health and medicine

Perhaps no section title for this site is more oxymoronic than this one, which combines medicine and health. For now this name will hold the space for information related to human health—both ill and good—and the unavoidable intersection with the practice of medicine.

The misfortune for many of us dealing with chronic disease, pain and depressed physical and mental performance is that we are conditioned to seek help from medical professionals, who in turn have been conditioned and trained to intervene with toxic pharmaceutical drugs, radiation-based imaging, a fixation on blood markers, and invasive surgical treatments.

It is not difficult to confuse these types of medical interventions with health. That system has even had the audacity to call itself the health care industry.

Genuine health is not an industry. It is a series of conscious lifestyle choices involving nearly every aspect of life, from where we life to what we eat to how we interact with others in the human race.

  • Save Rico

    I am getting sicker by the minute, after reading a story of horrific abuse of power by the medical establishment that broke early this morning. Tragedy has stricken a newborn infant, being held in the hospital affiliated with the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota. A court ordered that Rico Martinez Nagel be removed from…

  • HIV and my dear friend

    I mentioned in my last post that I frequently get messages from people, asking about something I’ve shared, or sharing their own story. A few days ago, I received just such an email from a person I’ve never met, but who I’ve come to know fairly well online, and we continued the exchange through…

  • Join me on my journey

    Today is Valentine’s Day, and I am sitting in a motel room in Wichita, Kansas, pondering: how do I dare ask friends, family and strangers to give me money so I can continue to experiment with alternative health therapies? The painful answer is:  I have no choice, but to try. I left KC at…

  • Just another tease

    Here’s another short outtake from the pre-show walkthrough that John Grosso and I had in a G+ Hangout On Air (HOA) earlier this week for tomorrow evening’s Rainbow Show. Live stream begins at 7 pm CST.     Please drop in to view the show live, and ask questions via the comment stream on YouTube or Google+….

  • Hang out with me on Friday

    Remember when Google+ was launched more than a year ago to compete in the social networking arena with giants like Facebook? You don’t?  Well, you’re not alone. Despite our love/hate relationship with Facebook, few of us who had grown accustomed to that place could find the time and energy to embrace yet another site…

  • Sunshine in the veins

    I first learned of ultraviolet blood irradiation (UBI) a few months ago from a mutual friend. UBI is also known as extracorporeal photopheresis (ECP) in the medical literature, and most recently BioPhotonic Therapy and Photoluminescent Therapy. Photopheresis been around for more than a century, and started gaining attention in medical circles as early as 1902. Like many alternative protocols, the spectacular success of antibiotics to fight battle field infections in WWII captured the hearts and minds of physicians and started the West’s love affair with pharmaceutical solutions to disease.

    Today, as best as I can tell, UBI is approved by the FDA for only two purposes: cutaneous t-cell lymphoma and graft-vs-host disease. It’s use is far more widespread in Europe, Russia, China and South America for a variety of conditions, though it is currently being studied in the U.S. as an alternative treatment or adjunctive treatment for malignancies, auto-immune disorders, and yes, AIDS.

  • The F word

    Enough already with the critics and detractors. I haven’t been doing a very good job lately of keeping current with documenting my personal story, which was and is one of the primary purposes of this blog.

    Despite the gruesome pictures from an earlier post, I am not currently experiencing any horribly disfiguring outbreaks, lumps or other obvious manifestations of poor health. The skin on my left leg has healed nicely and is completely intact, with no breaks, scabs or sores, for the first time in more than a year. The mystery lump on the right side of my face, under my jaw, has shrunk considerably, though I can still detect it. My smile is still crooked, due to what I assume is now permanent facial nerve damage resulting from Bell’s palsy. I also have a few persistent skin sores on my shoulders and back that are resisting healing.

    I can fall asleep anywhere, anytime.

    Other than these minor nuisances, my body seems fine, for the most part, and people who have known me for some time, assure me that I “look good”. What is not so obvious is the extreme fatigue (the F-word),

  • When trolls attack: an open letter to “Dora”

    Dear Dora,

    You and your ARV-loving friends at the HIVforum (Italian language forum for HIV-positives) might want to have your medications checked. Your latest public attack on a respected and admired researcher is nothing, if not irrational.

    When did you decide that you can speak for all of us who have AIDS, or who test positive for HIV?

    Your recent rant against University of Firenze (Italy) professor Marco Ruggiero, as reported at The Truth Barrier, is amazingly ill-conceived, malicious and detrimental to the well-being of all of us who are living with illness and HIV, and I am compelled to call you out.

    You have accused Ruggiero of advertising for patients to experiment with his probiotic yogurt, and you have claimed that he is putting people with HIV disease at risk by suggesting they not take their AIDS drugs. You offer no evidence that either of these allegations are true, while I can, and will, provide evidence that in fact, the opposite is the case.

  • The numbers game

    I’m still trying to wade through the results of several tests that have been done, and I summarize some of the important things I’ve discovered in a youtube video. While I have a lot of new information, I don’t necessarily have the answers yet, just more questions.  At least I now have a better…

  • Who needs t-cells, anyway?

    There seems to be a natural tendency among some skeptics and questioners that when part of a theory or concept is proven to be flawed, any and all other aspects about it should be dismissed as well.

    This certainly seems to be the case for some AIDS dissidents when it comes to discussions about the significance of certain laboratory markers, in particularly certain immune cells involved in fighting infections, called CD4 t-cells. CD4 counts are, arguably, considered by mainstream AIDS experts as the single most important measure of disease progression and risk for patients acquiring opportunistic infections.