ADD, ADHD, There’s no such thing. Just HEAL YOURSELF.

The other day I overheard a teenaged kid talking about how he has “ADD bad” and is “lucky” he had been “diagnosed” with ADD in middle school.

Why was he lucky? Because that way he could start taking toxic medication as a young kid and get better grades in school than he feels he otherwise would have.

My message to him and others like him?

ADD? There’s NO SUCH THINNNGG. YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING. GET A CLUE ALREADY!!!

It’s just stunning the way this insanity, this learning issues diagnosis thing has taken off. I mean the people I heard talking were reasonably thoughtful, reasonably educated people and they were discussing all this and who should be diagnosed and who shouldn’t and the medication and all that AS IF IT ACTUALLY EXISTS!!!

It doesn’t  exist, not really, not the way people see it as existing, as some chemical, genes caused thing that needs to be corrected with medication, and maybe one day with some kind of “cure”. Here’s what’s really going on.

Kids, and adults, are stressed out and eat messed up food and are told insane things and are “disciplined”, and all manner of things go on, and surprise surprise, they have difficulty sitting still and focusing and, among other things, doing schoolwork that may not even be well designed or appropriate for them.

So they get diagnosed with this ADD, ADHD, and other nonexistent things. What a phenomenon. What a boondoggle.

HOW CAN PARENTS EVEN FALL FOR IT AND LET THEIR KIDS INGEST THAT TOXIC MEDICATION?!?!??!?!?!?!?!

Well I guess with mothers drinking diet soda and even grabbing some of their kids’ meds to use as a weight loss aid and fathers taking little blue pills, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised.

Still, it’s all ridiculous, and to add some additional perspective here’s how I healed myself.

When I was in high school, between the general nuttiness of the way schools work and the stresses of life, I was not exactly enthusiastic, and given my behavior and the difficultly I had getting some things done I could have been so called diagnosed with ADD or some such thing, and I did even try some 1970’s style medication for a few days.

I still made it to college, and determined to get the work done, I would buy six packs of beer to drink while doing math and cigarettes to smoke while writing.

Many would call what I was doing with the beer and cigarettes self medicating.

Well guess what.

I finally figured out what was going on. I was all conflicted inside about doing the work and other things and I had repressed emotional stuff going on and I had fears, and there were all kinds of reasons, reasons I could discover myself, for my having difficulty sitting still and grinding through calculus problems.

So I meditated and improved my diet and changed my outlook on some things and processed all kinds of mental and emotional stuff and changed things about the way I was living, and as soon as I did all that I could pretty much focus all I wanted, and now I’m set, no cigarettes, no drinking, no six packs of cola and certainly no toxic, expensive, side effect creating medication.

And anyone having difficulty focusing can solve their problems by doing similar things. For some doing this may be easier than it was for me and for others it may be more difficult. For all it is doable.

So if you ever somehow start to get the insane idea that you or someone you know so called “has ADHD” or one of those things, realize that THAT’S A TOTAL MAD JOKE, and instead of falling for it all, just figure out what is going on and use some determination and common sense to solve the problem.

Does Mountain Dew cause als? Well, in a way the answer is yes.

I keep seeing people arrive at this blog by searching on the question “Does Mountain Dew cause ALS?” At first I thought it was because I had mentioned Mountain Dew in a post on preventing als. Now I am wondering if others are seeing the Mountain Dew, als connection. So here’s what I have seen and my take on Mountain Dew and als.

When working with someone to help him or her heal, I generally start by talking about basic things that could be contributing to the health problems the person is experiencing. It’s a good way to get a person thinking and to find some easy changes that can be made to improve a situation.

So, a few years ago, during this process, a guy diagnosed with als told me that prior to starting to notice the nerve problems, among other things he had been drinking about sixty, yup, sixty ounces of Mountain Dew a day. That’s five cans or three twenty ounce bottles of the stuff every day. Wow. So anyway, he had been stressed out in multiple ways and, beyond staying high on sugar and caffeine, not taking good care of himself, and sure enough his nerves had started to break down and he was so called diagnosed with so called als.

Soon after that, I was talking with another guy diagnosed with als and I happened to ask him,”By the way, do you drink Mountain Dew?” He told me, “Yes. I love the stuff.”

Around that time I met with another guy diagnosed with als, and during the meeting I asked him if he drank Mountain Dew. The answer was “Yes”, and sure enough there in the kitchen was a case of it, next to a case of, I think it was, Coke. He too had been stressed in multiple ways around the time he had started noticing nerve problems, and had not been sleeping well for months.

I have seen other cases where Mountain Dew and other caffeine containing beverages seem connected to neurodegeneration, and, while it does not add up to a whole lot of data and I have not done a huge amount of research into the Mountain Dew, als connection, I am sure that Mountain Dew can be a factor in the creation of the problem known as als.

Here’s the thing. Als is really just really poor nerve health. So anything that’s not good for one’s nerves is going to factor into the creation of the cascading neurodegeneration known as als. So consider this.

Sugar, plenty of which is found in Mountain Dew, can help foster internal inflammation, which is part of neurodegeneration. While I have heard that small amounts of caffeine may have some benefit for some people somehow, continual intake of huge amounts of caffeine and sugar, using this high to remain on the go constantly, and sleeping poorly sounds like a great way to keep one’s nerves overexcited and stressed, which once again sounds like a great way to create als. Also, do the in some countries banned artificial color and the brominated vegetable oil in Mountain Dew have some specific qualities that contribute to neurodegeneration? That’s possible too. For instance, tremors, convulsions and breathing difficulty are associated with ingestion of bromide. In addition, there are other ways drinking Mountain Dew can figure into the creation of als.

Also, if a person is willing to drink artificially colored, caffeine laden, genetically modified corn syrup filled stuff day in and day out, it seems likely that the person is not being careful in other ways, in which case, in addition to being a factor in the creation of so called als, drinking Mountain Dew is an indicator of lack of awareness of how to maintain health.

Is drinking some Mountain Dew enough to create cascading neurodegeneration? Maybe. Maybe not. Even the guy who was drinking sixty ounces a day had going on in his life a host of  als creating things, such as relationship issues, use of disconnection strategies and military service related trauma. So his Mountain Dew consumption was just part of the als creation picture. My guess is that for most people most of the time, as harmful as Mountain Dew might be to their health, they are not going to experience als just because they drink some. Still, it can be a contributing factor, and in general drinking it is probably not a good idea.

So there’s my answer to that Mountain Dew causing als question. I guess I should be glad that one or two servings of Mountain Dew was enough for me to decide not to have any more. Maybe reading this post will be enough for others to decide the same thing.

That Ridiculous Idea That Genes Underlie Behavior

Yesterday I was talking with a friend whose son has been so called diagnosed as being so called autistic. I got the impression that my friend feels that genes are somehow causing his son to behave in that so called autistic way. No chance.

I’ve also heard that genes cause depression and that genes can cause people to drink too much, and I even recently read about someone whose so called criminal defense team said that he should not be punished too harshly because his genes made him do it. While so called punishing people may be ridiculous, the idea that genes make people do things is maybe even more ridiculous.

Here’s the deal. Genes are merely templates for proteins. When a protein is needed somehow within a body, a gene is used in the creation of the protein. That’s all. I am not sure how many people are aware of this. People ascribe all kinds of things to genes and maybe once they are aware of what genes really are, they will see how ridiculous it is to blame behavior on genes.

A person is a being manifesting in a body. It’s not the body calling the shots. It’s not the genes calling the shots. When a person has another drink, or chooses a white shirt, or runs for political office, or acts all freaky, or takes lipstick without paying for it, the person, not the person’s genes, is making that choice.

People have all kinds of reasons for doing what they do, or don’t do. They may have misconceptions about life, misconceptions upon which they base their strategies for handling life. So their strategies may be flawed and their behavior bizarre. It’s not genes. It’s misconceptions. They can have infinite reasons for what they do, from childhood trauma, to messages picked up from alcohol marketing, to things they learned from their parents and peers. Whatever it is, it’s not genes making  them make choices.

So this is a good thing to get clear in your mind, especially because so many have it so wrong. If you are dealing with a kid who is acting up in school or you are having a tough time changing a habit or you know someone who is having difficulty interacting socially or focusing on tasks, just remember, it’s not about genes. It’s about ideas, habits, strategies, unconscious desires or anything else that underlies choices people make.

Diagnosed With So Called ALS? Just To Be Clear, There’s No Such Thing.

There’s a story out there, one that involves people being diagnosed, as they say, with this thing called ALS. “You have ALS,” they are told, a so called incurable disease with no known cause. The only thing is there’s a big problem with this story. There’s no such thing as ALS.

“Hey, but wait.” you might say. “People are getting weaker, and what about the genes that people say cause ALS to run in families? Surely there must be something going on.”

Yup, something is going on. People are getting weaker and genes are doing things. The thing is that ALS is not doing it. ALS cannot do anything.  There is no ALS attacking people or striking randomly. There is nothing called ALS that one can find using a microscope. People do not “have” ALS. ALS does not really exist.

Here’s what’s really going on.

People have nerve health problems and those nerve health problems look similar. The people’s nervous systems are deteriorating in a cascading fashion, often rather quickly. So someone came up with a name for those nerve problems that look similar, the name ALS. So that’s all ALS is, a name.

So this ALS, this name, is not causing anything. Rather, people’s nerves are deteriorating for many reasons and each story is a little different.

Some people’s nerves go partly because they never give themselves a break, instead choosing to keep going and going, using caffeine and whatever else to keep up the pace until their systems break down. Lou Gehrig’s case is a good example of this. Others have been exposed to substances or have been eating things that somehow figure into the destruction of their nerves. Maybe that’s why there seems to be a link between smoking and neurodegeneration. Certain types of ideas and mental patterns tend to figure in, people repress emotional stuff to the point where their systems no longer function and relationship issues and other forms of stress tend to be involved as well. Generally, there is some combination of things going on.

So there is not really a fast paced form or slower paced form of ALS. There is no ALS for there to be a form of. The reason some people’s nerves degenerate faster than do others’ is that the factors in and patterns of their lives are making their nerves degenerate faster.

Genes, proteins, mitochondria or other little biological things are not causing ALS. Sure biology is involved whenever something happens to a person’s body. That does not mean that these things are causing it. All that’s going on is that biological things are happening because of the stress and other factors and patterns which truly underlie the neurodegeneration.

While people may be struggling or feel that they are fighting various forces to stay well, they are not exactly fighting ALS. There is not really any such entity to fight. Similarly, while people may be surviving through all kinds of problems, there are not exactly ALS survivors. There is not exactly ALS to survive.

What is really going on is that people so called diagnosed with so called ALS just have nerve health problems that are created by the way they and those around them have been living, and that’s good news.

It’s very good news, because what people can create, they can change, and so people directly or interpersonally experiencing so called ALS can change things for the better. By changing what they do, how they think, what they eat, how they handle emotional issues and in general by changing how they live, they can change things so that they heal.

A Key to Healing – Rather Than Blaming A Disease, Take Responsibility and Make Changes

I have heard this type of thing time after time, “Such and such disease makes you weak.”

Wrong. There is no such thing as such and such disease making a person weak, or numb, or tired, or shaking.

Nope.

So what’s doing it then? Why are people weak, or numb, or tired, or shaking, or whatever?

They and the people around them are making things that way, that’s why.

So a key concept in healing is getting to feeling responsible, and in control, of what is going on with your health.

For instance, in one case I dealt with, a guy diagnosed with als was talking about biting his tongue. He thought that als somehow makes a person bite his tongue. He felt out of control.

So I suggested he look at it differently, that rather than als making him bite his tongue that actually he himself was somehow making him bite his tongue. That put things into a whole different perspective. Now he felt much more in control and as if he could find a way to solve the problem.

Another one I have heard is that multiple sclerosis makes a person weak. Nah. Multiple sclerosis is not doing anything. Multiple sclerosis can’t do anything. Why? Because multiple sclerosis is just a name someone made up. What makes a person weak is people’s making choices that result in a person’s immune system attacking the person’s nervous system. Then the nerves don’t transmit signals and the person feels weak.

Diabetes does not make it difficult to utilize sugar. People make it difficult for themselves to use sugar.

Parkinson’s disease does not make people shaky. They make themselves shaky, by stressing themselves out and repressing emotions and doing other things that cause their systems to break down.

Adhd does not make it difficult to focus.

Alzheimer’s does not cause memory loss and dementia.

Asthma does not make breathing difficult.

Whatever a person has going on, the key thing to realize is that it is just a logical consequence of ways of living and choices the person is making.

Then it is clear what needs to be done to make things better.

If you want to be stronger, figure out how to get stronger. If you want to stop biting your tongue, figure out why you are doing it and make some changes. If you are getting shaky or are having trouble remembering things or if your cholesterol level is sky high, just get to work making changes that will make you healthier.

It was you, with the help of others, doing it all along, and it is you who can solve the problem.

Knowing Better and Still Not Doing It – “That’s the sickness.”

A week or two ago I called a friend, Diego, to see how things were going with his blood pressure. He had had really, really high blood pressure, so high that a doctor seemed concerned about even letting him walk out of the office. Diego also had come up with a pretty solid plan for solving the problem, one involving things like diet changes, weight loss, exercise and changing the way he handles life issues.

Hey. That sounded like a great idea for a story, maybe called “My Friend Diego Solves Insanely High Blood Pressure. Here’s How.”

So before writing it I wanted to confirm that he had gotten the job done.

“It is lower.”  He told me.

So it was fixed, solved, the pressure in some kind of normal or healthy range?

“No.”

I told him about my story idea and he told me that I could just wait, maybe give him another month and all would be well and I could write about it. He said he was psyched, that the idea of the story was even a good incentive for him to get on with it.

So I called him today to see how our little project was going.

The answer? No progress.

“That’s the sickness” he said. Then he noted the similarity to what his mother had done, when she had basically chosen to die rather than taking advantage of healing resources he had provided for her, and he suggested that instead of writing about his success I should write about his lack of it. “That’s the sickness.”

Not a bad idea. What he said is so right on, and what he has going on is so common. It’s a level of sickness, one in which a person knows basically how to solve a problem and for some reason, inertia, unconscious issues, or whatever, leaves the problem unsolved.

Me personally, I don’t get it. I mean, sure I get it. I understand psychology and habits and things like that. Still, I don’t get it.

For one thing, being sick can be a total drag. In Diego’s case, for instance, he has real reason to be concerned about the consequences of continuing to live with what is still rather high blood pressure.

For another, solving things can be so straightforward. Losing that eighty pounds of extra weight, for instance, seems simple. Just eat less than you burn.

So between one thing and another, staying sick, especially when one has at hand an actual plan for getting healthy, seems insane to me.

Solving back problems, lowering bad cholesterol, solving diabetes, solving cancer, resolving relationship issues, any kind of thing, a person can do it, if the person just gets through the knowing what to do level to the actually doing it level.

Sickness Addiction, Maybe the Worst Addiction of All

A few years ago, at the beginning of a summer, I started working with someone who had been diagnosed with als and was using a motorized wheelchair to get around for the most part. We put some serious energy into getting her healthier, and toward the end of the summer she told me she had good news for me. She had gotten up from that wheelchair and walked around for, get this, an hour straight. Oh how much better she felt.

That was pretty much the last I heard from her.

Huh? Wasn’t she pleased? You would think she would be excited to keep going and get even healthier.

While I was surprised at the time, I am no longer perplexed by things like this. I know the deal. Sickness addiction put her right back in that chair and is keeping her there.

What do I mean?

Check this out. It turns out that right about that time, a group of people in her community had come together to give her, yep give her, a house, renovated to accommodate a wheelchair. Wow. What if she no longer needed the wheelchair? How would that have all worked out?

She also has projects going on, some of which are closely related to her being sick. What if she were no longer sick? What would happen to her bucket list of things to do before she died? What would happen with all the other things that to some degree revolve around her being sick.

So she was stuck sick, and still is, as far as I am aware.

I have seen this type of thing countless times and it is a huge theme in healing and has been a huge surprise for me.

When I got into helping people heal, I figured some people would be skeptical and others, such as people with medical degrees, would feel threatened by it. I was not ready for how stuck people are being sick. That’s maybe the biggest obstacle to healing of all. Sickness is so deeply integrated into people’s lifestyles, into their images of themselves, into everything they have going on, that getting healthy is the last thing they are ready to do.

Being sick can catalyze improvement in people’s lives, such as improving relationships with family members or changing for the better what they find worth focusing on. People who are ill get involved in causes and do other things they never did when they were healthier. People who are sick even get called heroes, just because they stay positive in the face of it all. For these and other reasons, being sick can have a very powerful allure.

Yes they march for cures, and speak before congress, and donate to research, and volunteer for clinical trials, and travel far to get treatment not available locally. Yes, they and their families are truly devastated by the consequences of illness.

Still, when you get right down to it, what’s really keeping people sick, when in reality their are plenty of ways available for them to get healthy, is their own addiction to sickness and all that comes with it. Sure, using drugs can harm your body. Sure, smoking has its damaging effects. Sure, gambling can be horrible on your finances and blood pressure. Still, the addiction that does the most to make and keep people sick is addiction to sickness itself.

The ALS “False Hope” Thing – One Spouse’s Strong Opinion

Soon after I started working with people to help them solve als, I did a presentation to the care team at a nearby ALS Association Chapter.

I told them about what I have going on and how it is all positive and has essentially no negative side effects and costs little to implement. So really, giving it a shot would be a no brainer.

While some of them were interested, the consensus was that they were rather reluctant to say anything about it to people experiencing als because, among other things, they were concerned about giving people “false hope”.

Since then I have heard this false hope thing repeated over and over.

What is this thing with false hope? I mean it seems something along the lines of disrespectful to withhold information from people, as if they are so weak and pathetic that they cannot handle ideas or make decisions for themselves. Beyond that, the message people are given, the story about als being somehow so called “100% fatal” is not even correct.

I suspect this same false hope thing goes on with problems other than als and, while maybe people feel that they are helping somehow, it can go too far and often tends to be just wrong.

The following are excerpts from an email message I received from someone whose spouse has been diagnosed with als and who has experienced the no “false hope” approach. Her frank response to it hammers the point home rather well.

I keep hearing people defending the doctors and it amazes me.
I hear over and over the doctors don’t want to give us FALSE hopes.
In our situation ANY hope is welcome.
To tell us there is NO hope is irresponsible!!

IT’s proven that positive thinking improves health, mentally, emotionally and physically.
Spontaneous remissions happen.  They don’t tell us that.
To purposely repeatedly plunge us into despair is torture and torture is illegal.

Massage is proven to help with discomfort, increases circulation and promotes healing but they don’t provide anything but a PT to show you how to stretch.

There are people alive! that have had ALS for years that say they have improved their health through holistic means.

What say you and I go kick some Doctor booty – (in a healing loving fashion) and sue their pants off?

By not at least presenting the information the holistic world offers they are promoting a death sentence.  They are lying to us!!!  There by causing emotional distress and possibly unnecessary horrible death.

They should be held responsible for that.

The way the doctors present the diagnosis is horrific!!  It took months for me to get my head back into living instead of dreading dying and I am in the HEALING World.”

“The anti depressants he started on made him so tired he couldn’t move.

They tell you eat all the carbs you want…again making any healthy person sick.

People keep telling me I don’t have time to fight this battle but I hate to think of all the other people who don’t have the mind set or support or education we have.

Enough said.

Scent to the Emergency Room – The Perils of Air Freshener and Other Masking Approaches

What I saw happen last week was a classic case of non healing approaches creating a cascading downhill path to a crash.

It started off pretty simply, with a woman whose house had air quality issues, including those caused by someone’s smoking. She also had some other stressful things going on in her life.

So what did she do? Did she heal the situation? Did she do something about the underlying issues?

Oh no.

She whipped out a can of air freshener, and blasted away, a classic example using of a masking approach, one which covers up problems without really solving them.

“good for me” she said.

Maybe.

Now with the air quality issues buried under a haze of probably toxic chemicals made to smell good and other issues still causing stress in her life, sure enough the woman developed a heavy cough, which kept her up at night.

Did she react by dealing with the underlying issues and healing the situation? To a degree she actually did. She started working to get some of the stress and air quality issues dealt with.

At the same time she hurried down to the local pharmacy to pick up some medication. Once again she was choosing a masking approach.

So,

At one point after taking the medication, she lost her footing somehow and somehow was not even able to break her fall.

Slam, she planted her face on the floor, hard, possibly hard enough to crack her skull, and that’s why she decided to go the the emergency room.

The whole thing seemed connected. Was it the lack of sleep, or an effect of the medication or what that had caused her to fall in a way that she had not fallen in years.

However exactly it worked, it seems clear that masking issues rather than resolving them once again led to a crash as it so often does.

Let’s Face It. Western Medicine is Way Off Track.

A while ago, a person working with me told me that a doctor had recommended knee replacement surgery. Her knees were not working so well and new knees would be just the ticket. Just one thing. She was way overweight, so overweight that she was worried about him succeeding in dealing with all the fat when performing the surgery. Uh, do ya think maybe before she had her living knees replaced with prosthetics that it might be a good idea to see if the living ones worked better once she lost some weight? Seems rather obvious that that would be a good question and yet somehow it was totally ignored.

Another crazy case I saw involved a person who had gotten his weight up so high that he had not gotten out of bed for years. A doctor recommended surgically altering his digestive tract to help him lose weight. Let me get this straight, a guy who cannot even get out of bed needs surgery to lose weight? Uh, how about if his parents were to just stop supplying him with so much food. There must be some serious psychological issues in that household and using surgery to lose weight just perpetuates the whole thing by changing one factor without dealing with those issues.

This type of slashing at one thing while ignoring huge parts of the picture madness pervades the medical system and the people who use it and the whole system is way off track.

It figures that Barack Obama, a person who only recently quit smoking, somehow jammed the support of this insanity down all of our throats. He is clueless about what it takes to be healthy and now laws have been passed to get everyone else to participate in the same nonsensical system he has bought into.

Lately I have been working with people experiencing the neurodegenerative problem called als. Western medicine has been typically clueless here too. Anyone with two eyes can see that the reason these people are sick is that they have been living in ways that end up killing them. The only thing that is really going to change this for them is their changing the ways they are living. What’s western medicine’s answer to als? They are looking for a medical cure, by doing things like torturing mice by the thousands. Holy moly. Are you serious? The western medicine concept of als is that it is kind of random, that for some reason things in a person’s body sort of spontaneously go haywire. Gimme a break folks. Als is not random and you will never ever solve it as long as you cling to that illusion.

This spontaneous development conception of disease seems to be the common theme with western medicine, one that involves the premise that people have little control over what goes on in their bodies, even in their minds, and that things go wrong on their own and can only be solved by somehow adding ingredients to the mix, pills, surgery, and lately bits of chopped up babies even. None of this is correct and none of it will ever really work. Why? Because none of these things really are random and out of people’s control. People whose bodies fall apart on them are living in ways to make that happen. People whose minds are split, who have difficulty functioning socially or who have other mentally focused issues have created those problems as well. What this means is that basically you can throw all the medication, surgery or bits of babies you want at these problems and they are going to persist as long as the people keep doing what they are doing and living the way they are living.

Kids will keep having learning problems, digestive problems and immune system problems as long as they are stressed out, eat junky food and have parents and teachers that use little common sense in working with them. Drugs are not going to help and using western medicine style medicine is just making things worse for them.

People will keep developing health issues as long as they keep living in basically unhealthy ways. Whether they have been diagnosed with anorexia, autism, Parkinson’s disease, heart disease or dementia, their genes and biology are not the problems. Their ideas and lifestyles are the problems, and western medicine’s coming up with all kinds of nutty genetic and biological theories as to why they are sick is not helping at all.

Until people in medicine see the basic errors they have made, that the foundation of all they do is unsound, they will continue to miss huge parts of the picture and to look for cures for things that neither require cures nor can be cured medically, and as a group in all fields they will continue to be way off track and perpetuate misery. That’s just the way it is.

« Older entries