30 years of living with Crohn's Disease
Question:
I love Four on the Floor! I haven’t seen those guys in SO long "they’ll go MAD!" haha thanks for reminding me about such a funny show PS this had nothing to do with IBD, isn’t that cool?
Response:
Has anyone considered that this may not be a question of disease<BR incidence, but of diagnosis?
Amen, Esther..my theory exactly. As a person who suffered from the age of 3 til 31 with 14 diffferent and erroneous diagnoses (from Lupus, ulcers, appendicitis, over-stresses, liver disease, Diverticulitis,gall bladder disease, Colitis, and so forth and so on), I feel that we simply have no accurate figures on the incidence of this disease because of the lack of fundamental training on the part of the internal medicine community. They have the knowledge of how to diagnose, but it’s as if they don’t cover it in Med School. When I finally met up with a guy that knew what he was doing, he showed me in 1981 the guidelines for Crohns…andIi was a classic textbook case! From the bloating, distension, years of constipation, low-grade fevers sever skin eczema,, complications of fissures and fistulas, iritis, the whole shebang . And yet no one can ever recognize these symptoms?? In my previous correlation of Dr’s to mechanics, I pointed out that the diagnosis can only be as good as the quality of that Dr’s ability to use his medical school training, and to NOT jump on current bandwagons and fads, i.e. the "ulcers" and "stress inducements" of the 60’s and the bad water theories of the 80’s and the "catch-all" phrasing of the "IBS" of the 90’s. How can we even begin to correlate what population groups are most affected, what genetic strains are repetitious, or what common factors may be attributable when there are so many either undiagnosed or misdiagnosed?? If there is one thing i have learned over the last few years on the net, my example was not that unusual. I was subjected to countless drugs, punch biopsies, surguries and even had aspersions caste on my mental health all because no one could properly diagnose this disease until i was 31. I am now 45, and can heartily assure those of you awaiting final diagnosis that life WITH the knowledge has been much better than never being sure what the heck was wrong with me. This disease ain’t pretty, but knowing it’s name and consequesnces gives me the ability to plan and feel somewhat autonomous, instead of adrift and frightened! If only Icould confer that priviledge on all those in the world now being told that they have "irritable bowels"!! Yours, Susan
Response:
Were that it would be so simple…but i have a feeling this will never be answered by only one "cause", but perhaps a combination of a few htings that, when put together, cause this God-awful disease! Thanks for the time! Susan
How true! Crohn’s doesn’t have a single genetic cause or trigger, but genes nevertheless do have a big role in the onset of the disease, as shown by its tendency to appear in families (if someone in the family has Crohn’s, and another develops typical symptoms, then it’s more likely going to be Crohn’s than UC or another IBD). Something in our genes gives us the propensity for developing Crohn’s, but there is no one clearly visible trigger other than (any and/or all of the) toxic pollutants and contaminants in our foodstuffs. Bill — — Every answer to a Spammer’s message only encourages greater spamming efforts…. Spamming will stop when spammers stop making profits!
Response:
It should be possble to compare a population of Native Americans using city water supplies with those who do not. There are thousands of NA is several cities. It should also be possible to find thousands of "whiteys" using wells and run comparisions. Crohn’s diagnosed 36 years ago, probable first relatd symptoms 42 years ago three reactions.
If I remember correctly from my research into the disease when I was in the hosp. with my last total blockage, the studies published then indicated that AmerInds who moved off the reservations and into the cities had about the same rate of occurrence of Crohn’s as everyone else. Living on the res. somehow seems to grant immunity; living in cities somehow seems to take it away. (!?!) It’s anyone’s guess right now as to why this is, but again, I point to urban pollution as the precursor if not the culprit. Bill — — Every answer to a Spammer’s message only encourages greater spamming efforts…. Spamming will stop when spammers stop making profits!
Response:
If I remember correctly from my research into the disease when I was in the hosp. with my last total blockage, the studies published then indicated that AmerInds who moved off the reservations and into the cities had about the same rate of occurrence of Crohn’s as everyone else. Living on the res. somehow seems to grant immunity; living in cities somehow seems to take it away. (!?!) It’s anyone’s guess right now as to why this is, but again, I point to urban pollution as the precursor if not the culprit.
Bill: Urban pollution is one possible hypothesis. The exact opposite hypothesis is also possible. On many Reservations, the rates for many diseases are very high. Perhaps on the reservations, the people are continually exposed to many bacteria/viruses which somehow form a protection against contracting IBD. In the clean water cities, we are not exposed to as many germs. So, our immune systems are triggered to fight our own bodies, instead of fighting the external invaders. Perhaps it’s not the ‘additives’ in the city water, but rather, the lack of disease causing organisms in the city water. This is just another hypothesis – a guess about what the cause is. It is another way of thinking about the same situation. I would just like to enourage divergent thinking about all possible scenarios. Ariel —
Response:
… AmerInds who moved off the reservations and into the cities had about the same rate of occurrence of Crohn’s as everyone else. Living on the res. somehow seems to grant immunity; living in cities somehow seems to take it away.
Has anyone considered that this may not be a question of disease incidence, but of diagnosis? I know that in Canada it is difficult to get a competent GP on a reservation, let alone any type of specialist. And many reservations are isolated and have no doctors at all (just RNs). Could it be that Native Americans who have the symptoms of UC/CD are more likely to move to the cities to get an answer about what is making them sick and to get competent treatment? Just a theory from someone who didn’t get properly diagnosed until she moved to a major urban centre, Esther — "We got plain," AAACCCHHHOOO! "and we got glazed…" -The Frantics "Four on the Floor" I love my RX-3, but it doesn’t reciprocate.
Response:
I just hope this doesn’t turn into another flame war. Erica
Ditto. Your points were/are valid and well taken. But I would include MTBE in the category of contaminants. And yes, I should think quantity is a greater factor than quality (Lots of water ingested). Remember that metallic taste school milk used to have? That was formaldehyde! Dairymen add it to the milk they peddle to schools at discount to preserve it, as it is often on the verge of spoiling when it is bottled/canned/cartoned. Nice, huh? Bill. — — Every answer to a Spammer’s message only encourages greater spamming efforts…. Spamming will stop when spammers stop making profits!
Response:
Where do you live ? If I’m thinking of what you mean the drugstores have it for contact wearers and our regular food stores have it because batteries , irons and coffee makers like it much better…less mineral build-up to clean…in PA. we have some pretty hard water…plus it doesn’t hurt to drink it as it can help leach minerals out of your system but it’s not something you should do on a regular basis as it’s said you can cause mineral deficiencies…can’t spell sorry…linda – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Is distilled water available to buy? I’ve only seen it in labs. –Roz
Response:
Ditto. Your points were/are valid and well taken. But I would include MTBE in the category of contaminants.
<<snicker Well, yes–but not a deliberate one. What I meant was that MTBE is in the category of Evil Contaminant as opposed to something like fluoride, which I would put in the Possibly-Evil, Possibly-Harmless Additive category. The water company sent out a letter at the end of January apologizing for the 4 parts per million of MTBE that had been found and letting us know that that well had been shut off until it was all taken care of. What was weird was that I was the only one with problems–my husband was fine.
Response:
Is distilled water available to buy? I’ve only seen it in labs. –Roz
Sure! Comes in gallon jugs in most grocery stores and mini-marts. It’s next to the regular drinking water, usually, and is sold for use in steam irons and such so they don’t clog with scale with heavy use. Distilled water is effectively tasteless, that is, it has (almost) no taste of its own. Most of what gives drinking water its flavor is dissolved minerals, and of course, distilling removes them (if it is done right!). But it’s great for making coffee, teas, reconstituting juices, cooking with, etc. It will change the way foods prepared with it taste to you, but once you begin using it regularly you stop noticing any changes, and regular drinking water and foods made with it begin to taste horrible! Bill 30 yrs. of sharing life with Crohn’s — — Every answer to a Spammer’s message only encourages greater spamming efforts…. Spamming will stop when spammers stop making profits!
Response:
Roz, Don’t know where you’re from … but in my area the grocery stores keep it with the bottled spring waters. Cheers Robin – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Is distilled water available to buy? I’ve only seen it in labs. –Roz
Response:
Bill, Great, thought-provoking writeup! definitely some food (water???!!!) -for-thought! Were that it would be so simple…but i have a feeling this will never be answered by only one "cause", but perhaps a combination of a few htings that, when put together, cause this God-awful disease! Thanks for the time! Susan
Response:
It should be possble to compare a population of Native Americans using city water supplies with those who do not. There are thousands of NA is several cities. It should also be possible to find thousands of "whiteys" using wells and run comparisions. Crohn’s diagnosed 36 years ago, probable first relatd symptoms 42 years ago three reactions. – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Greetings and felicitations to one and all: I am a relative newcomer to this newsgroup, but an ‘old hand’ with Dr. Crohn’s source of fame. My first symptoms began showing up ‘way back in 1965, but the disease wasn’t properly or adequately diagnosed for almost another twenty years. Back then, what I had was ‘regional iliitis.’ I’ve had surgery twice, once in the early seventies and again in the mid-eighties, and have had right around five feet of small bowl removed all told. I’ve had and have all the classic symptoms; 4 to 10 watery bowel movements daily, a low-grade fever throughout the day leading to ‘night sweats’ when it breaks about one and half to three hours after I go to sleep at night, crusty, inflamed eyes, pooping my britches in the middle of night when the disease is flaring, and, perhaps worst of all, the only form of arthritis associated with Crohn’s that isn’t reversable during periods of remission of the disease, ankylosing spondelitis (spinal arthritis). As many of you have come to know or to suspect from reading the postings about treatments, drugs don’t work worth diddley squat and tend to cause more damn problems than they alleviate. Prednisone is effective for slapping the disease down during a flare, and that’s all it’s good for. There are no maintenance drugs or dosages, no matter what various people claim. Yes, a few drugs WILL work, or seem to, for a FEW people, while a few others will have some success with a dietary regimin of one sort or another, but these are due to individual responses, not to any universal characteristic of the disease. Keep in mind that in any double blind trial of any drug or treatment, SOME people will respond positively to the placebo and not to the tested element. It isn’t their fault, it isn’t the drug’s fault, it’s nobody’s fault — it’s just the way individuals respond — individually! Do I think I know what causes our disease? You betcha I do! It isn’t a bacterium, and it isn’t a virus, or even a protovirus. It is not a parasite or a symbiont, or any living (or dead) thing. In thirty years, the demographics of Crohn’s hasn’t changed — it is still a disease of the First and Second World nations; it is unknown in Third World countries and on American Indian reservations, even — or especially — when those reservations are side-by-side with major urban areas where Crohn’s DOES rear its ugly countenance. Any explanation of Crohn’s HAS to include and account for this simply because this is a basic and undeniable feature of the model of the disease. It isn’t radar, or radio, or electromagnetic fields radiating from power transmission lines, nuclear fallout, holes in the ionosphere, or even HAARP. What it is, my friends and fellow sufferers, is WATER. H20. The one thing we all need to survive and can’t do without or escape or avoid. Water, he says! What a crock, you say! Ah, but think about it for just a moment…. The second thing a developing Third World country does, after buying weapons and nuclear reactors, is to construct water treatment plants for supplying ’safe’ drinking water to its citizens and visiting businessmen. A country can’t be considered Second World if its people still dip water out of streams and well with buckets — civilization and civilized status require the turning on and off of taps for the procurement of water, regardless of whether one’s plumbing facilities are indoors or out. Third World countries don’t purify their water; people drink it as they get it, parasites, diseases and all. American Indian reservations don’t get purified water either; even when the reservation is smack in the heart of a major city, as some are; they are NOT connected to the municipal water supply that everyone else is; they have their own wells and distribution systems. Water goes directly from the ground to the reservation consumer without any intervening steps of ‘purification.’ But look at what the rest of us get. Ycch! The vast majority of us get our drinking water from rivers or from water tables that are replenished by rivers. And, although it may sound paradoxical, the vast majority of us also live downstream from one or a dozen or more major urban centers, all of which use those same rivers and river systems to carry away their effluent wastes, that is, their sewage and industrial ‘byproducts.’ Because we are civilized, we do not allow municipalities and industries to contaminate our waters with raw sewage — we make them treat it with various noxious and toxic chemicals to ensure that no nasty organisms like e. coli, or typhus, or salmonella, or cholera are still alive when the shit hits the stream, er, I mean when the effluent is discharged into the watershed. Likewise, when the water is slurped out by the acre-foot by the next city downriver, it is tested and re-treated to make sure it doesn’t harbor any noxious little critters that might make Johnny and Mary sick and Mommy and Daddy sue the city. But — and if there are any exceptions they are very rare — organic contamination is all that water is tested for! Most water companies, both public and private, are not required to test for more than a scant handful of contaminants, and none of them do any more than what is absolutely required. They do not check for things like individual elements such as mercury, aluminum and boron, or for chemicals like dioxin or complex compounds of chlorine and flourine, or hundreds of other known deadly and harmful substances. Tell me, have you noticed lately how your toilet never seems to stain BELOW the waterline? It may build up a hell of a ring of crud around and ABOVE the waterline, but isn’t it nice how bright and shiny the porcelain stays when its under water all the time? Even scale deposits seem to take a lot longer to build up than they used to, don’t they? And have you noticed that when they do finally build up in areas where there is really hard water, they come off easier than they used to? What do you think causes that, boys and girls? Can you spell chloroflurohydrocarbons? You know, like carbon tetrachloride and c. tetraflouride, and other things we aren’t allowed to buy anymore to wash walls and strip paint with because they are so dangerous to the environment and people and other living things? Chlorine is added to our drinking water to sterilize it. Flourine is added to our drinking water to make our teeth rot-resistant. Aluminum is added to make our drinking water softer, so it makes prettier suds when we wash our clothes and our hands and faces. Did we say water softeners? Oh yes, those things that pull calcium atoms out of the water and replace them with sodium atoms instead. Calcium atoms make your washwater dingy gray and suppress sudsing. Sodium atoms don’t do that — they just rip the oxygen right out of the water molecule, leaving the hydrogen nothing to cling to. Poor hydrogen. Poor you, when it does its ripping right in one of the cells of your body…. But hey, your washwater looks good…. !! Seriously, though, I was in San Diego a few years ago, and suffering one of the worst flares of Crohn’s I’ve ever had. Nothing, and I mean, nothing, would slap it down. Prednisone would knock it down for a day or two at best, and then, WHAM! there it was back in full flare again! For almost two months I kept a night light on and clean shorts in the bathroom. My Doc (who was quite sympathetic and flexible) and I tried the whole spectrum of available drugs against it, to no avail. Then! I happened to read a tiny notice buried ‘way back in one of the newspapers about how the local water company had begun using a new combination of chemicals that would reduce and prevent any further buildup of scale in the piping system. Oddly enough, they had begun using it right about the same time my Crohn’s flared and stayed flared. Okay, sez I, easy way to find out if that’s what doing it — so I hied to the store and bought several jugs of distilled water. Not drinking water, mind you, DISTILLED water. Steam distilled. Water sans everything un-watery. And guess what? Easy, huh? Yup, flaring subsided. Like, BANG! Down, Crohn’s! Almost overnight the symptoms abated, and I mean drastically! So what’s happening? For most people, the level of toxic chemicals in our drinking water is within ‘tolerance levels.’ Their bodies can handle them without getting ‘bent out of shape.’ We’re unfortunate. We can’t. We’re more sensitive to ingested chemicals, and they have a nasty effect on us. They (the chemicals) attack our cells and tissues hour after hour, day after day. Our bodies’ response is an increased sensitivity of our immune systems. Something is attacking us, and our bodies naturally think it is something organic, a bacterium, virus, or parasite that can be killed and destroyed. But of course, there isn’t one, only nasty molecules and free radicals of some very potent metals and poisons. The cells lining our digestive tracts do the best they can to protect the rest of their less hardy compatriots (the rest of our innards). They proliferate, thickening the bowel walls to insulate the outer surfaces from the poisons within while suffering the brunt of the damage themselves, deforming and becoming more tumor-like than bowel-tissue-like. In the meantime, our immune systems, with nothing alien to the body
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Response:
Bill– As many of you have come to know or to suspect from reading the postings about treatments, drugs don’t work worth diddley squat and tend to cause more damn problems than they alleviate. Prednisone is effective for slapping the disease down during a flare, and that’s all it’s good for. There are no maintenance drugs or dosages, no matter what various people claim. Yes, a few drugs WILL work, or seem to, for a FEW people, while a few others will have some success with a dietary regimin of one sort or another, but these are due to individual responses, not to any universal characteristic of the disease.
I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this…yes, drugs are a pain in the butt and they can have nasty side effects (Prednisone being one of the most evil, but also (depending on the person) the most effective) but the impression I get from you is that we should all throw them out because they don’t really do any good anyway. Even if it is true that they only work for some people for a while, I would rather those people get that chance than ignore the possibilities of remission because they have been told that drugs don’t work. Do I think I know what causes our disease? In thirty years, the demographics of Crohn’s hasn’t changed — it is still a disease of the First and Second World nations; it is unknown in Third World countries and on American Indian reservations, even — or especially — when those reservations are side-by-side with major urban areas where Crohn’s DOES rear its ugly countenance. What it is, my friends and fellow sufferers, is WATER. H20. American Indian reservations don’t get purified water either; even when the reservation is smack in the heart of a major city, as some are; they are NOT connected to the municipal water supply that everyone else is; they have their own wells and distribution systems. Water goes directly from the ground to the reservation consumer without any intervening steps of ‘purification.’
It is an interesting thought and one I have considered over the years as well, but again, I don’t know that I agree with you. I grew up in Alaska on well water–we were not connected to the city water in any way, shape, or form. Yet I not only came down with CD on our well water, but had a truly terrible flareup while living in that same house. Of course, I had ingested small amounts of city water at school, etc., but I don’t necessarily think that would be enough to set off the disease. If it was, I think your comparison of the lack of CD in Native American reservations "wouldn’t hold water," if I may be allowed to make a horrible pun. :) The reason I draw the reservations into it is because later in your posting you talk about the water added to foods and fruit juices–I would think that a fair number of those foods, etc would be consumed by Natives on reservations and expose them as well. Of course, if you are making the claim that it takes LOTS and LOTS of "bad" water to set off CD, then you may have something there. I happened to read a tiny notice buried ‘way back in one of the newspapers about how the local water company had begun using a new combination of chemicals that would reduce and prevent any further buildup of scale in the piping system. Oddly enough, they had begun using it right about the same time my Crohn’s flared and stayed flared. Okay, sez I, easy way to find out if that’s what doing it — so I hied to the store and bought several jugs of distilled water. Not drinking water, mind you, DISTILLED water. Steam distilled. Water sans everything un-watery. And guess what? Easy, huh? Yup, flaring subsided. Like, BANG! Down, Crohn’s! Almost overnight the symptoms abated, and I mean drastically!
Hate to tell you this, but this is another case of "what works for some may not work for others" bit. A few years ago, during a flare, I drank almost nothing but distilled water for about 4 months. Didn’t do a damn bit of good. Flared before, flared during, and flared afterward. I *do* blame some major problems I had with my Crohn’s this fall as a result of MTBE being in our water; although I was not drinking any of it, I was having problems with dizziness and shortness of breath when showering. This went on for four months, but as my husband showed no symptoms and I was in the midst of a bad flare, we just thought I was sick. Later, we got a letter from our water company saying they had shut down the bad well and I haven’t had any problems since, but MTBE is in a whole ‘nother catagory than what you’ve been talking about, IMHO. The one TINY plus we get out of this is an unprecedented freedom from infection! In thirty years I haven’t had a cold or the flu. Cuts heal in what seems like no time at all, and without becoming infected or inflamed. Once in a great rare while I’ll get a little inflammation at the site of a cut, but it seldom lasts more than two days — and heaven only knows what the offending organism would have done to an ‘ordinary’ person if the bug was so hardy as to be able to survive two days in contact with my body.
Again, what works for one does not necessarily work for all. I used to get every little cold that even *thought* aobut looking my way. Now that I’ve started taking flu shots I hardly ever get sick, so that is what works for me. Plus, I have had more than one infection in the past, whether blood or a cut or what have you. I *have* noticed that when I get a cold or something, staying in bed for two days and sleeping round the clock will cure 90% of what ails me. Then again, that is fairly good advice for anyone, regardless of whether or not they have CD. But, on the other hand, I have developed a whole slew of allergies, and each year seems to bring on another one or two. Oh, well, win a little, lose a lot….
More indiviualistic response here…no problem with allergies here. Stress is bad for us, because it (stress) heightens the immune response.
Actually, it *weakens* the immune system, leaving you more prone to opportunistic infections, etc. But I agree, stress is bad. If you aren’t already (heavily) filtering your water or using distilled bottled water, you might want to try doing so. But then again, you’ve got Crohn’s — you don’t have to worry about how sterile your water is (within reason).
Uhhhhhh…That last sentence makes me uneasy. If you want juices, squeeze your own if you can; most bottled and canned juices are made from reconstituted concentrates, which means the canner or bottler simply added TAP water back into it, and tap water is what you really want to avoid as much as possible. And that means no sodas, no colas, no soft drinks, or at least very small amounts of them, for exactly the same reason. If you aren’t already a ‘label’ reader, check out a few and see just how much water is added to how many different foods in preparation and processing. Even the meats we buy have had water added to them! (Water added Ham, anyone?)
Again, interesting thought, and if someone wants to give it a shot, by all means go for it, but I don’t know that this will work for everyone. Not trying to slam you, Bill–in fact, thanks for bringing up such a thought-provoking theory. I just hope this doesn’t turn into another flame war. Erica – Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Bill
Response:
Is distilled water available to buy? I’ve only seen it in labs. –Roz
Response:
Greetings and felicitations to one and all: I am a relative newcomer to this newsgroup, but an ‘old hand’ with Dr. Crohn’s source of fame. My first symptoms began showing up ‘way back in 1965, but the disease wasn’t properly or adequately diagnosed for almost another twenty years. Back then, what I had was ‘regional iliitis.’ I’ve had surgery twice, once in the early seventies and again in the mid-eighties, and have had right around five feet of small bowl removed all told. I’ve had and have all the classic symptoms; 4 to 10 watery bowel movements daily, a low-grade fever throughout the day leading to ‘night sweats’ when it breaks about one and half to three hours after I go to sleep at night, crusty, inflamed eyes, pooping my britches in the middle of night when the disease is flaring, and, perhaps worst of all, the only form of arthritis associated with Crohn’s that isn’t reversable during periods of remission of the disease, ankylosing spondelitis (spinal arthritis). As many of you have come to know or to suspect from reading the postings about treatments, drugs don’t work worth diddley squat and tend to cause more damn problems than they alleviate. Prednisone is effective for slapping the disease down during a flare, and that’s all it’s good for. There are no maintenance drugs or dosages, no matter what various people claim. Yes, a few drugs WILL work, or seem to, for a FEW people, while a few others will have some success with a dietary regimin of one sort or another, but these are due to individual responses, not to any universal characteristic of the disease. Keep in mind that in any double blind trial of any drug or treatment, SOME people will respond positively to the placebo and not to the tested element. It isn’t their fault, it isn’t the drug’s fault, it’s nobody’s fault — it’s just the way individuals respond — individually! Do I think I know what causes our disease? You betcha I do! It isn’t a bacterium, and it isn’t a virus, or even a protovirus. It is not a parasite or a symbiont, or any living (or dead) thing. In thirty years, the demographics of Crohn’s hasn’t changed — it is still a disease of the First and Second World nations; it is unknown in Third World countries and on American Indian reservations, even — or especially — when those reservations are side-by-side with major urban areas where Crohn’s DOES rear its ugly countenance. Any explanation of Crohn’s HAS to include and account for this simply because this is a basic and undeniable feature of the model of the disease. It isn’t radar, or radio, or electromagnetic fields radiating from power transmission lines, nuclear fallout, holes in the ionosphere, or even HAARP. What it is, my friends and fellow sufferers, is WATER. H20. The one thing we all need to survive and can’t do without or escape or avoid. Water, he says! What a crock, you say! Ah, but think about it for just a moment…. The second thing a developing Third World country does, after buying weapons and nuclear reactors, is to construct water treatment plants for supplying ’safe’ drinking water to its citizens and visiting businessmen. A country can’t be considered Second World if its people still dip water out of streams and well with buckets — civilization and civilized status require the turning on and off of taps for the procurement of water, regardless of whether one’s plumbing facilities are indoors or out. Third World countries don’t purify their water; people drink it as they get it, parasites, diseases and all. American Indian reservations don’t get purified water either; even when the reservation is smack in the heart of a major city, as some are; they are NOT connected to the municipal water supply that everyone else is; they have their own wells and distribution systems. Water goes directly from the ground to the reservation consumer without any intervening steps of ‘purification.’ But look at what the rest of us get. Ycch! The vast majority of us get our drinking water from rivers or from water tables that are replenished by rivers. And, although it may sound paradoxical, the vast majority of us also live downstream from one or a dozen or more major urban centers, all of which use those same rivers and river systems to carry away their effluent wastes, that is, their sewage and industrial ‘byproducts.’ Because we are civilized, we do not allow municipalities and industries to contaminate our waters with raw sewage — we make them treat it with various noxious and toxic chemicals to ensure that no nasty organisms like e. coli, or typhus, or salmonella, or cholera are still alive when the shit hits the stream, er, I mean when the effluent is discharged into the watershed. Likewise, when the water is slurped out by the acre-foot by the next city downriver, it is tested and re-treated to make sure it doesn’t harbor any noxious little critters that might make Johnny and Mary sick and Mommy and Daddy sue the city. But — and if there are any exceptions they are very rare — organic contamination is all that water is tested for! Most water companies, both public and private, are not required to test for more than a scant handful of contaminants, and none of them do any more than what is absolutely required. They do not check for things like individual elements such as mercury, aluminum and boron, or for chemicals like dioxin or complex compounds of chlorine and flourine, or hundreds of other known deadly and harmful substances. Tell me, have you noticed lately how your toilet never seems to stain BELOW the waterline? It may build up a hell of a ring of crud around and ABOVE the waterline, but isn’t it nice how bright and shiny the porcelain stays when its under water all the time? Even scale deposits seem to take a lot longer to build up than they used to, don’t they? And have you noticed that when they do finally build up in areas where there is really hard water, they come off easier than they used to? What do you think causes that, boys and girls? Can you spell chloroflurohydrocarbons? You know, like carbon tetrachloride and c. tetraflouride, and other things we aren’t allowed to buy anymore to wash walls and strip paint with because they are so dangerous to the environment and people and other living things? Chlorine is added to our drinking water to sterilize it. Flourine is added to our drinking water to make our teeth rot-resistant. Aluminum is added to make our drinking water softer, so it makes prettier suds when we wash our clothes and our hands and faces. Did we say water softeners? Oh yes, those things that pull calcium atoms out of the water and replace them with sodium atoms instead. Calcium atoms make your washwater dingy gray and suppress sudsing. Sodium atoms don’t do that — they just rip the oxygen right out of the water molecule, leaving the hydrogen nothing to cling to. Poor hydrogen. Poor you, when it does its ripping right in one of the cells of your body…. But hey, your washwater looks good…. !! Seriously, though, I was in San Diego a few years ago, and suffering one of the worst flares of Crohn’s I’ve ever had. Nothing, and I mean, nothing, would slap it down. Prednisone would knock it down for a day or two at best, and then, WHAM! there it was back in full flare again! For almost two months I kept a night light on and clean shorts in the bathroom. My Doc (who was quite sympathetic and flexible) and I tried the whole spectrum of available drugs against it, to no avail. Then! I happened to read a tiny notice buried ‘way back in one of the newspapers about how the local water company had begun using a new combination of chemicals that would reduce and prevent any further buildup of scale in the piping system. Oddly enough, they had begun using it right about the same time my Crohn’s flared and stayed flared. Okay, sez I, easy way to find out if that’s what doing it — so I hied to the store and bought several jugs of distilled water. Not drinking water, mind you, DISTILLED water. Steam distilled. Water sans everything un-watery. And guess what? Easy, huh? Yup, flaring subsided. Like, BANG! Down, Crohn’s! Almost overnight the symptoms abated, and I mean drastically! So what’s happening? For most people, the level of toxic chemicals in our drinking water is within ‘tolerance levels.’ Their bodies can handle them without getting ‘bent out of shape.’ We’re unfortunate. We can’t. We’re more sensitive to ingested chemicals, and they have a nasty effect on us. They (the chemicals) attack our cells and tissues hour after hour, day after day. Our bodies’ response is an increased sensitivity of our immune systems. Something is attacking us, and our bodies naturally think it is something organic, a bacterium, virus, or parasite that can be killed and destroyed. But of course, there isn’t one, only nasty molecules and free radicals of some very potent metals and poisons. The cells lining our digestive tracts do the best they can to protect the rest of their less hardy compatriots (the rest of our innards). They proliferate, thickening the bowel walls to insulate the outer surfaces from the poisons within while suffering the brunt of the damage themselves, deforming and becoming more tumor-like than bowel-tissue-like. In the meantime, our immune systems, with nothing alien to the body to attack, begin to act like an over-manned army conscripted to police duty in a city; they relax the distinctions between friend and foe, between ‘citizen’ and ‘alien,’ and settle for ‘them’ and ‘us,’ going on what amounts to a rampage, attacking and destroying the body’s own ‘native’ cells for imaginary or non-existent reasons. The one TINY plus we get out of this is an unprecedented freedom from infection! In thirty years I haven’t had a cold or the flu. Cuts heal in what seems like no time at all, and without becoming infected or inflamed. Once in a great rare while … read more »
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.. take care!! (by the way, I like the "Peace" tag.. I miss the days of the peace sign haha) Randy & Connie