Archive for June 2010 | Monthly archive page
WOW!! Now I’ve heard it all. I was driving home from work a few days ago and a commercial came on the radio. It was talking about symptoms like fatigue, irritability, etc. It went on and on and on with different symptoms and then the sweet sounding lady on the commercial says, “If you suffer from these symptoms you may be suffering from “Shift-work Disorder” “. I laughed and then sat there waiting on the punchline because I was thinking this was surely a joke…but I waited and waited and then the music started again…..THEY’RE SERIOU!?! They have actually created a true medical diagnosis out of where someone works! Unbelievable…truly.
If you’re still confused about the diagnosis, here’s what one website described it as: “SWD occurs when your body’s internal sleep-wake clock is out of sync with your work schedule—your body is telling you to go to sleep when your work schedule needs you to stay awake. Because of this disruption of your body’s natural rhythm, people with SWD often struggle to stay awake during their waking hours, or have trouble sleeping during their sleeping hours.” WELL, NO JOKE! I want to talk to the guy who thought working a 24 hours shift and then being off was going to improve his sleep and help him focus better…lol
You have to understand the reasoning behind any diagnosis in order to understand fully my frustration. In order to create a medication an thereby create a market for a certain drug, you have to first have a diagnosis of something. So voila!! SWD now has a medication to help all those poor people out there that weren’t told that if you work all night long, you are going to be sleepy during the day. That drug is called Nuvigil, if you look it up online, here are the side effects of this drug:
Common side effects may include: headache, nausea, dizziness, trouble sleeping, serious allergic reaction or rash; swelling of the face, eyes, lips, tongue, or throat; mental (psychiatric) symptoms such as depression, anxiety, hallucinations, mania, or thoughts of suicide; or heart problems including chest pain.
I love that one of the side effects of the drug to help you sleep, is “trouble sleeping”! But don’t worry about all this Mrs. Jones because we have drugs to help all the side effects so we’ll fix you right up!
Diagnosis and corresponding medication creation in our country has arrived at the point of ridiculous. The public has allowed this and in some instances even begged for this to happen though because everyone relies on the medical community for their health. We’ve stopped thinking for ourselves and using common sense and have blindly trusted so much of what has been given us from the media and the medical profession that we just take whatever we’re given. How convenient that no matter what’s going on with me today, I can go get a pill for that. Headache? Pill for that… Can’t have sex?? Gotcha covered… Can’t get pregnant?? Don’t worry, we’ll fix you…. No matter what you can come up with, they have a drug for. This is why some people look at me so funny in the office when I tell them they need to take responsibility for their own health. They look at me like “Why?? I thought you were a doctor?” As if because I have letters behind my name, I am now responsible for their health and the health of their family.
One of our friends calls people that just blindly do whatever they’re supposed to do “Sheeple” and I totally could not agree with him more. We have to break this cycle! Please don’t just do what you’re told because you’re told, from me or anyone else. DO YOUR STUDIES!! And use your head, Shift-Work Disorder???? Sheesh….
Dr. JB
Another major hurdle to clear in your family’s diet transition are artificial sweeteners. Artificial sweeteners include aspartame, MSG, and Splenda.
Aspartame (also known as aspartic acid, phenylalanine, phenylketonurics, Nutrasweet, Equal) is a very potent neurotoxin. It is 180 times as sweet as sugar. Dr. Russell Blaylock is a well-known neurosurgeon whose book, “Excitotoxins” chronicles the horrible effects of aspartame on the brain and nervous system. What an “excitotoxin” does is it fires a particular nerve pathway so much that it causes it to burnout and die. There is a fatty layer around all the nerves in your body called Myelin. This fatty layer is what is responsible for the nerve signal getting back and forth down your nerves. Aspartame destroys this fatty layer, creating gaps in the nerve. This creates physical symptoms very closely resembling Multiple Sclerosis. Aspartame is found in most products with the words “sugar free” on the front. Puddings, sugar free gum, diet soft drinks, and many many other products use aspartame to sweeten their product. In the body, aspartame turns into Formaldehyde!! So read your labels carefully to catch this sweetener poking up its head in many of your products you ingest on a normal basis.
Splenda (aka sucralose) isn’t really any better either….sorry. Everyone (especially diabetics) were really excited at the invention of Splenda because you could cook with it, and that it wasn’t “sugar”. But in reality, Splenda is sugar, but with three chlorine molecules attached to it. Once the molecule enters your body, the heat in your body breaks this bond and you get a sugar molecule, and chlorine!
All other artificial sweeteners follow this general path, bait and switch. They lead you to believe it’s healthier than sugar and that it will help you lose weight because they either are low calorie or no calorie, but they don’t tell you the physical damage that is occurring to your body while you are taking it.
So what do you use to sweeten things you eat?? Don’t stress out, you have options!
Stevia: This is an herb used for sweetening that has grown in popularity in recent years in the U.S. It has been used as a sweetener in South America for over 1500 years! If at all possible, you want to find stevia that hasn’t been bleached and processed to make it as wholesome to you and your family as possible. This one takes some getting used to because it is hundreds times sweeter than sugar, so a little goes a long way. It doesn’t raise your blood sugar so it is safe for diabetics and you can cook with it too.
Other options for sweeteners are Sucranat, Organic raw brown sugar (you want to get the brown to stay away from the bleaching that happens to regular white sugar), some honeys, and dates if you’re baking.
Be creative on this and again, this will take some time to get used to because you’ve trained your family’s taste buds to crave un-naturally sweet foods for awhile so it may take a little while to get them to enjoy naturally sweet foods.
What do you use for your sweeteners?? Let us know! We always are looking for good suggestions to pass on!
Dr. JB
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