Be Well and Keep Moving blog

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This blog is specifically about taking control of your health.  Stop giving your body over to doctors and waiting for them to tell you what to do, after you get sick.  Stop the frustrating search for Over the Counter drugs that will fix the little things:  head aches, breaking finger nails, thinning hair, difficulty sleeping, constipation, bleeding gums.  These are like that red light that comes on when your car has something wrong.  You wouldn’t think of pasting a bandaid over the light so you couldn’t see it anymore, now would you?  Those OTC remedies are masking the symptoms that could be the warning sign of disease states in your body.  Everyone has a systemic weak spot. Mine are upper respiratory stuff–frequent colds, and early onset arthritis, so I focus on prevention and managing arthritis without surgery or drugs.  I share
1) how diet, exercise and supplementation can put a stop to frequent colds and rapid aging and
2) how you can keep arthritis at bay, so you, too, may be able to Keep Moving.
Genetics.  How important are they to your health?
No one is perfect. We all have little imperfections scattered through out our body.  Here’s my take on the throw-away remark, “Forget it.  It’s genetics.”
Because my youngest daughter Ruth was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer at age 43, after already having a melanoma removed from her arm at age (34) , the same age I was when I had a malignant breast removed, Group Health decided to do a genetic study of the two of us.  My mother had died of pancreatic cancer but had been diagnosed with breast cancer around age 68.  They came up with a genetic variant: P53.  It turns out that several families in the US are now in a study because of multi-generational variants in P53.
 There is a third cancer showing up in the families in this study:  brain cancer.  “Holy Shit” is the only response I could find. It turns out that I have a cousin who died of melanoma in 2012; a maternal aunt who died of a brain tumor and another cousin who died of complication from breast cancer.  Do you think they all had the P53 variant?  We will never know. 
When Dr. Stephen Chaney, noted cancer researcher and Shaklee consumer and promoter, sent his take on a recent article explaining how many errors our individual genomes have, I was eager to read on.  We are all full of variants.  ”We’re all defective in one way or another”.I have always said in my health talks that we must not give up in the face of genetic markers, known or unknown.  (Want to read the study? http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6070/823)
People say, “maybe it’s genetics” when they confront a diagnosis.  I find what Dr. Chaney has to say to be comforting, and, while I pay attention to little tweaks and pains here and there questioning the big Cancer picture, I am not about to stop taking care of every prevention measure I can come up with, just because I now have a “genetic tendency caused by a variant in P53.”
Now some of you may be saying ‘What does this mean for me?’Dr. Chaney says, “When you carry this idea through to its ultimate conclusion, the bottom line message is:
1) Nutritional recommendations are based on averages -none of us is average.
2) The identified risk factors for developing diseases are based on averages – none of us is average
3) Clinical trial results are based on averages – none of us is average.
4) Even clinical trials of drug efficacy for treating disease or drug safety are based on averages – none of us is average.
That means lots of the advice you may be getting about your risk of developing disease X, the best way to treat disease X, or the role of supplementation in reducing the probability of disease X may be generally true – but it might not be true for you.

“So my advice is not to blindly accept the advice of others about what is right for your body. Learn to listen to your body. Learn what foods work best for you. Learn what exercises just feel right for you. Learn what supplementation does for you. Don’t ignore your doctor’s recommendations, but don’t be afraid to take on some of the responsibility for your own health. You are a unique individual, and nobody else knows what it is like to be you.”

I couldn’t agree more.  This is my whole reason for writing this blog and sharing information with you.  Even with known variants, we can shape our health future.  Thirty years ago I was introduced to Shaklee vitamins and other food supplements. I believe these products have made all the difference.  If you already take supplements, or have never started, may I suggest the brand you take could be important?  Changing brands could change your life.  Browse the product guide, and try them out.  You will feel better or your money will be fully refunded.

Believe it.

Be well, Do well and Keep Moving.  Betsy

 

Read on if you are interested in understanding how I came to be a health nut, insisting on taking care of my wellness future.

The following is my story about how I came to hold the beliefs and attitudes I have about drugs and the use of them to deal with medical problems, the allopathic approach, as opposed to the alternative or natural approach. You might resonate more with my comments, knowing where I’m coming from.

My father was an Orthopedist.  My mother was a nurse.  They believed in the miracles of medicine.  Mother worked for a General Practitioner during a New York City outbreak of the flu in the 30’s.  It was nothing like the great Pandemic that swallowed up between 20 and 40 million people, but she and her doctor never saw their whole list of patients in a day’s work.  When my parents met at the still new Morrisania Hospital complex in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, he was an intern, she a nurse.  Beginning married life in the Great Depression, theirs was a youthful enthusiasm for life, for medicine as a burgeoning panacea, for a future for any hard working person.

By the invasion of Normandy, recently discovered penicillin would save thousands who might otherwise have died of infection.  He would have had penicillin in his kit on board the USS Boise in the South Pacific where he was a navy doctor from 1942-45.  Before the war, practicing from his office in our home in West Chester County, NY my father became involved in the debilitating and wide spread polio epidemics of the late 1930s, early pre-war and on into the 50s.  I remember his lecturing to parent groups and civic leaders about good diet and rest.  He encouraged people to continue to mingle in public places, but not large crowded movie theaters or swimming pools.  He felt isolation prevented the buildup of immunity.  He took me and my brother on home visits to polio patients, mostly children, expecting us to get exposed and build immunity.  Imagine his excitement when the poliovirus vaccine against polio wiped out this disease in the later 50s.  Much of his work in New York and later in Oklahoma beginning in 1947 was with polio victims and their rehabilitation through therapies and prosthetics.

I recount this history to get a better understanding myself of the enthusiastic embrace of pharmaceutical breakthroughs on the part of my parents.  Unfortunately my father’s excitement over each new drug led to indiscriminant experimentation with himself and his children. The largest drawer in the bathroom cabinet was filled with physician’s samples.  At the slightest sniffle, I would be offered the latest anti-biotic.  One such drug caused my first arthritis.

I was in high school, a competitive swimmer and when I came down with a serious sinus infection and was unable to continue swim practice, he gave me several doses of a new drug.  Unfortunately it settled in the synovial fluid of my knees causing pain especially when sitting in the back seat of a 2 door car or balcony seats in the theater.  Folding my legs tight was extremely painful.   I used aspirin for relief, carrying a bottle in my purse and often eating several tablets without benefit of water.

I deviate to tell you a little story about drugs and the Johnson family.  My brother Eric and I raised white Leghorn chickens for a 4H project.  The county extension agent recommended growth hormones.  This is the 50s when better living through chemistry was heralded on every side.  My brother decided he could hurry his growth by drinking one of the vials himself.  He was about 12 at the time.

Sometime during college my knee pain subsided somewhat, but residual creaking persisted.  Nothing stopped me from an active life of biking, swimming, walking, dancing and anything else where movement was involved.  There was always a bottle of aspirin in my purse.

Winters were tough on me.  I often had colds that descended to the chest, became bronchitis and required antibiotics.  A typical winter saw three rounds of colds, bronchitis and antibiotics.  Following my father’s model, at the first sign of the sniffles, I started taking Coricidin, drying up the natural response to a cold virus.

This cycle happened year after year until my senior year in high school, my sinus condition became so severe, and I begged my father to take me to a specialist in Oklahoma City.  It was a 4 ½ hour drive and a full day away from his own medical practice.  I remember sitting next to him in the front seat of our Nash station wagon, feeling special that he would make this effort on my behalf.  I am sure I had been a willing user of all the drugs he had offered me over the years.  After the office visit and some diagnostic procedure like today’s nasal endoscopy, the specialist told me there was nothing that could be done surgically.  I should give up swimming and certainly never dive into the water.

Medicine could not perform the magic I wanted.  My disappointment was profound.  I would not give up swimming.  I would wear ear plugs and a nose clamp, taking precautions.  Within three inactive winter months, I had gained 25 pounds.  No one noticed until one day a Doncaster clothing representative had set up his wares in our living room for my mother and several of her friends.  Mother urged me to try on several stylish slim fitting long skirts from his model size 12.  When I could not close the zipper, standing there in my bra and panties, she all but shrieked at the sight of me, belly too large with angry stretch marks running diagonally in two tracks down each side.  Now that I was the object of close inspection, further stretch marks were discovered on my breasts, buttocks and thighs.

This humiliation was reported dramatically at the breakfast table the next morning.  My father laid down the gauntlet, my two younger brothers cheering him on.  I would lose this weight.  Mother, who had slowly put on a few extra pounds, challenged me to a contest to see who could lose the most by summer.  Drugs to the rescue.  We bought boxes of those little chocolate and caramel chews laced with phenylpropanolamine – a substance the FDA has now ruled “not recognized as safe”.

What were we doing?  Lose weight without dieting.  Miracles through chemistry.

When I married Don Bell after my sophomore year in college, I was still a round person, strong, athletic, but carrying 25 extra pounds.  He gladly took over my father’s task of counting my calories and checking my weight every day.  But I needed to flex my independence from this tyranny and did so by eating a delicious double dip ice cream cone every afternoon from the shop on the University of California Berkeley campus.  After months of this indulgence, I experienced a humiliating episode of uncontrolled bowels.  I was paralyzed with cramps and loose stool as I trying to walk home from campus.  Finding a pay phone, dialing through tears, Don came to pick me up.  Tenderly sympathetic, he helped me to the bathroom where I cleaned myself up.  At an appointment with a proctologist the next week, I had to confess to the daily intake of rich creamy cones which had caused this mess.  Ice cream is not my friend.

In January of 1971, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and wheeled into the operating theater on the day my oldest of four daughters turned 10.  I made a pact that day with God that I would do everything in my power to lead a healthy life so no cancer would return.  Making sense of cancer at age 34 led me to believe all those antibiotics and other medications over the years had destroyed my own immune system’s ability to respond.  Perhaps irrational but nonetheless compelling, I decided against allopathic intervention for any illness I might develop until I had tried everything else.

Now that you have the back story for my crusade to heal the body without medicine, I will tell you what I have discovered to be helpful dietary choices and supplements.  Stay tuned.

What do you fear most when confronted with taking medication for an ailment?  What do you fear about not taking the offered drug?  How do you research the myriad of possible interventions, both medical and alternative?

My own process has lead to amazing good health and no surgery, even though predicted 25 years ago.  I can help you find you way if you like.

Be Well, Do Well and Keep Moving.

Betsy

Betsy Bell’s Health4U               206 933 1889

www.GrandmaBetsyBell.com

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Sherri Davis-Wilson
12 years ago

Despite all the information on the big “C” there is still a lot of unknowns. I believe the best thing to do in life is be at your best by taking care of your health. This means being careful what you eat, and breath, and you should exercise regularly. I have done this my whole life, and I am in better shape than most people in their twenties. I heard about Shaklee products when I was 19, but didn’t start taking them regularly until I was in my late twenties. Thirty years later, I am still taking them. Sticking to what you believe is hard sometimes, but well worth it. After all we only have one body, so we need to take care of it! Remember, it’s your future, be there healthy and of sound mind!!

Sherri Davis-Wilson
12 years ago

Thank you Betsy, I will never be able to keep up with you. Honestly, you are truly the healthest person I know. I think we both struck “gold” when we found Shalkee!

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