Healthy Homes Asia

by Phillip Day

‘There must be something to acupuncture – after all, you never see any sick porcupines.’ – Bob Goddard

Unnecessary surgeries, drug-prescribing, unneeded tests and dangerous treatments all contribute to a frightening toll wrought by doctors around the world today. My book Health Wars documents the phenomenon of ‘death by doctoring’ in detail and reveals the reasons why, while medicine has made great advances in certain areas, (infant survival, A & E trauma medicine, wound surgery, etc) and should justifiably receive the credit, it has failed miserably in others, most notably, ‘mental health’ and the treatment of disease. These failures are largely due to the belief that treating symptoms with drugs is the same thing as curing the disease itself, which it isn’t.

Examples:

·         Painkillers to treat hangovers, which are a dehydration issue 

·         The removal of tumours in the belief this will cure cancer

·         The treatment of behavioural ‘disorders’ using drugs to mask hyperactivity symptoms

·         Hysterectomies to cure menopausal woes

·         Electroshock treatment (ECT) to cure mental illness

Most diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, are metabolic (systemic) conditions related to diet and lifestyle, yet doctors are not trained in nutrition. Doctors are instead compelled to swallow the most extraordinary paradox that food is apparently good enough to keep you alive but not good enough to fix you when you’re sick. Many I’ve interviewed over the years are fed up to the back teeth with this crummy state of affairs and wish to see things changed. They did not go into medicine not to heal people. Most conventional doctors, if they’re honest, will admit they can’t heal their patients’ diseases with drugs, they only treat the symptoms.[1]

Facts

·         You are what you eat

·         Food can change your mood

·         Every cell in your body comes from what you ingest

·         A New You is produced approximately every seven years after all your old cells have died out and been replaced with new ones. The quality of the New You and how well it will function will be down to diet and lifestyle, with genetics playing an adjunctive role

Bad diets in hospitals only contribute to the difficulties patients experience in overcoming illness. MRSA and other infections strike patients who have compromised immunity. What we should do is fire the hospital dieticians, retool the kitchens to produce tasty, raw, nutritious whole-foods, train our doctors and nurses in nutrition, and do all we can to boost patients’ immunity with adequate hydration, hope and mental stimulation. Not drug them up and leave them sitting in front of Paul O’Grady on the TV with their bread and milk.

The current, drug-based, medical approach to disease:

·         Is failing and dangerous

·         Pays no heed to prevention

·         Lacks proper nutrition support completely

·         Prefers the bullish use of surgical or chemical intervention

·         Does not consider stress as a factor in illness

·         Views illness as a collection of localised symptoms to be treated with drugs/surgery rather than banishing the underlying causation with lifestyle and dietary changes  

Viz:

ISRAELI DOCTORS GO ON STRIKE AND DEATH RATES PLUMMET

‘Death rates in Israel have dropped considerably since physicians in public hospitals implemented a program of sanctions three months ago, according to a survey of burial societies.

The Israel Medical Association (IMA) began the action in March to protest against the government's proposed imposition of a new four-year wage contract for doctors. Since then, hundreds of thousands of visits to outpatient clinics have been canceled or postponed along with tens of thousands of elective operations. Emergency rooms, dialysis units, oncology departments, obstetric and neonatal departments, and other vital facilities have been working normally during the action.

The Jerusalem Post surveyed non-profit burial societies, which perform funerals for the vast majority of Israelis, and found that the number of funerals has fallen drastically.

According to one funeral parlor manager the same thing occurred in 1983, during a similar action by the IMA, which lasted 4 and a half months.

The only area of Israel which was found to not have a reduction in its death rate was the city of Netanya. It also just so happens that all of the doctors at the only hospital in this city have "no-strike" clauses in their contracts and are therefore unaffected by the action.’ [2]

In Short

No-one’s suggesting you don’t need a doctor. I am suggesting you might exercise reasonable caution before swallowing everything Nurse shoves down your throat. When assessing your needs for a doctor, fall back on those good old bastions of reason, logic and common sense:

·         Prevention is the best cure

·         Better not to get sick in the first place

·         Change your attitude, diet and lifestyle

·         Just do it!

·         Ensure the family is well fed with a varied intake of wholesome, nutritious, organic foods

·         Reduce stress

·         Be happy

·         Consult a doctor who gives advice on lifestyle and diet

Fact: Correct drug prescribing is the largest sub-sector of iatrogenic (doctor-induced) deaths in most First World countries.[3]

Notes [1] Hammond, Phil Trust Me, I’m a Doctor, Metro Books, 1999

[2] www.mercola.com; British Medical Journal 2000;320:1561

[3] Day, Phillip Health Wars, op. cit.

by Phillip Day

Can your body heal you or not? If so, what does the healing?

Nobel Prize laureate, visionary and famous doctor Albert Schweitzer once wrote:

"It's supposed to be a secret but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor within."

Thankfully the human body with which God blessed us did not come with a packet of pills with an FDA approval stamp on it. Long before old JD Rockefeller, Morris Fishbein, the American Medical Association, Stephen Barrett, Dr William Jarvis and insurance companies succeeded in convincing us we couldn't do without them, the human body had decent, nutritious food available to it and a T-cell lymphocyte system working away behind the scenes to return us to health if we got sick.

To understand how central diet and lifestyle changes are to a recovery from disease; also to come to terms with modern medicine's creepy hostility to ‘natural healing processes', and why medical doctors can actually be jailed in some countries for treating cancer with nutrition, you have to appreciate some mind-boggling discoveries about the human cell.

For the uninitiated, the cell is the smallest unit of life and you have in excess of 80 billion of these mini-miracles that make you up. Few of us pause to give this micro-world anything like the respect it so richly deserves. What follows will astonish you.

The cell city

Wars are not good for much but they are good for new toys. Following World War II, the cell began to be unlocked with an incredible advancement in technology unavailable in Darwin's day. "What exactly is life?" the age-old question was posed anew, but few were going to warm to the answer.

What confronted scientists down the new electron microscope was not Ernst Haeckel's homogenous glob of undifferentiated protoplasm proposed by Darwinism but a miniaturised city of untold complexity containing molecular machines performing numerous tasks. Professor of Biochemistry Michael Behe writes:

"At the very basis of life where molecules and cells run the show, we've discovered machines, literally molecular machines... There are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one end of the cell to the other. There are machines which capture the energy from sunlight and turn it into usable energy.... When we look at these machines, we ask ourselves, where do they come from? And the standard answer - Darwinian evolution - is very inadequate in my view."[1]

The flagellum, for example - the ‘tail' which drives the E. Coli bacterium - is essentially an outboard motor. The design comprises a hook with filament or propeller rotating up to 100,000 rpm, a rotor, stator, drive shaft, U-joint, bushings and engine casing (inner and outer membranes).

Its assembly defies any notion of a functional precursor in the evolutionary process. If just one of 40 structural components of the engine is missing, it does not work and the bacterium dies. How then could the flagellum have evolved? It would have to have worked from the very first bacterium for natural selection to become possible thereafter.

The system is said by Michael Behe to be irreducibly complex - in other words, it cannot be simplified further and retain function. Evolutionary biology has to explain how the bacterial flagellum came into being gradually when no advantage or function could be enjoyed at each stage of the evolutionary process until the last of some forty components was installed.

How was this machine built in the first place? Studies of the bacterial flagellum reveal that the parts have to be assembled in a certain order, as with a car engine. Chemicals cannot do this, there has to be information orchestrating the construction. Molecular machines construct the bacterial flagellum in the correct order for it to work. If one piece is mislaid or put in the wrong place the engine won't work, hence ‘irreducibly complex'.

And the machines which make the flagella are in turn made by other machines, which are themselves constructed by further systems which are also irreducibly complex. Such mind-boggling complexity ‘goes all the way down' and has led to an organised re-think into how life is possible. Darwin seemed to anticipate the problem when he wrote:

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."[2]

Well, guess what, Charlie....

The ‘simple' cell? DNA

Even the simplest cells are now known to be unbelievably complex. Biochemists have tabulated their components - mitochondria, nucleus, rough endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, cytoskeleton, smooth endoplasmic reticulum, proteins, fats, enzymes, minerals, and so on - but not the biophysical aspects the cell, which include the information required to assemble and replicate the cell, not to mention the bizarre property of one cell being able to communicate with others over distance.[3] Naval engineering graduate Chuck Missler PhD writes:

"The ‘simple cell' turns out to be a miniaturized city of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design, including automated assembly plants and processing units featuring robot machines (protein molecules with as many as 3,000 atoms each in three-dimensional configurations), manufacturing hundreds of thousands of specific types of products. The system design exploits artificial languages and decoding systems, memory banks for information storage, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error correction techniques and proof-reading devices for quality control."[4]

This is what confronted scientists after World War II. Different levels of multi-layered reality were peeled back to reveal a far deeper, astonishing order.

"What are the forces that control the twisting and folding of molecules into complex shapes?" biophysicist F Weinhold wants to know. "Don't look for the answers in your organic chemistry textbook."[5]

Twisting in the wind

At the base of the cell's intelligence is James Watson and Francis Crick‘s deoxyribonucleic acid template, DNA, a double-helical design marvel insurmountable for the evolutionist. Dr Jerry Bergman, professor of science at Northwest College, Archibold, Ohio, describes some informational aspects of DNA which have so boggled scientists:

"At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion ‘chemical letters'. This is enough information to fill 1,000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it! If all the chemical ‘letters' in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!

This vast amount of information is stored in our bodies' cells in DNA molecules and is coded by four bases - adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine (A, T, G and C). The key to the coding of DNA is in the grouping of these bases into sets that are further sequenced to form the 20 common amino acids. Together, these genetic codes form the physical foundation of all life.

We've all been exposed to the basic concepts of DNA and its double-helix structure in our high school biology classes. Perhaps you remember being taught that cells divide through the ‘unzipping' and subsequent replication of the double helix. In all likelihood, though, the incredible evidence of design in this process was not discussed."[6]

Missler argues that:

"...an elegant design is more than the parts themselves; it involves information. It requires information input external to the design itself - and the deliberate involvement of a designer. The Darwinians cannot explain the origin of life because they cannot explain the origin of information. The technology that provides language - semantics and syntax, for example - is quite distinct from the technology of the ink and paper it may be written on. The physical features of the circuits in a computer provide no clue about the design of the software that resides within it." [7]

Prof. Stephen Meyer states:

"Bill Gates says that DNA is like a software program but much more complex than any we've been able to write. The challenge of the chemical evolutionary theorist is to explain the origin of that biological software without reference to a programmer."[8]

Here's your science project for the week. Make a DNA model. Take two strands of mono-filament fishing line 125 miles long, stick three and a half billion bits of information unique to you on them, entwine them, then roll them up and put them into a basket ball in such a way that several times a day you can remove them, unzip them, copy sections of them, then replace them on spools at three times the speed of an airplane propeller without tearing or tangling the structure. Now do this millions of times a day as the conclusion of your test and ensure it's done flawlessly.

So proteins are formed by assembling amino acids according to the information contained in DNA, yet DNA itself is constructed by proteins using the same three-out of-four, error-correcting digital code. This circularity is analogous to very advanced engineering ‘loop' systems, or complex self-modifying arrays in computer programming, where components are formed by processes which themselves are formed by the components! There has to be a start to the process and an extraneous input of information to kick it all off. Now, if you want to go to Cambridge University, don't ask the following question: Who or what does the starting?

In my book, Origins, I give these subjects a fascinating airing. Don't ask your tutor the following either because they won't know and you'll get told off. Is there a ‘doctor within' as Schweitzer contended? Are we here by chance or design? We live on a planet replete with information coded into the very building blocks of our existence. Where did this information come from and what exactly sustains us at the sub-atomic level? How could something as complex as the human cell, comprised of countless sub-systems, ever have self-organised by the unintelligent, random processes of natural selection?

Pierre-P Grasse, editor of the 28-volume Traite de Zoologie, is a former Chair of Evolution at Sorbonne University and ex-president of the French Academie des Sciences. He writes:

"Directed by all-powerful selection, chance becomes a sort of providence which, under the cover of atheism, is not named but which is secretly worshipped.... To insist, even with Olympian assurance, that life appeared quite by chance and evolved in this fashion, is an unfounded supposition which I believe to be wrong and not in accordance with the facts."[9]

The deafening silence

Medical science in general, following evolutionary precepts, eschews nutrition and lifestyle changes in favour of man-made drugs because they cannot afford to surrender their sovereignty to the power in the molecules. Yet what defeats them is the explanation for how things heal and what exactly does the organising. To all but the terminally blinkered, the cell is an incredible designed system, a fact attested to even by Darwin's most obdurate fanatics.[10] What is the cell city made of? The food you eat. How important is food then to your overall health? Let's just say that diet is rather more serious than most people imagine.[11]

Doctors are required to swallow the most enormous paradox that food is good enough to keep you alive but it's not good enough to fix you when you're sick - an intellectually inconsistent argument. All these miracle cells in your body are made out of the food you eat and the water you drink. As Dr Andrew Saul reminds, there isn't one cell made out of a drug.[12] Never mind the bafflement of DNA/RNA and getting from amino acids to the first protein, the human cell is regulated by a further universe of minerals, vitamins, enzymes, fats, sugars and hormones which interact in such extraordinary ways, science can only cast up its hands and reach for the Prozac. In fact, they should be stretching for the salad because that's the designed food their designed body requires to make more of them. Accept no substitutes.

So evolution's scorn of ‘the doctor within' is evident today in the medical establishment's arrogant refusal to train its doctors in nutrition. The miracle of every cell in our body comes from what we eat yet, incredibly, drugs, radiation and surgery are the only options for cancer. Millions have died because of this catastrophic wrong turn.[13] Michael Behe summarises:

"The result of these cumulative efforts to investigate the cell - to investigate life at the molecular level itself - is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!'.... The observation of the intelligent design of life is momentous. The magnitude of the victory, gained at such great cost through sustained effort over the course of decades, would be expected to send the champagne corks flying in labs around the world. This triumph of science should evoke cries of ‘Eureka!' from ten thousand throats, should occasion much hand-slapping and high-fiving, and perhaps even be an excuse to take the day off.

But no bottles have been uncorked, no hands slapped. Instead, a curious, embarrassed silence surrounds the stark complexity of the cell. When the subject comes up in public, feet start to shuffle and breathing gets a bit labored. In private, people are a bit more relaxed; many explicitly admit the obvious but then stare at the ground, shake their heads, and let it go at that."[14]

Fuel for thought

I remember once pulling my Nissan into a petrol station to fill up. I was somewhat preoccupied with my thoughts and proceeded to pump 40 litres of diesel into my gasoline vehicle by mistake. The problem became evident a mile up the road when my car began smoking Brixton to a standstill and some rather alarming knocking sounds came from the sharp end. 24 hours and a £180 towing/repair bill later, I had solidly learned two very valuable lessons: one, that green means unleaded, and two, my vehicle runs better on the right kind of fuel.

And so do you. If you want to enjoy good health, then the right gas has to go in the machine. Step on the mines, smoke, eat junk, get stressed and indulge in all those vain imaginations, and you too can have a $35,000 joint replacement procedure, an amputation, lung or colorectal cancer and a triple heart-bypass operation - all paid for courtesy of the National Health or Blue Shield.

The good life is the natural life. Most of the ills the body faces while living on a good diet are known as ‘self-limiting' because the body takes care of them eventually. You are encased in an error-correcting, self-repairing, self-replicating, carbon-based machine that knows what it's doing on the cellular level. My advice? Have a little faith in your hardware!

Further resources

Origins by Phillip Day

References

[1] Unlocking the Mystery of Life, Illustra Media, www.illustramedia.com
[2] Darwin, Charles On the Origin of Species, 6th ed, New York University Press, p.154
[3] Stone, Robert B The Secret Life of Your Cells, Whitford Press, 1989
[4] Missler, Chuck In the Beginning, there was Information, audio presentation supplementary notes, Koinonia House, www.khouse.org
[5] Lipton, Bruce, The Biology of Belief, Hay House, 2008, p.111
[6] Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, PO Box 6302, Acacia Ridge D.C., Queensland, 4110, Australia
[7] Missler, Chuck, op. cit. pp.9-10
[8] Meyer, Stephen C, ‘The Origin of Information' lecture, www.khouse.org
[9] Grasse P-P Evolution of Living Organisms Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation, Academic Press, New York, NY, 1977, p.107
[10] When pushed by author Ben Stein on a design inference for the origin of life, Dr Richard Dawkins intriguingly states: "It could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilisation evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet. Now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it's possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer...."

(Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed documentary, Premise Media Corporation, 2008, www.credence.org)

[11] Day, Phillip Origins - The Greatest Scientific Discovery, Credence, 2010

[12] Food Matters DVD, op. cit. www.credence.org
[13] Day, Phillip Cancer: Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth, Credence Publications, 2007; also Day, Phillip The ABC's of Disease, Credence Publications, 2004
[14] Behe, Michael, Darwin's Black Box, op. cit. excerpted p.233

Did you know your thoughts can cause illness? Scientists have shown this in research over the past century. Doctors acknowledge it as the placebo effect.*

What does it mean for you? Simply, be aware of your thoughts when you visit a doctor. Especially in countries like Korea where doctors are usually the unquestioned authority.

Think about what happens when you go to a doctor. Do they look you over and say:

• you have a X condition, take X drug
• we don't know, we need more tests
• you have three months to live, sorry

How do you respond? Do you ask your doctor a million questions, read up on the condition and get a second, third, fourth opinion from a range of health professionals?

The loyal patient?

Or do you loyally agree with your doctor's diagnosis and do what he/she says? Be aware that if you agree, then you are literally telling your body to be sick.

Have you ever known someone who died almost on the exact day their doctor predicted they would? Is this outcome the clever work of modern medicine? Or is it something else? (And if modern medicine is so clever, why doesn't it create wellness instead?)

Perhaps it's something else. Consider this. When given the death sentence 'you have three months to live', your body will go into fight or flight mode, which suppresses the immune system. In other words, your thoughts (stress) will deny you the very thing your body needs to fight disease - your immune system!

So what can you do? The 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr Albert Schweitzers said: "It's supposed to be a secret but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor within." Does your doctor encourage your doctor within today? If not, do it yourself.

Ask questions

Start by asking some questions. For example, from an emotional point of view:

• What/who am I sick and tired of? What/who is the pain in my neck/gut/side/arse/[insert other as appropriate]? What/who am I dying to get away from?
• How have I created this situation/disease?
• What can I do to change this situation/disease?
• What do I love about this situation/disease? What am I refusing to acknowledge that has created this situation/disease? (Ever known someone who loved being sick, who loved playing the victim? Did they like the attention? Did they see hospitals as some kind of a holiday resort?)
• What could I be doing differently to create a healthier body? What would it take for me not to have this dis-ease? (Uh oh, you might actually have to do something, rather than rely on a pill for every ill...How many people love to rely on someone else to provide an 'answer'?)
• Body, what do you require? Do I need more water/rest/nutrition/exercise/kindness/ gratitude/drugs and less stress/toxins/judgement/hate? Do I need the expert advice of a doctor/chiropractor/massage therapist/fitness coach/other health professional?

By asking yourself these questions you can become clearer about how you have created your condition. Taking responsibility for it is key to uncreating it.

Certainly, sometimes you may need to see a doctor. So be aware that allopathic medical training, western-style doctoring, is pharmaceutically based and includes little or no study of nutrition. It treats the mind and body as separate.

Modern western medicine is expert at treating symptoms with drugs. It is also excellent at emergency and accident trauma, pain management, prosthesis, and infant survivability at birth. But about chronic metabolic conditions from which we suffer increasingly? Not so much. You only need look at the rapidly rising rates of people with chronic conditions. Cancer rates today? 1 in 3 for women and 1 in 2 for men following a western lifestyle.

So asking an allopathic doctor for a natural approach is like asking for Korean food in a French restaurant. It's simply not on the menu.

When you do see any health professional, remember that their opinion is just one interesting point of view. Rather than locking the condition into your body by agreeing with their diagnosis, ask questions. Get educated. And if it's really serious, such as "X months to live", get a second, third, fourth, 100th opinion.

You could say "Thank you so much for your expertise. I wonder what it would take to identify the cause so I can prevent it?" You are not making them wrong and you are inviting them to help you identify and rectify the source of the condition, rather than simply treat the symptoms.

Would you be willing to become a disloyal, naughty patient? What if this saved you time, money, suffering, or even your life?

It's simply an interesting point of view, and the choice is always yours.

About the author

Mary-Jane Liddicoat is an ex-diplomat now looking at what else is possible to create more ease, joy, prosperity and abundance in her communities. For more information visit www.conscious-living.asia and www.healthyhomes.asia. In Seoul she works in partnership with New York Wholistic Care. Mary-Jane lives between Seoul, Korea and New South Wales, Australia, with her Korean sculptor husband and their three children aged seven, six and two.

Resources * Want to know more? Start with Dr Robert B Stone's The Secret Life of Your Cells and Dr Bruce Lipton's The Biology of Belief.