Ten Natural Remedies That Can Save Your Life by Dr. James Balch

Dr. James Balch's book Prescription for Nutritional Healing: A to Z Guide to Supplements established him as one of the most trusted authorities in the fields of alternative and naturopathic medicine. Now, his potentially life-saving wisdom is made more accessible than ever in a groundbreaking new volume that will revolutionize the way Americans think about their health. Throughout his career in medicine, Dr. Balch has committed himself to helping patients take charge of their own well-being. But how can people remain in control of their health if their doctors are unable (or unwilling) to teach them the basic principles of healthy living? Many health care providers are still woefully uninformed about preventive health measures and effective natural remedies, relying instead on conventional courses of medication and surgery--which are frequently more difficult, invasive, and expensive. In Ten Natural Remedies That Can Save Your Life, Dr. Balch empowers readers to take action and protect their own health. He provides them with a better understanding of how the healthy mind and body function and suggests natural remedies for some of the most serious medical problems that face Americans today. Dr. Balch also offers a twenty-five-point exam that isolates the biological stresses in our everyday lives and helps us to eliminate them, so we can experience a higher standard of wellness than ever before. With plainspoken common sense and examples from the case histories of Dr. Balch's own patients, Ten Natural Remedies That Can Save Your Life reveals the simple, proven remedies that really can save your life--naturally. Editorial Reviews Amazon Review For thousands of years, people have relied on the gifts of the earth: nutritious food, clean water, natural light, medicinal herbs--and an active lifestyle to stay healthy. Now the gifts of the earth have been compromised: we eat highly processed food, bathe in and drink polluted water, work by artificial lighting, and take pills when we're sick and depressed from living this way. Natural remedies can make a drastic positive change in your life, says James F. Balch, M.D., in 10 Natural Remedies That Can Save Your Life. Balch, who is also the author of the bestselling Prescription for Nutritional Healing, presents 10 remedies to improve health. Some are no surprise--light, water, and air--but Balch gives us innovative, practical strategies for improving these areas. We all know we need to eat more green foods, but Balch isn't talking about broccoli; rather, he recommends wheat grass and barley grass (the most complete preventive medicine available ... one of the ultimate gifts of God). Balch's other favorite remedies are garlic, ginseng, ginkgo biloba, chelation therapy, natural hormone balance (diet, DHEA, natural progesterone, black cohosh), and combined vitamins C and E. Some of his remedies are controversial and not supported by the medical community; some are backed by good research; a few are common sense and indisputable. Inform yourself with this book and other viewpoints, talk it all over with your physician, and evaluate what is best for your health. --Joan Price From Library Journal More from the author of Prescription for Nutritional Healing, which has sold 3.5 million copies. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Inside Flap lch's book Prescription for Nutritional Healing: A to Z Guide to Supplements established him as one of the most trusted authorities in the fields of alternative and naturopathic medicine. Now, his potentially life-saving wisdom is made more accessible than ever in a groundbreaking new volume that will revolutionize the way Americans think about their health. Throughout his career in medicine, Dr. Balch has committed himself to helping patients take charge of their own well-being. But how can people remain in control of their health if their doctors are unable (or unwilling) to teach them the basic principles of healthy living? Many health care providers are still woefully uninformed about preventive health measures and effective natural remedies, relying instead on conventional courses of medication and surgery--which are frequently more difficult, invasive, and expensive. In Ten Natural Remedies That Can Save Your Life, Dr. Balch empowers readers to About the Author James F. Balch, M.D., is a graduate of the School of Medicine at Indiana University. He is the coauthor of Prescription for Nutritional Healing: A to Z Guide to Supplements--which has sold over 3.5 million copies to date. His other books include Prescription for Dietary Wellness and The Super Antioxidants. In his private practice as a urologist and in his well-respected newsletter, Prescriptions for Healthy Living, Dr. Balch has always searched for ways to help patients assume responsibility for their own well-being. Dr. Balch lives in Texas. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Garlic No one is neutral about garlic, just as no one is neutral about skunks. Some people love the look of a skunk's soft, furry body, its quizzical face, its seemingly gentle demeanor. Others bluntly say that a skunk stinks, and they want nothing to do with it. And then there's garlic. Some cuisines seem to start with garlic, the other ingredients, like tomatoes, herbs, and shellfish, serving as mere afterthoughts. There are gourmets, bon vivants, and, if truth be told, gluttons who all speak of garlic the way wine connoisseurs speak of their favorite vintage and cheese lovers talk of the subtle distinctions in flavor of one variety over another. The garlic haters, on the other hand, say it smells terrible. They can't stand the way it comes out on the breath, the way the odor seems to ooze through the pores of the eater. They even joke that garlic is an excellent method of birth control; if one lover eats garlic, the other will maintain a distance of at least ten feet. For some people, garlic is even mildly toxic, upsetting their stomachs. Garlic and alcohol are substances that are not metabolized. They are absorbed through the stomach lining, which is why they leave the telltale odor. And it's why some people are sick to the stomach after ingesting them. Fortunately, there is an aged garlic product that is detoxified and thus deodorized. Just as deodorized skunks make great house pets, so the more sociable garlic, with slightly altered chemistry and sold under the name Kyolic, can be used by people who can't eat ordinary garlic. In fact, a number of studies indicate that Kyolic may be more effective than raw garlic when it comes to boosting the body's immune system. Why is garlic, in its original form or as the extract of the aged vegetable, good for you? Garlic contains germanium and selenium, which are sulfur-containing antioxidants that boost the immune system. In the study mentioned, conducted by Dr. Tariq Abdullah, Kyolic killed 20 percent more of the tumor cells in laboratory cultures than did raw garlic. And raw garlic is by itself one of the most potent boosters of your natural killer cells. Kyolic has also been found more beneficial for hypoglycemics--people with low blood sugar levels--than raw garlic. The latter lowers the blood sugar level, unfortunately, but Kyolic stabilizes it. The aging process that creates Kyolic produces a supplement whose benefits I find stronger than those of raw garlic. As enthusiastic as I am about barley grass, if someone were to ask me which single supplement he or she should use, I would recommend Kyolic garlic. It is among the oldest and most versatile of the documented natural remedies. When Hippocrates, the father of diagnostic medicine, was busy noting which treatments worked for the Greek people he treated, he listed garlic. A total of twenty-two ancient Egyptian remedies were found to use garlic, as noted in the Ebers Papyrus dating from the sixteenth century B.C.E. Garlic was a tool against the plague when it struck Marseilles in the 1770s. Albert Schweitzer found that, when he ran out of pharmaceutical supplies in his African mission, garlic successfully stopped dysentery. Louis Pasteur discovered that garlic had antibacterial properties. The Vikings would not go on long sea voyages without garlic. And, of course, as we know from fiction, garlic is an excellent defense against vampires. Garlic's value for your heart is well known. First, it contains properties for fighting bad cholesterol. We know now that high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol is not dangerous, but low-density lipoprotein (LDL) certainly is, because it can be oxidized by dangerous free radicals. Oxidized LDL is an enemy of the white blood cells, which become enlarged as foam cells, and ultimately are deposited on the arterial walls in the form of plaque. The lumen, the open space of the artery, becomes more and more narrow until it is completely clogged. HDL works in a more positive fashion. It is thicker than LDL and acts a little like an older sibling assigned to keep the younger one out of trouble. HDL, in a way, takes the LDL by the scruff of the neck and escorts it to the liver, where it is broken down and removed from the body. LDL behaves itself only if it has not been oxidized. And it is the antioxidant quality of garlic that so diminishes the free radical damage to the cholesterol that LDL doesn't need its sibling HDL to hang around. It can be safely removed by itself. The result is that the garlic reduces the start and the progression of arteriosclerosis. Heart patients, therefore, are especially blessed by garlic, but it is important to check with your doctor before adding garlic to your regimen, because there are pharmaceuticals that match its chemical properties. This is especially the case with popular blood thinners. In fact, Germany licenses garlic supplements as drugs for the treatment of arteriosclerosis. In the 1920s, the world was introduced to one of the most valuable yet dangerous drugs ever created. This was aspirin, and 25 percent of all people will, at some point, have a serious, perhaps life-threatening reaction to it. Even more important, some children may develop Reye's syndrome from aspirin because their body chemistry is not sufficiently stable. Yet despite the risks, most emergency medical physicians and heart experts say that at the first sign of heart attack, you should take an aspirin and then call 911, because aspirin thins the blood, and this can delay or prevent a heart attack. Garlic is natural aspirin, not because it contains salicylic acid, which was first identified in willow bark tea as a substance to ease headaches and reduce joint inflammation, but because it can help to prevent red blood cells from clumping together. Other qualities of garlic, so different from aspirin that they present no risk, dissolve clots and lengthen clotting time. This natural thinning of the blood helps every aspect of blood flow within your body. It is the safest source of prevention of heart attacks and strokes. Keeping that aspirin bottle tucked in with emergency medical supplies is still a good idea, but the regular consumption of Kyolic will almost certainly preclude the need for more drastic measures. We know that garlic provides a benefit for the cardiovascular system. Perhaps you or someone you know has a little difficulty in walking. It doesn't seem serious, but maybe it's reached the point where you just don't want to walk any more than you have to. You find that your legs feel weak, or you have a certain amount of leg pain. And when you stop walking to pause for a rest or sit down, the discomfort goes away. That discomfort is caused by poor blood circulation in your legs. The technical term for the problem is intermittent claudication. Since it is known that garlic improves circulation to the body's peripheries, studies were conducted with patients experiencing this problem. The regular use of garlic lengthened the distance they could walk without weakness or discomfort. And as a side benefit, their cholesterol levels were lowered, and their blood pressure dropped to a healthy level. This is what happens when garlic becomes part of the diet and supplement program of those with heart problems. In these cases, we know that individuals who, by all rights of family history, should be experiencing problems with their hearts are not having problems. They are doing better than their ancestors. In longer-term studies, they have outlived everyone simply by adding garlic in one form or another. Are these individuals genetically unique? Possibly, but it is doubtful. Instead, it is safe to assume that the garlic made the difference. Yet this is not scientific methodology. It is just common sense, which, when it comes to the use of garlic to counter genetics, makes for good medicine. Where scientific methods can be applied, as with antibacterial factors, garlic has been repeatedly proven safe and effective. Probably every woman and most men have heard of yeast infection (a.k.a. yeast syndrome or chronic candidiasis), a term defined mostly through symptoms. Blood tests or stool cultures can reveal the infection. But usually it is determined through a careful, complete physical history that reveals such problems as depression, irritability, vaginal yeast infections, frequent bladder infections, chronic fatigue, lack of energy, reduced sex drive, inability to concentrate, and other distresses. Any one of these is a concern; several in combination generally indicate the presence of chronic candidiasis. Because yeast infections, along with fungus problems and viral infections, are not usually life-threatening, double-blind studies have been carried out on garlic as a treatment. The findings from these studies have repeatedly shown the value of garlic, in some cases used alone, and in others administered in combination with other natural therapeutics. Note: Be certain not to self-medicate with garlic in response to the problems mentioned above. With candidiasis, for example, there may be several other concerns. You must eliminate from your diet alcohol, high-sugar foods, and other substances with a high-yeast or mold content. Your digestion must be improved. Detoxification of the liver must be pursued and the immune system strengthened. Then you must coordinate your efforts with your doctor's for continued treatment, because yeast infections can lie dormant and suddenly return if you fail to continue your care after the immediate flare-up. Garlic is also excellent in the handling of body fat. This does not mean that you can eat garlic instead of getting exercise. You might be able to scare a vampire, but sloth, indolence, and overindulgence have no fear of garlic. Garlic, however, is acknowledged as one of the most effective means of reducing fat in conjunction with a healthy diet and exercise program. This is not to say that you can eat all you want, using garlic as a magic pill. What you eat and how much...