The Rate Of Aging – Inherited Genetics Plus Important Lifestyle Choices

 

The rate of aging varies significantly in individual humans for many different reasons. If we study a large sample of people who are middle aged or older, the impact of these differences become quite obvious, but the vast majority of people do not understand the complex underlying cause-and-effect relationships.

 

In general, most genetic adaptations in a large population take place very slowly over long periods of time. The human life form has changed very little over many thousands of years. In contrast, lifestyle changes that dramatically impact the rate of aging take place quickly in a single lifetime – significant benefits can be achieved in only a few weeks.

 

For example, there has been a significant increase in American morbid obesity since World War II. For the last twenty years, American obesity has increased 200% to 300%, depending on age group. More than 60% of Americans are now overweight. 30% to 50% of Americans (over 100 million) are obese, depending on sex and ethnic group. As the “body mass index” increases, the risk of deadly diseases increase, while life expectancy decreases significantly. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control state that obesity is costing over $117 BILLION per year, and increasing each year.

 

Many deadly weight-related, age-accelerating diseases like heart disease (heart attack and brain stroke), high blood pressure, type II diabetes, cancer and obstructive sleep apnea (respiration blockage during sleep) have increased dramatically, due to daily lifestyle choices of poor nutrition, fast foods, insufficient exercise, improper negative thought patterns and irrational decision-making cognitive processes.

 

The expensive, rapid decline in the health of our sedentary society in recent years cannot possibly be due to inherited genetics, but they are often passed from parents to their innocent children through injurious unhealthy lifestyle training examples.

 

Food intake has increased, while the level of healthy exercise has decreased. The average portion size of unhealthy french fries, sugar drinks and candy bars have increased 400% to 500% in the last thirty years. In only 20 years, the average weight of American women has jumped from 140 pounds to 164 pounds (largely due to low fat, low protein, high carbohydrate female diets).

 

More Americans spend more time in front of computers, televisions and video games (eating large quantities of bad snacks), and less time standing, walking, playing sports, exercising and doing heavy labor. Parents are transferring their poor lifestyle choices to their children, with dramatic life threatening results. An alarming number of young children are getting adult-onset diabetes, etc.

 

Obesity has become the most important health problem in America, but clueless board-certified, licensed medical doctors receive almost NO formal training in this critical. They know how to prescribe dangerous, expensive, poorly-tested (often recalled) new pharmaceuticals, procedures like chemotherapy and radiation treatments that are guaranteed to kill healthy cells, mutate DNA and create new cancer, and they do risky, often unnecessary surgery. All this, but they don’t have time to learn how, or discuss deadly disease PREVENTION.

 

Since the work on the Human Genome Project, much has been learned in a short time about the genetics of tumors. They are formed when DNA is damaged (by many diverse causes). Depending on the unique genetics of each particular individual tumor, various treatments may or may not be effective. Standard indiscriminately prescribed chemotherapy and radiation treatments may do deadly damage to the patient, when if the DNA of the tumor had been studied, it may have been possible to determine that chemotherapy and radiation treatments could not possibly be effective on a particular tumor.

 

For example, the World Health Organization has already genetically classified over 100 brain tumor variations, many of which are as different as night and day, having widely varying responses to different types of prevention and treatments. Until the details of genetic testing of cancerous tumors is much better understood, it is both irresponsible and downright idiotic for oncologists to indiscriminately prescribe deadly chemotherapy and radiation treatments to naive patients who lack critical thinking skills. Common medical (mal)practice should be made a felony crime, until doctors are forced to understand and apply the scientific knowledge that has been published in the last few years.

 

America spends far more per person on healthcare than any other nation, but we also have much higher major disease rates than more intelligent nations that spend far less, but pay more attention to PREVENTING disease, rather than ineptly dealing with it after the fact, indiscriminately using expensive treatments that often do much more harm than good. If you have strep throat or a broken bone, medical doctors do a good job of dealing with the problem. BUT, if you are obese and having problems caused by excess body fat, medical doctors are for the most part of very little value. They waste your time and money, and if they give specific weight loss advice, it is often incorrect, ineffective or sometimes unhealthy. Remember, there are a lot of overweight medical doctors, and some of them still smoke.

 

America has much higher paid doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, but most other advanced nations have healthier citizens. The World Health Organization ranked the over-priced United States healthcare system a very low 37th among all nations! (We rank just below tiny Costa Rica.)

 

Our typical U.S. healthcare is far BELOW international mediocrity – it is relatively abysmal, corrupt, ineffective and badly misdirected. With respect to LIFE EXPECTANCY, the United States is a dismal 24th. On average, Americans should expect to spend more time disabled and die earlier than citizens of most other advanced nations (who spend far less on healthcare than we do). Obesity has become a large portion of the problem, BUT, the number of U.S. doctor-caused (iatrogenic) deaths plus serious injuries is measured in the millions each year. Even the healthcare given to U.S. Presidents like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon failed to inform them of the simple steps that could have greatly reduced the risk, and delay or prevented, the diseases that ultimately disrupted their lives and killed them.

 

With the overweight baby boomers about to retire, our bad medical information overflowing, and low-quality mainstream healthcare costs spiraling upward (faster than the cost of our poorly-managed gasoline and other energy), medical expenses are about to bankrupt the poorly-managed, actuarially-unsound, ineffective, American Medicare system. Preventable diseases (like morbid obesity, heart disease (heart attacks, brain strokes), cancer, diabetes, Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s Disease, etc.) will soon far exceed the available resources of our dreadful healthcare system.

 

Throwing more money at the current ineffective, inefficient American medical system, and the corrupt politicians and government agencies that regulate it, is NOT the right answer.

 

New legislation to block or limit malpractice lawsuits against rotten, uninformed, unqualified doctors is NOT going to end the many millions of American-doctor-caused iatrogenic injuries or improve the quality of our failed medical system. The thinking that created this ghastly mess, and the unwarranted public trust in it, is insufficient to correct it!

 

It is obvious that those at fault have strong incentives to hide this clearly-documented information from American patients and tax payers. Comprehensive disease prevention (practiced by dozens of other nations with a far superior heath record) is extremely important.

 

American healthcare needs radical rethinking. Do NOT expect it to come from overpaid doctors, pharmaceutical companies or corrupt government agencies. It must begin from a grass roost movement of better-informed individuals. This movement has begun among dissatisfied baby boomers that are nearing retirement and searching for better healthcare and disease prevention solutions. There has been an explosion in alternative medicine products and practitioners. Some of it is midnight cable television quackery. We need to sort out the truth, measure, monitor and publish what works and what does not (including the worst of the mainstream medicine that is injuring millions of Americans each year).

 

Obese Americans spend billions of dollars each year on ineffective diets, diet books, and diet products. No study has ever shown that any of today’s dangerous artificial sweeteners has ever helped anyone lose one pound, but people blindly buy “diet” products and do long-term damage their health every day, with no loss of ugly excess body fat. Diets do NOT work in the long term – PERMANENT LIFESTYLE CHANGES DO.

 

Loss of excess body fat is an important part of the long-term solution to America’s overall poor health condition. BUT, weight loss and disease prevention are mostly overlooked by mainstream modern American medicine and governmental regulatory agencies. Bad “status quo” ignorant medical doctor arrogance is unforgivable. Patient blind trust in the highly-flawed American healthcare system is NOT justified (as documented by World Health Organization comparative studies and rankings mentioned above).

 

An important report in the Journal of the American Medical Association points out that less that half of American medical doctors discuss weight problems with their patients. The U.S. CDC believes that this is one of the important reasons that the “obesity epidemic” has become the most important health issue in America. The problem prevention solution is being ignored by doctors who could rapidly help  reduce the underlying problem - IF they knew how to deal with it, and they would take the time. The lack of U.S. doctors discussing weight problems with their patients is largely due to: (1) lack of scientific knowledge, and (2) lack of time created by cost-conscience health maintenance organization insurance penny pinching. The best solution is NOT a dangerous pill or surgery (all that M.D.s understand). The best solution is widespread understanding of solid scientific knowledge about nutrition, exe4rcise and mental aerobics.

 

Some doctors refer their overweight patients to registered members of the American Dietetic Association. The New York Times ran a powerful article on how the corrupt American Dietetic Association receives significant funds from the worst food industry offenders to endorse their disease-and-death causing products, like trans fats, artificial sweeteners, etc.

 

The people who created America’s expensive, corrupt, below-mediocre healthcare system are absolutely NOT capable of correcting its many serious problems. Their conflicting profit motives, corrupt bias, ignorance and history of deliberate deceit make it impossible.

 

This Joyful Aging material is presented to help the thoughtful intelligent reader learn more about the simple things that can be done to significantly slow down your own rate of aging and delay or even prevent the onset of many age-related diseases. If you have ever known a person who has grown old before their time, or visited a home that cares for the elderly, then you probably already understand the powerful emotional motivation to avoid unnecessary suffering and sadness for all of those who love these declining senior citizens.

 

Unhealthy, unhappy aging is NOT a natural process. It is the result of a poor healthcare system that ignores disease prevention, and uninformed voluntary lifestyle choices that the irrational majority makes every day of their lives.

 

Your thoughtful concern for your own future and that of your loved ones is demonstrated by the fact that you are now reading these words.

 

Joyful Aging’s goal in sharing the following valuable information with you is nothing less than to help you under­stand how to live a much healthier, happier, productive, and rewarding life, by providing you with the knowledge to become a living example of success for those around you to appreciate.

 

We are not trying to promote a particular product or service. This website does not attempt to diagnose or treat any particular individual. We are serious research scientists and individuals who have spent decades studying the underlying issues and successfully practicing superior antiaging methods for ourselves and our loved ones.

 

We are freely providing this information as an informal education and lifestyle enrichment service as a legacy for our families, friends, associates and anyone else on the worldwide web who is interested. We actively solicit your comments, interest in future related materials and constructive criticism. Please email us:  JoyfulAging@AOL.com

 

Premature Aging

 

Premature aging of the brain, nervous system, sensory organs, motor control, circulation, heart, joints, bones, skin, digestive tract, hormonal secretions, neurotransmitters and immune system can begin at any time of life. Feeding a newborn infant a formula other than mother’s milk introduces the risk of many maladies, as does improper nutrition of the mother while carrying or nursing the child. Teaching a baby to like the wrong kinds of foods (like “rewarding” them with candy for good behavior, or buying them unhealthy food with a toy in the box) accelerates the rate of aging, as does paying attention to commercials for bad food products and unhealthy lifestyles (like smoking, drinking alcohol and laziness) latter in life.

 

Various factors cause the body to deteriorate, including genetics, injuries that do not heal correctly, allergies, toxic chemicals, pesticides, preservatives, synthetic chemicals and foods (like trans fatty acids, sugar and sugar substitutes), heavy metals, free radical oxidizers, poor nutrition, excessive radiation (sunlight, industrial and medical), excessive stress (in various physical and mental forms), and sedentary inactivity, to name just a few.

 

Chronological age and biological age are not the same. By middle age, we can easily observe significant differences in individuals of the same chronological age. Poor lifestyle choices (like smoking, drinking and excess sun exposure) are most obvious in the skin, but the same is true of all internal organs. Aging is a physiological process that is only partially dependant on how old we are. How we look externally is a partial indicator of our biological age, but external appearances are often deceptive (due to risky surgery, unhealthy cosmetics, etc.).

 

Sometimes, premature aging occurs without any symptoms until suddenly there is a catastrophic traumatic event such as a heart attack, cancer, or a stroke. More frequently, atrophy (tissue and organ decline) occur incrementally, as in muscle weakness due to lack of exercise, mucous membrane and glandular deterioration with decreasing hormone levels, increasing blood pressure, and progressive irreversible neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson’s, and alcohol-related dementia.

 

Frequently, a body that is aging prematurely sends many messages to its owner that it is malfunctioning. The most common messages are pain and dysfunction. The cause of the early pain may be acute or chronic inflammation, joint instability, insufficient blood supply, or pressure in an enlarged / diseased organ or surrounding tissues.

 

At the moment of conception, most people are genetically capable of living their lives without serious pain and suffering caused by chronic degenerative diseases, IF their mother provides a reasonable gestation environment AND they adopt a healthy lifestyle as an adult (which the irrational majority do not).

 

Without premature aging, normal life expectancy is estimated to be over 110 years, but very few people achieve this today, due to a great many non-genetic lifestyle and environmental risk factors. Those who are over 100 years old today. often had simple, back-to-basics lifestyles with good nutrition, exercise and positive mental attitude.

 

100 years ago there were no televisions, trans fats, artificial sweeteners, X-rays, nuclear fission, or fast food restaurants with “happy meals” to teach children to eat extremely unhealthy foods. Most mothers stayed home and lovingly invested a lot of time in good foods and the mental health and social skills of their children.

 

Natural foods with minimal processing were the only available option. Nearby friends were important (in stark contrast to today’s Internet-based social isolation). Healthy exercise was required just to make a living. People did not spend all day in front of a computer and come home to bad food in front of a TV. They did not send their children to play violent video games, just because they were too lazy to spend time with the family they had created.

 

Today’s brave new world is indeed much different than that of our great grandparents. Today’s rate of unhealthy premature aging is generally much worse than was theirs, and it continues to get worse rapidly. Many more people are dying today of heart attacks, brain strokes, cancer, diabetes, violent antisocial behaviors, etc. than ever before in American history. The World Healthy Organization how bad American healthcare and life expectancy is relative to other nations.

 

In Psalms 90:10, King David said: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten (70); and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years (80), …” Three millennia later, with all of our stressful lifestyles, polluted environment, and many dangerous modern U.S. prescription medicines, chemotherapy, radiation, and risky, unnecessary surgical procedures, most Americans still cannot expect to live much beyond 70 to 80 years old, and a great many do not even make it that far. An obese American (with a “body mass index” above 35) has a greatly reduced chance of living 70 years. Our leaner ancestors were much healthier and many lived long beyond 70, as did humans nearly 3,000 years ago.

 

In many ways, our modern environment is far more chaotic and unhealthy than the world was 3,000 years ago, or even 100 years ago. Most modern people chose a less healthy lifestyle of poor nutrition, not enough exercise, and poor mental aerobics, which all contribute to pervasive premature aging, pain, inflammation, unnecessary suffering and expensive care giving.

 

Unfortunately for us, profit-motivated conventional medical care has focused more on short-term immediate-gratification symptom relief with neurotoxic painkillers and risky surgical procedures, and insufficient emphasis on slowing the premature aging process and preventing or curing disease.

 

Providing quick-fix symptomatic relief is often much less effective and much more expensive over the long term than correcting poor lifestyle choices that are the root cause of unnecessary premature aging. One obvious example it is much better to convince someone to stop smoking, than to try to ineffectively treat metastasized lung cancer many years later with high-risk approaches like chemotherapy and radiation treatments that actually directly CAUSE DNA mutation cancer. Many similar but subtle issues are difficult-to-understand risk factors for premature aging.

 

Poliomyelitis impacted millions of lives since ancient times. At the peak of its American polio devastation in 1952, Jonas Salk developed a one-time vaccine that effectively prevents polio. Older baby boomers are the last generation to have young friends who were struck down by polio. Today’s youth don’t have a clue what polio was, and for that we must all be very thankful.

 

Salk generously gave his valuable discovery to the world as a free gift. Those days of caring, compassionate, intelligent research scientists, drug manufactures and medical professionals now seems to be gone forever in our commercialized selfish world of “nothing-matters-but-profit medicine.”

 

Corporations have a legal fiduciary responsibility to stockholders to maximize return on investment. It now costs roughly $800 million dollars to get FDA approval to distribute a new drug. If a corporate executive tried to do what Jonas Salk generously did, the government and stockholders would have him censured or thrown in jail! It would be a major mistake for any medical research scientist to work on trying to prevent or cure any disease, since this would be extremely unprofitable. The goal is now to develop extremely expensive patent medicines that people will be forced to take for the rest of their lives. DO NOT EXPECT ANY PROFIT-MOTIVED CORPORATION TO EVER DO ANYTHING TO PREVENT OR CURE ILLNESS, ESPECIALLY UNNECESSARY RAPID AGING.

 

Today’s medical doctors openly report that they accidentally kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, due to their endless “iatrogenic” errors. Their peers would not call it malpractice, since everyone in mainstream medicine has agreed to make the same set of pervasive mistakes - Over 100,000 Americans are killed every year by “properly prescribed and administered” prescription drugs. Millions more are injured but do not die immediately. This is over and above the death and injury cause by improperly prescribed and administered drugs, surgery and unnecessary high-risk medical procedures like chemotherapy and radiation treatments, which are guaranteed to kill healthy cells and introduce new cancer into a suffering cancer patient. How insane is the world we now live in.

 

American iatrogenic (doctor-caused death or illness) results in astronomical increases in modern malpractice insurance. This makes the cost of modern, risky, low-quality healthcare spiral upward for everyone, while our people are disable more and die younger than people in nations with superior healthcare that costs far less.

 

Several wise countries Canada, Australia, Denmark, etc.) have made it ILLEGAL to sell products that are commonly available and consumed in large quantities in America (like the deadly trans fats used in American bread products, fried foods, chips, etc.) Consequently, there are now more dollars worth of healthcare in a Detroit automobile than dollars worth of steel! (How very sad.) This is NOT true for the exact same car produced in Canada, which has UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE COVERAGE FOR EVERYONE (an emphasis on education, prevention and a healthier population). In the U.S.A., 45 million people have NO HEALTHCARE INSURANCE, and that number is now rapidly growing by over 1.2 million per year. Canadians live longer and spend less time disabled with disease, than Americans doing the same jobs.

 

The high cost of America’s healthcare (in contrast to healthier Canada, Japan, etc.) has forced General Motors to fire thousands of their employees in recently years. In 2005, GM announced more layoffs of an additional 25,000 people in the near future. It is very likely that the American corporations are going to be forced to spend even less on health insurance (to become more competitive internationally). More than 45 million Americans will have no health insurance, and the health of the average American will continue to decline. The trend is very predictable. The thinking that created these trends is insufficient to reverse them.

 

Europe spends far less on healthcare than the U.S., but unlike the ineffective U.S. FDA, the European Union scientifically studies the relationship between food, food supplements and health. They regulate food supplement providers and wisely require detailed labeling and product warnings that the U.S. FDA totally ignores. Intelligent Europeans understand that disease prevention through good nutrition is far more valuable than expensive medicine, surgery and risky procedures (like chemotherapy and radiation treatments AFTER avoidable diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, etc. are present).

 

In a foolish attempt to reduce valid malpractice lawsuits, 2005 U.S. legislation limited medical law suit claims. If a prescription drug that was approved by the corrupt U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the direct cause of the painful death of thousands of people, how much is that worth? Should anyone be held accountable? What responsibility should the FDA be held accountable for? What if one of the deaths is you, or the person you love most in the world?

 

The great American medical economic disaster is happening just as the baby boomers are about to retire. We have been conditioned to ignore prevention opportunities and rely on corrupt, commonplace, inept, ineffective medical (mal)practice to reduce our illnesses AFTER we have contracted them (instead of avoiding them as other superior nations do). Almost everyone already knows that Medicare and Social Security are actuarially unsound and headed toward bankruptcy. More intelligent preventive healthcare in other nations has been shown to cost less and be more effective (people are healthier and live longer) than in the U.S.

 

Many companies can no longer afford to provide their retirees with lifetime health care coverage, which was common a generation ago. This economic fact is true, even if we were not in a severe economic downturn, where pension plans have also gone bankrupt and corporate corruption and greedy gross mismanagement are rampant. What a huge negative change we have undergone in the last half of a century, since Salk represented everything that was good about the medical profession and our grandparents cared deeply about the world they were leaving their offspring.

 

America may be one of the most “successful” nations in the history of this world (by some monetary standards), but we are also one of the few industrial nations that cannot find it in our hearts to provide even minimal healthcare benefits for everyone. The thinking which created today’s problems is insufficient to solve them. We clearly need preventative medicine and alternative integrated approaches to lifestyle behavior patterns that have been proven to stop or reduce many forms of unnecessary premature aging. Anything less will continue to produce an economic and healthcare disaster, when the baby boomers begin to retire next decade.

 

Please forgive me if I sound a bit cynical, but I think it puts me in a category described by George Bernard Shaw:

 

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

 

The POO Game

 

I tried to raise my children, as my research scientist father raised me: Live in the moment; pay attention to the details of the world around you; try to understand cause and effect; when you discover that your conceptual models are flawed, strive to learn more and correct your flawed decision-making thought processes. Whenever were traveled across town or around the world, we played the “POO Game.”

 

In an attempt to expand their Powers Of Observation (POO), I’d ask them about things we had just seen, often after they were no longer visible. I asked them about how these things related to their previous knowledge, and how they could apply new information tomorrow.

 

I often complemented them on Good POO, especially when they observed something interesting that I had missed. This taught me about their curiosity, which I then encouraged and built upon. Sometimes, I would tell them “Good POO” and someone nearby would look at us strangely – This always made them laugh about our inside knowledge of the fun POO game.

 

It is sad that most parents and teachers have poopy POO, and so do their children and students. They get up today and do the same things they did yesterday, futilely hoping that things will get better tomorrow, but they can’t, don’t and won’t.

 

Our worst American classrooms encourage poopy POO. Students are forced to conform to the epidemic plague of mindless mediocrity. They must sedentarily wait to be spoon fed, like little baby birds waiting for smelly old worms, rather than paying attention to the real-world principles of life all around them.

 

America needs many more rational skeptics, intelligent cynics, and curious critical thinkers, who pursue high POO and the long-term laws of cause and effect around them. The very few with good POO learn to understand so many important things that are not taught in obsolete schools, and that the irrational mindless mediocre majority will never become aware of.

 

Headaches Are Often A Sign Of Unnecessary, Avoidable, Premature Aging

 

Ask a modern mediocre American who lives in front of commercial television: “What should you do when you get a headache?” The answer is almost always “take a pill” (where “pill” is based on something that they or their mother saw on television recently or long ago).

 

This misinformed “poor POO” pervasive practice, (which most people do blindly without even thinking), is like irrationally removing the battery from a noisy smoke detector, rather than investigating and correcting the source of the smoke or fire.

 

Over-the-counter anti-inflammatory drugs like common aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen and naproxen all thin the blood, effect platelets, and are therefore statistically linked to a higher risk of brain stroke and various forms of internal bleeding (including death from peptic ulcers).

 

The more you take, the higher your risk of devastating catastrophic permanent brain damage, neuropathy, ulcers, etc., which also increases significantly with age. Stroke is among the most significant killers of overstressed, prematurely-aging Americans. Most painkillers increase its risk.

 

Acute and chronic inflammation is directly link to most diseases and unpleasant pain. 90% of Americans regularly consume some form of caffeine, which increases inflammation.

 

Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs (NSAID painkillers) are typically “COX-2 enzyme inhibitors.” NSAIDs include the above OTCs and many prescription drugs like VIOXX (one of the most widely prescribed drugs before it was withdrawn 9/2004), CELEBREX and BEXTRA. One of the problems is that they also inhibit COX-1 enzyme in varying degrees. This directly causes internal bleeding (in the brain, digestive system, and other organs), ischemic neuropathy (large or small incremental nerve death –intellectual, sensory and control function loss) and painful slow death by peptic ulcers, etc.

 

According to the scientific studies that followed the removal of VIOXX, MOST painkillers increase the risk of heart attack – some by up to 71%!

 

In April 2005, the U.S. FDA issued new label warnings for all prescription and over the counter anti-inflammatory painkillers. Prescription painkillers now must carry "black box" alerts warning of heart disease and stroke risk (which most consumers sadly ignore). Over-the-counter brands (which are usually taken at lower doses and for a shorter amount of time) were forced to include more information about the risk that they impose. The FDA recommends checking with your doctor if you take over-the-counter painkillers for more than 10 days.

 

Popular Painkillers With the Highest Risk

Indomethacin (Indocin) and sulindac (Clinoril) (traditional NSAIDs) had the highest risk in the new study. Indomethacin increased heart attack risk by 71% and sulindac by 41%. Mobic raised the risk of heart attack by 37%, while the recently pulled Cox-2 drug Vioxx increased risk by 32%. In a study published in the British Medical Journal, June 2005, commonly used and abused ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin and many others) was associated with a 24% higher risk of heart attack.

 

Bextra was recently removed from the market during the FDA's sweeping review of anti-inflammatory drugs. Bextra has been associated with a potentially fatal skin disease called Stevens-Johnson syndrome.

 

Heath risks increase significantly with escalating doses of all the NSAIDs. The higher the dose, the greater the risk, the studies have all showed.

 

Although encouraged heavily by profit-motivated commercial advertisements that ignore well-documented public health issues, habitually popping legal painkillers is an extremely DUMB thing to do.

 

It is interesting to note that painkillers often INCREASE long-term chronic pain in a variety of different ways. Not only do painkillers increase the risk of deadly diseases, they also do NOT reduce long-term pain! Mindless consumers with poor powers of observation are. hypnotized by misleading commercials. They respond to their increased level of pain (caused by pain amplifiers like caffeine, other stimulants and previous use of painkillers) by increasing the dangerous dosage of risky painkillers, which increase their pain even more in a cascading cycle of ever-increasing discomfort. This is a downhill snowball cause-and-effect of continually making things much worse until it eventually triggers sever personality changes and ultimately results in premature death (common in most Americans).

 

All NSAID / COX-2 inhibitors statistically increase the risk of HEART FAILURE and BRAIN STROKE. This risk increases with dosage and duration of taking common-but-dangerous painkillers. Should you take them every time you feel a pain?

 

The irrational mediocre majority of TV watchers, caffeine consumers and pill poppers (with limited critical thinking skills and weak powers of observation) incorrectly think that they should continue their long-term bad habits. They indiscriminately buy large bottles of painkillers, and keep them handy. Many foolishly take one or more per day, which increases their rate of aging and the risk of premature painful death. It should be a felony crime for parents to teach these bad lifestyle habits to their children!

 

There are many reasons for headaches and body aches, including: lifestyle-induced premature aging, improper mental response to physical and mental stress, vascular inflammation, hangover, stimulants (neural irritants and pain amplifiers like caffeine, ephedrine / ephedra, illegal drugs, etc.), unnatural patented prescription drugs, infections, poor nutrition, toxins, environmental pollution, pesticides, preservatives, artificial food flavorings, vascular problems, high blood pressure, excessive anaerobic exercise, uncorrected orthopedic (shoes) and ergonomic problems (chairs, work center habits), improper use of risky food supplements (poor / misinformed self-medication), conflicts between multiple drugs, drugs and foods (like grapefruit), etc.

 

Inflammation and Accelerated Aging

 

Commercials teach mediocre people with poopy POO and limited critical thinking skills that pain is linked to inflammation and anti-inflammatory drugs (OTC and prescription) are wonderful painkillers (which just happen to be very profitable for the misinformation advertisers who degrade public health).

 

Inflammation may be “acute” (a temporary injury that will heal if given the chance) or long-term “chronic”, whose trigger source needs to be identified and corrected. In either case, masking the problem with painkillers and leaving the source in place is the wrong thing to do.

 

Inflammation is triggered (initiated) by disease or injury to cells, tissues and organs, such as exposure to toxins, smoke, alcohol, radiation, pesticides, chemicals, allergens, dander, dust, dust mites, insects, stings, bites, pollen, mold, fungi, detrimental bacteria, viruses, parasites, carcinogens, stimulants (neural irritants and pain amplifiers like caffeine, ephedrine / ephedra, etc.), a fall, blow or concussion, cuts and scrapes, surgery (necessary or elective/cosmetic), food allergies, too much or too little of critical enzymes and vitamins, genetic mutations, drugs (legal and illegal, prescription and OTC), drug interactions with other drugs or certain foods (like grapefruit, etc.), excess body fat / obesity, and many other subtle or significant primary or secondary sources that may be difficult to understand.

 

In response to trigger event(s), the immune system releases white blood cells (macrophages) that concentrate in the injured area. Macrophages and “histamine” regulate the production of pro-inflammatory “cytokines”, chemical messengers that attack and clean up cells in the affected area.

 

Inflammation in a correctly controlled environment is an important part of the healing process. If you scrape your arm, the reddening of the skin around the injury is an example of the “histamine response.” It increases red and white blood cell flow to the injury and thus accelerates the healing, infection-fighting, and tissue-regrowth processes.

 

Another common example of the histamine response is the swelling of nasal passages in response to allergens. The body is trying to accelerate healing of sensitive mucous membranes, but excess inflammation creates the unpleasant “stuffy” congestion feeling.

 

OTC “antihistamines” attempt to reduce stuffy inflammation (in nasal passages, etc.), but antihistamines can slow the healing process and dry out mucous membranes. This can make nasal tissues crack and allow air born allergens, bacteria and toxins to directly enter the blood stream, triggering more disease, infection and inflammation.

 

If the inflammatory trigger continues (like daily smoking, environmental pollution, excess body fat, etc.), “cytokine” production rises, sending more and more signals for white blood cells to attack the trigger. This excessive, preventable, immune system response will eventually damage otherwise healthy cells, tissues and organs.

 

Chronic cellular damage, caused by long-term exposure to inflammatory triggers, will overwhelm the immune system and produce DNA mutations that result in viable, uncontrolled, self-reproducing cancer cells. In some cases, especially in those of advanced biological age or compromised immune systems, the body loses its ability to stop the cytokine production and “down-regulate” the chronic inflammation. Accelerated aging, heart attacks, vascular failures, brain strokes, dementia, diabetes, various forms of cancer and many other deadly diseases are the direct result of unrestrained inflammation, which is often combined with increased pain and the bad habit of taking OTC or prescription anti-inflammatory medications (to merely mask the inflammation triggers caused by poor lifestyle choices, without resolving the underlying source of the avoidable inflammation).

 

Inflammation is the result of trigger event causes (many of which are preventable), but inflammation also CAUSES many diseases throughout the body. Inflammation is BOTH a cause and an effect of illness.

 

Inflammation causes pain. This pain reflects cellular, tissue and organ damage that can eventually result in premature death. Here is one example: Suppose that taking a painkiller (or neurotoxic alcohol, drugs, or an excitotoxin like aspartame or MSG) weakens micro capillaries and there is a tiny hemorrhage that cuts off the blood supply to one-or-more neurons. Most people would not immediately notice such an isolated event, except for the fact that it triggers a cascading set of more serious reactions.

 

As one-or-more neurons begin to die, there is a histamine response that attempts to repair the damage by increasing blood flow to the starving cells. This causes inflammation. In tiny bundles of compacted nerves (in the brain, eyes, and throughout the body), inflammation caused by the death of one nerve, pinches off the blood supply to adjacent nerves in the same bundle.

 

When the small initial inflammatory trigger source causes the death of large numbers of neurons, people begin to notice a wide variety of central nervous system symptoms, such as: increased pain, headaches, blind spots, loss of memory, loss of sensation, loss of motor control, shaking, etc. If the person merely masks the inflammation trigger with a risky anti-inflammatory painkiller, and the original inflammation trigger is not removed, the problem will get progressively worse over time. Most individuals and medical doctors are extremely short sighted and only deal with symptoms, rather than the underlying causes of progressive disease, which are harder to understand.

 

Masking the pain with anti-inflammatory painkillers not only eliminates the immediate motivation to study and deal with the inflammation trigger (often due to poor lifestyle choices like smoking, drinking, caffeine, or taking painkillers), but the anti-inflammation drugs themselves CAUSE unnecessary heart disease, internal bleeding, etc. that accelerates aging, INCREASES inflammation and the risk of drug-induced premature death. (This foolish concept is similar to the common medical malpractice of prescribing radiation treatments and chemotherapy, (which directly CAUSE DNA MUTATION CANCER, for people who already have a serious case of cancer.)

 

C-Reactive Protein (CRP) – Extremely Valuable Inflammation Quantification – Measuring Lifestyle Improvements and Treatment Effectiveness

 

The relatively new CRP blood test is a measurement of inflammation, which has been found to be a fairly accurate predictor of many deadly diseases like heart attack, diabetes, accelerated aging, and many other common severe ailments.

 

In quick summary, a good diet rich in certain high-antioxidant fruits and vegetables can significant reduce CRP in only a few weeks. Conversely, medical research scientists can now use CRP to help quantify the life-threatening impact of poor lifestyle choices like: smoking, drinking, caffeine, insufficient exercise, excess body fat, not enough sleep, violence, negative thought processes, etc.

 

If a bad lifestyle choice is made, inflammation increases and so does measurable CRP. Improve your lifestyle (nutrition, exercise and mental activity) and your CRP will be reduced – indicating lowered risk for many diseases that are directly caused or aggravated by inflammation.

 

Your CRP number is a statistically significant measure of your rate of aging and risk factors for many deadly diseases. Repetitive CRP testing over time allows research scientists to precisely demonstrate, compare and rank the most valuable ways to reduce these measurable inflammation risk factors. They can also quantify the negative impact of elective procedures like cosmetic surgery, and other poorly studied potentially-dangerous inflammation-causing lifestyle choices.

 

Briefly consider the inflammation associated with painful arthritis. This disease has many different causes and treatment options. The dumbest option is anti-inflammatory painkillers (like VIOXX, NSAIDS, etc.), which temporarily mask the problem, and do nothing to reduce the source of the pain. For many people with certain types of arthritis, there are modern food supplements like glucosamine or hyaluronic acid for individuals who are allergic to shellfish. Such products hydrate the joints and encourage the growth of new cartilage. In many cases, this can completely eliminate arthritic joint inflammation and the need for risky, invasive joint replacement. These inexpensive nutrition solutions can be (for many people) far superior to the standard prescriptions for disease-causing anti-inflammation drugs like Vioxx, Celebrex, Bextra and OTC NSAIDS, which are widely advertised in medical journals and on television, while inexpensive, less profitable glucosamine and hyaluronic acid are simply not understood or recommended by most of the doctors who injure their patients with dangerous high-profit prescription painkillers. In fact, the corrupt U.S. FDA will not even allow the providers of glucosamine and hyaluronic acid to advertise the potential specific benefits of their food supplements, since they are not classified as FDA-regulated “drugs.”

 

The easy-to-administer CRP blood test can precisely measure and document the many benefits of improved nutrition. Long-term consumption of anti-inflammatory drugs can be a serious health risk. The CRP test demonstrates that lifestyle choices are much more effective at reducing inflammation and the related pain and secondary injury. The CRP test does not account for anti-inflammatory drugs, or measure the health risks that such drugs add to your life.

 

CRP has recently been found to be even more important to monitor than other older, less-effective blood tests like serum cholesterol, etc.

 

The CRP test is relatively expensive. Misinformed lazy medical doctors who have not kept up with modern literature about CRP and the many anti-aging scientific advances are not using CRP enough. They treat only symptoms and fail to investigate lifestyle-related, preventable disease causes.

 

If you feel that you are at risk for the many diseases that chronic inflammation is related to, discuss adding a CRP test to your annual physical examination. Find a licensed physician who will work with you to find causes, rather than treat only your symptoms.

 

If your CRP number is more than 1, improve your lifestyle and then have your CRP checked more frequently, until you see it drop below 1. Remember, your medical doctor has almost no formal training in non-prescription lifestyle improvements, so you will have to look elsewhere for authoritative information. CRP is an excellent way to receive precise, scientific, widely-recognized feedback about improvements to your diet, exercise and mental aerobics.

 

If you are one of the 45+ million Americans without health insurance, you can become a member of organizations like the Life Extension Foundation and receive significant price reductions on a variety of laboratory tests, including CRP, homocysteine and other comprehensive blood tests. You should budget at least $250 per year for comprehensive blood tests – more if you are found to have any values that are out of range.

 

Indiscriminately taking some food supplements (like iron) or eating foods that are artificially fortified with them (without knowing that you are already too high or too low) can kill you. Regular laboratory blood testing is critical, but be very careful about doctors’ subsequent recommendations to mask symptoms, rather than identifying and correcting the underlying source of your health problems and pain. Investigate the opinion of others and alternative solutions and treatments before adding the risk of dangerous drugs or unnecessary surgery. Natural disease prevention is a much better solution than things like joint replacement, chemotherapy, radiation, painkillers, etc.

 

A Few Issues About Migraine Headaches

 

The many manifestations of migraine can vary dramatically from one patient to another, and even within the same patient at different times. During a migraine pain attack, changes in brain activity (negative mental images and stress-related thought processes) produce inflamed blood vessels and nerves around the brain. Inflammation accelerates aging. High blood sugar (increasingly prevalent among overweight Americans) increases inflammation-related pain, disease and premature aging processes. Inflamed nerves can fire erratically. Inflamed nerves can pinch off the blood supply to adjacent nerves, causing progressive, irreversible, nerve bundle death. In extreme cases nerve inflammation can result in a variety of sensory illusions, such as hallucinations, unusual voices, hypersensitivity to light, sounds, temperature, touch, etc. and radical thoughts, fears, depression or muscle contractions. Stimulants (neural irritants and pain amplifiers like caffeine, etc.), increase nerve sensitivity and migraine pain.

 

High stress and mental anguish can trigger severe migraine headaches. When blood vessels tighten (especially the sides of the neck below the ear lobes), blood pressure increases. The heart can pump blood to the throbbing brain, but tight neck muscles and vascular inflammation prevent some of the stale blood from returning to the heart and lungs to receive a fresh supply of oxygen. This lack of oxygen increases the inflammation response and further aggravates the migraine pain / inflammation spasm cycle.

 

Many people can be trained in calming “mental imaging relaxation techniques” (such as prayer, relaxing meditation, self hypnosis, positive mental imaging, etc.). These techniques can often effectively interrupt the migraine pain / stress / inflammation cycle in only a few minutes.

 

We all need to learn how to cope, relax and let things go that are beyond our control. Most stress is self-generated. Our mental images release “fight or flight” adrenaline, which accelerates our heart rate and stimulates sensory perception, including our throbbing pain. It is not the situation or the stimulus that creates the stressIt is the mental image (good or bad) that we associate with it that triggers either comfort or stress, which aggravates inflamed blood vessels and pain-producing nerves. In modern introductory psychology courses, this is called Stimulus / Imagery / Response (SIR). Improving lifestyle and proper SIR mental conditioning can significantly reduce migraine pain.

 

It is not what other people do to us, or the situations that we find ourselves in, but rather, the mental image that we link to our current situation is what results in unhealthy levels of stress. Happiness Is A Learned Mental Attitude, Not A Situation.

 

Migraine headaches are common among children, as well as adults. Young and middle-aged women are especially susceptible. People with migraine headaches tend to be chronically tense. Ironically, sometimes the migraine pain greatly increases when they finally relax. This type of migraine can happen on Friday afternoon, when the person is able to relax after a week at work or school. In this case, relaxation of blood vessels causes them to expand and push against sensitive inflamed nerves. One shortsighted symptomatic prescription drug approach is the use of vasoconstrictors, without dealing with the source of the stress.

 

Very few stressed out medical doctors take the time to understand SIR mental imaging techniques or to teach relaxation exercises to their patients who experience self-generated unnecessary stress-related pain. Writing a risky (neurotoxic) painkiller prescription is much faster (and thus more profitable). AND, pharmaceutical salespeople have long provided perks and incentives for doctors to prescribe their most-expensive recently patented unnatural drugs.

 

Most general practice medical doctors, and even specialized neurologists, are unfamiliar with other ways to treat migraine pain and the cascading complications. Among the most successful are self-control strategies using biofeedback to quantitatively measure and give the patient guidance about relaxation techniques..

 

Biofeedback simply means giving patients information about their physiological states and allowing them to learn how to control them. At one level, biofeedback is a way to gain conscious control over one's physiology: mind over matter. But, in a deeper sense, biofeedback is also a way to tune into one's body's wisdom, correct invalid mental images, and allow the brain to self-regulate. This mind-body unity is achieved when the conscious mind is in a state of focused relaxation - quiet but highly alert. It is like the state of "flow" that successful athletes sometimes feel when they are at their peak performance.

 

A New York psychologist, Dr. Jeff Carmen, has specialized in treating migraines with biofeedback for many years. He began with a group of traditional procedures that have proven successful in many research studies. These are ways of learning consciously to relax, to turn off the "fight-or-flight" side of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the so-called "sympathetic" branch. This allows the relaxed "parasympathetic" arm of the ANS to become dominant. Sympathetic over arousal has a number of effects: cold hands, fast heart rate, fast shallow breathing, muscle tension, and sweat glandular over activity.

 

Traditional biofeedback training to reduce migraine pain involves learning the correct mental images required to warm the hands, reduce sweating, slow down breathing, and lower muscle tension (especially in the neck).

 

There are separate instruments that measure each of these, and information can be presented to the client on a computer screen. By watching the display, one can learn to control these physiological processes by simple trial and error mental image refinement. In addition to biofeedback in the office, home practice is essential. Two twenty-minute periods of daily practice, and numerous short periods of a few seconds each are essential, as one slowly learns to stop generating unnecessary, undesirable levels of self-induced unproductive mental stress.

 

After years of experience with traditional biofeedback methods, Dr. Carmen invented a new procedure, which is faster to learn and offers greater migraine control. It involves learning to control the temperature, (and hence the blood flow and metabolism), of the prefrontal areas of the brain, the location of the so-called "executive" functions of self-control, memory, and attention, and the highest concentration of “feel good” endorphin receptors. A sensor is placed on the forehead that looks deeply into the brain by measuring far infrared temperature. Infrared radiation passes directly through the skull and can be seen by the optical sensor. The new sensor is similar to the new heat-imaging techniques police use to look through the walls of houses in search of illegal drug grow lights. Most people are able to learn to control their temperature within a very few sessions. The results have been striking: about 80-90% of clients report significant improvement in migraine frequency or intensity, and over half have no migraines at all following the treatment, which involves no medications, just mental conditioning.

 

Dr. Carmen has presented his results at the Society for Neuronal Regulation. Other physicians and health practitioners are now using his system with good results. The best news is that in most cases brain temperature biofeedback is quite fast, often giving relief from headaches in as little as 2-5 sessions. The older processes of finger temperature biofeedback, breathing, etc. have been around for much longer and are understood by more biofeedback specialists. In all forms of biofeedback training, a similar mental attitude is important.

 

Thousands of years before the work by Dr. Carmen, or the use of the term “biofeedback,” countless others discovered similar mind / body mental image control processes. The ancient Greek term “hupnos”. from which we derive the word hypnosis, was used hundreds of years before Jesus. The word appears 5 times in the Greek New Testament. Jesus used and taught hupnos to His disciples. It is also linked to miraculous observations.

 

If you have migraine pain, or medical complications caused by an inability to control or cope with stressful situations, you CAN learn how to change your mental images, lower your frontal lobe brain temperature, warm your hands, reduce sweating, slow down your breathing, and lower muscle tension that aggravates many painful conditions. You can do this by visiting a licensed biofeedback neuronal regulation specialist, certain psychologists, some religious counselors, or simply by taking control of your negative mental images and replacing them with tranquil, positive, happy, upbeat images of the way things ought to be. In this case, reality clearly does not matter – Perception is far more important than reality in combating chronic migraine pain and reducing many of the mind / body factors that control the immune system and processes of unnecessary premature aging.

 

One important message from Laughter and Humor Therapy in  Psychoneuroimmunology - In the 1960s, Norman Cousin used funny movies and laughter to help cure his otherwise hopeless debilitating disease. He later wrote a book on "Laughter Therapy" that promoted this method. Today, the American Cancer Society references it as potentially beneficial, without scientific proof. Having experienced its many benefits myself, I recommend that participating in humorous situations is even more beneficial than passively watching television situation comedies.

 

Laughing out loud increases healthy respiration (a problem for many ill people). Tightening the upper cheek muscles with a big smile opens sinus passages. The creative frontal lobe of our brain is fed by blood vessels that flow past the nasal sinus cavities. The brain is a 7/24 hotbed of metabolic activity. It appreciates having its blood supply cooled. When the brain gets too hot, our stress level increases and we become grumpy, irritable and more sensitive to pain. Laughter releases calming endorphins (endogenous opioids). Increasing cool blood flow to the frontal lobe, that is loaded with endorphins can reduce stress-related pain and accelerate the healing process. If we simply smile and laugh when we are depressed, we will quickly become happier, healthier individuals.

 

Our hands can be warmed by merely petting a warm fuzzy animal (real or even a fake-fur stuffed toy). Holding hands with a smiling dance partner will also raise hand temperature, release endorphins, and provide many other mental, musculoskeletal and cardio vascular benefits.

 

Stressed neck muscles (which can restrict the flow of stale blood from the brain back to the heart and lungs) can be relaxed with a simple mental image of being in a warm relaxing happy place. I have a dominant personal sensory image of a beach in Florida with the sun shining on my neck, the blue waves rolling in and the rustle of palm fronds in a fresh, gentle, ocean breeze. I also have one of being suspended effortlessly in three dimensions while scuba diving in warm water on “Rainbow Reef.” By taking a deep breath I can rise or go deeper while enjoying the curious reef life forms.

 

Your autonomic nervous system responds more effectively, if your imaginary happy place has many vivid imaginary sensory inputs: color, motion, sounds, smells, etc. I also use such images to help me quickly fall asleep at night and dream pleasant dreams without disturbing nightmares. People who experience premature aging due to unproductive sleep caused by unpleasant night measures can use biofeedback techniques in a professional sleep laboratory, to learn “lucid dreaming,” which teaches you to recognize a nightmare while it is happening, and redirect it to your happy place image.

 

Mental conditioning can (without any drugs) help you effectively use productive REM sleep (rapid eye movement dreaming) to consolidate your short-term daily memories with your long-term stereotypes and discover creative alternatives to problems that you encounter during the day. My rainbow reef image (above) has matured on its own over time into a fantasy of Peter-Pan-like flight, that allows me to rise above the day’s details during my dreams and see a broader view of an otherwise complex situation context. During a stressful day, we rely heavily on logical, business-as-usual thinking. Productive REM sleep is irrational and fanciful creative thinking. I usually wake up refreshed and happy, ready to deal with issues that now seem much less stressful than they were the day before. Headaches are extremely rare for me, and I am convinced that this reduces my personal rate of aging.

 

If you frequently come home with a headache, you need some mental reconditioning. Unnecessarily elevated levels of stress almost always impair cognitive processes and increase sensitivity to pain.. Adrenaline from the sympathetic nervous system shuts down higher-level intellectual problem-solving creative capacity and enhances glucose metabolism in the muscles to help you run faster or fight harder. This was the correct thing to do when hungry bears chased our ancestors, but it is NOT what you need in today’s high-pressure office politics.

 

To help reduce high-pressure deadline stress, try to complete large jobs in small increments throughout a given time period instead of all at once with an impossible deadline. This is an issue of high-productivity job-related time management skills.

 

Long hours of sitting with a fixed focal length in front of a computer can cause severe eyestrain headaches, If this ever happens, you probably need glasses, specially design to make your eyes completely relax at the precise distance of your computer display. Carefully measure the distance from your eyes to your computer display when you are in the proper ergonomic position (neck-straight – nose perpendicular to shoulders, back vertical and supported, wrist at or below the elbow, knee at or above hip and toes elevated/supported – foot perpendicular to leg). Bring the eye-to-display measurement with you when you have your next refractive eye exam.

 

High blood sugar makes the refractive index of your eye unstable and you will frequently need to change your eyeglass prescription. Get your blood sugar under control and stable before you get new glasses. If you still get eyestrain headaches, you are still doing something wrong. Don’t give up until you get it right. Avoid popping pain pills – the problem will only get much worse.

 

Pain in your head is trying to tell you not to do what you did that caused it, but the irrational majority would rather temporarily mask their pain, rather than alter their unhealthy lifestyle (nutrition, exercise, mental activities, work-and-play habits, etc.) that caused the pain in the first place. It is generally easier for you to pop a pill than to investigate what caused the problem, regardless of the fact that the pill may cumulatively increase your risk of ultimate catastrophic brain devastation or other serious potential side effects (some of which include sudden death).

 

OBVIOUSLY IRRATIONAL THINKING: Perhaps you know that your pain is a common hangover, just pop two pills and then make plans to go drinking with your friends again soon. (GAK!) Alcohol is undoubtedly neurotoxic – it kills nerves all over your body. The hangover is merely the first proof that this is irrefutably true. Ultimately regular alcohol consumption  WILL lead to untimely death (breast cancer, etc.), or extremely unpleasant alcohol-related dementia (if you live long enough).

 

People rapidly build resistance to pain killers. As the pain gets worse and over-the-counter drugs become ineffective, it is easier for your doctor to prescribe a more-dangerous painkiller, rather than to study your lifestyle and then try to convince you to change your bad habits, so they usually don’t even try.

 

MORE IRRATIONAL THINKING: Scribble a quick prescription, and move on to temporarily reduce the next patient’s pain, while ignoring cause-and-effect avoidable lifestyle choices. (Double GAK!)

 

Consider this: If premature aging could be reduced and normal bodily function reestablished, then people would not only live longer and be happier, but they would also have a higher quality of productive life AND eliminate their recurring pain problems. BUT, cured patients would spend much less on drugs and medical doctors, so American corrupt medical practice deals mostly with temporary symptom relief, rather than intelligent disease prevention.

 

The modern profit-driven medical profession clearly has a negative economic incentive to develop a long-term cure for your problems, rather than to make you dependant on their long-term, high-risk, money-making medical care. Likewise, they have no monetary reason to do the research to develop a one-time inexpensive vaccine, or to teach you how to improve your lifestyle to prevent or delay the pain of many age-related diseases.

 

Let’s take a more detailed look at other things that are clinically linked to premature aging, associated with severe migraine pain.

 

Stimulants (like those in caffeine, ephedrine / ephedra, etc.) are actually neural irritants and pain amplifiers. Every living nerve in our body is constantly “firing,” whether we are awake or asleep. You can see these pulses clearly on electrocardiograms and brain electrical activity monitors. Many neurons normally fire roughly ten times per second. They are constantly saying “I’m alive – Keep listening.” When a nerve dies, the nerves that were attached to it will in a matter of seconds start looking for other nerves to listen to. (In advanced neurodegenerative disease, reduce numbers of neurons to talk with results in loss of memory, cognitive capacity, motor control, etc.)

 

When a sensory nerve is stimulated (sight, sound, smell, touch, temperature, etc.) or a chain of thought process / memory nerves or communication nerves are activated, they fire more frequently than normal. Cut yourself and many nerves will fire rapidly and tell you in a fraction of a second to do something quickly.

 

Stimulants irritate nerves throughout your body, which makes you more alert, since you are constantly experiencing elevated levels of pain from everywhere. Many adults become totally addicted to stimulants and cannot function without their unhealthy morning cup of coffee, but this pervasive lifestyle error is clearly accelerating premature aging of your entire central nervous system.

 

By clinical definition, stimulants make you more “irritable.” Many medical doctors are extremely addicted to caffeine (some to stronger stimulants). They will tell you that “Coffee is not so bad – it is the only way I made it through my 36 hours shifts as an intern in the ER.” Then, they will prescribe a neurotoxic pill to kill your pain, which is being made even worse by the stimulants you ingest every day.

 

Simple lesson: If you are in pain, STOP TAKING PAIN AMPLIFIERS! Stimulants and sugar unnecessarily accelerate the aging of your entire central nervous system and cause other premature aging problems like diminishing the capacity of the immune system.

 

Among the worst pervasive neural stimulants are “excitotoxins”, such as monosodium glutamate (MSG) and aspartame (Nutrasweet®, Equal®, etc.). Excitotoxins don’t stop working once they get past your tongue – they overexcite nerves throughout your body and burn them out like flipping a light switch on and off rapidly (excito-toxin). They release minute amounts of neurotoxic methanol, which is well known to cause nerve death, blindness, and damages micro-capillary blood vessel walls causing inflammation, migraine headaches, etc. (See Excitotoxins: The Taste That Kills)

 

Excitotoxin ingestion can be greatly reduced by knowing what to look for, reading ingredient labels, and asking restaurant owners if they use MSG or aspartame. Most modern diet foods and diet drinks contain neurotoxic aspartame.

 

There seem to be no credible studies that anyone has lost weight by consuming aspartame. In fact, it is so strong that they become addicted and often crave more sugar. There are however clinical studies that demonstrate that many people who STOP taking aspartame begin to lose weight!

 

Here are a few of the common dangerous foods that contain MSG: Accent seasoning, bacon bits, baking mixes, bouillon cubes, bread stuffing, breaded foods, canned meats, cheese dips, clam chowder, corn chips, croutons, dry roasted nuts, frozen dinners, frozen pizza, gelatins, Oriental foods, pot pies, potato chips, processed meats, relishes, salad dressings, salt substitutes, seasonings, soups and soy sauce.

 

Some people who suffer from frequent migraine pain are particularly sensitive to foods that contain “tyramine,” such as aged moldy cheeses; and preserved meats with nitrates and nitrites that can trigger migraine headaches. Here are a few examples of common foods with nitrates: bacon, beef jerky, bratwurst, corn dogs, corned beef, ham, hot dogs, liverwurst, lunch meats, pastrami, pork and beans, salami, sausage, smoked fish, Spam (the kind that you eat) and most turkey lunch meats.

 

Too much or too little sleep can trigger a migraine pain attack. Roughly 7.5 to 8 hours is appropriate, which allows time to fall asleep and then 5 or 6 productive uninterrupted 75 minute sleep cycles (plus or minus). The REM (rapid eye movement) sleep that occurs when we fall asleep and dream between each sleep cycle is essential to mental heath and long term memory consolidation. A repetitive lifestyle pattern of too little sleep, followed by strong morning coffee, will definitely accelerate aging. If you suspect that too much or too little sleep is a cause of your migraine pain, then adjusting your workload, stress level, and sleep schedule may help.

 

High stress combined with too little, or unproductive, interrupted sleep can increase many migraine irritability risk factors. Frequent middle-of-the-night urination (caused by high blood sugar, prostate problems, bladder infections, etc.) can aggravate this pervasive premature aging problem. Possible solutions include correcting urinary problems and going to bed at the same time each night and waking up at the same time each morning. It may be important to adhere to this schedule, even on weekends and holidays, to prevent migraines. If you cannot manage 8 hours of sleep every night, then be sure that you do it whenever you can. See:

 

Those Who Sleep Only 5 Hours Have 39% More Heart Attacks Than Those Who Sleep 8

 

Sleep Information Links (from Stanford University)

 

Sleep Tips

 

Sleeping with too large or too small of a pillow, where the neck is not straight, can trigger migraine pain and may lead to neck muscle / ligament strains with painful inflammation spasms. The potential problem seems to increase with age. If this happens to you even once, it will leave a strong memory that should motivate you to take corrective action to prevent it in the future. Watching television with your neck propped up can have a similar negative impact. Having one side of your neck very warm and the other side very cold can cause a painful asymmetric neck muscle nerve pinch. Proper neck position ergonomics and manual neck massage can sometimes help avoid or reduce such unnecessary pain.

 

Calcium, magnesium, vitamin D supplements (in combination) just before going to bed can help relax muscles, and they may provide many other health benefits for most aging adults. For some people, taking a low-dose (300 mcg) of natural melatonin improves productive sleep, but avoid the common unnecessarily-high doses of 1 mg to 3mg that are in most over-the-counter melatonin products – too much is not good. In general, the minimal amount that does the job is a superior solution with fewer adverse potential side effects.

 

Many women with severe migraine pain have attacks linked to the stress of their menstrual cycle. Fluctuating estrogen levels are thought to play a role. Menstrual migraines can be more debilitating, difficult to treat, and last longer than other migraines. Migraine also may worsen in early pregnancy, but in later pregnancy, it generally improves. Migraine typically declines in frequency as women age and estrogen levels decline. There is evidence that oral contraceptives or estrogen-replacement therapy can provoke or worsen migraine in some women. Post menopausal hormone replace is linked to other premature aging processes, breast cancer, etc. Hormones are a very delicate balance that changes significantly as we age. Indiscriminate self medication with food supplements that encourage hormonal changes is dangerous to do without adequate monitoring and analysis. Incorrect food supplementation can trigger migraine attacks – Remember: Pain often means “Don’t do that!”

 

If you are have headache pain, don’t just take a pill – try to understand the source and take corrective action to avoid the problem in the future. Every time you have a headache, write it down, and try to think what you did, ate, drank or thought that may have triggered your pain. Then rethink your unhealthy premature aging lifestyle choices. If you lack “will power”, seek a support group or professional behavior modification therapy – it may be well worth the investment, but be careful to not become a dependant personality. Developing discipline and self-control is a valuable character asset that will greatly assist you in the future.

 

See When Pain Killers Make Headaches Worse

 

See ”No Pain No Gain” Is Insane

 

Too Much Isolated Knowledge Specialization
- Not Enough Comprehensive Knowledge Integration

 

One serious modern medical deficit is that very few medical doctors have much exposure to nutrition, integrated medicine or complementary therapies. Patients with serious medical problems should NOT passively accept professional advice that they are "just getting older" or that they "will have to learn to live with it" or that there is "nothing more we can do." If your medical professional says these words to you, and offers nothing more than temporary quick-fix painkillers, then you should proactively study alternative sources of important healthy lifestyle information, since no one human knows everything about everything going on inside of you. We live in a complex society of isolated specialists, with only partial knowledge about most topics.

 

Antiaging, integrated medicine, and complementary medicine currently offer proven alternative therapeutic approaches that are slowly being recognized more by traditional medical doctors, (who have generally only been trained in surgery and unnatural patented prescription medicines). Very few medical doctors have the intellectual capacity or time in their busy schedule to keep up with the latest scientific research in areas that may be of great interest to your personal health and well being.

 

If you have been diagnosed with a serious problem, be careful about paying too much attention to unreliable anecdotal evidence from late night cable TV infomercials and biased individuals who know little about the underlying scientific cause-and-effect. (See Pill Pushing Quacks)

 

Take the time to read everything you can on the subject from reliable sources with diverse opinions, being sure it investigate alternative points of view, based on (often contradictory) clinical trials, laboratory tes, etc. (Do you remember when the tobacco industry funded clinical research that said that there was nothing wrong with smoking?).

 

Better yet, study the risk factors for common age-related diseases like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, hemochromatosis, etc. and learn how to PREVENT them in the first place, or at least delay their onset and reduce the lifetime cumulative damage of preventable premature aging.

 

Two Types Of Factors Influence Individual Aging Rate:

(1) Genetics, and (2) Our Choice of Optional Lifestyle Choices

 

Inherited Genetic Blueprint (the DNA that is in the nucleus of every human cell in our body and brain) accounts for only a portion of the reasons for faster-or-slower individual aging rates, and the premature onset of age-related physical and mental problems. The environ­mental and the lifestyle choices that each of us make every day of our lives account for the majority of the reasons that many people appear to age much faster than others who have similar genetic factors.

 

We do not get to pick our parents, or the life-influencing genetic program that is built into our DNA from the moment of conception, but mature adults have the ability to make extremely critical lifestyle choices about nutrition, exercise, attitude, and the various environments that they decide to live, work and play in.

 

We will introduce basic genetic issues and future hopes, and then discuss how simple lifestyle choices interact with our individual genetic blueprint throughout our entire life, and dramatically influence our rate of aging.

 

Our Hereditary Genetic Blueprint For Life

 

We know scientifically that (almost) all humans inherit 23 chromosomes from our father and 23 from our mother. Rarely, minute DNA mutations occur during gestation that result in a human blueprint with factors that neither of our parents possess. The multi-source (male/female) genetic combination form of human reproduction, plus the possibility of rare random mutations, make all of us what we are today. If a DNA genetic blueprint is “good,” it will result in an individual that is more successful than others in a particular environment (for example, one who is resistant to a common, contagious, life-threatening disease like the Black Plague).

 

Through natural selection, (in animal populations and challenging environments where only a small percentage of the offspring can survive), successful genetics are transferred to future generations, which tend to produce more successful children. But, in human cultures where a high percentage of our children survive, some studies have shown that “less successful” couples, (as measured by level of income, education, etc.), tend to produce more children than many “more-successful” couples (depending on your personal definition of “success”). Recent studies have also shown that better-educated, higher-income, far-sighted individuals tend to pay more attention to living a healthy lifestyle and teaching it to their children. This at least in part helps us understand why the majority of our population suffers from avoidable premature aging problems and diseases.

 

Genetics and Insurance

 

Insurance companies must quantify mortality and morbidity risk factors for life and health insurance. People with higher risk factors for early death and people who cost more to treat should pay higher premiums for their insurance. From a purely monetary perspective, dispassionate insurance company “actuaries” have a strong incentive to carefully study all issues that can be used to quantify risk factors and calculate “fair” (and profitable) insurance premiums.

 

The Human Genome Project progressed much more rapidly than most business (and insurance) companies thought possible. Many international companies and actuarial organization members are now rapidly studying molecular DNA issues that may have a scientific basis for quantifying risk factors. There are also MANY controversial social, political, ethical and legislative issues about what all of this implies for our future.

 

One point is important to observe: Since actuaries have significant funding to study and quantify risk factors (of all types), intelligent humans can study actuarial data to understand how important specific risk factors are in their own life. This valuable information can be used by smart individuals to intellectually prioritize lifestyle decisions, to reduce personal and family risk factors to greatly enhance the length and quality of your own life and those around you that your example will influence.

 

Example: Genetic Risk Factors For Breast Cancer

 

Significant scientific research has taken place in the last decade. Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a chemical found on cell chromosomes that provides the blueprint for life. “Chromosomes” are threadlike structures in every cell nucleus throughout every tissue and organ in every living thing. Human DNA’s double helix structure makes it possible for chromosomes to be replicated during cellular division and replication (mitosis).

 

Chromosomes are composed of multiple “genes” that contain precise instructions for controlling when different types of cells should grow/divide/die and the proteins and enzymes that the genes produce. Some types of genes called “tumor suppressors” slow the process of cellular division and shorten their life.

 

Abnormal DNA mutations can cause normal cells to become cancerous by de-activating the tumor suppressor genes (and other mechanisms). Researchers are investigating “why” and “how” some genes mutate (exposure to carcinogenic toxins, radiation, etc.). DNA mutations in parents can be transferred to their children. This partially explains why some cancers occur more frequently in some families. However, most DNA mutations that cause breast cancer are NOT inherited; they occur during a woman’s life and may be caused by a variety of factors (radiation, alcohol, smoking and other known and unknown environmental and food toxins).

 

Breast cancer genes (BRC1 and BRCA2) are two tumor suppressor genes that help repair damage to DNA and prevents tumor development. In 1994, researchers discovered that women who carry mutations of BRCA1 or BRCA2 are at higher risk of developing both breast and ovarian cancer than women who do not have these genetic mutations. Dr. Sandhya Pruthi, MD, a Breast Health Specialist at the Mayo Clinic, estimates that 20% of women who carry BRCA1 mutations will develop breast cancer by age forty, 51% by age fifty, and 87% by age sixty.

 

There are over 2000 known genetic mutation variations associated with BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Women w