It somehow never occurred to me that the seminal Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Dr. Weston Price was in the public domain. But Abby Eagle of Rejoice in Life did figure that out and has a link for a free download of Dr. Price’s book on his web site.

I scanned through the book online from Abby’s link for a little while before getting ready to post this. I happened to read a section on the varying health and customs in Switzerland and became deeply engrossed. It is not just that properly preparing and eating natural foods produced people with singularly healthy teeth. What Dr. Price observes is that societies based upon natural, simple ways of living produce people with powerful physiques, healthy teeth. strong moral character and clear vision both literally and metaphorically. Dr. Price comments upon customs and even styles of clothing as he relays medical/dental information. I found this to be riveting reading and, along with many other people, highly recommend this book to you. You may either purchase a hard copy or download it from the above link.

Living natural lives relatively free of the ravages of the rapacious engine of desire creation follows laws of seemingly unintended positive consequences. Well, really the positive consequences are certainly intended, but not by us. They were intended by our Creator. We have only to follow the natural laws that govern us. The dire consequences of man stepping outside of these laws is what generated the phrase “unintended negative consequences” in the first place. Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and discover some hints towards positive consequences. And while you are there, look around Abby’s site. It is loaded with information as is his very useful cookbook Learn How to Cook the Way Grandma Did …

Bon appetit for all that was actually intended for us to have and be!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

For a long time, I made Peppermint Tooth Powder for the family and everyone happily used it from the youngest to the oldest of our family members.

There was only one thing I personally didn’t like about it. We always ran out at night. I mean always. By nightfall, I am usually staggeringly tired so running into the kitchen and throwing together a batch of tooth powder at that point was often just too much for me. There are obvious ways of preventing such a situation (such as not waiting until absolutely every particle of powder has been used!) but I came across a bit of information that has provided us with something even simpler for brushing teeth.

In my first post on oil pulling, I linked to my favorite page on the subject which is Karen’s Guide for Self Healing site. I happened to check back at that page a couple of months ago and discovered that there are many more comments there on her How to Do “Oil Pulling” page now than there were then when I initially linked to it, and with great bits of information throughout them. In those comments, Karen gives more information about her recommended dentifrices (i.e. substances with which to brush teeth). She has several great suggestions, one of which was so astonishingly simple that I jumped up to implement it immediately upon reading it. Dr. Bronner’s soap. Go read about it in comment #11 but do read through all of the comments to get a bigger picture of the how’s and why’s.

I pulled out another trusty empty rennet bottle (suitable for its small size and tip designed to let out one drop at a time) and poured in some Dr. Bronner’s. Almond is the flavor we happened to have on hand. I put it on the shelf in the bathroom and was done!

You literally put one tiny drop of soap on your toothbrush and have enough to brush your whole mouth thoroughly. It is so economical. I imagine the peppermint flavor is probably tastier but the almond is fine. No one has any trouble with it, not even the young children. I personally have some childhood trauma associated with soap in the mouth (!) but Dr. Bronner’s is nothing like Ivory and brushing is nothing like being punished so I have had no problem at all using Dr. Bronner’s in my mouth.

I don’t know anything about how Dr. Bronner’s kills bacteria. That is what dentifrice is principally for - killing bacteria. I am thinking that I may make up a batch of Peppermint Tooth Powder again and just have everyone use it once a week or so. I know that baking soda and hydrogen peroxide kill the whole spectrum of bacteria. Karen suggests perhaps using baking soda perhaps once a week. Others say to use it every day. I think I will strike an average between the two.

Meanwhile, though, I am very happy to have such a simple, economical, effective dentifrice that everyone can manage on their own and which never challenges me at night when I am tired!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

Educating yourself about thyroid, adrenal and other hormonal issues is a powerful step to take towards improved health for many of us. The conventional, pharmaceutical medical industry tends to be poorly informed on these subtle matters of hormones and the endocrine system. Even finding an MD who can properly diagnose and treat the very common hypothyroidism is a rare event. I have paid very dearly over and over again for doctors thinking they know more than they do about how to treat hypothyroidism.

What do you do when you think you are suffering from adrenal fatigue? Most doctors do not even acknowledge the existence of adrenal fatigue as a debilitating and treatable condition. Worse yet, what do you do when you know you are suffering from adrenal fatigue and have a sense of how to treat it yourself? Most doctors do not even know how to accurately test for degree of deficiency, never mind have a handle on how to work with you on treating it. In the words of JH Tilden MD about a hundred years ago:

Professional minds are supposed to be trained into a power of discrimination that enables them to sense truth in anything. But it appears that the principle training today is into accepting authority without question.

This painful truth leaves patients with several problems including where to get effective treatment and how to get appropriate lab work done. Sole access to ordering lab work is one of the chief ways the medical industry holds us hostage. Sometimes it really helps to follow the up’s and down’s of your condition with lab work. Lab work can be an important source of information, if ordered correctly and interpreted usefully. But try finding a doctor who will order saliva testing for monitoring adrenal conditions or one who will monitor thyroid levels in the way you feel they should be monitored. It is almost impossible - especially if you are living in the country where there are fewer choices of physicians.

Most importantly if you are someone who is taking responsibility for your own treatment, you need access to lab work as you see fit. Being forced into the system in order to get this kind of information puts your treatment plan at risk. I have fretted and puzzled over this situation for years but now I am very grateful to have a solution.

Through The Canary Club, you can order your own lab work as you need it. The home page notes:

Hormone Imbalances can have a severe impact on your health, and yet, they often go undiagnosed. We understand the frustration and helplessness that comes from visiting specialist after specialist and never really getting what you need to feel yourself again.

Our easy-to-use hormone test kits can uncover the problem and get you started on the road to recovery.

In fact, our home test kits analyze specific hormone imbalances that traditional testing ignores.

The Canary Club makes it safe and easy to find out if your hormones are functioning properly and to help you find the answers you need to get back on your feet and enjoying life.

You can order the testing you need for thyroid, adrenal, and reproductive hormones levels as well as the all important Vitamin D levels. You can get the PSA test as well as order a panel of tests that detect early risk factors associated with Type II Diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The web site also has articles, testimonials, a page of web links, a gland self-evaluation quiz and links to the book Feeling Fat, Fuzzy or Frazzled - Restoring Thyroid, Adrenal and Reproductive Balance by Drs. Shames.

As the Canary Club founders note:

The Canary Club is a premier resource for discounted home saliva and blood spot testing for hormonal imbalance. A health topics of great concern is hormonal / glandular dysfunction. Over 40 million people in the United States alone are affected - and numbers are rising internationally as well. Hormone imbalance, as impacted by environmental pollution, is a worldwide problem which is growing at an alarming rate. Joining the Canary Club enables you to order testing directly from the lab at a special Canary Club discounted price.

Joining the Canary Club is free and the tests you can order through them are very reasonably priced. Observing and researching your own condition and now having the resources to order the lab work you need and have the results come directly to you is an incredibly important key towards not only eventually strengthening your physical health but also immediately strengthening your confidence, your self-reliance and your ‘power to discriminate which enables you to sense truth in anything’.

May you walk in health.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

When a system is functioning properly, you don’t attend to the inner workings because you don’t need to. Rather you busy yourself with gathering inputs, feeding the inputs into the system and then managing the outputs as they appear. Fussing around with the innards of the system is strictly up to engineers of various sorts depending upon the kind of system being used.

As far as physical systems (aka bodies) go, mine used to be one that generated a tremendous amount of energy seemingly on its own. This suited me just fine because I have always liked to do things, and learn new things, and muck about with lots and lots of new ideas. I have loved to work ever since I was a little girl because you learn so much that way. In fact I had the rather odd childhood problem of not being allowed to engage in meaningful work as a child and young person and this was a great grief to me. In any case, my nearly inexhaustible store of high energy was something I simply accepted and appreciated over the years as necessary for achieving goals of all sorts.

Alas and alack, I can no longer take my system or my energy for granted. I collapsed in May with severe Adrenal Fatigue. I don’t particularly attribute my case to the unnatural wear and tear of modern living as is said to be the case for many people, but rather to an abusive childhood. I was actually first diagnosed with adrenal fatigue when I was but 21 years old and life since then has not been exactly restful so any kind of recovery could not have been what you might call “spontaneous.” I didn’t know what to do about it then and was in so much physical pain that I don’t know how much the adrenal problem really got my attention. I wondered about it off and on many years later during my continuous pregnancies and breastfeeding of 15 or so years but no one I knew or worked with had a solid idea of how to safely support/treat the adrenals while pregnant and/or breastfeeding. More time passed.

This past May I was having a conversation with my husband about a very traumatic event that took place in my early 20s. I was always vaguely aware that this event related somewhat to my parents but I had never thought about it much. My husband pointed out some very obvious truths that that situation revealed (he is a champion at this, by the way) and I experienced a profound emotional shock from this sudden awareness. A few days later, I collapsed. It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong with me and to piece together this time line but I am glad that I did because it is important information critical to moving forward.

I don’t have the mental energy to write fully about what adrenal fatigue is as of yet so I will put a few links here for anyone interested. Adrenal Fatigue, Adrenal Burnout, Adrenal Fatigue 101, Adrenal Health in Women, What Causes Adrenal Fatigue.

Having all of my energies drop to so low a point has shown me many things already. Two that are most pertinent to blogging are that just having good ideas requires healthy adrenals and then writing about those ideas requires healthy adrenals. That implementing the ideas would require an energy pack and strong adrenals was always apparent even to me but there is nothing like having a good idea and then feeling exhausted from just that single act to make you appreciate the subtle nature of energy and the power drain that is the brain. I am also experiencing that writing exhausts me. Gosh, reading and writing are two activities I have always done like breathing. Always and forever. However, a head injury back in the late 80s put some brakes on my reading and this adrenal collapse has put the brakes on my writing. Life surely does present limitations, doesn’t it? Since I am a person who has to read and needs to write and has a mind that is a good idea factory, for crying out loud, I have to learn to work within these limitations. This will be one of my many challenges in recovering from severe adrenal fatigue and adapting to forever weakened adrenals no matter how much I recover.

All of which brings me to blogging. For the past year, I got up in the wee hours in order to type out the ideas, insights and experiences that pushed at me to be expressed here on the Pockets of the Future blog. Working on the computer makes me really tired but I persisted because I just had to. I felt compelled. On top of that, we have had problems with the blog since the spring. Wordpress problems and computer problems and then in June, our blog was hacked and we almost lost the whole thing. My husband worked mightily to get the thing fixed and it took a long time. He was victorious in the end but I lost some recent posts which just defeated me. Yes - now I will make copies in Open Office. I have lost posts twice now and it is not an experience I care to repeat.

So this is why I have not posted in so long. Bloggers need strong adrenals… who knew? In the face of this revelation, I am still going to go ahead and add Adrenal Fatigue to our list of categories. According to Dr. Wilson:

Adrenal Fatigue affects an estimated 80% of people living in industrialized countries at one time or another in their lives, yet it has been ignored and largely untreated by the medical community.

Given that it is now a predominating factor in my life and that I am fairly certain that my husband and one of my daughters particularly is affected by it as well and that it affects so many people in so many places, I cherish the hope of writing about it here from time to time. May it be so.

So, dear readers, please be patient with me. It took me weeks and weeks just to write this brief post and I am now exhausted from the effort. I can’t tell you how much that frustrates me. Even with my mind held under the water of exhaustion I have a half dozen posts on the tip of my tongue, so to speak. If I don’t write for a while, know that we are still here and that I am working my way towards another post and that the farm is still progressing which you can see on video and the children are wonderful. If, on the other hand, by some miracle I start to post too much, send me an email in which you very politely (we adrenal fatigue sufferers are a very emotional, sensitive lot) suggest that I not do that.

OK, that is it for now.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,
Leslie

During one of my ongoing searches for more information and experiences with oil pulling a couple of weeks ago, I came across Joe’s Health Site. This page has stayed in my mind since for two reasons. The first reason is that I read two pieces of information on it that were new to me and the other is the brevity and simplicity of this page.

Researching, learning, changing and eating our way back to some semblance of original health generally seems to be a ridiculously complicated endeavor. Books and web sites devoted to this subject are often fairly complex and contain so much information that the reader can easily become overwhelmed. Not at Joe’s Health Site. It is one page! And not one of those hugely long pages that is really the length of a full length novel. It is one page with a few select links. However, I can say with confidence that if you follow the recommendations on this page, the health of many,many people will dramatically improve. (I say this even though we are vegetarian and Joe clearly is not.)

Topics covered include:

Eating enough quality protein;

Using coconut oil daily;

Getting enough gelatin;

Oil pulling;

Thyroid health;

Information about good fats and the myths about cholesterol;

The Dangers of Microwave Ovens;

and the health benefits possible from Rebounding.

All good stuff simply presented. Now here are the two facts I pulled out of Joe’s Health Site that stuck with me personally:

I started oil pulling on 3//4/07 and I have no intentions of ever stopping it. It has helped my sleep, moods, reduced my anxiety, improved my brain function, and more. Read about it, and then try it! Curezone.com has a forum on it. They say if you do it once daily for 2-4 weeks, you’ll never want to stop it! This is an ancient Ayurvedic Healing Technique that’s very effective.

I have also found that once I started oil pulling, I never wanted to stop. It is funny that something I had never heard of just a few months ago is now something I intend to do always and teach my children and grandchildren to do too! I am not even aware of any big changes in my health from doing it. It just feels right to do and in some subtle way I have to do it! It is soothing and health promoting in a deep, natural way that I can feel but not necessarily pinpoint. By way of contrast, I have had to skip doing it for short periods a couple of times because I didn’t have any sesame oil to use. This didn’t wreck my day or anything but the morning felt incomplete. It’s like not brushing your teeth at a time when you always brush your teeth. It won’t kill you but it doesn’t feel good.

Secondly, I noted this with regard to thyroid function:

Taking the oral temperature is the best way to detect low thyroid. It should be 98 on arising and 98.6 to 99 during the day. If it’s much below this you’re probably hypo-thyroid. Resting pulse should be 85. Much below 80 usually indicates hypothyroidism.

Taking your temperature is pretty much the only way to accurately gauge thyroid function and I have known that for years. There is a bit more to the best way to do this than is mentioned here. However, the point about a low pulse being a sign of hypothyroidism really hit me. I have had a low pulse rate for as long as I can remember. Once I was getting a physical in order to work in Internal Medicine and Urgent Care at an HMO in Boston. The nurse practitioner took my pulse rate and then asked me if I had been jogging for years? I was surprised at the question. I had always been athletic and a dancer but had never found jogging even remotely interesting. I replied with a laugh that I did not jog. She commented that my pulse was so low that she thought that must be what I do.

If only she had had enough clinical experience to realize that a pulse in the high 60’s was a possible warning sign of hypothyroidism. (Most MD type medical people are not too good at this thyroid business, by the way.) Perhaps I could have gotten enough thyroid support at that time that my thyroid wouldn’t have collapsed almost completely after giving birth the first time. Sigh. And here up to now even I thought that my low pulse rate was one of the good things I had going for me healthwise. I was a little blue when I read this, to tell you the truth, but I guess it is better to know.

This is a lot of information from just one little health page. I am going to post this on our Effective Health and Personal Care page under Essential Links on the Pockets of the Future web site for future reference. May we all read it, take action and enjoy improved health.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

Our nine year old has had some problems with his teeth for years. I haven’t entirely figured out why but I think it is related to his digestion. After I tried oil pulling and then my husband tried it, we had Will try it hoping that it would strengthen his teeth and gums. He did it nicely for two days but then didn’t particularly want to continue it every day. I didn’t want to force him and let him take a break.

Two days later, we were in the grocery store in the afternoon when Will suddenly said, “Oh yeah, it seems like a tooth is coming in through the side of my gum back here,” and he showed me his gum. Well, that was no tooth coming in that he was feeling. It was infection. The gum was very swollen and there were two points of pus oozing out of the side of his gum under a tooth that has a hole in it.

Yikes.

Being the mom, I had to remain very cool. Plus I had to get through the rest of the grocery shopping. “Don’t worry, Will. We will take care of it when we get home.”

For the rest of the shopping trip, my mind was divided between how best to stretch our food money and how to treat Will’s very serious gum infection. Gradually, gradually it dawned on me that this visible infection was probably the result of the two days of oil pulling he had done. The oil pulling had pulled out the infection that was obviously deep down in there. That was a good thing!

OK. From this realization I could construct a treatment plan. The first step immediately when we got home was to have Will start back up with oil pulling. He did one session right then and then another session a few hours later before bed. The response was immediate.

These were not easy pictures to take plus it was evening for the second photo and the light was not good. I hope you can see the startling change between the first oil pulling and the second one a few hours later.

See the pus pockets pushing out of the side of his gum? Now here it is again a few hours later:

A remarkable change from just two treatments of oil pulling within hours of each other. Seeing this response gave me hope and confidence. (You can see a dark spot in the tooth just above. That is the hole between those two teeth which I have been working on to keep clean for months.) Now I could fill out the treatment plan. It was as follows:

Oil pulling every morning and evening;

Doses of colloidal silver three times a day;

Continued cleaning of the hole in his teeth together with an application of several drops of hydrogen peroxide both in the hole and over the area of pus in the side of the gum;

Cloves of garlic peeled and left in his cheek for an hour or so at a time in the evening.

We kept this regimen up for a couple of weeks. Visible signs of swelling and infection came and went, came and went. After some time, his gum would be clear all day but then by close to bedtime, I could see some pus again. This was logical as by the end of the day not only was Will’s physical system tired but inflammatory conditions always worsen at night. We patiently kept at it. As his condition improved, I gradually cut back on doses of oil pulling and colloidal silver.

I am very happy to report that Will’s condition is now stable and there is no sign of infection. I am keeping him on a preventive maintenance program, however. He is now doing one session of oil pulling first thing in the morning followed by a cup of water with a quarter teaspoon of colloidal silver after he has finished the rest of his morning routine. Every now and again he pops a peeled clove of garlic to hold next to his gum in the evening when I am reading to the children. I plan to keep him on this maintenance program indefinitely. Hopefully he will lose one of those molars soon so there will no longer be a pocket there.

In any case, Will is now a routine oil puller which is great for a nine year old.

A couple of notes:

The colloidal silver we use is such an important part of our Family Medicine Chest that I will write a detailed post about it in the near future.

Secondly, garlic has many medicinal properties not the least of which is being anti-bacterial. You can peel a clove, being careful not to nick the clove itself, and leave it in your mouth for hours even. It will absorb toxins while it is in there. After some time, spit the clove out and throw it away. Here is another similar approach:

At the faintest sign of a sore throat, runny nose or achy bones, simply peel a clove of fresh organic garlic, cut it in half and place one half in each cheek, which allows the juice to be absorbed in the saliva and pervade the system. The odor can be masked by use of anise, cinnamon or caraway seeds; chew these with a little parsley. Both garlic tablets and capsules are available for those who cannot adjust to the garlic odor, but fresh garlic is always preferred for the live enzymes it contains. Commercially grown garlic may be treated with a variety of chemical sprays so organically grown garlic is preferred. As a preventative, a good supply of garlic has no equal in the home. Herbal Remedies

I don’t think Will could tolerate leaving cut cloves in his mouth so we have just used cloves as “bacteria sponges” instead. The method listed above is a great way to get the medicinal value of garlic into your system without introducing the actual garlic into your stomach for anyone whose digestive tract is sensitive to it.

We have also had some interesting realizations about garlic around here which I have been wanting to post about as well. I will certainly get to it!

Meanwhile, Will’s mouth is in better shape and he has developed a healthy new habit of oil pulling. We parents have gained more experience and have developed more confidence in treating even potentially very serious health conditions at home in ways that work with our bodies and our way of life.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

I learned these shocking statistics about the overwhelming pollution of plastic bags in the world in Dr. Mercola’s February 15th newsletter:

• Between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide annually. That’s more than one million bags PER MINUTE!!

• U.S. consumers use more than 380 billion plastic bags annually

• Taiwan consumes about 20 billion bags a year, or 900 per person annually

• Australians consume 6.9 billion plastic bags each year, or 326 per person

• Ireland consumes about 1.2 billion plastic bags, or 316 per person

Of these billions of plastic bags:

• Only 1 to 7 percent are recycled

• It takes 1,000 years for polyethylene bags to break down

• During that 1,000 years of photodegradation, toxic substances leach into the soil and enter the food chain

We have been led to believe that paper bags are an appropriate alternative to plastic but this is apparently not the case:

1. 1. Producing a paper bag requires more than four times as much energy than it does to produce a plastic bag.
      
      A plastic bag uses 594 BTUs, compared to a paper bag, which uses 2511 BTUs during the manufacturing process.
      (Source: 1989 Plastic Recycling Directory, Society of Plastics Industry.)
   2. The majority of paper comes from tree pulp, so naturally the impact in the form of deforestation is enormous. In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year alone.In fact, paper bag production delivers a detrimental double-whammy as forests (major absorbers of greenhouse gases) are cut down, combined with the actual manufacturing process of the bags, which produces toxic greenhouse gases, acid rain, and water pollution.
   3. Although paper bags have a higher recycling rate than plastic, only 10 to 15 percent of paper bags are recycled. And, making matters even less attractive, it takes 91 percent LESS energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper.
   4. Last but not least, current research indicates that paper does not degrade at a substantially faster rate than plastic once it’s in a landfill. This is because virtually nothing degrades completely in modern landfills due to lack of water, light, oxygen and other factors necessary for successful degradation.

Just in case you think this all adds up to nothing but plastic bag eyesores, read the following information also included in the newsletter:

The problem is so bad that a plastic “stew,” twice the size of Texas has formed on the Pacific Ocean. Scientists have dubbed the mass of floating plastic trash the “Eastern Garbage Patch,” and its volume is growing at an alarming pace. Even more shocking: when researchers tested the water of the Pacific Ocean, they found it contained six times as much plastic as plankton, by weight!

It’s not just marine animals that are poisoned by all these stray plastic bags. You too (and your breast fed baby) are ingesting plastics every day through the food chain. It’s a hazardous mix of chemicals and additives, such as:

• Cancer-causing PFOAs
• PBDEs, which cause reproductive problems
• Phthalates; another group of reproductive toxins
• BPA, which disrupts the endocrine system by mimicking the female hormone estrogen

The end result of breathing, eating, drinking and absorbing all of this plastic includes obesity, declining fertility rates and other reproductive problems, and cancer, just to name a few.

Using cloth bags and woven baskets for carrying our groceries and other purchases is clearly the solution to mounting dumps of plastic bags all over the earth. We simply have to use them in order for them to work.

I have quite a few cloth bags to use for grocery shopping and have had them for years. I used to use them all the time but gradually I started forgetting them in the car all the time. When we used to do big shops at the Whole Foods in Charlottesville, I could have anywhere between 4 and 6 children with me and 1 or 2 full shopping carts. If I didn’t remember until the end that I had forgotten the cloth bags again, I was not in a position to run out and get them from the car. Besides, I chose paper bags in the winter and we used them to help start fires in the woodburning stove and I reused the plastic bags the rest of the time for all sorts of things. Otherwise I recycled them.

Since moving to Floyd, I realize that I have basically forgotten about the cloth bags altogether. The health food store here takes them and reuses them with other customers so I have been taking ours there. But obviously not using them at all is what is best.

I used to have a lovely steel trap mind. Really I did. But sometime during the last decade or so, my mind seems to have settled into a half open/half shut position and the steel has metamorphosed into a somewhat more giving material. I don’t know if this is due to many years of little sleep, hormonal changes, or just plain old constant overwhelm. Whatever it is, I had better overcome it with regards to using our cloth bags again for grocery shopping. I am startled by these statistics and must do the right thing.

I know - I will train the children to get the bags out of the trunk of the car before we go in to shop. Their young, fresh minds are just what I am looking for! As a matter of fact, young, fresh minds and cloth bags are together probably the real solution to the problem.

Oh, and do sign up for Dr. Mercola’s newsletter. I have been reading it for years and years. It is full of timely and important information about health, the environment and even Google tips.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

I have continued to do the oil pulling each morning. I find that I am not doing it as much because of all the benefits that will accrue but because I just really want to. It feels great frankly. It seems to me that the oil pulling is corrective but not through harsh cleansing but rather through its ability to nourish. I am experimenting some with brushing my teeth first or not or still drinking a glass of water first thing as is my habit. As I don’t have the slightest reaction of nausea to having the oil in my mouth, none of these things seems to make any difference which is nice.

I have found that the oil goes white and looses its oily quality long before 15 minutes of swishing is up. So I have been spitting the oil out when it is used up and taking a second spoonful so that I can swish the entire 15 minutes or so with oil that is working.

I also find that swishing my mouth out with warm water and sea salt after finishing with the oil is fabulous. It dawned on me yesterday that the warmth and the sea salt are feeding my poor exhausted adrenals a little bit. That makes for a great two for one routine!

On my day 2, my husband tried it. He also found it to be a very beneficial practice and is continuing on with it. He found that even hours later, he felt like toxins were being released from his system.

On day 3, I started our 9 year old on it. Will has had problems with his teeth for a long time for reasons I cannot understand. He willingly tried it out. He wasn’t crazy about the taste of the oil but it wasn’t a deal breaker for him or anything. He did have trouble breathing while swishing as he had a somewhat stuffy nose. So for anyone with allergies or a cold, they should make sure they are breathing freely before putting the oil in their mouths.

In her blog post Sunflower Oil Therapy - A Miracle Therapy, dorischua mentions cleaning your sink and toothbrush thoroughly after each session because of what is pulled out of your system through the action of the oil pulling. Good point. I will have to take that into account.

Another point I will have to take into account is the price of organic sesame oil!

With three people using it every day (and I personally would really like to start doing this at the end of the day as well), we are going to pound through this expensive oil. I guess I had better start searching out bulk prices.

That is the update for now. We will keep you posted on all oil pulling developments!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

A few years ago when searching for healing modalities for my family, I stumbled across the Health & Yoga site and their perfectly designed neti pot.

The practice of cleansing the sinuses with a neti pot, or jala neti, is an ancient Indian or Ayurvedic technique that has made its way overseas in recent years. Many westerners have now discovered the benefits daily use of a neti pot brings to not only sinus problems but allergies, colds and so on. Irrigating the sinuses is also an effective technique to use frequently or even daily during this day and age of dangerous airborn pollutants.

To read more about this ancient form of nasal irrigation, go to Health & Yoga’s neti page. Also read their article about Sinus Allergies which accurately points out that you can’t take medications for sinus infections until you have a full blown infection whereas using a neti pot is preventative and catches incipient infections while they are easy to reverse. Plus Health & Yoga offers 9 other articles related to Jala Neti or neti pot use. Here is a whole raft of testimonials besides just mine here!

Now that we have established the utility of using a neti pot, why is this particular pot so great?

1. It is made of stainless steel and so cannot break.

2. It is lightweight so your wrist and arm do not get tired while using it.

3. It holds enough water to effectively cleanse both sides with one prepared pot.

4. It is shaped in such a way that it fits comfortably in your hand while you are using it. It feels better than holding a little ceramic handle like on the neti pot most commonly available here in the US.

5. The cone shape on the end of the nozzle provides an air tight fit no matter the shape or size of the person using it.

6. This particular pot comes with information and support that makes using the neti pot much more effective than otherwise.

I want to explain more about this last point. The Health & Yoga neti pot comes with a free extensive booklet that gives you more info about how to properly irrigate your sinuses than you ever thought possible. This includes instructions for how to get all the water out of your nasal passages afterwards. I had never seen this before and found the added instruction important and helpful. On top of all of this, you can also get an instructional DVD that shows you how to do everything.

There is another big benefit to buying the DVD. It shows children using the neti pot. We don’t have our children use a neti pot every day but we do use it with them when they have colds or allergies. Having our children actually see other children using the pot went a long way towards making them open to using it themselves. Now when we suggest they have a go with the neti pot, they just accept it and we do it together. It is familiar to them and an accepted practice of childhood.

One last point - I have found Health & Yoga to be a wonderful business to work with with a customer service so warm and responsive that it inspires confidence about trying new things. They ship so quickly, by the way, that you can’t believe you just received something all the way from India. They respond to emails promptly and are quick to replace product if necessary. When we got our first pot, we somehow didn’t appreciate the corrosive effects of salt water on stainless steel. After a while the inside of the spout started to rust which I figured was probably not very healthy. When I emailed them about this problem, they replied immediately with more detailed information about thoroughly rinsing and air drying the pot after each use and rapidly sent us a new one!

We have had wonderful results using this neti pot. For one thing, we have moved many, many times and it has never broken! We have used it during allergy season, we have used it when a headache is coming on, we have used it when we have been unduly exposed to an allergen and found it helpful on every count. It washes a burden out of your system so that your body can better cope with the challenges facing it. Properly done, it leaves you with a sense of well being.

Once again we have an ancient practice to which is applied present day common sense and materials which yields us with an effective tool for the future. Every family should have one or two of these pots on their shelves.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

PS I just came across this page comparing various kinds of neti pots. They come to the same conclusions but spell it all out nicely. Neti Pot Comparison

I have just tried “oil pulling” for the first time and want to share my experience.

What in the world is oil pulling, you may ask? At about this time yesterday morning, I didn’t know either. Someone on a Charlotte Mason list I am on posted yesterday about battling a sinus infection and asked the group at large if anyone had any experiences to share regarding “oil pulling” as a possible therapeutic for sinus infection. Oil pulling?

I was intrigued by her question and immediately Googled it. I first went to Oil Pulling - a Wonderful Therapy and read up. The technique immediately sounded to me like something Ayurvedic in origin which does, in fact, turn out to be the case. My opinion about techniques and perspectives that are Ayurvedic in origin is this - people these days may debate the details and/or they may exaggerate about the results but nevertheless a technique or approach that is Ayurvedic in origin is going to be sound health practice. Ayurveda is the oldest form of medicine and it thus conforms to my two principles of discerning between health practices.

I continued reading and very quickly discovered that lots of people know about oil pulling and that many of them predictably debate about the finer points of the technique. Here is the oil pulling page at Earth Clinic and a brief page with directions and impressions at Colon Cleansing Zone and a confident article entitled How to do “Oil Pulling” on Guide for Self Healing. It was this latter article I pulled up this morning to refresh my mind with the details of how to proceed.

Oil pulling, which is to say, swishing oil around in your mouth for 15 minutes or so first thing in the morning, apparently pulls toxins of all kinds out of your mouth. This is said to have a positive affect on the health of the entire body just as the toxins in our mouths have profoundly negative effects on our entire bodies (oral bacteria found in the heart and so on). Also the tongue is apparently similar to the bottom of the feet in that points on it relate to areas all over the body. You affect the tongue, you affect the entire body just as in reflexology you affect the entire body through the feet.

We don’t go out grocery shopping all that often but yesterday we did happen to go so I picked up a bottle of unrefined, cold pressed sesame oil. This morning I pulled up the How to do “Oil Pulling” page and charged ahead. My reaction was so surprising to me that I came immediately here to share it.

When I first put the oil in my mouth, I found I enjoyed the flavor and I found the whole exercise of swishing it around very soothing. After some minutes, the flavor disappeared and the viscosity of the oil changed. You are supposed to swish the oil and mix it with your saliva until the oil turns white. Turning white indicates that the oil has picked up a full load of toxins, I guess. OK, I did all of this with no problem. Then you spit the oil out into the toilet so that you don’t clog up your sink. Rinse your mouth out with warm salt water and then brush your teeth (with something other than any kind of toothpaste). That’s it. Wisdom says that you start out doing this every morning and then, if you have intractable health problems of various sorts, you work up to doing it two or three times a day. It helps to clean and normalize the system.

Upon completing the entire procedure, I was immediately filled with a expansive sense of well being. I noticed that my teeth and mouth felt squeaky clean (people often to report that their teeth get whiter from oil pulling) in a way that felt very pleasant. And then within a minute or two, I felt positively ebullient! Ebullient like Tigger is ebullient - full of energy and bounce and good spirits. Pretty good for 5:30am!

This unexpected discovery is interesting to me so I will keep it up. I will do the oil pulling every morning and perhaps increase it to twice a day as an experiment. I will report back with developments the way I have been about going without an electric dryer or the way Steve Pavlino did during January about eating an all raw diet. Meanwhile, I feel great!

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie