Do you realize the tremendous change we humans have instigated and we have endured during the past few thousand years. Perhaps the first, biggest, and most challenging change was the agricultural revolution. Domesticated crops and animals allowed humans to become enormously less reliant upon their immediate environment for food. Since we could produce our own food rather than hunting and gathering it from our surroundings, we were able to migrate to less temperate regions of our planet and explode our population worldwide.
The early agricultural revolution gave us foods like dairy products, grains and beans. Later we discovered sugar, and we began feeding our livestock grains and beans. Then we began extracting isolates from food sources and combining them into processed foods. We also added chemical flavors, colorings and preservatives.
Our soil nutrients were used up, farmers went west to acquire new soil, reached the coast, and all our soil was depleted. We used chemical fertilizers to help our crops grow, ran out of pasture space, and began confining our livestock and feeding them grains, beans, and animal byproducts. We couldn't keep up with the weeds and bugs, so we added pesticides and herbicides.
We took ownership of seeds by genetically manipulating their genes to prevent first generation crops from reproducing. Then we genetically engineered seeds to produce crops that make their own insecticides and resist massive herbicide applications.
Our Genes Have Not Changed That Much.
These vast changes in the way we feed ourselves have accompanied almost no perceptible change in the human genetic code governing the way our bodies function. Our genetic code tells your body what proteins to make, how to make them, and directs the biochemical processes that convert the food we eat to energy. Our digestion, metabolism and immune systems being virtually identical to those of our cave dwelling ancestors, are adapted for digesting a cave dweller's diet. All of a sudden we are asking our bodies to digest and metabolize brand new food, food like substances and laboratory chemicals.
The human genome is adapted a very low carbohydrate diet of wild nuts, seeds, fruits, shoots, vegetables and wild game for 1,000 years. Now, within the last few moments of our existence, our food becomes 80% carbohydrate, genetically engineered grains, beans, and vegetables, and our meats and dairy products come from animals fed genetically modified grains and beans with artificial growth hormones and antibiotics added. Chemical preservatives, colorings, flavorings, pesticides, and sugar are in almost all our foods.
Are We Adapting or Perishing?
How are we handling these radical changes in our diet? Unfortunately, our genetic code requires more than a moment to adapt to new environments, certainly more than the few thousand years since our agricultural revolution. Professor Loren Cordain, Colorado State University, presents us with sufficient anthropological evidence to show that Paleolythic humans (our hunter-gatherer ancestors who lived before agriculture) were significantly healthier than Neolythic humans, those that came after agriculture. Paleolythic humans were a foot taller, had much greater bone density and their dental health was impeccable.
The changes in our food supply involving chemicals used for pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and fertilizers, food processing and the proliferation of genetically modified organisms are too recent for anthropology to measure. We can only look at the dramatic increase in chronic, degenerative diseases over the past hundred years for guidance. Do you think these changes could have anything to do with growing number of people with food allergies and food sensitivities?
Food Allergies and Sensitivities Are Probably Modern Phenomena.
It is unlikely our cave men ancestors had food allergies, since the foods they ate were digested and used by their bodies appropriately. The foods they ate were biologically compatible with their genetic make-up. Today, however, many of the substances we swallow include strange new proteins and chemicals that cannot be effectively digested or eliminated. Partially digested substances and chemicals enter our blood streams, are identified by our immune system as foreign invaders, cause autoimmune declaration of war against them. Our immune systems attack the "bad guys" with the same poisonous chemicals ordinarily reserved for infectious microorganisms. However, these weapons not only hit the foreign substances in our bodies, they also hit and injure everything which surrounds them.
Unfortunately, our immune system's chemical weapon blasters cause immense collateral damage to our cells, tissues and organs, and the resulting tissue and chemical damage to our bodies makes us sick. The chaos produced by our autoimmune response to foreign and undigested materials severely "stresses out" our immune systems, disrupting their ability to self-regulate and to distinguish between self and non-self. causing them to directly attack our own cells, tissues, glands and organs, and now we have autoimmune disease that could affect us for life.
Eat an Evolutionary Diet.
Here is my tip for avoiding and contending with allergies, food sensitivities and autoimmune disease. Simplify and clean up your diet. Eat an evolutionary diet, a diet most compatible with your genetic code. In other words, simplify your diet so it most closely matches the diet of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer. Focus your diet upon locally grown whole vegetables, fruits, and proteins, and avoid carbohydrates, processed, chemically raised, adulterated, processed and food that is otherwise manipulate by humans. This includes eliminating genetically modified organisms from your menu.
Eliminate Genetically Engineered Foods.
One way to eliminate GMOs from your diet is to eat organic food only. If organic food is too expensive or too difficult for you to find, learn which foods are have been genetically modified and avoid them.
To help you understand the link between consuming genetically modified organisms and food allergies, and to learn which foods are genetically engineered and how to avoid them, I suggest you read the following article:
Faced with knowledge about organized suppression of long term scientific GMO feeding studies and product labeling, how do you know if GMO usage continues to be a problem? How can you avoid GMOs and eliminate them altogether?
Would you choose genetically modified food if given a choice? Some animals won't.
There's a bowl of corn chips in front of you made from natural corn. Next to it are genetically modified (GM) corn chips. Which do you choose?
If you were a pig or cow, we know the answer—the natural corn. Farmers repeatedly let pigs or cows into pens with troughs of GM corn and non-GM corn. The animals would head straight to the closer trough, filled with the genetically modified organisms (GMOs). They'd sniff, maybe take a nibble, then go over to the trough with the natural corn. After finishing off the last kernel, they'd stop by the GM corn one more time just to check it out, but quickly walk away.
An Iowa farmer who read about the finicky livestock decided to see if squirrels had similar dispositions. He nailed an ear of GM corn and non-GM corn onto trees by his house. Sure enough, the squirrels ate only the natural stuff, over and over again. When the farmer stopped replacing the natural corn, the squirrels still refused to touch the GMO. After 10 cold winter days, they got up the courage to nibble a few kernels, but that was all they could handle.
Another curious farmer wanted to repeat this with the squirrels in his area. He bought a bag full of GM corn ears, and another of non-GM, and left it in his garage to wait for winter. He waited too long. Mice did the experiment for him. They broke into the natural corn bag and finished it. The GM cobs were untouched.
Farmers, gardeners, reporters, and scientists have noticed similar behavior on at least four continents. Chickens, elk, deer, and raccoons avoided GM corn, while geese, rats, and buffalo refused GM soy, tomatoes, and cottonseed, respectively. Why are animals put off by genetically engineered food? No one knows for sure, but let's get back to the GM corn chips still sitting in front of you.
Dangerous side-effects
Genetic material from bacteria and viruses are forced into the corn's DNA, which is then cloned into a plant. This process leads to substantial collateral damage, including changes in hundreds or thousands of natural corn genes, plus widespread mutations. Most of the side-effects are never tested for. We do know, for example, that an allergy producing gene, normally silent, gets switched on in a Monsanto corn variety. Proteins change shape, which might be a serious health hazard. And a compound called lignin is significantly overproduced. Lignin on its own may not be so bad, but in the process of producing it, the plant also produces rotenone, a natural pesticide linked to Parkinson's disease. No one has tested your chips to see if contains more rotenone.
In addition to the unpredicted changes, the genes inserted into the corn intentionally put more stuff into your snack food that may be hazardous. Monsanto's Roundup Ready corn, and Bayer's Liberty Link corn have added genes that allow the corn to withstand high doses of Roundup or Liberty herbicide. These varieties, therefore, have more weedkiller residues. Other GM varieties have inserted gene from bacteria that produce an insect killing toxin in every cell (and in every bite).
In addition, genes inserted into GM crops don't necessarily stay put. In the only human GM feeding experiment—done with Roundup Ready soy—functioning genes transferred into the DNA of bacteria living inside our intestines. This means that millions of Americans probably have Roundup Ready gut bacteria—unkillable with Roundup herbicide. No one has yet looked to see if GM corn genes also transfer. If they do, their insecticide-producing genes could turn your gut flora into living pesticide factories, continuously producing toxins inside you—long after you finish your bowl of chips.
Have you made your decision yet? If you still need encouragement, check out last issue of Urban Garden to find out why the American Academy of Environmental Medicine wants doctors across the country to prescribe non-GMO diets to everyone.
But aren't GMOs supposed to feed the world?
If you're feeling some moral imperative to support GMOs, that's understandable. The biotech industry spent more than $250 million convincing you that its gene-spliced foods are the answer to the sick and starving. So don't be embarrassed if you fell for it. Many leading US politicians have likewise been mesmerized by this long running PR ploy. Clinton's Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman spoke candidly to a St. Louis Post Dispatch reporter about the pro-GMO attitude embedded in the US government:
"It was almost immoral to say that it wasn't good, because it was going to solve the problems of the human race and feed the hungry and clothe the naked. . . . And if you're against it, you're Luddites, you're stupid. . . . You felt like you were almost an alien, disloyal, by trying to present an open-minded view."
Glickman acknowledged that he too "spouted the rhetoric," admitting, "it was written into my speeches."
The current Ag Secretary, Tom Vilsack, is the latest GMO cheerleader. As Iowa's governor, he gave Monsanto an award in 2000, and the next year was anointed Biotech Governor of the Year by the biotech industry trade organization.
In October 2009, Vilsack tried to play the "feed the world" card at a conference sponsored by the Community Food Security Coalition. Bad move Tom. The people in the room were actually experts at feeding the world. Attendees included numerous PhDs and eminent scholars, such as the co-chairman and several leading authors of the authoritative IAASTD report, the world's most comprehensive evaluation of agriculture.
This crowd knew that GMOs had no answers for world hunger. The IAASTD report, for example, concluded that the current generation of GMOs does not reduce hunger and poverty, does not improve nutrition, or does not facilitate social and environmental sustainability. A comprehensive analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that GMOs do not increase yield; in fact, on average they reduce yield. A USDA study showed that farmers' income doesn't increase, and in some cases, it decreases. And it doesn't help the overall economy either. The federal government has been spending $3-5 billion per year to prop up the prices of the GM crops no one else wants.
Thus, when Secretary Vilsack invoked "the ever-increasing population of the globe and the capacity to be able to feed all of those people," as the excuse to promote GMOs, he was greeted by moans, groans, hisses, and even boos.
That didn't stop Vilsack from playing the same card two days later, but this time he was at the World Food Prize conference. That's sponsored by the biotech industry, so they were overjoyed that the Ag Secretary was still supporting their myth.
How do you choose non-GMO?
Are you now ready to choose the bowl of natural chips? If so, you're not alone. Most Americans, according to a CBS/New York Times poll, would also choose foods made without genetically modified organisms (GMOs) if they knew which was which—if they were labeled. But unlike most other industrialized nations, GMOs don't have to be labeled in the US or Canada. Therefore, avoiding GM foods here takes some doing.
Tip #1: Buy Organic
The best way is to buy organic foods, which don't allow the use of GMOs. And you also benefit from organics' higher average levels of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, and lower pesticide residues.
Tip #2: Look for "non-GMO" labels
Some companies voluntarily label products as "non-GMO." The best label is now the Non-GMO Project Verified seal. It's the new uniform, third party verified standard for non-GMO claims that is spreading through the industry.
Tip #3: Consult the Non-GMO Shopping Guide
For a handy list of non-GMO brands by category, go to www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com. View it online, download or order copies, and look for the Mobile Phone Application coming soon.
Tip #4: Avoid at-risk ingredients
If it's not labeled organic or non-GMO, and the brand is not listed in the Guide, look at the ingredient panel to see if it contains any at-risk GMOs. The most pervasive GMOs are derivatives of corn and soy. Here are some common ones. (A more comprehensive list is available in the Non-GMO Shopping Guide.)
Corn • Flour, meal, oil, starch, gluten, and syrups • Sweeteners such as fructose, dextrose, and glucose
Soy • Flour, oil, lecithin, protein, isolate, and isoflavones
Oil from canola and cottonseed are genetically modified. Sugar from GM sugar beets was introduced in late 2008, but a recent ruling in a federal lawsuit may eventually drive it out of our food supply. For now, if the sugar doesn't say pure cane, it's likely blended with beet sugar.
Other than corn, there are only three items in the produce section that may be genetically modified. That includes papaya from Hawaiian (yes, only Hawaii) and a small amount of zucchini and yellow squash. Mercifully popcorn is not GMO.
Aspartame, the artificial sweetener also known as NutraSweet and Equal, is derived from GM microorganisms.
Meat, fish, eggs and dairy
FDA scientists had warned that animals fed GMOs might bio-accumulate toxins, which end up in milk, meat, or eggs. Their concerns were ignored and no safety studies have looked into this. Most US livestock, and even farmed fish, are fed GM soy or corn. To avoid GM-fed animal products, buy organic, wild caught, or 100% grass-fed. Fortunately, there are no genetically modified fish, fowl, or livestock yet approved for human consumption.
Dairy products also carry the risk that the cows were injected with genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, (rbST or rbGH). The milk from drugged cows has more pus, antibiotics, bovine growth hormone, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). IGF-1 is a powerful hormone and a high risk factor for cancer. That's primarily why the American Public Health Association, American Nurses Association, and many other groups condemn the use of rbGH.
Consumer concerns about rbGH has forced Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Dannon, Yoplait, and most of the major dairies in the US to stop using the hormone. Look for labels, consult the Non-GMO Shopping Guide, or buy organic dairy products.
Moving GMOs out of the market
The declining fortunes of rbGH demonstrate the power of informed consumers. As more and more people linked the milk hormone to cancer, marketing executives realized that allowing their suppliers to use the controversial drug was bad for sales. Because the mainstream media has been pretty silent on the health effects, it took a few years of a concerted consumer education to start the dominoes falling. If the hazards of rbGH had made headline news, the tipping point would have been swift.
The experience of GMOs in Europe shows us just how swift markets can move. In late January of 1999, biotech representatives predicted that 95% of all commercial seeds would be genetically engineered by 2004. But just a few weeks later, their plans to replace nature crashed. On February 16th, the gag order imposed on a scientist who had conducted GMO safety studies was lifted by order of the UK Parliament. When Dr. Arpad Pusztai, the top scientist in his field, discovered the extensive damage that a GMO diet can cause, he was fired after 35 years and silenced with threats of legal action. When he finally was able to speak, all hell broke loose.
Within the week, the European press reeled off 159 column feet of articles. Within the month, 750 articles on GMOs were circulating. According to one editor, the coverage divided society into two warring blocks. Within just 10 weeks, the tipping point of consumer rejection was achieved. GM ingredients had become a marketing liability. At the end of April, Unilever publicly committed to remove GMOs from its European brands. Within the week, so did nearly every other major food company.
These same companies continue to use GM ingredients in the US, where the Pusztai controversy was not reported. Here, only one in four people are even aware that they've ever eaten a genetically engineered food in their lives.
Engineering a US tipping point
The Campaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to achieve a tipping point of consumer rejection of GMOs in the US. Several indicators suggest that it's not far off. A December 2009 issue of Supermarket News, for example, predicted "The coming year promises to bring about a greater, more pervasive awareness" of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food supply." This trade publication, which is used by food executives as a source of industry news and trends, attributed this coming uprising in part to the Campaign's new Non-GMO Shopping Guide.
The article describes how food "culprits" such as fat, carbs, salt, and added sugar can "define the decade" for the food industry; companies scramble to create new low-culprit or culprit-free options. When the specter of GMO health dangers surfaces onto consumers' radar screen, however, there will be a significant difference. Whereas traditional ingredient culprits offer some consumer appeal like better taste or texture, GM foods do not. Furthermore, companies can usually eliminate GMOs without even changing recipes. They can simply substitute the non-GMO soy or non-GM corn, without reformulating.
Therefore, when the industry gets hit with the anti-GMO tipping point, they won't create separate brand options of low GMO or GMO-free. Instead, they will eliminate all GMOs from their brands and proudly proclaim that here as they do in Europe.
The number of shoppers rejecting GMOs need only be a tiny amount, perhaps 5% of Americans, in order to convince food companies to do a brand-wide GMO cleanout. But when you look at the numbers, no matter how you slice it, they add up to a coming non-GMO tidal wave.
More than 9% of Americans regularly buy organic. About 29% are strongly opposed to GM foods and believe they are unsafe. And 53% say they would avoid GMOs if labeled. While most people do not conscientiously avoid brands with GM ingredients, it's usually because they don't know how. Hence the importance of the Non-GMO Shopping Guide.
Time to take charge
There are so many people predisposed to reject GMOs, we can achieve a tipping point without ever having to convince those who are resistant. Just by educating the people who want to know why GMOs are unsafe and how to avoid them, we can kick GMOs out of the food supply.
The Campaign offers educational tools that are easy to use and to pass onto others. There are right-brain books, left-brain books, videos for the visual learner, brochures, articles, podcasts, CDs, PowerPoints, and of course, shopping guides.
The Campaign also provides strategies and support materials designed specifically for the most receptive targeted groups: Health- and environmentally-conscious shoppers, parents, healthcare professionals, chefs and food service professionals, and even religious groups.
If you would like to lend a hand and help protect the health of those you care about, visit healthiereating.org and look at the action items and tools available. Little did you know that a bowl of chips would turn you into an activist...
To learn more about the health dangers of GMOs, and what you can do to help end the genetic engineering of our food supply, visit www.ResponsibleTechnology.org.
To learn how to choose healthier non-GMO brands, visit www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com.
International bestselling author and filmmaker Jeffrey Smith is the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of genetically modified (GM) foods. His first book, Seeds of Deception, is the world's bestselling and #1 rated book on the topic. His second, Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, provides overwhelming evidence that GMOs are unsafe and should never have been introduced. Mr. Smith is the executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, whose Campaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to create the tipping point of consumer rejection of GMOs, forcing them out of our food supply.
Are you involuntarily participating in a massive, long term feeding experiment that could end up proving what you are unknowingly eating is causing serious chronic illness? Would you like to find out? If so, the read this article.
It looks the same—the bread, pies, sodas, even corn on the cob. So much of what we eat every day looks just like it did 20 years ago. But something profoundly different has happened without our knowledge or consent. And according to leading doctors, what we don’t know may already be hurting us big time.
In May 2009, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) publicly condemned genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food supply, saying they posed “a serious health risk.” They called on the US government to implement an immediate moratorium on all genetically modified (GM) foods, and urged physicians to prescribe non-GMO diets for all patients.
GM-What?
Genetic engineering is quite distinct from selective breeding because it involves taking genes from a completely different species and inserting them into the DNA of a plant or animal. The long term effects of this for our health and our planet’s biodiversity are unknown.
AAEM, an “Academy of Firsts,” was the first US medical organization to describe or acknowledge Gulf War Syndrome, chemical sensitivity, food allergy/addiction, and a host of other medical issues. But the potential for harm from GMOs dwarfs anything they have identified thus far. It can impact everyone who eats.
More than 70% of the foods on supermarket shelves contain derivatives of the eight GM foods on the market—soy, corn, oil from canola and cottonseed, sugar from sugar beets, Hawaiian papaya, and a small amount of zucchini and crook neck squash. The biotech industry hopes to genetically engineer virtually all remaining vegetables, fruits, grains, and beans (not to mention animals).
The two primary reasons why plants are engineered are to allow them to either drink poison, or produce poison. The poison drinkers are called herbicide tolerant. They’re inserted with bacterial genes that allow them to survive otherwise deadly doses of toxic herbicide. Biotech companies sell the seed and herbicide as a package deal, and US farmers use hundreds of millions of pounds more herbicide because of these types of GM crops. The poison producers are called Bt crops. Inserted genes from the soil bacterium Bacillus Thuringiensis produce an insect-killing pesticide called Bt-toxin in every cell of the plant. Both classes of GM crops are linked to dangerous side effects.
Doctors and Patients: Just Say No to GMOs
“Now that soy is genetically engineered,” warns Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles, “it is so dangerous that I tell people never to eat it.” How dangerous are GM foods? World renowned biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava, PhD, believes they may be a major reason for the recent rise in serious illnesses in the US.
The range of what GMOs might do to us is breathtaking. “Several animal studies,” according to the AAEM, reveal a long list of disorders, including: “infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, [faulty] insulin regulation, cell signaling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system.”
“There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects,” says the AAEM position paper. Based on established scientific criteria, “there is causation.”
Difficult to Trace the Damage
Outside the carefully controlled laboratory setting, it is more difficult to confidently assign GMOs as the cause for a particular set of diseases, especially since there are no human clinical trials and no agency that even attempts to monitor GMO-related health problems among the population. “If there are problems,” says biologist David Schubert, PhD, of the Salk Institute, “we will probably never know because the cause will not be traceable and many diseases take a very long time to develop.”
GM crops were widely introduced in 1996. Within nine years, the incidence of people in the US with three or more chronic diseases nearly doubled—from 7% to 13%. Visits to the emergency room due to allergies doubled from 1997 to 2002. And overall food related illnesses doubled from 1994 to 2001, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Obesity, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, and autism are also among the conditions that are skyrocketing in the US.
The Lyme Induced Autism Foundation, a patient advocacy group, is not waiting for studies to prove that GMOs cause or worsen Lyme, autism, and the many other diseases on the rise since gene-spliced foods were introduced. Like AAEM, the LIA Foundation says there is more than enough evidence of harm in animal feeding studies for them to “urge doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets” and for “individuals, especially those with autism, Lyme disease, and associated conditions, to avoid” GM foods.
Another patient group, those suffering from eosinophilia myalgia syndrome (EMS), is more confident about the GMO origins of their particular disease. It was caused by a genetically engineered brand of a food supplement called L-tryptophan in the late 1980s. It killed about 100 Americans and caused 5,000-10,000 people to fall sick or become permanently disabled. The characteristics of EMS made it much easier for authorities to identify the epidemic and its cause. It only affected those who consumed the pills; symptoms came on almost immediately; and its effects were horrific—including unbearable pain and paralysis. There was even a unique, easy-to-measure change in the white blood cell count. But even though EMS was practically screaming to be discovered, it still took the medical community more than four years—and it was almost missed.
“The experiments simply haven’t been done and we now have become the guinea pigs.” David Suzuki, renowned Canadian geneticist.
What if the GMOs throughout our food supply are creating common diseases which come on slowly? It would be nearly impossible to confirm them as the cause. “Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients,” says AAEM president Dr. Jennifer Armstrong, “but need to know how to ask the right questions.” The patients at greatest risk are the very young. “Children are the most likely to be adversely effected by toxins and other dietary problems” related to GM foods, says Dr. Schubert. They become “the experimental animals,” our collective canaries in the coal mine.
Warnings by Government Scientists Ignored and Denied
Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had warned about all these problems back in the early 1990s. According to secret documents made public from a lawsuit, the scientific consensus at the agency was that GM foods were inherently dangerous, and might create hard-to-detect allergies, poisons, new “super” diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged their superiors to require rigorous long-term tests. But the White House had ordered the agency to promote biotechnology and the FDA responded by recruiting Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney, to head up the formation of GMO policy. That policy, which is in effect today, denies knowledge of the scientists’ concerns and declares that no safety studies on GMOs are required. It is up to Monsanto and the other biotech companies—who have a long history of lying about the toxicity of their earlier products—to determine if their own foods are safe.
After overseeing GMO policy at the FDA, Mr. Taylor worked on GMO issues at the USDA, and then later became Monsanto’s vice president. In the summer of 2009, he went through the revolving door again. Taylor was appointed by the Obama administration as the de facto US food safety czar at the FDA.
Dangerously Few Studies, Untraceable Diseases
“Where is the scientific evidence showing that GM plants/food are toxicologically safe, as assumed by the biotechnology companies?” This was the concluding question posed in a 2007 review of published scientific literature on the health risks of GM plants, showing that the number of studies and available data are “very scarce.”
“The experiments simply haven’t been done and we now have become the guinea pigs,” says renowned Canadian geneticist David Suzuki. He adds, “Anyone that says, ‘Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,’ I say is either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying.”
Kicking out GMOs—for Everybody
When consumers realize the dangers of GM foods and that the FDA has abdicated its responsibility to protect us, they usually want to opt out of this massive feeding experiment. In fact, most Americans already say they would avoid GMO brands if given a choice.
It wouldn’t take a majority of us to kick GMOs out of our food supply. Kraft and other food companies wouldn’t wait until half their market share is gone before telling their suppliers to switch to the non-GM corn, soy, etc. By using GM ingredients, they don’t offer customers a single advantage. The food doesn’t taste better, last longer, or have more nutrients. Thus, if even a tiny percentage of US consumers—say 5% or 15 million people—started avoiding GMO brands, the millions in lost sales revenue would likely force brands to remove all GM ingredients, like they already have in Europe.
But the FDA doesn’t want to give us the choice. They ignore the wishes of nine out of ten Americans for mandatory GMO labeling in order to promote the economic interests of just five biotech companies.
Fortunately, with so many health-conscious consumers clamoring for non-GMO options, many brands, particularly those serving the natural food industry, voluntarily label or promote their products as Non-GMO. These healthier non-GMO foods have been compiled into the Non-GMO Shopping Guide, which makes it much easier to take the doctors’ advice and avoid eating genetically modified foods.
View or download the guide at http://www.NonGMOShoppingGuide.com" or get the free iPhone app “ShopNoGMO” and build a custom shopping list.
It’s time to take back our own diets, and in doing so, create a non-GMO tidal wave to wash away GMOs for everyone’s benefit.
To learn more about the health dangers of GMOs, and what you can do to help end the genetic engineering of our food supply, visit www.ResponsibleTechnology.org.
International bestselling author and filmmaker Jeffrey Smith is the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of genetically modified (GM) foods. His first book,Seeds of Deception, is the world’s bestselling and #1 rated book on the topic. His second,Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods, provides overwhelming evidence that GMOs are unsafe and should never have been introduced. Mr. Smith is the executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, whose Campaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to create the tipping point of consumer rejection of GMOs, forcing them out of our food supply.
By confusing nutrients with anti-nutrients, we endanger our health and the health of those dependent upon us. The quality of your life depends upon you knowing the difference.
Nutrition is the process of providing or obtaining the food necessary for health and growth. The quality of the nutrients, the proteins, carbohydrates, fats, minerals, water, antioxidants, phytochemicals (trace chemicals especially found in colorful fruits and vegetables which are good for your cardiovascular and immune systems) and fiber you consume determines, to a large extent, how well you function or support life.
Anti-nutrients are substances contained in some foods which impair the digestion, absorption and processing of your nutrition, interfere with the way you function and undermine your health and the quality of your life. Your basic functions include thinking, breathing, hydration, sleeping, digesting, moving and reproducing.
Here are a few anti-nutrient examples. Phytic acid, found in the hulls of nuts, seeds and grains, binds with calcium, zinc, iron and copper making them insoluble, indigestible and therefore unavailable for nutritional purposes. This is why soaking and rinsing the phytic acid from these foods is important. Other foods contain enzyme inhibitors which suppress your body's metabolism (chemical reactions). Potatoes, tomatoes and eggplant belong to the deadly night shade food group. Many people avoid or eat these foods sparingly because they contain neurotoxic enzyme inhibitors which kill or impair your nerves.
Some plant's neurotoxic enzyme inhibition is so severe, their extracts have been used to poison the tips of arrows and darts. Pesticides sprayed on agricultural crops contain insect killing neurotoxic enzyme inhibitors. To promote their own health and the health of the environment, many humans avoid consumption of these neurotoxin pesticide contaminated foods.
Over the past 17 years, a new class of anti-nutrients has emerged into our food supply, genetically modified organisms. Corn has been genetically modified to produce its own neurotoxic pesticide for killing corn consuming insects. However, when you and other members of the animal kingdom eat this corn, the corn's genes are incorporated into your gut bacteria, causing them to produce and release neurotoxic pesticide into your digestive tract. Now you have your own digestive tract neurotoxin factory working around the clock manufacturing and secreting neurotoxin that kills your beneficial gut flora and wreaks havoc on your nervous system. Farm animals have died from consuming this corn, and humans exposed to pollen from these crops have become seriously ill.
This is just one example of one of the minor ways genetically modified foods may destroy your health. As you read the literature, you will discover other more significant problems with GMOs, and you will understand why doctor's like me recommend eliminating genetically modified organisms, and animal foods produced with genetically modified organisms from your diet.
To begin understanding the more serious GMO consequences, read the next Health and Wellness eZine article, Doctors Prescribe: No Genetically Modified Foods, coming soon. Let me know what you think.
Sterility, retarded growth, infant mortality, and hair growing in the mouths of Genetically engineered soy fed experimental hamsters? Are you willing to act as an experimental animal for the big agribusiness GMO human feeding experiment?
Genetically Modified Soy Linked to Sterility, Infant Mortality
By Jeffrey M. Smith
April 20, 2010
“This study was just routine,” said Russian biologist Alexey V. Surov, in what could end up as the understatement of this century. Surov and his colleagues set out to discover if Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) soy, grown on 91% of US soybean fields, leads to problems in growth or reproduction. What he discovered may uproot a multi-billion dollar industry.
After feeding hamsters for two years over three generations, those on the GM diet, and especially the group on the maximum GM soy diet, showed devastating results. By the third generation, most GM soy-fed hamsters lost the ability to have babies. They also suffered slower growth, and a high mortality rate among the pups.
And if this isn’t shocking enough, some in the third generation even had hair growing inside their mouths—a phenomenon rarely seen, but apparently more prevalent among hamsters eating GM soy.
The study, jointly conducted by Surov’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the National Association for Gene Security, is expected to be published in three months (July 2010)—so the technical details will have to wait. But Surov sketched out the basic set up for me in an email.
He used Campbell hamsters, with a fast reproduction rate, divided into 4 groups. All were fed a normal diet, but one was without any soy, another had non-GM soy, a third used GM soy, and a fourth contained higher amounts of GM soy. They used 5 pairs of hamsters per group, each of which produced 7-8 litters, totally 140 animals.
Surov told The Voice of Russia, “Originally, everything went smoothly. However, we noticed quite a serious effect when we selected new pairs from their cubs and continued to feed them as before. These pairs’ growth rate was slower and reached their sexual maturity slowly.”
He selected new pairs from each group, which generated another 39 litters. There were 52 pups born to the control group and 78 to the non-GM soy group. In the GM soy group, however, only 40 pups were born. And of these, 25% died. This was a fivefold higher death rate than the 5% seen among the controls. Of the hamsters that ate high GM soy content, only a single female hamster gave birth. She had 16 pups; about 20% died.
Surov said “The low numbers in F2 [third generation] showed that many animals were sterile.”
The published paper will also include measurements of organ size for the third generation animals, including testes, spleen, uterus, etc. And if the team can raise sufficient funds, they will also analyze hormone levels in collected blood samples.
Hair Growing in the Mouth
Earlier this year, Surov co-authored a paper in Doklady Biological Sciences showing that in rare instances, hair grows inside recessed pouches in the mouths of hamsters.
“Some of these pouches contained single hairs; others, thick bundles of colorless or pigmented hairs reaching as high as the chewing surface of the teeth. Sometimes, the tooth row was surrounded with a regular brush of hair bundles on both sides. The hairs grew vertically and had sharp ends, often covered with lumps of a mucous.”
(The photos of these hair bundles are truly disgusting. Trust me, or look for yourself.)
At the conclusion of the study, the authors surmise that such an astounding defect may be due to the diet of hamsters raised in the laboratory. They write, “This pathology may be exacerbated by elements of the food that are absent in natural food, such as genetically modified (GM) ingredients (GM soybean or maize meal) or contaminants (pesticides, mycotoxins, heavy metals, etc.).” Indeed, the number of hairy mouthed hamsters was much higher among the third generation of GM soy fed animals than anywhere Surov had seen before.
Preliminary, but Ominous
Surov warns against jumping to early conclusions. He said, “It is quite possible that the GMO does not cause these effects by itself.” Surov wants to make the analysis of the feed components a priority, to discover just what is causing the effect and how.
In addition to the GMOs, it could be contaminants, he said, or higher herbicide residues, such as Roundup. There is in fact much higher levels of Roundup on these beans; they’re called “Roundup Ready.” Bacterial genes are forced into their DNA so that the plants can tolerate Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Therefore, GM soy always carries the double threat of higher herbicide content, couple with any side effects of genetic engineering.
Years of Reproductive Disorders from GMO-Feed
Surov’s hamsters are just the latest animals to suffer from reproductive disorders after consuming GMOs. In 2005, Irina Ermakova, also with the Russian National Academy of Sciences, reported that more than half thebabies from mother rats fed GM soy died within three weeks. This was also five times higher than the 10% death rate of the non-GMO soy group. The babies in the GM group were also smaller (see photo) and could not reproduce.
In a telling coincidence, after Ermakova’s feeding trials, her laboratory started feeding all the rats in the facility a commercial rat chow using GM soy. Within two months, the infant mortality facility-wide reached 55%.
An Austrian government study published in November 2008 showed that the more GM corn was fed to mice, the fewer the babies they had (PDF), and the smaller the babies were.
Central Iowa Farmer Jerry Rosman also had trouble with pigs and cows becoming sterile. Some of his pigs even had false pregnancies or gave birth to bags of water. After months of investigations and testing, he finally traced the problem to GM corn feed. Every time a newspaper, magazine, or TV show reported Jerry’s problems, he would receive calls from more farmers complaining of livestock sterility on their farm, linked to GM corn.
Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine accidentally discovered that rats raised on corncob bedding neither breed nor exhibit reproductive behavior.” Tests on the corn material revealed two compounds that stopped the sexual cycle in females “at concentrations approximately two-hundredfold lower than classical phytoestrogens.” One compound also curtailed male sexual behavior and both substances contributed to the growth of breast and prostate cancer cell cultures. Researchers found that the amount of the substances varied with GM corn varieties. The crushed corncob used at Baylor was likely shipped from central Iowa, near the farm of Jerry Rosman and others complaining of sterile livestock.
In Haryana, India, a team of investigating veterinarians report that buffalo consuming GM cottonseed suffer from infertility, as well as frequent abortions, premature deliveries, and prolapsed uteruses. Many adult and young buffalo have also died mysteriously.
Denial, Attack and Canceled Follow-up
Scientists who discover adverse findings from GMOs are regularly attacked, ridiculed, denied funding, and even fired. When Ermakova reported the high infant mortality among GM soy fed offspring, for example, she appealed to the scientific community to repeat and verify her preliminary results. She also sought additional funds to analyze preserved organs. Instead, she was attacked and vilified. Samples were stolen from her lab, papers were burnt on her desk, and she said that her boss, under pressure from his boss, told her to stop doing any more GMO research. No one has yet repeated Ermakova’s simple, inexpensive studies.
In an attempt to offer her sympathy, one of her colleagues suggested that maybe the GM soy will solve the over population problem!
Surov reports that so far, he has not been under any pressure.
Opting Out of the Massive GMO Feeding Experiment
Without detailed tests, no one can pinpoint exactly what is causing the reproductive travesties in Russian hamsters and rats, Italian and Austrian mice, and livestock in India and America. And we can only speculate about the relationship between the introduction of genetically modified foods in 1996, and the corresponding upsurge in low birth weight babies, infertility, and other problems among the US population. But many scientists, physicians, and concerned citizens don’t think that the public should remain the lab animals for the biotech industry’s massive uncontrolled experiment.
Alexey Surov says, “We have no right to use GMOs until we understand the possible adverse effects, not only to ourselves but to future generations as well. We definitely need fully detailed studies to clarify this. Any type of contamination has to be tested before we consume it, and GMO is just one of them.”
To learn more about the health dangers of GMOs, and what you can do to help end the genetic engineering of our food supply, visit www.ResponsibleTechnology.org.
The idea of giant agribusiness's alteration of living thing's genetic code and releasing these Frankenfoods into the environment appeals to me about as much as splitting hydrogen atoms and diffusing their energy and radiation into the atmosphere. When I first heard of genetic engineering and the proliferation of genetically modified organisms in the world, I felt awful. Little did I know this creepy feeling was coming from more that just hearing about humans tinkering with genetic foundations of life.
I was delighted to meet Jeffery Smith in 1998. He was in the process of writing his first book, Seeds of Deception, and explained to me how dangerous the gene engineering industry had become. All I knew about GMOs was from a story about a scientist member of my spiritual community.
Dr. John Fagan, a gene researcher, had discovered a technology that could be used to manipulate the genetic code of living organisms. After realizing his invention's potential for creating destructive organisms, he stopped his genetic engineering experiments and returned a one million dollar research grant to the US government. In 1998, I was not aware that genetically engineered organisms had been incorporated into the food supply, and certainly did not know I was consuming them myself.
I was in chiropractic college then, and was extremely fatigued from burning my candle at both ends during my first two years of intensive school work. For 6 months before hearing the news about GMOs in our food supply, I was feeling unusually tired, dull, irritable, sometimes nauseous, and was starting to develop food sensitivities. I was 48 years old, and I thought this downturn in my health was merely from pushing my aging brain and body to meet the strenuous academic demands I had created for myself.
For about one year I had formulated and manufactured my own breakfast protein powder to help me with my school work. My recipe included many brain-enhancing ingredients. My protein source came from soy beans. I included large amounts of soy lecithin containing phosphitidyl serine for improving cognitive function.
I had ordered these soy bean products wholesale, in bulk quantities, from a natural foods supplier known for providing inexpensive, but good quality natural, organic and whole foods. At the time, I don't think organic soy protein and soy lecithin were easy to find. When Jeffery told me most of the soy beans at that time had been genetically engineered with bacteria and virus genes to withstand farmer's drenching with Roundup, the popular poisonous pesticide used for weed control. I suddenly realized these protein powder ingredients were very probably made from genetically engineered soy beans, tossed them in the trash, and began feeling progressively better. My food sensitivities, however, lasted for many years afterwards.
Thanks to Jeffery, I avoided some seriously unhealthy consequences from consuming GMO soybeans. The genetically modified soy itself is found to be injurious to all organs in laboratory animals. I certainly felt sick myself, and think the Roundup present in the soybeans was not particularly healthy for me either.
Next week's Non-GMO article by Jeffery Smith is, Genetically Modified Soy Linked to Sterility, Infant Mortality. I hope you will give it a read and appreciate having this information as much as I do.
Each generation seems to have its unique bad idea that offers so many diverse threats to the future of mankind. For my parents generation, it was nuclear weapons. Today we have Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) with severe harmful consequences for our individual and social health, or environment, and our economy. Learn about GMOs and what you can do to halt their destruction.
Non-GMO Articles Help Campaign for Healthier Eating In America
According to Jeffery Smith, author of Seeds of Deception, Genetic Roulette, and director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, "It's time to reclaim a food supply without dangerous genetically modified organisms (GMOs). And we can do it—together."
Jeffery says, "When European consumers said no to GMOs, the food companies kicked them out. As more and more US consumers rejected GM bovine growth hormone, most dairies and brands, including Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Kroger, Dannon, and Yoplait, responded."
"Now we are joining forces nationwide in the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America—designed to achieve the tipping point of consumer rejection of GMO to force them out of the market."
To help the world achieve this tipping point, Groover Clinic will publish a series of Jeffery Smith articles that will help you find out:
About the serious documented health risks of genetically modified (GM) foods.
Why children and pregnant mothers are most at risk.
How scientists who uncovered these findings were threatened, vilified, and fired.
About the sneaky ways the industry scientists rig their research to avoid problems.
The way the biotech industry hijacked the FDA and regulators worldwide, and ignored the warnings of their own scientists about GMO health risks.
Which brands are non-GMO, so you can protect yourself and your family.
What you can do to make this campaign go viral.
Why even 5% of US consumers choosing healthier non-GMO brands could achieve a tipping point, eliminating GMOs for the rest of the nation.
After you read these articles, please pass them onto your entire network, and encourage them to do the same.
It is past time for us to look to the government to bail us out of this mess. We are on the top of the food chain, and we can make things happen—together.
Keep a look out for our first Non-GMO article by Jeffery Smith.
To learn more about the health dangers of GMOs, and what you can do to help end the genetic engineering of our food supply, visit the Institute for Responsible Technology.
A 70 year old man called my office inquiring about the upper cervical corrective procedure I use for eliminating the mechanical stress occurring at the junction between the upper neck and the head. This area involving the base of your head, the first bone of your neck (C1 or Atlas vertebra), and the second bone in your neck (C2 or Axis vertebra), is a neurological hotbed involving your brainstem and spinal cord.
Your brainstem is a critically important part of your brain, because, from an evolutionary perspective, it is your reptilian brain. This part of your brain contains all original neurology necessary for survival, including the origin of nerves controlling your smell, sight, sensation to your face, mastication, taste, facial expression, salivation, hearing, balance, proprioception (knowing where you are in space), swallowing, speech, thoracic and abdominal organ function, head, neck and shoulder movement, sleep, blood pressure, muscle tone throughout your body, and postural relationship to gravity.
This highly intelligent caller had heard of a simple procedure, Atlas Profilax, used to correct the misalignment of the upper cervical spine. Since I am a specialist in this field, wanted to know my opinion of it. I told him how previously, while surfing the internet for images of sacred geometry, I had stumbled upon some mysterious information about this procedure. Atlas Profilax was described by a group of people who believed humans beings were originally slaves placed on earth by aliens to mine gold. The aliens needed this gold to replenish their atmosphere. To keep the humans under control, the aliens installed limiters or regulators into the human physiology. By intentionally misaligning the human’s upper cervical spine the aliens were more able to control them. The website claimed these limiters were inherited generation after generation unless they were removed. It recommended Atlas Profilax for removing upper cervical misalignment limiter.
The website contained reports about the upper cervical spine and Atlas Profilax benefits. People were saying how, once the procedure was performed, the upper cervical alignment would be maintained for life. The website also contained information about humans who had inherited DNA from reptilian being who live beneath the earth’s crust. I explained what I had found on the internet to the man, and he told me he had read the same.
At this point in our conversation I had to restrain myself from declaring hyperbole and panacea. I remembered when a new patient of mine had returned from California. She described how a man had performed an “Atlas” correction on her which was supposed to last for life. I evaluated the patient through detailed physical examination and upper cervical biomechanical X-ray examination and analysis. My diagnosis for her was severe upper cervical spinal misalignment. Since my diagnosis conflicted with her previous experience with the Atlas Profilax “lifelong Atlas adjustment” she was partially dissatisfied with my care from that moment on.
I had also taken care of a man with severe anterior head carriage (Link), who would not perform the corrective exercises and stretches I prescribed for his condition. His anterior head carriage never improved. The stress from the forward position of his head interfered with the staying power of my upper cervical spinal correction, so he and I parted ways. Sometime later I head a story about him traveling to California for a “lifetime Atlas adjustment.
A woman from one of my social media sites shared her experience receiving the Atlas Profilax “lifetime Atlas adjustment” with me. She was in the process of having her “lifetime Atlas adjustment” touched up. I asked her to tell me what she knew about the Atlas Profilax diagnostic and treatment procedures, and the benefits it offers. She had previously been involved in a motor vehicle accident and said the procedure helped her neck pain.
Over the phone, I told the 70 year old man about these encounters with the Atlas Profilax “lifelong Atlas adjustment,” and spoke with him about the complex nature of the upper cervical spine. I told him about the extensive, objective diagnostic and treatment procedures I use for treating this challenging area of the body. He was interested to know how there are numerous permutations for how the upper cervical spine misaligns. The head tilts right or left, C1 translates right or left and rotates right or left, the C2 rotates right or left, and the lower neck bends and rotates right or left. I told him there are so many types of upper cervical spine misalignments, each requiring a specific type of approach for correcting them.
The caller listened to me describe how the upper cervical spinal misalignment causes postural distortion, and how I initially screen my patients for this misalignment by measuring their posture. I take my upper cervical spine diagnostic posture measurements using an Anatometer instrument. The man learned how tilting of the pelvis, shifting of the pelvis and upper back off one’s center of gravity, unequal right and left side standing body weight, and leg length inequality are positive signs for upper cervical spinal misalignment. I explained how my upper cervical corrective procedure requires precisely aligned X-ray equipment, specific, biomechanical, three dimensional upper cervical X-rays (which demand precise patient placement), and three dimensional X-ray analysis. I talked about how intense accuracy is required for these X-rays and the X-ray analysis for determining precise application of the controlled, directed force required to correct the upper cervical spine misalignment.
I described the difficult means I use for delivering the upper cervical corrective force, and how the initial postural distortion measurement are immediately returned to normal. He was interested to hear how the patient’s pelvis would be level, the center of their pelvis and upper back would align with their center of gravity, the difference between the right and left standing body weight would balance, and their leg lengths would be even. I also explained how I took two upper cervical X-rays following the patient’s first upper cervical spinal correction. I told him I used my analysis from these followup X-rays to verify the upper cervical correction or to provide the information required for improving my correction of the patient’s abnormal upper cervical spinal mechanics.
The man was interested to hear about the holding power of my upper cervical correction, but how I require at least 4 follow-up visits per year to insure my patients continue to enjoy the benefits they receive from their corrective care. I told him my average patient holds their upper cervical spinal alignment for months and years, but not usually for life.
The man considered everything I told him about the time involved in receiving my corrective procedure, my detailed procedures, and the expertise involved in my upper cervical corrective procedure. He weight this with the fast, inexpensive, and “lifelong” promise for the Atlas Profilax adjustment, and said he would try the “lifelong” procedure first. I told him I respected his choice. At the time, I was not certain either of my patients who had received the “lifetime Atlas Adjustment” had experienced Atlas Profilax, and I was curious about the procedure.
The man offered to receive an upper cervical spine evaluation by me before and after he received the Atlas Profilax procedure. I told him if there was an easier, faster, less expensive upper cervical corrective procedure with greater holding power, I would like to know about it. He liked the idea of our investigation and having a second opinion.
During the man’s initial upper cervical evaluation, he complained only of body stiffness and concerns about his prostate. I assured him if the Atlas Profilax procedure produced any adverse effects, I would be able to help him quickly resolve them.
I measured his posture using my Anatometer instrument. The man’s pelvis was tilted so his right hip was 7 degrees inferior. The center of his pelvis was midline, but his upper back was 3 degrees right of his center of gravity line. The difference between his right and left sides standing body weight taken as a percentage of his total body weight was 1.6%. The patient’s left leg was 3/4 inch physiologically short (apparent leg length inequality from postural distortion coming from upper cervical misalignment).
The man’s posture examination was positive for upper cervical misalignment. A normal posture examination would show zeros for all posture measurements, meaning the man’s pelvis would be level, hips and upper back aligned with his center of gravity, and his leg lengths would be even. The difference between the right and left sides of his body taken as a percentage of his total body weight would be less than 1%.
Further examination of the patients pelvis biomechanics revealed his right ilium (hip bone) had traumatically misaligned in a superior direction. This meant superior translation of the ilium at its articulation with his sacrum (triangular bone at the base of the spine which fits between your two ilia). Therefore, his right sacroiliac joint was hypo-mobile (not moving much), compounding the right side muscular hypertonicity (muscle spasm and tightness) caused by misalignment of his upper cervical spine.
The man received his Atlas Profilax “lifelong Atlas adjustment” that evening and returned to my office the next day. He had not experienced any new traumas, accidents, injuries, or unusual stress in his life. He described the person performing the procedure. I identified her as a psychic healer-energy worker who has worked in my town for years. This healer once asked for me to help her start a psychic-energy healing group. She was hoping to heal a jaw fracture where the jaw had been broken into two separate pieces and never healed. The jaw had remained disunited for many years.
The man described how the procedure lasted about 3 minutes and was painless. He said a vibrating or thumping device was applied to the base of his head. The man said he felt like his neck range of motion had improved somewhat since the procedure.
During the man’s followup evaluation, I noticed the sizable amount of head tilt I had observed the day before was slightly less. His left physiological short leg had reduced somewhat (from 3/4 inch to 1/2 inch). The man’s Anatometer measurements of postural distortion showed his basic abnormal postural pattern remained the same, but the amount of distortion had increased.
The sideways postioning of the center of the man’s upper back had reduced from 3 degrees right of his center of gravity line to 2 1/2. The center of his pelvis, previously centered upon his midline, had significantly shifted to 2 1/4 degrees right of his center of gravity line. The tilting of his pelvis had notably increased. His right hip, previously 7 degrees, was now 8 1/4 degrees inferior. The difference between his right and left sides standing body weight taken as a percentage of his total body weight had negatively increased from 1.6% to 5.5%.
The man’s upper cervical spine examination was still positive for upper cervical spinal misalignment. His increased postural distortion implied the abnormal relationships between his occiput (base of his head), C1 Atlas vertebra, C2 Axis vertebra, and his lower neck had worsened. Upper cervical biomechanical X-rays and X-ray analysis performed both before and after the procedure would be the only way to know how much worse.
From this study, I conclude the Atlas Profilax “lifetime Atlas adjustment” received by this man did not correct his abnormal upper cervical biomechanics. It is possible the procedure was performed improperly, or the man’s response was an anomaly. The practitioner performing this procedure is not a doctor or physical therapist, so it appears laypeople are trained to deliver the Atlas Profilax “lifetime Atlas adjustment.” Therefore, the procedure must be easy to learn and perform. To rule out the possibility that this man’s response was anomalous, I would need to perform this study on a larger population.
I graciously thanked the man for allowing me to examine him before and after he received the Atlas Profilax “lifetime Atlas adjustment.” I told him this case study has helped me answer my questions about this procedure and gain perspective about the claims I have recently heard about its simplicity, speed, effectiveness, longevity, and cost. He was going on a trip to the East coast and would think about what we had both learned from his experience with the Atlas Profilax “lifetime Atlas adjustment,” and what he had learned from me about the scientifically verifiable upper cervical spinal correction I perform.
This just in! I just went on the internet to check the spelling for Atlas Profilax, and up came this new search listing. You MUST read this one.
A young woman came to my office last week with pain all over her body and fatigue. During her case history, I saw she was on the Fibromyalgia drug Lyrica, but had not been formally diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. She told me she had been gaining unusual amounts of weight since she had started on the drug, and I told her weight gain was one of the Lyrica side effects my Fibromyalgia patients report the most. I suggested she go to the Lyrica website, and read the medication side effects, in case she may be experiencing more than her obesity. Obesity is a serious disease and I will write more about it later.
Lyrica is manufactured by Pfizer Pharmaceuticals LLC, the manufacturer of Lipitor. As with all pharmaceuticals, the scientists who performed the Lyrica FDA approval research were employed by the drug manufacturer, in this case Pfizer. The methods used by the FDA for approving drugs is a mystery to me. When I was in school, a professor told me drug companies only require 4% drug therapeutic effect on a condition to be FDA approved for that condition. I had my assistant research FDA approval criteria, but he was not able to find this information or any reference to this information. My assistant concludes this information is not publicly available.
If my professor was right, 4% therapeutic effect is hardly statistically significant. Since Pfizer is the manufacturer and researcher of its own product, even the slightest bias is likely to affect the outcome of their research. A few numbers finagled one way or the other could mean the difference between FDA approval or non-approval. I'll leave it to you to connect the dots.
Here’s my Lyrica first encounter story. One of my new Fibromyalgia patients called my office to cancel her appointment scheduled for the following day, explaining she was unable to get out of bed. She said she had done something really stupid, but wouldn’t explain what she had done. Everyone in my office fabricated their own version about the patient's stupid act and for why she could not get out of bed. The suspense became incredible.
The patient began seeing me for her Fibromyalgia a few weeks earlier, and arrived for her first visit on about 15 medications. Before this visit, her MD put her on Topomax for her Fibromyalgia. This drug put her in bed with severe physical and emotional breakdown and loss of consciousness. The discouraged from the devastating experience, she decided to give up looking for a Fibromyalgia cure. The 65 year old woman decided her life was over and pleaded with her children to place her in a nursing home where she could be numbed with medications and vegetate the rest of her life.
Fortunately, her daughter found me on the internet and brought her to my office. We provided her a report detailing each drug side effect and showed her how many of her drugs had the same side effect. These were the symptoms she was experiencing the most, those identical to Fibromyalgia.
In one or two weeks, the patient was taking one drug, and was feeling much better without her multiple drug side effects. The original problems for which she had taken the pharmaceuticals had disappeared. The need for all her medications had disappeared, and she had stopped taking all her drugs but one, Oxycotin. I’ll write more about prescription medication addictions later.
I had been treating this patient’s Fibromyalgia for two weeks and she was completely pain free. Her husband became ill, confused and was losing his mind. My patient accompanied her husband to his doctor’s office where he had been receiving Lipitor prescriptions for his high cholesterol. I’ll write more about Lipitor later.
During her husband’s medical visit, my patient happened to mention to the doctor she was delighted to be seeing me for her Fibromyalgia and having miraculous success. The doctor responded, using his supreme authority, by persuading her to try a free sample of Lyrica, “the new Fibromyalgia medication.” Advertisements for this drug had just begun appearing on television, and my patient, greatly impressed by the medical doctors offer, took home the Lyrica.
Finally, after one suspenseful week, my patient came through my office door for her treatment visit repeatedly exclaiming sheepish apologies for being so stupid. She sat down in my treatment room and described the meeting with her husband’s doctor, how this impressive, generous man gave her free Lyrica, and told the story of the nightmare she had lived since trying it. She recounted the symptoms from her Lyrica misery, the worst of which had kept her in bed for two days. These symptoms were the same side effects listed on the Lyrica website.
For your convenience, these are the side effects listed on the Lyrica website.
“LYRICA may cause side effects including: Trouble concentrating, allergic reactions, weight gain (Weight gain may affect the management of diabetes.), swelling of the hands and feet (edema), (Weight gain and swelling can be a serious problem for people with heart problems.), dizziness, sleepiness, eyesight problems (blurry vision), dry mouth, unexplained muscle problems such as muscle pain, soreness, or weakness.”
The moral of this story is to watch out for the allopathic medical serpent. Take drug warnings and side effects seriously. Search on the internet for more complete listings for drug side effects. When you see drug commercials on TV, ignore the commercial’s lovely cinematography, costumes, actors, scenery and pleasant story line, and listen to the voice-over stating the medication’s harmful side effects. Look at the printed drug ad paragraphs and pages warning you about the drug side effects. Consider these warnings are there not only to meet government requirements, but they are real. Research opinions of sources other than the manufacturers and medical doctors that prescribe the drugs.
Harmful drug side effects occur because drugs are toxic chemicals. They interfere with your cells normal metabolism (chemical reactions. Drugs are supposed to have an action which targets specific symptoms, and poisons the part of your physiology that manifests those symptoms. However, drugs not only poison the targeted physiology, they also poison other parts of your physiology in the process. So, when drugs suppress your symptoms by shutting down part of your biochemistry, they are shutting down essential biochemistry throughout your body. Health is the optimum function of our biochemistry, and shutting down your biochemistry is opposed to health.
Think about the theory behind drug therapy. Allopathic medicine erroneously confuses symptoms for disease, and sees health as the absence of symptoms. When you take pharmaceutical drugs, you are treating symptoms, not disease. Disease is a condition of malfunction, and only by restoring function can disease be eliminated. Drug therapy shuts down function and can never cure disease.
Holistic healthcare eliminates disease by creating wellness. Wellness comes from restoring function. Holistic medicine looks at interrelationships between all body systems; physical, emotional, and mental. Holistic treatment of disease requires restoring function to one or more of the body’s systems. Improving the function in of your body benefits all other systems and functions. Eliminating the cause of disease eliminates the disease by restoring health and wellness with no negative side effects.
See a medical doctor in emergency and life and death situations, but don't get caught up taking medications for long periods of time without trying to solve the underlying reason why you are taking the medications.
Poor arm function from elbow misalignment may severely affect the quality of your life. Unsuccessful medical treatment for this condition will leave you suffering unless successful alternative care is found.
Elbow Misalignment Causes Arm Pain, Spasm and Weakness
By Thomas D. Groover, BS, BSCI, MA, DC
If you have upper extremity (shoulder, arm, wrist and hand), problems such as pain, tingling, numbness and weakness, your elbow could be misaligned.
Three bones form your elbow joint. Your humerus forms your upper arm which hinges with your ulna to form a hinge joint responsible for elbow flexion and extension. Your radius joins your humerus and ulna at your elbow, parallels your ulna, articulates with the carpal bones of your wrist, and provides pronation and supination (internal and external rotation) of your hands.
The three joints comprising your elbow are your humeroradial (upper arm-radius), humeroulnar (upper arm-ulna) and radioulnar (head of radius-ulna) joints. These joints may misalign separately or as a group. The radioulnar joint misaligns secondary to the humeroradial joint and returns to normal with humeroradial correction.
The most common elbow misalignment involves your humeroradial joint. This misalignment occurs from stressful turning motions of the arm like trying to twist a stuck door knob, tightening a stubborn screw with a screwdriver, or throwing a curve ball. Humeroradial misalignment causes pain on the outside of your elbow, and is often misdiagnosed as tennis elbow.
If you have this elbow misalignment, you will feel pain when you apply pressure to the outside of your arm below your elbow. There will be muscle spasm and tenderness of your wrist and finger extension muscles running from the outside of your elbow directed toward the base of your thumb. Humeroradial misalignment restricts supination and pronate (palms up to palms down motion), wrist and finger flexion (making a fist and bending your wrist forward) and weakens your arm to the point where lifting a pot off the stove or drinking a glass of water can be difficult. One of my artist patients had severe humeroradial misalignment and couldn’t grasp her paintbrush. Her paintbrush would flip from her hand and fly across the room. Weight lifters often have this elbow problem, and my son (baseball pitcher) requires help with his humeroradial joint throughout baseball season.
My worse elbow misalignment case occurred a few years ago. A man came to my office with severe, long term right humeroradial misalignment, arm stiffness, weakness and pain. He was a tough guy, a pistol marksman practically unable to hold a pistol in his right hand. His problem was exacerbated from installing home walkway and patio flagstone. His case was complicated by paternal child abuse. His father wore an arm prosthesis with a hook separated into two pinchers. When angered at his son, the father squeezed the boy’s arm just below his right elbow with the hook.
My early elbow manipulations, arm muscle release and neuromuscular acupuncture attempts for the patients shoulder misalignment were a challenge. When I tried to treat his elbow, let alone hold it in my hand, he patient cried and squirmed away from me as if I were his abusive father. I used somatoemotional release, low level laser light therapy and light intensity neuromuscular acupuncture to reduce the patient’s arm and elbow psychosomatic stress.
The patient traveled 3 hours each way for his appointments. He was seen by me four to five times in one year. By the end of the year, he was able to receive elbow manipulation, deep arm tissue release, extensive neuromuscular acupuncture and electrical acupuncture needle stimulation. After his humeroradial joint was corrected and his soft tissue was normalized, the patient was pain free and able to hold and steady his pistol for accurate marksmanship.
Humeroulnar joint misalignment is less frequent and often accompanies humeroradial misalignment. Humeroulnar misalignment restricts elbow motion and causes pain 1 to 1 1/2 inch below the inner part of your elbow. This condition is not very complicated and usually corrects during the humeoradial manipulation.
Medical doctor’s fail to recognize elbow misalignment, diagnosing the misalignment’s arm muscle spasm, restricted motion, inflammation and pain as tendonitis. An orthopedist diagnosed on of my son’s baseball teammates with an obscure neurological condition of the arm characterized by reduced blood flow to his radius bone and resulting lost radius bone density. The orthopedist’s treatment recommendation was resting the player’s arm, so he had to stop pitching.
The MD’s diagnosis did not explain or treat the cause of the young man’s neurological disorder. The orthopedist’s observations were correct about the nerve, muscle, circulation and bone density symptoms, but did not perceive the patient’s elbow misalignment was causing these symptoms.
Elbow misalignment does not respond well to physical therapy exercise and modalities, medication, rest, cortisone injections or surgery. Patients receiving medical treatment for elbow misalignment must usually endure their pain and other symptoms unless receive treatment from a chiropractor with extremity joint expertise.
Short term elbow misalignments are usually relatively uncomplicated and respond well to manipulation without the need for tissue release procedures. Long term elbow misalignments are usually more complicated, requiring expert tissue release procedures. The emotional components involved with most long term elbow misalignments complicate manipulation and soft tissue treatment. Unless the patient’s related psychosomatic issues are handled properly, they will obstruct successful elbow corrective care.
Two of the 18 pressure points used for Fibromyalgia diagnosis are located at the lateral epicondyle (outside bump) of each elbow. Fibromyalgia patients frequently have radioulnar elbow misalignment contributing to the total stress burden causing their condition. Joint misalignments not only cause joint and soft tissue pain and dysfunction, they also cause global neurological, adrenal, digestive, immune, chemical and psychological stresses which must be resolved for one to proceed on the road to recovery, health and wellness.
Pain in your shoulders, neck, upper back and arms could indicate shoulder misalignment. If you have or would like to prevent shoulder problems, are considering shoulder surgery, or have received unsuccessful shoulder treatment, this article is for you.
Shoulder Misalignment Causes Pain in Your Shoulders, Neck, Arms, Upper Back.
By Thomas D. Groover, BS, BSCI, MA, DC
Shoulder misalignment causes shoulder, neck, upper back and arm pain. Shoulder misalignment is improper shoulder bone relationships, caused by direct shoulder trauma such as falls, collisions, improper shoulder use, poor posture and repetitive stress. At Groover Clinic, automobile accidents, sports injuries, poor lifting habits and postural distortion are common causes for patient’s shoulder misalignments.
Each shoulder has four joints or articulations. Your glenohumeral joint, commonly known as your shoulder joint, is where the ball of your arm (humerus) fits into your shoulder socket (glenoid fossa). Your acromioclavicular joint is the joint at the top of your shoulder relating the outer end of your clavicle (collarbone) and your acromion (part of the shoulder blade that forms the highest point of the shoulder). Your sternoclavicular joint relates your breastbone and the front tip of your first rib with the inside end of your clavicle. Your scapulothoracic articulation is the relationship between your rib cage and your scapula (shoulder blade). All four shoulder joints/articulations may misalign individually or as a group.
Glenohumeral misalignment is permanent displacement of the ball of your humerus (arm bone) down or backward in the shoulder blade’s socket. The inferior glenohumeral joint misalignment causes pain and muscle spasm at the front side of the shoulder and arm and produces general shoulder stiffness. Posterior misalignment of this joint produces pain and muscle spasm on the back side of the shoulder, also generally restricting shoulder motion.
Acromioclavicular joint misalignment usually specifically limits your shoulder lateral rotation and flexion. Pain and muscle spasm from this misalignment is usually felt more on the outside top of shoulder, radiating down the side of your arm toward your elbow.
Misaligned sternoclavicular articulation, hurts and feels stiff where your collar bone joins your breast bone.
Dull aching anterior to the scapula (between your shoulder blade and your rib cage) and restricted shoulder motion indicates scapulothoracic (shoulder blade) misalignment, which may occur in either a medial or lateral direction.
Traumatically torn shoulder muscles and tendons may cause permanent weakness, stiffness, inflammation and pain and require surgery to repair the tissue. However, another aspect of the shoulder injury if often overlooked. Muscle and tendon tearing traumas also misalign the shoulder joints and articulations causing more weakness, stiffness, inflammation and pain.
Shoulder joint degeneration such as bone spurs and joint cartilage deterioration may cause shoulder irritation, inflammation, weakness, loss of motion and pain severe enough to require surgery and rehabilitation. Shoulder misalignment causes shoulder joint degeneration, and must be addressed to fully restore shoulder function and eliminate shoulder pain.
The frequent medical diagnosis for shoulder inflammation, stiffness, weakness and pain are tendonitis and bursitis. Tendonitis is inflammation of tendons connecting muscles to bones. Bursitis is inflammation of bursa, the friction reducing fluid filled sacks between bones, tendons and/or muscles allowing free movement and preventing tendon and muscle tears.
Allopathic medicine is the system of medicine practiced by most medical doctors, nurses and physical therapists which treats disease symptoms rather than disease causes. Allopathic medicine does not recognize joint misalignment, and focuses upon treating the effects caused by joint misalignment. Allopathic solutions for inflammation are inflammation reducing medication and ice packs. Physical therapy exercises, stretches and ultrasound are used for restricted shoulder motion, and pain relieving medication is used for shoulder pain. When these options fail, cortisone injections are given, and when cortisone fails, surgery usually follows.
Misunderstood pain from joint misalignment often drives patients to pursue all their medical options. Shoulder misalignment patients, desperate for relief from pain, stiffness and weakness, will plead for shoulder surgery, even without justifiable medical necessity. Surgeons will interpret marginal or inconclusive MRI findings to justify their procedures.
Surgery is the most invasive of all shoulder treatments with dangerous side effects. Anesthesia can be deadly or crippling, at best causing diminished mental function. Surgical scarring and tissue damage cause inflammation, stiffness, arthritis and pain. Arthroscopic shoulder surgery, the least invasive shoulder surgery, is still severely invasive, causing permanent shoulder tissue damage, scar formation, muscle imbalance, arthritis and anesthesia risks.
Medical doctors are supposed to begin their treatment for shoulder problems with the least invasive medical procedures first, such as physical therapy and cortisone injections. As with shoulder surgery, shoulder misalignment is not corrected by injections and physical therapy exercises, stretches and modalities. Shoulder misalignment causes painful shoulder motion, making physical therapy exercises uncomfortable and unsuccessful. Cortisone injections may temporarily reduce inflammation and pain but cause cartilage, ligament and tendon damage. The damage caused by cortisone injections leads to more inflammation and pain in time. Cortisone is a synthetic cortisone (stress hormone) bearing stress hormone side effects such as adrenal stress, immune suppression, leaky gut, hormone imbalance and insulin resistance glucose management problems.
Medical doctors receive little or no training for diagnosing and treating abnormal joint biomechanics, except for joint dislocations. Subtler joint misalignments, joint subluxations, usually go undetected and untreated unless the patient is referred to a competent chiropractor. For this reason, I recommend you receive a good chiropractic shoulder evaluation before considering physical therapy, cortisone injections or shoulder surgery. Remember joint surgery is irreversable and a major cause for joint arthritis later in life.
Groover Clinic's shoulder evaluation includes neck, arm, upper back and rib cage evaluations. Nerves emanating from your neck operate your shoulders, so your neck intervertebral joints, discs and muscles must be checked for shoulder nerve pressure, tension and inflammation. Elbow, misalignment could cause nerve and muscle problems radiating into your shoulder. Thoracic vertebra and rib cage misalignments could cause shoulder muscle spasm, inflammation and pain.
Our secret to successful shoulder care includes evaluation and treatment of all factors influencing your shoulders. These factors not only include your shoulder and elbow joints, but also lower cervical and thoracic spine, rib cage and anterior head carriage. Your upper cervical spine must be properly aligned for your shoulders to function properly.
Your shoulder girdle hangs upon your rib cage like a coat and attaches to your axial skeleton (skeleton including your head, rib cage and vertebral column) at your sternum (breast bone). Normal shoulder hang provides the basis for normal shoulder operation along the normal shoulder joint planes of motion. Abnormal shoulder muscle length to tension relationships and postural distortion cause your shoulders to hang abnormally, skewing shoulder motion planes, stressing and misaligning your shoulder joints, disturbing shoulder function, cause joint degeneration, and increase your risk for acute shoulder injuries.
Anterior head carriage from spinal misalignment and muscular imbalance skews shoulder alignment and must be corrected for optimal shoulder function, treatment and maintenance. Shoulder muscle imbalance and postural distortion from upper cervical misalignment severely disturb shoulder function and interfere with successful shoulder treatment.
Your upper cervical spine must be corrected by a competent upper cervical specialist through physical examination, precise upper cervical biomechanical X-ray procedures and X-ray analysis, a controlled, specifically directed corrective procedure derived from upper cervical biomechanical X-ray analysis, and the upper cervical corrective procedure must be verified through physical examination upper cervical biomechanical X-ray procedures and analysis.
After your shoulder and related joint alignment is performed, you could require shoulder muscle manual therapy to help restore normal shoulder muscle length to tension relationships. Active, full range of motion shoulder corrective exercise is required to completely restore proper shoulder length to tension relationships, increase shoulder strength and flexibility, and thereby fully restore your shoulder function.
Understanding normal and abnormal shoulder function helps you prevent shoulder problems, and helps you receive the best treatment when shoulder problems occur. Shoulder misalignment causes shoulder, neck, arm and upper back pain, and usually contributes to Fibromyalgia - whole body pain, headaches, systemic inflammation, adrenal stress and many other health problems. Holistically restoring shoulder function and pain elimination are necessary for successful Fibromyalgia treatment and for your health and wellness.
Look in the mirror and you will probably see the most overlooked, obvious, preventable, treatable cause for human discomfort and functional impairment.
In my article, Rib Cage Secrets to Fibromyalgia Recovery - Health and Wellness, I explain the cause, nature and solution to rib cage misalignment. One primary rib cage misalignment cause is forward slumping posture. Forward slumping posture is highly destructive, entirely preventable, and somewhat self-treatable.
Neck injury, vertebral misalignment, poor posture and incorrect athletic training are common causes forward slumping posture (anterior head carriage). You have anterior head carriage if the opening of your ear canal is forward from the center of your shoulder. You may notice most people have this condition, but don’t think it is normal. As with many social phenomenon, average does not mean normal.
When the center of your ear is directly over the center of your shoulder, your head balances upon your neck. Balanced head carriage requires minimal neck muscle effort to hold your head upright. Only small, short duration neck muscle contractions are required to keep your head centered over your body. For example, when you are dosing off while sitting upright, your head may begin falling forward, backward or to your side. When this happens, your neck muscles automatically perform brief contractions, nudging your head back into the upright position.
The permanently fallen forward head position of anterior head carriage requires constant neck muscle effort to keep your head up. Three times the muscular effort is required to support your head for every inch of anterior head carriage. Therefore, anterior head carriage is an unnecessarily drains your energy, like leaving your car lights turned on while it is parked in your garage.
Besides draining your energy, anterior head carriage stresses your neck muscles. The muscles holding your head upright are posture muscles, intended for brief contractions, balancing head upon your neck. Constant posture muscle contraction from anterior head carriage causes stiffness, aches and pains. Anterior head carriage is a major cause for neck, shoulder and upper back tension, muscle spasm, muscle trigger points and pain, tension headaches and migraine headaches.
Normal neck curvature acts like a spring, absorbing shock from the pounding associated with walking, running and bouncing up and down while riding in a moving vehicle. Anterior head carriage straightens and even reverses your normal neck curve, subjecting your neck to pounding forces causing injury to intervertebral discs, and vertebral facet joints (joints on the back of your spine that relate a vertebra to the one above and the one below).
Intervertebral disc and facet joint stress from anterior head carriage makes us greatly prone to acute neck joint injury and intervertebral disc bulging, protrusion and rupture.
Anterior head carriage causes neck tightness and pain of “unknown origin,” called facet syndrome, as in, “I must have slept on it wrong.” Long term consequences for anterior head carriage are degenerative joint and disc disease, arthritis and neck vertebra compression fracture.
Anterior head carriage curves your upper back forward pushing your ribs in opposition to inhalation (together, down and in), reducing your lung capacity. Resulting shallower, more frequent breathing is associated with nervousness, anxiety, depression, and is a major impediment to exercise and strenuous activity. Anterior head carriage is the body language for resignation or giving up.
The anterior head carriage mental and emotional stresses fatigue your adrenal glands leading to endocrine imbalances, digestive disorder, immune problems, problems with blood sugar management...
The forward position of your neck and upper back draws your shoulders forward and together. Disoriented shoulder position abnormally alters the shoulder joint planes of motion, causing improper joint mechanics, shoulder joint degeneration, and greatly increases your risk for shoulder injury, inflammation, weakness and pain.
Straightening or reversal of your neck curve permanently stretches your spinal cord and brain stem as much as 7 centimeters, therefore stretching your spinal nerve roots and nearly all nerves in your body. This stretch disrupts nutrient, waste product and neurotransmitter flow, impairing control and regulation of all physical systems and functions.
Anterior head carriage is a serious condition responsible for neck, shoulder and back stiffness and pain, headaches, mental and physical fatigue, sleep disorders, adrenal gland stress, hormone imbalance, digestive problems, immune problems, infection, Fibromyalgia and so on. You may think chiropractic, physical therapy, acupuncture, massage, etc. is relieving your neck and shoulder tension and joint misalignments. However, as long as you have anterior head carriage, your neck will remain permanently misaligned, causing considerable mechanical, neurological, muscular and gravitational stresses.
Positioning your head upon your center of gravity is a highest priority, and must begin by eliminating all factors causing anterior head carriage. First perform a self assessment. Hang a plumb line from above your head to just above the floor. Stand to the side with the line passing at the front part of your ankle. Looking from the side, the line should be centered on your knee, hip, shoulder and ear canal. Have a buddy take a picture or just mark on your body where the line passes at the level of your shoulder and head. If your ear canal is forward of the plumb line, measure the distance. This is the extent of your anterior head carriage.
Next, begin sitting and standing in a way which aligns your ear canal over the center of your shoulders. Then strengthen your upper back and neck extension muscles and your hyoid muscles (anterior neck primary neck flexors), and stretch your sternocleidomastoid and sub-occipital muscles. Also, rectus abdominus muscle (the six pac abdominal muscle) overdevelopment pulls your rib cage down and your shoulders and head forward. You may need to suspend your sit-ups and abdominal crunch exercises and increase your core muscle and lumbar extension muscle conditioning. I recommend expert assessment and exercise program design for this project.
Misalignments of your upper cervical, lower cervical, thoracic spinal vertebra and rib cage must be corrected to remove mechanical limitations to your spinal motion, and remove the joint stresses maintaining your anterior head carriage. Resolving your spinal and rib cage joint misalignments greatly improve the nerve and muscle imbalances promoting your anterior head carriage. You may also need to address pelvis, knee and ankle misalignments contributing to all your upper body joint misalignments.
The professional expertise you receive diagnosing and treating your postural abnormalities, joint misalignments and muscular imbalances is critical. Solving anterior head carriage requires a scientific, objective, integrated, priority based, functional approach to eliminating the complex factors causing and contributing to this condition. Correcting your upper cervical and pelvis misalignments is the necessary starting point for all spinal and postural improvements.
Discover the little known truths about thoracic, shoulder, neck, abdominal, and low back stiffness and pain originating from your rib cage, how it effects your health and how to treat it.
RIB CAGE SECRETS TO FIBROMYALGIA RECOVERY - HEALTH AND WELLNESS
BY THOMAS D. GROOVER, BS, BSCI, MA, DC
Rib misalignment stresses your external intercostal, internal intercostal, shoulder muscles, and muscles originating farther away from the rib cage and attaching to your ribs. External intercostal muscle spasms may, at times, be located through palpation (examining by touch) and minor, temporarily experienced through expert massage. However, when these muscles spasms occur between your shoulder blades and your rib cage, you will usually feel vague, diffuse, impossible to locate pain, like an itch that is impossible to scratch. In this case, the same minor, temporary relief is almost impossible, unless your shoulder blade can be lifted away from your rib cage to allow access to your muscles.
Also located on the underside of your shoulder blades are your serratus anterior muscles (spanning the sides of your rib cage to the underside of your shoulder blades) and subscapularis muscles (runs from the underside of your shoulder blades to your upper arms and your shoulders). When the ribs associated with these muscles misalign, resulting muscle spasms and pain are also hard to locate and massage.
Internal intercostal muscles located on the inside wall of your rib cage cannot be located by touch or massaged at all. The deeper, more vague and diffuse pain associated with this misalignment is particularly disturbing, and without appropriate rib cage corrective care, the muscle spasm and pain will not usually respond to any form of natural, temporary symptomatic relief.
Rib cage misalignment causes tightness, spasm and pain in muscles originating from regions of your body more distant from your rib cage (muscles from your neck, shoulders, thorax, abdomen and pelvis) and travel longer distances to attach to your rib cage. Pain and stiffness of these muscles, combined with mechanically restricted rib joint motion, ligament stress and joint inflammation from your rib cage misalignment may greatly shut down the motion of your upper body. Restricted upper body motion diminishes your lung capacity through impaired rib cage lift, expansion and contraction. Resulting shallower breathing compromises your body’s energy production and is associated with depression, nervousness and anxiety.
Rib cage alignment begins with upper cervical spinal correction, to establish your body upon its center of gravity, level your pelvis, balance the standing weight between the right and left sides of your body, balance your muscle tone and relieve gravitational stress. Upper cervical correction reduces your postural distortion, setting the framework for successful lower neck, upper back and pelvis alignment procedures.
Pelvis alignment provides a stable base of support for your spine, and since your rib cage attaches to your spine, pelvis alignment provides a stable base of support for your rib cage. Upper back alignment brings your spinal vertebra onto your natural center of gravity, providing a stable foundation for aligning your rib cage and for keeping your rib cage aligned. When your upper cervical spine, pelvis and upper back are aligned, successful rib cage joint diagnostic and treatment procedures are possible. Rib cage manipulation, neuromuscular acupuncture, low level laser light therapy, corrective exercise and modifications in sitting, standing, walking and running produce rapid improvements in rib cage alignment.
Correcting abnormal rib cage biomechanics relieves generalized and specific upper back, lower back and neck tightness and pain. Improved rib cage motion increases your spinal range-of-motion. Many of my patients demonstrate 30-40% improved maximum lung capacity. 30% respiratory improvement for Fibromyalgia and automobile accident patients means reduced pain and improved capacity for movement, improved respiration, increased energy, mental clarity and happiness. Athletes appreciate increased lung capacity. 10% improved lung capacity translates into considerably improved athletic performance.
Lower Spine Corrective Care for Fibromyalgia Recovery, Health and Wellness
By Thomas D. Groover, BS, BSCI, MA, DC
Successful Fibromyalgia recovery and attainment of health and wellness, requires holistic, priority based, function driven corrective care. The term holistic pertains to comprehension of all parts of the person as intimately connected and explicable, only by reference to the whole. Priority based, refers to treatment of the deepest causations for your conditions. Function driven corrective care focuses upon normalization of deficiencies in the way your body works.
At the time of my first Fibromyalgia patient encounter, the upper cervical chiropractic community thought Fibromyalgia was caused by the upper cervical spinal misalignment, and scientific, objectively verified, upper cervical chiropractic spinal correction would resolve Fibromyalgia by treating its. See Groover Clinic’s First Fibromyalgia Success and Fibromyalgia Challenges My Healthcare Paradigm. However, a few incomplete Fibromyalgia recoveries, using predominantly upper cervical spinal care, showed me otherwise. Fibromyalgia is a condition caused by accumulated stress from diverse sources, with the upper cervical spinal misalignment being a major player.
My two previous articles describe how pelvis misalignment is an enormous factor in Fibromyalgia. Correcting upper cervical and pelvis misalignments relieves mechanical, neurological, muscular, gravitational and chemical stress throughout the body. Correcting pelvis misalignment also normalizes the spine’s structural base of support, further improving spine function, and your ability to move. Now I would like to reveal to you how lower spine corrective care plays an important role in Fibromyalgia recovery.
Strictly upper cervical specific doctors think upper cervical misalignment is the cause of most illness, and this thinking pervades within upper cervical chiropractic education. Early in my career, it seemed reasonable for me experiment with this upper cervical chiropractic theory while I was perfecting my upper cervical corrective procedure. Intense focus helped me develop competency with the extremely difficult, scientific upper cervical diagnostic and treatment procedures. However, my clinical experience gave me undeniable evidence upper cervical spinal care alone was not enough to provide effective holistic healthcare and achieve consistent success with conditions like Fibromyalgia.
Patients receiving and maintaining perfect upper cervical spinal corrections were still demonstrating misalignments in the joints of their pelvis, so I began taking care of the pelvis. Then I discovered, even though the upper cervical spine and pelvis were returned to normal, stable function, patients still had lower neck, upper back and lower back vertebral misalignments. I began correcting abnormal spinal biomechanics of these lower spine areas.
My clinical experience demonstrates Fibromyalgia patients require correction of their upper cervical spine and pelvis to alleviate the massive mechanical, neurological, muscular, postural, and chemical stresses causing and complicating all other stressors, contributing to the global physical, mental and emotional breakdown that is Fibromyalgia. Among many other benefits, effective upper cervical and pelvis corrective procedures balance nerve supply to your body and therefore your muscle tone. These procedures level your pelvis and get it working properly. They establish the center of your pelvis and upper back onto your body’s actual center of gravity, and balance the standing weight between the right and left sides of your body. Alignment of your core frame establishes your natural frame of reference, for the rest of your spine to move toward your natural center of gravity. Upper cervical and pelvis corrective care gives you your core “center”, providing necessary structural support for your body, an axis of origin for powerfully strong and coordinated physical movement, and effective protection and functional enhancement for your brain and spinal cord.
After correcting your upper cervical spine and pelvis, solving your lower spine (lower neck, thorax and lumbar spine) joint mechanical abnormalities is the most important next step in your Fibromyalgia recovery. Mechanical spinal joint abnormalities are abnormal relationships between individual spinal vertebra, and the overall relationship between your entire spine and your body’s true center of gravity. Lower spine vertebral misalignments stress the joints between your vertebra.
Each lower spine vertebra has 6 joints. Four of these joints are facet joints. There are two facet joint pairs, one pair located on the top, and the other pair on the bottom, back side of your spine. The top facet joint pair of each lower spine vertebra joins with the bottom facet joint pair of the vertebra above it. Facet joints provide motion between vertebra necessary for your spine to bend forward and backward, side to side and rotate right and left. Facet joints also help provide structural support needed to keep your spine aligned.
Each vertebra has two intervertebral disc joints. The top and bottom of each vertebra join with intervertebral discs. These joints also provide spinal motion and spinal alignment. The fluid filled, fibrocartilage intervertebral discs also cushion your vertebra against shock and wear.
Spinal traumas may forcefully twist, side bend, forward bend or backward bend one or more spinal vertebra beyond its normal range of motion, causing the vertebra to become stuck out of relationship (misalign) with each other. Vertebral misalignments compress and stretch ligaments holding facet joints together, and other ligaments holding the spinal vertebra in place. Vertebral misalignments compress and stretch the intervertebral discs. Persistent vertebral ligament and disc stresses generate spinal inflammation, degeneration and pain.
Swelling caused by vertebral inflammation may encroach upon spinal nerves and blood vessels as they exit the spinal cord through openings on either side of your spine. These spinal nerves supply all parts of your body with control and regulation. Blood vessels passing through these spinal openings nourish your spine, spinal cord, brain and brain stem and remove metabolic waste from these structures.
Nerve encroachment causes nerve pain, tingling, numbness, weakness and it interferes with body control and regulation. Disc stress may break down the external disc fibers responsible for maintaining disc strength and shape, causing bulging and rupturing of the disc’s gel-like nucleus onto the spinal cord and spinal nerve roots, causing further nerve encroachment.
Long term joint inflammation destroys joint cartilage but also elevates your systemic inflammation. Systemic inflammation is inflammation throughout your body. Systemic inflammation causes plaque formation in your artery walls and atheroschlerosis. Inflammation in your gut causes malabsorption and leaky gut. Incompletely digested nutrients then leak through your gut lining into your bloodstream. These “foreign invaders” drive your immune system crazy trying to fight them off. Your immune cells shoot inflammation causing histamine into your body, causing more inflammation and inflammation damage to your body, further stressing your immune system by forming food sensitivities, allergies, increased body fat...
Your brain perceives joint misalignment as an injury or potential injury, and contracts joint muscles to help stabilize and protect the joint. Constant muscle contraction drains your energy like when you leave your car headlights on all day. Muscle contraction squeezes blood vessels and nerves, inhibiting circulation to your muscles and your skeleton. Decreased muscle and skeletal blood flow causes oxygen and nutrient starvation to these tissues, and waste product stagnation, toxicity, irritation, inflammation, poor nerve conductivity, increased body fat, osteoporosis, and pain.
To further protect your misaligned joints, your brain withdraws its nerve supply to your muscles. Your joint’s muscle fibers are taken offline from brain’s first string joint mover bank, reducing or removing the joint moving muscles from action. Brain muscle deactivation reduces joint workload and risk for injury, by inhibiting muscle strength and coordination. In its effort to protect your misaligned joints, your brain creates muscle tension and spasm, weakness, and dis-coordination.
Abnormal muscle control and activation combined with joint misalignment requires compensatory movement patterns to enable your body to continue functioning. Substitute, alternate muscles are recruited to move your joints, but these muscles lie outside the natural movement tracks which permit correct joint planes of motion. Muscles other than your primary joint mover muscles pull your joints off track.
Abnormal joint movement produces long term joint wear and tear, degenerates joint cartilage and tendons, deforms bone surfaces and shapes, causing inflammation and pain. Abnormal function in one joint affects multiple joint function throughout your body, causing generalized joint stress, wear and tear, degeneration and risk for acute injury.
All spinal joint misalignments and their consequences are either caused or exacerbated by the mechanical, neurological, muscular and postural abnormalities produced by upper cervical spinal misalignment. Mechanical misalignment of the joints between the top of your neck and the bottom of your head stresses the brain and spinal cord, causing overpowering nerve imbalance to the muscles throughout your body. Your muscle’s diffuse, distorted pattern of contraction pulls your entire spine into curves and rotations, moves your pelvis and upper back away from your center of gravity, and usually makes your body weight greater on one side than the other. The resulting joint stress becomes a fixed pattern for life unless the upper cervical spine alignment is returned to normal. All attempts to correct the curves and twists throughout your spine will be futile until objective, scientifically verifiable correction and maintenance of your upper cervical spinal biomechanics.
Once your nerves and muscles are balanced, and abnormal gravitational stress is removed from your body, it is possible, through lower spine manipulation and corrective exercise, to improve the way your spine supports your body, protects your nervous system and allows you to move normally.
Lower spine misalignment stress, with its resultant functional impairments, energy depletion and pain must be resolved for successful Fibromyalgia recovery, health and wellness. Successful lower spinal corrective care requires successful upper cervical spine corrective care. Ideally, these two procedures are provided in a holistic, functional, priority based, integrated manner by a single provider who fully understands your case and manages your care effectively.
Read this foundational article and learn the unspoken truths about the real flaws in the American healthcare system, robbing our health, creativity, productivity, money, time and life.
This article is a longer than usual. The information contained here is essential for you to understand all my communications past, present and future. Give it a good read, and let me know what your think.
When you manage your health by treating aches and pains, insomnia, depression, sneezing and runny nose, fatigue, dizziness..., with medication and surgery, without attending to the deficiencies in how well your body is working, you are setting yourself up for lifetime chronic, degenerative disease. Degenerative illness saps your energy, mood, creativity, relationships, productivity, income...and eventually requires expensive, time consuming maintenance and dependency upon others for your survival.
You have probably heard 80% of healthcare expenditures occur during the last few months of life. The outrageous healthcare costs during the end of most people’s lives represent their degenerative illness crescendo. Hypertension finally wears out the heart. Cancer cells stop all body functioning. Kidneys, lungs, livers fail.
The same degenerative disease crescendo may happen when you are 98, but it also could hit you when you are 40. The contents of this article could help you avoid a health catastrophe during your lifetime, and could also help you avoid early or late life disability. Young or old, you could deserve a long, fulfilling, productive life right to the very end, if you follow my advise.
A disability is a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, or activities. When such a condition is recognized by the law as a disadvantage or handicap, a disabled person is entitled to privileges including state funding to pay for living expenses and medical care. Medical disability provides a humane safety net for those in serious need, but as the ultimate expression of a non-sustainable healthcare system, it has also become an insidious trap for wasted human life.
Here’s how the trap works. First a patient has a problem with body structure or function. Body structure is a discrete arrangement of related parts which perform a particular function (a natural activity of your body). The structure of your spine includes vertebra, intervertebral discs, nerves, blood vessels, etc. The spine’s function is to support your body against gravity and house and protect your brain stem and spinal cord. The structure of your circulatory system is your heart with muscular walls, chambers and valves, your arteries, capillaries, veins, and nerves.
Disease, is a structural or functional disorder which produces symptoms. Symptoms are aches, pains, or difficulties that you are aware of mentally indicating you have a disease. Structural or functional problems cause disease which causes symptoms.
Here’s an example of a structural problem becoming a functional problem, causing disease, which produces symptoms. Structural damage to your spinal ligaments and muscles from an accident causes abnormal vertebral joint mechanics leading to spinal nerve root interference, muscle spasm, and inflammation, pain producing arthritis which makes it impossible to stand for long and produces constant pain stimulation to the brain which inhibits production of neurotransmitters, leading to diminished mental function. Your functional problem is structural damage to your spine. Your symptoms are back pain, stiffness, difficulty walking and depression.
Here’s an example of a functional problem leading to disease causing symptoms. Say you have been tremendously stressed-out over the over night loss of your retirement fund due to white collar crime on wall street and government. Your adrenal glands work overtime secreting their stress hormones, cortisol, which constricts your arteries, raises your blood pressure and gives you hypertension.
The cortisol makes you resistant to insulin, impairing your ability to convert blood sugar into energy, and causing your body to store the glucose as fat. Your rapid weight gain leads to obesity.
The cortisol also thins the lining of your intestines, causing gut permeability to undigested nutrients, which enter your bloodstream and are seen by your immune system as foreign invaders. Your immune system becomes exhausted working full time to destroy these invaders, and you become infected with swine flu.
Your immune cells secrete histamine to help destroy the undigested nutrients, which inflames the mucous membrane of your gut causing you irritable bowel syndrome symptoms: bowel irritation, bloating, irregularity, indigestion, malabsorption, and pain.
Your respiratory mucous membrane exposure to your elevate histamine levels causes respiratory inflammation and allergies to dust, pollen and spores.
The histamines inflame your arteries, cholesterol lines them for protection, you have atheroschlerosis contributing to your hypertension, cardiac arrest, chest pain, delirium, and depression.
You get the picture? The point I am trying to make here is, the aches, pains, or difficulties that you are aware of mentally, indicating you have a disease, are not the disease, they are the symptoms of the disease. Symptoms are not the disease, and they are not the cause of disease. The cause of disease is structural or functional abnormalities which sets off an event sequence that culminates with symptoms.
Now for the next point of logic. Attempting to treat chronic disease symptoms such as the pain and fatigue of Fibromyalgia, the pain, swelling and stiffness of arthritis, the high blood pressure of hypertension, high blood glucose of diabetes, etc. is not the solution to these problems. Symptomatic treatment may temporarily eliminate the symptoms, but the disease will remain until the structural or functional abnormalities are removed.
Its just like sweeping dirt under the rug does not solve the problem of a dirty house, it just temporarily hides the dirt. The solution to the arthritis is solving the problems of muscle and ligament damage and vertebral misalignment. Solving obesity, flu, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, hypertension, etc. is to lower the stress which is clobbering your adrenal glands.
Another point I would like to make has to do with the sustainability of our healthcare system. Since the logical solution to health problems lies in solving the structural and functional cause, and the American health care system treats symptoms, patients usually do not directly recover from the treatments they receive from their medical providers. I remember one of my respected teachers telling me about research showing communities without medical doctors have better health statistics than those that have them.
How could this be? Generally, due to ignorance, brainwashing, and belief in magic, when symptoms appear, the American public enters the state of temporary insanity and marches blindly to their medical doctors, pharmacies and surgeons to get rid of there symptoms. The public has not been educated about health and cause of disease, but they are well educated about symptoms. They know if they have stomach acid, they take Tums, and to take Asprin for their headache, etc.
You are a rare breed if you have heard the closely guarded fact about 80% of America’s illness being fully preventable through lifestyle modifications such as changing your diet, providing nutrition and getting appropriate exercise. So, to eliminate 80% of all American illness, we only have to eat a good diet, take care of our nutritional needs and get some exercise. Oh, and maybe it would be a good idea to stop drinking and smoking and avoid poisons such as yard chemicals and mercury amalgam fillings.
Unfortunately, the public has first to be sold on the idea of changing their lifestyle. Have you noticed there is no public relations campaign informing the public about unhealthy lifestyle choices and their consequences, and teaching healthy alternatives. Instead misinformation about health and wellness is propagated by government on behalf of special interests, profiting from the sales of unhealthy things to eat, drink, inhale, ingest and rub on our skin. For goodness sakes, I have finally heard the FDA is going to warn the American public about the health hazards associated with mercury amalgam fillings.
The government has led us to believe margarine is better for you than butter, it is safe to drink chlorine and fluoride when it is put in our drinking water, it is safe to put mercury in your mouth when you use it to fill holes in your teeth, vaccination is the best form of prevention, drug therapy and surgery are the best form of healthcare, catsup is a vegetable...
Then Madison Avenue bombards the media with advertisements selling sugar, corn syrup, processed corn and other high carbohydrate food-like substances as nutritious and delicious (I’m cuckoo for Coco Puffs!). When was that last time you saw an advertisement for water? Our sporting events are sponsored by beer and the best place to eat is McDonald’s.
The masses believe in the magic bullet, the pill or procedure that effortlessly, conveniently solves our health problems without requiring us to understand what is causing our problems or know about our body’s requirements for staying healthy. “We don’t have to do anything but take the pill or surgery.” Do we really believe this lie? Of course not, we insanely follow along with this great cultural tradition to demonstrate how public relations really works. We believe in the lie even though we know it is a lie. The Government and Madison Avenue brainwashing convinces us to believe in magic about the products they are promoting, even when we are completely rational in every other part of our lives.
So it is no wonder we are paying more for health care than any other country in the world, and our health statistics are the lowest for all developed countries. We have a healthcare paradigm that does not improve health! We, as a nation are consumers in disease care program that helps us manage our disease. What is the disease care system’s motivation to help us become healthy? If we become healthy, we will no longer be healthcare consumers, and they will lose us as customers of drugs and surgery.
Follow the logic of the “Health care system” symptoms based approach. You take drugs and surgery to help manage your symptoms, but leave unattended the functional problems which cause your symptoms. Unknowingly, while you are managing your symptoms, your long term functional abnormalities continue worsening your degenerative illnesses. All the while, you think you are doing what you should be doing, managing your symptoms.
For instance, rather than realign the misaligned spinal vertebra, and healing the vertebra’s associated ligaments, muscles, and nerves, your take pain pills, muscle relaxants, inflammation pills, receive cortisol injections, physical therapy, have the pain nerves cauterized, and when these don’t work, you get surgery. The drugs and surgery do nothing to improve your spinal vertebra alignment, ligaments or muscles. These functional problems still exist. The improper workings of these joints and tissues continue causing degeneration of your spine and nerves, worsening and increasing the diversity of your symptoms, creating more need for medication and surgery.
People either know nothing about managing stress through mediation, exercise, dietary change, nutrition, etc., or they are talked out of it by exposure to intense mass marketing and public relations. We are educated to take medications, liposuction or a tummy tuck for obesity, drugs for hypertension, bowel irritation, sneezing and runny nose of allergies, and high cholesterol. Our failure to manage stress combined with the severe side effects from the medications we are taking, eventually tears us down almost to the point of nonexistence.
Eventually you are unable to work and have to receive disability assistance from the government to help with your living expenses, pay for your doctor’s visits, drugs and surgeries. Your life purpose is lost, and with it, your capacity for contributing to others. You become self absorbed in the difficulties of your existence and lose touch with reality.
How fast and how intensely you experience disease symptoms depends upon how fast you loose your body’s structural integrity or function. You don’t have to experience symptoms to have disease. You may have hidden disease from imperceptible functional loss or structural abnormalities which eventually manifest symptoms through time and circumstances.
In my opinion, disease symptoms do not usually appear until you lose 60% of the structural integrity or function of an organ or system in your body. Accidents and injuries and infectious diseases cause intense structural and functional losses sufficient to cause immediate symptoms. On the other hand, gradual functional and structural problems may develop and remain unrecognized until significant physical damage has been done.
I think it is time for to the public to receive education about the real scientific facts pertaining to natural, holistic health. Enough is known about diet, nutrition and lifestyle to launch a national health and wellness awareness campaign. It is time for the environmental polluters, makers of processed food-like substances, pharmaceutical companies, medical lobbies, chemical based corporate farmers, and all special interests who profit from disease, to subordinate their greedy self-interests for the good of society.
Structure and function based wellness, prevention checkups form a good holistic healthcare practitioner will help you detect and eliminate problems with physical structure and function long before they begin manifesting symptoms. In this way you will avoid the financial, health and social costs from consuming drugs and surgeries. America’s health care costs will drop 80%, and national health and wellness, creativity and productivity will increase 80%.
I would like you to know a little about the shortcomings my first healthcare paradigm, how it failed the Fibromyalgia challenge and what I planned to do about it. Understanding my first experiences treating this difficult condition will help you make the most appropriate healthcare choices for yourself and your family.
In a previous article I described how my first Fibromyalgia patient experienced complete Fibromyalgia recovery in less than a week from one treatment visit. During my initial work-up of this patient, I had discovered the woman’s dominant stresses were her upper cervical spinal misalignment and the misalignment of her pelvis. I was able to restore normal joint function to these areas, greatly reducing the patient’s mechanical, neurological, muscular, gravitational, chemical, mental, and emotional stress. The stress reduction upon the patient’s bodily systems and functions was sufficient for her to experience complete recovery from Fibromyalgia pain and fatigue.
For the next three years following this, my first Fibromyalgia success, I was glad to achieve some modest Fibromyalgia improvements by correcting patient’s abnormal upper cervical spine and pelvis biomechanics. However, many of my patients failed to show much improvement at all. In all these cases, the patient’s predominant symptoms such as headaches, and neck, back, hip, or extremity joint pain greatly reduced. My patients could stand, walk, run, and sleep less specific joint discomfort or headaches, but I was disappointed I had not discovered a reliable solution for Fibromyalgia. For the most part, the patient’s diffuse muscle pain and fatigue was reduced, but did not completely go away.
I would like to give you some background about my early experiences with upper cervical chiropractic care and the choices I made for becoming an expert in this field. I would also like to share with you some information about how I became committed to thorough diagnosis and treatment of the pelvis.
During my chiropractic training I had discovered the powerful, global benefits received from relieving the mechanical misalignment at the juncture between the head and neck. All body systems and functions are improved by taking the upper cervical spinal misalignment stress from the brain stem.
When I first entered chiropractic college, I was skeptical about upper cervical chiropractic. I had heard lectures by leading evangelical upper cervical chiropractors purporting this correction would cure everything. Their rational being, the nervous system is the pathway for innate intelligence to communicate with the body. By removing constriction from the brain stem, the brain achieves full communication with the body. Then innate intelligence fully enlivens the physiology to control, regulate, and heal almost anything. The leading proponents of this “religion” were banned from speaking on my chiropractic college campus. During one lecture, a doctor introduced a colleague’s spouse and explained how her upper cervical chiropractic care had cured her cancer.
The upper cervical spine treatment procedures these “true believers” practiced involved gross manipulations of the upper cervical spine. By setting the C1 “Atlas” vertebra (the top vertebra of the spine) in motion, they concluded innate intelligence would position this bone in its proper position. The most reasonable explanation for this innate intelligence positioning philosophy was, vertebral misalignments create tension on the soft tissue (ligaments, tendons and muscles) that ordinarily hold these vertebra in their normal neutral position. this soft tissue tension contains the memory of the normal, neutral vertebral alignment. When these misaligned vertebra are abruptly forced into motion in the direction of realignment, the soft tissue tension will spring the neck bones back into alignment. However, I questioned this reasoning, because soft tissue injury to vertebral ligaments, tendons and muscles changes or loses the memory of the normal, neutral vertebral alignment. These tissues, much like over-stretched springs, are not able to return to their original form. The overstretched, sprained and strained soft tissues are disabled from returning the vertebra to their normal, neutral position.
One of my most credible chiropractic college professors stated simply, “No matter how you practice chiropractic, if you want to fully help your patients, you better have a good upper cervical spine corrective procedure.” Following his advice, I began investigating upper cervical chiropractic procedures and trying them out on myself.
Eventually I became interested in a scientifically verifiable upper cervical chiropractic procedure that provided excellent relief from my old automobile accident spinal injuries that were previously untouched by other chiropractic methods. The upper cervical spinal misalignment was diagnosed using precise instrument measurements of postural distortion and biomechanical X-rays. The upper cervical correction involved an extremely controlled force directed according to precise calculations derived from precise upper cervical biomechanical X-ray analysis. The upper cervical spinal correction was objectively verified through biomechanical analysis of the upper cervical spine X-rays taken following the corrective procedure.
I began an elective course of upper cervical chiropractic training and attending two upper cervical chiropractic conferences per year. My immediate goal was to develop the competence required for me to practice this procedure in the college clinic during the final phase of my chiropractic training. I also planned to apply the pelvis diagnosis and treatment training I had received previously.
My pelvis diagnosis and treatment understanding began when I was a young man. I was a massage therapist and enjoyed access to very advanced continuing education. To my good fortune, I was given powerful insights into normal pelvis biomechanics and the diagnosis and treatment of abnormal pelvis joint function. Since the pelvis is the spine’s foundation, or base of support, I knew all spinal corrective work would be incomplete without making sure the pelvis was functioning properly.
My chiropractic training for pelvis diagnosis and treatment overlooked two serious pelvis misalignments, but my previous training completed my knowledge of this field. I knew I was going to offer my patients a combination of extraordinarily effective upper cervical and pelvis care that was not available elsewhere.
I applied my upper cervical and pelvis diagnostic and treatment training while working as a student extern in my college chiropractic clinic. My patient’s received impressive benefits from these procedures, and my staff doctor’s were very enthusiastic about the these results and the numerous patients under my care. Based upon this success, I founded my Boulder, Colorado clinic as an upper cervical chiropractic clinic, with a pelvis biomechanics sub specialty. My clinic achieved great results using these procedures, and I did not question my approach to healthcare until I began treating Fibromyalgia patients.
My regular neck, back and hip pain patients responded well to my upper cervical/pelvis diagnostic and treatment program, but Fibromyalgia patient’s did not completely recover. However the Fibromyalgia patient’s generalized reductions in their symptoms suggested their upper cervical and pelvis misalignments were part of the Fibromyalgia problem. At this point, I began searching further for structural and functional stressors causing, contributing or complicating the Fibromyalgia condition.
In my next article, I will share with you the first diagnostic and treatment discoveries from my early experimentation with Fibromyalgia solutions. I hope these insights will help you and others experience great improvements in your health and wellness.
This is a historic interview with Dr. Michael Pollan, speaking about his new book, "In Defense of Food." Gain insight into the need for field independence when making healthy food and lifestyle choices rather than following Madison Avenue suggestions.
Included in this article is a 39 minute Amy Goodman video interview with Michael Pollan. The interview introduction states, "Michael Pollan is one of the nation's leading writers and thinkers in this country on the issue of food. He is author of several books about food, including "The Botany of Desire," "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and his latest, "In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto." In light of what he calls the processed food Industry's Co-opting of "Sustainability" and its vast spending on marketing, Pollan advises to be wary of any food that's advertised."
My patients usually require diet and lifestyle education for eating whole foods with as much live food content as possible. Stay away from the inner isles of the grocery store lurking with denatured (nutrition stripped empty calories) processed foods containing harmful and poisonous additives. and dine on the fresh foods found along the store periphery.
Professor Pollan's interview helps support individual and societal improved health and wellness through good food choices. Watch this interview and learn more about nutrition, food safety, agricultural economics, food and health policy.
The following are the main points I took from the interview:
Industrialized agriculture's intense pig confinement makes neurotic, immune compromised animals, living in severely unsanitary conditions that are a perfect gene pool for virus mutation creating flue pandemics.
The genetically engineered foods (widely promoted in less developed countries as a means to increase food production) do not increase food production, and only allow expanding mono culture.
A rule for avoiding nutritionally barren, processed, edible food like substances has been refrain from consuming anything with high fructose corn syrup or multiple ingredients.Food processors have responded to these guidelines by advertising the use of real sugar rather than corn syrup (an implicit health claim for sugar) and using fewer ingredients (ingredients that don’t support life).
94% of food advertising is for processed food, so don’t eat food that is advertised, and don’t fall for any health claims associated with processed foods.
In the past, schools and institutions have been used for agricultural surplus disposal (tater tots and low grade ground beef) without much concern for nutritional value. The government now appears to be setting nutritional standards for schools and institutions and moving away from teaching our students to be fast food consumers.
Eat real food and more from the vegetable kingdom, and avoid products of food science resistant to spoilage, pests, mold, fungi that ordinarily grow on foods which have nutritional value.
The American Diet must be addressed to reform healthcare. Chronic disease is the greatest healthcare expense. Each new type II diabetic patient in New York City costs the government $500,000, and like most chronic diseases can be prevented through food choices. The healthcare crisis is a food crisis. A public advertising campaign is needed to inform the public about their diet.
Since cheap corn is the primary ingredient in most junk and processed food (high fructose corn syrup in sodas, grain ingredient in cereals and packaged foods), the government should stop subsidizing corn production and making these destructive foods affordable.
Farmland must be protected from the poisonous contaminants and erosion producing agricultural practices.
Not only is food the basis of America’s health care crisis, modern agriculture produces one-third of all greenhouse gas.
I hope you appreciate this interview as much as I do. At the bottom of this page, I have included for you some amazon.com links to some Michael Pollan books. Click on the title links to read the book reviews and receive more information about these valuable resources.
This article describes our beginner's luck treating Groover Clinic's first Fibromyalgia patient. Discover the origin of Groover Clinic's Holistic Fibromyalgia Treatment Program. Find out about the functional healthcare innovations leading to extraordinary patient recoveries from pain and other symptoms and great improvements in their health and wellness.
Her first visit to my office was in February of 2003. She had driven 2 hours from Colorado Springs to be treated from injuries received in a motor vehicle accident. The patient was complaining of severe neck, arm, and low back pain, and had previously been diagnosed by her medical doctor with Fibromyalgia.
The 32 year old woman reported severe, diffuse muscle pain throughout her body, but was not asking for treatment for these Fibromyalgia symptoms. She had resigned to living with her Fibromyalgia pain and fatigue because the “expert” advice she had received was Fibromyalgia is incurable.
The patient’s injuries included traumatically inflicted joint misalignments throughout her entire spine and pelvis. Her upper cervical misalignment (the alignment of the first two bones of her neck and the base of her head) was considerable. Trauma to the upper cervical spine had misaligned the passageway through which her brainstem travels from her head to her lower spine.
The patient's upper cervical misalignment was causing compression and tension of her brain stem, interfering with her central nervous system function. The central nervous system regulation of her body was impaired, causing mechanical, neurological, muscular, gravitational, chemical, mental, and emotional stresses that could be to some degree responsible for the woman’s diffuse Fibromyalgia pain and fatigue.
My first treatments were to her upper cervical spine and pelvis, and she scheduled to return for follow-up in one week. When the woman returned for her next visit, she was smiling and energetic. Not only had her neck pain and low back pain improved dramatically, but she said her Fibromyalgia pain and fatigue was gone! The patient thought she had experienced a miracle.
I previously had heard stories of Fibromyalgia patients receiving tremendous benefit from specific, objectively verified upper cervical spinal correction. Some of my colleges had reported success treating Fibromyalgia using only the upper cervical corrective procedure. I was beginning to think I had found my own clinical solution to this mysterious condition, but unfortunately, there was a bigger picture to consider.
In a future eZine article, I will describe my mixed results treating Fibromyalgia over the next three years and how I boosted my success through incorporating other complementary, holistic approaches to patient care.
I am pleased to share with you my stories and insights about Fibromyalgia causes and treatments, and about health and wellness. I am glad you have found your way to my eZine, and look forward to sharing with you my Fibromyalgia insights and achievements. I hope this information will enlighten and inspire you to reclaim your life from the devastation caused by the Fibromyalgia condition.
Shoulder misalignment causes shoulder, neck, upper back and arm pain. Shoulder misalignment is improper shoulder bone relationships, caused by direct shoulder trauma such as falls, collisions, improper shoulder use, poor posture and repetitive stress. At Groover Clinic, automobile accidents, sports injuries, poor lifting habits and postural distortion are common causes for patient’s shoulder misalignments.
Rib misalignment stresses your external intercostal, internal intercostal, shoulder muscles, and muscles originating farther away from the rib cage and attaching to your ribs. External intercostal muscle spasms may, at times, be located through palpation (examining by touch) and minor, temporarily experienced through expert massage. However, when these muscles spasms occur between your shoulder blades and your rib cage, you will usually feel vague, diffuse, impossible to locate pain, like an itch that is impossible to scratch. In this case, the same minor, temporary relief is almost impossible, unless your shoulder blade can be lifted away from your rib cage to allow access to your muscles.