We must take responsibility for our own care. In many ways, starting with the necessity to learn what we need to know. For half a century American’s view of medicine has become more and more like big government, holding that only orthodox doctors can heal, only doctors can write prescriptions, only the government can decree which medications and nutritional supplements can be used, who shall be given “free” medical care, and many more restrictions and dictatorial “WE know best” constraints. No, of course I do not advocate forging prescriptions! I believe that we must build health, not look for magic bullets and glittering knives to “heal” us.

We must avoid adulterated and altered products, including pasteurized and homogenized dairy products, plants which have been altered genetically, and meat which was forced through horrendous overuse of hormones and laced with antibiotics. Heart attacks were unknown a hundred years–and not because doctors did not recognize them. The first recorded incident was in 1914 and the second in 1917. Heart attacks result from nutritional deficiences such as milling all of the vitamin E out of wheat. Pasteurizing milk is not necessary so long as the cows are tuberculin tested and it changes the chemical structure. Homogenizing milk breaks the fat particles up into units too small to be filtered out by the liver. These things have been known for over eighty years, but it is not in anyone’s commercial interest to teach them. Vitamins, minerals, and supplements with strange names such as polyenol choline belong in the body. Statin drugs do not.

Until we seek out scientific results from experiments done repeatedly with the same results back in the nineteen thirties deficiency diseases will continue to increase. We must stop listening to “sound byte” medicos of the press. What the famous Framingham study REALLY showed was that those most at risk of heart attack were men with cholesterol UNDER 170.

Must quit before I write a short book! Again, great job, Tex.

Linda Brady Traynham