47 Comments
Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Excellent piece . Agree and Thank you.

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Really excellent, and especially important reading for anyone with a trauma history. Anyone whose backstory in life was extreme enough that it has contributed to their health issues needs to understand that they are totally on their own. Western medicine is great for a heart attack or a car wreck but is actively destructive at considering people as holistic, complex entities.

Having had emergency surgery because doctors missed what was, in retrospect, a *classic* presentation of a rare condition (the type of non-cancerous tumor most associated with cPTSD that starts in early childhood) taught me that it doesn't matter how many times a trauma survivor forces herself to recite that history--doctors simply never go, "Hmm, I should consider that this patient marinated in cortisol for 18 years and the consequences of this should weigh into any differential diagnosis." Doctors never will, so patients must.

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Yes.

The root cause of my early heart attack was child abuse. It is also the root cause of my sister having multiple, chronic, disabling illnesses that require her to have a pacemaker at 44.

It's not possible for me to put these in order of "most/least contributing", but these are the factors:

1. Prolonged child abuse followed by institutionalization in my teens. All those years of my body producing fear chemicals is hard on the body, and on the mind.

This led to. .

2. Taking up smoking and drinking at age 16.

3. Near-anorexia in my teen years turned to obesity when I grew up.

4. Unmanaged mental illness from childhood experiences, compounded by the self-abuse of my addictions.

As it is always and forever, what my parents did to me is their responsibility, and not my fault. But what I did in response to that is my responsibility to fix simply because no one else can.

I became an unhealthy alcoholic who almost died young directly because of child abuse. Few addicts and mentally deranged people are "born that way". Almost all of it can be traced back to child abuse.

But we talk about smoking, or unhealthy eating, or whatever, as "the" cause of heart disease and much else. They are causes, but they are also symptoms of unmanaged trauma.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Josh - and Holly - I hope you both know how inspirational you are to this 60-something square-peg who is still learning about how shit the real world often is. And no, I don't think you seek or intend to be. You both are just... genuine, a breath of fresh air in these ever-increasing, chaotic, ridiculous, Darktimes.

Wherever that hobbit is trudging towards Mordor, he frigging needs to step it up.

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Sometimes I get emotional reading or hearing from child abuse survivors who are forced to carry on without any real sympathy from society. People make fun of Freud but I will always respect him because he was the first person to stand up and say that your childhood impacts your adult life.

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Holly, what tumour is associated with cPTSD?

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It's extremely rare, roughly 100 a year are found in the US. I was lucky; most of them are found on autopsy tables after they cause a bowel obstruction and kill their host. I can neither spell nor pronounce the name, but it's basically a type of benign tumor that lodges in the intestines and is strongly associated with both PTSD (of the longterm/complex variety) and also a heightened colon cancer risk (hooray for annual colonoscopies...blech). They also tend to recur. My surgeon took a foot of intestine all the way around it to try to get every single tumor cell to reduce my chance of a recurrence, which has worked....so far. 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻

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Josh, thank you for this. Can you share your diet now? My mother-in-law is on a strict diet from Kaiser due to her heart failure diagnoses. She is taking Lasix and diuretics to supposedly keep liquid off her lungs. She is absolutely miserable and I believe her health is deteriorating due to lack of exercise (because she has no energy and the Lasix keeps her chained to the toilet at times). They have her scared to do anything to deviate from this course.

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Sep 19, 2023·edited Sep 19, 2023Author

Irresponsibly, my diet is too carb heavy right now. But when I eat correctly, I follow the low carb/high fat and meat pattern. I can tell you that after a few days of adjusting to it, I feel markedly better in mind, body, and mood.

-Low or no carbs. No bread, pasta, potatoes, flour, etc., or a much smaller helping than US guidelines call for.

-With vegetables, only leafy greens. No root veg. No carrots, no potatoes, etc. Those are carbs, and carbs are simply sugar.

-High fat dairy. Whole milk cottage cheese. Cream in coffee. Very little plain milk (milk is carb sugary; cream is not). Butter.

-Fatty meat. I cook with lard.

-Lots of eggs. Free-range, natural pasture diet (not commercial feed) chickens. Expensive, but worth it. If your yolks aren't bright orange, you're not eating good eggs.

-No more "vegetable" oils. No canola oil, no soybean oil, no vegetable oils except olive oil. I find peanut oil acceptable too.

-No sugar

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Thank you! I will pass this on to her.

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Best of luck to her.

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Keto is how I lost 70+ pounds. It works! I would caution that it can be hard on your kidneys, apparently. Inadequate no idea until my nurse friend (my highly intelligent nurse friend with multiple degrees, whom I actually trust) told me about it. I guess there’s been enough time to see how it affects people, long term, and it’s not great for the kidneys.

I don’t think Paleo and other *low* carb diets are necessarily a problem, just keto.

Sorry for butting in! I thought it was important enough that you might want to check into it yourself. I’m not sure you’re even doing strict keto, but at least now you can look into it with your doc, or research it yourself :)

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Yes. The kidney risks of keto have been known for a while.

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Great to see the connection between your physical symptomology with difficult moments in your childhood. Sorry to hear you went through that

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I was raised to distrust the medical system and I didn't think I could dislike it any further...until Covid happend. These days I DESPISE going to any doctor for any reason because no matter how much of my personal medical history they know or how much dough comes out of my pockets I know 99% of the time an agenda will be likely be given priority and I hate it.

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

I started to figure out the whole low-carb diet benefit about twenty five years ago. Unfortunately I didn't put ALL of the pieces together in order to understand that I was going to get Type 2 diabetes if I didn't keep up with a low-carb permanent eating plan. I thought I was just making it hard to maintain a good weight when I fell off the wagon.

When I did get a Type 2 diagnosis, at least I knew to go low-carb at that point despite medical advice to the contrary. It's so f'in hard to stick with it and maintain a good weight at my age, though---would have been a hell of a lot easier if I had understood this trajectory twenty-five years ago and had youth on my side. Medical science actually DID know, but ignored the evidence that there was a huge link between high carb diet and the breakdown of healthy metabolism into Type 2, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, heart disease etc.

I thank you for telling us about the link between your alcohol consumption and your triglycerides. That's a message that is still not out there. My poor mother died of a sudden heart attack at age 59. No one ever suggested to her that she cut back on drinking, they just urged her to eat even LESS fat (she never did eat a fatty diet to begin with) and to quit smoking. She kept gaining weight as she got further into middle age and didn't know why. I just thank God that she went quickly, in her sleep, because she was very much afraid that she would have a heart attack as heart disease ran in her family.

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I've been working in a public-health-adjacent profession for 30 years. Over that time the focus has become ever more oriented towards weeding out 'systemic racism in health care' that leads to 'disparate outcomes' yet every solution, every policy, every program that gets pushed to the top of the "what's current and trendy in health services research' pile *refuses* to come to terms with the fact that American blacks have *every reason* to be mistrustful of health care institutions. Not just Tuskegee -- there is a entire sordid history of the "progressive" American health care system -- the ones pushing "the most modern science" and "battling the forces of superstition" -- treating black people (and poor white people too, to be fair) like lab rats.

If you've never seen the video where Little Lord Fauci and The Lord High Mayoress of DC Muriel Bowser take a slumming tour of Anacostia trying to convince suspicious residents to get vaccinated, have a gander. It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

https://youtu.be/_sKVJ_i-FVw?si=xyMcB3tVZBvKTrb8

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Thanks for sharing!

I was a premie and had a very creepy grandfather who, well anyway. I got sober at 27& again at 30. Still smoke. For almost 20 years was neglected and gaslit by insurance dictated doctors. So thankful for my integrative medicine doctor!

All that gaslighting , humiliating. And I kept getting sicker. I feel bad for jab injured people, I know what they are going through to a degree.( bad booster shot in 2001 plus Lyme . Developed other issues with all the neglect.

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Thank you.

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

As usual, nail on the head and no beating around the bush. I especially like how you often include "bonus" life tips, and the ones you convey here are especially important!

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It also doesn't help that doctors don't learn about nutrition much if at all, they don't promote (or as you said) even know what is good/bad to eat. They disregard that they are just masking SYMPTOMS and not fixing any problems. They are being paid off by Big Pharma. They don't even pledge the Hippocratic Oath anymore (sometimes they allow med students to make their own up these days). Just look at the kind of food that is served in the hospital.

For years doctors were put on a pedestal due to their education and now after "C" we have learned they are just humans like ourselves and only have so much time in the day to study the med literature and research.

My family has been through too much (internal radiation burns from too much chemo, overdose on dilantin, errors on blood work more times than I can count which caused other issues), telling us that a drug has no side effects then saying "if I told my patients all the side effects they would never take the medication" and a missed tumor in the cochlea, overuse of medication for a foster child among others.

I DO agree in emergency situations "get 'er done" otherwise take care of your own health!

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It is nearly impossible to do a good study on the effects of diet because of so many confounding factors. What the most honest researchers do is just try to study the effect on some specific chemicals and hope they predict how healthy people are. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't.

Then the research gets flooded with rampant speculation, paid studies by big food companies that are barely disguised marketing, and all sorts of quacks.

It would be nice if doctors learned more about diet BUT the field is so shaky that it would probably just be wasted time.

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There is no money to be made in promoting health.

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Your descriptions of your heart attack and its precursors are immensely helpful. I shall take them to heart.

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

With only one exception, every adult I know who suffered childhood abuse remained unvaccinated. We see threats others don't and know first-hand that evil may reside in those meant to care for us.

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That's fascinating.

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YES!! 🙌

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Unfortunately, I am seeing a lot of people who were abused as children not only get vaccinated but medically transition genders as adults. So it may be your social circle. I'm working up an article about the correlation between transition and trauma.

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Maybe it's an age-related difference? I'm in my 50s and all the trauma survivors I know are over 45. Are the people you know younger?

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I didn't have a great childhood but I got vaccinated. I had doubts but concluded the overall risks of the vaccine were probably less than getting COVID several times (I live in a very cosmopolitan area so the probability of multiple strains is high). I knew it wasn't tested enough but gambled on it being better than the alternative. I was scared of lung scarring, not death.

I think I was right based on the data released at the time. Wildly experimental technology is risky but even the reported myocarditis rates didn't scare me.Turns out Pfizer had falsified some data.

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That makes all sorts of sense. My son, who suffered abuse from a narcissistic father, is the only one in my family I could talk to about the evil going down. He is 35 and based. I’m 64 and based, probably because I’ve always been a rebel. I had a tough childhood too, so that theory makes sense.

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Thank you SO MUCH for tips about a heart attack! My dad had one; I will memorize.

"My gut intuition was screaming DANGER at me." Yes! I wonder how many people heard that same voice and said, "oh, come on..!" Thank you so much for coming right out and telling your readers how dangerous these shots are, and yes, it IS the largest "health" debacle in... history. I used to feel sheepish about trying to share what I knew with you, but no longer, so....

Vaccine makers are given immunity from liability-- they can't be sued for damage (except in vaccine court, and that's hard), so it's a cash cow, esp any shot on the childhood schedule.

The damage from the shots causes people to seek medical care (esp for allergies/autoimmune), so it keeps the $$ rolling in.

CHD's vaxed/unvaxed bus is coming to Montpelier later this month. I encourage anyone able to visit, listen to the people in line waiting to tell their stories, and listen to others here: https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/bus/

In case this is useful for you other readers:

This man saved my mom's life with keto/supplements, extremely knowledgeable, many helpful videos:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_XAkQmLOnNrWRC4rckr1wg

For anyone suffering from covid shots/long covid, Sharyl Attkisson's Town Hall is outstanding:

https://sharylattkisson.com/2023/09/watch-the-covid-clots-a-full-measure-town-hall-with-sharyl-attkisson/

To learn about vaccine history, politics, how they work/don't:

https://www.amazon.com/Turtles-All-Way-Down-Vaccine-ebook/dp/B0B6S1ZNLC

Everything attorney Aaron Siri utters is brilliant, just one example. Fighting to end mandates, to make sure there are vaccine exemptions in every state, can't say enough about him. Josh, I think you will really appreciate him, he is so so bright.

https://twitter.com/HighWireTalk/status/1691880638696095758

What's been happening is worse that you think, not just doctors who've fallen for slick marketing.

https://rumble.com/v3hg4mi-hospitals-hiding-covid-killing-in-dedicated-wards.html

https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/american-domestic-bioterrorism-program

https://www.protocolkills.com/

Sherri Tenpenny was right, and right at the start! https://twitter.com/BusyDrT

Also recommended: The Defender (daily newsletter/TV from Children's Health Defense), Dr. Joe Mercola's newsletter, Dr. Meryl Nass. All the people the media says to stay away from!!

So many more but this will give people a grounding as to what we are facing.

Thank you again, Josh, for this life-saving Substack post!

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Sep 19, 2023Liked by Josh Slocum

Great advice. Thanks for sharing. I paid a heavy price with my family for my refusal to get the DeathVaxx. I believe it was the still small voice of the Holy Spirit warming me. Thank God I listened and was obedient to the warning.

I am not a physician but have worked closely with them as a consultant in healthcare for 25 years. They destroyed my faith in them and all their institutions from listening to their straw man arguments and hubris about masking and modRNA shots during COVID.

For almost a year I worked with physicians who knew the truth about COVID “science” and “scientism”” to set up an anonymous group of clinicians through a block chain driven organization to serve as a truly science-based evaluator of the rotten and faked studies powering the CDC recommendations. We couldn’t find enough physicians with the courage or who cared enough to fight the lies to get the effort of the ground.

My current philosophy is to do the exact opposite of whatever public health recommends. It’s both shocking and emancipating to realize that institutions that once had your best interest at heart, have passed through the phase of incompetence all the way through malevolence. They are actively evil and seeking to harm us. This is like going bankrupt. It happens slowly at first and then occurs all at once.

Now, all the once great institutions of America exist on the basis of fraud. Fraud has turned our national bedrock into sawdust. Our country, without an exceptional emergency response will soon totally collapse.

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We take for granted the pillars undergirding our way of life. They are fragile and the foundations are being eroded, on purpose. Medicine, law, transportation, energy, to name a few. All under attack.

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