Acne: A Natural Cure? The End of Acne (Book Review)

[Katee]

ANN MARIE MICHAELS
AUGUST 28, 2016

“Acne natural cure” — does it exist? Melissa Gardner, author of the new book,The End of Acne has found that cure.

If you have stubborn acne, you’re not alone. And it’s not just for teenagers anymore. Over 25% of women aged 30-40 have clinical acne. What if there was something right under our noses that was a natural cure for acne?
But it’s not just acne. This is the cure for cysts in your breasts or ovaries, melasma, arthritis, hypothyroidism, thyroid disease, diabetes, PMS, PCOS, tooth decay, osteoporosis, hormonal imbalances or endocrine disruption, heart disease, breast cancer, infertility or migraines, you need to read the new book, The End of Acne by Melissa Gardner. All of these conditions are caused by fluoride, a toxic waste product that has been added to our American water supply since the 1960s. Fluoride is in 70% of drinking water in the United States. It’s also in most of our food, especially in processed and packaged foods and restaurant foods, soft drinks, tea, wine, juice, fruits and vegetables, and more. In fact, you are consuming 100-200 times more fluoride in your food than in drinking water.

Read the rest, and view the video review at: Acne: A Natural Cure? The End of Acne

[Islander]

Although I haven't read the book, I'm afraid I can't accept fluoride as the cause of so many conditions, or going fluoride-free as the universal cure. I have been free of fluoride for 65 years, yet I am still hypothyroid, arthritic and diabetic. I'm skeptical of anything that seems to be a universal cure-all.

[Katee]

Yes. No one thing can explain everything. It tends to be a combo of a multitude of things.

Even so, there is hidden fluoride in many things most folks eat and are unaware of that contamination. May foods have fluoride because of the water. Many pharmaceuticals contain fluorine. Personally, i believe fluoride to be at least 70% responsible for the things i struggle with. I've done my best to clear our lives of it, but it has done significant damage before i knew to clear it. I've not used tap water for 30 years, probably. Still, my body has been assaulted before i knew to watch for it.

[Islander]

Katee, I know that fluoroquinolones can do serious harm, some of it long-lasting or even permanent. But what about people like you and me? I have drunk well water most of my life, and eaten home-cooked foods made from scratch, mostly from my own farm and garden, for most of my adult life. The exception to this lifestyle was the 12 years I spent in Chicago, age 21-33. Do you suppose that those 12 years of drinking city water had an effect that was never reversed? (I know what caused my hypothyroidism, arthritis and diabetes).

[Katee]

Islander, i don't have all the answers. For some people, there isn't a clear cut reason and people are so individual that what harms one doesn't, apparently, harm another. I don't know why someone who has lived as pure a life as you have would still have those issues. (What caused them for you?)

I can't claim such a pure existence. My parents did raise, can, and freeze their own very large garden, and we raised much of our own meat, as well. We had dairy cows for a while, but my dad pasteurized the heck our milk.

My mother also gave me enough sugar in all kinds of variety that i was seriously addicted by the time i was 3-1/2. She also gave me fluoride drops as an infant, and my baby teeth turned BLACK. She worshiped docs and they never made a suggestion she turned down. By the time i was 17 i had had at least 4 rounds of antibiotics when i was not sick. My sister had recurrent strep (so they said) and the doc my mother favored would treat the entire family prophylactically to "prevent" a family-wide infection. If i had been born 20 year later, she would have gone for the huge number of vaccines recommended.

She also favored buying day old bread, "fruit pies," and twinkie-type things from a bakery in town. I think she was as sweet-tooth addicted as i, although she recognized that it wasn't healthy and fought it. Still, our diet was filled with a lot of sugar.

What she didn't know was that i often walked downtown during lunch at school and spent my lunch money on Pepsi and candy. The only time i didn't do these things was when i was veering into anorexia (although my BMI was just over 20 at that point), but then i tended to go for the extreme. I would drink hot jello as part of my calories, simply to fill up. I did the egg and grapefruit diet at 16, and my mother encouraged it. I moved out at 18, but my diet didn't improve.

For many years, keeping my tummy filled with the minimum amount of calories was my focus. Because of this, i know now, the lack of nutrients affected me pretty severely, and i got myself several different psych diagnoses, and eventually the docs talked me into taking a wide variety of psych meds, none of which were beneficial in any way, and several of which did a lot of damage to me, culminating to where i took a fluoroquinolone in 2007. My life has never been the same.

Now, i began recognizing all of this about the time i married in 2004, and was moving to natural treatments, reduction of toxins, and eating a healthy diet.

I am very, very aware of how much we have been brainwashed to believe doctors, ignore nutrition, and take the easy way out for everything. When i was a kid, eating out was an occasional treat. Now days it is a routine, often, daily thing. I also recognize that my mother worked very hard for our homemade, largely healthy, meals and received very little appreciation for it. That was typical, and part of women's rights was not to tie the woman to the kitchen. But instead of teaching the whole family to pitch in, it became the norm to then begin eating out. And to resent the time in the kitchen.

And yes, again, i tend toward the extremes. I've not had aspirin/tylenol/motrin since 2008. I eschew all pharmaceuticals. If i'm dying, give it a try maybe, but none otherwise. I can see very clearly how we think something is good, without recognizing the backlash of what we are doing. I'm extreme enough to believe that EVERY drug - every single tablet of aspirin or capsule of tylenol does damage to every single person using it, it just may be that the damage is slight enough to be ignored. We just sprayed for zika mosquitoes in Florida, and killed millions of honey bees. We clear land for more crops, and destroy habitats with no thought. Those four unnecessary rounds of antibiotics when i was 13-17 probably did massive damage to my interior gut, but no one in those days gave a thought to that. Germs were "bad" and no one seemed to recognize they could have a benefit.

Most of the people i know who have abandoned this and are raising their kids without a multitude of vaccines and prescription drugs have very healthy children. They have now linked the possibility of having measles as a child may help prevent certain cancers later in life. There is the indication that being around children who have chickenpox helps an adult not to develop shingles. When we eradicate one thing, we seem to create new (often worse) problems in another area.

All that said, people in the past, eating healthy diets and often living to a ripe old age, also had arthritis, and thyroid problems, and diabetes. However not at the rate of our current culture.

I'm sorry for the rant. I think i lost my brain today. However, with my digression, this is what i wanted to say:

I'm not growing much of our food. For whatever reason, so far i'm very bad at it. But i am purchasing all of our produce organically, some of it from a local co-op. As organic produce, i can be assured that it won't have glyphosate and other really nasty pesticides. But i can't be assured no pesticide was used (as many are allowed for "organic"). Nor can i know if they were watered with a fluoridated water and thus contain fluoride i'm trying to avoid. I buy organic canned/bottled tomatoes and pickle relish. Were they grown or processed with fluoridated water? We are on city water, but they don't add fluoride to it. My point is simply that for most of us it is hard to know what is in our food, even when we are trying to be careful.

[Islander]

I don't know that I'll be able to finish this reply tonight, Katee, but I'm leaving a few lines just to let you know that I plan to come back and finish. I've had a hellacious week, a series of bad luck events that began when the garage door fell on my car. I thought bad things came in threes but I'm already up to five and counting!
Before I leave I want to be sure to make this point: I have gardened for most of my life in a short-season part of the country, where we were lucky to get a full 90 frost free days. You have a far greater challenge than I ever had, up there on your mountain! Weeds, weather, insects and disease all combine to make gardening an Olympic sport; people with an ideal climate and years of experience make it look easy. I think you're doing a marvelous job given the circumstances of your location!

[Islander]

Back again the next morning with the other half. You asked what caused my hypothyroidism, arthritis and diabetes. In a nutshell...

Hypothyroidism: diagnosed during my first pregnancy, roughly 50 years ago. It was gestational and would have disappeared once I gave birth, but this was not commonly known at the time and I was put on medication. After years of supporting my thyroid, a wise doctor contemplated dc'ing it to see whether my own body would kick in, then decided against it. Too risky. It's the only prescription drug I take.

Arthritis in my hands makes typing difficult. It's the result of 40+ years of hand-weeding vegetable gardens. That said, my gardening grandmother had it — but so does my first cousin, who never pulled a weed or did manual labor in her life, so perhaps it's just in my DNA.

Diabetes: by retirement age I was doing the recommended annual physical so I know my blood glucose was still normal. On my tiny SS pension I could no longer afford my 50-year habit of a pack a day, so I quit smoking, and I probably became more sedentary. The pounds started to accumulate: a year later, I had gained 60 pounds and become rapidly diabetic. I took my then-doctor's advice and began a course of Metformin, the routine Tx for diabetes, but I also began researching... and once I understood that this was a lifestyle disease, I dropped the med and adopted a new lifestyle: no grains, no sugars, increased physical activity. Over time I lost the weight and reversed the diagnosis. When I dropped my A1c from 8.9 to 6.5, the doc told me I was "no longer diabetic" but as you probably know, damage continues to be done to internal organs all the way down to an A1c of 4.5. That was my goal, and it still is, although I haven't been able to break the 5.0 barrier yet.

Hope that answers your questions. At age 75 I'm still living an active lifestyle, farming and gardening. I raise 60 broilers and four freezer pigs for sale every summer, and cultivate three large gardens, a modest orchard and a berry batch. Right now, at summer's end, the kitchen becomes a cannery as I preserve the harvest that feeds me organically year-round. And now if you'll excuse me, a have a canner load of tomatoes to process!