The Australian Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt announced on the 13th October 2017 that from 2019 private health insurance will no longer cover the following natural therapies:

Naturopathy, Herbalism, Homeopathy as well as Alexander Technique, Aromatherapy, Bowen Therapy, Buteyko, Feldenkrais, Iridology, Kinesiology, Pilates, Reflexology, Rolfing, Shiatsu, Tai Chi and Yoga

Naturopathy, Herbalism (Western Herbal Medicine) and Homeopathy have been part of private health insurance extras cover since early 2000 and the other natural therapies have been added to extras cover in more recent times.

As many as 55% Australians use natural therapies as part of their primary healthcare and extras cover under private health insurance.

The focus of natural therapies is preventative healthcare and improving and maintenance of wellness. This focus results in many Australians healthcare cost not impacting on the government health budget and health system.

The government claims that removing natural therapies will contribute to reducing private health insurance premium price increases although no figures on any savings have been published by the government or what premium price increases it proposes to deliver to Australians.

The decision by the government is false economy; it will adversely impact the health system, restrict the health services available to Australians with private health insurance cover, and effectively removes preventative healthcare and wellness maintenance for many Australians.

Your support is needed to reverse the decision by a short-sighted government who has lost focus on preventative healthcare and wellness maintenance for Australians.

High carbohydrate intake is associated with a higher risk of mortality, and high fat intake with a lower risk, according to a new study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.

The study looked at diet and mortality in 135,335 individuals between 35 and 70 years old in 18 countries over an average of more than seven years. Diet information depended on self-reported food questionnaires, and the international team of scientists controlled factors including age, sex, smoking, physical activity, and body mass index.

Compared with people who ate the lowest 20 percent of carbohydrates, those who ate the highest 20 percent had a 28 percent increased risk of death. However, high carbohydrate intake was not associated with cardiovascular death, according to the study.

People with the highest 20 percent in total fat intake (an average of 35.3 percent of calories from fat) had about a 23 percent reduced risk of death compared with the lowest 20 percent (an average of 10.6 percent of calories from fat).

High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke.

The relationship between macronutrients and cardiovascular disease and mortality is controversial. Most available data are from European and North American populations where nutrition excess is more likely, so their applicability to other populations was unclear. This lack of data is what originally drove researchers to conduct this study, which was formally released at the European Society of Cardiology meeting earlier this month.

Researchers called for global dietary guidelines to be reconsidered in light of these findings.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends an average of eight hours of sleep per night for adults, but sleep scientist Matthew Walker says that too many people are falling short of the mark. “Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain,” Walker says. “Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.”

Walker is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He points out that lack of sleep — defined as six hours or fewer — can have serious consequences. Sleep deficiency is associated with problems in concentration, memory and the immune system, and may even shorten life span.

“Every disease that is killing us in developed nations has causal and significant links to a lack of sleep,” he says. “So that classic maxim that you may have heard that you can sleep when you’re dead, it’s actually mortally unwise advice from a very serious standpoint.”

Walker discusses the importance of sleep — and offers strategies for getting the recommended eight hours — in his new book, Why We Sleep.

What Should I do if I Can’t sleep?

You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room — a room that’s dim. Just read a book — no screens, no phones — and only when you’re sleepy return to the bed. And that way your brain relearns the association with your bedroom being about sleep rather than wakefulness.

Another thing that people can do if you don’t want to get up and go to a different room is actually try meditating. Being quite a stoic, hard-nosed scientist, I actually didn’t really believe the data about meditation as a sleep aid, even though the data is very strong. And I started doing it myself, particularly when I was traveling with jet lag, and I found it to be very effective.

It just quiets the mind and it dampens down what we call the “fight or flight” branch of the nervous system, which is one of the key features of insomnia. And that can really have some efficacious benefits too. So that’s another solution if people would choose not to go to a different room.

Can I Make up for Lost Sleep by Sleeping Longer Another Day?

Sleep is not like the bank, so you can’t accumulate a debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time. And the reason is this: We know that if I were to deprive you of sleep for an entire night — take away eight hours — and then in the subsequent night I give you all of the sleep that you want, however much you wish to consume, you never get back all that you lost. You will sleep longer, but you will never achieve that full eight-hour repayment, as it were. So the brain has no capacity to get back that lost sleep that you’ve been lumbering it with during the week in terms of a debt.

How Does the Quantity and Quality of Sleep Decrease with Age?

The amount of sleep — the total amount of sleep that you get — starts to decrease the older that you get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that’s not true, in fact. We need just as much sleep in our 60s, 70s and 80s, as we do when we’re in our 40s. It’s simply that the brain is not capable of generating that sleep, which it still needs, and the body still needs. So, total amount of sleep actually decreases.

We also know that the continuity of sleep also starts to fall apart. Sleep becomes much more fragmented. There are many more awakenings throughout the night — pain, bathroom trips, etc. But we also know that it’s not the quantity of sleep that changes with aging, it’s also the quality of sleep.

It seems to be particularly the deepest stage of sleep — something that we call non-rapid-eye-movement sleep, or non-REM sleep, the very deepest stages of non-REM sleep — that are selectively eroded by the aging process.

By the time you’re in your 50s, you’ve perhaps lost almost 40 to 50 percent of that deep sleep you were having, for example, when you were a teenager. By age 70, you may have lost almost 90 percent of that deep sleep.

What About Using Sleeping Pills to Sleep?

Unfortunately the current set or classes of sleeping pills that we have do not produce naturalistic sleep. So they are all a broad set of chemicals that we call the sedative hypnotics, and sedation is not sleep, it’s very different. It doesn’t give you the restorative natural benefits of sleep. If you look at the electrical signature of sleep that you have when you’re taking those medications, it’s not the same as a normal night of sleep.

How Does Caffeine Affect Sleep?

First, and most obvious for some people, is that caffeine stops you falling asleep. Some people, however, say, “I can have a cup of coffee after dinner and I fall asleep just fine, so I’m not one of those people that is sensitive to caffeine.” And that’s quite dangerous, because we also know that even if you can fall asleep, the depth of the sleep that you have when caffeine is swilling around within the brain is not going to be as deep anymore.

So people may wake up the next morning, they’ll feel unrefreshed. They’ll start to reach for the coffeepot earlier. They’ll drink more caffeine, never having realized that it was the cup of coffee last night that has left you feeling underslept, because they didn’t wake up during the night, they didn’t have problems falling asleep, but caffeine can still have that deleterious impact.

What About Alcohol’s Effect on Sleep?

Alcohol is a sedative drug, and what you’re doing there is simply knocking yourself out. You are removing consciousness quickly from the brain by way of having alcohol, but you’re not putting yourself into naturalistic sleep.

The other issue is that alcohol will fragment your sleep — it will litter it and punctuate it with many more awakenings throughout the night, so short that you tend not to remember them. So, once again, you’re not quite aware of how bad your sleep was when you had alcohol in the system.

The final aspect of alcohol is that it is very good at blocking your REM sleep, or your dream sleep, which is critical for aspects of mental health within the brain and emotional restitution too. So alcohol is a very misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep — not helpful.

Source: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, by Matthew, Ph.D. Walker

Are you suffering from unrelenting fatigue that doesn’t seem to respond to any intervention?

Perhaps you’ve asked your doctor to check your thyroid function and it came back normal.

Perhaps you’ve been testing for iron-deficiency anemia this, too, was normal.  Or perhaps you’ve been told that your adrenal function is sub-optimal.  Maybe what you haven’t thought of is the fact that you could be harboring hidden pathogens in your body that are robbing your energy and stealing your steam!

If basic testing fails to reveal a cause of your fatigue, you may want to have your Health Practitioner test for occult infection. More sophisticated investigations can reveal the presence of all kinds of pathogens capable of colonizing the body and evading the immune system.

What are some common hidden infections that may be causing your fatigue?

• Epstein Barr Virus (EBV)
• Cytomegalovirus (CMV)
• Human Herpes Virus (HHV-6)
• Parvovirus (Parvo B19)
• Mycoplasma sp.
• Borrelia Burgdorferi
• Chronic mold and mycotoxin exposure

Why is it that some people who get an infection recover and have no fatigue and others may be colonized with pathogens and suffer from intractable lack of energy?

The initial infection followed by chronic inflammation of the immune system could explain the cause of fatigue in these genetically susceptible individuals.

The most common sequela to hidden infections is chronic fatigue syndrome

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a complicated disorder characterized by extreme fatigue that can’t be explained by any underlying medical condition. The fatigue may worsen with physical or mental activity, but doesn’t improve with rest.

Chronic fatigue syndrome  has eight official signs and symptoms, plus the central symptom that gives the condition its name:

• Fatigue
• Loss of memory or concentration
• Sore throat
• Enlarged lymph nodes in your neck or armpits
• Unexplained muscle pain
• Pain that moves from one joint to another without swelling or redness
• Headache of a new type, pattern or severity
• Un-refreshing sleep
• Extreme exhaustion lasting more than 24 hours after physical or mental exercise

Chronic fatigue syndrome is just a label.  It’s useful to identify a group of symptoms that causes significant fatigue and may affect one’s life dramatically causing inability to function or hold a job. It does not represent one clinical entity but the cause may be multi-factorial and different in each individual.

It may share a final common pathway of dysfunctional immune activation and inflammation that keeps on going in a self perpetuating manner (like the Energizer Bunny gone bad!)  From a functional medicine perspective it’s important to get to the root cause of the chronic fatigue symptoms.

Most of these infections, including the inflammatory response (CIRS) to mold and mycotoxins can be measured by ordering conventional lab testing.  Ask your health care practitioner to see if he can help you determine the root cause of your fatigue.  

Treating the root cause (or infection in this case) just might give you back your life!

• You can bounce and dribble a fully ripe cranberry.
• New England sailors ate cranberries to fend off scurvy, thanks to their rich store of vitamin C.
• Nutmeg contains potassium, calcium, iron and manganese.
• Ground nutmeg and honey creates a paste that can reduce scars, clear acne and make skin appear brighter.
• Ground clove can ease dental pain and promote healing.
• Clove tea can ease nausea.
• Chinese medicine uses cinnamon to treat colds, nausea, diarrhea and menstrual cramps.
• Two teaspoons of cinnamon contains 12 calories.
• 100 grams of peppermint contains 569 mg of potassium.
• Peppermint contains beta-carotene, B-complex vitamins and vitamins A, C, E and K.
• The Romans believed that consuming mint could boost intelligence.
• Allspice has been found to be anti-inflammatory, anti-flatulent and reduces bloating.
• The Ancient Mayans believed that vanilla could boost libido.
• Speaking of Mayans, along with the Aztecs, these ancient cultures believed that cocoa could improve muscle strength, heart health and fertility.
• Cocoa was originally consumed cold and unsweetened, frequently mixed with chili peppers.
• Studies show that ginger reduces inflammation in a manner similar to NSAIDs such as aspirin.
• Ginger can lower cholesterol and work as a blood thinner.
• While mistletoe is considered toxic, the leaves and berries are actually a high-protein food for many animals.
• The scientific name for American mistletoe—Phoradendron—is translated as “thief of the tree,” due to the parasitic nature of the plant.
• Pine needle tea has been found to ease varicose veins, kidney ailments, sclerosis and fatigue, as well as improve eyesight, mental clarity and vitality.