Are regular mammograms doing more harm than good? Let’s take a look at the science.

For the past two decades, controversy has swirled around the question of the benefits of mammography. Unfortunately, breast cancer is a huge and thriving industry, and its powerhouses have lined up squarely in support of mammography:
 

• Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which took in $342,373,526 in 2012 with major industry support and gave its CEO a 64% raise for a total pay package of $684,000, claims, “The Life-Saving Benefits of Mammography Are Clear!” (You may recall our 2011 article about Komen and their penchant for “pinkwashing.”)
• The American College of Radiology (ACR)—the organization that offers accreditation in breast MRI and mammography and rakes in tens of millions in fees from legally mandated mammography accreditations, says, “Mammography Saves Lives!”
• The American Cancer Society and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists both recommend yearly mammograms, starting as young as age 40.

 
But what does the science say? This past February, a twenty-five-year-long Canadian trial found no difference in death rates from breast cancer among women who had regular mammograms and those who did not.
 
The American College of Radiology immediately trashed the study, calling it “incredibly flawed and misleading.” The ACR’s self-interested reaction dismayed many, particularly Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the highly respected Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. He published a scathing opinion piece via CNN blasting the ACR, and fuming that “it’s time to get the science back in screening mammography and to recognize that mammographers may not be the ideal source for balanced information.” Well said, Dr. Welch!
 
But mammograms aren’t merely useless—they could very well be harmful. First, they may increase your risk of cancer by subjecting you to unnecessary radiation and by abusing breast tissue. Second, they’re inaccurate to the point of being downright dangerous. According to the National Institutes of Health, 90% of abnormal mammograms are false positives; even a staunch proponent like Komen acknowledges that the likelihood of getting a false positive over the course of ten screenings is 50 to 60%. Additionally, mammography misses 17% of cancers—that means for every ten breast cancers, two are completely undiagnosed.
 
A false positive causes more than anxiety—it can cause pain, financial distress, and exposure to risky, unnecessary medical procedures. Women who receive an abnormal mammogram must go through additional mammographic screenings, ultrasounds, magnetic resonance imaging, and even painful tissue samplings via fine-needle aspiration, core biopsy, or excisional biopsy. If there is cancer, biopsy can spread it.
 
Perhaps the saddest mammogram side effect is over-diagnosis and over-treatment—the treatment of breast “cancers” that most likely would never have resulted in illness or death. Many breast cancers resolve themselves. And treatment itself can endanger your health. Chemo attacks your body and immune system. Radiation pointed at the breast can damage the heart, potentially leading to death years later from heart failure. By then, of course, nobody will associate the heart disease with the radiation that caused it.
 
So, why promote mammograms if they’re ineffective and expensive? Well, if every woman who is recommended to get a breast exam did so, it puts $8 billion dollars a year into the pockets of the radiology industry.
 
Conventional medicine is not a unified bloc on this issue. More and more physicians, and even organizations that are typically opposed to integrative medicine such as the United States Preventative Services Task Force are recommending less frequent mammograms.
 
But if not mammograms, then what? Some kind of screening is necessary. After all, breast cancer is on the rise—in 2012, 1.7 million women were newly diagnosed with breast cancer, up 20% from 2008. And one in eight American women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. Although these figures are skewed by over-diagnosis, they still describe a very real threat.
 
Many integrative doctors recommend thermographic breast screening (thermography) as a safer, more effective alternative to mammograms. Thermography uses no uncomfortable mechanical pressure or ionizing radiation. Instead, it takes a picture of the heat produced by the body, which practitioners study for unusual changes or heat clusters. It can detect cancer up to ten years before a mammogram would, and can even detect cancer before tumors have formed.
 
The Mammogram Myth may be beginning to crumble, but don’t wait for the dust to settle—talk to your integrative physician about safer ways to prevent, detect, and treat breast cancer.
And for more about breast cancer and a popular FDA-approved drug that may be promoting it, see our other article in this issue.

The post The Breast Cancer Industry Is Deceiving Women first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The post Deadly Medicines: Organized Crime? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• MSG
• Propylene glycol (it helps stabilize a beer’s head of foam, though in high quantities it can cause health problems)
• High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
• Calcium disodium EDTA
• Caramel coloring
• FD&C blue 1, red 40, and yellow 5
• Insect-based dyes
• Glyceryl monostearate
• Isinglass (see below)

You’re unlikely to see any of these industrial-sounding ingredients on a label, because listing ingredients in beer is voluntary. And when ingredients are listed, it may be a partial list—which is even more deceptive than having no list at all.
Several beers, for example, contain HFCS, most of which is genetically modified (GMO), and isinglass, a clarifying agent made from the swim bladder of fish. But check most beer websites and they’ll tell you their “key ingredients” are “roasted, malted barley, hops, yeast, and water.” Perhaps the HFCS and isinglass were not “key” enough to merit inclusion on this list?
Some brands with less-than-wholesome ingredients:

• Newcastle uses artificial caramel color to simulate the golden brown color that is supposed to come from toasted barley. “Caramel color” sounds innocuous, right? But it’s manufactured by heating ammonia and sulfites under high pressure, which may create carcinogenic compounds.
• Miller Light, Coors, Corona, Fosters, Pabst, and Red Stripe use corn syrup, and Molson-Coors acknowledged that some of their corn is GMO.
• Budweiser, Bud Light, Bush Light, and Michelob Ultra use dextrose (made from corn).
• Anheuser-Bush uses corn.

The labeling regulations are confusing and capricious. Food is regulated by the FDA, and requires a Nutrition Facts panel, but alcohol is regulated by the US Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). Unless it’s beer made with something other than malted barley, and then it’s regulated by the FDA and must carry a Nutrition Facts panel. States also have their own regulations, which can supersede those of TTB, but not of the FDA.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, explained on her blog why we still don’t know the ingredients in alcoholic beverages. In short, TTB has been procrastinating since 2007 on completing their rules for labeling of alcoholic beverages.
People with allergies to genetically modified corn are taking a chance when drinking beer, as there is no requirement that GMO ingredients be identified on the label. We told you early this year about the dangers of GMOs, and in 2011 about the dangers of sugar, especially fructose. So genetically modified fructose carries a one–two punch, and may be one of the more toxic foods that can be hiding in your food or drink—with nothing about it on the label.
Unfortunately for those with a sweet tooth, eschewing HFCS for plain old cane sugar may not be that much of an improvement. A recent study of mice fed a mixture of fructose and glucose showed that even moderate amounts of sugar shorten life span (females fed sugar died twice as fast) and hamper reproduction (males were less likely to hold territory and sired fewer offspring).
While it certainly has its health benefits, and studies suggest that people who drink a little live a bit longer, alcohol—even without unsavory additives—has more negatives than plusses. It introduces what is treated as a poison by your body and stresses the entire gastrointestinal system, from mouth to colon, making cancer possibly more likely, especially in the esophagus. It may increase the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, and cirrhosis of the liver.
Not ready to give up the occasional brewski? According to the Food Babe, Sierra Nevada, Heineken, and Amstel Light are good choices, as they use only non-GMO grains and no artificial ingredients, stabilizers, or preservatives. German beers are subject to the “Reinheitsgebot” law mandating that beer be produced using only water, hops, yeast, malted barley, or wheat—you won’t have to guess what’s in them.
An obvious choice is certified organic beer, which cannot include GMOs and other harmful additives by law. And then there are the microbreweries. Many craft beer companies will give you a complete list of ingredients if you ask. Be warned, however: large beer companies are buying up microbreweries one by one, as Molson-Coors did with Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch did with Goose Island Brewery.
The healthiest of all alcoholic beverages is not beer at all, but red wine. It naturally contains resveratrol, which appears to have anti-aging, cancer-preventing, cardio-protective, neuro-protective, and anti-diabetic effects. It’s also an anti-inflammatory and an antiviral to boot. As we noted in a recent article, red wine can also help clear bad bugs from your stomach. Cheers!

The post What if Beer Companies Told the Truth? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

• In 2008, the FDA ordered makers of TNF-alpha blockers to carry black box warnings for the risk for histoplasmosis and other invasive fungal infections.

• In 2009, the FDA confirmed that TNF-alpha blockers cause cancer in adolescents and children. They required an additional black box warning.

• In 2011, TNF-alpha blockers received yet another black box warning for serious, and sometimes fatal, infections from two bacterial pathogens, legionella and listeria.

• Enbrel (which is genetically engineered in a process that involves the cells of Chinese hamsters) carries black box warnings for serious and sometimes fatal fungal infections; risk of serious and sometimes fatal TB infections; and risk of lymphoma and other cancers in children and teenagers.

• A child with Chrohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis is already in deep trouble. Giving these drugs just makes the situation infinitely worse, even threatening rapid death.

• Although the black box warnings refer to children and adolescents, the drugs are used for adults and have resulted in adult deaths as well.

Despite all their well-documented dangers, as of 2013, TNF blockers remain on the market. The FDA has simply asked manufacturers of TNF blockers to let them know when someone got cancer—essentially taking a “wait and see” approach to a drug that has caused at least thirty-five deaths from cancer, at least fourteen deaths from Legionnaire’s Disease, and at least seven deaths from listeria infections. Over fifty people have died, and the FDA is still at the “information-gathering” stage.

Moreover, there are reasons to believe the number of such deaths is greatly underreported. ANH-USA staff know of two such deaths among our own friends and doubt that these deaths were reported in this category.

In recent years, FDA has accelerated its rubber-stamping of dangerous drugs. This issue has become so serious it has caused internal strife at the agency. In particular, one FDA official, Thomas A. Marciniak, is seeking stronger warnings about a different class of drugs—angiotensin receptor blockers, or ARBs—in direct conflict with his bosses. The drugs, which are taken by millions of people (and generated $7.6 billion in US sales in 2012), have been linked to higher cancer rates, Dr. Marciniak argues. While this view is shared by other independent doctors, top FDA officials say the evidence is not yet clear.

Critics say the drug safety agency devotes so much attention to new drugs that it is ignoring the safety of long-marketed blockbusters. If a drug is profitable, the FDA seems to turn a blind eye to its dangers.

For example: the FDA recently approved a drug that cuts “bad” (LDL) cholesterol, even though it does nothing to reduce the risk of heart disease or death. The new drug takes Lipitor, which lost patent protection in 2011, and combines it with a new ingredient; this new combination is patentable (which is clearly an attempt by Pfizer to recapture Lipitor’s blockbuster sales). After initially rejecting the new drug last year, the FDA approved it because, as they put it, “LDL is a known risk factor for heart disease.” But again, this drug does nothing to reduce the risk of heart disease. Even cardiologists are questioning the logic of this approval.

Keep in in mind also, as we have pointed out, that so-called “bad” cholesterol is also a vital part of our body, one which we absolutely need. If it gets too low, it leads to numerous complications and even hasten death.

Why doesn’t the FDA pull deadly drugs like TNF blockers from the market? As illustrated by the FDA’s arbitrary hearings on Avandia that we told you about last month, they could just be trying to save face and avoid accountability.

At the same time, the US is experiencing a major drug shortage. The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), which keeps a drug shortage database, tracked a total of 211 drug shortages in 2010 alone. (By comparison, they identified 224 drug shortages between January 1996 to June 2002—an average of only 34 per year.) The main reason for the shortages is that drug companies are more and more required to get FDA approval for any operating step, no matter how trivial or unrelated to health. The shortages, in turn, can be used as a specious excuse to put more and more pharmaceutical drugs, many of them dangerous, on the fast track to approval, despite the complete lack of connection.

What the FDA and conventional physicians never seem to consider is a more natural approach. In the case of systemic inflammation—which underlies a host of health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, asthma, and many other conditions—there are natural treatments that should be explored instead of TNF-alpha blockers, including:

• An abundance of Omega-3 fatty acids, particularly from fish oils;

• Optimized levels of vitamin D, either from direct sunlight or careful supplementation;

• A healthy diet full of anti-inflammatory foods like turmeric, ginger, shiitake mushrooms, green tea, and rosemary, while avoiding pro-inflammatory items like trans fats, fried foods, and grains;

• Supplements like probiotics, boswellia, bromelein, resveratrol, the ursolic acid in Holy Basil (also called tulsi), and other substances targeted at bowel problems; and

• Stable insulin levels, regular exercise, and a normal waist size (see last week’s article on obesity).

Why, then, does the FDA continue to approve (and doctors continue to prescribe) drugs that can cause tuberculosis and leukemia, when herbs, natural treatments, and lifestyle modification will address patients’ health problems more effectively, more safely, and far less expensively?

The post How Can a Drug that Causes Leukemia, TB, and Listeria Remain on the Market? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Five states have introduced seven different “Ag-Gag bills” to silence people who try to expose CAFO practices. State-based Action Alerts!

• There are approximately 15,000 CAFOs in the US, which raise 50% of all animals used for our food.
• The largest food processors hold the greatest share of the market, so they wield more power, both economic and political.
• CAFOs receive a wide array of subsidies, both direct and indirect, such as crop subsidies on the corn and soybean used to feed CAFO animals. This in turn means more money in the pockets of feed producers like Monsanto.
• Because CAFOs are not held accountable for the environmental and health damage they do, they don’t have to worry about those costs, putting more into their pocket. Those costs are absorbed by the public at large.
• There are also the economies of scale: once a farm is automated for a large number of animals, doubling that number does not mean a doubling of costs. Organic costs more to produce—as much as 20% more—than  CAFOs and factory farms because they require more labor (no use of dangerous of chemicals), more costly fertilizer, higher labor costs for crop rotation, more money spent on organic certification, slower growing time, greater post-harvest handling costs to avoid cross-contamination, and more spacious (and thus more expensive) living conditions for livestock. And of course they don’t receive the aforementioned subsidies.

Sponsors of the 2012 Iowa bill, Senators Joe Seng (D) and Annette Sweeney (R), received contributions from special interests including the Iowa Corn Growers Association (who contributed 8% of Seng’s campaign funding and gave a similar amount to Sweeney), the Iowa Farm Bureau Association, Monsanto, and the Iowa Agribusiness Association. Of course we have no idea what lobbying, if any, went on behind closed doors, but the money trail—and the support for legislation that directly benefits these special interests—speak for themselves.

These Ag-Gag laws are inspired by a model bill called the “Animal and Ecological Animal Terrorism Act” from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC has both powerful corporate members and legislators, making the conflict of interest pretty seamless. ALEC’s corporate members are a Who’s Who of the Big Food supply chain, from farmers to retailers: Monsanto, Kraft, Walmart, Walgreens, etc.

The intent of the ALEC-modeled bills is to introduce them in many states, sometimes word-for-word. It becomes a systematized process. As the New York Times reported last year, an ALEC membership brochure “boasted that ALEC lawmakers typically introduced more than 1,000 bills based on model legislation each year and passed about 17 percent of them.” When ALEC runs with a bill, it has the support necessary to go much further by being introduced in many states simultaneously. It’s a sneaky way of legitimizing an idea that benefits only powerful and wealthy companies, not the general public.

Numerous state legislators are members of ALEC; last year, of the sixty legislators who voted in favor of Ag-Gag bills, 23% of them were members of ALEC, as are sponsors of three of the new Ag-Gag bills: Arizona state senator Jeremy Hutchinson and Wyoming state representative Sue Wallis. In 2010 Wallis was the subject of a conflict-of-interest complaint for trying to block legislation that would send stray horses to slaughter when at the same time she was planning to build a horse slaughter plant of her own. Both Wallis and her cosponsor on the Wyoming bill, Ogden Driskill, are both members of Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Driskill accepted contributions from livestock industry as well as Exxon Mobil.

Here’s a run-down of all seven state bills:

Action Alert! CAFOs don’t need further protection, and individuals who bravely expose CAFO conditions should not be penalized. If you’re a resident in one of the five states where these new bills have been offered, please contact your legislators and tell them to honor free speech and oppose these bills. Please send your message today!

Arkansas residents

Take Action

Indiana residents

Take Action

Nebraska residents

Take Action

New Hampshire residents

Take Action

Wyoming residents

Take Action

The post “Big Farma” Still Trying to Hide Their Dirty Secrets first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Causes gastrointestinal irritation with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. May cause central nervous system depression, characterized by excitement, followed by headache, dizziness, drowsiness, and nausea. Advanced stages may cause collapse, unconsciousness, coma and possible death due to respiratory failure. Aspiration of material into the lungs may cause chemical pneumonitis, which may be fatal….May cause reproductive and fetal effects. Laboratory experiments have resulted in mutagenic effects. May cause heritable genetic damage.

According to the EPA, acute (short-term) exposure to PPO has caused eye and respiratory tract irritation, and skin irritation and necrosis. It’s also a mild central nervous system depressant and causes inflammatory lesions of the nasal cavity, trachea, and lungs. In animal studies, PPO causes neurological effects and tumors, leading EPA to classify it as a class B2 carcinogen, and California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Massachusetts to list it on their state right-to-know registries as a known carcinogen.
So for raw almonds, your choice is to either cook them or make them potentially toxic. Steam treatments are running up to $2.5 million, whereas PPO starts at $500,000. Which do you think most farmers choose? Over 68% of almonds are treated with PPO.
Raw organic almonds not treated with PPO may be heat pasteurized with steam. But heat may oxidize the omega 3 fatty acids in almonds, potentially turning them rancid and producing free radicals, which are believed to play a role in the development of cancer and other degenerative diseases.
Even worse, there is no labeling requirement to show that almonds have been steamed or treated with PPO, so consumers are misled into thinking they are eating truly natural raw almonds when in fact they are not. Labeling is an absolute necessity for consumers to make an informed choice.
When the rule was instituted, raw and organic almond farmers were outraged and pushed back. They fought the USDA, and in 2010 a federal appeals court ruled they could challenge USDA’s almond regulation.
Now ANH-USA has submitted an Amicus Curiae brief in support of the plaintiffs (an amicus curiae, Latin for “friend of the court,” is an outsider who provides information to assist the court in making its decision). Our brief will allow ANH-USA to raise issues that may not be brought up by the plaintiffs during regular trial proceedings. It will also let us take a stand against the USDA and call attention to the public policy and public health implications of the almond rule.
Besides the aforementioned problems with the “pasteurization” process, there are serious legal concerns about the rule-making process. USDA did not go through the normal, open public hearing and comment process when issuing the almond rule. The agency contacted only 115 select almond growers and handlers—out of a total of over 6,000—to invite them to comment on the proposed rule, and consumers and retailers were almost universally unaware of the proposed rule. Only eighteen public comments were received from the entire country.
ANH-USA sees the almond rule as a slippery slope, because for the first time USDA is establishing minimum “standards” for how farm products are processed, setting a dangerous precedent for the potential sterilization of other organic agricultural products. Will they try to irradiate spinach, or will they realize the process will actually destroy the delicate product? We argue in our brief that the USDA is not a food safety agency and thus such decisions are not within their mandate.
The lack of labeling is arguably a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, which declares unfair or deceptive acts or practices to be unlawful. A “deceptive act” includes a “misleading omission.” Labeling steam-heated almonds as raw is intentionally misleading; and we would argue that not disclosing the fact that almonds are being treated with PPO, when the public, if they knew of the practice, would surely refuse to buy them, is extraordinarily deceptive.
Almonds have tremendous health benefits. They are an excellent source of manganese, copper, and vitamin B2 (all of which are important for the body’s energy production). Almonds are rich in magnesium, phosphorus, zinc and vitamin E, and high in health-promoting monounsaturated fatty acids and many other nutrients.
Raw almonds (with no heat applied) are particularly healthy. According to USDA data, raw almonds have more calcium, iron, potassium, fiber, manganese, and vitamin E. By insisting that raw almonds be “sterilized,” USDA is trying to take an extremely healthy food sound scary—something the public needs to be “protected” from, when actually the public may be more at risk from the chemical used to treat the nuts. Raw, organic almonds are not scary. As we point out in our brief, no salmonella outbreaks have been associated with organic almonds because they follow higher-quality processing controls. Therefore, organic raw almonds should not have been subject to the mandate in the first place.
Imported almonds are not subject to the almond rule (how is that for logic?)—so if consumers want real raw almonds, they will have to buy the imported ones. What a tragedy that our public policy is deliberately hurting the domestic market—especially small organic farmers, who need every sale they can get!
Action Alert! Tell USDA to put a hold on the almond rule at least until they open it up to public hearing and comment. Let them know that organic almonds should have been exempt from the almond rule since they already follow superior quality controls and there have been no salmonella outbreaks in connection to organic almonds. And insist that almonds that have been “treated” be labeled as such—particularly when PPO is used. Send your message to USDA today!

The post Ooh, Scary! USDA Wants to Protect Us from Raw Almonds first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Which organic brands really believe in organic—and which are working behind the scenes to betray natural health consumers?

The post The Great Organic Deceivers first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

The post Our Response to the Chicago Tribune first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

Close. Many products that now boast they’re “BPA-free” have simply switched to a BPA relative that may be equally toxic!

• This chemical can encourage cells in the pancreas to secrete insulin inappropriately, supporting a link between type 2 diabetes and exposure to low doses of BPA.
• Mothers who expose their fetuses to BPA risk having obese children because BPA can alter the development of stem cells, affecting both the DNA and the number of fat cells a person will have.
• And BPA may impair memory, according to study in published in Behavioral Neuroscience. Adult rats exposed to a single dose of BPA had trouble recognizing objects or remembering their location only a few hours later.

This is all in addition to the risk to reproductive health outlined in the groundbreaking book Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? by Theo Colborn et al.
Despite the chemical’s demonstrative dangers, FDA has refused to ban BPA in food packaging, claiming that “there is not compelling scientific evidence to justify new restrictions” on the chemical. In the past, FDA has relied on industry studies in reaching its decisions.

The post Is “BPA-Free” a Lie? first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.

What is the truth about them?

• an ongoing landmark mortality study (in progress since 1950) on 120,000 survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki;
• a fifteen-country collaborative study of cancer risk among 407,391 radiation workers in the nuclear industry; and
• a 2008 study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in which researchers estimated the potential risk of cancer from CT scans in 31,462 patients over 22 years.

This is what we’ve learned from them:

• Colonoscopy CT scans average 10 mSv per scan. A whole-body CT scan is 20 mSv or more. Patients who have multiple CT scans have up to 12% higher than average risk of cancer.
• If you get two virtual colonoscopies, you get as much radiation as the maximum allowed per year for nuclear industry workers—20 mSv. Nuclear workers, by the way, have a 27.5% higher death rate from cancer than the general population.
• If you receive ten CT scans in your life, you get as much radiation as did the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—about 200 mSv. The A-bomb survivors have had 46% more deaths from leukemia and 11% more solid cancer occurrences (tumors) than the general population.
• Some patients in the CT scan study had received as many as 70 scans over seven years, and received 579 mSv—nearly three times the amount of radiation received by people standing just 1.5 miles away from the epicenter of an atomic bomb, and about 21 times the amount received by those 2.5 miles away. It is unlikely that any one doctor of these patients was aware of all the scans they had.
• An estimated 70 million CT scans are performed in the United States every year, with as many as 14,000 people dying every year of radiation-induced cancers.

Life Extension founder William Falloon reports:

As risky as properly done CT scans are, reports published at the end of 2009 exposed instances of major medical centers being so sloppy in adjusting the settings on their CT scanners that patients were exposed to up to eight times the normal radiation dose.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, children receive four million CT scans per year, and of course their bodies are far more vulnerable to radiation than older people. William Falloon again:

Children are more vulnerable to the long-term effects of the DNA damage inflicted by X-rays. In one particularly heinous case, a 30-month-old child was exposed to more than 60 minutes of continuous CT scans when the normal time period is only 2-3 minutes. The hospital’s radiology manager called the overdose a “rogue act of insanity” while the chief of the state’s regulatory division said it was “one of the more egregious, extreme cases that I have ever seen.”

The journal Radiation Research just published a study showing that children who were under ten years of age when they were exposed to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiation have had a 58% higher death rate than average.
This same study also presents the strongest evidence to date that cancer risk not only exists at low doses of radiation, but may be even greater per unit of dose than at higher doses—and that ionizing radiation is associated with non-cancer diseases involving circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems.
If you can’t avoid getting a CT scan or an x-ray, you need to know that the damage from radiation comes from hydroxyl free radicals, and you can protect yourself against them by taking antioxidants for several days before and immediately after receiving the radiation. The best antioxidants in this case are vitamin C, alpha-lipoic acid, n-acetylcysteine (NAC), mixed-tocopherol vitamin E, selenium, and CoQ10.
You should also take antioxidants before a long airplane trip because of the surprising amount of radiation you receive during flights. Airline crew and frequent fliers can receive up to about 5 mSv per year from their hours in the air.
We’ve talked a lot about “virtual” colonoscopies in this article, but regular optical colonoscopies have their own risks too, of course. For one thing, endoscopic equipment is disinfected but not necessarily sterilized because the flexible tubing can be destroyed by the sterilization process. This can lead to illness, which has prompted a recent lawsuit in Oregon. And an investigation revealed that between 2004 and 2009, over 11,000 colonoscopies were performed at three different Veterans Administration hospitals using improperly sterilized equipment; as a result of those colonoscopies, 13 of those veterans tested positive for hepatitis B, 34 for hepatitis C and 6 for HIV, according to the VA.
The rate of bowel puncture from regular colonoscopies is also a serious risk, not to mention complications from sedatives and possible long-term injury to the anal sphincter, which could lead to incontinence. We need a much better and safer test than colonoscopy—and we should be able to get one in the form of a blood or stool test. There are stool tests now, but with too many false positives and negatives. The technology needs serious refinement, but gets little attention because colonoscopy is such a thriving and lucrative industry. Who exactly is going to fund research into a safe, low-cost test when a high-cost (albeit dangerous) test is already available?

The post Press Parrots the Manufacturer’s Line on “Virtual” Colonoscopies first appeared on Alliance for Natural Health USA - Protecting Natural Health.