Saturday, December 12, 2009

Why Does Emphysema Get Worse So Long After Smoking Cessation?

This, along with my mother’s worsening condition, greatly intensified my research. The intensity increased to a level higher than any I had ever experienced in college or for any new job I had taken in the past. After all, my mom was dying and I was quickly realizing that no one, including the doctors and their staff, was doing anything to save my mother’s life. I had to find some answers. I began to ask the doctors three simple questions. These questions I asked of each of her three doctors at the time. They are as follows:
  
  1. “Why is my mother’s emphysema worsening even though she has quit smoking? What is the mechanism at work  causing this disease to progress?”  
  2. “How many medications do you have at your disposal that you can prescribe for various ailments?
  3. “Can you name one that cures a single disease?


Not one doctor could ever come up with one drug that cured even one disease. This really concerned me. Why did they prescribe these drugs like candy if they weren’t curing anything? What was their motivation? Didn’t they realize they were killing people with these drugs? Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t but one thing was for sure, none of them seemed overly concerned about it.

The first question seemed to perplex the pulmonary specialist. He gave me some additional rhetoric about the disease progressing after being set in motion by smoking but when I persisted with my question,

“Why is my mother’s emphysema worsening even though she has quit smoking? What is the mechanism at work causing this disease to progress?”

He finally admitted they didn’t know. It was a mystery. A mystery? All those years of education and they were satisfied with emphysema being a mystery. Well, I’m sorry but that’s not good enough for me! Some how, some way, I was going to solve this big mystery. 

Maybe I was just dumb enough to believe that I could solve this big mystery. Maybe as a Christian, since I had been praying to God every night to help me find the answers and believed whole heartedly that God would lead me to the answers, I continued my research. I began to look in obscure places on the internet for answers.




For a complete understanding of these treatments, visit our latest video on YouTube,

“The Overlooked Cause of COPD”


If you would like additional information, please visit our website at:


Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Spirometry Test – The Doctors Play the Blame Game

As I began to do this I noticed that the doctors seemed a little nervous when they saw me sitting there. One doctor who was training medical students would bring them into other treatment rooms to see the patients but not my mother’s. They knew they did not intimidate me. 

I had done research on nothing but emphysema and COPD for over a year when I began to go with her into the treatment rooms. It wasn’t long before I could ask intelligent questions and I could also see through their rhetoric. After a while their responses and comments to me started to seem canned, almost like they were prepped on what to say to me by someone. But these were the doctors. They were the boss in the office so who could be prepping them? How could they all have the same responses to my questions almost word for word?

Upon initial diagnosis they had given her the spirometry test to determine the current state of the lungs and the integrity of lung function. They determined that she had the lungs of a 111 year old. I don’t know if any of you know anything about depression but I’m sure anyone with any common sense would realize that when a patient is depressed the last thing you want to do is make them more depressed. 

This however, is exactly what they did with this information. They repeatedly told her how she had done this to herself by smoking cigarettes. At this time she had not smoked for a few years. After this revelation she became very much to herself. She barely left her room. I finally asked her what was wrong and she said that she couldn’t believe that she had done this to herself.


I missed her bright smile


Watching her depression increase I began to intensify my research, staying up all night almost every night for a year and a half. I would check on her every hour or so to make sure she was okay and make sure she was still breathing. I had to turn the dining room light on so I could see her clearly. I didn’t want to turn on a light in her room and wake her up. She seemed to have more and more trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep once she did finally fall asleep.

As her emphysema and COPD worsened, her sleeping became sporadic. She could only sleep for a few hours at a time before waking up short of breath. Although I was not happy to see her unable to sleep for longer duration, I was relieved to see that she would wake up when she got short of breath. This provided a small bit of confidence that she would not stop breathing in her sleep.

I asked each of her doctors for the list of medications they had prescribed so I could check on each of these medications to make sure they were actually helping her. The first very disturbing thing I found was that they had prescribed Crestor™ (rosuvastatin calcium) which in my research I learned that it actually blocked CoEnzyme Q10 (ubiquinone) production, a nutrient necessary for heart health. 

I also learned that emphysema patients often died from heart failure! So the very thing that may very well kill my mother was being hastened by the doctor’s prescription! How could this be? Didn’t the doctors know this? Had I, in my limited research, eclipsed their knowledge of this disease? That possibility alone scared me! I was relying on them to do the right thing and now I was beginning to realize that maybe they were not.




For a complete understanding of these treatments, visit our latest video on YouTube,

“The Overlooked Cause of COPD”


If you would like additional information, please visit our website at:

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Trouble Coughing Up Phlegm? NAC May Provide Relief

Trouble Coughing Up Phlegm?
NAC Supplement May Provide Relief

After my mother’s diagnosis with emphysema/COPD, I noticed that she had a large amount of phlegm in her lungs and couldn’t seem to cough it up. She said that every now and then she could but usually she could not.

In my research I found that phlegm contained sulfur which formed di-sulfide bonds with each other and caused the phlegm to stick together into large clumps. I found a supplement at the local health foods store called NAC. NAC or N-acetyl-l-cysteine, breaks these di-sulfide bonds and thins out the phlegm.

I purchased some of this so we could try it. The tablets were large and were 200 mg strength. I gave her one and within about 45 minutes she said it had loosened some but she still could not cough up most of the phlegm. We tried another 200 mg and it loosened some more. After 400 mg of this supplement I was scared to give her much more so I broke a third tablet in half. About 30 minutes after the half pill and 500 mg and 2 hours total since she took the first tablet she could finally cough up the phlegm and spit it out. This seemed to help however, it wore her out to cough so much. She took a nap after the NAC and coughing session but she slept very sound so appeared it was worth all the effort.

After that, anytime she had trouble with phlegm we got out the NAC but we would just start with the two and a half tablets, the 500 mg that had helped before. You may want to try the same progressive dosage method we tried starting with only one tablet and giving it time to work before taking an additional tablet. If you have a chiropractor, naturopath or osteopath you can ask I would strongly recommend doing this. I don’t mention MDs here because they don’t generally train on many supplements and often don’t have a suggestion except not to take it. They learn primarily pharmaceutical treatments which I like only as a last resort.

She liked the fact that it was not another prescription that she had to take with a myriad of side effects she had to watch out for.







 

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Why Don't Doctors Know This?

Dr. A. V. Constantini of the World Health Organization stated that, "Fungal infections are the most overlooked medical problem in the world." Yet, if you ask your doctor if he or she took a class on Mycology (the study of fungi) in medical school they would probably say, NO! Most American medical schools removed these classes from the curriculum in the 1970s, probably at the suggestion, or insistence, of the high and mighty pharmaceutical companies.

According to Dr. Constantini and others, fungal infections are the underlying cause of many, even most, debilitating diseases. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Mycology textbooks were even written by MDs. They made similar broad statements in these textbooks.

More recently, Mayo Clinic found in a study they did on sinusitis (specifically the inflammation of the sinuses but commonly referred to as nasal congestion) that 96% of all sinusitis is fungal related. However, if you were suffering from sinusitis today, chances are your family physician would prescribe an antibiotic.

For those of you who do not know, antibiotics are mycotoxins (toxins produced and released by fungi). Remember penicillin? In 1928 penicillin, the first true antibiotic, was discovered by Alexander Fleming, Professor of Bacteriology at St. Mary's Hospital in London. He extracted it from mold (a fungi) that was growing on bread.

One major problem with antibiotics is that they kill probiotics. Probiotics are the "good bacteria" that populate your small intestine. They carry out a multitude of functions not the least of which is the production of Vitamin B12 and keeping Candida albicans (a one-celled fungi) from proliferating. Once in the bloodstream, Candida albicans becomes systemic and begins to invade other organs and organ systems. Many experts say that this unchecked proliferation is the underlying cause of many otherwise, seemingly unrelated, diseases.

In a televised interview, Lynn Jennings, M.D., from Wichita Falls, Texas was asked how many of her new patients she thought had fungal infections. Her answer, 

"All of them!"

It surprised me when I realized fungal infections played such a large part in the disease process. It surprised me even more when I realized that doctors were not even given a Mycology class in medical school. Dr. Jennings stated that her instruction on mycology was limited to a few lectures in Microbiology class.

An article in the October 2002 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association written by Ruth Edsell stated that corn is universally contaminated with Candida albicans. Candida albicans produces the mycotoxin, aflatoxin B1, a known carcinogen. It is known to cause, or at least be associated with, colon cancer.

Now you know why your doctor doesn't know this.


For a complete understanding of these treatments, visit our latest video on YouTube,

“The Overlooked Cause of COPD”


If you would like additional information, please visit our website at:





Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Emphysema/COPD and Conventional Medicine

I have been taking care of my mother who was diagnosed with emphysema almost 5 years ago. Her general practice physician and her pulmonary specialist started her on the usual emphysema medications and treatments and she began to deteriorate almost immediately. Her weight dropped from 103 lbs to 77 lbs and she went from not needing any supplemental oxygen at the time of her diagnosis to requiring 4 liters of continuous oxygen not to mention ending up nearly bedridden, only leaving her room for 15 to 20 minutes each day.

I researched for almost 4 years all night, every night so I could check on her regularly throughout the night and make sure she didn't stop breathing. After over 6500 hours of research, I realized what the etiology of the disease emphysema actually was and why it continues to get worse long after the patient stops smoking. I then realized why the drugs they currently prescribe for emphysema not only fail to cure the disease or reverse any of the symptoms, they actually make the patient worse.

Once I realized why the medications the doctors were prescribing made her worse I began to understand what had to be done to reverse this debilitating disease and immediately applied these principles to my mother’s daily regimen. She began to improve almost immediately. Within 3.5 to 4 months she gained 22 lbs of the 26 pounds she had lost over the previous 4+ years and was able to reduce her oxygen from 4 liters of continuous oxygen to only 2 liters. At present, she only requires supplemental oxygen some of the time. She is now able to go 18 hours at a time without any supplemental oxygen and even sleeps without any oxygen some of the time, something she has not been able to do for over 4 years.

I wrote a book outlining her struggles and ongoing recovery from this debilitating disease after being told by everyone I asked in the medical field that it was terminal. At this point you probably know what I think, NO IT ISN'T! 



For a complete understanding of these treatments, visit our latest video on YouTube,

“The Overlooked Cause of COPD”


If you would like additional information, please visit our website at:


https://www.emphysema-treatments.com.