Pancreatic Cancer

Posted on June 15, 2022 by Ken
Everything You Need To Know About Pancreatic Cancer,

Did Steve Jobs die of pancreatic cancer – Search (bing.com)
Over the past decade, the incidence of pancreatic cancer is seen to be on the rise.
It is one of the major types of cancer and is only behind lung and colon cancer in mortality rate. Even with new advancements, effective screening tests for pancreatic cancer are still not devised. Dr Ryke Geerd Hamer: How Unresolved Trauma Causes Cancer (alternative-cancer-care.com)

German New Medicine Emotions and Types of Cancer Chart – Search (bing.com)

Steve Jobs relationship with his daughter – Search (bing.com)

Steve Jobs Emotional Conflict in his Life – Search (bing.com)

Steve Jobs Stanford Speech – Search (bing.com)

The following blog post Cosmic Journey | Cancer Quick Facts (solitarius.org)
Illustrates the connections between organs and emotional issues. It combines Hamer’s correlations as well as some of my own. As a disclaimer, you must remember that not
all patients will follow what is in this chart. While it is a very helpful guide, individual assessment is necessary.

Definition
In simple words, pancreatic cancer can be defined as uncontrolled, un-programmed,
rapid cellular division of the pancreatic tissue, resulting in a malignant mass of cells,
which can be differentiated from normal cells by the loss of structural integrity and
architectural configuration of the cells.
Pancreas sits behind the stomach. It is an accessory organ serving in the digestive
function of the body. It has two types of functions. The endocrine function serves to release the pancreatic hormones, insulin and glucagon.
These hormones are significant regulators of glucose metabolism. The exocrine function of the pancreas serves to release digestive enzymes into the small bowel. These enzymes help in digestion of protein, carbs and fat components of the food.

Types Of Pancreatic Cancer
Depending upon the functional cell involvement, pancreatic cancer
can be divided into two main types. The exocrine tumors are more common.
Pancreatic adenocarcinoma accounts for more than 90% of all pancreatic cancers. 
It is the proliferation in the ductal elements of the pancreas, which feed pancreatic enzymes into the gut. One of its subtypes is the acinar cell carcinoma. This type of cancer results from proliferation of one type of cell, which releases fat-digesting enzymes.
The neuroendocrine pancreatic cancers are less common in occurrence. These involve the hormone-secreting cells of the pancreas called islets. Depending upon the specific cell undergoing proliferation, the subtypes include:

Insulinoma: which secrete excessive insulin.
Glucagonoma: which secretes glucagon.
Gastrinoma: which secrete excessive gastrin.
Nonfunctional islet cell tumor: no hormones.
The tumors, which are neuroendocrine in origin, are generally
slow-growing and less fatal than the tumors of exocrine origin.

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Mechanisms Underlying Development of Pancreatic Cancer.
Like all cancers, the root cause of the disruption is unclear. However, it can be seen
that underlying pancreatic illness, like chronic pancreatitis, has increased chances of developing into a malignant tumor. Recurrent attacks of pancreatitis, which is the inflammation of the pancreas, can result in cells accumulating genetic mutations. These mutations then unleash the malignant potential of cells. The cellular checkpoints which ensure proper multiplication of cells, are lost. The cells not only increase in number, but also fail to differentiate. This means that the new cells are unable to be functional.

Epidemiology of Pancreatic Cancer.
Pancreatic cancer is a disease of old age. It is not a frequent diagnosis in the adult population. The risk increases with age in an elderly population. There is an association, however weak, between gender and pancreatic cancer. Males seem to have stronger chances of contracting this type of cancer. The reason can be attributed to a number of environmental factors which expose men more than women. The incidence of pancreatic cancer is seen higher in Europe.

The pancreas is an organ located behind the stomach.
It releases enzymes that help with digestion, as well as hormones that help regulate blood sugar levels.
If you have pancreatic cancer, you won’t be able to feel a lump or mass when you press on the outside of your abdomen. You may not have any symptoms until the cancer has already spread. Unlike breast, colon, and prostate cancers, pancreatic cancer isn’t routinely found with screening tests. People aren’t generally tested because no screening test for pancreatic cancer has been proven to save lives.
Pancreatic cancer is sometimes called a silent disease because it’s hard to spot early, the stage when it’s most treatable. Besides knowing the symptoms, knowing the risk factors for pancreatic cancer is your best protection against this disease. For example, your chances of developing pancreatic cancer are significantly higher if:

you have a family history of the cancer
you’re a smoker
you’re obese
you’re exposed to certain pesticides and chemicals on a regular basis.

Pancreatic cancer typically spreads rapidly to nearby organs. It is seldom detected in its early stages. But for people with pancreatic cysts or a family history of pancreatic cancer, some screening steps might help detect a problem early. One sign of pancreatic cancer is diabetes, especially when it occurs with weight loss, jaundice or pain in the upper abdomen that spreads to the back. Treatment may include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy or a combination of these.

8 Signs that You have Cancer – YouTube

Some major symptoms are:
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Jaundice

Jaundice occurs in about 50% of pancreatic cancer cases. Your eyes and skin may turn yellow, and you may feel itchy. You may also feel sick, lose your appetite and lose weight, and feel tired and thirsty. Jaundice can be a symptom of pancreatic cancer at an earlier stage. Jaundice is caused by the buildup of bilirubin, a component of bile produced by
the liver. This can occur when a tumor blocks the bile duct connecting the pancreas to the liver.
If you develop jaundice, your doctor or nurse will assess whether you need a biliary
stent or drain. A biliary stent is a small tube that is inserted into the bile duct to relieve the blockage. A biliary drain is a small tube that is inserted through your skin into the bile duct and drains the bile into a bag.
The doctor or nurse will also treat any symptoms of jaundice. For example, they may give you medication to control any sickness or itching. While jaundice can be a symptom at any stage of pancreatic cancer, when pancreatic cancer is diagnosed early, patients may be eligible for surgery, which offers the best chance for long-term control of the disease.
This is why it’s important to know the symptoms and listen to your body.

Back pain
Approximately 70 percent of patients with pancreatic cancer go to the doctor initially
due to pain. This pain is often described as beginning in the stomach area and radiating around to the upper back. It can be worse after eating or when lying down. Sitting forward can sometimes relieve the pain. At first the pain may come and go, but over time it may become more constant. If any of the organs (pancreas, liver or gallbladder) in the abdomen are inflamed or enlarged the area may also be tender to touch. Pain is caused by the cancer affecting nerves or organs near the pancreas. It can also be a result of a tumor causing a blockage in the stomach or duodenum (top part of the small intestines).
A specific palliative step for managing pain in pancreatic cancer may include a nerve block of the celiac nerve plexus (located in the back/abdomen area where many patients feel pain with pancreatic cancer) via injection with alcohol or other agent. Other possible interventions to relieve pain are subarachnoid or epidural blocks  (both in the spinal space).

Greasy or clay colored stools
A condition called steatorrhea (stools that are large, pale, oily, floating and smelly) is a common symptom of diseases of the pancreas. It happens because the cancer affects the production of the enzymes needed to digest food, particularly high fat food. Undigested food passing quickly through the body can also cause diarrhea & subsequent weight loss.

Your doctor often orders these imaging tests to diagnose pancreatic cancer:
Computed tomography (CT scan)
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
Ultrasound
Positron emission tomography (PET scan): Radioactive glucose injected into the veins is absorbed by cancer cells. PET scans may help determine the degree of pancreatic cancer spread.
If imaging studies detect a mass in the pancreas, a pancreatic cancer diagnosis is likely, but not definite. Only a biopsy can diagnose pancreatic cancer. 
Biopsies can be performed in several ways:

Percutaneous needle biopsy
Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP)
Endoscopic ultrasound

Itchy skin
Pancreatic cancer patients may experience itching if their tumor blocks the bile
duct and causes jaundice. When excess bilirubin builds up in the skin, it also tends to cause itchiness and irritation. Some cancer treatments may cause itching or rashes over the entire body or in isolated areas. This may be result from a hypersensitivity reaction during chemotherapy infusion. Visit your healthcare provider as soon as possible in case you are having an itchy skin or a rash.

Weight loss

Losing a lot of weight for no particular reason can be a sign that something is wrong. People may also notice a loss of appetite or changes in what they feel like eating. Pancreatic cancer can affect the ability of the pancreas to produce digestive enzymes
that help to digest food, especially high fat food. This means that the body can’t digest
food properly or get the nutrients it needs, leading to weight loss. Cancer & Cachexia.

Hematemesis

Pancreatic cancer can also present with hematemesis in the early stage of the disease. Hematemesis is upper gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding, typically described as a hemorrhage proximal to the ligament of Treitz. Symptoms consist of coffee ground emesis, vomiting frank blood, melena, and hematochezia. Symptoms of anemia may also be present, including chest pain, weakness, fatigue, syncope, or dyspnea. Visit your doctor immediately so that proper diagnosis can be made starting the treatment.
 
Diabetes

Diabetes can develop if a tumor interferes with the pancreas working properly.
This is because the pancreas normally produces the hormone insulin which the body needs to regulate the amount of sugar in the blood. People with diabetes often feel extremely thirsty, pass more urine than normal, lose weight and feel weak and lacking in energy. Diabetes is particularly associated with pancreatic cancer in older people. If someone over 50 has developed type 2 diabetes within the past two years, with no other explanation, their GP should consider the possibility of pancreatic cancer.

Blood clots

Sometimes, the first clue that someone has pancreatic cancer is a blood clot in a large vein, often in the leg. This is called a deep vein thrombosis or DVT. Symptoms can include pain, swelling, redness, and warmth in the affected leg. Sometimes a piece of the clot can break off and travel to the lungs, which might make it hard to breathe or cause chest pain.
A blood clot in the lungs is called a pulmonary embolism or PE.


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Ascites

Swallowing Difficulty & Ascites (increased abdominal fluid)
Sometimes people get a problem in swallowing the food which is a clue for the pancreatic lump. They might choke or cough when they consume food. Most of the time the food come backward or a person may feel that food is stuck within the throat.
In most patients of pancreatic cancer, there is a tendency to increase the abdominal girth. This happens due to a collection of a large number of the fluid within the abdominal cavity. This state is named as ascites and sometimes also called as the malignant ascites. The right reason for this fluid accumulation is not understood completely. Yet its level and severity may vary according to individuals, but it’s associated with the factor related to the presence of peritoneal or lymphatic metastases.

Unexplained weight loss

Weight loss and muscle wasting (cachexia) are common and occur in over 90% of patients with pancreatic cancer. These phenomena, apart from physiological disadvantages which contribute to fatigue and weakness, often have a pronounced deleterious effect on such factors as a patient’s sense of well-being. Contributors include anorexia, nausea, other gastrointestinal symptoms, depression, the side-effects of chemotherapy, surgery, new dietary constraints, early satiety (sense of stomach fullness), medical procedures and perhaps most importantly the metabolic effects of the pancreatic cancer itself.

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Fatigue

Fatigue can be an early symptom of pancreatic cancer, manifesting even before the diagnosis is made. Sooner or later, the majority of pancreatic cancer patients indicate fatigue as a significant symptom. Typically described as a loss of customary energy levels and even as affecting mental processes, the fatigue of pancreatic cancer can be debilitating.
The range of causes of fatigue under these circumstances is very large and can include such factors as the pancreatic cancer itself, sleeplessness (possibly due to pain or for other reasons), anemia, chemotherapy side-effect, anxiety or depression, medication side-effect (including pain medication), infection, electrolyte disturbance, or dehydration.
The treatment of fatigue is first directed at trying to eliminate any correctable medical
or psychological underlying cause. This may include the adjustment of medications. Attention might be given to those factors which help promote adequate and restorative sleep.

Indigestion

New, unexplained and persistent dyspepsia (indigestion/heartburn) can be a
symptom of pancreatic cancer, particularly in older people. If you are suffering from prolonged indigestion, give a quick visit to your doctor. Treating the underlying cause is necessary but your doctor may prescribe medications like proton pump inhibitors to relieve the symptoms.
Pancreatic enzyme supplements can help manage problems with digesting food, including pain and discomfort. They replace the enzymes that your pancreas would normally produce and break down food.

Diarrhea

Diarrhea can occur with many types of pancreatic cancers. It can also be a sign of a tumor called a VIPoma. This uncommon pancreatic tumor releases a substance called vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP), which sends more water into your digestive system. Excess water in your intestines can lead to severe, watery diarrhea. Pancreatic cancer can also prevent you from properly absorbing nutrients from the foods you eat, which can also trigger diarrhea. Visit your doctor immediately if you observe any change in bowel habits.

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Upper abdominal pain

As cancer spreads, it can press down on nerves or other organs, causing abdominal pain.
A blockage in the digestive tract can also lead to pain. Most people with pain from pancreatic cancer experience pain in their abdominal region.
If cancer is diagnosed, relieving pain symptoms remains an important part of cancer care and treatment. This may be called palliative care or supportive care. Be sure to talk with your health care team about abdominal pain so that proper evaluation can be done. Moderate pain is treated with a “weak” opioid such as codeine with or without a non-opioid analgesic and with or without another adjuvant agent (such as an anti-anxiety drug). And severe pain is treated with a strong opioid such as morphine with or without a non-opioid analgesic and with or without another adjuvant agent (such as an anti-anxiety drug).

Swelling of legs

Fluid may also build up in your legs and feet, causing swelling. This is called oedema. People sometimes also get oedema in their genitals. Oedema can be uncomfortable and painful and can make it harder for you to move around.
Tell your doctor or nurse if you have any swelling. They may recommend pressure stockings to help control the swelling and suggest some exercises you can do to help the fluid drain away. Putting your feet up, for example on a foot stool, can help. It is also important to look after your skin by moisturizing the swollen areas – ask your nurse what moisturizer to use. Sometimes you may be offered medication called a diuretic to treat the oedema – although this may not make a big difference.

Dark urine

Bile is a yellowish-brown fluid released by your liver. It travels through the common bile duct to the intestines to be removed from your body via stool. When the common bile duct is blocked by a tumor, bilirubin can’t be removed and too much of it builds up in your body.
Excessive accumulation of bilirubin in your body results in its increased secretion
into the urine. Urine turns brown due to presence of excessive amount of bilirubin.
Surgery offers the best chance of controlling pancreatic cancer and its worrisome symptoms for a long time. But, most patients are diagnosed at later stages and are not eligible for surgery.  Chemotherapy is another option available to those who are in a later stage of the disease.

Nausea and vomiting

Nausea (feeling sick) and sickness can occur for several different reasons. A tumor may block the bile duct or press on the duodenum, which obstructs digestion resulting in vomiting. Nausea can also be due to inflammation around the pancreas and jaundice.
Both of these conditions can lead to a chemical imbalance in the body which can make people feel sick.
Nausea and vomiting may be a problem in up to 40% of pancreatic cancer patients. Consequently, the reason for the nausea needs to be sought out and the underlying
cause should be dealt with appropriately by the trained oncologist.
In addition, antiemetic agents may be prescribed to relieve the symptom.

Constipation

Constipation is a frequent complaint in pancreatic cancer patients. Some causes of constipation in pancreatic cancer patients may include low fiber diet, diminished fluid intake, diminished physical activity and postural effects from bed rest. More serious causes may include various metabolic abnormalities and even bowel obstruction.
The treatment should include evaluating and correcting any underlying problems, ensuring adequate fluid intake, increasing physical activity if possible, giving laxative
drug therapy where appropriate and providing enemas as needed.

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Depression

Mild to severe depression can often present itself in the early stages of pancreatic cancer. This is why someone who has never suffered from a severe bout of depression before should express their concerns to their GP. It can often highlight a medical problem in the very early stages.

Enlarged gallbladder

If the common bile duct is blocked, bile can get trapped in your gallbladder.
This causes the gallbladder to grow larger than normal. Your doctor may be able to feel the enlarged gallbladder during an exam. You may also have upper abdominal tenderness.  Understanding when symptoms are a sign of something serious and either diagnosing the disease or confirming a previous diagnosis require expertise from specialists trained and experienced in treating pancreatic cancer

Summary

Pancreatic cancer is known as a “silent disease” because identifiable symptoms are not usually present in the early stages of the disease. Several symptoms commonly associated with pancreatic cancer are pain on eating, jaundice, weight loss, poor appetite, dark urine, swelling of legs, indigestion, diarrhea, diabetes, abdominal pain, back pain, ascites, blood clots and enlarged gallbladder.
Pancreatic cancer is aggressive with few symptoms until the cancer is advanced.
Diagnosis can be made through ultrasound, ERCP, CT scan, MRI and biopsy.
Pancreatic cancer treatment depends on the stage of the disease and the patient’s
general health. Treatments include surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.

Dr Robert Martin University Louisville – Search (bing.com)

RiP Victoria Albers Obituary (1947 – 2022) RiP

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Kathleen Buhle

Posted on June 14, 2022 by Ken
Hunter Biden’s ex opens up about why she stayed — and also then why she left,

Hunter Biden’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle speaks out on their marriage,
financial woes – ABC News (go.com)

Readers know Kathleen Buhle better as Kathleen Biden, the long-suffering wife of Hunter, the brother who wasn’t Beau but who took up with his widow. Buhle excised Biden from her name in 2019, after enduring years of what many women could or would not: alcohol and drug abuse, affairs, public humiliation, a torrent of lies.
Now she’s written a memoir, “If We Break.” It is not revenge porn. It’s not even a tell-all. And obsessive Hunter gatherers out there, be warned, the book contains nary a mention of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma or the infamous laptop left at the Delaware repair shop. It ends long before those troubles. But, if you wish, you can read about them in his 2021 memoir, “Beautiful Things.”

Instead of matching towels, we have his-and-her memoirs.
Subtitled “A memoir of marriage, addiction, and healing,” the book is short on healing, while the addiction and masochism never appear to end. After Hunter’s fifth — or was it sixth? — visit to rehab, Buhle still accepts his lies. “Hunter told me he was going for the yoga workshops,” she explains of a trip he took to Big Sur. “Did I believe him? Not really. Did I try to stop him? No. Anything to do with his sobriety was still beyond questioning.”
In “If We Break,” Buhle reveals a talent for denial so deep that it is left to her teenage daughters to tell her that Hunter is having an affair with their aunt and Beau Biden’s widow, Hallie. They know because they found texts on his phone. Buhle’s friends later ask, “How could you have not even suspected?

You may have been the only one not to.” Ironically, it was Hallie who had warned Kathleen years earlier when she discovered photos of him with another woman at the Four Seasons in Paris: “If you leave him, Kathleen, he’ll find someone else, and then you’ll have to live with that.” (Eventually Hunter and Hallie split, too. He married Melissa Cohen, who is 17 years younger than he is, days after they met.)
After the Hallie telenovela-worthy bombshell, Buhle says that Hunter can no longer hurt her, that the worst is behind her. Reader, she is sorely mistaken.
The affair goes public in the New York Post, the tabloid that will turn Hunter’s lobbying exploits and role as a Burisma board member into something of a full-time beat. Buhle discovers that Hunter cruised the cheaters’ website Ashley Madison (Tag line: “Life is short. Have an affair.”),  his cellphone bursting with sexually graphic texts to “dozens of women — none of whom I’d ever heard of before.”

Buhle and Biden met when she was 23 and they worked as members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon. A year later, she was pregnant, and they wed. Buhle grew
up solidly middle class, selling hot dogs at Comiskey Park. She refers to herself as “just a silly girl from Chicago” and lives up to the description by opting to learn little about their finances, a poor move. If Hunter has any talents, it is for lying and living well beyond their means: Tom Ford togs (in D.C., where few would take notice), new teeth while hooked on crack, insisting that he meet with a sobriety coach while staying at L.A.’s pricey Chateau Marmont.
The Biden family history is marked by tremendous tragedy and loss. Hunter’s mother & baby sister were killed in a car accident when he was 3 years old and Beau a year older. The two brothers were so close that when Hunter and Kathleen’s “special” marriage — that’s her term for it — goes off the rails, she turns to Beau for help because “he was the one who fully understood Hunter.”

Let that sink in.
The two sons were thick as thieves, but there’s no question that their father believed that Beau, his namesake and Delaware’s former attorney general who died of brain cancer in 2015, hung the moon and was his political heir. It could not have been easy being the Bidens’ Prince Harry. “I never saw Hunter show anything but pride toward his father and brother for their incredible accomplishments, but I wondered if their success took a toll on him,” Buhle writes.
Addiction has long been a scourge of the Biden family, and an inheritance. Asked on the 2008 campaign trail why he doesn’t imbibe, Joe Biden said, “There are enough alcoholics in my family.” Alas, there would be more.
And what do we learn of Joe and Jill Biden? 
Buhle is cautious and loving, the challenge of publishing a memoir while your former in-laws and three daughters’ grandparents occupy the White House. The Bidens are loving and supportive, but it takes a long time for the truth of Hunter’s addiction to be shared.
In Buhle’s telling, the family is close, supportive and spends plenty of time together
but is not very open.

Jill Biden is perfect, gracious yet unknowable, a distant and largely offstage character.
At times, Joe Biden seems like regular folk in that he shops at Home Depot.
Then again, the Bidens do not seem that much like regular folk in that their Greenville, Del., home features a double staircase, a library with carved wooden nymphs and — wait for it — an actual ballroom. When Buhle’s bookie grandfather first visits, he asks, “Who’s buried here?” Hunter’s parents may share a talent for living above their means. Buhle notes that the home was “often behind on its upkeep, and whole sections were closed to save on heating costs.”
Buhle smartly consulted a professional writer, Susan Conley, and the prose is better than many books of its ilk. But “If We Break” seems padded. There are constant trivialities about how handsome Hunter looks in a suit and exchanges of “I love you” between the couple. Note to memoir authors: Don’t do this. The book clocks in at precisely 300 pages, as though dictated by contract.

Huma Abedin opens up about her marriage, the 2016 election and her #MeToo moment
This is the ex of a politician’s now-notorious son, a woman who claims no desire to be famous, guards her privacy, then publishes a memoir at precisely the moment when her former father-in-law is at the height of his power. Perhaps the experience provides some catharsis and revenue for Buhle, who leads a D.C. collaborative space for women and assists nonprofits. Perhaps it may offer solace for others in emotionally abusive relationships with alcoholics. But is this really a book the public is asking to read?
Karen Heller is a Washington Post national features writer.

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The cover of Buhle’s memoir, which is being published today.

BOOK DESCRIPTION: Kathleen Buhle shares her story of resilience and
self-discovery after her marriage to Hunter Biden unraveled in the wake
of substance abuse and infidelity in this intimate, astonishing memoir.

“Kathleen Buhle’s brave and honest story transcends politics, division, hearsay, and judgment.”—Connie Britton

This is not a story about good versus evil. Or who was right. Or who was better.
For decades, Kathleen Buhle chose to play the role of the good wife, beginning when, as a naïve young woman from a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago, she met the dashing son of a senator at the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon. Within months of falling in love, Kathleen found herself pregnant and engaged, living a life beyond anything she’d ever known.
 
Determined to build her family on a foundation of love, Kathleen was convinced her
and Hunter’s commitment to each other could overcome any obstacle. But when Hunter’s drinking evolved into dependency, she was forced to learn how rapidly and irrevocably
a marriage can fall apart under the merciless power of addiction. When the lies became insurmountable, Kathleen was forced to reckon with the compromises she had made to try to save her marriage. She wondered if she could survive on her own.
 
The result is a memoir that is page-turning and heart-breaking. Here Kathleen asks
why she kept so much hidden—from her daughters and herself—for so many years, why she became dependent on one man, and why she was more faithful to a vow of secrecy than to her own truth. This inspiring chronicle of radical honesty and self-actualization speaks to women who have lost part of their identity and want to reclaim it.”

In her new memoir If We Break, 
Kathleen Buhle doesn’t shy away from the ugly side of her 24-year marriage to 
Hunter Biden and the ramifications it had on both her own mental health and that
of their three daughters, Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy.
In the book, Buhle shares that she first began noticing Hunter’s drinking might be a problem around 2001 after the birth of their second child when he took a job as a partner at a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. which led to a lot of late nights and long periods away from their home in Delaware. “I watched his drinking spiral from social to problematic,” she writes. Watching how much he could consume scared me…

“For the first time, I didn’t trust my husband.”
By the fall of 2003, Hunter entered rehab for the first time and, when he returned, the author says their marriage “felt stronger than ever.” But after seven years of sobriety, Hunter relapsed again only to deny it, forcing Buhle into the permanent role of sobriety detective. “As my suspicions grew, so did Hunter’s defensiveness,” she says.
“He made me think that I must be crazy, when what I wanted from him was honesty.

But I didn’t know how to ask for it.”
When Hunter returned home after ultimately agreeing to a second stint in rehab in 2012, Buhle says she tried to “restart our marriage…We weren’t fighting, not in the beginning. We just seemed to be drifting. From the outside, everything was as it should be…
But inside, at home, we weren’t sharing.” And by the spring of 2013, she began to notice the warning signs that he was drinking again. “I didn’t trust my husband.
And he didn’t trust me, either, as if my own suspicion about him made me suspect…Sometimes I even believed that it was my own skepticism about him that was the problem,” she writes, blaming herself for driving her husband even further into his addiction.

After Beau Biden was diagnosed with a fatal form of brain cancer,
Buhle watches again as her husband’s drinking becomes “worse than ever,” finding beer cans and vodka bottles scattered throughout their home. She begins to lose faith that he’ll ever be able to stop. “Each time he drank, the process of getting him to admit he wasn’t sober took longer and was more exhausting,” she says. “The denials grew angrier and more bitter too. For the first time, Hunter was calling me names.” And as Beau’s disease worsened, Buhle writes, “Hunter’s drinking was obvious in the darkest, angriest way.”  

After over a decade spent grappling with her husband’s alcoholism, Buhle admits that the reality that Hunter might also be using drugs had never even occurred to her. That is until he confessed in late 2013 that, earlier that summer, he had failed a drug test necessary to join the Navy, testing positive for cocaine—a drug he completely denies having taken. Years later, following Beau’s passing, Buhle would also discover evidence that Hunter was smoking crack, finding a broken glass pipe in an ashtray in their home after a night of binge-drinking, and later discovering a pipe and small baggie filled with a white substance hidden in their car. But by then, Buhle writes, “After years of thinking it couldn’t get worse, I’d lost the ability to be surprised by him.”

As though dealing with Hunter’s alcoholism and drug addiction wasn’t enough of a challenge for their relationship to withstand, Buhle also discovers evidence of his infidelity years before he would get caught cheating on her with his late brother’s wife, Hallie.
After Buhle finds photos on his iPad of a robe-clad woman in his Paris hotel room, Hunter eventually admits that he’s cheated on her five times over the course of their marriage, claiming that they were “All prostitutes. All outside the country,” and only when he was drinking. 
Buhle admits that not only did her enmeshment with her husband keep her from leaving him, but she was also advised by Hallie that if she left him she would only come to regret it as Hunter would surely move on with someone else. Buhle’s therapist also told her at the time that “he didn’t think Hunter would be able to handle losing Beau and me at the same time.” So, she decides to stay. But just as the author begins to finally forgive him for his past indiscretions, Hunter begins pulling away from her again, spending more and more time with Hallie and her children following Beau’s passing. She notices that Hallie also begins to treat her more coldly. After years of friendship and family holidays, Buhle writes, “For the first time, she seemed truly tired of me. Soon she’d stop responding to me at all. One of my last texts to her said that I didn’t understand what was happening and that
I felt like I was being punished. I didn’t hear back.”

A year after Beau’s death,
Buhle finally discovers the true nature of Hunter and Hallie’s relationship when their middle daughter Finnegan reads a text conversation between them on Hunter’s phone. “Hunter’s relapses, Beau’s diagnosis, the cheating—each of these moments had brought a powerful, visceral wave of emotion,” she writes. “But this news, in some ways the most damning, seemed to sit placidly on the surface…I felt a strange sense of vindication.
Not only had I not been crazy, but it was so much worse than I could have imagined.” 
She adds that as she continued to go through his phone and found even more evidence of affairs with other women, “Something shifted in me. For so long I’d held on to some idea of love for the man I’d married. But that night, I felt no love for him at all…I didn’t feel sentimental. I just wanted to close this painful chapter.” Buhle also notes that while this was obviously a traumatizing experience for their children, it was also “serendipity that
the girls had found it. Because finally I didn’t have to keep another lie from them.
As painful as finding the phone was, it set us free from all of the secrets.”

After filing for divorce in 2016,
Buhle begins the slow process of taking back control over her own life after 23 years as
a stay-at-home mom, including over her own finances, only to discover that they had no savings whatsoever. “Both our houses had a double mortgage and no equity. We had credit card debt and medical bills. We were in terrible financial shape. The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me. We owed as much for both houses as when we’d bought them.
We were underwater,” she writes. But rather than blame Hunter for their lack of financial stability, Buhle recognizes her own accountability in the situation. 
Early on in the memoir, shortly after their marriage, she notes “For the next 15 years,
I’d leave every financial decision to Hunter, trusting his judgment in many cases ignoring warning signs that we were in over our heads.” She adds, “If Hunter said we were okay, that was good enough for me. He would figure out our finances while I continued that willful ignorance I first adopted when we bought the house on Centre Road [in Delaware]. In this way Hunter had all the pressure, with no partner, when it came to financially supporting our family. I know now what a burden that must have been for him.”

Buhle goes on to admit that it was that very dependency on Hunter that was partially to blame for the demise of their marriage. She writes, “From the beginning, needing each other became part of the language of our love, and soon my sense of value and self-forth came almost entirely from that need.” In fact, her identity and sense of self-worth became “more and more linked to who I was married to and less about me.”
Secrecy is another theme that runs throughout the book, not only in terms of Hunter’s addiction but also the lies Buhle told in order to keep up the facade of their happy, problem-free family.
“I became adept at hiding the truth, at lying. To the girls.
To the outside world. To my friends and my family and to myself,” she says.
“In the end, it shouldn’t be surprising that [Hunter] never realized his addiction’s impact on our family, because I never really told him.”

But Buhle’s challenges do not end with the culmination of her marriage. Following the finalization of their divorce in 2017, she discovers that she has stage 3 colon cancer. Yet, here too, the author finds the silver lining in having to undergo surgery and chemotherapy. “Eventually, I began to accept my limits in a way I hadn’t before,” she writes. “The need to prove myself while I had cancer just became too heavy to lift. I didn’t have the energy to care as much. Without my realizing it, cancer had reprioritized my life. It cleared a lot of the clutter and self-doubt and slowly put everything into new perspective.”
As she begins her recovery process, the writer realizes that the final step in her journey of self-actualization is changing her last name from Biden back to her maiden name, Buhle. She says, “The changed name was a physical manifestation of my reclaimed sense of self.
It signified that I was strong enough now to stand on my own. At the same time, it was a farewell letter to the old Hunter, the young man I had met in Portland, Oregon, and the young woman who’d fallen so hard in love.”   
Watch June 14, 2022, Good Morning America TV Show – ABC.com
Hunter Biden’s ex-wife Kathleen Buhle says she had no knowledge of ex-husband’s financial dealings (msn.com)

David Gergen: “Dumbfounded” by Biden’s Saudi trip
David Gergen, former adviser to four U.S. Presidents, talks to Bianna Golodryga about President Biden’s struggle to deliver a message on the economy. 
 
A ‘profit recession’ is even more concerning than an economic one, SocGen says
Societe Generale’s Head of Fixed Income Research Guy Stear discusses the likelihood
of a recession, warning that a profit recession for corporates is more concerning than
an economic one. 

US Debt by President | Chart & Per President Deficit | Self.
The national debt stood at $19.9 trillion when President Trump took office in January 2017, which reached $27.8 trillion at the end of Trump’s presidency, is a number that
for most of us is too high to even conceive of. 

U.S. National Debt Clock : Real Time (usdebtclock.org)

Key Stats:
Until the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown (03/16/20),
Donald Trump had increased debts by 16.08%.
That’s considerably less than Barack Obama (69.98%) and George W. Bush (105.08%)
To tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, national debt was increased by a further 18.01% totaling $4.25 trillion in additional debt from March 2020 to Jan 2021.
Daily national debt during Trump’s Presidency has increased from $2.861 billion
pre-lockdown (01/02/2017 – 03/16/20) per day to $16.366 billion since.
A 472% increase in the rate of daily debt.

What was the government debt when Trump left office – Search (bing.com)?
Trump releases 12-page statement bashing the Jan. 6 investigation,
saying it is merely to stop him from running for president again (yahoo.com)

Chelsea Manning: ‘I think somebody worse than Donald Trump can happen’ (msn.com)
IT DID: How many Americans view Biden ‘very’ unfavorably? The latest data (msn.com)

Dangerous Heat Indexes in Triple Digits Across the Country 
Meteorologist Ari Sarsalari has the forecast. – Search (bing.com)

Death Valley Heat Breaks 101-Year-Old Temperature Record – Search (bing.com)
Temperatures in Death Valley, California, exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit, breaking a temperature record in the process.
The temperature soared to 122°F on June 11, breaking the record high for the day set in 1921 of 121°F. June 11 saw the temperatures rise even further to 123°F, shattering the record of 120°F for the day in 1994. The heat has been attributed to a northward bulge in the jet stream that unfolded over the Southwestern.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Argues Global Warming
Is ‘Actually Healthy For Us’ (msn.com)

57 moderate House Democrats pressure Pelosi and Schumer to disable the Obamacare time-bomb set to go off before the midterms (msn.com)Biden loses control of inflation, and the trust of American people (msn.com)

In China “it’s the identity, stupid”: Expert | Watch. 
Kerry Brown, author of the new book “Xi: A Study in Power”, tells Amanpour
the Chinese leader’s focus on global status has transformed the country.

How the White House shifted its inflation messaging,

After initially saying in 2021 that inflation would be transitory,
the Biden administration has shifted to calling inflation its “top domestic priority.”    
Biden, Democrats believe Americans’ economic struggles ‘necessary price to pay to save planet’: Sexton (msn.com)
Car industry in shock and fuel prices climb as government scraps all grants for electric vehicles (msn.com)
Biden admin touting supply chain ‘improvements’ ripped as ‘wishful thinking’: Trade expert (msn.com)  
Explosion at Texas terminal injects uncertainty into global energy market (msn.com)
Warehouses in China and U.S. show global economy struggling to adjust (msn.com)
Why boosted Americans seem to be getting more COVID-19 infections – CBS News
The Chinese economy is in trouble, but not because of COVID-19 (msn.com)
Oil Falls Amid News Biden to Meet Saudi Crown Prince, After All (msn.com)
Video Shows Democrat Slammed By Secret Service (welovetrump.com)
The stock market is in bear territory. What does that mean? (msn.com)
Biden focuses on workers as high inflation remains a risk (msn.com)
Biden strains for a message on deteriorating economy (msn.com)
What Returning to China Taught Me About China (msn.com)?

Why US gas prices are at a record, and why they’ll stay high for a long time.
CNN – Breaking News, Latest News and Videos
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Consciousness: Theory and History

Posted on June 12, 2022 by Ken
What is the universal consciousness, it’s that tiny voice that preaches what is right
and what is wrong! Who can find it and where is it and what is the universal Word?

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Consciousness_Studies.pdf (wikimedia.org)
The Word has the ability to forever ascend from one body to another throughout
the universe of universes. We are never present, just in the past and the future.
Thus, it is forever ascending and resurrecting itself without doing this, for it is the one universal body of the universe without being a body at all. It is forever dying without dying, and forever being born without being born. The Universal Consciousness will forever sacrifice itself without doing it. 

Where does consciousness reside?
Originally Answered: Where does consciousness reside? I am familiar with Descartes, James, Wuhl, Freud, Hume, Skinner etc but they give no answer. Assuming physicalism, the best guess is the thalamus. In the overlying cortex” (MacDonald et al. 1998)

” The Cortex and Thalamus focal activity and the way the TRN is organized topographically (i.e.: has activity that is like an electrical image of receptive fields).
The thalamus is ideally placed for integrating brain activity, if tiny parts of the thalamus are removed consciousness is abolished and the thalamus is involved in attention and the global integration of cortical activity. Any impartial judge might pronounce that the site of conscious experience has been found, possibly in the ILN of the thalamus, but no one can say how it works.
Thus, this universal consciousness is the largest possible thing without being the largest possible thing, for it is also the smallest possible thing without being the smallest possible thing. In that consciousness is not simply negative, positive, or neutral, it is not simply in the past, present, or future.
Thus, we do not simply go to it, or bring it to us, for it is where we are without being where we are. About like when Danica Patrick knowing when and where to turn left driving a car at 195 mph and qualifies in pole position for the 2013 Daytona 500.

After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver.

Everything is Connected — Here’s How: | Tom Chi | TEDxTaipei – YouTube

What Is Consciousness? | Burning Questions | Ep 18 – YouTube

Danica Patrick youtube page – Search (bing.com)

Danica Patrick – YouTube
Thus, it can be found at any one point in all of existence,
for it is everywhere without being anywhere.
Thus, we find it without finding it, and we lose it without losing it,
for we are it without being it.
Thus, the universal consciousness has come to you without coming to you whether you know this or not, and you are it whether you know it or not. Many things are dwelling in this universal consciousness at one level or another whether they know it or not.

Whether one is aware of it or not.
 Thus, this universal consciousness can manifest itself anywhere, or in any so-called body, for it is not limited to a body at all. The universal consciousness is not limited to any one body, for it functions in relation to the one universal body that is not a body.
Although the universal consciousness can be discovered at the point of the physical consciousness,
it does not function in relation to the physical body, for it transcends all so-called bodies, for all bodies are one without being one.
Thus, the so-called physical body is not simply a physical body, for it is one with the universal body of the universe.
Thus the universal consciousness is not simply contained in the physical consciousness, for it is not simply contained anywhere, for it transcends all things, including itself,
for it is all things.
Thus, the universal consciousness is not found in any body at all, for it is beyond all bodies, including the one universal body of the universe.
Thus, it is the head of the body as well as the body.
Thus, the universal consciousness is not to be found in either a higher or lower body,
or in the one universal body of the universe.

Thus, all things must be transcended before one can discover the universal consciousness, including consciousness itself. It is an illusion to think that the universal consciousness cannot be comprehended at the point of the physical consciousness, and it is an illusion to think that it can be contacted at a point beyond the physical consciousness.
One cannot contact it at all until one gives up trying to contact it, for it is not something that one can contact, for it transcends even itself. it cannot be contacted in relation to anything, for it is beyond all things.
Thus, it must be contacted without being contacted. To find it in the so-called physical body Is to find that it is not simply in the physical body, and that it is not simply in any body, for it transcends all bodies, for it is a body without being a body. To realize that one can contact the universal consciousness at the level of the physical consciousness is to realize that one can take it with one anywhere in the entire universe of universes.

Thus, we learn to bring it to us without bringing it to us, and we learn to take it with us without taking it with us.
It is always at the point where we are at, and at the point where we are going, for we always go to where we are at, for we are everywhere, for the universal consciousness is everywhere. We cannot go to where the universal consciousness is not, for we take it with us without taking it with us.
Thus, we find it without finding it, and lose it without losing it, and we have it without having it, for we are it without being it, for it is itself without being itself.
We cannot go beyond the universal consciousness, for it is already beyond itself.

Thus, we go beyond the universal consciousness without doing it. In reaching the universal consciousness, one has gone beyond all things, and beyond nothing at the same time.
One goes beyond the extreme positive pole of existence, and beyond the extreme negative pole of existence, and reconciles the two poles: then, goes beyond the extreme neutral pole of existence.
Then beyond existence itself. Thus one goes beyond both ends and the middle of all things.
Thus, we do not go beyond anything, for we are already beyond all things without being beyond them. We cannot simply go beyond anything, for at the so-called point of contact, all things reverse themselves, and are neutralized. As one appears to go beyond the positive pole, one is also going beyond the negative pole.
Thus, one is neutralizing the two poles at the center.

Thus we never actually go anywhere.
We do learn that we are everywhere and at one point, and that we move without moving. We are forever at all points of the universe whether we are conscious of this or not.
As existence and nonexistence are reconciled, the universal consciousness is revealed without being revealed, for it is existence and nonexistence reconciled. It is consciousness and unconsciousness reconciled, the known and the unknown reconciled.
 It is itself reconciled with itself without being reconciled with itself. It is beyond all things without being beyond them. All things are within the universal consciousness without being in it, and all things are without it without being without it, and all things are at the center of it without being at the center of it. All things are it without being it. It is the ultimate of all things without being the ultimate of anything. It is the beginning without being the beginning, and the end without being the end, for it is the beginning and end reconciled. Thus the universal consciousness is the eternal rest of God, or the promised land of plenty.
The land flowing with milk and honey is none other than the universal consciousness of God, for it is the universal body of God. Thus the land flowing with milk and honey has never been found, for it is not something that one can find, for it is not simply what it appears to be. It is as real as anything can be, yet it is beyond reality, for it is reality and illusion reconciled. Thus the land of plenty is everywhere without being anywhere, for it takes in all of time and eternity, for it is time and eternity reconciled.

One cannot simply find the land of plenty, for one is the land of plenty.
For it is the universal consciousness of which one is. As all things exist without existing
in this universal consciousness, one can take out of it whatever one imagines to be in it.
Thus, it is a land of plenty without being a land at all. it is a land of all and nothing.
Thus, one can take out what one wants without doing it, for one must overcome want before one can approach this consciousness.
Thus, one must learn to give up all before one can receive all.
Thus, one cannot have anything as long as one wants something, except in an illusional sense, for it is an illusion to think that one can have anything, for one is not even oneself.
Thus, one must overcome oneself as well as all things, for one is one with all things.
To think that one can possess things is to think that things are permanent without knowing that nothing is permanent.
Thus, one cannot possess anything until one overcomes the desire to possess anything,
for one must come to possess without possessing, for this is the cosmic pattern of the universe.
Thus, one must learn to give and receive at the same time in order to receive from the universal consciousness, or the land of plenty.
Thus, one learns to take from the universal consciousness without taking and to give it back without giving it back, for giving and receiving are one without being one.

Thus, we learn that it is not necessary to take anything with us, for all things follow us, for we are all things. It is not necessary to take things from one dimension to another, for all things are everywhere. They need only to be called forth from the universal consciousness.
Thus, one learns to create things without creating them, for one creates them, and then allows them to go back into the realm of so-called nonexistence, or into a formless state.
They remain in the formless state until one calls them forth again.
Thus, nothing ever ceases to exist, for all things forever exist without existing.
Nothing ever comes into existence, and nothing ever goes out of existence, for existence and nonexistence are one without being one. As things do not actually exist, they do not actually cease to exist. Form and no form are one without being one.
Thus, form comes out of formlessness, and then goes back into formlessness.
Thus, the nature of the universal consciousness is such that there is no way to express, or to explain it, except in a limited way.
Of course, we are expressing it whether we know it or not, for we are it, and cannot help but express it. But one can only express it in the context of an illusion, for it is beyond expression without being beyond it. Just as we must explain it without explaining it, we must express it without expressing it. Since we are already doing this, it is a matter of becoming aware of it. It is a matter of becoming conscious of expressing it without expressing it.
Thus, to express it in totality is to express it without expressing it,
for all other expressing is but in part, and is an illusion.

The Universal Word.
There has been much confusion and secrecy concerning the nature of the universal Word. Thus some assume it to be lost, and some assume that it is a secret word. The nature of the universal Word, or the so-called secret or lost word is such that anything one can say about it is true, for it transcends all things, for it is all things.
Yet, all things that are said about it are also false, for it transcends truth as well as falsehood. It is beyond explanation, secrecy, and confusion, for it is the universal consciousness of the universe that is not simply a consciousness. We cannot explain the universal Word, for we must use the Word in order to explain it.
Thus, we are using the word subjectively, trying to explain it objectively.
We cannot explain it this way, for it is neither subjective nor objective, for it is beyond both subjective and objective things. As all things are one without being one, this Word is one with all things, for it is all things without being all things.
Thus, to explain it would be to explain it in part, for it is the explanation itself, not something to be explained. This Word follows the one cosmic pattern of the universe,
for it is the one cosmic pattern of the universe without being it.

Thus, it follows the pattern of the trinity, for it is the trinity, and as the trinity is a trinity without being one, the Word is a word without being one. Thus this Word cannot be kept secret, nor can it be given to anyone. The so-called confusion and secrecy concerning the Word is eliminated when it is realized that confusion and secrecy are a part of the nature of the Word. As in all things, one will never find the Word until one stops looking for it.
As long as one considers it to be lost, or to be a secret, one will not find it, for it is not simply lost, nor is it a secret, for it is its nature to be a secret, and to be lost without being these things.
To assume that one can give it to another is to assume an illusion, for there is nothing in all the universe that one can give another, for am doing it without doing it. Once the Word is found, one need not try to regulate it, for it becomes a part of one’s being.
The Word is creative without being creative. Thus when one discovers the Word, one doesn’t will oneself to create something with it, for the will must be transcended before the Word is discovered, for it is beyond all things, for it is beyond itself. Thus none can ever misuse the Word to harm another, for one will not discover the Word until one overcomes the desire to harm anything.

To use the Word in either a negative way, or a positive way is harmful, for positive and negative things are one without being one. To use the Word either positively or negatively is not to know the nature of it. Thus they who would use the Word either positively or negatively will not find it. Thus they use it in an illusional sense, not knowing the nature of it. It is also an illusion to think that one can use it in a neutral sense, for it is the reconciliation of the positive and negative, and the reconciliation of the neutral with the positive and negative. Thus one can not misuse the Word, for it is beyond use altogether. Just as we cannot use it against another, another cannot use it against us.
Thus one must overcome the negative-positive conflict before one can discover the so-called secret Word. The Word is forever protecting itself from those who would misuse it. Thus it remains a secret even after one discovers it, for secrecy is a part of its nature.
It is the Word that discovers itself without discovering itself, for it transcends itself, for it is not simply a Word. It is not necessary for me to try to hide it from you or from anyone, for it cannot be hidden anymore than it is, and it cannot be made any clearer than it is.

Thus it is given only to those who can receive it.
Thus it cannot be simply given to anyone. I can reveal it without revealing it, but you must discover it without discovering it. For you must learn to use it without using it. All things are using it whether they know it or not. It is a matter of becoming aware of this. When the unconscious is reconciled with the conscious, one learns to do without doing, and is conscious without being conscious.
Thus one finds the Word without finding it; one understands it without understanding it, and one uses it without using it, for one is it without being it. Thus as all so-called parts of one’s being are reconciled, all things are transcended, and the universal Word becomes a part of one’s being, and one uses it without using it. Thus one comes to control the negative, positive, and neutral force of the universe without doing it. The universal Word is not brought to the level of the physical consciousness, for it is not brought to the level of any consciousness, for it is beyond consciousness. It is at the point of the so-called physical consciousness without being there.

There is no such thing as a physical consciousness, for it is but a part of the one universal consciousness. The universal word is one with all so-called levels of consciousness, and it is not limited to anybody. When the Word is brought to the physical consciousness, it remains where it always is, and that is everywhere and nowhere. As it comes to the physical consciousness, it transcends the physical consciousness, for it is beyond all consciousness.
It is not something that one experiences on any level of consciousness, for it is universal.
It is the reconciliation of all consciousness into one level of consciousness. The universal Word is not experienced in relation to any so-called body, for it transcends all bodies without doing it. It is not experienced in relation to a permanent body, for there is no such thing as a permanent body, for all bodies exist without existing. The Word is one body, yet an infinite number of bodies without being a body at all.

Knowledge of the Word will cause one to ascend out of the so-called physical body,
for it functions in relation to the universal body that is not a Body.
The Word is dependent, yet independent of bodies.
Thus, the so-called permanent body must be transcended before the Word can function in accord with its nature.
The Word functions independently of bodies, for it can create a body any time it needs one. It does not create them as permanent things but lets them go back into the formless state. The word is not limited to a body, for it is beyond all bodies. It is that which brings things out of the nonexistent state into the existent state. It brings things out of the formless state into the form state, and allows them to go back into the formless state.
The Word is the universal body, and the body is form without being form, and formless without being formless. The Word is beyond both form and formlessness. Thus it regulates form and formlessness without doing it, for it is natural for it to regulate them. It can create a body or a universe without any effort, for creation is a natural part of its nature.

It creates without even thinking about it, for it is beyond thinking. it is beyond good and evil, for it is beyond all opposites. It is what we are, yet it is not what we are, for we are it without being it. As it is beyond itself, we must go beyond ourselves to reach it. As it is beyond itself, it is beyond all things. Thus we cannot go beyond it, or beyond ourselves, for we are already beyond all things. We only come to realize that we are already there without being there. We go beyond ourselves without going beyond ourselves.

The word has the ability to forever ascend from one body to another throughout the universe of universes. Thus, it is forever ascending and resurrecting itself without doing this, for it is the one universal body of the universe without being a body at all.
It is forever dying without dying, and forever being born without being born. It forever sacrifices itself without doing it.
It is forever going, coming, and standing still without doing either of these things.
It is here, there, everywhere, nowhere, and beyond that, for it exists without existing.
It does all things in a way that is as natural as anything can be. It does not force itself on to anything, for it is beyond force. It cannot be harmed, for it is beyond that, yet to harm any creature is to harm it, for it is in all creatures without being there. It is all creatures, yet it is beyond them, protecting them, watching over them. As the universal Word is beyond all things, including itself, it is beyond words.

Not only are there no words to express it, it is not a Word at all.
To think of it as a Word is to assume that it is something of which it is not.
It is not a word, for it transcends itself. When one transcends oneself one will find the Word without finding it, and one will find that it is not a Word, for it is a Word without being one.
It is no more a Word than it is anything else, for all things are one without being one.
It is beyond names and terms, for it is not simply a word or anything.
It is all things and nothing and more. it is the universal consciousness of the universe, the universal body of the universe, the universal head of the universe, for it is the universe of universes.
It is the nonexistent universe as well as the existing universe. It is all visible and invisible things, known and unknown, conscious and unconscious, and that which is beyond these so-called opposites.
It is all manifested things and all unmanifested things. The universal Word is all things that one can imagine it to be and more than that, for one cannot imagine what it might be, for it is beyond the imagination. Imagination is but a part of the Word, for the Word is the imagination without being the imagination.
Thus, the imagination must be transcended before one can find the Word, for it is beyond the imagination, for it is beyond itself. We must transcend the Word in order to find it, yet we cannot transcend it for it has already transcended itself.
Thus, we transcend it without transcending it. We just become aware that we are it without becoming aware of this. Since we are it, we cannot go to it, nor can it come to us.
It becomes aware that we are it, and we become aware that it is us. Once we get beyond the spoken and unspoken side of the Word, it is not necessary to speak it, for it speaks without speaking. Then it is neither heard nor spoken, for we hear it without hearing it, and we speak it without speaking it.

What is universal consciousness?
Where is it and who can find it and what is the universal Word and what can you do with this creative power source? The Word has the ability to forever ascend from one body to another throughout the universe of universes.
Thus it is forever ascending and resurrecting itself without doing this, for it is the one universal body of the universe without being a body at all. It is forever dying without dying, and forever being born without being born.

It forever sacrifices itself without doing it.As the Kundalini crosses the Chakras
one by one, there are some subtle mystic inner experiences of other worlds to the yogi.
He achieves many Riddhis and Siddhis (divine miraculous powers and knowledge).
No self-realization is possible without awakening and rushing up all the seven Chakras by the Kundalini Shakti and finally merging in Sahasrara with Lord Shiva.
Without awakening of Kundalini Shakti and raising it up to Sahasrara there can’t be any self-realization. Meditation is the key to make it happen, a new dawn of consciousness, awareness, intelligence love civilization freedom bliss ecstasy zest of life harmony balance just one universal consciousness.
The laboratory of CERN, through colliding particles they discover a new particle that humanity calls the particle of God. This Boson Higgs particle is present in all other 108 particles that we know. A New Cosmic Being or coming Sixth root race.

What are the benefits of a universal consciousness?
Kundalini is basically a healing force. Kundalini is the healing power of God within man. Kundalini is like an umbilical cord to God. Even within the DNA, there is a flow of kundalini and meridians, because it is the road through which the energy travels giving the instructions. It is the application within the instruction. 

Kundalini: The Energy of the Depths.
The arousal of kundalini, in its true sense, does not simply imply the activity of a hitherto sleeping force, but actually the start of a new activity by changing the whole system to adapt it to a new pattern of consciousness through changing the composition of the bioenergy or subtle life force permeating the whole body.

World-egoism proceeds from the Anglo-Saxon Race.
From that direction the whole Earth will be overlaid with egoism. It is partly England and America that all the discoveries come that will cover the Earth like a network of egoism. So it is from there that the whole Earth will be covered by a network of egotism.

The Journey To Enlightenment.
When your chakra system is awakened, the secrets of enlightenment will stand revealed. Kundalini is basically a healing force. Kundalini – The Butterfly Experience: How to Transform Your Life from the Inside Out – Bing video

Is Consciousness an Experience or An Attitude?

What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project—Stephen Wolfram Writings

What is the simplest form of life that has consciousness?
What was the earliest form of life that had consciousness?

For thousands of years, philosophers dominated the study of human consciousness. Rene Descartes, a French philosopher, pioneered the concept of mind-body dualism, or the idea that, while the mind and body are distinct,
they do interact. Once psychology was established as a distinct discipline from philosophy and biology, one of the first topics studied by early psychologists was conscious experience. Structuralists analyzed and reported conscious sensations, thoughts, and experiences through a process known as introspection.
Trained observers would examine the contents of their own minds with care. While this was obviously a highly subjective process, it served as a catalyst for further research into the scientific study of consciousness. Consciousness, according to American psychologist William James, is like a stream—unbroken and continuous despite the constant transformations. Sigmund Freud, a psychoanalyst, emphasized the importance of the unconscious and conscious minds. While much of psychology research shifted away from observable behaviors in the first half of the twentieth century, research on human consciousness has exploded in popularity since the 1950s.

Conscious Experience Vs. Conscious Attitude
Consciousness is the term used to describe your unique awareness of your thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and surroundings. Consciousness, in its simplest form, is your awareness of yourself and the world around you.
This awareness is subjective and personal to each individual. If you can verbally describe an experience, it is a part of your consciousness. Conscious experiences are in constant flux. For instance, you may be focused on reading this article at one point. Your consciousness may then shift to a conversation you had with a coworker earlier that day.

Or maybe a conversation with your coach.
When a coach plants a seed that you can go out and do something and you go out and do it, that is a collective conscious effort. Consciousness research has centered on deciphering the neuroscience underlying our conscious experiences. Additionally, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to identify specific neurons that may be associated with various conscious events. As previously stated, the primary objective in the case of conscious experience is to explain the properties of phenomenal consciousness.

And a first-order theorist is always free to respond to alleged evidence of non-conscious experience by insisting that the aforementioned experiential states are actually phenomenally conscious, despite their lack of access consciousness. That is, despite the fact that the subject is unaware of or does not report on it directly. There is nothing incoherent about the concept of phenomenally conscious experiences that subjects are unaware they possess, even if it is rather difficult to believe.

However, there appears to be no independent target of explanation in the case of conscious thought. For in this case, there does not appear to be any basis for claiming that the ‘unconscious’ thoughts investigated by psychologists are, in fact, conscious thoughts, despite the subjects’ lack of awareness. The phenomenon to be explained in the case of conscious thinking is the way we appear to have immediate and non-inferential awareness of our own thought processes. And this is because thoughts are not intrinsically phenomenally conscious. Our thoughts are unlike anything else in the relevant sense, except that they may be associated with visual or other images or emotional feelings that are phenomenally conscious due to their quasi-sensory status.

Of course, there is a sense in which entertaining a conscious attitude is similar to something. This is because, depending on what one is thinking about, various aspects of the world come into focus. As one’s thoughts shift from one subject to another, one’s attention is drawn to different aspects of the world. For any experience or attitude will entail a partial and partially subjective ‘take’. on the objects of the experience or attitude. What is necessary for phenomenal consciousness, however, is that there be something that resembles the subject’s own mental states. Mental states themselves are subjective in nature, possessing properties amenable to introspective recognition, and so forth. With this distinction established, there is no reason to believe that non-imagistic thoughts are comparable to anything.


“Consciousness informs itself with its creations” – this is the non-dual view 🙏🏼🕉💕

Heart – Stairway to Heaven Led Zeppelin – Kennedy Center Honors HD
Although many people will argue about the definition of “proven fact,” the overwhelming bulk of evidence points to the conclusion that consciousness is a physical process. Consciousness is not formed at birth, it takes many years of training to form a fully functioning human consciousness. Human consciousness can be degraded by physical trauma. Damage to the areas of the brain that produce consciousness also damage the functionality of consciousness.
Consciousness can be dramatically altered by drugs, which are physical interactions
with neurons in the brain. Anesthesia can turn a brain off like a light switch through mechanical means. Switching off neurons with drugs also switches off consciousness.
This is proof that consciousness relies on physical activity. 
Consciousness cannot survive without the physical form. When the body dies (or even goes to sleep) consciousness disappears. Consciousness disappears when somebody is hit in the head with a large force. 

Physical kinetic trauma can kill consciousness. 
If consciousness were not physical this would not be true.  If consciousness were not physical it would not be affected by physical things like drugs or trauma or stress or fatigue or hunger. The fact that consciousness needs to burn food and oxygen and needs to sleep and heal to survive is fairly solid proof that consciousness is a physical process, more like an engine running than an eternal soul. When the engine shuts off the consciousness disappears.

This would not happen if consciousness was non-physical.
Are we all sharing the same consciousness or are there 7 billion separate human consciousnesses?
Originally Answered: Are we all sharing the same consciousness or are there 7 billion separate human consciousness’?
“We are all one… separated by our own experience in thought but taxed separately.” *

The idea that we all share a common consciousness is a popular mystical idea: you find it in Advaita Vedanta, for example. And the physicist Erwin Schrödinger linked it with his own science-informed attitude towards reality.

But how could this be proved using science or logic? Everyone experiences a restricted consciousness — I have no idea what the person next door is conscious of. Doesn’t that imply a very practical form of separateness?

At best, you can recover the notion of a common consciousness by saying that we are all fragments of a larger whole. But why assume this larger whole is a consciousness? Isn’t an ‘unconscious’ universe an adequate container for all these fragmentary consciousnesses?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. It may depend on whether you believe that “to be is to be perceived”.
In my opinion the idea of a universal consciousness cannot be established purely through science or logic.
As far as I can tell it is closer to a feeling than a provable statement. Mystical traditions and/or abnormal brain states can make such feelings more easily accessible, at least transiently.

So, perhaps ironically, the feeling of universal consciousness is very personal.
But it’s a feeling that is frequently expressed, and not just in mystical texts!

“Strangers passing in the street ~
By chance meet two separate glances.
And I am you and what I see is me”
– Echoes — Pink Floyd | Last.fm
Pink Floyd – Echoes (Remastered)

American families struggle to survive as inflation and gas prices soar.
Gas prices hit $5 a gallon nationwide this weekend while inflation rose by the fastest rate in decades. 
NBC News’ Kate Snow follows three American families forced to make lifestyle changes just to make ends meet.    

Here’s how Lindsey Vonn, 37, Stays in Shape (msn.com) 
What are the 7 densities of consciousness? – Quora   
The Role of the Conscious Mind (verywellmind.com)
What Is Consciousness? – Psychology (wsu.edu)  
What Is Consciousness? (verywellmind.com)  
What Is Consciousness? – Bing video
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Terminal is a Label

Posted on June 11, 2022 by Ken
B.J. Thomas Reveals Stage 4 Cancer Diagnosis
By Erik Pedersen

Singer B J Thomas Reveals Stage 4 Cancer Diagnosis – YouTube
B.J. Thomas has Stage 4 lung cancer, the Grammy-winning singer said today through
his reps. The man who topped the Hot 100 with “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and had four other top 10 singles is receiving treatment in a Texas health care facility and is hopeful for a complete recovery.

Saying he plans to continue to interact with industry colleagues and fans and remains optimistic about his availability to make public appearances, Thomas released this statement via his publicists at 2911 Media:

“I just wanted to take this unique opportunity to share my gratitude to Gloria,
my wonderful wife and my rock for over 53 years, my family, friends, and fans.

I’m so blessed to have had the opportunity to record and perform beautiful songs in pop, country, and gospel music, and to share those wonderful songs and memories around the world with millions of you. I ask all of you for your prayers during this time and that my music can live on with you.”

That’s a Cover?: Hooked on a Feeling (B.J. Thomas / Jonathan King / Blue Swede) – Cover Me (covermesongs.com)
The Oklahoma native who was raised in Texas broke through in 1966 with his version of Hank Williams 1949 song “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100.
He scored a second national hit with “Hooked on a Feeling” in late 1968 — a song
that went on to reach No. 1 in its “Ooga-Chucka” version by Blue Swede six years later. Blue Swede was first formed in 1973, when Björn Skifs, a top vocalist in Sweden, was looking for a band to accompany him during his concerts.[3]

The band was originally called “Blåblus” (Swedish for “blue blouse” [could be
made out of denim], a pun on the word “blues”[4]) and featured Skifs singing the lead vocals. The band got their international breakthrough in 1974 with their cover of the 1968 B. J. Thomas song “Hooked on a Feeling“.[5] Blue Swede recorded Thomas’s song
in 1973 but based its rendition of the song on a 1971 version released by British pop eccentric Jonathan King, which created the “ooga-chaka” introduction.
Blue Swede released “Hooked on a Feeling” in Sweden in May 1973 and in the United States in February 1974. The song reached number one in the U.S. for one week in April 1974 and stayed in the Billboard Hot 100 chart for 18 weeks. The track also topped charts in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, where it reached a peak chart position of 26.[3] To capitalize on the success of the song, Blue Swede released an album of the same name that same year.

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BJ Thomas I could cry – Search (bing.com)

The following year, Thomas recorded “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head” which Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote for 20th Century Fox’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The film went on to be the top grossing-movie of 1969 and win the Oscar for Best Song, while the single became Thomas’ first
No. 1, spending four weeks on top at the beginning of 1970.

Listening to the classic “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” it’s easy to notice
what appear to be some struggles by the singer. Thomas actually was recovering
from laryngitis when he recorded it, which gave the song its singular vocal sound.

The song also earned Thomas his first Grammy nomination; was inducted into
the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014; and is heard in subsequent films and TV shows
ranging from Forrest Gump and Spider-Man 2 to Clerks II, Family Guy and last year’s
“Mrs. America.”

 B.J. Thomas & Dusty Springfield – As Long as We Got Each Other the theme
song from ABC’s Growing Pains that led off all 167 episodes of the 1985-92 sitcom. 

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Sceptre Records

Thomas returned to the top 10 that year with “I Just Can’t Help Believing” –
before a run of nearly five years when only two of his singles — “No Love at All” and
“Rock and Roll Lullaby,” with Duane Eddy on guitar — reached the national top 20.

He roared back to the pop spotlight in 1975 with “ [Hey Won’t You Play] Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” which became his second pop No. 1
and won the Best Country Song Grammy for its writers Chips Moman & Larry Butler.

It also is the song with the longest title to top the Hot 100.
He won Grammy Awards every year from 1976-81 for his recordings of such tracks
as ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ from ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ by Reba Rambo & Dony McGuire
and “Amazing Grace” and the 1976 LP Home Where I Belong.

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When was Carl Helvie diagnosed with cancer?  1974

Carl O. Helvie – Nursing Theory (nursing-theory.org)

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Carl O. Helvie (August 13, 1932 – December 3, 2019)[1] was an American registered nurse and Professor Emeritus of Nursing at Old Dominion University. Helvie is known for his development and implementation of the Helvie Energy Theory of Nursing and Health.[2][3]  Remembered As the longest lived lung cancer survivor[4][5] he has focused on holistic alternative integrative health and wellness interventions. A major part of his career also focused on education, practice and research with homeless and low-income individuals and families. 

A dream sparked a significant turning point in Helvie’s life in 1974.
In the dream, he received the message that he needed to get an X-ray. He had no symptoms, but the X-rays revealed a spot on his lungs that was diagnosed as lung cancer. Reviewing his experience as a nurse, he surprised the doctor by refusing the prescription for surgery.
The doctor responded by pronouncing, “You’ll be dead in six months.”
A friend of a friend at the National Cancer Institute had success with a program
that included laetrile, a raw fruit and vegetable diet, and an exercise program. 
Helvie began the regimen and incorporated his own program of prayer, meditation, and positive visualization. When asked about the controversy surrounding the use of laetrile, Helvie described how the body uses certain enzymes involved in protein digestion to work with the laetrile.
In his experience, part of his protocol’s success was due to following nutrition guidelines. Eating meat or fish prevented those enzymes from being available for the laetrile.
In due course, Helvie was pronounced cancer-free and has been cancer-free ever since. 
The importance of living a holistic life; “lifestyle is very important in staying healthy; incorporate spirituality and enjoy what you’re doing in life. If you’re not staying positive, you’re not attracting positivity back to you.”

Lung Cancer Healed with Natural Therapies (Dr Carl O. Helvie) –
Cancer Compass an Alternate Route (cancer compass alternate route.com)

Longest Lung Cancer Survivor Used Laetrile and
Other Holistic Natural Interventions – Bing video

The Story of How Carl O. Helvie Cured Himself of Cancer – Life Stories Productions
If you were given a diagnosis of lung cancer and told you had six months to live –
that’s pretty much a death sentence, right? Wrong! 
When Dr. Carl Helvie was given that very diagnosis 45 years before his death.
He decided it would be without the debilitating effects of traditional medicine.
Up onto his death on December 3, 2019, of a ruptured intestine he was not only free of chronic illnesses and prescribed medications. But was known as the longest living lung cancer survivor!
His book, You Can Beat Lung Cancer: Using Alternative/Integrative Interventions (Ayni Books), is one of the most comprehensive books on alternative treatment for lung cancer.
We have been conditioned to believe that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are the only way to fight cancer but, according to Helvie, “this could not be more wrong!” Interestingly, a team of researchers in Washington state recently discovered by ‘accident’ that chemotherapy does not treat or cure cancer at all but rather fuels the growth of cancer cells, making it even more difficult to destroy the second time around.

Using holistic natural interventions of supplements, herbs, enzymes, diet, prayer, meditation, visualization and more. Dr. Helvie not only overcame his cancer but
prevented a recurrence.
So, considering only 11% of Americans over age 65 are free of chronic illnesses,
and by age 75 the average is three chronic illnesses and five prescribed medications, following the steps outlined in his book is like being given back 20+ years of life!

Dr. Helvie’s book is based on his 60-year background in medicine and research, and input from some of the leading medical and health practitioners currently in the field today.
By shedding light on the alternatives to traditional harsh treatments, he is arming us with the necessary information to make a rational decision should we ever be faced with this diagnosis.

Dr. Carl Helvie was a registered nurse with two masters and a doctorate in public health and wellness. He had 60 years experience as a nurse practitioner, educator, author and researcher and is the recipient of numerous awards and has listings in Who’s Who In American Nursing, Men of Achievement, American Men and Women of Science, just to name a few.
He has eight published books, has contributed to others, and has published
or presented internationally over 100 papers and articles. He developed and published a nursing theory that is used worldwide and has established a nursing center that provides primary care for homeless and low-income individuals and families.
Dr. Helvie wrote for magazines and was the host of a radio show on natural holistic health. www.BeatLungCancer.net. You can still listen to Carl O. Helvie and his guest archives at: www.bbsradio.com/theholistichealthshow

Available at fine bookstores or online outlets
You Can Beat Lung Cancer: Using Alternative/Integrative Interventions:
Helvie, Carl O: 9781780992839: Books: Amazon.com

Publisher: Ayni Books
Released: November 16, 2012
ISBN-10: 1780992831
ISBN-13: 978-1780992839
###

Reviews:
G. Edward Griffin, Author of World Without Cancer, The Politics of Cancer Therapy, President of American Media: “… one of the most comprehensive books available on alternative treatments for lung cancer…explains the treatments used successfully by
[this] cancer survivor /health professional and some of the leading medical and health practitioners in the field.”

Julian Kenyon, MD, Medical Director, The Dove Clinic for Integrated Medicine:
“Helvie’s case is remarkable…a man of great courage, who has followed a natural
approach to his life-threatening illness, and this has resulted in a cure…”

Patrick Quillin, PhD, RD, CNS; Author of Beating Cancer with Nutrition and Adjuvant Nutrition in Cancer Treatment: “Lung cancer is both common and lethal…Helvie approaches subject as both health care professional and lung cancer survivor…invaluable advice for beating this disease that is often called “a death sentence” if diagnosed in later stages of the disease…not only offered his invaluable experiences as a cancer victor, but adds the wisdom of other world class experts on the subject of cancer treatment.
If you or a loved one have lung cancer, then this book could become your ‘get out of jail free’ card toward recovery or at least a dramatic extension in quality and quantity of life.”

Frank Shallenberger, MD, HMD, ABAAM, Author, Medical Director,
The Nevada Center of Alternative Medicine:
“If you are ever diagnosed with advanced cancer, the odds are very good that your oncologist will tell you that unless you immediately consent to chemotherapy you are going to die. This is a lie!
I know, I’ve been treating conventional chemotherapy failures for years. Other than for leukemia or lymphoma, conventional chemotherapy is almost always a death sentence. There are so many more effective ways to treat advanced cancer, and Dr. Carl Helvie’s [book] describes some of the most effective.”

Source: Dr. Carl Helvie – Good News! (goodnewsplanet.com)

Country music star Toby Keith reveals stomach cancer diagnosis.

New drug cures cancer for 100% of patients in trial (msn.com)

New vaccine could prevent deadliest cancer returning

Signs You Have a “Deadly” Form of Cancer

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Okinawans Falling Life Expectancy

Posted on June 10, 2022 by Ken
Many Okinawans have recently adopted the ‘hurry, hurry’ approach to life that is more associated with mainland Japan:

What’s behind Okinawans’ falling life expectancy?
Julian Ryall (Tokyo), Deutsche Welle

An influx of foreign influences, ranging from fast food to less exercise, the stress of modern life, as well as a loss of the traditional sense of “Ikegami” in younger people are all to blame. For generations, the people of Okinawa prefecture in Japan have enjoyed the reputation of being among the longest-lived humans on the planet.

What Is the Okinawa Diet? Foods, Longevity, and More (healthline.com)

Okinawa foods they eat – Bing video
Medical experts and gerontologists have flocked to these semi-tropical islands off southern Japan in search of the secret to the local population’s longevity, with most concluding it was a combination of a nutritious diet, regular exercise and the support of family and the broader community.

Today, however, that is changing. And while the wider Japanese population is living longer than ever before, the people of Okinawa are beginning to die earlier. And the blame is being pinned on younger generations turning their backs on the old way of life in the islands.

In 1980, Okinawa had the highest average life expectancy for both men and women, with men generally expected to reach at least 84 and women going on until the age of 90.

Life expectancy declines:
But that enviable record has begun to slip. By 1990, average life expectancy for Okinawan men was only the fifth highest of the 47 prefectures in Japan and by 2020 had fallen to 36th place on the list. Okinawan women were top of the prefectural list until 2005 but were down to seventh spot in 2020.

In the 2020 census, conducted by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, Okinawan men lived to an average age of 80.27 and women reached 87. Makoto Suzuki has a close interest in the subject; he is 89 years old and has been studying the reasons behind his fellow islanders’ longevity all his life.

“The life expectancy of the people of Okinawa is coming down quite rapidly and we
believe the problem is that younger people have failed to follow in the footsteps of earlier generations,” said Suzuki, who still works part time as a clinical cardiologist and is joint-founder of the Naha-based Okinawa Research Center for Longevity Sciences.

“The people of Okinawa have been influenced by the food and lifestyle choices of other societies, particularly that of the United States,” he told DW. Since Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II in 1945, Okinawa has remained home to a large number of US military bases and tens of thousands of troops.

A culture of fast food and television over physical exercise has rubbed off on local people, he said, and the results can now be seen. “Typically, the Okinawan diet included lots of vegetables, local fruit, dishes such as ‘tofu’ and fish and meat, although in small portions,” he said, adding: “When I was a boy, we had meat about once a week and that is a habit
I have stuck with to this day.”

Related video: Inside Japan’s highly effective Lost and Found system.

“When I was younger, I would also do a lot of walking, climbing and archery, but I do not do so much now, mostly because I just do not have the time for those hobbies anymore.

Significance of Faith in Life – Happy Science Ikegami (happyscience-ikegami.com)

The importance of ‘ikegami’ – Loving where you’re out in Life.
“I also believe the concept of ‘ikegai’ is important to our lives, especially in older people,” Suzuki said, referring to the traditional idea of the reason a person has for living. “My job at the hospital is very busy and that is my ikegai,” he said. 
“I also believe the concept of ‘ikegai’ is important to our lives, especially in older people,” Suzuki said, referring to the traditional idea of the reason a person has for living.

“My job at the hospital is very busy and that is my ikegai,” he said. “It is important for me to help people who are sick and I do not consider them my patients, I see them as my friends. But being with them also helps me as isolation and loneliness are very dangerous for old people.

“My wife died two years ago so now I often go to the hospital at night to be with other people as my friends are there.” Tomoko Owan, an associate professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of the Ryukyus, agrees that outside influences have had a negative impact on the islanders’ well-being.

“Okinawa has been famous as a place where people live well into old age, but that began to change in the years after the war,” she said. “People from overseas moved here and they brought their own cultures with them. Slowly, local people became mixed in with these newcomers and our diet and traditions changed.” Food is one important element that has altered, she says, but there are others.

There are 3 Key Lessons from Karate that Teach Us to Keep Fighting
the Good Fight so we can Persevere in the long run.  

Lesson # 1
Everything isn’t always as it seems–  Sometimes our circumstances take us places we don’t really want to be.  They can be overwhelming and discouraging.  In the movie Mr. Miyagi says over and over to Daniel ‘Everything isn’t always as it seems.’  In the beginning of their training Mr. Miyagi has Daniel son wash, wax, sand and paint various things around his house.  Daniel son becomes frustrated, because he thinks Mr. Miyagi is using him as a slave to do his work for him.  On the surface it looked like Daniel was being used to do Miyagi’s work, but in reality he was being prepared for something bigger.  In this Karate Kid montage clip, Mr. Miyagi reveals why Daniel had been doing what he was doing 
(to view Click Here.)

Lesson #2
You are being prepared for something bigger–  Just as Mr. Miyagi was preparing Daniel son for the fight, God is preparing You for something bigger.  Mr. Miyagi didn’t tell Daniel son his plan, but he didn’t have to.  Daniel son needed to learn Karate and he knew in order to learn, he had to trust Mr. Miyagi that he knew what he was doing.  

We may not always know what God is up to or understand it, but we don’t need to.  God knows better than anyone what we need, because he is the one who created us.  His ways and plans are so much better and greater than mine.  You are Loved my friend, that is the only part of God’s plan we need to know. “Do not be overcome by evil, however, overcome evil with good.”  Romans 12:21

Lesson #3
Never Fight evil with evil, Fight evil with Good–  No matter what evil tactics Daniel’s opponents tried to use, Mr. Miyagi was teaching him never fight evil with evil, it will never get you anywhere.  The same way Daniel’s opponents were trying to steal, undermine, cut-off, kill and destroy is the same thing the enemy tries to do to us.
The enemies of doubt, fear, and discouragement would like nothing more than to keep you right where you are.

The definition of STUCK:
Satan Steals
Tries to
Undermine
Cut-off
Kill, destroy

 No matter how many times Daniel’s enemy tried to knock him down, he kept getting right back up. He was able to persevere, because of his training and being equipped with the right tools for the fight.  You are more than a conqueror fighting an endless battle.

God is equipping and preparing you for something More.  He has made you Persevere not to be overcome by evil.  (Click to Tweet)

Keep Fighting the Good Fight
In the end of Karate Kid 1, Mr. Miyagi didn’t know Daniel was going to be the champion of the fight. In the process of his preparation, Daniel became stronger which enabled him to persevere in the long run. The lessons we learn in the Process are some of the most valuable lessons we can learn. You are being prepared for something greater, God will use your trials for something better. You can rejoice despite your circumstances because of God’s love for You. His love is so much greater than any amount of evil. 
His love will Persevere.  No matter how long and hard your fight may be, know that you are always Victorious in Jesus. Nothing the enemy can do can ever change what Jesus has done for us already.  Jesus has  defeated the grave, the victory against death has already been Won.  God’s truth and love for you never changes, it always stays the same no matter what.

You were made for More.  
Has the Enemy Tested Your Faith and Try to Keep You STUCK?
 
What kind of more is Your Life Filled with?
Lesson #1–Adapt to the circumstances. Dre and his mother moved to another land far away and with a different language. Although very difficult to adapt under these circumstances, Dre found a way. He started making friends and learning the language.
Lesson #2–Sometimes you have to fight to keep a friendship alive. Dre and Mei Ying had many challenges in their friendship. Their friendship was opposed by Mei Ying’s parents and by Cheng, the bully, and his crowd. Nevertheless they valued each other’s friendship enough to persevere.
Lesson #3–Everyone has their moments of weakness. Mr. Han was idolized by Dre. Even so, Mr. Han had his own demons. Mr Han’s weakness was exposed in the car scene. The victim of a tragedy involving his family, he was unable to overcome the grief.
Lesson #4–Grief and sadness can be overcome by throwing yourself into your training. Dre was wise enough to know what would drag Mr. Han out of his grief–focus on training.
Lesson #5–When blocking, be powerful and strong. Your first move in a self defence situation, usually a block, has to be strong to be effective. Mr. Han illustrated this with Dre.
Lesson #6–Life will knock us down, but we can choose to get back up. There will always be setbacks in life, but how we react to them is the true test of our character. Dre chose to rise to the challenge.
Lesson #7–A warrior’s spirit is not forged in one day. The hours upon hours Dre spent with Mr. Han, the relentless jacket drill, and the other brutal training methods are what forged Dre’s spirit.
Lesson #8–By confronting our fears we overcome the fear itself and gain respect from others. By facing Cheng and the others in the ring, Dre overcame his fear of them and earned the respect of Master Li’s kung fu school.
Lesson #9–Trust in your teacher. The sensei has many more years of training than you. You must follow his or her advice without question if you are to progress in the martial arts. Dre did not see the wisdom of the jacket drill at first, but he persisted because he trusted Mr. Han. Finally at the end of his rope, Dre understood the value of the drill when Mr. Han showed him how it worked in a real self defense situation.
Lesson #10–There are no bad students, only bad teachers. So true, as Master Li was affecting every student in his organization with his poisonous attitude. Every one of his students was once a white belt and had the potential to be a good person, if only guided by the right teacher.

“This was an island society in which the family and community were always very important,” she said. “It was peaceful and, in the past, the people had little stress.”

A rural backwater in years gone by, many Okinawans have recently adopted the “hurry, hurry” approach to life that is more associated with mainland Japanese, Owan pointed out, while growing commitments to work mean there is less time for relaxation, for friends and family and a person’s hobbies.

Karate is closely associated with Okinawa and, to this day, many elderly Okinawans practice the martial art. Owan herself teaches karate in her university and says it is an indispensable part of her daily exercise routine. It is, she emphasizes, training for the body, the mind and the soul.

Yet younger generations of Okinawans seem content with their present way of life,
even if it means they are unlikely to live as long as their grandparents.
“This is the modern Japanese lifestyle,” said Shuhei Kohagura, a 39-year-old official
with the prefecture’s tourism agency, admitting that he puts in a lot of overtime hours at work every week, grabs a snack from a local convenience store for his lunch and goes out drinking after work with colleagues.

“I grew up with this way of living so it is comfortable for me now, even though I do complain that I’m too busy a lot of the time,” he said. “The traditional way of life here might sound appealing but I think it would be very hard for me to adapt to that because it is just so different to everything that I have become accustomed to.”

Pointing out that his own mother lived to be 105 years old, Suzuki stressed that he
intends to continue to work as a doctor for as long as possible. “I think the young people of Okinawa have failed to learn from their elders,” he said. “It’s unfortunate as they are not living so long, but our society has undergone serious changes in a short period of time.”

Okinawa fruit off a tree – Bing images
Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru

Copyright 2022 DW.COM, Deutsche Welle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Body Movement Healing Effect

Posted on June 10, 2022 by Ken
The nice thing is that light to moderate exercise is enough to help people tackle anxiety.
Photograph: Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times

Can Moving the Body Heal the Mind? Gretchen Reynolds
How light exercise can help with depression, anxiety and stress
Walking, cycling, swimming, dancing – a wide variety of activities work!

Can moving the body heal the mind? | bdnews24.com
When Jennifer Heisz was in college, she borrowed a friend’s aged, rusty bicycle – and wound up redirecting her career. At the time, she was studying cognitive neuroscience, but, dissatisfied with the direction of her work and her personal life, began experiencing what she now recognizes as “pretty severe anxiety”. Her friend suggested biking as a reprieve. Not previously athletic, she took to the riding with enthusiasm, finding it “soothed my mind,” she said.

That discovery convinced her to change the focus of her research.
Now the director of the NeuroFit Lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, she studies the interplay of physical and emotional health and how exercise helps stave off or treat depression, anxiety, stress and other mental health conditions. “The effects of motion on the mind are just so pervasive and fascinating,” Heisz said. That idea animates her new book –
Move the Body, Heal the Mind – which details the latest science about exercise and mental health, as well as her own journey from inactivity and serial emotional slumps to triathlon training and increasing serenity.

“Can we talk about exercise and anxiety, which many of us are feeling these days?”
Exercise is extremely beneficial for reducing anxiety. At the end of every workout, in fact, you typically get a brief reprieve from anxiety, due to neuropeptide Y, which increases with exercise. It’s a resiliency factor. It helps soothe the anxious amygdala, which is the part of the brain that recognizes danger and puts us on high alert. For the last few years, with the pandemic, our amygdala has been on hyper-alert, setting off an almost constant stress response. This chronicity of stress starts to make our minds really fearful, and you wind up with constant anxiety. Exercise, by up-regulating neuropeptide Y, helps soothe the anxious amygdala, dial down the fear and hyper-vigilance and keep us calmer.”

“Any particular type of exercise?“
“The really nice thing is that light to moderate exercise, like walking, is enough. Research from my lab shows this kind of exercise reduces anxiety immediately after your workout and then, over time, if you keep exercising, it reduces anxiety even more and for longer.
It looks like about 30 minutes of this kind of exercise three times a week is good. Walking, cycling, swimming, dancing – a wide variety of activities work.

” What about more intense workouts? “
You need to be careful with really intense exercise and anxiety. If you’re feeling anxiety, you’re already under stress. High-intensity exercise is also a kind of stress. But our bodies only have, in general, one stress response. So, during intense exercise, you add extreme physical stress onto the stress your body already is feeling and it might all become too much. Right before the pandemic, I was training for a triathlon and doing a lot of high-intensity workouts. But once the pandemic started, I was feeling so much emotional stress, I couldn’t finish those workouts. So, I backed off. What I would tell people is that, when you’re already feeling stressed-out, prolonged, intense exercise may not be the right option.”   

“What would you recommend people do instead?“
Aim for exercise that feels comfortably challenging, so your heart rate is elevated but not racing. For a lot of people, that would mean taking a brisk walk around the park or the block.” Jennifer Heisz, the director of the NeuroFit Lab at McMaster University, at the school in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. March 12, 2022. In her new book, Heisz blends personal experience and the latest science about how exercise can improve your mental well-being. (Narisa Ladak/The New York Times)

image.png

Jennifer Heisz, the director of the NeuroFit Lab at McMaster University,, at the school
in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. March 12, 2022. In her new book, Heisz blends personal experience and the latest science about how exercise can improve your mental well-being. (Narisa Ladak/The New York Times)

“Does exercise help in the same ways against depression?“
Classically, depression has been blamed on a lack of serotonin in the brain, which antidepressants treat. But for some people with depression the drugs don’t work well, probably because serotonin is not their problem. Many of us who study depression now think their problem may involve inflammation, which is linked to stress.
The inflammation starts to damage cells in the body, inducing an immune response and increasing inflammation, which can then get into the brain, affecting mood. For those people, exercise may be the medicine they need, because it helps fight the inflammation. In studies, when individuals who haven’t responded to antidepressants start exercising, they usually see significant reductions in their symptoms.

”How much exercise are we talking about?“
One study that looked at frequency, or how much exercise you need to combat depression, compared 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week, which is the standard exercise recommendation for physical health, with a quarter of that.
And both groups benefited the same. So, it looks like the exercise prescription for mental health is less than that for physical health, which is kind of nice.”

In terms of helping to potentially combat depression.

“Do you think the exercise intensity matters?“
It might. We conducted a study a few years ago with healthy students who were facing high-pressure final exams. Some of them rode stationary bicycles moderately three times a week for 30 minutes and others did shorter, more-intense interval cycling. A third group didn’t exercise at all. After six weeks, the students who hadn’t worked out showed symptoms of fairly serious depression, which had come on shockingly fast, and presumably from their academic stress. The students who had been exercising moderately, though, were less stressed out than they had been at the start of the study and their bodies’ inflammation levels were lower. But what’s really interesting to me is that the intense exercisers showed symptoms of increased stress, both physical and mental.

So, it does look as if moderate exercise may be the most beneficial for mental health.
”You talk frankly in your book about your own bouts of anxiety, stress and obsessive compulsive disorder, including after the birth of your daughter and, later, your divorce. Did exercise help you cope?“
It’s the key. Mental illness can happen to anyone, even people who seem to be handling things well. For me and many other people, life transitions, like divorce & childbirth, can be especially challenging. After my divorce, I really needed something to redirect my life. And I knew how potently exercise, as a stimulus, alters the brain. Someone mentioned triathlons. I was still biking then. So, I added in the running and swimming.”

And qualified for the World Championships?
“Eventually, yes. But it took years. Then the championships were delayed by
the pandemic and now I’m out of shape and will have to start training all over again.
But that’s something to look forward to, really. What I find is that, in times like these,
there is solace in exercise. In the peaceful moments after a workout ~ all hope is alive.
You feel like the world is right again. And that’s really special.” – SOURCE NY Times.

Can moving the body heal the mind? | bdnews24.com
Marjie Gilliam Exercise Videos – Search (bing.com)
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Fear·mon·ger·ing

Posted on June 8, 2022 by Ken
WHO: COVID cases and deaths falling nearly everywhere (msn.com)?

The ‘Mortality Gap’ Between Republican and Democratic counties is widening.
Adrianna Rodriguez

A new study found death rates are improving faster in Democratic counties than Republican ones. Experts are calling this phenomenon the “mortality gap,” and say state policies, individual health decisions and a shift in party demographics may be widening it. 
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital looked at mortality rates using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and compared them to federal and state election data from 2001 to 2019.

The team compiled data from more than 3,000 U.S. counties in all 50 states and
found mortality rates decreased by 22% in Democratic counties but dropped only 11% in Republican counties, according to the study published Tuesday in the British Medical Journal. 
“We wanted to see whether political affiliation had an association with death rates in the U.S.,” said corresponding author Dr. Haider Warraich, associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “Over these two decades, the mortality gap between Republican and Democratic counties has really widened quite considerably.”

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Mortality rates in Democratic counties dropped from 850 deaths per 100,000 people to 664, but in Republican counties, mortality rates declined from 867 to 771. The mortality gap widened across leading causes of death in the U.S. including heart disease, cancer, drug overdoses and suicide.
Democratic counties also saw greater reductions in deaths from chronic lower respiratory tract diseases, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease. 
But when Warraich and colleagues stratified the data by race and ethnicity, they found there was little difference between the improvements in mortality rates of Black and Hispanic residents in Democratic and Republican counties.

“The real reason why we think this gap occurred between Democratic and Republican counties is because of what’s going on with white Americans,” Warraich said. “White Americans who live in Democratic areas are much more likely to have great improvements in health compared to white people who live in Republican counties.”
Although Black and Hispanic Americans in Republican counties saw greater reductions in mortality rate compared to their white counterparts, the study still found Black residents experienced an overall higher mortality rate than any other race and ethnicity, regardless of the county’s political leaning. 

 Health experts say Democratic counties are more likely to adopt policies that benefit health outcomes. Study authors observed a substantial drop in mortality rates
in Democratic counties after the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, Warraich said.
More Democratic states than Republican states adopted Medicaid expansion under the ACA, which expanded health insurance coverage to people with low income.
“This data can open people’s eyes to the fact that policy matters and it’s having
a real effect on people’s lives,” he said.

However, health experts say individual behavior can’t be discounted as research
has shown people living in Democratic counties are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors, experts say.
“From what we’ve seen over time, many health behaviors have become divided over political lines,” Warraich said. “Democratic-leaning people are more likely to accept vaccination, practice social distancing, and more likely to engage in healthier habits.”
The widening gap may also be due to a shift in party base, said Dr. Peter Muennig, professor of health policy and management at Columbia University Mailman School
of Public Health, who is not affiliated with the study.


par·a·digm shift

White, working-class Americans who were once a part of the Democratic party shifted to the Republican party when former President Donald Trump began his campaign, he said. This shift also pushed wealthier Americans towards the Democratic party.
“The takeaway is that we’re seeing social shifts that mean that the Democratic party
is increasingly pulling in healthier people and the Republican party is pulling in sicker people,” Muennig said.
Although the study period ended before the pandemic, health experts worry the coronavirus may have further widened the mortality gap between Republican and Democratic counties. 

In another study published Monday in Health Affairs, a team led by University of Maryland researchers found majority-Republican counties experienced 73 more
COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people compared to their Democratic counterparts. Although the studies highlight an ideological divide, health experts hope they can bring lawmakers from both sides together to improve health outcomes. 
“It’s my hope this paper instead of further widening the partisan divide can actually sensitize people in wanting to come together for a common cause,” Warraich said.
“That common cause being that we all want to live long and healthy lives.”

Beyond differences in attitudes about masking, social distancing and vaccines, a study, published in Health Affairs and led by the University of Maryland has found that Republican counties have higher death rates from COVID-19.
Comparing the number of COVID-19 deaths through October 2021 with counties’
voting behavior in the 2020 presidential election, they found that Republican counties (where 70% or more voted Republican) experienced nearly 73 more COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people compared to Democratic counties (where less than 30% voted Republican).
According to researchers, the disparity in mortality rates between Democratic and Republican counties was predominantly due to structural, policy and behavioral differences in the more conservative counties.

Pandemic politics influence the rate of death across the USA.
Neil Jay Sehgal, assistant professor of health policy and management in UMD’s School of Public Health, said: “People living in states and counties with more conservative voters are dying at higher rates from a largely preventable disease.
Even after they controlled their analysis for other characteristics likely to influence COVID-19 transmission and mortality such as age, race/ethnicity, chronic disease and access to health care, results remained the same for Republican counties.

“COVID-19 vaccine uptake only explained 10% of the difference in mortality between red and blue counties. The vaccine-only approach to public health isn’t doing enough to combat the continued toll we are paying.”
Senior author Dylan Roby, associate professor of health, society and behaviour in the UC Irvine Program in Public Health, added: “Voting behaviors at the county level are likely to represent the compliance or lack of compliance with mask mandates, vaccine uptake and use of other protective policies to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic.”
The United States surpassed 1 million deaths from COVID-19 in 2022

And In Biden’s second year, US infection rates continue to rise in many states, to which, these policies could help prevent infections and reduce the chance of serious outcomes among those who do get infected, including death or the lingering symptoms known as long COVID, which may affect as many as 30% of people who have been infected.
Sehgal said: “The impact of partisanship doesn’t only impact people of one political stripe. Not everyone who lives in a Republican County votes Republican. In very few of these counties was there 70% or greater vote share.
“Even in the reddest counties, you have people who aren’t able to vote or aren’t able to leave, and yet are subject to the policies and behaviors that surround them. If they are older, immunocompromised or an essential worker, that puts them at greater risk of death or disability.”

Red counties have higher mortality rates than blue counties — and the gap is growing’

Pandemic politics
GENERALLY REPUBLICAN COUNTIES HAVE AN OLDER POPULATION!!!

Pandemic politics: People in Republican counties were more likely to die from COVID-19, new analysis shows by University of Maryland JUNE 6, 2022.

Cumulative COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people, by county proportion of Republican presidential popular vote in the 2020 election, January 1, 2020–October 31, 2021.
Credit: Neil Jay Sehgal, University of Maryland
The partisan divide in the United States throughout the COVID-19 pandemic stretched beyond differences in attitudes about masking, social distancing and vaccines. According to a new study led by a University of Maryland researcher, it also is tied to a clear difference in mortality rates from the virus.

In the study, published today in Health Affairs, Neil Jay Sehgal, assistant professor of health policy and management in UMD’s School of Public Health, and co-authors from UMD and the University of California, Irvine Program in Public Health compared the number of COVID-19 deaths through October 2021 with counties’ voting behavior in the 2020 presidential election. Their analysis controlled for other characteristics likely to influence COVID-19 transmission and mortality such as age, race/ethnicity, chronic disease and access to health care.

They found that Republican counties (where 70% or more voted Republican) experienced nearly 73 more COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people compared to Democratic counties (where less than 30% voted Republican).
“People living in states and counties with more conservative voters are dying at higher rates from a largely preventable disease,” Sehgal said. “COVID-19 vaccine uptake only explained 10% of the difference in mortality between red and blue counties. The vaccine-only approach to public health isn’t doing enough to combat the continued toll we are paying.”

The disparity in mortality rates between Republican and Democratic counties was due largely to structural, policy and behavioral differences in the more conservative counties.
“Voting behaviors at the county level are likely to represent the compliance or lack of compliance with mask mandates, vaccine uptake and use of other protective policies to mitigate the impacts of the pandemic,” said senior author Dylan Roby, associate professor of health, society and behavior in the UC Irvine Program in Public Health.
Since the United States surpassed 1 million deaths from COVID-19 earlier this spring and infection rates are up in many states, these policies could help prevent infections and reduce the chance of serious outcomes among those who do get infected, including death or the lingering symptoms known as long COVID, which may affect as many as 30% of people who have been infected. Death by political party: The relationship between
COVID‐19 deaths and political party affiliation in the United States – PMC (nih.gov)

The state with the most conservatives in America, according to data.

image.png

Death rates per 1,000 people in 2015
Greater Darker to Lighter Colors

List of U.S. states and territories by median age – Wikipedia
Median Age by State 2022 (worldpopulationreview.com)
Want to live longer? You may need to move – Big Think
Mortality rates differ by U.S. state. Why? – Big Think
Why is life expectancy in the US so low? – Big Think
COVID-19 Death Rate by State | US News Best States
Population Over 65 by State (2022) | ConsumerAffairs
• U.S. COVID-19 death rate by state | Statista
United States Mortality Database
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

MAcro Diet Plan

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Ken
Nutrient-rich foods often keep you fuller than less healthy alternatives, even if the calories and macros are similar.  © Getty

Macro Diet Plan – Bing video
By Rachel Hosie

Overall macros and calories matter most for fat loss and muscle maintenance, diet coach Nick Shaw said. However, prioritizing nutritious foods keeps you fuller and can make it easier to hit your targets. Don’t cut out any foods you enjoy though, just try to eat them in moderation.

Read more Working It Out here.

Dear Rachel,
I’ve started counting my macros with the goals of losing fat, maintaining muscle, and just keeping myself healthy. However, I’m wondering how much it matters what type of foods I eat. For example, if I eat the same amount of carbs from oats or cookies, or the same amount of fat from avocado or bacon, will it have a different effect on my body? Essentially, if I can fit all foods into my macro targets, is it OK to do so as much as I want?
— Macro Counter

Dear Macro Counter,
The approach you’re describing is commonly referred to as “if it fits your macros,” or IIFYM. Macro-tracking is sometimes considered a step-up from calorie-counting.
There are three macronutrients (or macros): protein, carbohydrates, and fat, and these make up all our foods in different quantities. Protein and carbs have four calories per gram, and fat has nine.

“Food is not just made up of one single nutrient, there are often a combination of
macro and micronutrients, such as vitamins and minerals, found within food products,” Rhiannon Lambert, registered nutritionist and author of “The Science of Nutrition,”
told Insider.
While some people enjoy tracking their macros, I’ve always found it unnecessary to hit my goals — I’m more concerned with calories and protein alone and have found these to be the most important factors for performance and physique changes. I let the carbs and fat fall into place, but generally prefer to eat higher carb.

We’re all different though.
 “Each of the macronutrients is required in relatively large amounts every day to support your body, however how much you need depends on your individual needs, such as sex, weight, age, and physical activity levels,” Lambert said.
Nutritious foods keep you fuller
When it comes to fat loss and muscle maintenance, overall calorie and macro intake matters most.  “Technically speaking, the amount of food you eat in terms of calories and then the macronutrient breakdown matters more than the quality of food when it comes to losing weight and body fat,” powerlifter, bodybuilder, diet coach, and personal trainer at RP Strength Nick Shaw told Insider.

But to get the best results, you should consider food quality as well as overall quantity,
he spoke. While you could just eat desserts and bacon to hit your carbs and fat targets,
that would likely leave you not very full or satiated, and potentially lead to more intense cravings, he said. This is unhelpful when trying to stick to a calorie deficit to lose fat.
“The best idea is to use food quality as a means to easier control your food quantity,”
Shaw said.

By prioritizing whole food sources like lean proteins (like chicken), fruit and vegetables, healthy fats (like avocado and olive oil), and carbs (like sweet potato or whole grains),
you will feel more full, have fewer cravings, and still hit your macros, he said.

Don’t forget overall health
Comparing two foods based on their macronutrient content alone doesn’t provide a complete picture, and two foods with similar macros may affect your body and performance differently, Lambert said.
While bacon and avocado may contain similar amounts of fat, the bacon is higher in saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease, and contains fewer micronutrients, Lambert said.
“The avocado on the other hand contains monounsaturated fats, that has been linked to several health benefits including a reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes, and a much greater amount of the micronutrients such as vitamins C, E, K, and B vitamins.”

Don’t overly restrict foods you enjoy 
While eating mainly nourishing whole foods will likely make it easier to stick to your calorie and macro targets, denying yourself anything you enjoy entirely isn’t a good strategy either, as restriction often leads to overeating down the line.
For this reason, I favor the 80/20 rule:
I try to eat about 80% whole foods, and 20% “soul foods.”
Cake, pizza, and fries may not be the most nutritious foods, but I enjoy them, so by including them occasionally in my diet and not putting them on a pedestal or demonizing them, I’m able to enjoy them in moderation without feeling the need to overeat.
“Having a balanced and varied diet ensures that you are including a range of these macro and micronutrients which support a happy and healthy lifestyle,” Lambert said.
Experiment a bit and see what balance of foods makes you feel best, both mentally and physically.

As a senior health reporter at Insider and a self-described fitness fanatic with an Association for Nutrition-certified nutrition course under her belt, Rachel Hosie is immersed in the wellness scene and here to answer all your burning questions.
Whether you’re struggling to find the motivation to go for a run, confused about light versus heavy weights, or unsure whether you should be worried about how much sugar is in a mango, Rachel is here to give you the no-nonsense answers and advice you need, with strictly no fad diets in sight.
Rachel has a wealth of experience covering fitness, nutrition, and wellness, and she has the hottest experts at her fingertips. She regularly speaks to some of the world’s most knowledgeable and renowned personal trainers, dietitians, and coaches, ensuring she’s always up to date with the latest science-backed facts you need to know to live your happiest and healthiest life.

Have a question?
Ask Rachel at workingitout@insider.com or fill out this anonymous form.
All questions will be published anonymously.

Read more Working It Out:
I want to lose fat but also fuel my workouts. How much should I eat?
I do CrossFit 4 times a week. Will it help me lose fat and gain muscle?
I want to lose weight for my wedding. What’s the best way to do it?
I’ve heard it’s important to eat protein right after a workout —
even if I’m not lifting weights. Is that true?
Read the original article on Insider

Hi, my name is Rochelle Johnson
I want to share a formula with you that supports healthy blood sugar (glucose) levels, through the use of fantastic nutrients. This formula can also allow you to enjoy deeper, more restful sleep… And may even reduce hunger cravings, which can make it easier to lose weight without having to stick with a bland diet.

It’s Called GlucoTrust…And just one capsule per day, taken before bedtime, promotes healthy blood sugar levels while giving other health benefits such as…
Promoting healthy blood flow and circulation
Reducing sugar and junk food cravings
Supporting deep, rejuvenating sleep.
Now I’d like to share some of the nutrients in each capsule of GlucoTrust…

First, GlucoTrust contains Gymnema sylvestra, which comes from a leafy vine. It’s been used for hundreds of years in India for medicinal purposes. This nutrient is known to help restore healthy blood sugar levels while curbing your cravings at the same time. Next there is biotin, which gets its name from the Greek word “biotos,” which means “life.”

A daily dose of biotin can help your body to convert food into energy and metabolize carbs, fats and proteins more effectively.
The biotin you get in every GlucoTrust capsule also promotes healthy hair and skin while supporting your liver, eyesight and nervous system.
GlucoTrust also contains chromium.
This ingredient supports your metabolism and helps it to work faster on burning fat.
Manganese stimulates insulin production, which turns your blood sugar into energy it can burn. Manganese also promotes healthy brain and nervous system function.
Licorice root is one of the world’s oldest herbal remedies, used for thousands of years in traditional Chinese, Middle Eastern and Greek medicines.
It’s also known as a weight loss aid, because it helps to control your appetite while being rich in flavonoids, which are said to prevent obesity.

Cinnamon, known for thousands of years as “the king of spices”.
It also promotes healthy blood pressure, assists with digestion, and has anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-inflammatory properties.
Before finalizing the GlucoTrust formula we also added zinc, which can stimulate insulin production in the pancreas.
And you’ll also enjoy the benefits of juniper berries. Juniper berries were buried in the tombs of ancient pharaohs and used to help the performance of athletes in the Roman Olympics. Their healing powers come from antioxidants that support the immune system.
GlucoTrust also contains several, sleep-enhancing ingredients…
Because when you sleep, your body goes into repair mode. This is especially important when your body is under stress.
Yet the number of hours you sleep means nothing compared to the amount of deep sleep you get.
During deep sleep your body is able to balance important hormones, such as cortisol, your “belly fat storing” hormone.
A lack of deep sleep elevates cortisol. This means the food you eat can get turned into a dangerous form of fat: visceral fat. This is the fat inside of you that wraps around your abdominal organs.
On the other hand, getting deep sleep keeps your cortisol in check while boosting leptin, your hunger-controlling hormone. Get it Now from the link below and the shipping is FREE! bit.ly/3Q4g2Y0

Cut carbs
9 Eating Habits That You Think Help You Lose Weight, but Actually Don’t
Let’s cut through the confusing diet advice and start eating healthy again.
By Jeff Csatari 

Published on June 5, 2022 | 6:38 AM
FACT CHECKED BYOLIVIA TARANTINO

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus once said that change is the only constant in life, and he may as well have been talking about the rules of weight loss.
The rules about how to eat healthy and lose weight have been tweaked and adjusted so often with every new diet strategy that it can be hard to keep track. And amid all the confusion and uncertainty, we often stumble into eating patterns that do more harm than good.
It is very common for people to develop eating habits that they believe are the answer to losing weight, but can backfire, say dietitians. And that’s unfortunate because following misguided advice that doesn’t work can make you feel that something’s wrong with you. Here are some of those eating habits that may be secretly undermining your goal of losing weight. Read on, and for more on how to eat healthy, make sure you avoid these 100 Unhealthiest Foods on the Planet. Read the original article on Eat This, Not That!

Not eating
1. Eating very little

Logic tells us that if we’re gaining weight because we’re eating too much, the opposite—eating very little—should help us lose weight. That’s just wrong and it’s a common approach that often backfires. “Not only can this lead to increased cravings and potentially feeling more out of control around food but entering the starvation zone can slow down your metabolism through adaptive thermogenesis,” says medical board member 
Lisa Moskovitz, RD, a registered dietitian with the NY Nutrition Group and author of The Core 3 Healthy Eating Plan. If your body doesn’t get the calories and nutrients it needs to function properly, it will respond by holding onto fat cells, she says.

chocolate smoothie bowl with banana, peanut butter, and granola
2. Eating loads of smoothie bowls

We know what you’re thinking: “Hey, I’ve been told these foods are super healthy, loaded with antioxidants, filled with tropical fruits and vegetables. What gives?” Well, yes fruit and antioxidants are good, but not at the expense of too many calories and grams of sugar.
“Top these fruit bases off with nut butters and granolas and more fruit and you have a very big calorie bomb that ultimately may lead to more sugar cravings,” warns medical board member Amy Shapiro, MS, RD, founder of Real Nutrition. You need to be choosey about the ingredients that go into smoothie bowls. “Watch your toppings; skip the granola and enjoy nuts, chia seeds, and coconut to reduce the sugar even more,” Shapiro says.

Gluten free bread ready for purchase, for those on the gluten free diet.
3. Thinking ‘gluten-free’ means ‘healthier’

It doesn’t. And it certainly doesn’t mean fewer calories. In fact, going for the gluten-free stuff often leads to eating more processed foods and gluten-free foods often contain more calories than regular wheat products. “Many people believe gluten-free equals low carb, but this is incorrect,” says Shapiro. “If you want to go gluten-free, do not eat the food substitutes like bread, cakes, cookies, and chips. Eat whole foods like potatoes, beans, and gluten-free grains to see results.”

woman pushing bread away
4. Following an ultra-strict low-carb diet:

Carbohydrates have been vilified so often in diet books, online programs, and food advertising that people have taken “watching your carbs” to the extreme by trying to 
cut out almost all carbs. Big mistake. “Yes, you cut calories and may lose water weight initially since carbs hold water in the tissues, but the weight loss typically is fleeting,”
say Eatthis.com medical board members Tammy Lakatos Shames, RDN, CDN, CFT,
and Lyssie Lakatos, RDN, CDN, CFT, also known as The Nutrition Twins.
Carbs are fuel for the brain and your muscles. “Cutting carbs completely is unrealistic since carbs are fuel for the brain and muscles. Without them, you’ll crave the quickest pick-me-up you can find – SUGAR. When you give in to the craving, often you end up throwing in the towel on healthy eating completely, thinking also you have to be very stringent with your diet to see results.” That’s not true.

RELATED: 5 Worst Eating Habits for Sugar Cravings, Says Dietitian

Hungry woman skipping meal
5. Skipping meals

This is a variation of the “eating very little” misguided habit above. You skip breakfast, lunch, or dinner in an effort to cut way back on calories. “Unless you’re intermittent fasting and there’s some consistency to your eating plan, and waiting long hours to eat, will end up making you so hungry that you eat back all of the calories you would’ve eaten at your meal, and then some,” warn The Nutrition Twins.

Plant based healthy fats like avocado olive oil nuts seeds
6. Avoiding all fats all the time

Obsessing over counting daily fat grams is not only not fun, but it’s also not healthy.
“Fat is not the enemy and it’s healthy to include some healthy fats like nuts and olive oil when trying to lose weight,” says registered dietitian nutritionist Lisa Young, PhD, RDN, author of Finally Full, Finally Slim. Fat is satiating, so, even though it’s high calorie, it can help you lose weight.
“The key is to include healthy fats in reasonable portions,” says Dr. Young. “Enjoy 1/4 cup of nuts as a snack and use one tablespoon of full-fat salad dressing (olive oil-based) on your salad.”


7. Choosing low-fat or fat-free products

That’s another mistake dieters make that leads to unhealthy behaviors. “Fat-free foods don’t fill you up, so you end up eating larger portions of fat-free food which ultimately leads to overeating and intensified cravings,” says Shapiro. “When you remove fat from foods, it is often replaced with sugar to improve the taste.” Excess sugar eaten turns to fat, which is exactly what you’re trying to prevent.

steak on grill with garlic cloves
8. Overdoing the protein

The low-carb obsession goes hand in hand with another—loading up on protein.
“Many people think if I cut carbs, I can eat all the protein (think meat!) that I want without paying attention to portion sizes,” says Dr. Young. “I’ve seen clients gain weight using this approach.” A better way to eat for weight loss, says Dr. Young: “Include foods from all the food groups and pay attention to portion sizes as well as hunger levels.”

granola
9. Going vegan

Eating a vegan diet can be healthy and certainly can help with weight loss.
But if you don’t go about, it the right way, you can end up gaining weight. “We see this frequently in our practice—a few servings of nut butter, several tablespoons of olive oil, and a big bowl of granola or pasta, and you may already meet your calorie needs for the day,” say The Nutrition Twins. If you go vegan, you may need to be extra vigilant about avoiding excess carbs, nuts, oils, and other calorie-dense foods. And remember:
You can get a good dose of satiating protein from plants.

Here are 20 Vegetables Ranked By Protein.

Jeff Csatari, is a contributing writer for Eat This, Not That! is responsible for editing Galvanized Media books and magazines and for advising journalism students through
the Zinczenko New Media Center at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA. Read more

FILED UNDER: Emeli Sandé – Next to Me (Official Music Video)

FOOD & NUTRITION // HABITS // WEIGHT LOSS

More content from Weight Loss
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– The #1 Way Weight Loss Has Changed in the Last Two Years, Says Report
– 5 Best Breakfast Habits for Belly Fat Loss at Any Age
– The #1 Eating Habit for Weight Loss From the Longest Living People
– 5 Eating Habits to Lose Your Gut in Your 50s, Say Dietitians
– 8 Best Breakfasts for Rapid Weight Loss
– 5 Best Fast Food Burgers for Weight Loss, Says Dietitian   

Bonus: 10 personality disorders explained in 1 chart (msn.com)

Vanderbilt researchers release odd findings concerning COVID-19 (msn.com)

6 People Who Should Never Eat Red Meat, According to Dietitians (msn.com)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Our Civil Liberties

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Ken
We need to all remember what is really under attack here.

It’s All Chaos＼(^o^)／
5 Ways We Short-Circuit God’s Power in Our Lives | Live Intentionally
“The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be he who controls
that chaos, his own and that of the enemy.” This quote by Napoleon Bonaparte,
the famous French statesman, and military leader, aptly summarizes why controlling
the chaos is vital to be a winner.  

No matter what anyone says, the Pilgrims came in 1620 to find religious freedom.
To be able to worship God, freely! We need to know our history.
The progressives are trying to destroy our history daily.

We need to remind others of the greatness of America and what we have always
been about. You need only to ask the question, why does everyone want to come here?
And that’s Because Nobody wants to walk in darkness, therefore, being the shining light
on a hill draws them!

Biden ripped for D-Day ‘after-thought’ hours late: ‘Unconscionable’.
Re. JUNE 6, 1944: Thousands of American military men died on D–Day,

on the beaches of Normandy, France. RIP, Brothers. 🎯🇺🇸✝☦ 🙏— 

/From a former (1960’s) infantryman./—- I wonder how the modern FEMINIZED, WOKE military of Leftist KAMALAmerica, ruled by the Globalist Cabal, would perform in such a battle. It welcomes women, cucks, communists, Muslims, perverts, anti–white racists, and is purging its ranks of white conservative (Christian + other non–Muslim) men. ⁉—- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmiphUYwL_0&t=437s

Markets should brace for ‘fire’ and ‘ice’: Morgan Stanley executive warns of a recession and even bigger ‘paradigm shift’ (msn.com)

‘Very strange and somewhat alarming’: White House, Justice aides offer insider accounts of Jan. 6 Capitol attack (msn.com)  

The Sequel to The Fall of the Cabal Documentary – 22 – Money and Murder in Hospitals (rumble.com)   Midazolam

Ukraine sounds alarm about possible cholera outbreak in Russian-occupied Mariupol
‘The persistence of inflation’ could tip us into recession, Citi managing director says
Global Growth Will Be Choked Amid Inflation and War, Says World Bank (msn.com)
How politically divided is the U.S.? It’s complicated but quantifiable. (msn.com)
Biden ripped for D-Day ‘after-thought’ hours late: ‘Unconscionable’ (msn.com)
Three key indicators showing inflation is poised to ease (msn.com)
How Biofuel May Be Worsening The Food Crisis (msn.com)

United we stand, divided we fall.
They come for one, they come for all.
All for one, and one for all.
Any other way this nation will fall.
If we do not insist on our rights.
We have no rights.
Our right is to do what is right regardless of the cost.
Cowards don’t make the cut.
Wake up. And stay Awake! Get vigilant.
Dark days are here and we need to learn to see in the dark.

First they came for the conspiracy theorist, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a conspiracy theorist.
Then they came for MAGA, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not MAGA.
Then they came for the religious, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not religious.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Because everybody was to distracted to care!!!

https://rumble.com/vn03l1-united-we-stand-divided-we-fall..html

For Katie Sowers, the Ultimate Win is Inspiring Others | GQ

Is Pope Francis nearing the end of his pontificate? (msn.com)

It's all chaos
IT’S ALL CHAOS

Twenty-three short and not so short stories revealing the complexity of human relationships among people of all ages and walks of life. Every reader can find stories he or she can identify with. Reviewer comments: “Aaron’s short story fiction captures many of the thoughts and worries that plague us all, no matter what age we are.” “In these riveting stories of stark prose and lacerating dialogue Aaron’s authentic vision of the post World War II’s sterile era sparkles.” amazon.com

JPMorgan’s chief economist says there’s no reason to be worried about a US recession, with the private sector in ‘remarkable’ shape (msn.com)
Record Crack Spreads, $9.77 A Gallon Gas And Why Pump Prices Seem To Go Up Faster Than They Go Down (msn.com)
China could put 1,000 nukes in range of US, Europe with bullet-train missile launchers
Pandemic doubles migration of wealth out of New York, California and New Jersey, to Florida and Texas.
Media love Biden’s high gas prices while ordinary Americans struggle with pump records
Kamala Harris Emerges as Biden Team’s Leading Voice in Battle Over Abortion Rights
ANALYSIS-Musk’s warning could be auto industry’s ‘canary in the coal mine’ moment
Elite Unit of Russian Army Destroyed in 14-Hour Battle, Ukraine Says (msn.com)
Record number of millennials and Gen Z are defaulting on car loans (msn.com)
US Trade Deficit Narrows Most on Record on Muted China Imports (msn.com)
John Kerry: ‘We Have to Push Back Hard’ on Efforts to Build New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure in Response to Rising Gas Prices (msn.com)

Can America Prevent a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan? | The National Interest
Wage gap between CEOs and US workers jumped to 670-to-1 last year, study finds
California’s Drought Is Making Everything Less Green, Including EVs Erin Marquis
More pain to come for U.S. economy as Fed tightens, economist says | Watch (msn.com)
Newt Gingrich: Biden has no clue the world has gotten very expensive and very dangerous
Newt Gingrich labels Biden the second-worst president in American history (msn.com)
Exposure to high levels of air pollution linked to severe COVID-19: study (msn.com)
Black-White Wealth Gap Getting Worse, 160 Years of US Data Show (msn.com)
Kamala Harris called out on ‘The Five’ on border crisis: Where is she? (msn.com)
World Bank warns global economy may suffer 1970s-style stagflation (msn.com)
Baby formula producer Abbott Nutrition begins production again (msn.com)
Maine Fisherman Catches 100-Year-Old Lobster That Met His Ancestors |

US Inflation Nearer 1980 Peak Than Thought, Summers Group Says (msn.com)
U.S. faces ‘unacceptable levels of inflation,’ Yellen tells senators (msn.com)
US Says China Fabricated Quotes From Diplomats on Xinjiang (msn.com)
Sen. Bennet warns of ‘five-alarm crisis for the American West’ (msn.com)
Biden’s inept Cabinet shares blame for Biden’s many failures (msn.com)
Texas power use hits record for June, all-time peaks to come (msn.com)
With war close by, Finnish women prepare to fight – Search (bing.com)
Some cancer patients can skip treatments, 2 studies show (msn.com)
Subtle Signs of “Deadly Cancer,” According to Experts (msn.com)
Seattle Implodes After Defunding The Police (msn.com)
2023 Cadillac LYRIQ | Electric SUV | Model Overview

Yellen calls elevated inflation ‘unacceptable,’ but offers few solutions to cool prices
World Bank slashes global growth forecast to 2.9%, warns of 1970s-style stagflation
Treasury Secretary Says U.S. Facing ‘Unacceptable Levels of Inflation’ (msn.com)
Lumber prices are falling. Could prices in the housing market follow? (msn.com)
Biden throws last-minute nod to D-Day as disgust for second-year snub grows
World Bank dims outlook for global economy amid Russia war (msn.com)
Varney levels Biden’s claim of ‘most robust recovery in modern history’:
How Americans Are Absorbing Price Surges Tied to Inflation (msn.com)
Three key indicators showing inflation is poised to ease (msn.com)
China’s population crisis is much worse than projected: Expert
Record inflation, recession concerns loom in the US (koaa.com)

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Immunotherapy

Posted on June 7, 2022 by Ken
All participants in the trial saw their tumors disappear using immunotherapy, without surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. (Left to right) Sascha Roth, Dr. Luis Diaz,
Imtiaz Hussain, Dr. Andrea Cercek, Avery Holmes and Nisha Varughese.

Are we on the verge of a cure for cancer? (msn.com)
Trial of rectal cancer drug leads to remission in every patient
Colorectal and Gastrointestinal  Cancer Before 50 Experts at MSK’s Center for Young Onset Colorectal and Gastrointestinal Cancer are devoted to creating the best treatment plan for you and your family. – Search (bing.com)

Four people who were successfully treated for rectal cancer in a clinical trial
at Memorial Sloan Kettering join the trial’s two principal investigators.

Sascha Roth remembers the phone call came on a hectic Friday evening.
She was racing around her home in Washington, D.C., to pack for New York,
where she was scheduled to undergo weeks of radiation therapy for rectal cancer.
But the phone call from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) medical oncologist Andrea Cercek changed everything, leaving Sascha “stunned and ecstatic — 
I was so happy.”

Dr. Cercek told Sascha, then 38, that her latest tests showed no evidence of cancer,
after Sascha had undergone six months of treatment as the first patient in a clinical
trial involving immunotherapy at MSK.
Immunotherapy harnesses the body’s own immune system as an ally against cancer.
The MSK clinical trial was investigating — for the first time ever — if immunotherapy alone could beat rectal cancer that had not spread to other tissues, in a subset of patients whose tumor contain a specific genetic mutation. 
Listen to how immunotherapy is transforming the treatment of cancers at MSK.
“Dr. Cercek told me a team of doctors examined my tests,” recalls Sascha.
“And since they couldn’t find any signs of cancer, Dr. Cercek said there was no reason to make me endure radiation therapy.”

100% Remission of Rectal Cancer
These same remarkable results would be repeated for all 14 people — and counting —
in the MSK clinical trial for rectal cancer with a particular mutation. While it’s a small trial so far, the results are so impressive they were published in The New England Journal of Medicine and featured at the nation’s largest gathering of clinical oncologists in June 2022.
In every case, the rectal cancer disappeared after immunotherapy — without the need for the standard treatments of radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy — and the cancer has not returned in any of the patients, who have been cancer-free for up to two years.
“It’s incredibly rewarding,” says Dr. Cercek, “to get these happy tears and happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realize, ‘Oh my God, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery.’ ”

   image.png
Andrea Cercek
Medical 0ncologist

Her co-investigator, MSK medical oncologist Luis Diaz, Jr., is equally thrilled. He’s spent his career studying how to defeat cancer with immunotherapy. “It’s really exciting,” says Dr. Diaz, a member of the White House’s National Cancer Advisory Board. “I think this is a great step forward for patients.”

Using Immunotherapy Earlier to Target a Genetic Mutation
Drs. Cercek and Diaz explain that their team’s research was sparked by two key ideas.
The first premise, says Dr. Diaz, is to figure out precisely which patients benefit most from immunotherapy, so they can receive it right away. “Immunotherapy has proven successful in treating a subset of patients with colon and rectal cancer that has metastasized, meaning spread to other tissues.”
The patients in this subset, Dr. Diaz explains, have tumors with a specific genetic makeup known as mismatch repair-deficient (MMRd) or microsatellite instability (MSI).
Between 5% and 10% of all rectal cancer patients are thought to have MMRd tumors, including all the patients in the MSK clinical trial that Sascha participated in.
There are 45,000 Americans diagnosed a year with rectal cancer.
“An MMRd tumor develops a defect in its ability to repair certain types of mutations that occur in cells. When those mutations accumulate in the tumor, they stimulate the immune system, which attacks the mutation-ridden cancer cells,” says Dr. Diaz, who heads the MSK division of Solid Tumor Oncology and holds the Grayer Family Chair.
But cancer has a trick up its sleeve to stop the immune system from doing its job.

Helping the Immune System Overcome Rectal Cancer
Immune cells contain a safeguard called a checkpoint, to prevent them from attacking normal cells. Cancer cells can trip this safeguard and shut down immune cells,
allowing a tumor to hide and grow.
However, immunotherapy can turn the tables yet again.
An immunotherapy agent called a checkpoint inhibitor releases the brake on an immune cell, freeing it to recognize and attack cancer cells. “When the brakes are taken off the immune cells, MMRd cells look especially strange because they have so many mutations. So the immune cells attack with much more force,” explains Dr. Cercek.
Dr. Diaz’s pioneering research in treating cancer with immunotherapy had already shown that checkpoint inhibitors could “help people with MMRd colorectal tumors that have spread,” he says. “We thought, ‘Let’s try it before cancer metastasizes as a first line of treatment.’ ”

Avoiding Life-Altering Side Effects
The second premise of the clinical trial was to avoid the toxicity often associated with treatment for rectal cancer.
Dr. Cercek explains: “Our first duty is to save our patient’s life. But the standard treatment for rectal cancer with surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy can be particularly hard on people because of the location of the tumor.” She continues, “They can suffer life-altering bowel and bladder dysfunction, incontinence, infertility, sexual dysfunction, and more.”
Dr. Diaz notes, “Obviously, that can lead to a lot of self-esteem and psychiatric issues as well.”
To avoid these toxicities, many approaches to rectal cancer try to shrink the tumor as much as possible with chemotherapy and radiation to facilitate surgery. Drs. Cercek and Diaz surmised that immunotherapy in MMRd patients may similarly shrink the tumor to enable a more successful surgery.

But Dr. Cercek proposed going further: In patients where the immunotherapy caused the cancer to completely disappear, doctors would omit chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery — and, instead, closely monitor for any signs of recurrence. Dr. Diaz says this decision by Dr. Cercek was “a world-class moment” that promised to change the lives of patients —
if it worked.
All patients in the trial must have stage 2 or 3 rectal tumors that are MMRd — which makes their cancer particularly sensitive to immunotherapy. The patients were given the checkpoint inhibitor dostarlimab (Jemperli) intravenously every three weeks, for six months. Their tumors were closely tracked, Dr. Diaz explains, “using imaging, visualization such as endoscopy, as well other methods.”

No More Symptoms of Rectal Cancer
The results surprised even Drs. Cercek and Diaz. “The immunotherapy shrank the tumors much faster than I expected,” says Dr. Cercek. “My research nurse Jenna Sinopoli would tell me, ‘The patient has only received one treatment and already they’re not bleeding anymore and their terrible pain has gone away.’ ” Dr. Cercek recalls: “Patients came to my office after just two or three treatments and said, ‘This is incredible. I feel normal again.’ ”
As the first patient to enroll in the trial, the research team was anxious that Sascha’s experience might prove to be an outlier.
Sascha explains: “Before I came to MSK, oncologists at another medical center told me
I needed chemo, radiation, and surgery. To instead get immunotherapy infusions every
few weeks in New York with no side effects seemed like a cakewalk in comparison.”

It turned out Sascha was not an exception. Dr. Diaz recalls his growing excitement as “the first patient had a complete response to therapy and didn’t need anything else. Then the second patient didn’t need surgery or radiation. Then the third. Pretty soon we’re at the 10th patient that had a complete response. That is incredible.”
Patients, of course, were even more thrilled. “One young man and his family just sat in stunned silence when I told them his cancer had disappeared,” recalls Dr. Cercek. “Then they thanked us over and over.” She continues, “A young woman looked at the screen during an examination and asked, ‘Where is the tumor?’ ‘It’s gone,’ we told her.”
Dr. Cercek says: “The most exciting part of this is that every single one of our patients has only needed immunotherapy. We haven’t radiated anybody, and we haven’t put anybody through surgery.” She continues, “They have preserved normal bowel function, bladder function, sexual function, fertility. Women have their uterus and ovaries. ”

It’s remarkable. 
 Hear from the patients about the treatment they received. This approach helps the patients’ own immune systems recognize and attack their tumors, which contain a vulnerable genetic mutation. This treatment allowed the patients to be treated without surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy.  Video Details
Meet four patients who were successfully treated for rectal cancer thanks to a clinical trial involving immunotherapy at MSK | Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (mskcc.org) VIDEO | 01:56

Next Steps for Study Patients
Drs. Cercek and Diaz want people with rectal cancer tumors that are MMRd to know the clinical trial continues to enroll patients and is growing. Dr. Diaz says, “Our message is: Get tested if you have rectal cancer to see if the tumor is MMRd. No matter what stage the cancer is, we have a trial at MSK that may help you. And MSK has special expertise that really matters.”
That’s particularly important for people at high risk of rectal cancer. Sascha, like eight of the people in the study, was found to have Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition that puts people at significantly higher risk of rectal, colon, and other cancers.
Lynch syndrome is associated with poorer outcomes from chemotherapy and surgery, so treatment with immunotherapy may be an important new tool.
Similarly, there has been a disturbing rise in the number of people under 50 who are diagnosed with colorectal cancer — particularly rectal cancer. Dr. Cercek says: “We are seeing more and more young people with rectal cancer, including people in their 20s in our trial. Immunotherapy might be an important new option for them.”
MSK is also trying to help the growing number of younger patients with the Center for Young Onset Colorectal and Gastrointestinal Cancer. It’s the first center in the world devoted to the specific needs of people under 50 and is co-led by Dr. Cercek.

Potential Help for Other Cancers 
As MSK’s rectal cancer trial continues, Dr. Diaz says he hopes “it’s the tip of the iceberg.” He explains that “we are investigating if this same method may help other cancers where the treatments are often life-altering and tumors can be MMRd. We are currently enrolling patients with gastric (stomach), prostate, and pancreatic cancers.”
Dr. Diaz has coined a term for this new method of using immunotherapy alone to target MMRd tumors, calling it “immunoablative” therapy — that means using “immunotherapy to replace surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation to remove cancer.”
Dr. Diaz says, “That might sound futuristic — but in this trial, we have a clinical example where that happened.”
Today, nearly two years after she began the trial and remains cancer free, Sascha continues to live a normal life. She runs a family-owned home-furnishing and interior design business and often speaks to people facing rectal and other cancers.
“My whole experience has been like a dream,” she says.
“MSK research and cancer care is simply years and years ahead of where other hospitals — even really good ones — are or should be.”

Luis Diaz is a member of the board of directors of Jounce Therapeutics and Epitope.
He is a compensated consultant to PetDx, Innovatus, CP, Se’er, Delfi, Kinnate, and Neophore.  Dr. Diaz is an inventor of multiple licensed patents related to technology for circulating tumor DNA analyses and mismatch repair deficiency for diagnosis and therapy.  Some of these licenses and relationships are associated with equity or royalty payments to the inventors.
He holds equity in Epitope, Jounce Therapeutics, PetDx, Se’er, Delfi, Kinnate, and Neophore. He divested his equity in Personal Genome Therapeutics to LabCorp in February 2022 and divested his equity in Thrive Earlier Detection to Exact Biosciences in January 2021. His spouse holds equity in Amgen. The terms of all these arrangements are being managed by Memorial Sloan Kettering in accordance with their conflict-of-interest policy.

Dr. Cercek receives research funding from GSK, Inspirna, and Seagen 
 She serves on the Advisory Boards of Bayer, Merck, Janssen, GSK, and Seagen.
‘Tumors just vanished’: Cancer patients now in remission after drug trial.

Treatment with the immunotherapy Dostarlimab showed promising results in a small trial of more than a dozen rectal cancer patients, according to new research, but further study is needed, it is too early to call it a cure. CNN’s Erin Burnett speaks to Dr. Andrea Cercek, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. 

The Fall of The Cabal: The Sequel – Red Pill Documentaries

Fall of The Cabal: The Sequel (Complete Series 1-23) – Red Pill Documentary

image.png
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

A small cancer immunotherapy drug trial in patients with rectal cancer recently
had an “unheard of” result: Every single patient treated achieved complete remission.

Why it matters: Based on just 12 patients, the trial was published Sunday in the 
New England Journal of Medicine and needs to be replicated in a much bigger study.
But seeing complete remission in 100% of patients tested is a very promising early signal, researchers said. “I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” paper co-author Luis A. Diaz Jr. of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center told the NY Times.

Details: Patients were given the drug known as a programmed cell death-1 or PD-1 inhibitor, or dostarlimab, to treat a certain type of locally advanced rectal cancer.
After six months or more of follow-up, they continued to show no signs of cancer without needing standard treatments of surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.
“It’s incredibly rewarding to get these happy tears and happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realize, ‘Oh my god, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery,'” said the principal investigator medical oncologist Andrea Cercek in a statement.
Yes, but: Again, this was a small study and not enough is yet known “to supplant our current curative treatment approach,” an accompanying editorial pointed out.

Source:  Rectal Cancer Disappears After Experimental Use of Immunotherapy
| Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (mskcc.org) 

Massive Breakthrough As Cancer Vanishes For All Patients In Drug Trial (ladbible.com)

Hear from the patients about the treatment they received. This approach helps the patients’ own immune systems recognize and attack their tumors, which contain a vulnerable genetic mutation. – Search (bing.com)

Center For Young (Early) Onset Colorectal & Gastrointestinal Cancer
| Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (mskcc.org)

Clinical trial puts pancreatic cancer patient in partial remission | MD Anderson
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Fall of The Cabal: The Sequel (Complete Series 1-23) – Red Pill Documentary
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The Fall of The Cabal: The Sequel – Red Pill Documentaries
Biden Isn’t Taking His Presidency Seriously (msn.com) 
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