Toss that chemical-laden insect repellent! Vitamin B-1 does the job (I think)

If you live in the Houston area you know that the mosquito season is just around the corner and, if you are like many of the parents who email me every year about this, you don’t feel comfortable using chemical-laden insect repellent on your child but don’t know what other options you have.

Last summer I became aware of locally produced patches called “Don’t Bug Me” patch sold at some grocery stores that contained a dose of vitamin B1. I decided to see if they worked and asked a few mothers who happened to be around to try them on their children.

The consensus was that the patch worked, but was expensive, and patches often fell off or children scratched them off and then could no longer be used.
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Nutrition and the mind: amino acid therapy for depression and much more

As my nutrition practice turns ten years old, it is a good time for me to reflect on lessons I have learned about the effects of nutritional therapy on the mind. Though nutrition is a second career for me, and one to which I came relatively late in life, it is the realization of my lifelong interest in psychology and the mind in general.

While at an earlier point in my life I might have chosen to study psychology or psychotherapy, by the time I was finally able to embrace this field I had learned enough about the interaction between the mind and chemistry or nutrition to know that nutritional medicine held far more powerful answers than any type of talk therapy.

This interest led me to chiropractic school in a roundabout way, basically because I felt I needed some medical training and a license that would enable me to practice. In any case, while in school and in my first years of practice I took every seminar and advanced training I could find on clinical nutrition. However, seminars on nutrition for the mind are rare, when available at all, and consequently the field is replete with preconceived ideas and unsubstantiated theories.
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Cancer politics, early detection, and alternative treatment options

A few months ago I attended a conference where one of the speakers was Charlotte Gerson, daughter of the late Max Gerson, MD. Though Charlotte is now 85, you would never guess it by looking at her or listening to her speak. She walks erect, with no hesitation in her step and talks with the clarity and lucidity you would expect in a forty-year-old.

We could say that Charlotte is living proof that her father’s therapy works because she has been implementing it for decades.  Dr. Gerson’s story is well worth summarizing here.

When Max Gerson, as a young man, attended medical school in his native Germany, he suffered from debilitating migraine headaches. That was the turn of the century, before the development of the modern arsenal of drugs. Today he would be prescribed a drug or combination of drugs that might leave him feeling like a zombie, but would control the pain.
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