Boning Up on the Facts

I hope my friend Carla won’t mind if I take a cue from her for today’s blog but she was pondering osteoporosis and its affects on her aging mother. I have osteopenia which means when I had my Dexa scan done there was some thinning of my bone but not enough for my functional medicine doctor to concern himself with. To quote him ” it is a normal thinning of bone”. My mother had osteoporosis and this was evidenced by the change in her general height. That said, she really never did break a bone until she was 90, and she fell more than any other person I know. When she did tumble from her walker at the nursing home she fell right on her left elbow and it did break. It was surgically corrected, and once they took the darned pin out it healed and she acted like she had never had a break. Mother started taking one of the Pharma drugs in her 80’s and it may have helped but it also may have contributed to some wasting in her jaw bone that caused her to lose some teeth. I guess we will never know and that is what the Pharma world counts on. I am left pondering my mother’s osteoporosis thanks to Carla and here are my ruminations.

I believe that my osteopenia and my mother’s osteoporosis were primarily caused by undiagnosed Celiac’s disease. We were a family of bread eaters and cereals, you name it there wasn’t a grain that wasn’t eaten at our house all in the name of healthy eating. Mother had the ability to clear her colon in seconds as her doctor told her “with any kind of stress”. I think we would now call that IBS and mother had it her entire life but not one person thought to alter her diet. I think of all the nutrients she didn’t absorb and I am no longer in wonder at her osteoporosis or for that matter her dementia. I have blamed my similar issues on anything and everything, that is until I started reading and then took to heart everything that Joe Mercola and others were putting out there about grain consumption. Once I eliminated grain from my diet, allowing for the occasional treat, my digestive issues all but disappeared.

Calcium is supposed to build strong bones. Well milk was huge at our house and mother dutifully drank her glass of milk at almost every meal ostensibly “for her bones”. Mother also took her tums. Pasteurized milk is truly useless and that “healthy” drink, skim milk, is just pure sugar and does little more than cause insulin resistance in the individuals who drink it (my father drank gallons of the stuff but ate no sweets and little bread and died with undiagnosed diabetes). In other words, calcium is not the only answer and most of us get plenty of calcium in our diet from various vegetables and if not lactose intolerant from cheese, cottage cheese, etc. What is often is missing is Magnesium to balance the calcium intake and Ionic Fizz and Peter Gilham’s Calm both easily add magnesium to your diet. I love my raw milk kefir and have some most mornings in my smoothie. By the way, there is no pasteurized milk in my house if I can help it but that is a recent revelation (last 10 years) and pasteurized skim milk used to be a constant in our refrigerator and I, too, took Tums regularly.

Mother exercised in her fifties but only then and it was always walking. She worked harder than anyone I know and had more energy than anyone I know but she didn’t actually do weight lifting or any kind of exercise that would cause percussion of the bone and a pulling of muscle on the bones. Lesson learned is exercise your muscles and pound a little on your bones with exercise like running, walking, climbing stairs, etc. T-Tapp actually does it all and also improves your mirror image.

Mom ate a lot of fish especially in her later years as they lived on the shores of Lake Superior but fish is notoriously high in mercury and she was still eating her oatmeal and bread, so whatever goodness she was supposed to get from her fish was washed down the loo. Omega 3 oils are vital to healthy bones and the best kind of fish oil I know of is Vital Choice Salmon Oil. It is a deep orange it is so rich in astaxanthan from krill, has a pure taste and is undistilled and has undetectable levels of mercury.  Omega 6 oils need to be minimized at least in the summer (we may have increased need for some if we live in the northern climes).

Mother judiciously avoided sunshine. She slathered on sunscreen, put a large brimmed hat on her head and covered every inch of her body with thick fabric. In her last years she was seldom exposed to sunshine and when she was she squinted and asked to go back inside. I never had her Vitamin D levels checked but I wish I would have as it is easy to do and is so important. Vitamin D levels should be at least 50-60 ng/ml and even higher if you have any health challenges like cancer or even a virus. My functional medicine doctor ordered the test for me originally but now you can order your own online at the Vitamin D Council site. It is so cool that at my local Healtheast hospital (Woodwinds) you can walk in to the hospital lab and ask for a Vitamin D3 test without doctor’s orders and for $40 find out for yourself. It may be true of a lab near you and it pays to ask. Once you know your D3 levels you may need massive amounts of D3 to get your levels up (up to 50,000 mg temporarily) but you might just need daily exposure to midday sunshine. Sunshine prescription: 15-20 minutes midday sun on as much exposed naked skin as you can decently manage. In the north our sunshine is only effective from May-September unless you live at high altitude so another option is the Sunsplash from Mercola not only will it help your body produce its own Vitamin D all year you will also walk around with a healthy glow.

Lastly, Mom took a daily multiple vitamin but we know now those really aren’t adequate and with her digestive issues it was mostly a waste of her time and money. What she really needed were a host of minerals and vitamins that would have helped her keep her bones strong. Vitamin K2 is vital, selenium, boron, copper, zinc and B12 (a vitamin many of us have unhealthily low levels of) are all necessary to build and keep bone strong. Recently, I found quite by accident a product developed by Jonathon Wright called ProBone-O by Life Enhancement. It has no fillers or magnesium stearate and is easy to use as you just drop it in the vestibule of your mouth, let it sit 20 seconds and then swallow, even the digestively challenged will absorb the nutrients.

I can’t change things for my mom as she died in March at the age of 91 but maybe my ruminations can help you or someone you love. All of the experts I mention have numerous articles about bone health on their websites and they have all proven to be quite reliable. It really is up to you to bone up on your health.

Death be thee kind

My mama died the other day but she was not the mother I grew up with she was a mother who had dementia, you may call it what you want. Just when you catch yourself saying “poor thing” I can tell you that it wasn’t all bad and she handled it like the lady she always was.

Mama began the transformation about 20 years ago and everyone thought she was just acting “socially inappropriate” but I knew she was changing against her will. It was as if she couldn’t really stop what came out of her mouth and swirled around in her head and I spent many a night mourning the loss of the mother I had known.

About 4 1/2 years ago her fluffy little kitty bit her finger leaving a deep wound that literally festered overnight in to a deadly septicemia and Mama was found writhing on the floor of her bedroom and rushed to the hospital. She writhed and seized until they found an antibiotic that was specific to the infection and she recovered but never lived at home again. She couldn’t as her hands were left permanently curled, damaged by the heat of the infection in her brain and the swelling that had affected nerves in her hands. I suspect it was a little like melted wires on an electric panel.

At this point we had a diagnosis, Alzheimer’s, and everyone panicked but suddenly became more compassionate and understanding. Well everyone except one very determined brother who was not going to let his mother have Alzheimer’s. Despite his best efforts Mom could no longer put her world together  as she once did and she found refuge in a nursing home, Northern Lights in Washburn, Wisconsin. Her new home was filled with kind and skilled human beings who grew to love and respect my mother, the new one (personality does change) and the old.

That was 4 1/2 years ago and this week she died. My daughter and I were by her side and it was dignified and kind. Those fine people that cared for her all this time cried and mourned her loss almost as much as we did. They knew all her stories and all of us because they took the time to listen to her ramblings. They would sit with her in their down time and hold her hand and tell her they loved her and really made her last years count just like all the other years Mama had on this earth.

You may ask, what is my point in writing this particular blog? It is a tribute to Mama in a sense but it is a lesson for us all. Dementia is not pretty but it is not always the horror that we read about. It can actually be kind because often the folks that were closest to us and died come back to stand by our side and lead us in to our next destination and Mom talked about their comings and goings almost daily. If we find ourselves impaired and have the good fortune to spend our final years in a well run nursing home (key words “well run”) you can actually enjoy your days surrounded by people who tell you they love you, who celebrate your birthdays with you and make the transition from this life to the next the best it can possibly be.

I think the challenge for all of us is to acknowledge that we, too, may need nursing home care. Once we can face the possibility we need to contact our senators and congress people letting them know that our tax dollars need to go to funding these facilities more completely. Nursing homes barely make enough to keep their heads above water and pay their staff next to nothing to do all the basic things that we all may need to have done for us. If we are lucky, very lucky, we will never live in a nursing home environment, we will always have our partner by our side but if our luck runs out it would be nice to know we will be taken care of and not left to lie in soiled diapers in a dark unkempt room, unloved and unknown.

PACE with Kathy Smith

I have had Kathy Smith’s DVD called Functionally Fit Peak Fat Burning (FFPFB) for sometime and enjoy working out to it immensely. It had occurred to me sometime ago that it fit very nicely in to the Progressively Accelerated exercise program that Al Sears devised and I thought it was worth a mention to those who like PACE.

Kathy Smith does it with a bit of humor as she does occasionally make mistakes that are not edited out but I enjoy a smile when I am exercising, so that is alright with me. She takes you through a stretch and warm up and then in to the exercise itself quite effortlessly. The exercises are accelerated for 2 minutes at a time for 6 different segments and following each accelleration there is a cool down that she uses to work your lower body. The total workout is 45 minutes ( longer than Al Sears suggests you need) but it flies by and you feel energized when you are done.  At the very end you can do her stretch or your own stretch. I happen to like the stretch she does on her DVD titled Power Walk for Weight Loss, so I choose to do that when I am done.

I do FFPFB every other day and mix it up with the Power Walk because she works your upper body in that program and it is shorter for those days when you don’t want to spend lots of time getting fit. It also does have you work out at different levels but it is not a PACE type of exercise.

If you  mix this exercise with 5 minutes in front of your Vitamin D sunlamp three times a week and 20 minutes in your Sunlight FIR sauna almost every day you have done everything a body needs to be healthy and you will feel fighting fit.

Mercola, my health guru

I am ruminating today as I am want to do now and then but Joe Mercola has been on my mind lately and I want to share some thoughts with you the reader.

Several years ago I, quite by accident, came upon Mercola. No one pointed me to this site I was not solicited online but it popped up when I “googled” a health issue I had, namely high cholesterol and a high lipoprotein reading on some blood work I had done. My practitioner was telling me I had to go on statins or die of a heart attack even after I had emphatically told her I was not interested in statin drugs due to their side affects.

I got busy “googling” sites with answers, albeit their answers, but the one site that offered a possible solution and proof to back it up was Mercola.com. I read the research and read and read (because he and his staff of researchers have endless studies for one to look at). I finally tried Mercola’s protocol at that time which involved high doses of Vitamin C, non-flushing Niacinamide and two amino acids. I went back three months later and my readings were within acceptable margins and no talk of heart attacks.

I have tried other recommendations on his site and honestly more often than not he is right on. I say the proof is in the pudding and I have learned countless things from experimenting with his “far out” suggestions and those very ideas are now being proven to be correct by even the mainstream researchers and promoted by our pitiful media. I researched raw milk and found the people who sell it because of Mercola’s site. I have pursued medical professionals who are better than average because of the information on his site. I have pursued alternative practitioners because of evidence on his site. We eat healthier as a result of the plethora of articles dealing with that subject on his site. My family is healthier and wiser, so I guess you could say we are an example of what one can be if you just read all the information that he provides on his site and act on that which makes sense to you.

Now, you might ask why I am going on and on? Many people I talk to are very turned off by his site and I may or may not understand their reasons. One person said he was “schlocky” and that his face represents a disturbed person. Another health care practitioner stated that he had gone overboard on selling products and his message was therefore lost on her. I will admit that I nearly quit reading his online site last year when he went to Hawaii and then told me in every newsletter that I was a fool to stay in the northern climes and risk dying (or something like that). I could hardly stand one more day of seeing him in his Hawaiian print shirts, so I get that he can be annoying BUT…………..

If you want to form your own opinion, if you want to know what is going on with our medical paradigm that is really, really wrong and then find out what you can do about it you really must start reading what he has to offer. It is not untruthful, it is not deceitful, you don’t have to buy anything or read any of his self promoting articles, just read and learn and you will find yourself disgusted and ready to make a change. It won’t be the change that the mainstream media preaches, or that our government promotes but you will have educated yourself and made your own decisions as painful as that may be. Go ahead check out Mercola today and be amazed at the knowledge you glean from reading just one article and then let me know if you think I am right or wrong.