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Diabetes Memory # 379: First Night Home

Cathy & I - Christmas 1978
She bought me the GREASE calendar & Soundtrack - And I was too cool for school~

Circa Late November 1977, the first night I returned home from the hospital after my diagnoses.

My favorite sister Cathy (9.5 years my senior, holder of my heart, my only sister sans diabetes, and my roommate until she went off to college and broke my heart) and I were sitting on our bed in the room that we shared.

She was writing in her diary (whom she referred to as Anne) and I was snuggled up close to her. Side note: A few years later I start writing my own diary, and named it Cathy- in her honor.

One of the things I'd missed most while I was in the hospital was my big sister Cathy. She was and has always been my protector; the person I looked and look up to, my cheerleader, and my best friend. She was the sibling that never yelled at me or made me cry. she'd take me along wherever she was going, and protected me from the crazy eruptions that happened in the Kunik household.

We shared a room, we shared a bed, and we shared memories, both good and bad.

Our nightly ritual was simple. She'd write in her diary while I read a book. I was a night owl and she went to bed early on school nights, so even though she was in High School and I was in 3rd grade, we were somewhat in sync. And even when she had other plans (which was a lot come to think of it,) she'd still sit with me before I went to sleep. When she was finally done writing, she'd read me what she wrote; tuck me in, and I'd go to sleep.

Looking back, I'm sure she edited her diary entries, I mean of course she did!
But to my 8 year old self, it was if she was sharing all her secrets only with me. It made me feel special, it made me feel important, and it made me feel loved.

My first day back home from the hospital is mostly a blur. I know it was a cold, gray November day, and I know my next door neighbors Grace and Willie dropped off gifts including an argyle sweater with a crazy color combo of maroon, cream, and electric blue all mashed together. The very same sweater I would eventually where when my big sister Cathy finally took me and my friends to see Star Wars a few months later. And stop rolling your eyes re: the sweater. It was the 1970's and it was considered quite styling.
The other gift was a heartshaped necklace with multi colored faux gemstones. That's about all I remember from that day long ago - until it was time for bed.

I got in my PJ's, grabbed a book (most likely Encyclopedia Brown, Romona, or Little House on the Prairie) and we snuggled up tight. I put my book down and didn't bother to read. I'd missed her so much while I'd been away and I just wanted be.

She wrote while I waited - finally she put her diary down and looked at me.

Cathy: Want to hear what I wrote pretty girl?
Me: Yep.
Cathy: Do you want to hear what I wrote the night you were diagnosed first?
Me: Yep.
Cathy: Dear Anne, I can't believe it, my baby Kelly was diagnosed with diabetes today & all of us are devastated! I cried when I found out- so did everyone else.
Me: You...cried?
Cathy: Yep.
Me: I'm so sorry I made you cry Cathy.
Cathy: I'm so sorry you have diabetes Kelly - I wish it had been me.
Me: I'm glad it wasn't.

I don't remember the rest of the conversation or the diary entry from that day long ago.

I just remember us hugging tight for a very long time and I don't really remember who let go first.
Posted by Mr. Boy at 08.43, Add Comment
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Stop on over to the D-O-C & Thanks For Your Kind Words Yesterday!

Stop on over to the D-O-C & Thanks For Your Kind Words Yesterday!

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know that I'm "Featured Blogger' over at the Diabetes OC this week. Gina's in Spain and I want to make her proud, so "La escala y me dejó sabe lo que usted piensa!" Rough translation: "Stop over and let me know what you think!"

You may, or may not think, "I'm full of it!"

I also wanted to thank all of my DOC friends for checking in on me yesterday.
My Aunt Betty's funeral was very sad and it was an emotional day for our whole family. Your kind words, emails, & tweets meant the world to me!
If you have the chance, try connecting with your Uncles & Aunts. We don't realize it always, but they are a huge part of our lives, and when they leave this earth, your world really does change forever.

For those of you on the East coast - go out and soak up the sun! After 3 days of rain, we all could use some extra vitamin D - but please Diabetesalicious compadres, wear your sunscreen!
Posted by Mr. Boy at 08.36, Add Comment
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Measles. The Moral Panic in Swansea?

Measles. The Moral Panic in Swansea?

The outbreak of Measles in Swansea this month (April 2013) has led to a moral panic that has been extraordinary to watch.
First, Measles has been with us for a very long time. It was first described in the 7th century, and eventually differentiated from Smallpox and Chickenpox, in the 10th century. It has been estimated that 220 million people had died from the disease, and this kind of data forms the basis of the modern day ‘scare’ stories that so often hit the headlines today. This outbreak of measles is quite typical of this. It is a panic created by a disease that the BMJ know is no longer a serious, killer illness.
Indeed, the BMJ knew this as long ago as 1959 (7th February, p354), where they speak about the large number of cases recorded in England and Wales (41,000 compared with under 1,000 in Swansea). They asked doctors to comment on Measles and concluded that
"these writer agree that measles is nowadays normally a mild infection, and they rarely have occasion to give prophylactic gamma globulin".
The reality is, now as then, that although most children will contract measles during their lifetime, for most healthy people it is a disease that the body deals with quite normally, and without complications. It has, however, always been a 'killer' disease to those living in poverty, in poor, damp housing, with a poor diet. This is why the death rates rose so rapidly during the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions of the late 18th, early 19th centuries. And it is why, following the increasing affluence of the Victorian era, alongside the urban public health measure that were introduced, the disease has been on a steady decline.
"The combined death rate of scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 per cent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization. In part this recession may be attributed to improved housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition. In poor countries today, diarrhoea and upper-respiratory-tract infections occur more frequently, last longer, and lead to higher mortality where nutrition is poor, no matter how much or how little medical care in available". Illich.  
Illich wrote this in 1975 - but the idea that conventional Medicine has cured Measles persists, largely owing to the success of its brilliant, self-congratulatory propaganda over recent years.
For anyone who believes that the MMR vaccine played a role in the reduction of deaths through measles, please look at this graph.
Listen to the Conventional Medical Establishment, however, and you will be led to believe that it has been antibiotics and vaccines have achieved this result. They have not. The graph shows, quite clearly, that the decline of measles as a 'killer' disease has been consistent over the decades, and the introduction of antibiotics or vaccines have played no visible role in this decline whatsoever.
So why has Measles become a more serious disease over the last few decades, and certainly since 1959 - a time when mother's organised measles parties in order to ensure that their children contracted it naturally? Has it, perhaps, something to do with the promotion of the MMR vaccine? 
Certainly, the purposeful generation of fear in Swansea has been something that the NHS, with the supine support of the mainstream media (led, as always by the BBC, compliant as always to the wishes of the Conventional Medical Establishment) has created.
We are told that those people contracting measles are those who have not been vaccinated in the late 1990's, largely owing to that 'awful' doctor, Andrew Wakefield, who had the audacity to suggest that the MMR vaccines might be dangerous! (For the known and accepted dangers of the MMR vaccine, see here). These children should get vaccinated as soon as possible, to protect themselves from this dreadful disease!
Yet measles is not 'dreadful'. And the MMR vaccine is not safe. So the NHS are telling us to take a medication that is dangerous to prevent an illness that is not serious.
And the treatment of the measles, with homeopathy, can take the fear of the illness away, completely.
Even the alleged cause of the outbreak in Swansea is far from certain. We have been told that it has arisen from too many children not being vaccinated in the late 1990's. Is this really the case? If so, where are the statistics? Where are the children, aged 13 and just below, who have contracted the disease? We must patiently await the statistics that will ultimately emerge.
The evidence about outbreaks of disease, like this one at Swansea, have hitherto shown that it is the vaccinated, and not the unvaccinated that have been more likely to contract the disease. See, for example, the following links.
Survey: Vaccinated children five times more prone to disease than unvaccinated children
The Marvellous Health of Unvaccinated Children | International Medical Council on Vaccination
Latest research shows vaccinated children more chronically ill than non-vaccinated
Study: Unvaccinated children far less prone to allergies and disease than vaccinated children
Serious Chicken Pox Outbreak in Indiana is Among Vaccinated Children | Health Impact News
Unvaccinated Children Suffer Fewer Infectious Diseases: StudyGaia Health
If my hunch is correct, the Swansea episode has been another example of a health scare, a panic created in order to sell more drugs and vaccines. If so, the Department of Health, the NHS, our GP's, and our national media, have all been complicit in yet another marketing exercise in favour of the Big Pharma drug companies.

Posted by Mr. Boy at 07.34, Add Comment
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Andrew Wakefield and Safe Medicine

Andrew Wakefield and Safe Medicine
Andrew Wakefield is a ConMed practitioner who dared to suggest a possible link between the MMR vaccine, inflammatory bowel disease and autism. He has paid a heavy price for his audacity. ConMed, and in particular, pharmaceutical drugs and profits, are NOT to be put at risk. So he has been pilloried and victimised by the conventional medical establishment, eventually losing his job, being prosecuted by the General Medical Council, and losing his medical licence in the UK.

Wakefield is not a homeopath, and does not advocate homeopathy. But like this blog, he does advocate safe medicine. And as he is firmly embedded into the 'scientific' medical community, he wants drugs and vaccinations to be properly tested. So now, after he has suffered the full force of ConMed's wrath, he can begin to speak openly about what he has done.

He is interviewed here by Dr Mercola. It is a lengthy and detailed interview, well worth watching for anyone who wants to understand what this affair was all about, and the darker, clandestine side of the medical establishment from an 'insider'.


http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/04/10/wakefield-interview.aspx


The interview is interesting for another reason. Here are two conventional doctors who are calling for 'safer medicine'. In doing so, they follow in the footsteps of Samuel Hahnnemann, a conventional doctor in the 1780's, who realised that the medicine he was using at the time was doing more harm than good to patients. He spent the rest of his life developing homeopathy. Perhaps these two doctors, and many more like them, who can see the profit driven motivation of Big Pharma, will do likewise.
Posted by Mr. Boy at 06.26, Add Comment
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Why Big Pharma drugs always fail

Why Big Pharma drugs always fail

"The art of healing comes from nature and not from the physician. Therefore, the physician must start from nature."   Paracelsus 1493-1541.
Conventional medicine (ConMed) has always looked for ‘wonder’ drugs that could cure disease. It was widely expected that science would generate dramatic breakthroughs in medicine - just as it had done in most other spheres of life. During the 19th and early 20th century our lives had been transformed by electricity, telephony, the internal combustion engine, and much else - so, the argument went, science would surely lead to the end of the scourge of disease.

The failure of ConMed has been dramatic, particularly over the last 100 years, and especially over the last 20 years. Big Pharma drugs have been found to cause chronic disease, to lead to drug dependency, and to kill the patients it sought to treat. New diseases, previously rare or unknown have been created - and Big Pharma drugs and vaccines are heavily implicated in the rise and rise of chronic diseases, or all types. Even ConMed's ‘wonder drug’ of all ‘wonder drugs’, antibiotics, are now known to be dangerous to our health, and in any case, because of massive over-use, resistance to them is becoming a serious and increasing problem.
Of course, ConMed still seeks to claim the credit for the demise of acute diseases that once caused so much death during the 19th century. But any investigation into these claims is found to be bogus. Cholera, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, et al, were declining, rapidly, long before ConMed introduced its drugs and vaccines. The decline was the result of public health measures, the reduction of poverty, and improved housing and diet.
The hope and expectation ConMed produced in the early 20th century led traditional therapies, like homeopathy, to decline. But during the latter part of the 20th century, and particularly now in the 21st century, people are returning to traditional therapies. The dreams of ConMed, and the medical science that underlies it, have become an increasing nightmare.
At the most fundamental level, medical science's understanding of illness and disease is, and always has been, deeply flawed. It has studied what is happening to the human body in disease in enormous detail, and can describe disease with enormous complexity, in terms of what it has seen. But crucially, it has always ignored the fact that part of what happens to our bodies in disease is, in large measure, the body’s response to the disease.

What this leads to is that ConMed, and Big Pharma drugs in particular, actually attack the very processes adopted by the body to make itself well. What pharmaceutical drugs seek to do is to 'out-think' the body. They act against the body. They refuse to allow the body to do what it is ideally suited to do - to heal itself.
ConMed's strategy might appear to work on a temporary basis, but ultimately, it is destined to fail. Initially, there may be so-called side-effects; then more serious adverse reactions; and then the patient will go down with other diseases, usually worse than the original condition. And all this happens in the mistaken belief that drugs can heal us better than the body itself. 
This process has become a familiar picture with so many patients. Rapidly declining health is more often blamed on ‘bad luck’, or on the ravages of life and living, than the outcome of a medical system supposed to treat the original illness.
What is more, ConMed is the only medical therapy that adopts such a strategy. All traditional therapies seek to support the body, and its natural functions. They do not attempt to second-guess them. This is why treating ‘like with like’, as homeopathy does, is more successful. Similarly the needles of acupuncture, the pressures and manipulation of reflexology, and other massage therapies, are all aimed at stimulating, rather than repressing or subverting, the body's reaction to disease.
So will ConMed, or Big Pharma drugs, ever work? I will finish this blog with another passage from my book, ‘The Failure of Conventional Medicine’ - which goes into much greater detail about ConMed, its failure, and the certainty of this failure.
The problem is that even with all this knowledge, understanding and skill, ConMed has little or no understanding of what actually makes the sick human body better. Indeed, it has abandoned the insights that traditional medicine has known for centuries, and by obstinately rubbishing these therapies, it has condemned itself to ongoing and increasing failure.
In other words, NHS-ConMed will never work because it has failed, and continues to fail, to comply with the essential laws of nature and health.
Posted by Mr. Boy at 03.32, Add Comment
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