In India, cows are worshipped in part because of their ability to provide for most of the nutrients a person needs. But not all of the cows on the planet today are able to connect humans with healthy patches of earth or with sun-blessed grasses. It isn't the cow's fault.Got Deficiency?
A long, long time ago, in antiquity (or so it seems), the cow produced milk. And the milk contained many nutrients that the body needed in order to be healthy. Back in the day, milk from a cow was a major source of sustenance. The nutrients in the milk came initially from the soil and from the sun (in the form of chlorophyll which was consumed by the cow as grass). Iodine and vitamin K2 were two of these substances that are now practically non-existent in milk that comes from cows raised on industrial farms. But we'll come back to that later. The thymus gland, is a seldom-acknowledged, mostly forgotten structure in the body that is at the core of any discussion involving bones. This gland, which is located in front of the heart (one might say that it is the material, glandular representative of the heart chakra), plays a vital role in immunity. In diseases like Myasthenia Gravis, for example, the thymus gland is central to the plot, though it is mostly silent unless it becomes seriously inflamed or if thymus gland cancer develops. In conventional medicine, future doctors are taught that the thymus gland is nearly useless after childhood and thymectomies (surgical removal of the thymus gland) are routinely performed with the same casual approach given to gallbladder removal (both surgeries are generally unnecessary and harmful to general human health). Removal of the thymus gland is very difficult though. Often bits and pieces are left behind which means that even after patients endure a thymectomy they often have a long road ahead of them involving treatments that won’t work or additional surgeries to mitigate the problem of inflamed or cancerous thymus gland tissues. As such, treating the core issue of thymus gland problems to resolve thymus gland inflammation is important, even in patients whose doctors attempt to remove the thymus gland.The thymus gland is located in the chest behind the sternum, though some individuals may have a thymus gland located slightly higher or lower in the chest cavity. This gland plays a vital role in immunity. It functions rather like West Point or some other highly esteemed military school in that it receives T cell “recruits” from the bone marrow tissues. These T cell recruits (known as “T cell precursors”) travel from the bone marrow to the thymus gland to go through a stringent selection and training process. While inside the thymus gland, these T cell recruits will be trained and tested before being released into the wild as soldiers ready to stand sentinel and defend our bodies from pathogenic attack.
Bone marrow is at the core of every human body. You really can’t go any deeper into the body before you start to come back out. Bone marrow is located deep inside our bones. But most people don’t really think about bone marrow unless they’re unfortunate enough to develop leukemia or lymphoma or some other serious blood / bone disease. And like the thymus gland, bone marrow seems to be something that’s totally silent and disconnected from the rest of the body according to conventional medicine doctors. Bones are bones and bone marrow is something that doesn’t exist unless your bone marrow is diseased. The connection between bone marrow and blood diseases like leukemia is not emphasized unless the patient is forced to undergo bone marrow biopsies and stem cell transplantations. And even if a leukemia patient happen to make the connection between healthy bones and healthy blood, the connection is not emphasized because conventional medicine doctors don’t generally work with tools that can heal the bones and thus the blood. If you develop a disease that is rooted in unhealthy bone marrow tissues, it’s very unlikely that your doctor will point out the relationship between your bone tissues and bone marrow and how unhealthy bones lead to unhealthy bone marrow and in turn how unhealthy bone marrow leads to unhealthy blood and an ailing immune system. Doctors, after all, peddle patented pharmaceuticals which are synthetic and therefore unable to to resolve nutrient deficiencies that can only be healed by natural nutrients. Though there are doctors out there who truly wish to heal their patients of disease, Big Pharma punishes doctors who advise their patients on nutrients or medicinals that will cure disease.
Let’s make a metaphor to simplify this thought a bit…
Let’s imagine that you live in a nation with young people who are unhealthy. Let’s say that this nation has some serious issues in terms of nutrition. The government has created a system that yields profits when a citizen is ill. The motivation to make people well is thus removed and most people who are a part of this nation aim to make money by making people sick. Let’s say that this capitalistic model of healthcare is at least as profitable as selling fossil fuels and, to be realistic, let’s also say that most of the medicines are actually made from petroleum products.
In this nation, young people grow up with serious nutrient deficiencies that cause them to have physical and physiological abnormalities. But from this pool of malnourished individuals, you must put together an army to protect the land.
These malnourished individuals who are chosen as recruits must go to a new place at a training facility and try to learn to do many things. They must first learn to identify the enemy. Then, they must learn to use tactics to defeat the enemy. They must learn how to seek out the enemy when the enemy is hiding. And they must train their bodies to be agile and strong. It’s a tall order for a nation of kids that are sick. And it’s a complex riddle to figure out by kids who are being preyed upon by those who claim to protect them too.
This metaphor might seem all too real. But if the body was like a nation trying to defend itself and if your body had to use this pool of sick recruits to defend itself from all forms of attack, the body would do the best that it could with these sick recruits.
It isn’t hard to imagine that a nation with ailing kids would have some unique security issues that would arise. Some of those soldiers might get confused about whether a given entity is an enemy or not. Other soldiers might have mood problems that end with explosive, over-reactive, or even fatal behaviors. In terms of human health, it’s obvious from this metaphor that a number of different diseases and symptoms could develop out of the problem of ailing bone marrow and sick bones since sick bones would mean sick bone marrow. And sick bone marrow would mean sick soldiers. And so, we’ll begin this discussion by paying homage to this most important relationship at the core of our structure (the bone marrow) and at the heart of the matter (the thymus gland). This seems like a thought-provoking vantage point where we can begin to talk honestly and intelligently about organophosphates.
A Holographic View of Health
A holograph is a three-dimensional image created using laser technologies, but in this discussion, we’re going to look at health as a holographic structure. If you were to take a 2 dimensional holograph (that looks 3 dimensional) and cut it up into smaller pieces, each piece would contain all of the information of the whole holograph. In other words, when you divide up the whole holograph, each piece of the whole still contains the whole image. If you cut up those pieces into even smaller pieces, the entire holographic image would still be present in each piece as a whole image up to a point, at least, until the pieces get too small.Our view of human health is holographic in that we look for metaphors and analogous structures or functions even as we drill down into the scientific data to look at the entire body, the organs, tissues, the cells, and then molecules. Rather than dividing our thoughts up into “systems” of the body or focusing exclusively, for example, on nutrients, we look for novel ways to relate one piece of data to another piece of data to mix up the prevailing way of thinking about disease. This is an intentional process, though sometimes, bits of information that we string together in these novel ways may seem awkwardly connected. In all cases, our goal is to demonstrate that its possible to look at the diseases, syndromes, and symptoms that we feature from other perspectives with surprising resonance from octave to the one above and the one below.
A cell might be a holograph of the entire body. And as the patient, you might choose to focus your treatments on cells rather that focusing your treatment approach on the entire body. Just as a sick nation might create an illness in its people through greed, a poor diet based on indulgence in non-nutritious foods might create an illness in the very bones of the human body. This is holographic thinking and it can be useful in solving problems that have been deemed “unsolveable”.
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Feeling It In Your Bones
Organophosphate exposure involves a bio-accumulation of organic phosphates in bone tissues. Normally, inorganic phosphorus in the form of phosphate couples with calcium in a sort of soul-mate union that we talk about in greater depth in another discussion. This union yields strong, yet flexible bone tissues and teeth. This super-strong structure that we refer to as “the skeleton” is made up of bone tissues that vary in width and length. Bones that are big enough like the femur contain a soft, central cavity made up of marrow that makes an array of blood cells including red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets as well as T cell “recruits” that we mentioned above that leave the bone marrow and travel to the thymus gland for training to become the body’s military.One of the most important things that organophosphates do in the body is disrupt the natural production of bone tissues. Normally, you see, our bones need inorganic phosphorus / phosphates in combination with calcium, but under certain conditions that we’re going to describe later, our bodies become weakened by a lack of essential nutrients and willing to absorb and use organic phosphorus / organophosphates. How and why this weakness occurs is something that we’re going to expand on in depth in the pages that come. Don’t assume that your body needs more phosphorus or phosphates though because the equation is just a bit more complicated than that.
But as we introduce this topic, we wish to reconfigure the way that our readers are looking at the human body. In this article, we’re going to ignore some of the traditional boundaries around health and expand beyond isolationist concepts like the organs and “systems” and even beyond “holism” into alternative models of medicine and beyond.
From the Bone Marrow to the Thymus Gland
As we discussed above, T cells migrate from the bone marrow to the thymus gland where they mature and “train” to become soldiers that can fight against pathogens that might attack the body. The bone marrow and the thymus gland involvement in organophosphate exposure and poisoning brings us quickly to our “model diseases” that we’re going to use to walk readers through our holographic concepts in future discussions. These model diseases were chosen because they’re iconically representative of “bone marrow disease”, “blood disease”, and “thymus gland disease”, etc. Model diseases tend to be related to a “family tree” of other diseases that we regard as “Disease Family Trees”. We’ll expand more on this topic throughout this discussion.In our model of disease that we use throughout this website, every cancer has one or more corresponding autoimmune diseases connected to it. And in turn, every autoimmune disease has one or more types of cancer associated with it too. The cancer-autoimmune disease connection is highlighted in the literature under the term “paraneoplastic”. Read more about paraneoplastic autoimmune diseases here. For now, just note that cancer and autoimmunity are two sides of the same coin. They are essentially the same disease.
Model Diseases
Leukemia / Paraneoplastic Hypokalemia / Paraneoplastic Neuropathy
Leukemia is a blood cancer, but in this discussion we’re using it as a model disease. In other words, our goal is to present enough information that people with other types of blood or bone cancers, such as lymphoma, or acute myeloid leukemia can extrapolate the information out to decide for themselves whether the material fits their situation or not.There are several different autoimmune diseases associated with leukemia and other forms of blood/bone cancer. These include paraneoplastic hypokalemia and paraneoplastic neuropathy to name just two. Both of these autoimmune diseases which are intimately related to blood/bone cancer also cause nervous system issues. Indeed, there is a strong and compelling relationship between bone marrow disease and nervous system issues like neuropathy.
Myasthenia Gravis / Thymoma
About 25% of patients who develop thymoma or cancer of the thymus gland, eventually go on to develop myasthenia gravis. And about 15% of patients with myasthenia gravis develop thymoma. But the myasthenia gravis-thymus connection is not readily obvious at first glance. Myasthenia gravis, after all, is a disease that involves the nervous system, specifically acetylcholine receptor dysfunction. It tends to start in the eyes and move downward into the chest as the disease progresses.As we’ve already mentioned above, the thymus gland is mostly regarded by conventional medicine doctors as a useless structure in the adult body. Myasthenia gravis patients who develop thymoma are often advised to have the thymus gland surgically removed. But though it’s true that the thymus gland does, in fact, shrink over time, its importance and relevance in the body is demonstrable through a quick search of the scientific literature. Indeed, myasthenia gravis patients struggle to maintain their focus due to ptosis (drooping of the upper eyelid) caused by disturbances in acetylcholine function and the thymus gland is innervated by acetylcholinergic nerves. Acetylcholine is a main character on the myasthenia gravis stage, so this fact that the thymus gland is connected directly into the cholinergic system is important. Studies have shown that the acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junctions as well as in the thymus gland are both affected by myasthenia gravis. But that’s not all…
The antibodies (B cells) and lymphocytes (T cells) that attack acetylcholine receptors in myasthenia gravis patients are the immune-system-soldier/recruits that are produced in the bone marrow to be sent later to the thymus gland. Both T cells and B cells can be found in the thymus gland, so essentially, though the symptoms of myasthenia gravis are primarily related to the nervous system, the disease itself is rooted in the bone marrow and thymus gland. Anyone with myasthenia gravis might think it trite to distill things down to this level of simplicity, but scientific data supports this idea if you look for it. And we’re not the first ones to note that the bone marrow-nervous system relationship exists.
Antibodies that react with the acetylcholine receptors of human muscle tissue can be found in about 90% of myasthenia gravis patients. These antibodies are unique to myasthenia gravis. So that’s interesting. But maybe the most interesting thing about this statistic is the fact that the anti-acetylcholine-receptor antibodies are not present in every patient who is diagnosed with myasthenia gravis. If 10% of myasthenia gravis sufferers do not have anti-acetylcholine-receptor antibodies, why are they suffering from the disease? What’s going on with 1/10th of the population of myasthenia gravis sufferers? And is it right to assume that these anti-acetylcholine receptors are actually the root cause of this disease and focus exclusively on them for treatment if fully 10% of myasthenia gravis sufferers don’t even have these antibodies?
Perhaps there’s something else going on here.
The thymus gland contains nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and in myasthenia gravis sufferers, the antibodies that react with acetylcholine receptors are present in the thymus gland. And scientists have found that it isn’t possible to induce myasthenia gravis and the antibodies to acetylcholine receptors without the participation of thymus-gland-derived lymphocytes.
It’s important to emphasize the importance of this fact: if scientists are not able to induce myasthenia gravis and the anti-acetylcholine receptor antibodies without the participation of lymphocytes in the thymus gland, then we can easily trace the symptoms of myasthenia gravis back to the bone marrow as location where this disease is most likely to take shape. In other words, we can focus instead on the lymphocytes an wonder what’s going wrong with them. We can also think critically about whether or not there’s a way to heal those lymphocytes.
Atherosclerosis / Osteoporosis / Dementia
Osteoporosis is a disease of the bones. Atherosclerosis is a disease of the blood vessels. And dementia is a disease of the nervous system. But these three diseases are all intimately connected. Some might even say that they are the same disease. And each of these diseases are vitally important in any discussion regarding organophosphates because the most commonly prescribed drugs for post-menopausal osteoporosis are actually organophosphates that have been renamed as bisphosphonates. Read more about bisphosphonates here.But most people (male or female) with osteoporosis also have atherosclerosis. We talk more about that relationship here. And atherosclerosis is essentially the same disease as vascular dementia. And some scientists say that every form of dementia is vascular dementia (and I tend to agree). But let’s talk a bit more about bisphosphonates…
Bisphosphonate drugs like Fosamax and their effects on women with osteoporosis give us a bird’s eye view into the health impact of organophosphate exposure. Bisphosphonates allow us to confirm that indeed, organophosphates do accumulate in the human body. Indeed, that’s the whole purpose of bisphosphonate treatment—to promote the buildup of organophosphates that couple with calcium in disrupted patterns that make the bone tissues appear to be more dense than they actually are on x-rays or MRIs. Most people never get to see their own bones without the assistance of these medical technologies, so patients with osteoporosis are understandably impressed by the apparent density of their bones following bisphosphonate treatment even though the bones are actually more susceptible to fracture than if the patient had received no treatment at all. This is a well-known fact. Doctors know that their bisphosphonate patients are likely to experience a unique type of bone fracture that is unlike a normal bone fracture, but the fracturing of bones probably won’t happen until several years after the patient finished their bisphosphonate treatments. So most of them won’t add it all up to realize that the bisphosphonates caused the fracture. And most of these patients are older, so Big Pharma sees them as a big profit-opportunity.
Many patients and their loved ones have also recognized the connection between dementia and osteoporosis treatments like bisphosphonates. Bisphosphonates that are prescribed to treat osteoporosis will later significantly increase the risk that the patient will develop dementia. The reason why this occurs is fairly straightforward. We go into greater detail on this topic here.
Atherosclerosis is a hardening of the arteries due to a buildup of calcium in the blood vessels. It is essentially the same disease as osteoporosis. The two regularly coexist for a simple reason–if a person is vitamin K2 deficient, they will be able to absorb calcium into the blood supply, but they won’t be able to put that calcium into their bones and teeth. As such, calcium circulates in the blood supply and like an adolescent without supervision, the calcium puts itself into damaging and unproductive endeavors for lack of proper direction. Calcium must be absorbed into the blood supply in order to find its way into the bones, the teeth, and into the neurons and cells where’s it is vitally needed. And vitamin D ensures that calcium is absorbed into the blood from the intestines. Vitamin D must be present in the intestines for this reason, a substance that was meant to be produced by our own bodies when the skin is exposed to sunlight (without sunscreen). From the skin, inactive vitamin D travels through the organs of detoxification–first the liver to become partially activated, and then onward to the kidneys to be fully activated–before settling into the intestines to transport calcium across the membrane into the blood supply. But once calcium is in the blood supply, vitamin K2 is the nutrient that must be present and ready for action in order for calcium to be placed in bone tissues. If vitamin K2 is not present in the blood supply, calcium will linger in the blood vessels and if it stays there too long, it will settle in the vessels to become atherosclerosis or worse, it will begin to calcify organs or glands.
Vitamin K2 is a newly discovered vitamin that is related to vitamin K1 (the blood coagulation vitamin) via its impact on promoting healthy bone tissues. Readers should note that vitamin K2 is a part of the vitamin K complex which are nutrients that deal with bone, bone marrow, and blood.
Vitamin K2 is not available in the average diet. It used to be widely available when animals were grass-fed. A grass-fed cow will produce milk that contains not just vitamin K2, but also iodine, another nutrient that features heavily into our discussion regarding organophosphates. The relationship between vitamin K2 deficiency and iodine deficiency can explain a wide range of different illnesses. But both of these nutrients require an introduction and understanding. After all, we don’t live in an ancient society close to the land eating an ancestral diet. Most people eat highly processed food without even realizing that the food has been processed. And while the people of antiquity did not have to study their nutrients before consuming them and then living a healthy life, modern day people do.
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Nutrient Deficiency Wars
When I first started working as a medical writer over 20 years ago, I had no idea that I would spend so much time writing about nutrients. Indeed, there are a few nutrients that I focus on a lot. Each time I learn that a mere nutrient is the core cause of a disease, I first feel appalled. We live in a world of plenty. No one, especially in the developed world, should be malnourished.But over the years, it’s becoming easier to see, if not impossible to ignore the fact that nutrition is a battleground. Several years ago, a young woman, a student of agricultural sciences, came to a language exchange I was attending. She was studying soil in Mexico and she and I had some interesting discussions about soil.
The soil within which our food is grown, after all, might be regarded as our external metabolism. Everything about our nutrition begins in the soil.
But what if the soil is depleted of nutrients? And what if the government knows that soils are depleted of nutrients like minerals and vitamins? What if the nutritional deficiencies in fresh produce are calculated and maintained by Big Food in order to make Big Pharma more profitable?
This is a serious problem. It is. Indeed, it’s the kind of problem that could make a person weak in the knees for lack of a way to solve it. Not everyone has garden-space after all to grow their own fruits and vegetables. So we’ll talk about how to solve this lack of nutrients in soil in a later discussion using supplements like shilajit or humic / fulvic acid and seawater supplements.
But as if nutrient deficiencies aren’t a serious enough problem, Big Pharma and Big Food have contrived ways to administer poisons en masse that exploit these nutrient deficiencies. Let me put it this way: if you are deficient in iodine or in vitamin K2 then you are significantly more susceptible to bromide and organophosphate toxicity.
Iodine deficiency and vitamin K2 deficiency are just two examples of nutrient deficiencies that have been programmed into the food supply in developed countries. In the 1980s, iodine fortification was ended. Iodine fortification was inexplicably removed from commercial bread products for example. And bromine and bromide were introduced into the food supply. Iodine is an essential nutrient and back in the 1900s iodine deficiency was so common that iodine was the most commonly prescribed “medicine” by doctors in the U.S. But by the 1980s, medical students were being taught that iodine is a toxin. This material found its way into AMA-certified medical curricula as a tongue-in-cheek discussion about how toxin radioactive iodine treatments and diagnostic tests are for patients. A lack of nutrition classes helped solidify this material which would qualify as propaganda since it contains an element of truth without full transparency of data. Radioactive iodine is indeed, one of the most toxic medicines that doctors regularly administer. It kills the thyroid gland. I would never recommend to patients. But natural iodine–the nutrient in the form of Lugol’s iodine which contains both molecular iodine and potassium iodide–is one of the most important nutritional protectors that our bodies need.
If nuclear fallout were to occur, a huge dose of potassium iodide might save you. If you have a severe lung infection or lung disease, a massive dose of potassium iodide might cure. If you have menstruation problems, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, reproductive organ cancer, infertility, breast cancer, asthma, or pneumonia then Lugol’s iodine will be your best friend. All of these diseases can be cured using Lugol’s iodine (with supportive nutrients that we’ll detail in other sections). When you think of potassium iodide (which is one of the two ingredients in Lugol’s iodine), you should think about reproductive organ cures and reproductive hormone balancing effects. But you should also think about respiratory system cures. Lugol’s can be used to cure and protect the body from COVID, for example. One might wonder, in fact, if COVID would’ve ever become a serious issue had the world been better charged up with Lugol’s iodine (or better yet, high dietary consumption of foods that contain iodine like dairy milk from grass-fed cows eating grass from soils with plenty of iodine in it).
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Molecular iodine, the second ingredient in Lugol’s iodine, in contrast, feeds the thyroid gland which means that a deficiency will likely lead to hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, weight gain, thyroid cancers, and a number of other thyroid-related diseases. Indeed, the rise of the obesity epidemic corresponds to the moment in time when Big Food decided in its infinite wisdom to remove iodine fortification from bread products (bread was an excellent carrier for iodine) and put iodine into salt products (salt is a horrible carrier for iodine—the iodine evaporates completely within days of opening a box of salt). Read more about how to use Lugol’s iodine to lose weight easily here.
But before you go buy your first bottle of Lugol’s iodine online (you can’t get it at a pharmacy or a grocery store after all–only petroleum-based povidone iodine which is not bioavailable can be purchased available in pharmacies or grocery stores), you need to understand the Nutrient Wars just a little better.
In the Nutrient Wars, human bodies are first weakened by a nutrient deficiency. This deficiency state comes on slowly over time. Nutrient deficiencies are like that. They’re insidious, slow-to-develop and they produce strange symptoms. So a person who develops these strange symptoms is already weak and sick. But then, these nutrient-deficient-bodies are exposed to synthetic nutrient-poisons that masquerade as the natural nutrient inside the body. These synthetic nutrient-poisons might be sprayed on fields. They might be prescribed as medicines. Synthetic nutrient-poisons might be found in foods or in the water supply. Administration of these synthetic nutrient-poisons is intentional and designed to target nutrient deficiencies that are cultivated (no pun intended) and contrived by Big Pharma in collaboration with Big Ag and Big Food.
So, if you have a nutrient deficiency such as an iodine deficiency, you might be having health issues like reproductive hormone imbalances, thyroid problems, weight problems, or respiratory issues among other things. Your immune system might be low. But then, when you’re exposed to something like bromine / bromide from a nearby crop-spray, for example, suddenly, you become seriously ill.
Bromine, you see, masquerades in the body as iodine. It is in the same family, the halogen elements, as iodine on the periodic table so the body mistakes bromine for iodine easily because on the surface these two atoms look similar. Fluoride and fluorine in the water supply is just as toxic as bromine / bromide, but for simplicity sake, we tend to focus on bromine because if people get a halogen water filter (which would filter both bromine and fluorine out of their water), their main concern is bromine which is in foods and drinks, on fabrics, on furnishings, in swimming pools, in the air (from insecticide sprays). If the body is deficient in iodine, bromine becomes a major issue. And if you’re deficient in iodine and you’re exposed to bromine, you have to reverse these effects slowly by taking Lugol’s iodine to remove bromine from the iodine receptors that it easily occupies. The process of detoxifying from bromine or fluorine exposure can be easy or it can be rocky, but it usually doesn’t last longer than 6 to 8 weeks. Until a person detoxifies and removes the fluorine/bromine from the body, Lugol’s iodine won’t be able to reverse the nutrient deficiency.
As far as we can tell to date, vitamin K2 is to organophosphates what Lugol’s iodine is to methylbromide. Protecting your body from organophosphates means charging your body with certain nutrients and making an effort to avoid taking medications that contain organophosphates or bromide / bromine. You won’t be able to completely avoid organophosphates or bromide / bromine, but you should try to avoid experiencing a direct hit, if you can.
It was literally shocking to us when we researched the drugs that contain bromide/bromine. Many of these drugs are used to treat coughs and colds. In other words, if you’re iodine deficient and you take one of these drugs, you’re taking a poison that will actually cause the symptoms you’re intending to treat. This poison is no joke. Bromism or bromide toxicity was a disease that was well known about 100 years ago as one of the most common causes for psychiatric illness. Read more about drugs that contain bromine / bromide here.
Organophosphate-containing medications like bisphosphonates should also be avoided. And foods that contain phosphates as additives should also be avoided because these food additives obliquely contribute to the problem of organophosphate toxicity. Read more about organophosphate food additives here. But the most surprising thing about organophosphate exposure that we learned about as we researched the material for our book, Root Cause, was the fact that vitamin K2 seems to have a protective effect against organophosphate exposure via its ability to improve bone health naturally. And the real shocker was the fact that vitamin K2 deficiency can make it hard to restore iodine levels in individuals with iodine deficiency. The relationship between these two nutrients and the fact that these nutrient deficiencies are programmed into the food supply so as to make the people of developed countries susceptible to specific synthetic nutrient-poisons that are ubiquitous in food, air, and water, is one of the reasons why we decided to dedicate so much time to writing Root Cause.
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Bones, Blood, Thymus Gland, and Neuroendocrine Connections
Up to this point, we’ve managed to connect the bones and bone marrow with the blood and the thymus gland. But now that we’ve introduced vitamin K2 and iodine, we need to expand the conversation considerably.There are, basically, four nutrients that are going to take center stage in our organophosphate discussion:
- Phosphate (inorganic)
- Calcium
- Iodine
- Vitamin K2
It might help to think about calcium and phosphate as soul mates. Read more about the inspiring love-relationship between these two nutrients here.
Similarly, it might help to think of iodine (specifically Lugol’s iodine, which contains both molecular iodine and potassium iodide) and vitamin K2 as business partners. They work together and they support each other’s endeavors. Their activities are intimately connected in a earth-air-fire kind of way. Iodine, after all, is a mineral that was meant to be present in soil while vitamin K2 is a nutrient that works its miracles in part through chlorophyll, sunlight, and the magical process of fermentation. You can’t really talk about vitamin K2 without referencing its cousin-nutrient, vitamin D which shouldn’t really be considered a vitamin at all, but rather a hormone given our natural ability, as humans, to produce vitamin D naturally in our bodies via exposure to the sun (sans the sunscreen).
So let’s regroup these four nutrients and list them again, just for emphasis:
- Calcium and Phosphate (inorganic)
- Iodine and Vitamin K2
Calcium and inorganic phosphate must be present in the body in order to be healthy, but these nutrients are available in most foods that we eat. It’s unwise to take calcium or phosphorus supplements because these elements exist in the body in a delicate balance that shouldn’t be tampered with unless you’re monitoring their presence with vigilant attention. If you eat a somewhat healthy diet, it’s best to avoid supplementing with calcium or phosphorus / phosphate and allow the body to naturally accept and reject these nutrients as they pass through our long tube (known as the digestive system) from mouth to anus.
But it’s important to realize that calcium in the blood supply inhibits iodine absorption. Calcium in the bones, on the other hand is a good thing. Context matters when we talk about both calcium and phosphate. Calcium in the blood supply puts iodine out of business if vitamin K2 isn’t there to ensure that calcium goes into the bones and teeth rather than lingering in the blood. It is this crucial fact that underlies much of our discussion regarding organophosphate exposure treatments. Calcium absorption from the blood into the bones and teeth, which is modulated by vitamin K2, plays a pivotal role in the body in terms of iodine absorption. A deficiency of either vitamin K2 or iodine leaves the body open and vulnerable to two of the most toxic types of pesticides in use today: bromide-containing insecticides and organophosphates.
The Thyroid-Thymus Gland Relationship
Studies have shown that thymic hormones such as thymulin and thymic peptide release are modulated by thyroid hormones. Triiodthyronine (T3), in particular, seems to play an important role in thymic hormone and peptide release. Indeed, scientists have noted that thymic hormone activity in the body is modulated by other glands in the neuroendocrine system, especially by thyroid hormones. Of course it makes sense that endocrine glands communicate with each other since these glands release hormones into the blood supply, but it takes time for science to uncover these facts. Nonetheless, we need to note that the thyroid gland and the thymus gland have a relationship. They influence each other to give greater credence to the idea that iodine deficiency is a major cause of immune system dysfunction.
The thyroid gland requires molecular iodine as food in order to function properly. If you have a vitamin K2 deficiency though, your body won’t be able to absorb iodine easily because calcium competes with iodine and prevents iodine from being absorbed. And a vitamin K2 deficiency leads to high blood-levels of calcium and low bone-levels of calcium.
Calcium is a nerve-related nutrient. That’s not common knowledge. Most people think of bones and teeth when they think of calcium. But wherever there are acetylcholine neurotransmitter discharges happening, calcium is there. So disruptions in the proper metabolism of calcium causes the body to take strange health trajectories. Calcium supplements can thus be dangerous.
If calcium is present in super-high quantities in the blood, which happens when people take a vitamin D supplement (or worse, a vitamin D plus calcium supplement) without also taking a vitamin K2 supplement to complement the calcium absorption effects of the vitamin D, iodine won’t be properly absorbed, leaving the thyroid gland, thymus gland, other endocrine glands and reproductive organs, immune system, nervous system, circulatory system, respiratory system, etc. in a state of weakness. Thyroid hormones become dysregulated as a result. And then thymus gland peptides and hormones become correspondingly dysregulated as well. An array of diseases spiral out from the chaos. The synthetic nutrient-poisons like bromine / bromide or organophosphates move in to complicate the health situation considerably when these deficiencies reach a certain threshold.
Damages from synthetic nutrient-deficiencies have to be repaired before health is restored. Correcting a nutrient deficiency is relatively straightforward if a person recognizes the problem before it becomes critical. But correcting a deficiency that’s complicated by the presence of synthetic nutrient-poisons in the nutrient receptor sites requires a more focused effort at nutrition and often the administration of herbal medications, vibrational medicines, and more. Nonetheless, the body is designed to heal if given the proper tools. We’ll talk in depth about how to use these tools in the upcoming chapters.
Hypothyroidism leads to low levels of thymulin or low thymic peptide levels in the body. This is relevant both to adults with hypothyroidism as well as to premature infants who have low levels of triiodothyronine (T3). In hyperthyroid patients, thymulin levels tend to be higher than in normal subjects that have normal thyroid function. Hypothyroid patients have lower thymulin levels than patients with normal thyroid function.
Thymulin is a thymus gland peptide with the sequence: Pyro-Glu-Ala-Lys-Ser-Gln-Gly-Gly-Ser-Asn. In order to become active, zinc must be present in the body in adequate quantities. This is one of the reasons why zinc is listed as one of the supporting nutrients for proper iodine absorption. If zinc is not present in the body in adequate quantities, thymulin will be present, but it won’t be biologically active. Even a mild zinc deficiency will lower thymulin levels causing the immune system to become weak and imbalance. Thus, there are reasons why we recommend that people wishing to overcome iodine deficiency and vitamin K2 deficiency take supporting nutrients. The list is not random. Without the supporting nutrients, iodine therapy and vitamin K2 therapy may not have the same results that you’re looking for.
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Detoxification and Protection from Insecticides
Acute organophosphate poisoning causes an initial cholinergic crisis that can evolve into intermediate syndrome which looks identical to myasthenia gravis in terms of symptoms. Organophosphate poisoning does not always cause long-term myasthenia gravis symptoms (which are known as “intermediate syndrome” when the symptoms are caused by an overdose of organophosphates). Whether or not any given organophosphate poisoning patient will develop intermediate syndrome cannot currently be predicted, but the fact that some patients develop intermediate syndrome myasthenia or not is a clue that tells us that some people are at least, somewhat resistant to toxic exposure to organophosphates. What makes them resistant to organophosphate poisoning? That’s a question we attempt to answer in this article and in our book, Root Cause.
As with insecticides like methylbromide and drugs like pyridostigmine bromide that contain bromide / bromine that compete in the body with iodine receptors, organophosphates appear to be more or less toxic to human beings depending on the patient’s dietary deficiencies. Deficiencies of iodine leave the body weak and wanting for any halogen element that has an outer electron shell resembling iodine. So iodine deficiency makes people susceptible to fluoride and bromide toxicity.
Organophosphate exposures seem to also be more toxic when a person who is vitamin K2 deficient is exposed to these toxins. Vitamin K2 pushes calcium into bones which inevitably pulls healthy phosphates in with it causing the bones to be strong, healthy, and nutrient dense with natural, inorganic phosphorus. When the bones are healthy and nutrient dense, the body doesn’t crave organophosphates and instead it works to get rid of organophosphates instead of storing them in bone tissues.
Often, patients (including kids) who have asthma or other types of illness are given steroid medications. When I hear that a patient has been prescribed a steroid medication by a doctor, I always look first at iodine as a natural alternative to steroids because iodine helps the body produce natural “steroids” or rather, natural reproductive hormones. But iodine allows the body to balance itself and as a nutrient it balances health rather than destroying it and causing an addiction as steroid medications do. Sadly, many of the patients who take steroids long-term develop osteoporosis or other bone diseases. And when this happens, instead of prescribing vitamin K2 to cure osteoporosis, leukemia, or whatever the bone disease may be, doctors instead prescribe bisphosphonates which are, as we discussed earlier, organophosphate-containing medications that don’t actually heal the bone tissues, but rather make them more susceptible to a specific type bone fracture later on down the road.
When doctors prescribe medications, they often do so with the intent to heal. And it takes many years for many doctors to realize that their patients aren’t healing, but rather that their patients are getting worse and worse over time. Doctors to recognize the problem and attempt to heal their patients using nutrients or herbs are chastised. Some of them are politically burnt at the stake. So patients do have to be wary. Even over-the counter medications contain toxic substances that have a more pronounced activity on human health than the listed “active” ingredients. For example, giving your teenager dextromethorphan that contains bromide for a harmless cough can cause your child to become depressed and unable to concentrate. The bromide doesn’t go away if the child is deficient in iodine. It can lead to chronic respiratory disease, infertility, and reproductive organ cancer. So, if you’re reading this, be aware that you will not be able to blindly trust the medical establishment to care for your health once you fully acknowledge what the medical establishment is doing to doctors as well as to patients.
Autoimmunity and and Acetylcholine
Acetylcholine is the most important neurotransmitter in the cholinergic nervous system. It plays a vital role in autonomic nervous system function as well as motor function. But a number of immune system cells also manifest components of the cholinergic system. These immune system cells include:- T cells
- B cells
- Macrophages
These cells express both muscarinic and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, choline transporters, choline acetyltransferase, and acetylcholinesterase. These immune cells store and release acetylcholine and are affected by calcium as a signaling molecule. Acetylcholine thus impacts both innate and acquired immunity.
Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that works inside the autonomic nervous system. This means that any disease involving dysautonomia or rather, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, is mediated at least in part, by acetylcholine. That being said, there are experts on the autonomic nervous system like Dr. Francis Pottenger who believed that all diseases are rooted in the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is another big topic that we’ll expand on later. It is the part of our body that functions in the gray-zone between the endocrine glands (which are regarded as material representatives for each of the seven chakras) and the autonomic nerves with the pineal gland sitting at the third eye in the so-called “seat of the soul”. So while this part of the nervous system is (like the thymus gland and the bone marrow), practically unknown and undiscussed in biology classes even in medical schools, the autonomic nervous system is a part of us that can easily link into energetic systems of medicine like Reiki, shamanic medicine, other forms of energy healing, vibrational medicine, hypnotherapy, and more. So if you have a taste for obscure, but fascinating connections, our tour through insecticide exposures and poisonings will give you food for thought.
To bring these ideas into focus, it might help to know that without acetylcholine, you wouldn’t be able to breathe without thinking about it. Without acetylcholine, your food won’t digest and your pupils won’t dilate or constrict unconsciously in response to changes in the amount of light in the environment. Without acetylcholine, the part of you that operates unconsciously, without conscious control starts to disappear.
In shamanic medicine (which is legitimately the oldest system of medicine and the only system of medicine that has existed on every continent), the disappearance of this unconscious part of ourselves would be called soul loss. In modern medicine, the most iconic representation of soul loss is something called resignation syndrome that occurs when the body is overwhelmed with fear or some form of danger (real or merely perceived).
The Origami of Autism: Transforming 2-Dimensional Thinking about ASD into 3-Dimensional Solutions - BUY HERE!Autism has been identified by scientists as a disease that resembles resignation syndrome, but most autoimmune diseases and cancers also resemble resignation syndrome in terms of cellular behaviors and autonomic nervous system behaviors. So, as we bring this chapter to a close, let’s earmark the idea that acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that makes the autonomic nervous system go. And let’s also note that autonomic nervous system dysfunction is almost always a root cause of dysfunctions relating to the organs that operate unconsciously, including the lungs and breath (which can sometimes be consciously overridden if we so choose). Let’s also note that breath and our breath rate and breath depth (which is under unconscious control most of the time) is the main thing that determines whether our tissues are alkaline or acidic. And the fact that most pathogens and cancer cells prefer acidic conditions in order to thrive. And acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter under attack by organophosphates insecticides.
In future discussions, we’ll expand on how to protect yourself and your family from organophosphates.
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Download the Living Database Now to Learn More about Cures for Disease
We've recently released the Living Database, the tool that Lydian and I use to store our data when we research cures for diseases. Sometimes we stumble across natural treatments cures for rare diseases in the scientific literature. If we do, we put in the Living Database. Sometimes we find links to surprising scientific data or even anecdotal reports of a cure for diseases that have been dubbed "incurable" or even, in some cases "untreatable" by doctors. And this tool, the AlivenHealthy Living Database allows us to store this information. Now, we've made the database live so our readers can use it to find cures for disease even if we haven't had a chance to write about it yet. The AlivenHealthy Living Database is an excellent tool for healers and body workers or even just for average people to use on family and friends. If you search for a disease or disorder that isn't in our database, this alerts Lydi and I to the fact that someone in the database user pool is looking for that particular disease. If our client load is low and we have time to do research into that disease, we can update the database immediately with information about diseases that interest Living Database users. Click here to learn more and download the Living Database now.Resources:
• Mocchegiani, E. et al. (1990). Neuroendocrine-thymus interactions. I. In vitro modulation of thymic factor secretion by thyroid hormones. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2184190/
• Fabris, N. et al. (1986). Thyroid function modulates thymic endocrine activity. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3944232/
• Prasad, A. S. (2020). Clinical and immunological effects and biomarkers of zinc deficiency. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/thymulin
• Cordero, O. J. et al. (1998). Thymic Hormones and Peptides. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0122267656005971
• Wulf, G. G. et al. (1996). Paraneoplastic hypokalemia in acute myeloid leukemia: a case of renin activity in AML blast cells. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8841102/
In India, cows are worshipped in part because of their ability to provide for most of the nutrients a person needs. But not all of the cows on the planet today are able to connect humans with healthy patches of earth or with sun-blessed grasses. It isn't the cow's fault.
The thymus gland is located in the chest behind the sternum, though some individuals may have a thymus gland located slightly higher or lower in the chest cavity. This gland plays a vital role in immunity. It functions rather like West Point or some other highly esteemed military school in that it receives T cell “recruits” from the bone marrow tissues. These T cell recruits (known as “T cell precursors”) travel from the bone marrow to the thymus gland to go through a stringent selection and training process. While inside the thymus gland, these T cell recruits will be trained and tested before being released into the wild as soldiers ready to stand sentinel and defend our bodies from pathogenic attack.
Bone marrow is at the core of every human body. You really can’t go any deeper into the body before you start to come back out. Bone marrow is located deep inside our bones. But most people don’t really think about bone marrow unless they’re unfortunate enough to develop leukemia or lymphoma or some other serious blood / bone disease. And like the thymus gland, bone marrow seems to be something that’s totally silent and disconnected from the rest of the body according to conventional medicine doctors. Bones are bones and bone marrow is something that doesn’t exist unless your bone marrow is diseased. The connection between bone marrow and blood diseases like leukemia is not emphasized unless the patient is forced to undergo bone marrow biopsies and stem cell transplantations. And even if a leukemia patient happen to make the connection between healthy bones and healthy blood, the connection is not emphasized because conventional medicine doctors don’t generally work with tools that can heal the bones and thus the blood. If you develop a disease that is rooted in unhealthy bone marrow tissues, it’s very unlikely that your doctor will point out the relationship between your bone tissues and bone marrow and how unhealthy bones lead to unhealthy bone marrow and in turn how unhealthy bone marrow leads to unhealthy blood and an ailing immune system. Doctors, after all, peddle patented pharmaceuticals which are synthetic and therefore unable to to resolve nutrient deficiencies that can only be healed by natural nutrients. Though there are doctors out there who truly wish to heal their patients of disease, Big Pharma punishes doctors who advise their patients on nutrients or medicinals that will cure disease.
Let’s make a metaphor to simplify this thought a bit…
Let’s imagine that you live in a nation with young people who are unhealthy. Let’s say that this nation has some serious issues in terms of nutrition. The government has created a system that yields profits when a citizen is ill. The motivation to make people well is thus removed and most people who are a part of this nation aim to make money by making people sick. Let’s say that this capitalistic model of healthcare is at least as profitable as selling fossil fuels and, to be realistic, let’s also say that most of the medicines are actually made from petroleum products.
In this nation, young people grow up with serious nutrient deficiencies that cause them to have physical and physiological abnormalities. But from this pool of malnourished individuals, you must put together an army to protect the land.
These malnourished individuals who are chosen as recruits must go to a new place at a training facility and try to learn to do many things. They must first learn to identify the enemy. Then, they must learn to use tactics to defeat the enemy. They must learn how to seek out the enemy when the enemy is hiding. And they must train their bodies to be agile and strong. It’s a tall order for a nation of kids that are sick. And it’s a complex riddle to figure out by kids who are being preyed upon by those who claim to protect them too.
This metaphor might seem all too real. But if the body was like a nation trying to defend itself and if your body had to use this pool of sick recruits to defend itself from all forms of attack, the body would do the best that it could with these sick recruits.
It isn’t hard to imagine that a nation with ailing kids would have some unique security issues that would arise. Some of those soldiers might get confused about whether a given entity is an enemy or not. Other soldiers might have mood problems that end with explosive, over-reactive, or even fatal behaviors. In terms of human health, it’s obvious from this metaphor that a number of different diseases and symptoms could develop out of the problem of ailing bone marrow and sick bones since sick bones would mean sick bone marrow. And sick bone marrow would mean sick soldiers. And so, we’ll begin this discussion by paying homage to this most important relationship at the core of our structure (the bone marrow) and at the heart of the matter (the thymus gland). This seems like a thought-provoking vantage point where we can begin to talk honestly and intelligently about organophosphates.
Our view of human health is holographic in that we look for metaphors and analogous structures or functions even as we drill down into the scientific data to look at the entire body, the organs, tissues, the cells, and then molecules. Rather than dividing our thoughts up into “systems” of the body or focusing exclusively, for example, on nutrients, we look for novel ways to relate one piece of data to another piece of data to mix up the prevailing way of thinking about disease. This is an intentional process, though sometimes, bits of information that we string together in these novel ways may seem awkwardly connected. In all cases, our goal is to demonstrate that its possible to look at the diseases, syndromes, and symptoms that we feature from other perspectives with surprising resonance from octave to the one above and the one below.
A cell might be a holograph of the entire body. And as the patient, you might choose to focus your treatments on cells rather that focusing your treatment approach on the entire body. Just as a sick nation might create an illness in its people through greed, a poor diet based on indulgence in non-nutritious foods might create an illness in the very bones of the human body. This is holographic thinking and it can be useful in solving problems that have been deemed “unsolveable”.
One of the most important things that organophosphates do in the body is disrupt the natural production of bone tissues. Normally, you see, our bones need inorganic phosphorus / phosphates in combination with calcium, but under certain conditions that we’re going to describe later, our bodies become weakened by a lack of essential nutrients and willing to absorb and use organic phosphorus / organophosphates. How and why this weakness occurs is something that we’re going to expand on in depth in the pages that come. Don’t assume that your body needs more phosphorus or phosphates though because the equation is just a bit more complicated than that.
But as we introduce this topic, we wish to reconfigure the way that our readers are looking at the human body. In this article, we’re going to ignore some of the traditional boundaries around health and expand beyond isolationist concepts like the organs and “systems” and even beyond “holism” into alternative models of medicine and beyond.
In our model of disease that we use throughout this website, every cancer has one or more corresponding autoimmune diseases connected to it. And in turn, every autoimmune disease has one or more types of cancer associated with it too. The cancer-autoimmune disease connection is highlighted in the literature under the term “paraneoplastic”. Read more about paraneoplastic autoimmune diseases here. For now, just note that cancer and autoimmunity are two sides of the same coin. They are essentially the same disease.
There are several different autoimmune diseases associated with leukemia and other forms of blood/bone cancer. These include paraneoplastic hypokalemia and paraneoplastic neuropathy to name just two. Both of these autoimmune diseases which are intimately related to blood/bone cancer also cause nervous system issues. Indeed, there is a strong and compelling relationship between bone marrow disease and nervous system issues like neuropathy.
As we’ve already mentioned above, the thymus gland is mostly regarded by conventional medicine doctors as a useless structure in the adult body. Myasthenia gravis patients who develop thymoma are often advised to have the thymus gland surgically removed. But though it’s true that the thymus gland does, in fact, shrink over time, its importance and relevance in the body is demonstrable through a quick search of the scientific literature. Indeed, myasthenia gravis patients struggle to maintain their focus due to ptosis (drooping of the upper eyelid) caused by disturbances in acetylcholine function and the thymus gland is innervated by acetylcholinergic nerves. Acetylcholine is a main character on the myasthenia gravis stage, so this fact that the thymus gland is connected directly into the cholinergic system is important. Studies have shown that the acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junctions as well as in the thymus gland are both affected by myasthenia gravis. But that’s not all…
The antibodies (B cells) and lymphocytes (T cells) that attack acetylcholine receptors in myasthenia gravis patients are the immune-system-soldier/recruits that are produced in the bone marrow to be sent later to the thymus gland. Both T cells and B cells can be found in the thymus gland, so essentially, though the symptoms of myasthenia gravis are primarily related to the nervous system, the disease itself is rooted in the bone marrow and thymus gland. Anyone with myasthenia gravis might think it trite to distill things down to this level of simplicity, but scientific data supports this idea if you look for it. And we’re not the first ones to note that the bone marrow-nervous system relationship exists.
Antibodies that react with the acetylcholine receptors of human muscle tissue can be found in about 90% of myasthenia gravis patients. These antibodies are unique to myasthenia gravis. So that’s interesting. But maybe the most interesting thing about this statistic is the fact that the anti-acetylcholine-receptor antibodies are not present in every patient who is diagnosed with myasthenia gravis. If 10% of myasthenia gravis sufferers do not have anti-acetylcholine-receptor antibodies, why are they suffering from the disease? What’s going on with 1/10th of the population of myasthenia gravis sufferers? And is it right to assume that these anti-acetylcholine receptors are actually the root cause of this disease and focus exclusively on them for treatment if fully 10% of myasthenia gravis sufferers don’t even have these antibodies?
Perhaps there’s something else going on here.
The thymus gland contains nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and in myasthenia gravis sufferers, the antibodies that react with acetylcholine receptors are present in the thymus gland. And scientists have found that it isn’t possible to induce myasthenia gravis and the antibodies to acetylcholine receptors without the participation of thymus-gland-derived lymphocytes.
It’s important to emphasize the importance of this fact: if scientists are not able to induce myasthenia gravis and the anti-acetylcholine receptor antibodies without the participation of lymphocytes in the thymus gland, then we can easily trace the symptoms of myasthenia gravis back to the bone marrow as location where this disease is most likely to take shape. In other words, we can focus instead on the lymphocytes an wonder what’s going wrong with them. We can also think critically about whether or not there’s a way to heal those lymphocytes.
But most people (male or female) with osteoporosis also have atherosclerosis. We talk more about that relationship here. And atherosclerosis is essentially the same disease as vascular dementia. And some scientists say that every form of dementia is vascular dementia (and I tend to agree). But let’s talk a bit more about bisphosphonates…
Bisphosphonate drugs like Fosamax and their effects on women with osteoporosis give us a bird’s eye view into the health impact of organophosphate exposure. Bisphosphonates allow us to confirm that indeed, organophosphates do accumulate in the human body. Indeed, that’s the whole purpose of bisphosphonate treatment—to promote the buildup of organophosphates that couple with calcium in disrupted patterns that make the bone tissues appear to be more dense than they actually are on x-rays or MRIs. Most people never get to see their own bones without the assistance of these medical technologies, so patients with osteoporosis are understandably impressed by the apparent density of their bones following bisphosphonate treatment even though the bones are actually more susceptible to fracture than if the patient had received no treatment at all. This is a well-known fact. Doctors know that their bisphosphonate patients are likely to experience a unique type of bone fracture that is unlike a normal bone fracture, but the fracturing of bones probably won’t happen until several years after the patient finished their bisphosphonate treatments. So most of them won’t add it all up to realize that the bisphosphonates caused the fracture. And most of these patients are older, so Big Pharma sees them as a big profit-opportunity.
Many patients and their loved ones have also recognized the connection between dementia and osteoporosis treatments like bisphosphonates. Bisphosphonates that are prescribed to treat osteoporosis will later significantly increase the risk that the patient will develop dementia. The reason why this occurs is fairly straightforward. We go into greater detail on this topic here.
Atherosclerosis is a hardening of the arteries due to a buildup of calcium in the blood vessels. It is essentially the same disease as osteoporosis. The two regularly coexist for a simple reason–if a person is vitamin K2 deficient, they will be able to absorb calcium into the blood supply, but they won’t be able to put that calcium into their bones and teeth. As such, calcium circulates in the blood supply and like an adolescent without supervision, the calcium puts itself into damaging and unproductive endeavors for lack of proper direction. Calcium must be absorbed into the blood supply in order to find its way into the bones, the teeth, and into the neurons and cells where’s it is vitally needed. And vitamin D ensures that calcium is absorbed into the blood from the intestines. Vitamin D must be present in the intestines for this reason, a substance that was meant to be produced by our own bodies when the skin is exposed to sunlight (without sunscreen). From the skin, inactive vitamin D travels through the organs of detoxification–first the liver to become partially activated, and then onward to the kidneys to be fully activated–before settling into the intestines to transport calcium across the membrane into the blood supply. But once calcium is in the blood supply, vitamin K2 is the nutrient that must be present and ready for action in order for calcium to be placed in bone tissues. If vitamin K2 is not present in the blood supply, calcium will linger in the blood vessels and if it stays there too long, it will settle in the vessels to become atherosclerosis or worse, it will begin to calcify organs or glands.
Vitamin K2 is a newly discovered vitamin that is related to vitamin K1 (the blood coagulation vitamin) via its impact on promoting healthy bone tissues. Readers should note that vitamin K2 is a part of the vitamin K complex which are nutrients that deal with bone, bone marrow, and blood.
Vitamin K2 is not available in the average diet. It used to be widely available when animals were grass-fed. A grass-fed cow will produce milk that contains not just vitamin K2, but also iodine, another nutrient that features heavily into our discussion regarding organophosphates. The relationship between vitamin K2 deficiency and iodine deficiency can explain a wide range of different illnesses. But both of these nutrients require an introduction and understanding. After all, we don’t live in an ancient society close to the land eating an ancestral diet. Most people eat highly processed food without even realizing that the food has been processed. And while the people of antiquity did not have to study their nutrients before consuming them and then living a healthy life, modern day people do.
But over the years, it’s becoming easier to see, if not impossible to ignore the fact that nutrition is a battleground. Several years ago, a young woman, a student of agricultural sciences, came to a language exchange I was attending. She was studying soil in Mexico and she and I had some interesting discussions about soil.
The soil within which our food is grown, after all, might be regarded as our external metabolism. Everything about our nutrition begins in the soil.
But what if the soil is depleted of nutrients? And what if the government knows that soils are depleted of nutrients like minerals and vitamins? What if the nutritional deficiencies in fresh produce are calculated and maintained by Big Food in order to make Big Pharma more profitable?
This is a serious problem. It is. Indeed, it’s the kind of problem that could make a person weak in the knees for lack of a way to solve it. Not everyone has garden-space after all to grow their own fruits and vegetables. So we’ll talk about how to solve this lack of nutrients in soil in a later discussion using supplements like shilajit or humic / fulvic acid and seawater supplements.
But as if nutrient deficiencies aren’t a serious enough problem, Big Pharma and Big Food have contrived ways to administer poisons en masse that exploit these nutrient deficiencies. Let me put it this way: if you are deficient in iodine or in vitamin K2 then you are significantly more susceptible to bromide and organophosphate toxicity.
Iodine deficiency and vitamin K2 deficiency are just two examples of nutrient deficiencies that have been programmed into the food supply in developed countries. In the 1980s, iodine fortification was ended. Iodine fortification was inexplicably removed from commercial bread products for example. And bromine and bromide were introduced into the food supply. Iodine is an essential nutrient and back in the 1900s iodine deficiency was so common that iodine was the most commonly prescribed “medicine” by doctors in the U.S. But by the 1980s, medical students were being taught that iodine is a toxin. This material found its way into AMA-certified medical curricula as a tongue-in-cheek discussion about how toxin radioactive iodine treatments and diagnostic tests are for patients. A lack of nutrition classes helped solidify this material which would qualify as propaganda since it contains an element of truth without full transparency of data. Radioactive iodine is indeed, one of the most toxic medicines that doctors regularly administer. It kills the thyroid gland. I would never recommend to patients. But natural iodine–the nutrient in the form of Lugol’s iodine which contains both molecular iodine and potassium iodide–is one of the most important nutritional protectors that our bodies need.
If nuclear fallout were to occur, a huge dose of potassium iodide might save you. If you have a severe lung infection or lung disease, a massive dose of potassium iodide might cure. If you have menstruation problems, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, reproductive organ cancer, infertility, breast cancer, asthma, or pneumonia then Lugol’s iodine will be your best friend. All of these diseases can be cured using Lugol’s iodine (with supportive nutrients that we’ll detail in other sections). When you think of potassium iodide (which is one of the two ingredients in Lugol’s iodine), you should think about reproductive organ cures and reproductive hormone balancing effects. But you should also think about respiratory system cures. Lugol’s can be used to cure and protect the body from COVID, for example. One might wonder, in fact, if COVID would’ve ever become a serious issue had the world been better charged up with Lugol’s iodine (or better yet, high dietary consumption of foods that contain iodine like dairy milk from grass-fed cows eating grass from soils with plenty of iodine in it).
Molecular iodine, the second ingredient in Lugol’s iodine, in contrast, feeds the thyroid gland which means that a deficiency will likely lead to hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, weight gain, thyroid cancers, and a number of other thyroid-related diseases. Indeed, the rise of the obesity epidemic corresponds to the moment in time when Big Food decided in its infinite wisdom to remove iodine fortification from bread products (bread was an excellent carrier for iodine) and put iodine into salt products (salt is a horrible carrier for iodine—the iodine evaporates completely within days of opening a box of salt). Read more about how to use Lugol’s iodine to lose weight easily here.
But before you go buy your first bottle of Lugol’s iodine online (you can’t get it at a pharmacy or a grocery store after all–only petroleum-based povidone iodine which is not bioavailable can be purchased available in pharmacies or grocery stores), you need to understand the Nutrient Wars just a little better.
In the Nutrient Wars, human bodies are first weakened by a nutrient deficiency. This deficiency state comes on slowly over time. Nutrient deficiencies are like that. They’re insidious, slow-to-develop and they produce strange symptoms. So a person who develops these strange symptoms is already weak and sick. But then, these nutrient-deficient-bodies are exposed to synthetic nutrient-poisons that masquerade as the natural nutrient inside the body. These synthetic nutrient-poisons might be sprayed on fields. They might be prescribed as medicines. Synthetic nutrient-poisons might be found in foods or in the water supply. Administration of these synthetic nutrient-poisons is intentional and designed to target nutrient deficiencies that are cultivated (no pun intended) and contrived by Big Pharma in collaboration with Big Ag and Big Food.
So, if you have a nutrient deficiency such as an iodine deficiency, you might be having health issues like reproductive hormone imbalances, thyroid problems, weight problems, or respiratory issues among other things. Your immune system might be low. But then, when you’re exposed to something like bromine / bromide from a nearby crop-spray, for example, suddenly, you become seriously ill.
Bromine, you see, masquerades in the body as iodine. It is in the same family, the halogen elements, as iodine on the periodic table so the body mistakes bromine for iodine easily because on the surface these two atoms look similar. Fluoride and fluorine in the water supply is just as toxic as bromine / bromide, but for simplicity sake, we tend to focus on bromine because if people get a halogen water filter (which would filter both bromine and fluorine out of their water), their main concern is bromine which is in foods and drinks, on fabrics, on furnishings, in swimming pools, in the air (from insecticide sprays). If the body is deficient in iodine, bromine becomes a major issue. And if you’re deficient in iodine and you’re exposed to bromine, you have to reverse these effects slowly by taking Lugol’s iodine to remove bromine from the iodine receptors that it easily occupies. The process of detoxifying from bromine or fluorine exposure can be easy or it can be rocky, but it usually doesn’t last longer than 6 to 8 weeks. Until a person detoxifies and removes the fluorine/bromine from the body, Lugol’s iodine won’t be able to reverse the nutrient deficiency.
As far as we can tell to date, vitamin K2 is to organophosphates what Lugol’s iodine is to methylbromide. Protecting your body from organophosphates means charging your body with certain nutrients and making an effort to avoid taking medications that contain organophosphates or bromide / bromine. You won’t be able to completely avoid organophosphates or bromide / bromine, but you should try to avoid experiencing a direct hit, if you can.
It was literally shocking to us when we researched the drugs that contain bromide/bromine. Many of these drugs are used to treat coughs and colds. In other words, if you’re iodine deficient and you take one of these drugs, you’re taking a poison that will actually cause the symptoms you’re intending to treat. This poison is no joke. Bromism or bromide toxicity was a disease that was well known about 100 years ago as one of the most common causes for psychiatric illness. Read more about drugs that contain bromine / bromide here.
Organophosphate-containing medications like bisphosphonates should also be avoided. And foods that contain phosphates as additives should also be avoided because these food additives obliquely contribute to the problem of organophosphate toxicity. Read more about organophosphate food additives here. But the most surprising thing about organophosphate exposure that we learned about as we researched the material for our book, Root Cause, was the fact that vitamin K2 seems to have a protective effect against organophosphate exposure via its ability to improve bone health naturally. And the real shocker was the fact that vitamin K2 deficiency can make it hard to restore iodine levels in individuals with iodine deficiency. The relationship between these two nutrients and the fact that these nutrient deficiencies are programmed into the food supply so as to make the people of developed countries susceptible to specific synthetic nutrient-poisons that are ubiquitous in food, air, and water, is one of the reasons why we decided to dedicate so much time to writing Root Cause.
There are, basically, four nutrients that are going to take center stage in our organophosphate discussion:
It might help to think about calcium and phosphate as soul mates. Read more about the inspiring love-relationship between these two nutrients here.
Similarly, it might help to think of iodine (specifically Lugol’s iodine, which contains both molecular iodine and potassium iodide) and vitamin K2 as business partners. They work together and they support each other’s endeavors. Their activities are intimately connected in a earth-air-fire kind of way. Iodine, after all, is a mineral that was meant to be present in soil while vitamin K2 is a nutrient that works its miracles in part through chlorophyll, sunlight, and the magical process of fermentation. You can’t really talk about vitamin K2 without referencing its cousin-nutrient, vitamin D which shouldn’t really be considered a vitamin at all, but rather a hormone given our natural ability, as humans, to produce vitamin D naturally in our bodies via exposure to the sun (sans the sunscreen).
So let’s regroup these four nutrients and list them again, just for emphasis:
Calcium and inorganic phosphate must be present in the body in order to be healthy, but these nutrients are available in most foods that we eat. It’s unwise to take calcium or phosphorus supplements because these elements exist in the body in a delicate balance that shouldn’t be tampered with unless you’re monitoring their presence with vigilant attention. If you eat a somewhat healthy diet, it’s best to avoid supplementing with calcium or phosphorus / phosphate and allow the body to naturally accept and reject these nutrients as they pass through our long tube (known as the digestive system) from mouth to anus.
But it’s important to realize that calcium in the blood supply inhibits iodine absorption. Calcium in the bones, on the other hand is a good thing. Context matters when we talk about both calcium and phosphate. Calcium in the blood supply puts iodine out of business if vitamin K2 isn’t there to ensure that calcium goes into the bones and teeth rather than lingering in the blood. It is this crucial fact that underlies much of our discussion regarding organophosphate exposure treatments. Calcium absorption from the blood into the bones and teeth, which is modulated by vitamin K2, plays a pivotal role in the body in terms of iodine absorption. A deficiency of either vitamin K2 or iodine leaves the body open and vulnerable to two of the most toxic types of pesticides in use today: bromide-containing insecticides and organophosphates.
Studies have shown that thymic hormones such as thymulin and thymic peptide release are modulated by thyroid hormones. Triiodthyronine (T3), in particular, seems to play an important role in thymic hormone and peptide release. Indeed, scientists have noted that thymic hormone activity in the body is modulated by other glands in the neuroendocrine system, especially by thyroid hormones. Of course it makes sense that endocrine glands communicate with each other since these glands release hormones into the blood supply, but it takes time for science to uncover these facts. Nonetheless, we need to note that the thyroid gland and the thymus gland have a relationship. They influence each other to give greater credence to the idea that iodine deficiency is a major cause of immune system dysfunction.
The thyroid gland requires molecular iodine as food in order to function properly. If you have a vitamin K2 deficiency though, your body won’t be able to absorb iodine easily because calcium competes with iodine and prevents iodine from being absorbed. And a vitamin K2 deficiency leads to high blood-levels of calcium and low bone-levels of calcium.
Calcium is a nerve-related nutrient. That’s not common knowledge. Most people think of bones and teeth when they think of calcium. But wherever there are acetylcholine neurotransmitter discharges happening, calcium is there. So disruptions in the proper metabolism of calcium causes the body to take strange health trajectories. Calcium supplements can thus be dangerous.
If calcium is present in super-high quantities in the blood, which happens when people take a vitamin D supplement (or worse, a vitamin D plus calcium supplement) without also taking a vitamin K2 supplement to complement the calcium absorption effects of the vitamin D, iodine won’t be properly absorbed, leaving the thyroid gland, thymus gland, other endocrine glands and reproductive organs, immune system, nervous system, circulatory system, respiratory system, etc. in a state of weakness. Thyroid hormones become dysregulated as a result. And then thymus gland peptides and hormones become correspondingly dysregulated as well. An array of diseases spiral out from the chaos. The synthetic nutrient-poisons like bromine / bromide or organophosphates move in to complicate the health situation considerably when these deficiencies reach a certain threshold.
Damages from synthetic nutrient-deficiencies have to be repaired before health is restored. Correcting a nutrient deficiency is relatively straightforward if a person recognizes the problem before it becomes critical. But correcting a deficiency that’s complicated by the presence of synthetic nutrient-poisons in the nutrient receptor sites requires a more focused effort at nutrition and often the administration of herbal medications, vibrational medicines, and more. Nonetheless, the body is designed to heal if given the proper tools. We’ll talk in depth about how to use these tools in the upcoming chapters.
Hypothyroidism leads to low levels of thymulin or low thymic peptide levels in the body. This is relevant both to adults with hypothyroidism as well as to premature infants who have low levels of triiodothyronine (T3). In hyperthyroid patients, thymulin levels tend to be higher than in normal subjects that have normal thyroid function. Hypothyroid patients have lower thymulin levels than patients with normal thyroid function.
Thymulin is a thymus gland peptide with the sequence: Pyro-Glu-Ala-Lys-Ser-Gln-Gly-Gly-Ser-Asn. In order to become active, zinc must be present in the body in adequate quantities. This is one of the reasons why zinc is listed as one of the supporting nutrients for proper iodine absorption. If zinc is not present in the body in adequate quantities, thymulin will be present, but it won’t be biologically active. Even a mild zinc deficiency will lower thymulin levels causing the immune system to become weak and imbalance. Thus, there are reasons why we recommend that people wishing to overcome iodine deficiency and vitamin K2 deficiency take supporting nutrients. The list is not random. Without the supporting nutrients, iodine therapy and vitamin K2 therapy may not have the same results that you’re looking for.
Acute organophosphate poisoning causes an initial cholinergic crisis that can evolve into intermediate syndrome which looks identical to myasthenia gravis in terms of symptoms. Organophosphate poisoning does not always cause long-term myasthenia gravis symptoms (which are known as “intermediate syndrome” when the symptoms are caused by an overdose of organophosphates). Whether or not any given organophosphate poisoning patient will develop intermediate syndrome cannot currently be predicted, but the fact that some patients develop intermediate syndrome myasthenia or not is a clue that tells us that some people are at least, somewhat resistant to toxic exposure to organophosphates. What makes them resistant to organophosphate poisoning? That’s a question we attempt to answer in this article and in our book, Root Cause.
As with insecticides like methylbromide and drugs like pyridostigmine bromide that contain bromide / bromine that compete in the body with iodine receptors, organophosphates appear to be more or less toxic to human beings depending on the patient’s dietary deficiencies. Deficiencies of iodine leave the body weak and wanting for any halogen element that has an outer electron shell resembling iodine. So iodine deficiency makes people susceptible to fluoride and bromide toxicity.
Organophosphate exposures seem to also be more toxic when a person who is vitamin K2 deficient is exposed to these toxins. Vitamin K2 pushes calcium into bones which inevitably pulls healthy phosphates in with it causing the bones to be strong, healthy, and nutrient dense with natural, inorganic phosphorus. When the bones are healthy and nutrient dense, the body doesn’t crave organophosphates and instead it works to get rid of organophosphates instead of storing them in bone tissues.
Often, patients (including kids) who have asthma or other types of illness are given steroid medications. When I hear that a patient has been prescribed a steroid medication by a doctor, I always look first at iodine as a natural alternative to steroids because iodine helps the body produce natural “steroids” or rather, natural reproductive hormones. But iodine allows the body to balance itself and as a nutrient it balances health rather than destroying it and causing an addiction as steroid medications do. Sadly, many of the patients who take steroids long-term develop osteoporosis or other bone diseases. And when this happens, instead of prescribing vitamin K2 to cure osteoporosis, leukemia, or whatever the bone disease may be, doctors instead prescribe bisphosphonates which are, as we discussed earlier, organophosphate-containing medications that don’t actually heal the bone tissues, but rather make them more susceptible to a specific type bone fracture later on down the road.
When doctors prescribe medications, they often do so with the intent to heal. And it takes many years for many doctors to realize that their patients aren’t healing, but rather that their patients are getting worse and worse over time. Doctors to recognize the problem and attempt to heal their patients using nutrients or herbs are chastised. Some of them are politically burnt at the stake. So patients do have to be wary. Even over-the counter medications contain toxic substances that have a more pronounced activity on human health than the listed “active” ingredients. For example, giving your teenager dextromethorphan that contains bromide for a harmless cough can cause your child to become depressed and unable to concentrate. The bromide doesn’t go away if the child is deficient in iodine. It can lead to chronic respiratory disease, infertility, and reproductive organ cancer. So, if you’re reading this, be aware that you will not be able to blindly trust the medical establishment to care for your health once you fully acknowledge what the medical establishment is doing to doctors as well as to patients.
These cells express both muscarinic and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, choline transporters, choline acetyltransferase, and acetylcholinesterase. These immune cells store and release acetylcholine and are affected by calcium as a signaling molecule. Acetylcholine thus impacts both innate and acquired immunity.
Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that works inside the autonomic nervous system. This means that any disease involving dysautonomia or rather, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, is mediated at least in part, by acetylcholine. That being said, there are experts on the autonomic nervous system like Dr. Francis Pottenger who believed that all diseases are rooted in the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is another big topic that we’ll expand on later. It is the part of our body that functions in the gray-zone between the endocrine glands (which are regarded as material representatives for each of the seven chakras) and the autonomic nerves with the pineal gland sitting at the third eye in the so-called “seat of the soul”. So while this part of the nervous system is (like the thymus gland and the bone marrow), practically unknown and undiscussed in biology classes even in medical schools, the autonomic nervous system is a part of us that can easily link into energetic systems of medicine like Reiki, shamanic medicine, other forms of energy healing, vibrational medicine, hypnotherapy, and more. So if you have a taste for obscure, but fascinating connections, our tour through insecticide exposures and poisonings will give you food for thought.
To bring these ideas into focus, it might help to know that without acetylcholine, you wouldn’t be able to breathe without thinking about it. Without acetylcholine, your food won’t digest and your pupils won’t dilate or constrict unconsciously in response to changes in the amount of light in the environment. Without acetylcholine, the part of you that operates unconsciously, without conscious control starts to disappear.
In shamanic medicine (which is legitimately the oldest system of medicine and the only system of medicine that has existed on every continent), the disappearance of this unconscious part of ourselves would be called soul loss. In modern medicine, the most iconic representation of soul loss is something called resignation syndrome that occurs when the body is overwhelmed with fear or some form of danger (real or merely perceived).
Autism has been identified by scientists as a disease that resembles resignation syndrome, but most autoimmune diseases and cancers also resemble resignation syndrome in terms of cellular behaviors and autonomic nervous system behaviors. So, as we bring this chapter to a close, let’s earmark the idea that acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that makes the autonomic nervous system go. And let’s also note that autonomic nervous system dysfunction is almost always a root cause of dysfunctions relating to the organs that operate unconsciously, including the lungs and breath (which can sometimes be consciously overridden if we so choose). Let’s also note that breath and our breath rate and breath depth (which is under unconscious control most of the time) is the main thing that determines whether our tissues are alkaline or acidic. And the fact that most pathogens and cancer cells prefer acidic conditions in order to thrive. And acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter under attack by organophosphates insecticides.
In future discussions, we’ll expand on how to protect yourself and your family from organophosphates.
Resources:
• Rosenfeld, M. R. and Dalmau, J. (2010). Paraneoplastic Neurological Disorders in Leukemia and Lymphoma. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7668-0_20
• Romi, F. (2011). Thymoma in myasthenia gravis: from diagnosis to treatment. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21860784/
• Aharonov, A. et al. (1975). Immunological relationship between acetylcholine receptor and thymus: a possible significance in myasthenia gravis. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1055418/
• Lennon V. A. (1976). Immunology of the acetylcholine receptor. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/61167/
• Stojanovic, O. I. et al. (2011). Association between atherosclerosis and osteoporosis, the role of vitamin D. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258717/
• Chaurasia, D. et al. (2018). Severe Organophosphate Poisoning with Acute Cholinergic Crisis, Intermediate Syndrome, and Organophosphate Induced Long-Term Ptosis.Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31313560/
• Mashimo, M. et al. (2021). Regulation of Immune Functions by Non-Neuronal Acetylcholine (ACh) via Muscarinic and Nicotinic ACh Receptors. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34202925/#:~:text=Acetylcholine%20(ACh)%20is%20the%20classical,regulate%20various%20immune%20cell%20functions.
• Fabris, N. et al. (1989). Thyroid-Thymus Interactions During Development and Aging. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2722140
BEFORE YOU READ THIS ARTICLE...
Be sure to take a look at a few of our e-Books titles below that might pertain to your health search:
Be sure to take a look at a few of our e-Books titles below that might pertain to your health search:
In India, cows are worshipped in part because of their ability to provide for most of the nutrients a person needs. But not all of the cows on the planet today are able to connect humans with healthy patches of earth or with sun-blessed grasses. It isn't the cow's fault.Got Deficiency?
A long, long time ago, in antiquity (or so it seems), the cow produced milk. And the milk contained many nutrients that the body needed in order to be healthy. Back in the day, milk from a cow was a major source of sustenance. The nutrients in the milk came initially from the soil and from the sun (in the form of chlorophyll which was consumed by the cow as grass). Iodine and vitamin K2 were two of these substances that are now practically non-existent in milk that comes from cows raised on industrial farms. But we'll come back to that later. The thymus gland, is a seldom-acknowledged, mostly forgotten structure in the body that is at the core of any discussion involving bones. This gland, which is located in front of the heart (one might say that it is the material, glandular representative of the heart chakra), plays a vital role in immunity. In diseases like Myasthenia Gravis, for example, the thymus gland is central to the plot, though it is mostly silent unless it becomes seriously inflamed or if thymus gland cancer develops. In conventional medicine, future doctors are taught that the thymus gland is nearly useless after childhood and thymectomies (surgical removal of the thymus gland) are routinely performed with the same casual approach given to gallbladder removal (both surgeries are generally unnecessary and harmful to general human health). Removal of the thymus gland is very difficult though. Often bits and pieces are left behind which means that even after patients endure a thymectomy they often have a long road ahead of them involving treatments that won’t work or additional surgeries to mitigate the problem of inflamed or cancerous thymus gland tissues. As such, treating the core issue of thymus gland problems to resolve thymus gland inflammation is important, even in patients whose doctors attempt to remove the thymus gland.The thymus gland is located in the chest behind the sternum, though some individuals may have a thymus gland located slightly higher or lower in the chest cavity. This gland plays a vital role in immunity. It functions rather like West Point or some other highly esteemed military school in that it receives T cell “recruits” from the bone marrow tissues. These T cell recruits (known as “T cell precursors”) travel from the bone marrow to the thymus gland to go through a stringent selection and training process. While inside the thymus gland, these T cell recruits will be trained and tested before being released into the wild as soldiers ready to stand sentinel and defend our bodies from pathogenic attack.
Bone marrow is at the core of every human body. You really can’t go any deeper into the body before you start to come back out. Bone marrow is located deep inside our bones. But most people don’t really think about bone marrow unless they’re unfortunate enough to develop leukemia or lymphoma or some other serious blood / bone disease. And like the thymus gland, bone marrow seems to be something that’s totally silent and disconnected from the rest of the body according to conventional medicine doctors. Bones are bones and bone marrow is something that doesn’t exist unless your bone marrow is diseased. The connection between bone marrow and blood diseases like leukemia is not emphasized unless the patient is forced to undergo bone marrow biopsies and stem cell transplantations. And even if a leukemia patient happen to make the connection between healthy bones and healthy blood, the connection is not emphasized because conventional medicine doctors don’t generally work with tools that can heal the bones and thus the blood. If you develop a disease that is rooted in unhealthy bone marrow tissues, it’s very unlikely that your doctor will point out the relationship between your bone tissues and bone marrow and how unhealthy bones lead to unhealthy bone marrow and in turn how unhealthy bone marrow leads to unhealthy blood and an ailing immune system. Doctors, after all, peddle patented pharmaceuticals which are synthetic and therefore unable to to resolve nutrient deficiencies that can only be healed by natural nutrients. Though there are doctors out there who truly wish to heal their patients of disease, Big Pharma punishes doctors who advise their patients on nutrients or medicinals that will cure disease.
Let’s make a metaphor to simplify this thought a bit…
Let’s imagine that you live in a nation with young people who are unhealthy. Let’s say that this nation has some serious issues in terms of nutrition. The government has created a system that yields profits when a citizen is ill. The motivation to make people well is thus removed and most people who are a part of this nation aim to make money by making people sick. Let’s say that this capitalistic model of healthcare is at least as profitable as selling fossil fuels and, to be realistic, let’s also say that most of the medicines are actually made from petroleum products.
In this nation, young people grow up with serious nutrient deficiencies that cause them to have physical and physiological abnormalities. But from this pool of malnourished individuals, you must put together an army to protect the land.
These malnourished individuals who are chosen as recruits must go to a new place at a training facility and try to learn to do many things. They must first learn to identify the enemy. Then, they must learn to use tactics to defeat the enemy. They must learn how to seek out the enemy when the enemy is hiding. And they must train their bodies to be agile and strong. It’s a tall order for a nation of kids that are sick. And it’s a complex riddle to figure out by kids who are being preyed upon by those who claim to protect them too.
This metaphor might seem all too real. But if the body was like a nation trying to defend itself and if your body had to use this pool of sick recruits to defend itself from all forms of attack, the body would do the best that it could with these sick recruits.
It isn’t hard to imagine that a nation with ailing kids would have some unique security issues that would arise. Some of those soldiers might get confused about whether a given entity is an enemy or not. Other soldiers might have mood problems that end with explosive, over-reactive, or even fatal behaviors. In terms of human health, it’s obvious from this metaphor that a number of different diseases and symptoms could develop out of the problem of ailing bone marrow and sick bones since sick bones would mean sick bone marrow. And sick bone marrow would mean sick soldiers. And so, we’ll begin this discussion by paying homage to this most important relationship at the core of our structure (the bone marrow) and at the heart of the matter (the thymus gland). This seems like a thought-provoking vantage point where we can begin to talk honestly and intelligently about organophosphates.
A Holographic View of Health
A holograph is a three-dimensional image created using laser technologies, but in this discussion, we’re going to look at health as a holographic structure. If you were to take a 2 dimensional holograph (that looks 3 dimensional) and cut it up into smaller pieces, each piece would contain all of the information of the whole holograph. In other words, when you divide up the whole holograph, each piece of the whole still contains the whole image. If you cut up those pieces into even smaller pieces, the entire holographic image would still be present in each piece as a whole image up to a point, at least, until the pieces get too small.Our view of human health is holographic in that we look for metaphors and analogous structures or functions even as we drill down into the scientific data to look at the entire body, the organs, tissues, the cells, and then molecules. Rather than dividing our thoughts up into “systems” of the body or focusing exclusively, for example, on nutrients, we look for novel ways to relate one piece of data to another piece of data to mix up the prevailing way of thinking about disease. This is an intentional process, though sometimes, bits of information that we string together in these novel ways may seem awkwardly connected. In all cases, our goal is to demonstrate that its possible to look at the diseases, syndromes, and symptoms that we feature from other perspectives with surprising resonance from octave to the one above and the one below.
A cell might be a holograph of the entire body. And as the patient, you might choose to focus your treatments on cells rather that focusing your treatment approach on the entire body. Just as a sick nation might create an illness in its people through greed, a poor diet based on indulgence in non-nutritious foods might create an illness in the very bones of the human body. This is holographic thinking and it can be useful in solving problems that have been deemed “unsolveable”.
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Feeling It In Your Bones
Organophosphate exposure involves a bio-accumulation of organic phosphates in bone tissues. Normally, inorganic phosphorus in the form of phosphate couples with calcium in a sort of soul-mate union that we talk about in greater depth in another discussion. This union yields strong, yet flexible bone tissues and teeth. This super-strong structure that we refer to as “the skeleton” is made up of bone tissues that vary in width and length. Bones that are big enough like the femur contain a soft, central cavity made up of marrow that makes an array of blood cells including red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets as well as T cell “recruits” that we mentioned above that leave the bone marrow and travel to the thymus gland for training to become the body’s military.One of the most important things that organophosphates do in the body is disrupt the natural production of bone tissues. Normally, you see, our bones need inorganic phosphorus / phosphates in combination with calcium, but under certain conditions that we’re going to describe later, our bodies become weakened by a lack of essential nutrients and willing to absorb and use organic phosphorus / organophosphates. How and why this weakness occurs is something that we’re going to expand on in depth in the pages that come. Don’t assume that your body needs more phosphorus or phosphates though because the equation is just a bit more complicated than that.
But as we introduce this topic, we wish to reconfigure the way that our readers are looking at the human body. In this article, we’re going to ignore some of the traditional boundaries around health and expand beyond isolationist concepts like the organs and “systems” and even beyond “holism” into alternative models of medicine and beyond.
From the Bone Marrow to the Thymus Gland
As we discussed above, T cells migrate from the bone marrow to the thymus gland where they mature and “train” to become soldiers that can fight against pathogens that might attack the body. The bone marrow and the thymus gland involvement in organophosphate exposure and poisoning brings us quickly to our “model diseases” that we’re going to use to walk readers through our holographic concepts in future discussions. These model diseases were chosen because they’re iconically representative of “bone marrow disease”, “blood disease”, and “thymus gland disease”, etc. Model diseases tend to be related to a “family tree” of other diseases that we regard as “Disease Family Trees”. We’ll expand more on this topic throughout this discussion.In our model of disease that we use throughout this website, every cancer has one or more corresponding autoimmune diseases connected to it. And in turn, every autoimmune disease has one or more types of cancer associated with it too. The cancer-autoimmune disease connection is highlighted in the literature under the term “paraneoplastic”. Read more about paraneoplastic autoimmune diseases here. For now, just note that cancer and autoimmunity are two sides of the same coin. They are essentially the same disease.
Model Diseases
Leukemia / Paraneoplastic Hypokalemia / Paraneoplastic Neuropathy
Leukemia is a blood cancer, but in this discussion we’re using it as a model disease. In other words, our goal is to present enough information that people with other types of blood or bone cancers, such as lymphoma, or acute myeloid leukemia can extrapolate the information out to decide for themselves whether the material fits their situation or not.There are several different autoimmune diseases associated with leukemia and other forms of blood/bone cancer. These include paraneoplastic hypokalemia and paraneoplastic neuropathy to name just two. Both of these autoimmune diseases which are intimately related to blood/bone cancer also cause nervous system issues. Indeed, there is a strong and compelling relationship between bone marrow disease and nervous system issues like neuropathy.
Myasthenia Gravis / Thymoma
About 25% of patients who develop thymoma or cancer of the thymus gland, eventually go on to develop myasthenia gravis. And about 15% of patients with myasthenia gravis develop thymoma. But the myasthenia gravis-thymus connection is not readily obvious at first glance. Myasthenia gravis, after all, is a disease that involves the nervous system, specifically acetylcholine receptor dysfunction. It tends to start in the eyes and move downward into the chest as the disease progresses.As we’ve already mentioned above, the thymus gland is mostly regarded by conventional medicine doctors as a useless structure in the adult body. Myasthenia gravis patients who develop thymoma are often advised to have the thymus gland surgically removed. But though it’s true that the thymus gland does, in fact, shrink over time, its importance and relevance in the body is demonstrable through a quick search of the scientific literature. Indeed, myasthenia gravis patients struggle to maintain their focus due to ptosis (drooping of the upper eyelid) caused by disturbances in acetylcholine function and the thymus gland is innervated by acetylcholinergic nerves. Acetylcholine is a main character on the myasthenia gravis stage, so this fact that the thymus gland is connected directly into the cholinergic system is important. Studies have shown that the acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junctions as well as in the thymus gland are both affected by myasthenia gravis. But that’s not all…
The antibodies (B cells) and lymphocytes (T cells) that attack acetylcholine receptors in myasthenia gravis patients are the immune-system-soldier/recruits that are produced in the bone marrow to be sent later to the thymus gland. Both T cells and B cells can be found in the thymus gland, so essentially, though the symptoms of myasthenia gravis are primarily related to the nervous system, the disease itself is rooted in the bone marrow and thymus gland. Anyone with myasthenia gravis might think it trite to distill things down to this level of simplicity, but scientific data supports this idea if you look for it. And we’re not the first ones to note that the bone marrow-nervous system relationship exists.
Antibodies that react with the acetylcholine receptors of human muscle tissue can be found in about 90% of myasthenia gravis patients. These antibodies are unique to myasthenia gravis. So that’s interesting. But maybe the most interesting thing about this statistic is the fact that the anti-acetylcholine-receptor antibodies are not present in every patient who is diagnosed with myasthenia gravis. If 10% of myasthenia gravis sufferers do not have anti-acetylcholine-receptor antibodies, why are they suffering from the disease? What’s going on with 1/10th of the population of myasthenia gravis sufferers? And is it right to assume that these anti-acetylcholine receptors are actually the root cause of this disease and focus exclusively on them for treatment if fully 10% of myasthenia gravis sufferers don’t even have these antibodies?
Perhaps there’s something else going on here.
The thymus gland contains nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and in myasthenia gravis sufferers, the antibodies that react with acetylcholine receptors are present in the thymus gland. And scientists have found that it isn’t possible to induce myasthenia gravis and the antibodies to acetylcholine receptors without the participation of thymus-gland-derived lymphocytes.
It’s important to emphasize the importance of this fact: if scientists are not able to induce myasthenia gravis and the anti-acetylcholine receptor antibodies without the participation of lymphocytes in the thymus gland, then we can easily trace the symptoms of myasthenia gravis back to the bone marrow as location where this disease is most likely to take shape. In other words, we can focus instead on the lymphocytes an wonder what’s going wrong with them. We can also think critically about whether or not there’s a way to heal those lymphocytes.
Atherosclerosis / Osteoporosis / Dementia
Osteoporosis is a disease of the bones. Atherosclerosis is a disease of the blood vessels. And dementia is a disease of the nervous system. But these three diseases are all intimately connected. Some might even say that they are the same disease. And each of these diseases are vitally important in any discussion regarding organophosphates because the most commonly prescribed drugs for post-menopausal osteoporosis are actually organophosphates that have been renamed as bisphosphonates. Read more about bisphosphonates here.But most people (male or female) with osteoporosis also have atherosclerosis. We talk more about that relationship here. And atherosclerosis is essentially the same disease as vascular dementia. And some scientists say that every form of dementia is vascular dementia (and I tend to agree). But let’s talk a bit more about bisphosphonates…
Bisphosphonate drugs like Fosamax and their effects on women with osteoporosis give us a bird’s eye view into the health impact of organophosphate exposure. Bisphosphonates allow us to confirm that indeed, organophosphates do accumulate in the human body. Indeed, that’s the whole purpose of bisphosphonate treatment—to promote the buildup of organophosphates that couple with calcium in disrupted patterns that make the bone tissues appear to be more dense than they actually are on x-rays or MRIs. Most people never get to see their own bones without the assistance of these medical technologies, so patients with osteoporosis are understandably impressed by the apparent density of their bones following bisphosphonate treatment even though the bones are actually more susceptible to fracture than if the patient had received no treatment at all. This is a well-known fact. Doctors know that their bisphosphonate patients are likely to experience a unique type of bone fracture that is unlike a normal bone fracture, but the fracturing of bones probably won’t happen until several years after the patient finished their bisphosphonate treatments. So most of them won’t add it all up to realize that the bisphosphonates caused the fracture. And most of these patients are older, so Big Pharma sees them as a big profit-opportunity.
Many patients and their loved ones have also recognized the connection between dementia and osteoporosis treatments like bisphosphonates. Bisphosphonates that are prescribed to treat osteoporosis will later significantly increase the risk that the patient will develop dementia. The reason why this occurs is fairly straightforward. We go into greater detail on this topic here.
Atherosclerosis is a hardening of the arteries due to a buildup of calcium in the blood vessels. It is essentially the same disease as osteoporosis. The two regularly coexist for a simple reason–if a person is vitamin K2 deficient, they will be able to absorb calcium into the blood supply, but they won’t be able to put that calcium into their bones and teeth. As such, calcium circulates in the blood supply and like an adolescent without supervision, the calcium puts itself into damaging and unproductive endeavors for lack of proper direction. Calcium must be absorbed into the blood supply in order to find its way into the bones, the teeth, and into the neurons and cells where’s it is vitally needed. And vitamin D ensures that calcium is absorbed into the blood from the intestines. Vitamin D must be present in the intestines for this reason, a substance that was meant to be produced by our own bodies when the skin is exposed to sunlight (without sunscreen). From the skin, inactive vitamin D travels through the organs of detoxification–first the liver to become partially activated, and then onward to the kidneys to be fully activated–before settling into the intestines to transport calcium across the membrane into the blood supply. But once calcium is in the blood supply, vitamin K2 is the nutrient that must be present and ready for action in order for calcium to be placed in bone tissues. If vitamin K2 is not present in the blood supply, calcium will linger in the blood vessels and if it stays there too long, it will settle in the vessels to become atherosclerosis or worse, it will begin to calcify organs or glands.
Vitamin K2 is a newly discovered vitamin that is related to vitamin K1 (the blood coagulation vitamin) via its impact on promoting healthy bone tissues. Readers should note that vitamin K2 is a part of the vitamin K complex which are nutrients that deal with bone, bone marrow, and blood.
Vitamin K2 is not available in the average diet. It used to be widely available when animals were grass-fed. A grass-fed cow will produce milk that contains not just vitamin K2, but also iodine, another nutrient that features heavily into our discussion regarding organophosphates. The relationship between vitamin K2 deficiency and iodine deficiency can explain a wide range of different illnesses. But both of these nutrients require an introduction and understanding. After all, we don’t live in an ancient society close to the land eating an ancestral diet. Most people eat highly processed food without even realizing that the food has been processed. And while the people of antiquity did not have to study their nutrients before consuming them and then living a healthy life, modern day people do.
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Nutrient Deficiency Wars
When I first started working as a medical writer over 20 years ago, I had no idea that I would spend so much time writing about nutrients. Indeed, there are a few nutrients that I focus on a lot. Each time I learn that a mere nutrient is the core cause of a disease, I first feel appalled. We live in a world of plenty. No one, especially in the developed world, should be malnourished.But over the years, it’s becoming easier to see, if not impossible to ignore the fact that nutrition is a battleground. Several years ago, a young woman, a student of agricultural sciences, came to a language exchange I was attending. She was studying soil in Mexico and she and I had some interesting discussions about soil.
The soil within which our food is grown, after all, might be regarded as our external metabolism. Everything about our nutrition begins in the soil.
But what if the soil is depleted of nutrients? And what if the government knows that soils are depleted of nutrients like minerals and vitamins? What if the nutritional deficiencies in fresh produce are calculated and maintained by Big Food in order to make Big Pharma more profitable?
This is a serious problem. It is. Indeed, it’s the kind of problem that could make a person weak in the knees for lack of a way to solve it. Not everyone has garden-space after all to grow their own fruits and vegetables. So we’ll talk about how to solve this lack of nutrients in soil in a later discussion using supplements like shilajit or humic / fulvic acid and seawater supplements.
But as if nutrient deficiencies aren’t a serious enough problem, Big Pharma and Big Food have contrived ways to administer poisons en masse that exploit these nutrient deficiencies. Let me put it this way: if you are deficient in iodine or in vitamin K2 then you are significantly more susceptible to bromide and organophosphate toxicity.
Iodine deficiency and vitamin K2 deficiency are just two examples of nutrient deficiencies that have been programmed into the food supply in developed countries. In the 1980s, iodine fortification was ended. Iodine fortification was inexplicably removed from commercial bread products for example. And bromine and bromide were introduced into the food supply. Iodine is an essential nutrient and back in the 1900s iodine deficiency was so common that iodine was the most commonly prescribed “medicine” by doctors in the U.S. But by the 1980s, medical students were being taught that iodine is a toxin. This material found its way into AMA-certified medical curricula as a tongue-in-cheek discussion about how toxin radioactive iodine treatments and diagnostic tests are for patients. A lack of nutrition classes helped solidify this material which would qualify as propaganda since it contains an element of truth without full transparency of data. Radioactive iodine is indeed, one of the most toxic medicines that doctors regularly administer. It kills the thyroid gland. I would never recommend to patients. But natural iodine–the nutrient in the form of Lugol’s iodine which contains both molecular iodine and potassium iodide–is one of the most important nutritional protectors that our bodies need.
If nuclear fallout were to occur, a huge dose of potassium iodide might save you. If you have a severe lung infection or lung disease, a massive dose of potassium iodide might cure. If you have menstruation problems, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, reproductive organ cancer, infertility, breast cancer, asthma, or pneumonia then Lugol’s iodine will be your best friend. All of these diseases can be cured using Lugol’s iodine (with supportive nutrients that we’ll detail in other sections). When you think of potassium iodide (which is one of the two ingredients in Lugol’s iodine), you should think about reproductive organ cures and reproductive hormone balancing effects. But you should also think about respiratory system cures. Lugol’s can be used to cure and protect the body from COVID, for example. One might wonder, in fact, if COVID would’ve ever become a serious issue had the world been better charged up with Lugol’s iodine (or better yet, high dietary consumption of foods that contain iodine like dairy milk from grass-fed cows eating grass from soils with plenty of iodine in it).
The AlivenHealthy Iodine Bible - Everything you need to know to get started taking iodine and more!
Molecular iodine, the second ingredient in Lugol’s iodine, in contrast, feeds the thyroid gland which means that a deficiency will likely lead to hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, weight gain, thyroid cancers, and a number of other thyroid-related diseases. Indeed, the rise of the obesity epidemic corresponds to the moment in time when Big Food decided in its infinite wisdom to remove iodine fortification from bread products (bread was an excellent carrier for iodine) and put iodine into salt products (salt is a horrible carrier for iodine—the iodine evaporates completely within days of opening a box of salt). Read more about how to use Lugol’s iodine to lose weight easily here.
But before you go buy your first bottle of Lugol’s iodine online (you can’t get it at a pharmacy or a grocery store after all–only petroleum-based povidone iodine which is not bioavailable can be purchased available in pharmacies or grocery stores), you need to understand the Nutrient Wars just a little better.
In the Nutrient Wars, human bodies are first weakened by a nutrient deficiency. This deficiency state comes on slowly over time. Nutrient deficiencies are like that. They’re insidious, slow-to-develop and they produce strange symptoms. So a person who develops these strange symptoms is already weak and sick. But then, these nutrient-deficient-bodies are exposed to synthetic nutrient-poisons that masquerade as the natural nutrient inside the body. These synthetic nutrient-poisons might be sprayed on fields. They might be prescribed as medicines. Synthetic nutrient-poisons might be found in foods or in the water supply. Administration of these synthetic nutrient-poisons is intentional and designed to target nutrient deficiencies that are cultivated (no pun intended) and contrived by Big Pharma in collaboration with Big Ag and Big Food.
So, if you have a nutrient deficiency such as an iodine deficiency, you might be having health issues like reproductive hormone imbalances, thyroid problems, weight problems, or respiratory issues among other things. Your immune system might be low. But then, when you’re exposed to something like bromine / bromide from a nearby crop-spray, for example, suddenly, you become seriously ill.
Bromine, you see, masquerades in the body as iodine. It is in the same family, the halogen elements, as iodine on the periodic table so the body mistakes bromine for iodine easily because on the surface these two atoms look similar. Fluoride and fluorine in the water supply is just as toxic as bromine / bromide, but for simplicity sake, we tend to focus on bromine because if people get a halogen water filter (which would filter both bromine and fluorine out of their water), their main concern is bromine which is in foods and drinks, on fabrics, on furnishings, in swimming pools, in the air (from insecticide sprays). If the body is deficient in iodine, bromine becomes a major issue. And if you’re deficient in iodine and you’re exposed to bromine, you have to reverse these effects slowly by taking Lugol’s iodine to remove bromine from the iodine receptors that it easily occupies. The process of detoxifying from bromine or fluorine exposure can be easy or it can be rocky, but it usually doesn’t last longer than 6 to 8 weeks. Until a person detoxifies and removes the fluorine/bromine from the body, Lugol’s iodine won’t be able to reverse the nutrient deficiency.
As far as we can tell to date, vitamin K2 is to organophosphates what Lugol’s iodine is to methylbromide. Protecting your body from organophosphates means charging your body with certain nutrients and making an effort to avoid taking medications that contain organophosphates or bromide / bromine. You won’t be able to completely avoid organophosphates or bromide / bromine, but you should try to avoid experiencing a direct hit, if you can.
It was literally shocking to us when we researched the drugs that contain bromide/bromine. Many of these drugs are used to treat coughs and colds. In other words, if you’re iodine deficient and you take one of these drugs, you’re taking a poison that will actually cause the symptoms you’re intending to treat. This poison is no joke. Bromism or bromide toxicity was a disease that was well known about 100 years ago as one of the most common causes for psychiatric illness. Read more about drugs that contain bromine / bromide here.
Organophosphate-containing medications like bisphosphonates should also be avoided. And foods that contain phosphates as additives should also be avoided because these food additives obliquely contribute to the problem of organophosphate toxicity. Read more about organophosphate food additives here. But the most surprising thing about organophosphate exposure that we learned about as we researched the material for our book, Root Cause, was the fact that vitamin K2 seems to have a protective effect against organophosphate exposure via its ability to improve bone health naturally. And the real shocker was the fact that vitamin K2 deficiency can make it hard to restore iodine levels in individuals with iodine deficiency. The relationship between these two nutrients and the fact that these nutrient deficiencies are programmed into the food supply so as to make the people of developed countries susceptible to specific synthetic nutrient-poisons that are ubiquitous in food, air, and water, is one of the reasons why we decided to dedicate so much time to writing Root Cause.
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Bones, Blood, Thymus Gland, and Neuroendocrine Connections
Up to this point, we’ve managed to connect the bones and bone marrow with the blood and the thymus gland. But now that we’ve introduced vitamin K2 and iodine, we need to expand the conversation considerably.There are, basically, four nutrients that are going to take center stage in our organophosphate discussion:
- Phosphate (inorganic)
- Calcium
- Iodine
- Vitamin K2
It might help to think about calcium and phosphate as soul mates. Read more about the inspiring love-relationship between these two nutrients here.
Similarly, it might help to think of iodine (specifically Lugol’s iodine, which contains both molecular iodine and potassium iodide) and vitamin K2 as business partners. They work together and they support each other’s endeavors. Their activities are intimately connected in a earth-air-fire kind of way. Iodine, after all, is a mineral that was meant to be present in soil while vitamin K2 is a nutrient that works its miracles in part through chlorophyll, sunlight, and the magical process of fermentation. You can’t really talk about vitamin K2 without referencing its cousin-nutrient, vitamin D which shouldn’t really be considered a vitamin at all, but rather a hormone given our natural ability, as humans, to produce vitamin D naturally in our bodies via exposure to the sun (sans the sunscreen).
So let’s regroup these four nutrients and list them again, just for emphasis:
- Calcium and Phosphate (inorganic)
- Iodine and Vitamin K2
Calcium and inorganic phosphate must be present in the body in order to be healthy, but these nutrients are available in most foods that we eat. It’s unwise to take calcium or phosphorus supplements because these elements exist in the body in a delicate balance that shouldn’t be tampered with unless you’re monitoring their presence with vigilant attention. If you eat a somewhat healthy diet, it’s best to avoid supplementing with calcium or phosphorus / phosphate and allow the body to naturally accept and reject these nutrients as they pass through our long tube (known as the digestive system) from mouth to anus.
But it’s important to realize that calcium in the blood supply inhibits iodine absorption. Calcium in the bones, on the other hand is a good thing. Context matters when we talk about both calcium and phosphate. Calcium in the blood supply puts iodine out of business if vitamin K2 isn’t there to ensure that calcium goes into the bones and teeth rather than lingering in the blood. It is this crucial fact that underlies much of our discussion regarding organophosphate exposure treatments. Calcium absorption from the blood into the bones and teeth, which is modulated by vitamin K2, plays a pivotal role in the body in terms of iodine absorption. A deficiency of either vitamin K2 or iodine leaves the body open and vulnerable to two of the most toxic types of pesticides in use today: bromide-containing insecticides and organophosphates.
The Thyroid-Thymus Gland Relationship
Studies have shown that thymic hormones such as thymulin and thymic peptide release are modulated by thyroid hormones. Triiodthyronine (T3), in particular, seems to play an important role in thymic hormone and peptide release. Indeed, scientists have noted that thymic hormone activity in the body is modulated by other glands in the neuroendocrine system, especially by thyroid hormones. Of course it makes sense that endocrine glands communicate with each other since these glands release hormones into the blood supply, but it takes time for science to uncover these facts. Nonetheless, we need to note that the thyroid gland and the thymus gland have a relationship. They influence each other to give greater credence to the idea that iodine deficiency is a major cause of immune system dysfunction.
The thyroid gland requires molecular iodine as food in order to function properly. If you have a vitamin K2 deficiency though, your body won’t be able to absorb iodine easily because calcium competes with iodine and prevents iodine from being absorbed. And a vitamin K2 deficiency leads to high blood-levels of calcium and low bone-levels of calcium.
Calcium is a nerve-related nutrient. That’s not common knowledge. Most people think of bones and teeth when they think of calcium. But wherever there are acetylcholine neurotransmitter discharges happening, calcium is there. So disruptions in the proper metabolism of calcium causes the body to take strange health trajectories. Calcium supplements can thus be dangerous.
If calcium is present in super-high quantities in the blood, which happens when people take a vitamin D supplement (or worse, a vitamin D plus calcium supplement) without also taking a vitamin K2 supplement to complement the calcium absorption effects of the vitamin D, iodine won’t be properly absorbed, leaving the thyroid gland, thymus gland, other endocrine glands and reproductive organs, immune system, nervous system, circulatory system, respiratory system, etc. in a state of weakness. Thyroid hormones become dysregulated as a result. And then thymus gland peptides and hormones become correspondingly dysregulated as well. An array of diseases spiral out from the chaos. The synthetic nutrient-poisons like bromine / bromide or organophosphates move in to complicate the health situation considerably when these deficiencies reach a certain threshold.
Damages from synthetic nutrient-deficiencies have to be repaired before health is restored. Correcting a nutrient deficiency is relatively straightforward if a person recognizes the problem before it becomes critical. But correcting a deficiency that’s complicated by the presence of synthetic nutrient-poisons in the nutrient receptor sites requires a more focused effort at nutrition and often the administration of herbal medications, vibrational medicines, and more. Nonetheless, the body is designed to heal if given the proper tools. We’ll talk in depth about how to use these tools in the upcoming chapters.
Hypothyroidism leads to low levels of thymulin or low thymic peptide levels in the body. This is relevant both to adults with hypothyroidism as well as to premature infants who have low levels of triiodothyronine (T3). In hyperthyroid patients, thymulin levels tend to be higher than in normal subjects that have normal thyroid function. Hypothyroid patients have lower thymulin levels than patients with normal thyroid function.
Thymulin is a thymus gland peptide with the sequence: Pyro-Glu-Ala-Lys-Ser-Gln-Gly-Gly-Ser-Asn. In order to become active, zinc must be present in the body in adequate quantities. This is one of the reasons why zinc is listed as one of the supporting nutrients for proper iodine absorption. If zinc is not present in the body in adequate quantities, thymulin will be present, but it won’t be biologically active. Even a mild zinc deficiency will lower thymulin levels causing the immune system to become weak and imbalance. Thus, there are reasons why we recommend that people wishing to overcome iodine deficiency and vitamin K2 deficiency take supporting nutrients. The list is not random. Without the supporting nutrients, iodine therapy and vitamin K2 therapy may not have the same results that you’re looking for.
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Detoxification and Protection from Insecticides
Acute organophosphate poisoning causes an initial cholinergic crisis that can evolve into intermediate syndrome which looks identical to myasthenia gravis in terms of symptoms. Organophosphate poisoning does not always cause long-term myasthenia gravis symptoms (which are known as “intermediate syndrome” when the symptoms are caused by an overdose of organophosphates). Whether or not any given organophosphate poisoning patient will develop intermediate syndrome cannot currently be predicted, but the fact that some patients develop intermediate syndrome myasthenia or not is a clue that tells us that some people are at least, somewhat resistant to toxic exposure to organophosphates. What makes them resistant to organophosphate poisoning? That’s a question we attempt to answer in this article and in our book, Root Cause.
As with insecticides like methylbromide and drugs like pyridostigmine bromide that contain bromide / bromine that compete in the body with iodine receptors, organophosphates appear to be more or less toxic to human beings depending on the patient’s dietary deficiencies. Deficiencies of iodine leave the body weak and wanting for any halogen element that has an outer electron shell resembling iodine. So iodine deficiency makes people susceptible to fluoride and bromide toxicity.
Organophosphate exposures seem to also be more toxic when a person who is vitamin K2 deficient is exposed to these toxins. Vitamin K2 pushes calcium into bones which inevitably pulls healthy phosphates in with it causing the bones to be strong, healthy, and nutrient dense with natural, inorganic phosphorus. When the bones are healthy and nutrient dense, the body doesn’t crave organophosphates and instead it works to get rid of organophosphates instead of storing them in bone tissues.
Often, patients (including kids) who have asthma or other types of illness are given steroid medications. When I hear that a patient has been prescribed a steroid medication by a doctor, I always look first at iodine as a natural alternative to steroids because iodine helps the body produce natural “steroids” or rather, natural reproductive hormones. But iodine allows the body to balance itself and as a nutrient it balances health rather than destroying it and causing an addiction as steroid medications do. Sadly, many of the patients who take steroids long-term develop osteoporosis or other bone diseases. And when this happens, instead of prescribing vitamin K2 to cure osteoporosis, leukemia, or whatever the bone disease may be, doctors instead prescribe bisphosphonates which are, as we discussed earlier, organophosphate-containing medications that don’t actually heal the bone tissues, but rather make them more susceptible to a specific type bone fracture later on down the road.
When doctors prescribe medications, they often do so with the intent to heal. And it takes many years for many doctors to realize that their patients aren’t healing, but rather that their patients are getting worse and worse over time. Doctors to recognize the problem and attempt to heal their patients using nutrients or herbs are chastised. Some of them are politically burnt at the stake. So patients do have to be wary. Even over-the counter medications contain toxic substances that have a more pronounced activity on human health than the listed “active” ingredients. For example, giving your teenager dextromethorphan that contains bromide for a harmless cough can cause your child to become depressed and unable to concentrate. The bromide doesn’t go away if the child is deficient in iodine. It can lead to chronic respiratory disease, infertility, and reproductive organ cancer. So, if you’re reading this, be aware that you will not be able to blindly trust the medical establishment to care for your health once you fully acknowledge what the medical establishment is doing to doctors as well as to patients.
Autoimmunity and and Acetylcholine
Acetylcholine is the most important neurotransmitter in the cholinergic nervous system. It plays a vital role in autonomic nervous system function as well as motor function. But a number of immune system cells also manifest components of the cholinergic system. These immune system cells include:- T cells
- B cells
- Macrophages
These cells express both muscarinic and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, choline transporters, choline acetyltransferase, and acetylcholinesterase. These immune cells store and release acetylcholine and are affected by calcium as a signaling molecule. Acetylcholine thus impacts both innate and acquired immunity.
Acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that works inside the autonomic nervous system. This means that any disease involving dysautonomia or rather, autonomic nervous system dysfunction, is mediated at least in part, by acetylcholine. That being said, there are experts on the autonomic nervous system like Dr. Francis Pottenger who believed that all diseases are rooted in the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system is another big topic that we’ll expand on later. It is the part of our body that functions in the gray-zone between the endocrine glands (which are regarded as material representatives for each of the seven chakras) and the autonomic nerves with the pineal gland sitting at the third eye in the so-called “seat of the soul”. So while this part of the nervous system is (like the thymus gland and the bone marrow), practically unknown and undiscussed in biology classes even in medical schools, the autonomic nervous system is a part of us that can easily link into energetic systems of medicine like Reiki, shamanic medicine, other forms of energy healing, vibrational medicine, hypnotherapy, and more. So if you have a taste for obscure, but fascinating connections, our tour through insecticide exposures and poisonings will give you food for thought.
To bring these ideas into focus, it might help to know that without acetylcholine, you wouldn’t be able to breathe without thinking about it. Without acetylcholine, your food won’t digest and your pupils won’t dilate or constrict unconsciously in response to changes in the amount of light in the environment. Without acetylcholine, the part of you that operates unconsciously, without conscious control starts to disappear.
In shamanic medicine (which is legitimately the oldest system of medicine and the only system of medicine that has existed on every continent), the disappearance of this unconscious part of ourselves would be called soul loss. In modern medicine, the most iconic representation of soul loss is something called resignation syndrome that occurs when the body is overwhelmed with fear or some form of danger (real or merely perceived).
Autism has been identified by scientists as a disease that resembles resignation syndrome, but most autoimmune diseases and cancers also resemble resignation syndrome in terms of cellular behaviors and autonomic nervous system behaviors. So, as we bring this chapter to a close, let’s earmark the idea that acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter that makes the autonomic nervous system go. And let’s also note that autonomic nervous system dysfunction is almost always a root cause of dysfunctions relating to the organs that operate unconsciously, including the lungs and breath (which can sometimes be consciously overridden if we so choose). Let’s also note that breath and our breath rate and breath depth (which is under unconscious control most of the time) is the main thing that determines whether our tissues are alkaline or acidic. And the fact that most pathogens and cancer cells prefer acidic conditions in order to thrive. And acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter under attack by organophosphates insecticides.
In future discussions, we’ll expand on how to protect yourself and your family from organophosphates.
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Download the Living Database Now to Learn More about Cures for Disease
We've recently released the Living Database, the tool that Lydian and I use to store our data when we research cures for diseases. Sometimes we stumble across natural treatments cures for rare diseases in the scientific literature. If we do, we put in the Living Database. Sometimes we find links to surprising scientific data or even anecdotal reports of a cure for diseases that have been dubbed "incurable" or even, in some cases "untreatable" by doctors. And this tool, the AlivenHealthy Living Database allows us to store this information. Now, we've made the database live so our readers can use it to find cures for disease even if we haven't had a chance to write about it yet. The AlivenHealthy Living Database is an excellent tool for healers and body workers or even just for average people to use on family and friends. If you search for a disease or disorder that isn't in our database, this alerts Lydi and I to the fact that someone in the database user pool is looking for that particular disease. If our client load is low and we have time to do research into that disease, we can update the database immediately with information about diseases that interest Living Database users. Click here to learn more and download the Living Database now.Resources:
• Mocchegiani, E. et al. (1990). Neuroendocrine-thymus interactions. I. In vitro modulation of thymic factor secretion by thyroid hormones. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2184190/
• Fabris, N. et al. (1986). Thyroid function modulates thymic endocrine activity. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3944232/
• Prasad, A. S. (2020). Clinical and immunological effects and biomarkers of zinc deficiency. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/thymulin
• Cordero, O. J. et al. (1998). Thymic Hormones and Peptides. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B0122267656005971
• Wulf, G. G. et al. (1996). Paraneoplastic hypokalemia in acute myeloid leukemia: a case of renin activity in AML blast cells. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8841102/
• Rosenfeld, M. R. and Dalmau, J. (2010). Paraneoplastic Neurological Disorders in Leukemia and Lymphoma. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4419-7668-0_20
• Romi, F. (2011). Thymoma in myasthenia gravis: from diagnosis to treatment. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21860784/
• Aharonov, A. et al. (1975). Immunological relationship between acetylcholine receptor and thymus: a possible significance in myasthenia gravis. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1055418/
• Lennon V. A. (1976). Immunology of the acetylcholine receptor. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/61167/
• Stojanovic, O. I. et al. (2011). Association between atherosclerosis and osteoporosis, the role of vitamin D. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3258717/
• Chaurasia, D. et al. (2018). Severe Organophosphate Poisoning with Acute Cholinergic Crisis, Intermediate Syndrome, and Organophosphate Induced Long-Term Ptosis.Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31313560/
• Mashimo, M. et al. (2021). Regulation of Immune Functions by Non-Neuronal Acetylcholine (ACh) via Muscarinic and Nicotinic ACh Receptors. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34202925/#:~:text=Acetylcholine%20(ACh)%20is%20the%20classical,regulate%20various%20immune%20cell%20functions.
• Fabris, N. et al. (1989). Thyroid-Thymus Interactions During Development and Aging. Retrieved November 6, 2022 from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2722140
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