5 Ways to Fight the Flu Without a Flu Shot
Posted By Dr. Gary Huber : Head Medical Ego On December 1, 2010 @ 11:52 am
Time to ramp up for flu season and many are wondering whether to get a flu vaccine. I do not care for them for many reasons. Instead I prefer to choose healthy living, a healthy diet and immune system boosters that have a more natural yet supportive effect.Here is my list of favorite interventions to support the immune system. Simple things like getting enough sleep and avoiding sugary foods play a big role in keeping your immune system strong. Inadequate sleep can make you 5 times more susceptible to viral infections such as the flu. After eating any high sugar food, your white blood cells become very sluggish and for the next 5 to 6 hours you are more susceptible to viral attack. So watch your diet and don’t let your guard down.
Strengthen your immune system with the following measures:
1. Vitamin D is a powerful adjunct to support your immune function. Get your vitamin D level measured and optimize your vitamin D level with simple cholecalciferol (vitamin D3). See “Vitamin D Counsel .com” for more information. A typical dose of D3 is 2000 to 5000 units per day. Children usually require 1000 to 2000 units, and every adult should be taking 5000 units. It is important to get a blood measurement of this important nutrient, as too much vitamin D3 can be problematic but it is more important to get this started now. You can check a blood level after a couple of months of supplementation. Be cautious with vitamin D if you have sarcoidosis.If you are actively infected then take a high dose of vitamin D for 5 days to elevate your immune response and trigger anti-microbial peptides in your defense. Take 20,000 units, three times a day for 5 days only. You will not become toxic with this short program. Studies using doses twice as high as this have been shown to be safe in nursing home patients.
2. Vitamin C and bioflavonoids support immune function, ease respiratory illness, and offer antiviral properties. Take 500 to 1000 mg of vitamin C and 300 to 600 mg of bioflavoniods as prevention. If you become ill then increase this dose to 3000 mg of vitamin C daily.
3. Andrographis paniculata is my favorite plant extract for boosting immune power. It has an ability to increase white blood cell production and activity and also increases interferon production, which fights the flu virus ability to reproduce in your body. As prevention I recommend 300-400 mg per day for kids and 600 to 800 mg per day for adults. If you get the flu then increase dose to 1200 mg for kids and 2000 to 3000 mg for adults.
4. Echinacea and goldenseal have a long history as proven agents that support immune function. Take 500 mg of Echinacea and 350 mg of goldenseal twice a week during flu season.
5. Limit sugary foods, as they will decrease your immune capacity leaving you more vulnerable to all types of infections. Also manage your stress as this has a similar effect.
I am not a big fan of the “vaccine game”
I will state that up front. It has not been proven to be very successful but it has been proven to be very risky. It causes neurological side effects and irreversible damage to thousand of people each year.
Fact: You cannot rely upon me or your primary care doctor to give you ALL the facts. If you truly have questions regarding the safety of vaccines then you must do some digging. My opinion is biased as I have been lied to for far too many years by the pharmaceutical industry and the vaccine manufacturers to believe anything they say anymore. I used to believe the “game” but I got stung and I am not going back.Here are the websites to reference: Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) [1] and the National Vaccine Information Center [2]
Go nose around and see if you can find out how many cases get reported each year and how many deaths occurred due to the vaccine itself. The VAERS only exists because vaccine manufacturers are free to make vaccines without fear of legal suits. You cannot bring a legal claim against any vaccine manufacturer, even if they kill your family member. They are protected by law and so the VAERS was put it place to offer money to the thousands of vaccine victims each year.
Tough choices
The flu is going to contribute to the death of people who have a weak immune system. This happens each and every year and is a sad but true reality of life. These folks tend to be the very young who have not developed a mature immune response and the very old who’s immune system is frail and eroded by the march of time. The decisions for a caregiver in these populations are a difficult one as you will struggle to pick between two undesirable options. The best advice I can offer is that if you choose to vaccinate then select a ”monovalent” vaccine, which will be free of mercury, aluminum or other unnecessary preservatives.
I continually see recommendations to vaccinate kids with asthma as they are at greater risk of death from the flu. Why? The answer is that asthma is a disease of the immune system, not the lungs. The wheezing is the symptom that gets attention but why don’t we look more intently at the true failure in asthmatics?
Looking at food allergens
The failure is the immune system. Why aren’t food allergens and environmental allergens evaluated and treated more successfully? The vast majority of kids with asthma have a sensitivity to milk yet the traditional medical community will not bring this fact to light. Therefore, unsuspecting parents continue to feed their kids milk products because the dairy council has convinced them that they are bad parents if they don’t.We have been brainwashed into thinking that without milk our kids will have weak bones. The scientific literature has spoken and the answer is . . . poppycock. Sorry to get so technical on you but milk is NOT needed for strong bones and does not correlate with fewer fractures in kids. So let’s get our asthmatic kids off milk, treat their immune deficiencies and stop poisoning them with a known food allergen that makes their asthma worse. THEN, and only then, will their immune system be strong enough to stand up against the flu and not create a problem.
The root of the problem
The real problem is that there is no money in good health. I went to medical school and attended thousands of hours of lecture. I did not see one class called “Health.” We are taught disease recognition and drug therapy.
We were not told how to make the immune system healthier. We were not instructed on what foods or lifestyle activities would strengthen the immune system.
A doctor cannot make a living selling broccoli. A doctor is taught by the pharmaceutical companies how to make a living selling drugs. The pharmaceutical companies pay for all the research at big universities. The pharmaceutical companies buy all the fancy equipment and give big grants to promote the development of new ideas in treating disease as long as the answer involves drug therapy. Do you think a pharmaceutical company is going to pay for research that shows that food supports the immune system? Health is big business and the vaccine business is booming.
Here’s a fun fact to chew on: Amish populations don’t use vaccines and they also don’t report have a high rate of autism. A study our of Oregon that looked at occurrence of autism and other neurological outcomes in boys that were vaccinated showed the following finding:
Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated boys are:
* 155% more likely to have neuro disease
* 224% occurrence of ADHD
* 61% occurrence of autism
Want some studies to support you decision?For more studies, Google the Cochrane Collaborative. This is a group of physicians and scientists that review the literature to offer an unbiased opinion of what the literature shows in a great many areas of medicine. Their findings in the field of flu vaccine have caused quite a stir. The following is just one of many quotes I have discovered in their research.
Dr. Jefferson with the Cochrane Collaborative: the vast majority of studies are deeply flawed. Only 4 studies properly designed to detect the effectiveness of flu vaccine: 2 of them show that it might be effective in school aged children with no underlying health issues like asthma, and the other 2 show no benefit or equivocal results. Most deaths that re reported as “flu deaths” are not confirmed by testing for flu. This leaves the numbers reported rather questionable. You can’t tell the difference between “influenza like illness” and “flu” without doing a flu test.
Just remember when you ask a health practitioner whether a flu vaccine is a good idea or not, the response you get will be determined by the background of the person giving the advice.
If you ask your doctor then the answer will be YES, the vaccine is safe and effective and wonderful, can I get you one? Pay the nurse on your way out. That’s like asking a Buick salesman if Buicks are good cars. Why YES of course they are. Your doctor was trained by the very people who make the flu vaccine.
Again, I do not care for them. I will take my chances with healthy living, healthy diet and immune system boosters I already mentioned that have been shown to have a natural and beneficial effect.
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URLs in this post:
[1] Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS): http://vaers.hhs.gov/index
[2] National Vaccine Information Center: http://www.nvic.org/
