#and by host you mean autism adhd brain

[lillyorlyracat]

Look man, I understand perfectly well that 2012 tmnt is not wonderfully written. This does not change the fact that it is a part of meee

[system-of-a-feather]

Another one of those "passing on the notes I learned from my years of therapy and recovery for those to consider as perhaps a cheat code to not learn it in the long and hard way I did" but one of the things that helps the most to unlearn / learn in recovery is that not everything is pathological and not everything pathological has to be "fixed"

The former is simply saying that not every trait and aspect about you has to come from or be sorted into originating from one of your conditions. Sure, maybe something you do is a bit odd and it could be explained by trauma or neurodivergence, but it also just might be a genuine personality quirk and its fine. It doesn't have to be sweated over or looked at in a lens of a mental / medical condition.

As for the latter, the obvious case of this is autism and ADHD - a lot of the traits in those are "pathological" in the sense that they are considered to be specifically due to having a disorder, but a large number of those "pathological" symptoms (like excessive stimming and having intense interests) on their own really don't inherently need to be fixed.

But the other thing is that some pathological trauma behaviors and symptoms can clearly originate from your traumatic childhood and be something that "no normal person would think / do / behave like" and assuming that extreme statement is true, just because a trait / behavior / aspect of how you live developed due to trauma, doesn't mean it has to change. A trait and behavior can be pathological in that sense and - if its not really hurting anyone and if it can be adapted well into your life - it doesn't have to be a problem. Some pathological trauma-developed aspects of your life are deeply intertwined with how you grew up (much like non-trauma aspects) and sometimes they just aren't worth digging up and doing all the processing to 'fix'. This is especially so for the aspects of yourself that developed due to trauma that are semi or even usually adaptive.

You can have behaviors, traits, and views that obviously developed from your past with trauma AND still keep those in your life AND be happy.

I'm mostly saying this because I am once again reflecting on just how much of our life is pretty intense and wild due to the fact that I - a part that was originally meant to be an imaginary friend and fantasy-orientated escapism and source of hope - became host. A lot of how I experience myself and my relationship with the world is weird and there are a lot of experiences I just don't really have in me to process in a "typical" way.

I'd say that there are probably parts that used to be prone to processing the things I can't, but after so many years our systems become structured to support the quirks I have and I think our brain at this point just doesn't really find the demand or interest to restore those aspects for any near-future reason as it largely still serves us.

At some point, maybe we will target them. Maybe they will become more harmful and/or limiting than helpful, but these traits both work for us, work for those around us, and help us and just all in all work very well for us. Yes they are pathological, but not everything pathological has to go.

On top of that, the idea that all pathology has to be fixed and cured to be happy really just isn't true and honestly just stems from a place of pushing this concept of "normal" which.... who the hell supports the narrative and concept of "normal" in 2024 on tumblr dot com

It's okay to be disabled, disordered, neurodivergent, affected long term by trauma, and / or just straight up weird.

Fix what doesn't work in your life, everything else doesn't have to be sweated over.

[rayssyscourse]

if you want a syscourse topic, i personally was thinking about the mental age thing.

it kinda gives me whiplash tbh as an autistic person with DID. mental age is considered pretty ableist in the context of autism, but is considered perfectly fine and normal in a DID context. at least, community wise.

Oooh this is really interesting.

I'll preface this by saying I am not autistic, so I won't speak on autistic experiences. I have several neurodivergencies, but just be aware that when I talk about that, I am not speaking for autistic people.

So, I think the entire concept of "mental age" is kinda nonsensical. No matter how you have developed, your brain is only as old as you are. Young kids can be forced to act more maturely than they should, and adults can act more immaturely than they should, but either way, your brain has the experience of however many years you've lived.

Alter age, however, is a little different, and I think people shouldn't use "mental age" in place of it. Again, your brain can only be one age, but due to different circumstances the brain can split into alters that behave more accordingly to a different age.

So, for example, Grey (a co-host in our system) is 18 in headspace, and when fronting he behaves like an 18 year old, but neurologically he is only as old as the body (16). So he only has 16 years of neurological development and experience, but he is able to, at least to an extent, emulate the behavior of somebody older than the body actually is. He formed because the situation we were in was seen by our brain as something that I could not handle, and felt it needed a more mature and capable figure in order to cope. Thus formed Grey, who was able to emulate the behavior of someone a couple years older than me. He acts older, and in most senses is older, but neurologically he still only has the development and experiences of the body's age. (I'm only speaking on trauma-formed alters because we're traumagenic btw, I don't know how it works for non-traumagenics and that's probably a whole other convo anyways, lol.)

The thing is, I totally see what you're saying with the term mental age being ableist thing. This is purely anecdotal, but I saw this from the outside. My younger brother has autism, and for a long time as a kid I was told that that meant he was "mentally younger" than other kids his age. That didn't make any sense scientifically, but even more importantly it just wasn't true. He is still as intelligent and capable as kids his age, he just processes and expresses those things differently. To say an autistic person is "mentally younger" implies that they have on a fundamental level a lesser ability to think and process things, which makes it seem like they shouldn't be listened to or that their experiences are less valid in some way.

Plus, acting in a way traditionally seen as "immature" does not always equate to impaired thought processes. This is also anecdotal, but I have ADHD, and when I was a young undiagnosed kid, I would often get overwhelmed by tasks or sensory experiences that I did not know how to handle. This would manifest in outbursts, even beyond the years that it was age-appropriate. This didn't mean that I was less capable of processing the emotions I was having, or that I was not able to think as critically about them as others my age, because I absolutely was. I just processed them in a different way that my peers. (That's not to say that outbursts are a good coping mechanism, lol. That's just how my child brain decided to express what it was experiencing.)

All that to say, alter age and mental age are two diff things, and I don't think mental age should be used at all, especially when it's being used to mean alter age. Mental age implies that somebody has the development and experiences of a differently aged brain, whereas alter age helps to more specifically speak about the age a specific alter emulates or behaves as. Plus this also kinds goes into system responsibility/accountability, where to an extent alter age can affect their behaviors and responsibility for said behaviors, but that should not excuse unexcusable behaviors based on neurological age.

Sorry for how long this got lol. I ended up having a lot more thoughts than originally planned :) thank you for the ask!! <3

[studyscrasic]

I want to find other langblrs and studyblrs to follow but it's bothering me that the studyblr tag especially is so...... academic grind mindset, I guess. Like, posts saying a 4.0 is always possible (no actually, it isn't for everyone) or going on about prestigious universities (I got into a famous one and then had to withdraw from it entirely due to burnout) and people geenerally acting like being academic is synonymous with perfect grades and prestige.

I used to really buy into that mindset and it was awful for me, and now I'm a two-time dropout struggling through trying to go back to school to finish my degree and desperately hoping my grades and brain are still okay enough for grad school when I finish. I used to be a great student, but I have ADHD and autism and a host of other things going on in my brain (and life) that just aren't really conducive to being that kind of an academic.

But I still love learning and want to spend more time in the learning corner of tumblr! I don't think being mentally ill and neurodivergent and struggling with school means you can't romanticize being a student a bit and have a fun time sharing what you're reading and learning with people. I like that aspect. Langblr especially has been a bit more my speed, and if I'm following you (as astriiformes) it's because I think you're cool and have a healthier relationship with academics and academia. Ideally I'd love to make a nice little corner of us who can encourage each other through our various challenges with school, and be open about how sometimes it's a hard time!

But oof. Here I was hoping studyblr would be a nice space to motivate myself and instead it's making me a bit melancholy about what I used to want vs what I've actually been capable of so far. And I bet I'm not the only one and that makes me a bit sad.

[candiid-caniine]

You once made a post quite a while ago about neurodivergency and how that affects kink. And while I am about a month and a half late to the party, I thought I'd answer. Because we have thought a lot about this.

So I think the most obvious way for us is through DID, dissociative identity disorder. Each headmate has their own kinks and attitudes towards sex. My dom, who is also plural and also of the mindset that everything can and should be sexualized, has certainly done some thinking about this. Favorite has to be an idea they've had for a long time (but never gotten around to doing because of a bunch of reasons) about making me switch out just as I'm about to cum. And having me switch back as soon as they do so, so I have to clean up the mess. Another plurality-derived sexy moment came from looking at nudes that another headmate took. I just had a deeply rooted feeling that even though this pictures looked like me, they weren't me. They were somebody puppeting my body around. I had never had a kink for such a thing before, and I still don't really, but oh my god. Oh my god.

For me specifically (call me... Gold), autism and ADHD heavily inform my kinks. We have severe executive dysfunction issues that make it really difficult to do basically anything. Clear instructions are the cure to this for me, to the point where I will do literally anything a select list of friends ask. The happier they are with me, the happier I am. I'm sure how you can see how this leads to me humiliated, in immeasurable pain, and so horny I could cry. Being horny just amplifies this feeling, so obviously orgasm denial is my number 1 kink. I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it.

Now to expose the system's other host (we have two), who you can call Lily. She is the holder for our histrionic personality disorder. Basically she really really really really needs attention so the rest of us only kinda need it instead of just really needing it. If that makes any sense at all. But, of course, sex is a place to find attention. Which means she's big into being worshipped. Number 1 kink right there. And on the sub side she loves praises and insults alike. Often she'll be a terrible brat when around friends who are also kinky just so that she can be the center of attention.

And to bring it back to your blog's theme, I am both pleased and dismayed to discover that the way horniness builds overtime is mostly (if not entirely) emotional in nature. If I'm being denied for an extended period of time (like now, happy November), and a headmate of mine fronts and cums, I don't feel any less horny.

I think that's all worth mentioning. Hope you find this interesting!

- @golden-tumble

hi friend! wow, this ask was so detailed and so, so interesting to me! thank you so much for sending it!

i can honestly say that, while i've had several friends who are plural, i've always felt...i don't know, unsure of how etiquette works irt sex. of course, i know each person in the body is, well, a person, and i should simply communicate with the person and the system at large about boundaries and preferences, etc. but i've felt out of my depth in regular conversation with members of a system, so i think that informs some of my anxiety.

it's fascinating to me that Gold continues to experience the intensity of denial even if another headmate orgasms. i guess i never really thought about which parts of denial-brain are truly brain and which parts are body, so that's a question answered that i never really thought to ask!

i've heard from plural friends/plural-owned nsft blogs that some headmates also hold what we consider "paraphilias," or any sexual interest that other system members feel is taboo, so that the rest of the system is protected from the guilt or shame that said paraphilias might cause, which i've always found really fascinating too.

i'll answer your wonderful ask with a bit of sharing of my own re: autism and some other things:

i frequently experience speech loss with enough stimulation/deep enough in subspace. i actually find it highly erotic, rather than distressing. uh, i mean, it is somewhat distressing, but in an erotic way, and i trust my spouse deeply and they know how to communicate with me despite the speech loss!

i have visual synesthesia triggered by (some) orgasms. i have seen flowers, horses galloping, all kinds of colors, robots, etc. when i cum lol!

one of my special interests since my early teens has been BDSM, in case you somehow didn't pick up on that lmao!!

my sensory-seeking behaviors for pressure affect my preferred positions and activities. fucking *love* being crushed under another person's weight, grabbed roughly, having my face shoved into the bed...just,, and i actually have an aversion to light touches. tickling/caressing, brushing lightly, poking, all make me squirrely, so i need to be touched like you fucking mean it ;)

it's obvious from this blog, but when i *want* to be, i'm ridiculously easy to condition. even when i don't *know* i want to be. see my interaction with lady maria a few posts ago. see also that i accidentally started cumming on command, then accidentally stopped being able to cum without permission. (downside: i might be losing my ability to cum on command, since we don't let me cum much anymore ;-; unsure if it was bc i was just bone-tired last time they told me to, but future testing will confirm.)

weirdest one: ever since i was young, i've been a maladaptive daydreamer and had highly vivid imaginary friends. one might even consider them accidental tulpas (i know the term is contested but it's the most recognizable one and i don't know what else to call them, sorry!). in childhood these friends were just friends, but as i got older and started to experience arousal/sexual interests, my relationships with them have gotten...charged, at times. they're not concrete enough for me to "feel" touch from them, etc, but i've definitely had them watching me and egging me on and dirty-talking to me while i touch myself, and it's fucking hot <3

i consider my romantic orientation to be affected by both my physical disability and my neurodivergence. the degree, times, and forms of attraction that i experience to others fluctuates and shifts depending on what's going on with my body and what's going on with my mind. i don't remember the terms for this, but to a degree it affects my sexuality as well--not so much whom i'm attracted to sexually, that's static, but *how.*

thanks again so much for sharing! <333

[carewyncromwell]

Jsckos inability to focus is such a mood schu I literally have to walk around when I cashier bc just standing there is impossible lol ( I have ADHD and autism) anyways I love him

Aww, thank you, sweetie!! <33 I have ADHD too, so the way I wrote Jackson in that drabble is directly from my own experiences, trying to focus in classes that didn't engage my interest.

In high school, I took a beginner's Psychology class, where my teacher did perhaps one of the best things a teacher had ever done for me in my entire school career by actually hosting our classes outside next to the creek behind our school, rather than keeping us in his sterile, all-white classroom. The teacher in question had read multiple studies that people who study outside are less likely to suffer from depression than those who study inside -- and well, our students being depressed would be unsurprising, given that our entire school, like so many others in America, had been designed like a prison with no possible visual distractions anywhere. Even all of the school's windows were positioned at the very top of the walls, way too high to see out of. And contrary to what many administrators apparently think, having nothing else going on in the classroom doesn't make you pay attention to your teacher's lessons more -- on the contrary, studies show student productivity, attention span, engagement, and creativity are generally all better in an outdoor setting.

Now, admittedly, my brand of ADHD means I'm very prone to hyperfocus, so I find truly multitasking very difficult. Doing two completely different and equally challenging assignments at the same time would be incredibly difficult for me. Trying to troubleshoot my Wi-Fi while simultaneously writing down a grocery list -- yeah, no, I'd have to focus solely on one or the other. What I do find helpful, though, is having some sort of mindless "busy" work for my hands, eyes, feet, etc. to do while I'm focusing on that thing I'm really focusing on. It can also kind of "wake my brain back up" if I've gotten into a rut or I've lost track of what I was doing.

In Jackson's case, he's read these poems by Edgar Allen Poe so many times that he's memorized them, so he's not taking in any new information or challenging his brain too much by rereading them. Brewing tea is something he's done countless times too, so he can do it largely on autopilot. And walking around to do these things involve more physical movement than deep, involved thought. So all of those things help keep his mind present and aware enough to finish his potion, which is his primary focus.

For me, while I'm working on a challenging word game on my phone, I might occasionally pop over to my Tumblr app to scroll absently through some pictures and then go back to my game, or I might also put on some music or some background TV noise while I'm working on that puzzle. The word game at that moment is my focus -- it's just the stuff around it that keeps my brain flexed enough to do the mental exertion needed to focus on the primary thing.

[otterish]

Please note that I'm not angry/upset at @my-autism-adhd-blog! I'm just upset at the study and how the website reports on it!

First off, here is a link to the study they are basing this on:

A very important part at the conclusion sums up the biiiiiiiiig problem with this study:

"These findings suggest that digital media exposure might be a potential risk factor for the development of atypical sensory profiles."

They're trying to blame screens for Autism and ADHD!

Another red flag in this study is that the data came from a questionnaire that the parents filled out. Not to mention the question regarding screen time was just "Does your kid watch TV or videos?" No data on how long each day they did, or if the parent was present (physically/emotionally) when they watched stuff. They didn't ask the kids themselves if their parents plopped them down in front of a movie to quiet them or anything like that.

I'm gonna just paste an amazing comment that someone made on the page for the study, because they sum up the rest perfectly:

Kylie Hesp, PhD Biotechnology: I am appalled to see such a strong bias / lack of awareness in this research group's work. The fact that kids with autism and ADHD are more likely to have high screen time does NOT mean that increased screen time CAUSES autism and ADHD. Correlation does not equal causation, that is the most basic principle in science, and they still got it wrong. As someone with both autism and ADHD, and a parent of a child with both, I think it is much more likely that children who are born with a neurodivergent brain are more attracted to screens, because it is a type of stimulation that is easy to regulate and allows one to zone out when they are overwhelmed. Another, separate issue, is that we should stop trying to blame autism / ADHD on environmental causes. Neurodivergence is not a disorder caused by something that needs fixing, it is a different way of processing information one is born with. Unfortunately, it just so happens not to work very well with the way our society is set up, which causes a lot of issues and limits someone's ability to function. It is disappointing to see that "experts" in this field still have such a lack of understanding of what they are studying.

By the way, what originally caught my attention was the website itself. Anything that is super granola-y always makes me suspicious, doubly so if it's against anything modern. I checked around and it turns out that the website itself was started by a tech bro (With no medical schooling) who was sued by Microsoft for faking clicks in order to get more money from ad revenue:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft-files-suit-for-faking-clicks-on-web-advertising

Here is his LinkedIn if you want to see more about him:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-ralls/

I then also checked the website that published the study, and I learned that they are also terrible! They recently got in trouble for denying medical racism!!!

it seems the closer I look, more info comes to light that makes them untrustworthy.

Hi everyone,

I found this interesting article about screen time and its connection to Autism and ADHD. Here’s an excerpt:

A recent study from Drexel University reveals alarming new insights into the effects of screen time on toddlers.

The research suggests that babies and toddlers exposed to television or video viewing may exhibit atypical sensory behaviors and have difficulty processing the world around them.

Atypical sensory behaviors include being disengaged, seeking more intense stimulation, or being overwhelmed by sensory inputs such as loud sounds or bright lights.

The full article will be below in case any one else wants to read it.

[a-dragons-journal]

Hello again. This is the 5-part anon from earlier. I wrote a long response to your post and I think it’d be more convenient to dump the text in a pastebin than split it into asks. The link is going to expire in a few months, so I recommend copying the contents into its own post rather than posting the link: pastebin. com / 2r49iein

I had, sorry; you've just caught me in the lead-up to and midst of finals week, so I haven't been answering asks as quickly as usual, especially ones that will take a significant amount of time and energy xD (No worries about checking in, though, Tumblr does have a horrible habit of eating asks and it's good to check! And also my ADHD no-object-permanence ass will see an ask, go "I'll respond to that later," and then forget it exists sometimes with no Tumblr interference necessary, so good to check for that reason too xD)

Hello again. This is the 5-part anon from earlier. Thank you for your thoughtful answer. First off, I want to apologize to anyone who may have been hurt by my words on the topic of otherheartedness, copinglink, etc. I did not mean to in any way minimize the importance of these identities for others. Because I felt I didn’t have the "right" to claim a "full" otherkin identity, I felt like I had to settle for something that simply didn’t fit my experience, which led to my frustrated, generalized words.

With that out of the way, I’ve been giving what you said some thought. I have to admit I never really participated in otherkin communities, only watching from afar. It’s good to know that I "qualify" as otherkin, but I wonder if it’s such a good idea for me to identify that way. I have so few experiences in common with most otherkin that I would probably feel *more* alienated by calling myself that, not *less*. In my experience, forcing myself into an identifier that is technically correct but feels wrong/bad is not the way to go. At any rate, I’ll describe my feelings in more detail, just because I’m really curious to know if you’ve ever heard of anyone similar, or if this reminds you of anything. I apologize if some of it is repetitive or if it jumps from topic to topic without making much sense.

Some parts of otherkin… culture, I guess? Baffle me. For example, needing to narrow down one’s exact species or the cause/origin of one’s identification as nonhuman. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s not valid; just that I don’t personally see the point? All the rules about who gets to call themself otherkin feel constraining to me, because I guess there’s not really any other term that fits, but even that one doesn’t fit that well, so I’m kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place.

So I’m more inclined to just say, yeah, I’m a bird. Do I behave like a bird? Do I have bird instincts? Not really, but I’m still a bird. Adopting an otherkin identity throws a wrench in that, making me feel like a failed nonhuman, because it’s *hard* not to feel invalid when everyone else seems completely different from you. If anything, I feel more valid doing my own thing! I didn’t come to this bird identity because I felt like I was Different somehow and needed to find an explanation for it (been there, done that with the autism, lol). Instead I came to it because it felt good, and right, and it made me happy.

You say since I don’t know if I chose this or not, it’s unlikely to be voluntary. I guess I just… feel weird about this? I don’t really have words to describe it. Maybe it boils down to "does it matter?". And I know when it comes to the term "otherkin", it *does* matter, which is kind of one of my problems with it.

I looked at that daemonism post you reblogged and found myself relating to the way Rook described Tukuxa: "She lacks a shark’s instincts, fears and drives - but her core is still shark." I wouldn’t say I *lack* these things, just that I simply don’t have them. Do I have a human mind in a human brain? Sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a human, nor does it make me any less of a bird. It makes me happy to conceptualize myself as a bird, to design my own appearance as a bird with qualities that can’t physically exist in this world, to daydream of flight. Is that such an uncommon experience?

I have a headmate who is a dragon. She was born as a dragon, she looks like a dragon, she simply Is A Dragon. She’s not dragonkin, she’s not based on any fictional dragon, she just… is. (Not to say that dragonkin folks aren’t dragons, just that she doesn’t identify as dragonkin.) But she doesn’t have any of the typical dragon traits you might expect; like me she has a "human mind" in a "human brain", and yet she’s just a dragon. I guess it’s sorta the same with me.

I just feel like it’s better for me to say "I’m [X]" and keep the specifics to myself. Despite these asks, I have no intention of holding my identities up to the scrutiny of others. If I say I’m a thing, I could mean it in a number of ways. Total or partial identification as/with, or even just a passing attachment. Ultimately, it’s my business, and trying to define it beyond just "I am this thing" or "I relate to this thing" or "This thing is me" feels sort of obnoxious? (For context, I do have nonhuman identities other than a bird, I just used that one as an example/shorthand.)

I guess that about covers everything. What do you think? If your followers/anyone who sees this wants to chime in, I’ll be looking at the notes. Thanks again!

(Regarding the 'hearted/'linker stuff, I figured that wasn't what you meant in your previous asks; I just wanted to bring it up because it's a conflation that gets made a lot, accidentally or on purpose.)

Honestly, these are all incredibly valid points, and if you just want to call yourself nonhuman or bird but not otherkin/therian then that's entirely up to you. If the label doesn't work for you, then it doesn't work for you! You are not obligated to use every label that you technically fit under (gods know I don't), and I didn't mean to imply so - just to make it clear that it's available to you if you do want it. I can see now that I probably kind of missed the point in that response.

And you're right that frankly, even though there is a wide range of experiences under the otherkin umbrella, there's also a set of common experiences that almost everyone seems to share at least a few of, and when you don't share those I can imagine it makes it kind of hard to connect with others in the community. Unfortunately, like I said, I don't know that there's a way around that other than trying to host a platform for those atypical experiences to speak, which is a good idea but probably not very effective in practice because of the sheer numbers game.

So you've decided you're probably better off not trying to make the "otherkin" label or community fit, and that's entirely valid - I guess the question is, what now? If you're wanting to find others with similar experiences to you, you still need somewhere to look, and it seems like this isn't it.

You might want to look into other nonhuman terms - "nonhuman" and "transspecies" come to mind, and while neither of these might fit you, they do collect different subcultures that might be less alienating for you or easier to find others with similar experiences within. The broader "alterhuman" label may also be useful, though that can be a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack just because of how many things are included in "alterhuman" and I don't know that you'd have any better luck than with "otherkin".

Or you might want to try older platforms, if you haven't already - forums, IRCs if they still exist. The community wasn't always as focused on some of the things you noted as it is now (pinning down a specific species, voluntary vs involuntary, etc.), and platforms with a population that trends toward people who've been around longer sometimes still have more of that culture than Tumblr and Discord tend to, though they come with their own problems of course.

Ultimately, if "I'm a bird" is the easiest way to communicate your experiences, then that's that on that. These words only exist because people find them useful - if you don't find them useful, don't feel like you have to use 'em. As far as finding community when so much of the otherkin community feels alienating to you, I'm afraid that's all I've got - y'all got anything for anon?

[literaticat]

My question is about mental health. When you have a client who has mental health issues such as periodic depression, anxiety that sometimes spirals into problematic levels for productivity, ADHD that affects speed of delivery and things like that, how is that dealt with? How do you work with such people and with delivery schedules at the same time?

Let me preface this by saying, I have ADHD and anxiety and probably a host of other brain things. And I have clients with these issues, and who are on the Autism spectrum, and who have any number of other neurodivergencies. Like, we're all people, right, and people's brains are all different, and that's fine. Life is a rich tapestry!

So, if you are straight with me about what is happening with you, I can probably help. Whether that means getting some kind of accommodations for you, or helping iron out a misunderstanding with your editor, or making sure your deadlines make sense, or just being a listening ear, or whatever.

If my clients are NOT straight with me about what is happening, though, it's very hard for me to be helpful. I'm not psychic, and I don't know what's going on with you unless you TELL me what's going on, nor can I help solve problems that I don't know exist.

So, as far as schedules go, I can help by making sure the deadlines make sense for you, or move them if we need to -- but at the end of the day, YOU'RE the one that has to do things like "make those deadlines" and "finish your book in a timely manner." It's your job.

Just like, I have to do MY job, so I do what I need to do to make it work. (Which for me, means taking my medication and making lots of lists and getting on with it.)

It could be that your needs change over time or with experience. Like you realize, oh shit, I am NOT OKAY when I sell an unfinished book, and I need to be able to write the whole thing BEFORE I sell it otherwise I freak out. OR, oh shit, I need extra time for copyedits. OR, oh shit, I don't understand edit communications done via phone. Or whatever. So, if/when that happens, you stay communicative and we figure it out together. I'm on your team, not the publisher's, but when you are under contract with the publisher, you are responsible for following that contract -- so, as a member of YOUR team, I'm happy to help you fulfill your end of the bargain, as long as you are doing the work and staying communicative with me.

[rjalker]

Also, yeerks can't magically cure mental illness, because if they could... They would literally just mess with their host's chemical balances to make them happy and joyful at being hosts.

If the yeerks were capable of messing with serotonin and dopamine production, everybody that has ever been a host would want to stay host for the rest of their lives. They literally be addicted to it.

Also well York's can experience our memories and emotions and shit, they are completely cut off from like, instincts and stuff. Humans are instinctively afraid of spiders and snakes, but a year can a human host does not react at all. Despite the human instincts that should be screaming at them.

The yeerks brain is completely separate from the human brain. Yes a yeerk in an autistic human host would act "normal", but it would be normal for a yeerk, not normal for a human. And that doesn't mean that the host is suddenly not autistic. It's just that the autism does not affect the yeerk.

Same with depression and ADHD. Sure if you didn't know that somebody was a hearse you think they magically been cured. But it's literally just the Yeerk, who is not depressed and does not have ADHD.

Being in a host is not at all like morphing.

Morphing you get all the instincts.

Except, and honestly this might just be k a Applegate drawing the line, but Yeerk's do not breed in their hosts. Even though honestly they should be if they're honestly trying to get as many hosts as possible. But they don't! Because it squicks them the fuck out.

Because while they can probably feel arousal and stuff they have absolutely no instinct to breed. Although again, it's probably just k a Applegate Drawing the Line, because if they can feel arousal there'd be no reason for them not to do it... Aside from it squicking them out which is K a Applegate drawing a line so it just goes in a circle. So whatever.

The point is that yeerks cannot cure depression, ADHD any mental illness. They cannot mess with the chemicals in your brain to make you neurotypical. They're not a magical pill that just happens to be a space slug.

If they could alter our brain chemistry, the war would already be over.

[astral-arbour-system]

Hah, we fit most of the criteria for OSDD (which they probably don't think is valid either let's be honest) and don't know our exact origin. Lets do this.

➖ We post about plurality a lot bc it's part of our life? Sue me I guess.

✅ Girl what, those are your terms, why are you mad about that. Yes we use them they're helpful.

➖ Many of us are queer because the host is queer and bleedover is very normal in systems.

✅ Not at the moment but I'm gonna dye it again soon. It looks cool as hell loser.

✅ I think they're describing the enby floof there. Again, what're you gonna do, I like it.

✅ Sorry I have ADHD and autism and our brain needs templates to make people so it uses hyperfixations.

❌ Never said those words, usually I just block people and if that's not possible I try to have a respectful conversation (it doesn't work).

✅ People want to know which of us they're talking to and so would we for that matter (by the way, Rowan is writing this post)

❌ Surprisingly, no. Unless you count Nico, I guess? But like op said, traumatized people often seem "edgy" so what on earth is their point.

❌ Never worn eyeliner, we hate makeup cause of sensory issues.

➖ No fuckin clue how old we look but we are 18. Y'all insist it has to form in childhood and then get pissy when minors know they have it. What.

➖ I mean. We post about our interactions because we're people and talk about normal things that can be pretty funny sometimes. You're allowed to not hate every moment of your life. Maybe that's why this group is so mean.

✅ Most people use discord?? Literally not relevant. And we have a carrd because a lot of system spaces wouldn't let us in without one, but we keep it up because it's useful to tell other people about us.

❌ We talk about a lot of things.

➖ Sorta, we didn't get diagnosed because we only fit most of the criteria. Know what we don't have? Significant distress or impairment. Meaning it isn't a disorder, it's just something that exists (psych's words).

❌ Nope.

❌ No DSMP introjects but some other MCYT ones. Do I need to get into why that's okay AGAIN?

➖ I don't even... fakeclaiming people isn't "polite" ever.

❌ If someone fucks up I make it clear who it was so that others don't get shit unnecessarily, but I would never blame something I did on one of my headmates.

❌ There would be no point to that since our switches don't look like anything.

➖ Don't know if we're traumagenic or not.

Tw // Fakeclaiming

Saw this and saw some other systems answering so we want to too! (Note, we don't have DID, but in the case of Sysmeds they interchangeably use DID and System as the same thing)

❌ we post about our interests a lot.

✅ They describe our system members' roles easily, so why not?

❌ We have a few cishet people, and I think only a couple use neopronouns.

❌ We have never dyed our hair.

❌ Our hair is just past our shoulders and we have a regular middle part, our fringe just frames our face a lil.

✅ We get new Headmates often in times of stress, and if we have a character who brings us great comfort, why wouldn't we introject them?

❌ We've actually never been fakeclaimed. We've been posted on r/systemscringe twice I believe, but one was because of an inside joke that the poster took seriously, and I honestly can't remember the other one 💀. Not once did they say we were fake. One person did comment "out of all the star wars characters why introject Ezra Bridger" which was. Something.

➖ We do if we're talking about system experiences. We often forget on here. While talking to people on discord we often use pk. It's so people know what they can and can't talk about i.e Don't talk Abt Belos around Hunter, Don't talk about the Kraang around me(Leon) etc. Also I'd like to sign off because I use they/he and hate She Pronouns, whereas some people use He/She and hate They pronouns.

❌ I don't think so? Most of us are super outgoing. The most "edgy" I can think of is Hunter but he's just traumatised.

❌ Never worn eyeliner

✅ Yeah? We are under 18. Minors can be systems!

➖ We don't talk about how we interact a lot. We have a couple times but we don't see any point.

➖ Don't a lot of people use discord? Also no! We have a carrd but we prefer Rentry.

❌ We talk about being plural a lot because it's a massive part of who we are but sometimes we just wanna talk about tmnt or the owl house or star wars.

❌ We don't want to be diagnosed with DID, because we do not have it.

❌ Typing quirks are difficult for us to read and understand, why would we do that to ourselves? Yuno types in italics but only because he likes how it looks, and Evelyn puts ᓚᘏᗢ before her messages because she likes cats.

❌ We don't have any of them. Our most introjected media currently is Rottmnt.

❌ We'd be happy to educate them and if they started getting aggressive we would simply block them.

❌ Headmates who are aggressive and/or would cause distress to other people do not interact on social media, and we strongly believe in system responsibility.

❌ We don't record ourselves ever, and our switches are very small and unnoticeable.

➖ We are Praesigenic. We will not say if we are Traumagenic or Endogenic, although we do completely support Endo Systems.

Overall we relate to only 3 of these things.

Note: Even if you relate to all of these things, or none of these things, that does not mean you are faking. Plurality is different for everyone and as long as you say you are a system, you are a system. <3

[babyjakes]

〈 disclaimer: this blog posts content not suitable for individuals under the age of 18. minors are strictly prohibited from viewing, sharing, or interacting with this blog. for more information on this blog's commitment to protecting minors, read our full statement here. 〉

nav | masterlist | rules | library

come check out who's running our blog!

about eun's system.

i'm eun, and i have a dissociative disorder, which means my consciousness is divided into separate parts; these parts are called alters. different alters are “in control” (conscious) at different times. the most widely known dissociative disorder is did (dissociative identity disorder), formerly known as mpd (multiple personality disorder). other dissociative disorders include: osdd, ddnos, etc. while system sizes vary greatly, my system is small, consisting of just a few regularly fronting alters. complex early childhood trauma prevented my brain from properly developing into one state of consciousness. due to my extreme environment, it was safer for me to be able to compartmentalize things easily and have different states of awareness to face different situations. i have been properly evaluated and diagnosed by my therapist and psychiatrist who are now “treating” me. “treatment” for dissociative disorders looks different for every system; some are aiming to fully re-integrate (merge) their parts, however this is not the type of treatment i’m receiving. i am doing mainly trauma and system maintenance work. in addition to did, my system is also diagnosed with autism, adhd, and we're recovered from a restrictive eating disorder.

meet eun, the owner of this blog.

name | eun (pronounced "yoon", like "moon") system role | host age | 20’s pronouns | she/her

mini introduction | hey there! i’m eun- it’s so nice to meet you! i really hope you enjoy your time here on my blog; my goal is to make a safe, fun space for anyone who might be needing it. feel free to stay a while and reach out if you’re feeling up to it. i love making new friends and can’t wait to meet you!

meet stella, the sweetheart of the system.

name | stella (aka “star”) system role | trauma-holder age | 20's (body age) pronouns | she/her

mini introduction | hi, thanks for reading this and nice to meet you! i'm stel; i'm slowly getting comfortable with being more active on eun's blog, right now i mainly help with design components and contributing to eun's new series (egem) in which she's lovingly based her oc (wren) off of me. she's also helping me look for a rp nonnie within the community, which you can find out more about below. i'm a bit nervous to be here, but looking forward to interacting more with everyone and being more active in this space!

stel's blog | stella's sideblog @aestelics is where she tests out themes for @babyjakes and posts her digital art. go give her a follow!

meet winnie, a celebrity among eun's friends and followers.

name | winnie system role | trauma-holder age | 3-5 (internal age) pronouns | she/her

mini introduction | hi im winnie i hamg out here some tiem when bigeun away pos some art too like to paimt rocksand play in the gardem with the bugs and do those cute mymelo picure and hope we can be friems !

winnie's safe!dad!steve | like many accounts in the community, winnie has a “dada” anon who helps take care of her and plays with her. because of her unique circumstance, her dad, steve rogers, is completely non-sexual and functions more like an actual caretaker and not a partner. when she refers to "dada”, she most likely means steve (unless she clarifies that she means eun’s real father.) steve is best known on the blog as safe!dad!steve.

winnie's designated safe!friend anons | winnie also has some friends who play with her and help her when safe!dad!steve isn’t around. these accounts are mainly character anon accounts and all follow the same strict sfw-only guidelines as safe!dad!steve. because of previous “safe” accounts exploiting winnie, safe!friends are now selected with much caution and discretion.

winnie’s blog | winnie is mainly active on her sideblog @pisachio, though she’ll occasionally stop by on @babyjakes to say hi! go check out winnie’s blog for lots of art, sanrio, memes, and overall wholesome vibes!

[vergess]

If you relate intimately to this, you have untreated conditions impacting your executive function. Autism and ADHD are the “big ones” but depression, anxiety, PTSD, and a host of other conditions also impact your ability to work at a steady, low-stress pace.

If you have any meaningful access to a doctor, please ask them to give you an ADHD diagnostic, and if that comes back “clear” then ask them about other ways of controlling for this immense swing in abilities and mood.

If you don’t have access to a doctor, there are still non-medication options that can ease the burden of executive dysfunction. Personally, I have found that just asking someone to tell me to go do a thing I have already decided on doing can be enough to push past the initial block, but your brain will be different. (And I don’t mean “remind” or “ask” but specifically say, “okay it is time to do X, like you said you would”).

Your life is not supposed to be a roller coaster of unbearable exhaustion and immeasurable panic. That is not “normal” and it is not healthy.

You deserve better.

I don’t want to feel addressed

[paullassiterca]

Top Tips to Avoid Pharmaceutical Injury

30 Tips in 30 Days Designed to Help You Take Control of Your Health

This article is included in Dr. Mercola’s All-Time Top 30 Health Tips series. Every day during the month of January, a new tip will be added that will help you take control of your health. Want to see the full list? Click here.

Vaccines have quickly become Big Pharma’s most lucrative profit center. Currently valued at more than $34 billion a year, the vaccine industry is projected to exceed $49 billion by 2022.1 There are several reasons for this rapid growth. Not only are vaccines priced much higher than pills, but governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are also engaged in the marketing of vaccines.

These unethical partnerships, which use both taxpayer and NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves.

To cash in on vaccine profits, Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have cast all vaccines as “life-saving.” One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present the HPV vaccine as an “anticancer” vaccine, even though there’s not a single shred of evidence that it actually has an impact on cervical cancer rates. Meanwhile, mounting evidence of serious harm and death caused by the HPV vaccine is being ignored or cast aside as “coincidental.”

To Avoid Vaccine Injury, Educate Yourself About the Risks

The official stance repeated by most mainstream media is that vaccines have been thoroughly researched, that “hundreds” of studies have proven their safety, and that no link between vaccines and health problems, such as autism, have ever been found.

It sounds definitive enough, and is often repeated as established fact. Yet it’s far from the whole truth. Importantly, the vaccine industry has long shied away from evaluating vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations to determine potential differences in general health outcomes.

The few independent scientists who have attempted such an investigation have little comfort to give to those who believe vaccines are essential for health, and mandatory use of vaccines by all children is the only way to protect society from disease.

Vaccine May Actually Be Doing More Harm Than Good

One such study,2 published in 2017, examined health outcomes among infants 3 to 5 months old following the introduction of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine in Guinea-Bissau, which took place in the early 1980s. This population offered the rare opportunity to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children due to the way the vaccines were rolled out in the West African country.

Shockingly, researchers discovered “DTP was associated with fivefold higher mortality than being unvaccinated.” According to the authors, “All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis.”

In short, the researchers concluded that DTP vaccine weakened the children’s immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to a whole host of other often deadly diseases and serious health problems.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines by the time they’re 18 years old, with 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before the age of 6.3

This, despite the fact that no thorough investigation has ever been conducted to determine how all of these vaccines actually affect a child’s health. What’s worse, no one is tracking the health outcomes of children who adhere to the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule and state mandatory vaccination programs.

Lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department also defend vaccines in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP), commonly referred to as “vaccine court,” which means the U.S. government has a stake in maintaining the illusion that vaccines are a necessary lifesaving measure that causes minimal harm.

High Vaccination Rate Does Not Translate Into Better Infant Health

What we do know is that:

• The U.S. has the highest vaccination rate in the world, with 94 to 96 percent of children entering kindergarten having received multiple doses of vaccines4

• The U.S. also has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any developed nation5,6

• 1 in 6 American children has a developmental disability, which includes ADD, ADHD, autism, hearing loss, learning disabilities, mental disabilities, seizures and stammering — many of which are also listed or known side effects of vaccines

• 54 percent of children have a diagnosed chronic illness, including anxiety, asthma, behavioral problems, bone and muscle disorders, chronic ear infections, depression, diabetes, food and/or environmental allergies and epilepsy.

This list again mirrors many of the acknowledged side effects of vaccines, and the rise in prevalence of these diseases parallel the rise in required vaccines, yet vaccine promoters insist that these illnesses are in no way associated with vaccinations

Common Vaccine Side Effects

Both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have also admitted that government licensed and recommended childhood vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe,”7 and possible side effects that are actually listed on vaccine inserts include:

Autoimmune diseases

Food allergies

Asthma

Eczema

Type 1 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Tics

Tourette syndrome

ADD/ADHD

Autism

Speech delay

Neurodevelopment disorders

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Seizure disorder

Narcolepsy

Vaccines also have the highest number of recalls of any drug, which speaks to their “unavoidably unsafe” nature. Victims have also received compensation from the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) for the following (and other) injuries:

Guillain-Barre syndrome

Transverse myelitis

Encephalopathy

Seizure disorder hypoxic seizure

Death

Brachial neuritis

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP)

Premature ovarian failure

Bell’s palsy

Type 1 diabetes

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura

Rheumatic arthritis

Multiple sclerosis

Fibromyalgia

Anaphylaxis

Ocular myasthenia gravis

Infantile spasms

The Vaccines-Autism Link Revived

According to the latest survey,8,9 1 in 40 American children between the ages of 3 and 17 is now on the autism spectrum. This shocking update was published in the journal Pediatrics in December 2018. In 2014, the rate was 1 in 59; in 2010, it was 1 in 68; in 2000, it was 1 in 150.10 To say we’re looking at exponential growth would be an understatement. But do vaccines have anything to do with this trend?

According to a Full Measure report11 by award-winning investigative reporter and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, was the pro-vaccine expert witness the government used to debunk and turn down autism claims in vaccine court.

“Zimmerman was the government’s top expert witness and had testified that vaccines didn’t cause autism. The debate was declared over,” Attkisson reports. “But now Dr. Zimmerman has provided remarkable new information.

He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children. That turnabout from the government’s own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out …

And he has come forward and explained how he told the United States government vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children and [the] United States government, the Department of Justice [DOJ], suppressed his true opinions.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of The World Mercury Project, was the one who convinced Zimmerman to speak out about the cover-up. In a sworn affidavit, dated September 7, 2018, Zimmerman states that, in 2007, he told DOJ lawyers he had “discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism.”

“I explained that in a subset of children … vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation … did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder,” Zimmerman writes.

A week after this 2007 meeting, the DOJ fired him, saying his services would no longer be needed. According to Zimmerman, the DOJ then went on to misrepresent his opinion in future cases, making no mention of the exceptions he’d informed them of. Kennedy has now filed a fraud complaint with the DOJ Inspector General.

William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the CDC’s National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, has also confessed to covering up links found between vaccines and autism, in this case the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

According to Thompson, this scientific fraud was committed for the express purpose of covering up potential safety problems so the agency would be able to maintain that the MMR vaccine had been proven safe to give to all children. By eliminating the incriminating data, the link vanished, and this research has been cited as proof ever since that vaccines don’t cause autism.

Attkisson’s report also reveals how Congressmen who wanted to investigate the autism-vaccine link were bullied, harassed and threatened. Dan Burton (R-IN), Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL) are among 11 current and former members of Congress and staff who told Attkisson they were warned to drop the vaccine safety issue by PhRMA lobbyists.

Vaccines Can Have Serious Consequences for Adults Too

While children are more susceptible to vaccine damage than adults, grownups can and have been seriously injured and killed by routine vaccinations as well. It’s important to realize that no vaccine is 100 percent safe for everyone. As reported by CNN, an oncologist with London’s Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust recently died following a routine yellow fever vaccination:12

“Martin Gore, 67, died Thursday morning after receiving the vaccine, which is recommended to travelers visiting sub-Saharan Africa, most of South America, and parts of Central American and the Caribbean …

Gore’s death casts light on the heightened risk associated with the yellow fever vaccine and the over-60 demographic. Typical side effects of the vaccine include headaches, muscle pain, mild fever and soreness at the injection site …

However, the vaccinations can, in rare circumstances, cause more severe side effects, including allergic reactions and problems affecting the brain or organs …

The WHO reported that all cases of viscerotropic disease — a rare but dangerous side effect of yellow fever vaccinations where an illness similar to wild-type yellow fever proliferates in multiple organs — have occurred in primary vaccines, starting two to five days after vaccination.”

Might Vaccine Reaction Rate Be as High as 1 in 10?

In the video above, Del Bigtree,13 an Emmy Award-winning producer of “The Doctors” talk show for six years, and one of the producers of the documentary, “Vaxxed,” discusses vaccine safety, or rather the lack thereof.

In it, he recounts how, in 2010, the CDC hired a company to automate the federal vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) in such a way that any potential vaccine reactions reported to doctors participating in the Harvard Pilgrim HMO would automatically be uploaded into the VAERS database.

Remarkably, preliminary data showed that out of 376,452 individuals given 45 different vaccines, 35,570 possible vaccine reactions were identified. This means nearly 1 in 10 people suffered a reaction after vaccination concerning enough to be reported, yet the official CDC mantra is that the risk for serious vaccine injury or death is 1 in 1 million.

Unfortunately, while the creation of VAERS in 1986 was an opportunity to get a firmer grasp of the number of potential vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths occurring after vaccinations given in the U.S., the CDC didn’t follow through, and the project fell by the wayside.

Medical Errors Are the Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

While I’ve focused a lot of attention on vaccines and the necessity for educating yourself about their risks in this article, vaccines are by far not the only hazard presented by the medical industry. In fact, medical errors in general are the third leading cause of death, killing an estimated 250,000 Americans each year,14,15 an increase of about 25,000 people annually from data published in 2000.16

Side effects from drugs, taken as prescribed, account for the vast majority of iatrogenic deaths, but unnecessary surgeries, medication errors in hospitals, hospital-acquired infections and other medical errors occurring in hospitals also claim their fair share of lives.

Research17 published in 2013 estimated that preventable hospital errors kill 210,000 Americans each year — a figure that comes very close to the latest statistics. However, when deaths related to diagnostic errors, errors of omission, and failure to follow guidelines were included, the number skyrocketed to 440,000 preventable hospital deaths each year.

10 Tips to Avoid Medical Harm

How can you avoid becoming one of these statistics? Aside from educating yourself on the risks and benefits of vaccines, here are several additional suggestions:

Ask your doctor whether a recommended test and/or treatment is really necessary, and do your own homework — According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may be unnecessary,18 any one of which can put you at risk for a potentially serious or lethal side effect.

An investigation19 by the Mayo Clinic published in 2013 also revealed between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments and procedures you receive are of no benefit to you — or are actually harmful — as determined by clinical studies. To learn which tests and interventions may do more harm than good, browse through the Choosing Wisely website.20

Avoid hospitals unless absolutely necessary — According to 2011 statistics, 1 in 25 patients in the U.S. end up contracting some form of infection while in the hospital,21 and 205 Americans die from hospital-acquired infections each and every day.22

Do your due diligence before undergoing endoscopy — If you’re having a colonoscopy or any other procedure using a flexible endoscope done, you can significantly reduce your risk of contracting an infection by asking the hospital or facility how the scope is cleaned, and which cleaning agent is used.

Some esophagoscopes and bronchoscopes have sterile sheaths with disposable air-water and biopsy channels, but many others do not, and must be cleaned between each use. If the hospital or clinic uses glutaraldehyde, or the brand name Cidex, cancel your appointment and go elsewhere.

About 80 percent of clinics use glutaraldehyde because it’s a less expensive alternative; however, it does not do a good job of sterilizing the equipment. If they use peracetic acid, your likelihood of contracting an infection from a previous patient is slim.

To learn more about this, see my interview with David Lewis, Ph.D., in “How Improper Sterilization of Endoscopes Could Put Your Health at Risk.”

Enlist a health care advocate — Once hospitalized, you’re at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there have someone there with you. It’s important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes.

For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: “What is this medication? What is it for? What’s the dose?” Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they’re getting it right if they know they’ll be questioned about it.

To learn more, listen to my interview with Dr. Andrew Saul in “What Hospitals Won’t Tell You — Vital Strategies That Could Save Your Life,” or pick up a copy of his book, “Hospitals and Health: Your Orthomolecular Guide to a Shorter Hospital Stay.”

In it, he discusses the dangers of hospital stays, the type of patient that tends to get killed most frequently, and how you can protect your health and life in the event you have to be hospitalized. For example, reminding nurses and doctors to wash their hands and change gloves before touching you can go a long way toward avoiding contamination with potentially lethal microbes.

Do your own prep for surgery — If you or someone you know is scheduled for surgery, print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual,23 which is part of the campaign “Safe Surgery Saves Lives.” The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. Print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect yourself, your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.

Know the most effective protocol for sepsis — Sepsis is a progressive disease process initiated by an aggressive, dysfunctional immune response to an infection in the bloodstream, which is why it’s sometimes referred to as blood poisoning. Each year, an estimated 1 million Americans get sepsis24,25 and up to half of them die as a result.26,27,28

Symptoms of sepsis are often overlooked, even by health professionals, and without prompt treatment, the condition can be deadly.

Unfortunately, conventional treatments often fail, and most hospitals have yet to embrace the use of intravenous (IV) vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine,29 a treatment developed by Dr. Paul Marik, which has been shown to reduce sepsis mortality from 40 to a mere 8.5 percent.30,31 Common signs and symptoms of sepsis to watch out for include:32

A high fever

Inability to keep fluids down

Rapid heartbeat; rapid, shallow breathing and/or shortness of breath

Lethargy and/or confusion

Slurred speech, often resembling intoxication

Should a few or all of these be present, seek immediate medical attention to rule out sepsis. Also inform the medical staff that you suspect sepsis, as time is of the essence when it comes to treatment, and urge them to use Marik’s protocol (currently the standard of care for sepsis at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where Marik works). You can learn more about this protocol by following the hyperlink provided above.

Optimize your vitamin D instead of getting the flu vaccine — Research33,34 shows vitamin D optimization is a more effective flu prevention strategy than flu vaccination, reducing respiratory infections such as influenza by 50 percent in those with vitamin D blood levels below 10 ng/mL. People with higher vitamin D levels at baseline may reduce their risk by about 10 percent, which the researchers stated was about equal to the effect of flu vaccines.

Aside from vitamin D, loading up on vitamins B1 and C may go a long way toward keeping you healthy through the flu season and beyond. Influenza has also been successfully treated with high-dose vitamin C.35 Taking zinc lozenges at the first sign of a cold or flu can also be helpful.

Avoid antibiotics — Drugs are vastly overprescribed and misused, and this is particularly true for antibiotics. Avoid using them unless absolutely necessary, and remember they don’t work for viral infections. Unnecessary use of antibiotics is one of the driving causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Turn a deaf ear to drug ads — While drug makers are required to inform consumers about potential side effects in their ads, they’ve perfected drug ad narration to make them less frightful.36

Avoid drugs, unless absolutely necessary — As mentioned, drugs — taken as prescribed — account for a majority of the 250,000 people who die from medical mistakes in the U.S. each year. A great many, if not most, diseases can be effectively addressed using simple lifestyle changes.

Key factors include diet, exercise and nonexercise movement, sleep and stress reduction. To investigate your options, you can search my database of tens of thousands of articles simply by entering your condition in the search engine.

Among the most lethal drugs right now are the opioids, which need to be used with extreme care and only in the short term. For treatment options, see “Treating Pain Without Drugs,” and “Study Reveals Previously Unknown Mechanism Behind Acupuncture’s Ability to Reduce Pain,” which also provides a long list of other drug-free pain relief strategies.

Tip #21Make Magnesium a Priority

from Articles http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/01/22/tips-to-avoid-medical-harm.aspx source https://niapurenaturecom.tumblr.com/post/182210854766

[jerrytackettca]

Top Tips to Avoid Pharmaceutical Injury

30 Tips in 30 Days Designed to Help You Take Control of Your Health

This article is included in Dr. Mercola's All-Time Top 30 Health Tips series. Every day during the month of January, a new tip will be added that will help you take control of your health. Want to see the full list? Click here.

Vaccines have quickly become Big Pharma's most lucrative profit center. Currently valued at more than $34 billion a year, the vaccine industry is projected to exceed $49 billion by 2022.1 There are several reasons for this rapid growth. Not only are vaccines priced much higher than pills, but governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are also engaged in the marketing of vaccines.

These unethical partnerships, which use both taxpayer and NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves.

To cash in on vaccine profits, Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have cast all vaccines as "life-saving." One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present the HPV vaccine as an "anticancer" vaccine, even though there's not a single shred of evidence that it actually has an impact on cervical cancer rates. Meanwhile, mounting evidence of serious harm and death caused by the HPV vaccine is being ignored or cast aside as "coincidental."

To Avoid Vaccine Injury, Educate Yourself About the Risks

The official stance repeated by most mainstream media is that vaccines have been thoroughly researched, that "hundreds" of studies have proven their safety, and that no link between vaccines and health problems, such as autism, have ever been found.

It sounds definitive enough, and is often repeated as established fact. Yet it's far from the whole truth. Importantly, the vaccine industry has long shied away from evaluating vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations to determine potential differences in general health outcomes.

The few independent scientists who have attempted such an investigation have little comfort to give to those who believe vaccines are essential for health, and mandatory use of vaccines by all children is the only way to protect society from disease.

Vaccine May Actually Be Doing More Harm Than Good

One such study,2 published in 2017, examined health outcomes among infants 3 to 5 months old following the introduction of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine in Guinea-Bissau, which took place in the early 1980s. This population offered the rare opportunity to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children due to the way the vaccines were rolled out in the West African country.

Shockingly, researchers discovered "DTP was associated with fivefold higher mortality than being unvaccinated." According to the authors, "All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis."

In short, the researchers concluded that DTP vaccine weakened the children's immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to a whole host of other often deadly diseases and serious health problems.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines by the time they're 18 years old, with 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before the age of 6.3

This, despite the fact that no thorough investigation has ever been conducted to determine how all of these vaccines actually affect a child's health. What's worse, no one is tracking the health outcomes of children who adhere to the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule and state mandatory vaccination programs.

Lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department also defend vaccines in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP), commonly referred to as "vaccine court," which means the U.S. government has a stake in maintaining the illusion that vaccines are a necessary lifesaving measure that causes minimal harm.

High Vaccination Rate Does Not Translate Into Better Infant Health

What we do know is that:

• The U.S. has the highest vaccination rate in the world, with 94 to 96 percent of children entering kindergarten having received multiple doses of vaccines4

• The U.S. also has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any developed nation5,6

• 1 in 6 American children has a developmental disability, which includes ADD, ADHD, autism, hearing loss, learning disabilities, mental disabilities, seizures and stammering — many of which are also listed or known side effects of vaccines

• 54 percent of children have a diagnosed chronic illness, including anxiety, asthma, behavioral problems, bone and muscle disorders, chronic ear infections, depression, diabetes, food and/or environmental allergies and epilepsy.

This list again mirrors many of the acknowledged side effects of vaccines, and the rise in prevalence of these diseases parallel the rise in required vaccines, yet vaccine promoters insist that these illnesses are in no way associated with vaccinations

Common Vaccine Side Effects

Both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have also admitted that government licensed and recommended childhood vaccines are "unavoidably unsafe,"7 and possible side effects that are actually listed on vaccine inserts include:

Autoimmune diseases

Food allergies

Asthma

Eczema

Type 1 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Tics

Tourette syndrome

ADD/ADHD

Autism

Speech delay

Neurodevelopment disorders

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Seizure disorder

Narcolepsy

Vaccines also have the highest number of recalls of any drug, which speaks to their "unavoidably unsafe" nature. Victims have also received compensation from the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) for the following (and other) injuries:

Guillain-Barre syndrome

Transverse myelitis

Encephalopathy

Seizure disorder hypoxic seizure

Death

Brachial neuritis

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP)

Premature ovarian failure

Bell's palsy

Type 1 diabetes

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura

Rheumatic arthritis

Multiple sclerosis

Fibromyalgia

Anaphylaxis

Ocular myasthenia gravis

Infantile spasms

The Vaccines-Autism Link Revived

According to the latest survey,8,9 1 in 40 American children between the ages of 3 and 17 is now on the autism spectrum. This shocking update was published in the journal Pediatrics in December 2018. In 2014, the rate was 1 in 59; in 2010, it was 1 in 68; in 2000, it was 1 in 150.10 To say we're looking at exponential growth would be an understatement. But do vaccines have anything to do with this trend?

According to a Full Measure report11 by award-winning investigative reporter and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, was the pro-vaccine expert witness the government used to debunk and turn down autism claims in vaccine court.

"Zimmerman was the government's top expert witness and had testified that vaccines didn't cause autism. The debate was declared over," Attkisson reports. "But now Dr. Zimmerman has provided remarkable new information.

He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children. That turnabout from the government's own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out …

And he has come forward and explained how he told the United States government vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children and [the] United States government, the Department of Justice [DOJ], suppressed his true opinions."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of The World Mercury Project, was the one who convinced Zimmerman to speak out about the cover-up. In a sworn affidavit, dated September 7, 2018, Zimmerman states that, in 2007, he told DOJ lawyers he had "discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism."

"I explained that in a subset of children … vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation … did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder," Zimmerman writes.

A week after this 2007 meeting, the DOJ fired him, saying his services would no longer be needed. According to Zimmerman, the DOJ then went on to misrepresent his opinion in future cases, making no mention of the exceptions he'd informed them of. Kennedy has now filed a fraud complaint with the DOJ Inspector General.

William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the CDC's National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, has also confessed to covering up links found between vaccines and autism, in this case the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

According to Thompson, this scientific fraud was committed for the express purpose of covering up potential safety problems so the agency would be able to maintain that the MMR vaccine had been proven safe to give to all children. By eliminating the incriminating data, the link vanished, and this research has been cited as proof ever since that vaccines don't cause autism.

Attkisson's report also reveals how Congressmen who wanted to investigate the autism-vaccine link were bullied, harassed and threatened. Dan Burton (R-IN), Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL) are among 11 current and former members of Congress and staff who told Attkisson they were warned to drop the vaccine safety issue by PhRMA lobbyists.

Vaccines Can Have Serious Consequences for Adults Too

While children are more susceptible to vaccine damage than adults, grownups can and have been seriously injured and killed by routine vaccinations as well. It's important to realize that no vaccine is 100 percent safe for everyone. As reported by CNN, an oncologist with London's Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust recently died following a routine yellow fever vaccination:12

"Martin Gore, 67, died Thursday morning after receiving the vaccine, which is recommended to travelers visiting sub-Saharan Africa, most of South America, and parts of Central American and the Caribbean …

Gore's death casts light on the heightened risk associated with the yellow fever vaccine and the over-60 demographic. Typical side effects of the vaccine include headaches, muscle pain, mild fever and soreness at the injection site …

However, the vaccinations can, in rare circumstances, cause more severe side effects, including allergic reactions and problems affecting the brain or organs …

The WHO reported that all cases of viscerotropic disease — a rare but dangerous side effect of yellow fever vaccinations where an illness similar to wild-type yellow fever proliferates in multiple organs — have occurred in primary vaccines, starting two to five days after vaccination."

Might Vaccine Reaction Rate Be as High as 1 in 10?

In the video above, Del Bigtree,13 an Emmy Award-winning producer of "The Doctors" talk show for six years, and one of the producers of the documentary, "Vaxxed," discusses vaccine safety, or rather the lack thereof.

In it, he recounts how, in 2010, the CDC hired a company to automate the federal vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) in such a way that any potential vaccine reactions reported to doctors participating in the Harvard Pilgrim HMO would automatically be uploaded into the VAERS database.

Remarkably, preliminary data showed that out of 376,452 individuals given 45 different vaccines, 35,570 possible vaccine reactions were identified. This means nearly 1 in 10 people suffered a reaction after vaccination concerning enough to be reported, yet the official CDC mantra is that the risk for serious vaccine injury or death is 1 in 1 million.

Unfortunately, while the creation of VAERS in 1986 was an opportunity to get a firmer grasp of the number of potential vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths occurring after vaccinations given in the U.S., the CDC didn't follow through, and the project fell by the wayside.

Medical Errors Are the Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

While I've focused a lot of attention on vaccines and the necessity for educating yourself about their risks in this article, vaccines are by far not the only hazard presented by the medical industry. In fact, medical errors in general are the third leading cause of death, killing an estimated 250,000 Americans each year,14,15 an increase of about 25,000 people annually from data published in 2000.16

Side effects from drugs, taken as prescribed, account for the vast majority of iatrogenic deaths, but unnecessary surgeries, medication errors in hospitals, hospital-acquired infections and other medical errors occurring in hospitals also claim their fair share of lives.

Research17 published in 2013 estimated that preventable hospital errors kill 210,000 Americans each year — a figure that comes very close to the latest statistics. However, when deaths related to diagnostic errors, errors of omission, and failure to follow guidelines were included, the number skyrocketed to 440,000 preventable hospital deaths each year.

10 Tips to Avoid Medical Harm

How can you avoid becoming one of these statistics? Aside from educating yourself on the risks and benefits of vaccines, here are several additional suggestions:

Ask your doctor whether a recommended test and/or treatment is really necessary, and do your own homework — According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may be unnecessary,18 any one of which can put you at risk for a potentially serious or lethal side effect.

An investigation19 by the Mayo Clinic published in 2013 also revealed between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments and procedures you receive are of no benefit to you — or are actually harmful — as determined by clinical studies. To learn which tests and interventions may do more harm than good, browse through the Choosing Wisely website.20

Avoid hospitals unless absolutely necessary — According to 2011 statistics, 1 in 25 patients in the U.S. end up contracting some form of infection while in the hospital,21 and 205 Americans die from hospital-acquired infections each and every day.22

Do your due diligence before undergoing endoscopy — If you're having a colonoscopy or any other procedure using a flexible endoscope done, you can significantly reduce your risk of contracting an infection by asking the hospital or facility how the scope is cleaned, and which cleaning agent is used.

Some esophagoscopes and bronchoscopes have sterile sheaths with disposable air-water and biopsy channels, but many others do not, and must be cleaned between each use. If the hospital or clinic uses glutaraldehyde, or the brand name Cidex, cancel your appointment and go elsewhere.

About 80 percent of clinics use glutaraldehyde because it's a less expensive alternative; however, it does not do a good job of sterilizing the equipment. If they use peracetic acid, your likelihood of contracting an infection from a previous patient is slim.

To learn more about this, see my interview with David Lewis, Ph.D., in "How Improper Sterilization of Endoscopes Could Put Your Health at Risk."

Enlist a health care advocate — Once hospitalized, you're at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there have someone there with you. It's important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes.

For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: "What is this medication? What is it for? What's the dose?" Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they're getting it right if they know they'll be questioned about it.

To learn more, listen to my interview with Dr. Andrew Saul in "What Hospitals Won't Tell You — Vital Strategies That Could Save Your Life," or pick up a copy of his book, "Hospitals and Health: Your Orthomolecular Guide to a Shorter Hospital Stay."

In it, he discusses the dangers of hospital stays, the type of patient that tends to get killed most frequently, and how you can protect your health and life in the event you have to be hospitalized. For example, reminding nurses and doctors to wash their hands and change gloves before touching you can go a long way toward avoiding contamination with potentially lethal microbes.

Do your own prep for surgery — If you or someone you know is scheduled for surgery, print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual,23 which is part of the campaign "Safe Surgery Saves Lives." The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. Print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect yourself, your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.

Know the most effective protocol for sepsis — Sepsis is a progressive disease process initiated by an aggressive, dysfunctional immune response to an infection in the bloodstream, which is why it's sometimes referred to as blood poisoning. Each year, an estimated 1 million Americans get sepsis24,25 and up to half of them die as a result.26,27,28

Symptoms of sepsis are often overlooked, even by health professionals, and without prompt treatment, the condition can be deadly.

Unfortunately, conventional treatments often fail, and most hospitals have yet to embrace the use of intravenous (IV) vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine,29 a treatment developed by Dr. Paul Marik, which has been shown to reduce sepsis mortality from 40 to a mere 8.5 percent.30,31 Common signs and symptoms of sepsis to watch out for include:32

A high fever

Inability to keep fluids down

Rapid heartbeat; rapid, shallow breathing and/or shortness of breath

Lethargy and/or confusion

Slurred speech, often resembling intoxication

Should a few or all of these be present, seek immediate medical attention to rule out sepsis. Also inform the medical staff that you suspect sepsis, as time is of the essence when it comes to treatment, and urge them to use Marik's protocol (currently the standard of care for sepsis at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where Marik works). You can learn more about this protocol by following the hyperlink provided above.

Optimize your vitamin D instead of getting the flu vaccine — Research33,34 shows vitamin D optimization is a more effective flu prevention strategy than flu vaccination, reducing respiratory infections such as influenza by 50 percent in those with vitamin D blood levels below 10 ng/mL. People with higher vitamin D levels at baseline may reduce their risk by about 10 percent, which the researchers stated was about equal to the effect of flu vaccines.

Aside from vitamin D, loading up on vitamins B1 and C may go a long way toward keeping you healthy through the flu season and beyond. Influenza has also been successfully treated with high-dose vitamin C.35 Taking zinc lozenges at the first sign of a cold or flu can also be helpful.

Avoid antibiotics — Drugs are vastly overprescribed and misused, and this is particularly true for antibiotics. Avoid using them unless absolutely necessary, and remember they don't work for viral infections. Unnecessary use of antibiotics is one of the driving causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Turn a deaf ear to drug ads — While drug makers are required to inform consumers about potential side effects in their ads, they've perfected drug ad narration to make them less frightful.36

Avoid drugs, unless absolutely necessary — As mentioned, drugs — taken as prescribed — account for a majority of the 250,000 people who die from medical mistakes in the U.S. each year. A great many, if not most, diseases can be effectively addressed using simple lifestyle changes.

Key factors include diet, exercise and nonexercise movement, sleep and stress reduction. To investigate your options, you can search my database of tens of thousands of articles simply by entering your condition in the search engine.

Among the most lethal drugs right now are the opioids, which need to be used with extreme care and only in the short term. For treatment options, see "Treating Pain Without Drugs," and "Study Reveals Previously Unknown Mechanism Behind Acupuncture's Ability to Reduce Pain," which also provides a long list of other drug-free pain relief strategies.

Tip #21Make Magnesium a Priority

from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/01/22/tips-to-avoid-medical-harm.aspx

source http://niapurenaturecom.weebly.com/blog/top-tips-to-avoid-pharmaceutical-injury

[jakehglover]

Top Tips to Avoid Pharmaceutical Injury

30 Tips in 30 Days Designed to Help You Take Control of Your Health

This article is included in Dr. Mercola's All-Time Top 30 Health Tips series. Every day during the month of January, a new tip will be added that will help you take control of your health. Want to see the full list? Click here.

Vaccines have quickly become Big Pharma's most lucrative profit center. Currently valued at more than $34 billion a year, the vaccine industry is projected to exceed $49 billion by 2022.1 There are several reasons for this rapid growth. Not only are vaccines priced much higher than pills, but governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are also engaged in the marketing of vaccines.

These unethical partnerships, which use both taxpayer and NGO money, advance misleading research intended to frighten the public. Worse, they discredit vaccine critics who raise legitimate safety and efficacy questions and even discredit the families and victims of vaccine injuries themselves.

To cash in on vaccine profits, Big Pharma, governments and NGOs have cast all vaccines as "life-saving." One of the clearest examples is the attempt to present the HPV vaccine as an "anticancer" vaccine, even though there's not a single shred of evidence that it actually has an impact on cervical cancer rates. Meanwhile, mounting evidence of serious harm and death caused by the HPV vaccine is being ignored or cast aside as "coincidental."

To Avoid Vaccine Injury, Educate Yourself About the Risks

The official stance repeated by most mainstream media is that vaccines have been thoroughly researched, that "hundreds" of studies have proven their safety, and that no link between vaccines and health problems, such as autism, have ever been found.

It sounds definitive enough, and is often repeated as established fact. Yet it's far from the whole truth. Importantly, the vaccine industry has long shied away from evaluating vaccinated versus unvaccinated populations to determine potential differences in general health outcomes.

The few independent scientists who have attempted such an investigation have little comfort to give to those who believe vaccines are essential for health, and mandatory use of vaccines by all children is the only way to protect society from disease.

Vaccine May Actually Be Doing More Harm Than Good

One such study,2 published in 2017, examined health outcomes among infants 3 to 5 months old following the introduction of diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis (DTP) and oral polio vaccine in Guinea-Bissau, which took place in the early 1980s. This population offered the rare opportunity to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated children due to the way the vaccines were rolled out in the West African country.

Shockingly, researchers discovered "DTP was associated with fivefold higher mortality than being unvaccinated." According to the authors, "All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis."

In short, the researchers concluded that DTP vaccine weakened the children's immune systems, rendering them vulnerable to a whole host of other often deadly diseases and serious health problems.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now recommends that children receive 69 doses of 16 vaccines by the time they're 18 years old, with 50 doses of 14 vaccines given before the age of 6.3

This, despite the fact that no thorough investigation has ever been conducted to determine how all of these vaccines actually affect a child's health. What's worse, no one is tracking the health outcomes of children who adhere to the federally recommended childhood vaccine schedule and state mandatory vaccination programs.

Lawyers with the U.S. Justice Department also defend vaccines in the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP), commonly referred to as "vaccine court," which means the U.S. government has a stake in maintaining the illusion that vaccines are a necessary lifesaving measure that causes minimal harm.

High Vaccination Rate Does Not Translate Into Better Infant Health

What we do know is that:

• The U.S. has the highest vaccination rate in the world, with 94 to 96 percent of children entering kindergarten having received multiple doses of vaccines4

• The U.S. also has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates of any developed nation5,6

• 1 in 6 American children has a developmental disability, which includes ADD, ADHD, autism, hearing loss, learning disabilities, mental disabilities, seizures and stammering — many of which are also listed or known side effects of vaccines

• 54 percent of children have a diagnosed chronic illness, including anxiety, asthma, behavioral problems, bone and muscle disorders, chronic ear infections, depression, diabetes, food and/or environmental allergies and epilepsy.

This list again mirrors many of the acknowledged side effects of vaccines, and the rise in prevalence of these diseases parallel the rise in required vaccines, yet vaccine promoters insist that these illnesses are in no way associated with vaccinations

Common Vaccine Side Effects

Both the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have also admitted that government licensed and recommended childhood vaccines are "unavoidably unsafe,"7 and possible side effects that are actually listed on vaccine inserts include:

Autoimmune diseases

Food allergies

Asthma

Eczema

Type 1 diabetes

Rheumatoid arthritis

Tics

Tourette syndrome

ADD/ADHD

Autism

Speech delay

Neurodevelopment disorders

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)

Seizure disorder

Narcolepsy

Vaccines also have the highest number of recalls of any drug, which speaks to their "unavoidably unsafe" nature. Victims have also received compensation from the federal vaccine injury compensation program (VICP) for the following (and other) injuries:

Guillain-Barre syndrome

Transverse myelitis

Encephalopathy

Seizure disorder hypoxic seizure

Death

Brachial neuritis

Acute disseminated encephalomyelitis

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy (CIDP)

Premature ovarian failure

Bell's palsy

Type 1 diabetes

Idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura

Rheumatic arthritis

Multiple sclerosis

Fibromyalgia

Anaphylaxis

Ocular myasthenia gravis

Infantile spasms

The Vaccines-Autism Link Revived

According to the latest survey,8,9 1 in 40 American children between the ages of 3 and 17 is now on the autism spectrum. This shocking update was published in the journal Pediatrics in December 2018. In 2014, the rate was 1 in 59; in 2010, it was 1 in 68; in 2000, it was 1 in 150.10 To say we're looking at exponential growth would be an understatement. But do vaccines have anything to do with this trend?

According to a Full Measure report11 by award-winning investigative reporter and former CBS correspondent Sharyl Attkisson, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist, was the pro-vaccine expert witness the government used to debunk and turn down autism claims in vaccine court.

"Zimmerman was the government's top expert witness and had testified that vaccines didn't cause autism. The debate was declared over," Attkisson reports. "But now Dr. Zimmerman has provided remarkable new information.

He claims that during the vaccine hearings all those years ago, he privately told government lawyers that vaccines can, and did cause autism in some children. That turnabout from the government's own chief medical expert stood to change everything about the vaccine-autism debate. If the public were to find out …

And he has come forward and explained how he told the United States government vaccines can cause autism in a certain subset of children and [the] United States government, the Department of Justice [DOJ], suppressed his true opinions."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chairman of The World Mercury Project, was the one who convinced Zimmerman to speak out about the cover-up. In a sworn affidavit, dated September 7, 2018, Zimmerman states that, in 2007, he told DOJ lawyers he had "discovered exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism."

"I explained that in a subset of children … vaccine-induced fever and immune stimulation … did cause regressive [brain disease] with features of autism spectrum disorder," Zimmerman writes.

A week after this 2007 meeting, the DOJ fired him, saying his services would no longer be needed. According to Zimmerman, the DOJ then went on to misrepresent his opinion in future cases, making no mention of the exceptions he'd informed them of. Kennedy has now filed a fraud complaint with the DOJ Inspector General.

William Thompson, Ph.D., a senior scientist at the CDC's National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, has also confessed to covering up links found between vaccines and autism, in this case the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.

According to Thompson, this scientific fraud was committed for the express purpose of covering up potential safety problems so the agency would be able to maintain that the MMR vaccine had been proven safe to give to all children. By eliminating the incriminating data, the link vanished, and this research has been cited as proof ever since that vaccines don't cause autism.

Attkisson's report also reveals how Congressmen who wanted to investigate the autism-vaccine link were bullied, harassed and threatened. Dan Burton (R-IN), Dr. Dave Weldon (R-FL) and Bill Posey (R-FL) are among 11 current and former members of Congress and staff who told Attkisson they were warned to drop the vaccine safety issue by PhRMA lobbyists.

Vaccines Can Have Serious Consequences for Adults Too

While children are more susceptible to vaccine damage than adults, grownups can and have been seriously injured and killed by routine vaccinations as well. It's important to realize that no vaccine is 100 percent safe for everyone. As reported by CNN, an oncologist with London's Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust recently died following a routine yellow fever vaccination:12

"Martin Gore, 67, died Thursday morning after receiving the vaccine, which is recommended to travelers visiting sub-Saharan Africa, most of South America, and parts of Central American and the Caribbean …

Gore's death casts light on the heightened risk associated with the yellow fever vaccine and the over-60 demographic. Typical side effects of the vaccine include headaches, muscle pain, mild fever and soreness at the injection site …

However, the vaccinations can, in rare circumstances, cause more severe side effects, including allergic reactions and problems affecting the brain or organs …

The WHO reported that all cases of viscerotropic disease — a rare but dangerous side effect of yellow fever vaccinations where an illness similar to wild-type yellow fever proliferates in multiple organs — have occurred in primary vaccines, starting two to five days after vaccination."

Might Vaccine Reaction Rate Be as High as 1 in 10?

In the video above, Del Bigtree,13 an Emmy Award-winning producer of "The Doctors" talk show for six years, and one of the producers of the documentary, "Vaxxed," discusses vaccine safety, or rather the lack thereof.

In it, he recounts how, in 2010, the CDC hired a company to automate the federal vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) in such a way that any potential vaccine reactions reported to doctors participating in the Harvard Pilgrim HMO would automatically be uploaded into the VAERS database.

Remarkably, preliminary data showed that out of 376,452 individuals given 45 different vaccines, 35,570 possible vaccine reactions were identified. This means nearly 1 in 10 people suffered a reaction after vaccination concerning enough to be reported, yet the official CDC mantra is that the risk for serious vaccine injury or death is 1 in 1 million.

Unfortunately, while the creation of VAERS in 1986 was an opportunity to get a firmer grasp of the number of potential vaccine reactions, injuries and deaths occurring after vaccinations given in the U.S., the CDC didn't follow through, and the project fell by the wayside.

Medical Errors Are the Third Leading Cause of Death in the US

While I've focused a lot of attention on vaccines and the necessity for educating yourself about their risks in this article, vaccines are by far not the only hazard presented by the medical industry. In fact, medical errors in general are the third leading cause of death, killing an estimated 250,000 Americans each year,14,15 an increase of about 25,000 people annually from data published in 2000.16

Side effects from drugs, taken as prescribed, account for the vast majority of iatrogenic deaths, but unnecessary surgeries, medication errors in hospitals, hospital-acquired infections and other medical errors occurring in hospitals also claim their fair share of lives.

Research17 published in 2013 estimated that preventable hospital errors kill 210,000 Americans each year — a figure that comes very close to the latest statistics. However, when deaths related to diagnostic errors, errors of omission, and failure to follow guidelines were included, the number skyrocketed to 440,000 preventable hospital deaths each year.

10 Tips to Avoid Medical Harm

How can you avoid becoming one of these statistics? Aside from educating yourself on the risks and benefits of vaccines, here are several additional suggestions:

Ask your doctor whether a recommended test and/or treatment is really necessary, and do your own homework — According to a report by the Institute of Medicine, an estimated 30 percent of all medical procedures, tests and medications may be unnecessary,18 any one of which can put you at risk for a potentially serious or lethal side effect.

An investigation19 by the Mayo Clinic published in 2013 also revealed between 40 and 78 percent of the medical testing, treatments and procedures you receive are of no benefit to you — or are actually harmful — as determined by clinical studies. To learn which tests and interventions may do more harm than good, browse through the Choosing Wisely website.20

Avoid hospitals unless absolutely necessary — According to 2011 statistics, 1 in 25 patients in the U.S. end up contracting some form of infection while in the hospital,21 and 205 Americans die from hospital-acquired infections each and every day.22

Do your due diligence before undergoing endoscopy — If you're having a colonoscopy or any other procedure using a flexible endoscope done, you can significantly reduce your risk of contracting an infection by asking the hospital or facility how the scope is cleaned, and which cleaning agent is used.

Some esophagoscopes and bronchoscopes have sterile sheaths with disposable air-water and biopsy channels, but many others do not, and must be cleaned between each use. If the hospital or clinic uses glutaraldehyde, or the brand name Cidex, cancel your appointment and go elsewhere.

About 80 percent of clinics use glutaraldehyde because it's a less expensive alternative; however, it does not do a good job of sterilizing the equipment. If they use peracetic acid, your likelihood of contracting an infection from a previous patient is slim.

To learn more about this, see my interview with David Lewis, Ph.D., in "How Improper Sterilization of Endoscopes Could Put Your Health at Risk."

Enlist a health care advocate — Once hospitalized, you're at risk for medical errors, so one of the best safeguards is to have someone there have someone there with you. It's important to have a personal advocate present to ask questions and take notes.

For every medication given in the hospital, ask questions such as: "What is this medication? What is it for? What's the dose?" Most people, doctors and nurses included, are more apt to go through that extra step of due diligence to make sure they're getting it right if they know they'll be questioned about it.

To learn more, listen to my interview with Dr. Andrew Saul in "What Hospitals Won't Tell You — Vital Strategies That Could Save Your Life," or pick up a copy of his book, "Hospitals and Health: Your Orthomolecular Guide to a Shorter Hospital Stay."

In it, he discusses the dangers of hospital stays, the type of patient that tends to get killed most frequently, and how you can protect your health and life in the event you have to be hospitalized. For example, reminding nurses and doctors to wash their hands and change gloves before touching you can go a long way toward avoiding contamination with potentially lethal microbes.

Do your own prep for surgery — If you or someone you know is scheduled for surgery, print out the WHO surgical safety checklist and implementation manual,23 which is part of the campaign "Safe Surgery Saves Lives." The checklist can be downloaded free of charge here. Print it out and bring it with you, as this can help you protect yourself, your family member or friend from preventable errors in care.

Know the most effective protocol for sepsis — Sepsis is a progressive disease process initiated by an aggressive, dysfunctional immune response to an infection in the bloodstream, which is why it's sometimes referred to as blood poisoning. Each year, an estimated 1 million Americans get sepsis24,25 and up to half of them die as a result.26,27,28

Symptoms of sepsis are often overlooked, even by health professionals, and without prompt treatment, the condition can be deadly.

Unfortunately, conventional treatments often fail, and most hospitals have yet to embrace the use of intravenous (IV) vitamin C, hydrocortisone and thiamine,29 a treatment developed by Dr. Paul Marik, which has been shown to reduce sepsis mortality from 40 to a mere 8.5 percent.30,31 Common signs and symptoms of sepsis to watch out for include:32

A high fever

Inability to keep fluids down

Rapid heartbeat; rapid, shallow breathing and/or shortness of breath

Lethargy and/or confusion

Slurred speech, often resembling intoxication

Should a few or all of these be present, seek immediate medical attention to rule out sepsis. Also inform the medical staff that you suspect sepsis, as time is of the essence when it comes to treatment, and urge them to use Marik's protocol (currently the standard of care for sepsis at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where Marik works). You can learn more about this protocol by following the hyperlink provided above.

Optimize your vitamin D instead of getting the flu vaccine — Research33,34 shows vitamin D optimization is a more effective flu prevention strategy than flu vaccination, reducing respiratory infections such as influenza by 50 percent in those with vitamin D blood levels below 10 ng/mL. People with higher vitamin D levels at baseline may reduce their risk by about 10 percent, which the researchers stated was about equal to the effect of flu vaccines.

Aside from vitamin D, loading up on vitamins B1 and C may go a long way toward keeping you healthy through the flu season and beyond. Influenza has also been successfully treated with high-dose vitamin C.35 Taking zinc lozenges at the first sign of a cold or flu can also be helpful.

Avoid antibiotics — Drugs are vastly overprescribed and misused, and this is particularly true for antibiotics. Avoid using them unless absolutely necessary, and remember they don't work for viral infections. Unnecessary use of antibiotics is one of the driving causes of antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Turn a deaf ear to drug ads — While drug makers are required to inform consumers about potential side effects in their ads, they've perfected drug ad narration to make them less frightful.36

Avoid drugs, unless absolutely necessary — As mentioned, drugs — taken as prescribed — account for a majority of the 250,000 people who die from medical mistakes in the U.S. each year. A great many, if not most, diseases can be effectively addressed using simple lifestyle changes.

Key factors include diet, exercise and nonexercise movement, sleep and stress reduction. To investigate your options, you can search my database of tens of thousands of articles simply by entering your condition in the search engine.

Among the most lethal drugs right now are the opioids, which need to be used with extreme care and only in the short term. For treatment options, see "Treating Pain Without Drugs," and "Study Reveals Previously Unknown Mechanism Behind Acupuncture's Ability to Reduce Pain," which also provides a long list of other drug-free pain relief strategies.

Tip #21Make Magnesium a Priority

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2019/01/22/tips-to-avoid-medical-harm.aspx