Mercola on Vaccines

I have been trying for some time to research and understand the vaccination controversy from a health perspective, rather than an illness perspective. It is sometimes difficult to adopt the health paradigm (instead of the illness paradigm: ) when reading arguments that go back and forth.

Today, Mercola posted an article on the Whooping Cough vaccine, which has tons of information, and the comments from other people provide more information.  I encourage you to have a look - but the information is so complex I don't expect many people to come away satisfied.  I believe this is partly because virtually ALL of the experts discussing vaccines adopt an illness paradigm, only studying a small part of the problem.  We need to learn from a health paradigm, the illness paradigm is too limited to provide valuable infomation: http://personalhealthfreedom.blogspot.ca/2011/01/health-paradigm.html

Here are my comments on the Mercola post:

It is important to understand that immunity, whether it is vaccine immunity or natural immunity, does not kill the virus, nor do they prevent the virus from spreading.  Vaccines are designed to tune your immune system to fight the virus when it appears. Vaccines use a dead virus, so it is natural that they are less effective than natural immunity. 

It is entirely possible that so called 'herd immunity' does not exist. The whooping cough virus exists in the environment.  We cannot eliminate it from the environment.  Even people who are vaccinated come in contact with whooping cough virus - and it reproduces in their bodies.  Then, after some time, the immune system might recognize and fight the virus. Even then it is still reproducing and being spread by the person with the virus. This is the same for every virus we tackle with immunization.

Vaccine statistics measure how many people were affected by the virus, seriously enough to create a diagnoseable condition. Anyone who contracts the virus and exhibit fewer symptoms, or does not go to a doctor, is 'not counted'. People who are vaccinated, and thus suffer whooping cough at a lower level are still spreading the virus.  Because their immunity is lower than those with natural immunity - they might be spreading it more.

Vaccination and the arithmetic of vaccine studies is very, very complex.  Simple statements and techniques like 'herd immunity' and 'cocooning'  are designed to promote vaccines, not to understand them. We need to study and understand the mechanisms, successes and failures of every vaccine individually and not make generalizations that promote mis-information. We need to use a Health Paradigm to understand vaccines, our illness paradigm is too limiting: personalhealthfreedom.blogspot.ca/.../health-paradigm.html  

Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of healthiness. tracyhttp://personalhealthfreedom.blogspot.ca/p/subject-index.html

Tracy is the author of two book about healthicine: 

Is Brown Rice Healthier than White Rice

Quora often poses health questions and gets a wide variety of responses from their user community - of which I am an active member. Unfortunately, the questions asked often show the bias, or unscientific nature of the site managers.  And today is no exception. Today's Quora included this silly question:

Why is brown rice healthier than white rice? Is brown rice healthy?  -  you can click the link to see the question and the ensuing discussion.

Let's follow the chain of nonsense.  First untested assumption: 'white rice is healthy'.  Is white rice healthy?  Frankly, we don't know.  Many people think it is - and many people think it is not healthy.

So. Next silly assumption: 'brown rice healthier than white rice.'  This might be true.  But it might not. At least one commenter has suggested, and provided arguments that brown rice is not healthier than white rice.

Which lead Quora to the question:  "Why..."  Of course we cannot discuss why something is true, until we actually measure whether or not it is true.  Has anyone bothered to test brown rice to see if it is healthier than white rice?  Not as far as I know.  Not in a scientific fashion.

My responses to Quora often question the question - and today is no exception.  And I often get negative points for pointing out the obvious, such is life.  Here is my response to the Quora question.


As is often that case, the person who wrote the question made a fundamental error.

We do not know if white rice is healthy.  White rice provides energy, but does not provide other nutrients.  Eating white rice might actually be an unhealthy activity, because it displaces foods that provide real nutrition and not just empty calories.

Is eating brown rice healthier?  As far as I know this theory is 'yet to be proven' as well.

If we ran a lab test, with mice, not people, and fed them ONLY white rice, or ONLY brown rice, we might expect the brown rice mice to live longer, healthier lives than the white rice mice.

Until we actually make some scientific measurements - we don't know white rice from brown. You can rationalize all you want - the truth is only to be found in actual measurements.

to your health, tracy
http://personalhealthfreedom.blogspot.ca/p/subject-index.html

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Tracy is the author of two book about healthicine: 

Health Freedom and the News: Merck vs The Wall Street Journal

I don't generally blog about topical issues, but today - Dr. Mercola's post prompted me to write about Merck aka The Wall Street Journal.

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about a lawsuit against Merck.  Former employers of Merck accuse the company of falsifying evidence about the mumps vaccine, and falsifying results of mumps vaccine testing - and publishing false results on vaccine information inserts. They claim that these lies gave Merck a monopoly in the sales of mumps vaccines - costing the taxpayers billions of dollars for a vaccine that was far less effective, and possibly more dangerous than represented.

A few days ago, this news didn't surprise me.  I am currently doing some research of a vaccine blog post, and I thought it would be useful info when I'm working on that post. What do I think about vaccines?  To tell the truth, I'm not sure.  I believe that the concept of vaccines is valid, and that they can work - but I also believe that each specific vaccine needs to be tested and constantly measured to ensure that it is both effective and safe.

Today, Mercola advises that the Wall Street Journal article is gone. It has disappeared from their website and also from all internet cache sites.  Google, for example, and Bing - don't seem to know it existed.  Links that were published are suddenly 'broken'.  According to Mercola, the article disappeared after an "elite" network of CFOs from the world’s top corporations met at the WSJ. Merck is on that executive council." You can view Mercola's post and comments here. 

It's worth checking out the Mercola article, and the comments as well.  I've actually made a point of saving the article to my computer, and also saving a PDF of the court documents because I'm worried about more censorship. 

I believe in health freedom - and it is difficult to attain any kind of freedom when our major news organizations decide what to publish, what not to publish - and what to 'unpublish' based on pressure from corporate interests. Frankly, why should anything they publish be 'unpublished'? If they want to apologize - they should be honest about it and apologize.  Unpublishing, making the news disappear is downright Orwellian. 

Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of healthiness.  We all have a right to the news, not just the news that corporations decide to allow us to read.  Yesterday's news is part of history and should not be disappeared.

to your health, tracy

Tracy is the author of two book about healthicine: 

Mercola on Pain and how to Relieve Pain with Healthy Actions

Dr. Mercola has an interesting post about PAIN and EMT to relieve pain. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/21/eft-for-pain-relief.aspx?e_cid=20120721_DNL_artNew_2

I often find Mercola's posts very useful - and read the comments as well. However, I view these issues from a health perspective - most people view from an illness perspective.  When viewed from a health perspective, different facts come to light. Mercola neglects to mention that sometimes, we need to fix pain by finding the source, not by techniques that minimize pain.

Pain, like all health factors, exists on a continuum from pain deficient, to normal healthy pain, to excessive pain.

Here is my comment to Dr. Mercola's post.
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Pain is healthy, a healthy response to danger in our environment, a healthy response to damage in our bodies.  In healthy bodies we need to feel pain appropriately.  What is pain? 

personalhealthfreedom.blogspot.ca/.../what-is-pain.html

When pain becomes persistent, it is clear that there are severe problems.  Pain is also a learned response - and our body and brain can re-create pain where it does not exist, even where body parts do not exist. Treating long term pain with painkillers is basically an admission of failure to understand the problem. The underlying problem may be: 

1. 'learned pain' as discussed in this post, or

2. it may be 'ongoing damage' - which needs to be located and stopped, or

3. it may be a result of 'severe damage' to the body which is not ongoing, but is so severe, or of a nature that it will not heal.  

Both 1 and 3 above can be treated with EMT.  We can learn to 'not feel pain' when the pain is learned.  We can also learn to 'not feel pain', or at least not feel it so severely, for severed damage.  

Painkillers should be prescribed as a bridge - for short term pain due to injury.  But for all cases of long term pain, a re-assessment is required. For items 1 and 3 - 'severe damage' and 'learned pain' EMT is the appropriate response.  

For ongoing damage, it is important to identify the source of the damage - possibly toxins in the diet, for example and eliminate the source of the pain. 

Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of healthiness.  Everyone has a right to UNDERSTAND their pains. tracy

personalhealthfreedom.blogspot.ca/.../what-is-pain.html

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Unhealthiness vs Disease

There are many so called diseases, that are actually not 'diseases', they are actually serious 'unhealthiness'.  We need to distinguish between unhealthiness and disease.

What's the difference?  In the posts Concepts of Illness and Disease, and Healthiness and Healthicines, we saw that a disease occurs at the red line of diagnosis. Diagnosis occurs when the unhealthiness has become so severe that it can be diagnosed as a disease.

Once a disease is diagnosed, we often look for a single solution.  An antibiotic for a bacterial infection.  An antifungal for a fungus infection.  A drug for a disease. We treat disease with a surgical approach - a very specific solution that tackles a key point in a serious problem.

Treatment is judged as a success if it moves the unhealthiness across the line of diagnosis.  Duh. You can be just a shade over the diagnosis threshold, but according to the medical community you might be judged as 'healthy', because you cannot be diagnosed with a disease.  This problem exists, in part, because medical doctors have a monopoly on diagnosis.

Unhealthiness is broader than disease. It includes disease - but also the gradient between perfect health and disease. It is harder to recognize, harder to identify, and much harder to treat. It must be treated with healthicines, not medicines. We all know situations where someone seemed 'perfectly healthy' and then they were 'struck' by a disease like cancer.  But we also know that cancer normally takes years to develop.  Years of unhealthiness that is not recognized.  Arthritis is also a disease of unhealthiness, not a disease with with a single cause.  There are many similar disease: Alzheimer's, macular degeneration, obesity. A disease sometimes affect just a single part of the body - an unhealthiness tends to affect the entire hierarchy of healthicine.

How can we recognize the difference between a serious unhealthiness and a disease? A primary disease has a simple cause. The cause can be identified and the disease can be treated. It can often be prevented or the progress stopped.  

An serious unhealthiness is typically a condition with many causes or contributing factors. Is obesity a disease?  Or is it an unhealthiness?  Labeling it as a disease leads to attempts to find simple 'disease' causes and solutions to a problem.  The magic bullet. There is no magic bullet to healthiness.  

A combination of many different unhealthinesses might not be severe enough to be diagnosed as a disease - but may cause severe health problems.  Many so called diseases might actually be a combination of different types of unhealthiness, each of which is below the threshold of a disease.

You can't fix a serious unhealthiness with a single solution - it's the wrong solution to the wrong problem. It's more complicated.  If you try to treat an unhealthiness with a single solution - you will likely create more, different and possibly worse unhealthiness. It doesn't matter if your 'solution' is a drug, from conventional medicine, or a natural product, from alternative medicine, it's still the wrong answer - to the wrong question.

The first step to resolve an unhealthiness is to recognize it, and to recognize that is not a 'disease'. Once we learn to recognize unhealthiness and to distinguish between 'disease' and 'unhealthiness', we will learn to eliminate many so called 'diseases' by the application of health.  

In many cases, we don't recognize an unhealthiness until it becomes a serious problem - at which point it is diagnosed as a 'disease'. Like the frog in a pot of water on the stove.  It doesn't realize the water is slowly getting hot - and is eventually cooked.  If we have symptoms of arthritis, we might ignore minor pains and get more and more used to them.  As the pain grows we become less sensitive.  The pain becomes part of us.  The arthritis grows in severity.  By the time we recognize it as a serious problem - it may have caused irreparable damage. I believe the same happens with many degenerative diseases, obesity and even cancer. People often try to treat obesity with unhealthy, short term dietary changes, when what is needed is a permanent health change.  Of course permanent health changes are much more difficult to identify, and much more difficult to implement.  Many healthy changes initially have strange 'symptoms of healthiness', that cause rejection.

With arthritis, as with many unhealthy conditions - using drugs can actually make the problem worse, treating the symptoms, or some minor aspect of the condition - while letting the cause persist and grow under the level of awareness.

There are many unhealthinesses that are susceptible to simple changes. These are the result of simple deficiencies or excesses.  If you are deficient in Vitamin C, you can resolve the unhealthiness by consuming Vitamin C.  If you are suffering from an excess of many single nutrients or toxins - you can eliminate the unhealthiness by changing your habits.  However, these unhealthiness conditions can be very difficult to identify if they are not so serious that they can be diagnosed as diseases.  And by that time - they might have caused serious, possibly irreparable damage.

Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of healthiness. Everyone needs to have unhealthiness recognized, measured and tracked, and healthy actions recommended - before disease appears.

to your health, tracy

Tracy is the author of two book about healthicine: 

ps. If you enjoy my posts, please share - and you might LIKE my facebook page. 
This post was also published on Health Freedom Alliance 
and also at Quantum Wellness Houston
and also by IndyInAsia.com