10 Things You May Not Know About Your Weight

While it’s a common belief, your body weight does not always accurately reflect your health.

Your weight tells you nothing about your body’s composition, nor does it indicate where hidden fat might be accumulating.

Over the years, you may lose muscle and gain fat but see little change in your weight.

Such a change in body composition may reflect declining health, especially if you have visceral fat packed in and around your abdominal organs.

Visceral fat is associated with a heightened risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

In fact, a recent report found that women drinking two or more sugar-sweetened beverages a day were more likely to develop raised levels of triglycerides and accumulate visceral fat — even if they did not put on weight overall.

According to DrBriffa.com:

“It’s entirely possible for someone to be a ‘healthy’ weight, and have biochemical and physiological evidence of enhanced risk of disease.”

Can You Be Skinny and Still Be in Poor Health?

The short answer is yes.

It’s certainly possible to be thin and unhealthy.

However, overall, there are far more unhealthy overweight people than unhealthy thin people.

The central issue that primes you for poor health is insulin and leptin resistance, which is far more common in overweight individuals than thin.

But regardless of your physical size, measuring your insulin, leptin and cholesterol levels can give you a good indication of whether or not you are “metabolically fit,” and whether you’re headed toward chronic illness, regardless of your weight.

That said, health problems related to excess weight are definitely more common.

The risks of obesity are fairly well-known by now — obese adults tend to have higher rates of high blood pressure, abnormal lipids, cancer and diabetes, for example.

Your body is designed to operate best when it’s at an ideal weight, which varies slightly from person to person. However, carrying around extra pounds will inevitably increase your risk of developing just about every chronic degenerative disease there is, so the idea that you can be overweight and maintain optimal health indefinitely can easily lead you down the wrong path.

How to Measure Your Body Composition

The body mass index (BMI) gauges your weight in relation to height. However, this measurement is rather flawed, particularly for those who are very muscular. These individuals can easily be misclassified as obese (since muscle weighs more than fat) when in fact they’re just carrying a lot of muscle and very little fat. The BMI measurement also does not give you any indication of where the fat is located in your body, and this appears to be more important than the amount of fat when it comes to measuring heart risks.

The easiest and perhaps best way to measure your body composition is to simply measure your waist size. Studies have shown that your waist size is a far more accurate predictor of your heart risks than your BMI, as abdominal fat in particular is strongly associated with heart disease. Your waist size is also a powerful indicator of insulin sensitivity, as studies clearly show that measuring your waist size is one of the most powerful ways to predict your risk for diabetes.

Determining your waist size is easy. With a tape measure, figure the distance around the smallest area of your abdomen below your rib cage and above your belly button. If you’re not sure if you have a healthy waist circumference, a general guide is:

• For men, between 37 and 40 inches is overweight and more than 40 inches is obese
• For women, 31.5 to 34.6 inches is overweight and more than 34.6 inches is obese

For even greater accuracy, you can resort to hydrostatic weighing, where you get weighed under water. This measures the density of your body, which is then used to calculate how much body fat you have.

Another technique that is gaining support by medical and fitness experts is the bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA). To measure body impedance, an electrical signal is passed through your body. Impedance is greatest in fat tissue, which contains low amounts of water, while fat-free mass, which contains up to 75 percent water, allows the signal to pass through fairly unimpeded. This measurement, along with other factors such as your height, weight, and body type, is then used to calculate your percentage of body fat, fat-free mass and other body composition values.

10 Things You May Not Know about Your Weight

A related article by Prevent Disease lists 10 things you may not know about your weight, but really should. Below are a few of them. (To review previous articles written on these topics, please follow the hyperlinks provided.) For the rest of the list, please see the original article:

• You can change your metabolism:  A study of sets of twins where one was fat and the other thin found that fat cells in heavier twins underwent metabolic changes that make it more difficult to burn fat.  Physical activity can reverse the effect.
• Stress can make you fat: Stressful circumstances can cause cravings for carbohydrate-rich foods. Stress hormones also increase fat storage.
• Sleep more to promote weight loss:  Sleep deprivation upsets your hormone balance, triggering a decrease in leptin (a hormone that helps you feel full) and an increase of ghrelin (a hormone that triggers hunger).
• Sugar is addictive:  Research has determined that foods people like excite the same parts of the brain that are activated in drug addicts.
• Antioxidants are also anti-fat:  Free radicals damage the cells that tell you that you’re full. Get rid of them by eating colorful, antioxidant-rich vegetables.

What’s More Important: Diet or Exercise?

If you could choose between diet or exercise, diet actually has far more influence on developing your ideal lean body mass and overall health than exercise. It accounts for about 80 percent of the health benefits derived from a healthy lifestyle, but of course both are necessary for optimal health. Unfortunately, many are confused on this issue and believe that as long as they’re exercising appropriately, they don’t have to be very careful with their food choices.

This simply is not true.

If you want to lose weight, your first action item should be to drastically reduce or eliminate all forms of sugar from your diet, particularly fructose. Fructose is a major contributor to:

• Insulin resistance and obesity
• Elevated blood pressure
• Elevated triglycerides and elevated LDL
• Depletion of vitamins and minerals
• Cardiovascular disease, liver disease, cancer, arthritis and even gout

You’ll also want to cut out most grains, including organic ones, as they break down into sugar in your body. The easiest way to avoid both fructose and grains is to stop buying processed foods, and focus on a diet of fresh whole foods, cooked from scratch instead.

The reason why fructose and grain-avoidance is so important for optimal health and weight is because these are the primary contributors to insulin resistance, which not only hampers your ability to lose weight, but also gives rise to virtually every chronic disease we know of.

Read more:http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/12/17/10-things-about-your-weight.aspx?e_cid=20111217_DNL_art_1

Massage Beats Meds for Lower Back Pain, Study Says

Massage therapy may be better than medication or exercise for easing low back pain in the short term, a new government-funded study suggests.

Seattle researchers recruited 401 patients, mostly middle-aged, female and white, all of whom had chronic low back pain.

 

Those who received a series of either relaxation massage or structural massage were better able to work and be active for up to a year than those getting “usual medical care,” which included painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, muscle relaxants or physical therapy, the researchers found.

Lead study author Daniel Cherkin, director of Group Health Research Institute, said he had expected structural massage, which manipulates specific pain-related back muscles and ligaments, would prove superior to relaxation or so-called Swedish massage, which aims to promote a feeling of body-wide relaxation.

Structural massage, which focuses on soft-tissue abnormalities, requires more training and may be more likely to be paid for by health insurance plans, which may equate it with physical therapy, said Cherkin.

“I thought structural massage would have been at least a little better, and that’s not the case,” Cherkin said. “If you’re having continuing problems with back pain even after trying usual medical care, massage may be a good thing to do. I think the results are pretty strong.”

The study, funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is published in the July 5 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: structural massage, relaxation massage or usual care. Those in the massage groups were given hour-long massage treatments weekly for 10 weeks.

At 10 weeks, more than one-third of those who received either type of massage said their back pain was much better or gone, compared to only one in 25 patients who received usual care, the study said. Those in the massage groups were also twice as likely in that period to have spent fewer days in bed, used less anti-inflammatory medication and engaged in more activity than the standard care group.

Six months out, both types of massage were still linked to improved function, Cherkin said, but after one year, pain and function was almost equal in all three groups.

Noting that most Americans will experience low back pain during their lifetime, Cherkin said another benefit of massage is its relative safety.

“Maybe one of 10 patients felt pain during or after massage, but most of those thought it was a ‘good pain,’” he said. “A good massage therapist will be in tune with the patient and will ask what hurts.”

One of the study’s weaknesses was that those who were assigned to usual care knew that others were receiving massage therapy and may have been disappointed to be excluded, tainting their reported improvement, said Dr. Robert Duarte, director of the Pain and Headache Treatment Center at North Shore-LIJ Health System in Manhasset, N.Y.

“I think massage therapy can be useful for patients with back pain, but more as a . . . supplemental therapy,” Duarte added.

Read more: http://news.health.com/2011/07/05/massage-beats-meds-for-lower-back-pain-study-says/

Massage Found to Benefit Preterm Infants’ Brain Electrical Activity

Massage therapy has been found in past studies to boost preterm infants’ weight, help their rest-activity cycle, and benefit parent-infant bonding.

New research indicates that massage therapy benefits preterm infants’ brain electrical activity.

The investigators set out to test the hypothesis that massage determines changes in EEG spectral activity, a highly sensitive index of brain maturation, in preterm infants, according to an abstract published on www.pubmed.gov.

Infants were randomly allocated to a massage or comparison group, the abstract noted, and intervention consisted of standard care only (comparison group) or standard care plus infant massage (massage group).

“Massage was started at around 10 days after birth and was provided for 12 days during a two-week period,” stated the abstract. “EEG was performed at around one and four weeks, i.e. before and after intervention.

“The modification in global EEG spectral power between the two assessments was significantly different for the two groups, especially for the delta band activity; the spectral power did not change in massaged infants although, not surprisingly, it decreased significantly in the comparison group, as shown by previous studies,” the abstract noted.

“We propose that massage intervention affects the maturation of brain electrical activity and favors a process more similar to that observed in utero in term infants,” the investigators noted.

“The effects of preterm infant massage on brain electrical activity” was published in Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. (2011 Sep;53 Suppl 4:46-51. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8749.2011.04065.x.)

Read More: http://www.massagemag.com/News/massage-news.php?id=11815&catid=massage-found-to-benefit-preterm-infants-brain-electrical-activity&title=

Enjoy Those Thanksgiving Leftovers, but Don’t Let Them Linger

Leftovers are one of the best things about Thanksgiving, and no doubt you’ve already had your turkey-stuffing-potatoes-cranberry-sauce sandwich, the official meal of post-Thanksgiving Friday. But even though the perishables may be in the refrigerator they’re still vulnerable to bacteria, so let’s have a little primer on food safety.

First, it’s a good idea to make sure your refrigerator is at or below 40 degrees Fahrenheit and the freezer is 0 degrees or colder, said Ruth Frechman, a Burbank-based registered dietitian and spokesperson for theAmerican Dietetic Assn. Those can be checked with an inexpensive refrigerator thermometer. A warmer environment gives bacteria a more hospitable environment to grow.
Cooked poultry can stay refrigerated for three to four days and frozen for four months, according to the Home Food Safety website (a collaboration between the ADA and ConAgra Foods). After that, give it the heave-ho.

Did you opt for ham instead of turkey? Cooked, sliced leftovers can stay in the fridge for three to four days, and in the freezer for one to two months. Soft cheeses are OK in the fridge for a week, hard cheeses for three to four weeks if they’re open.

Many of us eat leftovers cold, but standing in front of the refrigerator in pajamas scarfing down yams loses its appeal after a while. When reheating leftovers, the food safety site recommends using a meat thermometer to make sure foods are reheated to an internal temperature of at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit.

That goes for reheating food in the microwave. And if yours doesn’t have a turntable that helps ensure even heating, the site recommends giving the food a 180-degree turn halfway through the heating time, stirring if necessary to make sure everything gets hot. Wait one minute before testing it with the thermometer. Frechman has a video on reheating leftovers that goes over the basics.

Did you eat out and take leftovers home? Make sure that gets sent to the refrigerator tout de suite, and the site suggests you write the purchase date on the container.

The most commonly identified food-borne illnesses, says theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention, are caused by the bacteria trifecta of Campylobacter, Salmonella and E. coli, and by a group of viruses best known as Norwalk-like viruses. Symptoms of eating foods with these organisms are pretty much the same: diarrhea, abdominal cramps, nausea and sometimes fever and vomiting. Good times. More information on food safety and food poisoning can be found at FoodSafety.gov.

Read more:http://www.sun-sentinel.com/health/la-heb-thanksgiving-leftovers-food-safety-20111125,0,862351.story

How to Get Your Vitamin D Within to Healthy Ranges

 

Research into vitamin D over the past two decades has revealed a spectacular amount of solid evidence backing its importance for countless aspects of human health.

In the past, vitamin D was primarily regarded as an important nutrient for bone health, and it was conventionally thought that a person had enough vitamin D as long as they didn’t have bone diseases like rickets or osteomalacia.

But new research shows how wrong this assumption was, as higher levels of vitamin D are necessary to provide protection from more serious chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease, infections, multiple sclerosis and more.

The factor that sets vitamin D apart from many other nutrients is that vitamin D receptors are present in virtually every tissue and cell in your body, and as a review in the Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine reported:

” … adequate vitamin D status is essential for optimal functioning of these tissues and cells.

An impressive body of research has accumulated over the past two decades providing new information about the role of vitamin D in prevention of a broad range of diseases.”

Have You Had a 25(OH)D Test?

If you have never had your vitamin D levels tested, I urge you to consider doing so very soon, as simply assuming your levels are in the healthy range is quite risky.

Vitamin D deficiency is at epidemic proportions in the United States and many other regions around the world today, largely because people do not spend enough time in the sun to facilitate this important process of vitamin D production..

So the first step to ensuring you are receiving all the benefits of vitamin D is to find out what your levels are using a 25(OH)D test, also called 25-hydroxyvitamin D.

There are two vitamin D tests — 1,25(OH)D and 25(OH)D — but 25(OH)D is the better marker of overall D status. It is this marker that is most strongly associated with overall health, and it is the one you should ask your physician for.

Alternatively, you can have your vitamin D levels tested right in your own home by joining the GrassrootsHealth D* Action Study. D*Action is a worldwide public health campaign which aims to solve the vitamin D deficiency epidemic through focusing on testing, education, and grassroots word of mouth.

When you join D*action, you agree to test your vitamin D levels twice a year during a five-year program, and share your health status to demonstrate the public health impact of this nutrient. There is a $60 fee each 6 months ($120/year) for your sponsorship of the project, which includes a complete new test kit to be used at home, and electronic reports on your ongoing progress.

You will get a follow up email every six months reminding you “it’s time for your next test and health survey.” To join now, please follow this link to the sign up form.

What Do Your Vitamin D Test Results Mean?

The point of vitamin D testing is, of course, to be sure you are maintaining a therapeutic level of vitamin D in your blood. A few years back, the recommended level was between 40 to 60 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml), but more recently the optimal vitamin D level has been raised to 50-70 ng/ml, and when treating cancer or heart disease, as high as 70-100 ng/ml.

According to the chart below, optimizing your vitamin D levels can help you to prevent at least 16 different types of cancer, along withheart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, the flu and much, much more.

 

Why You Should Strive to Get Your Vitamin D Fromthe Sun

It’s been suggested that only about 30 percent of Americans’ circulating vitamin D is the product of sunlight exposure. This is an unfortunate byproduct of public health agencies’ misguided advice to stay out of the sun to avoid cancer (when in fact vitamin D from sun exposure will prevent cancer).

The truth is, vitamin D from sun exposure is the BEST way to optimize your vitamin D levels, and a recent interview with Dr. Stephanie Seneff brought the importance of getting your vitamin D from sun exposure to a whole new level.

I’ve consistently recommended getting your vitamin D from regular sun exposure whenever possible, but Dr. Seneff’s review of how vitamin D—specifically from sun exposure—is intricately tied to healthy cholesterol and sulfur levels, makes this recommendation all the more important.

As a quick summary, when you expose your skin to sunshine, your skin synthesizes vitamin D3 sulfate. Unlike oral vitamin D3 supplements (which are unsulfated), sunlight-formed vitamin D sulfate is water soluble. The water-soluble form can travel freely in your bloodstream, whereas the unsulfated form needs LDL (the so-called “bad” cholesterol) as a vehicle of transport. Dr. Seneff’s suspicion is that the oral non-sulfated form of vitamin D may not provide all of the same benefits as the vitamin D created in your skin from sun exposure, because it is not readily converted into vitamin D sulfate.

I believe this is a very compelling reason to make a deliberate effort to get most of your vitamin D requirements from exposure to sunshine, or by using a safe tanning bed (one with electronic ballasts rather than magnetic ballasts, to avoid unnecessary exposure to EMF fields). Safe tanning beds also have far less of the dangerous UVA than sunlight; while unsafe ones have more UVA than sunlight. If neither of these are feasible options, then you should take an oral vitamin D3 supplement.

It is very difficult to get enough vitamin D from food sources alone, as very few foods naturally contain vitamin D — and those that do will not contain enough to optimize your levels.

Interestingly, the only vitamin not found in breast milk is vitamin D. This can be considered a giant clue that we were NOT designed to get our vitamin D through the oral route through our food.   Rather, we were designed to produce it by exposing our skin to natural sunlight. Lack of sun exposure is really the very root of the problem, as historically speaking, vitamin D deficiency is a fairly recent health concern.

Continue this article at: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/11/21/how-to-get-your-vitamin-d-to-healthy-ranges.aspx?e_cid=20111121_DNL_art_2

The First Thing to do When a Cold or Flu Strikes

Cold and flu season are right around the corner, and with it we can expect lots of advertisements for flu vaccines.

I’ve written extensively on the dangers of flu vaccines before, and the fact that they simply do not work—according to the scientific evidence.

So here’s a timely review of what you can do to protect yourself and your family from colds and any type of flu this season, and in years to come.

What Causes Colds and Influenzas?

Both colds and various influenzas are caused by a wide variety of viruses (not bacteria).

While the two ailments typically affect your respiratory tract, there are some differences between them.

Common symptoms of a ‘regular cold’ include runny nose, congestion, cough, and sore throat. The symptoms of the flu tend to be far more severe, as the influenza viruses are capable of causing severe lung infection, pneumonia and even respiratory failure. They also tend to affect your joints—hence that allover achy feeling.

The most common way these viruses are spread is via hand-to-hand contact. For instance, someone with a cold blows their nose then shakes your hand or touches surfaces that you also touch. However, the key to remember is that just being exposed to a cold virus does not mean that you’re destined to catch a cold.

If your immune system is operating at its peak, it should actually be quite easy for you to fend off the virus without ever getting sick. Ditto for flu viruses. If your immune system is impaired, on the other hand, they can easily take hold in your body. So, it’s important to understand that the reason you catch a cold or flu is because your immune system is impaired. It’s not an inevitable event based on exposure alone.

Lifestyle factors that can depress your immune system, alone or in combination, include:

• Eating too much sugar, particularly fructose, and too many grains. The average person is consuming about 75 grams of fructose per day, and when fructose is consumed at that level it can devastate your immune system.One of the ways it does this is by unbalancing your gut flora. Sugar is ‘fertilizer’ for pathogenic bacteria, yeast, and fungi that can set your immune system up for an assault by a respiratory virus. Most people don’t realize that 80 percent of your immune system actually lies in your gastrointestinal tract. That’s why controlling your sugar intake is CRUCIAL for optimizing your immune system.

  It would be wise to limit your total fructose consumption to below 25 grams a day if you’re in good health, or below 15 grams a day if you have high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, or are insulin resistant.

• Vitamin D deficiency, as a result of insufficient sun exposure
• Not getting enough rest
• Insufficient exercise
• Using ineffective strategies to address emotional stressors

Vitamin D Deficiency: An Underlying Cause of Both Colds and Influenzas

It’s estimated that the average U.S. adult typically has two to four colds each year, while children may have up to a dozen. Each year, between five and 20 percent of the US population also come down with flu-like illness, according to Medline.

One reason for the widespread prevalence of colds and the flu may be that vitamin D deficiency is incredibly common in the United States, especially during the winter months when cold and flu viruses are at their peak. Research has confirmed that “catching” colds and flu may actually be a symptom of an underlying vitamin D deficiency. Less than optimal vitamin D levels will significantly impair your immune response and make you far more susceptible to contracting colds, influenza, and other respiratory infections.

In the largest and most nationally representative study of its kind to date, involving about 19,000 Americans, people with the lowest vitamin D levels reported having significantly more recent colds or cases of the flu — and the risk was even greater for those with chronic respiratory disorders like asthma. At least five additional studies also show an inverse association between lower respiratory tract infections and vitamin D levels.

Read more: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/11/13/could-a-cup-or-more-of-this-a-day-keep-the-flu-away.aspx?e_cid=20111113_SNL_Art_1

Men Who Have this Popular Screening Have a Staggering 4-Fold Increase in Serious Blood Infections

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers in men, but it is not  as deadly as breast cancer. According to the latest statistics from the American Cancer Society, an estimated 240,890 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year, and just over 33,700 men may die from it, so only one in seven diagnosed with it will die from it.

Overall, American men have a one in six chance of being diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their lives, or one in 42 chance of dying from it..

Most cases of prostate cancer do not occur until after men turn 50, but in recent years there has been a steady rise in the percentage of men in their 30s and 40s with both prostate problems and prostate cancer, primarily as a result of poor diet and increasing environmental pollution.

Unfortunately, investigations over the years have discovered serious flaws with the PSA test used to diagnose prostate cancer. And the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—which has also declared women in their 40s don’t need mammograms—may soon recommend that men not get screened for prostate cancer using the PSA test.

Researchers are also questioning the conventional treatments of prostate cancer, which include surgical removal of the prostate gland and radiotherapy, as they may not be necessary for most men. All in all, I think this really highlights the necessity to employ preventive strategies, which I will discuss at the end of this article.

Moderate to High Certainty PSA Test Does More Harm than Good, Task Force Says

The prostate-specific antigen test (PSA test), analyzes your blood for prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a substance produced by your prostate gland.  When higher-than-normal levels of PSA are detected, it is believed that cancer is present.

However, the PSA test has been criticized as useless for a number of years now. For example, back in 2004, Stanford University News reported:

“The most commonly used screening tool for detecting prostate cancer – the PSA test – is virtually worthless for predicting men’s risk of contracting the disease, medical school researchers have determined. Stanford scientists studied prostate tissues collected in the 20 years since a high PSA test result became the standard for prostate removal. They concluded that as a screen, the test indicates nothing more than the size of the prostate gland.”

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is now planning on recommending a “D” rating for PSA testing, meaning that “there is moderate or high certainty that the service has no net benefit or that the harms outweigh the benefits.”  A review of studies has shown that the PSA blood test yields “small or no reduction” in prostate cancer deaths.

As reported by CNN:

“The report adds that PSA testing is ‘associated with harms related to subsequent evaluation and treatments.’ … The problem is that many of the cancers that get detected are so small and slow-growing, they’ll never be harmful, and doctors have a difficult time discerning the quick, harmful cancers from the slow, harmless ones.”

The PSA Test for Prostate Cancer is Deceptive

Today, many experts agree that PSA testing is unreliable at best and useless at worst for accurately diagnosing prostate cancer. Many also agree that routine PSA blood tests often lead to over-diagnosis of prostate cancer, resulting in unnecessary treatments. Similar to mammograms, the PSA screen has become little more than an up-sell technique. The false positive rate is high, and the bulk of the harm is a result of subsequent unnecessary treatments.

According to the American Cancer Society: “There can be different reasons for an elevated PSA level, including prostate cancer, benign prostate enlargement, inflammation, infection, age, and race,” all factors that make PSA test results confusing, leading to potential for unnecessary treatment and suffering when tests are elevated.  Getting a PSA test reduces your lifetime risk of dying from prostate cancer from three percent to just 2.4 percent, so the difference is negligible.

Drs. Boyle and Brawley of the International Prevention Research Institute, Lyon, France have said,

“The real impact and tragedy of prostate cancer screening is the doubling of the lifetime risk of a diagnosis of prostate cancer with little if any decrease in the risk of dying from this disease.”

Complications of ill advised prostate cancer treatments include urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction. Both of these conditions are difficult to reverse and can significantly decrease your quality of life.

Prostate Biopsies Can Result in Dangerous Infections

A positive PSA test will typically lead to a biopsy—which has also come under increasing scrutiny and criticism in recent years. On the one hand, the procedure itself may cause acute or long-term harm, and on the other, the rate of false negatives is high.

There are over one million prostate cancer tissue biopsy procedures performed annually in the U.S. Approximately 25 percent of these tissue biopsies are reported “positive,” indicating the presence of prostate cancer. The remaining 75 percent are reported “negative.” One-third of the men with initial “negative” results for prostate cancer actually do have prostate cancer that was missed by the biopsy.

A prostate biopsy involves inserting fine needles into the prostate gland. But specialists have begun to worry about a recent, significant increase in the risk of complications from the procedure. In particular, they are concerned about hard-to-treat bloodstream infections that can require weeks of treatment. Over the past decade, the rate of hospital admissions in Ontario, Canada, for serious infections caused by prostate biopsy increased four-fold.

Earlier this summer, the NPR reported:

“Doctors all over the world are increasingly concerned about post-biopsy infections. At last week’s annual meeting of the American Urological Association, there were 10 reports on the phenomenon … The underlying problem, many say, is the spread of antibiotic-resistant microbes.”

Prostate biopsies inherently pose a risk for infection because:

• The needles that collect a tiny piece of prostate tissue can transport bacteria through your rectal wall into the prostate and bloodstream, and/or
• The needles can spread harmful bacteria present in your gut into your bloodstream

Many Cancer Screenings Don’t Save Lives and May Cause Cancer

A recent article featured on PreventDisease.com brings up yet another problem with the PSA test:

“Perhaps most concerning, the PSA test frequently identifies something that qualifies as cancer under a microscope but acts nothing like cancer in real life. That is to say, the large majority of PSA-discovered “cancers” would never cause any problem whatsoever if they went undetected. Finding something through screening invariably leads to treating it through conventional means which cause cancer themselves.”

An underlying issue that needs to be addressed is that both breast- and prostate cancer screenings (mammography and PSA testing respectively) fail to address prevention. Although they are commonly viewed as “preventive” measures, they’re nothing of the sort.  Furthermore, they both appear to result in increased risk of mortality.

The article on PreventDisease.com also includes the following shocking statistics about breast- and prostate cancer screening:

“In a Swedish study of 60,000 women, 70 percent of the mammographically detected tumors weren’t tumors at all. These “false positives” aren’t just financial and emotional strains, they may also lead to many unnecessary and invasive biopsies. In fact, 70 to 80 percent of all positive mammograms do not, upon biopsy, show any presence of cancer.

When it comes to prostate cancer, a 20-year study from Sweden suggests that screening for prostate cancer does not reduce the risk of death from the disease. In fact, many men receive false-positive results and overtreatment, adding an element of risk to widescale screening, researchers report in the March 31 online issue of the BMJ.

To view this article in full visit: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/11/07/conventional-prostate-cancer-treatments.aspx?e_cid=20111107_DNL_art_3