively measured by a lab. I say “sadly,” because healthcare would be so much simpler if I could just detox all my patients into high states of health.

On the other hand, the idea that our bodies can stay perfectly healthy just by eating a standard American diet— while ingesting the non-food products sold in the middle isles of the supermarkets, all manner of drugs and chemicals (and worse) in the environment is even more ludicrous (this is the “accepted medical viewpoint”).

Your Body Never Stops Detoxing

The health and function of your body can be compared to a scale: On one side is your body’s ability to function correctly and handle stress (such as toxins). On the other side is the total load of toxicity and lifestyle-induced stress. If your body can keep up and the scale stays tipped in the healthy direction, you will be fine. Other than some very specific situations (heavy metals, radiation, etc.) toxins really don’t load up in a body that is maintaining its health.

Where things go wrong is when the function of your body can’t keep up with the toxic and stress load you are giving it.

So truly, your body never stops detoxing, because in our current environment the toxins never stop getting into it! The trick is to get your body into a condition of health where it can “keep up” with the toxic load.

One disagreement I have with the “culture of detoxification” is that often people think they can detox once a year for a week or two as a substitute for a truly healthy lifestyle and effective therapy for their health problems. It’s not true!

Real Benefits of Detoxification Programs

A properly done detox program has the effect of kicking off a long-term improvement in lifestyle and diet while addressing acute stress in the liver and digestive systems. While I may not be sold on the “Detox to be less toxic” bandwagon, I am very sold on proven and effective ways to improve function and reduce stress.

My favorite detox? It’s the Standard Process “Detox Balance” program. This is a 28-day program of diet improvements and whole-food supplements in smoothies.

Does this “get out all the nasty toxins?” Probably not.

What it does with great efficiency for every patient I’ve ever put on the program is:

• Better energy
• Better sleep
• Better digestion
• Improved mental clarity

Often there are many other benefits, such as improved libido, improved skin, weight loss, etc.

The detox works because doing the program can radically shift your personal “scale” toward the good side.  Suddenly your body has a lot less stress and a lot more function. What does it do with this? It compensates better for stress and starts the healing process.

You get the benefits that are touted for a “detox,” just for different reasons!

You Can’t Stop with the Detox

Let’s say you do a detox and feel lots better. Yea! But how long will this last?

Sadly, not long.

With no follow-up, it’s just like you washed your car. In a week you can’t tell it ever happened.

With the proper follow-up, however, it’s just the beginning of an entirely new level of life and health!

BUT: How do you know what to do for a follow-up?

Should you “eat healthy?” Well, sure, but what does that mean? And are there specific dietary recommendations that YOUR body needs?

Should you take supplements? Which ones? How do you know they’re correct? How do you know you don’t need more or less supplements? How do you know when your body is done with a supplement?

Are there functional problems with your body that will override all efforts to maintain your health? This could be hormone problems, allergy problems, nervous system problems, etc. Do you need therapy for this type of issue? If so, what therapies and for how long?

A Simple Solution

Get tested. Why would you want to guess at all these difficult and complicated issues when you can spend an hour getting tested and find out the truth?

To find out more about testing, just go here.

Find Out More

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

The Insanity of Disease Prevention

With heart disease and cancer killing 1.2 million annually (the two leading causes of death in the US), should you be fooled into believing that anything is really known about prevention?

If you worry sometimes (or a lot) about getting cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, or other life-altering (or life-ending) diseases, there’s a reason for that:

You aren’t in control of whether you get these diseases, and you are hoping that you get lucky.

Sure, that would worry anyone.

Using cars as an analogy: you climb into the passenger side of a car and look over to see your neighbor’s 16-year-old son getting into the driver’s seat. You are WORRIED! You’re sweating, you’re shaking. So, you get out, evict the kid from the car and drive it yourself. Suddenly, no worries! You’re back in control. It’s not like you are the world’s most talented driver, but you trust yourself to stay out of trouble.

What if you did this for your health worries as well? What if you evicted your doctor from the driver’s seat and made the guy into an advisor instead? What if you stopped buying into the idea that “you can’t know” what to do to stay healthy and prevent disease other than general, inane stuff like “stop smoking.”

Here is an example of the insanity that passes for “Prevention” in our current health care system:

(Actual) Top Tips for Cancer Prevention:

1. Don’t use tobacco.
2. Eat a healthy diet.
3. Exercise and avoid being overweight.
4. Get regular medical care and screenings.

Here is my satire of these tips:

Top Tips for Auto Accident Prevention (Medical Version):

1. Make sure your headlights work if you drive at night.
2. Make sure your brakes and tires are inspected regularly.
3. Test your horn.
4. Schedule regular bumpergram imaging for early detection that you’ve already had an accident.

What’s Preventing the Prevention?

Prevention implies that something is being DONE to prevent the bad thing from happening. Current medical prevention includes no hint that you have some control of your own life and health outcome. There isn’t any inkling that you could be responsible for your health.

If you add personal responsibility and the idea that you can have control of your own health into the Tips List, it would look something like this:

Tips for Auto Accident Prevention (Personal Responsibility Version):

1. Pay attention to the road, traffic and your environment.
2. Drive as if the other guy might do something stupid at any time.
3. Don’t do distracting things while driving (phones, radios, kids).
4. Keep your speed and spacing with other vehicles so you have reaction time.

Tips for Cancer Prevention (Personal Responsibility Version):

1. Test your body to find out if anything is inhibiting your immune system and correct it.
2. Test your body to find out what you could do to help your body improve its overall health and do this.
3. Find out what diet restrictions are needed with your body and develop a more ideal food plan to improve and maintain your health.
4. Get tested regularly for cancer risk factors (such as thermography) and handle any that are found.

If you aren’t familiar with these last four tips, you should know that understanding them could be the answer to much of your worry about scary diseases.

To understand how these tips would work, here’s a quick rundown of important health information that is either little known or little understood:

Summary: Your body is intelligent and constantly is working to maintain and heal itself. By accessing information from the nervous system with specific types of testing, it’s possible to let the body be its own doctor. You can find out from it what help it needs and then assist it to heal itself. We have treatment techniques and supplements all designed to be used by the body to repair itself and return to health.

Here’s a detailed version of the above summary:

1. Your body is alive and intelligent. You may think of it as a kind of biological machine run by reflexes, but it’s really a bona fide intelligence. It created itself starting with just two cells. It runs itself and repairs itself (even from threats such as viruses that it’s never seen before). Most important, it is aware of the areas in it that are damaged or not functioning correctly and knows what it needs to repair them.

2. There are testing techniques that access your body’s nervous system to expose the information about what is damaged and what is needed by your body to repair this.

3. There are noninvasive treatment techniques and specific supplements that are designed to work with your body, giving it what it is asking for so that it can repair itself.

4. Using tools called “functional lab testing” along with the nervous system testing described above, it’s possible to know what your body shouldn’t eat and to design a diet that would be healthy for you.

This Information Changes Everything

Working with the body to assist it to heal itself ends the standard trial-and-error methods of conventional medicine. It ends the tyranny of the pharmaceutical treatment model as the ONLY method of treatment accepted as legitimate. It gives you the ability to improve and control your own health, and to kick the teenage driver out of your car for good.

Find Out More

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Should You Get the Flu Shot?

 Learn the facts and then decide…

“Get Your Flu Shot Here” signs have been all over the city since late summer. It’s that time of year when we are bombarded with flu shot advertising encouraging you to get your shot. CVS and Target are offering “free” shots (no copay on your insurance).

There are many physicians who are pushing flu shots, however there are many others who believe that the flu vaccine is not a good idea for anyone. Here are some facts about the influenza virus and the vaccine so that you can make an informed decision on whether you should get the flu shot:

FACT: Did you know that influenza is not a very common illness? Just because you have flu-like symptoms does not mean you have the flu. There are over 200 viruses that cause influenza-like illness and symptoms and without a laboratory test, you cannot tell the difference.

ACTUAL percentage of the US population likely to get the flu? 3% to 11%. (This figure is the current one from the CDC (Center for Disease Control). Previously, the percentage has been given as 5% to 20%, because people with “no symptoms” were being counted. Huh?)

FACT: Flu vaccines only work against the virus strains picked as most likely to show up in any given year. The vaccines must be manufactured well in advance of the season, so no mid-flu-season adjustments can be made. Here’s the vaccine effectiveness for the past few years (according to the CDC):

• 2014-15 – 19%
• 2015-16 – 48%
• 2016-17 – 40%
• 2017-18 – 38%
• 2018-19 – 47%

FACT: You can get the flu despite being vaccinated. Here’s what the CDC says about this:

There are several reasons why someone might get flu symptoms, even after they have been vaccinated against flu.

1. One reason is that some people can become ill from other respiratory viruses besides flu such as rhinoviruses, which are associated with the common cold, cause symptoms similar to flu, and also spread and cause illness during the flu season. The flu vaccine only protects against influenza, not other illnesses.
2. Another explanation is that it is possible to be exposed to influenza viruses, which cause the flu, shortly before getting vaccinated or during the two-week period after vaccination that it takes the body to develop immune protection. This exposure may result in a person becoming ill with flu before protection from the vaccine takes effect.
3. A third reason why some people may experience flu like symptoms despite getting vaccinated is that they may have been exposed to a flu virus that is very different from the viruses the vaccine is designed to protect against. The ability of a flu vaccine to protect a person depends largely on the similarity or “match” between the viruses selected to make the vaccine and those spreading and causing illness. There are many different flu viruses that spread and cause illness among people. For more information, see Influenza (Flu) Viruses.
4. The final explanation for experiencing flu symptoms after vaccination is that the flu vaccine can vary in how well it worksand some people who get vaccinated may still get sick.

FACT: The vaccine contains toxic ingredients that are potentially or overtly dangerous to everyone, but especially to developing infants and children, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems. Some of the ingredients are:

• Formaldehyde
• Aluminum Salts
• Mercury (preservative)
• Antibiotics (anti-contaminant)
• Chicken Egg Proteins
• MSG (as a stabilizer)
• Polysorbate 80 (emulsifier)

FACT: Flu vaccines are made from viruses that are grown in chicken eggs with embryos. If you have a severe allergic reaction to eggs getting a flu shot is very risky. So, if your baby hasn’t eaten eggs at 6 months how do you know if she is allergic to it?

FACT: Vaccination studies are not independent and unbiased.  The Cochrane Collaboration caution people evaluating flu vaccine research to be aware that most research conducted on vaccines is funded by the very pharmaceutical companies who market the vaccines and make huge profits on their sales.

The Cochrane Collaboration’s long-running review of flu vaccines (2018 update) has this statement in its Main Results:

Healthy adults who receive inactivated parenteral influenza vaccine rather than no vaccine probably experience less influenza, from just over 2% to just under 1%. NOTE THE WORD “PROBABLY.”

What Should I Do?

Become educated about the flu and its risks and the vaccine and its benefits and risks and make an informed decision after consulting multiple sources of information and discussing your questions with one or more health professionals.

Getting a flu shot because “it’s just the normal thing to do” may not be your best decision.

Doing whatever your doctor recommends because he or she “knows best” should be considered with the knowledge that more than 50% of the US population has chronic illness that your doctor doesn’t understand and can’t treat. In general, medical science knows much, much less than the popular media represents.

More Information

To help your body’s immune system stave off that flu, learn how changes to your diet can give you an immune boost:

Boost Your Immune System (A diet-based way to dramatically reduce your chances of illness)

Start Now! Get Healthy!

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Don’t Get Sick, Boost Your Immune System

Mostly I don’t think very much about my immune system… it chugs along keeping me protected and repaired without bringing any attention to itself.

That is, until I start to get sick. Then I’m really paying attention to my immune system!

Will I get really sick, or will my immune system win and I’ll be better by tomorrow? I feel like I’m in the last minutes of the big game, the invaders are ahead by 3 points and I’m on my feet screaming for the home team to pull off that big win. Come, ON immune system! Kill those guys! Win WIN WIN!!

What I have for you is a secret weapon to boost and energize your immune system (so it can WIN more often). It won’t cost you anything, you don’t have to swallow pills and it works phenomenally well.

But: You must understand how to work it, or you’ll mess up and still get sick.

How to Work It

Your body has a very efficient system for protecting itself from invaders such as viruses, bacteria, funguses, etc. A very important part of this system is the body’s ability to identify and destroy any invaders that get inside.

In the 1970’s Dr. Linus Pauling (one of the greatest researchers in the field of microbiology and only scientist to ever win TWO Nobel Prizes) made a critical discovery about the immune system that you can use to stay well. The fact that you likely haven’t heard of this research demonstrates how our society ignores what it doesn’t want to agree with.

Here’s how it works:

Your immune system disposes of invaders (like bacteria and viruses) by literally swallowing them with a special type of cell called a phagocyte. This is a cell (example: a white blood cell) that engulfs and absorbs waste material, harmful microorganisms or other foreign bodies in the bloodstream and tissues.

Dr. Pauling discovered that white blood cells use vitamin C to dissolve and absorb the invaders once they’ve been engulfed.  A white blood cell needs a 50 X concentration of vitamin C (compared to the amount of C in the blood) to be as efficient as possible in dissolving toxins and invaders. To maintain this concentration of C, the cell pulls in vitamin C as needed from the bloodstream around it.

Glucose (sugar in its simplest form, as found in the blood stream) and vitamin C have a similar chemical structure. So similar, in fact, that when a white blood cell tries to pull in more vitamin C from the blood around it, glucose can get substituted by mistake. If the concentration of glucose in the blood goes beyond a certain concentration (in other words, if your blood sugar level gets too high), the white blood cell’s 50 X vitamin C concentration can start to drop because of the large amount of glucose it’s pulling in as a substitute for vitamin C.

In fact, the blood sugar level created by eating some candy, cookies, drinking a sweet drink or juice can reduce the white blood cell’s vitamin C concentration from 50X to about 13X. This cuts your immune system’s ability to absorb and destroy toxins and invaders by 75%. Worse, it can take four to six hours for the vitamin C concentration in the white blood cells to reach that optimum 50 X concentration again and return your immune system to normal efficiency.

The Secret Immune Weapon:

To boost your immune system, don’t raise your blood sugar level!

Here’s how to avoid this:

1. Don’t eat refined sugar (cake, candy, cookies, soda, wine, beer). Refined sugar is processed to make it absorb more rapidly into your bloodstream (which is why we love it SO MUCH… it’s the sugar high). Also, most foods containing refined sugar contain a LOT of it (cake, candy, cookies, etc.). This combination of a lot of sugar that absorbs rapidly is the nuclear option: you WILL raise your blood sugar, there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
2. Fruit contains a lot of sugar. Sugar is sugar. Your white blood cells can’t tell if the sugar they’re pulling in instead of the vitamin C comes from bananas or lollypops. Some guidelines about eating fruit: Don’t eat more than 3 servings a day, and not at the same time. Don’t drink fruit juice of any kind (it’s refined sugar). Eat protein (meat, eggs, nuts) WITH the fruit to buffer it. The protein slows down the sugar being absorbed in your stomach so that it doesn’t raise the blood sugar nearly as much.
3. When buying food with a label: Check that the sugar per serving is 5 grams or less.

Summary: Don’t eat any kind of sugar if you’re sick, including the much-recommended orange juice (which may contain vitamin C, but this won’t help if the white blood cells can’t get past the sugar to use it!).

The Long-term (Chronic) Illness Connection

If you’re trying to recover from a chronic illness (arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, hormone problems, depression, anxiety, digestive problems, etc., etc.) you must know that your body is damaged because your immune system has been unable to keep up with the repair work.

Bodies rebuild and repair themselves every minute of every day. In the time you read this sentence, your body has replaced about 50 million cells. If you wish to recover your health, you’d want to help your body in any way you can to rebuild cells more rapidly. If your body could catch up, it might repair much of the damage from your illness and you could be dramatically better.

Here’s the Problem:

As your body replaces cells during the healing process, much of the material from the old, replaced cells becomes toxins that must be gotten out of your body. The faster your body heals, the more toxins from dead cells it must deal with. If you are already very toxic (this is true for almost anyone with a chronic health problem), your body can rapidly “hit the ceiling” of toxicity, because it’s trying to replace too many cells too quickly.

In this case, your body has no choice but to stop or slow the healing process to bring the toxic level into a manageable range.

If you could help your body get rid of the dead cells more efficiently, it could increase the healing capacity enough to help you recover.

Guess what? The only way your body can get rid of dead cells is… white blood cells! So, if you follow the above guidelines for not raising your blood sugar level on a long-term basis, it can increase your body’s capacity to heal from chronic illness.

Talk to us about some great sugar substitutes you can use! And the next time you go to the drug store and notice that the cough syrup contains mostly sugar, you can wonder as we do what happened to Dr. Pauling’s valuable research that no one seems to remember.

Start Now! Get Healthy!

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Photo Credit: By Volker Brinkmann – (November 2005). “Neutrophil engulfing Bacillus anthracis”. PLoS Pathogens 1 (3): Cover page. DOI:10.1371. Retrieved on 2009-01-04., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2107792