To Vaccinate Or To Not Vaccinate

I don't really have an answer for this question, from my angle yet, but what I want to do is to just look at this issue and see exactly what we are dealing with.

We have people fighting all over the Internet about this topic, if you haven't noticed. But what exactly are we fighting over? Personal rights? Fear of autism in our children in the future? Anger at people who selfishly don't want to vaccinate their children?

I am not an authority on this subject, but have been reading quite a bit lately, just because the articles are in front of me, from both sides of the argument.

I would also like for you to read another person's article on this subject:
http://authenticsimplicity.net/2015/01/5-indisputable-facts-vaccines/

To summarize my thoughts, I do not think this issue is over whether we should vaccinate our children or not, based upon facts. The CDC and FDA have warning about taking the vaccines, but those who give out the vaccines either ignore them or don't know about them.

We should just learn the facts as best as possible, and not attack people who are on the other side of this issue. There are valid reasons why people do not want to vaccinate their children. It helps if we know what these reasons are. (Go to the link above for more information).

Years ago, we were at a church service, and out in the lobby were some children coughing. You could tell they had whooping cough. I remember getting irritated that the mom would not have vaccinated her children. My baby was possibly exposed to whooping cough now.

   Not sure why someone would bring their children with whooping cough into public areas. Fortunately, for their sake, a doctor was there and gave them some medicine. Grateful that my baby didn't catch the sickness!

  I used to see a stereotype of people who didn't vaccinate. They were those families who had home births, and who home schooled. It almost looked like some kind of rebellion to society to vaccinate your children, whenever I saw these people and their families. Maybe they were in some kind of silent contest of who could be the most radical? I didn't know, but back then, I thought that not vaccinating your children went a little bit too far.

   Now that I am older and more informed, I am seeing an alarming trend in society, particularly in America. I see the American Cancer Society who has been working for decades to find a cure for cancer, yet being unsuccessful. Yet, I have also seen people, not related to the medical society, come up with cures for cancer. What happens to these people? Many times, they end up in jail. The FDA doesn't approve of what they were doing. There has been a lot of talk about genetically modifying seeds to make plants resistant to sicknesses and also to make them resistant to the harmful affects of herbicides, like Roundup. Again, the FDA together with Monsanto, are defending their 'right' to genetically modify plants. But what would happen if Monsanto continues to work with genetically modifying plants? What would that lead to? One farmer found out. Apparently, he planted seeds on his farm, but the seeds were tainted with Monsanto's genetically modified seeds and produced the kind that were put out by Monsanto. The farmer claimed that he never planted any Monsanto seeds. He was arrested and went to jail. The fear of what could happen, is that Monsanto could actually take over the whole food industry, and put the local farmer out of business, or create laws that would prohibit people from farming and gardening, altogether. If the government has its way, all food would be processed and owned by corporations like Monsanto, and we would not have a say in the kinds of foods that we want to eat.

   We see commercials advertising all these 'wonder medicines' that can help with the sicknesses we have today. By law, they have to put the disclaimer on them though, which makes it kind of funny. They tell the side effects of taking the drug and the warnings. Many times, one of the side affects is 'death'.

   All these things tie in with each other, and vaccines are included as well. We have the FDA which forbids selling root beer, the way it was originally made. Root beer used to be made from Sassafras root and bark. A study done using mice indicated that drinking root beer made from sassafras could cause liver cancer. Mice were given the equivalent of a human's consumption of 3 gallons a day for a long period of time. First of all, I don't know anyone who is going to drink 3 gallons of root beer every day for months. So now, when we buy root beer from the grocery store, it is made with tons of sugar (which is approved by the FDA) and artificial colors and sweeteners. Did you know that sugar feeds cancer cells? This same group approved of sugar being added to food, even in large amounts, forbids using Sassafras in soda.

   I think we are probably the sickest nation of people in the world. Is there any wonder why? With a McDonald's on every corner and most of our store bought food being filled with sugar and other chemicals which are approved by the FDA, this is no mystery.

   I know of two people who recently got the flu vaccine, and they got really sick afterward. I know of a young woman who almost died from a vaccine when she was going to leave the country and was required to be vaccinated. Recently, we are having a measles epidemic and are being encouraged to have our children vaccinated. There is question of whether or not to penalize those who choose not to vaccinate.

   Why is it that we cannot understand that the best prevention is to use preventive care instead of running to a doctor after we get sick? Vaccines are a type of preventive measure, but again, we choose to take the preventive measures we like, instead of the ones that are best. We would rather get a shot than to give up McDonald's hamburgers or fries. We would rather risk getting a shot that contains harmful chemicals and potential side effects than to give up drinking Coke or Pepsi. It is so much easier to buy a box of scalloped potatoes that are already prepared (but full of preservatives) than it is to buy some potatoes and make scalloped potatoes from scratch.

  The key to being healthy and staying well is to build up our immunity systems. The key to building up our immunities is to get rid of the toxins that cause inflammation and lower our resistance. Are we willing to do that? That is the question. So far, the answers I have seen, for the most part, are 'no'.

   We live in a society that embraces convenience and searches for what makes us happy. We think that shortcuts are always good and that there is little or no effects on our lives, by the things we do to our bodies. There is always a trade-off though. Taking care of our health is hard work, and we as Americans do not like to do 'Hard things'. We like the easy, quick, fun way out of difficulties. If something is hard, or takes a process to accomplish, we avoid it. If something is as simple as 'I like this so I will eat it' then we eat it. But if we have to learn about that thing we are eating, it will be too much work for us, and we just simply, in ignorance, enjoy it. Then, somewhere down the road, we suffer. Go figure.

  I can make a lot of connections for people on this topic, but I would rather just put out the information, and also statements made by the FDA and CDC, as well as real time events that have taken place (see above link). You don't need to be a genius to figure things out. I am not one who believes in a conspiracy theory either (except the one concerning the devil being behind all evil ultimately). I believe there are evil people in key positions making very unwise decisions concerning our health, and the fear of it all is that the choices they make will result in their being enacted as law, when they see those who do not agree with them rising up. We can point fingers all we want to. We can expose all the facts, but ultimately, we are the ones who placed them in office to begin with. And now, we are reaping the consequences of decisions being made today, following an era of an apathetic society when it comes to having a standard of right and wrong.

  It is up to you to make the decision of whether or not to vaccinate your children (or yourselves). I am not going to be angry with people either way. The only thing I ask is that we look at the facts (and, for the sake of space) I did not put anything here concerning the 'facts' and statements made by other authority figures. The link above will bring you to more information on that.

Flavorful Mexican Corn Recipe

Here is a recipe I came up with this morning as my son needs a Mexican side dish recipe for an event he is attending tonight. I will not make this one for my family, as we have a certain family member who finds Mexican food repulsive! You can make this recipe as clean as you want to. You can find organically grown corn, peppers, and onions, and you can use butter that is made from cows who are grass-fed and who have never been treated with growth hormones or antibiotics. But, if you do decide to cook with butter, always remember that butter burns. You can ruin a meal quickly by heating up butter on too high of a heat level. If you are cooking something with oil or butter, if it starts smoking, you have gone past the smoke point and the oil is no longer any good. (I will make this recipe for myself and for others in our household who are find with eating Mexican food.)

Flavorful Mexican Corn

12 oz. corn (If using canned, drain)

¼ cup chopped pepper (I like green or red peppers. Use hot or sweet or a mixture. Just remember, a little bit of hot pepper goes a long way! Be careful when cutting hot peppers up if you use them).

2 TBS. chopped onion

3 TBS. butter or peanut oil

¼ cup grated Cheddar Cheese

Salt and Pepper to taste, if desired

Place butter or oil in large skillet. If using butter, do not turn the stove temperature above medium. Turn skillet on and let butter or oil heat up. Add corn and sauté for about 5 minutes or until corn is heated through. Add chopped pepper and onion and continue to sauté. Turn skillet off when the pepper and onion are cooked through, about 5 to 10 minutes. Place in a bowl and add cheese. Stir until cheese is mixed in. Serves 4. Source: Susan Seifert.

A note on hot peppers: People have burned their fingers while cutting up hot peppers! I took some jalapenos to a slumber party, and a woman was cutting them up. Her finger burned all night long! If you do get a burn from hot peppers, do not use water to extinguish the burn. Use vinegar instead. Water will not take the burn away. Do not touch your face or eyes until you know that all the juice from the pepper is off your hands. 

Alleviating Sore Throat Pain Using Natural Means

With the flu season upon us and all those bad germs surrounding us, what is one to do when she gets a sore throat? Here is a link that gives several natural methods to help ease a sore throat. Even with the best immunities and detox methods we use, it is still possible to get a sore throat. There are natural things to do to relieve the symptoms.

Sore-Throat-Remedies - Alternative Medicine About.com

Interestingly enough, I have been taught to do some of these things. When I was pregnant, I had a sore throat and the doctor told me to use salt water and gargle with it. My mom used to mix honey and lemon together. Sometimes, we ate it straight off the spoon, but we also had it in tea.

Here is a list of the suggestions they put on the page:
*Marshmallow - This is not the marshmallows that you put in your hot cocoa. Marshmallow is actually a plant that has excellent health properties.
* Licorice Root - Another plant (not candy) that helps with sore throats.
* Slippery Elm - Sounds kind of gross. But it is a plant that can be made into cough drops which have been reputed as helpful with sore throats.
* Sage Tea - Oh how I want to grow sage! Make it into a tea to help with sore throats.
* Honey - You can do a lot with honey. Honey also has some antibacterial properties.
* Warm Black Tea - This might be something you make every day anyway!
* A Lemon Drink made from Lemon, Cayenne, and Honey
* Gargle with warm Sea Salt Water

So there you go. Now, off to find a recipe for natural, homemade cough drops, now that I have the ingredients in the house.

Some Ingredient Resources, teas, and natural cough drops:

Does The Average Doctor Know About The Benefits of Vitamins and Supplements?

   I have a couple of doctors who are very much into holistic medical care. They know about supplements and which ones should work for corresponding illnesses. But I wonder if the average medical doctor actually knows the connection between what we eat and our health.

    I have a holistic, medical doctor who prescribes some medicine when needed, but relies on supplements and other means of natural cure. He put me on hormone therapy, but when I went to my gynecologist, he was not happy about that. Hmm. What was I to do now? The gynecologist wanted me off the hormones that my doctor had me on. Should I just go to one doctor instead of going to two different doctors who seem to conflict with each other?

   The concern I have is that the medical doctors I have gone to don't seem to understand about alternative medicine or even the benefits of other means of curing sickness or physical problems. For example, I have been taking melatonin in order to try to find a cure for my insomnia. I wrote down the supplements so my doctor could see whatever I was taking. Without wanting to sound like I am making fun of my doctor, she actually had no idea what melatonin was. She also advised that I don't take the supplements because she was concerned that they could be harming me.

   I am on a medicine to try to help me sleep at night, and I have a feeling, it is a natural medicine, for when I asked the neurologist about possible drug interactions with this particular medicine, he told me he hadn't heard of this medicine. He went on his I-phone and tried to look up the medicine I am on, but nothing came up.

   Here is the crux of the matter: Whenever I look for natural cures for ailments, there is always a disclaimer which says something like, "Do not take this vitamin/supplement/herb unless you have discussed this with your doctor." I feel like we are going around in circles. There could be a supplement that really works but if I ask my doctor about it, he or she will recommend that I don't take it. Why? Simply because they don't know enough about the supplement, and they want to be careful.

   I was looking at some supplements for urinary tract problems in cats and watched a video on one of them. Of course, there was the disclaimer which said that you need to talk with your vet before giving the supplement to your cat. If I talk to my vet, I have a feeling I know what he or she would say...

Homemade Aspirin Beats Commercially Made Aspirin

Aspirin, like the kind you can find at the pharmacy, has been known to be a valid pain reliever, at least in the past, that is until Tylenol, Advil and Aleve came along.

   The problem with aspirin, is that it is very hard on the stomach. But to add to that, the kind you see at the drug store is no longer a pure product. It has to go through a process to make it into a tablet and you might want to evaluate whether it is worth taking it or not. On the other hand, Aleve and Advil are not good at all to take. Tylenol is hard on the liver. All of these things, including aspirin sold in the bottle, have been processed and have things added to them. Just as we would want to have pure food, it would be nice if we could have pure medicine. But how can we have pure medicine?

   I have good news on pure medicine. It helps to know a little history involved with aspirin making. I am going to paste a clip here from an article on making homemade aspirin. Here is the url, and you can read the whole article for yourself. http://www.bluestem.ca/willow-article1.htm

  This article, written by Ilene Sternberg is called, Willow Magic. "In the fifth century B.C., the Greek physician, Hippocrates, wrote that chewing bark of a willow tree could relieve pain and fever. (No wonder squirrels don’t get headaches.) In 1829, the effective ingredient, salicin, was successfully isolated from willow bark.  Toward the end of the 19th century, The Bayer Company in Germany trademarked a stable form of acetylsalicylic acid, calling it “aspirin,” the “a” from acetyl, “spir” from Spiraea (the salicin they used came from meadowsweet, Spiraea ulmaria, subsequently renamed Filpendula ulmaria), and “in,” a common ending in drug nomenclature."

     In the olden days, people would use the bark from the willow tree and make it into a tea and drink it. That is how aspirin originated. According to this article, people also chewed on willow bark. So, aspirin comes from willow bark, so I guess if you have a willow tree in your back yard, you are in luck, so to speak.

   But there is even an easier way for us, who are used to a lifestyle of convenience. You can buy this willow bark from amazon.com and make your own aspirin. The directions say to take 2 teaspoons of willow bark and let it steep in a cup of hot/boiling water for a couple of minutes. I have used it whenever I get a headache, which is rare now, for some reason.

   I have found that it works for me. I am glad I don't have to depend upon the drug store to get the kind of medicine I need. All I have to do is go to amazon.com and order the items I need.

   Click on the picture on the left, and see how easy it is. Of course, you can spend a lot of time doing Google searches on the best prices for willow bark.

  Also, although this is not necessary to make willow tea with, it is really cool to make it in a glass teapot with a section that will keep the bark separated from the tea. I have one that is similar to this one. You can pull the section in the middle out and it will strain the bark from the tea itself.

   I also have a little glass teapot that looks like this, and I love it. The only problem is, you have to take a strainer and pour the tea through a strainer because there is no strainer in the pot.


   I originally looked into this when I found out how aspirin can actually help my plants. But those who recommended the aspirin were in the U.K. and it was hard to convert the measurements to figure out how much water to how much aspirin to make the recipe. Whatever the measurements are, you don't need very much aspirin to help the plants have the effects of the aspirin. Here is another clip from the article concerning plants:

  "Another discovery: In the January, 2004 issue of The Avant Gardener, a monthly newsletter to which you can subscribe for $24/year at Horticultural Data Processors, Box 489, New York, N.Y. 10028, editor Thomas Powell notes that gardeners reported all sorts of plants growing remarkably better when given regular doses of tiny amounts of aspirin (1 part to 10,000 parts water; larger doses actually proved toxic),” and that The Agricultural Research Service is investigating the reasons behind aspirin’s beneficial effect."

  Thanks to this article, I now know the dosage of the aspirin to water. Now, to make aspirin for my plants!

A Chiropractor Saves A Woman From Cancer!

  There are several alternatives to traditional medical treatments, and going to a chiropractor is one of them. This is a story of a doctor, Dr. Charles Mayo, whose wife had cancer, who sent his wife to a chiropractor as a last resort to get help for the cancer that was growing in her body.

  The time period was in the early 1900s, and Dr. Mayo had taken his wife to several doctors, including ones in Europe, but nothing seemed to help his wife in recovering from cancer. Not sure whose choice it was to go to a chiropractor, but he sent his wife to Dr. Palmer, a chiropractor in another state.

   The dialogue between the doctors was very telling. Dr. Mayo only addressed Dr. Palmer as Mr. Palmer. He questioned Dr. Palmer's every move and was very cynical of his ways. Obviously, he was in enough agreement to allow his wife to continue treatments by Dr. Palmer in spite of his disdain for chiropractors.

   Many months later, Dr. Mayo's wife was well. Dr. Mayo even admitted that she was well. Amazing.

  The writer of this article worked at the B.J. Palmer Chiropractic clinic in 1953-54. He made the comment that some 60-80% of the patients at the chiropractic clinic were referred to them by someone who worked at the Mayo Clinic.

http://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=31733

Alternative To Medicine - Building Up Our Immunity Systems

   When we get sick, what do we usually do? We complain, and then we go to the doctor. What I am writing is not a complaint against doctors though. We have some good friends who are doctors. They do a good job at what they have been trained to do simply because they love their jobs and they care for people.

   The medical society is part of the system we live in. The medical society primarily deals with sickness after the person is sick. It tries to come up with a cure, but most of the time, only symptom relief is available.

    A better way to treat illnesses is to not get sick in the first place. Another thought is to build our immunities so that we can fight off sicknesses when they come.

   There are several ways to build immunities, and I won't list them all here today. But there is one that is really good. It is called, 'Juice Plus+'. Many who take Juice Plus+ either do not get sick, or, if they do get sick, they seem to recover more quickly.

    A standard for us today is to eat at least 9 servings of fruits and vegetables each day. I remember trying to calculate this in my mind and come up with the cost of all this food that we need to be eating, and the price was quite high! Of course, if we lived on a farm with an orchard, it would be a lot easier to do this. But most of us don't live on a farm. Plus, the vegetables and fruit that are sold in stores can be polluted with pesticides. We don't know what kind or how much pesticides are used to protect the vegetation from bugs.

   No one in authority really wants to check and see how damaging pesticides are to our bodies. Those who own the farms which use pesticides, are very common. It is sad to see how much pesticides are on our food today.

    This is just one way to help build immunity: Juice Plus+
Here is the back of the garden (green) chewables:

  I know this is a plug for Juice Plus+ and I know there are other things we can do to help build our immunity systems. I will cover other options as well in later blogs.

   The Juice Plus+ information is fresh in my mind because I just watched a presentation on it and one of the pictures was like the one I posted. There are a lot of people who want to know the ingredients, so I shared a couple of pictures on Facebook as I was watching the presentation, but the pictures were not allowed to be shared, so, I will just make my own. 

  There are a lot of people selling oils, and I believe oils are beneficial, however, I am not going to be selling oils because I would have no customers! But with Juice Plus+, not everyone is aware of the benefits, so, I want to make sure everyone knows some of the good things Juice Plus+ is known for.

   If you go to my page, http://www.ss.juiceplus.com , you will see different categories listed. One of them is called, 'Clinical Research', I believe. There have been studies done to show how beneficial Juice Plus+ really is. 

   One of the tests for research was on how Juice Plus+ affects the heart. The study was done and those who took the Vineyard (purple) Juice Plus+ fared much better than those who did not use Juice Plus+ in the study. 

   Our arteries should be elastic like in the way they function, and one of the reasons for clogging of the arteries is due to inflammation. Our bodies react to inflammation by actually producing cholesterol. And then we end up with clogged arteries. Old school would say that eating meat and eggs causes us to have high cholesterol but there is more truth to cholesterol appearing in our arteries from those things that cause inflammation. Vineyard Juice Plus+ can help with that, according to the research that was done. 

   In another post, I would like to cover the myths that people think about, when they hear about Juice Plus+. But for right now, I do highly recommend this product. It is not only recommended by me, but also by several doctors, including my own. 

  Please go to my page if you are interested in taking Juice Plus+. The url is http://www.ss.juiceplus.com  There is also contact information available on that page. 

  Later on, I will be writing on other ideas and options on how to build a good immunity system.