Static on Your Frequency

An introductory Substack from a 3rd generation chiropractor in his 3rd decade of practice. I’ve got something to say.

Growing up the kid of a chiropractor, I’ve been at odds for most of my life with medicine in general.  My deceased family (dad, uncle, and great uncle) were all chiropractors and had mixed encounters with their medical counterparts over their careers.  All three of them practiced during the American Medical Association’s orchestrated campaign to “contain and eliminate” the chiropractic profession.  (Look up Wilk vs. AMA for yourself sometime.)  It wasn’t successful and the AMA lost in court.  I remember my dad telling me a story about his experience with a local epilepsy chapter.  He had successful treated patients with epilepsy early in his career with nothing but chiropractic care.  He was successfully able to reduce seizures in a patient from 10 per day down to about 1-2 per week.  When he approached the local epilepsy society with his discovery he was professionally threatened.  They came to his office and told him that they would shut him down and destroy his career if he pursued it any further.  It seems they were not interested in finding relief for their patients; it only threatened their funding.  The animosity only worsened over the years.  It was my dad’s greatest pleasure in life to point out the hypocrisy and failings of medicine with its co-opted pharmaceutical interests.  He would often write about medicines absurdities during his career… Hospital Donations Largesse   I memorialized his life’s work here:  Obituary

Being a child of a DC meant that our definition of healthcare was probably very similar to what the Amish/Quaker/Mennonites practiced.  We relied on breast feeding, whole food nutrition, natural immunity, and minimal medical intervention.  I would describe my healthcare experiences as a child as non-existent.  And that was a good thing. It was rarely needed.  Many other chiropractic families in Phoenix would eschew traditional medical care and take their kids to see Gladys McGarey, MD, MD(H) who is widely considered the mother of holistic medicine.  She is the daughter of two osteopathic medical missionaries and was born in India in 1920. She is still alive and well at 102 years old (doesn’t that speak volumes?) and actively writing to this day. She is board certified in holistic and integrative medicine and held a family practice for more than 60 years.  In 1970 she and her former husband opened a clinic in Phoenix, AZ which integrated allopathic and holistic medical practices.  Read more about this amazing woman here.  Suffice it to say that when we were sick and could not manage it at home we would seek out alternative health and eschewed “modern” medicine’s approach to health.  I would later find out a patient of mine was an RN that worked for Dr. Gladys in the early 70’s and most likely took care of me when I was a child.

Our family mostly ate home cooked meals lovingly prepared from our stay-at-home mother. Proper nutrition/diet was the key along with regular chiropractic care and the occasional use of home/folk remedies. That kept us healthy. We also grew some of our own food and frequented health food stores.  We drank glass bottled mineral water and avoided drugs and environmental chemicals which was a far cry from how my dad grew up. 

My dad described the first two years of his life as having to be carried around on a pillow because he was so sick.  He grew up in an industrial railroad town on the Monongahela River in Western PA.  One of the most heavily polluted regions in the US at the time.  He often swam in that heavily polluted river as a kid. Nearby was the 1948 Donora smog event which was the worst air pollution disaster in U.S. history  (Video Here)  Donora changed the face of environmental protection in the United States and inspired the clean air act. 

I didn’t have to withstand the historic environmental pollution that he did, but I had a few challenges as a child.  I was unable to breast feed beyond 3 months as my mother developed mastitis and had to cease.  So, my parents sought other routes of infant nutrition which included goats’ milk from a local farm.  My mother also relied on ground up whole foods and rarely bought baby food.  I also had recurrent ear infections as a child for which my parents resisted medical advice for tubes and antibiotic use (antibiotics were later found to be ineffective anyway) and tried dietary interventions to ameliorate it. We treated most health issues at home with vitamin C (my dad was a Linus Pauling fan), vitamin E, chiropractic care and folk remedies.  I’ve never used prescription medication beyond limited pain medication after three surgeries: A broken nose, one wisdom tooth extraction and an inguinal hernia surgery as a teen.  My parents were more health conscious than the average person in the 1970’s but still succumbed to the prevailing horrible governmental (captured) nutritional advice and rising processed food industry behemoth. We would eventually eat what a lot of families ate based on faulty claims of health at the time and that persisted into the 80’s and early 90’s like most Americans.  It was not until the mid to late 90’s when I started to seriously rethink nutrition.

Our being “different” served us well. That is why I believe I was never vaccinated as a child.  It was also due to the continued animosity and distrust of medicine in general.  Vaccination was never much of a polarizing issue back then as it is today. It was nuanced and not as political (read: captured) as it is now. It was one way (and not the only way) of approaching health which didn’t fit into our natural health paradigm. Those who understand evolutionary history and understand how the body works and functions comprehend health; and that if you got sick you were out of accord with nature and you would either get better or die.  And, not surprisingly, 99.999% of the time you lived.  An old chiropractic philosopher once said: “Nature needs no help, just no interference.” Medicine was selling pharmaceutical drugs and prophylaxis (vaccination), and we just weren’t buying it.

A highly recommended Substack author, “el gato malo”, has opined that “all medical decisions are everywhere and always a risk/benefit decision.” (Should you read his substack, be forewarned that his lack of capitalization is a test to see if you have poetry in your soul.)  This is the cornerstone of informed consent to any medical procedure.  What are the risks and benefits?  My parents weren’t willing to take that risk when it came to vaccination for their young healthy children.  And I am glad to be the recipient of that decision as I enter my 6th decade of life free of prescription medication use and free of the chronic metabolic diseases that 88% of Americans face. 

The truth is, we’ve never been sicker as a society.  And it’s getting worse.  Maybe it’s time to change things?  What we thought was working, isn’t.   Medicine excels at acute care but fails miserably with chronic disease.  

The vaccination calculus never sat well with my dad; it just wasn’t worth the risk based on the supposed benefit. His generation had first-hand experience with these conditions and even treated some of these kids with positive outcomes when medicine had failed.  I suspect they understood that the diseases of childhood were just that. They were expected and part of the human experience.  And it was well known by most chiropractors that natural immunity was THE way forward for infectious disease.  Always has been.  Robust lifetime immunity would be the result. Millions of years of immune system evolution led to this point.   If you were a healthy child that had access to clean water, closed sewers, and adequate nutrition it would be a normal childhood experience.  Even Bernard Guyer, et al, in their 2000 Pediatrics paper Annual summary of vital statistics: trends in the health of Americans during the 20th century wrote:

“nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality among US children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.”  “The major declines in child mortality that occurred in the first third of the 20th century have been attributed to a combination of improved socioeconomic conditions in this country and the public health strategies…including water treatment, food safety, organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practice.”  “Thus vaccination does not account for the impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century.”

I used to think that vaccines were appropriate for the third world, which is where they lack basic standards of health, nutrition and sanitation; necessitating their use. But the grandfather of vaccines in Africa, Dr. Peter Aaby, changed my mind with a first ever, true vaccinated vs unvaccinated study (no healthy user bias/confounding which is prevalent in most, if not all epidemiological studies done on vaccine safety) in 2017  The introduction of Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis and Oral Polio Vaccine Among Young Infants in an Urban African Community: A Natural Experiment  This man has been working with vaccines in Africa for decades…

Conclusions: “DTP was associated with a 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated…it should be of concern that the effect of routine vaccinations on all-cause mortality was not tested in randomized trials. All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis.” 

A real humdinger of a statement.

Then I became a parent after finishing graduate school and becoming a chiropractor.  And based on my upbringing, and further medical research and weighing the risk/benefit ratio I decided against vaccinating my own kids for many of the same reasons. They were breast fed for at least 6 months, grew up on filtered water, organic food, fluoride free and with minimal exposure to chemicals. They were rarely sick except for the usual expected childhood illnesses which developed their immune systems.  Beyond seeing Dr. McGarey very infrequently as kids, I handled their health issues at home conservatively without medical intervention. My kids are now adults with no health issues and take no medications and are healthy, with one caveat.

My oldest daughter’s risk/benefit analysis changed when she decided to take a trip to Peru and spend time in the Amazon jungle.  So, I decided to get her vaccinated for yellow fever and tetanus. I was not concerned about neurodevelopmental injury because of her age (which is THE reason both my kids never received any vaccinations prior) and I had less concerns about any adverse events. These would be her first ever vaccines in her life at age 14. Up until that point she was healthy with no issues at all.  Within 4 months of the Tenivac (Td) and a yellow fever vaccine (both given one week apart) she started to lose her hair. Then she developed a thyroid cyst confirmed by ultrasound and was subsequently diagnosed with an autoimmune disease; Hashimotos’ thyroiditis.  She became gluten intolerant and then developed an egg allergy both confirmed by labs (Cyrex).  She never had issues with eating wheat or eggs.  Eggs were one of her first foods. (Yellow fever vaccine is produced in chicken embryos.)  There was no other likely explanation as to what may have caused this.  In the medical literature vaccines are known to cause autoimmune disease and that is what I suspected based on the temporal association alone.  This is when I started to read deeper into the medical literature and read as many books as I could concerning vaccines.  I regret giving her those two shots, but she has opined that it forced her to evaluate her health at a young age and made her the knowledgeable person she is today.  She has managed to keep her autoimmune condition in remission and live a healthy life and takes no medication.  She went on to earn her B.S in nutrition (due to her experience) and lives an active, happy, and balanced life.

When an adverse reaction occurs to your child you go looking for causation.  I picked up J.B. Handley’s excellent book “How to End the Autism Epidemic” and decided to read what the medical literature was (and wasn’t) saying, as he had done.  So, I spent the next 4 months reading the vaccine literature which was upheld as proving safety and efficacy.  The studies were deficient. The studies essentially only looked at one shot, the MMR.  And they essentially only looked at one ingredient, thimerosal.  And this was the totality of evidence upheld as proof that vaccines did not harm?  I was aghast at the lack of data, lack of inert placebos, lack of unvaccinated control groups and an over reliance on epidemiological data.  I shared my experience on twitter and my post went viral with over 22K impressions.  I became a stakeholder to this discussion when these temporal adverse events occurred to my daughter.  I had been partially blinded by consensus in the medical community and did not fully question the science enough.  Consensus is not science, and I could not just sit idly with group think and appeals to authority over the science.  I had to engage, read, and question it.  I am reminded of those old commercials where “4 out of 5 doctors recommend….” Would you not want to hear what that one voice of dissension has to say? I guess it takes a chiropractor to think differently and question the status quo; we’ve been second class physicians for decades due to medicines efforts to “contain and eliminate” our profession.  

My research led me to the work of Dr. Chris Exley, formerly of Keele University in the UK.  He’s the worlds expert on aluminium (aluminum).  Aluminum is used as an adjuvant in most vaccines to elicit a strong immune response.  I had a “great awakening” on aluminum by reading his important paper: Silicic acid: The omniscient molecule This was the beginning of my understanding of how aluminum is novel to biota and how nature (via silicon) selects it “out” of all living things.  However, the events of the last 150+ years of mans’ processing of bauxite ore causing liberation of aluminum from being safely sequestered in the earth’s crust away from biota, and now into the environment, has been detrimental to biological systems.  Aluminum, a known neurotoxin, is a novel silent visitor to the body, unlike other heavy metals that have been exposed to living systems for millions of years.  Living systems have not evolved any enzymatic detox systems to deal with aluminum due to its recent evolutionary pressure.   I have read most (if not all) of Dr. Exleys papers on aluminum and silicon.  He has elucidated the pharmacokinetics and distribution of Al in the body to the greatest extent than any other researcher has.  He’s the worlds authority on Al.  I highly encourage you to read his groups papers and visit his group’s website or follow him on his Substack.  He also has an excellent laymen’s book: “Imagine you are an Aluminum Atom.”  The data are there if you choose to read it.  How many of my medical counterparts have chosen to not critically read what they were told was settled science?  How many have read beyond a study’s abstract?  I surmise only those that have been affected negatively by vaccines have taken the time to read the medical literature and ask the important questions.

I have maintained my minimalist approach to medicine to this day. I’m 53y.o., 175lbs, 6 ft 1 in tall and metabolically healthy (2-fasting insulin) with no health issues.  I practice intermittent fasting and strive to eat a mostly red meat (and organ) diet, with fruit/honey and limited vegetable consumption. I’ve made a complete 180 degree turn on vegetable consumption; avoiding nuts/seeds (the most highly chemically defended parts of plants) and leaves with some limited consumption of roots.  I’ve come to the understanding that plants should mostly be used as medicine and not as food.  I base this on the hunter gatherer societies in the world (Weston Prices’ work), the work of Paul Saladino, M.D, and other anthropological research into ancient cultures.  In our ancestry plants were “fallback foods” when animals were not available. They were a ready source of calories for survival but not ideal for the long-term.  Animals would have been preferred and optimal for our larger brains.  Dr. Saladino states over the past 400+ million years of plant and animal co-evolution there has been a chemical “arms race” between the two. Plants produce chemicals to prevent predation by animals, then animals develop defensive antioxidant systems to better deal with plant pro-oxidants.  Plants are rooted in the ground and can’t “runaway” and their only defenses are physical thorns or producing defense chemicals (broadly called phytoalexins) to dissuade predation by animals. These chemicals when consumed can bind up essential minerals/nutrients, cause GI distress, affect your nervous system, interfere with hormones/reproduction, make you physically ill and even kill you. The reality is that most plants are not edible, but almost all animals are edible.

The exception being fruit. Fruit is designed to be eaten seasonally by animals except for the seed which is usually “deposited” some distance away hastened by an increase in gut transit time by some plant defense chemical (e.g., prunes).  I believe that the produce department at your local grocery store is mostly a man-made invention and that plants are overhyped as good for us (largely due to the limitations of nutritional epidemiological science- which can never prove causation and can only look for associations that are confounded by healthy/unhealthy user bias).  One can easily understand the problems and shortfalls of epidemiological science by reading in the press that one day eggs are bad for you and another they are good! (Insert your favorite food for eggs and you get my point.)  Most of what you see in the produce department is a result of hybridization, artificial selection, shipping from other “seasons” and genetic modification. (Think about that large juicy, crispy, sweet, red delicious apple… Its most recent ancestor is a crab apple; small, pithy, and bitter.)  We can receive more bioequivalent nutrients, something that plants don’t offer, from eating animal foods. (e.g., Vitamin A: Animal retinoic acid vs. plant beta carotene- the former is the bioequivalent form your body needs, the latter requires a poor conversion process) And when I say animal foods, I mean the whole animal. Organs too, not just skeletal muscle.  Nothing goes to waste in traditional hunter-gatherer societies. Even in nature animals consume the most nutrient dense tissues first, the organs, and then everything else.

The only supplements I take are desiccated organ meats from grass-fed cattle and the occasional use of vit. C and E. I get regular unprotected sun exposure and interestingly since restricting/severely limiting my linoleic acid (seed oil) consumption, I rarely sunburn anymore at 33 degrees North latitude.  I am active with biking/hiking/scuba diving.  I have an active chiropractic practice wrestling patients for joint manipulation and physical therapy services.  This has served me well in my sixth decade of life. 

Maybe I’m onto something?