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If you’ve been going through a nasty divorce or child custody battle that has lasted years, it’s likely you have experienced a great deal of chronic stress. Years of such stress can create devastating health problems that are often misunderstood and inadequately treated. The stress of dealing with a high-conflict co-parent is particularly likely to badly damage a person’s health as the troubles often continue until well after the children grow into adulthood. But often medical professionals treat these problems as merely mental health issues when in fact there has been significant physiological to the body. This article points out some of the common symptoms of the physiological damage and refers you to additional reading on medical tests that can help you determine appropriate treatment for such conditions.

Personality Disorders and “High Conflict Personalities” Can Cause Severe Mental and Medical Damage

Parents who are dealing with a person who appears to suffer from a personality disorder such as Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, Antisocial, or Paranoid personality disorders are particularly prone to devastating health effects. Often these people engage in parental alienation child abuse such as by blocking the children from contact with a capable or loving parent and trying to force the children to hate that parent. The children are clearly being abused along with the target parent. It’s entirely possible that the young ones will develop mental and physiological injuries from this abuse, too.

Some are literally driven to their deaths by years of abuse. A few even commit suicide to escape it. Others end up on work disability and require expensive medical care for many years. Yet for them, the symptoms still linger for even decades because often medical professionals treat these people as if they are simply suffering from “major depression” or “generalized anxiety disorder” when in fact they are physiologically very ill and in need of medical care, not just counseling and psychotherapy.

Common Symptoms of Physiological Damage from Chronic Stress

The following symptoms are often signs of long-term damage to the stress management systems in the body. Every one of them can result from damage to the adrenal glands after they have been forced to pump out vast quantities of cortisol for years trying to help you cope with the ex’s harassment and attacks.
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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).

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We sometimes get emails from our readers asking about the mix of information on our web site. Some readers wonder why we write about topics that seemingly have nothing to do with each other. Many of our readers are interested in the family law abuse and judicial corruption stories, others appreciate the coverage of health topics, and yet others find the stories about police abuse tactics match their own experiences. But what do they all have in common? The answer is they are all tied together by the involvement of government in abusing its duties to the public to uphold the law, avoiding conflicts of interest and bias, and staying away from corruption. In this article, I’ll be comparing examples of what I’ve learned about the abusive conduct of the FDA with the abusive conduct of family law courts. They are both excellent examples of how the United States has strayed a long distance down a very dark road that leads to becoming an abusive totalitarian state that views its citizens as slaves to be controlled for its own profit and power.

Violating Civil and Human Rights For Job Security, Power, and Profit

We prominently feature stories of abuse, corruption, and persecution by out of control government intent on building job security and power by crushing opponents and inventing fictional “crimes” and “crises” to “justify” their abuses and budgets. They commonly do all of this and more not only in violation of the law but also against any reasonable norm for moral and ethical behaviors for governments and government employees. While our readers may be familiar with the pattern of government abuse and corruption in their own experiences or those of family and friends who have been badly harmed by it, they may not be familiar with similar trangressions in other areas.
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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.
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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.
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Here’s a promotional code for 10% off orders at Swanson Health Products. Enter YES0923 as a promotional code to get 10% off your order. It appears this code may be good until September 30, 2009, but that is unclear so if you’re interested, it would be better to try it sooner than later. I tried it on September 24 and it appears to work successfully.
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Often one of the challenges of raising children is getting them to brush their teeth. Cavities are a common problem in children. While it is undisputed that brushing and flossing help reduce the number of cavities, actually getting your children to do this is often another matter entirely. Even if you succeed at getting your kids to stop fighting brushing their teeth and they learn to do their own dental hygiene well, you’re still typically stuck with kids and their love for sweet foods and juices feeding bacteria that damage their teeth.

A few months ago, I wrote an article that discussed a new development in oral health care that would help both kids and adults. My focus at the time was on the improvements for adults, but the same idea applies to kids, too. The article Mouth Probiotics Speed Canker Sore Healing and Reduce Cavities, Arthritis Pain, Heart Disease discusses the use of “oral probiotics” to seed the mouth with bacteria that reduce or prevent cavities and common ENT (ear, nose, throat) bacterial infections.

Mouth Probiotics Can Knock Out Harmful Bacteria

No matter how much you brush, floss, and rinse with dental solutions, you are still left with a mouthful of bacteria and many of those bacteria are harmful to your teeth. The basic idea of dental probiotic lozenges is that by chewing or dissolving a probiotic lozenge containing “friendly” oral bacteria such as Bacillus coagulans and Streptococcus salivarius, the bacterial flora in the mouth is shifted towards a higher percentage of bacteria that do not attack the body and in fact interfere with the growth of harmful bacteria.
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Are you one of the majority of Americans who are overweight or obese? It might interest you to know that the growing mountain of vitamin D research showing that your health will suffer if you don’t get enough vitamin D now includes research that ties increased vitamin D blood serum levels to improved success at weight loss during diets.

This data is from a small study of 38 obese individuals undergoing an 11 week long weight loss program. Obviously replication in larger groups and in other studies would help firm up the conclusions. However, intriguingly the amount of weight lost during the 11 week diet was predictable based upon vitamin D blood serum levels in a very consistent fashion.

The researchers believe there is a predictable pattern here despite the small study size. For each 1 ng/mL higher vitamin D in blood serum, the dieter lost about half a pound more weight. Further, the higher vitamin D levels correlated with more abdominal weight loss. Researchers suspect that vitamin D may help the body metabolize fat more effectively. While more studies are needed to fully understand the exact mechanism of the increase fat loss induced by higher vitamin D levels, it’s not premature to be advising that people need to be increasing and/or monitoring their vitamin D intake more carefully to improve their health.

Given the widespread prevalence of vitamin D deficiency, few side effects from vitamin D supplements, and the low cost of those supplements, anybody intent on losing weight and body fat should be sure to bump up their vitamin D intake to attain optimal vitamin D levels. If you’re willing to spend money on diet books, Weight Watchers classes, low-calorie meals, etc. then you shouldn’t hesitate at the small annual cost (well less than $100 for most adults) of vitamin D supplementation and periodic vitamin D blood tests to verify you are getting optimal nutrition.

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Here’s a promotional code for 10% off orders at Swanson Health Products. Enter YES0916 as a promotional code to get 10% off your order. It appears this code may be good until September 30, 2009, but that is unclear so if you’re interested, it would be better to try it sooner than later. I tried it on September 14 and it appears to work successfully.

Further Reading

Swanson Health Products 9-9-09 Sale

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The products mentioned in this post are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

You’ll have to act quickly if you want to catch these savings. Affordable Supplements is offering 10% off the price of 1FAST400 products until midnight on September 1, 2009. You can use the coupon code FAST4 at checkout. Look in the lower left of the checkout screen for the “redeem coupon” field.

If this does not work for some reason, you can enter your order and get ready to submit it and then call their 877-478-3678 toll free number and coordinate getting the discount over the phone.

Some of the 1FAST400 products we’ve mentioned in past articles include:

1FAST400 N-Acetylcysteine Powder, 1000 grams for $54.99

1FAST400 L-Theanine Powder, 20 grams for as little as $7.22 each in quantity 9+

1 FAST400 Acetyl-L-Carnitine Powder, 1000 grams for $47.99

Further Reading

N-Acetylcysteine (NAC) Reduces Hair Pulling Compulsion and May Also Be Useful for OCD

L-Theanine for Anxiety, Insomnia, and Depression

Idebenone, a Better CoQ10

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The products mentioned in this post are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.