Only You Can Prevent Disease

There’s a billboard on I-25 that has a huge picture of Smokey the Bear.  I remember Smokey from growing up in Florida.  As wet and humid as Florida can be, I recall many forest fires during the summers, and where there is fire, there is Smokey warning us of the dangers.  Smokey’s message is “Only you can prevent forest fires.”  But as I was passing the sign on the interstate the other day, I started thinking to myself, “That’s not true. There’s a lot of ways and a lot of people that can prevent forest fires!”  We have entire organizations whose job it is to prevent fire.  Now I understand the notion.  We all must take responsibility because any one of us can cause a fire.  But that is a shared burden.  And as I often do, I started thinking about health and the more I thought about it the more I realized, only you can prevent disease!

Your health is your most important asset.  If you lose your health you lose your freedom.  It doesn’t matter how much money you make, where your kids go to school, where you live, nothing matters when you lose your health.  How far would you travel, how much would you spend just to get your health back?  Your entire life is turned upside down at the first sign of disease.  The point is driven home in the fact that the number one cause of bankruptcy in our country is unpaid medical bills.  When you lose your health, there is nothing you won’t give up to get it back.  I don’t think most people realize this simply due to the fact that we have given away the responsibility of keeping us healthy over to the government and the pharmaceutical industry.  Just to paint it in black in white, the pharmaceutical industry profits off sick people, not healthy people.  Why in the world would you put your health in the hands of a system that only benefits if you stay sick??  What if Smokey the Bear made billions of dollars off of fighting fires.  How likely would it be to see him campaigning to PREVENT the fires?  He’d be the first to START the fires. Luckily ‘ole Smoky is a goodhearted bear and loves the forest!  But can we say the same of the authorities we’ve placed in charge of our health?  

I’m not here to argue the life saving benefits of emergency medicine.  If I get in a crash and lose my leg, please do not take me to the chiropractor!  But crisis care and health care are two very different things.  The CDC has been responsible for the health of Americans since 1945.  How well are they doing?  To tell the health of a nation you need look no farther than the children.  So after nearly 80 years, here’s the numbers: 

• Ranked 169th in the world for Infant Mortality
• 48% of children have at least one chronic disease
• Cancer is the leading cause of death in children
• 1 in 7 children on an antipsychotic drug
• 1 in 6 children learning disabled 
• 1 in 12 suffer with asthma 
• 1 in 5 with an emotional, mental or behavioral disorder 
• 1 in 5 with obesity 
• 1 in 3 overweight
• 1 in 13 with allergies 
• 1 in 34 with Autism

These are pre- 2020 numbers.  Since the introduction of mass COVID shots in kids, these numbers are rapidly worsening.  The fact is that those whom we have handed our health to, have failed us.  It has become more clear than ever that “Only you can prevent disease.”  

Your health and the health of your children is your responsibility and yours alone.  No government, no industry, no doctor can make or keep you healthy.  But most people don’t think they know how to be healthy or what to do when sickness comes so they blindly follow whatever the talking heads on the screens say.  Again, when billions of dollars are involved, they don’t want you to make your own decisions.  They want you in the dark and in fear so that you run to them for health care.  We are being told from the day we are born that our bodies are sick and broken and that we require manmade drugs and injections just to keep us alive.  I’m here to empower you and tell you that you and your children were designed perfectly and you were designed for health and abundance!  You DO know how to be healthy!  You are way more equipped than you know.  

One of the biggest problems I see in our world is that we have replaced ancient wisdom with science and research.  It used to be that knowledge was passed from one generation to the next and in that way, the things that proved beneficial for humanity carried on for thousands of years.  But as science began to take over, wisdom became mocked and ridiculed as religious practice, cultish, or quackery.  We lost the knowledge that enabled our ancestors to survive.  Things like herbal remedies have been banished to the back corner of health care.  But, luckily our instincts are still holding on.  We have the basics in place!  We all know the foundations of what to do. 

If we were to poll 100 people, all 100 would agree that if you eat well and exercise that your chances of being diagnosed with heart disease, cancer, or diabetes would go down.  We can all agree that when you put chemicals into your body that it will cause damage.  And we can all agree that stress is bad for your health.  We can even agree that your nervous system must be able to function properly in order for you to be healthy.  These are the basics of health that we all know.  These are the remnants of ancient wisdom that has been lost.  This is how we begin to reclaim responsibility of our health.

Only you can prevent disease.  Only you are responsible for your health.  No one can do it for you.  Luckily God designed you for health and vitality and He left the knowledge deep within you.  Where ever you are on your health journey you already know the answer.  Eat well.  Move often.  Minimize stress and toxins.  Keep a clear nervous system.  The rest will follow.  

 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Gut Health & Chemical Stress

Recently we took a deep dive into stress and how it impacts the health of your gut, but the effects of stress go much deeper than just giving you a tummy ache.  If you recall, stress leads to a state of “fight or flight”.  In fight or flight your nervous system switches your entire body into survival mode.  Blood rushes away from your organs and into your muscles so you can fight! (Or take flight.)  Your non-essential systems shut down to give more energy to the essential systems because they are in a state of emergency!  You don’t need to be digesting your lunch if a bear is after you, all you need to do is survive to digest another day.  This system is perfect in emergency situations, but it can be deadly if we get stuck.

Stress is a constant in our world today.  It comes from every direction.  Remember there are 3 main stressors that keep us in fight or flight in our modern world: emotional, chemical, and physical stress.  The one we are all most familiar with is emotional stress.  Your kids are out of control, you’re stuck in traffic and late for a meeting, the bills are due, etc.  There are infinite things that cause us emotional stress but what about the other two?  I believe that the chemical and physical stresses are by far more hurtful than emotional stress because most of us don’t know about them, yet they are just as harmful to our health.

Chemicals are everywhere.  They are in the air, in the water, in the food, and in the products you put on your skin every day.  Chemicals have become standard in our modern lives especially in the U.S.  The problem is that every single chemical that comes into your body is considered a health damaging toxin.  Thankfully God designed us to detox!  You have entire systems in your body that are made just to remove the toxins.  All day every day your body is in constant search of toxins so that it can get them out.  But what if there is an overwhelming amount of toxins??   

When I was growing up, one of my chores was to pick up the dog poop in the backyard.  What a great job!  Especially when you grow up with big dogs like Labradors and Rottweilers…  I never really had a set timeline or schedule.  The dog poop just needed to be picked up.  Sometimes I would get lazy and not do my job for several weeks.  Then I’d find out people were coming over and the backyard needed to be spotless.  In those times the amount of poop was overwhelming!  I was stressed to the max running all over the backyard with my pooper scooper.  But that is exactly what happens in your body.  When small amounts of toxins come in your body can handle them.  But when overwhelming amounts of toxins come in, your body goes into fight or flight.  It goes into survival mode.

Chemical stress is one of the reasons your gut is so vital to your health.  Your gut is one of two barriers from the outside world.  The first barrier is your skin.  Your skin’s job is to keep the world out of your body.  It acts as a barrier that prevents most things from getting in.  But your gut does the exact same thing.  Even though it is on the inside, it is still a line of defense keeping the outside world out and only allowing certain things in.  But when your gut lining is damaged by too many toxins, too much sugar and grains, gut killing antibiotics, or even chronic stress, all of a sudden all those toxic chemicals are able to get in.  It’s like those medieval battles where the castle walls get breached and the enemy comes flooding in, overwhelming the good guys.  There’s just too many to handle. 

Even though there are toxins all around us, there is a lot that we can do to manage them.  One of the easiest ways I ever found to reduce dog poop is to have less dogs or at least littler dogs!  Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs, BUT your health isn’t worth it.  I know you love your toxic food and soda.  I know antibiotics are easier than more holistic and God made solutions, but it’s costing you your health!

Join us here at NGFC on August 16th @ 6PM as we take a deep dive into all things Gut Health!

 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

No Guts, No Glory

These days the importance of gut health has really come to light.  We know now that your gut does way more than just digest food (which in and of itself is a miracle!).  Beyond turning your broccoli into human cells, your gut helps balance hormones, produce essential enzymes, house 70% of your immune system, create serotonin and dopamine (both neurotransmitters for your brain), and so much more.  But these days more and more people are coming into our office with gut related issues.  Gas, bloating, and pain are becoming all too common, but it’s also the secondary issues that are concerning.  Gut issues lead to things like infertility, hormone disruption, behavior issues (in both kids and adults), autoimmune disease, heart disease, diabetes, cancer… the list goes on forever.  So it behooves us to look at the cause of gut issues.  Luckily it all comes down to one problem: stress.

We all know stress is no good.  If you polled 100 people, all 100 would agree that they don’t want stress in their life.  But stress is a much bigger problem than we give it credit for.  One of the issues with stress is that there are 3 different types.  

Emotional Stress – Chemical Stress – Neurological Stress

The one we are most familiar with is Emotional Stress.  This is the one that occurs when the bills are due and the bank account is low.  Or the school calls and your child is in trouble again (my mom had to deal with this one a lot).  Maybe there’s conflict in your relationships, or your boss is a jerk.  Maybe it’s as simple as the traffic on your commute.  Emotional stress is abundant in our world.  

The problem with emotional stress is what it does to our health.  You see God knew we would deal with stress in our lives, so he gave us a built in response to it.  He designed our autonomic nervous system with two parts.  The sympathetic and the parasympathetic.  Sympathetic is the fight or flight response and parasympathetic is the rest, digest and heal response.  You can only be in one or the other, never in both.  The way it was designed, when we are out in the field tending our sheep and a lion comes immediately our sympathetics turn on and we go into fight or flight mode.  In fight or flight, our blood flow is directed away from our brain and organs to sent to our muscles, our heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing all increase, our digestion, reproductive system, and immune system all turn OFF.  This is great because it gives us the ability to run (flight) or turn and face the lion (fight like David from the Old Testament).  Then once we have saved our sheep, the stressor is gone, and we switch back to rest, digest, and heal mode.  Blood is sent back to the vital organs, blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing return to normal.  We start to DIGEST and heal again.  A perfect design.

The problem is that our stressors are no longer lions.  Like I said before, our world is one big bucket of stress!  Studies show that even having your cell phone near you causes stress.  We eagerly tap it just to see if we missed a notification.  On average, if you can see your phone you think about it every 7 seconds.  In our stressed out world, we get stuck in fight or flight mode.  Heart rate and blood pressure stay up while immune function, reproduction, and DIGESTION stay down.  

One of the easiest ways to see this is in children.  It might not seem like it, but I am an introvert at heart and always have been.  I was the little boy that hid behind my mom as much as she would let me.  Talking to people was one of my biggest fears growing up.  I remember every Sunday on the ride to church how stressed out I would get at the notion of all the people I’d encounter.  But the worst part was the tummy aches.  My stress would send my stomach into a fit.  It makes sense looking back.  I was deep into fight or flight because of my stress.

Finding ways to manage your emotional stress is ESSENTIAL to your gut health.  That’s why Mindset is one of the 5 Essentials of Health.  Your thoughts control your health via the autonomic nervous system.  When your emotional stress is stuck “on” your gut cannot break down food.  It can’t utilize that 70% of your immune system.  It can’t help to balance your hormones or produce the essential neurotransmitters for your brain.  

Of the 3 types of stress, Emotional Stress is likely the most difficult to handle as many things are outside of our control.  But the reality is that if it’s not in your control there is no reason to stress over it.  Stop worrying over the things you can’t do anything about.  You can’t control what others think or say about you.  You can’t force the traffic to clear.  As much as you’d like to, you can’t make your child do what you want them to.  Minimize your emotional stress by only worrying about the things that you have control over and that way you will spend the majority of your life resting, digesting, and healing.

On August 16th here at NGFC we are taking a deep dive into Gut Health.  We will look at Emotional, Chemical, and Neurological Stress, what they are, and most importantly what to do about it to make sure you and your family are living the best life possible!  This is an event I highly recommend bringing a friend to.  Far too many people unnecessarily struggle with gut issues.  Help your friends by bringing them!  See you there!

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc

Kids and COVID Shots Part 2

As our government and medical industry continue to push unnecessary and untested vaccines on our children, more and more information has been arising as to the nature of the newly approved COVID shot for children 6 months  to 5 years old.  Last week we looked at the need for the shot (rather the lack of need) and how we got to this point.  This week I want to outline some of the injuries that have already occurred due to this injection.

Pfizer’s safety study for children ages 6-23 months included 1,178 shot recipients and 598 placebo. Thirteen children withdrew from the study, nine who received the Pfizer shot, and four who received the placebo.  Those withdrawals were:

• A 21-month-old with a known nut allergy had an anaphylactic reaction 14 days after the shot that was attributed to eating nuts the day before.
• A 6-month-old had a respiratory infection with fever that turned into seizures two days after dose 2, which continued for 17 days. The child was withdrawn from the study at parental request. Whether the reaction was due to the shot “cannot be definitively excluded” but was also not admitted, nor was the FDA’s assessment included in the report.
• Another 21-month-old suffered febrile seizures 38 days after dose 1, which was determined to be unrelated.
• A 4-year-old was hospitalized after dose 2, suffering fevers, pain that caused a limp, and a rash over a 10-day period. The Pfizer investigator considered only the fever related to the shot and the FDA attributed the events to “an unspecified viral infection.”
• Two 4-year-olds happened to get appendicitis 11 days and 105 days after dose 2, both of which were considered unrelated to the shot.
• A 4-year-old with a complex medical history had seizures after dose 1 that investigators decided were due to a urinary tract infection rather than the shot. The child was withdrawn from the study.
• A 2-year-old had febrile convulsions 21 days after dose 1, but continued in the study to receive two more doses.
• A 4-year-old had seizures 47 days after the shot, which was attributed to a flu shot given after the COVID shot.

These trials in our youngest children started with a grossly inadequate sample size, then dropped even more without transparency in why children were excluded or withdrawn. Parents can’t make a decision about the safety of these shots if we still have so many unanswered questions about what happened to children in the trials.

Further, Pfizer reports there are 749,249 reports of injury or death due to their COVID shot alone as of May 19, 2022.  Tens of thousands of reports represent children who experienced anaphylaxis, myo-and pericarditis, seizures, fevers, rashes, and death after COVID shots.  This is a massive safety signal that is being ignored. Parents need to know this before they take their child to a clinic for these shots! These shots are unnecessary, untested, and unsafe.  Why would you put your child at risk with zero benefit?  

If you have more questions or concerns, join us on July 26th as NGFC hosts our annual Stand for Health + Freedom Conference.  At this event you will hear from multiple speakers on vaccine safety, mandates, parental rights but most importantly how to make sure you and your family are protected against ANY virus and ANYONE trying to take your freedoms.  

 

In Health and Faith, 

Dr. Marc

Kids and COVID Shots

 With some recent events regarding the health of children I thought I would share an article written by our partners at Stand for Health Freedom.  

COVID-19 shots for kids starting at 6 months have FDA authorization and CDC recommendation.

The White House is ready to start giving “shots in arms” of our babies and toddlers Tuesday, June 21, 2022, mere days after the federal agencies fulfilled their part in the Biden administration’s plan to vaccinate America. Now that FDA has authorized the Pfizer and Moderna COVID shots as of Friday, June 17 and the CDC gave its recommendation on Saturday, June 18, there are over 18 million more children (ages 6 months through 5 years) who will now be strategically targeted for the shots.

States were able to pre-order COVID shots for kids under 5 in the beginning of June, two weeks before the FDA even met publicly to discuss their recommendation. There are 10 million doses at the ready for Tuesday the 21st, with more on the way.

Parents must question the COVID shots.

The White House knows that people are going to turn to trusted people they know, like a pediatrician or a community leader, to make this decision. So they have already started educating “a network of providers and trusted messengers.” The White House is working with the American Academy of Pediatrics to create a speakers’ bureau to spread their messaging. The CDC site is ready to go with social media downloads with the tagline “less worry, more play” if infants and toddlers get the shot.

On June 8 the White House made it clear that their messages will be coming from every direction:

“We’re going to be reaching out to millions of children and their parents and guardians nationwide through WIC and SNAP, through Head Start and child care programs, through HUD-supported housing, and Medicaid, and CHIP.”

“We’re going to work with trusted organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Library Association, the National PTA, the National Diaper Bank Network, and the National Association of Community Health Centers, as well as a number of Black, Latino, AANHPI, and Native American community-based organizations.”

“We’re also going to activate our 17,000-plus-member HHS COVID-19 Community Corps, which will help provide creative, kid-focused English and Spanish toolkits to trusted local messengers.”

“At this point in the Biden administration’s vaccination program, our partners are accustomed to this process, and so are we.”

“As we have said previously, we are not in the predicting business; we’re in the planning business.” 

–Excerpts from White House Press Briefing on the Administration’s Operational Plan for Vaccinating Children Under 5 Against COVID-19.

Friends, it’s our responsibility to use our voices. Let’s talk to pregnant moms, bring up the topic with neighbors, and have the difficult conversations with family members. But always remember to open the door with love and curiosity.

We all want our children to be healthy. This is our common ground.

Some people may be drawn to the story that the CDC is painting about the shots: that kids can get COVID, kids can be hospitalized from COVID, and kids can die from COVID, and the only answer to those fears is the COVID shot. This is the core message they want parents to internalize so parents will make a decision based on their message, rather than exercise their constitutional rights to informed consent.

A ”senior administration official” explained at a White House press briefing on June 8, 2022, “the administration’s goal on COVID from day one has been to leave no stone unturned and to deploy every capability of the federal government. We will put that into practice and help to vaccinate America’s youngest kids.

“Our objective is clear: to be ready to swiftly and efficiently deliver vaccines for kids under the age of 5 to communities nationwide as soon as the FDA grants emergency use authorization.  And we are ready.”

Parental rights have not been taken away – yet.  But they will be if we don’t insist on them. We must make sure that American parents have the facts they need to make medical decisions, especially when it comes to the COVID shot.

Our babies and toddlers need you to speak up now.

Friends in your community will hear from their local health department, hospital systems and doctors, and public spaces like museums and libraries, that their babies as young as 6 months are due for their COVID-19 shot. The White House is working on all possible fronts to get their agenda for getting COVID shots out to parents around the country. But their message does not include all the information parents need to make an informed choice about the COVID shots. Read on to learn some things they won’t be told, and what you need to tell them, so they have the chance to make a real decision.

It is on us to break the censorship, and care enough to raise our voices.

COVID-19 is not a leading cause of death among children ages 0-19 years.

There is a graphic from a presentation by Dr. Katherine Fleming-Dultra from the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC that was presented during the hearing to recommend the shots for babies and toddlers.  The graphic states that COVID is the 5th leading cause of death in children.  The data in the graphic is based on a paper with the same title, published as a pre-print (without peer review) on May 27, 2022.  This chart is being used to support the message that COVID 19 is a leading cause of death among children.

What’s not stated in the table presented by the CDC is that the rank of COVID-19 among causes of death in the different age categories is the cumulative total of all COVID-coded deaths for the timeframe of March 1, 2020-April 30, 2022, and that sum total across two years is compared to other causes of death for the single year 2019 when COVID deaths were not even counted. This is only one of the problems with the CDC data. Stand for Health Freedom has also been educating advocates on the changes in recording on death certificates that inflated the statistics that would have been the basis for the article. Other inaccuracies have been reported by independent investigators. 

Parents are being told there is “good antibody response” to both shots, but the FDA and the CDC don’t know if the shots work in children under 5, and that wasn’t important for authorization.

Dr. William Gruber, Pfizer, told the CDC, “Remember, the efficacy was not a requirement for approval.” Pfizer’s application to expand their EUA to our youngest children included only “preliminary descriptive efficacy data from an ongoing” trial, and both the FDA and CDC accepted this. 

The CDC’s Program Lead for COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness, Dr. Ruth Link-Gelles, reported that “two-dose vaccine efficacy (VE) declines quickly in children and adolescents, following a similar pattern in adults during Omicron predominance. A booster dose in adolescents significantly improved VE initially, although there was waning.” 

Dr. Amanda Cohn with the Centers for Disease Control, who also sits on the FDA Advisory Committee VRBPAC, said the agencies don’t know what the efficacy will end up being. Dr. Sara Long, a member of ACIP, said “I think we should just assume we don’t have efficacy data.” 

The FDA and the CDC have internal reviewers, as well as advisory panels, full of medical doctors and researchers whose job it is to review data from trials on the COVID shots. These people are saying in public hearings that they have no idea how effective the shot is. Why would it be given at all if it is not effective? Is it okay to give drugs to children when the people who are supposed to certify them as “safe and effective” have no idea if they are effective? How many parents know that the FDA and the CDC don’t know this information? How many doctors, pharmacists, or drive-through clinic workers know?

Talk about antibodies is misleading, because how much immune response one body has is not the same as determining if a medical product works (is it effective at stopping the spread of disease). Dr. Eric Rubin, who votes on safety and efficacy to recommend these shots for FDA approval, sums it up: “We know what kind of antibody response can be generated, we just don’t know if it works.” In fact, the FDA and CDC do not know the number of shots that we have to give to kids before we even begin to see a benefit.  

There is no data about getting the COVID shot at the same time as other childhood vaccines.

There are no studies about the safety of getting COVID shots at the same time as others on the childhood immunization schedule. This is so important for parents to understand because at that 6-month well visit, when babies are scheduled to get six separate shots of nine different doses of vaccine, COVID will now be added to that list, making seven shots including 10 doses. 

Dr. Sarah Oliver of the CDC advised on “best practices for multiple injections,” encouraging injections at least 1 inch apart on baby and toddler limbs. One of the factors the CDC wants doctors to consider when deciding on coadministration, is the “likelihood of the child returning for another vaccination.” In other words, if the doctor thinks a parent won’t schedule another appointment for a vaccine, “general best practices” are to give all shots at the same visit, despite no evidence this is safe.

This is especially dangerous for the COVID shots because the mRNA shot is nothing like any vaccine on the schedule, has not yet gone through the full FDA approval process, and has been tested on a very small percentage of the population.

As this is one of the most critical decisions you can make for your child’s health we will continue on this subject in the weeks to come.

 

In Health and Faith,

Dr. Marc