My kids’ Health 2

Childhood Disease and Vaccinations

I nursed each of my kids until they were about two. I knew they had immunity to whatever I had immunity to, but illness never crossed my mind in those years. I have practically no childhood illnesses to discuss. The kids were healthy. When they appeared to be drooping, they were allowed to ask for a day off from school. When they complained about a sore throat, they gargled salt water and stayed home.

Sometimes they felt low feverish and so were put to bed, fed soup and encouraged to sleep. I never even thought about vaccinations. When they began school, my hubby got an exemption because he was CS. I will say that all the kids at their school were healthy. No one ever got a major childhood illness like chicken pox or measles at their school. Now I think that my kids were safe with herd immunity.

But there came a day when the son broke a bone when he was in middle school. The hospital asked if he was vaccinated and we said no. So they vaccinated all three and had us come back until they were done. My older daughter was 14, the son 11, the youngest, 2. The reason my hubby agreed was that I said it would protect the kids from other people’s fear.

Eat right.

My hubby works in the arts and we never had a steady 9-5 job with health insurance. However, about the same time I found out hubby was CS in our early dating life, I became interested in nutrition and a good diet.

The big thing at the time was that sugar was bad because it was a highly refined white substance, so I quit sugar. My dad was diabetic so I was raised without it anyway. I am sure this step was the single best step I ever could have taken for my health and my families’ health. We had no sugar in the house for decades. The kids had homemade birthday cakes made with honey. they ate sugar elsewhere, as I did as a child, but dessert was not on the menu. Fruit was.

I became an expert on why refined sugar is bad, but will not repeat that entire rant today. I read books about the history of sugar. The history is the reason for slavery, so sugar is way-bad karma, too. Then, once I heard an interview with Eric Clapton shortly after he cleaned up. The interviewer asked what his earliest drug of choice was and he said, “Sugar”. I had been saying that sugar was a drug, not a food, for years, but always got blank stares. Few people I knew were of a mind to give up sugar. But, sugar is not a food. It has no food value except high glycemic calories. It is a highly refined white substance that has killed more people than any other drug in history. If you look at it as a drug, you will understand what I am saying.

This stance, which has been a my hard stance since 1966, has led me away from all refined and processed foods. No white flour for me! No boxed foods. Fresh meat, fresh veggies and fresh fruit was our diet and still is. I never paid attention to the low fat craze and I am glad it is over, because fat is good.  Full fat yogurt. Butter. Heavy cream. cottage cheese. All cheeses. Not too much meat, but veggies and fruits- all you want!

My hubby and kids continue in excellent health to this day at ages 74, 47, 44, and 35. I have never given 100% credit to Christian Science for this good health. I think the good diet did most of it.

Plus exercise.

I put my kids in dance, karate and gymnastics and worked them hard several times a week. Punishments for squabbling etc. was always to run around the house X times or do X number of sit-ups or push-ups. I was determined that my kids’ bad behavior was redirected into physical activity. I plumb wore them out almost every day. My oldest at about age 9, one day asked me to count how many sit ups she could do. I did and she quit around 350. She did them for fun.

My kids always slept like logs.

Eat right, exercise and sleep. That is what keeps you healthy. If Christian Science contributes a positive outlook in addition to the above, that’s fine.

 

I am back, briefly, with my new direction.

While I detest the idea of people being prevented from making their own medical choices, I think there are dangers from “big” medicine far worse than death by CS.

While CS allows die-off by inaction, only a few hundred, mostly old, people die a year as Christian Scientists. On the other hand, so-called science based medicine kills far more people. Millions a year, actually.

The following excerpt is from a science based MD who puts food and exercise first, as the best way to get and keep good health. I have followed him for years, mainly because he is right.

Avoiding most science-based medicines is an extremely good idea. Even if there is a medicine for an ailment, sometimes the nutritional approach is simply the least toxic. An example, using l-lysine for all cold sores and other herpes infections, ie shingles. In turn, shingles is a disease of those who have been vaccinated for chicken pox. People who got the actual disease do not get shingles- or get it at 1/100th of the rate vaccinated folks do.

OK. Here I am veering into vaccinations- already. I am not an anti-vaxxer, but ‘vaccines for everything’ is not the ultimate answer. I am pre-WWII, so the only vaccine I got was smallpox, until the polio vaccine came along. Also I went out of the country in 1954, and had to get typhoid and typhus and some other vaccination before I left. These are all deadly, deadly diseases.

I got all my kids vaccinations, even though we were members of the Christian Science church. This was about 1983. The vaccinations were fast and easy. they included the mmr, tetanus, polio- I think smallpox was skipped by then. I nursed my kids, so they had my antibodies when most babies get vaccinations. I have NEVER seen that discussed.

But today, my brand new grandchild, if born in a hospital will get a hepatitis A,b, or C shot in the heel- at birth. In spite of whether the mother is at risk for the disease or not. I do not like that, one bit. But I am still not an anti-vaxxer, I am newly developing the position that we need to be smart vaxxers and not get vaccines we do not need.

Anyway, here is the beginning of one of the best written articles on the flaws of the American medical system.

Death by Medicine.
A definitive review and close reading of medical peer-review journals, and government health statistics shows that American medicine frequently causes more harm than good. The number of people having in-hospital, adverse drug reactions (ADR) to prescribed medicine is 2.2 million.1 Dr. Richard Besser, of the CDC, in 1995, said the number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed annually for viral infections was 20 million. Dr. Besser, in 2003, now refers to tens of millions of unnecessary antibiotics.2, 2a
The number of unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5 million.3 The number of people exposed to unnecessary hospitalization annually is 8.9 million.4 The total number of iatrogenic deaths shown in the following table is 783,936. It is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States. The 2001 heart disease annual death rate is 699,697; the annual cancer death rate, 553,251.5

From <http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2003/11/26/death-by-medicine-part-one.aspx&gt;

Even though I partake in our medical system, I am a very wary consumer who does believe eating real food and getting plenty of exercise is the key to good health and a healthy immune system. I am always tracking my immune system, because it is my best defense against dangerous outside intrusions like nasty bug or viral infections. I believe my gut biome is the heart of my immune system, so I track that too. I eat lots of fibrous veggies because fiber supports a diversity in the gut biome.

I am a fan of Michael Pollan and think ideas like his are the way to reclaim good health and avoid the chronic diseases that are rampant in America today. Diabetes II is a disease of eating too much sugar. Period. End of sentence. It is reversible as is high blood pressure and other stress related afflictions. Virtually all chronic diseases can be avoided by healthful living, yet these diseases of lax living are the bread and butter of today’s medical system.

I believe the medical system might even perpetuate this, because good nutrition is not practiced or preached by doctors. After all, the medical system would be much smaller if we avoided so much sugar, foods grown and processed with manmade chemicals, and exercised.

Medicine would be there for the infections that respond to antibiotics, fixing holes in babies’ hearts, saving burn victims, setting broken bones, using gene therapy for genetically caused problems that can be fixed and so much more. Yes, and developing and giving vaccinations.

I wish the vaccine situation were not so polemic, but I think there is room for a lot of improvement, in both the vaccines themselves and the safety of the inert ingredients. I can’t believe there is no better preservative than mercury, for instance. Plus, other unwanted substances contaminating the medium in which the vaccine is delivered. Even the egg being used, could be improved to something that is not so allergenic.

Sloppy manufacturing is as bad in vaccines as it supposedly is in the health food industry. Some vaccine-making people cheat and allow outside contamination. Virtually no R&D is being done on vaccines and vaccine schedules. Kids now face multiple unnecessary vaccinations from birth through age 18. Close to 100 shots altogether.Way too close.

I can’t believe all this is necessary. The MMR is not that effective and must be given multiple times. The vaccination industry will not even consider giving these vaccines separately. Meanwhile contracting mumps before puberty confers lifelong immunity as does contracting the very mild German measles. Why give German measles vaccine when it is a very mild disease that confers lifelong immunity? Or, give it just prepuberty, which is the only time it is needed. Rubella does not harm anyone but fetuses, so it should be given when there is going to be a fetus or possibly, when there already is one.

Profiting off of fear is the motive of the companies that make vaccines, so if any old fear of something becomes a required vaccination, you can bet the drug companies make huge profits on the vaccination industry, yet spend nothing on making better vaccines. Instead the tendency is to make more laws requiring any vaccine when the drug companies can exploit the fear of the disease.

All vaccinations cause reactions- that can be just the pain of the shot itself, or the immune response kicking in to the insult of the substance being injected, or reaction to the so-called inert ingredients, which also stress the immune system.

Why not have a huge education campaign lifting the curtain of secrecy around the manufacture of vaccines? Let’s do real assessments of the effectiveness of the vaccine as opposed to getting the illness. Maybe one is better for one kid, the other better for another. Smallpox and polio vaccines are one thing, measles, mumps, chicken pox, hepatitis, genital warts, is another. Yes, people do die after they contract measles, but is always a secondary infection that does the killing, and that, in turn, is from not taking good care of the child in avoiding the known secondary infections. I am Bernie Sanders left, politically, but I fear and loathe the idea of mandated vaccines without critical examination of what is needed when, not just what is being pushed.

Anyway, this is the position I have evolved and I am sticking to it. CS can be dangerous, but so can established medicine. I maintain a central position, that taking proper care of the body, which is proper food, exercise and sleep, and scientifically developing the immune system, including some vaccinations, avoiding the use of antibiotics for viruses, eating lots of naturally occurring probiotic enhancers, listening to my gut, both metaphorically and physically, I have maintained good health compared to my peers, so far. Time will tell.

Funny thing, I have maintained this position since I was in the Haight Ashbury in 1966-69, when I first learned good nutrition was real food, then, including when I was in CS, I just maintained the same attitude, real food, exercise and sleep, my keys to good health.

I have no idea when I will be motivated to post again; it was that Mercola article. When I read it I thought the healthy lifestyle approach is supported in a science-based way by this guy. Ex-Christian scientists should take a look at learning good nutrition.

Warning: Mercola is politically a leaner toward libertarianism, a form of conservatism, but I rarely see evidence of it, so I am ok with using his site as a resource among others.