Dear Healthy Friend,

For any reader who isn't 100% sure what gastic bypass surgery is, I'll tell you - in layman's terms... It's a surgical process that makes the stomach smaller and allows food to bypass part
of the small intestine to aid rapid weight loss. It's quite an extreme op and patients need to "qualify" for it by being extremely obese... But now mainstream is thinking of using it as treatment for type II diabetics... Keep reading to try find the logic in the argument...

In the name of good health,

Taryn Strugnell
Managing Editor of Nutrition & Healing

P.S. Arthritis can be extremely painful in adults... Just think how children would feel suffering from this... Dr Wright reveals the answers...

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Should all diabetics go under the knife?
Christine O'Brien
Contributor, Nutrition & Healing

Here's an idea: Bariatric surgery for everyone!

Well, okay, maybe not for everyone, exactly, but for all people with type II diabetes. Which is still a pretty shocking prospect.

A group of researchers at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Centre have started a clinical trial testing whether surgery is the best medical treatment for controlling type II diabetes.

Yep, you read that right - gastric bypass surgery, until now reserved for severely obese patients, may soon be the go-to treatment for overweight (which doesn't take much, really) and mildly obese people. For the trial, 50 people will be randomised to receive one of two treatments - surgery or "traditional" therapy with lifestyle modification.

If the researchers like what they see, millions of people could go under the knife for "diabetes surgery".

You know, it's really amazing to me that the mainstream would invest so much time and energy - not to mention willingly subject people to numerous serious risks - in investigating such drastic "solutions" to chronic illness and disease when there are so many simple, safe and EFFECTIVE natural ways to conquer them. (I know, I know, follow the money... But please allow me my musings here.)

We have to fight for doctors to put natural treatments first. To go for simple and safe, to focus on diet and nutrients and whole-body wellness over knives and patent medicines.

But until the mainstream is willing to, for example, try out a cinnamon regimen before going for broke with surgery and pills and... Here's a thought... Actually WORK with the patient to find what's right for that particular patient, we're going to keep running in circles.

I'll never forget what happened when one of my best friends completely healed what she'd always thought was rheumatoid arthritis by eliminating gluten from her diet. She'd been on five prescription drugs and some of them had some pretty scary side effects. The very first day of her gluten-free diet was amazing - she stopped taking the drugs and has never looked back.

Exciting, yes. But what really makes it unforgettable is how her mother's doctor responded when she went to him wondering if going gluten-free might work for her (after all, it's a genetic thing). She'd suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for most of her life and the prescription drugs she took to manage it had landed her in the hospital with life-threatening infections a couple of times.

Face-to-face with this woman who had been in pain for so long, as a result of both the arthritis and the drugs he'd prescribed to her, the doctor didn't bat an eye. "Oh, yeah," he mused. "I heard a while back that can work really well for some people."

I often think of this a little sadly. I mean, I'm so glad she finally found, through her daughter's research and experience, a solution to her life-long pain (going gluten free happily worked for mother as well as daughter).

But I wonder how different her life might have been if her doctor, upon learning about the ways in which celiac disease and gluten intolerance can ravage some people's bodies, had said, "Hey, I have an idea about something we can try..." instead of picking up that prescription pad...

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Teenage arthritis?

Q: My son is 14. He's been telling me for the past month that his knee hurts. He hasn't fallen or been injured. I've been giving him painkillers, but I hate to give them to him for so long. What can I do? Could it be arthritis? Isn't he too young for that?

Dr. Wright: When knee pain occurs in children between the ages of 10 and 15, it's not typically arthritis. Instead, it's usually a condition called Osgood Schlatter's disease, which is characterised by a tender swelling an inch or two below the kneecap, right over the front and top of the tibial bone.

Most peadiatricians will tell you that there's nothing to do except take aspirin and wait for it to go away. But that can take a year or more and in the meantime, the child has to sit on the sidelines and watch his classmates play during break.

But there's a better solution: 250mcg of selenium and 400IU of vitamin E as mixed tocopherols will usually get rid of the pain in just four to six weeks. I'm not sure why most peadiatricians haven't heard of this simple technique, but I've been writing about it since 1979.

Of course, as always, it's best to confer with a physician skilled in nutritional and natural medicine before starting yourself or anyone in your family on a new supplement regimen.

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More health hot topics and recent rants...

Take a look at some of the most popular past articles:

    * Is this drug worth the risk of diabetes?
    * Don't trade a broken bone for a tumour!
    * Diabetics, pay close attention!
    * The torture of tennis elbow...