Day: 11/22/2012

Manaka Ion Pumping Cords Effective for Burns and Whiplash.

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Manaka ion pumping cords are commonly used in Japanese-style acupuncture practices. Many Chinese-style acupuncturists do not know about the simple and very effective treatments using these cords. Particularly, the burn and whiplash treatments have quick and substantial results.

I was fortunate to observe an acupuncturist do both the burn and whiplash treatments during my extensive assisting hours required for my Masters in acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Although I did not go on to study Japanese-style acupuncture, I have incorporated the ion pumping cords in my practice. Recently, I used both the burn and whiplash treatments, with remarkable results. I hope that in sharing the treatment protocols and my recent cases, other Chinese-style acupuncturists will use these treatments and share their experiences.

Manaka ion pumping cords are a simple setup of a copper wire with a black clip on one side, a red on the other, and a diode in the middle. Although they are called ion pumping cords, the physical properties of a wire do not allow atoms or molecules to move along them. However, electrons can flow along the wire, effectively lowering the number of ions in one area and raising them in another. Although the cords move electrons, the total number electrons moving is so low that it would be practically impossible to measure. This makes using the cords completely safe.

Dr. Yoshio Manaka, a renowned Japanese acupuncturist, initially developed the ion pumping cords for treating burns. He theorized that excess ions prevent the skin from healing. Typically cell membranes keep some charged atoms in the cell and others out. A burn destroys these boundaries, leaving all types of ions everywhere. Manaka thought removing some of these ions would allow the cells to heal more quickly.

The burn treatment is as follows: put foil over the burn, connect the black clip to the foil and the red clip to a needle in a distal acupuncture point. Leaving this set up for 20 minutes can reduce the inflammation and pain of a burn and speed its overall healing. The book Hara Diagnosis, Reflections on the Sea by Kiiko Matsumoto and Stephen Birch gives more detail on how to choose the distal point according to a Japanese-style treatment. In my experience, choosing a distal point on the same channel is effective. The burn treatment can be used on burns from any source including heat, radiation and friction (aka road rash).

I recently treated a patient with severe road rash from a bicycle accident. He had large areas of broken skin on his torso and left elbow and a smaller wound near his left wrist. I did burn treatments one week and two weeks after his accident. Immediately after each treatment the area looked less inflamed. The areas continued to heal quickly and four weeks after the accident the torso and elbow wounds had shrunk to half of their original size. However, the wound on his wrist, which I initially didn’t consider treating, looked almost the same four weeks after the accident as it did one week after the accident.

Seeing the significant results on burns, Manaka experimented with the cords, creating numerous treatment protocols including ones for tinnitus, rhinitis, muscles spasms, asthma, and headaches. He found that the cords have a strong effect on the extraordinary vessels. His most well known extraordinary vessel treatment is for whiplash. The whiplash treatment uses the yang qiao mai and the yang wei mai, which go through the neck.

To do the whiplash treatment, first needle the master and coupled points for the yang qiao mai (BL 62 and SI 3) and for the yang wei mai (TW 5 and GB 41) bilaterally. Then, attach a black clip to the needle in BL 62. Attach the red clip of the same cord to SI 3 on the same side. Then, attach a black clip of a different cord to TW 5. Attach the red clip of that same cord to GB 41 on the same side. Repeat for the other side, using a total of four ion pumping cords.

When I recently used this treatment, I only had two ion pumping cords. I used the yang wei mai on my patient’s right side and yang qiao mai on her left side. I chose those sides because the patient felt GB 41 and TW 5 strongly on her right, but not on her left. She didn’t have a strong reaction to SI 3 or BL 62 on either side.

This patient came in for a treatment the day after she was in a car accident. Her neck had a limited range of motion and was painful even without movement. After the treatment, she had a noticeable range of motion increase and a 50 percent reduction in pain. She reported at her next appointment that she continued to feel better after the treatment, with no pain and a full range of motion in her neck the following day.

These two cases are representative of my experience using Manaka’s burn and whiplash treatments. Although I never hope to have a patient with a burn or with whiplash, I am always excited to use these treatments, because they are so effective. I do hope that other Chinese-style acupuncturists try these treatments and educate their patients about acupuncture for burns and whiplash. Then, more people will benefit from such treatments.

Source: http://www.acupuncturetoday.com

 

10 Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist.

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Sure, the gear may look like it came straight out of Avatar or Battlestar Galactica. But all of the laser weapons, robots, sonic blasters and puke rays pictured here are real. Some of these weapons have already found their way onto the battlefield. If the rest of this sci-fi arsenal follows, war may soon be unrecognizable.

The XM-25 grenade launcher is equipped with a laser rangefinder and on-board computer. It packs a magazine of four 25mm projectiles, and programs them to detonate as they pass by their targets. That feature will allow soldiers to strike enemies who are taking cover. By 2012, the Army hopes to arm every infantry squad and Special Forces unit with at least one of the big guns.

In August, a lucky soldier got to pull the trigger, and fire off a HEAB, or High Explosive Air Burst, round at the Aberdeen Testing Ground in Maryland. Those projectiles pack quite a punch. They are purportedly 300 percent more effective than normal ammo, and will be able to strike targets as far as 700 meters (2,300 feet) away.

Remotely operated weapons are showing up everywhere. Israel is building an automated kill zone. An American firm, More Industries, offers a turret that can aim and fire two automatic shotguns.

Some bots have been defusing bombs for years, but none have seen combat. That’s a shame, according to Lt. Gen. Rick Lynch, who believes that 122 men could have been spared if combat bots had been working in their stead.

There was a set of armed robots sent to Iraq. They never fired a shot, however. They weren’t allowed to. No one could guarantee that the bots wouldn’t go berserk and mow down friendly troops or otherwise malfunction, even though they have lots of safeguards.

Considering how much firepower they pack, safeguards are really important. The Maars system (above) can be equipped with four grenade launchers and a machine gun that packs 400 rounds of 7.62 caliber ammunition.

But its manufacturers like to point out its less-lethal capabilities. Instead of mowing people down, it can stick to the fine print of the first law of robotics and fire tear gas canisters, smoke grenades, smoke bombs and perhaps even Taser’s upcoming 40mm people-zapper projectile. Three were deployed to Iraq last year.

The Active Denial System fires a beam of millimeter-wave radiation. It make people feel like their skin is burning without causing any permanent damage. Though promising as a nonlethal weapon, the pain ray has some serious limits.

On a rainy day, water droplets will disperse the beam, and it may feel warm and refreshing instead of frightening. On a hot day, the cooling system might give out. The problems don’t stop there. Raytheon’s baby is bulky, and despite repeated requests to send it into battle, shipments of the energy weapon have been delayed. The military is looking for a stronger, lighter weapon.

f troops spot someone suspicious approaching them, they can use the Long Range Acoustic Device to send a warning message. It fires narrow beams of sound waves that can be heard clearly from 300 meters (about a thousand feet) away. Crank up the power, and it can emit a warning tone so loud that anyone in its path would have no choice but to cover their ears and run.

The manufacturer doesn’t like to call these devices weapons, even though they’ve been used to repel pirates. Cops used them to harass protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh this year.

Drones are arguably the most controversial weapon in the war on terror. By some accounts, they are deeply feared by the Taliban.

They’ve taken out many Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, and their sound when flying low is a constant annoyance and a reminder of their menace . But they also kill a lot of civilians.

They are, however, far more cost effective than supersonic fighter jets. Predators can pack two Hellfire missiles. Their big brothers, Reapers, can hold four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs.

Flash bang grenades were designed to stun people. But they have a pretty bad safety record. The little bombs have dismembered at least one soldier and caused hearing loss in others.

To remedy that problem, Mark Grubelich and his colleagues at Sandia National Laboratory built the Improved Flash Bang Grenade. It hurls flaming aluminum particles into the air, causing a bright flash without an accompanying shockwave.

Even the angriest mobs would probably think twice about trying to pass a Taser Shockwave barrier. It is the less-lethal equivalent of a claymore mine. Push the big red button, and it will fire 24 electrified probes at the same time in a single direction.

After learning about an experimental weapon that can make people feel seasick, Limor Fried and Phil Torrone decided to build their own. They did it for less than $250, and wrote step-by-step instructions so that anyone can make one at home.

It can create a nauseating lightshow with 36 pulsating LEDs.

Their design has a bonus feature. You can set it to disco mode. Instead of making you sick, the weapon will add life to your next party.

If you’re worried that someone’s about to attack you, but not completely sure of their intent, it’s a good idea to give them a warning before pulling the trigger. Green laser pointers are a great way to extend that courtesy. The Marines like to call them “ocular interruption devices.”

Shine one in someone’s face, and your target should immediately get the message that it’s time to back off. The LA-9/P, made by B.E. Meyers, can warn people from up to 4 kilometers (2½ miles) away. It fires a 250-milliwatt beam. That’s roughly 1/4,000 the strength of the smallest anti-aircraft lasers.

Even so, you’ve got to be careful when handling the thing. Over a few months in Iraq, a dozen soldiers were wounded in dazzler “friendly fire.” Several troops may have been injured while monkeying around with laser target designators, which are substantially more powerful than the less-lethal devices.

Behold the Laser Avenger, a cannon that could be used to take down incoming aircraft. Boeing was able to shoot a drone out of the sky with the hummer-mounted laser, even though it’s not particularly high-powered. It cooked the remote-controlled aircraft using a somewhat feeble 1-kilowatt beam.

More recently, the company shot down another UAV using a low-power laser paired with its Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments, or Matrix, system during a test in White Sands, New Mexico.

Northrop Grumman is hard at work on a 100-kilowatt laser weapon, which could do far more damage, but it’s not quite ready for prime time. It’s fully operational, but looks like a refrigerator.

Boeing announced in late December that the Avenger has been used to destroy 50 different improvised explosive devices, during tests at Redstone Aresenal in Huntsville, Alabama.

Source:weired.com

Using Acupuncture to Improve the Success Rates of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF).

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Most of us are aware of the scientific research articles that were published in esteemed journals such as Fertility and Sterility and BMJ showing how patients receiving acupuncture before and after IVF transfer improved the success rates of IVF.

 

Most of us talk to our fertility patients about these studies. Most of us employ this practice in our clinics—we see our patients right before and after IVF transfer and follow a similar point prescription to the one depicted in the research papers. And, when we are treating our fertility patients for months or longer and they are faced with the IVF, we are there to support them and guide them.

But, not all of the patients coming to see us for IVF support have been patients that we have been working with for months. A lot of the IVF patients we see in our clinics are coming in specifically for acupuncture support with IVF.

So, how should we approach those who come to us, often as new patients, a few weeks, some times a few days before their IVF transfer and want to do acupuncture because they are willing to do anything to increase their odds of getting pregnant? Of course, we treat them. Of course, we talk about the research that was published showing how acupuncture helped IVF outcome. But, for me, the question that comes up is: do most acupuncturists follow the exact point prescription depicted in the research papers or do they treat what they see? Do they take the entire case into account?

Over the years, I’ve seen many practitioners who follow the exact point prescription from the research papers. And, honestly, earlier on in my practice, I was more likely to strictly adhere the point prescription from the scientific research papers as well. However, as I have matured in my practice, I don’t. Now, I treat what I see and adjust the protocol to fit the individual patient.

Most often these fertility patients are seeking our assistance because they want to do anything possible to improve their odds of getting pregnant. And, as practitioners, I think it is our responsibility to assist them. But, what we do is more than just follow a specified point prescription. We take the time to talk to the patient, to hear their story, to diagnose their case and to develop a treatment plan that best suits them. And, that goes way beyond sticking needles in specified points.

These patients—like all our patients—are seeking guidance. And, as practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, we have a lot more to offer them than just scientific research. There is an essence and beauty to our medicine that transcends any science.

With any fertility patient—one that I’ve know for months, or one that I am meeting the day before her scheduled IVF—I take the opportunity to discuss the importance of “preparing their palace.” When I say palace, you are all aware I mean their uterus. But we are not just talking about them avoiding cold foods (to avoid a cold uterus), we are talking about preparing their palace on a spiritual level.

I’ll often ask all my fertility patients emotionally charged questions such as:

“Do you want to be a mother?”
“What are your fears surrounding being a mother?”
“Have you made space in your life for a child?”
“Is your partner ready to be a parent?”

For the most part, what I find clinically is that there is often a great deal of emotional blockage surrounding motherhood. And, I use acupuncture points accordingly. Typically, I choose points on the heart and kidney meridians to allow their spirit to be unblocked and to move freely. I needle with the intention of calming their spirit, bringing them peace and courage and allowing their bodies to open up to having a child.

I also always encourage my fertility patients to visualize themselves pregnant. I think it is extremely important that the patient tune into their bodies and get a sense of what it will feel like and even look like to be pregnant. I’ll have them talk to me about what emotions come up as they imagine themselves pregnant. And, based on their responses, I choose the acupuncture points I deem appropriate. When I am doing this, I am following what I was taught as a student: listen to the patient as they know what treatment they need.

I find, if I listen closely, patients always guide me on how to treat them.

As well, I strongly encourage the patient to have their partner come in for acupuncture. I feel this is often missing in the treatment plan. Seeing the partner is extremely important to align the energies of both partners prior to the IVF transfer. As what should normally occur in vivo is happening in vitro—sperm and egg should be meeting inside the women’s body, not outside in a petri dish. And when that meeting happens—no matter where it is—the partners should be aligned in spirit. I feel that treating both partners helps with that alignment.

Sometimes this is not feasible. If that’s the case, I have them do a little spiritual work prior to the transfer—focusing on each of them picturing themselves as parents, feeling the joy of parenthood, seeing them as a unit, seeing their family grow, feeling love and support and excitement and gratitude. I encourage the partners to talk through this process, to really hear one another and to work out any tension that arises in this conversation. I truly believe that the energy of the couple needs to be in sync for a healthy happy pregnancy.

Of course, when treating these patients, my point protocol is also focused on supporting the yin and on getting warmth to the uterus and on supporting the kidney energy. However, I feel that as practitioners, we need to take it to the spiritual level, especially with patients undergoing infertility treatments as they are often dealing with an overwhelming amount of emotion.

These patients not only need their qi to be unblocked but they need their spirit to move freely, they need to heal and release from the emotional roller coaster they have been on. When they come into our clinics, we not only need to give them acupuncture, but we are there to allow them the space to grieve and open their hearts to allow life to flourish inside of them.

Source: http://www.acupuncturetoday.com

 

They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside.

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The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.

The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.

The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles.

The master starts plucking hairs from the candidate’s eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are “symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning,” the master assures the candidate. The candidate places his hand on the master’s amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another. This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the members say. Now you can see.

For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.

It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic “sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes.

In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany.

Source: http://www.wired.com

 

Science in the Courtroom.

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Scientific evidence concerning the biological causes of bad behavior is becoming increasingly common in the courtroom. Forensic psychiatrists at Vanderbilt University have genetically screened defendants charged with first-degree murder for a gene associated with antisocial personality disorder, for example. And when it came time to sentence convicted murderer Brian Dugan, neuroscientists performed neuroimaging on Dugan’s brain in order to claim he has a defective, psychopathic brain.

What would you do if you were faced with such a decision? Imagine you’re a juror tasked with the job of recommending a sentence for a criminal found guilty of aggravated battery. The criminal, Jonathan Donahue, went into a Burger King restaurant with the hope of robbing it, then beat the manager so severely that he sustained brain damage. After he was arrested, Donahue seemed to revel in his crime, even going so far as to have a king’s crown tattooed on his back.

At the sentencing hearing, a psychiatrist provides expert testimony saying that Donahue is a diagnosed psychopath. She explains that psychopathy is a clinical diagnosis defined by impulsivity, lack of empathy, and lack of remorse. The judge tells you that the standard sentence for cases of aggravated battery is about 9 years.

First Question: With this information, how many years in prison will you recommend for Donahue?

There’s one more expert witness. This one is a neurobiologist, and he tells you that Donahue has a particular gene that contributes to atypical brain development. Specifically, the part of Donahue’s brain that controls his violence-inhibition mechanism is damaged. In normal humans, the violence-inhibition mechanism automatically creates anxiety when they recognize that other humans are in pain or distress. Psychopaths, like Donahue, lack a normal violence-inhibition mechanism.

Second Question: In light of this additional neurobiological evidence, how many years in prison will you recommend for Donahue?

How did you answer the Second Question relative to the First Question? If you increased Donahue’s sentence, you probably did so because you interpreted the neurobiological evidence as suggesting his biological constitution makes him a continued threat to society. On the other hand, if you decreased Donahue’s sentence, you probably did so because you interpreted the neurobiological evidence as suggesting his biological constitution makes him less responsible for his actions. Or, you could have dismissed the neurobiological evidence entirely and recommended the exact same sentence.

This is the double-edged sword of the science of criminal behavior. The exact same evidence could either increase or decrease punishment, depending on how that evidence is interpreted.

With scientific evidence about the causes of criminal behavior becoming more and more common in the court room, the legal system faces a pressing question: Which way will the double-edged sword cut? In Dugan’s murder case, a jury ultimately sentenced Dugan to death, but according to his attorney the scientific evidence switched a slam dunk case against Dugan into a much more complicated decision for the jurors. To investigate this question in a systematic way, my colleagues and I performed a national experiment involving US state trial court judges. We presented the judges with Donahue’s case and asked them to sentence him. The results of this experiment were published last month in Science. The judges told us that on average they sentenced convicts guilty of aggravated battery to about 9 years in prison. The judges who received only expert testimony concerning Donahue’s diagnosis of psychopathy sentenced him on average to almost 14 years in prison. But the judges who received the expert testimony concerning Donahue’s diagnosis of psychopathy as well as the evidence concerning the neurobiological causes of his psychopathy sentenced him on average to about 13 years in prison. Compared to just the diagnosis of psychopathy, that is, the neurobiological evidence reduced Donahue’s sentence by roughly a year (a statistically significant difference).

So, our study suggests which way the double-edged sword might cut—towards slightly shorter sentences. But there is another pressing question, one at the intersection of science, philosophy, and the law: Which way should the double-edged sword cut?

The presence of scientific evidence about the causes of criminal behavior is only likely to increase in the courtroom. As a result, scientists and non-scientists alike need to discuss this issue and decide how biological knowledge should influence the legal system.

To get the conversation going, in the Comments section below, list your answers to the First and Second Questions and explain your justification for the increase, decrease, or lack of any change in the prison sentence that you recommended for Donahue.

James Tabery is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah.

Source: http://www.the-scientist.com

 

Russian Roulette — An Excerpt From the Wired E-Book John McAfee’s Last Stand.

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Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is 66, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his arms and shoulders.

More than 25 years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he’s holed up in a bungalow at his island estate 15 miles off the coast of Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of ammunition, fake IDs, Frontiersman bear deterrent, and a single blue baby pacifier.

McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity, his light blue eyes sparkling. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.

“Let’s put the gun down,” I tell him. I’d come here to investigate why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure.

But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do a demonstration?”

He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver and spins the cylinder.

“This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.

My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit.

“We don’t have to do this.”

“I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it five times in rapid succession. There are only six chambers.

“Reholster the gun,” I demand.

He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a sixth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”

It’s the same thing, he argues, with the government’s accusations. They were a smoke screen—an attempt to distort reality—but there’s one thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid predawn murk of April 30, 2012.

Source: http://www.wired.com

 

 

Huge Solar Eruption November 20th.

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On Nov. 20, 2012, at 7:09 a.m. EST, the sun erupted with a coronal mass ejection or CME. Not to be confused with a solar flare, a CME is a solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space and can reach Earth one to three days later. When Earth-directed, CMEs can affect electronic systems in satellites and on Earth.

 

NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) captured this image of a coronal mass ejection on Nov. 20, 2012 at 8:54 a.m. EST, about two hours after it left the sun.

Experimental NASA research models, based on observations from the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), show that the Nov. 20 CME left the sun at speeds of 450 miles per second, which is a slow to average speed for CMEs. CMEs can cause a space weather phenomenon called a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when CMEs successfully connect up with the outside of the Earth’s magnetic envelope, the magnetosphere, for an extended period of time. In the past, CMEs of this speed have not usually caused substantial geomagnetic storms. They have caused auroras near the poles but are unlikely to cause disruptions to electrical systems on Earth or interfere with GPS or satellite-based communications systems.

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (http://swpc.noaa.gov) is the United States government’s official source for space weather forecasts.

 

On December 11 (tentative), SWPC will introduce two new forecast products titled the 3-Day Forecast and the Forecast Discussion.  These new products will: be available twice a day at 0030 and 1230 UTC; provide space weather information in two separate formats, abbreviated and detailed; and use NOAA Space Weather Scale information.  Examples of these new products are available to familiarize our users at http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/info/3-Day.pdf(the concise, 1-page summary) and http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/info/Discussion.pdf(the in-depth space weather analysis for the technical user).  These two products will supplement the existing product suite and no current products will be discontinued.

Source: http://beforeitsnews.com

Major Problems With Food Safety That Could Make You Sick.

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The latest recall of E. coli infected beef should not only be a concern for beef and beef products but also other meats, cheeses, vegetables and water.

E. coli is a generic name for billions of such bacteria thriving in the alimentary canal of humans and animals. Their presence in food or water indicates fecal contamination.

The consumption of any such food or water can cause deadly disease. It cannot become safe by cooking or irradiation. Irradiation of the end products, such as steaks, hamburger, etc., may kill microbes but it does not exclude their original source which is feces and urine. Irradiation of meat may also generate carcinogenic substances. All such food and water must be rejected.

What Promotes E.Coli Infection?

Virtually every E. coli infection traces to unsanitary conditions in which food-producing crops and animals are being cultivated, processed, transported, stored, and ultimately sold for human consumption.

Most food-producing animals these days are raised at mega farms, commonly called factory farms. From there, they get transported for thousands of miles to similarly large slaughterhouses without being fed or watered for as long as 48 hours.

Covered in feces and urine, dehydrated, frozen and badly bruised, approximately 50 percent of them are reported to arrive there already dead. Moreover, the mechanized tools and procedures used to slaughter these animals convey their infection-loaded excreta into the eventual meat and meat products for human consumption.

Finally, the waste water from these mega farms, slaughterhouses, packing plants and other establishments gets drained into fields, rivers, lakes and wells. Reports indicate that every year approximately 36 million Americans and 11 million Canadians contract food-borne infections, out of which many thousand get hospitalized and several thousand die.

Drugs Used in Livestock are Central to the Problem of Food Borne Illness

Central to this problem are the drug manufacturers selling tons of different antibiotics to prevent frivolous infections in farm animals. However, what ends up happening in these animals is that thus used antibiotics destroy harmless microbes in their alimentary canal and yield room to antibiotic resistant “super-bugs”, such as E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, etc.

Due to these problems, large scale use of antibiotics is no longer allowed in the EU. In contrast, it continues to prevail in the US and Canada with government approval.

Another cause for concern is illegal approval of sex hormones by USFDA and Health Canada in beef production. Beef stimulating hormones are recognized to be “complete carcinogens”. In other words, they can initiate cancers and also promote existing cancers. In addition, sex hormones are recognized to cause endocrine disruption.

As such, sex hormones cause reproductive disorders, such as infertility, precocious puberty, drop in sperm count, etc. Like antibiotics, no such hormones to increase beef production are allowed to be utilized in the EU.

Other Food Safety Concerns: Slaughterhouse Waste Used in Animal Feed, and GMO’s…

Yet another concern for food safety should be the Canadian approval of slaughterhouse waste being fed to food-producing animals, which is known to transmit BSE in cattle (mad cow disease) and CJD (a fatal neurogenerative disorder) in people. Once again, any such use of slaughterhouse waste is strictly forbidden in the EU. The only other industrialized country allowing agricultural applications of antibiotics hormones and slaughterhouse waste is the US, whose food safety record is no better than that of Canada.

At issue also are genetically modified organisms (GMOs) attached to various herbicides and pesticides to increase agricultural yields of milk, meat, vegetables, fruits and ethanol whose public safety is being questioned throughout the world but not in Canada or the US.

These should be sobering thoughts for both Health Canada and CFIA. They cannot go on pretending the Canadian food supply to be the safest in the world when it is so frequently found to be unsafe. People have the right to know how their food is produced. The only sure way to know that is to conduct a public inquiry.

Source: Dr. Mercola

Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore.

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You have a secret that can ruin your life.

It’s not a well-kept secret, either. Just a simple string of characters—maybe six of them if you’re careless, 16 if you’re cautious—that can reveal everything about you.

 

Your email. Your bank account. Your address and credit card number. Photos of your kids or, worse, of yourself, naked. The precise location where you’re sitting right now as you read these words. Since the dawn of the information age, we’ve bought into the idea that a password, so long as it’s elaborate enough, is an adequate means of protecting all this precious data. But in 2012 that’s a fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated sales pitch. And anyone who still mouths it is a sucker—or someone who takes you for one.

No matter how complex, no matter how unique, your passwords can no longer protect you.

Look around. Leaks and dumps—hackers breaking into computer systems and releasing lists of usernames and passwords on the open web—are now regular occurrences. The way we daisy-chain accounts, with our email address doubling as a universal username, creates a single point of failure that can be exploited with devastating results. Thanks to an explosion of personal information being stored in the cloud, tricking customer service agents into resetting passwords has never been easier. All a hacker has to do is use personal information that’s publicly available on one service to gain entry into another.

This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust—seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well—but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their way into one, they had them all. They really just wanted my Twitter handle: @mat. As a three-letter username, it’s considered prestigious. And to delay me from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I’d ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter.

The age of the password is over. We just haven’t realized it yet.

Since that awful day, I’ve devoted myself to researching the world of online security. And what I have found is utterly terrifying. Our digital lives are simply too easy to crack. Imagine that I want to get into your email. Let’s say you’re on AOL. All I need to do is go to the website and supply your name plus maybe the city you were born in, info that’s easy to find in the age of Google. With that, AOL gives me a password reset, and I can log in as you.

First thing I do? Search for the word “bank” to figure out where you do your online banking. I go there and click on the Forgot Password? link. I get the password reset and log in to your account, which I control. Now I own your checking account as well as your email.

This summer I learned how to get into, well, everything. With two minutes and $4 to spend at a sketchy foreign website, I could report back with your credit card, phone, and Social Security numbers and your home address. Allow me five minutes more and I could be inside your accounts for, say, Amazon, Best Buy, Hulu, Microsoft, and Netflix. With yet 10 more, I could take over your AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon. Give me 20—total—and I own your PayPal. Some of those security holes are plugged now. But not all, and new ones are discovered every day.

The common weakness in these hacks is the password. It’s an artifact from a time when our computers were not hyper-connected. Today, nothing you do, no precaution you take, no long or random string of characters can stop a truly dedicated and devious individual from cracking your account. The age of the password has come to an end; we just haven’t realized it yet.

Passwords are as old as civilization. And for as long as they’ve existed, people have been breaking them.

In 413 BC, at the height of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general Demosthenes landed in Sicily with 5,000 soldiers to assist in the attack on Syracusae. Things were looking good for the Greeks. Syracusae, a key ally of Sparta, seemed sure to fall.

But during a chaotic nighttime battle at Epipole, Demosthenes’ forces were scattered, and while attempting to regroup they began calling out their watchword, a prearranged term that would identify soldiers as friendly. The Syracusans picked up on the code and passed it quietly through their ranks. At times when the Greeks looked too formidable, the watchword allowed their opponents to pose as allies. Employing this ruse, the undermatched Syracusans decimated the invaders, and when the sun rose, their cavalry mopped up the rest. It was a turning point in the war.

The first computers to use passwords were likely those in MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, developed in 1961. To limit the time any one user could spend on the system, CTSS used a login to ration access. It only took until 1962 when a PhD student named Allan Scherr, wanting more than his four-hour allotment, defeated the login with a simple hack: He located the file containing the passwords and printed out all of them. After that, he got as much time as he wanted.

During the formative years of the web, as we all went online, passwords worked pretty well. This was due largely to how little data they actually needed to protect. Our passwords were limited to a handful of applications: an ISP for email and maybe an ecommerce site or two. Because almost no personal information was in the cloud—the cloud was barely a wisp at that point—there was little payoff for breaking into an individual’s accounts; the serious hackers were still going after big corporate systems.

So we were lulled into complacency. Email addresses morphed into a sort of universal login, serving as our username just about everywhere. This practice persisted even as the number of accounts—the number of failure points—grew exponentially. Web-based email was the gateway to a new slate of cloud apps. We began banking in the cloud, tracking our finances in the cloud, and doing our taxes in the cloud. We stashed our photos, our documents, our data in the cloud.

Eventually, as the number of epic hacks increased, we started to lean on a curious psychological crutch: the notion of the “strong” password. It’s the compromise that growing web companies came up with to keep people signing up and entrusting data to their sites. It’s the Band-Aid that’s now being washed away in a river of blood.

Source: http://www.wired.com

 

Cancer Trials Can Lack Clear Information on Biopsies.

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 Cancer drug trials often require participants to receive invasive procedures like biopsies, which are used to assess the drug’s effectiveness but have no therapeutic value – and can pose serious risks — for the patient.

Informed consent documents are supposed to inform study participants about these types of risks so they can make an educated decision on whether or not to participate in the trial, but a new study found this type of risk information to be seriously lacking.

Risks of Biopsies Not Clearly Stated

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, researchers stated:1

“A better representation of the risks and benefits of research biopsies in study protocols and informed consents is needed.”

This was their conclusion after finding that more than 5 percent of biopsies in cancer drug trials may cause complications, but the informed consent documents did not adequately explain this. In fact, on average the consent documents had only 39 words addressing risks from invasive biopsies – less than the number of words used to address risks for simple blood draws.

Of the 745 tumor biopsies reviewed for the study, 39 resulted in complications, including lung air leaks, bleeding and other major effects that required hospitalization or surgery.

Whether you’re participating in a drug trial, or considering a biopsy for another medical reason, you should know that while biopsy risks are rarely discussed, there are risks, indeed.

Serious Biopsy Complications Every Patient Should Know

During a biopsy, a piece of tissue from a tumor or organ is removed so that it can be examined under a microscope, often to determine if it is cancerous. Needle biopsies, for instance, are widely used as part of the traditional allopathic approach to diagnosing breast cancer. But they may accidentally cause malignant cells to break away from a tumor, resulting in its spreading to other areas of your body.

According to a study from the John Wayne Cancer Institute, it appears that a needle biopsy may increase the spread of cancer by 50 percent compared to patients who receive excisional biopsies, also known as lumpectomies.2

The procedure also involves a serious risk of infection. For prostate gland biopsies, specialists have begun to worry about a recent, significant increase in hard-to-treat bloodstream infections that can require weeks of treatment.

Prostate biopsies inherently pose a risk for infection because:

  • The needles that collect a tiny piece of prostate tissue can transport bacteria through your rectal wall into the prostate and bloodstream
  • The needles can spread harmful bacteria present in your gut into your bloodstream

Pain, bleeding (that can be so severe it requires a blood transfusion or surgery to stop it), infection and accidental injury to a nearby organ are established risks that are present no matter what type of biopsy you receive. And then there is the issue of its questionable effectiveness.

In the case of prostate biopsies, an estimated one-third of men who receive “negative” results for prostate cancer actually do have prostate cancer that was missed by the biopsy. For breast biopsies, estimates suggest that 17 percent of D.C.I.S. (ductal carcinoma in situ) cases found through needle biopsy are misdiagnosed. And oftentimes it is an inaccurate mammogram (mammograms carry a first-time false positive rate of up to 6 percent) that leads to the breast biopsy in the first place, making the procedure completely unnecessary.

So, certainly if you’re considering taking part in a drug trial, you need to carefully assess whether the biopsy risks are worth it to you … and this is also true anytime you’re faced with a recommendation of a biopsy. You must measure the potential benefits against the risks in order to make an informed decision.

5,000 Combinations Of 100 Existing Cancer Drugs Tested To Find More Effective Treatments

Whereas biopsies are one of the go-to procedures conventional medicine uses to diagnose cancer, chemotherapy is the go-to procedure to treat it. But one of the reasons why conventional cancer treatment is such a dismal failure in the United States is because it relies on chemotherapy. Despite its reputation as the gold-standard in cancer treatment, chemotherapy has an average 5-year survival success rate of just over 2 percent for all cancers, according to a study published in the journal Clinical Oncology.3

The researchers concluded:

“ … it is clear that cytotoxic chemotherapy only makes a minor contribution to cancer survival. To justify the continued funding and availability of drugs used in cytotoxic chemotherapy, a rigorous evaluation of the cost-effectiveness and impact on quality of life is urgently required.”

It’s no secret among the cancer industry that these drugs are often ineffective, or that oftentimes the cancer patient survives not because of — but despite — the treatment. Moreover, it’s now common for treatments to use combinations of drugs, as many cancers have become resistant to single drugs, rendering them useless. Chemotherapy often supports the more chemo-resistant and malignant cell subpopulations within tumors (e.g. cancer stem cells), as it kills both the more benign cells and/or senescent cells within the tumor that keep it slow-growing, or even harmless.

As a result, this unleashes a more aggressive, treatment-resistant type of cancer to wreak havoc on the body.

A new study recently tested 5,000 combinations of the 100 cancer drugs approved for use in patients in an attempt to find more effective treatments.4 They plan to move several of their novel combinations into clinical trials as quickly as possible, but is this really going to benefit cancer patients?

Chemo Drugs Destroy Your Healthy Cells, Including Your Immune System

Chemotherapy drugs are, by their very nature, extremely toxic and typically work against your body’s natural ability to fight cancer by harming your immune system (often irreparably) instead of supporting it. Combining them into new formulations could cause any number of unforeseen consequences. Already, it’s known that certain chemo drugs become so toxic when combined that they would have to be used at such a low dose they would no longer work against the cancer!

And one of the biggest drawbacks to chemotherapy of any kind is the fact that it destroys healthy cells throughout your body right along with cancer cells, a “side effect” that often leads to accelerated death, not healing.

Another study, “The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD)”, found that more than four in 10 patients who received chemotherapy toward the end of life experienced potentially fatal effects. And after reviewing data from over 600 cancer patients who died within 30 days of receiving treatment, it was found that chemotherapy hastened or caused death in 27 percent of those cases.

In the last 30 years the global cancer burden has doubled, and it will likely double again between 2000 and 2020, and nearly triple by 2030 — unless people begin to take cancer prevention seriously. We CAN turn this trend around, but to do so the medical community must stop overlooking the methods that can actually have a significant impact.

Why I Strongly Advise Avoiding Chemotherapy

I strongly advise everyone to avoid taking any chemotherapy drugs. In my experience the people who survive the chemotherapy do it in spite of the therapy not because of it. More typically, once a person starts chemo it can lead to death. It is the one form of cancer therapy that I strongly advise most to avoid.

Why?

Because the way your body fights cancer normally is through a healthy immune system, and if you take drugs to target and destroy your immune system you tend to radically reduce your likelihood of long-term survival. This is not the case for surgery and radiation, which although also overused, do not impair your immune system and may debulk the tumor enough to give your immune system a chance to fight it.

Please also be aware that avoiding chemo comes with massive responsibility and the need to do something positive. Typically this involves a radical application of my advanced nutrition plan in addition to severely limiting protein and carbs and using high-quality fats as a source of calories. This would include foods like avocados, coconut oil, butter, nuts, olive and olive oil. This will tend to lower the mTOR pathway and optimize leptin and insulin signaling.

Four Must-Know Tips for Cancer Prevention

If you’re facing a health challenge, I recommend seeking out a qualified natural health consultant. When it comes to cancer, you’ll want to identify someone that is well known and respected for their work in treating cancer patients. If you don’t find someone locally then scour the Internet and make calls to plenty of patients that the practitioner has seen.

For the rest of you, focusing on cancer prevention is essential. Here are four advancements that have not yet been accepted by conventional medicine, but are extremely powerful cancer preventive tools nonetheless:

1.  Avoid Fructose and Sugar

It’s quite clear that if you want to avoid cancer, or are currently undergoing cancer treatment, you absolutely MUST avoid all forms of sugar — especially fructose — and this is largely due to its relation to insulin resistance.

According to Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, as much as 80 percent of all cancers are “driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells,” Gary Taubes reported,5 adding:

“As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it.

The more insulin, the better they do.

Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Some do both.

Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.”

Some cancer centers, such as the Cancer Centers of America, have fully embraced this knowledge and place their patients on strict low-sugar, low-grain diets. But conventional medicine in general has been woefully lax when it comes to highlighting the health dangers of this additive.

As a standard recommendation, I strongly advise keeping your TOTAL fructose consumption below 25 grams per day, including fruits. But for most people it would also be wise to limit your fructose from fruit to 15 grams or less, as you’re virtually guaranteed to consume “hidden” sources of fructose if you drink beverages other than water and eat processed food.

2.  Optimize Vitamin D

There’s overwhelming evidence pointing to the fact that vitamin D deficiency plays a crucial role in cancer development. Researchers within this field have estimated that about 30 percent of cancer deaths — which amounts to 2 million worldwide and 200,000 in the United States — could be prevented each year simply by optimizing the vitamin D levels in the general population.

On a personal level, you can decrease your risk of cancer by MORE THAN HALF simply by optimizing your vitamin D levels with sun exposure. And if you are being treated for cancer it is likely that higher blood levels — probably around 80-90 ng/ml — would be beneficial.

If the notion that sun exposure actually prevents cancer is still new to you, I highly recommend you watch my one-hour vitamin D lecture to clear up any confusion. It’s important to understand that the risk of skin cancer from the sun comes only from excessive exposure.

3.  Decrease Protein

Ideally your protein level should be around one gram of protein per pound of lean body mass. Be very careful not to exceed this level and be assiduous about calculating and following this important recommendation. If you exceed this level of protein you will activate your mTOR pathway, which has been strongly correlated with promoting tumor growth.

4.  Exercise

If you are like most people, when you think of reducing your risk of cancer, exercise doesn’t immediately come to mind. However, there is some fairly compelling evidence that exercise can slash your risk of cancer. One of the primary ways exercise lowers your risk for cancer is by reducing elevated insulin and blood sugar levels, which creates a microenvironment that discourages the growth and spread of cancer cells.

If you have cancer, exercising during and after cancer treatment can reduce your risk of dying from cancer; reduce your risk of cancer recurrence; boost energy; and minimize the side effects of conventional cancer treatment.6

It’s important to include a large variety of techniques in your exercise routine, such as strength training, aerobics, core-building activities, and stretching. Most important of all, however, is to make sure you include high-intensity, burst-type exercise, such as Peak Fitness.

Source: Dr. Mercola