Alternative Cures

Following on from my last post about Chinese Herbs as Alternative Cures, I want to move onto a real problem that affects millions of people, me included. That’s an extremely painful condition known as gout.

While arthritis is a disease I’ve all but rid myself of, gout is an intermittent problem that can be extremely painful and debilitating and one that sneaks up and grabs me every once in a while. This has always baffled me, because in my fight against arthritis, I changed my diet quite considerably in order to avoid the foods that cause elevated levels of uric acid to be present in the blood, which then lead on to the arthritic conditions cause by it. This worked in removing the cause of the stiff and painful joints, but hasn’t seemed to be effective in preventing the occasional attack of gout.

So lets look at what gout is.

Gout is similar to arthritis in cause, in that elevated levels of uric acid in the blood find their way into the joints and form a hard egg-shell like covering that attacks the synovial membrane, which is the slippery membrane that exists in between the ball and socket formation of joints. This membrane is alkaline in make-up and so attracts the acidic nature of uric acid when it reaches excessive levels in the blood. The difference between gout and arthritis, in simplistic terms, is that while arthritis is gradual, degenerative and gets worse over time, gout attacks form quickly, are of intense severity, and then they disappear as mysteriously as they form (or so they appear to)

Gout is also caused by excessive levels of uric acid in the blood gravitating to the alkaline joints but the subtle difference between the cause of arthritis and gout is that with gout the uric acid gets inside the joints and crystallizes. That causes extreme pain when the joint is moved as severe as a broken bone. To add to the woe, the body’s immune system attacks what it sees as the foreign body in the joint by flooding the area with histamines, which causes extreme swelling to occur. While the body is fighting off what it sees as an attack, it surrounds the uric acid crystals in the joint with cells in order to contain the problem. When this happens, the pain is reduced and the swelling abates.

As the uric acid levels return to normal in the blood a strange thing happens. Unlike with arthritis, the lowered levels of uric acid actually clean the crystals from out of the joints. This causes a secondary attack of gout as the body’s immune system goes into attack mode again and floods the area with histamines, although this attack is often more short lived than the first.

Knowing the cause of a problem is often the most important step in curing it. Unfortunately, with both gout and arthritis, knowing that elevated levels of uric acid in the blood are the cause is not enough. That in itself is actually a symptom of something else and while doctors can control this acid level with drugs, treating the symptom will not cure the illness, only mask it.

We also know that elevated levels of uric acid in the blood are largely due to bad diet.

But recent studies have thrown this previous knowledge into question somewhat by discovering that diet only has around a 15% effect on the levels or uric acid in a person’s body. That goes some way to explain why one person who has lived on a diet of hamburgers, pizzas and beer never suffers from gout and another person will get it on a regular basis. There are other causes, there is no doubt.

One of these is reduced kidney function, where in a person with normal healthy kidneys will be able to filter out all the excess and leave normal levels in the blood, a person with reduced kidney function is not able to remove the excess and so the levels build up in the blood and lead to attacks of gout and/or arthritis. One cause of reduced kidney function is dehydration, so it is important to always make sure enough water is dunk throughout the day. Another cause - and this will upset some people - is aspirin.

Aspirin in some people reduces kidney function and suppresses their ability to filter out excessive uric acid. This is a double bind, because many people take aspirin as an anti-inflammatory for arthritis and gout, unwittingly adding to the very condition that they are trying to fight.

Yet another cause of reduced filtering or uric acid by the kidneys is alcohol. Contrary to popular belief, alcohol itself does not cause elevated levels or uric acid in the blood,so it does not directly cause gout or arthritis. What it does do, however, is compete with uric acid in the kidneys during the filtering stage, so that the alcohol will be filtered out of the bloodstream in place of the excessive uric acid. This is one reason why a person suffering an attack of gout, or an acute attack of arthritis should not drink any alcohol during the attack.

It gets worse. Another substance that competes for your kidney’s filtration time is caffeine. So while coffee might actually help the condition, the caffeine it contains actually worsens the situation, in a similar fashion to alcohol.

Another cause of excess blood levels of uric acid is our old adversary, stress. When a person is stressed, many normal bodily functions go into survival mode in order for the person to deal with the cause of the stress. In the days of our ancestors, that would have meant fight or flight. The body would create the perfect conditions for the person to either stand and fight or run away at speed. In modern life, stresses are caused by many things and the fight or flight response is suppressed, leaving the body in fight or flight mode for much longer than is healthy. This is a trigger for many of the illnesses that afflict us nowadays and one of these is gout, caused by the elevated levels of uric acid in the blood, in turn caused by the fight or flight response not being acted upon.

So now we know what causes gout and we know how to avoid it as far as is humanly possible, but we can’t control what life throws at us and from time to time we are going to get stressed and those of us who are more susceptible will suffer further attacks of gout. So what about treating it once you have it?

Well, here is a pretty darn good resource for gout treatments that is well worth you looking over as there are a lot of really helpful tips for using natural methods for fighting back against gout attacks.

I also have a squidoo lens of the same name as this site that looks at arthritis in more depth as well as some of the things you can do to reduce the condition or prevent it if you have not quite got there yet.

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

In my last post Looking After Your Heart, I wrote about the importance of looking after you heart and keeping as healthy as possible in order to live a long, full and active life as possible. In this post, I’m going back to alternative cures and will take a look at some of the ways that Chinese herbs which are used in traditional Chinese medicine can be of great benefit to all of us in our overall health and wellbeing.

Not that I particularly want to exclude all medicinal as well as culinary herbs here as they all have their place in healing and health, but I want to focus mainly on the herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine and will probably go on to different herb groups in later posts.

So first a bit of history. Not that anyone who has any inkling about Chinese medicine will be in any doubt about the incredible length of time that has passed since the earliest records were written about the use of Chinese herbs in traditional medicine! But it is still staggering to realise that Chinese herbs have been at the forefront of Chinese medicine for over five thousand years.

The use of certain herbs for curing certain ills has always been practised by our ancestors not only in China and other far eastern countries but also in medaevil Europe, Asia, Africa, The Pacific Islands and by aboriginals in Australia long before Europeans ever knew of the existance of that continent. It almost became a forgotten art in the West as modern medicine evolved as a seemingly more potent force for healing, buoyed up by the emerging drugs industry that modern medicine appears to be almost completely dependent on.

Not so with alternative cures and the many holistic approaches to health which can work in harmony with modern medicine to provide a more comprehensive armory in the fight against illness than humankind has ever known. The alternative remedies that we have labelled them were once the mainstream methods of curing and healing. They all relied on our ability to work in harmony with nature and use what we found growing from the earth.

It is unfortunate that modern drugs companies are geared more towards profit than actual compassion and they disregard nature with a haughty thumbing of their collective noses in the arrogant belief that they can beat nature and take our hard earned cash to prove it.

Well, this isn’t about money, profit or greed, arrogance, ignorance or blatant disregard for common sense.

This is about going back to nature and using what she has provided us with and which has been here all along waiting for us to discover, or rediscover the plants and minerals that we can use to benefit us before the huge conglomerate machines scour the earth for ever more profit until it is dead.

Traditional Chinese herbs and their uses for the good of mankind has been handed down for generations along with the knowledge that working in harmony with nature and the natural energy lines of the human body. The modern Chinese berbalists and practitioners use these carefully selected herbs to generate natural remedies and bring herbal pain relief to people suffering from a huge variety of ailments. We also know that the inherant herbal energy contained in the preparations can be used as a focus for our body’s own energy makeup to bring the lines of force back into alignment and thereby bring relief from suffering.

So we should take heed of the teachings of ancient Chinese wisdom and be very aware of the herbs that we can harvest and make use of to bring about cures in certain areas where even modern drugs and potions cannot. There is room for all types of healing and medicine in our modern world and all should be used wisely and not instead of any other form, but used together to increase each other’s potency.

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

Looking after your heart may seem a pretty obvious thing to do, except when you realise the sheer numbers of people who do not! My last post Alternative Cures for Acne, I looked at acne and natural cures versus standard medical treatments. In this, I’m going to have a go at taking on the health of the heart.

Your heart is something you need to keep healthy, or the alternative is a shortened, weakened and possibly miserable life. That’s a truth millions of people in the western world don’t want to hear. They’ll go right on smoking, eating junk food, drinking excess alcohol and fizzy soda drinks and (in frighteningly increasing numbers) taking recreational drugs without wanting to hear anyone tell them that they are damaging their hearts, let alone other internal organs.

So this post may fall mainly on deaf ears (or blind eyes, whichever way you take it), but nevertheless, I’m going to have my say and if just one person who reads this changes their ways and gives their heart a chance, then it was worth writing.

Ok, that’s the minor rant part out of the way. Now for the common sense talk.

Heart disease is the biggest killer in the UK and probably the US as well. It kills more people than lung cancer from smoking, more people than even breast cancer. It kills more people than are killed on the roads. If you want statistics, go look them up for yourself - suffice it to know that heart diesease is the biggest killer of modern times in the west.

So why is that do you suppose? Why is heart disease not such a big problem in say Japan, or in Africa? In fact, my sweeping statement about the West is not entirely accurate. In Mediterranean countries like Spain where I live, Italy, the South of France, Greece, the Baltic states etc do not have such a high rate of heart disease as do the UK and United States. That despite the fact that more people smoke in France and Spain per head of population than do in the UK and USA. There are plenty of obese people in Spain yet so many of them live well into their 80s and 90s. Why is this?

In a word, diet.

“You are what you eat” is a very accurate saying. For it is only in countries like the US and UK that the diet is relatively poor and lacking in fresh fruits, vegetables, fish and olive oil although higher in food fried in vegetable oils, snacks and fast food such as hamburgers, hot dogs, pizzas and ready-made meals that are not only laden with trans fats and too much salt, they also contain preservatives, artificial colourants, artificial sweeteners and monosodium glutamate in far too high quantities, despite what government guidelines say to the contrary.

Believe it or not as you wish, it’s not my call.

What I have noticed here in Spain that the general diet is more oriented towards salads, fish, fresh fruit and olive oil, although more heart disease is beginning to appear in the younger generations as the fast food monster gets a foothold here and attracts young people. The older generations tend to shun fast food joints (restaurants is too good a word for them) and stick to their traditional diets, which is why they live longer despite most people not having access to medical assistance as they do in the UK. Here in Spain, as in the USA you have to pay or have insurance, both of which are expensive.

What is not helping is the escalation in the use of a cocktail of pesticides and other chemicals on tehcrops we eat. I fear this is having effects in other areas of health, but the knock on effect must be bad for the heart as well.

So what do you do when heart disease takes hold and your health takes a dive?

Well, by this time of course its too late to lament on the excesses of your past. Its time to realise that you have no real choice other than to turn to standard medical assistance where your options are limited to drugs or surgery. Well one form of heart surgery that is open to you when your problem comes from the mitral valve is a special form of mitral valve surgery that incorporates using ultra-modern and recently successfully implemented mitral valve repair. This form of surgery has greater long term benefits for patients that undergo this treatment rather than the traditional method of mitral valve replacement. Failing that, there are other types of heart surgery open to you depending upon your specialist’s prognosis.

All that may sound scary… and it is. Remember, this article is aimed at heart disease that is for want of a better term, self inflicted. Should your problem exist through genetic disorder or unrelated health problem, I’m not ranting and raving about self abuse to you. Only to those that were given a healthy heart to begin with and have spent their lives systematically mistreating it.

To have progressed to the stage where you need surgery to treat a diseased heart means your body has taken a lot of abuse and either it happened because of pure ignorance of the consequences of your actions or of burying you rhead in the sand and ignoring the advice that has been given for many decades.

The moral of this story? If you have not got heart disease, then whatever harm you’ve done to your body up to this point can be halted and reversed by changing your lifestyle and bettering your diet and taking regular exercise. Its not too late.

Ditch the burgers, hot dogs, pizzas, fizzy drinks, cigarettes and excess alcohol. Take some mild exercise and build it up while adding fresh fruit and vegetables to your diet along with more fish. Use olive oil to drizzle over salads instead of vegetable oil to fry bacon etc, its better for your heart!

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures

                                     

Moving on from my last post When Alternative Cures Meet Traditional Medicine, I want to look at a problem that certainly affected me in my teenage years along with the vast majority of my friends. Acne!

Acne is generally a teenager thing although it can keep going well into a person’s twenties as it did me and beyond. There often seems no rhyme or reason for its appearance or severity, although there are certainly some triggers that are known about that can be avoided.

During the growth spurt that we all suffer once we reach puberty, our hormones are all over the place which often contributes to many problems, behavioural and otherwise during that time. The hormone imbalance is often one of the main culprits for the appearance of acne, but this is not the only one.

Diet plays an important role in determining how severely we are affected by acne and teenagers are prone to eat more junk food, sweets, chocolates, cakes, biscuits etc and drink sweet fizzy drinks than at any other time in their lives.

I was no different, being quite happy to devour a juicy hamburger or two with fries, washed down with a large Coke and then rounded off with a chocolate bar or three. Then I wondered why, the next day my face broke out in spots!

Well, I know a lot of teenagers do try to keep an eye on their diets but a lot do not and go looking for treatments to cure a problem that is generally although not always entirely self induced!

Well, in certain cases there are bad attacks of acne that do not follow the general rule of eating badly and filling the body full of toxins. While personal hygiene also plays a part, most teenagers tend to scrub their faces several times a day in a vain attempt to ward off the next outbreak of those dastardly red spots and blotches, and worse, the puss-filled yellow-heads that they morph into. Yuk!

So what is the cure for acne?

Well, that is a big question and one that there are many answers to. Far more than can be handled in this article no matter how lengthy it might turn out to be. That’s not to say there aren’t some good pieces of advice that can be handed out here - there are and I’ll do my best to let you know what I know so that at least will give you something more to go with than just a few wives tales and doctor’s prescriptions of God-only-knows-what potions, applications and creams that are popularly doled out by the bucket-load.

Not surprisingly, I will take an alternative cures approach to dealing with any ailment, no matter what it is. That’s because I firmly believe that the body is a marvelous piece of engineering that is designed to heal itself. As long as everything is working in harmony with everything else, then you should not get sick or suffer any malady.

It is when something is thrown out of kilter that we get sick or contract things like skin disorders including acne at any time in our lives. Often it is a case of finding out what has gone off track in our bodies, or whether there are any stresses that could be causing us to misalign with the resulting imbalance allowing problems to manifest.

Just so as to give you a balanced outlook and to provide at least an alternative viewpoint, there is a useful Acne website that has plenty of ideas and products for treating this problem. Murad Acne is a product that is believed to be effective in treating acne which incorporates the Murad Acne Complex to work its magic. Whether you think this might be worth your while at least looking at, then any one of these links in this paragraph will take you to the Acne Complex website so you can get another opinion on this and it’s worth taking a look at if you want to go down the propriety treatment road.

On a more natural and common sense note, there are of course several things you can do to help yourself to minimise the effects or possibilities of any further serious attacks of acne.

Watch your diet and be ruthless!

Avoid fast food, junk food, potato chips and other salted snacks, greasy fried food, cakes, biscuits, chocolate and candy. If you can’t avoid eating these things, then at least cut them down to the barest minimum and tell yourself that you don’t really need any of them! If you’re ever tempted to grab a can of Coke or any other fizzy soda drink for that matter, remember that Coke is one of the best things to use to clean rust off chrome and that US highway patrol police carry a couple gallons of the stuff in the trunk to wash the blood off the road surface after an accident!

Now what is that liquid crap doing to your insides?

Oh, by the way, don’t think that you can cheat and drink so-called diet fizzy drinks just because they may not contain any sugar. They still have all the other nasty ingredients plus the potentially cancer causing aspartame and saccharine and sometimes sorbitol artificial sweeteners lurking up their cylindrical metallic sleeves! If you think you are immune to the effects of these chemicals, well you might be now, but in a few years time the cumulative effects of ingesting these chemicals could prove to be disastrous. And if you don’t believe me, just listen to what your own country’s politicians say about these chemicals. Of course they endorse them and tell you they are safe.

When did you ever meet a politician that actually told the truth?

Ok, so if you think you’re going to weaken and still eat or drink any of that stuff, then you can ask yourself, “How bad to I NOT want a face full of spots?”

If you still want to indulge, then you get what you ask for!

Naturally, keeping your face as clean and grease free as possible is good horse sense, as is avoiding using any harsh make-up or products on your face. Stick to mild, pH neutral products that are designed for combination or sensitive skin.

After all this advice, if you feel that you still need something more, there is an excellent book that you can download called: Acne No More. If you follow that link you’ll go to my resource page where you’ll find a short review of that book and a link to the author’s website where you can obtain some more information.

Terry Didcott
Alternative Cures