Posted May 20, 2013: by Bill Sardi
An article in The New York Times asks why immigrants come to the United States and their health falls apart thereafter and they live shorter lives. The NY Times report says the longer immigrants live in the US the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes.
Why does life in the United States — despite its sophisticated health care system and high per capita wages — lead to worse health?
Smoking, drinking, high-calorie diets are blamed. But that doesn’t precisely identify what items in the food chain promote obesity and chronic disease.
Posted in Diet ; No Comments »
Posted May 19, 2013: by Bill Sardi
The announcement was too slick. The news media rolled it out, heralding 37-year old Angelina Jolie’s bravery in disclosing her decision to have her breasts prophylactically removed solely based upon detection of a mutated BRCA gene that posed a high future risk for breast cancer maybe two or three decades in her future.
It was coordinated with simultaneous press releases from Ms. Jolie’s female breast surgeon at the Pink Lotus Breast Center and an appeal before the Supreme Court by a biotechnology company to uphold its patent application involving the BRCA gene.
Was this serendipity or a well-orchestrated public relations campaign to persuade fearful women to undergo needless care? Is the Supreme Court ready to rule against the applied-for BRCA-gene patent by a biotech company in the face of hordes of women who may feel the highest court in the land is insensitive to their fears?
Posted in Dietary Supplements, Modern Medicine ; No Comments »
Posted May 17, 2013: by Bill Sardi
When radio listeners, like the 5 million-strong Coast-to-Coast nighttime radio audience, hear an interview with a so-called authority on essential oils and he casts a convincing pall over the idea of taking one of the most popularly used dietary supplements, fish oil, there are sure to be millions who pause before they put the next fish oil capsule in their mouth.
The expert is Brian Peskin, an MIT graduate in electronic engineering, who mixes a lot of pseudoscience and straw-man arguments to falsely brand fish oil supplements as ineffective, even potentially dangerous.
Like many of us, Mr. Peskin has his own product to peddle – a plant-based multi-ingredient formulation of sunflower, safflower, pumpkin, evening primrose seed oil along with coconut oil. (Not wanting to lead naïve consumers to his website that disseminates factitious information, his website will not be divulged.)
Posted in Dietary Supplements, Heart ; No Comments »
Posted May 16, 2013: by Bill Sardi
Blood tests for many nutrients are not reliable and may only indicate recent consumption. It is more practical to use symptoms to detect nutrient deficiencies.
Posted in Dietary Supplements, Minerals, Vitamins ; No Comments »
Posted May 15, 2013: by Bill Sardi
Read the shocking report of women, as young as age 21, who are having both breasts removed solely because they have a gene mutation. They do not have breast cancer:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2324362/Angelina-Jolie-mastectomy-Why-4-women-chose-preventive-breast-cancer-surgery-like-Angelina.html
One of Hollywood’s goddesses, and undeniably one of the most beautiful women in the world, Angelina Jolie has announced she underwent double mastectomy surgery in February of this year. Knowing that what Hollywood stars do the public copies — expect a parade of double mastectomies to follow.
Similarly in 2005 when Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue announced she was undergoing cancer treatment, hundreds of thousands of women scheduled screenings, an unexpected outcome that was dubbed “the Kylie effect.”
CNN News anchor Zoraida Sambolin has also jumped on the bandwagon and announced she is undergoing a double mastectomy.
Posted in Dietary Supplements, Modern Medicine, Resveratrol ; No Comments »
Posted May 13, 2013: by Bill Sardi
The revelation is large – and shocking. Senior Americans that take commonly-prescribed drugs such as sleeping pills, antihistamines, blood thinners, diuretics, and many other medications, are blocking a nervous system transmitter (acetycholine, pronounced a-seat-a-coal-een)) that causes over 2 million cases of senile dementia in the US, not Alzheimer’s disease as most people mistakenly believe. (There are an estimated 5 million Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, half that may be re-classified now as “victims of drug-induced delirium.”)
A university-based center has now been established to help physicians identify the problem and substitute other less problematic drugs.
A list of the suspect drugs that induce dementia can be found at the Aging Brain Care website.
Posted in Health Care System ; No Comments »
Posted May 10, 2013: by Bill Sardi
The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) has issued a bulletin suggesting individuals with hepatitis C seek testing that will help determine if their body has cleared the virus or if they are still infected. I’m skeptical of the reasons behind this health directive the CDC itself knows only a small number of people (maybe 2 in 10) do not have a positive antibody test for this viral infection that targets the liver.
An estimated 3 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C and 3 of 4 don’t know it, says the CDC. Hep C is a contagious disease that causes 15,000 deaths a year in the US and is a leading cause of liver transplantation. An estimated 170 million people worldwide are infected with hepatitis C.
Baby Boomers, those Americans who were born between 1945-65, represent 75% of the hepatitis C cases. Infection is linked to use of injected drugs or blood transfusions during that era.
Posted in Dietary Supplements ; No Comments »
Posted May 5, 2013: by Bill Sardi
Even the chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic is disturbed by the Food & Drug Administration’s late Friday night approval of a combination drug intended to reduce circulating cholesterol levels. The FDA approved Liptruzet (Zetia + generic Lipitor, chemically known as Ezetimibe and Atorvastatin) that lowers cholesterol but has not been shown to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease or death, a fact its maker does not dispute. This newly approved drug will sell for about $5.50 per pill or $2007/year. Lipitor is the historically best-selling statin cholesterol drug whose patent expired in 2011. Zetia works by reducing cholesterol absorption from foods while Lipitor interferes with the liver’s natural production of cholesterol.
This development is quite surprising given that the FDA said it is going to pay more attention to what are called “primary end points” in drug approvals, such as mortality, rather than just factors that correlate with but may not cause disease. Or in some circumstances there may be drugs that address relevant measures of disease, but over-inhibition of inflammation or blood sugar or blood pressure, for example, obviously can be problematic.
Posted in Dietary Supplements, Modern Medicine ; No Comments »
Posted May 3, 2013: by Bill Sardi
The anticipation builds for anti-cancer drugs that target a broad array of genes that combat various types of cancer in different organs rather than a different drug for each cancer by their anatomical origin. Instead of anti-cancer drugs for each organ, such as lung, prostate, breast and colon, geneticists now say new drugs in development may address many forms of cancer.
The first examples of this new thinking are studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine showing uterine cancer and leukemia have similar genetic fingerprints and could be treated by the same drug. A large effort to this end is being commandeered at the Cancer Genome Atlas website.
However, the thinking is far too narrow now that geneticists know diseases are integrated via gene networks. An online map can be viewed showing genes in many diseases overlap one another (note: it takes time to load).
Posted in Cancer ; No Comments »
Posted April 24, 2013: by Bill Sardi
What a day to launch a health radio show! I’m positioning the show to be skeptical (not cynical) of modern medicine’s many self-acclaimed successes and I don’t need to make up any sensationalist headlines to make my point. Lo and behold, a number of damning reports are published on the very same day the Bill Sardi Health & Wealth Show is launched on KLAV 1230 AM (Las Vegas)!
Posted in Health Care System, Modern Medicine ; No Comments »
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