Introduction & Welcome

My name is Jennifer Depew, and I am a Registered Dietitian with fifteen years experience working in public health in a program that has been found to save money on Medicaid costs for every dollar spent on preventative health education and supplementary food vouchers. At the time I felt it should be available to all women who wanted the educational services whether they were income eligible or not, but being busy, limits in life are placed and it was a program to support lower income families who had young children by providing funds for foods and providing health screening education.

      This is a story of personal and professional struggle and triumph, success and failure. Priorities are based on values and values are based on what we experienced and learned as a child. I learned many valuable lessons and developed some coping skills that have helped me succeed in many areas of life and fail in others, or a little of both in all areas. I'm still typing, so that is still on the win side of "Staying Alive,"  - the ultimate and most basic goal for an individual, but also for a group. Mothers may be the people who are most closely connected to that sense of keeping the group alive - keeping the next generation alive.  Or maybe its fathers who are most connected to a sense of keeping the group fed and warm and  safe. Or maybe it’s both, and teens and retired people, maybe we all have that sense of keeping going, together.    

     Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist and he also was a Holocaust survivor. He taught us that when the going is tough the tough not only keep going, they take notes, so they can share the wisdom that was learned while surviving or trying to survive the rough times. As a health professional and a patient I have benefited from his notes on the effects of starvation on the human body - he took notes while starving in a concentration camp during World War II about the effects of malnutrition on his body and mood. Good news - he survived, and reached old age, and the medical research aided the academic study of malnutrition. (I.Viktor Frankl)    

     Evidence based medicine is often based on clinical trials of large groups and averages that need to just prove to be better than placebo effect - help more than roughly 40% of the patients. Individualized counseling tries to investigate more precisely what each patient may need for their specific metabolism and level of health. A patient case study can be helpful but is considered "anecdotal" - just one story, not representative of clinical trial group so not as helpful for making recommendations. When a disease is rare however, a patient case study can become more helpful as research studies would be less possible and less likely to be available in prior research
I've been a sickly baby, sickly child, teen, and adult, but never quite sick enough for lab tests and diagnoses . What I heard too often was , so maybe you should see a therapist. Well , therapy can be helpful, it did help, but not at fixing everything and eventually, lack of an accurate diagnosis led to medications for psychiatric problems that I didn't have at the time. The medications did cause side effects and some lasting negative changes. Genetic screening that I've had done on my own since the time of the "you're not sick, you're in need of very strong anti-psychotic drugs with no diagnostic reason other than just to see if they help," they didn't help and the genetic screening showed that I have numerous significant problems with my metabolism which supplements have helped. Isn't that simpler than years and years of lab tests that say, "Go see a therapist, because we don't have a prescription medication for you."

     My story is dedicated to Viktor Frankl - he keeps me going. I hope some other patients with physical and mental health symptoms will be able to find help for their physical needs instead of just having their mental health further harmed by inadequate and possibly discriminatory diagnostic procedures and policies. If they have to look for the help on their own, just know, it exists. The answers or kernels of the answers are known in the vast body of research and experience, it just take time to put the answers together for each individual’s specific need. General advice to help guide people to their own improved health do already exist.       

     This volume or edition, is about the first step in the Stages of Change - recognition that a problem exists. This edition is about policy and procedure and our human instincts. Policy is about how to do things and if we try to write policy that is impossible, implausible or too annoying then it most likely will be a costly problem rather than a solution. Policy is about politics but it is also about employees washing their hands before going back to work and teaching young children to wash their hands before sitting down to eat a meal.      

     Preventative health education can be a do-it-yourself project, and in fact is always something you have to do yourself. Health insurance is important but so is having a self empowered attitude. Our own choices each day are the ultimate insurance plan for preventing accidents and preventing chronic disease and even for helping prevent an argument at the water cooler. The virtual community makes education easy to share, but having get togethers in community centers where recipes can be demonstrated and sampled can also help share knowledge more quickly and may build a sense of community. 

     People gain emotional support from social connections that are physically healing - physically helping to repair the damages caused by oxidative stress. Some sections of the site go into more scientific detail and I hope to get academic support and publish them in a peer reviewed journal. In the meantime, if the information can help other patients or researchers I will be glad. The information has helped me with managing my own health issues, so my great appreciation goes to all the authors and academics who labored over their research or their books, articles, and blog-posts - know that a reader appreciated your taking the time to share.

Summary points for the website:

1. The health education part of a public health preventative health education program could be provided very inexpensively in the virtual world.
2. Policy should be physiologically and physically possible and not go so far against human nature that it is implausible or so annoying to worker's sense of fair play that it might cause a work slowdown or some other retaliation by the workers - or voters.
3. Inflammation and pain are the same problem or can be and can be due to magnesium deficiency and emotional or physical stress.
4. Lifestyle and environmental choices can help the body cope with the negative chemicals produced by oxidative stress before chronic damage has a chance to occur - but the sooner you get started the sooner chronic damage isn’t occurring.

Policy and national priorities can equal hungry children. Budget cuts were a threat to the program where I worked every few years when the federal budget was reviewed and up for a re-vote by Congress. Participants in the program where I worked had hungry children and were grateful for the help and looking for work rather than being “entitled” - for the most part. We are all different. The program saves money in health care costs for every dollar spent so it is an effective preventative health program and is administered from the same agency that manages the national school lunch program. Nutrition support is health support and early child health effects long term potential as a worker and taxpayer. An “entitlement” program is one of the programs that provides financial assistance formerly known as “welfare.”

     Budget cuts to a different area of public health administration did effect my position and it turned out for the better in some ways for my personal and professional education. Prior to the state changes I had seen only high risk patients for several different programs, so I was visiting with senior citizens and new mothers with infants on different days of the week. After the budget cut Home Health care was not allowed to be provided by a public agency and I worked exclusively with the new mother and baby programs. The advantage to my education was in working with all clients rather than only seeing those designated “high risk.” With fewer worries to be shared and heard, there was time to learn from the mothers with lower risk, the helpful tips that they had learned with their families. Everyone likes to help others and usually love to give helpful tips, their own "best practices" of parenting. 

     It made me a better high risk counselor because I was able to pass forward the “best practices” and “effective care” habits of the doing-fairly-well families with the higher risk or struggling-to-cope families or single parents. They coped too though, and I learned from their struggles and successes too. 

     My thanks goes out to all of them for helping me with my own growth as well, as a person and as a mother. My children were slightly older than the population I was working with by that time, so some of the early childhood tips were passed forward with a “I wish I had known this when my kids were that age (aren’t you lucky to have a chance to learn what I didn’t know right now when your child is in the active learning stage, soaking up good habits - and bad habits - from the routines that you share with them each day.)”, or something like that. 

Preventative health care isn't something you have to go to an agency to receive, or go to a doctor to have prescribed for you, or at least, not always. Preventative health care is as simple as brushing teeth and putting on a jacket on cold days like mom might have reminded you to do when you were young. Learning what promotes health and developing habits that support health are the basics of preventative health care. 

     Providing workplace policies and procedures that model and support healthy preventative self care can benefit management by promoting happier employees and healthier employees. Workplace turnover and sick days might be reduced. Health and happiness go together like peanut butter and jelly or some other cliche. Pain hurts and it is difficult to not be grouchy and irritable when you are suffering from chronic pain.

     The most effective health care is effective self care - taking care of the body you have now. Prevent chronic disease in the first place, or if it has developed then the second place choice is to work to understand what habits are not helping and then work to develop new habits that restore normal function. 

     The sad truth is that our bodies do change as we get older and each decade can mean we are losing muscle more easily and rebuilding it with more difficulty. Learning to listen to our body for pain is listening to it communicate. Pain means something is wrong, maybe change occurred and old habits are no longer helping or maybe new toxins entered the environment in the form of a new office carpet and an increase in volatile chemicals. Just taking an allergy pill or pain reliever wouldn't help in the long run to discover the cause of the pain.

     Hand washing is an example of "effective care." It took twenty years for physicians to adopt the practice from when it was first "discovered" to be effective to protect women from infection during childbirth.  (Ignaz Semmelweis, 1.pbs.org)  

 "What made her ugly was -- hope. Incurable hope like an obstinate case of scabies, which lodges, damp and reddish, in the infected skin, producing a constant itching, and refusing to yield to any outer force.”- Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), (p 1081,  1)

I was an unhealthy child, covered with patches of eczema, so congested I could rarely breathe through both nostrils at the same time or prone to nosebleeds during dry weather - if I didn't have hope that I could breathe through both nostrils the next day - what did I have to keep me going through this day? Answer - hope and fairy tales and other fiction - there was entire galaxies of wonder where breathing or the inability to breathe well didn't matter as much. I'm better now, but only because I've struggled to figure out what seemed to make my symptoms worse and what seemed to help - standard medical tests never discovered any standard diagnoses. 

     This site includes examples regarding safe alcohol use. It has been more than twenty years since it was discovered that binge drinking can cause death. "Just say no," as a public health message, doesn't provide information on signs of toxicity, or how to treat it, or how to prevent it in the first place (actually saying no to significant peer pressure is difficult). "Just say no" doesn't educate on handling increased aggression or violence in others who didn't say no. 

     This book is in memory of those who lost their lives due to alcohol toxicity and is dedicated to those who remain and who remember - for some people, it's not easy to stop drinking, so it's really better not to start again. Genetic differences can be involved in alcoholism & eating disorders. 

• See I. Addiction or Starvation?  for more on the possible underlying cause of many substance abuse problems and an example of my own pursuit of effective self care with special health needs.

So if you would like to make a donation on behalf of that goal, to an organization dedicated to educating and preventing alcohol and drug abuse, that would be nice. Providing information for educational purposes within the Guidelines of Fair Use has to be provided for free - that's the deal - "educational purposes" do not include "for the purpose of profit." This website and information is being offered for educational purposes and it is not listed as a nonprofit organization at this time, and in the interest of not reinventing the wheel, a non-profit preventative health education organization already exists if anyone wanted to support the goal financially, consider donating to: unitedpatientsgroup.com, or some other group.

     The United Patients Group website states that the group is dedicated to helping physicians and patients learn more about what nature can do for our health. An article on their website is available regarding alcohol, medical marijuana  and addiction, but the organization was originally created for the purposes of cancer prevention by the adult children of a person whose case of cancer was dramatically helped with the aid of medical marijuana. The addiction article: Medical Marijuana as Treatment for Alcoholism & Addiction, (unitedpatientsgroup.com)

See 10. Food helps too. for more about general health effects of poor nutrition and low blood sugar and sensible meal planning for parties where alcohol will be served.

• U.S. National Suicide Prevention Hotline: Call 1-800-273-8255, Available 24 hours everyday. (I.suicidepreventionlifeline.org)
• National Helpline: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration: "SAMHSA’s National Helpline, 1-800-662-HELP (4357), (also known as the Treatment Referral Routing Service), is a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders."  (I.samhsa.org)
• Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, RAINN Hotline: 1-800-656-HOPE, (I.RAINN.org)
• National Domestic Violence Hotline: 24/7 confidential support at 1−800−799−7233 or TTY 1−800−787−3224. (I.thehotline.org)
• Child Welfare Information Gateway: a variety of toll-free hotline numbers for concerns involving the safety of children. (I.child welfare gateway)
• Power and Control and Equality Wheels: The following training materials are for helping victims of domestic violence and batterers learn how to recognize problem behaviors but emotional manipulation or abuse of power and control can occur in many types of relationships not just between couples.The Power and Control Wheel was developed by the Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs (DAIP). Manipulative behaviors are grouped into eight categories in the model. An additional Equality Wheel was developed to help guide batterers and victims of emotional or physical abuse towards healthier ways to interact. It is grouped into eight categories with examples for working towards change. Problems frequently can involve communication issues by both people in a relationship.

Help is only helpful when you accept it. Recognizing that you need it is the first step.

Health can be a do-it-yourself project. Take charge everyday.

Preventative health care can be as simple as drinking more water and choosing fruits and vegetables with meals and snacks.

• Health insurance is important in case of emergencies but it can not insure that health can be restored once a chronic condition has developed. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, relaxation and friendship, are all important for good health in addition to healthy foods.

Why wait for a chronic condition or emergency health situation to occur?

Take charge of your future everyday.

Disclaimer & "Find an expert" near you.

• Disclaimer: Opinions are my own and the information is provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of fair use. While I am a Registered Dietitian this information is not intended to provide individual health guidance. Please see a health professional for individual health care purposes.
• The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has a service for locating a nutrition counselor near you at the website eatright.org: (eatright.org/find-an-expert)

Introduction: Links and References: (Introduction: Links & References.pdf)