McCain or Obama on vaccine damage?

John McCain did catch my attention when in the primaries he said something about looking into vaccines as a cause of autism.

But then he went all "Walnuts" as Wonkette would say, and I don't know half of what he is saying anymore.

In this Age of Autism piece, it appears McCain IS more responsive to things like parental choice, etc., http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/10/mccain-or-oba-1.html#more

But personally, I've been in the tank for Obama from day 1, and when I look at his picture, I feel happy and calm...when I look at McCain, I feel blech. Well, there is an autistic young man who agrees with me on this, so McCain's admittedly more bold stance on vaccines isn't enough to make me switch:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-hall/obama-and-autism_b_137571.html

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Many doctors give patients placebo treatment

If a placebo works, I think I'd thank my doc for circumventing the need for pharmaceuticals. Note how different the take is on this US vs UK. From Reuters:

By Will Dunham Will Dunham – Thu Oct 23, 10:48 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Many American doctors give their patients a placebo, usually a relatively innocuous drug such as a pain reliever, in the guise of medical treatment and view the practice as ethical, researchers said on Thursday.

Among 679 primary-care doctors and rheumatologists, who treat arthritis patients, about half reported prescribing placebos at least two to three times a month and most said they did not explicitly tell patients they were getting a placebo.

The idea may be to trigger the "placebo effect" -- a genuine improvement in health driven by psychological expectations of a benefit and not due to the physiological effect of a given treatment -- in cases in which normal treatment might not be warranted, the researchers said.

More than 60 percent of the doctors who answered the survey published in the British Medical Journal said that prescribing a placebo is ethically permissible.

But such actions run afoul of standards set by the American Medical Association, which asserts it is unethical to use placebo therapy on patients without clearly telling them.

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Depression During Pregnancy Can Double Risk of Preterm Delivery

This suggests getting your neurotransmitters in order before you conceive. Remember, serotonin is just ONE of the dozens of neurotransmitters that affect mood. A healthy and balanced person is not depressed. And you might want to note that many PESTICIDES work on insect's neuroendocrine systems...and it's somehow believed that it won't affect humans who eat, breath, absorb the residues, too. Maybe it's magic!

Lastly, you DO need serotonin to build a sufficient uterine lining--this could possibly one of the pathways that depression affects preterm birth. Low serotonin is often a marker of autoimmune disease. When I had my serotonin tested, the doctor was amazed to find it was near zero. He put me on Lexapro right away...and I stopped after two weeks because it made me feel really, really weird and frankly I will never touch the stuff again.

I DID use some natural herbs and things and was able to boost it up to a low, but normal level by my next blood test. Sounds a lot better than rewiring the brain.

From Newswise, the journalists' only site:
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Newswise — Depressed pregnant women have twice the risk of preterm delivery than pregnant women with no symptoms of depression, according to a new study by the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. The study is published online in the Oxford University Press’s journal Human Reproduction on behalf of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.

The study found that pregnant women with symptoms of depression have an increased risk of preterm delivery, and that the risk grows with the severity of the depressive symptoms. These findings also provide preliminary evidence that social and reproductive risk factors, obesity, and stressful events may exacerbate the depression-preterm delivery link, according to the researchers.

Because the majority of the women in the study did not use anti-depressants, the study provides a clear look at the link between depression and preterm delivery.

The study -- which is among the first to examine depression and pre-term delivery in a representative and diverse population in the United States -- looked at 791 pregnant Kaiser Permanente members in San Francisco city and county from October 1996 through October 1998.

Researchers interviewed the women around their 10th week of pregnancy and found that 41 percent of the women reported significant or severe depressive symptoms. The women with less severe depressive symptoms had a 60 percent higher risk of preterm delivery -- defined as delivery at less than 37 completed weeks of gestation -- compared with women without significant depressive symptoms, and the women with severe depressive symptoms had more than twice the risk.

“Preterm delivery is the leading cause of infant mortality, and yet we don’t know what causes it. What we do know is that a healthy pregnancy requires a healthy placenta, and that placental function is influenced by hormones, which are in turn influenced by the brain,” said lead author Dr. De-Kun Li, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland.

“This study adds to emerging evidence that depression during early pregnancy may interfere with the neuroendocrine pathways and subsequently placental function. The placenta and neuroendocrine functions play an important role in maintaining the health of a pregnancy and determining the onset of labor,” Li explained.

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REVIEW: Beckons Men's Yoga pants

It's a bird...it's a plane...it's MAN FERTILITY doing the archer pose.

He tried out this cute organic cotton Beckons "Strength" pants, which replaced his usual slippy slidey Adidas warmups. Perenially afraid of looking "goofy," he actually ended up really liking them for the fit and look and he was wearing them in the house and out doing errands. Plus, as I pointed out, he wears organic briefs so as to keep pesticides away from the privates, and then why not workout pants, especially because when heated, you absorb more toxins?

Bonus points: Beckons is a small, two-person company with good karma!

read all about it here.

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Bonus Post: RNC spends $150K on Palin wardrobe and hair--and for her kids, too

You may be hearing on the AP about how Sarah Palin brought her kids with her for official gov. functions, which is OK, I guess, but she made Alaska pay for it, not OK.

Now the Main Street Wasillian accepted $150K in goodies from the RNC for herself and her kids, including Trig. Eeek.

The caption of his, from the Huffington Post, is

Piper Palin carries a Louis Vuitton bag on September 11th.

I guess Bush did tell us to go out and shop...although this is getting to seem more like the last days of the Marcos regime or something....

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Link Between Anesthesia and Behavior and Development DIsorders

This is cautionary news to be heeded when deciding on surgery for your child. Anesthesia can deplete b12, especially you have have a variant of the MTHFR gene (variants A and C are very common). Surprise, our son has a variant, he had to have a ton of surgeries as a baby...and guess what, his B12 levels are very low and he has autism. Google MTHFR--it's an easy test you can have done at any lab and if you are considering conceiving, you may need more folic acid. It's a folate reductase gene, which meanas you may have trouble processing folate.

So, I don't know if we could have done anything differently with our son given the urgency of the situation, and we're glad we said no to adding radiation to the mix (they're finding THAT also causes learning disorders later on). Hello, Hippocrates? FIRST, do no harm. I kind of wish the medical field would focus on that a little more.

From Newswise, the journalists' only site:

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Newswise — A new anesthesiology study analysis presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, indicates a possible link between childhood exposure to general anesthesia and an increased risk of behavioral and developmental disorders in young children.

Recent animal studies have shown that commonly used anesthetic agents may have serious neurotoxic effects on the developing brain. To assess whether the experimental animal data can be applied to humans, Lena S. Sun, M.D., professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics and colleagues at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health and the Columbia University School of Nursing, performed an analysis of a group of children born into the New York State Medicaid Program between 1999 and 2000.

Over a 4 year period, 625 children under the age of three were exposed to general anesthesia as part of uncomplicated hernia repair. When compared to a random sample of 5,000 children with no history of anesthesia exposure, the children exposed to anesthetic agents were twice as likely to be (subsequently) diagnosed with a developmental or behavior disorder.

“Given that the study subjects were taken from a Medicaid population, one limitation of the data is the demographic factors of this group that may vary from the general population. The excess risk of developmental and behavioral disorders in the children exposed to anesthesia cannot be completely explained by demographic factors or confounding health factors including premature birth or low birth weight.”

Researchers stress the need for more rigorous studies to assess the long-term health effects of exposure to anesthesia in young children. “This current analysis only examined two or three years of post-exposure data. To determine long-term effects of exposure, it is essential to continue and expand the efforts of this study with continued follow-up with the study subjects and design additional studies in which direct neurodevelopmental outcomes could be assessed. It is important to emphasize that given the limitations and preliminary nature of the study, these results should be interpreted with caution; parents should not keep their children from having necessary surgical procedures,” said Dr. Sun.

While a number of animal studies have provided useful direction for further research, it is important to note that animal studies are considered basic science, and their findings do not always translate to the complex physiological system of human beings.

Anesthesiologists: Physicians providing the lifeline of modern medicine. Founded in 1905, the American Society of Anesthesiologists is an educational, research and scientific association with 43,000 members organized to raise and maintain the standards of the medical practice of anesthesiology and improve the care of the patient.

For more information visit the American Society of Anesthesiologists Web site at http://www.asahq.org.

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Low Estrogen Patch is actually HIGH Estrogen--and deadly not just to fertility

I've written before about how you might want to stay away from oral contraceptives, ESPECIALLY if you plan one day to be pregnant--it can really mess up your delicate cycle, possibly permanently. Before you pour chemicals and hormones into your body at someone else's profit, you might want to consider, who's looking out for you? Not the drug companies. From Nerve.Com:

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Rough Patch

by Nicole Ankowski

"Those fucking bastards," I whispered to my boyfriend and cat when I read the article. "They're getting away with it!"

In April, The New York Times brought us a nasty update to the 2005 news that pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson had been lying to the public about their Ortho Evra birth-control patch. Marketed as a lower-estrogen birth-control option (meaning fewer and milder side effects than the pill), the patch actually delivered much higher doses of estrogen than the pill; Johnson & Johnson failed to reveal this to the public for six years. At least fifty deaths have been attributed to the patch because of this, with thousands more women reporting alarming symptoms.

And now, Johnson & Johnson is arguing that women hurt by the patch cannot sue, because the FDA approved the patch in the first place.

read more here.

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