Posts in “ Personal Musings ”

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Monday, 15 April 2013 11:10

I predict that this simple and feasible project proposal which will alleviate a host of different modern ailments will be rejected by any mainstream health care system which relies heavily on Big Pharma’s budget and its status quo.

Summary

It is increasingly recognized that certain fundamental changes in diet and lifestyle that occurred after the Neolithic Revolution, and especially after the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age, are too recent, on an evolutionary time scale, for the human genome to have completely adapted. This mismatch between our ancient physiology and the western diet and lifestyle underlies many so-called diseases of civilization, including coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, epithelial cell cancers, autoimmune disease, and osteoporosis, which are rare or virtually absent in hunter–gatherers and other non-westernized populations. It is therefore proposed that the adoption of diet and lifestyle that mimic the beneficial characteristics of the preagricultural environment is an effective strategy to reduce the risk of chronic degenerative diseases. Giving support to this notion, human intervention trials have demonstrated that a diet composed of meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables, roots, tubers, nuts, and seeds may be superior to so-called healthy diets such as a low fat diet. The aim of this project proposal is to reproduce these results at the Primary Care level in a healthy population whose traditional diet included animal products and only until recently has adhered to industrialized low fat foods.

Background

On September 2011, the United Nations declared that, for the first time in human history, chronic non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes pose a greater health burden worldwide than do infectious diseases, contributing to 35 million deaths annually. [1] This is not just a problem of the developed world. Every country that has adopted the Western diet — one dominated by low-cost, highly processed food — has witnessed rising rates of obesity and related diseases.

According to the CDC, about one-third of U.S. adults (33.8%) are obese and approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2 – 19 years are obese. In 2010, no state had less than 20% obesity prevalence. Another statistic tells us that over two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or obese.

Available population data in Spain from the SEEDO’2000 study show a prevalence of obesity (BMI > or = 30 kg/m(2)) of 14,5% in adults aged 25-60 years, estimates based on individual measurement of body weight and height. [2]

Worldwide, with the spread of Western lifestyle (including diet), obesity has more than doubled since 1980. In 2008, 1.5 billion adults, 20 and older, were overweight and nearly 43 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2010.

Aside from quantitative over-consumption, various macronutrients have been postulated to contribute to the metabolic syndrome. Some suggest that specific dietary fats, such as saturated and trans-fats, are the culprit, while others suggest that a deficiency of monounsaturated lipids, such as olive oil (oleic acid) or linoleic acid, are implicated. However, our absolute consumption of dietary fat has not changed in these last 30 years, and high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets appear to be protective against the metabolic syndrome [3]. Read more…

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Saturday, 15 December 2012 13:00
Holmes_jeremy_brett_29776763_8

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” – Sherlock Holmes

I’m sick and tired of the anti-smoking culture that has taken over the entire world. I have had enough of hearing “don’t smoke, it’s bad for you!!” The ignorance that betrays such remarks is utterly abysmal, especially coming from people who should know better. So for all those who have asked me why do I actually smoke, I’m going to explain my reasons in this article.

I have found anti-smoking activists to be intolerant, judgmental Authoritarian Follower types. They believe and parrot emotionally charged catchphrases taken straight from government anti-smoking propaganda. Doctors and non-smokers alike are guilty of this. They feel righteous when providing such ‘advice’ yet fail to take notice of how ill they themselves look, and forget that, in many cases, their own health issues went downhill when they stopped smoking. Thanks to some pretty convoluted thinking, if they are some day diagnosed with a serious disease, they will later blame their ‘smoking years’, while overlooking the real culprits of today’s modern diseases: junk diets high in carbohydrates and the industrial-scale toxicity that has choked our environment.

Yes, the changes in our diet, particularly since the introduction of mechanised agriculture, the Industrial Revolution and arrival in the ‘enlightened’ Modern Age, have systemically destroyed our health. The mismatch between our ancient physiology – which thrived with little or no edible plant food – and our current diet, is at the root of many so-called diseases of civilization: coronary heart disease, obesity, hypertension, type-2 diabetes, cancer, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis, etc. But I’m not here to talk about that. You can read more about it here. My aim here is to defend the rights of people who choose to smoke. It may surprise you to know that, while the percentage of the population that smokes has declined in recent years (due to government propaganda), the incidence of heart disease has not declined. The reason, shock! horror! is that smoking is not the real problem to begin with!

Almost all smokers I know feel guilty about smoking and are planning to quit one utopian day when life gets ‘less stressful’. The way things are going, good luck with that one! I arrived in Europe when there was still a smoking culture and it wasn’t seen as the profound ‘evil’ it is today. The European smoking bans were introduced during my time here and, coincidentally enough, the general state of society has deteriorated badly during the same time. Could that deterioration have something to do with the replacement of nicotine – a chemical that enhances learning and memory – with Big Pharma tranquilizer drugs and dissociative technology?

Read more…

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Wednesday, 27 May 2009 19:57

Paul Weindling is an expert on medicine in Nazi Germany and is author of Health, Race and German Politics, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, and Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials.

According to Weindling, there were four main phases in the atrocities performed during Nazi Germany. The first phase (1939-41) is called the neurological which was linked to the euthanasia program, but it was actually a testing ground for killing techniques. He estimates that more than 70,000 adult patients were killed in mental institutions.

The second phase (1939-1944) was a large scale experiment on sterilization and human reproduction were 400,000 people with inherited disorders were presumably sterilized without their consent under the Nazi regime.

The third phase was of military experimentation, which included studies of people’s reactions to high altitudes, freezing temperatures, exposure to incendiary bombs, mustard gas, poisons, and other highly disturbing practices. Prisoners were also exposed to infections of typhus, malaria, and epidemic jaundice in order to develop vaccines and other treatments.

The fourth phase was experiments on children, such as studies on the inheritance of racial characteristics.

Weindling also writes about the Nuremberg medical trial which took place after the international military trial, where the concept of medical war crime was first introduced.

Read more…

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Saturday, 18 April 2009 18:27

Looking for something to watch during my far infrared sauna session, I stumbled upon The Glass Menagerie, based on Tennessee Williams’s play. I suddenly remembered that this play was referenced in Barbara Hort’s book, Unholy Hungers, in the context of the feminine vampire archetype. Although the label “vampire” may sound too drastic, it is actually very appropriate because the book is basically about psychic feeding dynamics. After watching the movie, I felt compelled to review what was said in the book about the female vampire archetype. The book is probably one of the best psychology books I’ve ever came across with, so I’ll include the relevant quote here related to the movie as food for thought:

The vampire in Williams’s autobiographical work is Amanda Wingfield, a fading Southern belle whose husband has left her alone to raise their two children-the discontented dreamer, Tom, and Laura, his crippled, reclusive sister. Although Amanda devotes most of her energy to feeding on the resistant Tom, she achieves her greatest vampiric success with Laura. Bled to the point of transparency by her mother, Laura drifts through each day by playing with her glass menagerie, the little crystal animals that are as fragile and as translucent as Laura become in the grip of Amanda’s vampiric “love.”

Amanda clearly operates under her vampiric veil of vulnerability when she confronts Laura with her truancy from the secretarial school in which Amanda has forcibly enrolled her: [Amanda leans against the shut door and stares at Laura with a martyred look.]

Read more…

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Friday, 13 March 2009 19:34

Calcified heart valve (near the center)One of the things I dread the most as a heart surgeon is… calcium. Yes, severely calcified valves and arteries are probably my worst nightmare. To remove the calcium, we have to use surgical instruments such as the “bone eater” – and even with that you struggle a lot! Eventually the instruments end up losing their sharp cutting edge. It is like cutting a rock, I kid you not. Tissues that should be smooth and silky are calcified and have the consistency of a rock or a bone. It has gotten worse over the years and there could be other factors involved as well, but magnesium is one of those things that is absolutely essential -and usually it shines by its absence in most therapies!

Magnesium helps to dissolve calcium; it becomes more water soluble. So with foods artificially enriched with calcium, and the boom of calcium supplementation, there is never enough magnesium. Already in 1936 in the US Senate, there were discussions about dangerous diet deficiencies due to mineral depleted soils. Foods raised on millions of acres of land no longer contain enough of certain minerals, no matter how much of them you eat (and this was in the 1930′s!). So usually there is always a constant deficiency in magnesium in most populations.

If you don’t have enough magnesium to help keep calcium dissolved, you end up with calcium-excess spasms, calcification of arteries, calcium deposits, kidney stones, spasms of your blood vessels (which can lead to heart attacks and angina), migraine headaches, broncospasm (asthma), arrhythmias, etc. Magnesium deficiencies are also seen in depression and anxieties!

Read more…

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Saturday, 28 February 2009 23:56

As I mentioned yesterday, the misuse of anger can be hazardous to your health, but it can also have disproportionate consequences for those people around you. An example of this last case might be Killing in Small Town which I saw recently. The movie is about a brutal ax murder where the killer strikes her victim 41 times. The murderer is a reserved woman who repressed her anger in such a way that when she got angry, she surely lost control! As I previously said, angry responses very seldom reach uncontrollable levels and when they do, they are usually because of misuse of angry feelings that have little or nothing to do with the immediate actual irritating situation, for example unconscious anger rooted in the past or in someone else. In general, the greater the awareness of how we really feel, the less chance there is to lose control. And needless to say, the murderer in this movie is so unaware of her anger, that it becomes impossible for her to have control once she explodes. In the movie (spoiler warning…) the anger was triggered by a childhood memory where she was hit in the head and also because her victim was trying to kill her in the first place!

The personality of this anger-repressed woman reminded me of what Theodore Rubin, M.D. explains in The Angry Book about cooling off our anger, whether it is due to childhood trauma, survival, or to sustain illusions of our ourselves about never getting angry:

Read more…

Written by Gabriela Segura, MD
Monday, 9 February 2009 21:11

One of my most interesting readings as of lately is Where There is Evil by Sandra Brown which is the author’s account of a young girl’s disappearance, Moira Anderson, from a small town of Coatbridge near Glasgow in 1957. Sandra’s quest to find out what happened to Moira began nearly 30 years later, at a family funeral, when her father confessed that he had been involved in the girl’s disappearance.

Sandra’s father was a pedophile whose activities were known by everyone, including the police! After putting the puzzle together, she becomes totally certain that her father was indeed involved in Moira’s disappearance.

Read more…