Nutritition and Doctors

An article in my latest trade magazine had an interesting survey about doctors. It seems that doctors are not pleased with the level of nutritional training they received in medical school. The survey polled 400 doctors of which 97% were members of the American Academy of Family Physicians. The survey revealed that many of these doctors felt that is at least somewhat or mostly their responsibility to provide nutritional counseling for their patients. Think about this for a moment. How many times in the past have you read where some unknown doctor was quoted as saying nutrition didn't matter? Like every other business, the medical field is changing when faced with consumer demand. Consumers have an almost infinite amount of information at their fingertips with the Internet. What consumers need and want is someone to help to interpret the information.

Where does one go to help interpret this kind of information? The Internet is not the place to go for most people. Why? If you don't know enough to know that you don't know enough, then how are you going to sift through the thousands of pages of Internet drool looking for one tidbit of usable information. Even if you found that tidbit, would you know how to apply this information to your particular problem? The answer is finding several people that you can trust to help you decide what is the best course of action for you. One of the best persons for this job should be your doctor. But as is stated above, he does not know enough to give you an informed decision. Here at my store I work with my customers and their doctors to determine what if any supplements should be used and for how long.

Thanks for spending part of your day here with me,

James

A Real Cure for CANCER?

A few days ago an interesting newsletter came across my email. I have seen many articles claiming a cure for cancer, from Barley Grass to Hydrogenperoxide all have failed to live up to their promise. This is not unexpected since the best cancer researchers in the world still do not agree upon how a normal cell becomes cancerous.

This new article was featured on the January 20th e-newsletter form newscientist.com. The link for the article is : http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19325874.700-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html. This is an exciting development if all the facts become known and the follow-up research is carried on.

I am going to summarize the article only because I think you should read this for yourself. Scientists at the University of Alberta in Edmonton found that by using the chemical dichloroacetate, abnormal cancerous cells switched back form using glycolysis to using their mitochondria. So what you say. This is big. Very, very big. The mitochondria in addition to providing the individual cells energy also serve the body by telling an abnormal cell to self destruct. Which means the cancer cells kill themselves without the use of toxic chemotherapy or radiation treatments.

I googled dichloroacetate and found several citations. A rat study showed that 80% of rats infected with human cancer cells survived when fed dichloroacetate. Rats are a long way form humans, but it is a start. The only problem with this drug is that it is not patent protected.
Why is this a problem? None of the big drug companies are going to invest millions of dollars that they cannot exclusively sell. So this means that others are going to have to contribute money in order to do the research to see if this is the magic bullet medical science has been looking for the last 50 years.

Thanks for spending a part of your day here with me,

James