If invigoration product purchases, worth $22 million per year are anything to go by, tiredness is a modern plague. People nowadays average two hours less sleep each night than they did 100 years ago.

A good night’s sleep does wonders for your wellbeing. Quite a bit of research has been done on the benefits of getting enough sleep each night. We feel better, work better, are easier to get along with, stay healthier, have more energy, make better decisions and fewer mistakes. Adequate sleep also helps depression, our weight, prevent accidents of all kinds. It enhances memory by improving the ability to learn and remember how to do things. A one-hour nap helps us to learn and remember, giving weight to the effectiveness of daytime napping.

Less than six hours sleep per night is associated with impairment in day-to-day tasks. Professor Stanley Coren from the University of British Columbia in Canada, author of ‘The Sleep Thieves’ believes that western society is chronically sleep-deprived, making us clumsy, stupid, unhappy, or dead. Symptoms of sleep deprivation are agitation, moodiness, grumpiness, irritability, waking up unrefreshed, problems with short-term memory, attention and concentration. Insufficient sleep in the long term can also lead to health problems.

But what if you do go to bed in time to get enough sleep, but can’t fall asleep, or wake during the night, leaving you permanently sleep-deprived?

 There are many strategies for dealing with chronic tiredness:

• Take a 20-minute nap during the day
• Avoid caffeine and alcohol
• Exercise in the evening
• Stop working in the evening. Work  in the morning when you function more efficiently.
• Avoid using devices, including TV, at least one hour before bedtime. The glow of  screens suppresses the sleep-promoting hormone melatonin.
• Sweetened hot milk before bed stimulates tryptophan, which can induce sleepiness.
• A comfortable set of earplugs, eye mask and lightweight bedding can make all the difference.
• Find a way of destressing that suits you – pursuing a hobby, meditating, listening to music are a place to start.

Sleeping problems can be due to what’s called poor ‘sleep hygiene’- habits that are conducive to falling and staying asleep. Good sleep hygiene habits include relaxing and doing something enjoyable in the evenings and reading before bedtime, to help ‘wind down’. Going to bed at the same time each night is important, but recent research suggests that getting up at the same time each morning is also important. Early waking enables exposure to early morning sunlight, which helps to stimulate the sleep hormone melatonin.

A sleep diary to express thoughts and anxieties help to gain insight into what may be causing insomnia. You can also write about what happened on the nights they did get a good night’s sleep.

An age-old yoga technique helps to relieve tension and stress; the yoga technique of alternate nostril breathing, helps to deepen your natural breathing and release stress. Doctor Gillian Ross, a PhD in behavioural sciences and Yoga teacher, says: “Alternate nostril breathing before getting into bed is a calming centering practice that helps to unwind from daily activities.”

Getting enough sleep when you haven’t been sleeping well, can literally be life-changing. The strategies  described here are the result of solid research, so are well worth trying out. 

Detoxing To Prevent Or Reverse Dementia

Experts estimate that over 24 million people worldwide have dementia, and they expect those numbers to go up in the next twenty years until in 2040 they estimate that 81 million people will be living with the disease. There are different kinds of dementias; some cases are reversible while others are likely not.

What Is Dementia?

Dementia is a word that healthcare practitioners use to describe a set of symptoms. These symptoms include memory loss, inability to reason and problem-solve, inability to focus and pay attention, decreased visual perception, and a decline in language skills. Dementia symptoms usually stem from brain damage of some sort. Alzheimer’s is a form of dementia.

Does Detoxing Help?

Dementia refers to a set of symptoms. The cause of an individual’s symptoms may be a number of different factors. Sometimes, dementia is the result of a toxicity of some sort. One example is Mercury toxicity, which is a common cause of brain damage.

Other toxicities may include a buildup of toxic drugs, toluene, lead, or arsenic. If this is the root cause of an individual’s dementia, then freeing the body of the underlying toxic substances will restore balance to the body and reverse the damage to the brain.

How Can I Detox?

If you are interested in helping to prevent the onset of dementia by detoxing your life from harmful chemicals and metals, you should start by doing a little bit of research. This can help you understand what parts of your environment might be introducing hazardous substances in your life. Once you identify a few culprits, take the time to eliminate them and replace the harmful material with one that is neutral.

For example, you can exchange harsh cleaning chemicals like Comet with natural clears like baking soda and orange oil. Making these positive switches is a significant first step. Next, help your body eliminate the toxins by increasing your fiber intake. Also eat foods that help your body fight toxicity, such as kale, cilantro, and watercress.

If you do an assessment of your environment, but can’t seem to identify which materials might be contributing you your possible toxicity, you can work towards eliminating all of them. This will likely benefit your health in countless ways, as well as the health of those who share your space with you! You can also get bloodwork done to help you zero in on specific culprits.

Experts show that 50% of individuals who are 85 or older have some form of dementia. This can be incredibly limiting and even dangerous. Detoxing can prevent or reverse dementia in some cases, and it is a worthwhile endeavour to engage in.

No parent on the planet wouldn’t want a simple solution for preventing potentially harmful diseases in their children. So, why do parents who totally believe in vaccinating their children, have them vaccinated and then spend time and energy questioning vaccine safety? If the problems with vaccines these parents experienced could be identified and remedied, it would satisfy many of those who are asking questions about them.

However, in the current climate, to simply question the safety of vaccines is to be labelled an ‘anti vaxxer’ or ‘Vaccine Hesitant Parent’. But why is the topic of vaccination not available for any public debate whatsoever, when the US government has paid out over 3 billion USD in vaccine compensation for vaccine damaged children?

Too many questions, and no answers from governments. Silence.

For the curious, a 7-part documentary series has recently been released into the public domain, which thoroughly explores the history, past and present practises of vaccinations.

This series is called The Truth About Vaccines which interviews 60 top vaccine scientists from around the world to describe to you  the available information on evidence and efficacy of today’s vaccination programmes.

This is a time to carefully watch, listen and learn.

You can’t avoid childhood disability – can you? Well, yes, when you can avoid the effects of the stealthy cytomegalovirus (CMV) contracted in the womb, potentially causing permanent disabilities such as deafness blindness, developmental delays, epilepsy and cerebral palsy.

CMV is a member of the herpes family that can lie dormant and undetected for years. It is found in over half the population  but rarely causes a problem until a person’s system is weakened. It is a sneaky virus, because the immune system doesn’t recognise it, so even if a person has the virus, there aren’t usually any symptoms.

CMV lies dormant until the body is weakened and becomes vulnerable. In healthy people, CMV can cause a mild flu-like illness that lasts a few days or weeks, which they fully recover from.

If a mother contracts CMV during pregnancy, there is a one-in-three chance of CMV being contracted by the foetus, resulting in developmental delay, making it a leading cause of birth defects in the Western world.

You can read the research paper in Cell

Treatment at hand:

Common nutrients that have direct antiviral effects are often quite low in normally healthy people. The king antiviral nutrient is zinc, and it is low in many people. I see this quite clearly when I test patients, as you can see in the graph below.

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I first got the feeling for this book when I saw a movie called ‘First Do No Harm’ starring Meryl Streep. The story unfolded of a young boy who had life threatening epilepsy, with massive and repetitive seizures. He’d had  every medication, brain surgery, and was still having seizures. Eventually he was given a ketogenic diet (high protein, low carb) and promptly recovered. No more seizures.

Paediatricians and neurologists know about the ketogenic diet, but their patients are not told about the diet, just medications. Having been a nurse and natural therapist for  close on 30 years, I was struck by the fact that I hadn’t heard about this diet. Turns out it’s been around since the 1920s. My first reaction was: “I bet loads of people would love to know about this diet and this story”.

Next, I was attending an Autism Forum in Sydney. A paediatrician presented the case of a non-verbal nine-year old boy, said to have an IQ of 70. His parents had been told to have him institutionalised and get on with their lives. They took him to a biomedical paediatrician who treated him, and found his IQ was around 140. That was a pivotal moment in my career. No one dares to speak of recovery from autism, and here I was sitting at conference (10 years ago) that was teaching parents and practitioners how to treat autism and recover from it.

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