angiEmedia

NOTE: This collaboratively written article incorporates text by multiple authors including Rob, Alison, and Chris.

Divorce is one of the most stressful experiences most people endure, right up there with a death in the family, job loss and extended unemployment, or a medical catastrophe such as cancer. When you add to the mix a child custody battle with a Personality Disordered Abuser as your adversary, you will likely experience years of false allegations, be kicked out of your home, see your kids and family suffer the abuse of parental alienation, experience frequent misconduct by the courts, see your reputation ruined by defamation, suffer job loss and chronic underemployment or unemployment, and many other damages. During such a hellish experience, it is only natural to be depressed, anxious, and suffer chronic sleep problems. The continual stress results in what may initially appear as psychological problems but which inevitably result in physiological damage to one’s health.

Many suffering from this nightmare will seek medical help from their general practitioner or psychiatrist. At some level they know the stress-related symptoms they are experiencing are not “all in their heads” as some may claim. Sometimes medical practitioners do help, other times they begin another series of upsets to their patient’s health. That’s because the mainstream therapies used by many doctors often include too quickly prescribing common antidepressants and anxiolytic medications that have a plethora of adverse effects on health. Fortunately, there are alternatives that can often help without the need for these medications or can help to reduce the prescription medication dosages required and thereby help avert some of the worst of the side effects.

Psychotherapy Is Not A Cure

When you visit your doctor or psychiatrist and explain how you can’t sleep and are depressed and anxious from the horrors of the family law system, first of all you should realize that most of these medical practitioners don’t really understand you or your situation. Unless one has been through the nightmare of the family law courts or has seen the destruction they inflict upon a close family member or friend, it’s hard to have any real understanding of this miserable reality.

Some medical providers may brush off your request for medication, pointing out that your stress is temporary and will go away in a few months and advise you to see a psychologist or therapist. While good psychologists and therapists can certainly provide some help, what they can do is often not enough as the manifestations of the family law crisis often include physiological illness brought on by chronic stress.

Many psychotherapists simply aren’t much use in such difficult situations. First of all, for a chance of good results you must find one who has some experience with the family law system and forms of child abuse including parental alienation. If you pick a therapist who has never set foot in a family court room and seen how dysfunctional the system is, you are far less likely to get competent treatment or helpful advice.

Many psychotherapists have zero experience in family law battles. They may be experts at substance abuse, marital arguments, or helping people suffering job loss but know nothing about extreme divorce and child custody battles. Even those who do have some experience often lack a full appreciation of how abusive, arbitrary, and destructive the family law courts are to their victims and how it frequently takes nothing but an unproven false allegation to put a good parent who has broken no laws and abused nobody into a no-contact or expensive supervised visitation situation that is itself a form of emotional abuse.

Naive therapists may be operating under the mistaken impression that you can’t be kicked out of your home and have all your property and assets taken from you without a chance to present your side of the story or at least some evidence of wrongdoing. But in today’s family law courts, it is not unusual for that to happen. One lie is all it takes to ruin months or years of the lives of the falsely accused parent and his or her children. A second lie is often all it takes to amplify the damage tenfold. The general public fails to understand this, and so do most therapists.

A really excellent therapist for you should also be expertly familiar with personality disorders and sociopathic abuse patterns. Some therapists run away from personality disorder cases as fast as they can. They know how dangerous these people can be to them personally. Others are totally ignorant of how destructive personality disorders can be to the misfortunate ones who married and/or had children with a person suffering one of the DSM-IV Axis II Cluster B personality disorders including Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Antisocial personality disorders. Ideally, you want a therapist who knows a lot about personality disorders and is brave enough to help you face off with one of these people. “Brave” applies here because it is common for the Personality Disordered Abuser to seek to defame and even file complaints seeking to revoke the license of a therapist who dares to challenge their abusive behaviors or help their victims.

Unfortunately, finding a suitable therapist is often very difficult to do. For many people, joining a high conflict divorce or parental alienation support group or web discussion forum and asking for referrals from the people there may be one of the few realistic means they have to find a therapist who might be of some help.

If you are fortunate enough to find a good therapist familiar with family court abuse, you are likely to get some useful support and advice that may help you weather the long storm. But even when you have found a good therapist and are starting to build some rapport, the odds are strong that by then you will be suffering physiological symptoms of extreme stress that even an excellent therapist cannot resolve. Lots of talk therapy isn’t enough on its own to turn around severe depression, anxiety, or sleep disorders. Realizing this, you’ll probably go back to your doctor again looking for medical help.

Psychiatric Medicines Are Not Panaceas or Candy

After hearing that you’ve got a psychotherapist and are still suffering, even conservative doctors are going to whip out the prescription pad if they haven’t already. They are likely to quickly prescribe an antidepressant, an anxiolytic, and possibly a sleep medication from their list of favorites. Every doctor has favorite meds, ones they have used for years or new ones they want to try because they got a box full of samples or a fancy $100 surf ‘n turf dinner, golf outing, or a week long tropical vacation in the dead of winter from a big pharma rep pushing a lucrative new pill. So what you will be prescribed may often have little or nothing to do with what will actually work.
Read more…

The US Senate is at its typical deceitful antics again. Senators are once again debating more repressive legislation, this time in the form of the Food Safety Accountability Act of 2010. This legislation is designed in part to silence those who cite research on foods and supplements that have beneficial effects to health. The main sponsor of the legislation, Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat from Vermont), claims he’s trying to protect Americans from unsafe contaminants in foods and supplements. But the legislation is so defective that, if passed, it will almost certainly be used by the FDA to continue to attack, persecute, and shut down companies and organizations that publish citations of scientific research that shows their food and supplement products are beneficial.

If after reading this article you are persuaded that this new legislation has some problems and should not pass in its present form, please take action by contacting your Senators to oppose the bill. It takes just a couple of minutes to do this.

FDA Happy to Sacrifice Your Health, Life, and Freedom for Its Money and Power

Why does the FDA want to silence these people? Simple, they are a threat to its income and influence.

Innovative food and supplement companies sell a wide variety of highly beneficial products that often out-perform expensive and side-effect laden drugs at a fraction of the cost. The FDA would rather have you buying the latest and greatest statin drug to lower your LDL cholesterol, not eating healthy foods and taking cheap and effective supplements like niacin, plant sterols, red yeast rice, and fiber supplements that all have scientific backing for lowering LDL cholesterol without the dangerous side effects of statins.

Why does the FDA prefer statins? Again, follow the money. Statin makers are big pharmaceutical companies. They pay billions in fees to the FDA to approve these drugs. The FDA is addicted to these fees. While the drug companies “complain” about the high fees, they are actually very happy to participate in this plot because it enables them to introduce pricey new products every year, many of which work not much differently from the dozens of similar products already on the market, and keep smaller competitors from cutting into their markets. The FDA is a very good business partner in that it helps create drug monopolies and destroy any competition that may arrive before it can take too big a cut out of big pharma and FDA profits.

Small companies can’t afford $1 billion plus drug approval processes that take several years, even more than a decade, to get a drug approved. So many small companies that want to offer consumers products to help solve their health problems have turned to foods and supplements as the only route available to them.
Read more…

On July 29, 2010, the British Medical Journal published a flawed study of the usage of calcium supplements and associated risk of heart attack. The study misleadingly concluded that use of calcium supplements increases the risk of heart attacks by 27% and has no significant effect on overall mortality. The authors advise that the use of calcium supplements in treating or preventing osteoporosis should be reconsidered. Some in the media are broadcasting this study as a reason to stop using calcium supplements.

Please don’t stop your calcium supplements before reading more about the serious flaws in this study!

A major problem with this study is that it excluded people taking vitamin D, magnesium, and other common ingredients in bone protection products. As a result, the study participants generally had low levels of nutrients that are associated with lower risk of diseases such as atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease and are directly tied how calcium is used in the body. These nutrients all work together to keep calcium in the bones where it belongs, rather than building up calcium deposits in the vascular system and heart that can contribute to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks.
Read more…

Nursing infants should be able to spend quality time, including overnights, with their fathers. Yet some mothers try to use nursing as an excuse to block contact between infants and their dads. Courts should be fully aware that there are plentiful means to ensure a good supply of breast milk for use by fathers caring for infants.

Robert Franklin of Fathers & Families recently penned the posting Expert: No Conflict Between Breastfeeding and Shared Parenting about an article from a breastfeeding advocate who claims fathers are trying to assert in court that breastfeeding is inappropriate behavior:

(Breastfeeding Court Letter, by Katherine A Dettwyler, Ph.D., Anthropology)

In addition, my research has been used to counter charges of child abuse and “inappropriate parenting behaviors” in many court cases, especially involving divorce and custody disputes, where fathers may accuse the mother of “inappropriate parenting by virtue of extended breastfeeding” as a strategy to gain custody of children, or may simply claim that ‘continued breastfeeding’ is not relevant to shared custody arrangements.

At this point (2005), all of the research that has been conducted on the health and cognitive consequences of different lengths of breastfeeding shows steadily increasing benefits the longer a child is breastfed up to the age of 2 years, and no negative consequences. No research has been conducted on the physical, emotional, or psychological health of children breastfed longer than 2 years. Thus, while there is no research-based proof that breastfeeding a child for 3 years provides statistically significant health or cognitive benefits compared to breastfeeding a child for only two years, there is no research to show that breastfeeding a child for 3 years (or 4-5-6-7-8-9 years) causes any sort of physical, psychological or emotional harm to the child. This has recently been confirmed in the 2005 American Academy of Pediatrics “Recommendations for breastfeeding the healthy term infant” (see below).

Read more…

The FDA misled consumers for years about the protection conferred by sunscreen products. Their flawed SPF rating system disregarded the risk of skin damage from UV-A light, the type of UV light most likely to penetrate deep into the skin and cause damage. Old product labels usually disclosed only UV-B protection, mentioning nothing about UV-A and UV-C light. While new product labels on many sun protection products have recently started to disclose the type of UV light against which protection is effective, fundamental weaknesses with sunscreens remain. Consumers often do not apply enough sunscreen or fail to apply it to areas that will receive significant sun exposure. For instance, a white T-shirt may let through a large amount of UV light yet many people will only apply their sunscreen to exposed bare skin. Even when properly applied, perspiration and water exposure can cause the protection to be uneven and incomplete.

In recent years, a few companies have introduced products that allow consumers to gain the benefit of significant sun protection from oral supplements that cause protection to be distributed throughout the skin. One such product is Life Extension’s Enhanced FernBlock with Sendara.
Read more…

Low vitamin D levels have long been tied to malnourishment and resultant health problems such as rickets that involve weak bones. But what is surprising to many is that recent research on vitamin D has found that most people are deficient in vitamin D. In particular, those with dark skin such as African-Americans are at particularly high risk for low levels of vitamin D and a wide range of common health problems including obesity, diabetes, asthma, autism, and depression that research is showing are likely related to insufficient vitamin D.

Vitamin D Deficiency Epidemic Tied to Obesity and Diabetes Epidemics

The mainstream media has been reporting lately on Michella Obama’s efforts to improve nutrition for kids. She is focusing on reducing calorie-laden foods such as soft-drinks and fast-food, increasing the consumption of healthier foods such as vegetables, and getting kids to trade in some of their sedentary activities such as watching TV for exercise. Yet she and her associates appear to be paying little attention to the widespread vitamin D deficiency epidemic that is increasingly being tied to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes.
Read more…

I was recently alerted to the actions of Senator John McCain who is sponsoring the misleadingly named Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA). This flawed legislation should concern anybody who wants to be able to manage their own healthcare free from unreasonable prohibitions and cost-inflation caused by the United States government. It should also concern anybody alarmed by the out of control healthcare costs in the county. While McCain’s primary intent appears to be to assist the US sports industry from stomping out illegal steroid use, his legislation is irresponsible, destructive, and won’t fix the problem. This article explains why DSSA is flawed and if passed would be harmful yet not solve any real problems. It also explains how you can easily contact your legislators via two web sites to relay your disapproval of DSSA.

Read more…

I’ve been a fan of the nutritional supplement DMAE (dimethylaminoethanol or dimethylethanolamine) for some time. Some women swear by it for reducing wrinkles and age spots, especially when applied in cream form. However, I believe this nutrient has a much wider and more important use than skin care. That use is boosting brain function in people experiencing problems with sleep, focus, and attention.

When I started taking DMAE years ago, I noticed about an hour reduction in the number of hours of sleep I needed each day to feel rested. I also noticed improved ability to concentrate. As with any supplement, your results may vary due to many factors including diet, weight, biochemistry, genetics, dosages, and perhaps random chance. That said, if you’ve got concerns about excessive sleepiness, trouble focusing, and problems maintaining attention, it’s my opinion that DMAE is worth a look as it is an inexpensive dietary supplement with a long track record.

DMAE is especially worth consideration by parents who are being threatened by schools, CPS, and courts with removal of child custody because of their children’s problems with educational achievement due to problems with attention, focus, and hyperactivity. These kids are often diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Mainstream doctors prescribe Ritalin for this condition, but sadly this drug has killed hundreds of children while safe alternatives such as DMAE are widely ignored. Furthermore, problems with attention and school performance can often be traced back to social problems like the impact of bad parenting and child abuse endemic to divorces. You may be a fine parent, but your child could be stressed out from custody exchange conflicts and mommy-bashing or daddy-bashing from the other parent who is far from fine. The result may be a misbehaving child who seems hyperactive and gets categorized as an ADHD case to be medicated.
Read more…

Winter is the time of year with shorter days, lower intensity sunlight, and colder weather leading to most people making less vitamin D in their skin due to less sun exposure. The result is that vitamin D levels decline markedly during the winter in people not taking vitamin D supplements. Scientists believe that this accounts in large part for why winter is also the time of year with higher rates of colds and flus. We’ve discussed this further in our article H1N1 / Swine Flu Risk Increased by Low Vitamin D.
Read more…

I’m a typical middle aged American guy with a weight problem. I’d like to share some of the useful experiences I’ve had without blushing, and also want to share some of my personal medical data with readers, too. So I’m writing this under the pseudonym “Lester Waite” because one of my goals, and I’m sure that of many others, is “less weight.”

Human health is complicated and there can be many different causes behind similar symptoms. It would be nice if there was a “magic bullet” fix for weight gain that will work for everyone, but from my experiences and reading I don’t believe this is likely to ever happen. Having tried a lot of recommendations that worked for others that didn’t work for me, I’ve seen firsthand how weight loss ideas seem very hit-or-miss and for me, unfortunately, mostly miss.

I did, however, finally discover the means to lose some significant weight. But it has some big “gotchas” that really need to be addressed to make it workable for more people. In this article, I’ll explain what I found that has worked for me as it might work for you, too.

Want to Lose Weight?

I wanted to lose weight. Over the years, I tried lots of ideas, ranging from reducing portions to increasing exercise to various weight loss supplements designed to crank up the metabolism. Nothing worked much. Even when I found supplements that helped reduced my appetite and food intake, the weight didn’t come off.
Read more…