Every one should watch this video.  Allan Savory shows how to stop desertification using the ways of nature – by increasing livestock and moving them the way predators used to.  By mimicking this natural cycle he has created lush pastures and forests from deserts.

The best side effect is that it creates enough meat to feed the world (Vegans won’t enjoy that part, but I don’t give a shit, because their massive mono-cropping of grain is part of the desertification process of our lands.  Mono-cropping destroys the land and the wild life that lived on it, so vegans are killing animals by the tens of thousands each day – it’s just not animals they care about. like snakes, turtles and insects – many are endangered species)

Savory’s way works, I know that for sure.  When I first bought my farm, about ten acres had been desertified by years of orange groves.  I live in Florida where the soil is mostly sugar sand and refuses to hold water.  After two years of having cattle grazing and moving the herd from one field to another, that land is now one of the most lush pasture land in the county.  When I had the property appraised, the county rated my field as a meadow (A difficult rating to get), but that’s how beautiful it is – and it was all done by cattle – I did nothing but move them.

Livestock add carbon to the soil by tampering their manure into the soil.  This creates a barrier which allows the soil to hold water and the urine and manure adds nitrogen and many other minerals and nutrients.  Since the cattle improved the land, many other species of animals have made my pasture their home, gopher tortoise, indigo snakes and 400 other species which use the holes the gopher tortoise abandon.  That’s natures way!

Savory’s plan would end starvation and turn every desert into a lush grassland, virtulally ending many wars over richer and more productive lands.  But people will not listen, because assholes, like vegans, like to scream that cattle are ruining the atmosphere with their farts and would fight any attempt to increase their numbers – even though they are all city dwellers and know nothing about nature or science.

I advise you to watch this wonderful speech by a very knowledgeable and passionate scientist.  He receives a well deserved standing ovation at the end.  It’s well worth your time and his conclusion may be man’s only hope for the future.  I hope we can spread his message.

(By clicking the button on the bottom right of the screen while video is playing, the video will play at full screen)

I would like to thank all those who have been writing me with concern for my health,  It  meant a lot to me and I was overwhelmed at the amount of readers that I have and surprised at the amount of people who have really missed me writing new articles.   I did have a rough time the last few months for several reasons which I will explain in an up coming article.  I have been answering comments the entire time, so those reading comments knew I was still alive.   I will begin writing again.  I am doing much better now.  Thanks again.

On the other side, I have been saddened and tore apart by the comments and emails I have received from those that lost loved ones needlessly to colonoscopies and also from those who have lost their intestines and are dying on TPN and are in need of a transplant.  I have been able to put some of those people in touch with my surgeon and hopefully they will get a transplant soon.  This is one of the hard parts of what I do, because I know what it is like to lie in a hospital bed hooked up to a pump pushing TPN directly into your heart – doctors telling you every day you will die within months.  

TPN feeds everything, because it is high in sugar, amino acids vitamins and minerals, so fungus and bacteria thrive on it.  I suffered two line infections (very common) that went systemic while on TPN and nearly died twice as a result.  Both times I went into septic shock with fevers above 105.5 degrees F and my blood pressure dropped below 44/28.   I had no intestines at that time and TPN was the only thing keeping me alive.

Some people who have written are suffering the same thing, so it is urgent that they get a transplant.  I am doing all I can to assist these unfortunate people, but this is all very emotionally taxing, especially given the fact the many people in the same group as me at Jackson Memorial Hospital and got transplant at the same time, have recently died.  We had all become very close during our recovery, but I will write more about this in an up coming article.

I have missed writing for you and can’t wait to get back to it.  I have been very encouraged by all the letters and comments I have received.  Sorry I have been away so long and many of you were frightened that maybe I was very sick or possibly died.  Not yet!  I am doing very well –  I am Wolverine!  I bounce back from any injury. (It was nurses and doctors who gave me that name, they say I heal twice as fast as a normal person)  

I have survived 4 bouts of septic shock, over 20 feet of necrotic bowels in me for three days, an intestinal transplant,  followed by the worst septic shock, which put me in a coma for 2 weeks while simultaneously having a collapsed lung (punctured during intubation) and most recently, cancer (Multiple Myeloma, which is in total remission now).  I will write more about this in an upcoming article.  You can see that I have a lot to write about.

Love you all and can’t wait to get writing again.  Thanks again for the wonderful letters of encouragement.

In my last post, I attempted to shed some light on the obvious association between SSRI medications (antidepressant drugs, like Prozac) and the recent wave of wholesale shootings/suicides.  The correlation is so profound that it should at least warrant some serious investigation, yet all is quiet on that front as the politicians instead rush to blame a very old technology for a very new problem.   This is a sickening exploitation of the death of children, simply to prop-up bad legislation that offers no real solutions to the problem, but instead rekindles long-standing , irrelevant battles between Special Interest Lobbies and Congress.

More than 1 in 10 Americans take at least one of these SSRI drugs regularly.  Why suddenly, does everyone need to be on antidepressants, when humans have thrived for tens of thousands of years without them?   Are people actually becoming more and more depressed and mentally ill?   If so, then why?   These are the questions that I would like to take a look at in this article

I certainly do not believe that everyone prescribed these drugs are clinically depressed nor in need of any chemical sedation.  As I mentioned in the last post, my wife and I were both offered these drugs by doctors, even when we were not expressing any feelings of depression.  These new wonder pills are just another fad drug (similar to Valium in the 1970s), which are being prescribed for anyone with a complaint, but no real disease.   Even though I believe they are given out to perfectly healthy people, I do believe that depression has been on the rise in the last few decades, but handing out SSRI medication certainly does not answer the question as to why.

It appears to be the goal of modern medicine to treat a symptom, rather than the cause of a disease, perhaps because it is far more profitable to establish life-long treatments than simply finding a prevention or cure for a disease.  I believe that there is a root cause for the massive amount of clinical depression arising in the western world and it is not simply because of a poor economy, terrorists and every other excuse being tossed around.  Humans have had to deal with everyday stress of survival for millions of years and very few americans are actually affected by terrorists – only through the scare tactics shoveled out by the media.

The rise in the rate of depression seems perfectly in sync with the evolution of the American diet.   Depression has been on a steady incline since the 1970s (depression in woman has doubled since 1970), which was also when the hysteria concerning high cholesterol began to take hold of America.   Each decade following has pushed the desired cholesterol levels lower and lower and lower.   The most recent advertisements for Crestor now claim that your doctor’s goal for your cholesterol is below 100 mg/dl – that’s suicide – literally!

Low cholesterol, depression and attempted suicide appear to go hand in hand in every clinical study.   The association is undeniable.   This article from Psychology Today (full article) plainly states:

As low cholesterol is linked to depression, low cholesterol is also a risk factor in suicide attempts.”.

Of course, like any modern medical publication, they paint a dichotomy by echoing the rhetoric about high cholesterol causing heart disease, even in spite of a 2009 study published in the American Heart Journal that showed that 75% of heart attack victims admitted to emergency rooms tested with low to normal cholesterol levels.  Read what Dr. Dwight Lundell, a heart surgeon who has performed more than 5,000 open heart surgeries, has to say concerning the role of cholesterol in heart disease here.  Why would nature evolve us to be “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” – it wouldn’t.   So, one of these theories has to be wrong and I believe that the evidence for cholesterol causing heart disease is far weaker than the link between low cholesterol and depression.

This all tends to make sense once you realize that the brain accounts for 25% of the body’s total cholesterol.   Your brain and nervous system are made predominantly of this molecule.   Then again, we have the fact that most of our hormones are also constructed from cholesterol and it becomes obvious how low cholesterol can cause mood problems.   Little wonder why vegans tend to be extremely moody and temperamental?

The human body is completely incapable of making many of the essential hormones without cholesterol, including the male hormone testosterone – perhaps explaining the need for Viagra and Cialis in our zero cholesterol society?   Studies have proven that low testosterone not only causes a lower libido, but can also cause severe mood swings.   Many children today are placed on low-fat diets from birth.   Human breast milk is very high in cholesterol by nature, much higher than cow’s milk; I guess this was just another mistake that evolution made.

Now, babies are fed very low-fat formulas at the point in life that the brain begins developing – remember, the brain is made predominantly from cholesterol, which might explain why human milk is so high in it.   Cholesterol is so important to our health, that not only is it manufactured in the liver, but every cell in the human body can synthesize cholesterol if necessary.  This is why the pharmaceutical companies had to create certain drugs in order to pound cholesterol down to the unnaturally low levels they recommend.  Very few people realize that the American Heart Association even scoffed at Ancel Key’s “Lipid Hypothesis” up until the year that he was appointed to their board of directors.  Click here for a great breakdown on the history of how the bogus Lipid Hypothesis came into being.

Once the AHA foolishly adopted Keys erroneous theory, the drug companies ran to manufacture drugs that could lower cholesterol.   This would ultimately become the 30 billion dollar a year industry that is presently their leading cash cow.   Cholesterol lowering drugs are the top money-maker for the pharmaceutical industries, is it any wonder why they are the driving force behind perpetuating the lie that is the “Lipid Hypothesis” and bury any evidence to the contrary?

Most of everything that your doctor believes, was taught to them by the pharmaceutical companies and their less-than-honest studies.   Here are just a few pieces of evidence of the drug companies influence over medical schools here, here and here.  Even many years after leaving medical school, nearly every lecture, conference or piece of literature that your doctor is provided is paid for by the pharmaceutical companies – they are the core of modern medicine and doctors are strictly the licensed vehicle they need to distribute their wares.

Now we see that SSRI medications are beginning to close in on the profits of statins by garnering some 19 billion dollars in revenues.   The pharmaceutical companies are double-dipping on this one.   As long as they continue to perpetuate the myth that cholesterol causes heart disease, people will lower their cholesterol, thereby becoming depressed – not to worry, they have the answer for this with another magic pill – a pill that also causes thoughts of suicide!  How long until they invent a pill that will attempt to prevent the suicidal side-effects of the SSRI?   That’s how the pharmaceutical game works.  Let’s take a look at just how SSRI work to prevent depression – at least in theory.

SSRI stands for “Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor”, which means that the drug increases the amount of serotonin available at the synapses of the nervous system by inhibiting the body’s ability to re-uptake the excess serotonin.  These nerves also include the brain.   The synapse is a fancy name for the gap between nerve endings.  As a signal is sent along a nerve, it ultimately reaches a nerve ending, where the signal must be relayed across this gap or “synapse”.  This relay is achieved by the secretion of certain chemicals, like acetylcholine, serotonin and glutamate called neurotransmitters.

Any one of these neurotransmitters in extreme abundance can be considered an excitotoxin, because they will keep the nerves constantly firing, which we are not designed to do.  This action can eventually cause cell damage to the nerve.   Do any of those chemical neurotransmitters sound remotely familiar with any ingredients in the American diet?   How about glutamate – as in Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) – does this ring a bell?   MSG became a necessary ingredient in most processed foods the minute that the fat was removed.   Food without fat can become rather flavorless and boring to eat.   Flavor enhancers, such as sugar, salt, MSG and aspartame made up for the loss of fat and excited the nerve endings, which creates a pleasurable experience in the brain when eating this non-nutritious garbage.

Glutamate is used in literally thousands of food products from frozen pizzas to chips and cookies.  It is hard to know all the products that contain MSG, because the federal government allows manufacturers to list it as “natural flavorings” in their ingredients list – but Americans are consuming a butt-load of this chemical.  So, is the real problem with the rise in depression caused by a lack of serotonin or is it too much glutamate?   High glutamate levels have also been associated with OCD and other brain disorders in some studies.   Glutamate is also manufactured in our bodies from blood glucose, so it has been found to be very high in those with type 1 diabetes, also causing depression (source).

Whenever any of these neurotransmitters become out of balance, depression is sure to follow.   It is very apparent after a little study that the modern problem of depression is rarely that serotonin levels are too low, but that glutamate levels are far too high and that is easily associated with the modern diet of processed foods, which jack-up blood glucose levels and dump tons of excitotoxins, such as glutamate and aspartame, into our children’s bloodstream.  The following is a must-see report on flavor enhancers aired 60 Minutes.  They are quite candid on what the manufacturers are trying to achieve when designing these chemical cocktails.

They admit that their goal is to create an addiction and design flavors to not “linger”, so you will want to eat more and more, never being satisfied – how ethical is this practice in a nation suffering from a rising obesity problem?   By every definition, these flavor enhancers behave more like a drug and just like street drugs, they continue to get more powerful as the technology progresses.

The medical industry’s solution is very similar to their solution to the imbalance of fatty acids, also caused by the modern diet.   The medical community would have us believe that humans do not get enough omega 3 fatty acids, DHA and EPA, in their diet and therefore why they constantly push fish and flaxseed oil to patients.   But, the reality is that americans consume far too much omega 6 fatty acid via vegetable oils (actually seed oils, because they came from grains or beans).

This again is a mainstay of processed foods and is also recommended as being more heart healthy than saturated fat.   Rather than have people cut down on the amount of plant derived oils, the insanity is now to attempt to match the over-consumption and resulting inflammation of omega 6 fatty acids with an over-consumption of omega 3 fatty acids.

In a similar way, these same geniuses are attempting to offset the high glutamate levels, caused by a diet high in processed foods, by jacking up the serotonin levels at the synapse of the nerves.   This is a complete over excitement of the nerve cells and is little wonder why this experiment is beginning to back-fire.   Their logic reminds me of the children’s song, where the old woman accidentally ate a fly and then she decided to eat a spider to catch the fly.   She continues to eat larger and larger animals to get rid of the last one, until ultimately eating a horse, which finally kills her (lyrics here)).

I don’t think you can cheat nature this way – excess is excess, but no entity of commerce would dare advise anyone to reduce the consumption of any product, when they can double their profits by advising you to double your consumption of something else.  It’s like telling you to eat a pound of poison and not worry, because I have a pound of antidote.  Who would do this?   The old woman in the story would be proud of this logic, unfortunately she’s too dead to enjoy it.

I am sure that the people who have very low cholesterol and are inundating their bodies with all these excitotoxins do feel better when first taking these drugs, but we can see that it leads to a much larger meltdown as time passes.   It also appears that the problem becomes even worse when someone on these SSRI medications withdraws from them.  These drugs are extremely addictive and create a dependence by taking away the body’s natural ability to “feel happy” or “good” without the drug.

Not unlike methamphetamines, this dependence seems to become permanent or at least have withdrawal symptoms so long that few people make it without going back to the drug or committing suicide.  It would seem that the dopamine receptors are severely crippled after long-term damage to the nerve cells, so with or without the drug, the patient experiences a hopelessness and inability to feel good about life anymore.

With methamphetamines, the dosages must be continually increased in order to achieve the happy feeling the user desires – ultimately the drug no longer delivers the happy feeling at all, but the drug must be continued just to prevent falling  into a feeling on total desolation.  Without the drug, their life becomes a dark and miserable place.  I think we are seeing evidence that these SSRIs can produce a similar result and a similar feeling of despair in some users when the drug is no longer taken.

Some of these maniac shooters had stopped taking their medication prior to their explosion.   This leads many to believe that these people were insane to begin with and that the SSRI medication made them civil.   Once they stopped taking the medication, they went back to being nuts.   This could be a possibility, but that theory begins to fall apart when we see how many of the shooters were still on their medication when they went postal and the fact that very few of them had shown any signs of violent behavior towards others prior to being on the drugs.  (Here is a list of shooters and the drugs they were on or withdrawing from at the time of the shootings)

We will never know the answer, because no one cares to investigate this problem.   The politicians, news media and Hollywood know-it-alls see these shootings as an opportunity to further other political agendas they hold dear – they also hold the megaphone with which to shout their opinions much louder than the rest of us and draw all attention away from this problem.

Though I believe that many doctors prescribe these drugs to people who are not depressed or are just going through a temporary depression with an obvious cause (death in the family, divorce, loss of job, etc..), but there is a growing population of people who are manic-depressive, and that number is most likely growing because of the deterioration of the American diet.   As the medical professionals continue to push the recommended cholesterol level lower and lower and the manufacturers of these flavor enhancers continue to make them more powerful, this problem will become worse.

Each generation of children are raised on more highly processed diet than the previous one – food lower in fat and higher in exitotoxins.  Younger and younger children are being placed on these drugs as a result.  Our government has pretty much taken over the diet of the American children through the school system.   There are some states who have begun to make the school lunch program mandatory, not allowing parents to send their children to school with a homemade lunch.

I have read other stories of some schools that inspect the lunches sent from home and have confiscated any foods that their diet guidelines doesn’t agree with (the confiscation was claimed to be a misunderstanding, but this is the type of problems that will arise once the genie is let out of that bottle).

This next video is a good illustration of just how fake our modern food can be.  Remember as you watch this, according to the story of the confiscated lunch in North Carolina, the chicken nuggets were the school system’s replacement for the turkey sandwich.  Let’s see what our government considers a superior food.

I am not sure how American parents are going to take back control of the food that their children eat, but if something is not done soon, this problem will continue to grow, no matter how many weapons that the government decides to ban.   The school lunch mandate also included fruit juice, which may as well be soda as far as quantity of sugar and artificial flavoring.  If a parent does not want their child drinking this liquid candy, what right does a school have provide it to the child?

In Summary

It seems quite clear that the problem begins with this American diet that is low in healthy fat and cholesterol, yet high in sugar, starch and flavor enhancers (excitotoxins).  Low cholesterol and high glutamate levels is a recipe for depression, OCD, and ADHD.  This leads to a visit to the doctor, who will no doubt prescribe one of these drugs, further elevating the level of excitotoxins at the nerve synapse, which will ultimately cause cell damage to the nerve endings and dependence on stronger and stronger doses.   Given the fact that these drugs are being administered to people at a younger and younger age, even at the point where a child’s brain is still growing and developing, how are we surprised when these kids go off the deep end?   And why is it that our leaders in both politics and medicine cannot see this pattern and refuse to investigate?

I think this is the appropriate time to say, “follow the money”.   The pharmaceutical companies have an endless goldmine propping up the lie that cholesterol is deadly and setting the desired level far too low to achieve by diet, thereby needing their cholesterol lowering drugs to smash cholesterol down to a level that nature never intended (remember, their statin drugs work by crippling the liver’s ability to manufacture cholesterol – like everyone’s liver decided to take out a contract on our hearts).   This accounts for 30 billion dollars per year for statin drugs.   Perpetuating this lie for profit has also caused the American people to reduce their fat intake, even to their children, whose developing brains need cholesterol far more than an adult.

This all leads to depression, onset by the lack of cholesterol, coupled with the high intake of excitotoxins.   The fact that children consume more junk food than adults, further complicates the problem as junk foods are inundated with these flavor enhancers.   Now we finish off the poor child’s brain by tossing in more excitotoxins in the form of drugs in an attempt to offset the ones in the highly processed foods.   Using favor enhancers is far cheaper to produce processed food and the removal of fats also extends their shelf life, so it is far more profitable to the food manufacturers to continue this pattern.

Then we have the fact that the politicians not only receive huge contributions from both of these entities (pharmaceutical companies and processed food manufacturers), but they also have other agendas that expand federal government power by taking away the liberty of the people to make their own choices.   It was not only the talk of gun bans (the dream of every politician), but there was also a lot of rhetoric concerning the expansion of mental health – translation: MORE POWERFUL DRUGS and easier access to them.

Given the fact that Obama’s goal is “Mandate people to behave” (according to his interpretation of behavior), may we also see court ordered medications for those deemed mentally ill in our near future?  Possibly even those deemed physically ill?   A heart attack victim may be ordered by the court to take statin drugs once Obamacare becomes the law of the land.

Why people continue to place the welfare of their children into the hands of a government that has lied to its people so many times and been flat-out wrong in may of its assumptions, boggles the mind.   It is actually not so hard to understand once you see the fear that is created and maintained by our leaders and the media by the corporations and special interest groups that support them both.

I plan to cover this in greater detail in an upcoming post in my newest category called “Fear Mongering”.  Creating fear is the favorite tool of commerce and it is through that fear that we surrender our right  to make choices for ourselves and do what we’re told by the media and their sponsors.   Americans must find the courage to take charge of their own lives and decisions, before we completely lose the ability or freedom to make those choices.

I have been working on several articles, two of which I hoped to release in the next week.  Unfortunately, I have put them on hold for a couple of days in order to write this very controversial post concerning the debates that will no doubt rage throughout the holiday season, because of the horrific shootings that happened in Newtown, Connecticut last week.

These kinds of crimes simply boggle the mind and leave everyone with their jaws agape, trying to make some sort of sense out of such an event.  So, everyone does exactly what they always do in these situations, which is why they continue to happen.  The media rushes in and plasters the identity of the shooter across the global satellites, when this type infamy was likely his motive and sends a clear advertisement to the next wacko who is seeking attention, that he too will be martyred (which is why I refuse to mention his name in this article).

And though the media will make this killer as notorious as he wished to be, there is no need for a criminal investigation, because the politicians have already convicted the firearm as the responsible party, the shooter was just another victim of the easy access to guns.  Blaming the gun, or more accurately, the freedom to attain guns as the reason for these crimes is not only misplaced justice, but is not even asking the right question.  The question should be;  what would make someone want to shoot and kill defenseless children, irregardless of the weapon they use?   Is it strictly access to firearms that is the root cause of all of these school shootings?

Americans have had access to guns ever since the American Revolution and there are far more gun restrictions now than there ever was in U.S. History, and Connecticut has some of the strictest.   Why have we never seen these type of senseless shooting sprees (without motive) prior to the last 20 years?  Billy The Kid, Jesse James and John Wesley Hardin did not shoot as many people in their entire criminal career as this nut-job killed in one day.   One argument says that it is because people now have access to more powerful weapons which can fire large capacity magazines.   Is this truly the cause?

In the 1920s, just about anyone could walk into a Hardware Store and purchase a Thompson submachine gun (which could hold 100 rounds of .45 ACP ammunition in its drum magazine and was FULLY automatic).  “Tommy Guns” were used in the “Saint Valentines Day Massacre“, where it is said that some of the victims were nearly cut in half by the enormous spray of bullets.  Bonnie and Clyde prefered to use the BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), which had the capability of shredding through the heavy iron in cars of that period with its .30-06 rounds.   So the idea that today’s weapon are more powerful and capable of a higher rate of fire is a completely erroneous one.

But even though their were bloody shootings in those times, all of the crimes committed had very clear motives.  They were either based on greed (robbing banks or trains) or fights over gangland territory – never just for the execution of unarmed children, followed by the suicide of the shooter.  If automatic guns were truly the source of the problem, then we would have expected to see similar school shootings/suicide from the periods of 1890s to the 1930s.  Most of the violent crime from 1920 till 1933 was the result of the prohibition on alcohol.  This prohibition actually increased crime in the 1920s in the same way that the “War On Drugs” not only helped to create an underworld, but has increased the size and power of such organized crime and placed more drugs on the street as a result – but I’m sure that the prohibition of guns will not have that same effect.

The school shooting/suicide that we see today are unlike any crime we have seen in the past.  These shootings are completely senseless – the work of an animalistic and suicidal mind.  So the other proposal that has been talked about all week has been government offering better care for the mentally ill.  Yet again, we have always had mentally ill people here in the U.S., yet we have never seen these type of wholesale murders, with no apparent motive, happen with such frequency.  Why does this new brand of mental illness seem even crazier than before?  We should be looking for something new – something that did not exist more than 30 years ago.  There is one difference that has yet to be discussed by any politician or anyone in media – and for good reason.

Though the politicians and media will bring the gun control debate straight to the headlines, it will be many months from now, when the people have lost interest in the story, that the real truth will slip its way onto page 14 of a paper or news website.   This is what has happened in every other shooting.   In over 90% of these completely senseless shootings, it is later found that the perpetrators were not only mentally unstable, but had been on antidepressants, mainly SSRI medications, for many years prior to going totally apeshit.

Please click on this link to see a list of school shooters and what antidepressants they were taking.  That’s a pretty comprehensive list – and much longer than expected, wasn’t it (around 4,800)?    All SSRI medications list the possibility of suicidal tendencies as a side effect and research has shown that these suicidal effects are much more pronounce in the younger patients that take them.  Seniors have the least negative effects, but the younger the patient, the stronger the thoughts of suicide tend to be.  Some of these shooters had stopped taking their SSRI, which are highly addictive drugs and can cause greater difficulties when sudden cessation of the drug is attempted.  A person on these drugs must be removed from them gradually or really bad things can result.

Absence of these mind-altering drugs seems to be the only marked difference between killers of the past and these modern school shooter/suicide killers, whose actions of violence are totally mindless and suicidal. When these kids start mixing these pharmaceutical monsters with alcohol or illegal street drugs, like methanphetamines or Bath Salts,  you have a real recipe for death and mayhem.  The fact that this most recent shooting incident has created a knee-jerk outcry for better mental health care, means that the pharmaceutical companies will have more funding with which to create even more potent antidepressant drugs.

The correlation between these drugs and the total mental meltdowns we see are so strong that it begs the question, why is no one in the media, or the crying President, talking about this possible connection?   Pharmaceutical conglomerates are major sponsors of the news media.  Have you ever noticed the thousands of pharmaceutical advertisements inundating the local and national news media?  Since when does anyone in the media speak ill about the practices of the pharmaceutical companies or the ease with which doctors prescribe these medications to children?

Because doctors have been elevated to a god-like status in our country, these drugs are always considered the solution to the problem, so people are incapable of considering them as a contributing factor (cognitive dissonance).   The national media will always toss guns into the center of the debate while everyone’s emotions are running high, thereby putting up a smokescreen to where the real truth lies – because guns frighten people and prescription drugs don’t – even though you have a 6,200% better chance of being killed by a doctor than you do a gun.  290 people are killed each day in the U.S. by prescription drugs, and that only includes direct deaths from the drugs, not the deaths of those who may be killed by the one under their influence (shooter, driver, etc..).  In order for gun deaths to eclipse the deaths from pharmaceuticals, there would have to be an Aurora, Colorado, Batman movie massacre take place every hour of every day, 365 days a year.

The pharmaceutical companies contribute millions of dollars to elected officials and until one of their concoctions kills thousands of people in a way that can no longer be hidden, then, and only then, will the FDA reluctantly pull one of their poisons from the shelves.  The drug Vioxx killed nearly 60,000 people before the FDA finally took action.  It is in the best interest of the pharmaceutical giants to protect the doctors, because it is only through the doctor’s license that their chemicals are distributed.  Just between the years 1996 to 1997 the amount of children on antidepressants rose from 8,000 to over 40,000 and nowadays number continues to rise.  There has no long-term study on the effects of these drugs on the developing brain of a child (mostly adult studies).  These SSRIs are being handed out like candy on Halloween and not just by psychologists, but even General Practitioners have gotten into the act.  These drugs are not only easy to get, but doctors seem to insist on everyone taking them.  Here are just some of my experiences:

All of the intestinal transplant recipients were automatically placed on antidepressants (Prozac), because the doctors claim that 100% of them go into depression  (I found that most people will take whatever a doctor gives them, so all of the other patients I know still take the antidepressants).  When I refused them, a nurse told my wife that I was showing “classic signs of depression” (why does a nurse feel she can diagnose that?).  Next, they secretly sent in a psychologist to examine me.  The shrink found that I was not depressed and they finally got off of my back.  I told them that I knew I wasn’t depressed, because if anything, I have high anxiety (probably from being cooped up in a hospital for more than a year) and they told me that the SSRIs would help with the anxiety also and still attempted to give them to me.

What?  It seems like anxiety and depression are like polar opposites, yet, somehow this magical elixir can cure both.  Years before I met my wife, she told me she had went to a doctor simply to get a blood work-up.  The doctor ran the blood test and told her she was healthy, but then suggested that he write her a prescription for SSIRs.  When she refused, he began to ask her personal questions – just digging for a reason to give her the antidepressants.  She became offended by his questioning and never went back to that doctor.

I still suffer some chronic abdominal pain (most likely caused by surgical adhesions).  When I described the pain to my primary physician, she wrote me a prescription for Prozac.  I figured she was insinuating that the pain was all in my head, but she claimed that antidepressants also have pain relieving properties (what can’t they do?).  Of course, I refused the medication.  She then offered to write my wife a prescription for SSRIs, just because she was in the office with me – I am not kidding.  She thought that my wife could use them because of all the stress she went through while I was in the hospital, yet my wife never asked for them, nor did she accept the offer.  This is how easy it is to get these drugs.  Doctors seem to automatically place everyone on them for any reason.   It would certainly appear that there is some sort of incentive for doctors to write scripts for these pharmaceuticals.

Any child diagnosed with ADHD will ultimately end up on these SSRIs.  Children, especially teenagers, can go through a lot of mood changes – it’s called adolescence.  No one gave us drugs for that when I was young.  As a matter of fact, one of the best drummers I was in a   band with was a guy who was very hyperactive as a child.  He had trouble paying attention in school, because of the ridiculous amount of energy he had.  In today’s time they would say he had ADHD and placed him on drugs.  Back in the 1970s, the doctor told his mother to get him into sports or buy him a drum set, so they bought the drums.  He had been beating on those things since he was eight years old and damn, did he get good – and had endless stamina.  That’s how they dealt with children back then, they tried to turn a negative to a positive – now we give them drugs and turn them into killers.

I have been doing a lot of research on this subject, even prior to the recent shooting.   I have a grand-nephew who has been diagnosed with ADHD and is always getting sent home from school.  I have a suspicion that his behavioral problems could stem from a wheat allergy, which seems to run in my family.  I have seen him at family functions perfectly behaved until about twenty minutes after stuffing his face with tons of bread, cakes, pies or cookies.  At that point he becomes a terror – totally out of control and unable to listen to authority – like someone on drugs.  I know that all children love cookies and cakes, because I have 2 nephews, 6 nieces, 3 grand nephews and 2 grand nieces, but his craving for wheat is unlike anything I have seen in any of the other children.  It is not just for sweets, he can’t get enough bread, and if he is not watched, he will eat an entire meal in bread.

Some studies have shown that a wheat protein called gliadin can cross the blood-brain-barrier and bind to opiate receptors in the brain (please read here for much more detail from Dr. William Davis on gliadin).  This protein in the wheat can cause the addiction that some people suffer when trying to quit.  My sister (my grand-nephew’s grandmother) claims that she had a horrible addiction to wheat and literally suffered drug-like withdrawals while trying to quit, including cravings.  I have a friend whose daughter is autistic and he claimed that her condition improved greatly after her doctors took her off of gluten.  So, I asked my niece to at least try to remove her son from wheat and see if he improved before submitting him to a life of drugs.  Of course, her doctors insisted on the drugs and that seemed a lot easier to her.  He is only eight years old and already on some mind-controlling drug.  How many years will they be effective before he needs a stronger drug?   All of these behavioral drugs have proven to be very addictive and become les s effective over time, thereby making it necessary to increase the dose or move to a stronger drug.

I’m not sure if he is on Ritalin, but it is some drug similar to Ritalin.  From articles I have read, many of these shooters started out on drugs like Ritalin when they were very young.   By the time they were 14 to 16, they needed to be placed on much stronger behavioral drugs, like Prozac or some other SSRI.  There are more than four times the amount of children on these drugs now than there was just ten years ago.  Are we to believe that the entire human race has suddenly become depressed and in need of these modern drugs?  Has the human race suddenly become deficient in Prozac?   If these drugs were actually warranted and effective, then we would expect to find that all of these shooters were people who were not on SSIRs and that all the children on them were functioning citizens.   I could accept the fact that a very small percentage of the population may benefit from some of these drugs, but there are millions of people taking these concoctions and many of them started taking them as children.  I believe that they are over-prescribed and in many cases just an easier way for parents to handle their children than proper discipline, exercise and a healthy diet.

There certainly seems to be a pattern emerging, but the media ignores it and the President and other politicians could care less, because they only use tragedies to further political agendas – never solutions that would actually reduce or stop the problem.  After 9/11, every politician ran to push forward some bill that expanded government power and robbed us of more liberties – usually some bill that they had been unsuccessfully hawking for years, including a national ID card.  Something as unconstitutional as the “Patriot Act” (completely shredding the 4th ammendment) could not have passed had it not been pushed through while emotions were high following the attacks of 9/11.  No one can exploit a tragedy like a government can.

Even though there is quite a history now of school shooters who were life-long pharmaceutical addicts, it will be completely ignored by the authorities and the media. Obama will use this tragedy to pen an executive order and force another ban on some semiautomatic assault weapons, which will do absolutely nothing to slow down these school shootings.  When the next shooting transpires, the entire media circus will start again and they will find a new gun to blame for the shooting and more money will be dumped towards mental health medications, which will be shoved down the children’s throats before any long-term testing will be performed.

I am not trying to make any political statement on guns here, so don’t start littering my comments with anti-gun propaganda.  I am only pointing out that the politicians are not out to fix the problem.  They seize these opportunities to further party agendas and in this particular case, it’s gun control.  After 9/11 it was personal privacy that was targeted (because the hijackers used box cutters.  Had they used guns, then guns would have also been targeted).  I guarantee you that a ban on semiautomatic rifles will not make this problem go away as long as these children’s minds are being twisted by these SSRI drugs of the pharmaceutical companies or the withdrawal from them.  The same way that any kid can get their hands on any illegal drug if they wish, they will always be able to gain access to guns or other weapons if they so desire – no matter how many laws you write.  The U.S. spends billions of dollars per year attempting to enforce the drug laws, yet any teenager knows where they can score drugs if they want them.  Stop kidding yourself about the wonders of contraband and how ineffective we are at enforcing the laws that already exist.

Just like with my grand-nephew, many of these problems start with food allergies and poor health from the horrible American diet of processed foods.  If these highly inflammatory foods, loaded with MSG, aspartame and other exitotoxins are not damaging enough on their little developing minds and nervous system, we then begin shoving highly addictive and mind altering pharmaceuticals into their mouths at very young ages.  I expect the problem to get much worse, no matter how many weapons we ban.  Any weapon is only as dangerous as the mind that wields it.  As modern food, environmental toxins and pharmaceutical drugs continue to get worse and worse, we may see a level of crazy scarier than anything we have seen to date.  That one psycho in Miami that ate the face off a homeless guy is just a taste of where we may be headed if everyone continues to ignore the real source of the problem and continues to trust these doctors and pharmaceutical companies to make your children behave.  That zombie guy didn’t need a gun.  He was so insane that he simply used his teeth.

Let’s face it, the mind that would shoot other innocent children in such a horrific nature as we have seen in recent years, is not a mind that has gone mad by any natural means.  We are seeing mental illness on a whole new level not seen since Vlad The Impaler or fictional bad men like Hannibal Lecter.   I could be wrong, but I believe that they will find that this latest crazed idiot had been on these antidepressants since he was as young as the children he targeted.  So far, the history of these type shootings have proven that to be the case.

In a world full of animals that bite, claw, sting, envenomate and gore, it’s nice to know that there are perfectly defenseless plants for the weak at heart to hunt.  But are plants really as defenseless as they appear?  We all know that there are plenty of highly toxic plants in the world, but certainly the ones we eat aren’t poisonous.  Think again.  There have been weapons of mass destruction created from plant toxins, like ricin (used by the Soviets during the cold war), but I know of no WMD ever derived from animals.

Every single living thing on this planet has one goal in mind – to proliferate its genetics.  Nothing wants to be eaten – life has a mechanism to protect itself and its offspring.  The nice thing about animals as a food source is that their defenses typically die with them.  Whether it’s sharp teeth, powerful jaws, stingers, horns or hooves they are no longer a threat after the animal is dispatched.  Even a rattlesnake is quite edible once it is dead.  Plants have evolved a much different way to protect themselves – and especially their offspring.  Any species that does not develop a mechanism to protect its children would have certainly went extinct by now.

There is a major misconception that human beings existed mostly on plant foods with only a small amount of meat for supplement.  I guess the conventional wisdom there is based on the idea that our human ancestors were poor at hunting.  Yet, there is plenty of historical evidence of primitive hunter/gatherers hunting certain species into extinction, like the very large ruminant, Aurochs.   So our ancestors were not poor hunters – it is only because we have been shopping for our meat for so long, that we have lost many hunting and trapping skills of our ancestors.  Given the fact that better than 99.9% of all plants on this planet are poisonous to human beings, I’m not sure how this myth has stood the test of time.  I guess if something is repeated enough, people will come to believe it.

Unless the entire planet were a rainforest, it would have been impossible for humans to cover the earth as a vegetarian species.  Even many of the plants we consume today are toxic to us in their raw state, especially their offspring.  Beans, legumes and seeds of all kind are the future of the plant – they are the zygote from which more generations will spring forth.  So why would the plant leave them undefended?   They don’t.   Most seeds contain lectins, which are highly toxic to most animals.   The lectins of the castor bean are so lethal that they were used in the formation of the warfare chemical called ricin.  A dose as small as a few grains of salt is more than enough to kill an adult human.  Many weapons of mass destruction have been created using plant toxins – I know of no WMD that was ever derived from an animal.

Prior to the advent of fire and the ability to make containers to cook them in, it would have been impossible for humans to consume any quantity of beans, legumes or grains.  Heat can destroy the lectins in many plants, so humans were able to use them as a food source once cooking was available.   But heat does little to reduce the amount of phytic acid contained within the offspring of the plant.  Phytic acid binds to many minerals, such as iron, calcium, zinc and magnesium, which renders them unavailable for absorption.   These precious mineral are then carried away and excreted from the body.

Only by soaking and fermenting seeds can phytic acid be reduced.  Any predator that would gorge itself on the seeds of these plants, would soon find themselves depleted and deficient in many of these minerals, which can be quite problematic.  And few seeds are higher in phytic acid than soybeans, which is why the Asian people only consumed soy that was heavily fermented.  The massive amounts of soy inundated in all of today’s processed foods is not fermented and therefore quite counter productive to good nutrition.  Is it any wonder why osteoporosis is so prevalent in our time?   With all of the phytates within those grains, beans and legumes, the american people are crapping out their dietary calcium by the bucket, because it is bound to the phytates.  Then, their high carbohydrate diet further deplete calcium from their bones and teeth.  Because calcium is the only way the body can neutralize the high blood acidity cause by high blood sugar, if dietary calcium is not high enough, it will rob it from the bones.  Eating lots of sugar and phytic acid is a recipe for osteoporosis.  This is the standard american diet (SAD).

 Most antacid tablets for gastritis, such as Tums, contain mostly calcium because of its neutralizing properties.  Our body also uses calcium to neutralize acidic blood, which is deadly if not neutralized.  That’s why I believe that it is not the cholesterol (which is flexible) that causes hardening of the arteries, but all the calcium caught in the plaque that leads to a cardiac event.  Just like the Egyptians, the high carbohydrate blood level invites calcium into the bloodstream which gets caught in the plaque and lead to loss of arterial flexibility.  When Mann studied the Masai, who eat tons of meat and milk, he found cholesterol plaque, but they rarely suffered heart attacks, because the cholesterol was flexible (being a fat) and allowed the arteries to expand.  Mann did not find calcium deposits in their plaque, probably because of their low carbohydrate consumption, thus lower blood acidity.

The most diabolical design of these plant defenses, is that they will not kill the predator right away, especially in the absence of the lectin.  If we humans were to eat raw seed, we would become very ill or die within a short time of consuming them.  That was how our ancestor would have made the association that it was the seeds that were making them ill and avoided them as a food source.   Once we learned that heat would prevent us from getting sick right away, then the first agriculturist civilizations determined that they would be safe to eat.

But unfortunately, there are many back-up defenses evolved into the plants, which do not cause illness right away, thereby making it difficult for people to determine that it is the plant that is causing their failing health.   Now, we have such a large part of the U.S. economy structured on the proliferation of grains, making it even more difficult for anyone to make the correlation, because they are bombarded daily with advertising telling them how super-healthy these grains, beans and legumes are.   Aside from containing a butt-load of carbohydrates, grains and other seeds are a poor source of nutrition.  Human cultures that had to predominantly live on grains found ways to make them easier to digest, but the process of doing so is quite laborious and time-consuming – and in today’s times – not very profitable.

Because poor people had to exist mostly on grains, many of them, and especially their children, suffered from malnutrition.  Because of this, the U.S. government began to mandate that flour made from grains be fortified with vitamins and minerals by their manufacturers.  If grains, bean and legumes were naturally high in nutrition, then why were the poorer people, who could only afford grains, becoming sick?  And why does the government require the enrichment of cereals and flour, if they were so uber-healthy?  Grains are naturally high in only one nutrient – sugar.  Grains are not only very high in carbohydrates, but contain carbohydrates, such as amylopectin-a, which spike the blood glucose levels higher than cane or beet sugar.  Is it any wonder that diabetes has reached epidemic proportions?  The U.S. government recommends 8 to 11 servings of these blood sugar spikers per day.

During his studies, Doctor Weston A. Price found civilizations whose nutrition depended on plants and grains, because of their location and lack of good hunting.  Price found no civilization or tribe who thrived on a fully plant-based diet, absent of any animal foods, but he did find cultures that ate little animal foods and were able to thrive on a grain based diet.   But, these people went to great length to make these seeds digestible.   They were soaked, sprouted. roasted, ground and then fermented (creating sourdough) before baking them into bread or cakes.  Very few people today ferment grains or beans, because it is a time-consuming process and not very profitable to the process food manufacturers.  Even sourdough bread commercially sold are rarely fermented and have sour additives for sour flavor.  If you have ever eaten fermented sourdough bread, you would find them far more sour than any commercial bread advertised as sourdough.

It is far more likely that most of our ancestors prized meat and animal products far above plant foods for its higher nutrition and better safety from toxins, which is why we still call vegetables a side-dish to this day.  Plants were much easier to acquire, so they would have sought after meat as a first priority and simply settle for plants if meat was not readily available and if a hunt was successful, they would supplement or cook the vegetation with the meat.  But, grains were simply not a part of the paleolithic man’s diet until the technology was discovered to make them safe to eat, which only occurred about 10,000 years ago – just a fraction of the time that humans have been around.  Early grain eating societies, like the Egyptians, have recently been diagnosed with massive calcium deposits in their arteries at ages of 40 to 50 years old.  CT scans of ancient mummies has revealed dangerous levels of atherosclerosis. (source) (source) (source).  Remember, these were active people, who ate very little animal fat (usually geese) and got plenty of sunshine.  But the Egyptians loved wheat.  They made cakes, smothered in honey and were the inventors of beer from barley and consumed it as the hydration drink of choice.  Was it their love of wheat that was killing them?  I believe so.

The soybean had a much more diabolical defense to unleash on its predators.  The seed of the soy plant contains very high levels of phytoestrogens.  The purpose of these plant-based estrogen is to cause the insects that dine on them to ultimately become sterile, so the parents may feast on the seeds, but there will be a lot fewer offspring of the predator in the future.  The soybean has evolved its own birth control for those that would eat its young – after all, birth control pills are just estrogen.  These high doses of estrogen can be very problematic for humans, causing breast cancer and young women to enter puberty at a very young age and the boys will not enter puberty until a much older ages.

Peek into your pantry and read some of the processed food labels and you will be amazed how many products contain unfermented soy products.  Even most tuna fish cans will list soy as an ingredient.  If you are eating tuna to obtain more omega 3 fatty acids, they have tricked you by adding omega 6 soybean as filler. (you can get tuna without soy, but it’s a bit more expensive.).  You are probably consuming mass quantities of unfermented soy – why?  Because soy was a necessary plant used in crop rotation to replenish nitrogen into the soil, so they had to find a way to market it.  The government subsidizes farmers that grow it, so its cheap filler for all processed foods – and is making us sick.  It makes cattle and chickens sick, why does anyone believe that it is a health food?  A lot of heavy advertising and marketing brainwashing.

Fruits evolved a completely different mechanism.  The fruit is not a zygote, but actually the ovary of the plant.  The ovary is purposely designed to be high in nutrition and sweet and juicy, because the plant actually wants a predator to eat the fruit.  The seeds of the fruit are completely indigestible, so the plant willfully surrenders its delicious ovary so it will be replanted somewhere else when the predator takes a dump.  But only a fool would decide to grind up the seed of the fruit and make a bread or cake from the flour.  We know that the seeds of most fruits are highly toxic and many can kill a human in short order if made digestible and eaten in quantity.  If we all know this, then why are we convinced that the seeds of other plants are so defenseless, just waiting to be plucked, cooked and eaten?  They are not.

 If seeds are left so defenseless, I defy anyone to grind up some apricot and apple seeds, make a flour and bake it into a cookie and eat it.  It will be the last thing you will ever eat.  Apricots seeds and apple seeds  both contain hydrogen cyanide.  If swallowed, they are harmless, because we cannot digest then and they will safely pass though us.  One seed crushed may not kill you, but could make you feel ill.  Several seed ground up into a flour is certain death to those that dare to eat it.  Plants do and will defend their babies as ferociously as any mother bear would defend her cubs.

Many birds and insects have evolved mechanisms to deal with the toxins in grains.  Rodents seem to be one of the only mammals that can thrive on grains.  One thing that all of these animals have in common is a very fast metabolism – humans do not.  Any wonder why the problems with obesity in the modern world?  We are eating foods intended for animals with heart beats and metabolisms 8 to 10 times that of a human.  We cannot possibly burn the calories per hours that these animals have to.  A humming-bird must dine on pure sugar, but unless you can flap your arms at 80 times per second all day and maintain a heartbeat of 1,200 beats per minute (the human heart would explode) then you can share in their diet.  Problem is, humans are consuming the calories from sugar at the rate of a humming-bird, with our 74 beat per minute heart rate.  Hmmm.  wonder why so many are obese.

As far as plant toxins, many species of birds are known to first consume types of clay prior to eating some of these poisonous grains and berries.  Minerals in the clay can chelate to the toxins and safely remove them.  Humans have no such system yet continue to eat unfermented grains by the pound.  Doughnuts, begals, pasta, snack cakes, chips – all loaded with these anti-nutrients which rob minerals from your body.  The plants will win the battle in the long run, as all of humanity, eating 8 to 11 servings of these heavily defended offspring, playing a game of diabolical chemical warfare on your system, continue to make the human race fatter and sicker (think diabetes).

These little monsters are also reeking havoc on our digestive system, as the gluten protein wear away at your intestinal villi, shrinking them back and opening huge holes in the intestinal mucosa.  Once this happens, large proteins can be absorbed into the bloodstream and cause many autoimmune disease.   Celiacs, Crohn’s, Ulcerative Colitis have been on the steady rising and there is no cure known for these diseases, other than cessation from grains, but few doctors will go against the zeitgeist of the huge advertising of the giant agribusiness (who own the USDA) and will continue to recommend that these IBD patients increase their grain consumption.  Every new study has proven what IBD sufferers already knew, grain fibers make their condition worse.  Though most doctors (who tend to be behind the times) still recommend insoluble fiber from grains, new studies have shown this to be counterproductive, causing gas, bloating, obstructions and bleeding in patients.  Read the testimonies here from some IBD patients talking about the horrible results they suffered when following a doctor’s advice to include indigestible psyllium from grains) into their diet.  I had similar experience with insoluble fiber as they had.

Don’t fool yourself into believing that these people are some how different or from another planet. (basically saying, “it sucks to be them”).  I consider them and me to simply be a more sensitive meter.  Similar damages are being perpetrated on your gut at a slower degradation, but it’s there.  If you do not believe me, take a scan of the gastric medicine isle at your local pharmacy or even Walmart or Target.  Look at all the different OTC medications for GERD, constipation, diarrhea, gas, enzymes for digestion (such as beano) and indigestion.  Someone must be buying this crap, or these stores would not stock so much of it.  How many times a week do you take one of these products?

 Our ancestors did not have access to such OTCs, so they had to learn to avoid or better prepare foods that caused these problems. Now people feel free to indulge in any crap they want and then pop some protonic or other digestive aid.  Is this really healthy?  The damage is still being done and you may well develop an IBD or colorectal cancer at some point.  Grain fiber WILL NOT prevent colorectal cancer as the heavy advertising from the agribusiness has brainwashed everyone – in fact, I believe it has instigated the higher numbers of cases now than we had 100 years ago.  We would have less reason to risk people’s lives with dangerous procedures, like colonoscopies, if grain eating (especially whole gain with the indigestible husks) were not the predominant food of choice.  I believe that colorectal cancer rates would dive bomb and the fear would not be so great as to scare people into risking their lives for colorectal screening (please read my post “The Dangers Of Colonoscopies”) that kills and disables so many at much younger ages than anyone would ever develop cancer.

Ruminant animals, such as cattle, get very sick and will die on a grain based diet if not given antibiotics.  It must have been brilliant marketing to convince what is supposed to be intelligent people that the same grain used to fatten cattle, which makes them sick and in need of daily antibiotic injections, would somehow make humans slim and healthy.  As should have been predicted, these grains also made humans fat and sick – any wonder why.

Dogs and cats have begun to develop many of the same diseases afflicting humans when fed a grain based diet, and most modern pet foods, made for these carnivores, is made mostly from grains.  Now it is quite common to see obesity, diabetes and even cancer in our pets.  Someone felt it was a great idea to base most of our dietary studies using rodents, which is why I pay little attention to any study which based their study on rats.  They are possibly one of the only mammals that have evolved to eat grains and are therefore a very poor analog for humans, who have not developed such a mechanism to deal with the problems offered by grains.

Historically, grains were mostly reserved for the poor as a dietary base and the poor have historically always been sick – therefore why the government mandated the addition of man-made nutrients into the cereal and flour (think agribusiness, like Monsanto, and cereal companies who give huge grants to the USDA and actually have ex-employees appointed to positions in the FDA and USDA).  If a diet rich in grains were the healthiest diet, then the impoverish people would have enjoyed the better health over the rich people who ate so much more animal fat.  This was never the case.  How have people of means, in one of the richest nations in the world, been convinced that the diet historically eaten by the poor and sickly was the diet best for the human being escapes me?  A masterful brainwashing indeed.

These grasses have not been around for millions of years by waving around naked and undefended from predators, with all that sugar available for easy food.  They evolved to reduce their predators population and unfortunately we are now the predator.  Their highly bioavailable sugars promote visceral fat, which in turn drive hormones, such as leptin (messes up the brain’s ability to determine satiation) and insulin (which drives fat to be stored), rendering the predator into a perpetual hunger needing more and more and satisfaction is never achieved.  As a result, this predator suffers obesity, diabetes; which leads to heart disease and cancer and a whole host of gastric and digestive malfunctions.

This is all driven by the billions of dollars of advertising and influence of the large agribusiness, bread and cereal companies to market their highly profitable, government subsidized, genetically engineered and patented franken-plants.  They have successfully convinced people, politicians and medical personnel that these foods, that are at the heart of most of the american health problems, are the healthiest foods that humans have evolved to eat.  How could a species evolved to thrive on such a strange food they never consumed for 99% of their existence in less than 10,000 years?

The plant’s diabolical defenses, that still remain lethal far after harvest, are winning the battle for survival.  They were here before humans and will be here long after humans are gone.  Their purpose is to reduce the population of their predator and it seems that they are on their way to achieving that goal.

If you read my post entitled, “Are Humans Living Longer Than Ever Before“, it explains how poor nutrition killed the impoverish en mass.  The poverty-stricken people over 100 years ago had no choice but to attempt to live on flour and sugar for calories, which were very low in available nutrients, thus succumb to malnutrition and other diseases of deficiencies, such as beriberi, rickets and even scurvy.  This was why the U.S. government mandated that all grain flour and cereal would have to be fortified or enriched with man-made vitamins.  The health of the poor did improve as a result, so it was a success, but still did not enjoy the health that those of means, who were able to eat animal foods, did.  The enriched flour is typically inundated with mostly B vitamins, because they can stand the heat of cooking, but still lack vitamin C (which is heat sensitive) and vitamin D3, the most important for human health.  These are also man-made vitamins and there are many questions as to their bioavailability, especially after being baked in excess of  350ºF and even higher temperatures when extruded to make cereal flakes and other shapes, where proteins are denatured and vitamins are destroyed.

My next rant will concern the large agribusiness and bioengineering companies, like Monsanto and where I believe that their future goals are and how they will affect us.  I hope you will return to read it.  It should be finished in a few days.  I would like to thank all my readers and especially those who have provided links to some of my articles and help spread the word on the very important information concerning colonoscopy dangers and the fact that intestinal transplants are possible and can give back life to those stuck on TPN.  Together we can make a difference, even if small, we can certainly save some lives.

Humans live longer now than any time in known history.  Is this commonly recited statement true?  From a purely statistical standpoint, the answer is simple – yes.  So why do I have so many paragraphs left in this article?  Because statistics can be deceiving and without further investigation we can be led to some pretty erroneous conclusions.

Statistics are based on averages, so anyone in a population that dies extremely young (like an infant), will dramatically offset the figures of those who lived to a ripe old age.   Infant mortality rates were very high in antiquity, so when all the numbers are crunched, the average figure for a society’s mortality rate will often end up between their 40s-50s.  The modern statistical average for the United States has been reported to be 78.2 years (75.6 for males, 80.8 for females).   When you add in the rest of the world, that average drops to 66.57.  This huge drop is due to the addition of non-industrialized nations who also suffer high infant mortality rates.

Genetically, we are no different than our most ancient ancestors and they were not preprogrammed to self-destruct at the age of 40, like is so commonly believed.   I would like to address three irritating myths regarding this subject or at least the ignorant arguments I have encountered when discussing this subject.

MYTH #1

Many people seem to believe that everyone dropped dead at the age of 40 – 45 prior to the 20th century.  I have heard too many people confidently make this claim.  They heard the statistic and simply assumed that everyone prior to the 20th century would have received their AARP membership at the age of 25.  I am joking about the AARP, but if everyone assumes that people died of natural causes at the age of 45, then certainly 25 would be considered over-the-hill and time for the depends undergarments.

MYTH #2

Many people credit our modern longevity to medical advancements.  Other technologies have been a greater contributor to human longevity than medical.  Modern medicine has helped to lengthen the lives of some people, but has also prematurely cut short many lives, considering that adverse drug reactions are the leading killer of humans in the U.S. and medical errors is the third leading cause of premature death (for more details on this please read my posts under the category “Medical Mayhem” – especially “The Dangers In Modern Medicine“,  “How Common Are Medical Errors” and “The Dangers Of Colonoscopies“.).

MYTH #3

Many of these same people use this statistic to support the idea that we eat healthier now and thereby live longer.  People died younger because they ate all that animal fat.  This proves that they have not given this subject much thought or research or they would know that heart disease and cancer were very rare just 100 years ago, so how could saturated fat be the cause of premature death?

I would assume that the average american has a difficult time understanding math and statistics.  If this weren’t true, no one would buy lottery tickets or toss money down the drain at casinos.  It is true that according to statistical averages, people died much younger prior to the 20th century.  But the truth is, that their lives were taken by completely different causes than today.  It was not cancer, diabetes or heart disease that was killing most people in times past.  So what was killing them so young?  Let’s take a look at what were the major causes of death in centuries past and see why other technologies played a greater role than medicine.

Starvation and Malnutrition

Probably the single highest killer of human beings throughout history.  Due to droughts, locusts, floods, poverty and even war, food could be extremely scarce at times and millions of people died as a result.  Children are far more vulnerable to kwashiorkor.  Malnourished mothers have a higher likelihood of losing their babies, so infant mortality rates were very high among the poor as was the death of mothers giving birth (who were much younger than many mothers today).  It was advancements in agriculture, distribution methods and food preservation that made it possible to get the food from one location to the area where the disaster had struck.

Communicable Diseases and Plagues

Bubonic plague, scarlet fever, small pox and a whole host of diseases wiped out many humans and once again, hit children the hardest because of their developing immune system.  Medical advancements did less to help with this problem than did improved sanitation.  When the garbage dump is located in the middle of town and human and animal excrement runs through the city streets, disease and plagues are inevitable.  Finding a clean water supply also saved millions of lives.  People in the past often drank extremely contaminated water.  While visiting Saint Augustine, Florida recently, we noticed that many of the houses had cisterns in the basement that were filled from drainage of rain water from the roof.  This was how they obtained their drinking water and attempted to purify it by adding chalk to the water.   Many of the diseases that killed people in mass are still incurable to this day – we only prevent them by not living like pigs.

Infection

This is still one of the top killer of humans, but far, far less than before the advent of penicillin and more advanced antibiotics.  Minor infections, which can now be cleared up with a simple antibiotic before going systemic, often became lethal in the past.  Hunting and farming were both dangerous occupations that carried a high risk of injury, so many healthy people died as a result of an infection from even superficial wounds.  Antibiotics and vaccines are the one area where modern medicine has saved millions of lives – unfortunately, we are now at a point where overuse of these drugs are quickly becoming a greater threat to human health.  Hospital borne pathogens are now becoming resistant to most antibiotics.

War

It seems that the further we go back in history, the higher the death toll from war becomes.  In the ancient times of melee warfare, the idea was to simply overwhelm your enemy with sheer numbers.  If you found you were outnumbered, retreat became a suicidal option.  Armies were engaged at such a close range, that turning your back on your opponent was certain death, so casualties were very high.  These were very young men dying – much younger than today’s soldiers.

My wife and I were recently in Saint Augustine and took a tour of Fort Matanza where the Ranger informed us that the Spanish artillery soldiers started training at the age of 10, so they would be experts on the cannons by the age of 14.   These deaths were often very young men losing their life (12 – 25), which would bring down the lifespan averages quickly.

We no longer have the stomach for the same level of losses from war as our ancestors did.   Because of our ability to strike with accuracy from greater and greater distances, we suffer far fewer casualties.  In the near future, more drones will be used in warfare, so we should see the death tolls from war decrease – at least on one side.   In today’s modern warfare, the U.S. will lose less than a thousand soldiers within a year of war,  whereas in the past they could lose over a thousand soldiers in a single battle lasting only a day or two.

For example, the U.S. has been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for ten years now and the U.S. death toll is around 4,486.  There were 3,108 Confederate soldiers killed in three days, on July 1 – 3, 1863 at Gettysburg.  There were over 110,000 Union soldiers killed in combat throughout the Civil War and a total of 360,000 total deaths to just Union soldiers.  These were very young men dying, so the average lifespan figures take quite a hit during periods of war.

Though modern medicine has contributed somewhat to the lower mortality rates from injury due to war, it is certainly the technology of the weapons and armor that has lessened the toll.

We can see that other technologies played a greater role in extending human lifespan than did modern medicine.  At least where our ancestor’s causes of death were concerned.  This is where this all gets rather ironic.  If we examine this subject more closely than just a simple statistic or quick sound bite that we heard, we would see a completely different set of problems between then and now.  We now NEED medical intervention just to reach the ages that our ancestors would have, if they could have adverted the problems that we have now solved (in the industrialized world).  How do I know that they would have lived as long?  Because many of them did, AND without any serious medical intervention.

In order to look at this clearly, we have to stop looking at the population as a whole and using averages to fool ourselves into the idea that we have improved our lifespan and quality of life so much more than the generations that preceded us.  In order to do this we must remove the impoverished from the equation.  Someone who lives in poverty today have a lot less problems than those of antiquity.  Here in the U.S., even the most poor among us can get access to food and medicine, something unheard of in times past.  This alone makes the average lifespan appear that everyone is living comfortably into our late seventies and eighties, while creating the illusion that everyone dropped dead at the age of forty in the past.   Many bloggers (vegans and paleo dieters) love to debate about the diet and life-span of paleolithic humans, but we have little record from that period to really make a strong argument.   For the purpose of this article, I would like to look back around 200 years ago in the United States as compared to the last couple of decades.  This way we are looking at people from similar culture and genetic backgrounds.

The argument I often hear when the fact that heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other diseases were so rare 200 years ago, is that because they died so young, no one lived to an old enough age to succumb to today’s top killers.   That excuse is beginning to run pretty thin now that we are seeing a higher frequency of these diseases in children.  Obese and diabetic children were pretty much non-existent in the U.S. 200 years ago.  What are the differences in the common diet then and now?

COOKING OIL:  Two centuries ago, there were no processed vegetable oils, especially hydrogenated oils that mimic the properties of saturated fats (the hydrogenation process was not discovered until the beginning of the 20th century).  Everything prior to 1900 was pretty much cooked in saturated fats such as butter, lard and tallow or tropical oils like palm or coconut.  Given today’s belief, and governmental dietary recommendations, obesity and diabetes should have been rampant in children at that time with the diet being so rich in animal fat – yet it was not.   Americans consume far less animal fat than they did just 50 years ago.  Butter and lard consumption is a fraction of what it was prior to the war-on-fat started in the 1970s by the U.S. government.   Since then, margarine replaced butter and Crisco took the place of lard.  These are highly inflammatory trans fat and are used in nearly all processed foods.

SUGAR: Sugar consumption was very low in the 18th and 19th century.  The average american consumed less than 30 pounds of sugar per year, whereas the average child today can eat as much as 150 pounds of sugar per year – and this is simply calculating the refined sugar and corn syrup consumed and does not account for the higher amount of starch consumed presently (8-11 servings of starchy grains).  Modern grains have been bred to have a much higher carbohydrate content than grains from just 100 years ago.  By the time today’s children reach 50 years of age, they will have consumed over 8,750 pounds of refined sugar – that’s more than 4 tons of sugar cycled through their arteries.

MODERN WHEAT:  Today’s wheat is nothing like its ancestor.  The modern high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat used today in processed foods and baked goods is a genetic hybrid of its ancestors.  This wheat was not introduced into the human food supply until the 1960s and became 98% of the wheat supply by the 1980s.  Since the 1980s, there has been a quadrupling of Celiac’s Disease and many other intestinal disorders, such as Crohn’s Disease, Ulcerative Colitis and other forms of IBS have been steadily on the rise.  Researchers have found many other gluten intolerant diseases in patients other than Celiac Disease and have identified certain antibodies created by many people’s immune systems with the sole purpose of attacking wheat gluten (link).  These antibodies are responsible for many other autoimmune diseases, such as Rheumatoid Arthritis (since dropping wheat from my diet, all of my joint pains slowly disappeared over the first year) .  Here is a quote from a website called The Natural Recovery Plan.com (click here to read the entire article):

The hybridisation and genetic engineering of wheat has resulted in a staggering 500 fold increase in the gluten content of modern-day wheats compared to the wheat our forefathers would have known and this may be one of the prime reasons behind the massive rise in incidence of gluten intolerance and coeliac disease in recent decades.”

If you wish to read one of the best detailed research on the history of our modern wheat and the problems that have possibly arisen from it, I highly recommend Dr. William Davis’ terrific book “Wheat Belly” and visit his site here.

These are just some of the differences in diet from the 19th to the 20th century.  Both sugar and vegetable oil (containing mostly linoleic acid) are highly inflammatory to the human body, especially the arteries.  To read my documented accounts of the damage I have seen from linoleic acid that is infused to TPN patients, please read my article, “The Truth About Soy”.   I also have a detailed article on the damage I experienced from the high sugar content infused with the TPN entitled “The Effects Of Sugar On The Arteries”.   Besides seed oils and sugar, there are many other variables to consider, such as flavor enhancers (MSG and artificial sweeteners), preservatives, coloring and let us not forget GMOs (genetically modified organisms), such as “Round Up Ready Seeds” by Monsanto.  (I will be covering this in an upcoming article).

It is not inevitable that our ancestors would have suffered the same fates as our seniors today had they lived longer.  To be fair, I decided to look at a very small group of men who would have lived similar lifestyles.  Let’s take a look at U.S. Presidents and you may find it quite surprising.  If we look at the first 5 presidents, we will see that they all lived well beyond the age that those diseases should have showed up in one or more of them.

George Washington – 67

John Adams – 90

Thomas Jefferson – 83

James Madison – 73

James Monroe – 80

I wonder why these men didn’t drop dead at 40?   John Adams was 61 years old when he was inaugurated.   Why would the people vote in a president who was already past the average life-span of a human?    Because these were men of means, they were able to avert all of the other problems that killed poorer people in huge numbers.  Starvation, poor sanitation and infections were less of a threat to someone above the poverty level (safer occupations), so these men lived to ripe old ages.  George Washington is the youngest death in this list, but he did not die of natural causes.  Washington was bled to death by his doctor (medical errors were killing people prematurely even then).  Had he not been bled to death, he still may well have died anyway, because he had a respiratory infection and this was a time before antibiotics.  Even so, he still lived to the age of 67 (my father had his first heart attack at the age of 66 and without the use of stents, it would have been a fatal heart attack).  Let’s take a look at the last 5 presidents  (excluding Obama, because he is still too young to know his fate).

Jimmy Carter – Still living at 88

Ronald Reagan – 93

George H. W. Bush – Still living at 88

Bill Clinton – Still living at 66

George W. Bush – Still living at 66

Ronald Reagan is the only one who has passed on – and he was 93 at the time.  So why would I list these last 5 when the only one that died was older than any of the first 5 presidents and the rest are still alive, even beyond the average age of death?  Because I wanted to take a more detailed look to determine if all of these men would still be alive had they not had the modern medicine and procedures we have today.  The bigger question that we have to ask ourselves is how in the hell did the first 5 presidents live to those ages without medical intervention – especially with all that animal fat they ate daily?  Remember, even a ruptured appendix or gall bladder would have taken their life at that time.  Certainly with modern antibiotics, George Washington would have survived the influenza and may well have lived as long as John Adams or possibly longer.

Ronald Reagan did live to the age of 93, but also had a serious tumor surgically removed from his colon in 1985 – without treatment he may have died many years earlier.  Reagan also suffered with Alzheimer’s disease for at least the last decade of his life and many believe he began suffering signs of the disease even while serving as President.  Without medical intervention, he certainly would have died at a much younger age.  There is no record that Adams was not of sound mind (John Adam’s health history).  Most all of the founders were very active even late into their lives.  George H. W. Bush now suffers from vascular Parkinsonism and is confined to a wheelchair, John Adams was not in a wheelchair at 88.   Bush Sr. also underwent a procedure to reduce his thyroid gland (radioactive iodine), because he suffered with Graves disease (the doctors overdosed him, destroying too much of the gland.  Since then his life has been dependent on hormone medications).  Adams also suffered hyperthyroidism, but his went untreated.

Bill Clinton is still with us, but clearly would not be without modern medicine.  Clinton began having cardiovascular health problems at the age of 48 and underwent a coronary bypass surgery at the age of 58.  It would be safe to say that Bill Clinton would have most likely never seen the age of 60 without modern medicine.

George W. Bush had precancerous skin lesions removed from his skin a few times.  Of course we are told this was caused by that enemy-in-the-sky we call the sun – which was strictly put there to kill us.   Could Bush have actually had more sun exposure than Andrew Jackson, who led his troops throughout subtropical states like Louisiana and Florida?   “W” has had access to sunscreen his entire life, Jackson did not and lived to the ripe old age of 78 with a lead bullet imbedded in his chest from a duel he had while in his forties (Jackson’s health record).  Bush could have died from cancer far before the age of 65 – and he didn’t have a bullet stuck in his chest for more than 30 years.  Jackson had no access to sunscreen while in the hot Florida sun.  Sunscreen could likely contribute to the high number of melanomas seen today, but it’s extremely profitable to the manufacturers (I’ll save that for another rant).

Many people today would never see their 60^th birthday without some sort of medical intervention.  So even though we solved all of the killers that plagued our ancestors, we found a way to level the playing field by creating a whole new set of killers.  Though we have invented medications, treatment and procedures for many of them, they hardly improve on the quality of life.  We may live longer, statistically, but we live sickly, racked with pain and dependent on medications starting at middle age.  If we could improve our lifestyle and eat real food, like our ancestors, we could possibly live longer and with more vitality than ever before in history.  Had our ancestors eaten the crap we do, without our modern medicine, their lifespans would have been much shorter and we may not have even survived as a race.

Modern technology has given us toxic food, but plenty of medications, surgeries and other medical procedures to keep us breathing well into our decrepit eighties. Unfortunately, the party is about to be over.  The medicine is not improving at the same rate that our diet and lifestyle is decaying.  We are beginning to see a shortening of the average lifespan that I believe will continue if something drastic is not done to fix the standard american diet (SAD).  I will continue with more evidence on this is an upcoming post.  I apologize for not posting anything in a while.  I actually have dozens of drafts written that I simply haven’t had time to proof read and edit, so the next several articles should follow very shortly.  Thank you for your patience.

The mug seen in the poster is the surgeon that nearly cost me my life, Karl Hagen.  This rant is not intended as simply a personal attack on a single surgeon, but I am using his story as an example of a very real problem that could affect you or your family.  Until recently, I was not aware that a doctor or surgeon who has had their license revoked in one state can move their practice to another state and legally begin a new practice.  The biggest mystery to me is why any state medical board would want to license a doctor that another state has deemed unfit to practice medicine.  This is what the state of Florida granted to Karl Hagen – and this is not an isolated or rare case.  I was shocked to discover that this is a quite common occurrence and it is not unique to Florida.

At first glance, this may not seem like as frightening of a prospect as it actually is, because any responsible person will do extensive research on their doctors and surgeons before submitting themselves for treatment.  Prior offenses and reprimands on medical professionals are of public record and easily searchable through websites like HealthGrades.com.  Most of us are not going to consider the fact that we may require emergency medical treatment at some point in our life and not be afforded the luxury of time necessary to research or seek recommendations for our doctors. Not all surgeries or treatments are scheduled.

I was admitted to South Lake Hospital for a simple blood transfusion and never thought that I may require surgery.  I would have never went to a rural hospital for surgery.  By the time I was taken in for surgery, I had been unconscious for more than 48 hours.  Many patients are rushed into emergency rooms everyday needing immediate treatment.  We all would hope that if we we’re in need of emergency medical treatment or surgery, that the nearest hospital we were taken to would not have doctors on call that have had their licenses revoked in other states.  After all, ER doctors and surgeons are the one doctor that the patient will not have the opportunity to conduct a background check on before ending up under their knives.

In an emergency situation, you could find your life in the hands of a doctor that was determined to be unqualified to practice medicine in another state, as was the case with Karl Hagen.  To make matters worse, not only do hospitals hire these doctors, but they are not required to inform the patient, nor their family of the fact that an unlicensed doctor is about to begin invasive procedures on their loved ones.  Karl Hagen’s dismal record as a surgeon is of public record and can be verified here.  In addition to several blunders, some of which cost the patients their life, he also had his license to practice medicine in California revoked on July 29, 2009.  He operated on me on September 20, 2009, just two months later.  At the time he was about to operate on me, my wife did a quick research of his credentials, but at that time all the information listed for Karl Hagen was reported as “pending”.  The record that exists now on-line, including the revocation of his license, did not appear until over a year later.  South Lake Hospital certainly knew of his problems, because his case had been decided and the Florida State reprimand and California revocation of his license had all transpired months before he operated on me.

I am not sure whether Hagen ever practiced in California.  His online profiles always list both states, Florida and California as where he is licensed to practice.  HealthGrades.com still lists him as being licensed in California and Florida here – even though he is no longer licensed in that state.  His license in California was revoked in 2009, but as far as I can tell, it was based on reprimands he received while practicing in Florida.  He has a long history of medical reprimands and did settle for $300,000.00 in a case which cost the patient their life.  This seems a rather low amount of compensation for the loss of one’s life, but seems common in the world of malpractice law.  If a pharmaceutical company injures or kills a person, the financial damages can be staggering – usually in the millions, but as I have mentioned many times before, doctors are awarded special protection under the law that no other professional enjoys.

In the first account brought against Doctor (and I use that term loosely, because California no longer considers him a doctor) Karl Hagen in 2006, he failed to examine the x-ray for a woman who was scheduled to have a chest tube placed.  The excuse given for this blunder reads like a gag from a bad sitcom.  According to the public record, a doctor told the nurse to schedule the operation for a chest tube to be place.  The nurse asked the doctor if it was to be placed on the left side and the doctor replied “right”, indicating that it was to be placed on the right side.  The nurse assumed the doctor was saying “right” in agreement with her and therefore prepped the left side for the surgery.  The detailed legal account of this case can be found here and included a $5,000.00 fine – considerably less than the payment he received for the service, I’m sure.

Yes, it was an error in communication between the doctor and nurse – sort of an Abbott and Costello type deal – and might be a riot in a comedy routine, but is not very amusing when a patient’s life is in jeopardy.  Karl Hagen was reprimanded and punished by the state of Florida because he failed to check the x-ray himself.  But, even less excusable was the fact that the patient already had several chest tubes placed on the right side that had been ineffective.

So Karl Hagen is presented a patient who has several scars on her right side from prior chest tubes and still decides to place the new one on the left – you would think that the scars on the right side would have been a signal for him to examine the x-rays.  The patient did eventually die, but I’m not sure whether his error contributed to her death or not.  The punishment for this critical error was “education” – sort of like those courses you have to take after getting a traffic ticket.  That’ll teach him a lesson!   Do you feel more comfortable letting this guy open you up now, knowing he took those courses?   At this point, California still considered him licensed in their state and he continued to practice in Florida.

His worst sanction came from another deadly mistake and was very similar to the error he made on me.  He operated on a man who suffered from diverticulitis, which is a bulging pocket in the colon that becomes impacted and infected.  He was to resect that portion of the colon, which is the proper procedure for diverticulitis, and to then form a stoma for a colostomy – again, all typical treatment for this illness.  Hagen obviously has a bad habit of not thoroughly checking the viability of the tissue when resecting bowels.  He failed to send the material to pathology and instead discarded it.  This caused a 17 hour delay in surgery when the necrotic tissue he left inside the patient caused a systemic infection which ultimately led to the death of the patient.  The detailed legal account of this malpractice can be found here.

When I read that report, it was like deja vu and sent chills down my spine.   Hagen had repeated this error while operating on me.  We had to obtain all of the medical records to provide to the transplant surgeons in Miami in order to qualify for an intestinal transplant.  Going over Karl Hagen’s surgical notes, he records that the section of jejunum, that he was forming into the stoma, appeared to be compromised and yet he used it and never sent a sample of the tissue to pathology to see if it was viable.  To make matters worse, he even wrote in his surgical notes that the compromised tissue could result in a high morbidity and mortality (notes that he thought I would never see).

Over the next five days, the stoma continued to darken in a manner referred to by doctors as a “dusky” appearance.  The Attending Doctors were concerned about this and continued to consult with Hagen, but he refused to take the time to examine it.  He also insisted it was fine and would begin to turn pink as blood began circulating to it.  On the contrary, it continued to darken each day and became less and less active.  The doctors of South Lake Hospital played a dangerous waiting game and refused to send me for an MRI, because the hospital’s only MRI machine was located in small building across the parking lot and it would be very difficult to transport me with all of the IV pumps I was attached to.

I was literally dying from the three feet of necrotic bowels left inside of me and these doctors did not want to make the extra effort to move me to the equipment necessary, because for some strange reason they had it housed in a building over fifty yards from the hospital.  By the time they decided that my condition was becoming too critical to ignore any further (four days) they did transport me to the machine.

Luckily for me, the MRI revealed what appeared to be a partial occlusion of the mesenteric artery (the artery that supplies blood to the intestines).  Why do I say lucky?  Because this hospital was not equipped for vascular surgery, so the decision had to finally be made to transfer me to a better equipped hospital.  Even at this point, Karl Hagen was still maintaining that the stoma was fine and continued to ignore the problem.  Hagen was quite clear about his position to my family.  He personally felt that I would have such a horrible quality of life if I lost that last three feet of intestines that I may be better off dead.  He had obviously decided to himself to spare me the suffering and just let me die if the stoma did not come back to life on its own.  This is not his decision to make.  All of the other attending doctors were in agreement with Hagen, because they didn’t know that intestinal transplants were possible. I really believe they transported me to the other hospital so I would die there, rather than at their hospital.

I arrived at the trauma hospital in Orlando, where I was prepped for the vascular procedure.  The vascular surgeon hoped that after the clot removal that the stoma would begin to brighten up, once the blood flow was improved.  He removed the occlusion and watched me closely over the next couple of hours really expecting the stoma to come back to life.  By this time the stoma was nearly black in color.  They left me alone for a couple of hours and I was in the room alone.  It was during that time when I began to have seizures.  There is a bit of missing time during the seizure, because the last thing I remember was a large oxygen mask being pulled off of my face and the room was suddenly filled with doctors, including the vascular surgeon.

At this point the vascular surgeon immediately called Karl Hagen to have him come over and examine the stoma and consult them on what actions needed to be taken.  Hagen felt no need to make the twenty-minute trip to Orlando.  He determined over the phone that the seizures were unrelated to the black stoma and that they needed to just wait another day or so for the blood to get to the stoma and I would be fine.   It is certain that Karl Hagen was going to play the waiting game until I died, had I remained at that hospital.  You would think that after all the patients he had lost in the past by leaving necrotic tissue inside, he would not continue to make the same dumb-ass mistake – but he’s obviously quite a dumb-ass and doesn’t learn from his past mistakes.

My wife asked the vascular surgeon to take action and he said something about me being Hagen’s patient and it would be wrong protocol for him to intervene.  He must have used the word, territory, because the last thing I can clearly remember was my wife loudly proclaiming to the vascular surgeon that; “He isn’t anyone’s territory, he’s my husband!”.  Then she added; “Can you just sit here and watch him die?”.   He contacted the trauma surgeon who was on-call and assisted him in the an emergency surgery, because I was in septic shock by that time.

Several weeks later I had to visit the trauma surgeon so he could examine the incision.  He actually told us that they had considered just closing me up and keeping me sedated until I died in the next couple of hours.  It was the vascular surgeon that convinced him to go on with the long hard operation.  It took hours for them to irrigate and suction out all of the necrotic tissue that had turned to liquid and spread throughout my abdomen.  The vascular surgeon told us that it was only because of my age that they committed to the effort.

Because of just how critical the situation became, I know that had I not been transferred to the Orlando hospital my fate would have been death, because Karl Hagen would never had made the effort.  This was the only difference between me and the other patient who had died several months earlier under Hagen’s care.  Karl Hagen is still practicing medicine somewhere and I have no idea how many people he will have to kill before he loses his license to operate for good?

It was the incident with that other gentleman that ultimately caused Hagen to lose his license to practice in California.  The lawsuit, reprimand and revocation of his license had all transpired prior to my operation.  In other words, South Lake Hospital allowed a surgeon who had lost his license to practice in California to continue to practice and perform serious operations in their hospital.  I have stated his name many times in this article so that it may be found on any searches being done by any patient who may be under his care or considering him for a surgery.  I did not realize that this problem existed and I wonder how many people know this is possible.  I have since done research on this subject and have found that it is quite a large problem in this country.  If you were unaware of this problem (as I was) and believe it may only be a Florida problem, here are some articles on how common this occurs:

New York Times:  SOME ERRANT DOCTORS GET NEW U.S. FUNDS BY CHANGING STATES

WPTV.com:  DOCTORS LOSE LICENSE BUT STILL TREATING PATIENTS

FSBCT:  A FAILURE TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC

It seemed that there were a multitude of cases of doctors who had lost their license to practice in the state of New York that move their practice to Connecticut and continued treating patients.  I really cannot understand the logic used by any state medical board to grant a license to doctors who had their license revoked to practice medicine in another state.  If you have that many deadly mistakes in your career, maybe it’s time to seek a new one.

I cannot expect the federal government to forbid states to license doctors based on the decision of another state to revoke their license, but it would seem reasonable to demand that hospitals that allow a doctor to practice must have to make that information known to potential patients and be liable for any damage that doctor commits.  If a pack of cigarettes have to have warning information as to the danger they possess, then similar information should have to be provided for a dangerous doctor.   There are hundreds of patients rushed into emergency surgery everyday – many are unconscious and in critical condition.  How is it their responsibility to research the doctor or surgeon on-call at the hospital they are rushed to?  Is it too much to ask that hospitals not permit doctors with so many discipline problems administer to emergency or trauma cases?  Maybe they could be restricted to private practice or clinics where the patients are of sound mind and not in a rush for treatment.

At the point it was determined that I required surgery, my family wanted me transferred to a better equipped hospital in Orlando, but the doctors actually refused, even though they had a helicopter pad and are part of the Orlando Health system who pays to equip them with emergency transport equipment for just such occasions.  Time was not the motivating factor, because their on-call surgeon, Karl Hagen, was not available and they told my family that he had 24 hours to respond to the emergency page.  I would have actually gotten faster treatment had they shipped me to ORMC, where trauma surgeons are on-call 24-7.  The refusal to transport me was solely based on greed and pride.  Most doctors are far too arrogant to admit when a case is beyond their training and experience.

Most recently, we were told by an employee of South Lake Hospital, that Karl Hagen had been banned from practicing there further.  Though I cannot verify her reason for his dismissal, the employee told us that it had something do with an alcohol abuse problem.  Why in the hell would South Lake Hospital allow such a surgeon to work out of their hospital?  When you allow a doctor, who a major state like California decided was unfit to practice medicine, did you really believe he would achieve great things for your hospital?  So this hospital allowed this surgeon to perform such a risky surgery on me knowing his past malpractice record, the loss of his license to practice in California and that he had a drinking problem.  The most frightening part of this is that even though he has been removed from South Lake Hospital, he is still license to practice medicine in the state of Florida – if he loses his license in Florida anytime soon, he may move to another state and be practicing in a hospital near you.

If you think he is a unique case, you’d be wrong. Do a little research and it won’t take long to see that this is happening all over the U.S..   We wonder why the U.S. is ranked 37^th in health care.  There are very talented people who become doctors and then there are people who were just not intended to be doctors, but become one anyway.  It’s kind of like those wannabe singers that turn up for auditions for American Idol and holler like a wounded moose – it makes you wonder what ever made them believe they were going to be the next singing sensation.  Maybe we need a Simon Cowell in the medical auditions.  Someone with the stones to tell an untalented doctor to get out of the business.

Some medical apologist posting as ‘Kathleen” left a comment over at Paleohacks.com in response to a link that someone had provided to my article “How Common Are Medical Errors”.  Her brilliant rebuttal was to point out that all of the mistakes made on me were simply because I was in Florida.  How much do you want to bet she works in the medical profession?   This is the exact “stick-your-head-in-the-sand” mentality that allows this type of thing to perpetuate.  Medical errors are the 3rd highest killer in the United States and this ignoramus wants us to believe that all of them happen only in Florida.

So if all the statistics concerning medical errors from Florida were removed, then the U.S. would magically leap to number one on the world stage.  Can someone really be so mentally blind?  I gave the national statistics in that article, yet her wishful thinking says “Yeah, but it’s much better where I live”.  No it’s not!   As a matter of fact, it could be much worse.  I’m sure that Florida has a very high hospital mortality rate compared to most states because they have more seniors as its populace.  After all, Florida is the place most people go to die.  Getting rid of Florida or avoiding treatment in Florida is not going to fix the problem, as this medical shill suggested.  It’s just another excuse to look the other way and why nothing is being done to fix the problem – because they refuse to see a problem.

Doctors losing their license in one state and moving to another to practice is actually becoming quite a common problem in the U.S. medical system and I believe that few people are aware of it.  It would seem to me that a license to practice medicine is a privilege, not a right.  Just because someone spent all the time and money in education to become a doctor should not mean that they are perpetually granted the right to practice, even after leaving a population of cadavers in their wake.

So many lives could be spared if some of these problems I have pointed out in this series were given more awareness.   The three main topics I would like to see made common knowledge are:

Colonoscopies injure and kill more people than they save. (as a matter of fact, your chance of being killed by a colonoscopy are 3 time greater than ever getting colon cancer)

Medical errors are the 3rd largest killer of humans in the U.S..  (you really have to question and research any and all treatments offered by doctors and are best to have a family member or close friend with you as a much as possible if you are hospitalized)

Doctors who lose their license in a U.S. state should not be able to work in emergency rooms or in any other manner where patients do not have the opportunity to do a background check prior to treatment.

The last topic in my series called “Medical Mayhem”, will address a very lethal problem in the medical systems that there is no hope of changing, but I will rant about it anyway.  It concerns “The Cynical Attitude Of Doctors Towards Patients”.   This attitude is where many of the following problems stem from.  Everything bad that happened to me was the result of a cynical approach by a doctor – and almost every doctor and more than half of the nurses had this very same cynical attitude.  I hope you will return to read it.