Post by yvonnemm on Mar 10, 2013 12:38:56 GMT -5
Believe it or not - this is the short form
It’s only been 17 or so years ago that I thought “organic” was a way for people to charge more for the same thing. Then I was diagnosed with MS, chronic, progressive MS. The forecast for my future was – wheel chair bound in 5 years, probably dead in 10. Not much of a forecast. After my initial few days of wallowing, it dawned on me that MS just didn’t mesh with my character. I know that sounds funny, but after having worked with people and their diseases for 10 years already, I had come to realize that the disease usually matched the person. It’s too hard to explain for the point of this writing, but that was my conclusion – MS didn’t fit.
I started investigating MS. I already knew the basics, I wanted to know the esoteric, unconventional, outside of the AMA stuff. I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that there was a preponderance of evidence linking aspartame to ms symptomology - chiefly the demyelinating of one’s nerves in the brain. Aspartame was capable of crossing that all important blood brain barrier and doing damage. There were a couple of other notable chemicals that did the same but I focused on the damage that had been done and the most likely culprit. I stopped consuming all ‘foods’ and beverages containing aspartame. I started seeing a chiropractor and a massage therapist. I learned Reiki – quite a stretch for my active left brain After 3 or 4 months, all of the ‘symptoms’ that led to my diagnosis were gone. After 5 years I went back to the neurologist to get the MS diagnosis, which was so obviously wrong, removed from my medical record. Into the MRI machine I went again. When the results were read, we (dr. and I) were stunned. The spot at the base of my brain, consistent with demyelinating disease (MS) was bigger, almost twice as big. Well, he couldn’t remove the diganosis since the protocal was to leave me strung with it despite the fact that it was obviously not the case. I asked “considering where the spot is, dr, and it’s large size – if this was MS- I wouldn’t be walking or talking, would I”? He replied that I would be lucky to have any movement. “But clearly, I do. In fact, I am the picture of function and coordination, am I not?” Yes, he said. So what is the spot? I’ll avoid delving into this sidebar. Suffice it to say the diagnosis was never removed, spot is alive and well and may or may not still be growing. I’ll probably never know what it really is or why, nor will the dr.
What was awakened in me was the desire to understand how something I consumed, legal and fda approved, gave me a ‘disease’. I’ve never been one to believe everything or really anything I read or hear unless I can substantiate the facts to my level of comfort. It’s been an extremely long process of learning nutrition, biology, anatomy and perhaps oddly, intuition. The culmination of the process can be illustrated with the following facts:
There has been very little research (virtually none) done on the long term effects of any food addtive, pesticide, herbicide, or preservative – basically any “man chemical”.
There has been very little research done on the synergystic effects of really anything. Not prescription medication, not any “man chemicals”.
There are literally millions of man chemicals out there. Can you even wrap your head around the dizzying task of learning how A reacts in the body with B, then how A reacts with B#999,999,999? How about how A and B react with A #’s 2 through #999,999,999. It is unimaginable and actually impossible to test all the combinations. The former sentences are overwhelming enough, but now consider that all things react differently with every single person experiencing them.
The fact is; that very little of this testing is done. Even the things that are easy to test haven’t been tested.
There is no way the FDA or any other agency or any person or group of persons in the world can guarantee that ANY food additive or man chemical is safe for me to consume or be in contact with. Even if there is evidence it won’t kill me right away, there is nothing to show what might happen when I am carrying a load of it or a combination of things or what will be 30 years down the road.
I have been blessed with loads of computational abilities. I wasn’t feeling very blessed when I realized how utterly powerless I was to use my brain to figure out which chemicals were safe for me. That even when I considered what limitless money and resources would do for the issue it still resulted in utter defeat.
I reached that culmination 6 years ago. I had been eliminating noxious chemicals from my diet for years but the flabbergasting awareness of the futility of trying to figure it out hit home and I stopped everything. I stopped consuming any food that wasn’t labeled organic. I stopped using any product on myself or in my house that wasn’t organic. I stopped using perfume, shampoo, makeup – hell even grocery store toilet paper. Then I started to raise my own food.
The power of the realization/culmination turned a city girl who looked forward to the spring collection from Jones New York and others, one who feared the nasty looking creepy crawly critters and needed long handled weapons to dispatch them when encountered, a woman who was rarely seen with mussed hair or wrinkled clothes, a person who carried -what I considered to be- a healthy disdain for the effluence of animals into this – what I am now. A person who bargain hunts at goodwill, one who sometimes forgets to change my boots and finally remembers when the heat has been blasting my feet for an hour in the truck and the scent of crap oozes from the inside of my truck and surrounds it like a cartoon bubble, one who will kneel in pig crap without reservation to ascertain the condition of a pig whose mood isn’t quite right, one who will chase down, catch and bring and end to the rooster guilty of attacking my partner – It’s like I’m from another planet vs who I was.
The other important transformation was the attentiveness to intuition. We all have it. As dizzying as the ‘man chemical’ situation is the natural world is no less dizzying all be it safer. There is no way I can wrap my head around the hundreds of thousands of herbs I now use in place of the AMA. I use herbs, not hundreds of thousands of them. But there are so many and each has so many uses and or possibilities I can only learn and remember as many as I can. I have to let my intuition guide me the rest of the way. It does. I get better every day with allowing it to. That’s really the only problem with intuition. Not whether we have “good” intuition or not but whether we allow ourselves to use it/rely on it. Our society has taught us that intuition is not to be used for a great many things. That science is the definitive answer for this pathetic excuse for an answer called intuition. Society has taught us wrong.
This is why I eat and live organically. My hope in writing this is that some of you will be just as overwhelmed as I was and move toward an organic lifestyle. I am absolutely convinced that almost all disease is caused by malnutrition and subsequent loads of substances your body sees as toxic (and this is not a new idea). I’ve had the opportunity to witness several others with various ‘diseases’ change the way they ate to organic and add/subtract various components (mostly upping their veg intake) of their diets with great success. The success has been, in each case – a cessation of disease.
Maybe you have carpal tunnel or celiacs disease or MS or cancer or heart disease or diabetes or arthritis. Maybe you wouldn’t if you were organic and ate a well rounded diet that included lots of fruit, veggies, organic meat and raw milk. The only way to know is to try. There is no science that can or will tell you.
Maybe I have MS, science says I do. Science also said it was okay for me to eat aspertame. Science also told me I was dead 7 years ago.
I’m 6’ tall, I weigh 145 lbs, I can bike straight up a mountain and run any animal on my property to exhaustion when it’s necessary (has been about 4 times), I rarely trip, I rarely fall, I can throw a knife 50 yards and have it land exactly where I meant for it to land, I can shoot the eye out of a rabid racoon with a .22 at 200 yards, no rooster has ever attacked me because they aren’t quick enough – my point? Do I sound dead to you? Do I sound like I’m suffering any of the effects of a brain ravaged by MS? Do I sound uncoordinated or wheel chair bound? I’m feeling pretty bad for all of the people diagnosed with diseases and given death sentences. I’m sure that I am not the only one for whom it was wrong. I surely hope I am not the only one for whom it wasn’t deadly wrong.
How do we know when we really have a disease or when our disease symptomology is caused by man chemicals? WE DON’T. That’s the point. Just like our mothers always said…you never know until you try.
It’s only been 17 or so years ago that I thought “organic” was a way for people to charge more for the same thing. Then I was diagnosed with MS, chronic, progressive MS. The forecast for my future was – wheel chair bound in 5 years, probably dead in 10. Not much of a forecast. After my initial few days of wallowing, it dawned on me that MS just didn’t mesh with my character. I know that sounds funny, but after having worked with people and their diseases for 10 years already, I had come to realize that the disease usually matched the person. It’s too hard to explain for the point of this writing, but that was my conclusion – MS didn’t fit.
I started investigating MS. I already knew the basics, I wanted to know the esoteric, unconventional, outside of the AMA stuff. I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that there was a preponderance of evidence linking aspartame to ms symptomology - chiefly the demyelinating of one’s nerves in the brain. Aspartame was capable of crossing that all important blood brain barrier and doing damage. There were a couple of other notable chemicals that did the same but I focused on the damage that had been done and the most likely culprit. I stopped consuming all ‘foods’ and beverages containing aspartame. I started seeing a chiropractor and a massage therapist. I learned Reiki – quite a stretch for my active left brain After 3 or 4 months, all of the ‘symptoms’ that led to my diagnosis were gone. After 5 years I went back to the neurologist to get the MS diagnosis, which was so obviously wrong, removed from my medical record. Into the MRI machine I went again. When the results were read, we (dr. and I) were stunned. The spot at the base of my brain, consistent with demyelinating disease (MS) was bigger, almost twice as big. Well, he couldn’t remove the diganosis since the protocal was to leave me strung with it despite the fact that it was obviously not the case. I asked “considering where the spot is, dr, and it’s large size – if this was MS- I wouldn’t be walking or talking, would I”? He replied that I would be lucky to have any movement. “But clearly, I do. In fact, I am the picture of function and coordination, am I not?” Yes, he said. So what is the spot? I’ll avoid delving into this sidebar. Suffice it to say the diagnosis was never removed, spot is alive and well and may or may not still be growing. I’ll probably never know what it really is or why, nor will the dr.
What was awakened in me was the desire to understand how something I consumed, legal and fda approved, gave me a ‘disease’. I’ve never been one to believe everything or really anything I read or hear unless I can substantiate the facts to my level of comfort. It’s been an extremely long process of learning nutrition, biology, anatomy and perhaps oddly, intuition. The culmination of the process can be illustrated with the following facts:
There has been very little research (virtually none) done on the long term effects of any food addtive, pesticide, herbicide, or preservative – basically any “man chemical”.
There has been very little research done on the synergystic effects of really anything. Not prescription medication, not any “man chemicals”.
There are literally millions of man chemicals out there. Can you even wrap your head around the dizzying task of learning how A reacts in the body with B, then how A reacts with B#999,999,999? How about how A and B react with A #’s 2 through #999,999,999. It is unimaginable and actually impossible to test all the combinations. The former sentences are overwhelming enough, but now consider that all things react differently with every single person experiencing them.
The fact is; that very little of this testing is done. Even the things that are easy to test haven’t been tested.
There is no way the FDA or any other agency or any person or group of persons in the world can guarantee that ANY food additive or man chemical is safe for me to consume or be in contact with. Even if there is evidence it won’t kill me right away, there is nothing to show what might happen when I am carrying a load of it or a combination of things or what will be 30 years down the road.
I have been blessed with loads of computational abilities. I wasn’t feeling very blessed when I realized how utterly powerless I was to use my brain to figure out which chemicals were safe for me. That even when I considered what limitless money and resources would do for the issue it still resulted in utter defeat.
I reached that culmination 6 years ago. I had been eliminating noxious chemicals from my diet for years but the flabbergasting awareness of the futility of trying to figure it out hit home and I stopped everything. I stopped consuming any food that wasn’t labeled organic. I stopped using any product on myself or in my house that wasn’t organic. I stopped using perfume, shampoo, makeup – hell even grocery store toilet paper. Then I started to raise my own food.
The power of the realization/culmination turned a city girl who looked forward to the spring collection from Jones New York and others, one who feared the nasty looking creepy crawly critters and needed long handled weapons to dispatch them when encountered, a woman who was rarely seen with mussed hair or wrinkled clothes, a person who carried -what I considered to be- a healthy disdain for the effluence of animals into this – what I am now. A person who bargain hunts at goodwill, one who sometimes forgets to change my boots and finally remembers when the heat has been blasting my feet for an hour in the truck and the scent of crap oozes from the inside of my truck and surrounds it like a cartoon bubble, one who will kneel in pig crap without reservation to ascertain the condition of a pig whose mood isn’t quite right, one who will chase down, catch and bring and end to the rooster guilty of attacking my partner – It’s like I’m from another planet vs who I was.
The other important transformation was the attentiveness to intuition. We all have it. As dizzying as the ‘man chemical’ situation is the natural world is no less dizzying all be it safer. There is no way I can wrap my head around the hundreds of thousands of herbs I now use in place of the AMA. I use herbs, not hundreds of thousands of them. But there are so many and each has so many uses and or possibilities I can only learn and remember as many as I can. I have to let my intuition guide me the rest of the way. It does. I get better every day with allowing it to. That’s really the only problem with intuition. Not whether we have “good” intuition or not but whether we allow ourselves to use it/rely on it. Our society has taught us that intuition is not to be used for a great many things. That science is the definitive answer for this pathetic excuse for an answer called intuition. Society has taught us wrong.
This is why I eat and live organically. My hope in writing this is that some of you will be just as overwhelmed as I was and move toward an organic lifestyle. I am absolutely convinced that almost all disease is caused by malnutrition and subsequent loads of substances your body sees as toxic (and this is not a new idea). I’ve had the opportunity to witness several others with various ‘diseases’ change the way they ate to organic and add/subtract various components (mostly upping their veg intake) of their diets with great success. The success has been, in each case – a cessation of disease.
Maybe you have carpal tunnel or celiacs disease or MS or cancer or heart disease or diabetes or arthritis. Maybe you wouldn’t if you were organic and ate a well rounded diet that included lots of fruit, veggies, organic meat and raw milk. The only way to know is to try. There is no science that can or will tell you.
Maybe I have MS, science says I do. Science also said it was okay for me to eat aspertame. Science also told me I was dead 7 years ago.
I’m 6’ tall, I weigh 145 lbs, I can bike straight up a mountain and run any animal on my property to exhaustion when it’s necessary (has been about 4 times), I rarely trip, I rarely fall, I can throw a knife 50 yards and have it land exactly where I meant for it to land, I can shoot the eye out of a rabid racoon with a .22 at 200 yards, no rooster has ever attacked me because they aren’t quick enough – my point? Do I sound dead to you? Do I sound like I’m suffering any of the effects of a brain ravaged by MS? Do I sound uncoordinated or wheel chair bound? I’m feeling pretty bad for all of the people diagnosed with diseases and given death sentences. I’m sure that I am not the only one for whom it was wrong. I surely hope I am not the only one for whom it wasn’t deadly wrong.
How do we know when we really have a disease or when our disease symptomology is caused by man chemicals? WE DON’T. That’s the point. Just like our mothers always said…you never know until you try.