Letters, Winter 2019

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ALS AND ELECTRICITY

Mainstream medical literature has finally confirmed that workers in certain occupations are more at risk of Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS). The full ar­ticle can be read at: newscientist.com/ article/212626. Roel Vermeulen at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his team found that people whose jobs exposed them to high levels of very low frequency (VLF) magnetic fields were twice as likely to develop ALS as those who have never had this kind of occupational exposure. These jobs include electric line installers, welders, sewing machine operators and aircraft pilots. Vermeulen said, “These are es­sentially jobs where workers are placed in close proximity to appliances that use a lot of electricity.”

Dr. Samuel Milham, author of the book Dirty Electricity, was far ahead of mainstream medicine when he pos­tulated that athletes come down with ALS far more often than the general population be­cause of their exposure to TENS machines. This is a small electri­cal device that is used extensively by athletes and others when they injure themselves. It is used for pain re­lief. Milham knew of a twenty-three-year-old athlete who had ALS.

This reminds me of a minister who worked at a nearby church and died of ALS. He often mentioned that he owned a motorcycle and that he rode it extensively. When I heard about his death from this disease, I was not surprised. When you are sit­ting on a motorcycle, you are sitting on a large motor absorbing large amounts of EMFs, no doubt! At least in a car, the driver is a fair distance from the motor and so the EMF levels are somewhat lower. There are no regulations about how much EMFs can be given off by motorcycles, cars, trucks, etc.

It behooves us to keep our EMF levels down and to measure them once in a while. There are various meters on the market that measure magnetic fields, radiofrequency (RF) micro­waves and electric fields. The price of these meters is coming down as more people are using them. Or you can hire a building biologist who will take mea­surements in your home and workplace.

To read more about the link between disease and electricity exposure, a good book is The Invisible Rainbow by Arthur Firstenburg.

Julia Hattori
Kingston, Canada

Editor’s Response: The TENS machine is a modern inven­tion, but other electrical stimulation devices for pain existed in earlier times, including one called the Electreat. It is entirely possible that the New York Yankees had such a machine in the mid-20th century, when Lou Gehrig was playing for the team.

FAST HEALING

Our family has been incorporating Wise Traditions principles for about seven years now. Last year, our three-year-old daughter was unfortunately injured while playing with her older sisters. Her cry was different this time, and we knew she needed medical attention, but as a first stop we went to the chi­ropractor to see whether she had dislocated her knee. The chi­ropractor felt her leg and said that the muscles on one side of her lower leg were stiff in one loca­tion. He said that there was most li kely a f rac­ture and that we should seek out x-rays and medical attention at the lo­cal clinic. We followed his advice, and two hours later we found out that our three-year-old had a complete fracture of her tibia and a hairline fracture of the fibula. She was put in a splint and the next day a cast on her leg.

We returned eight days later for a recheck and more x-rays to make sure the bones had stayed stabilized. During this appointment, the pediat­ric orthopedic surgeon pulled up her x-rays and could not believe his eyes! He exclaimed, “How many days has it been? Only eight! I’ve never seen a bone heal this fast!” The hairline fracture in her fibula was completely healed, and the complete fracture in her tibia was 75 percent healed! He said that he normally wants children to be in a cast for at least four weeks, as the bone needs all that time to heal. After much discussion, the doctor agreed to allow removal of the cast at three weeks as long as the x-rays showed that the injury was completely healed. Well, on day fourteen, our three-year-old was up and running in her cast, chasing chickens and playing in the sun! I had no doubt that her leg had indeed healed. We still had another week in that cast, though (a very long week for a three-year-old)!

We returned in week three, and after one x-ray she was cleared for cast removal! The doctor couldn’t believe it. He said, “I don’t know what you did.” I promptly interrupted him and told him what we had done—a diet consisting of emu oil, cod liver oil, raw milk, raw yogurt, raw cheese, homemade bone broth, while avoiding sugars and processed foods. I also handed him a Weston A. Price brochure! Like most doctors, he just chuckled, told me to have a good day and left the room.

Our three-year-old is our first child who is 100 percent Weston Price—as I ate properly before conception and dur­ing pregnancy—and she has been well-nourished since birth. I have no doubt that God heals through food. He created our bodies to heal themselves with the right nutrition. His master blueprint for our bodies is so very perfect that our skin regenerates, cuts heal and bones can be healed! There is a huge differ­ence between being merely fed and be­ing well nourished! Thank you, Weston A. Price Foundation, for spreading the word about true nourishment!

Crystal La Brake
Co-Chapter Leader
Tyndall, South Dakota

MEASLES AMNESIA

Recently, a study by Michael J. Mina and others made news because it stated that following a measles infec­tion, antibody levels to other viral and bacterial infections drop during the fol­lowing three to six months. This means, according to these authors, that not only is the actual measles infection itself a grave danger to the child, but also that having a measles infection causes a global immune suppression, making the child susceptible to other potentially deadly infections in the period after the measles have cleared.

This same immune suppression is not caused by the MMR vaccine, they assert, thereby creating an even stron­ger argument that we must vigorously push for full acceptance of the measles vaccine so that we can achieve “herd immunity,” which they claim happens when 95 percent of the population is immune from measles because they received the required measles vaccines.

For very important reasons, how­ever, the Mina paper should lead us to exactly the opposite conclusion.

First, antibody levels are not pre­dictive of immunity. In fact, there is significant research showing that the drop in antibodies following measles infection is a protective response, as it means that the level of cell-derived transfer factor, the substance in the blood most linked with resistance to viral diseases, has gone up. This phe­nomenon is the most likely explana­tion for the results of the biggest study ever done on what actually happens to children after they have a measles infection. Dr. Peter Aaby’s research showed that even though the levels of antibodies went down, the death rate of children following measles infection was four times lower than the death rate for children who didn’t contract measles. Here is the quote from Aaby’s paper: “Exposed children developing clinical measles had lower age-adjusted mortality over the next four years than exposed children who did not develop clinical measles.”

In addition, I have to mention that the idea of vaccine-induced “herd immunity” to measles is pure fiction. According to published CDC data, the primary failure rate for measles vac­cines i s 4 .7 percent. In other words, 4.7 percent of children who receive a measles vaccine never develop immu­nity to measles. If we need to have 95 percent immunity, then the figure the CDC uses for effective herd immunity if we vaccinated 100 percent of the people is at best 95.3 percent.

However, we must consider the “secondary failure rate.” This term refers to the percentage of people who lose their immunity over time after vac­cination. This happens because without the working together of the cellular and humoral immune systems, most people will not develop lifelong immunity. In fact, peer-reviewed studies show that between 0.5 and 1 percent of vaccinated people lose immunity to measles for each year that passes. In other words, for thirty-year-olds, whose last vaccine was at age ten, they have between a 10 to 20 percent chance of no longer hav­ing immunity to measles. If you do the math and average this all out, one finds that the maximum level of immunity to measles that can be achieved through vaccination is about 65 percent in the entire population—far, far below the level we are told needs to occur to achieve effective herd immunity.

Herd immunity is a make-believe concept, used to “herd” unsuspect­ing people into a behavior that they wouldn’t choose otherwise. As Dr. Albert Sabin noted, official data have shown that large-scale vaccination in the U.S. has failed to obtain any sig­nificant improvement of the diseases for which the vaccines are supposed to provide immunity. In essence, vaccina­tions were and are a failure.

Thomas Cowan, MD
San Francisco, California

DYEING TO LOOK GOOD

Regarding the article “Dyeing to Look Good” (Fall, 2019), there is a global movement concerning the dan­gers of sensitization associated with PPD (paraphenylenediamine) found in the traditional box hair color products. Catherine Cartwright-Jones, PhD, has championed the path to safe hair color­ing with plants that have been used for centuries.

I first became aware of Dr. Cart­wright-Jones’ work when doing my own research to find a better way after experiencing an itchy scalp every time I used box hair dye. The natural henna and other plants finely ground, mixed and applied to even stubborn grey hair result in lustrous, shiny, healthy hair in a wide variety of shades. The mehandi. com website not only educates against PPD and fake henna, but also provides videos, boxed or bulk plant hair prod­ucts and all of the history and scientific research available. They also have a Facebook page.

I highly recommend reading the information on the site, even if you are not interested in coloring your hair!

Betty Armbrecht, DNP APRN, FNP-BC, CEN
Richmond, Texas

CHICKENS AND CABBAGES

With each passing issue of Wise Traditions, my affinity increases for the ideas and events discussed. No sooner had the Fall 2019 copy arrived when I read Nenah Sylver’s “Mutant Cabbages” letter, which reinforced the experience I have had with chickens.

For ten years I have raised chick­ens, primarily for their eggs, selling most of them through a CSA. My modus operandi was to buy a cohort of twenty-five-day-old chicks of the same variety. Six months later I would buy another cohort of a different variety. Sequenc­ing cohorts in this manner made it easy to tell the ages of the birds and to track the productivity of certain varieties. Over the years, I have had Wyandottes, Barred Rocks, Buff Orpingtons, Rhode Island Reds and New Hampshires. After two years of a cohort, egg pro­ductivity would begin to drop off and I would process the cohort for meat.

Each new cohort required six months of tending before I got the first egg, and within a couple of weeks, they all were laying. It was like clockwork. That pattern was well-established for all of the chickens, except the last batch.

I was astounded to have some of the chickens laying eggs within three and four months. I could barely believe it. When their egg-laying rate started to taper off in less than two years, I also was surprised—but not so much. I figured that “normal growth and metabolic signals [had] been dramati­cally interfered with”—using Nenah’s words—but I suspected a different cause. I was buying the same heritage lines from the same supplier and using the same feed and forage. I could under­stand how through selective breeding, the supplier, remaining true to heritage lines, chose to select for a more rapid maturity to enhance marketability.

Nenah’s cabbage might be mutant. I have no doubt that our changing bio­logical (viruses), chemical (pesticides) and physical (radiation) environment may be the culprit for Nenah’s inferior cabbage. It might also be an overlooked side effect of aggressive breeding by the seed supplier seeking any of a myriad of “preferred attributes” such as a higher germination rate; greater disease, heat and drought resistance; or faster  growth. This can all take place with­out violating any organic or heritage standards. Even as “purists,” we must realize that a seed supplier’s preferences do not always match perfectly with the consumer’s preferences.

For me, I face a daunting task. If I want, for example, Barred Rock chickens to mature more slowly and to lay for a longer period of time, I need to consider raising my own line so that they will conform to my definition of what a Barred Rock chicken is.

Bill Hyde, PhD
Happy Farm
Henderson, Colorado

PEA PROTEIN

I just watched a deceptive, mislead­ing movie (infomercial) called “Game Changers” (see p. 63) on Netflix by James Cameron in which he poo-poos eating meat and tries to convince ev­eryone that eating any animal product including cheese, eggs and milk is disease-producing, unhealthy and far inferior to eating vegan. The film is vague, full of half-truths or wrong on almost all aspects. I looked up James Cameron and found he is invested in a one-hundred-forty-million dollar en­terprise to produce pea protein, which I suspect he sells to veggie-burger mak­ers and other vegan companies. This is another example of a self-serving infomercial trying to appear objective.

Robin Hood, DC
Concordia, Kansas

Editor’s Response: Actually, pea protein is the main ingre­dient of the Beyond Burger!

TRY ALTERNATIVES FIRST!

The other day I found an article about afib (atrial fibrillation) and low potassium—and yesterday found a plethora of articles about the “well-known” connection between potassium deficiency and hypertension. Nobody mentioned that to me when, starting in 2012 (taking care of my dying par­ents), my blood pressure started going up and up. I was never told to eat more potassium-rich foods nor to supple­ment! What is this world coming to?

This is my philosophy now, said before but bears repeating: for chronic conditions (including aging), try alter­natives first. If they don’t work, you still have strong options left. But, if you go in guns blaring and remove body parts or permanently alter stuff and wreck physiological pathways, you cannot go back and explore the gentle “cures.” Also, prevention is number one.

I look for safe, cheap, effective, easy, simple-elegant, mechanistically plausible, ancient practice, accessible to many, not irreversible and quick. Western emergency care is spectacular, but acute! For example, consumption of apple cider vinegar as a remedy is very old, about twenty-five hundred years!

Vaccination is in no way “preven­tion.” It’s a Frankenstein-injecting, money-making, disease-inducing tech­nology which bypasses crucial immune system checks and evolved mechanisms Using these chemical cocktails first is a thoroughly bad idea.

Laurie Lentz-Marino
Belchertown, Massachusetts

HOMEOPATHY WORKS

After years of reading the home­opathy column in the WAPF journal, mainly out of academic interest, and because I like to read your journal cover to cover, I have finally waded into homeopathy.

It’s been like a miracle for the vac­cine-injured pets we inherited. Travis’s multi-year-old fluid-filled cyst (tumor?) has shrunk by 40 percent, and Roxy’s perpetual river of morning brown eye gunk, that drained in three-inch-long rivulets each day, has evaporated with Thuja Occidentalis 3 0C. S he i s a lso much better adjusted mentally. She has become a much more loving dog and is better engaged with other dogs. That is, she does not emit blood curdling howls at them, followed by a “raised hackles” diarrhea. I chose Thuja 30C because it fit all their symptoms perfectly, and it has worked for many an autistic child.

Early this summer, while garden­ing, a big wheelbarrow filled with dirt tipped on my calf and gave me a giant bruise that hurt abominably. I was writhing in pain on the lawn. I developed a five-inch by five-inch black-and-blue, blunt trauma bruise on the underside of my calf. I hobbled to the kitchen cabinet and took Arnica Montana 30C (only because I had abso­lutely nothing else to treat it with), and the pain disappeared like magic.

It started hurting again in thirty minutes. I took another dose and it disappeared again. Sometimes, and definitely in my case, you have to be hurt really badly to see the light. I was able to walk the dogs a couple of miles on my injury. The injury also healed beautifully.

I have no idea how homeopathy works. As a matter of fact, for years I have wrestled with all the theories of homeopathy and found them to be inex­plicable, yet I am now a firm believer in the magic and miracle of homeopathy. I don’t need randomized controlled trials, and I don’t need proof positive, because for this sample of one, it has been amazingly restorative medicine. And I know it’s not placebo, because it works on pets. I can actually measure tumor shrinkage. And I know it’s not toxic.

Thanks to your persistence in educating the general public over a long period of time, through all sorts of men­tal blocks (to wit mine), my family now have a way of administering medicine that is in keeping with our philosophy. I am deeply saddened that I forgot that my mother routinely took us to old Dr. Banerjee, the homeopath in Delhi. I had relegated these memories to the back of my mind as really drudgerous things mums do to torture you. My only recollection of those events is sitting in his office fidgeting restlessly, while he took long case histories and made ev­erybody wait for hours. Sometimes you have to be very, very old to respect and admire what your mom did for you. The WAPF has been a lifesaver for me. Like the universal mother (and grandmother) really, without the intergenerational receptivity gap.

Truly, knowledge is power. Even subliminal knowledge! I have now been reading through many of the eighteen hundred or so studies that were trashed by the Australian epidemiological analysis on homeopathy and am find­ing fascinating nuggets of research that have been simply dismissed by mainstream allopathic medicine—a horrendous state of affairs we must cor­rect. Similia similibus curentur—like does indeed cure like. Hippocrates was right, as was old German folk medicine. I am reading the Banerji protocols and their stunning results for cancers—all without chemotherapy and radiation.

I am so glad my grandson is grow­ing up in Europe where MDs and pe­diatricians routinely prescribe homeo­pathics. I am starting a homeopathic study circle in my town. All parents who are trigger-happy with Tylenol and amoxicillin need this information. All American mums need this information. Actually, all mums worldwide need this information.

Sushama Gokhale
Sebastopol, California

HIGH TUNNELS?

The article about growing fruit and vegetables in high tunnels (Summer, 2019) did raise some general doubts in my mind. Obviously, it is helpful to provide reliable warmth and shelter in climates that can otherwise pose a problem, but what research has been done—none I suspect—on plants and their nutritional quality grown under either semi-opaque or dark material? For instance, I have read that here in the UK cherry growers now grow their fruit under cover—clear for the early fruit, then semi-opaque and then dark plastic roofs.

More and more is being discovered about the subtle effects of the full spec­trum of radiation from the sun on the human body, and plants are probably no different.

The author writes that the four requirements for plants are water, air (he does not mention the sun here), an amicable temperature and nutrients. How is the soil going to be kept healthy? He implies that you test for nutrients and put in what is missing, but that only tests for what you think is important! Good soil, and one that continues to be good, is far more complex than that.

No doubt the resulting crops from tunnels will be market-fresh with much reduced food miles and will look healthy. But I do wonder whether there will be a long-term decline in the nu­tritional quality of produce grown like this.

Diana Ratzer
London, United Kingdom

PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Recently I wrote a letter to our prime minister, Boris Johnson, which I want to share with fellow WAPF mem­bers:

Dear Mr. Johnson: I consider it wholly inappropriate to find a conserva­tive leader claim at the United Nations that consumer choice and personal sovereignty have a negative impact on the development of any technology or product. How come all conservatives agree that personal consumer choice in, say, shoes and socks or bread is the very force, nonexistent in the Soviet Union, that drives innovation, yet somehow, if we remove these things and agree with Karl Marx with regards to vaccination, that it will somehow result in techno­logical innovation?

Conservative voters will not accept the doublethink in this speech, which claims that repression, censorship and control and an Orwellian state are repulsive in the areas where our dear leader seeks liberty, but not in those that he seeks to repress.

You stated: “A whole movement called the anti-vaxxers, who refuse to acknowledge the evidence that vacci­nations have eradicated smallpox, and who, by their prejudices, are actually endangering the very children they want to protect. And I totally reject this anti-scientific pessimism.”

Surely, it is by government step­ping out of the way, forcing the pharma­ceutical industry to have to engage their marketing departments with those who have concerns about their products, be it vaccines, thalidomide, socks and shoes or loaves of bread, that we can allow Adam Smith’s invisible hand and not the whip hand and boot of govern­ment to drive technological innovation?

If you genuinely believe in vacci­nation, you should focus on persuasion, debate, possibly reverse psychology and certainly free-market principles, not the Orwellian boot-on-the-face that you re­jected on the one hand, supported on the other. If you continue to demonize sov­ereign individuals for their consumer choice in regards to medical products, you transfer the debate from whether these are good products to a matter of principle about personal choice. This is not the sort of debate that is easily won against the British, who tend to reject tyranny in principle regardless of its intention.

Philip Ridley
WAPF Honorary Board Member
London, United Kingdom

A LITTLE BIT OF LIGHT

I just wanted to write to say thanks for being a little bit of light in this crazy time. When my daughter was born in the 1990s, I knew several moms who questioned the safety of vaccines and were interested in diet. We read Moth­ering magazine and had a whole com­munity. Now, I constantly see people being crucified online if they even dare to question vaccines! They are called anti-vaxxers and labeled as insane. So much change has come about in the last twenty-two years, and it scares me to death.

I found a pamphlet about you in my local Amish health food store (I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania), so I felt compelled to write. I will be donating. And I just subscribed to your podcast as well.

Tracey McCarriar
Lancaster, Pennsylvania

COOKBOOKS FROM THE PAST

I’m in Switzerland and in my small amount of spare time, I check out many second-hand shops looking for cookbooks showing the history of food from countries like Italy, Spain, Greece, France, Germany and Russia. I even have one called Das römische Kochbuch des Apicius (From the Time of the Romans) with half the book writ­ten in Latin. I also have two or three military cookbooks from Switzerland.

In Europe during and after the Second World War, there was famine everywhere (because streets were bombed, roads broken, businesses disrupted, stores empty) and most folks were on food stamps in order to   distribute food equally. But these people were not vegetarians. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who just made a movie promoting vegetarianism, grew up on a farm in Austria and had raw milk! Has he forgotten?

Every one of my newly-obtained books include fatty meats of all kinds, with more fat than you ever see in any American supermarket. I have pictures from our past visits in Ukraine of an open farmers market having huge tables filled with a slab of fat and more fat, or­gan meats and more organ meats—and all this in ninety-plus-degree summer heat, sitting there all day!

These people wanted meat, and that includes the Swiss military cook­books—they even cooked with bone broth!

Tomorrow morning early I’m out hunting for a special spoon or needle that butchers here use to thread fat strips into roasts. One can find roasts here wrapped in fatty bacon strips. Hello Dr. Ancel Keys!

Judith Mudrak
Bern, Switzerland

A JOURNEY TO WELLNESS

I found out a lot about vaccines when we lived in Pennsylvania for a brief time. I ended up getting the Tdap and then feeling horrible. The doctors (two of them) just said I was homesick. I was homesick, but not so homesick as to feel suicidal, as the shot made me feel. Anyway, I went to a place called the Well of Life in Bethlehem, Pennsyl­vania. It was the first time I had heard of natural healing. It truly changed my life. It was the first time I heard of muscle testing and asking the body.

I have Hashimoto’s and had my thyroid taken out in 1999. I had been doing trial and error with diet and ex­ercise to keep myself feeling better.

I found out about eggs from soy-fed hens because my hands would hurt when I ate them. My joints would feel arthritic. We love eggs. We were buying organic eggs at Costco. So I stopped eating the eggs and then tried again. It was definitely the eggs. I got online and found lots of information about Costco and their practices and the Environ­mental Working Group gave them a very low score. I went to Mom’s Market and started experimenting with eggs. I noticed the eggs with soy weren’t my friend. What I find bothersome is you don’t know what they are feeding the chickens and many times it’s a gamble. Even the dozen (Vital Farms) I have in the fridge now say they are pastured and the Environmental Working Group gives them a very high rating. And I’ve not had a reaction from them but I don’t know what they are fed.

But I think producers should be required to list what they feed the chickens. Same with the beef.

We had been buying organic meat and poultry from Costco, and I just wouldn’t feel great. But I blamed it on my Hashimoto’s. But then my husband would get sick to his stomach with the chicken and it started to raise a red flag. And I looked into it.

Now we have found soy-free eggs and beef and feel so much better. Now, we’re sticklers about whether the meat is grass- or grain-finished because it really makes a difference. Some grass-finished is a bit tougher to chew but we’re not getting questionable grain.

My husband has chronic aspergil­lus and has lost most of his left lung. Together we have learned food is medi­cine or it can be poison. It’s up to you to choose.

Celeste Behsmann
Annapolis, Maryland

WISE TRADITIONS ROCKS!

I want to take this opportunity to let you know that I think that the Wise Traditions journal is written factually, truthfully and very professionally. It should be required reading in every high school in the U.S. It should be a required course in every university too. I am so proud of everyone involved in the creation of this publication. I love the information and education it pro­vides and I love reading every word of it. It’s worth the price and if the price was raised, I would pay without com­plaint. Thank you for the wonderful irreplaceable information you provide. It’s a treasure. I’ve saved every issue.

Christina Enderle
Keystone, South Dakota

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