"Nothing concentrates a man's thoughts so much as the knowledge that he is to be hanged on the morrow" [Samuel Johnson]

A Glass of Water for a Heart Attack

          It had come out of the blue -- sudden hot pain behind
the lower part of the sternum, which had flashed left, right, up
and down till it had engulfed his whole chest and quickly grown
so intense that he could barely breathe.  It had felt as though
bands of steel had been laid about him.  And he had broken out in
a cold sweat though he could not have told whether the sweating
was part of what had befallen him or a secondary effect, one of
fear that he was in the middle of a heart attack.
          At Emergency, the doctor had taken his blood pressure
and checked his pulse.  "125/70 against a heart rate of 68," he'd
heard the doctor mutter; "no indication of heart trouble there."
The ECG had turned out reassuringly regular.  For good measure,
an X-ray and a blood sample had been taken, neither of which had
shown anything irregular.  Whatever it had been, it did
not seem to have come from the heart.  Moreover, even before they
had quite finished with him at Emergency, the pain had
disappeared, no more than a hint of it left as though to confirm
that it had not just been his imagination.  He had left Emergency
almost reassured that he was all right.  
          He had gone through it all again a few weeks later
-- the sudden pain that spread from an epicenter behind the lower
sternum, the checks at Emergency, the doctor's conclusion that
there was nothing wrong with him.  In a little follow-up chat,
the doctor had suggested that his problem might be psychosomatic,
the result of too much stress.  
          When, trying to describe the pain to me, he used the
words hot and burning several times, I had a hunch.   Yes, he
said, when I asked him about heartburn, he knew what a heartburn
was, but the pain he was talking about was nothing like a
heartburn.  While a heartburn was mostly burn, what he had
experienced had been almost all pain, though with perhaps a hint
of burning in it.
          I remembered that, though the normal response to
stomach acid backing up into the esophagus is a heartburn,
medical literature reports cases where the esophagus responds to
the acid with spasms accompanied by pain so intense and massive
as to mimic a heart attack.  I told him of my hunch and advised
him to treat his next "heart attack" with a big glass of water --
water at room temperature, not iced, to be drunk slowly but
continuously, in hopes that it would wash the acid out of the
esophagus and so, by eliminating the cause, ease the pain.  
          A few weeks later I had a phone call from him.  He had
had another one of his "heart attacks" and he had tried the water
therapy.  The results had been spectacular.  The first sips of
water had barely reached the lower end of his food pipe, when the
tightness around his chest had loosened and the pain disappeared
as though it had never been.  No need for a trip to the
Emergency.  His excitement was palpable.
          Now, I am not suggesting that anyone experiencing a
sudden burst of massive pain radiating from behind the sternum
should do no more than slowly drink a glass of water.  My advice
to him is that he had better get himself to Emergency the
quickest way possible.  He might, on his way there, take several
deep breaths, breathing in normally but exhaling with bursts of
deliberate coughing.  If he should be in the throes of a real
heart attack, the coughing would, by massaging the heart, help it
keep beating till he should get to where expert first aid is
available.

If the doctors should find nothing wrong with his cardiovascular
system, if they should wonder whether stress might be at the
bottom of the complaint, he might try the water treatment.  
If his problem is esophageal spasms due to acid backup, the
water therapy is bound to help and it will, ex iuvantibus,
corroborate the diagnosis.   

About a hundred years ago, Rockefeller used his financial clout to eliminate virtually all alternative health care approaches so as to create the monopoly of mainstream medicine as we know it, the only health care approach that can legally prescribe drugs.  This way Rockefeller all but made mainstream medicine a branch of his business empire since a good many of the drugs were derived from petroleum, the black gold that had made him one of the richest men to walk the earth.  
In more ways than one, we are all still victims of Rockefeller's machinations, particularly in this one -- that our national health insurance -- I am speaking for Canada -- which is funded by tax dollars, pays ONLY for the services of MM, i.e. Rockefeller Medicine.  If you want to see a naturopath or a homeopath, you pay out of your own pocket. And the big irony of it is that the alternatives are not known for doing people in the way MM is, killing hundreds of thousands every year.  Don't take my word for it.  Just google and look at "Death by Medicine."  Or look up “The Vioxx scandal.”

To read the full story – “Western Medicine is Rockefeller Medicine – All The Way,” click this URL: http://freedom-articles.toolsforfreedom.com/western-medicine-rockefeller-medicine/

         What follows is an abbreviated version of my secret for good health far into old age.  I typed it for a pharmacist in one of the Sobey stores a few years ago.   I told her, tongue-in-cheek, "Lady, if everybody lived like me, you'd be out of a job."  We talked.  She shook her head in disbelief when I told her that, though I was pushing 80, I was on no drugs, in fact had not been on any drugs in 40 years. But she was open-minded, unlike most pharmacists and/or doctors, and she wanted to know what my secret was.  Told her that it was not possible to give it to her in a few words but would go home and type up a telegram-style summary of it for her.  And I did....

        I talked to you – the pharmacist -- briefly a few days ago about being healthy without drugs or doctors.  You surprised me by your willingness to listen.  Most of your colleagues don't need to listen because they know it all already.  I came away from our brief encounter determined to "talk to you" a little more.  Since I can't take up your time while you are working and I have no other way of cornering you to listen, I decided to take this approach -- to put a few thoughts on paper for you and to hand it to you next time I;d see you.
        So, what's the secret of living to be almost 80 without drugs or the ministrations of doctors?  The answer is so incredibly simple that most people respond to it with an incredulous "You must be kidding."  In a nutshell, it is doing what comes naturally instead of doing what vested interests brainwash you to do.  

1.    Exercise regularly, rain or shine, all your life...

        I have been jogging -- a minumum of 5 km a day, six times a week -- without a major interruption for more than 40 years.  When I was younger, I ran marathons too.  I jog in any season, rain or shine, summer heat or winter cold.  I have jogged through Ottawa winters and through almost twenty years of the tropics.  There is nothing life-threatening about jogging at 30 below zero.  If there is a problem, it's in the mind. For me, jogging is not only not a chore but something I enjoy.  If, for whatever reason, I don't get to jog for a couple of days, I feel like a caged animal.  
        Does not have to be JOGGING.  Any kind of truly aerobic exercise does the trick -- bicycling, swimming, rope skipping, the treadmill, mountain climbing, or just WALKING.  Walking and jogging are only different intensities of the same activity, not different kinds of activity.  You just have to invest a little more time in walking to get the same exercise value as you get from jogging.  Little kids and animals "jog" naturally.  It is us grown-ups that need to be reminded of it.

2.  Eat only unrefined food, most of it raw...

        Even the gentlest of cooking destroys some nutrients and / or alters the molecules of some foods till the body does not "recognize" them and does not know what to do with them.  Worst of all, cooking destroys the all-important enzymes.  Biologists who have worked with wild animals tell us that wild animals which live in an environment not yet ruined by man by and large do not get sick.  That's largely because -- herbivorous or carnivorous -- they haven’t been taught how to cook their food.  Goes without saying that they get a minimum of exercise.  They stay healthy till far into old age. Some end of a day, when their hour has come, they go to sleep not to wake up the morning after.  Pets which eat the same denatured food as their masters get as sick as their masters..  And the veterinary establishment is little more interested in real health for its patients than mainstream medicine is.
        Some few foods are better eaten at least partly cooked.  Carrots, for instance, and squash or potatoes yield more of their nutritional goodness if cooked than they do raw.  The human digestive system cannot digest the fiber in them completely the way ruminants -- cows, camels, goats, sheep -- do, and so much of them goes through the body unused.  Cooking "softens" the fiber so that our digestive system can handle it.  But don’t overcook them.  Even better than cooking these vegetables is juicing or  pureeing them. I do....
        Here is a little side remark.  It is NOT difficult to live so that you don't get sick.  The main reason why so many people find it difficult, if not impossible, to do what they should be doing is that they have permitted themselves to be manipulated by the commercial brainwashing of a system that does not want people to be healthy.  No money to be made off people that are healthy.  They don't buy junk food.  They don’t crowd doctors’ offices.  They don't buy drugs.  They walk where others would take the car or hire a taxi.  They don't spend much of their waking lives before the main instrument of brainwashing -- the TV screen.  I don’t spend 20 hours a year before a TV screen. I’d rather read a book than watch what’s presented of it on TV.  I’d rather DO than watch OTHER  people do.
        If you think you – that’s talking to the pharmacist --  sell health, you are kidding yourself.  You sell palliatives, which deal with the symptoms of disease but do nothing to build real health.  A pharmacist friend of mine told me a few years ago, "Ambros, I gotta get out of this racket.  I feel guilty selling an unquestioning clientele stuff I would not take myself."  And he did.  
        I am simplifying my argument 'because, for obvious reasons, I can't go into the full details of it.  The last thing the mighty pharma industry wants is healthy people.  It does not want people to be dead.  No money to be made off corpses except for the undertaker.  But it does not want them healthy.  A sane health care system would want to keep the sale of drugs to a minimum.   Our system promotes the sale of drugs as though it were the only road to salvation.  And a good many drugs -- high blood pressure drugs, cholesterol-lowering drugs, diabetes drugs, etc. -- are life-sentences..  Once you are on them, you can't stop taking them.  If you stop taking them, you are in trouble.  They are for life.  What a sourse of income for Big Phama.  Take Lipitor for an example. The run-away best seller, it nets Big Pharma BILLIONS of dollars every year and in the end causes what it is supposed to prevent, heart attacks.  Its German kissing cousin Lipobay was taken off the market for that very reason.
        Doctors, by and large, are not aware that they are the salesmen of the pharma-mafia.  They are trained in medical schools that are supported by pharma money and they come away "brain-washed" to believe that the three pillars of mainstream medicine -- drugs, surgery and radiation -- are what saves humanity from extinction.  
        A sane system of medicine would make its future doctors understand that the human body, so wonderful a piece of biological engineering that it can build itself in all its complexity from two tiny cells met in conception, is its own best doctor.  If given half a chance, it can maintain itself in good health far into old age.  The most important thing for a doctor is to know what giving Body that "half a chance" means and to understand that drugs, surgery and radiation should be a very last, not a first, resort.
        Doest know that ancient China had a health care system which rewarded doctors for keeping people healthy and penalized them for letting them become sick?   All patients would pay a small, regular fee as long they were healthy.  They stopped paying when they fell ill and did not pay again till their health was restored.  There it would have been in the doctor’s own best interest to restore his patients’ health.  In our system, a doctor makes the more money the more sick patients he has.

3.      Don't eat till you are hungry.

    If you eat before you are really hungry, you rob yourself of one of life's genuine pleasures -- that of really enjoying your food.  If you permit yourself to get hungry before you eat, the simplest of foods -- a spoonful of plain yogurt, a celery stick, a slice of whole-wheat bread -- taste delcious.  If you eat before you are hungry, you need dips and sauces to pinch-hit for the real pleasure.  The only “sauces” I use now and then are a little Dijon mustard and some Kikoman soy sauce..

4.      A few special foods:

    Yogurt, yes, but only GOOD yogurt, i.e. home-made yogurt.
    Takes hardly more time to make a batch of your own yogurt
    than to make a cup of coffee.  Want my fool-proof recipe --
    no yogurt maker required -- look for it on my Blog --
    http://askambrosius.simplesite.com/.
    Liver... not fried... raw or steamed...
    Coconut oil…
    Garlic... flaxseed oil...
    Walnuts... almonds... hemp seed...
    A mixture of cinnamon and honey... real miracle food...
    A can of sardines... low on the food chain...
    Sauerkraut and miso, two of the foods that rehabilitate your
    gut flora....

5.    Stay away from doctors... stay away from pharmacies...

    Medical history reports a number of situations where doctors went on strike.  When researchers set out to assess the damage, they found that no damage was done; that, on the contrary, the death rate went down while the doctors were on strike.  Don’t believe me?  Go do a search for “When doctors go on strike.”  Doest know that, according to a Ralph Nader study, some 300,000 people are done in annually in North America by "ethical" drugs?  That ain't saying nuttin about the millions more who are hurt by drugs -- many very gravely -- without becoming mortality statistics.  I'd put much more trust in a Ralph Nader survey than in one done by the pharma industry.  

6.    Have faith in the healing powers of the body

    Most people short-change themselves terribly in terms of health and life-expectancy.  They take it for granted that around 70 life is more or less over.  If they are alive beyond 70, they take it for granted that they will be prey to ills commonly associated with old age -- circulatory problems, arthritis, diabetes, failing eyesight, loss of hearing acuity, deteriorating memory and what have you. [Though I am crowding eighty, I do not neeed glasses, not for reading not for looking off in the distance., no hearing aid, no crutches of any kind]  Few people realize that, if they lived right, they could live way beyond 70, far into old age, and stay healthy all the way.  Most of the ills we associate with old age are but the accumulated wages of years of faulty living AND of the drugs most old people are on, not the inevitable accompaniment of growing old.
    One of the worst sins of our medical system is that it has robbed people of their faith in the self-healing powers of the body.  

Here you have a few general rules of healthful living

1.    Avoid foods that do not spoil.  If a food does not spoil –  like white flower,  white sugar, most of the cooking oils and most of the cookies or pastries you find on supermarket shelves --  it is probably so full of chemicals or so empty of nutrients that even spoilage bacteria stay away from it.  Eat only food that spoils, but eat it before it spoils.
2.    Consume very little, if any, coffee or alcohol.
3.    Avoid sugar and white flour and all foods that contain them.  No candy, no cookies, no cakes; no ice-cream, none of the commercial flavored yogurts.  If you want a sweet treat turn to fruit.  Mash a ripe banana and stir it into a bit of unflavored, unsweetened yogurt.  Delicious!   Eat some dried dates.  I love figs soaked in water for a couple of days.  The soaked figs are a delicious sweet treat that comes loaded with the B-vitamins and various minerals.  The water they soak in is itself a delicious drink.
4.      Avoid foods that contain chemical additives.
5.    Avoid unconditionally the pure junk foods like soft drinks, potato chips and other party foods such as soda crackers, pretzels, etc.  These substances give you next to nothing of nutritional value -- virtually no vitamins, no minerals, no fiber; very little, if any, protein.  But they give you lots of empty calories -- the last thing most of us need -- and undesirable additives.  
6.    Avoid commercial sauces and salad dressings.  Most of them contain sugar and chemical additives.  All I use for a salad dressing is olive oil (only extra virgin), a touch of vinegar (only unpasteurized apple cider vinegar), soy sauce or sea salt and pepper.  And I love it.  You could too.  As taste buds can be conditioned to like the wrong foods so they can be reconditioned to like what’s good for you.
7.    Go easy on the salt shaker.  If most of your food is unprocessed and unrefined, you get nearly all the salt you need from it.  If salt at all, use sea salt or soy sauce.
8.    Don't consider milk a drink: consider it a food.  Have a glass of milk, if you must, between meals for a snack, but do not drink milk with your meals. Better still, don’t drink North American milk at all.
9.    Don't drink with your meals.  Drink up to half an hour before a meal and don't drink again till at least an hour afterwards.  More about this below.
    You cannot hope to build health or to maintain it on a diet of fast food.  When in doubt, skip a meal.  Rather than inflict a doughnut and coffee on your organism, wait till you can get to real food -- food that has been processed only as much as is necessary to make it eatable.  And remember, the more of your food you eat raw, the better it is for you and the less energy and time it takes to prepare it.  I often go for weeks without cooking.
    Our taste buds can be conditioned to accept foods which are good for us as readily as they can be conditioned to want junk food.  Let a smoker, who swears that only a Rothman is worth smoking, smoke a Camel for a few weeks and he will swear that only a Camel is worth smoking.  By the same token, you don't have to eat good, wholesome foods for more than a couple of weeks to change your taste buds’ preferences.  Not eating a doughnut is a sacrifice only if you permit yourself to think it is.  For me, it would be more difficult to eat a donut than not to eat it.  
    Therefore eat all your food in as natural a state as possible.  And eat the whole food -- eat the whole orange rather than just drinking the juice of it; eat peanuts with their skins; eat tomatoes rather than drinking tomato juice; when possible, use tomatoes in your cooking, not tomato paste; eat potatoes, not potato chips; eat the whole corn (maize) rather than corn flakes.  And don't be ashamed to eat simple foods.  Let others think you old-fashioned for eating old-fashioned food from the farm instead of elegantly packaged food from the supermarket.  If you stick to your food-from-the-farm resolution, you are going to reap big benefits of good health; they -- those who eat the highly processed and refined gentile foods -- are setting their course for disease.
    Every day try to eat raw some food that can be eaten raw -- some fruit, a tomato or two, some lettuce, a cucumber.  All processing of food, even cooking, destroys some nutrients.  Raw food has its nutrients intact, especially the all-important enzymes.
    Such non-foods as coffee and soft drinks, white sugar or white flour – not only do they not contribute any nutrients to the body's ecology, they actually rob the body of nutrients.  Everything we eat or drink has to be processed in the body.  But, for this processing the body needs certain vitamins and minerals.  Whole foods come well-provisioned with vitamins and minerals; in fact, they carry more of them than is needed for their own processing, and what is left over after they have been processed is credited to the body's nutritional bank account.  Because the non-foods do not supply any vitamins or minerals, the body must dip into its own reserves of nutrients to process them.  Thus these offending substances -- they don't deserve to be called food or drink -- rob the body of vitamins and minerals instead of supplying them.  Every cup of coffee costs in terms of the B-vitamins; sugar robs the body of B-vitamins and of certain minerals such as calcium, magnesium and potassium.  You make matters worse if you take your coffee with sugar.  If you do,  you send two nutritional thieves to prey on your body at the same time.  A coke is much like a strong cup of coffee with lots of sugar.
    But sugar, soft drinks -- in fact, all highly refined foods -- harm you in yet another way: they crowd out good foods that would supply essential nutrients.  When you are hungry, you should eat foods that supply what your body needs of building materials, of  vitamins, of enzymes and minerals.  Natural foods like whole grain products, vegetables, fruit, etc. do that.  The non-foods discussed above don't.  With the calories they supply, they assuage your hunger and so take your appetite away for the good foods, which would bring nutrients to your body.  
    Go easy on the salt shaker.  A high salt intake is the root of several ills, chief among them high blood pressure.  Go for sea salt, available at most health food stores.
    Don't eat several different foods at the same sitting.  Different foods require different digestive media.  Carbohydrate foods require an alkaline environment while protein foods require an acid environment for optimal digestion.  But the stomach cannot be alkaline and acid at the same time; in fact, these two substances neutralize each other.  So, if you eat protein foods with starchy foods -- steak and potatoes, for instance -- digestion is either inhibited or arrested altogether.   Instead of digesting, the mixture of foods in the stomach starts to decompose and to ferment.  In the process gases are produced, which may leave you feeling bloated and bilious.  Small quantities of alcohol may be produced, which can leave you feeling drowsy and out of sorts.  Therefore, as much as possible, do not eat protein foods and carbohydrates at the same time.  If you must have the steak and the potatoes, eat the former at noon and the latter in the evening.  J  You may eat vegetables with either proteins or carbohydrates, but do not eat fruit and vegetables at the same time.  Fruit, in fact, is best eaten by itself, on an empty stomach.  One of the worst nutritional sins is a sweet dessert after a protein meal.  That goes even for fruit.
    As I said above, do not drink with your meals.  Drink up to half an hour before a meal and not again till half an hour to an hour afterwards.  When you eat, your saliva glands secrete saliva, which gets mixed with the food as your teeth grind it into pulp.  This way the food becomes soft and slippery and it can be swallowed easily.  But saliva serves yet another purpose, probably more important than the first one.  There are enzymes in saliva which are important for the digestion of food.  If they are properly mixed with the food in the mouth, digestive processes are initiated even before the food reaches the stomach.  But if you drink while you eat, your saliva glands get lazy.  No need for them to exert themselves producing saliva.  Lots of fluid coming in to make the food soft and moist for easy swallowing.  But, no saliva means no predigestion of the food on its way to the stomach.  An important part of the digestive process is aborted.
    There is a second reason why you should not drink with your meals.  A healthy stomach contains a delicately balanced mixture of digestive juices, all of them present in the right concentration.  If you drink, that delicate balance is disturbed.  The mixture gets diluted, the concentration of its various components is lowered.  As a result, food cannot be effectively digested -- not until the natural concentration of the digestive juices is restored.  Meanwhile the food in the stomach begins to deteriorate: it ferments, it starts to rot.  In the process some nutrients are destroyed.  Flatulence is a frequent side effect -- trapped gas rumbling up and down the intestines accompanied by frequent breaking of wind.  Indigestion is another possible side effect.
    Take heart, healthful living is not an all-or-nothing proposition but rather one of more or less. Fortunately the human body comes with lots of reserves.   It forgives a fair bit of sinning.  Just make sure that you are on the more side of the scale.  The closer to the upper end of the scale, the better.
    I do not have much faith in mainstream medicine.  It's all about money.  Doctors are educated -- call it brainwashed -- in med schools financed largely by Big Pharma.  (Privately I call it the Pharmamafia).  They come away believing that DRUGS -- medical drugs -- are the only salvation of mankind.  At least half a dozen of the biggest Pharma companies have been fined more than a billion -- yes, billion, not million -- dollars for fraudulent advertizing.  The money they must have to be able to pay billions of dollars of fines!  Just search for and read the following three things.  They prove my point.  And I am to believe that Big Pharma's mission is to make people healthy, to believe that they can be trusted.  
    The much vaunted scientific medical research is not designed to find cures.  Cures -- real cures -- would put them out of business, the last thing they want.  The intent of medical research is to find ways of alleviating symptoms, in other words to make the patient feel better, feel that (s)he is cured.  There is no mainstream medication that really heals.  All they do is treat the symptoms, but they have nasty side effects.  Some of them KILL.  Just read the Vioxx scam.  Big Business.  One of the reasons I don't know what it means to be sick is the fact that I have not consumed any mainstream medication in at least 40 years.
    1.  Search for and read "The cholesterol fraud."  There are mountains of evidence that people with high cholesterol live longer.  Here is the URL for one eye-opening article if you want to type it: http://healthimpactnews.com/2012/newest-scam-to-increase-statin-cholesterol-lowering-drugs-if-youre-older-than-50/ If you don't feel like typing it, search for the part I've colored red.  But read with a cautious eye.  Many of the hits are pro-medication propaganda.
    2.  Drug Giant Pfizer fined 2.3 billion for fraudulent advertizing.   Trust them?  If  you find it too tedioius to type the long URL, go search for what I marked in red.... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2009-09-02-pfizer-fine_N.htm
    3.  The Vioxx scam: Here a quotation from the article:  "Merck joins Pfizer and most other major drug companies in settling long
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/business/merck-agrees-to-pay-950-million-in-vioxx-case.html   
investigations with prosecutors."   And we are expected to trust this brood of gangsters.  Vioxx was withdrawn from the market after 200,000 heart attacks had been attributed to the drug, 60,000 of them deadly.  And Merck had known for years that the drug was killing people.   Nah, I seem to do quite well withoiut mainstream med drugs, both financially and hygienically.  I'll keep going that way.

Post Script

    I wrote this several years ago.  Since then, an update has become necessary.  Here I'll just hint at a thing or two.  Will flesh it out soon.

1.  Your Gut Flora   To be truly healthy, you must keep your gut flora up to par.  A robust gut flora is the Alpha and the Omega of a strong immune system.  Enemy No. 1 of the gut flora -- antibiotics.  True, the drugs have saved lives but at what cost!  There is convincing evidence that even one full course of antibiotics can do permaent damage to the gut flora.   Consume these probiotic foods to rehabilitate your gut flora -- sauerkraut, good yogurt or kefit, miso and other fermented foods.  Good yogurt means primarily homemade yogurt, most of the yogurts you find on the shelves of your supermarket have been pasteurized; i.e. have had their probiotic bacteria cultures heat-killed.
2. Your pH balance   Get some litmus paper to check your pH balance.  It should be 7 on the scale or higher.  Below 7 is acidic; above 7 is alkaline.  If your pH is below 7, you are vulnerable to all sorts of ills; if it is above 7 -- ideally around 7.5 -- you are immune to most of the common ills that plague humanity, maybe even to cancer.  The pH of most people in the west is below 7.  How to up it?
       You can do so by making certain changes in your nutrition, but there is a quick and easy way to up your pH -- take a teaspoon of baking soda every day in some fruit juice diluted with water at a 5 to 1 ratio.  Take it on an empty stomach or between meals.