The actual life expectancy for the U.S. population in 2020 was 77.0 years, a decrease of 1.8 years from 2019.¹

However, these are figures from birth. If you have already made it to 50 or 60, you’ve proved you’re a survivor. You will live much longer than the average for all ages—well into the 80s! But again these are averages. As many as half of us will reach 100!

The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that the top three causes of death are heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

Statistics Can Lie

Don’t let statistics bog you down. The really important thing is what will happen to YOU, not what happens to everybody else. You’re not a statistic, you’re not even average. Nobody is average. We are all different. I only want you to understand that the old-fashioned idea of a generation ago—that you were pretty well finished by your 70s and there was nothing much you could do about it—is false and has always been false.

If you go to other supposedly less fortunate societies, you find that living beyond 100 is pretty common and always has been. I first noticed this among my Scottish ancestors, living to 90- 100 years, on a diet of herring and oatmeal (good scientific reasons why these would help you live long). They also had plenty of exercise, walked long distances and, by the way, drank plenty of whisky.

But if you go to societies like the Okinawans of Japan, the Hunzas of Pakistan or the Georgians of Azerbaijan, the picture really is dramatic: many men and women live to be 100 years old, can still work, ride a horse and father children. Unfortunately the ladies cannot match this last but do enjoy occasional “rumpy-pumpy” and they are right up there as sprightly centegenarians, along with the men).

One picture in National Geographic, Jan 1973, shows a woman the researchers know to be at least 130 years old. She’s lucid and lively and—wait for it—has a cigarette in one hand and a glass of vodka in the other!

I took one look at that photograph and thought “What do we doctors know, really?”

Jeanne Louise Calment, a French lady, who famously lived till just a few months short of 123 years. She drank every day and didn’t give up smoking till the age of 117!

So my first piece of advice for living healthy and long is IGNORE EVERYTHING YOU ARE TOLD BY REGULAR DOCTORS. Medical science is crude, simplistic, biased, ignorant, narrow-minded and dangerous. Most of it is, after all, centered around drug company profits, not patient care in the true sense of the word.

So What Do We Die Of?

The Center for Disease Control reported the top 10 causes of death for 2005 were as follows:

1. 1. Heart disease
   2. Cancer
   3. Stroke
   4. Chronic lower respiratory diseases (lung diseases)
   5. Accidents
   6. Diabetes
   7. Alzheimer’s disease
   8. Influenza and pneumonia
   9. Kidney disease
   10. Septicemia (a serious infection that affects the blood)

These were closely followed by suicide, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, high blood pressure, Parkinson’s disease and homicide.

But wait—I argue that there are just 6 main speed bumps in the road. Yes, that’s right. A lot of these figures are quite complicated and don’t necessarily speak the truth. For example, someone who had a paralyzing stroke but survived, only to die in bed of pneumonia (a very common outcome), would not show up as a stroke death.

But really a stroke was the cause of the fatality; pneumonia and respiratory disease is thus exaggerated. In any case 4 and 8 are pretty similar (lungs).

Stroke and heart disease are also pretty much the same thing, under different names.

The actual disease is arteriosclerosis or bad arteries, whether the heart is most affected or the brain. Even Alzheimer’s could be seen as a disease of the circulatory system since the main problem seems to be poor nutrient blood supply to the brain, caused by aging arteries.

We can rule out accidents, since avoiding them is hardly a medical matter. To die in a car crash has nothing to do with the aging process! It’s just tough luck.

So!

We can actually boil the top of the list down to this:

1. 1. Aging circulation
   2. Cancer
   3. Diabetes
   4. Kidney disease
   5. Septicemia.

But that’s only 5 you say. What about the 6th?

This is what they didn’t tell you in the report: doctors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US! They account for over 225,000 deaths per year.² These show up as “iatrogenic” causes, a Greek word which means “caused by doctors”.

This year the CDC tried to claim that COVID is the 3^rd leading cause of death. Well, since that’s medical blundering and falsehoods at its worst, that too may be added to iatrogenic causes!

Doctors May Be The Number One Killer

But according to Dr Barbara Starfield of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, who prepared the report for The Journal of the American Medical Association, doctors are actually the number one killer, because they do not inform patients properly of the hazards of the procedures they offer (why would they? The patient might have second thoughts and that would lose income for the doctor!)

According to Starfield’s figures:

• • 12,000 —–unnecessary surgeries
  • 7,000 —–medication errors in hospitals
  • 20,000 —–other errors in hospitals
  • 80,000 —–infections in hospitals
  • 106,000 —-non-error, negative effects of drugs

These total to 250,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes!! Note that over 100,000 deaths are not “errors”, the patients died of the “correct” treatments.

Another analysis, published in the British Medical Journal³, concluded that between 4% and 18% of consecutive patients experience negative effects in outpatient settings, with:

• • 116 million extra physician visits
  • 77 million extra prescriptions
  • 17 million emergency department visits
  • 8 million hospitalizations
  • 3 million long-term admissions
  • 199,000 additional deaths
  • $77 billion in extra costs

The high cost of the health care system is considered to be a deficit, but seems to be tolerated under the mistaken assumption that better health results from more expensive care.

In fact, evidence from a few studies indicates that as many as 20% to 30% of patients receive inappropriate care (medicalese for “wrong treatment”)! An estimated 44,000 to 98,000 among them die each year as a result of medical errors.

My often-repeated piece of critical advice therefore, if you want to live a long and healthy life, is STAY AWAY FROM DOCTORS AND HOSPITALS. They are by far the biggest speed bump in your way. In fact when doctors go on strike, ironically, the death rate always drops.

Not a lot of people know that! [a phrase from Peter Sellers and often attributed to Sir Michael Caine]

Keep healthy and choose your own day of departure!

To your good health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

References:

1. NCHS Data Brief No. 427, December 2021

2. Journal American Medical Association 2000 Jul 26;284(4):483-5

3. Weingart SN, Wilson RM, Gibberd RW, Harrison B. “Epidemiology and medical error.” BMJ. 2000;320:774-777.

Now, almost by serendipity, a new study came across my desk only this week, AGAIN demonstrating a link between milk consumption and cancer—breast cancer in women…

For women who drink two to three cups of dairy milk per day, the study proclaimed the associated risk of developing breast cancer rose by more than 70%.

Drinking dairy milk may be a contributing factor in having an increased risk of developing breast cancer, according to a new study conducted by researchers at Loma Linda University Health.

Researchers published the controversial study this week in the Oxford International Journal Of Epidemiology. They looked at the dairy intake of 53,000 American women and found that higher intakes of dairy milk were associated with greater risks of developing breast cancer. The average age of participants in the study was 57 years old.

The national rate of breast cancer in the U.S. is 13 percent. It is believed that about one in eight women will contract cancer. The rate of breast cancer frequency in the study was lower than the national average.

The study was funded by the National Cancer Institute and the World Cancer Research Fund as a part of a health study exploring the links between lifestyle, diet, and disease.¹

A previous study of men suggested dairy products might increase a male’s risk of developing prostate cancer by 30 to 50 percent.

So what’s a milk lover to do? If you like the flavor and texture of milk, there are many alternatives on the market, part from daily milk. Milks are made from coconuts, almonds, oats, flax, and more are readily available in stores and are very easy to make yourself. Often these milks provide even more nutrients than cow milk does too.

Don’t be fooled by the calcium story: milk weakens bones and removes calcium from bones, as I said last time.

Well, it’s not often I spend a big chunk of my newsletter crowing about something I already said. But I do feel at last that I am getting support from real science for what I’ve been saying for decades.

By the way, if you haven’t yet downloaded my free eBook on osteoporosis, you can do so now, from this link:

DOWN THE OSTEOPOROSIS REPORT

The Mrs. Muir Effect

Here’s where I’d like to ask some of you for real help with a project. Let me share with you a section for a new book I am writing: Overcoming The Fear Of Dying. I’m sure it’s a much-needed text. Death is still a taboo subject and still evokes fear or avoidance in typical Westerners.

Here Are My Preliminary Notes For This Section:

One thing I have seen countless times on the wards is the patient being beckoned over to the other side by a friendly spirit. Nurses know this, of course; they see it often but don’t mention it to the doctors… at least not the male doctors! But obviously there is a presence there. It’s a ghostly immaterial apparition that is calling the patient over at the moment of dying.

You witness the terminal patient making gestures, apparently talking to someone at the end of the bed, some spectre; someone who isn’t there. Sometimes there is a friendly smile of recognition as if the patient already knows this being.

And then, next thing, he or she is gone from us.

I suspect this happened with my Mum Florence (I told you this story in a newsletter at the time). She and her ex-husband, who died within a day of each other (their obituaries were only an inch apart in the local rag!), probably went through this ritual.

I wasn’t there. I’d flown home to Las Vegas. But the nurses say that Mum was fine when they went round to do her vitals at 2.00 am, laughing and joking, and yet when they came again, at 3.00 am, she had passed. I can imagine it easily, having seen it myself so often. The non-material presence appears and beckons… it might even have been her first husband, my own Dad, saying “Come on Flo, it’s time.” By then she would be halfway to the other side anyway, having left our world and was already peeping into the next.

I think she would have found it comforting to find someone she knew and trusted, to help her make that final, eventful step!

I call this the “Mrs. Muir Effect”, after a wonderful sweet movie called The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. It starred Gene Tierney, as Mrs. Muir, and Rex Harrison as the cantankerous ghost of Captain Daniel Gregg, who originally owned Gull Cottage, the house Mrs. Muir has bought for herself and her daughter.

There’s not a scary moment in the whole story; just love, courage and reverence. It turns out in the end that even the daughter (played by a young Natalie Wood) has seen the ghost of Captain Gregg and talked to him often, without the least fear.

Right at the end of the movie, Gregg re-appears to take the aging Mrs. Muir to her final particular paradise.

What I am asking for is: do any of you have any true stories or anecdotes of this sort? I’d want to put them in the book and share, with or without your name. So do bear that in mind.

You would be doing good in the world, in helping poor souls who dread death to come to terms with the fact there is something out there!

Please do NOT send me Christian propaganda: I have subscribers all over the world, practicing many religions, who feel no need of being told what to think from any one particular tradition. They have their own way. We must respect that.

This is for ALL HUMANITY. I really feel a strong sense of mission in this work. I can take this way beyond Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work On Death and Dying and beyond The Tibetan Book of The Dead.

As I said, there is a real need for some comforting truths, as religious values are steadily eroded in this competitive and mechanistic world. So-called science insists we are all just a brain, with the inference that when we die and the brain is gone, we are gone too.

I say nonsense. There is an enormous abundance of evidence to the contrary; that we are NOT just a brain. Near-death experiences, out of the body, infinite mind, remote viewing, telepathy, prescience, and many other phenomena demonstrate clearly that we are non-material souls and therefore do not (and cannot) UN-Be!

Please help! Blessings,

To Your Good Health,

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

Reference:

1. International Journal of Epidemiology, dyaa007, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyaa007

It’s something the US specializes in: getting blood from students, tramps and druggies for a few dollars and then selling it to the rest of the world at a huge profit, on the understanding it’s a quality-controlled product, WHICH IT IS NOT.

My own dear father was killed by this medical negligence and commercial greed. He was a hemophiliac (the bleeding disease). He needed a  transfusion because his blood would not clot. He needed factor VIII enriched (this was nearly 30 years ago, research has moved on since), which came from the USA. The best there is, you might think. Yeah, but the blood included lots of Hep C viruses. Nobody had bothered to check.

So he “caught” Hep C, without any mistake or lifestyle indiscretion, and died as a result. It was sad to see his liver ruined and one day he just exsanguinated (bled out) when liver cirrhosis caused the blood vessels around the esophagus to rupture. I drove like the furies to see home before he left this earth. But I was denied> He was dead by the time i Got an hour down the freeway. It was another 5 hours before I finally reached the hospital. They couldn’t resuscitate him.

And then I was reading in my MENSA (high IQ club) magazine, only today, that Isaac Asimov, the brilliant science fiction writer and futurist, died of AIDS because he had received a filthy blood transfusion loaded with HIV. Nothing changes. we lost a very great intellect at that time.

Isaac Asimov

Caffeine Transfusion

So I might as well keep going in the same grumpy vein! Ha ha!

You’d think donor blood ought to be perfectly pure, but a study from Oregon State University showed there are a lot of surprise substances in donor blood. They looked at 18 bags of blood and discovered caffeine in all the samples, as well as traces of cough medicine and anti-anxiety drugs in many of them, too.

The analysis was made as part of a study into how botanical dietary supplements and other drugs can interact together in the body, using mass spectrometry to identify the chemical composition of the molecules in the blood samples.

I presume they were trying to take another swipe at holistic medicine and how “dangerous” it is, because what the scientists set out to do was identify how dietary supplements might have adverse effects when they interact with existing prescriptions. Of course the problem would be the dietary supplements, not the damned meds, you can be sure!

Anyway, the team ended up discovering how our lifestyles cause changes that live on in the samples when we donate our bodily fluids. Ugh!

Based on this sample, we’re so keen on coffee, tea, chocolate, soda, and energy drinks that caffeine and sugar are literally running in our veins.

“But the other drugs being in there could be an issue for patients, as well as posing a problem for those of s doing this type of research,” says pharmacologist Luying Chen, from Oregon State University, “Because it’s hard to get clean blood samples.”

Besides the caffeince, which appeared in ALL the samples, 13 of the samples showed the presence of alprazolam, the anti-anxiety medicine sold under the name Xanax. It’s dreadful stuff and nobody should take it, never mind get it unknowingly, so get whacked mentally, without realizing where the horrible feelings came from.

Meanwhile, eight of the samples had traces of the over-the-counter cough medicine dextromethorphan.

As Chen, says, this causes complications for blood transfusion as well as for medical research on blood samples – because researchers might not be starting from a clean state very often.

However, the team was able to successfully prove the effectiveness of their technique for measuring the presence of drugs in blood samples. That should make it easier to figure out how botanicals – natural products with drug-like activities – affect other compounds in the bloodstream.

“It’s not straightforward or necessarily predictable, thus the need for methods to look for these interactions,” says pharmacologist Richard van Breemen, from Oregon State University. “The odd thing in this case was finding all the tainted blood.”

You need to get real van Breeman: transfusion blood is dirty blood, period.

In the end the team behind the study had to enlist the help of two volunteers who promised to abstain from eating or drinking anything with caffeine before their blood was taken as a sample. That gave them a baseline.

The number of samples in this case wasn’t very big at all, so it’s not comprehensive proof that caffeine is proliferating through blood donations bags worldwide. But it poses an interesting question on what exactly might be present in donated blood, whether it’s being used for medical treatments or for further research.

“Another thing to consider is that we found drugs that we just happened to be looking for in doing the drug testing – how many others are in there too that we weren’t even testing for?” says van Breenmen.

A lot Buddy!

By amazing serendipity, as I was writing this very piece, one subscriber asled me to do a piece on the pros and cons of donating blood. That’s a different evaluation, of course, from the hazards of receinving blood.

Basically men should donate blood regularly. Otherwise we tend to build up too much iron (hemoglobin). Indeed, that may be one of the reasons why men don’t live as long as women on average (iron is a surprisingly toxic free radical).

For women, it depends on their menses. If you lose a lot regularly, it still won’t make you seriously deficient to donate blood occasionally. But maybe do it less frequently: once or twice a year, instead of monthly or quarterly.

I can’t be a blood donor because I had glandular fever and hepatitis when a teenager. That was rough to think back on!

Just take care of yourselves out there and remember my motto: if you want to be healthy and life long, stay away from doctors and hospitals! Just make sure you never need a blood  transfusion and you’ll be OK!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby

The Official Alternative Doctor

SOURCE:
The research has been published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis.

She accidentally spilled 2 drops of dimethyl mercury on her gloved hand… and subsequently died in agony.

Now it’s important you take note this is dimethyl mercury, which is NOTORIOUSLY dangerous. Methyl mercury, which caused the outbreak of Minamata Disease in Japan in the 1960s and 70s was METHYL mercury, not DIMETHYL mercury. We all saw the horrible picture of young kids from the city if Minamata, twitching and jerking in wheelchairs, as they slowly died.

Well, dimethyl mercury is ten times as deadly.* It’s horrible!

KW turned up in ER five months after her accidental exposure. She was sure that she had not touched the chemical. She apparently followed the full detox procedure at the time (she was a professional, after all). But…

This is what happened to her: she noticed progressive deterioration in balance, gait, and speech; she has lost 15 pounds in the 2 months leading up to her admission, and experienced several brief episodes of nausea and abdominal discomfort.

She started walking into walls and assumed she had not been paying proper attention. Then, one day, she almost got into a car accident. She started asking her husband to drive her to university. Maybe she hadn’t slept well, she thought.

When examined, she had a condition called “dysmetria” (“dys-” meaning wrong, and “-metria” meaning length). She was mis-estimating distances and how close or far away things were, which made her extremely clumsy.

Similarly, she had ataxic gait, meaning her walk was awkward, imbalanced, and disorderly. Both of these were combined with lousy handwriting and slurred speech, all of which amounted to severe neurodegeneration, with mercury as the likely culprit.

She was a skilled professional and she knew what all this meant. She was right to be concerned about her condition.

As the days continued, KW reports that she has a tingling in her fingers that’s getting stronger. She sees brief flashes of light in both eyes. She introduces the concept of white background noise that begins to wash away her normal hearing in both ears. Her gait becomes even more ataxic. Her speech becomes more slurred; her field of vision, more narrow.

A blood test revealed that her blood mercury levels were over 4,000 mcg/L. Thats 4,000 times greater than the upper limit of normal. Obviously, mercury poisoning was THE cause of her condition.

But the sad part of the story is that she did not show any signs of recovery, many weeks after leaving the lab. Where was the mercury hiding? It was clearly not being excreted. 95% of her “dose” was unaccounted for.

In fact it ended up in the nervous system. Remember, she was not poisoned by mercury metal but the dimethyl form, which has a strong affinity for fatty tissue. What’s the fattiest organ in the body?

The brain! it’s over . 60% fat.

So a near-lethal dose of organic mercury is transferred to her brain and nervous tissues. She was in big trouble.

The problem with dimethlymercury is that, in the liver, it’s broken down to methylmecury, which still dissolved strongly in fatty tissue (hence Minamata Disease). Even worse, it’s known to bing to tissue and cause free radical damage and oxidative stress, and form complexes that accelerate cell death.

The best solution here is to trap the mercury inside a molecule that’s water-soluble on the outside, so that it will grab the mercury but still dissolve in water and be excreted by the kidneys. We call this “chelation”, from the Latin word for a crab’s claw!

But it was too late. A week later a neuropsychiatric consultant found severe cognitive deficits. She’s losing touch. Her husband tries to speak to her, but she would stare blankly into a void.

At 3 weeks’ time after initially presenting to the emergency room, KW becomes unresponsive to verbal, visual, and touch stimuli. From the depths of her coma, she is sometimes found yawning spontaneously with brief episodes of agitation, screaming, crying, and unpromted sudden, jerky limb movements. There’s someone inside, but that person is trapped in a prison of her own comatose body.

There continued to be some debate whether her condition was caused by steady accumulation of mercury from her work. But a hair analysis showed that was not the case.

The amount of free mercury found in her body halved every 75 days, with a maximum excretion recorded roughly 150 days before presenting to the emergency room: the time she was subject to the spill in the lab.

Working, backwards, it became obvious that she had absorbed a MASSIVE quantity of demethylmercury, four times the lethal dose. She was as good as dead from the moment of the spill. In fact at one point her blood mercury levels were likely to be 16,000 times the upper limit of normal, it was calculated.

It was discovered later the dimethylmercury does, in fact, diffuse through the type of disposable latex gloves KW wore that day, and it does so within seconds. The small exposure, equivalent to a few drops absorbed into her skin, embedded into her body and caused delayed onset of cerebral disease.

In view of the dismal prognosis and after more than three months of trying everything they could do to saver her, the patient’s advance directives were followed, and she was left to die peacefully on June 8, 1997, 298 days after exposure.

Before she lapsed into a vegetative state, the patient requested that her case be presented to the general medical community, to scientists working with mercury, and to toxicologists, in the hope of improving the recognition, treatment, and prevention of future cases of mercury poisoning.

Only three other cases of dimethylmercury poisoning have been documented in history. In 1865, two lab assistants who were synthesizing it for the first time passed away several weeks after doing so. In the 1960s, another lab worker was exposed to it and he too suffered a delayed neurologic decline in the same fashion as KW.

In general, it’s a good rule to not touch things if you don’t know what they are. Be cognizant of what comes in contact with your skin. Unless you’re a chemist, you probably won’t come into direct contact with dimethylmercury the way that KW did. And don’t worry, you would have to eat 65,000kg of fresh Atlantic salmon in one sitting to get you to where she was.

It is important to understand that methyl and dimethylmercury are ORGANIC forms of mercury, not the same as thiomersol at all (mis-spelled by Americans as thimersal).

I don’t think it is appropriate to illustrate this story with an image of the patient. But if you want to watch a YouTube video about this famous case, go here:

A gloomy story, And of course it poses the obvious question: why would they want to put ANY form of mercury into babies? Teething powders resulted in deadly “pink disease”, back in the 1940s and 50s. Then it was used in vaccines. Duh! now we have to worry about polluted fish (from coal burning and other industrial waste). As a general rule, smaller fish, like squid, scallops, sardines, contain less mercury than larger varieties such as tune and swordfish, which are higher up the food chain.

Also- a good idea: get yourself a copy of the Monterey Aquarium phone app. Check the quality of fish you are eating!

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby 

The Official Alternative Doctor

• A figure of speech only.

Sources:

1. Medpage Today

2. June 4, 1998. N Engl J Med 1998; 338:1672-1676 doi: 10.1056/NEJM199806043382305

I’m one of the few internationally-known medical writers who occasionally writes about death and dying. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is exceptional. Others seem to avoid it, as a sort of denial (“Just do as I say and things will never come to that” sort of mentality).

As I have pointed out often, doctors MUST be there to serve their patients at life’s end, otherwise what use are you as a healer and comforter? Being absent at life’s end is a betrayal.

It’s also nuts because we all die sooner or later. There’s no use pretending. Even if we attain “immortality”, we’ll eventually choose to die, whenever. But that fateful moment can’t be stalled forever. The joke is, of course, that as non-material spiritual beings, we can’t actually die! We can only transition from one plane to the next.

It’s just the body that tuckers out and vanishes. The YOU never does (it can’t!) So dying is only a loss of context, not a loss of Being…

Yet doctors are never taught what to say, or how to behave, in a life-ending situation. Consequently, there is little scientifically documented data as to what happens. It’s the territory of poets and playwrights, novelists and musicians. That’s a pity.

Because we can learn a lot about life at life’s ending.

As a decent physician, I’ve never shirked the moment. As a result of that, I’ve had some awesome and rewarding experiences. To me, it’s routine, that deceased relatives and friends come to call for the dying person. I’ve watched patients reach out and take someone’s hand at the foot of the bed… and been dead within minutes or hours.

Moreover, the “deathbed scene” is always a time of powerful love and forgiveness. As the end draws near, the terminally ill patient sinks into a wonderful calm. They  show great love for all and desire to heal or bring forgiveness and closure to whatever situations were hurtful and unhealed in their life.

Sometimes the other person is there. Often not, and the desired reunion is not fulfilled.

I have a strong determination to teach people NOT to wait till life’s end! If you’d seen some of these moments of wonderful reconciliation you’d understand. Why wait? You miss out on years of love that could have been yours to enjoy, instead you left it till the last minute!

That’s sad.

The good news is that it’s never too late to heal wounds. The better news is that—if you do it now—it feels just as wonderful and the good times last far longer.

Not preaching, just offering a suggestion!

Doctors Get In The Way

I’m sorry to say that doctors are not only little use at this time but they often really mess it up for everyone involved. They try to defy death and then, when they fail, they react by denying it.

The kinds of encounters I have been describing are often dismissed as “ravings” or “confusion”. Doctors might even prescribe meds to “cure” it, or at least to submerge the patient’s awareness. To them, death is just a physiological process, not a moment of spiritual truth that has to be processed consciously.

Being given sedatives or a “cocktail” mix (morphine) denies the patient this need.

And there is the issue of mortality. Sometimes, a person’s time has come and doctors should STOP what they are doing!

Remember the moment in the movie Groundhog Day, when obnoxious Bill Murray—who is trying to be a better person to impress his girl—tries to save the old man dying of cold and old age?

Murray can’t help and learns eventually, that if a person’s time has come, even magic can’t turn back the clock. The old man dies in every repeat iteration.

Instead of feeding the guy hot soup and bread, Murray may have done better to just talk to him and say, “Tell me about your greatest love.” That one, simple question is among the most healing tools I know (and we have plenty in Supernoetics®).

While I’m talking about movies, try to get to see The Ghost and Mrs Muir (starring Rex Harrison, George Sanders and Gene Tierney, 1947). I found it today on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V34d4jEF-y4. The closing frames are of the ghost of Captain Gregg coming to take Mrs. Muir home with him to the afterlife! It’s a lovely movie indeed (oops, plot spoiler).

No Fear

We all fear death, of course. But that’s when it is remote; an inconvenient interruption in the things we want so earnestly to do. Distant death is a bummer.

But when it comes very close, things are different. You will not fear, once inevitability sets in. You’ll have far to much to process, without worrying about details like “Why me?” or “Why now?”

Now some interesting work has surfaced that actually goes to dying patients for the facts (that’s revolutionary!) At least one doctor has listened to dying patients and BELIEVED them. He’s Dr. Christopher Kerr of Hospice Buffalo and he presented his findings in a TEDx talk (2015).

He found, as I do, that people become aware of the “presence” of deceased relatives, ready, loving and waiting to help them cross over. It’s all rather jolly. Certainly not a time for mourning.

The poor souls we should feel for are those luckless people who didn’t have time to prepare and were catapulted into the next world with no warning or time to think: victims of bombings, shootings, landslides, etc. That’s not to say they won’t be welcomed or linked up with family who have gone before; I just don’t know.

What I do know is that the poor youths shelled, shot or busted in half on the battlefields of World War 1, for example, always cried out “Mum!” in their extremis, not their sweethearts. For many, I know, Mum is the start and end of it all!

Anyway, Dr. Kerr found by collecting data that it became possible to predict roughly when the person’s transition would come, just from the frequency of dream encounters with loved ones. I find it all very wonderful.

Go and see Dr. Kerr’s talk here:

See if you can pick up the quavering of grief in his voice (could be just nerves, I suppose)

Meantime, make the world better by doing this:

1. Tell as many people as you have guts for that you don’t want to wait till the deathbed scene, “Let’s start the healing and forgiveness here and now!” Just be gently persistent, not overpoweringly supercilious.
2. Talk to those you meet who are dying, and who know they are, about what their hopes and dreams are for the next life. Don’t be shy. They’ll love you for it.
3. Ask your family (and friends) how they want to approach the end: do they want “lights out” with a chemical cosh, or not? Just remember people are fearful while death is far away and may not give a fearless answer.
4. If you have a care for it, read Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying. Become an advocate of open, honest discussion around the end-of-life scenario.
5. Live long, live well, show love, forgive all and spread as much kindness in the world as you can, before getting tangled up in this dying stuff! Ha ha!

And before you email and ask, NO, I’m not thinking about this topic because my own passing is close (not unless the FDA, AMA or similar sends out a hit man to shut me up!)

Fond Regards,

Prof.

Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby
The Official Alternative Doctor

He was killed at the age of only 45, in a world water speed record attempt in 1967. But his body was only recovered in 2001. It had lain at the bottom of Lake Coniston (Coniston Water) for nearly 4 decades. Campbell was finally laid to rest in a quiet churchyard in Coniston village. Vivien and I were moved to find his grave and it stirred mighty thoughts!

His final, fatal attempt was to break the 300 mph. barrier (480 km/h). His first run reached a blistering 297.6 mph (478.9 km/h). But on the second run, the boat lifted, spun over and broke up. He was presumed dead instantly. Hitting the water at around 300 mph is like landing on concrete. Later evidence suggested he was likely decapitated. [Wikipedia]

Here comes the spooky part:

On the night before his death, while playing cards, he had drawn the ace and queen of spades. Reflecting upon the fact that Mary, Queen of Scots, had drawn the same two cards the night before she was beheaded, Campbell told his mechanics, who were playing cards with him, that he had a fearful premonition that he was going to “get the chop”.

On salvage, the boat still contained fuel in the engine fuel lines, discounting a fuel-starvation theory. The wreckage all evidenced an impact from left to right, wiping the whole front of the boat off in that direction. Campbell’s lower harness mounts had failed and were found to be effectively useless.

The remains of Campbell’s craft was recovered by the Bluebird Project. The project began when diver Bill Smith was inspired to look for the wreck after hearing the Marillion song “Out of this World” (from the album Afraid of Sunlight), which was written about Campbell and Bluebird. Campbell’s body was finally located and recovered from the lake on 28 May 2001, still wearing his signature blue nylon overalls.

DNA testing proved the identification was correct.

So, why am I telling you this?

First, I was profoundly moved, standing at the man’s graveside. I was a little choked, to be honest. It seemed to make the seasonal guzzling and partying a little shallow and silly.

I also tried to imagine strapping myself into a jet-propelled craft, with a heavy premonition of death, knowing that the least slip would be fatal, and I had to admit to myself that I could not have done it.

I have faced death a few times in my career, such as dragging victims from a burning car, disarming a murderous psychopath, tending a crash victim with cars hurtling past mere inches away and being on the wrong end of a gun. But these were instant, unthinking reactions; nothing like the cold-blooded courage that Campbell must have manifest that day.

It started me wondering about courage as a quality. I hope after reading this missive that you may perhaps resolve to do better. We live lives of such unimaginable convenience and comfort that there is sometimes little motivation to do something, just because we would be a better person to do it.

And no, I don’t mean taking risks, whether unnecessary or calculated. I’m talking about things like honoring others, resolving conflict, surrendering our sovereignty when someone needs help and doing what we can to save our environment.

Behaving well towards others does require courage. You have to believe the result will be worth it, if you admit “I was wrong, sorry.”

Being charitable does require the courage to trust that you will regain what you lost—or at least that you will survive without whatever it was.

It requires courage to be the best we can be, whatever the circumstances. Some people are scared of flying; some make themselves do it anyway; others can’t face it…

But what’s the alternative? If you don’t measure up, you know you have failed. You are less of a person than you might have been. It can be hard to feel good about yourself after that. What do you suppose would have happened to Donald Campbell, if he’d announced, “I don’t think I can do this,” and called off the attempt?

He’d probably have ended up a drunk.

An alcoholic is often a person who has failed the courage test, lost his or her self-respect, and taken to drink to hide the misery. There are many other “solutions” that seemed to me, that morning, were simply ways to duck an action that required more courage than the person was willing to invest.

Because that’s how I see it: like an investment balance sheet. How much are you willing to risk on the plus side, to avoid a miserably negative side outcome? It’s a trade off we all make. So much of this and so much of that. But how often is it the mediocrity of compromise?

Don’t go there.

I urge you to remember the wonderful words of Stephen Spender and his poem which starts: I think continually of those who were truly great.

Even if you are not much into poetry, you must surely see that these lines about men and women like Donald Campbell, who should inspire us to have the courage to be the best we can be (English spellings throughout):

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Stephen Spender, “The Truly Great” from Collected Poems 1928-1953. Copyright © 1955 by Stephen Spender. Reprinted by permission of Ed Victor Ltd.

Prof.

By the way: The current world water speed record is 317.58 mph (511 km/h), achieved by Australian Ken Warby in the Spirit of Australia in 1978. The record is one of the sporting world’s most hazardous competitions. [Wiki]

“Brain-death determination requires an arbitrary decision on when someone is dead enough. There will never be zero activity in the brain (at brain death).”

I’m sure some of my subscribers snicker a little at my idiocy when I say we are not a brain. We don’t even need a brain to be conscious and aware. We just need our brain to manage body activity and to communicate with our world.

I’ve mentioned in the past that Professor John Lorber (UK) had a series of several hundred patients who had virtually no brain to speak of. Yet nobody could tell! Their thoughts, memories and emotions were entirely normal. One had a doctorate, another was an accountant. This can’t happen if the brain is such a crucial organ as we are being told.

Well, here’s more compelling evidence that we are truly NOT A BRAIN. What about people who are pronounced “brain dead” and yet wake up? Many cases, such as Zack Dunlap from Oklahoma and Trenton McKinley from Alabama. Trenton woke up just one day before his organs were due to harvested.

He’s alive and well to this day. There are HUNDREDS of cases like these two. Do doctors step back and scientifically question the phenomenon they are observing, to figure out what’s to be learned?

No, of course not. To read their official responses to such cases, you might be persuaded that it was just a simple blunder. The case should not have been pronounced brain dead (they say).

“In virtually all those cases, brain-death determination was not done correctly,” says Robert M. Sade, MD, professor of surgery and director of the Institute of Human Values in Health Care at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “If you don’t go through the exact protocol for brain-death determination, you’re likely to have patients diagnosed as being dead by neurologic criteria who are, in fact, not brain dead.”

Unfortunately, his B*S* is a complete fabrication. It’s more “thought science” than fact, meaning “It must have been that way, so it was…”

This propaganda is reinforced by pronouncements like the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) committee of experts, after searching the literature, and finding no legitimate “reports of patients recovering brain function when the criteria for brain-death determination was used appropriately.”

Can you spot what’s wrong with that pronouncement? It’s easy! They didn’t search cases, or life, they just searched “the literature”. So unless somebody publishes the truth in a medical journal, they can go on saying there are no “legitimate cases”!

Even if there were legitimate cases, there is no way of knowing how many people recover from brain death because they are usually quickly removed from life support and “harvested” for their organs (follow the money!)

Differing Diagnosis of Brain Death

The high-profile case of Jahi McMath has caused some experts to question whether brain-dead patients are truly dead and move families to legally fight a loved one’s brain death diagnosis.

Subsequently, two neurologists stated that McMath was not brain dead based on their interpretation of an EEG, an MRI, and an MRA done a year later and observation of video clips from 2014 to 2016 that appeared to show McMath following commands and communicating with finger movements.

So much for “expert” opinion. Listen to this baloney:

“We have high confidence that McMath’s initial diagnosis of brain death was correct,” says Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD, director of the Health Law Institute and professor of law, Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St Paul, Minnesota. “It’s never happened in human history that someone correctly diagnosed as brain dead is no longer dead.” Oh yeah?

The funny part of all this—that is NOT funny at all—is how the doctors justify their baloney and claim all is p-e-r-f-e-c-t. The system has no weaknesses. Stories are dismissed as unimportant exceptions to their agreed-upon truths.

But that’s really nonsense. HOW CAN THEY KNOW HOW MANY PATIENTS COULD POTENTIALLY REVIVE, if they are immediately taken off life support to harvest their organs? There is no way this phony logic adds up.

Vested Interest

The thing that worries me is not so much the question of medical incompetence. Or not knowing what are the true boundaries are between life and death.

It’s the fact that patients are pronounced dead and then “harvested” for their organs. There’s BIG money in pronouncing someone brain dead at the earliest possible moment.

Making brain death criteria more rigorous would likely reduce the number of brain-dead organ donors, who are the primary source of transplantable organs, including all hearts. Sade, who previously ran South Carolina’s organ procurement program, stirs the brain death controversy in the opposite direction. He is advocating for potential organ donors who are nearly dead to have their organs harvested, which would make formal brain death determination unnecessary.

In other words: “Kill ‘em. They are likely to die anyway.”

“Once a potential organ donor’s death is imminent, I would like for us to be able to remove his organs even though he is still breathing, and his heart is beating,” Sade says. Waiting until brain-injured patients progress to brain death results in physiologic abnormalities and organ damage from neurologic and hormonal changes.

My God, I hope he never runs for president (just a coincidence he shares the name of the infamous Marquis de Sade, who gave us the word sadism?)

“Any organ donor would want the organs to be in the best possible condition and as many organs used as possible for transplantation.” Sade estimates that as many as 6684 additional organs could be retrieved from brain-injured organ donors who were imminently dead rather than brain dead. “We could wipe out the waiting list for all organs for two or three years,” he says.

How can he define donor death as imminent, when people wake up from a coma all the time… sometimes after decades in a vegetative state? He can’t. The whole point of these dramatic brain-dead-but-not-dead cases is they show us clearly that DOCTORS KNOW NOTHING. It’s no better than guesswork.

The Honest View

Professor emeritus James L. Bernat, MD, is one brain death expert who believes the current neurologic tests leave too much room for error, and, consequently, patients are being declared brain dead who aren’t. He’s not addressing the issue of doctors dishonestly pronouncing someone dead, which I believe happens a lot more than anyone dares think.

But Bernat’s point of view is interesting. “There are a group of people who strongly believe that although McMath fulfilled the pediatric brain death criteria, she wasn’t really brain dead because she retained certain brain functions,” he says. Bernat is an a former chair of the AAN’s Ethics, Law, and Humanities Committee.

“If she wasn’t really brain dead, which I believe to be the case, then it suggests that our tests are not fully accurate. Some of us have argued in response to McMath and other cases that have been published that we need to tighten up the tests to eliminate cases like this getting through in the future.”

Ever since “irreversible loss of all clinical brain function” was proposed 50 years ago (by a committee at Harvard University), there has been heated argument about the issue. “The debated issues were that brain death isn’t the same thing as death, that it is a contrived concept for the purposes of organ donation, that is outdated and antiquated…” Bernat says. “But until recently, those claims haven’t generated much traction.”

So-called brain death fulfills the medical and legal criteria of death in the United States and in about 100 other countries today. Every state in the United States has adopted the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), which defines death as the “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions” or the “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.”

Dead Enough?

Again, we are back to the point “irreversible”. How could they possibly know, when it keeps happening that a patient wakes up? How dead is dead?

Even Sade concedes this much: “The Uniform Determination of Death Act is a legal fiction because it requires irreversible loss of function,” Sade says. “There are some patients who meet all the clinical criteria for brain death, and yet they still have cells in their brain that are neurologically active. They can survive for relatively long periods of time, although these cases are very infrequent…”

Ultimately, however, “brain-death determination requires an arbitrary decision on when someone is dead enough,” Thaddeus Pope says. “There will never be zero activity in the brain (at brain death). At some point, you have to make a value judgment of what is meaningful brain activity. There is no objective truth on where to draw that line.”

So, yet again, we are back to my first point. The brain has little to do with being alive! If a “dead” brain can causes an unconscious patient to blink, waggle a finger, or indeed wake up altogether from a long and deep slumber, isn’t there something more wonderful to be learned about life, consciousness and Being, that maybe is being missed here?

I think so.

Here’s a YouTube video that describes much more than I have room for here:

Pray it doesn’t happen to you or your family. Dying isn’t that big a deal—it happens all the time. But to be harvested for profit by greedy and dishonest doctors is an obscenity we can all do without.

Prof.

SOURCE: Anita Slomski. Another ‘Brain Dead’ Patient Wakes Up Just in Time – Medscape – Oct 16, 2018

What is Sudden Death in Adults?

The primary cause of sudden death is a cardiac event – loss of heart function – which is almost always due to an irregular heart rhythm. It accounts for more than half of all heart disease deaths. Men are twice as likely to experience sudden cardiac death (SCD) than women.

The truly starting statistic is the average age for sudden death in adults.

You may be surprised to learn that SCD occurs most often in men between the ages of 35-45 years old – not the elderly. In more than 50% of cases, there were no prior symptoms to alert the patient that there was a problem. Sometimes, a person experiencing a cardiac event may feel dizzy or feel as though their heart is racing.

Risk Factors for Sudden Cardiac Death

• Prior cardiac event or artery disease
• Smoking
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• Drug use

If you present with arterial damage and your cardiologist tells you replacing the damaged tissue close to your heart is sufficient treatment, you need a second opinion.

Your arteries are the “plumbing” system of your body. Pumping blood and nutritional requirements to every organ such as the kidneys, liver, and brain. When they malfunction, none of your key body functions are getting what they need.

The Family History Myth

Most doctors like to talk about “family history” as being one of the biggest factors of heart disease. What this usually means is that one generation passes their lifestyle and eating habits on to the next generation.

If they are healthy habits such as proper nutrition and regular exercise, your risk is going to be lower.

If you were raised on fried foods and eight hours of television each day, chances are you aren’t going to enter adulthood with habits that keep your heart strong and your arteries healthy.

The general impression is that if you have a bad “family history” when it comes to heart disease, you’re doomed.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only can you prevent damage to your cardiovascular system and keep your arteries healthy – you can repair the damage that has already been done.

The Lifestyle Rules that Change Everything

There are four simple health strategies can make all the difference – no matter your gender, age, or family history.

• Eat healthy food that feeds your body in every way.
• Drink alcohol in moderation and do not smoke.
• Maintain a healthy body weight.
• Implement a regular exercise regimen.

According to research done at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, choosing to do any one of these lifestyle changes tends to lower your risk of a deadly cardiac event between 10-30% – but combining all four lowers your risk by an incredible 92% overall.

Dr. Agneta Akesson explains:

“Our study shows the great effect you get from each of these and by combining them. It’s quite a simple health message, and you can do them by yourself.”

The study included more than 24,000 women participating in the national health survey. The women with the best numbers overall ate a diet that consisted primarily of vegetables, legumes, and fish.

The researchers determined that 75% of cardiac events could be prevented by following these guidelines.

Don’t Neglect Your Arterial Health

Not looking after your “plumbing” can result in blood clots, aneurisms, and narrowing of your arteries. All of these can lead to heart attack and stroke.

Arterial degenerative disease causes half of all deaths in the Western hemisphere.

What is usually overlooked is brain health. Without adequate blood flow, the brain gets disoriented and doesn’t process information as quickly. Long-term starvation of your brain may lead to dementia.

Your body’s natural detoxification system – liver, gall bladder, kidneys, and so on – needs blood flow functioning at peak to work efficiently.

The old saying, “a man is only as old as his arteries” could not be truer. Keeping them in excellent health ensures you fight aging and disease from the inside out.

The Secrets to Total Body Wellness Are Out There!

Read more about anti-aging secrets your health will thank you for with How to Live Beyond 100 Years. Slow down the aging process and start reversing the years today.

The city of Durham in England is installing a special crematorium, designed to burn corpses to generate electricity. Apparently, we can get as much 150 kilowatt-hours of juice from a single corpse — enough to power 1,500 televisions for an hour (Oh no! I don’t want to go like that!!)

We are told that the process makes cremation much greener by utilizing its by-products. I’m all for green. But burying is pretty good for ecology too. I’m happy to push up plants and crops (not GMO, thanks).

God, do I sound like a nit-picky corpse?

Thing is, in Europe, tightening regulations on crematorium emissions, coupled with the high price of energy, will lead more and more facilities to go the way of Durham in the future.

Will crematories in the United States follow suit? Not any time soon. The expensive turbine systems being installed in Durham are not yet economically viable for crematories here in the USA. They don’t have enough through-put, I’m told. Cremation in some parts of Europe is over 90 percent, but it is not over 50 percent yet in the USA.

Then there is a better idea: why not eat the old folks when they are gone? That would solve the coming population/food shortage, wouldn’t it? Throw in a bit of salt and pepper; it would certainly add new meaning to the term “spice of life”.

Nah! Actually not. Cannibalism on a global scale could never work in the long term. Humans are just not very “meaty” compared with cows, pigs, deer and other animals.

Even if social conventions broke down to such a catastrophic extent that we began eating each other wholesale, humans are simply not that nutritionally viable when compared to other mammals, says James Cole of the University of Southampton ‘s Center for the Archaeology of Human Origins.

Still, even the fact that these issues are being aired (and they are) gives me the creeps.