Are You Using Toxic Sunscreen?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States. Between 1973 and 2003, malignant melanoma increased by 83% and continues to increase at a rate of 3% per year. We have all heard that we should apply sunscreen to prevent skin cancer, but did you know that a number of published studies suggest that applying sunscreen either does not significantly decrease the risk or may actually increase the risk of melanoma? A 2006 publication from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stated “there is no evidence that sunscreens protect you from malignant melanoma.” Contrary to the research, huge efforts have been made to increase the use of sunscreens that block UVA and UVB radiation, but is the sunscreen you use doing more harm than good?

Many of the widely used commercial sunscreens contain ingredients that are actually harmful to your skin and body. Some of the most common toxic chemicals in these sunscreens are avobenzone, oxybenzone, phthalates, and parabens. Studies show that when avobenzone is exposed to sunlight, it creates carbon-centered free radicals and damages DNA. This alone is a significant risk factor for developing skin cancer, yet we are spraying this onto our skin to prevent it.

A few studies have also shown that oxybenzone can penetrate the skin and enter the bloodstream. This chemical has been shown to disrupt hormones and mimic the effects of estrogen. Also, due to its UVA and UVB blocking ability, oxybenzone prevents your body from producing vitamin D. A deficiency in vitamin D is actually a risk factor for developing malignant melanoma, as well as a number of other diseases. The human species has been producing vitamin D through UVB exposure since the beginning of time. In the proper amount, UVB rays are essential for health.    

Some of the latest research considers phthalates and parabens “probable human carcinogens,” which means they probably cause cancer. If your sunscreen contains phthalates or parabens, it seems counterproductive to spray something on your skin that “probably causes cancer” to help prevent cancer. The scary thing is that a lot of these toxic sunscreens are deemed “dermatologist approved/recommended.” I believe this to be more of a marketing scheme rather than a scientific one.   

           The good news is that there are a number of different sunscreens that do not contain any of these toxic chemicals and are just as effective at preventing sunburns. One of my favorites is The Honest Company sunscreen. This sunscreen does not contain any parabens, phthalates, benzone’s, or any other known cancer causing chemicals. I always wait at least 20 minutes before applying sunscreen so that my body has a chance to produce a sufficient amount of natural vitamin D. The key is to prevent sunburn, not sun exposure. Next time you need sunscreen, consider buying one without all the toxic chemicals. Your body will thank you!

References 

1. CDC.Gov

2. Planta, B.M. Sunscreen and Melanoma: Is Our Prevention Message Correct? J Am Board Fam Med 2011;24:735–739.

3. Gorham et al. Do Sunscreens Increase Risk of Melanoma in Populations Residing at Higher Latitudes. Ann Epidemiol 2007;17:956–963.

4. Hanson M.K. Sunscreen enhancement of UV-induced reactive oxygen species in the skin. 

Free Rad Biol & Med. 2006;41:1205–1212.

Drugs, Surgeries, and More Drugs!

     A few weeks ago I was watching the Browns game with my wife and couldn't help but notice there were 3 different pharmaceutical commercials in just one commercial break. A few minutes later, I open up my Fox 8 News app and the first article I see under “Latest Health” is an article that mentions that scientists have made a “breakthrough” discovery of a new gene that may be responsible for a number of different cancers, only to assure us that scientists are working on a new treatment (drugs) to help turn the gene off. It seems that everywhere we turn there is some new drug that promises to take away all your problems. I am choosing to write this article because I simply cannot stand by any longer and watch the health of Americans continue to spiral downward only to be caught with the false sense of health that prescription medications has to offer.

There is a time and a place for the use of drugs and surgery. If I got into a terrible car accident and I was bleeding internally and had multiple fractures, drugs and surgery would end up saving my life if it wasn’t too late. This was what drugs and surgery were intended to do upon its inception. Today, drugs and surgery seem to be a part of people’s lifestyles, yet we have never been sicker than we are right now. People who are diagnosed with a chronic disease, such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, Alzheimer’s, and many more, have been led to believe that they got this disease because of “bad genes.” They leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for a drug that helps them “manage” their disease, but does not cure the disease. A lot of patients that I have talked to think because they are on a drug for high blood pressure, for instance, that they are cured or no longer have hypertension. This is a common misconception; they still have hypertension because if they were to go off the drug their blood pressure would shoot back up. This is because the CAUSE of the hypertension was never addressed. I am going to list a number of facts with citations regarding sick-care in America just to show you how sick we really are as a population and why medical intervention could be doing more harm than good with chronic diseases.

Fast Facts

• 65% of adults over the age of 20 are considered overweight or obese.¹

• 64 million Americans have one or more types of cardiovascular disease.¹

• 45% of the U.S population has at least one diagnosed chronic disease.² 1.7 million Americans will die each year from chronic disease.² This is equivalent to 566.6 Sept. 11th terrorist attacks each year.

• Chronic diseases are responsible for 7 out of every 10 deaths in the U.S.²

• In the U.S alone, spending on medication exceeded $307 billion in 2010.³

• The number of retail prescription dispensed in 2010 was 3.99 billion.³

• 600,000 people die every year from heart disease.⁴ Even though 255 million cholesterol lowering medications were dispensed in 2010.³

• 50% of all people who have heart attacks have normal blood cholesterol levels. 50% of people with high cholesterol have no evidence of cardiovascular disease. Cholesterol levels are actually a very poor indicator of cardiovascular disease.⁵

• Every 30 seconds someone gets a limb amputated as a consequence of diabetes.² Diabetes killed more than 234,051 people in 2014.⁴ This is extremely high considering 165 million prescriptions were filled in 2010.³

• The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is a calculation of how many people need to take a drug for 1 person to benefit from the drug. Statins( given for high cholesterol) have a NNT of 60, meaning 60 people have to take the drug for 5 years to prevent 1 non-fatal heart attack, and not 1 fatal heart attack would be prevented.⁶

• 80% of published drug studies are funded by the drug industry and 30% of all drug studies are never published. ⁶ This means if a drug study does not favor the drug then they don’t have to publish it.

• For every fifty people on statins, one will develop type II diabetes that otherwise would not have.⁶

• 3 out of 4 first-time heart attacks occur in people with normal LDL cholesterol.⁶

• New guidelines from the American Heart Association would put 44% of American men over the age of 40 on a statin.⁶

• 50% of the 700,000 stents done in the U.S yearly are done to patients in no danger of heart attacks.⁶

• Roughly half the elderly men in the U.S have evidence of cancer in their prostate, yet only 3% will die from it.⁶

• For every man who avoids a prostate cancer death, roughly 50 are treated needlessly.⁶

• 40% of medical tests and procedures were found to be worthless after evaluation by the New England Journal of Medicine.⁷

• (Estimated benefit vs. harm for screening mammography) For 1 woman to avoid dying from breast cancer, 1,000 will have a false alarm, about half of whom will undergo biopsy. Breast cancer will be over diagnosed in 5-15 women, who will be treated needlessly with surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, or a combination.⁸

• A single mammogram can be equivalent to 1,000 chest x-rays.⁹

• According to a study by the American College of Cardiology, the half-life of medical truth is about 20 years. In other words, looking back at the literature only about half of what was touted as being true 20 years ago is still thought to be valid 20 years later.¹⁰

• Iatrogenesis is defined as “deaths induced inadvertently by a physician, surgeon, medical treatment, or diagnostic procedures.” Iatrogenesis kills roughly 783, 936 people a year, which is equivalent to 6 jumbo-jets crashing every single day.¹¹ Most people have never even heard the term before.

• Properly prescribed medications kills roughly 106,000 each year.¹¹ This number is equivalent to thirty-five 9/11 terrorist attacks a year.  

• Babies who follow the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule will be injected with nearly 5,000 mcg of aluminum by 18 months of age.¹²  Aluminum is neurotoxic and has been shown to accumulate in the brains of humans.¹³

• If you follow the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedule, your child will be given 49 doses of 14 different vaccines by the age of 6, and 69 doses of 16 different vaccines by the age of 18.¹⁴ 

• At two months of age, an infant will be vaccinated with 1,225 mcg of aluminum, which is 50 times higher than safety levels.¹²

• A large number of studies have shown that aluminum containing vaccinations causes immunoexcitotoxicity.¹³Which means that it causes certain brain cells to get so excited that they die.

• Childhood vaccines are not tested for mutagenesis, carcinogenesis, or impairment of fertility. This means that vaccines could cause genetic mutations, cancer, or cause infertility and no one would know.¹⁴

• If you get paralyzed by a flu shot or your child has a serious reaction to a vaccine required for school and becomes learning disabled, epileptic, autistic, asthmatic, diabetic or mentally retarded, the vaccine manufacturer can’t be sewed or held responsible.¹⁵

• 24,000 infants die each year in the United States. This equates to 6 infants for every 1,000 live hospital births and places us in 27^th place out of all the other developed countries.⁴

• In any given year, 20% of American children will be diagnosed with a mental illness. Roughly 7.5% of U.S kids and teens are on at least 1 psychotropic prescription medication.⁴
• Published studies report that about 25% of all U.S. adults have a mental illness and that nearly 50% of U.S. adults will develop at least one mental illness during their lifetime.⁴

• Only 15% of all medical procedures have been found to be supported by any literature at all and only 1% of that literature has actually been deemed scientifically rigorous.¹⁶

• Mainstream medicine attempts to partly blame our genes for the rise in chronic diseases. Did you know our genetics have not changed in the last 10,000 years? Yet the rate of chronic disease has skyrocketed just in the last few decades.¹⁷ Blaming our genes on why we developed a chronic disease is not only ridiculous but unscientific.

I could continue listing these absurd health statistics for pages but, I think I have made my point. The United States is suppose to have the best medical technology, the best doctors, the best surgeons, the best imaging modalities, the best hospitals, the best prenatal care, the best drugs ect. yet we are absolutely pathetic when it comes to overall health status. We have been trained to believe that when we get sick or develop some type of symptom, we go to a doctor and get a drug in order for that symptom to go away, and when the symptom goes away, we call that health. This ingrained belief is a big part of why we are one of the sickest counties in the world.

If you want to become healthy, you must study the healthiest humans in the world. The healthiest humans with almost no chronic diseases are modern day hunter-gatherers. We must try to mimic there lifestyles in order to achieve their health status. These modern day hunter-gatherers have virtually no cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, MS, fibromyalgia, ect. I urge you to look further into this because the evidence is overwhelming. There is no money to be made for the medical community in this practice but being sick there certainly is, billions and billions. I am here to tell you that if you do not invest and be proactive with your health than it is likely only a matter of time before you develop a chronic disease yourself. Most people reading this will quickly forget what I have written and not change a single thing about their lifestyle. I hear excuses all day everyday on why people don’t have time to be healthy but cancer, heart disease, diabetes and all the other chronic diseases do not care. We are given one body and one body only, so please take care of it.

If you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to email me directly. Thank you for reading and have a great day!

           -Dr. Brady-

Reference

1) Origins and Evolution of the Western Diet: Am J Clin Nutr 2005;81:341–54.

2) Almanac of Chronic Disease. Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease. November 2009.

3) The Use of Medicines in the United States: Review of 2010 Report by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. IMSInstitute.org. pg 1-36.

4) CDC.gov

5) Sinatra, S. Bowden, J. The Great Cholesterol Myth. 1^st ed. Beverly(MA):FairWinds; c2012.

6) Hooper, J. When To Say No To Your Doctor. Men’s Journal. October 2014:23: 82-90

7) Mayo Clin Proc. August 2013;88(8):790-798.

8) Kalager M, Zelen M, Langmark F, Adami H-O. Effect of screening mammography on breast-cancer mortality in Norway. N Engl J Med 2010;363:1203-10.

9) Mercola.com/archive/2012.

10) Hieb, L. Letter to Hospital Authorities on Mandatory Influenza Vaccination. JPandS. 2013;18:2.

11) Null, G. et al. Death By Medicine. 1^st ed. Mount Jackson(VA). Praktikos. c2011. 1-157.

12) Miller, N. Vaccine Safety Manual.2012

13) Blaylock, R. Aluminum Induced Immunoexcitotoxicity in Neurodevelopmental and Neurodegenerative Disorders. Curr Inorg Chem, 2012;(2):1.

14) NVIC.org

15) Chestnut, J. The Wellness and Prevention Paradigm. 1^st ed. Victoria (B.C) TWP Press. c2011.

16) Imrie R., Ramey D.W., “The evidence for Evidence-Based Medicine”. Compliment Ther Med. June; 8(2): 123-126.

17) Supreme Court of the United States. Russell Bruesewitz et al v. Wyeth et al. No. 09-152. Argued October 12, 2010 – Decided February 22, 2011. 

Bedwetting and Vertebral Subluxations

Nocturnal Enuresis, commonly referred to as bedwetting, can be a socially and physically debilitating problem for parents and their children. Children who experience frequent bedwetting can develop antisocial tendencies (avoiding sleepovers) due to the embarrassing nature of the problem. Bedwetting can also begin to cause low self-esteem and social anxiety in children.¹  

Bedwetting affects approximately 10-24% of children up to 7 years of age, and 2.3% of those affected children will become adult bedwetters.¹ Nocturnal Enuresis can also become an exhausting burden on the parents because of the constant washing of sheets, changing of pajamas, replacing mattresses, and so on.^1-3 Although there are a number of causes for this condition, one particular cause called “vertebral subluxation” is very common.^1-7

Vertebral subluxations are subtle misalignments within the spine that interfere with the brain’s ability to communicate with the body.^4,5 In children, subluxations can be caused by the birthing process, initiation of crawling, walking, running, and, most commonly, falls.⁴ The diagram below shows you how the brain controls the bladder and the muscles responsible for retaining urine. When a child has a subluxation in the lumbar or sacral region of the spine, there is interference with the messages from the brain to the organ it supplies; this results in dysfunction of the organ(s). A subluxation in the upper region of the neck can also result in bedwetting because it causes tension on the brainstem via spider-like connections called dura mater. If these subluxations are left uncorrected, they will gradually get worse and ultimately cause disc degeneration and further neurological compromise.⁵

(Google.com/images)

If you have a child who is experiencing bedwetting, you may want to consider seeing a chiropractor for an examination to determine whether subluxations are the cause of his/her problem. I have had numerous parents tell me that they’ve seen a laundry list of specialists and were never given an explanation for their child’s bedwetting. I even had a patient tell me that her child’s doctors told her that that the child’s bladder was formed “too small” – we later found out that was not the case. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me!

Yours in Better Health,

Dr. Brady

References

1. Gunlogson JE. J. Pediatric, Maternal & Family Health - December 29, 2010

2. Rodnick A. Rodnick P. J. Pediatric, Maternal & Family Health - October 19, 2010

3. Reed WR, Beavers S, Reddy SK, Kern G. “Chiropractic management of primary nocturnal enuresis.” J Manipulative Physiol Ther. 1994; 17(9): 596-600.

4. Lantz CA: “The subluxation complex.” In: Gatterman MI (ed): “Foundations of Chiropractic Subluxation.” Mosby, St. Louis, MO, 1995. 

5. Miller J, Schmatz B, Schultz A: “Lumbar disc degeneration: Correlation with age, sex, and spine level in 600 autopsy specimens.”  Spine (1988) 13:173.

6. Blomerth PR. “Functional nocturnal enuresis.” J Manipulative Physiol Ther. 1994; 17(5): 335-8.

7. Baeyens D, et al. “Behavioral problems and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children with enuresis: a literature review.” Eur J Pediatr. 2005;164:665-672.