Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby's Total Health Newsletter #39. Week ending Feb 21st, 2010
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• This week's Quote

1. The Most Feared Disease Of Our Time (Guess The Most Common!)
2. Poor Bill Clinton. Watch His Brain Deteriorate
3. Yet ANOTHER Reason To Love The Doctor's Chocolate
4. Maybe There Is A Miser Gene
5. Is God A Brain Chemical?
6. What's In A Word?

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This Week's Quote:

Now.

NOW is the great engine of life, the workshop, the factory that generates our tomorrows.

What you put into today is what you get out in the future. The raw materials for the fabrication of the days of energy, concentration, commitment and honesty. And above all LOVE.

If you want a brilliant future full of love, light, beauty, grace and passion, then you must put these qualities into TODAY.

Now is here. Tomorrow is what you get.

Treat the day well!

It's by Keith Scott-Mumby! (1994)

1. The Most Feared Disease Of Our Time (Guess The Most Common!)

If you opened the email I sent you a few days ago you’ll know I’m thinking about cancer when I say the "most feared".

But this is not the most common. I'll tell you what that is in just a moment.

Cancer commands respect. It scares the daylights out of most people, and rightly so. When a patient is told “It’s malignant”, time stops for him or her and their whole life runs in front of them. What you may not know is that this scenario will play out for you or someone close to you. The Big C Movie, with all its poignant drama, will come one day, to a cinema very close to you!

Statistics say that 1 in 2 men and almost that many women will get cancer at some time in their life. That's 50/50 odds. Some of you will have heard me liken this to playing Russian roulette but with THREE bullets in the gun, instead of just one.

If you want to lengthen these odds to 50/1 or less, you need to get my amazing "Cancer Confidential" report. In reality cancer need not be a death-sentence. That’s something I have taught for decades. It is a wake-up call; it’s telling you your health is in ruins. But you don’t have to die. You can fix it!

If you haven't already bought this major report, you should check it out on this page:

The Most Feared Disease Of Our Time

However, cancer is not the most common disease in the world. You may not easily guess what is but I'm going to tell you: it's parasites. Malaria, a parasite disease, is still the world's number one killer (blog)

But there are commoner parasites still, like worms and flukes, Giardia (1 in 6 of the population), Cryptosporidia, Toxoplasma and yeasts. Almost everybody has them. It's not a disease of dirty unhealthy people. Americans, especially, are fond of believing THEY are clean and civilized and parasites don't affect Americans! But there are parts of the USA where worms are so common and endemic, I would warn Europeans to be especially careful when they visit these zones.

For instance, 40 million people in the US are infected with pinworm (that's official). 5.5 million of those are children. One of the biggest parasite outbreaks of all time took place in a northern US city and killed hundreds and made nearly a million people sick.

Sanitary habits do not actually protect you and, in fact, may aggravate the problem, by not stimulating your immune system enough. I have lived and travelled in Asia, as you know, where they laugh at Westerners for trying to be too hygienic. They trust their immune systems more than Chlorox and antiseptic soaps, quite rightly. There may be something to this: a highly unusual and very effective treatment for Crohn's disease is to deliberately infect the patient with worms. This worked so well patients were actually asking for more worms. All but one of 29 patients showed some improvement and 21 had no symptoms at all! [visit this BBC (UK) page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4091881.stm]

The fact is we live in an uneasy battle with parasites. They are constantly evolving, our immune systems constantly trying to contain them and first one side gets ahead, then the other.

In biology, this is a process called "The Red Queen" scenario, after the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's "Alice Through The Looking Glass". In it, the Red Queen is running as fast as she can go, just to stay still. If she paused for a moment, she would go backwards and lose the race.

Get the parallel?

Swapping anti-parasite genes is one of the main reasons sex evolved, so we needed those critters! [No, I'm not crazy, this is now official biology. Check out Matt Ridley's book "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature". It's a corking read!]

Parasites are such an important topic, for the health of everyone, men, women and especially children, that I have prepared another major eBook report. It will be announced in the next few days.

2. Poor Bill Clinton. Watch His Brain Deteriorate.

I like Bill Clinton. To an outsider, he's the most intelligent president since Jimmy Carter (and before that, JFK). See, to the outside world, the US president needs to be a man who knows what's going on.

We don't give a damn who he's podgering or which part of her anatomy. We deplore the hypocritical outcry, when one of those domestic scandals (actually manufactured attacks) gets started. What the world wants is a US president who is capable of understanding the bigger issues and making the world a safer place.

Of all the men at the White House in the last 50 years, Clinton seemed to be the most knowledegable, up to date, connected with the rest of the world and attuned to major international issues (and I don't just mean wars).

I'm not taking political sides, though childish members of the US public believe that no Democrat or, if they are on the other side, no Republican can ever be any good. I judge only the individual, not by party stand.

What's sad is that Clinton is now in the hands of conventional cardiologists and his days are numbered. They persuaded him he needed stents. The man is smart, so they clearly hid from him the truth that stents, like bypasses, are a worthless procedure, which adds nothing to survival and have never been vaidated in proper clinical studies. They don't even last and have to keep being re-done (good dollars for the cardios).

Look, he's already had a triple bypass in 2004. How good was that? $100,000 and it has to be repaired within 6 years! More money, more suffering and still no statistical benefit or life extension! It's staggering what they can get away with.

"This is not an unusual occurrence after bypass surgery," says P.K. Shah, MD, director of cardiology at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles (who isn't treating Clinton).

The unfortunate part of the story, though, is that all this heart surgery rapidly cripples the brain's cognitive function. People undergo personality changes, become forgetful and eventually senile. Drugs make everything 10 times worse. Cardiologists hunting for dollars always keep all this secret, of course. But it's there, in the literature, for those honest enough to look.

And you know what? The ONLY nutritional advice he'll get is eat a low fat diet, which is a waste of time and dangerous. He needs essential fatty acids and LOTS of them, plus antioxidants, vitamin B6, B12 and folate and lots of the right exercize (not any old exercize).

Fat chance anyone will prescribe that for the poor guy. That would get him on the road back to health and kink the money hose!

3. Yet ANOTHER Reason To Love The Doctor's Chocolate!

As if people need another reason to love my designer "doctor's health chocolate", here it is: Eating a little bit of chocolate each week may not only lower the risk of having a stroke, it may also decrease the odds of dying from one.

A new review of recent research on chocolate and stroke risk found at least two large studies are suggestive of the health benefits of chocolate in lowering the risk of stroke. The results will be presented in April at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Toronto.

The first study found 44,489 people who ate one serving of chocolate per week were 22% less likely to have a stroke than people who didn't eat chocolate (that's a BIG study, by the way).

The second study showed that 1,169 people who ate 50 grams of chocolate once a week were 46% less likely to die after a stroke compared to people who didn't. That's a MASSIVE reduction. It fits with the fact that Kuna islanders in Panama, who drink 4- 5 cups of chocolate a day, have 90% less heart disease and, incidentally, 90% less cancer than mainlanders.

The secret is not a secret at all: chocolate contains one of the highest concentration of antioxidants polyphenols known. Prof. Norman Hollenberg of Harvard University thinks epicatechin, found in chocolate, should be classified as a vitamin. It's essential for health because, without it, your health suffers.

A couple of years ago I recorded a complete talk on my thinking behind this, which you can listen to on this page: http://www.alternative-doctor.com/chocolate

The "Doctors Chocolate" was designed by me to include the best of current choco-science and there is torrents of it coming out from universities around the world. Chocolate comes from a tree called the Theobroma, which means "food of the gods". Well, we know it tastes like the food of the gods; but it does seem to be a gift from heaven too, in view of its wondrous health benefits.

Learn more here: http://www.doctorkeithschocolate.com

The company licensed to sell it is doing a two for the price of one right now.

4. Maybe There Is A Miser Gene!

They try to find genes for everything these days: a gene for liking cheese on toast maybe!

Now researchers say they've pinpointed the area of the brain responsible for the fear of losing money. So maybe there is a miser gene! (new subscribers, you just have to get used to my weird sense of humor).

The neuroscientists concluded that the human aversion to losing money is tied to the amygdala, a structure that registers rapid emotional reactions and plays a role in depression, anxiety and autism.

The study included two people with amygdala damage caused by a rare genetic disease and a control group of volunteers without amygdala damage. The study's main author is Benedetto de Martino, a University College, London, neuroscientist who is a visiting researcher at the California Institute of Technology.

All the participants were asked if they were willing to accept a variety of gambles involving small amounts of money. The two people with amygdala damage accepted risky gambles much more often than those in the control group and showed no aversion to money loss.

Monetary-loss aversion has been studied in behavioral economics for some time, but this is the first time that patients have been reported who lack it entirely, due to brain damage.

Of course losing a lot of money can give you brain damage after the fact!

"We think this shows that the amygdala is critical for triggering a sense of caution toward making gambles in which you might lose," a function that may be similar to the amygdala's role in fear and anxiety, said Colin Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech.

The study appears in the Feb 8, 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

SOURCE: California Institute of Technology, news release, Feb. 8, 2010

5. Is God A Brain Chemical?

I'm only asking that question because it's been asked before, in a scientific context.

You need to read this in conjunction with my article posted at:  www.alternative-doctor.com/soul_stuff/brain_god.htm

I do not decry transcendental experience. But there is some strange connection with very non-spiritual effects, ie. brain chemistry, that needs explaining.

Findings published in the Feb. 11 issue of Neuron, based on research into patients who had surgery to remove brain tumors, revealed that damage to specific parts of the brain boosted levels of spiritual thinking and feeling.

The results have pointed to new insights into the connection between religious attitudes and the physical makeup of the mind, researchers say. I can’t help thinking of the connection between hallucinogenic drugs and spiritual experience, too.

Previous imaging studies of the brain have shown a clear link between spirituality and a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal and temporal cortexes.

But this time researchers studied what happened before and after brain surgery to the levels of "self-transcendence" in patients.

According to the report, damage to the posterior parietal regions of the brain led to an increase in self-transcendence and unusually fast transformations from one state to another. The study authors said dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors.

Does that mean they are saying some transcendent states are crazy? The researchers suggested that the finding could help in the development of treatments for mental illness. A strange thought, perhaps.

SOURCE: Cell Press, news release, Feb. 10, 2010

6. What's In A Word?

Let's have some fun this week, with really daft medical words:

adelphepothia an incestuous desire for one's sister

apodyopsis the act of mentally undressing someone

kyphorrhinos having a nose with a bump in it

saprostomous having bad breath

steatopygic having a fat behind

tibialconcupiscent have a lascivious interest in watching a woman put on stockings (I think I had that but the advent of tights cured me, without any medication!)

Enough! I can't take any more of that... This is witzelsucht (a feeble attempt at humor). It sounds German and presumably it means the wit sucks!

So, that's all for this week!

Be well; find the sacred in all you do, otherwise don't do it!

Prof.

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