The Case for Stem Cell Research

On Thursday, Sept. 9, a U.S. court of appeals overturned a federal judge’s ban on government funding of embryonic stem cell research at the National Institutes of Health.

Embryonic stem cells could be used to cure Parkinson’s disease, injuries to the spinal cord, and other genetic defects. However, research involves the destroying the embryo (fertilized egg), which would develop into a fetus in about eight weeks and be born in nine months if it were implanted into a woman’s uterus, making this funding controversial.

According to Michael Kinsley of Time Magazine, fertility clinics destroy or freeze more embryos than will ever be used in stem cell research, so the controversy is groundless. While adult stem cells have been proposed as an alternative to embryonic stem cells, they are much harder to isolate, divide more slowly, are less plastic, are prone to DNA abnormalities, and have not been shown to treat heart damage in mice.

When a woman takes the “morning after” pill after sex, she hopes to destroy any fertilized egg in her Fallopian tubes before it implants in the uterine wall, which may take over 24 hours. This destruction of potential human life is deliberate and purposeless, yet perfectly legal and uncontroversial. At least stem cell research tries to benefit humanity instead of merely reducing our numbers.

Sources:
Bloomberg: Embryonic Stem Cell Funds Resume by U.S. After Ruling
Time: The False Controversy of Stem Cells

This is an essay I wrote for my college-credit course Basic Anatomy & Physiology for Health Careers (BSC1080).

An Aspirin a Day Debunked

Aspirin is in fact very dangerous and millions of people take it everyday to reduce the chance of heart attack, when in fact they are also increasing the chance of a fatal hemorrhagic stroke. Aspirin interferes with your body’s ability to prevent bleeding by clumping platelets together at the site of the wound (clotting). This clotting action is the cause of heart attack if your arteries are clogged by fatty deposits, and also stroke if clotting blocks blood flow to the brain. However, thinning the blood makes hemorrhagic stroke and gastrointestinal bleeding worse, and can cause allergic reactions and hearing loss in some cases. When combined with ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, etc.), aspirin’s effectiveness is reduced, and when combined anti-coagulants (Coumadin, generic: warfarin), it is very dangerous.

According to the Mayo Clinic, you should only consider taking a baby aspirin daily if you’ve had a heart attack or clot-related stroke, or you are at high risk of either. Risk factors are high blood pressure, bad cholesterol levels, smoking, heavy drinking, diabetes, stress, obesity, inactivity, and family history. Aspirin should not be taken if you have asthma, hemophilia, stomach ulcers, or heart failure. Aspirin is more dangerous in diabetics, so the American Diabetes Association recommends low-dose aspirin only to men over 50 and women over 60 who have at least one risk factor for heart disease. Aspirin should not be taken during pregnancy. Stopping an aspirin regimen abruptly is dangerous. Your risk of heart attack or stroke may become even greater than it was before you started taking aspirin.

Aspirin results from the unnatural mixing of salicylic acid with sodium and acetyl chloride. It was first patented, named, and marketed by Bayer in the 1890s. Along with heroin, also developed by Felix Hoffman, aspirin was the literally started the pharmaceutical industry. Aspirin initially sold poorly as it was thought to be more dangerous than heroin, but aspirin took off when heroin was found to be highly addictive.

I am 19 and have not been to a doctor in years. I have no known heart problems and I do not take aspirin, though I am about 30 pounds overweight. My father is 50 and takes half an aspirin every couple days. He has not had a heart attack or stroke and has also not been examined by a doctor in many years. I would prefer the adage “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” to “an aspirin a day keeps the doctor away.” Where the benefit of eating fruits and vegetables is obvious, the benefit of taking vitamins to compensate for a lousy diet is evident, but merely a band-aid. The benefit of taking a synthesized, dangerous drug as a preventative, not even attacking an actual condition, is ludicrous, in this student’s opinion.

Links:
http://www.wisegeek.com/how-was-aspirin-invented.htm
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/daily-aspirin-therapy/HB00073
http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/tc/low-dose-aspirin-therapy-topic-overview
http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/should-everyone-take-an-aspirin-a-day
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Heart_Letter/2009/June/New-guidelines-refine-aspirin-prescription

This is an essay I wrote for my college-credit course Personal Health and Wellness (PET2084).

Curing Parkinson’s Disease

I left this reply after seeing Sergey Brin’s blog entry on his genes’ predisposition toward Parkinson’s disease:

My Great Aunt contracted Parkinson’s disease in her fifties; she passed on a couple years ago in her seventies. After twenty years, it got progressively worse to the point that she couldn’t move.

I remember my Grandma often having to call her back over the phone, because she’d inadvertently hit the “talk” button from the shaking.

I think Parkinson’s disease has a connection to arthritis and cancer, because all three involve the body turning against itself; destruction from the inside out rather than from external causes. I found out this year that cancer is a vitamin deficiency; you should eat apple seeds and similar seeds every day, so your body can use vitamin B17 to kill the rogue cells that want to form cancerous growths. I blogged about it here: The Cancer Myth. Cancer is a big problem, so it’s nice to know I’ll never suffer from it, despite all my friends and family that have died in vain…

Might Parkinson’s disease be a vitamin deficiency too, and all this stuff about genes just be a coincidence? There could be a vitamin we don’t get, because we eat all processed foods rather than natural foods. Our modern treatments don’t cure the disease; they just patch the symptoms, buying you some time.

If there is a natural cure, it’s probably something you have to get in your diet every day, just like how you eat iodine every day (in salt) to avoid goiters. It’s likely that you can’t “cure” Parkinson’s disease, just like you can’t “cure” thirst.

Finding that natural cure and prevention is harder, because it requires long-scale testing to be effective. But it should be easy to get started. Research dogs and cats in captivity (i.e. apartments) vs. in the wild; it could be that the ones in the wild don’t get the disease but the ones in captivity do, just like only domesticated dogs get cancer (because they can’t eat grass and weeds which have B17 in them).

The next step is to research people who live close to the Earth and eat straight from nature; perhaps in the jungles of Africa. Do they get Parkinson’s disease? If they don’t, find out what it is they’re eating that prevents it.

Good luck Mr. Sergey, and let me know if you get to the bottom of this.

The cure

Keep in mind that if you find the prevention and cure for Parkinson’s disease, it does nothing on it’s own. A few hundred thousand in this country know that vitamin B17 cures cancer, but the cancer industry is vehemently against the cure because it will put them out of business.

Even the FDA is in on this. The government is behind keeping you in the dark about cancer. I’m actually breaking the law by touting B17 as the cure for cancer right here. If I dared to sell apricot seeds on this blog, I could earn myself five years in federal prison.

B17 isn’t even recognized as a vitamin, and it can’t go through FDA testing because it’s an organic substance. They only want inorganic cancer cures.

Besides, no one will pay the tens of millions of dollars for the colluded, bureaucratic testing process. You can’t recoup the cost selling apricot seeds, unlike the phony cancer treatments we have now, which, incidentally, cost upward of $8000 a month. That’s how much the hospital was paying for my cousin when he died of brain cancer in 2006. And it was all B.S. and he could’ve easily avoided cancer if he’d been eating apples with seeds all along. Heck, he probably could’ve got out of it when he found out about the cancer if he would’ve started on laetrile pills right away.

The people in the American Cancer Society will tell you not to eat seeds, because they’ll poison you. It’s all for shock value, to scare you away from pursuing the truth. Seeds poison you no more than water.

When we find the cure for Parkinson’s disease, there will be a lot of resistance. Not as much as with cancer, because cancer has legendary status and is poised to kill tens of millions over the next 100 years. But still a lot of resistance.

Parkinson’s disease is a chronic affliction. Victims do not get better, unlike with strep throat or any normal ailment, which we can eliminate with antibodies or surgery. You get Parkinson’s disease, you start with pills, progressing to invasive and mechanical treatments. The whole time, you get progressively worse, on the march toward death. At best, the mechanical treatments prolong your death. My neighbor has terrible arthritis dating back twenty years. He’s had two shoulder blades and a hip replaced, and the next hip is scheduled for the spring. And he’s still in terrible pain and his fingers don’t work and his face is contorted. Doesn’t that tell you we’re doing something wrong?

We’re not getting to the source of the problem by applying band-aid patches. That’s what modern treatment for cancer, arthritis, and Parkinson’s disease is. A collection of kludges. If we treated tooth decay like we do cancer, the solution would be this:

1. Don’t brush your teeth. Do you know how much those bristles hurt your gums?
2. Keep eating the same foods. Diet change is linked to death, because many people who die recently changed their diets.
3. As your teeth decay, we’ll drill them out and replace the innards with concrete.
4. Your gums will shrivel and rot, but we’ll apply salves to counteract that.
5. Eventually, all your teeth will rot from the roots and fall out. We’ll go ahead and pull them out. Then you can wear dentures.
6. Eventually, the dentures won’t stay put because your gums will become fully eroded. If you haven’t died yet. Time to start drilling into your jaw bone. We can put in fake teeth with screws.
7. We put in the fake teeth. It’s a very dangerous operation, but it proves successful. Unfortunately, you get a minor infection and die, because your immune system is in shambles from the continued abuse to your mouth.

This is absurd. But it’s what we do right now with Parkinson’s disease. We have pills that stave off Parkinson’s disease temporarily. Once those fail, we bust open your skull and stick an electrode in your brain. “Deep brain stimulation.”

This is witchcraft.

Witchcraft does not work.

Pellagra is caused by a deficiency of niacin (B3). Pellagra is a terrible disease. Your skin starts peeling, you suffer from dysentery, you become light-sensitive, you go insane, and then you die.

Pellagra raged through Europe for hundreds of years. It even hit America hard 100 years ago, because people weren’t eating the foods with niacin or tryptophan, which the body can convert to niacin. Milk, eggs, soybeans, yeast, and meat stop pellagra.

The people with pellagra spent most of their time eating corn, because that was their dominant crop. For two hundred years doctors believed that corn was toxic. Obviously it causes pellagra.

Another hypothesis was that the people who got pellagra were evil and God was punishing them.

These are all valid guesses, but they pale in contrast to the truth. It’s a simple nutritional deficiency.

You could spend millions of dollars now on research for a mechanical cure for pellagra. Perhaps we can use surgery? Perhaps there’s a pill that can cure it? Even better, a pill that you have to take for the rest of your life, so we can keep charging you.

Of course there is. A multi-vitamin. Even better, you can eat the foods that have niacin in them.

What are the theories behind Parkinson’s disease? It’s either your parents (genes) or your food (toxins). But really, it isn’t the foods you’re eating. It’s the foods you’re not eating. That’s the only logical answer.

What are the theories behind cancer? Everything causes cancer. Sunshine, motor oil, radiation, dish soap, cell phones, computers, processed food, lead, lawn mowers, air conditioning, genes… the list goes on.

It doesn’t matter if you have a consensus that pellagra is God’s wrath. It’s still false.

It doesn’t matter if everyone agrees that sunshine causes cancer. Science is neither a popularity contest nor an emotional debate. This may seem cold, but it’s actually the most loving thing I’ve ever said. When you become trapped by dogma, you never get to the truth. People continue to die en masse. Phony solutions persist under the guise of scientific theory. This is happening with cancer, and I bet it’s happening with Parkinson’s disease.

There’s got to be something better than witchcraft. In the future, students of nutrition will have to answer the question: “__________ is to Parkinson’s disease as Vitamin C is to scurvy.” If only we can find out what that blank is.