Recognizing a Stroke

The following is not really in line with our usual stuff, but this was just forwarded to me and I know of at least two people on this list that should read it, then print it out and hand it to their respective partners. The rest of you might also want to pass this on to any friends you have who you suspect might have had, or are in danger of having, a stroke.

Susie is recovering at an incredible pace for someone who had a massive stroke, all because Sherry saw Susie stumble – that is a key indicator that is not mentioned below – and then she asked Susie the three questions (see below). So simple – this literally saved Susie’s life. Suzie failed all three, so 9-1-1 was called. Even though she had normal blood pressure readings and it did not appear to be a stroke because she could converse, to some extent, with the Paramedics, they took her to the hospital right away.

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the general lack of awareness often spells disaster. The stroke victim might suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke.

Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:

• Ask the individual to SMILE.
• Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
• Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE (coherently – i.e., “It is sunny out today.”).

After discovering that a group of non-medical volunteers could identify facial weakness, arm weakness, and speech problems, researchers urged the general public to learn the three questions.

They presented their conclusions at the American Stroke Association’s annual meeting last February. Widespread use of this test could result in prompt diagnosis and treatment of the stroke and prevent brain damage.

Here’s another one that I’d like to share with you. It’s about my glucosamine comments from a previous newsletter. I cannot attest to some of this person’s claims, but she says it worked for her. You guys can decide for yourselves.

I took very good glucosamine and MSM in separate capsules... and the MSM I still take. It keeps my hair from falling out and it (from what I have found in reading) also kills bacteria and parasites if taken in high enough doses. (How high is high enough?) It is also good for inflammation.

When just taking glucosamine alone, I didn’t notice any differences, but glucosamine with chondroitin (Twin Labs label), immediately upon taking, took the pain and inflammation away in my left knee. I no longer take it and only rarely have a bit of pain and inflammation in that knee. I think I will see it go away completely once my body is totally detoxed and I keep eating healthy.

Keep on truckin’ lady… J

DISCLAIMER: It should probably be noted here, for those of you who like sharing what works and what doesn’t, that I can print your testimonials here (i.e., “It worked for me”), but when you send me a claim that something does this or that and you cannot personally attest that you have used it and you are certain that it was that particular thing that fixed you, I will not share it until I have personally researched it and can be relatively confident the claims are valid. This is an attempt on my part to not be passing around claims for Dr. Marvel’s Snake Oil Cure-All. Many products work on some people only because of their beliefs that they will work, not because they have been laboratory tested and proven to work on everyone. In double blind tests, often sugar pills cure people, which means it was all in their heads to begin with (and where else would manifestations start?). In any case, I am attempting to keep this newsletter as scientific as possible.

Are Antibiotics the Fuel for Fungal Fire?

In 1969, then U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart was quoted as saying it was “time to close the book on infectious disease.” Stewart said that, thanks to antibiotics and other pharmaceutical antimicrobial agents, the war on microbes was soon to be over and man will win! (Scientific American, November 1998)

It makes me wonder, who paid him off? The truth is “Despite trillions spent on medication, infectious and degenerative disease are increasing, not just in the United States, but in the rest of the world as well.” – Nancy Appleton, PhD.

As you might have noted, the date of Stewart’s proclamation was 1969. Is it coincidental, or at government edict, that in 1970 all five of this country’s fungus research and teaching centers were closed down? It was also at this same time that pharmaceutical companies stopped putting the antifungal nystatin into the same pills with the antibiotic tetracycline. Again, coincidence, or part of some master control conspiracy? <that last word used only slightly tongue-in-cheek>

Reader Q&A

Q: You talk about grains getting moldy during storage. I have read that the storage-to-use cycle in this country is only a couple months.

A: If someone is trying to convince you of that, they are lying through their teeth. Please cite your sources for these types of claims (if possible) so I can check them out. Anyway, you only have to walk into, or in some cases drive by, any grain storage facility to see the above claim is not valid.

As a kid, I often hung around the local grain co-op in my small hometown and watched these guys at work. I was intrigued by the dumping of all those tiny grains of wheat, oats, barley, and corn from trucks and watching it go up conveyor belts to dump into silos, then to see the silos getting emptied into rail cars to be hauled away, presumably to be turned into whatever products they made. I had no idea, at that time in my life, that this stuff would become my bread or breakfast cereal or I would have quit eating them way back then. Those granaries were filthy! Grain constantly fell off the conveyors and they had pooper-scooper type shovels propped up in the corner to put it back on the belts. Guys stood on the grain, walked through it, mud from the truck tires fell through the grating into the hopper, all manner of dust and dirt got in it, etc., before it even got to the silo. Then, when coming out to go to rail cars, you could frequently see black patches of something in the grain. Those patches were mold!

How long did they keep them? As a small kid, I can’t be certain which batch came in and which batch went out. I didn’t keep records when I was nine years old. But I do know that the farmers cut their crops a couple times each summer and seldom did anything get shipped until they could fill several train cars. That meant that shipping it out didn’t happen until late Autumn. Today, however, you can read the schedules of granaries and find that a couple months is a minimum. In some cases, grain in this country is in storage for 10 or 12 years before being shipped to manufacturers.*1 How long does it take mold to get on the grain? That depends on the environmental conditions inside the silos, but it could be as little as just a few days. And some of that grain arrives at the silos already moldy from the fields.

*Note 1: These are older numbers. That data used to be available from USDA, but a recent check of their site shows they apparently no longer wish to inform us of that. They do, however, list the numbers (in USDA Economics, Statistics, and Market Information) of millions of bushels of each grain type that are stored on the farm or at off-farm storage. Any of you who have seen “on the farm” silos will know that this is poor storage indeed. As of March 1 of this year, on-farm storage of corn was over 3 million bushels, while off-farm storage was just over 2 million. Why? Waiting for the price to rise before they sell it. And in that wait, what is happening to your future food?

I read somewhere, several years ago, while researching an article on how long the world’s food supply would last, that the maximum our federal government would allow grain to be stored was 20 years. I do not know if that is still true, but I’d hazard a guess that grain stored for more than a few weeks is just about guaranteed to have some form of mold, and therefore, some form of mycotoxins in it. And remember, even though there are a few hundred different mycotoxins, the only one the USDA requires grains to be tested for is aflatoxin.

I have quoted this one before, but perhaps it bears repeating: Ruth Etzel, PhD, MD, proclaims that mycotoxins are “common contaminants of our grain food supply.” – Journal of the American Medical Association, January 2002

Q: If antibiotics are so bad for us, why do I have so many problems today when I haven’t had an antibiotic in 10-15 years?

A: I guess the easy answer is that all things take time. Hey, if you had a shot of antibiotics and your ears fell off the next morning, even your doctor would probably get the picture that it was the antibiotic that caused this. However, when the antibiotic, which is a mycotoxin from molds, enters your system, it picks a fight with the bacteria in your body.

If your immune system was in reasonably good shape before that time, then the fight might last awhile. If you had a bacterial infection, which presumably is why your doctor prescribed the antibiotic, then those two factions are going to wage war until one loses. So you are feeling lousy while this is going on, then the bacteria start losing and, because the battle is nearing an end, you actually start feeling better. You and your doctor both proclaim that the antibiotic worked. But the mycotoxins are now free to multiply and run rampant throughout your body. Remember, even the good bacteria that you need were killed off in that battle. You might then experience some totally different symptoms. Or, in the event all the bad bacteria weren’t killed off, you get a relapse and the doctor tries a different antibiotic and you go through the process again.

In that case, you now have two or more different mycotoxins wandering around in you and because your immune system has been devastated by having the good bacteria killed, you have nothing with which you might fight these invaders. They now start to progressively invade all areas of your body. You can tolerate a certain percentage of mycotoxins and you would get some antifungals in your food supply, even if you didn’t know it, which would help stave off the coming illness. So for people who ordinarily maintained a reasonable diet, it could take 10, 15, or even 20 years before the mycotoxin level was high enough to give you enough pain to go back to your doctor with a complaint. For some of those people, they have found organs severely damaged because those little nasties had been chewing on them for 20 years. But, do you suppose either you or your doctor will associate the two events that far apart?

In other people, particularly those who indulge in large amounts of sugary foods (e.g., candy and pop), heavy grain consumption (e.g., cereal, bread, muffins, bagels, donuts, cake), or heavy yeast consumption (e.g., beer, wine, bread), the mycotoxins got immediate reinforcements and in large quantities, along with copious quantities of the food they like best (sugars), so they had lots of support troops for their invasion, sweeping through your body like a Mongol hoard. That person didn’t last 20 years, but was probably back at the doctor in a year, or maybe even a month. And not only did they have pains, but gained weight too.

So, to conclude this answer, if you have to have an antibiotic, follow it with probiotics (at least two hours after the antibiotic – give it time to do its job), and back way off on all the carbohydrate foods, the sugary foods and drinks, and anything that is made with yeast. Then you probably won’t end up with a mycotoxin-caused illness many years down the road.

Q: What’s the best way to eat antifungal foods? I have heard some people juice them and others insist they be eaten whole and raw.

A: We have read and heard from various sources that juicing is the preferred method. But I think this is because it makes consumption easy, like taking a pill instead of eating healthy meals. I guess my view is that it is just another form of laziness. But beyond that, there are some things in vegetables that are lost in the juicing process. For example, carrots have carotenes (lots of them, not just beta carotene) in the pectin in the fiber that you will get in your system if you eat the carrot, but when you juice the carrot, you will have to juice about eight of them to get the same quantity as you’d get by eating just two whole carrots. Our personal preference, therefore, is to eat whole raw veggies, just the way Nature intended. Sure, that requires you to spend a few more minutes in the chewing process, but I just think you get more out of it that way.

Is it Asthma or is it Fungus?

David A. Holland, M.D.

The following text is copied from the book The Fungus Link: An Introduction to Fungal Disease, copyright © 2000, by Doug A. Kaufmann, with permission of the author.

Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, 12^th Edition, defines asthma this way: “A disease of the airways that is characterized by increased responsiveness of the tracheobronchial tree to a multiplicity of stimuli… manifested physiologically by a widespread narrowing of the air passages, which may be relieved spontaneously or as a result of therapy, and clinically by paroxysms of dypsnea, cough, and wheezing. It is an episodic disease, acute exacerbations being interspersed with symptom-free periods.”

Is it possible to make something so complicated that we miss the simplicity of it? As with other diseases we have previously covered in other publications, the cause of asthma is often unknown. With a few cases we are able to pinpoint the cause, whether it is a chemical that is inhaled, causing lung damage, or an environmental dust, like cement, that can irritate the bronchial linings in the lungs and trigger wheezing and bronchial spasms in the worker, or victim. Once again, we will be looking at the role of fungus in this disease. We might as well include allergies, also known as allergic rhinitis, along with asthma in this discussion.

Often patients have both asthma and allergies, and the allergies can sometimes trigger the asthma or simply cause the daily misery of sniffles and congestion that you know if you are unfortunate enough to have experienced allergies. We hope to offer some simplicity to a disease that is approached with so much complexity.

I recently reviewed an overview of asthma prepared by a pharmaceutical company that was entitled, Asthma Market Overview. So, asthma is a market. A source of millions of dollars in profits. I guess that’s okay; after all, we all have the opportunity to make a profit in this country. It is the people with asthma who fail to take an interest in their health who will continue to contribute to this market. Obviously, you are not one of these people. You have decided to stop the money trail by taking an interest and learning more about your particular condition. Whether this information helps you or not, we deeply appreciate the effort you are making to recapture your health. Let’s look at some of the figures mentioned in this asthma report:

“An estimated 15 million Americans suffer from asthma, including 4.8 million children and adolescents.” (CDC, Asthma mortality and hospitalization among children and young adults – U.S. 1980-1993. MMWR)

“The prevalence of asthma is increasing substantially (38% over the past decade).” (CDC. Asthma – U.S. 1980-1990, MMWR. 1992:41:733-735)

I wonder if 38 percent more antibiotics have been used over the last ten years.

“The total estimated cost of asthma in 1990 was $6.2 billion, up 38% from 1985.” (Weiss, K.B., Gergen, P.J., Hodgson, T.A., “An economic evaluation of asthma in the United States.” New England Journal of Medicine, 1992. 326:862-866)

Based on these figures, whoever helps people substantially with their asthma is going to make a lot of money by taking the market share and upsetting the pharmaceutical companies at the same time! Overall though, they will be contributing to significant savings in both therapy and lives. Often we forget that there is human life behind all of these figures.

And then there was the Life magazine issue that Doug mentioned in his article “Respiratory Disorders and Fungus.” There are two references in this article that I would like to expound on. First of all, it is widely known that sugar has the ability to depress the immune system. Anyone with a potentially fatal illness (around 5,200 people still die of asthma each year) should not be gambling with blue soda pop and Magic Star cereal. Cane sugar is a notoriously moldy food, and when consumed, is able to introduce molds and their toxins directly into the human body. Speaking of mold, the article also refers to another asthmatic child whose former home tested positive for mold. Some mold growing in homes has been known to cause respiratory diseases and even bleeding from the lungs. Based on this observation, my question might be: should the boy have been moved out of the moldy house more quickly, or should he simply have been prescribed more medicine to reduce the potentially toxic effect of the mold on his respiratory system?

An article by Kaufman, H.F., et al (“Review of fungus-induced asthmatic reactions.” American Journal of Respiratory Critical Care Medicine. June 1995) outlines the ability of fungus to not only cause an allergic reaction by simple exposure to the lungs, but also colonize the lungs and induce inflammatory reaction from the infection. How common is this? A different Dr. Kaufman states that, “Each year in the U.S. the fungi Histoplasma capsulatum, Blastomyces dermatitidis, and Coccidioides immitis cause more pulmonary infections than bacteria.” (Kaufman, Carol A., M.D. “Nonresolving pneumonia: Is endemic mycoses to blame?” The Journal of Respiratory Diseases. Vol. 16. No. 11. Nov 1995). According to C.C. Kibbler, these fungi “routinely infest persons with apparently normal immunity” (Principles and Practices of Clinical Mycology. 1996. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.). Ever notice that the asthma you once had as a child is no longer bothering you as an adult? It is well known that sensitization to fungi is higher in the early years and declines rapidly as we age (Kaufman, H.F., et al). If fungal infections, then, can contribute to asthma and allergies, why not treat asthma, when the cause is unknown, empirically as if a fungus caused it?

In a study on allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis, a fungus-induced condition that can essentially mimic asthma and is a common complication of cystic fibrosis, 100% (six out of six) of the patients treated with the antifungal drug Sporanox experienced improvement in the lung function (Dennis, David W., et al. Adjunctive Therapy of Allergic Bronchopulmonary Aspergillosis with Itraconazole. Chest 100; 3:813-819. Sept 1991). This was a small study done in 1991. No interest in a larger study has occurred so far.

Another so-called “cause” of asthma, you might have been told, is reflux (that is, reflux of acid from the stomach up the esophagus and back down into the lungs causing irritation of the lining of the bronchioles). Can this really be fungus as well? You guessed it – the most common cause of Candida albicans bronchopneumonia is from aspiration of oral secretions. Everybody aspirates a small amount of either oral secretions or stomach fluids at night while sleeping. If large amounts of yeast can cause pneumonia in a debilitated person, can it “just” cause asthma in a normal person? The question would be, is the acid causing the lung irritation, or is it the yeast that is sneaking in along with the fluids? And if it is the acid, what is causing it to reflux in the first place? We should not even have to answer that question!

We once saw a prominent man who had asthma and was spending upwards of $600 a month on asthma medications. He lived in a small town in Texas and, because of his frequent trips to the pharmacy, he had become good friends with the pharmacist.

In desperation and in light of not seeing any improvement after much time, he sought our help. We advised a particular diet known to starve fungi (vital to the program), a few supplements, and empirically, like the above study did, prescribed antifungal medications. The results were no less than dramatic. He lost weight, looked younger because of that, and was able to shed all of his asthma medications. The only dissatisfied party was the pharmacist, who no longer returned his calls.

$600 per month = $7,200 per year. So, is that the cost of friendship with a pharmacist? Sigh…

This from the April 2005 issue of Discover magazine, R&D Flash section: Prescription drug deaths go up 25 percent in the first week of every month, says a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego. Pharmacies are busiest at that time, which may underlie the fatalities.