In spite of the best efforts of the conventional medical profession, women show their preferences by supporting the use of Bioidentical HRT. There is good reason for this – women feel better on it, and do better. Although the medical profession may denigrate BHRT, the FDA said that  they have never had a complaint about BHRT.  Note my post of Aug 26th below:

FDA admit no adverse report on Bioidentical HRT

The North American Menopause Society News, 12/22/2015

Despite the risks, the number approaches that for FDA–approved hormone therapies. The number of prescriptions for mostly unregulated compounded hormone therapy for women at menopause has reached an estimated 26 to 33 million a year. That approaches the 36 million prescriptions per year for well–regulated and tested FDA–approved hormone therapy, shows an analysis of the market compounded hormone therapy market, published online this month in Menopause. Nearly 500 pharmacists (118 compounding and 365 independent community pharmacists) completed the survey, which asked about the number of compounded hormone therapy prescriptions filled, the percentage of total volume, the percentages of different types of compounded hormone therapy sold, and what growth the pharmacists expected for these medications in the next 2 years. The analysts then estimated the size of the market based on the responses and the average percentage of compounding reported by the national Community Pharmacists Association and the industry market research firm IBISWorld. The authors highlighted concerns over the lack of clinical data about the safety of compounded hormones as well as fears over the quality of these products. Some contained too much of the prescribed estrogens and some too little progesterone, an imbalance that can allow overgrowth of the uterine lining and lead to cancer.

This is one doctor’s (well credentialed opinion) and not the last word on the need for mammograms. As you have no doubt realised by now, I am not fan of regular mammograms. See previous posts. However, I believe it is an individual decision that all women must make, as to what they decide is best for them. My complaint is that women are not given both sides of the debate due to various biases and commercial interests. Breast screening and the Think “Pink” campaign is big business and very lucrative for many.  The alternative side needs to be told.

This is Dr Ben’s Bio:

Dr. Johnson’s medical career spans over thirty years, from his graduate work in immuno-pathology in 1976 to his current concentration-writing and speaking on staying healthy, especially for women in the area of breast health. In 1997 Dr. Johnson began to formally combine conventional and complementary medicine, moving back home to Georgia and founding a complimentary/alternative cancer clinic in Atlanta, The Immune Recovery Foundation. Turning in 2004 to breast cancer research and breast health education, Dr. Johnson founded the International Cancer Foundation in Rossville, Ga. Dr. Ben, as he is known, has helped thousands of women, and health care professionals around the world seek his advice.

Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2003 and finding no hope in either conventional or alternative medicine, Dr. Ben met Alex Loyd, creator of the “Healing Codes™”. Dr. Ben’s subsequent work with Loyd’s procedures-addressing the core emotional/energy issues that control every aspect of our lives-and relief of the “incurable” symptoms of ALS led to Dr. Johnson’s appearance in the best-selling, 2006 documentary film The Secret™ and co-authoring of the best selling book The Healing Codes and The Secret of Health: Breast Wisdom.

Dr. Ben owns Dr. Ben Johnson Services LLC, a business promoting natural health care products, and healthy breast cancer screening for women. Always looking for more ways to spread his message of health and wholeness, Dr. Ben has just finished “Healing Water” released in June of 2011 and a new book on Thermography and the health problems associated with mammography to be released in 2012.

Video of Dr Johnson’s talk can be viewed at : https://youtu.be/L6rrUK54lvg

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Dr. Ben Johnson: I wrote a book for women, The Secret of Health Breast Wisdom1 because we, as a medical society, are giving women breast cancer with our demanding that they get mammograms. Mammograms cause breast cancer. Period. So mammograms are not healthy for women. Women should not be getting routine mammograms. That’s crystal clear, published in the peer review literature.

And yet today, if a woman went to her gynaecologist or family doc, she would have this shoved down her throat, extreme coercion to go get this mammogram that is causing breast cancer. It’s not saving lives. You have a 4% increased risk of dying if you get mammograms, period.

Ty Bollinger: So the detection technique that we’re using, the primary technique that we use to detect breast cancer, is causing breast cancer.

Dr. Ben Johnson: Absolutely, it’s a terrible test; you know smashing women’s breasts and then irradiating with cancer-causing radiation. And then it’s so insensitive. For women under 50, it’s only like 52% effective, sensitive. That means 52 is pretty close to 50, right?

Ty Bollinger: Yeah.

Dr. Ben Johnson: So about half. That means that half the women that have breast cancer, it would not detect their cancer. That’s a terrible test. And so there are much better tests. And yet this is what’s still being crammed down women’s throats today. Terrible test, causes breast cancer.

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Ty Bollinger: And it doesn’t detect, it detects 50% and causes cancer. You said there were better options. What better options are there for detecting breast cancer?

Dr. Ben Johnson: Well there’s two better options. If you’ve got a lump, if you think you’ve got something, ultrasound is great. It’s a test of anatomy. Mammograms are tests of anatomy. Ultrasounds are tests of anatomy. MRIs are tests of anatomy. So if you’ve already got a lump, you want a test of anatomy.

So, that would be like an ultrasound because they can see the lump, they can see its consistency. They can see where there’s calcium in it. And they can look at blood flow because tumors are going to have increased blood flow. So, for instance, a sensitivity of ultrasound is up around 80%. It’s much higher than mammograms. And the sensitivity is higher too.

But if you’re looking about prevention, if you’re talking about screening, there’s really only one device out there and that is thermography. An infrared thermal camera. Nothing touches the lady. Nothing smashes her breasts. There’s no cancer causing radiation.

As we sit here, we are omitting heat in the spectrum called infrared. There’s infrared, visual, and ultraviolet. So this is the infrared spectrum of light, which our eyes don’t see, but which is very detectable by the camera. The military developed this so that they could see people sneaking at them at nighttime and so that they could shoot down missiles and things because they’re producing heat.

Ty Bollinger: Sure, like night vision goggles.

Dr. Ben Johnson: There you go. Night vision goggles are infrared goggles. So we use it as a medical application to detect hotspots in the breast.

Well long before there was a tumor there, there were cancer cells. Probably 8 to 10 years before there was a tumor, there were cancer cells starting to grow. Two cells, four cells, 16 cells, 144 cells, etc. It takes about eight years until you get to about a centimeter in size for a mammogram or an ultrasound to detect it. Well that’s too late. Because that one-centimeter tumor, about five-sixteenths of an inch, less than half an inch, is about one billion cells.

When you get to one billion cells, the cancer has already eroded into the lymphatic system and the venous system and it’s shedding cancer cells all through the body. So that’s why mammograms—one of the many reasons mammograms don’t save lives,
it is NOT early detection. That’s one of the little lies they’ve propagated along. “Early detection saves lives. Get your mammogram today.”

Ty Bollinger: Right.

Dr. Ben Johnson: Well, that statement’s true. Early detection does save lives. It’s just that mammography is not early detection; it’s too late. And then the cancer-causing radiation. So the long and the short is you’re causing much more breast cancer with mammograms than you are detecting.

 

 

Why different painkillers are only effective for certain types of pain
December 16, 2015 6.35am AEDT .

Author
Maree Smith
Executive Director, Centre for Integrated Preclinical Drug Development and Professor of Pharmacy, The University of Queensland

Disclosure statement

Maree Smith currently holds competitive research grant funding from the Australian Research Council in collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, from the National Health and Medical Research Council and from The University of Queensland (CIEF grant) in collaboration with Que Oncology. Maree Smith is named inventor on patented AT2 receptor antagonist technology for the relief of neuropathic and chronic inflammatory pain, commercialized by the UQ spin-out company, Spinifex Pharmaceuticals (2005-2015), that was acquired by Novartis in mid-2015. Maree Smith conducts contract R&D studies for a large number of companies in her role as Executive Director of the Centre for Integrated Preclinical Drug Development at The University of Queensland. She is currently President and Board member of the Australian Pain Relief Association (APRA) and she is a member of the Editorial Board of Pain: Clinical Updates.

Whether it’s your head, tooth or back, when you’re in pain, it’s hard to think about anything else. If it’s not too strong, some can ride it out. But in many cases, the pain just gets worse and won’t go away until you take something.

Medicines that kill pain are called analgesics and they vary in how they work. No single painkiller can relieve all types of pain. Those that work for mild pain usually have little effect on severe pain unless combined with a stronger painkiller.

If you want to effectively control your pain, you will need to match your medication to its type and severity.

Nociceptive pain

Nociceptive pain is caused by damage to body tissue. If the pain is mild, such as a headache or a sprained ankle, commonly used over-the-counter painkillers are effective. These include tablets containing paracetamol (Panadol), aspirin, or non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen (Nurofen).

Paracetamol helps to dampen pain signals to the brain. NSAIDs inhibit the activity of the enzymes that lead to pain, inflammation and fever being produced in the body.

If you want to control your pain, you will need to match your medication to its type and severity.

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Combination tablets, which have a small dose of codeine plus paracetamol, aspirin or ibuprofen, can be used to treat moderate pain. In Australia, you can buy these kinds of painkillers only in a pharmacy. Those sold over the counter have brand names such as Panadeine, Aspalgin and Nurofen Plus.

The government recently announced it will make any medication containing codeine available only with a prescription from mid-2016.

It is important to remember the maximum adult dosage for paracetamol is four grams (eight tablets) per day. Taking more than the recommended dose can cause damage to your liver.

Painkillers typically prescribed by a doctor to relieve acute to moderate pain are codeine together with paracetamol tablets (Panadeine Forte) and tramadol tablets, which are opioid pain killers.

The severe pain you experience following a broken bone or an operation usually needs strong painkillers that your doctor would prescribe. This may be morphine given as a tablet or by injection.

Morphine-like medicines relieve pain by interacting with specific proteins called opioid receptors, which are located in the brain, spinal cord and other parts of the body. These opioid receptors are the same ones the body’s own natural pain-killer molecules, called endorphins, use.

Neuropathic pain

Neuropathic pain is pain caused by damage to the nerves. Painkillers such as morphine, NSAIDs and paracetamol that are effective for the relief of nociceptive and inflammatory pain conditions are not effective for the relief of neuropathic pain.

This is because the underlying mechanisms that cause neuropathic pain following nerve injury are different from those that induce nociceptive and acute inflammatory pain.

Medications originally developed to treat depression and epilepsy are recommended as first-line treatments for the relief of neuropathic pain.

Antidepressants alleviate neuropathic pain by boosting the body’s own pain-fighting pathways. This includes boosting signalling in the brain which inhibits pain-signalling at the level of the spinal cord. The detailed mechanisms by which anti-epileptic drugs alleviate neuropathic pain are diverse but the net effect is to dampen pain signals.

Migraine pain

Paracetemol is an effective painkiller for mild pain. Pete/Flickr, CC BY
.

Migraine is a particularly debilitating type of pain. It is often accompanied by nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light and sound. It can last for a few hours or several days.

Migraine affects about 12% of Australians. Some experience auras such as flashing lights or changes in smell perception, which can serve as early warning signs the migraine is coming.

If painkillers such as paracetamol, aspirin, ibuprofen or ergotamine (made specifically to relieve migraine by narrowing blood vessels in the brain) are taken at the onset of the aura, the migraine can often be stopped or its severity reduced. For those suffering a severe migraine attack, prescription medications known as triptans can be effective treatments by reversing the brain blood vessel dilation.

Chronic inflammatory pain

Chronic pain affects up to one in five adults. One of the most common is pain from osteoarthritis, the most common type of arthritis.

Osteoarthritis pain is a chronic inflammatory pain caused by arthritic joint disease, typically in the knee or hip. As the joint cartilage and underlying bone break down, the joint becomes inflamed and this triggers the pain. The first-line painkiller for osteoarthritis pain is paracetamol.

For people with more severe pain, NSAIDs such as naproxen may be more effective. But chronic use of these is associated with an increased risk of side effects, especially bleeding and ulceration of the stomach lining. Less commonly, morphine or strong morphine-like analgesics are prescribed.

Cancer pain

Most cancer pain is caused by the tumour pressing on bones, nerves or other organs in your body. Pain can also be caused by the cancer treatment such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Oral morphine-like analgesics taken regularly, often in combination with paracetamol, are prescribed for moderate to severe chronic cancer pain.

Although drowsiness usually occurs at the start of treatment or after a dosage increase, this typically reduces after a couple of weeks. Anti-nausea and laxative agents are given at the beginning of treatment to minimise the side effects of nausea, vomiting and constipation. Nausea usually lasts no more than two to three weeks.

However, as constipation persists, it is very important that laxative use is maintained. For cancer pain involving nerve impingement, your doctor will add a prescription painkiller for neuropathic pain.

Fibromyalgia is a common and disabling condition. it is often misdiagnosed, as no accurate tests is available for it. There has been no effective treatment either, until recently, when good results have been obtained by using low dose naltrexone (LDN) for fibromyalgia. See my web site for more information on LDN and the research on its use in fibromyalgia and other auto-immune diseases.

Hidden and unexplained: feeling the pain of fibromyalgia

December 17, 2015 11.40am AEDT

Bernadette Fitzgibbon

Author

1. Bernadette Fitzgibbon

   Neuroscientist, Monash University

Disclosure statement

Bernadette Fitzgibbon receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council and Arthritis Australia.

Partners

Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

Victoria State Government provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

For some people, waking up every day means the start of persistent pain that affects their mood, thinking and relationships. This experience is more difficult when the pain doesn’t seem to have a cause; at least not a visible one.

That’s the reality for people with fibromyalgia, a chronic disorder characterised by pain and muscle tenderness throughout the body where even the slightest touch can be sensitive. Sufferers often have other health issues, including sleep difficulties and fatigue.

For a long time, fibromyalgia was thought of as a medical mystery. Technological advancement has allowed us to look closer. Today, it is a recognised disorder, part of a group of chronic pain syndromes described as central nervous system disorders.

The condition affects more than four times as many women as it does men. With as many as 2-5% of the developed world living with fibromyalgia, it is far from uncommon. Yet targeted and effective treatment options aren’t available for the condition. And compared to fibromyalgia’s impact, this area of research remains highly underfunded.

Chicken or egg?

Fibromyalgia has a long history of stigma. Some explanations even pinned it down to being psychosomatic, “made up” and “all in your head”, as well as a condition people needed to “just get over”.

There may be some truth in saying fibromyalgia is “all in your head”, but more as a reflection of associated brain changes than a figment of the imagination. An explosion of recent research has shown brains of fibromyalgia sufferers are made up differently. There are variations, for instance, in regions key to how we think and feel.

Although our understanding has taken a dramatic leap in the last few decades, we can’t shut the book on fibromyalgia’s exact cause or causes. The reported brain changes pose a real chicken and egg scenario: are these brain changes causing fibromyalgia, or is fibromyalgia causing the brain changes?

The condition may have multiple causes. Some suggest biological factors, including a genetic basis for the disorder. Other research shows a history of sexual, emotional and physical abuse among sufferers. Psychological factors, including responses to chronic stress, have also been shown to contribute to its cause.

None of these are likely to be independent of each other.

Links to mood disorders

Further complicating explanations of fibromyalgia include its link to other illnesses, such as mood disorders like depression. This relationship likely reflects the fact they share some of the same biological processes, such as inflammation.

Inflammation occurs when injury or infection triggers the production of messenger molecules that flood to the site of injury as part of an immune response. It is now believed that, like injury to the body, psychological adversity and mental illness can trigger the same immune response affecting the brain.

And recent research suggests the occurrence of fibromyalgia or depression may increase the likelihood of the other. Regardless of what came first, though, the presence of mood disorders in fibromyalgia is linked to more pain and reduced quality of life.

It comes as no surprise, then, that if medical professionals and scientists can’t explain what causes fibromyalgia, it is even harder for the person living with the condition. In fact, those diagnosed have a significantly harder time understanding or explaining their pain to people with other disorders, like arthritis for instance.

Treatment options

It can take years to receive a fibromyalgia diagnosis, and some may have been misdiagnosed with one or more other conditions beforehand. This can be very frustrating for the patient as well as their doctor.

Currently, the best method of diagnosis is classification-based. Physicians assess the number of possible body areas where someone experienced pain in the last two weeks, and the severity of other symptoms, including fatigue and cognitive function.

Following diagnosis, there is no universally effective treatment plan. It usually includes a multi-method pain management regime from a team of health care providers. But responses to treatments can be no better than chance, regardless of whether these are pharmacological or others such as acupuncture or hypnotherapy.

Despite the poor response rate, pharmaceutical methods are the main treatment option. Prescriptions are commonly made out for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (such as ibuprofen), opioid analgesics (such as codeine), antidepressants, or anticonvulsants (drugs used to control seizures that also affect pain signals).

Because there is no clear treatment target for fibromyalgia, drug doses needed to manage symptoms have significant side effects. These include problems with thinking, drowsiness and the risk of drug dependency.

We don’t know exactly what causes fibromyalgia, but treatments need to be developed based on what we do know. For instance, we know there are brain changes. One promising treatment may therefore be brain stimulation techniques like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS); a non-invasive technique that can change the activity of neurons in the brain.

There is a clearly an urgent need to provide targeted and effective treatment options for fibromyalgia sufferers. Considering how far we have come in explaining the unexplained pain of the condition, there is real hope for the future.