Antony Brush

Hi, I do natural healing and hypnotherapy, and took a speciality in PTSD.
PTSD in itself is exhausting, though it can be erased.  It doesn't erase the memory, but it takes away its charge.  Mess is also exhausting.  The more you tidy your environment, the more energy you'll have.  And lastly, low energy often has a physical component - stored toxins and malnutrition.  If you get physically well your energy will improve.
HTH

I gotta tell yous.

When I was a teenager I skipped some classes to get books signed by Terry Pratchett.

He wrote in my copy of Pyramids: "May your camels multiply."

Legend.

I read https://www.dailysceptic.org.  This grew out of Lockdown Sceptics, created in 2020, and based in the UK.

Rachel Lindsay wrote:This seems like very good news to me. Just now I saw from a social media post that British conservationist Mr. Derek Gow applauds this research. Perhaps his voice on this matter will have more weight with British farmers. Here's hoping!

Thanks.  In the documentary, Brian May was initially greeted with skepticism by at least one farmer, but when he gave his presentation, shown at the end of the documentary, he handled that with sensitivity and humility, and received a round of applause from all of the farmers present.  How far that message has been heard in the farming community since then, I don't know, but my thought on watching this was, you can see how he could relate to large audiences as a virtuoso musician.

I'd never heard of Derek Gow - interesting link - thanks for sharing!  Good to know this message is growing within the farming and conservation communities.

Hi folks,

There's been a long standing belief, certainly in the UK, that bovine TB is spread to cattle by badgers, leading to massive badger culls to prevent this.



However, this has been challenged.  

I saw this documentary in December, and thought yous might find it interesting / useful.  Here's a brief synopsis.

Brian May (guitar, Queen) has for a long time been a campaigner for the protection of badgers. As you might guess, some farmers whose families have been farming for generations were not keen on being taught their craft by someone whose best known credentials are in music (as epic as those might be).

May was in contact, as a campaigner, with other farmers conducting research on the bovine TB / badger connection.

The upshot of the research was this:

Farmers have for a long time been convinced that badgers were the source of TB, as herds have become contaminated when the only incoming bulls had previously been tested for TB, and declared clear.

However, those tests have been shown to be inadequate. The programme gave an example of a bull that had passed the standard test many times over, but after being slaughtered, was found to be riddled with TB.

Therefore, farmers who've been convinced that the only possible vector for TB to their herd was from wildlife, specifically badgers - that theory is shown to be uncertain.

What was found to be the primary vector for the disease was manure from an infected cow, although standard testing practice had not been to test manure.

In standard farming practice, cows' manure is spread over fields that are grazed by the same herd. If one cow / bull was brought into the herd with TB, that would spread via their manure to the other cows.

Once this was discovered, the farm altered their practices, e.g. watering troughs were adapted to make it impossible for cows to back into them, to prevent them from polluting the water with manure.

At the end of the documentary, May presented these findings to an audience of farmers. Aware of the risk of it looking like a guitarist lecturing farmers on farming, his presentation to the farmers was handled with all due respect, just laying out these discoveries and innovations, and telling them it was not their fault, they had simply been lied to about the source of TB outbreaks.

Very interesting programme. It didn't prove that badgers had no involvement in the spread of TB, but it did show that the primary vectors were from within the cattle herds themselves, and badgers may have been the victims of TB from cattle, more than the other way around.

As someone interested in health history, I found this all analogous to the plagues of the 1700s-1800s in the West. With the industrial revolution, people rushed to the cities, which had inadequate infrastructure to support them. Among other factors, hygiene was unimaginably bad, with highly polluted sources of drinking water, and these were the primary drivers of epidemics. Primary credit for improvements in public health in this time belongs to sanitary engineers.

So there's a point of continuity with the bovine TB story. Clean water, and clean food are key to health, even in animals.

r ranson wrote:. . .

All that stuff we should be doing anyway as chickens have way worse things than bird flu - says the person who's been hospitalized in intensive care due to Campylobacter twice thanks to "helpful" people not following protocol and keeping bird shit out of the kitchen.  There's a reason why we wash our hands after handling raw (including alive) chicken.  . . .  

You have my sympathy.  I had campylobacter once thanks to a dodgy canteen.  One of the worst sicknesses I've experienced.

As to bird flu, for a historical point of reference, there was the bird flu panic of 2005.  Professor Neil Ferguson was quoted as saying "Up to 200 million could die."  In the end, the death toll was in the low hundreds worldwide, and none in the USA.  Which was 100% bad for those affected, but never on the scale of the predictions.

At the time I was following Dr Mercola, who rightly predicted, when everyone else was panicking, that the panic was hugely overblown, and did his best to offer practical health advice about it, through the limitations enforced by censorship rules.

The following year, his book came out, "The Great Bird Flu Hoax".  I highly recommend it, it goes not only into medicine and health, but the media, Big Agra, and more.  To be clear, on page 1 he stated that the bird flu was real and people had died, which was tragic for all those affected, but the degree of panic was never justified.

I think permaculturalists will find what he wrote about farming practices very interesting, and it had practical info on health.

How comparable avian flu of 2005 is to the current avian flu, I cannot say, but owing to past events, I'm less concerned by panics.

Hi folks,

I'm looking for sources to back up the notion that organic agriculture can work economically against conventional farming, at scale, and even beat it economically.  

I have basically one book which discusses this, "Food Futures Now" (2008).  It's a good book, but I'm looking for anything more up to date.  Can anyone make any recommendations?

Any pointers much appreciated.

Hi, I have some stories to share.  The first is a horror story, re: vasectomies.  A woman I used to know married a guy who'd previously had the snip for a prior marriage, but on remarrying, he and my friend wanted to start a family.  So the guy went to have the vasectomy reversed.  The surgeons found out that, though the guy had no knowledge of this, the first operation had been botched.  They'd cut the tubes too close, and the surgeons couldn't reverse the operation.  So the couple had to go for the next method - IVF - which is way expensive and, I'm told, tough for the woman.  But to get the sperm from the guy, because of the botched vasectomy, they had to go in with a needle.

Every guy reading this is now mouthing "Ouch!" of something similar.

During one of these operations - might have been the failed vasectomy reversal? - they guy got a serious post-operative infection, yes, right there, it was apparently pretty yucky.  The guy was ex-military, and tough, so bore it well, but it sounded horrendous.  When they decided to have a second child, he said he just couldn't go through getting the needle again.  It was apparently against the rules to do this, but they found a way to give him a general anesthetic to get the second sample.  The couple now has two healthy kids.

Another anecdote:

I used to know a certain doctor.  He told me a colleague was doing vasectomies.  One day he snipped the wrong tubes.  The patient was left permanently impotent.  My doctor friend's attitude was, "Well, accidents happen."

And finally - a happy story, but a word of warning if you're trying to avoid pregnancy:

If  people go to a good natural healer for something unrelated, and they're in a relationship, we have to warn them: as you heal, detoxify, etc., you will become more fertile as an indirect consequence.  A healthy body is naturally more fertile.  Just something to be aware of.