cancer Archives - Hormones Matter

The Speed of Time in Health and Disease

Published on October 3, 2022

4961 views

My father was an economist who came up with a formula for pricing derivatives called the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. He was interested in finance, but his background was physics, and his 1964 Harvard PhD thesis was about artificial intelligence. He instilled in me and my three younger sisters an abiding curiosity about the world, and a willingness to look at things in fresh ways. If I could describe him in two words, they’d be gentle irreverence.

Black-Scholes builds upon the work of others, including Louis de Broglie’s pilot-wave models, the idea of quantum equilibrium, and Brownian motion. De Broglie believed that all matter has wave properties. I am matter. Might I have wave properties, too?

In 2014, while living in a lake house in Dutchess County, New York that had a hidden mold problem, I developed a lot of issues with my health, but doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I tried to figure out what was wrong myself, and in this essay, I will share some of what I learned with you.

Oxalate, Time, and Viral Infections

Oxalate is a crystal found in plants capable of photosynthesis. High-oxalate foods include rhubarb, tea, beets, and spinach. It can also be produced endogenously (internally). Both my parents were kidney-stone formers—most kidney stones are calcium-oxalate—and when I was sick, I seemed to do well with a low-oxalate diet.

I noticed it was when I most struggled with oxalate issues (joint inflammation, fatigue, crystals in my urine, pain at the site of old injuries) that I was most likely to experience the reactivation of old viruses. I had mononucleosis in my fourth year of college, and the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) at times reactivates in me. Viral reactivation also occurs during spaceflight. Astronauts experience time differently than we do. Could the reason their viruses are re-activating have something to do with time?

Oxalate and time — Oxalate Crystal. Image: Facebook, Trying Low Oxalates

What is time? We don’t really have a solid answer at the moment, but it is a rich area of interest and research. Some physics equations that we use to describe the universe work best if we leave time out. But, intuitively—especially since we experience time on a daily basis—leaving it out of the equation does not feel quite right.

What if it is not that time is being left out so much as that it is being compensated for? When time speeds up—light slows down. When time slows down—light speeds up. When time is too fast or too slow, light has to be too slow or too fast, respectively. When light is too slow or too fast, it is not able to appear as itself. Instead of light qua light—light as light—it will appear as … oxalate crystal?

When the Cycle Spins Backwards

Thiamine has been studied extensively by Drs. Derrick Lonsdale and Chandler Marrs, whose book, Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition, explores how thiamine deficiency alters the functioning of the brainstem and autonomic nervous system by way of metabolic changes at the level of the mitochondria.

I suffered from fatigue, gastrointestinal dysfunction, joint pain, and cognitive loss. The first time I tried high-dose thiamine (vitamin B1), I had a profound recovery. My body tightened, my pain vanished, and I felt clear-headed, strong, and happy.

But, after a few weeks, I hit a wall. Thiamine lost its potency, and I stopped.

A few months later, when I tried high-dose thiamine again, I experienced something odd: a slow-motion grinding in my gut that took my breath away. For lack of a better phrase, it felt as if time were slowing down for me.

Thiamine powers the Krebs (energy) cycle. When I took it the second time around, it felt as if I had eclipsed some limit, and was powering Krebs in reverse. Instead of using my energy cycle to make energy, I was using it to make matter.

The Speed of Reality

What is the nature of reality? I was raised Catholic, and continue to love my Catholic faith. I’m inclined to respect the old sayings, such as we are the light of the world. I respect the old ideas—while also probing and questioning them.

The holographic principle was first proposed by Nobel laureate Gerard ‘t Hooft in the 1990s. In 2017, a UK, Canadian, and Italian study provided substantial evidence that the universe is, indeed, holographic. But what would that mean? I know myself—and the world—as matter, not light.

What if light functions like a plasma? A plasma is something that possesses a dual character, such as a gel. In some ways, gels behave like a liquid; in other ways, like a solid. We see a similar indeterminate quality in stem cells. A plasma’s relationship with time is that of an open gate: not limited to one direction. Neither chicken nor egg, it is a kind of chickenegg.

Perhaps light functions similarly. It can display characteristics of matter, or characteristics of energy. When time (the background fabric) is slow, light can acquire speed, like matter. When time (the background fabric) is fast, light can acquire density, like energy. At the speed of light, the perception of the background fabric flips, from “slow,” to “fast.”

[O]ur observable universe is at the threshold of expanding faster than the speed of light. ―physicist Lawrence M. Krauss

Er, “background fabric,” you say? What in the name of Michelson-Morley is that? We treat the background against which our observations are made as a vacuum—zero.

That is right. We do. I am suggesting that we may be mistaken. I am suggesting that the background here—the Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB—is not a vacuum, but matter and energy, trading places.

And that matter and energy, trading places, is light.

Like Eugene Wigner, who famously noted the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in describing the natural world in 1960, I am fascinated by suspiciously ubiquitous symmetry. Moon’s size: 27.27% of earth’s size. Moon’s orbital period: 27.27 days. The sun is 400 times larger than the moon—and also 400 times farther away. Hmm. Kind of makes you scratch your head a little, doesn’t it?

The black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, has the largest angular size in the sky, followed by M87. M87’s black hole is 1000 times bigger, but roughly 1000 times farther away. —Feryal Özel, Harvard University Black Hole Initiative

In the spirit of Plato and René Descartes in the old age, and Nick Bostrom and Donald Hoffman in the new one, this essay asks a fundamental question: Is what we perceive an image that’s being rendered? Perhaps reality is not static, like a painting; but it has speed, like a movie.

Does it have a “correct” speed? Yes and no. It has a correct speed, but the correct speed can be achieved in different ways. It can be achieved via (for example) the color green—or via yellow + blue.

We have assumed that time is like a river whose speed we are strapped to. What if it is more like a current in which we can swim backward or forward—or tread in place? Altering the pH of my brain (e.g. with a micro dose of “acid,” LSD) seems to affect how long I am able to remain in each discrete moment of time. The more acidic, the longer—up to a point.

In other words, if we think of time as being comprised of discrete units—the way an image is pixelated, the way a movie is comprised of frames—my speed need not match time’s speed, but if it veers too far afield, I can run into problems.

Homeostasis Against the Speed of Time

I am like a glass of water, pH7. I maintain homeostasis—balance. When I perceive a background force that is expanding (high manganese?), I contract, becoming more salty. But would we perceive too much salt in the glass if the fabric against which the glass was rendered were expanding?

When I perceive a background force that’s contracting (high iron?), I expand, becoming less salty. But would we perceive too little salt in the glass if the fabric against which the glass was rendered were condensing?

Here is how time seems to operate, in me.

To one side of the baseline, time is slower (dopamine). To the other side, time is faster (serotonin).

I can slow time down, using dopamine, up to a point. But if I start to have too much dopamine, I will compensate, by hyper-methylating.

I can speed time up, using serotonin, up to a point. But if I start to have too much serotonin, I will compensate, by hypo-methylating.

This creates problems with perception. For one thing, the feeling of hypo-methylating can mimic the feeling of dopamine. Is time slow—or am *I* slow? Similarly, the feeling of hyper-methylating can mimic the feeling of serotonin. Is time fast—or am *I* fast?

What if, in Parkinson’s disease, my metronome needle is stuck all the way to the time’s left (Alpha-shifted)? I am both dopamine-toxic—and hyper-methylating.

What if, in Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), my metronome needle is stuck all the way to time’s right (Omega-shifted)? I am both serotonin-toxic—and hypo-methylating.

In both instances, I am trapped. If I am too fast (hyper-methylating), how can I slow down if the background is too slow? But if I am too fast, the background will look too slow. If I am too slow (hypo-methylating), how can I speed up if the background is too fast? But if I’m too slow, the background will look too fast.

With two parallel trains, it is difficult to judge speed in a meaningful way. Am I slow—or is the train beside me accelerating? Am I fast—or is the train beside me decelerating?

Of Tumors and Time

I am interested in looking at the cosmos as a whole, where what we perceive (a tumor, a planet) is not fundamentally separate from its environment. This is not balls of matter in a sea of air. It is light within a speed-of-light boundary (black hole?) that is both achieving the speed of light (“sun”) and precipitating out of solution (“moon”) simultaneously. The speed of light is the 2D tipping point about which time changes directions, from acceleration to deceleration.

The perception of the speed-of-light “speed limit” depends upon an observer, and varies.

The speed of light can function like a lens. When the image becomes too dense, to one side of the lens, it becomes too expanded, on the other.

With cancer, I am deranged on both sides of time—both sides of the speed of light lens. To one side, I am too salty, too bitter. To the other, I am not salty enough. Instead of the flower, I become the fruit and the seed.

Like the speed of time, the speed of light is not necessarily a simple number (“green”); it can be a compound number (“blue + yellow”). Light has a “net” speed that I am helping to create with my own speed.

Those brown sun-spots on my shoulder? It may look as if their metronome is keeping pace with the rest of me, but what if it’s a trick of the eye? I suspect they are both denser and wider than time. They require both more magnetism (iron)—and more electricity (copper). They present as “green.” But could they be “blue and yellow, superimposed,” behind the scenes?

Once my lens curves too little or too much, I am no longer “flat” (relatively speaking); I start to have more depth than my environment. Instead of space, I start to acquire time—a new axis that is perpendicular to space the way a quasar is perpendicular to a galaxy.

What if, when I insert a new lens—a fresh perspective, “new light,” a stem cell—into an old environment, I run the risk of re-setting the metronome, and creating a new definition of so-called flatness—speed zero? Perhaps new light creates a new 2D plane from which light can expand and condense (energy)—or condense and expand (matter). It creates a “fresh green,” if you will, from which can be derived “fresh blue” and “fresh yellow.” New light is capable of operating at a different time signature—a different scale.

What does the basal cell carcinoma on my shoulder look like? A sinkpit. A small vortex. An actual indentation, like a tiny tornado. You can almost see light spinning so fast that it’s spinning backward—imploding, precipitating out of solution (rocky planets). If I use radiation or hypo-methylating agents to slow time down, I might swing too far to the other side, where light is spinning so slowly, it burns up (gas giants). Ideally, I want to be in the middle. I don’t want my metronome to be eclipsing the speed of light, to the right of time, and dipping beneath the speed of light, to the left of time, faster than the rest of my body, the rest of the universe. I want to be oscillating at the speed of light, along with the rest of the rendered world.

The Speed of Light Squared

Perhaps, in a holographic universe, the speed limit for a single universe is not the speed of light, but the speed of light squared. When we reach the speed of light squared, a new observer is created.

In this video clip, called “Microscope Imaging Station Cancer Cells behaving badly,” I believe we are witnessing cancer cells as they achieve the speed of light squared (“round up”) and become refractile. When we “round up,” we make duplicate copies of the same information (e.g. DNA). When we round up by a factor of two during embryogenesis, we produce twins. When we round up by a factor of three, we produce triplets.

We don’t create the new inside a vacuum. We make the new inside—or outside—the old.

I am interested in physicist Nikodem Poplawski’s theory that our universe is the interior of a black hole inside another universe. In fact, I wonder if we could be inside a black hole inside a black hole inside a black hole—etc.—where “black hole” is the 2D boundary known as the speed of light. Moving outward from brane to brane, scale increases. Moving inward from brane to brane, scale decreases.

A holographic universe is one in which light can serve as background or foreground, canvas or painting—or canvas and painting. As lovely as this is—are we the light of the world, for reals?—it presents difficulties with perception. How can I know what type of light I am seeing? Is what I perceive light itself, the genuine article—or light playing the role of light? Or light playing the role of light playing the role of light playing the role of light?

How many iterations of light are in an E8 crystal?

Is the speed of light functioning as a boundary we can’t see beyond? And—perhaps more importantly—is there a degree of remove above or below which light is no longer light but something else entirely—matter or energy?

The Imprecision of Time

We don’t seem to have a solid grip on time. We need leap years—even leap seconds—to make our calendars work. But there is a “cosmological constant” when it comes to time. Was there a total solar eclipse on a certain date? Add or subtract 27,729 days, and see if there was also a total solar eclipse on that date (spoiler alert: there was).

eclipse to eclipse

27,729 days is ~76 years, about the length of a human life. It’s also roughly 70 times 360 plus 7 times 360 days. Could it be the number of days between branes of time—the distance above or below which light undergoes a state change?

I don’t know. But here’s something interesting. The Tunguska Event took place on June 30, 1908. The largest explosion the world has ever seen, it flattened 80 million trees. No one knows what caused it. But if you add 27,729 days to the date of Tunguska, you get another date—May 31, 1984. What happened on this date?: US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site.

Are we living inside a singularity? Beats me; I’m a short story writer. I barely understand what a singularity is. But I do know this. I was sixteen years old in 1986. When I was a teenager, I used to love Mary Chapin Carpenter, especially a song called When Halley Came to Jackson.

“It came from the east just as bright as a torch

She saw it in the sky from her daddy’s porch

As heavenly sent as it was back then”

Funny. Halley’s Comet “comes around” every ~76 years, almost like a nuclear reaction slicing backward through the branes of time. Almost like … Chernobyl.

Haley's Comet — On the Left: Haley’s Comet 1910, image Wikimedia Commons. On the right, Haley’s Comet 1986, image by Bob King.

What if, because of the act of rendering, light can exhibit characteristics of paradox? When it eclipses the speed of light, precipitating out of solution, it’s “too cold because it’s too fast.” When it dips beneath the speed of light, burning up, it’s “too hot because it’s too slow.”

Might this type of paradox—of metabolic cul-de-sac—have bearing on human illness? If I’m “too cold because I’m too fast,” how can I slow down? I’m already too cold! If I’m “too hot because I’m too slow,” how can I speed up? I’m already too hot! Time is a veil, and I am trapped to one side.

In these models, matter, light, and energy exist on a continuum. A spectrum. Matter or energy may behave as light, in locus light, as long as allowances are made. When light is denser than light (i.e. energy), it’s too hot, but it’s able to be too hot if time is too slow (Autism?). When light is faster than light (i.e. matter), it’s too cold, but it’s able to be too cold if time is too fast (ME/CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?).

So what’s the answer? I don’t know. I’m sorry; I wish I did. I’m better at asking questions than answering them. My hope is that others who understand biology, chemistry, and physics far better than I will join the conversation, and help us to decode our illnesses.

But I do know this. When I was at my sickest, my pineal gland and my eyes did not seem to be in agreement about the character of light they were observing. Was it going fast, like matter that has speed, in a 3D image where there’s foreground and background (blue + yellow)? Or was it innately fast (green), a 2D “mono” image, where the subject itself is high-energy? The pineal gland, a tiny crystal at the center of the brain, was dubbed “the seat of the soul” by René Descartes. It sets the circadian rhythm, communicates with the HPA axis, and is the font of the neuroendocrine cascade. If hormones matter, the pineal gland matters.

The lack of an objective, outside observer is a serious constraint. How can I gauge time if the instrument I am reading time with is part of time? I have to both read time (pH) and move around in it (core metabolic rate) using the same instrument: my brain.

A Metabolic Straitjacket

After my chronic fatigue had persisted for a while, I began to realize I was wearing a metabolic straitjacket. Whatever I ate or drank was not merely providing nutrients for my body; it was providing information for my brain. This “double duty” was a huge handicap. Sodium gave me the power to increase my metabolic rate—but not the permission. Potassium gave me the permission to increase my metabolic rate—but not the power. When I would attempt a metabolic increase in spite of an acidic terrain, I would get gout-like pain. This happened a month or two before my cancer.

My basal cell carcinoma is analogous to a local high-pressure system. A planet forming in the sea of me. The cells in my shoulder are “hoarding” my time, if you will. They are stealing my electricity and my magnetism—my copper and my iron. They’ll hoard my electrolytes, too. What can I do, other than try to have them removed? If I use vasodilating agents, like raw garlic extract or niacinamide, unless I inject them, my brain reads them and responds to them, too. It does not fix the asynchrony. If I use radiation or hypo-methylating agents, to slow down time, that might work for a while, but there is a tipping point—the speed of light—above which, to slow down is actually to speed up, and these cells reach that threshold sooner than the rest of me.

It’s not that they can’t dance. They’re just dancing to a different beat.

The best thing I ever did for my health was to eliminate all glyphosate, i.e. switch to a 100% organic diet. Glyphosate (“Roundup”) was giving my brain false information about light and time. Cosmetics, underwear, mattress, etc. I will not even chew a stick of gum if it isn’t organic. Nothing makes me sicker quicker than chemical fragrance in products such as Glade plug-ins, Bounce, Downy, Tide, etc. I use organic products that treat the universe as one coherent network, a communicating whole—a garden. Because it is.

Many Worlds

I am a fan of physicist Sean Carroll and his defense of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed by Hugh Everett in 1957. According to Many Worlds, the universe continually splits into new branches, to produce multiple versions of ourselves. Carroll thinks that, so far, Many Worlds is the simplest possible explanation of quantum mechanics.

Many Worlds may seem exotic at first, but it possesses a simple power, especially if we treat the speed of light as a lens. When viewed from beneath the speed of light lens, light will appear to be branching into many worlds. When viewed from above the speed of light lens, light will appear to be condensing into one. At the speed of light, light is light.

If my brain misunderstands the degree of curvature of the speed of light lens, and the way the speeds of light and time titrate, it can become metabolically trapped. In Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I may be trapped above the speed of light. Many worlds are branching faster than I am able to move through them. In Autism, I may be trapped beneath the speed of light. Many worlds are condensing faster than I am able to move through them. In Autism, it is as if I am trapped in the future. In Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, it is as if I am trapped in the past.

Endnote: Before he met my mother, my father was engaged to a brilliant woman named Frances Marshall Watkins. Fran was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), and died before they could wed. I would like to dedicate this essay to her. Had she not died, I would never have lived.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash.

A Role for Thiamine Deficiency in Cancer

by Derrick Lonsdale MD, FACN, CNS

Published on July 30, 2020

11312 views

There is ever increasing evidence that energy metabolism is involved in the causation of cancer. A phenomenon known as the Warburg effect has been known for a century and was thought by Warburg to be the cause of cancer. To summarize this effect, normal cells primarily produce energy by the consumption of oxygen in a complex mechanism known as oxidative phosphorylation. This involves the consumption of glucose as fuel. The Warburg effect is because most cancer cells produce energy through a high rate of glucose metabolism by fermentation, even though there is abundant oxygen present. This is a less efficient method of producing energy, an effect that has been much studied but whose mechanism still remains unclear.

In cancer research today, the focus has been primarily on genetic mechanisms and the Warburg effect is considered to be a result derived from these genetic changes rather than the underlying cause. However, energy is vital to normal cell function, so a drop in energy synthesis might be a defect that has a secondary effect on genetically determined mechanisms. Since the vitamin, thiamine, is so closely involved with the metabolism of glucose, it is not surprising that a few researchers have looked at the involvement of this vitamin in relationship to the cause of cancer. For this reason I turned to looking at what medical literature has been published in regard to this and was surprised to find that it was relatively abundant.

Wernicke’s Encephalopathy, Thiamine Deficiency, and Cancer

It has long been known that a deficiency of thiamine in part of the brain causes a brain disease that was named after the person who originally described it. This is known as Wernicke encephalopathy (WE). I discovered a manuscript in which 18 patients had developed WE during cancer treatment. Cancers involving blood cells and the gastrointestinal tract were reportedly more common, but poor appetite and weight loss were common risk factors. All of the 18 patients presented with cognitive dysfunction represented by impaired alertness, attention deficit and poor short-term memory. Few of these patients developed the typical symptoms described for the clinical diagnosis of WE, thus making it difficult to recognize the cause of the changes in the patient’s mental status. Of course, the obvious question is whether this is secondary to treatment or whether it is involved as part of the causative mechanism in the cancer. I looked for further evidence.

Breast Cancer and Thiamine Homeostasis

A group of researchers set out to try to find whether there was a difference in thiamine homeostasis (its overall place in body chemistry) in breast cancer cells as compared with normal breast tissue. Without going into the scientific details, they concluded that their findings demonstrated an adaptive response by breast cancer cells to increase cellular availability of thiamine, thus demonstrating its importance to those cells. To explore further the relationship of thiamine in breast cancer, female breast cancer genetically susceptible mice were exposed to 4 diets that varied in fat and thiamine content. The scientific discussion is complex but the authors concluded that there was a potential role for dietary thiamine and an interaction between thiamine and fat in breast cancer progression. This may be important since thiamine has recently been found to be involved in the metabolism of some fats. The findings of a study support the protective effects of thiamine, folate, riboflavin and vitamin B6 against breast cancer in general.

A compound by the name of dichloroacetate has been found to kill cancer cells in breast, brain, and lung cancers in rats, while not harming healthy cells. The anti-cancer effects of this drug have been reviewed. Without indicating the scientific aspects of the study, the authors noted that their findings, together with limited clinical results, suggest that there is a potentially fruitful area for clinical trials with some tumors. A study suggested that high-dose thiamine reduces cancer cell proliferation by a mechanism similar to that described for dichloroacetate.

Surgery, Thiamine Deficiency, and Wernicke’s Encephalopathy

Cancer patients submitted to gastrointestinal surgery are at risk for thiamine deficiency and WE. They often remain undiagnosed and untreated and WE may become manifest several months after hospital discharge. The authors stated that “even in the absence of symptoms of thiamine deficiency the use of prophylactic thiamine supplementation should be taken into consideration, as the consequences of misdiagnosis can be severe “.

With Cancer Genetic Research Dominates

A well-known proverb states that “there is never smoke without fire”. The questions raised in this post suggest that there is indeed “smoke”. There are several obvious reasons why the “smoke” is not being recognized sufficiently to jump start major research. The first reason is that it has been concluded that the Warburg effect is secondary to genetic cause. Genetic issues have therefore become virtually the exclusive approach. However, the available literature suggests that nutritional issues may have an epigenetic (how genes are affected by nutrients and lifestyle) relationship with genetic activity.

I would like to suggest a third issue, the impact of stress. A definition of stress states that it is a mental or physical force requiring brain/body defensive interaction, requiring an individual to adapt to the existing situation. It makes little difference whether the stress is mental or physical. It is the brain that has to conduct the orchestrated reactions. Chronic long-term mental stress is just as debilitating as prolonged physical illness or severe trauma. The reasoning is derived from the work of Hans Selye. For those unfamiliar with this research, Selye stressed rats physically by many different types of assault. It is probable that his cruel experiments, performed over many years, made the recognition of his work much less acceptable. Nevertheless, he was able to determine that physically stressed animals went through several stages of resistance that he called the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). These stages were repetitive from animal to animal and were reflected by laboratory changes in tissues and blood similar to those seen in human disease. Selye’s most interesting conclusion was that a great deal of energy was required in order to meet the physiological needs of resistance and that it was a failure of this energy synthesis that caused final collapse. Skelton, one of Selye’s students, was able to induce the GAS by making an animal thiamine deficient, thus demonstrating a relationship with energy metabolism. Selye offered the statement that human diseases were “diseases of adaptation”. His conclusion was more remarkable since little was known during his time concerning the synthesis of energy in the human body. Much more is known now, making Selye’s work more plausible.

Preventing Illness

We cannot avoid the situations of life that give rise to chronic long-term mental stress. If our ability to handle them successfully depends on pristine nutrition, it obviously entails self-discipline as possibly our strongest preventive method. Physical stress may be lethal in its own right but nonlethal injury demands brain activity in coordinating the adaptive defense and is thus just as dependent on brain function. We now know that consumption of energy is greatest in the heart and brain so perhaps it is not surprising that heart and brain disease are so common.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This article was published originally on September 17, 2018.

Summer’s Best Bargain: Free Vitamin D

by Susan Rex Ryan

Published on July 2, 2019

3553 views

The warmest season of the year is around the corner. Many of us are looking forward to school holidays, work vacations, and relaxing. And shopping often accompanies our summer fun. So take advantage of the best bargain of the season: better health – for free! That’s right, I am talking about sunshine: the light emitting from the fiery heart of our solar system. Ultraviolet B (UVB) rays from the sun provide us with an essential nutrient called vitamin D. Yes, this is the vitamin that not only strengthens our bones and muscles but may significantly protect us from a wide range of serious diseases including autoimmune disorders, cancer, contagious illnesses, diabetes, and heart disease, according to a plethora of credible medical studies from around the world.

Many people—across generations and geographical locations—suffer from low vitamin D levels from lifestyles that do not include unprotected sunbathing. Since the late 1980’s, the medical community has emphasized the need to “shun the sun” to avoid skin cancer. Consumers have embraced this advice by spending billions of dollars so they can slather chemical-laden lotions with exponentially increasing sun protection factors all over their bodies. This behavior has resulted in a vitamin D deficiency epidemic.

Moderate sun exposure is healthy for most individuals. Our bodies possess an inherent mechanism to process only the necessary intake of sun rays, about 20,000 international units of vitamin D. After our skin is exposed to direct sunlight under optimal conditions for about 20 minutes, its safety mechanism turns off the initial production of vitamin D. For many folks, it is then time to move to the shade or don additional protection to reduce the risk of sunburn.

Optimal conditions to enjoy summer’s vitamin D depend on a number of factors that we can, and in some cases, cannot control. These factors include:

Geographic location. The closer you are to the equator and the higher your altitude the better your opportunity to acquire vitamin D-rich sunlight.

Time of day. The window of sunlight between 10:00 in the morning and 2:00 in the afternoon is optimal. If your shadow is shorter than your height, you are in the potential vitamin D-producing time frame.

Sky clarity. An azure sky is highly preferable to cloud cover. UVB light is decreased by about 50 percent when penetrating clouds. Ozone pollution absorbs UVB rays before they reach your skin.

Skin. The less clothing, makeup, and sunscreen you wear, the better the odds that your skin can produce vitamin D. It also is important to understand that melanin, the pigment in your skin, absorbs UVB rays. The lighter your skin, the better chance you can make vitamin D more efficiently.

Age. Youth trumps older ages because the concentration of the vitamin D precursor in our skin, called 7-dehydrocholesterol, decreases with age.

Weight. Less weight means typically more vitamin D production from the sun. As vitamin D is fat-soluble, the body’s fat cells more rapidly absorb vitamin D, decreasing its availability to organs, tissues, and cells.

You may be thinking, “I live near sea level, far from the equator, in mostly cloudy conditions with cool summer temperatures; work full-time during the day; and am dark-skinned and overweight. How on earth (literally) can I get any measurable vitamin D from the sun?” Take advantage of sunny weather by enjoying an outdoor lunch break. Remove that hat, roll up your sleeves, and soak in the sun. Ten minutes of sun exposure is better than none.

Each individual’s options for absorbing nature’s gift of vitamin D may differ.* Fortunately, widely available sources of vitamin D including vitamin D3 supplements may be highly effective in raising your body’s D levels to protect you from a wide array of medical conditions. The information about, and benefits of, vitamin D could fill a book. In fact, I am so impressed with vitamin D’s health benefits that I recently published a book called Defend Your Life to encourage people to improve their health by taking vitamin D.

Happy summer, and happy health!

*Persons who have developed sarcoidosis, specific granulomatous diseases, and rare cancers may experience hypersensitivity to sunlight exposure.

Image by pixel2013 from Pixabay .

Falling into the Planned Parenthood Gardasil Snake Pit

by Paul Haeder

Published on December 4, 2017

7454 views

“With 80 percent of clinical trials failing to meet recruitment deadlines in the West, major drug companies are today conducting half or more of their trials outside the major markets, often in countries–like Nigeria–with poor human rights records and weak regulatory infrastructures. Pfizer’s Nigeria trial is unusually sensational and high profile, but its bending of the rules may be more the rule than the exception.” – Sonia Shah, author of The Body Hunters
“It is clear from the evidence presented in this book that the pharmaceutical industry does a biased job of disseminating evidence – to be surprised by this would be absurd – whether it is through advertising, drug reps, ghostwriting, hiding data, bribing people, or running educational programmes for doctors.” ― Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients

The entire mess of questioning one vaccination – HPV, human papilloma virus vaccine known as Gardasil produced by Merck, and, Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline’s labs – has opened up more than a Pandora’s Box for me. A viper pit I have been dumped into. I am facing a Medusa of sorts, a monster I already battled in other arenas, but I never thought I’d be up against it as a social worker for foster youth.

For four and a half decades, I have witnessed up close the Medusa of Disaster Capitalism and the Unfettered Military Industrial Complex as a reporter in the Southwest USA and throughout Mexico and Central America.

Today, that mythical Medusa’s many snakes as hair strands is most troublesome: I call it the Military-Surveillance-Fossil Fuel-Penal-Medicine-Financial-Education-Media-Pharma-Digital Industrial Complex. It’s turned into an all-encompassing monster.

That reality is a given for many of us who question authority, who see a world better served as non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal and earth/ecosystems/cultures focused. The reader can go to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or something like the Earth Charter and get a sense of how millions of us have not only a yearning for something more just than the current global financial Medusa running things, but we’ve worked for that social-earth-economic justice hard and long.

Fear of Advocating for Clients

One of the rights we hold as self-evident, supposedly held as a God-given American tenet, is the unrestricted ability for any person to find work to both help the person survive in this pay-as-we-go society and to, in some cases, help a person achieve some sort of self-worth and dignity.

The careers I have had include college instructor/faculty, newspaper journalist, community organizer and social worker. My work in the past seven years includes working with adults with severe developmental disabilities; with adults in a memory care facility as their educator and outings lead. I’ve worked to help adults in a sheltered workshop find competitive employment; I have worked with clients deemed homeless/addicts/felons to gain skills, services and employment on their road to recovery-reentry-resuscitating.

I was working a pretty cool job most recently as a social worker/case manager for an independent living program, a suite of services set up nationally for foster youth, 16 to 21 years of age, mainly to get them to finish high school and go onto college or trade school. My gifts as teacher, outdoor educator, world traveler, communicator, and creative soul aided me in making deep and profound connections to youth who have seen the underbelly of life and face many challenges tied to the disconnected nature of living sometimes in dozens of foster care homes. Exposure to drug use, pornography, drug dealing, violence, sexual assault and criminal acts are just some of the histories of these youth.

I worked hands on with youth one-on-one and in groups. I got to take them on outings like surfing in the Pacific and a four-day conference at a private university. I had some level of independence and developed great relationships with other professionals in state, county, city public sector jobs and with foster parents and the youth. The job also afforded me decent training in all sorts of areas, including trauma-informed care and motivational interviewing.

Sex Ed and Me

I came face-to-face, though, with the inner workings of Planned Parenthood, as in my first intersection with PP while training to be a facilitator for one five-hour curriculum attempting to get youth to understand the high risks associated with alcohol use and unprotected sex.

The specific training I had taken as part of my job description was focused on case managers becoming trainers, titled Sexual Health and Adolescent Risk Prevention (SHARP). My former employers, Lifeworks Northwest, a 46-year-old non-profit, receives thousands of dollars from Planned Parenthood each year to allow PP to utilize our caseloads, youth, 16 to 21, characterized as high risk for homelessness, dropping out of school, substance abuse, pregnancy and contracting an STI, sexually transmitted infection:

“The goal of the Healthy Youth Collaborative is to reach youth by bringing evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programs to scale. To achieve this goal, Planned Parenthood implements Healthy Youth Collaborative programming within each community, in four different settings including schools (middle and high school), health centers, community-based organizations, and juvenile justice facilities. A curriculum has been chosen so that there is an appropriate evidence-based program for each of these settings.”

I’m all for protecting youth and having myriad of ways to incite responsibility through education and modeling. What I found from the training was a bizarrely out-of-touch with current youth culture Planned Parenthood. I found the insistence to follow their curriculum word for word both interfering and hobbling. I also found a lot of condescension, and what I have seen in my many years working in educational circles: both a dumb-downing and infantilizing of many important aspects of a training or course.

While I have always supported the mission to help youth not face unwanted pregnancies, to have strong information and tools tied to sexual health and sexuality, and a place to obtain services for either preventing or curing STI’s/STD’s, I have also worked on the frontlines in El Paso as a volunteer escort for anyone seeking services at that Planned Parenthood. Those Saturday episodes found me face-to-face with angry, picket-bearing extremists who wanted to harass the women we were escorting in for family planning services. I even facilitated media workshops to that same Planned Parenthood on how to handle rough and pervasive anti-Planned Parenthood characters like those in the 1980s and ‘90s making headlines not only in the El Paso Times where I also worked but Time Magazine and the NYT.

Questioning Authority

Ironic, now, that just one month ago, I was in a PP second training, this time at the Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest, and I was summarily not only banned from finishing the two-day course, Fundamentals of Sex, but I was then put on administrative leave in Portland by my former employer and then fired ten days later. I’ve pretty much exhausted the scenario tied to that banishment and termination here at Hormones Matter and other venues in the blog sphere.

I had no ax to grind with Planned Parenthood concerning training us – case managers — on how to communicate sex ed to youth. I expected to get through 16 hours of training with flying colors and a three-hour road trip back to Portland.

That did not happen, and Planned Parenthood – four trainers and two supervisors – contacted my employer to not only ban me from the second day of training, but fraudulently stated that I was against Western medicine, was untrainable related to the subject matter, and was a disruption to the learning environment for the other 39 students.

There wasn’t even a kernel of truth to what they stated to my former employer on Oct. 15; however, during my termination meeting Oct. 26, the HR director stated that “the trainers with Planned Parenthood stated you voiced your disagreement with vaccines.” The only voicing I did was anonymously, on paper, about Gardasil. Not vaccines in general.

The relationship between non-profits working with vulnerable youth, including homeless youngsters, and Planned Parenthood is more than just cooperative or symbiotic. My case exposes the fact Planned Parenthood’s falsehoods concerning my participation at a training led directly to my termination.

While I am currently receiving unemployment benefits after the Oregon State adjudicator contacted both my former employer and myself, and here are the findings below, I am really vulnerable on the job market because of the short duration as a case manager (six months) with Lifeworks Northwest when I was really committed for years on this job. The first thing coming to mind for prospective employers is “why such a short tenure with your previous employer?”

You ARE allowed benefits on this claim . . . .
Findings: You were employed by Lifeworks NW until Oct. 26, 2017 when you were fired because you received too many complaints about being unprofessional, confrontational and argumentative. This was not a willful or wantonly negligent disregard of the employer’s interest because there was no policy or rule violation. You deny the accusations of being a disruption to a training that occurred on October 16, 2017. Employer failed to respond to additional attempts to retrieve information.
Legal Conclusion: You were fired but not for misconduct connected with work.

They Say Follow the Money – How about Follow the Compassion!

Writing these articles does bring things into perspective, but anyone with a decent amount of psychological grounding will note that this journalistic process also opens up repeatedly the ludicrousness and trauma tied to what happened to me – wrongful termination without any due process.

I’ve used up my three “free” psychologist visits through the company’s EAP, employee assistance program. I’ve also reached out to a national legal firm on the viability of pursuing a case against Lifeworks Northwest but specifically Planned Parenthood.

I am disenchanted with the characterizations of me as unprofessional, confrontational and argumentative, since I was one of three males at a training with 45 total people, and also, I am working in a field – social services – predominately staffed and managed by females.

Given that, though, I still am following the money:

The 2015-16 budget from Lifeworks Northwest shows some of the money trail, i.e. revenue –
SERVICES BY CLIENT — $24,280,894
PUBLIC GRANTS & CONTRACTS — $16,645,143
CONTRIBUTIONS — $830,512
OTHER REVENUE — $220,952
TOTAL –$41,977,501

The money coming from Planned Parenthood to my former employer — which is money Planned Parenthood receives in the form of federal grant money largely from the Health and Human Services adolescent division – is significant in that Lifeworks NW has dozens of programs, and the Independent Living Program is relatively small so any funding coming into that program is significant.

What’s troubling is that I broke no policy, did not act bizarrely or unprofessionally, and did not engage in argumentative or combative behavior at the Planned Parenthood training, as the Oregon Employment Department’s findings belay –

“This was not a willful or wantonly negligent disregard of the employer’s interest because there was no policy or rule violation.”

The precipitating factor for Planned Parenthood essentially informing my employer that I was not trainable and that I was incapable of imparting sound, evidence-based sex ed information to my clients, was a handwritten suggestion/inquiry solicited by the trainers (stated by them to stay anonymous) after each of the seven modules. One of my two notes was a deep skepticism about one of Planned Parenthood’s money makers – the HPV vaccine, manufactured as Gardasil by Merck. I imparted disappointment that Planned Parenthood trainers were not even aware of or concerned about the negative press around Gardasil.

I never mentioned any disregard for the sex ed training, nor did I state I would not allow my clients to pursue getting any contraceptive or vaccine.

It was clear that the training was all about Planned Parenthood’s word on everything or the highway.

I am not a big fan of any forced (or group-think) hyper rah-rah-rah of any organization, or what I am now calling the “ich liebe dich Planned Parenthood uber alles in der Welt … I love you Planned Parenthood above anything else in the world” syndrome.

Of note, in my six months working with 40 youth, I was asked more than just occasionally about the safety of IUDs, birth control pills, the transdermal patch, Depo-Provera and once, the Gardasil series of vaccines. I encouraged those youth to check out the Planned Parenthood site and to use Google to find out if there were any large forums commenting on those products so my youth would have more information to make an informed choice.

Planned Parenthood never gave me a chance to meet with the three trainers and two supervisors to discuss their concerns. And, after the banishment, my former employer never sought testimony from me concerning my beliefs about contraception and abortion, nor did they solicit comments from two fellow case managers who were at the training with me to determine my participation and commentary at the training.

If the reader looks at the $16.6 million in public grants and contracts the Lifeworks non-profit received last year, ipso facto this large Portland non-profit depends significantly on money coming from the state, county, and US taxpayer in the form of Planned Parenthood.

It’s All About Language, Narrative Framing, Intent

“What, really, is a word? In its written form, it’s a great many things. It is a symbol. A representation of individual phonics that, when assembled in such a sequence, produces a gestalt. Rearrange the letters corresponding to those sounds, and you’ve eliminated or transformed that symbol. A word is an idea. Not simply a representation of an idea, but an idea in itself. The idea that what we think can not only be thought, not only expressed verbally, but also textually, a physical marking of the presence of thought — the evidence of its spatial existence.” — Daniel Choudhury, What’s Your Word Worth?

Before I go further, a quick glossary of terms should be inserted to help the reader see the context from which I am writing this third part of a series I could thumbnail title as “ My Run-in with Gardasil, Planned Parenthood, and a Culture of No Questions Asked – A Firing Story!”

Sacrosanct – An adjective is defined as anything (principle, place or routine) regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with.
Antivaxxer – A derogatory term used by industry to describe individuals who question vaccine safety or efficacy; typically parents of children injured by vaccines.
Planned Parenthood – A noun defined as a nonprofit organization that does research into and gives advice on contraception, family planning, and reproductive problems.
Big Pharma – A noun defined as large pharmaceutical companies (= companies producing medical drugs), especially when these are seen as having a powerful and bad influence.
Whistleblower – A noun defined as a person who tells someone in authority about something illegal that is happening, esp. in a business or government.

Of course, I could insert the Urban Dictionary’s definitions of these items, and I certainly could link profoundly to various narratives around the mission, vision, and history of Planned Parenthood, what I would call the good, the bad and the ugly of its roots in the 1920’s with Margaret Sanger, a slew of eugenicists, and its oddly racist backers of contraception and sterilization. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, and 21 years later changed its name to Planned Parenthood.

Note that I am now in dangerous territory for many readers – the sacrosanct right to seek contraceptive and abortion services. In some ways, I have crossed that line in the sand by criticizing that Sacred Cow in the minds of many, Planned Parenthood.

I am really just attacking the malfeasance and unethical behavior and then treatment of me as a human being in the context of a Planned Parenthood training. I didn’t even get out of the gate, so to speak, with an adult, robust, discussion about the HPV, cervical cancer, the vaccine and its risks.

Almost everything now that I written about Big Pharma-GSK-Merck-HPV Vaccine-Planned Parenthood came AFTER I was fired on the word of Planned Parenthood staff.

Like this doozy – the 2017 Lasker Awards (sort of dubbed the US Nobel Prize) was given to Planned Parenthood and the developers of the HPV vaccine September of this year:

The winners “are being honored for their work in basic and clinical medical research and in public service,” Claire Pomeroy, MD, president of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, said at a teleconference today.
Douglas R. Lowy, MD, and John T. Schiller, PhD, both from the National Cancer Institute, Rockville, Maryland, won the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for a major advance that improves the lives of many thousands of people. Their research centers on the development of HPV vaccines that prevent cervical cancer and other tumors caused by HPVs.
Planned Parenthood won the Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award for providing vital health services and reproductive care to millions of women for more than 100 years.

The Lasker-Bloomberg Public Service Award comes with a $250,000 award for each winner. Planned Parenthood in 2012 received 45 percent of its revenues from government health services grants and reimbursements. Now that’s around 35 percent of their revenue stream. In addition, in 2012, 16 percent of revenues were tied to non-medical programs.

From 1939 to 1942 Margaret Sanger was part of the Birth Control Federation of America alongside Mary Lasker and Clarence Gamble in the Negro Project, an effort to deliver birth control to poor black people.

I know my research into Big Pharma’s duplicitous, double-dealing and dangerous schemes is not as risky as throwing down criticism of Planned Parenthood. At Hormones Matter, maybe the idea of questioning Gardasil and Cervarix or even the birth control pill, especially by a white male, also is not dangerous territory.

The reality of how suspect, dangerous and medically unnecessary the HPV vaccine is also puts me into a league of its own vis-à-vis the antivaxxer campaigners, a title I have never adopted or will adopt. I never expected this pebble into the pond – my superficial questioning a vaccine – to turn into a tsunami-like rippling effect in my life.

Vaccines, Science, Anti-Science, Marketing, Propaganda, Resistance to Business as Usual a la Big Pharma

Interestingly, during my research, I came across a story out this February about a meteorologist who questioned the safety of vaccine schedules and chemical ingredients being fired, and hit with the Scarlet Letter, A, as an Antivaxxer.

Did WGBH News hire a science reporter who doesn’t believe in science?
That’s the question being asked by some employees of the PBS affiliate after learning that Mish Michaels, a former meteorologist at WBZ-TV who has been outspoken in her controversial belief that vaccines cause autism, had been hired as the station’s new science reporter.
Among those who wondered whether Michaels was right for the job was Jim Braude, host of WGBH News’s “Greater Boston,” for which Michaels was supposed to report stories. We’re told that Braude this week raised his concerns with station bosses, including WGBH News GM Phil Redo and “Greater Boston” executive producer Bob Dumas, and they have since changed their minds.
“The decision was made that [Michaels] is not a good fit for ‘Greater Boston’ and she won’t be working there, Braude stated.

Most of the 240 comments on the Boston Globe website that carried the news were stinging like this one:

cra-cra-in-sherborn: 02/08/17
Vaccines work because of herd immunity. Everything has risks and benefits and with vaccines the benefit outweighs the risk. What gets me is the antivaxxies lost in the world of narcissistic oblivion who decide they don’t want to take the small risk of vaccinating their kids and mooch off the herd immunity that everyone else created by vaccinating their own kids. If everyone opted out we would all have measles mumps and small pox.
Vaccines should be required for school entry no exceptions. Or home school your kids.

or this one:

mauthedog: 02/09/17
Through work over the last thirty years I’ve made friends across the United States. A few are anti-vaxxers. They constantly share anti-vaxxer posts on Facebook. Over the last couple of years I’ve noted how they have started attacking the “herd” theory and even attacking flu shots.
Most of them are quite religious. Several are right-wing evangelical Christians. They are generally anti-science.
During a FB discussion, one wrote to me how I “chose Science over God.” I didn’t realize there was a choice.
You can’t reason with them. Facts don’t matter. They’ve told me—-Tests can be faked. The CDC is a profit center. It’s about money, not safety. The government is helping big pharma. The government is covering it up.
And so on.
I fear under the current administration, this quackery will grow worse.

Using one giant latex brush, then, by questioning the safety of Gardasil at a Planned Parenthood training, I am now being painted with that same broad stroke into the same corner as the anti-evolution, anti-science “quacks or loonies” or whatever pejorative is the flavor of the digital hour.

Talk of the herd effect is now parlayed into the “rule of the mob,” as everyone, including mainstream and progressive media, attack anyone who dares question Gardasil or the MMR — all the scientists and researchers making a connection with vaccinations like HPV to physical (and brain specific) injuries are vilified. Or the fact that Merck has paid out millions of dollars (and we don’t have all the dollars tied to really how much Merck is shelling out because of courts awarding damages are tied to non-disclosure provisos) gets swept under the rug as “nuisance lawsuits”?

Yet, the story of HPV vaccine and injuries and deaths keeps coming around: Japan pulls Gardasil off the shelves three years ago. A lawsuit, class action, followed this move:

Lawyer Masumi Minaguchi, a representative from the planned lawsuit’s defense team, told a news conference in Tokyo the victims will file the suit sometime after June against the central government, GlaxoSmithKlien PLC, the maker of Cervarix, and Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., the maker of Gardsil, at four district courts in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka.
“The victims wish to live a peaceful life and prevent further suffering by finding out the truth (about the vaccine side effects),” Minaguchi added.
She said the defense team will seek additional plaintiffs to join the lawsuit by holding seminars in April and May. Currently, 12 plaintiffs are taking part in the suit, according to Minaguchi.
Saitama Prefecture resident Nanami Sakai, who plans to be one of the plaintiffs, was one of four to attend the news conference. The 21-year-old, who was given Cervarix twice in 2011, said she did not receive information about the pros and cons of the vaccine before receiving the injections.
“I’d like to know why I was left scarred by the vaccine, why I was not able to receive proper treatment right away and why my situation was not adequately conveyed to the state,” Sakai said.
Sitting in a wheelchair, Sakai said she has numbness in the right side of her body, back and around her chest.

And what about in Colombia, and the injured, dead and lawsuits there tied to HPV vaccine?

Lloyd Phillips, an American researcher of infectious diseases and genetics, has studied the adverse effects of Gardasil for five years. His work has revealed how Gardasil works differently in different people. He has documented related and biologically plausible mechanisms of action which could cause the many serious and life-threatening side effects which are being reported by girls and young women around the world after receiving the HPV vaccine.
In Colombia we have a potential crisis of major proportions resulting from the use of Gardasil because it is “free and compulsory” by “Law of the Republic”. It is assumed that this HPV vaccine is effective when used to combat cervical cancer, which can be caused by human papilloma virus. However, this vaccine has been hotly debated internationally for allegedly being dangerous and ineffective. It is currently being administered in Colombia without obtaining informed consent from young girls and their parents as to the potential and unknown risks of use.

Is the Ending Full-Circle Back to Bad Pharma and Big Non-profits?

So where does the next installment — part four — go now after not getting to the two big definitions left in my glossary – Big Pharma and Whistleblower? There are literally thousands of documents out there from researchers and scientists and whistleblowers on just what is happening to the human population tied to the vaccine for HPV, let alone those other mandatory childhood vaccinations we are supposed to get for our children before they turn three.

Listening to hours of radio shows on the blog-sphere, and viewing hours of interviews and documentaries on the internet and Netflix, I may sound jaded or exhausted, but alas, I am not. The only way through this is to keep up some hope that change is possible, whether as a climate-environment activist or social worker. Writing is just one rung in the ladder helping me and I hope you, kind reader, get above the miasma and smoke and mirrors our Western For-Profit Medical Industrial Complex has deployed with their endless billions for lobbying and marketing and subterfuge and obfuscation.

Keep reading until Part Four comes out.

“No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.” — Thomas Browne
“Big Pharma needs sick people to prosper. Patients, not healthy people, are their customers. If everybody was cured of a particular illness or disease, pharmaceutical companies would lose 100% of their profits on the products they sell for that ailment. What all this means is because modern medicine is so heavily intertwined with the financial profits culture, it’s a sickness industry more than it is a health industry.” ― James Morcan, The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy

HPV Vaccine Debate — Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Gardasil Scandal Brewing in Colombia
Four Year Analysis of Adverse Reactions to Gardasil
Gardasil Syndrome
Clinical Trials
In The Know w/ Lloyd W. Phillips (he starts talking at 10:53 into the interview)
Vaccines/Gardasil

We Need Your Help

Hormones Matter needs funding now. Our research funding was cut recently and because of our commitment to independent health research and journalism unbiased by commercial interests we allow minimal advertising on the site. That means all funding must come from you, our readers. Don’t let Hormones Matter die.

Yes, I’d like to support Hormones Matter.

Oxygenation, Nutrition and Cancer

by Derrick Lonsdale MD, FACN, CNS

Published on January 26, 2017

4841 views

One of the most important scientists in medical research was Otto Warburg whose presentation at the 1966 Nobel Laureate conference in Lindau, Germany, was entitled “The Prime Cause and Prevention of Cancer”. Based on his meticulous experiments and independently verified thousands of times, Dr. Otto Warburg knew the prime cause of cancer. What he discovered was that oxygenation of our body cells is the key issue. A normal cell derives the energy that it uses for function by a complex series of biochemical reactions that yield energy. The normal use of oxygen results in respiration, also known as oxidation, something that takes place in the nucleus of the cell. If there is a deficiency of oxidation within the cell, energy production is by fermentation, a less efficient way of producing energy. The resulting energy deficit may be the underlying cause of the sensation that we call fatigue, as well as affecting the structure and functions of the cell that influences the process of becoming cancerous. Once a cell has become cancerous, there is no way to return it back to its normal functioning. It must be destroyed. So the key is to kill existing cancerous cells while preventing new cancerous cells from developing. It is the long term deficit over years that finally erupts as cancer and a salient preventive measure is appropriate nutrition.

Oxygenation: Key to Health or Disease

The major message is that the normal delivery of oxygen and its use in respiration within cells is vital to complete health, resting heavily on the pioneering work of Dr. Otto Warburg. Most of us give little thought to what we do with the oxygen that we extract from the air by breathing. We are aware, of course, that oxygen is picked up by the hemoglobin in our red blood cells. The action demands an intricate biochemical transfer of oxygen from the lung alveoli to those cells. They then travel in the blood stream to all our body tissues and another complex reaction transfers oxygen from the red blood cells to the cells that make up all our tissues and body organs. This transfer mechanism depends on the health of the cell membrane that is at least partly dependent on the ingestion of the vital omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAS).

Our cells, and we have between 70 and 100 trillion of them, have an extraordinarily complex structure. Each one, with the exception of red blood cells, has a nucleus, surrounded by a fluid called cytosol. The outer membrane of each cell, known as the plasma membrane, represents a potential barrier to the transfer of nutrients, including oxygen, from red blood cells to the cytosol. Oxygen, vitamins, and essential minerals then have to cross the membrane around the nucleus where respiration gives rise to an energy storage molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). If this transfer is not complete, respiration declines and the cell uses fermentation in the cytosol to synthesize ATP.

This essential transfer across membranes depends on what is known as fluidity. The nearest that we can get to describing cell membrane function simply is that they require fluidity similar to the fluidity in a soap bubble, but much more complicated. Omega-6 and omega-3 PUFAS are essential oils obtained from ideal nutrition and they help in maintaining this fluidity, enabling oxygen transfer and absorption of cell nutrients to take place.

tumor hypoxia

Oxygen, the primary nutrient, then has to be consumed in the process of synthesizing ATP. It is, of course, useless to have oxygen transferred into cells if it then remains unused. The fuel that is burned (oxidation results from the combination of oxygen with a fuel) in this process is glucose and one of the vital components is vitamin B1 (thiamine), a nutrient that I have emphasized repeatedly on this forum. Deficiency of this vitamin, together with an excess of simple carbohydrate, causes the ancient scourge of beriberi.

One of the known factors in this disease was reported by Japanese investigators many years ago. They found that the oxygen saturation of arterial blood (on route to body tissues) in beriberi victims was very low. The venous oxygen saturation was very high (blood returning to the lungs for oxygenation). This means that the pickup of oxygen at the lung was poor and it was transferred to the venous circulation without doing its job in the cells. It is therefore possible that long term, low grade thiamine deficiency could well be the forerunner of cancer.

Thiamine, Cancer, Diabetes and Neurodegeneration

Recently it has been found that low dose administration of thiamine stimulates cancer cells in an animal model, while very high doses inhibit their growth. Diabetes type I is pancreatic insulin deficiency. Type II is insulin resistance. Alzheimer disease is associated with glucose metabolism and may be diabetes type III. Cancer may turn out to be diabetes type IV. Reading between the lines, it looks as though thiamine metabolism is a key factor in causing many diseases because of its role in oxidation. This information is also important in understanding why malnutrition, particularly involving an excess of sugar, as is common today, is causing so much functional change in millions of people.

The so-called psychosomatic symptoms are often due to the early stages of beriberi, a disease where changes in the control mechanisms of the autonomic nervous system have long been known to occur. Thus the reduction of normal oxygenation and oxidation in the production of cancer is emphasized and it may well be that we can extend the principle to the cause of many different diseases. The brain is the most oxygen consuming organ in the body so that even minor deficiencies of oxidation can affect its performance. Since the lower brain contains the mechanisms of automatic control of the autonomic endocrine axis, it could explain why so many publications in the medical literature report an association of autonomic nervous system dysfunction with a variety of organic diseases that are so common in our world today.

Considering Malnutrition in the Presence of Abundance

A little history may help us to understand why various forms of malnutrition are so easy to neglect when we fail to follow the rules set by Mother Nature. Beriberi often broke out in Japan when there was increased affluence. The reason was really quite simple. Brown rice is the full grain and the vitamins needed for processing the starch are stored in the cusps around the grain. White rice is produced by milling the cusps off the grain and this was performed at a rice mill, a relatively expensive procedure for many people. The cusps were given to feed pigs and it is paradoxical that the pigs were better fed than the humans. White rice was therefore considered to be a marker of affluence and caused many people to set the milled rice in a silver bowl and invite their friends to dinner. They did not realize that they were inducing the common dread illness that they all knew about.

Can we take a leaf out of their book and compare our affluence of today with what happened in Japan years ago? Sugar and simple carbohydrate are dangerous commodities that may well be one of the commonest causes of disease in Western civilization. Consider this together with the absence of appropriate PUFAS and other essential nutrients and we cannot deny that malnutrition is today very much alive and well.

We need your help.

Hormones Matter needs funding now. Our research funding was cut recently and because of our commitment to independent health research and journalism unbiased by commercial interests, we allow minimal advertising on the site. That means all funding must come from you, our readers. Don’t let Hormones Matter die.

Yes, I’d like to support Hormones Matter.

Thyroid Hormone T3 Protects Ovaries from Chemo and Other Damage

by Chandler Marrs, PhD

Published on January 25, 2017

2464 views

Women who undergo chemotherapy for any cancer often face infertility due to premature ovarian failure. The chemo drugs themselves deplete ovarian follicles and granulosa cells gradually leading to what is called chemotherapy induced amenorrhea (CIA). The only strategy currently available to maintain a modicum of fertility is oocyte or embryo cytopreservation, extracting and freezing the eggs alone or fertilized for later use. While encouraging, this is not an option for many women, especially younger women.

Researchers in Italy may have identified another method for preserving fertility post chemotherapy. They hypothesized that if they could protect the granulosa cells, those cells that control follicle (egg) maturation and hormone production, from chemotherapy induced apoptosis (cell death), then perhaps fertility could be protected post chemotherapy. Through a series of experiments, they found that the thyroid hormone, triiodothyronine or T3 prevented chemo induced cell death via multiple mechanisms.

Study Details – T3 and Ovarian Granulosa Cell Survival

Ovarian cells from female rats were extracted and cultured in media that contained the chemotherapeutic drug paclitaxel (PTX) alone, plus vehicle or PTX plus T3. Post extraction and pre-exposure, the cells were evaluated to ensure the extraction process did not alter normal steroidogenic pathways and to confirm the presence of all the appropriate thyroid hormone machinery. Next, a series of tests were conducted to measure cell cycle activity with the different exposures. The researchers found that T3 prevented PTX induced cell death and allowed these cells to cycle normally. T3 blocked critical factors actively involved in PTX related cell death.

T3 prevented PTX-induced cell-cycle arrest
T3 downregulated PTX induced caspase 3 production – proteins involved in cell death
T3 diminished PTX increased Bax levels – Bax genes induce apoptosis via mitochondrial permeability and other mechanisms

What This Means

Thyroid hormones regulate each of the fundamental processes associated with cell proliferation, differentiation and cell death in virtually all tissues. That they would be involved in preventing cell death relative to chemotherapy is not surprising. That the thyroid hormone machinery is present in ovarian granulosa cells is also not surprising. What is surprising is that we are have only recently begun to look towards these endogenous ligands and hormones systems as therapeutic options for disease.

T3 is a proliferative hormone, known for initiating and maintaining growth processes in tissues. In hepatocytes, the liver cells, T3 protects against apoptosis via both genomic and non-genomic mechanisms. In the pancreas, T3 promotes survival of the beta-cells in diabetic induced apopotosis. In the heart, thyroid hormones regulate rhythm and other processes. We see diminished T3 in cases of multiple sclerosis and other axon degenerating diseases. Researchers have shown that when T3 is added back, the disease state shifts from one of progressive demyelination towards a pattern of remyelination, regrowth and ultimately healing. Since at least 13% of diabetics also have hypothyroid conditions, where pancreatic beta cells are destroyed and peripheral neuropathies are common, T3 could be a viable treatment option here as well. It would protect not only pancreatic health but heal the peripheral neuropathy and perhaps even control the progression of the associated heart disease.

T3 and Common Women’s Health Conditions

Where disorders of reproduction are concerned, the role of T3 is less clear. In the present study, we see evidence that T3 exerts a protective and pro-survival effect on the granulosa cells. Should we expect, given its pro-survival role in other tissues that T3 would be involved in regulating cell survival in the non-beneficial tissues as well, such as fibroids, endometriotic and adenomyotic growths, and ovarian and other cysts? Since T3 is functionally pro-survival would this mean that the abnormal tissue growth seen in common women’s health conditions is linked to too much T3? Maybe not.

With polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) correcting hypothyroidism was associated with a regression of ovarian cysts and a reduction of androgenic hormones, suggesting other hormones are also involved in tissue growth. This makes sense. Hormones operate in systems. It is never as simple as one hormone > one function or set of functions. The cells involved in reproductive tissues come in many forms, have many functions and are bathed in a veritable cocktail of many different hormones and other ligands, each controlling a myriad of processes.

From the research thus far, T3 prevents cell death in dying tissues. It is not clear whether it would initiate the same pro-survival mechanisms in non-dying or proliferating tissues. It is also not clear how T3 interacts in the presence of other hormones and other signals. What is clear is that many women suffer from hypothyroidism and also suffer from a slew of reproductive conditions that involve aberrant tissue growth. How the two are connected ought to be investigated more thoroughly.

We need your help.

Hormones Matter needs funding now. Our research funding was cut recently and because of our commitment to independent health research and journalism unbiased by commercial interests, we allow minimal advertising on the site. That means all funding must come from you, our readers. Don’t let Hormones Matter die.

Yes, I’d like to support Hormones Matter.

This post was published previously on Hormones Matter in March 2014.

Vitamin D3 and Thyroid Health

by Susan Rex Ryan

Published on January 17, 2017

11858 views

The benefits of vitamin D3 garner a plethora of glowing press these days but little information has been reported about how this essential nutrient may be associated with thyroid disorders. An alarming number of Americans—over 25 million—suffer from thyroid disease. Women are four times more likely than men to develop a thyroid disorder. The thyroid, a butterfly-shaped gland located in your neck, regulates your metabolism and affects every cell in your body. When your thyroid is not working properly, your body becomes unbalanced, potentially causing symptoms including weight gain or loss and chronic fatigue as well as autoimmune disease and cancer. Let’s look at how vitamin D3 may affect thyroid health:

Thyroid Hormonal Balance

Vitamin D receptors (VDR) are present in the cells of the pituitary, the pea-sized gland located at the base of the brain that controls your thyroid. The pituitary produces a hormone called thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) that signals your thyroid gland to make thyroid hormone (T3 and T4). Thyroid hormone constantly circulates throughout your body, regulating metabolism. Either inadequate or excessive thyroid hormone can wreak havoc to your health, culminating in hypo- or hyperthyroidism. Understanding the regulating effects of VDR in our cells, I surmise that the amount of activated vitamin D3 in the pituitary’s VDR may be connected to the balance of thyroid hormone.

Autoimmune Thyroid Diseases

Adequate levels of vitamin D3 may protect the immune system from attacking itself. Low vitamin D3 levels have been linked to autoimmune thyroid diseases including Hashimoto’s and Graves’ thyroiditis.

Discovered one hundred years ago by a Japanese physician, Hashimoto’s disease is caused by abnormal blood cells and white blood cells constantly attacking and damaging the thyroid. About 95 per cent of Hashimoto’s disease patients are women. A study published in a 2011 issue of the journal Thyroid revealed that 92 per cent of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis cases had insufficient circulating vitamin D3 levels.

Ten times more likely to develop in women than men, Graves’ disease is caused by antibodies that overstimulate thyroid hormone production, causing hyperthyroidism. Researchers, who investigated Japanese female and male patients with Graves’ disease over a one-year period, found a high prevalence of woefully low circulating vitamin D3 in the female patients compared to the male subjects.

Thyroid Cancer

Incidences of thyroid cancer have doubled over the past four decades. The likelihood of women developing thyroid cancer is three times greater than for men. Activated vitamin D3 regulates cell differentiation, cell proliferation, and cell death. If these vital functions go awry, cancer may develop. Epidemiological studies indicate a link between vitamin D3 and thyroid cancer. Vitamin D researcher W.B. Grant, Ph.D. published a paper in a 2012 issue of the journal Anticancer Research that indicated an association between solar ultraviolet B, vitamin D3, and cancers including thyroid.

A relatively rare form of thyroid cancer—medullary thyroid cancer—originates in the thyroid C cells where a hormone called calcitonin is secreted. Calcitonin’s functions include stimulation of vitamin D3 production in the kidneys. The measurement of calcitonin is a diagnostic screening tool for medullary thyroid cancer. VDR are present in the thyroid C cells. Understanding the powerful effect of activated VDR on cell regulation, I hypothesize that activated VDR in the C cells may possibly prevent the development of medullary thyroid cancer.

In conclusion, recent medical literature suggests a connection between vitamin D3 and thyroid health. However, additional research is required to determine if thyroid dysfunction may cause vitamin D3 deficiency, or low vitamin D3 status may contribute to thyroid disorders.

This post was published previously on Hormones Matter in September 2012.

Childhood Leukemia: Notes from a Retired Pediatric Oncologist

by Derrick Lonsdale MD, FACN, CNS

Published on November 28, 2016

1566 views

Many years ago, I was a pediatric oncologist for about six years as part of my career. Nearly all the children that I tried to treat died. It was a very stressful occupation and I gave the job to a successor and took up another interest. The chief of radiotherapy had become a friend and not very long before I gave up oncology, I was having lunch with him one day. He asked me whether I had a patient with leukemia in the hospital at that time. I replied that I did indeed have an 18-year-old girl with the variety of leukemia known as myelogenous. This particular form of leukemia was at that time the most resistant to all types of treatment. I knew that the state of her disease was critical and I did not expected her to survive. In fact her death was predictably imminent.

I asked my friend why he had posed this question. He replied that he wanted to take a unit of blood from a patient with leukemia, irradiate it and put it back into the patient. Naturally, I asked him why on earth he had conjured up this experiment. In fact I knew that blood irradiation as a treatment for leukemia had been tried with little or no success. He replied that he had had a patient with Hodgkin’s disease (cancer of the lymph glands). He had irradiated swollen cancerous glands in the patient’s neck and to his surprise, glands in the groin area disappeared. He had come to the conclusion that irradiating the neck glands had released something into the bloodstream that had an effect on the glands in the groin.

Well, I said, if you can get the blood from my patient, treat it and put it back before the patient passes on, you are welcome. He took a unit of blood and put it under the cobalt bomb (the most up-to-date way of carrying out therapeutic irradiation), turned the machine on and went for lunch. When he came back he found that he had delivered 13,000 rads (a rad is a unit of x-ray dose). When you consider that 1000 rads given to a patient could be lethal, please be aware that this dose was given to a unit of blood, not the patient. He put the blood back into my patient and to my incredible surprise, she went into a clear-cut remission. I sent her home with a modest dose of an anti-leukemia drug. She relapsed about a year later and died.

Remember, at that time our treatment of acute leukemia was unpredictable. When you achieved a remission, relapse would take place sooner or later. For this type of leukemia to produce a remission that lasted a year was impressive. In fact my friend and I did the same thing with six more children with leukemia and each of them went into remission. Although remissions didn’t last, at least one of these patients was in the end-stage of the disease after two remissions had relapsed and was not expected to respond again. Well, obviously we needed data and we asked for a meeting with the specialists known as hematologists who took care of adult leukemia. We presented the facts as we had seen them and to our great surprise, the skepticism was obvious. The whole idea was rejected and no further interest was shown by our colleagues. I went to the Research Division and I was told that they had a research project that they were following and could not take on any further work.

Because we could not collect sufficient data, we were unable to publish this in a medical journal and it has been on my conscience ever since. I have tried to get numerous physicians interested, but skepticism has always abruptly ended our conversation. I write this with the hope that somebody might read about this experiment who is in a position either to begin personal research or report it to somebody else that can. The treatment of leukemia in children is still devastating although it has advanced considerably since my years of oncology.

We Need Your Help

More people than ever are reading Hormones Matter, a testament to the need for independent voices in health and medicine. We are not funded and accept limited advertising. Unlike many health sites, we don’t force you to purchase a subscription. We believe health information should be open to all. If you read Hormones Matter, like it, please help support it. Contribute now.

Yes, I would like to support Hormones Matter.

Photo by Aditya Romansa on Unsplash.

cancer

Oxalate, Time, and Viral Infections

When the Cycle Spins Backwards

The Speed of Reality

Homeostasis Against the Speed of Time

Of Tumors and Time

The Speed of Light Squared

The Imprecision of Time

A Metabolic Straitjacket

Many Worlds

We Need Your Help

Related posts:

You might be interested in

Wernicke’s Encephalopathy, Thiamine Deficiency, and Cancer

Breast Cancer and Thiamine Homeostasis

Surgery, Thiamine Deficiency, and Wernicke’s Encephalopathy

With Cancer Genetic Research Dominates

Preventing Illness

We Need Your Help

Related posts:

You might be interested in

Happy summer, and happy health!

Related posts:

You might be interested in

Fear of Advocating for Clients

Sex Ed and Me

Questioning Authority

They Say Follow the Money – How about Follow the Compassion!

It’s All About Language, Narrative Framing, Intent

Vaccines, Science, Anti-Science, Marketing, Propaganda, Resistance to Business as Usual a la Big Pharma

Is the Ending Full-Circle Back to Bad Pharma and Big Non-profits?

We Need Your Help

Related posts:

You might be interested in

Oxygenation: Key to Health or Disease

Thiamine, Cancer, Diabetes and Neurodegeneration

Considering Malnutrition in the Presence of Abundance

We need your help.

Related posts:

You might be interested in

Study Details – T3 and Ovarian Granulosa Cell Survival

What This Means

T3 and Common Women’s Health Conditions

We need your help.

Related posts:

You might be interested in

Thyroid Hormonal Balance

Autoimmune Thyroid Diseases

Thyroid Cancer

Related posts:

You might be interested in

We Need Your Help

Related posts:

You might be interested in