Having suffered with Mold Toxin Illness and Chronic Lyme Disease for half a dozen years, along with health challenges my wife has had including a cancer scare, we have uncovered some disturbing aspects of the medical industrial complex that more people really should be aware of - before they get sick. As I was thinking about everything I want to write about this topic, I realized it's too much for one post. So I'm going to write a series of posts, interspersed with all of our other projects, all about health optimization. 

Elsewhere I've written about Seven Self-Evident Secrets: Seven Health Pillars for Peak Performance vs. Seven System Disruptors that Add Up to Cause Chronic Illness (you can find that here). This is information you want to have before you develop chronic illness like over half the country already has (your odds are pretty high). Why wait until problems begin? Preventative medicine is safer, saner, and wise stewardship of the body God gave you.

If you or a loved one already suffers from chronic illness, you've likely already experienced disappointment with conventional medicine. Of course they don't typically tell you this up front, but it turns out that many of their diagnostic tests are inaccurate a high percentage of the time, many of their therapies are theories, and when the drugs they've been trained to use can't make your symptoms go away, they're even known to tell you it's all in your head. Is this why they say they're just "practicing medicine" - at your expense? Of course that isn't the whole story. There are many good healthcare professionals and I'll share some ways to find them in future articles.

Horror Stories

Many who practice medicine adopt an authoritarian attitude when questioned and insist that it's their way or the highway. I've heard countless stories over the years of healthcare bullies. For example, a family I know just had a baby about two weeks ago and the newborn needed some medical interventions. The hospital had a treatment path they wanted to take and the family wanted to know all their options because they were sure there were better and safer ones. The hospital called CPS and made some less than honest accusations against the parents. They insisted that their preferred path was the only option and coerced everyone to go along with it. Turns out the parents were right and there were better and safer options. But it's too late. If there are consequences for the hospital's riskier approach, this family will now live with it.

We had a family doctor when my first children were born who tried to bully my wife into vaccinating them in spite of the fact that she had suffered with seizures and high fevers after early childhood vaccinations that impaired her hearing for the rest of her life. If a parent suffered adverse reactions, you shouldn't do the same thing to the children.

One of the common symptoms of Mold Toxin Illness is Multiple Chemical Sensitivities. A few years ago I didn't know I had either of these, but I had started having increasingly severe heart attack symptoms over the course of several days that landed me in the emergency room in the middle of the night. They performed all their diagnostic tests, said there was nothing wrong with me, tried to give me some pills, and told me to go home. I had the audacity to question the need for the pills if they didn't know what was wrong with me. With almost a scowl the nurse said, "You're the one who came to us for help." So I was supposed to abandon my brain and personal responsibility for my own health when I checked in? 

Aside from the fact that I didn't want to pay inflated prices for their pills, I also found out they were NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). I had some stomach issues a couple years earlier that I discovered may have been caused by NSAIDs. Common side effects of NSAIDs are indigestion, stomach upset (including nausea or feeling sick), ulcers and bleeding, reflux, heart problems and increased risk of cardiovascular conditions, fluid retention leading to edema, chest pain and shortness of breath. You may be surprised to learn that NSAIDs are nonprescription drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen.

But this is so typical of conventional medicine: We don't know exactly what the problem is, but we're handsomely rewarded by Big Pharma to be their drug pushers so you must take something. They rarely seek the cause of the problem and solve that - that's not how they were trained (and who funds their colleges?). Instead they patch the symptoms by giving you synthetic drugs with a slough of side effects that result in additional problems for which they prescribe additional drugs. It's insane. The above scenarios are all too common, but I don't want to imply that all healthcare professionals are bad. There is more to the story that I'll cover in future articles. 

Multiple Chemical Sensitivities was the cause of my earlier stomach issues and the heart attack-like symptoms that landed me in the emergency room. When I had the stomach issues I had been traveling up and down the east coast almost weekly for work. I had started ordering a lot of salads in an attempt to eat healthier. But salad veggies are also heavily drugged with synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. It was all these toxins that caused the stomach issues. A couple of years later my wife tried saving some money on the grocery bill by using the EWG's “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen” lists (conventionally grown fruits and vegetables with the highest and lowest amounts of pesticide residue) as a guide for buying some produce that was not organic. Two weeks later I was in the emergency room in the middle of the night thinking I was having a heart attack. I continue to have problems to this day whenever I eat chemically-grown produce.

But Wait, There’s More

To start this series I have mostly focused on problems. In future posts I will focus mostly on solutions. However, I do need to share some of the background story about how healthcare became such a boondoggle and a racket, but we'll save that for another time.

Sabbatical Ranch is specifically designed for health optimization. From the healthy environment we're creating to the healthy food we're working on growing, we're building a place for healing and we invite others to be a part of it. We're more of a demonstration site at this point. We don't have residents, but we do welcome guests who want to come and learn by volunteering on any of our projects from healthy building to elegant, edible landscaping.