The array of forms, notes, tests and histories can be dizzying and difficult to know what to keep track of and how to organize.  Fortunately, Gail Coffey, a long time health advocate has made the task a little simpler.  She has compiled a manual for organizing the important records and information.   Sharing Wellness Info: Ready for Health Emergencies is a book designed to help you have the information you need ready when emergencies occur.  It will help Emergency Medical Technicians help you or a loved one if for some reason you  are unable to communicate your medical history, insurance information, and type of care you desire.   It is a good value for the money – $6.50.  In her words,  “I’m not interested in making money on it- I just want people to be prepared.”   How often do you hear that these days?

Gail along with Lyndy Kimball-Pacheco are the cofounders of SharingWellnessInfo.com.  They are passionate about their mission of health and wellness education and awareness.  You can find a wealth of information on the site about alternative and holistic modalities including tips about finding and working with a  practitioner.

What took them so long? The data behind the decision certainly isn’t “new”.  Since 2006 studies began pointing to the increased incidence of fractures in the hip, wrist and spine. The first of these drugs appeared on the market in 1989 and from the very beginning some researchers hypothesized about the possibility of the drugs causing nutrient absorption problems with long term use.  Stomach acid has a purpose -  among other things it helps break down food so that nutrients can be better absorbed.  So logically if stomach acid is suppressed so is the absorption of some  nutrients.  Calcium is particularly sensitive to stomach acid.  Without it, absorption is much less.   Hmmm— and now we have incidence of increased fractures with the long term use of these drugs – golly how could that happen?

The official FDA approved prescribing information for these drugs indicates that they are only for short term use- four to eight weeks. There is just one little catch- nobody followed the rules.  I have seen many patients on these drugs for years!

Where did the system go wrong? How is it that we have allowed the mis-prescribing  and over-prescribing of these drugs to go on for so many years,  knowing full well that there might be  serious sequela involving  disruption of the absorption of important key nutrients such as calcium?

We could blame it on the doctors for recklessly prescribing these drugs, and that is certainly part of the problem, but there are deeper underlying issues here as well.  In fact  these drugs are very effective for relieving symptoms of acid reflux(aka heartburn)and GERD in the short term with very few side effects.  However,  patients ask  doctors to renew their prescriptions beyond the four to eight  week limitation because when they stop taking them their heartburn often gets worse.  Let me  repeat that – patient’s symptoms often get worse when they stop taking these drugs.

There is growing evidence that the cause of GERD is not excess gastric acid but increased abdominal pressure caused by lack of acid-yes that’s right I said lack of gastric acid.  It  is much too complex to explain in this post, but I will dedicate future posts to the subject.  So in short these drugs may be going after the wrong target.  But in the eyes of the pharmaceutical industry it is exactly the right target.

Could there be any better drug for the company coffers?  The symptoms go away almost magically with very few short term side effects and patients can’t stop taking it without their symptoms coming back and often getting worse.  So wink, wink everyone ignores the rules and the PPIs have become a source of billions  of dollars  of revenue to the pharmaceutical industry.

Drugs for acid reflux and GERD are cash cows for the pharmaceutical companies. More than 60 million prescriptions for GERD were filled in 2004. Americans spent $13 billion on acid-stopping medications in 2006. Nexium, the most popular, brought in $5.1 billion alone – making it the second highest selling drug behind Lipitor.

Big pharma board rooms celebrate their wonderful success.  Physicians are delighted that they can solve a problem with a 5 minute visit and a simple prescription – well within the health insurance reimbursement for their time.  Pharmacies are pleased by the growing drug business.

Everybody is happy- except perhaps for the patient who now has osteoporosis and other serious side effects caused by these drugs.   Oh well,  you can’t please everybody.

You can find out more about the changes around your eyes, jaws, cheeks – and teeth! – that a plastic surgeon and Smithsonian physical anthropologists discovered. It’s an interesting read.

I do have a quibble however. And it happens to fit in very nicely with promoting our bone health program that starts in two days:
Women Doing It For Themselves: 8 Steps to Building Strong Bones for Lifelong Vitality

First of all, building your bone health and density matters. It’s maddening how this physician minimizes and dismisses ‘exercise and drinking all the milk you want’ out of hand, to suggest that there’s nothing you can do to maintain your mass. Osteoporosis itself is not a natural part of aging. Read more myths here. I’m not suggesting I know that building your bone density will maintain your facial bone structure, on the other hand, I have no reason to believe it won’t. As osteoporosis seems to be evenly distributed throughout your body, why wouldn’t it be natural to assume that building bone density would equally build bone mass everywhere? You can be sure that this physician has no data to back up his remarks. He’s a plastic surgeon, not a nutritionist and this area of inquiry is new. Yes, aging is a natural phenomenon, and people age in many different ways, most of it related to lifestyle – particularly in the areas of nutrition and exercise.

It’s also not just about milk, it’s about the 24 essential nutrients you need for healthy bones. And exercise, like the yoga facial stretches we posted on earlier. They matter. Bone metabolism and mineralization depends to some degree on movement, and to the extent that you exercise – and perhaps also get facial massages – your face, bone growth will be stimulated.

I’d rather he posed these as interesting questions for further study: Wouldn’t it be interesting to study how a bone building regimen affects bone density in the skull? I wonder what kind of specific facial exercises would help preserve density? Could stimulation from massage have a similar regenerative effect as exercise?

I know it’s a lot to ask from doctors who have had from from 0 to a handful of hours of nutrition education in medical school, as is the norm. Physicians are so conditioned by ideas of entropy and an interventionist approach to health and healing that it’s only a very special sort of physician that thinks to ask how we might support the body’s own abilities to regenerate itself.

Read more from Michael Murray, N.D. and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D., authors of the Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine:

“Many general dietary factors have been suggested as a cause of osteoporosis, including: low calcium-high phosphorus intake, high-protein diet, high-acid-ash diet, high salt intake, and trace mineral deficiencies. It appears that increased soft drink consumption is a major factor that contributes to osteoporosis. A deficiency of vitamin K leads to impaired mineralization of bone. Boron deficiency may contribute greatly to osteoporosis as well as to menopausal symptoms.”

“Soft drinks have long been suspected of leading to lower calcium levels and higher phosphate levels in the blood. When phosphate levels are high and calcium levels are low, calcium is pulled out of the bones. The phosphate content of soft drinks like Coca -Cola and Pepsi is very high, and they contain virtually no calcium.”

“The United States ranks first among countries in soft drink consumption. The per-capita consumption of soft drinks is in excess of 150 quarts per year, or about three quarts per week.”

And this is why I thank my mom: “Soft drink consumption in children poses a significant risk factor for impaired calcification of growing bones.”

Related Posts:

Soft Drinks: America’s Other Drinking Problem

Take New Zero Calorie Sweetener with a Grain of Salt

Women Doing It for Themselves: 8 Steps to Building Strong Bones for Lifelong Vitality

Women Doing It for Themselves: 8 Steps to Building Strong Bones for Lifelong Vitality

Master the essentials and become your own most powerful ally in safeguarding and building your bone vitality for life

A drug-free and natural way to reverse or prevent osteoporosis and osteopenia without side effects

If you are one of the millions of women diagnosed every year with low bone mass – osteoporosis or osteopenia – please know that losing some bone mass with age is normal. However – while you want to be informed and proactive in protecting your bone health – you don’t have to rely on risky drugs for the rest of your life. They are not your only option. You are not powerless, but – like many women – you may not have all the facts about what you can do to take control of your health. Find out more …

In a follow up study, also funded in part by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the National Institutes of Health, women “undertaking a ten week program of 75 minute Restorative Yoga classes gained positive differences in aspects of mental health such as depression, positive emotions, and spirituality (feeling calm/peaceful) compared to the control group.” The study, published Psycho-Oncology, focused on physical activity, and showed that women had a 50% reduction in depression and a 12% increase in feelings of peace and meaning after the yoga.

She recommends supplementing with calcium and magnesium in a 1:1 ratio as optimal, though a 2:1 ratio (i.e., 800 mg of calcium to 400 mg of magnesium) of magnesium oxide or chloride, or chelated magnesium, is adequate.

She offers additional recommendations to ensure particularly active or stressed women get enough magnesium, including taking it in divided doses, like calcium, throughout the day, and to add Epsom salts to your baths, which is essentially magnesium sulfate.

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Women Doing It for Themselves: 8 Steps to Building Strong Bones for Lifelong Vitality

Next program begins April 20, 2010

While there is plenty of information on bone health available, finding help that’s specific to your lifestyle and your body’s own metabolic needs – and putting those recommendations into practice – isn’t always that simple.

If you are one of the millions of women diagnosed every year with low bone mass – osteoporosis or osteopenia – please know that you don’t have to rely on risky drugs for the rest of your life. They are not your only option. Join veteran nutrition educator, Dr. Judith Valentine and a support group of other women doing it for themselves to take charge of your bone health.

With a step by step program of assessments and action steps, you don’t have to fear osteoporosis – or the recommended drug therapies to treat it.  This unique bone building program helps you to cut to the chase in choosing foods and supplements that meet your own body’s individual metabolic needs – and your lifestyle.   Find out more.

According to the survey:

• 63% have an adult child living with them now, and most expect them to stay for more than a year
• Only 41% of these women report having returned to live at home as adults themselves
• 27% have grandchildren living under the same roof
• 13% have parents or in-laws living with them as well
• 70% blame the economy as the reason for this outcome.

How do these midlife mothers feel? Well, many are feeling stressed. 39% report that the experience has either strained or worsened their relationship with the adult child living with them. They also continue to make personal sacrifices: 71% report that living in a multi-generational household makes it harder for them to achieve their personal goals.

* With its own nervous system, the heart can sense, learn, remember and make functional decisions independent of the brain.
* The heart communicates electromagnetically, so that an EKG signal can be picked up anywhere on the body, and the field permeates around us, radiating outward up to several feet, affecting the fields of those around us.
* Reclassified as an endocrine gland, the heart sends messages to the brain and the rest of the body through hormones that influences our emotional responses in and play a decisive and a pivotal role in how we feel and think, and especially in how we respond to stress.

Remember the definition of stress: It’s a reaction to a perceived threat, coupled with the perception that we have no control. It’s all perception.

Measuring How Emotions Affect Physiology

When we feel relaxed and emotionally balanced – ‘at home’ – heart rhythm patterns, measured electrically, show up as coherent. Neural information sent to the brain heightens mental clarity, improves decision-making ability, and can increase creativity. Positive emotions like appreciation, awe, gratitude, joy, curiosity, and love increase heart coherence.

Negative emotions like anger, anxiety, worry, and fear lead to disordered and incoherent patterns. These incoherent patterns correspond to the increased cortisol levels associated with stress response, putting us at increased risk for heart disease, loss of bone mass, fat buildup in arteries and redistribution of fat to the waist and hips. What’s new – and amazing – is the ability to measure the influence of emotions – mediated by the heart and recorded in our heart rate variability.

The Power of Emotion

Emotions give meaning to our lives, and, for better or worse, drive many of our decisions and actions. They come and go, faster than the speed of thought, showing up in brain activity before we even have time to think. We evaluate everything emotionally as we perceive it and think about it afterward.

Unfortunately we’re often at the mercy of our emotions, reacting to events rather than consciously choosing how to respond. Fortunately, you can decide to do something about it. You can learn to shift your perception.

Consciously shifting your perception shifts your physiology into a state of heart coherence – balancing your heart rhythms, nervous and electrical systems, and hormone levels – and allows you to consciously choose non-reactive responses, that can, not coincidentally – increase everyone’s coherence.

These two powerful tools move you from chaos to coherence. Use them when you need to slow down and reframe a situation causing you stress. Developed by the Institute of Heart Math, leading researchers in the field, the freeze-frame technique was studied in police using it to restore their heart rhythms after shooting incidents. Using the technique immediately after the shooting, they restored their heart rhythms within minutes, rather than the two hours it otherwise took when they took no deliberate action.

Freeze-Frame Technique

Perform the freeze-frame on-the-spot to shift your perception and access a more intuitive guidance when under stress. Beyond positive thinking, it’s a heartfelt shift in how you view a situation, a person or yourself.

1. Shift your attention out of your head, and focus on the area around your heart. Keep your attention there for at least ten seconds. Breathe normally.
2. Recall a positive time in your life or a positive feeling, and put yourself back into it so that you re-experience it. Don’t simply visualize it, but rather feel it fully by engaging all your senses.
3. Ask a question from the heart: “What can I do in this situation to make it different?” or “What can I do to minimize stress?”
4. Listen to the response of your heart.

You’ll likely feel calmer, confirm something you already know, or experience a shift in perspective, seeing the moment with more balance and perhaps a creative insight to resolve it. You may not be able to control an event but you can control your perception of it.

em Wave Desktop

Heart rhythm coherence is akin to the body/mind’s operating system. Learning what chaos and coherence feels like, and how to reestablish coherence, is a skill you can learn.

The emWave Desktop heart coherence training program also developed by the Institute of Heart Math, teaches you how to recognize – and recreate – feelings of coherence. When you become conscious of what an in-sync, balanced state of heart, mind and emotions feels like, you can recreate it instantly. The pulse sensor plugs into your USB port and displays your heart rhythms in real time while you play interactive games. The emWave Personal Stress Reliever is a portable device you can slip into your purse and take with you anywhere.

People use the portable device to “become coherent” and calm before a meeting and perform at their best, or before a family encounter they know will push hot buttons.

You’ll reduce stress and anxiety, build emotional resilience, increase your energy and focus, be more relaxed, improve your sleep and your long term ability to manage stress. You can even us it to break reactive habits of emotional eating, to heighten your creativity, to experience positive emotion at will, and facilitate access to meditation and prayer states.