Hysteria is good for Big Pharma

Here is one more example of “Who profits from the crime?”

imagesMNPV9GXQ“Since Ebola’s first symptoms resemble that of the flu, fears about Ebola could drive an influx of patients to doctors and emergency rooms with flu symptoms, who might otherwise have stayed home”, doctors say.

Read on: http://fortune.com/2014/10/22/how-ebola-hysteria-could-help-contain-the-upcoming-flu-season/

Glaxo has a promising Ebola vaccine in development and plans to expedite its testing and production.

“This is still at an early stage, but we are grateful for the support of all our partners, including the WHO, to expedite development of this candidate vaccine,” said Andrew Witty, CEO of Glaxo.

The vaccine is already in safety trials in the U.S., UK and Mali, and the results are expected by the end of the year.

Previously, Glaxo said it would need six months to figure out how to produce hundreds of thousands of doses for distribution.

Read on: http://fortune.com/2014/10/22/glaxosmithkline-moving-forward-with-ebola-vaccine/

Fear not, keep connecting the dots.

Love,

Leo

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2014

 

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The torturing of Joss – “just to be sure”

Joss is one of my neighbours. A friendly man with a good sense of humour.

He retired young and all was fine for him until he received a bizarre mail from a government health agency.

The envelope he received (I know, because I received one too) contained a bag and precise instructions. In a nutshell he was invited to send (free of charge) a fresh sample of his pooh to the agency’s lab. They would analyse it to see if his intestines were all right, i.e. free of colon cancer.

Thank goodness, he threw away the lot.

But “they” are persistent.images  Symbol of Medicine

Some time later he received a second envelope, with a more insistent message. Somehow he got worried and followed the suggested procedure. You never know, he thought.

Indeed, you don’t.

And guess what, they found suspicious “polyps” in his intestines. So he’d better come round to the university hospital to see to that. Through a non surgical (but nevertheless pretty intrusive) procedure they managed to remove some of these polyps.

Some, but not all.

So he had to have surgery. Again he followed the suggestion, and ended up with 30 cm of his intestines removed. Mind you, he recovered well from the operation and was riding his bike soon afterwards.

But “they” don’t let you off the hook so easily.

What if these polyps were cancerous?

They recommended six month chemo-therapy, “just to be sure”.

He had no choice, he thought. Doctors know about these things better than him. So he started the chemo over a month ago.

We see much less of him in the street these days.

I met his wife this afternoon. She put on a brave face. He’s not feeling too bad yet, she said. He gets the treatment once a fortnight, and he’s better the second week, when the effects diminish. But, she added, they‘ve warned that he would feel worse as the treatment goes on.

Three months ago, Joss felt on top of the world, had no complaint, no symptom.

He hadn’t received the second envelope.

But “they” had  him on their radar screen.

Fear not, trust your inner voice.

Love,

Leo

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2014

Open letter to Angelina Jolie

By Yves Rasir (*)

Dear Ms. Jolie,

Since we don’t know each other and you will probably never read this letter, I would like to call you Angelina.

I’ll be frank and direct; between your doctors and your breasts, I’m afraid you made ​​the wrong choice.

Of course, at first glance your decision to undergo a double mastectomy might seem justified. Women who, like yourself, carry the BRCA1 gene have an 87% risk of developing breast cancer. And surgery is supposed to drastically reduce this risk down to 5%. Sacrificing your bust would seem to spare you the fate of your mother, who died prematurely at 56.

But do you know that these cold statistics hide appalling lies?

Besides the fact that breast tumors account for less than 5% of female mortality, and represent therefore only a relative danger, a first terrible lie is to have you believe that medicine is getting better and better at fighting cancer.

This is a delusion based on statistics suggesting that the rate of remission after 5 or 10 years is improving. But this apparent progress has nothing to do with the presumed effectiveness of conventional treatments.

In reality, this is mainly a consequence of widespread screening: as cancers are diagnosed earlier and earlier, the time between verdict and death gets longer statistically, with no real benefit for patients.

As Doctor Marc Girard points out in his latest book (1) there is in fact “no serious evidence that early treatment of cancer improves the chances of survival or cure.” On the contrary, there are indications that heavy treatments undertaken after mammography shorten life expectancy.

The emerging industry of preventive mastectomy is a new way to hide the failure of conventional medicine in cancer treatment. By removing an organ, all we do is circumscribing a local problem, but with no benefit to overall health. And probably even to its detriment.

Another truth that was shamefully hidden from you, Angelina, is that your risk of getting the disease was probably much lower than claimed.

Let me explain: all human beings carry oncogenic promoters of cancer, yet only a minority actually develops the disease. Why? Because the genetic make-up may well remain closed. The progress of a new science, epigenetics, enables us to understand that gene behaviour during life depends heavily on the context, and circumstances external to the cell are more decisive than its internal structure. To paraphrase Claude Bernard, one could say that “the gene is nothing, its environment is everything.”

There is no fatality, because anyone can ensure that the damaged DNA fragments inherited from his or her parents are not awakened by negative stimuli. Through a healthy lifestyle, we can put defective genes to sleep and build immunity capable of controlling runaway cells.

Concerning breast cancer, for example, it has been shown that exposure to pesticides, contraceptive pills and menopause treatment by synthetic hormones are risk factors. By contrast, the practice of sport, breastfeeding and a diet rich in Omega 3 and resveratrol (from grape pigments) have been identified as protective factors. I don’t know if you like fatty fish or sport, but I know that you have had three children and that you look after three others, and that you must love wine since you own wine production in the South of France and your vineyard is in a village devoted to organic viticulture.

Your usual pallor suggests you may be wary of the sun, which is a pity because the sun is a friend of the breasts through vitamin D, but for the rest you have a really “anticancer” profile. If you had known, would you have had the “courage” (as Brad put it) to allow being butchered?

The people who cut off your breasts also lied to you on the validity of their scientific data.

There is in fact no evidence that mutation of the BRCA1 gene is the Damocles sword suggested by the scary “87% risk “. The alarmist studies were conducted on families where most women developed cancer. The estimate of the threat has been calculated on a very narrow segment of the population, instead of on the total population. This is a huge bias since it is not possible to compare the relative influences of lifestyle and heredity.

This has been recognized by the National Cancer Institute of the United States, and here is their official statement: “Because members of the same family not only have genes in common, but often also share the same environment, it is possible that the number of cancers observed in these families may be due to other genetic or environmental factors.” (2) Therefore, in the current state of knowledge the presence of BRCA1 should not allow anyone to make you panic. Moreover, there is no long-term study comparing the health of women carrying the mutated gene to that of women genetically “healthy”.

But there are two studies whose crucial conclusions have undoubtedly been hidden from you.

The first one, published last January in The Journal of Cell Biology (3), indicates that vitamin D supplementation significantly reduces the likelihood of developing breast cancer, with or without the BRCA1 gene. Which means that the latter does not have the role attributed to it or that the nutrient hinders its effect.

The second, published in 2009 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention (4), highlights the remarkable benefits of selenium supplementation for women at risk. This research on double-blind mode has shown that the first blood cells of female carriers of the defective gene were indeed fragile. When exposed to chemical attack, they have an injury rate of 0.58 on average, against 0.39 in women without BRCA1 mutation. In a second phase, the researchers prescribed 276 micrograms of selenium per day to participating carriers of the gene. After three months, they found that the percentage of damaged DNA was decreased to 0.40 on average, roughly the same level as in the cells of genetically “correct” material. In other words, the antioxidant element found in abundance in seafood does as well as surgery to protect mammary glands!

Before they mutilated you your doctors also lied by omission in not telling you that the psychological factor is not negligible in the genesis of cancer.

Yet it is in scientific literature, that, for his latest book (5), psychologist Gustave Nicolas Fischer found the arguments to highlight the link between the psyche and the onset of the disease. Although psychological factors can’t be isolated or quantified as objectively as biological ones, there are many studies showing that negative emotions play an important role in the etiology of cancer.

But what would you have done if, in addition, you’d had knowledge of the works of Doctor Ryke Geerd Hamer and Doctor Claude Sabbah?

With his “iron law of cancer,” the first one discovered it takes a major emotional shock to trigger a malfunctioning which is in no way anarchic. In boldly stating that “the gene is not the cause but the consequence” the second suggested that cancer could be “programmed” by the traumatic experience of our ancestors.

This is highly relevant! What are breasts for? To feed and to seduce.

The first function is obvious, and the second one too when we remember that the woman is the only female mammal whose breasts are still swollen outside periods of lactation.

The disease develops when a “nest conflict” alters the relationship of a mother with her children (real or symbolic) or with a sexual partner. Even when they have a legacy of deadly memories, happy moms and women tenderly loved run little risk of experiencing the carcinogenic emotion.

For all these reasons, Dear Angelina, you shouldn’t have surrendered to the scalpels. You shouldn’t have accepted the removal of your beautiful natural bust which silicone ersatz could never replace.

But your sacrifice will not be in vain.

Now the whole world can see that Western medicine is reaching the peak of its materialist mechanistic delirium.

It used to change parts of the human machine, now it goes further and removes them preventively to avoid failure! When will they emasculate to avoid testicular cancer or decapitate to prevent brain tumors?

Your personal drama has the merit of exposing how deep in irrationality allopathic medicine is sinking.

Incidentally, offering your two breasts draws attention to a strange fact: you could still develop breast cancer in the absence of your breasts! To explain this your senologist may have pointed to the limitations of surgery and told you that cells surviving the scalpel could stay long in the surrounding tissues or travel erratically.

According to an alternative hypothesis, more fascinating and more credible, these particular breast cells are actually stem cells with a mandate to differentiate under instructions from the brain.

Anyway, this phenomenon of “breast cancer without breast” after mastectomy reflects the tremendous intelligence of nature and the biological purpose of its special programmes called diseases.

Diseases, as evidenced by the new medicine of Doctor Hamer and total biology of Doctor Sabbah, are no just pointless maledictions, but pain expressing inner suffering.

Contrary to appearance, they are solutions of survival! And when a body organ is gone, the body acts as if the lost organ was still there until the causal stress is resolved.

I hope this will not be the case for you, Angelina, and I hope that your nest will be free of conflicts. I hope you never have to regret having sacrificed a splendid part of your anatomy for nothing.

If, by chance, you read this letter, forgive its hardness and be assured that I would be very happy to discuss with you while enjoying a bottle of your delicious rosé.

Yours sincerely,

Yves Rasir

(*)  Yves Rasir is editor in chief of “Néosanté” a French language magazine dedicated to a free and lucid view on medicine, healing and health

link to English page of the site :  http://www.neosante.eu/?gtlang=en

(1) « La brutalisation du corps féminin dans la médecine moderne »  (disponible dans la médiathèque de Néosanté)

(2)  www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/BRCA

(3) BRCA1 loss activates cathepsin L-mediated degradation of 53BP1 in breast cancer cells. The Journal of Cell Biology, 2013; 200 (2)

(4) Selenium Supplementation Reduced Oxidative DNA Damage in Adnexectomized BRCA1 Mutations Carriers -Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev November 2009 18; 2923

(5) « Psychologie du cancer », Editions Odile Jacob.

From placebos to self healing

A placebo is a cheat with remarkably positive effects. You are given a pill containing no active substance, but you firmly believe it is a real medicine…and it works. Triggered by belief, your neurones send messages to various organs and these generate the hormones, chemicals, tissues or whatever is needed for recovery. All natural, no harmful side effects. The strength of placebos is well documented by mainstream science.

But could belief with similarly positive effects be induced in our neurones without having to be cheated?

Yes, definitely, but under one important condition: belief must be genuine and complete. Nagging doubts spoil the mechanism.

Ah. Here the sceptics will jump and briskly dismiss the whole idea as old magic practices rooted in credulity and ignorance. Note, by the way, that the word “sceptics” is a gross misnomer for people who routinely accept any piece of misinformation from the establishment without much if any critical analysis. But let’s leave this aside.

Thoughts can set physical processes in motion in the body; this is well established and recognised by official science. Thoughts of resentment, despair, hatred …lead to various ailments, sometimes very serious. On the other hand, thoughts of optimism, joy, gratitude, forgiveness…. do reinforce the body’s natural resistance.

Furthermore, recent studies have shown that the altered state of consciousness attained through meditation not only calms the mind but leads to more regular heart activity, improved digestion, better skin condition, stronger immune system, etc.

All this is good news, but does it provide a sufficient basis for effective natural healing relying mainly on positive thoughts?

The answer is entirely linked to the worldview you choose to adopt.

In the materialist worldview, physical things follow a cold mechanistic logic, with few if any influences of the mind, and on the contrary thoughts themselves are seen as solely based on a sophisticated physical mechanism as yet largely unexplained. From that perspective it is hard to imagine that pure thoughts could do the trick when required; reliable cure has to come from medical procedures, either with chemicals or natural remedies.

In the holistic, energy and consciousness based worldview, thoughts are expressions of universal awareness. They are totally intertwined with energy flows. What appears to us as “material” is structured energy. Structured dynamically by information, which itself originates in consciousness. This is a model of metaphysics. It is consistent with hard science, but it goes further in that it is enriched by intuition.

Self healing is part of total opening to intuitive guidance. Overcoming specific ailments, however satisfactory and important per se, is far from the whole story. The consequences of trusting intuition to receive guidance from universal source are wide and far reaching. Life is fundamentally changed. Relations with oneself, one’s own body, other people, other creatures, situations, events are experienced in a totally new way, lighter, deeper, freer, more serene.

There are quite a few practitioners, writers and teachers of intuitive self healing and more generally intuitive guidance. Here is one I know through someone close to me: Inna Segal, an Australian lady originally from Belarus. She has a written a very clear and well structured book. Her site is at http://www.innasegal.com/

When you improve your own health and life trajectory through non egotist self healing, you radiate to the world. With more power than you can imagine.

Fear not, take a sip of good wine and open your heart.

Love,

Leo

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2012

What are the odds of pills working?

Overused statistics often create a smokescreen for lack of rigour and honesty in science.

This is clearly the case in the medical domain.

But let’s see how average rough statistics could be interpreted fairly to address the old question of allopathy versus homeopathy.

Say you are a skeptic. You don’t believe in homeopathy. But you respect logic.

It is well known and accepted by official medicine that, generally speaking, a number of patients recover without any treatment, while others recover when receiving only  placebo.

Percentages found by studies for these two groups are surprisingly high.

Let’s say that, on average, roughly a third of patients recover without any treatment and another third get better on pure placebo.

Logically, this means that when you are unwell, there is only about one chance out of three that taking either an allopathic drug or an homeopathic treatment will possibly help you beyond the pure placebo effect.

But there is more to it.

Official medicine recognises that drugs don’t always work. Percentages of cases where the drug does positively work vary considerably with the types of ailments and the molecule.

Let’s say that, on average, a drug will work positively in three quarters of cases.

There is still another consideration to bear in mind. Most drugs are known to have side effects of widely varying severities.

Let’s say that in one case out of three the side effects will be at least as serious as the condition being treated.

So, looking at the one chance out of three that a treatment may help you beyond pure placebo effect, if you choose allopathy you have to consider that half of that one chance out of three will be wasted by the drug either not working or producing side effects at least as bad as your condition.

In other words, there is on average about one chance out of six that an allopathic drug will positively help you. And of course if you do take an allopathic drug, there is on average, say, one chance out of three that it will harm you at least as much as it helps.

As a skeptic you are convinced that there is zero chance for an homeopathic treatment to help you, but being intellectually honest you have to concede that the chance of being seriously harmed is close to zero.

What can you conclude from the comparison; take no treatment at all, since the odds for successful effects versus drawbacks are so low? No, for in that case you forego the key placebo effect.

Serious studies have shown that when people strongly believe in their treatment, be it conventional or alternative, the placebo effect is significantly more pronounced.

So if your doctor knew that you believed strongly in the treatment he was going to prescribe, he might reason that the chance of the placebo effect might jump from one third to say 40%, meaning that the percentage of chances of effects beyond recovery without treatment or placebo would fall to around 27% (100-33-40) instead of 33%.

Applying the halving for no action or side effects at least as serious as the condition, the percentage of positive action falls to 13.5%, a bit more than one chance out of eight.

For your doctor, the ideal would thus clearly be to give you a placebo.

But of course, for the placebo to work, you would have to believe it was a conventional drug. That would entail cheating you, with the complicity of the chemist.

Understandably your doctor doesn’t wish to embark on this course.

While not too sure how to proceed in the best interest of his patients, he gets frequent visits by sales people from pharmaceutical companies. Finally, he’s only human. Why make his life complicated when easy pickings beckon?

We can’t judge him. Neither can we judge the sales person from Big Pharma. Neither can we judge R&D and marketing folks from Big Pharma. All of them are trapped in a system.

A system of thought. Powerful, insistent, just sufficiently mildly threatening to keep (almost) everybody in line.

Mind you, if you aren’t a skeptic regarding homeopathy, things are much easier: you take the homeopathic treatment. For one it doesn’t harm you. Then you benefit surely from the placebo effect. And if it works beyond placebo, that is extra benefit.

For my part, I’m sure it does work, even at very low dilutions where no molecule of the substance is present. For it is not a question of a molecule being present, but of an energy signal being present.

Embracing the holistic paradigm is liberating.

Fear not, enjoy maths combined to intuition.

Love,

Leo

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2012

Big pharma in full swing

Before you swallow any pill, always bear in mind what really motivates drug manufacturers:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2167742/GlaxoSmithKline-pay-3b-fine-pleading-guilty-healthcare-fraud.html

In any case, it’s not your health.

Besides, there is almost certainly a much better way to treat your ailment.

Fear not, sleep tight.

Love,

Leo

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2012

Essilor shines in the market

Essilor is the world leader of corrective lenses.

This morning its share price was up 26% since the beginning of the year, after a great performance in 2011. In ten years it went up threefold. Not bad, eh.

Essilor’s business may appear relatively innocent compared to that of, say, Big Pharma or the agro-food sector.

And it certainly is much less harmful than corrective eye surgery.

But the fact is that it thrives on people becoming ever more stressed and anxious.

Why?

This was explained in some detail in a previous post: https://leoforesta.com/2012/02/11/medical-technology-is-great-for-gdp/

In short, the more deep seated fear, the more tension in the muscles controlling eye globes, the more pronounced the resulting optical faults.

Essilor’s success looks like a reflection of humanity’s profound unease.

Therefore, no regret at all about not being one of their “happy” shareholders (many of whom wear glasses or contact lenses themselves).

Fear not, and go for natural restoration of vision.

Love,

Leo

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2012

Medical technology is great for GDP

Contact lenses, hip replacement, pace makers, open heart surgery, IVF… are all marvels of modern technology.

We can’t help but admire the technical prouesses that they imply.

But couldn’t their aims be reached by other means, possibly more natural, less painful, with fewer or no side effects, and cheaper?

Take contact lenses for example.

They may seem a great help for short sighted people. They do enable to see with more accuracy, but at the cost of a significant intrusion: the eye surface is definitely not meant to be covered by a layer of glass or plastic.

And lenses do not restore natural vision.

According to conventional ophthalmologists, restoring natural vision is impossible. Once you are short sighted, there is nothing else to do than wearing glasses or contact lenses, or having the shape of your eye corrected by surgery.

But what exactly is short sightedness? And why does one become short sighted in the first place?

The eye is a globe whose movements are commanded by very powerful muscles.

These, like other muscles in the body, are subject to abnormal tensions when the mind experiences certain emotions.

When particular states of mind persist, eye muscles become permanently tense, causing the eye shape to be altered, with the optical consequence of short or long sightedness, and/or astigmatism.

Clear characteristics in the psychological profiles of short sighted and long sighted people are well documented.

For instance, underlying fear and anxiety are always strongly present in the minds of short sighted individuals.

One doesn’t usually become short sighted before a certain age, say eight or nine, the time for basic fear and anxiety to get in and take root.

What it is not generally known is that some people, through fundamental changes in their outlook on life, manage to improve their vision significantly, sometimes back to sharp accuracy.

This always involves deep relaxation and reaching some state of “let go” of fear.

Conventional ophthalmologists are usually not interested in the deep seated psychological problems of their patients.

They haven’t been trained to deal with them. Their extended knowledge concerns the physiology of the eye, and all the possible forms of eye diseases.

Their focus is on the eye, not the person.

In contrast, when you follow the path of improving your vision naturally, you concentrate on your mind, and even on your soul.

You learn to relax, to meditate, to accept life with more confidence, to experience what happens as fascinating events in the bigger picture of universal consciousness.

When you were a child, fear and other emotions settled in you and caused different things in your body, including tensions in eye muscles, resulting in the symptom of short sightedness.

Once you realise that connections between soul, mind and body are the key to all, you regain your freedom.

Nothing is irreversible. Life is movement, flow and changes. If parts of your body are malfunctioning, there is always a subtle reason.

Always very deep in your fundamental outlook on existence: fear, ego, distrust, impatience, rejection, bitterness, …

These induce subtle messages in the energy/consciousness fields of all your cells, with myriads of physical consequences, invisible and undetectable until they consolidate into manifest symptoms.

In the particular case of short sightedness, changing one’s mental dynamics towards trust, acceptance, patience, etc., has two kinds of effects.

It induces improvements of visual accuracy, often first only during occasional brief spells of a few seconds or minutes: “flashes of clear vision”,  indescribable bliss to whoever has been short sighted for many years.

It also brings a much enhanced comfort of vision: pleasurable sensations in the eye and around, fewer headaches and facial pains. The energy starts flowing again in your eyes. And your thinking becomes clearer, less rigid, less anxious.

You may still need your glasses for driving and other activities requiring accuracy, but most of the time you can live happily without them, enjoying long hours without the tension always present with lenses on.

As for contact lenses, only use them very exceptionally, when you need lenses and absolutely do not whish to wear glasses.

Once you start wearing glasses and contact lenses for much reduced periods of time, you obviously need to buy fewer of them.

Which is great for you, but not so good for business, and not so good for GDP.

Here we are: the money motive, omnipresent in every aspect of life, is especially strong in things medical.

It is interesting to note that Essilor, the number one multinational in contact lenses and glasses, was one of the few companies whose share price improved significantly in 2011 while most of the market booked a strong decline.

It is also interesting to notice that kids tend to wear glasses at a much younger age than was the case a few decades ago.

Could it be that feelings of fear, lack of trust, …etc develop earlier in today’s society which is distinctly child unfriendly.

But for ophthalmologists it seems so much easier not to ask too many questions or to dig too deep. Just prescribe the specs.

Anyway, there are so many trendy coloured frames nowadays that good mothers almost find it a pleasure to buy them for the little darling.

Which is jolly good for business, share price and GDP. Why is it that we see young kids with fun glasses in adverts, films,…etc.

Everything is connected. Nothing happens without a reason.

It is pretty obvious that we could develop a similar line of argument for many other medical conditions and brilliant technologies that are supposed to deal with them.

We focused here on short sightedness because it is often (wrongly) not considered so serious and therefore would not raise the same controversies as more life threatening diseases.

But the gist of the matter is this: there are two approaches to health, which are directly related to two opposing views of the universe.

One is mechanistic, materialist and great for big business, and the other is holistic, subtle, and great for free souls.

Finally, note that medical expenses represent now more than 10% of GDP in several developed economies, fast approaching 20% in the US.

Given the state of public finances, it is glaringly obvious that the system will increasingly focus on a very restricted fraction of population: the rich (generally oldish), and on a few mass public actions particularly remunerative for big business, like vaccination campaigns.

Fear not, be free and keep well.

Love,

Leo

Copyright © Leo Foresta 2012

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