OT...Are we killing ourselves...or what?

http://www.essiacinfo.org/

Now on to the rest of the world. About 75% of the world's population lives in developing countries. Probably 90% of these people live in abject poverty in conditions similar to what our great great grand parents lived in about 100 years ago. Many of these people live in mud huts or flimsy shanties make out of scraps. Close to 50% have no access to safe drinking water or sanitation facilities, medical care, paying jobs, etc. Their mortality rates are high. For example, in many countries in West Africa, out of every 1,000 live births about 200 children die before their fifth birthday. Average life expectancy is under 50. If you are lucky enough and have a good immune system to make it through childhood, then you may still get cancer and die in terrible pain because there is no access to medicines.

I would say we in the developed world have it so much easier in many ways. When refugees come to the US, almost none of them want to go back to their country of origin, even if the war in their home country were to stop. And refugees are dirt poor in the US.

We all must die. Almost all of us will get sick before we die, or we will die a traumatic death. The nursing homes are full for a reason. To reduce your chances of premature death basically be smart, do things in moderation, exercise regularly, do not get too fat, avoid things that are known to cause cancer, don't sleep around and enjoy every moment you have.

By the way, I spent 1 year in Liberia, West Africa and 2 years in Ghana, West Africa. I am just getting involved in Honduras, Central America. I was an unpaid volunteer for those 3 years. I lived in small rural villages and had way too many children and decent people die on me from both preventable and unpreventable causes. About 40% of my clinical practice here in the US are refugees.

Ok, now I am off my soapbox.

Douglas Stockman, MD
Clinical Assistant Professor, Dept. FamMed U. Rochester
Medical Director, Family Medicine Center
Director, International and Refugee Health

I own 3 IH tractors and have a great time with them.

When you walk through a typical grocery store it is unbelievably hard to find any wholesome food. By that I mean food that is not loaded with trans fats, refined flour, refined sugar, preservatives, pesticide residue, or generally processed to an extent that nearly all nutrition has been forced out of it.

My feeling on cancer is that nothing "causes" it, per se. What hapens is that our immune systems get weakened through a number of things. Most of us don't get the ideal combination of nutrients that will keep our bodies in good repair.

We generally dont get the exercise we used to when we had to really work for a living.

Combine that with increased exposure to man-made toxins like herbacides, out gassing from plastics, glues, etc, constant exposure to 60 hz magnetic fields...a weaken body will fail one way or another. Cancer is a syptom of a body being unable to fend off the mutations of cells that happen all the time.

Sorry to pontificate, but you brought it up...

Cancer and heart disease are the two largest killers of people in this country. The reason for that is because we are living longer by average and have eradicated many things that killed more in the past. Accidents and complications from simple infections used to kill many more. Since that is no longer the case, we live longer and fall to other things like cancer and heart disease.

I go to farm auctions from time to time and are sometimes appalled by the poor physical conditon that many older farmers are in. Moreover, many are NOT getting their preventative care like annual physicals. That is very evident when I see morbidly obese individuals with rotting teeth just kind of waddling around. Many simply do not go to the doctor until it is too late. Cancer is one of those things that really must be caught early.

Some of the cancers and heart problems are a result of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle as well as poor diet. Eating right and exercising properly will reduce those things to a certain extent.

Now, I am sorry to hear about your friends and maybe there is some kind of problem localized to your area. That could very well be the case. There were a lot of toxic things in the 40s and 50s that we used daily without knowing that they were dangerous.

That being said, I do NOT believe that cancer is some sort of government conspiricy that has been perpetrated on dwellers of rural areas. That is just too silly to contemplate seriously.