Category — Newsletters

Karen

July 1, 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve been in touch, and I wanted to give you some important information about something that’s been on everyone’s minds - the flu - but even more importantly, what you can do to minimize the risk without harmful vaccines.

The actual risk is much smaller than is being reported, but it’s still wise to keep yourself as healthy as possible - The best defense against infectious disease is a healthy immune system.

The focus is commonly on “the germ” reponsible for a particular illness, but it’s just as important to look at why your body might be willing to play the hospitable host!

And in many cases, flu-like symptoms are NOT caused by Influenza, but by many other possible factors - a release of unexpressed emotions; or a detoxification process; a flareup of a chronic illness, among others.

Most of my readers already are aware of the devastating effects of conventional vaccines - my website contains numerous articles on that issue, including many links to excellent websites for more information.

But what can you do in a positive way to strengthen yourself against illness in general?

You can improve your Regimen - nutrition, exericse, sleep, etc. - lifetyle factors that can be adjusted to shore up your life energy.

We have “Four Cardinal Points” of Regimen -

1. Nutrition - the proper nutrition for you as an individual - there are no “one-size-fits-all” diets.
2. Hydration - consuming the proper amount of pure water and enhancing your body’s ability to utilize it
3. Dormition - proper sleep
4. Recreation - including proper movement (”exercise”), and activity that engages your creative energy

I’m sure you’re aware that there are many dimensions, many levels of reality that we engage when we approach healing. This is so fascinating to me, and I’d like to share some further thoughts.

Sometimes we talk about a great technique for preventing and getting rid of dental plaque that can make a huge difference in your oral health and save teeth. Other times we talk about the deep emotional patterns that can keep you stuck in a chronic health condition, and how to become more conscious of those patterns so you can release them.

Some people prefer to work on the pragmatic side of things; and for others, it ultimately becomes most practical to work on the side that’s more difficult to access and more challenging to face, the emotional/spiritual side. Usually the best approach is an integration of both.

Personally I have felt at times that I needed a quick fix to “put out a fire” of an acute situation. That situation might have a proximal cause like “lack of iron.” But there may be deeper reasons why the body isn’t utilizing the iron it has, and then simply supplying more iron won’t work - we need to look to a deeper level of function and a deeper cause to remedy the problem.

But each person has their own unique path, and what one person needs to experience in order to heal can’t be compared to what another needs to experience.

In many areas of natural healing, when teachers or practitioners haven’t resolved their own emotional issues, often they displace their own self-expectations onto others, and admonish people about what they must do in order to get well. Your intellect might agree and say, “Sure, I know I need to do that.”

But what often happens is that your unconscious is rebelling against this kind of controlling dynamic, which is felt as a threat or a lack of support in some way. Unconsciously you are feeling railroaded, admonished, or guilted, and not in resonance with this injunction about what you must do - because your inner wisdom knows it’s not what you need right now, even if your intellect thinks so.

This is one of the important reasons why individualized guidance can be so helpful. You can get loads of great ideas about “the best new antioxidant” or “the best detox program.” No one needs my services to find out about the zillions of products that are on the market.

But do you really know that a particular product or program is what you really need at this time, and what your own body/mind is going to resonate with and make use of, safely and without causing more imbalances?
The choices that will really support your health, and not just temporarily cover up symptoms, require more than an intellectual, linear approach.

Health is more than biochemistry. Each person has a biochemical individuality - that’s complex enough! But also the blueprint for the biochemistry is the level of energy, the soul/spiritual level, and everything that manifests on the physical level has its seed in the soul/spiritual level.

That’s why we work on all these levels to get to the root of the problems and to support each level in its re-adjustment to a healthier condition.

Even dental plaque isn’t just about an imbalanced biochemistry!

But at a higher level it’s about emotional armoring - the emotional blockage we create in order to prevent the radial energy of the life force from expanding too much, when there is a held emotional pattern of fear. The emotional armoring has its counterpart on the physical level often as muscular tension, and/or dental plaque - there are many ways the armoring can manifest.

So for example, I teach people about oral hygiene (the kind that really works safely, not the conventional dogma), and about diet and nutritional supplements to rebuild the body and remineralize the teeth, but also about the emotional issues that can be blocking the healing process.

Healing can be complex, but doesn’t need to be complicated. There are many facets, many dimensions, but a rational program can be devised that honors your completely individual path and doesn’t leave your unconscious inner child throwing a tantrum!

Many of you are aware that I’m an advanced student of medical Heilkunst, and for anyone who is interested in learning about that system of medicine, I can introduce them to the principles, in email consults. All the consulting services I provide are really informed by the Heilkunst view, which is the map of the territory that an individual needs to cover in order to be well and whole.

Here’s some news about my website - The free articles are now organized on the main navigation menu, so you can find them easily, under specific topics. When you click to expand the Article menu, you see all the topics, and then when you expand a topic you see all the titles of the individual articles within that topic.

I hope this makes it easier for you to find the articles you’re interested in - there are now 80 of them, and I hope you spend some time with them and enjoy!

And remember, I’m still offering a free email consult with no obligation to continue.

Many people have asked me what I think of Dr. Mercola’s recent caution against cod liver oil (CLO). CLO is one of the most important supplements, containing essential nutrients for the immune system, and is one of the few “one-size-fits-all” that almost everyone can benefit from.

Especially in the winter months, most of us are deficient in vitamin D, and we need the form that nature provides in CLO. Naturally many people were confused about this sudden change of view, since Dr. Mercola is so well respected in the natural health field.

So I thought I’d give you my thoughts on this issue and point out some of the fallacies I see in the kind of analysis that Dr. Mercola is relying on here. It’s an important case in point. This is not to detract from Dr. Mercola’s very useful information but to illustrate the problem with following “what the authorities say.”

Most of us who keep our eye on the natural health field are familiar with Dr. Mercola and his informative website and newsletters. I would point out that his approach although it’s “alternative” in a sense is still grounded in allopathic medicine, and I also think that his promotion of supplements is potentially a conflict of interest.

Dr. Mercola started selling the tanning machines that promote vitamin D production in the body, at the same time that he began cautioning against the use of CLO, which is an important source of natural vitamin D. The reason he gives for his caution against CLO is the high ratio of vitamin A to vitamin D that some of the CLO products have. There have been studies showing that vitamin A can be toxic at high levels. He also talks about some CLO manufacturers adding synthetic vitamins to their CLO.

I see several flaws in this argument.

One is that there are CLO products that don’t have the high vitamin A/D ratio that he’s talking about, and that don’t add any extra synthetic vitamin A. There’s no reason to blame all CLO prodcucts for the problem with only some of the products.

The studies showing vitamin A toxicity were done withsynthetic vitamin A, and common sense tells us that the body is going to complain about that at high levels! But he’s jumping on the allopathic bandwagon there with the idea that vitamin A is problematic. Vitamin A supplements may also compete with sales of cardiac drugs, so in the world of Big Pharma-driven medicine, that may be part of the bias against it.

We know that native people ate very high amounts of these fat-soluble vitamins in natural form, for ages, and Dr. Mercola doesn’t address this contradiction to his argument.

In place of the vitamin D from CLO, Dr. Mercola recommends his tanning bed, and in place of the omega-3 fatty acids in CLO he recommends his proprietary krill oil. The question that remains to be answered is, is his particular krill oil, or krill oil as compared with other fish oils, actually so much more effective? Is there real grounded evidence behind the claims?

I use and recommend high-vitamin CLO (Green Pastures brand) and then because it’s low in omega-3 oils, additional fish oil can be taken.

Recently Dr. Mercola’s site seems to be throwing so much information at his readers in a way that focuses on quantity of information rather than deeper understanding. These recommendations such as with CLO are usually based on meta-analyses of data, which are not reliable.

Pharma has coopted so much of the natural medicine field in ways that most practitioners aren’t even aware of. Most natural medicine practitioners are still using a basically allopathic model and promoting less toxic methods on top of that, instead of shifting their paradigm entirely.

So as it is with everything, we have to use our own critical thinking and not trust any authority figure blindly. Usually when some new recommendation is based on a new “study,” it’s pretty easy to find the fallacies on closer look at the study itself. Even at first glance, when Dr. Mercola talked about the high levels of vitamin A, I checked my bottle of CLO, and it just didn’t add up.

My recommendation: Keep reading Dr. Mercola’s newsletter and website! He’s uncovering and distilling a lot of valuable information.

The lesson is that the truth doesn’t come from “authority figures” anymore. We can’t shift our allegiance from the allopaths over to the naturopaths. We have to let go of blind allegiance, develop our own discernment and think for ourselves.

When any health authority, natural or otherwise, refers to a “study,” we need to look critically at that study and see if the analysis is sound. It takes practice, but that’s the price in this new world where independent thinking is the ticket!