Positive Health Online

Reader Seeks Help re Dog Vaccinations

Hi. I have just read your article on vaccinations (www.positivehealth.com/ articles.asp?i=55) and agree completely. When I refused to vaccinate this year, the vet told me that the vaccines were good for 3 years. Since I was uncomfortable with the yearly program, I signed a form saying they were up to date so I could board my dog during the holidays.

How can I get around this in the future as the boarder will not take dogs if they are not vaccinated? Also, my female is an Aussie border collie X and has eczema. What do you recommend for her? My male has colitis and is starting to get cramps in his butt. From reading I believe it may be caused from the vaccines. What can I do or where should I look for information. Vitamin E, fish oil and evening primrose was recommended by another dog owner. Any suggestions?
Thank you for your help.
Margaret Harlos
harlos@rogers.com

Scandalous Refusal to Accept Success Rate of Thought Field Therapy (TFT)

I would like to comment on Julie Metaxa’s article The Unmet Friends: Pain, Anger and Fear (Issue 110 April 2005).

I agree that our emotions do have the power to bring about changes in our lives but over time, left unchecked, these out-of-control emotions can result in depression and heart problems. Julie seems to suggest it is necessary for us to suffer in order to learn.

I am a practitioner of Thought Field Therapy (TFT) which regularly eliminates these problems; there is no need to suffer.

Dr Roger Callahan PhD, an American Clinical Psychologist of forty years experience, is the founder and developer of Thought Field Therapy. TFT has now been used quite extensively and has been proven to cure anger, rage, fear, phobias, grief, anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress and more. It has the highest success rate of any psychotherapy – up to 98%. However, this unprecedented success rate is still not taken seriously by the orthodox medical profession because we do not have double blind gold trials to prove it!!

Thought Field Therapy has been used with 98% success rate in Kosovo for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder – dealing with the victims of ethnic cleansing. Because of the results, the Surgeon General of Kosovo has set up a national programme of TFT. It has also been used to eliminate PTSD of Vietnam War veterans and Dr Callahan also cured a victim of the holocaust (Auschwitz) who had been suffering trauma and nightmares for over fifty years – no other therapy could eliminate his problems but he was cured in minutes with TFT.

Despite the evidence of TFT’s success around the world, the medical profession will not even enter into discussion with regard to using this therapy. Unless we can obtain funding of at least £35,000 to enter into double blind trials we will not be accepted by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) in this country and to this end neither the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the Police Force, Fire Service or emergency crews will not even look at offering this treatment to staff or to patients who so desperately need help.

We have our military personnel returning home from the Iraq war, Kosovo and previous conflicts in The Gulf, traumatized by events they have witnessed; yet the Ministry of Defence and the medical profession will not be introduced to this highly successful therapy which, in most cases, would eradicate much of the suffering involved. It is a scandalous situation,

Julie Metaxa also wrote about how pain can affect us. Thought Field Therapy can reduce, or in some cases, eliminate pain. Sometimes physical pain makes its presence felt around the time of emotional trauma, but when the emotional trauma is removed using TFT, the physical pain disappears. However, we are not able to remove ‘warning’ pain e.g. due to an appendix about to rupture etc. Pain in this case is a useful way of informing us something is drastically wrong.

Dr Callahan states that the cause of emotional pain is the perturbation in the thought field. This information is the code to produce upset. Once the perturbation is removed by TFT the person can no longer become upset when thinking about his/her problem. All the client has to do is to think about or ‘tune in’ to their particular problem whilst they do the treatment – there is no need for long, drawn-out discussion on the subject.

Julie Metaxa says “it seemed natural to me that leaving Fear unchecked she would grow beyond herself and will too quickly seek out her brother Anger”. Yes, this is often true. Many fears arise in childhood causing emotional problems throughout a person’s life, and the situation becomes more complicated with other emotions arising including anger, rage and guilt. With TFT the upset from each of these can be eliminated. We do not ‘brainwash’, we do not remove the memory of what happened, merely the distress that goes with thinking about it.

The effect of negative emotions and distress on the autonomic nervous system can be seen by Heart Rate Variability (HRV) test measurements. Studies have shown that anxiety produces imbalance of the ANS (one could also mention here another article in the same magazine by John Spottiswoode BA Bsc. Cancer Causes and Mechanisms: Hypothesis – depending on which part of the nervous system is dominant can determine which cancer is likely to develop). A pre-treatment HRV measurement is taken whilst the client thinks of their ‘upset/problem’. This will often show the autonomic nervous system out of balance by varying degrees. Another measurement is taken post treatment which shows the ANS returning to balance with an increase in the Heart Rate Variability.

Dr Callahan and colleagues found that a low Heart Rate Variability measurement is a powerful predictor of all cause mortality but especially the likelihood of myocardial infarction. A study published in the American Journal of Cardiology (Bilchick et al) gives meaning to the degrees of improvement in HRV and what it means. The research states the “each increase of 10 milliseconds in HRV (SDNN), gives a 20% decrease in the risk of mortality…” A successful treatment using Thought Field Therapy can improve Heart Rate Variability considerably.

In 1997 Dr Callahan was contacted by Fuller Royal, MD director of a medical clinic in Las Vegas advising that TFT treatments were helping his patients. Another expert on Heart Rate Variability in Colorado was also using HRV to measure the effectiveness of various treatments to reduce anger. When he used the TFT treatment for anger he saw a dramatic improvement in the patient but also in the patient’s HRV reading. (It is well known that chronic anger can be a serious problem for heart patients). We could help prevent further heart problems – yet, in the UK we are not utilizing this treatment.

In the USA, many physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, chiropractors and other health professionals have been trained in Thought Field Therapy and the use of HRV for years – why does it appear impossible to progress in the UK? I think I know the answer to this question: Thought Field Therapy is a drug-free, non-invasive, natural therapy – or am I just being cynical?

References and Further Information

Bilchick KC, Fetics B, Djoukeng R, Gross-Fisher S, Fletcher RD, Singh SN, Nevo E, Berger RD Prognostic value of heart rate variability in chronic congestive heart failure. American Journal of Cardiology. 90(1): 24-28. 2002.
Stop the Nightmares of Trauma. Roger J Callahan PhD and Joanne Callahan MBA. Professional Press. 2000.
Tapping the Healer Within. Roger J Callahan, PhD with Richard Trubo. Judy Piatkus. 2001.
The Five Minute Phobia Cure. Roger J Callahan. Wilmington, Enterprise, (out of print).

Web Sites

www.thoughtfieldtherapy.co.uk Thought Field Therapy in the UK including Practitioners.
www.tftrx.com Dr Callahan’s web site in the USA.
Terri Perry
Thought Field Therapy Practitioner
healthyu@tiscali.co.uk

Safety of Complementary Medicines: Health Risk Statistics

by Ron Law
I've analysed New Zealand, Canada and Australia in detail, and the USA moderately so… the trends are all the same.

Key points. The regulation of risk should differentiate between voluntary and involuntary risk… if an action is involuntary, such as consumption of pesticide residues, then protection levels should be higher than voluntary risk such as consumption of supplements… therefore it is scientifically and risk management wise fallacious to use the same process for both.

By any standard, the risks associated with commercially produced supplements is minimal – if one assumes a 1: million risk as the de minimis threshold, then supplements are, by and large 30-60 times safer.

Disproportionate risks require quite different risk management strategies… the differences of risk between pharmaceuticals and supplements is between 4 and 5 orders of magnitude… According to international risk management literature supplements fall in to the ultra safe category –   pharmaceuticals fall into the dangerous activity category…

I've now standardized the relative risks against the risk of a single flight on a Boeing 747 which is just on 1 per million passenger flights. That's something that is considered acceptable.... regulators keep using the term 'acceptable risk' but don't actually define it. I say that a risk of 1: million for a voluntary activity is well within the realms of acceptable risk…

Ron Law (Juderon)
juderon@clear.net.nz
Source: Elwood Richard elwood.richard@nowfoods.com
Ron Law worked for twenty years as a medical laboratory scientist, 5 years as a university business management lecturer, 4 years as executive director of a trade association, and more recently as an independent risk & policy analyst. Ron was appointed by the Ministry of Health as a member of the expert group that advised the Director General of Health on the reporting and management of medical injury in New Zealand's healthcare system. Ron Provided risk analysis and advice to the National Association of Health Stores in their recent case in the European Court of Justice challenging the Food Supplement Directive.

New Evidence on Vitamin E Safety

by Neil E. Levin, CCN, DANLA
An important review published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in April, 2005 sheds new light on the safety of Vitamin E.

Statistical experts have already largely discredited the extremely poor meta-analysis announced last Fall by the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine that re-analyzed only 19 studies on Vitamin E. The experts’ overwhelmingly negative responses are posted on that journal’s web site. Combining studies that did not use consistent forms or doses unfairly added variables while ignoring positive effects of the vitamin. The authors acknowledged that their findings do not apply to healthier populations and are not definitive.

The new review of Vitamin E published in the American Journal of Nutrition on April 1, 2005 states that after adjusting for variables in supplementation, the actual dose of Vitamin E that may have been slightly harmful to these seriously ill patients was statistically significant only at levels where patients took over 2,000 IU per day, well above the 400 IU suggested by the original Annals analysis.

A recent JAMA article on Vitamin E also used very sick patients but subjected positive data on Vitamin E’s benefits to different, more stringent statistical methods than the equally skimpy negative data to produce a negative result and thereby tainting the study, which had been already been rejected by the journal Lancet a year earlier.

The National Institute of Medicine’s safe upper limit of 1,500 I.U. per day of natural Vitamin E is based on their own expert review of hundreds of well-designed studies.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports the ongoing Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT), a multi-centre, long-term, double-blind, randomized trial that includes 35,534 men age 55 and older taking 400 IU of vitamin E daily to verify earlier evidence of it preventing prostate cancer. NIH researchers carefully examined the data from these few negative reports and decided not to change their protocol, still believing that Vitamin E at this dose is unlikely to cause any harm to their patients.

This confirms the new American Journal of Nutrition review stating that there is no good evidence that levels of Vitamin E under 1,600 IU have been shown to increase health risks.

Two large observational studies (the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study) show that people taking Vitamin E supplements of 400 IU or more for at least two years had between 20-40% reduction in coronary heart disease. In the GISSI Prevention Trial of 11,000 heart attack survivors, Vitamin E reduced the number both of sudden deaths and deaths due to cardiovascular disease.

The scientific method of giving only one isolated nutrient has generated some brutal publicity for individual members of the antioxidant family because antioxidants function inter-dependently. For example, beta-carotene has been cited in one study as putting smokers at greater risk of lung cancer, but a more thorough follow up analysis – looking at their diet plus other dietary supplements taken – revealed that the smokers’ actual danger was due to low total antioxidant levels.

One caution is that people should not try to take a high dose of any one supplement without considering that it may increase our need for other nutrients. And elderly, sick people especially need a more holistic approach, rather than using a single nutrient in high doses as if it were a drug. Nutrients just don’t work well in isolation from each other. Most people would benefit from taking a multiple vitamin and a Vitamin E supplement, and it would be even safer than just the Vitamin E alone.

There are also differences between natural and synthetic Vitamin E, with most studies using only the synthetic forms, which are composed of different-shaped molecules only half as effective as natural Vitamin E. Natural Vitamin E is called d-alpha tocopherol and synthetic Vitamin E is called dl-alpha tocopherol. It is known that alpha tocopherol can block absorption of gamma tocopherol, an important antioxidant. Vitamin E complexes with several forms of natural tocopherols, along with the related tocotrienols, are far better than just one kind of Vitamin E.  The alpha forms have preferential absorption versus the other forms, for both tocopherols and tocotrienols, making it important to have the right balance so all can work together, as they do in healthy foods.

Vitamins are essential to health and life, but the average American gets only 1/3 of the recommended daily intake of Vitamin E, the amount that the Institute of Medicine determined to be needed by the average adult to prevent serious illnesses. People with serious heart diseases are more likely to take a Vitamin E supplement than the general population, but a single supplement may not work very quickly or effectively on these seriously ill people and should not be blamed for their illnesses without some more convincing science to back it up.

There is no published evidence that the average person taking a mixture of antioxidants is at greater risk of any disease, but plenty of studies show that people eating a variety of antioxidant nutrients receive some protection from various diseases. In the case of antioxidants, there is safety in numbers.
Neil E Levin CCN DANLA

Main References:

1.    Margaret E. Wright , Susan T. Mayne, Rachael Z. Stolzenberg-Solomon, Zhaohai Li, Pirjo Pietinen, Philip R. Taylor, Jarmo Virtamo and Demetrius Albanes. Development of a Comprehensive Dietary Antioxidant Index and Application to Lung Cancer Risk in a Cohort of Male Smokers. American Journal of Epidemiology. July 2004.
    http://aje.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/160/1/68?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&
RESULTFORMAT=1&andorexacttitle=and&andorexacttitleabs=and&fulltext=beta+carotene&
andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1100534768534_1530&stored_search=&FIRSTINDEX
=0&sortspec=relevance&fdate=7/1/2004&tdate=7/31/2004&journalcode=amjepid
2.    Edgar R. Miller, III, MD, PhD; Roberto Pastor-Barriuso, PhD; Darshan Dalal, MD, MPH; Rudolph A. Riemersma, PhD, FRCPE; Lawrence J. Appel, MD, MPH; and Eliseo Guallar, MD, DrPH. High-dose vitamin E supplementation may increase all-cause mortality, a dose response meta-analysis of randomized trials. Annals of Internal Medicine 142: (1). Online: Nov. 10, 2004: Print: 4 January 2005.
    http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/0000605-200501040-00110v1
    http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/short/142/1/37   
http://www.annals.org/cgi/eletters/0000605-200501040-00110v1
3.    Satia-Abouta J, Kristal AR, Patterson RE, Littman AJ, Stratton KL, White E. Dietary supplement use and medical conditions. Am Journal Preventive Medicine. 24: 43-51. January 2003.
    http://www.ajpm-online.net/article/PIIS0749379702005718/fulltext
4.    Huang HY, Appel LJ. Supplementation of diets with alpha-tocopherol reduces serum concentrations of gamma- and delta-tocopherol in humans. J Nutr. 133(10): 3137-40. 2003.
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.
fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=14519797
5.    The Lewin Group, DaVanzo, J. et al. Improving Public Health, Reducing Health Care Costs: An Evidence-Based Study of Five Dietary Supplements. September 22, 2004.
    http://www.supplementinfo.org/contentman/ anmviewer.asp?a=156&z=14
6.    The Lewin Group, Al Dobson PhD et al. A Study of the Cost Effects of Daily Multivitamins for Older Adults. Prepared for: Wyeth Consumer Healthcare
    http://www.lewin.com/NR/rdonlyres/exul3
vts44kvq5kr35iw6vt3sc6nhtmj3hwope245srdtp
3iw7bco4dctska6gilvhewvhivcbujnl/StudytheCost
EffectsDailyMultivitaminsforOlderAdult.pdf
7.    Richer S, Stiles W, Statkute L et al. Double-masked, placebo-controlled, randomized trial of lutein and antioxidant supplementation in the intervention of atrophic age-related macular degeneration: the Veterans LAST study (Lutein Antioxidant Supplementation Trial). Optometry. 75: 216-30. 2004.
    http://www.nutrition4health.org/NOHAnews/
Biographies/April%202004%20Optometry%20
LAST%20Study.pdf
8.    John N Hathcock, Angelo Azzi, Jeffrey Blumberg, Tammy Bray, Annette Dickinson, Balz Frei, Ishwarlal Jialal, Carol S Johnston, Frank J Kelly, Klaus Kraemer, Lester Packer, Sampath Parthasarathy, Helmut Sies and Maret G Traber. REVIEW ARTICLE: Vitamins E and C are safe across a broad range of intakes. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Vol. 81, No. 4, 736-745. April 2005. http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/81/4/736
Neil E Levin CCN DANLA
Neil E. Levin is a professional member of the International & American Associations of Clinical Nutritionists. Neil is a member of the Scientific Council of the national Clinical Nutrition Certification Board and has a Diplomate in Advanced Nutritional Laboratory Assessment. He is on the Board of Directors of the Mid-American Health Organization (MAHO).
Neil is also the President of Nutrition for Optimal Health Association, Inc.  (www.nutrition4health.org), a not-for-profit nutrition education corporation and may be contacted via neil.levin@nowfoods.com
Additional References:
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Anderson SL, Qiu J, Rubin BY. Tocotrienols induce IKBKAP expression: a possible therapy for familial dysautonomia. Biochem Biophys Res Commun. 306(1): 303-9. PMID: 12788105. Jun 20 2003.
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Stephan Christen, Alan A. Woodall, Mark K. Shigenaga, Peter T. Southwell-Keely, Mark W. Duncan, and Bruce N. Ames. -Tocopherol traps mutagenic electrophiles such as NOx and complements -tocopherol: Physiological implications. PNAS. 94: 3217-3222. 1997.
RV Cooney, AA Franke, PJ Harwood, V Hatch-Pigott, LJ Custer, and LJ Mordan. gamma-Tocopherol Detoxification of Nitrogen Dioxide: Superiority to alpha-Tocopherol. PNAS. 90: 1771-1775. 1993.
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Why Vitamin E Is Only Dangerous With Drugs

The recent HOPE trial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a slight increase in risk of heart failure in heart patients on medication given vitamin E might suggest that vitamin E itself is dangerous, rather than harmful.  Before we all ditch our vitamin E supplements it’s important to know that vitamin E behaves very differently in people taking anti-cholesterol drugs than it does in those not on medication. While vitamin E has been shown to act as an anti-oxidant, protecting cells in the arteries from damage under normal circumstances, vitamin E may become dangerous when taken with statin drugs, designed to lower cholesterol.

The reason for this is that vitamin E can only act as a powerful antioxidant when another antioxidant, called co-enzyme Q, which is produced in the body. Statin drugs, such as Zocor, block the enzyme that makes both co-enzyme Q and cholesterol. The net result is that vitamin E becomes an oxidant not an anti-oxidant. Statin drugs, which have already been associated with 400 deaths, many from heart failure, induce co-enzyme Q deficiency, which then increases heart muscle dysfunction. A recent study in the American Journal of Cardiology (Am J Cardiol 94:1306-1310. 2004) found that statin drug therapy worsened cardiac function in most patients and that coenzyme Q supplementation in patients with worsening cardiac function with statin therapy improved heart function.

Taking large amounts of vitamin E at the same time may make matters worse still since vitamin E cannot function as an antioxidant without coenzyme Q. This drug/nutrient interaction may explain the results of the latest vitamin E trial published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in which the majority of patients were taking medication. The makers of statins are well aware of this danger and have already patented the combination of statins and co-enzyme Q, which is also available as a supplement. If this proves to be the reason for vitamin E’s protective effect for people not on medication, and detrimental effect, at least in high doses, the solution is simple: take vitamin E supplements (or statin drugs) with a supplement of Co-enzyme Q. Antioxidants are team players and are best eaten, and supplemented together.

My recommendation is to eat foods rich in vitamin E (nuts, seeds and fish), vitamin C (fruits and vegetables), glutathione (onions and garlic) and beta-carotene (car