Alternative Cures

Looking after your heart may seem a pretty obvious thing to do, except when you realise the sheer numbers of people who do not! My last post Alternative Cures for Acne, I looked at acne and natural cures versus standard medical treatments. In this, I’m going to have a go at taking on the health of the heart.

Your heart is something you need to keep healthy, or the alternative is a shortened, weakened and possibly miserable life. That’s a truth millions of people in the western world don’t want to hear. They’ll go right on smoking, eating junk food, drinking excess alcohol and fizzy soda drinks and (in frighteningly increasing numbers) taking recreational drugs without wanting to hear anyone tell them that they are damaging their hearts, let alone other internal organs.

So this post may fall mainly on deaf ears (or blind eyes, whichever way you take it), but nevertheless, I’m going to have my say and if just one person who reads this changes their ways and gives their heart a chance, then it was worth writing.

Ok, that’s the minor rant part out of the way. Now for the common sense talk.

Heart disease is the biggest killer in the UK and probably the US as well. It kills more people than lung cancer from smoking, more people than even breast cancer. It kills more people than are killed on the roads. If you want statistics, go look them up for yourself - suffice it to know that heart diesease is the biggest killer of modern times in the west.

So why is that do you suppose? Why is heart disease not such a big problem in say Japan, or in Africa? In fact, my sweeping statement about the West is not entirely accurate. In Mediterranean countries like Spain where I live, Italy, the South of France, Greece, the Baltic states etc do not have such a high rate of heart disease as do the UK and United States. That despite the fact that more people smoke in France and Spain per head of population than do in the UK and USA. There are plenty of obese people in Spain yet so many of them live well into their 80s and 90s. Why is this?

In a word, diet.

“You are what you eat” is a very accurate saying. For it is only in countries like the US and UK that the diet is relatively poor and lacking in fresh fruits, vegetables, fish and olive oil although higher in food fried in vegetable oils, snacks and fast food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, pizzas and ready-made meals that are not only laden with trans fats and too much salt, they also contain preservatives, artificial colourants, artificial sweeteners and monosodium glutamate in far too high quantities, despite what government guidelines say to the contrary.

Believe it or not as you wish, it’s not my call.

What I have noticed here in Spain that the general diet is more oriented towards salads, fish, fresh fruit and olive oil, although more heart disease is beginning to appear in the younger generations as the fast food monster gets a foothold here and attracts young people. The older generations tend to shun fast food joints (restaurants is too good a word for them) and stick to their traditional diets, which is why they live longer despite most people not having access to medical assistance as they do in the UK. Here in Spain, as in the USA you have to pay or have insurance, both of which are expensive.

What is not helping is the escalation in the use of a cocktail of pesticides and other chemicals on tehcrops we eat. I fear this is having effects in other areas of health, but the knock on effect must be bad for the heart as well.

So what do you do when heart disease takes hold and your health takes a dive?

Well, by this time of course its too late to lament on the excesses of your past. Its time to realise that you have no real choice other than to turn to standard medical assistance where your options are limited to drugs or surgery. Well one form of heart surgery that is open to you when your problem comes from the mitral valve is a special form of mitral valve surgery that incorporates using ultra-modern and recently sucessfully implemented mitral valve repair. This form of surgery has greater long term benefits for patients that undergo this treatment rather than the traditional method of
mitral valve replacement. Failing that, there are other types of heart surgery open to you depending upon your specialist’s prognisis.

All that may sound scary… and it is. Remember, this article is aimed at heart disease that is for want of a better term, self inflicted. Should your problem exist through genetic disorder or unrelated health problem, I’m not ranting and raving about self abuse to you. Only to those that were given a healthy heart to begin with and have spent their lives systematically mistreating it.

To have progressed to the stage where you need surgery to treat a diseased heart means your body has taken a lot of abuse and either it happened because of pure ignorance of the consequences of your actions or of burying you rhead in the sand and ignoring the advice that has been given for many decades.

The moral of this story? If you have not got heart disease, then whatever harm you’ve done to your body up to this point can be halted and reversed by changing your lifestyle and bettering your diet and taking regular exercise. Its not too late.

Ditch the burgers, hot dogs, pizzas, fizzy drinks, cigarettes and excess alcohol. Take some mild exercise and build it up while adding fresh fruit and vegetables to your diet along with more fish. Use olive oil to drizzle over salads instead of vegetable oil to fry bacon etc, its better for your heart!

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

Moving on from my last post When Alternative Cures Meet Traditional Medicine, I want to look at a problem that certainly affected me in my teenage years along with the vast majority of my friends. Acne!

Acne is generally a teenager thing although it can keep going well into a person’s twenties as it did me and beyond. There often seems no rhyme or reason for its appearance or severity, although there are certainly some triggers that are known about that can be avoided.

During the growth spurt that we all suffer once we reach puberty, our hormones are all over the place which often contributes to many problems, behavioural and otherwise during that time. The hormone imbalance is often one of the main culprits for the appearance of acne, but this is not the only one.

Diet plays an important role in determining how severely we are affected by acne and teenagers are prone to eat more junk food, sweets, chocolates, cakes, biscuits etc and drink sweet fizzy drinks than at any other time in their lives.

I was no different, being quite happy to devour a juicy hamburger or two with fries, washed down with a large Coke and then rounded off with a chocolate bar or three. Then I wondeed why, the next day my face broke out in spots!

Well, I know a lot of teenagers do try to keep an eye on their diets but a lot do not and go looking for treatments to cure a problem that is generally although not always entirely self induced!

Well, in certain cases there are bad attacks of acne that do not follow the general rule of eating badly and filling the body full of toxins. While personal hygene also plays a part, most teenagers tend to scrub their faces several times a day in a vain attempt to ward off the next outbteak of those dastardly red spots and blotches, and worse, the puss-filled yellow-heads that they morph into. Yuk!

So what is the cure for acne?

Well, that is a big question and one that there are many answers to. Far more than can be handled in this article no matter how lengthy it might turn out to be. That’s not to say there aren’t some good pieces of advice that can be handed out here - there are and I’ll do my best to let you know what I know so that at least will give you something more to go with than just a few wives tales and doctor’s prescriptions of God-only-knows-what potions, applications and creams that are popularly doled out by the bucketload.

Not surprisingly, I will take an alternative cures approach to dealing with any ailment, no matter what it is. That’s because I firmly believe that the body is a marvellous piece of engineering that is designed to heal itself. As long as everything is working in harmony with everything else, then you should not get sick or suffer any malady.

It is when something is thrown out of kilter that we get sick or contract things like skin disorders including acne at any time in our lives. Often it is a case of finding out what has gone off track in our bodies, or whether there are any stresses that could be causing us to misalign with the resulting imbalance allowing problems to manifest.

Just so as to give you a balanced outlook and to provide at least an alternative viewpoint, there is a useful Acne website that has plenty of ideas and products for treating this problem. Murad Acne is a product that is believed to be effective in treating acne which incorporates the Murad Acne Complex to work its magic. Whether you think this might be worth your while at least looking at, then any one of these links in this paragraph will take you to the Acne Complex website so you can get another opinion on this and it’s worth taking a look at if you want to go down the propriety treatment road.

On a more natural and common sense note, there are of course several things you can do to help yourself to minimise the effects or possibilities of any further serious attacks of acne.

Watch your diet and be ruthless!

Avoid fast food, junk food, potato chips and other salted snacks, greasy fried food, cakes, biscuits, chocolate and candy. If you can’t avoid eating these things, then at least cut them down to the barest minimum and tell yourself that you don’t really need any of them! If you’re ever tempted to grab a can of Coke or any other fizzy soda drink for that matter, remember that Coke is one of the best things to use to clean rust off chrome and that US highway patrol police carry a couple gallons of the stuff in the trunk to wash the blood off the road surface after an accident!

Now what is that liquid crap doing to your insides?

Oh, by the way, don’t think that you can cheat and drink so-called diet fizzy drinks just because they may not contain any sugar. They still have all the other nasty ingredients plus the potentially cancer causing aspartame and saccharine and sometimes sorbitol artificial sweeteners lurking up their cylindrical metallic sleeves! If you think you are immune to the effects of these chemicals, well you might be now, but in a few years time the cumulative effects of ingesting these chemicals could prove to be disasterous. And if you don’t believe me, just lietsn to what your own country’s politicians say about these chemicals. Of course they endorse them and tell you they are safe.

When did you ever meet a politician that actually told the truth?

Ok, so if you think you’re going to weaken and still eat or drink any of that stuff, then you can ask yourself, “How bad to I NOT want a face full of spots?”

If you still want to indulge, then you get what you ask for!

Naturally, keeping your face as clean and grease free as possible is good horse sense, as is avoiding using any harsh make-up or products on your face. Stick to mild, pH neutral products that are designed for combination or sensitive skin.

After all this advice, if you feel that you still need something more, there is an excellent book that you can download called: Acne No More. If you follow that link you’ll go to my resource page where you’ll find a short review of that book and a link to the author’s website where you can obtain some more information.

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

Moving swiftly on from my last instalment Running to Fitness, where I ended up preferring the more leisurly pace of a walk to a frenetic and thoroughly uncomfortable rush of a run, I think it might be a good place to mention the important role traditional medicine plays in our lives as an adjunct to and not a replacement for alternative medicine and therapies.

It almost seems ludicrous to call modern medicne “traditional” as it is anything but. The fact of the matter is that what we now call “alternative medicine” or “alternative cures” or “alternative therapy” are the real traditional medicines as they came long before modern medicine was born.

The ancient Chinese probably go back the farthest in mankind’s history as practitioners of herbal remedies and mental therapies. These are probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to knowing for sure exactly what they used in order to “cure” the ailments afflicting the members of their villages.

The use of certain herbs to allay the symptoms of a variety of illnesses is well documented in English and European history. As for mental therapies such as meditation and the use of the will to power, these date back to biblical times. The ancient Babylonians used more than military might to become one of the richest nations that probably ever existed. But that is maybe the topic for another time or even another place, as it borders on the uses of mental abilities that are considered more in keeping with the revelations to be found in The Secret than in the realms of alternative therapy and alternative cures.

So lets come back to the present and where alternative meets traditional medicine and cures.

We know full well that many alternative cures are just as effective if not more so than their modern medical equivalents for certain ailments, although modern medicine should never be completely overlooked when seeking a cure for any illness or physical ailment. Often a life-threatening condition can be successfully dealt with via surgery where an alternative treatment may fail.

So what often tends to happen is that people will turn to alternative medicine when the established medical profession has no answers, or cannot cure a certain problem using drugs or surgery.

So now lets look at that statement in more depth. It seems clear that just about the entire established medical profession is based around the use of either of these two items. Drugs or surgery. You go to see your doctor about this or that compalint and he either writes you a prescription to take to your local pharmacy for this or that drug or drugs, or you are sent to a specialist who will investigate your problem more closely and either recommend more drugs (another trip to the pharmacy) or surgery. When you think about it, from your local GP’s perspective there isn’t really much more to it apart from knowing which drugs to prescribe for what illness or condition or whether your problem should be escalated to a specialist. GPs of course will know when drugs are not necessary and a change in lifestyle may bring about a swifter relief from the problem, or perhaps a regime of exercise and diet. There is of course pregnancy and childbirth to consider, but other than the things I’ve already mentioned, there is not much else you’d go to see your docior about.

So what about therapy?

Well, the medical profession does include some forms of therapy, which broadly fall under the realms of psychiatry and psychology. Let’s discount psychiatry straight away as it is a form of therapy that includes the necessity of taking certain drugs to bring about change. Yes, another trip to the pharmacy! Psychology is a very broad science and there are several branches that do go some way to bringing relief from certain ailments that the use of drugs and/or surgery cannot. There are also problems with this in that despite what many emminent psychologists may tell you to the contrary, the workings of the mind are still a very long way from being understood fully by mankind. In other words, when you go to see a phsychologist (or a psychiatrist for that matter), the chances are they are going to use therapies on you that are still experimental because nobody has all the answers!

It doesn’t help to know that of all the professions, the one with the highest incident rate of suicides is amongst psychiatrists!

Just remember that next time you contemplate going to see a “shrink” to sort out a problem that would most likely be better remedied by having a “coffee morning” with your closest friends and just spilling your guts and getting it all off your chest to those who would be sympatheitic to you. Better that than to face a complete stranger who not only has the power to prescribe powerful drugs but can also get you sanctioned and carted of to the funny farm if he has a mind to.

Mmm… and they call it the caring profession.

Ok, I’m being more than a little harsh on a profession that may not deserve it (entirely), but getting back to the point, the modern evolution of medicine and the medical profession is basically driven by the drugs industry where most of its cures are derived, or the surgeon’s knife.

Alternative therapies, alternative cures and remedies are less involved with using external substances to provide the results and more oriented on the patient having a majority holding in their own healing. It uses the person’s power of thought and positive thinking to bring the body back into harmony with itself so that it can get on and do what it was designed to do - and that is to heal itself.

Certain herbs can assist in that healing as can a change in diet to include certain foods which are known to provide the right nutrients and antioxidants to help the body to fight off the infection, or cause of the illness, but the bottom line is in helping the body to use its own defences to heal itself.

To this effect, the acupuncturist uses the stimulus of tiny needles to redirect the body’s own energy flow back to one of health. The reflexologist uses similar stimulus on points on the soles of the feet and hands to bring the body back into harmony with itself. The many other simiar alternative therapies use varying techniques to bring about what is in essence the same result - harmonising the body so that it can heal itsef. Even hypnotherapy uses the subconscious part of the mind directly to bring about the necessary change in the body’s own energy flow even though it is thought of in a different way, it is the same.

Some drugs of course can directly attack the infection, such as antibiotics to bring about a cure. But we can see that drugs generally only mask the problem by dealing with the symptoms of the disease and bringing about a temporary relief. Surgery cuts out the offending or diseased tissue or resets the broken bones so they can heal.

By working with the body, alternative cures and therapies have a more natural approach to healing.

But when modern medicine and alternative cures are combined in the treatment of a disease or ailment, then the healing process gets a double dose of power and as long as one does not get in the way of the other, the healing can be much more effective and successful.

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

Following on from my last post Dew Face Wash, which seems to have been left behind a bit thanks to my other writing assignments (which pay my bills) keeping me away from my blogs, I’m going to wade into the fitness arena with a post on the merits of running.

Ok, I can hear those of my generation cringing in horror at the very thought! “What, you mean that thing we used to do when we were young?” I can hear you thinking to yourselves!

Well, yes! Running is something that as we get older we sort of forget how to do! Well, not everybody of course. There are plenty of over 40s and over 50s who run regularly and are very fit and healthy because of it. It becomes a bit of a pyramid though, as age increases, the number of people who run regularly decreases. That’s normal, as people become less active, especially as debilitating diseases such as arthritis are affecting more and more people these days. I won’t go into the reasons why that is – oh, I know you’d probably love me to go off on a tangent here and rant and rave about how the overuse of modern pesticides on our food is one major link in that rather nasty chain… but I’ll save that for a rant in my organic blog that hasn’t seen much writing lately, either!

So back the running part. Do I need to tell you that going for a run three or four times a week is actually a good thing to do as you get older? Probably not, but I will anyway. As I sit here in my chair typing this it sort of brings it home that it is especially more pertinent for those of us who lead far too inactive lifestyles that we should be doing more exercise not just to burn off the excess calories, but to remind our aging muscles what they are there for!

So it’s with a modicum of trepidation that I slip into shorts, tee shirt and trainer and make off for a short burst along the coastline where I live. Ok, I stress the word short! When you haven’t done anything like running for longer than you can remember and your memory is getting shorter than your breath with every stride, it pays to take it easy and build up to anything approaching seriousness. It also helps to have some music playing on your running headphones just to help pass the (very short) time before you collapse in a heap after a couple of hundred metres with your chest wondering what the hell its supposed to be doing with all the expanding and contracting and your heart trying to pound its way out of your chest cavity.

Ok, it wasn’t that bad, but its perhaps something I don’t feel in any hurry to repeat, running headphones or not.

In fact it resurrects a memory (told you it was getting shorter and definitely hazier) of when Janice and I used to walk along the beach in the evenings with the dogs a couple of summers ago and there was this oldish looking guy, probably around the 60 mark which I know isn’t all that old but he looked like he had one foot in the grave… well he used to run past us every evening, kitted out with designer running kit, MP3 player and running headphones, the whole nine yards and he looked like he was about ready to drop dead with every laboured step he stumbled over. Yet there he was, every evening doing the same thing. We often remarked upon his resemblance to a stumbling, half running half staggering zombie.

The memory only returned as this summer he is prominent by his absence.

Mmm. Maybe I won’t follow his particular footsteps and instead stick to merely walking the dogs. The exercise is still good, far more enjoyable and the chances of seeing many more summers rather better than following the footsteps of that old guy…

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures