Sunshine on my Shoulders Makes Me Happy and Healthy!

I don't know about the rest of you, but I became a parent in the midst of the "slather every inch of your child's body with sunscreen every second of the day lest you relinquish him to an early death from melanoma" dogma.  Now, as the parent of a child with cancer, and a friend of a young man who died from melanoma at age 38, I don't want to seem like I'm trivializing.  However . . . could it be that, like with so many things, we've been sold that bridge in Alaska in the form of products we don't need and that don't even do what they claim to?

In Defense of the Passionate Argument

Thank you, Liz, for posting.  It is your comments that inspired this post.  I hope that I won't offend you with my further comments.  This is the closest I've ever gotten to a real discussion of these issues.

Liz is a blogger.  (She writes about farm life, but she is a politically-energized mom as well as a farmer.  You'll find her blog, if you're interested, at http://iafarmwife.com/.)   In researching an earlier post I ran across her blog and became one of her "followers."  In some ways, her writing is a balm to my occasional bouts of homesickness, when I'm mired in the political drama that envelopes me here in Michigan.  When I read about pickling a cow tongue, I feel a little closer to home.  I come from the folk that pickled everything, you know.  Even watermelon rinds.  I come from the folk that don't throw anything away, ever.  The anti-consumption element - that's rural America, where the memory of the Great Depression lives on through the self-sufficiency and thrift of its people.  We didn't recycle, but then we didn't waste, either.   We had the first two R's down pat; if you do the first two, you don't need the third.)* 

It is true that I will blog with passion and emotion.  However, those things do not necessarily exclude logic.  They are necessary to any endeavor.   And it is because of my passion that you can trust my intent.  Don't hesitate to correct me when I might be wrong about something.  While I wish I understood it all, I know that I don't.  If you're knowledgeable, share it.

It's Not Sustainable, it's unjust, it's immoral . . .

Grab your coffee . . . this is long.  If you don't have a lot of time, just read the first link!

My goal here is not to impress my ideas upon you so much as to share with you the cogently and / or eloquently stated ideas of others.  The words of Vandana Shiva, which you will hear upon clicking the link below, fall into the category of both.  (We'll get to my ideas, less cogent and less eloquent, a little later.)  Give her a listen.

http://youtu.be/vi1FTCzDSck

If you're a follower of such things, then you already know the damage that Monsanto has done in India.  Google India and farmer suicides and you'll have all sorts to read about. 

Must-See TV for Sick People

Okay, so it's not really TV - it's a movie. A documentary movie.  I would rather watch a good documentary than anything else, as you've all probably figured out.  But this one is so enlightening on many levels.  The FDA and others have fought relentlessly against the use of this antineoplaston therapy, and the movie is about the battle fought (and won, not by the FDA but by Dr. Burzynski.)

I suspect that this movie won't be widely available in rental chains.  So tonight's the night.

While you watch, keep one thing in the back of your mind.

Pathways.

Here's the link:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articlewwws/archive/2011/06/11/b
urzynski-the-movie.aspx

Pathways . . .

I've mentioned before that my nephew is autistic.

Well, I'm hoping that my sister won't kill me for using her as blog fodder, but . . . that's what I'm gonna do.

She found a DAN! doctor for her son, bade her time on the waitlist, and saw him earlier this week for the first time.  Her excitement was contagious.  And my sister is not a demonstrative type like me.  She's reserved and dignified; she doesn't gush like I do.   Still, I could tell:  she's excited.

But this post will not be about autism.

Nope.  It's about . . . pathways.

The future of disease . . . prevention?

from Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies:  A Biography of Cancer . . .

"Cancer at the fin de siecle," as the oncologist Harold Burstein described it, "resides at the interface between society and science."  It poses not one but two challenges.  The first, the "biological challenge" of cancer, involves "harnessing the fantastic rise in scientific knowledge   . . . to conquer this ancient and terrible illness."  But the second, the "social challenge," is just as acute:  it involves forcing ourselves to confront our customs, rituals, and behaviors.  These, unfortunately, are not customs or behaviors that lie at the peripheries of our society or selves, but ones that lie at their definitional cores:  what we eat and drink, what we produce and exude into our environments, when we choose to reproduce, and how we age.

This passage is toward the end of the book - an amazing book, one I'd highly recommend and since it won the Pulitzer last year, I'm apparently not alone in my assessment of its greatness.  After chapter upon chapter of the history of a disease whose very name is terror, culminating in the unveiling of its secrets - the 13 pathways, the key to all cancers - one would be inclined to agree with Mukherjee on this one.  Like the very organism from which it stems, cancer is designed to adapt, to respond to insults, to find a way to keep on existing.  So every treatment that hopes to kill cancer may just succeed in making it stronger.  More virulent. 

"What does not kill me makes me stronger."