With breast cancer, early detection is considered the primary factor in good outcomes and reduced mortality. Conventional medicine is focused almost entirely on early detection, as are most of the breast cancer non-profits.
This focus on early detection is an excellent thing, in that survivability statistics for breast cancer are improving.
But, mammography does not PREVENT breast cancer (a common misconception). In one study, 68% of the women surveyed believed that mammography prevents or reduces the risk of contracting breast cancer. Mammography can only find already existing cancer so it can be treated.
Personally, I would Rather be Proactive and Avoid Breast Cancer
Excellent technology exists to prevent breast cancer, even though it’s not a big part of the breast cancer information you are likely to see.
There are two important parts of breast cancer prevention:
Thermography
Hormone health and balancing
Thermography is a very specific and advanced type of infrared photography that maps the surface temperature of the breasts. When analyzed by a trained and certified thermologist, risk factors can be identified, along with the level of risk. Then you can do a program to improve that risk, followed by another thermography to confirm that your risk is reduced.
Hormone levels can add to breast cancer risk in several ways. Estrogen imbalance can show on thermography as well as on a lab test. Getting your hormones in balance can reduce or eliminate many common symptoms and improve your life while reducing your cancer risk.
Can I do thermography instead of mammography?
First, ask yourself why you are having a mammogram. If you are having a mammogram to prevent cancer, then that is the wrong test. A mammogram never prevented even one person from getting cancer. It can only detect a dense object in the breast.
On the other hand, thermography detects the physiological, chemical, and temperature changes before pathology develops, 5 to 8 years before detection on a mammogram.
So, thermography is appropriate for preventative screening.
A mammogram is appropriate for detecting and diagnosing cancer, both early and later stage pathology. Thermography and mammography gather different information, and a woman may need both of these to ensure that her breasts are and remain healthy.
A thermography study does not replace a mammogram but is very complementary. Many women choose thermography to give them additional and early information about breast changes.
Would you please take five minutes to fill out a health assessment survey and send it to me? I’ll call you for a phone consult and discuss what could be done about your health. It’s complimentary, no strings attached. Either I can help you or point you in the right direction to get help. Don’t give up! You can recover your health if you persist.
The Most Effective Exercise for Lowering Blood Pressure
Introduction
If you are currently taking medication for high blood pressure or in danger of doing this, you should know that you can do things to improve your hypertension.
One of the most effective is exercise.
** ALWAYS CHECK WITH YOUR PHYSICIAN BEFORE STARTING ANY FORM OF EXERCISE FOR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
I have worked with thousands of patients battling high blood pressure, and many of them had been on an exercise regimen but had seen little to no results with their blood pressure.
Numerous recent studies show a specific TECHNIQUE of exercise works better than any other to reduce blood pressure. This is great because you can use the technique for any exercise you like: biking, walking, running, swimming, etc.
The technique is called “HIIT” or High-Intensity Interval Training. Almost anyone can do it, and it’s easy to do.
Read the article below for the particulars and instructions on how you can get started.
Here’s another article about using isometric exercise (at your desk or driving your car!) to reduce blood pressure.
READ: Want To Lower Your Blood Pressure By 20 Points? Try This Exercise…
HIIT and blood pressure
Ronald Grisanti D.C., D.A.B.C.O., DACBN, MS, CFMP
When it comes to lowering blood pressure, exercise is a non-negotiable factor.
You may be wondering what would be the most effective form of exercise to lower blood pressure?
More and more studies are showing the exciting results of something called HIIT in lowering blood pressure. HIIT stands for High-Intensity Interval Training
What is HIIT? HIIT is not any specific exercise; instead, it is a technique. You can apply this technique to almost any exercise, whether it be walking, riding a bike, swimming, doing some body weight exercises, or even dancing in your living room.
** ALWAYS CHECK WITH YOUR PHYSICIAN BEFORE STARTING ANY FORM OF EXERCISE FOR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE
HIIT training combines very short bursts of working at your absolute maximum alternating short periods of active recovery rest. Research has found that this form of exercising gives you more health benefits than any other way of exercising.
It shortens the amount of time you need to exercise and is more effective; you work out for just 10-30 minutes and reap impressive health benefits. You burn more body fat, your metabolism is stimulated for long after you finish exercising, and it also helps you utilize oxygen more efficiently.
One of the most significant benefits people find from HIIT is the reduction in training time. Through HIIT, you can put in about half the amount of time compared to traditional cardio exercise to reach your goals.
One study found that just 2 minutes of HIIT sprinting increased metabolism as much as 30 minutes of running. HIIT increases the efficiency of your heart, and HIIT training also has a significant effect on naturally lowering your blood pressure.
HIIT and blood pressure:
Although most any type of exercise has its benefits, HIIT shines when it comes to saving time. Using the HIIT technique is the ultimate shortcut.
Study after study shows that HIIT exercise improves blood pressure in people with hypertension better than any other exercise routine.
HIIT is highly effective in reducing resting heart rate and blood pressure in overweight and obese individuals.
It has been shown that HIIT exercising just three times per week for just 20 minutes at a time lowers blood pressure more effectively than continuous endurance training.
What is the science that makes HIIT so effective?
HIIT training changes something called endothelial function.
The endothelium is a very thin membrane that lines the inside of your heart and your blood vessels. The cells in this membrane release various substances that control how your blood vessels relax and contract.
We know that stiff hard arteries play a role in high blood pressure.
The ability of your artery walls to expand (vasodilate) is very important.
You need to have flexibility in your arteries to allow for proper blood flow throughout your body.
HIIT improves endothelial function and reduces the stiffness in your artery walls more than any other traditional form of exercise.
Just a 1% improvement in your endothelial function can result in a 13% reduction in the risk of cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes.
One study showed that 73% of people restored blood pressure to normal using a HIIT training method for just two months and 24 exercise sessions. There was a significant reduction in systolic blood pressure from 145.4 (± 9.0) to 118.3 ( ± 15.6) mm Hg.
How to Apply HIIT
With HIIT training, you’re are going to go “all out” at a high intensity for short amounts of time. You then do an ‘active recovery’ rest for a short interval. You can apply this technique to any kind of exercise, walking, running, jumping rope, cycling, and even weight training.
I prefer using a stationary bike to minimize injury. It is simply a great option to implement HIIT into your workouts.
Using the HIIT on a stationary bike
Warm-up for 5 minutes on a low setting.
After your 5 minute warm-up, increase the bike’s tension and pedal as fast as you can for 20 seconds. This is called the Sprint phase. After the 20-second sprint phase, lower the tension on the bike and comfortably pedal for 2 minutes.
This is one session of HIIT.
Repeat the above five times, and you are done.
Heart Recovery Tip
After doing your 20-second sprint, lower the tension and wait 60 seconds and check your pulse. You want your elevated pulse to come down between 8-10 beats. This is your heart recovery zone. If your pulse does not come down 8-10 beats for some reason, you should stop and call it a day. For example, after you do your all-out sprint for 20 minutes, your heart rate goes up to 110 beats. After one minute of decreasing the tension and comfortably pedaling, your heart rate should come down to 100-102 beats. That is a good heart recovery.
Although, as I mentioned above, I prefer the stationary bike, this can be applied to walking as well. Simply walking at a comfortable pace for 5 minutes, then do an all-out “brisk” walk for 20 seconds. Walking comfortably for 2 minutes, then repeat five times.
That is all you need to do to maximize this effective form of exercise (HIIT) to lower your blood pressure.
Would you please take five minutes to fill out a health assessment survey and send it to me? I’ll call you for a phone consult and discuss what could be done about your health. It’s complimentary, no strings attached. Either I can help you or point you in the right direction to get help. Don’t give up! You can recover your health if you persist.
A supplier sent me some samples of skin cream yesterday made with CBD oil… CBD in skin cream? I was a little amazed by this, though I know that CBD oil is apparently being sold by everyone for almost everything. After seeing the skin cream, I got a wild idea and looked up—yes!—CBD oil toothpaste! It’s a real thing!
You might think that I’m writing here about being either for or against the CBD oil fad. But to me, the claims for CBD oil isn’t the issue at all. In my experience, CBD oil along with a large part of the $120 Billion sold in supplements every year has created a very evil trap.
This trap can string along anyone with a health problem, wasting their time, money and hope. It can cause huge frustration.
But if you understand this trap, you will also understand some very important concepts about how your body heals. Avoiding this trap can put you on the correct road to long-term health improvement. And if you are a person who researches your health problems and takes supplements to improve them, this information can improve your health, your bank account and free up a lot of your time.
How the Trap Works
Here’s an example of this trap in action: You have a health problem, let’s say it’s sleep. You lie awake at night and have difficulty waking in the morning. So, you Google sleep problems and see that supplements with magnesium, 5 HTP, melatonin and GABA all are supposed to help with sleep. Hey, what have you got to lose? These are natural supplements, not drugs with side effects. You buy the supplements and a week later you get a couple of really great nights of sleep. Happiness! You have solved your problem.
Except that two weeks later you’re back to not sleeping. But you now know from experience that supplements can fix the problem, it’s just a matter of getting the right ones! Back to Google and the on-line supplement stores.
If you have experienced this then you know that the cycle can continue indefinitely. Sometimes your health problem seems to improve, then it gets worse. You can’t ever seem to find the right supplements to fix it permanently, but you get enough encouragement from temporary or partial successes that you keep trying.
Why Supplements Stop Working
Your body is a closed system. It is forced to work with whatever resources it has available and it has no way of notifying you if it’s running short on something.
Often, stresses and damage occur that your body does not have the resources to fully repair. It’s like fires that are burning and can’t be completely put out. In order to keep the fires from spreading, your body has firetrucks parked permanently around them constantly pouring on water. But there are only a fixed number of firetrucks, so if there’s a fire without enough firetrucks available to fully control it, the uncontrolled stress can produce a symptom.
By chance, one of the supplements you try might reduce stress on one of the fires. This allows the body to move some of the firetrucks away from this fire to another one that has been creating a symptom. So, you take a supplement and see that the symptom is improved. From this you conclude that the supplement you took is fixing this symptom, when really there is no connection at all.
After some time, another stress causes the body to reassign the firetrucks that had been controlling the symptom and you are back where you started (less the price of the supplements).
The real error you can make to get stuck in this trap is to try to treat health problems using a supplement as a drug. The entire concept of “take this supplement to help this symptom” is the medical model of treating symptoms, just using supplements instead of drugs.
What Does Work to Resolve Health Problems?
The effective method of solving stubborn health conditions is:
Find out where the body has become stuck or hung up in the healing process, then assist it past this stuck point until it’s healing normally again. If it sticks repeatedly, keep testing and assisting as needed until the body resumes its normal ability to maintain itself.
It helps to understand how health problems develop in the first place.
In our current environment, your body is under considerable stress all the time. There are toxins in the air, water and food. The food supply is highly processed and mostly grown with chemical fertilizers, creating significantly less nutrition than even 50 years ago. Emotional stress is pretty much constant.
Your body was originally designed a long time ago (we are still on version 1.0, there hasn’t even been an update!). This original body design was for a world without most of the toxic and emotional stress we deal with today. So, your body is being constantly damaged on a daily basis just by living in its current environment. This is fine, so long as your body can keep up with the repair and maintenance for the damage being done. But once it gets behind, the backlog of unrepaired damage can start to build up. When your body has too much stress from this damage to successfully hide it from you, you’ll get a symptom. This is the source of most chronic (ongoing or repeating) health problems.
The only real solution to this problem is to help your body recover its ability to heal itself to the point that it can get back on top of its maintenance and repair jobs.
How Do You Assist a Body to Heal?
Here is a free booklet you can read online in 30 minutes that will explain how your body can be assisted to heal itself successfully from many “permanent” medical conditions.
Are You Fed Up with Endless Trial-and-Error and Want Help?
I’d be happy to get you started on improving your health. If you’ll fill out a health assessment on this website, I’ll go over the clues with you on a free phone consult (limited to greater Atlanta area). This way you can get started doing something about your health problems quickly.
How many important life events have you had compromised or just ruined by digestive problems? Because you just hurt too much, you felt too bad or couldn’t stray far from a restroom. These problems are termed “Functional Bowel Disease” or “FBD” in conventional medicine.
What about the mental effects caused by indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, cramping, and the combination of all of these, known as “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” (IBS)? These all cause mental and physical lethargy… so you just don’t feel up for much of anything.
Now I have something staggering to tell you, especially if you’re a woman:
In the US, over 66 MILLION people—one in five—suffer from these problems… and 70% of them are women. That means that 35% of women in the US have these problems. 66 million is greater than the entire population of the United Kingdom. That’s a lot of people.[i]
With a problem this common, it’s not surprising that people frequently seek help from their doctors. Medically, these symptoms are known as Functional Bowel Disease because no physical cause can be found for them. Every year, over $8 BILLION is spent on medical costs for these problems, and FBD is one of the top 10 reasons people see their primary care doctors. Also, patients diagnosed with FBD spend on average 74% more in direct healthcare costs than other people.
But…
There’s no known cause for these problems. Treatment is limited to mostly time-proven remedies to reduce symptoms, which work on a hit-or-miss basis (this is something you’ll agree with wholeheartedly if you suffer from Functional Bowel Disease).
I wasn’t aware of much of this information until I started researching for this blog. In my practice, I see mostly severe patients; people don’t come to me just for Functional Bowel Disease symptoms. However, most of my patients have these symptoms in addition to all their other more severe problems. We handle diarrhea, constipation, abdominal cramping, bloating, reflux, heartburn, stomach upset, nausea, etc. at the beginning of most patient treatment programs. These symptoms are usually gone or mostly handled in a few weeks, no big deal, so I was taken aback by the statistics I’m quoting here.
I’m just amazed that the public is spending 8 billion annually on what are honestly simple, easy-to-handle basic issues. I commented to my office manager that if the 66 million sufferers of Functional Bowel Disease were all given one specific whole-food supplement we use frequently, it would probably solve the symptoms of about half of them.
Symptom Relief is Temporary: How to Solve the Actual Problem?
Most Functional Bowel Disease symptoms can be quickly relieved with basic food supplementation and some diet changes. But these symptoms are just evidence of underlying health problems. With my patients, it’s very common that severe problems began with simple digestive issues:
“At first, I just took Tums every time I had heartburn.
“Then, after a couple of years I had to prop up my bed, because I couldn’t sleep lying down flat anymore.
“Then I had to stop eating after about 6 o’clock.
“Then I was diagnosed with GERD and ulcers of the esophagus.
“Then I was put on a PPI drug (PPI is Proton Pump Inhibitor, a drug that reduces stomach acid).
“Two years later, I started having heart problems, which I’ve found may be related to my body not absorbing minerals because of the PPI drug. This might also be a reason my memory and concentration has become so poor.”
The underlying cause of digestive symptoms can be sex hormone problems (remember that Functional Bowel Disease symptoms mainly occur in women?), allergies, mental stress, thyroid problems, adrenal problems, liver problems… many, many possibilities. This is why conventional medicine only treats the symptoms: it has no training or tools to discover the underlying causes and no effective treatment techniques to apply if it did know a cause.
In almost all cases, a drug can’t cure Functional Bowel Disease problems. These problems are termed “chronic conditions” that can only be managed with (often) lifelong drugs but never cured.
So, I find myself in an odd position of knowing what to do to solve the horrific digestive problems of 66 million people… most of whom think their problems can’t be solved and just keep taking drugs to try and take the edge off.
It’s a strange situation.
[i] All statistics are from the Centers for Disease Control website.
If hormone problems have ever made you ill, you know the madness I’m talking about. If you have ever been sad for so many reasons and for no reason at all, you understand the madness. If you are a young girl or woman troubled by extremely painful periods, missing hours or days of your life in a haze of pain and pain killers, you know the madness. If you have hot flashes and night sweats, feeling heat rising off your body during that meeting at work or waking up soaking wet and having to change your pajamas and sheets, you know about the madness. If you suffer from chronic skin problems and food allergies, or intolerances that cause stomach pain and nausea or other discomforts every time you eat, you know about the madness. If you have ever become very angry at the drop of a hat and screamed at those you love and then later, with much shame and regret, realized it was really a trivial matter, then you too understand this madness. Insomnia, exhaustion, mood changes, constant weight gain, depression, and anxiety are all part of the madness.
The madness is often connected to our hormones. Those little microscopic amounts of substance can give us the time of our lives or make a ruin of them.
Hormone Problems often get Started Early
The beginning of the female cycle in adolescence is for many the start of a life of stress, pain, depression or worse. Over the course of my practice I have seen many women begin their adult lives with hormone problems and other health issues that have never been resolved and have only worsened over time — sometimes for life, often because of the very solutions they have been offered. Most of these early onset conditions, and their underlying concerns, were never diagnosed correctly. These young women have either been offered no solutions or solutions that include the birth control pill to “regulate” their cycle, or anti-depressants to “fix” their moods. Women come to me in their 40s and 50s on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, which they’ve been taking since their teen years. As a result, they have been unable to stop using them because the root cause of their hormonal problems or other health condition was never found.
The young girl who was once miserable with a flooding cycle and horrible cramps is now a nervous, anxious woman in her 30s or 40s, exhausted and stressed, possibly diagnosed with thyroid nodules, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome or other hormonal problems. This woman is likely taking anti-depressants and has often turned to other drugs and chemicals to survive. She may smoke marijuana or drink wine at night to sleep and then drink copious amounts of coffee or take caffeine pills or drink energy drinks to be able to get through her busy schedule.
Or, as one of my patients described it, she had to “Elvis it” to keep going. To her, that meant alcohol at night to sleep and caffeine all day to stay awake. This woman was in graduate school trying to keep pace with her schoolwork and not understanding her exhaustion. She expressed dismay at how her body seemed to betray her when she needed it the most.
Often women in their 30s have young children and are exhausted by work and home responsibilities. These women also know that if they don’t get it all done no one else will. The child rearing phase of life can be challenging, and many of the women I meet do not know there is help available. It is not normal to feel completely wrung dry all the time — this should be the time of your life!
The beginnings of more serious health issues have already taken root by the time you reach your 30s and 40s.
By now you may have struggled for years with nagging health concerns, doing your best to self-medicate or trying to ignore your growing health issues.
By the time they reach their 50s or 60s, many women have had a hysterectomy because of fibroids or continued heavy menstrual flow, leading their doctors to determine that their female parts are no longer useful and should be removed! Women are told they are in menopause now and do not really need these organs anymore, or other such questionable logic. This often leads to synthetic hormone replacement therapy, which carries its own health risks and complications. For some women, this time of life can be fraught with ill health. It is not uncommon for someone to be prescribed two or three blood pressure meds and possibly a statin drug for high cholesterol along with an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drug.
This same woman could be battling pre-diabetes, high blood pressure or a full-blown case of diabetes, with stubborn weight that now won’t ever let go. She is often exhausted, hot flashing, experiencing insomnia and facing even more serious health issues like osteoporosis and heart disease, often because of unbalanced or deficient female hormones.
If You Found Yourself Described Above…
There are answers to hormone problems at every stage of life. These aren’t medical “take a drug” or “remove a body part” solutions. The answers lie in understanding what has caused your body to become unbalanced and unhealthy and in doing the work to help it to recover.
One of the first actions I take with my patients with hormone problems is to have them become informed on their bodies and their conditions. If you have hormone problems, YOU will do most of the work to recover your own health. If you’re doing this blindly, on a “just tell me what to do” basis, you may have limited results.
For this reason, I wrote a book for women who have hormone problems (or want to avoid them!). The book is easy to read, and:
Clarifies all the common medical diagnoses and other information you may have been exposed to but not fully understood.
Shows you how your body is designed in a beautiful way that can give you great joy—rather than the negative image so many women have of their bodies.
Teaches you the most important basics of how to be a woman and stay healthy, or how to recover your health if you need to.
You can pick up an ebook or paperback from Amazon here, or drop by the clinic and I’ll autograph a copy for you.
I have devoted most of my life to researching about and treating women with debilitating hormone problems. If you are suffering from this kind of problem, please contact me and I’ll help you in any way I can to get you back to the healthy, happy, beautiful life you should be experiencing.
How frustrated are you by your own body? Does it have a stubborn health condition like blood pressure, IBS or PMS? Is it overweight? Is there something about your body that drives you nuts, but you’ve almost given up finding out why or if something could be done about it?
I think I can make it clear why you’re frustrated and at least steer you toward some solution.
In a world where engineers can create working quantum computers and keep a manned space station in orbit for over 18 years, scientists are still incredibly frustrated by bodies. The reason for this is that the wrong scientific model is being used by doctors and researchers.
Scientific model: a representation of an idea, an object, a process or a system that is used to describe and explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly.
The Medical Model:
The scientific model used in medicine is the body as a biological machine. In this model, the parts of the body work together to create overall function. Parts that get damaged or wear out from old age need to be repaired or replaced. If a body is ill in some way, it means that the machine is broken and needs to be repaired. Repair is accomplished by changing the chemistry with drugs or changing the structure with surgery.
This model is very effective for injury, acute illness, infections and the like. You can easily determine what health problems work well with this model. It’s the list of health problems where medical doctors get good results.
Where the model does NOT work with is “chronic” (continuing or repeating) health problems. This again is obvious, because medical doctors can do nothing with these other than manage the symptoms with drugs (PMS and hormone imbalances, digestive problems, pain, fatigue, depression, weight, diabetes, blood pressure, etc.).
Chronic problems are accurately represented by an entirely different scientific model. This is overlooked by the medical community, probably because only their old model works with pharmaceuticals— which is what their business model is based on.
The Chronic Model:
This could also be called “The accurate model” as it comes closest to how the body really works.
In this model, the body is seen as an organization of over 37 trillion cells, each one independently alive. These cells live an average of about three months, and our bodies replace about two million cells per second. Looking at your face in a mirror? How old is that face? How about three months!
Our environment is very stressful to a body. You don’t realize how many toxins are in the air and water, how much stress we’re all dealing with, how bad the food can be, the effect of drugs, and on and on. You don’t realize this because bodies are designed to hide stress and symptoms as much as possible. Your body is being damaged almost continuously; you just aren’t aware of this.
Your body is at its core really a mechanic. It is constantly repairing and rebuilding itself. If your body can keep up with the repair and rebuild work, you stay healthy. If it can’t, or if some damage to its “mechanicing ability” happens, then you will develop a chronic health condition.
If science turned its attention to how to use this model to help bodies restore their own healing ability, we wouldn’t be living in a society where over half the population has a chronic health condition— and maybe you wouldn’t have PMS. If science and government publicized the toxins and foods that cause so much misery, these things would change to everyone’s benefit.
Don’t hold your breath, however.
What you can do:
If you have a chronic health problem, it can be very helpful to recognize some facts:
There is no medical “cure” or solution for your problem available from conventional health care. If it’s advisable to control your symptoms (blood pressure, diabetes, etc.) then you should take advantage of the excellent medical technology for this. Just understand that there is no final solution coming from this area.
The solution to your problem comes from your own body regaining its ability to heal. The only doctor expert enough to make this happen is… your own body. No one else, no matter how well educated, has the slightest idea what needs to be done in your specific case. If you need help, you should look for like-minded practitioners who have expertise in testing the nervous system and using functional labs.
In some cases, reducing overall stress can give your body enough additional resources to recover. Try it! Stop eating sugar, junk food and refined carbs. Eat regularly, don’t skip meals. Stop eating milk and cream. Quit alcohol and/or recreational drugs of all kinds. Get active several times each day. Make yourself get enough sleep. Avoid stressful people as much as possible.
Supplements without testing are so hit and miss that it’s hard to even make recommendations. Stick with basic digestive enzymes and probiotics.
If you have a serious condition, my experience is that DIY has little to no chance of success. You will need to find an expert in helping bodies to heal their own conditions.
Successfully recovering from a chronic health problem such as PMS in our current society isn’t easy or simple. But if you understand what I’ve told you in this post it IS POSSIBLE. You just must start by understanding the bankrupt nature of medicine regarding chronic problems and realize you must look elsewhere for help.
Find out more
Here is a webpage with a short summary of what I do.
Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information).
Here is a link to a book I wrote about women’s hormones in every stage of their lives (on Amazon)
Here is a link to a book I wrote about my treatment technique (on Amazon)
Here is a link to a book my office manager wrote on staying healthy long-term (on Amazon)
Here is a link to a free online health survey that you can submit for a phone consultation on your health
Here is a link to request a new patient appointment
If you have a health problem with no solution other than to manage the symptoms, I can recommend that you stop accepting this and start researching a real solution. In many, many cases there will be a way back to health for you.
I wish you the best of luck, and offer you any help or advice I can.
