DAY 185 - Path to a Dairy-free Cancer Cure

photo from the Center for Food Safety

This is more like stepping stones in a stream of consciousness, rather than a path, but, walk with me if you will.
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We start in 1961; me with severe back pain at age 10.
My first chiropractic treatment in Fillmore, CA in 1976.
I graduated from Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1982.
In 1991, Dr. Steven Shuel, chiropractor, brings me an audio tape of a lecture on inflammation, by biochemist, Jeffrey Bland, PhD.
Almost overnight I recognize Dr. Bland as my first (and still only) professional mentor.
I subscribe to Dr. Bland’s Preventive Medicine Update (PMU); a monthly review of cutting-edge, scientific medicine (now called Functional Medicine Update).
In 1991 Dr. Bland interviewed Sherry Rogers, MD on PMU regarding her new book, Tired or Toxic?
I subscribed to Dr. Rogers newsletter – Total Wellness – in 1999.
Today, April 7, 2011 – sorting through a stack of Total Wellness newsletters, my attention was drawn to the title, Cancer is Just a Label, in the December 2006 edition. The story was that of a remarkable woman and a remarkable cure through foods, of a would-be-terminal, metastatic, multi-organ cancer.
I searched the internet to see if I could learn more about this case, and found http://www.kushicenter.com/Metastatic%20Cancer_en.htm
On this webpage I read the following:
Healing Metastatic Cancer with Diet By: Janet Vitt, R.N, B.S.N.
“Looking back, I think the main cause of my problems was cheese. I was obsessed with cheese. Not a day passed when I didn't eat it. I loved cheese omelets, I enjoyed cheese on hamburgers, and added cheese to all my vegetables. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, after aerobics class, I would come home and eat cheese and crackers. I was a cheese-a-holic.
There were several positive side effects of practicing macrobiotic. The migraine headaches I suffered from for over 20 years were now gone. The Joint pain in my knees and ankles, which I attributed to playing tennis and growing old, disappeared. My restless nights of sleep and waking to go to the bathroom became a thing of the past.”

The End
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50 years of hopping from stone to stone. It has been an interesting and valuable path for me. One of the clear threads that runs from beginning to end is; Warning! Dairy may be dangerous to your health!

Dairy products were clearly the single greatest cause of my own arthritis, back pain, fatigue and digestive issues. Janet Vitt suspects dairy products as being central to her nearly fatal cancer. In practice since 1983, I have seen the following conditions caused by dairy products: headache, migraine, ear infections, ringing in the ears, sinus infections, acne, tonsillitis, vertigo, neck pain, TMJ pain, back pain, knee pain, muscle pain, neuritis, arthritis, reflux, constipation, intestinal gas, nausea, gastritis, bedwetting, frightening dreams, carpal tunnel syndrome, menstrual cramps, menopausal symptoms, anxiety, depression, fatigue, sciatica, elevated blood pressure, hyperactivity, colds, flu, snoring, asthma, and weight gain.

Let the eater beware!

DAY 30 – Tweeting Not for Twits Necessarily

Twitter, as you may know, is a very popular instant-messaging system that lets a person send brief text messages, called Tweets, up to 140 characters in length to a list of followers. My bet is that a huge percentage of Tweets are light on significance. Some folks, like my wife, think of them as worthless.

But, some Tweets, as it turns out, carry powerful messages.

My professional mentor, Jeffrey Bland, PhD, (pictured at left) the founder of the Institute for Functional Medicine, a biochemist by training, and a brilliant philosopher and educator by gift and diligence, tweets. I limit my Twitter following, but he is on my short list.

Today I looked at two of his Tweets. The first was a link to an article by neurologist, David Perlmutter, MD, on the brain’s ability to regenerate. One paragraph reads as follows:
““In 1998, the journal Nature Medicine published a report indicating that neurogenesis, the growth of new brain cells, does indeed occur in humans. As Sharon Begley remarked in her book, "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain," "The discovery overturned generations of conventional wisdom in neuroscience. The human brain is not limited to the neurons it is born with, or even the neurons that fill in after the explosion of brain development in early childhood.””
For the complete article -> Synthesis (@FMUbyJBland) (via @HuffPostHealth) http://huff.to/9AJzJq

The second Tweet, a quote from Dr. Bland, stated: “A hyperinsulin state can overdrive specific kinase-modulated pathways and increase the relative risk of a metastatic disorder.” In lay terminology, this means that elevated levels of insulin in ones blood (often caused by excess dietary intake of sugars and starches) can cause an overproduction of molecules involved in the process of inflammation, which themselves increase the risk of developing cancers that spread from the initial site in the body. In excessively simple terms this means that eating too much sugar and starch is a risk factor for developing aggressive cancers.

The first Tweet dealt with brain health and brain regeneration, the second with a mechanism of the genesis of metastatic cancers. This is not lightweight material. For busy doctors like myself, these data blasts help to keep me on the cutting edge. 

They may be packed into 140 characters or less, but these are not twit Tweets.