UK Dept of Health recommends pushing people to exercise despite contraindications

Britain's Medical Research Council (Dept. of Health), ran a trial, PACE, reported on in The Lancet, UK medical journal in 2011) to evaluate - read, promote a psychological approach to treating ME (CFS in the USA).
The prime aim seemed to be steadily increasing exercise and telling the patient that it is all in his head. The 4 therapies used were: adaptive pacing therapy (APT), cognitive behavior (CBT), graded exercise therapy (GET), and specialized medical care (SMC). NB: APT does not mean that the patient decides how much to exercise, but standard amounts and times for exercise plus no naps.
Despite very limited improvement across all categories apart from APT, ie., between 3.4% decrease in fatigue, and 9.4% improvement in mean physical function compared not to a control group who received no treatment, but to the SMC group, and "severe adverse reactions" varying
between 1% to 3%, the government's decision was that the PACE trial was a success and was the way to go for CFS/ME patients.
Needless to say, the largest children's ME charity in Britain,The Young ME Sufferers Trust, disagrees, saying that a separate trial reported on in the Clinical Rheumatology journal in 2011, found that GET and CBT resulted in "worse physical function and bodily pain scores"; and
that "children's symptoms are exacerbated with GET".
The writer of the book, Osler's Web (the history of ME) commented that this was a way to avoid disability and medical payments as is seems to push the idea that CFS/ME is psychological in nature and that people can improve with more exercise than they would ordinarily consider.
And this despite, the year before, a group of 86 Member's of Parliament signing a petition to bring the issue of ME before Parliament, stating that ME is a genuine medical condition, that govt. funding "must be focused on the bio-medical factors involved and not simply managing the psychological symptoms". Now this concerted effort must have come about through ME patients and their families contacting their MP's and complaing about the way they were being treated - or not treated, sometimes (it is difficult to get diagnosed with ME).
So if anyone would like to make a comment on how they or their loved one was or is being treated by the medical community, please leave a comment.

Just got 2 new friends

After almost 6 mnths, I am back writing my blog. Will not leave it so long now as am officially retired. Now can concentrate on this blog and finishing my book on this disease. And have a grand total of 2 people who have paid attention to me!
My latest comment is about the UK's new focus on CFS (ME in Britain) which seems to consist of making patients exercise more - CEB's? - essentially telling them it's all in their head. 1 or 2 patients forced to exercise beyond their capability developed further severe problems: a teenager had heart damage and another ended up in a wheelchair.
Now while exercise is fundamentally important - I try to walk each day or at least every other day (and go swimming sometimes) for at least 20 minutes, then it's on my terms and I do not push myself beyond what I am capable of. To do otherwise is tantamount to torure.

Activia yoghourt is dangerous

Activia yogourt was originally like any other yogourt - made of milk, a thickening agent, fruit, and some "good" intestinal bacteria, but it advertised itself as "regulating your digestive system" and the probiotic bacteria did not do enough of a good job. So some very clever company person remembered that carrageenan (from seaweed) damps down bacterial and fungal growth. Initially, everything works well, but over a long period of time - several years - this carrageenan finds its way into intestinal cells where it causes damage: lysosomes that ingest food particles and carrageenan cannot break carrageenan down. But they release their digestive enzymes causing ulceration.
The people who eat Activia are going to be in for a rough surprise when this happens - especially as Activia seemed to work so well for them earlier on. So these people will eat more and more Activia and more and more carrageenan thus damaging themselves even further.
The Activia ads are manipulative: "Activia makes you feel good inside... will regulate your digestive system - until several years down the line when you will start to feel very, very bad indeed.

Dr. Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Chemistry

If you want to read an excellent rebuttal of the latest pro-exercise PACE theory, then go to CFS or the British-named myalgic encephalomyelitis UK web site and look for The Gilbert Report supported by the above-named professor at the University of Sunderland in the north of England.
Dr. Hooper lays out most, if not all of the problems that CFS patients have and shows how this information totally disproves the latest wrinkle: that exercise and pyschology is the key to treating CFS/M.E. patients.
The doctors at the heart of the exercise theory are all psychology based; the doctor in charge, Dr. W-, is partly financed by a Swiss medical insurance company whose prime motivation is to deny disability payments to anyone with this disease. Furthermore, all scientific research has to have a control group to make such research valid - and this latest PACE group research does not. And down in the small print is the admission that such excercise gains are limited and could cause damage to people.

Lancet trial

The British medical journal, The Lancet, recently published the results of a trial (PACE) looking at various therapies based on psychological and exercise bases. (18 February 2011). While I only have access to an abbreviated summary (the journal does not put the full articles online and the actual journal takes a while to be sent over the Atlantic), I still feel the need to comment upon their findings.
The article was published by a professor of psychological medicine at St. Barts in London (UK), and states that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), graded exercise (GET), which includes pushing people beyond what they feel they can do, trumps adaptive pacing therapy (APT) - which is favored by British CFS patient groups and who feel that the UK Medical Research Council is strongly insinuating that CFS/M.E. is simply all in the mind and if only these people would get off their backsides then all will be well.
A month or so ago, I connected to an online newspaper, the Scottish Daily Record, because of several articles about CFS/M.E. One mother wrote about her young teenage son (fostered out for one reason or another) who developed this disease and who was forced to exercise beyond his capacity and who, therefore, developed heart damage as a result and who is now in a wheelchair.
It makes me wonder if her poor son's result was listed in the "serious adverse reactions" or if such results were simply shelved and ignored. Such people seem to be too zealous and fascistic (Germany, both pre-WWII and during WWII) comes to mind!
It reminds me of going to the dentist after The American Heart Association "recommended" that any work done on patient's teeth should be accompanied by an antibiotic. The dental assistant said that I "had to have" an antibiotic tablet which I duly swallowed only to turn up at the required time to find out that the dental office had made a mistake and had not recorded my appointment so that I was now required to take another antibiotic tablet for another appointment. I said no because the antibiotic had violently upset my intestines, destroying a lot of "good" bacteria, encouraging the "bad" bacteria, giving me gas and further damaging my intestines. I'd already tried explaining to the assistant (who was far less educated than me) that taking antibiotics was not good for me. I was intrigued and phoned up the American Heart Association to find out their actual stance and was told that antibiotics were recommended but not required, but that's the danger of small minds and less educated people: they become uncaring, dogmatic and zealous, not allowing of differences and not allowing patient's imputs - I didn't go to another dentist for several years after that so what good does such strict interpretations do?
CFS/M.E. patients' groups are right in being upset; their other complaint is that their is no research being done into the actual physical cause - the idea of a mouse virus (XMRV) has been discounted. Fair enough, for I agree with that too, but there is a phsyical cause!

Stand Up To Cancer! Really?

So September (2010) was the Stand Up To Cancer month. The money raised goes to a very good cause but how much interest is there in cancer prevention? What if half of all cancers good very easily be prevented? Why wouldn't the government want to do this - obviously the drug companies, hospitals and doctors would stand to lose a great chunk of their income and so are not actually interested in preventing cancer.
Thirty-two years ago, in 1978, an article was published in the journal, Cancer Research, "Effect of dietary undegraded carrageenan on colon carcinogenesis in F344 rats treated with azoxymethane or methylnitrosourea".
Now going from memory since within a week of reordering the article, I lost it again which makes it seem as though there is a curse on the article, I'll try to dredge up what I remember. 1 of 2 known carcingens, azoxymethane (AZM) or methylnitrosourea (MNS) was given to rats who were on a diet of carrageenan: 100% of those rats developed precancerous pinpoint ulcers in their distal colons (if the experiment had continued further, the adenomatous ulcers would have progressed to cancerous tumors).
Only half of a further group of rats just fed 1 or other of the 2 carcinogens (AZM or MNS) developed such ulcers. 2 out of 10 of another group of rats just fed carrageenan also developed these ulcers.
So carrageenan acted to boost the action of other carcinogens (a synergistic reaqction). We also drink and eat carcinogens (azo colors added to foods and drinks; nitrates in bacon and deli meats, etc), so the carrageenan that we also ingest just like the rats will also act synergestically to cause ulcers and, later, tumors in our colons too.
It's obvious that the removal of carrageenan from the human diet would reduce cancer by up to 50%. You might think that carrageenan's effects are just limited to the colon but the whole body is affected. What happens to the colon is just the first symptom of similar damage happening within the body.
Now why after all this time hasn't carrageenan been removed from the human diet? I'll let you answer that one!

Multiple sclerosis and a little-known sheep disease

J.K.Rowling of the Harry Potter books fame recently announced that she was funding a research center in Scotland primarily for multiple sclerosis (which her mother died of), but also for other degenerative neurological
diseases.
MS is a disease of northern climes: where you were born and lived for the first fifteen years of your life determines your susceptibility to MS.
Remember Dr. Sigurdsson, the medical examiner for Iceland during WWII, who came up with the concept of slow viruses, i.e., viral (and more recently, prion, diseases that take a long time to develop into a full-blown disease, e.g., AIDS, mad cow disease - BSE).
Iceland was, at the time, suffering financially from what appeared to be two new sheep diseases: one that caused pneumonia (maedi - coughing), and another (visna - wasting) which caused wasting, tremors, blindness, paralysis of the hind limbs, and ultimately, death. Dr. S. determined that the two diseases were actually caused by the same slow lentivirus (which has been found to be related to the modern slow virus disease, AIDS).
Maedi-Visna (MV) was introduced into Iceland during the 1930's by the importation of diseased sheep from Germany. Dr. S. also remarked how similar MV was to MS - similar brain and neurological damage and symptoms.
The first documented human case of MS (a young woman) appeared in Holland during the mid-1700's, which makes it obvious that MV has been around for quite some time in some Dutch/German flocks of sheep. Don't forget that people and their animals did not move around much back then. What may have began and remained for years as a small, isolated-to-one-or-two-small valleys disease, started to become a world-wide disease with the large increase of movement of animals to different countries.
Yet when I googled MV disease and came up with mainly British articles, I got the somewhat startling info that MV had 1st presented itself in two widely different places: in South Africa and Montana in the US some eighty years ago. Using simple arithmetic I worked out that these two outbreaks also began in the 1930's, just like Iceland's. And, at least in South Africa, there is a direct link to Holland (and probably Germany), as the country was settled by Dutch settlers, who, obviously, would have brought, or bought, sheep from their country with them. Now there aren't any sheep indigenous to Montana and so I am assuming that German or Dutch settlers also brought or bought sheep from their homeland too, thus introducing MV disease into the US.
The British are concerned about this disease since it is new to the UK,and we do have a lot of sheep in Wales and Scotland, where this is a major source of income in wet, difficult mountainous areas; there were only 3 recorded cases two years ago, but there were 11 cases last year, and so companies are trying to find a vaccine for this retroviral disease (which given how difficult it has been to try and find a vaccine for the related retroviral disease, AIDS, may well prove to be impossible.
But if MS is the human equivalent to MV, why aren't researchers looking for a vaccine for MS too?