Doug's health and wealth blog

The newest trend in music today is one of the oldest trends.  I refer to the lowly reed organ.  Some folks call them pump organs or Granny organs, preacher organs, melodeons, or harmoniums.  Today there are more and more people using these instruments in rock bands in their homes, churches, and solo artist videos and CD’s .  Just check out youtube and search reed organ and those other names above and you will come up with over 12,000 videos containing these instruments.

You may be able to pick one up for the cost of moving if you are lucky…or find them in antique shops, second hand stores, thrift shops.  They cost from $50 or less up to thousands.  Most reed organs operate on suction generated by the foot pedals and have one keyboard.  A few of the larger ones may have two or three keyboards and a full pedal keyboard and they may have a lever or crank for a second person to furnish the wind or suction to the instrument while the organist plays.

There are several kinds of reed organ.  The tiny melodeon is usually a single rank of reeds and some have legs that fold up for easy trasnport.  They are short and unfortunately many of them have been gutted out to make a uselessly tiny writing desk.  That was something that Better Homes and Gardens magazine suggested in the fifties and many people decided to gut their Grandma’s melodeon.  Their kids are really disappointed in them today.  The later version folded up into a suitcase called a preacher organ for military chaplains and evangelists to carry with them and those were built into the 1950’s or 60’s. Most of the others ceased production in the twenties or thirties some earlier than that as the popularity and quality went up in the American piano industry.

A step up from the Melodeon, there is also the larger version or the full sized reed organ with 2 or more sets of reeds playable with drawknobs similar to a pipe organ console.  This is the most common.  They often have very opulent cases with fine woodwork, often a decorative top with mirrors, gingerbread, latticework, and sometimes music and book storage cabinets.  If the back wall of the organ has plain dyed or black back boards, it was built as a parlor organ.  If it has a back that is fine finished wood , it will likely also be short enough for the organist to see over and possibly direct a choir over it while facing the choristers.  This would be called a chapel model.  This will often have a decorative grill in the back board so that sound can be heard to the back of the organ directed at the choir or the full church.

Some instruments are quite different.  These are mostly built in Europe and they run on pressure.  These are the true harmoniums.  Many people in America call these reed organs, but many in Europe call reed organs harmoniums.  These both seem to have become generic terms for the other as well.

The Reed organ was first coming out in the mid 1800’s.  The first man building these seems to have been George P. Bent who built several models of organ in his long run as a major builder.  He built the King Organ, the Queen Organ, the Prince Melodeon.   The most prolific reed organ builder would be Estey in Brattleboro VT.  Musically the finest was often found bearing the Mason Hamlin label.  Story and Clark and Ann Arbor, and Chicago Cottage organ were good names as well. Beckwith was the brand sold by Sears Roebuck while the Windsor reed organ was sold by Montgomery Ward.

Too often these organs are found missing their tops.  These often highly decorated tops had to be removed when moving the organ and they seem to have not survived some moves.  Also in the quest for modernity the old Victorian tops would be burned as firewood when Victorian went out of style leaving a rather plain organ case below that would better blend in with later styles of furniture.  You can tell if there was a missing top by looking at the top back corner where the back wall of the organ meets the top board of the cabinet.  If there is a stairstep here from right to left, then there is definitely a missing top that should go there.  If the back top is square then it may not have had a top originally.  Also if there are screw holes in the top boards of the organ then likely there were brackets missing that were part of the top.

The condition of these reed organs after more than 100 years, surprisingly, is sometimes good enough to be playable.  The bellows are the most susceptible to the ravages of time.  The pedals had canvas webbing straps going to the feeder bellows and these straps are usually rotted and broken and replaced by previous owners by now.  The leather flap valves found on the outside of these movable feeder boards are usually not usable by now.  In some rare cases replacing these flap valves and straps will allow the organ to play once again for a short time.  Take note:  after 100 years every reed organ MUST be restored at some point very very soon.  While just recovering the bellows system with new cloth will make it functional in some cases, don’t think you can get away with never finishing the job.  The whole organ action is full of felt and leather, both of which oxidize over the years and turn into powder.  Usually moths have eaten holes out of all the felt and in some cases all felt throughout the whole organ Is nothing more than powdered moth poo left by marauding moths.  Mice have often left signs of nests and in a few cases have wrought such damage as to make the organ unrestorable.  In several decades of restoring several hundred of these instruments I have only found two instruments that were too badly damaged to restore and those just weren’t worth the money it would take to go ahead and restore them.

So what does a total restoration do?  It should make the instrument totally functional and musical.  It must include tuning as reeds do go out of tune.  However these instruments were not tuned to modern standard A-440 in most cases.  They are usually higher in pitch.  A normal tuning will tune it to itself at the pitch at which it is found.  In rare cases the customer will pay the extra hourly fee to get the organ tuned to modern standard A-440.

A restoration should recover the bellows system complete with replacing the hinges, bellows cloth and all flap valves and gaskets.  If the reservoir was originally glued to the foundation board or bellows table, this joint should be gasketed and screwed together when reassembled.  All wood should be sealed with shellac as 100 year old wood is now porous.  All pallet valves under the keys should have new felt and leather and spring tension should be checked for evenness of touch.  All stops or mutes over the reed cells should have new leather and should be regulated to be completely off when the stop knob is in the off position.  All keys should be rebushed, and regulated for dip and leveled so the keyboard is totally even across its length.  The name board should be restored and the name itself should be saved or if not in good enough shape, it should be scanned and replaced to look exactly like the original.  The couplers should be regulated to push the key down completely but not push up any keys when activated.  Stop knobs should be repaired or replaced and the correct stop names put in place.  Sometimes that takes some research to find out what goes on a knob that originally had a blank missing label.

The end result in a restored reed organ is to be a fully functional, MUSICAL piece of history that will continue to play for many decades.  While we restore to make our instruments last 30 years before any major work is needed they may very well last far longer just as they did originally.  I seriously doubt that those American artisans who built these wonderful reed organs ever thought they would be around 30-50 years later.  They would be amazed to know that their organs lasted over 100 years and then some yutz like me goes in and restores it to last possibly another 100 years.

I mentioned that these organs are a new trend.  I have restored these for decades now but in the last two years my shop has had a backlog of reed organs waiting to be restored reaching perhaps 8 patiently waiting in line.  Perhaps it is the economy…people want to fix what they have and enjoy it at home.  Or perhaps they see more reed organs in music videos and they just like the music.  With the resurgence in popularity of the reed organ’s little cousin, the accordion the reed organ now enjoys a resurgence of its own popularity.  Luckily even complete restoration is so inexpensive compared to piano restoration, that the restoration of Granny’s organ is well within the means of most Americans with an interest in their own family’s musical history.

To see more of these reed organs check out the pages of organs that I sold or offer for sale over the last 2 years.

<http://thepianoworld.com/Carton-Collection.html>

Or listen to several reed organs played on my youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/pianoworldenterprise

Doug L.  Bullock at http://thepianoworld.com

I have been overweight since junior high school, not massively but enough to seldom remove my shirt in public.  Enough that I knew I did not look good in some clothes.  I quit wearing T-shirts in my twenties because they made me look fat.  I have tried to manage it for decades and have worked really hard and did so several times.  I usually got myself down once I reached a weight or a pants size that outraged and enraged me enough to take action and get back to lifting weights and taking metabolism supplements.  I am highly averse to using drugs or anything non natural so I did it in the past with just raw willpower, workouts, and grit.

So I personally never thought I would actually lose much weight using OsoLean Powder, the new peptide technology that targets fat for removal while building up bone and muscle.

I have used it since the rollout and I had absolutely no results for 5 months.  Then I noticed I had lost 3 inches in my waist as I had to add a hole to my belt and I had dropped about 10 pounds.  I knew I felt better and I liked my clothes fitting better.

Once the hoopla died down over the newness of OsoLean, I kept using the peptide powder for the last year.  While at first I made some permanent changes to my diet to help lower calories, I haven’t done any depressing draconian so-called diet.  I have not gone hungry.  I eat when I am hungry and I don’t crave anything.  What did I do to step down 500 calories per day as advised in the OsoLean Plan?  I was more often substituting plain iced tea instead of soda most of the time.  I also changed to no dessert unless it was real fruit (and not cherry pie or some cobbler–just fruit).  I have added clementines or other tangerine to my regular purchases for that little healthy snack.

I get my Osolean powder almost every day.  I try to use it morning and night but you know how things go without a regular schedule, I missed from time to time.  I got the night OsoLean serving 90% of the time and the morning OsoLean serving about 50% of the time or more.

Well I had stopped expecting any more weight reduction but I kept on using OsoLean powder because it is very healthy for you in building bone and muscle so that is what I was looking for–more muscle and bone density.  So I continued every few months to add a hole to the belt as I got smaller, but noticed no change in weight because muscle and bone is heavier than fat.

Well today I got the shock of my life.  I stepped on the scales and noticed to my absolute shock—–I am now down a full 25 pounds from the day OsoLean Powder rolled out on the Mannatech stage.  The last 12 pounds seem to have rolled off in the last two months.  I think there is another factor in play here as well.  I saw the video on youtube called “Sugar: the bitter truth” which taught me that I never want to put high fructose corn syrup into my body ever again.  Unfortunately finding a food that does NOT have that in there is almost impossible but I have worked hard to remove it from my diet as much as I can.  HFCS has horrendous catastrophic health effects on your body and they are the same as if you became a raging alcoholic—-all the major health problems associated with being a lifelong alcoholic without any buzz or intoxication involved.

Well I think using OsoLean powder and avoiding HFCS together put me on warp speed targeting of fat and removing it.  I may just go shopping and see if I can fit into a pair of 36 inch waist jeans this week.  I haven’t been able to do that since I was age 25 so that would be really cool.  If they don’t fit, I now know all I have to do is keep using OsoLean powder and check the jeans every month or two until they fit.

I just got out my older slacks that I have worn for years and I noticed they swallowed me.  I looked at the label and they were a 42 inch waist.  When I wear them the belt looks like the drawstring on a nearly empty laundry bag, cinched up and wrinkled around the top.  I can’t believe I have gotten this much smaller and I didn’t even notice it.  I only stepped on the scales because I had a couple of friends comment that I had lost weight.  I responded that no, that is not likely but sure enough, they WERE right.  I counted holes in all my old belts and I find that according to the creases in my belts, I use 7 inches less of my belts than I did when I started.  I need to add another hole to everything as well.  Where’s my leather punch?  Perhaps a new belt is in order.  Looking for a new belt used to be a very depressing activity because I could never believe how long a new belt needed to be to fit.  But this time I think I will enjoy doing it.

So without going on a diet, without being hungry, without losing energy, in fact I have more….without running a mile every day or even running at all, without doing what I used to do to get thinner which is lift weights…..without any of that…by making a couple of permanent changes in my eating habits and adding OsoLean Powder to my everyday life, I have dropped 25 ugly pounds and I didn’t have to cut off my head (old joke reference LOL)  Of course there is one other thing that I do that I know helps as well….I also use  a couple of Optimal Support Packs from Mannatech every day like clockwork.  Even before OsoLean arrived I found that adding these high tech real food technology products to my everyday life had almost totally stopped my junk food cravings which got me overweight decades ago.

So I am not going to try to sell you anything because I am not the hype type but this new peptide technology works.  It cranks up your body to build more bone and muscle and target and remove 3 times as much fat as you normally would lose in muscle using a regular old fashioned “diet”.  It actually “builds” your body thin.  It worked for me and I did not have to work hard to make it work.  Yes it was slow for me because I did not start a workout routine.  If I had I am sure my results would have come much sooner.  But the point of my story is just keep plugging away.  Watch what you eat and use OsoLean powder to help you deal with hunger and help reverse the muscle loss that occurs when you diet the old fashioned way.  If you think it is time to get slender again or for the first time, just ask me and I can help.  I don’t know if there is a link to get the stuff on this blog, but maybe I can put one up just in case you are shy and don’t want to contact me personally.

Doug L. Bullock

(Okay, okay!  Per request, here is the link to get the stuff:)

So why is it so easy to get sick today in America?  You see it every day.  Friends come down with or develop some nasty disease way too often.  We love our friends and sometimes we feel so helpless.  I am not a doctor and you probably aren’t either. But today even doctors are discouraged by how much disease there is and how little their work of doctoring actually helps people get well or avoid getting sick.  The World Health Organization who compares the general level of health of all countries  in the world rate us as spending more for our healthcare system than all the other countries put together.  But where do we rate in quality of our actual health?  We are number 72 behind Mexico Sri Lanka and even several third world countries.

This would indicate to me that too much of our health expenditures are misdirected or perhaps wasted because something is horribly wrong.

Well drugs are good and they have their uses, but they should always be temporary.  They do nothing to keep us healthy on a daily basis.  Even doctors will tell you that the thing that determines how well someone responds when they need a drug is their general level of health.  Doctors prefer to do their work when the body HELPS!  If your body is not in a good enough level of health then it cannot respond in a favorable way when a doctor tries to get you well.

So how do we build our own wellness so that when we do need a doctor he or she can actually help us?

Drugs don’t cause the body to build good health.  There is only one thing that does build the body and that is food.

So what’s wrong with our food today that it is NOT keeping us healthy?  Do you want a list?  Well it all boils down to one thing and that is THE main problem with our health in 2010, the reason we are number 72 in our level of health in the world—Missing Nutrients.  In Grandma’s day she and many of her friends grew their own food.  She used organic fertilizer swept from the barnyard floor.  They picked their dinner fresh from the plant at the peak of ripeness and freshness.  When the tomato bugs moved in, she picked them off or used other plants to make them leave.  What she planted often helped control other garden pests.  Grandma grew what we now call organic vegetables.  In those days the government measured the nutrients in the produce and set Required Daily Amount levels.

But they never expected those levels to change over the years.  Today we don’t farm like Grandma did.  We use heavy duty pesticides and herbicides to protect the crop and those get into the plant and cause– missing nutrients.  The soil is not enriched by barnyard soil, it has synthetic chemicals to fertilize the crops—missing nutrients.  Pretty is more important than nutrient levels to the big agra companies that now own 99% of all farms these days.  Nutrients that may be missing in action are not even thought about.  Then the veggies are picked green and shipped to the store thousands of miles away where they are gassed with ethylene to make them look pretty and ripe without actually BEING ripe—more missing nutrients.  Today the big chemical companies now grow seeds genetically modified so the plants contain their own powerful pesticides.  Some are designed to protect the plant from herbicides.   While the animal studies on GMO have shown severe organ and reproductive damage caused by their eating those GMO foods, the GMO producers don’t seem to think there will be any human damage from our eating them so we eat them almost every day without even knowing.

All this combines to make the perfect storm of missing nutrients.  Since the government measured the nutrition in our veggies in the late 40’s and early 50’s the measurable levels have drastically changed with one main result—missing nutrients:

Vitamin C level—Then = 1 orange /  Today = 10 oranges to get the same now missing nutrients

Vitamin A level —-Then  = 2 peaches / Today = 53 peaches to get the same now missing nutrients

Iron level—-Then =  1 cup of spinach / Today =  65 cups of spinach  for the same missing nutrients

Lets face it with the food we have in a modern grocery store, we need to eat enough food for an army to get enough of the missing nutrients to keep a body healthy.

So what do we do?  How do we fight back for our good health?  Well learning to grow a garden is a good start, even if it is in your sunny kitchen window.  Also, in order to not have to eat enough for 10 people every day of our lives, we MUST supplement our diets or we could die, quite literally, from malnutrition.  It won’t look like the starving children on TV but when our body can no longer keep us well or protect us from what pathogens are going around, it is caused by malnutrition or simply—missing nutrients.   Even extreme overweight is caused by malnutrition and that problem is epidemic these days.

But I warn you.  Don’t go out and buy a bunch of vitamin pills at Walmart and think you are supplementing.  If your supplement is not 100% food sourced then it is synthetic chemicals and chemicals are not food…If you have a problem with missing nutrients you need REAL FOOD.  Next time we will talk about how to get that without eating for 10 every day.

Once again we hear from an expert in natural health—the Health Ranger.  He has hit the nail directly on the head once again.  This man has got to be one of the world experts in staying healthy and avoiding illness.  Listen to this man as he once again makes perfect sense.

Doug

Why Are Smart People So Ignorant When it Comes to Health, Vaccines and Vitamin D? by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

A deathly ill patient of late
Had an IQ of 168.
His brain was immense
But it lacked common sense
And it never engaged when he ate.
- by the Health Ranger

As an observer of human behavior, one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever witnessed is really smart people dying of diseases that are easily preventable through basic nutrition (vitamin D, phytonutrients, targeted supplements, superfoods, etc.). I know doctors dying of really bad stuff who take chemotherapy over vitamin D supplements. I know members of MENSA who are killing themselves with junk foods. I know extremely intelligent attorneys and physicists who are among the smartest people in their respective fields; but when it comes to basic health, they’re completely ignorant.

In fact, if you look around at all the “smart” people you know, you’re likely to find the vast majority of them are incredibly ignorant when it comes to their own health. They know nothing about basic nutrition, the benefits of superfoods or the dangers of pharmaceuticals. They eat processed junk foods, dairy products and food products contaminated with pesticides and toxic chemicals. They may be the smartest people in the world in their labs or offices, but when it comes to their own bodies, they are among the most ignorant people on the planet.

How can this be?

How can such high-IQ people remain so utterly ignorant when it comes to their own health?

There are two reasons, it turns out. And one of them will blow your mind..

How to become an expert in one area while abandoning the basics:

To be an expert in astrophysics, you have to spend many years studying astrophysics. To get really good at law, you have to study law. If you want to get good at anything, you have to focus on it, learn about it, and invest some time learning how it works.

That’s what I’ve done with the subject of health and nutrition (and you too, probably). And yet I’m not an expert in astrophysics, nor law, nor brain surgery. Importantly, I don’t have to be an expert in those areas because I don’t practice in those areas.

And yet — here’s the important part — all those physicists, attorneys and surgeons do have a physical body they need to take care of. They all need to become proficient in basic human health, regardless of whatever other specialties they might pursue.

In other words, everyone with a body needs to learn the basics of taking care of that body. And yet most of the smartest people in the world today have spent essentially zero time learning about human health. So even with their high IQs, they make childish, ignorant decisions when it comes to their own health. They may be doctorate-level academic thinkers in their own fields, but when it comes to protecting health and preventing disease, these people haven’t even graduated from kindergarten yet.

You see this quite frequently in the geek community, by the way. Junk food, pharmaceuticals and caffeinated soda drinks seem to go hand-in-hand with the wired, pale and frenzied computer brainiacs who are, after all, smarter than everybody else. They can write DRM decryption code with one hand while they eat MSG-laden fried snack chips with the other. Like everybody else, they are high-IQ, highly-specialized experts in their fields who remain woefully uneducated when it comes to their own health.

But how can so many smart people be so utterly unaware of the basics of nutrition? That vitamin D prevents most disease? That aspartame kills your brain cells? That processed meat (beef jerky, bacon, sausage, pepperoni) contains carcinogenic coloring chemicals designed to make the meat look rosy fresh?

The real reason is more insidious than you may have imagined. If you want to learn it, read on…

Good health is bad for business

Here’s the real reason why so many smart people remain so uninformed when it comes to their own health:

The institutions of power in our modern world go out of their way to keep people nutritionally ignorant.  By “institutions of power,” I mean our governments, our private industries (health care and others) and the corporations that pull all the strings behind the curtains.

What are the most powerful corporations in our world? Aside from the military bombs-and-bullets companies (who have their own scams running), the most powerful corporations are drug companies, media companies, agriculture companies and food & beverage companies.

Now think about this clearly for a minute: What do all these companies have in common? How do all these companies keep their economic machines running?

The answer is: Nutritional ignorance of the masses.

You see, the agriculture companies depend on nutritional ignorance in order to keep selling their processed ingredients to food companies which then turn around and sell those nutritionally-depleted products to consumers. Media companies depend on the advertising revenues from the promotion of junk foods and junk beverages, and drug companies depend on the revenues from all the diseases caused by the widespread consumption of all those products.

These four industries — Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Media and Big Food — have a dark, incestuous relationship that generates huge profits… but only as long as the masses remain nutritionally ignorant.

If people became proficient in nutrition, superfoods, vitamin D and natural foods, all four of these industries would suffer huge financial losses. Their sales and profits would plummet in a world where nutrition is common knowledge. Their continued financial success requires nutritional ignorance among the masses.

Enforcing nutritional ignorance

Powerful corporations, of course, require the services of oppressive government to enforce nutritional ignorance across the population. In the USA, the Food and Drug Administration is the primary enforcer of nutritional ignorance.

The FDA, as most NaturalNews readers well know, makes one of its primary missions the destruction of knowledge about nutrition and natural remedies. This is accomplished by outlawing any honest speech about nutrition from supplement companies, even going as far as threatening them with arrest and criminal prosecution if they dare link to scientific studies about nutrition (http://www.naturalnews.com/019366.html).

Meanwhile, the FDA openly approves health claims on processed food products sold by powerful corporations. This is designed to convince consumers that junk foods are healthful foods, even while healthful foods can make no claims whatsoever about their health benefits.

The FTC also gets in the game with its own brand of censorship, arresting and imprisoning owners of companies that offer natural disease treatments based on good science. That’s why no real disease cures are offered in the U.S. anymore — all the scientists who know the subject have either been imprisoned or run out of the country.

Medical journals also play a part in the ongoing nutritional ignorance of the masses by promoting intellectually dishonest information about the supposed benefits of pharmaceuticals while attacking natural remedies and ignoring nutritional cures.

The disease non-profit groups also play a big part in the nutritional ignorance scam. Note, carefully, how the non-profits dare not teach people to take vitamin D supplements? If they did, their particular disease would cease to be such a big problem and those non-profits would lose membership (and power). So they continue the grand charade of ignoring known disease cures while claiming they’re still “searching for a cure.”

I’ve even seen lots of smart people jogging along in those “race for the cure” events — which are of course just a fundraising fraud. When I’ve asked these people where the money goes that they’re donating, they just shrug their shoulders and say, “I dunno. I guess it goes to find a cure!”

These are very smart people, mind you, who have been sucked into this sucker’s fundraising trap. They have no clue where the money is going (hint: almost all of it goes to disease “recruiting” and screening efforts to scare more women into chemotherapy) and yet they jog along with all the other sheeple, somehow believing they are doing good in the world.

In all, these institutions and power centers accomplish something quite remarkable: The complete nutritional ignorance of virtually the entire population.

And with that, they shore up their own profit centers by keeping the American people ignorant and nutritionally illiterate.

Find the rest of this article at Natural News

Finally someone else beside me gets  it.  This is dead serious and every human should take this to heart and understand what we all must do to improve our lives, our economy, our country, our world.

Doug L. Bullock

Special report issued by NaturalNews.com

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) Most Americans would agree the state of the nation is less than ideal. Unemployment is at record highs, home foreclosures are driving people onto the street, health care remains a disastrous failure and the population is more diseased, obese and depressed than ever before.

In a newly-published special report, NaturalNews.com editor Mike Adams (the Health Ranger) argues that all these problems have a common cause: Poor nutrition.

The full, free report is available at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/report_N…

In it, the Health Ranger explains that virtually all the major problems facing America today have their roots in nutritionally-depleted, over-processed, chemically-contaminated foods. Turning America around, he says, starts within changing what Americans eat. Replacing junk processed foods and chemical additives with fresh produce and superfoods will automatically lead to vast improvements across America, including:

• Greatly reduced health care costs and far lower rates of disease.
• Enhanced cognitive function, creativity and productivity.
• Vastly improved results in education.
• Huge reductions in crime and prison populations.
• A stronger Democracy and improved voting results.
• Enhanced happiness and longevity of the population.
• Improved international competitiveness, both academically and economically.

“Eating healthy is patriotic,” says Adams. “One of the best things you can do for your country is eat a truly healthful diet that’s free from junk foods and chemical additives.”

Read more in the full report here:
http://www.naturalnews.com/report_N…

I recently found out about a large company (Kimberly Clark) that is actively working to inform us and our healthcare professionals about ways to improve a dangerous situation—the danger of just being in a hospital or around a doctor’s office.

It has long been known that if you want to live longer, stay out of the hospital.  With the exorbitant rates of death from correctly and incorrectly administered medical therapies there is also the well known risk of acquiring an infection that lurks mainly in hospitals.  Here in St. Louis recently we had a well known and loved city Alderman who went into the hospital for minor procedure and within a day was in a coma which left him dead in a very short time from a raging hospital acquired staph infection.

When someone develops an infection at a hospital or other patient care facility that they did not have prior to treatment, this is referred to as a healthcare-associated (sometimes hospital-acquired) infection (HAI).

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a global crisis affecting both patients and healthcare workers.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at any point in time, 1.4 million people worldwide suffer from infections acquired in hospitals.

A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report published in March-April 2007 estimated the number of U.S. deaths from healthcare asociated infections in 2002 at 98,987.

The risk of acquiring healthcare-associated infections in developing countries is 2-20 times higher than in developed countries.

Afflicting thousands of patients every year, HAI often leads to lengthening hospitalization, increasing the likelihood of readmission, and adding sizably to the cost of care per patient.

Financially, HAIs represent an estimated annual impact of $6.7 billion to healthcare facilities, but the human cost is even higher.

Until recently, a lack of HAI reporting requirements for healthcare facilities has contributed to less-than-optimal emphasis being placed on eliminating the sources of healthcare associated infections. However, growing public anxiety regarding the issue and resulting legislation on state and local levels demanding accountability is serving to accelerate initiatives to combat HAIs.

To learn more about the impact of healthcare-associated infections for both medical professionals and patients, please visit www.haiwatch.com.

About Not on My Watch Prevention Campaign

To protect patients by reducing the risk of HAI, healthcare professionals must continually update their knowledge of infection management.  Here is a sample video for training patients and professionals as well in improving this important part of staying healthy–avoiding HAI’s.

As part of an ongoing commitment to quality care and infection prevention, nationwide doctors and hospitals are partnering with Kimberly-Clark to deliver continuing education programs on healthcare-associated infection (HAI) prevention to staff and management. As simple as education sounds, busy doctors and nurses on the front lines of delivering care can find it difficult to find the time to take advantage of scheduled programs within their hospitals.

The HAI Education Program is part of a national infection awareness campaign for healthcare professionals called “Not on My Watch” and will provide the facility with a toolkit that contains informational flyers, patient safety tips and posters.

The “Not on My Watch” campaign provides accredited continuing education (CE) programs based on best practices and guidelines as well as research available on reducing the incidence of healthcare-associated infections.

For details about the “Not On My Watch” campaign, and the HAI Education Bus please visit www.HAIwatch.com.

Of course if you plan on a hospital stay it would be a very good idea in the week(s) previous to your stay, to eat larger amounts of fresh vine ripe and raw, steamed, or stir fried, lightly cooked  vegetables and fruits as well as increase your intake of real food technology supplements to improve your body’s functions– especially the function of your immune and repair systems.  Improved nutrition gives the body what it needs to better fight off anything that may be lurking in your hospital room.

While I am not connected with KC in any way I applaud their program to educate us all to avoid disease whenever possible especially when in or around healthcare facilities.

Doug L. Bullock

Doug’s take on this:  Our brains are built to stay healthy longer than presently believed by most people.

My personal research has backed this up and I have found that other recent studies show substantial improvement in cognitive function coming from a particular type of nutrient called polysaccharides or long chain polysaccharides.  These are found in organically grown, vine ripe fruits and vegetables, larch, arabinogalactin, barks, gums, and fresh or stabilized aloe vera gel.  While these are not even available in most grocery stores or even health food stores, I found a great source of concentrated polysaccharides and precursors of bioactive monosaccharides which I have been adding to my diet now for 6 years.  I have noticed improved memory, greater discrimination in my vision and my hearing.  As a piano and pipe organ tuner the improvement in my hearing discrimination has been remarkable.  I have always had exceptional hearing and have never had any hearing problems.  The only way I can describe it is I now hear more–in what I hear.  The time it takes me to tune any instrument has been shortened greatly and the quality of my tuning has improved.  A link to my supply of concentrated daily supplementation of polysaccharides I add to my diet is found at the end of this blog post.

The following is a Paraphrase from a Natural News feature by S. L. Baker

As people age, the chance of age related brain fog rises. The most dreaded form of this memory robbing condition is already the seventh-leading cause of death in the U.S.  The incidence of age related brain decline is expected to soar as the huge Baby Boomer generation ages. According to the National Institute on Aging, as age related brain fog progresses, the brain shrinks. So it is not a comforting thought to know that science has long stated normally aging brains shrink as we grow older, even if you don’t have brain decline. Having a brain that is going to atrophy with the passing years seems to indicate that some mental decline must be inevitable, right?

Well, guess what? That “fact” is looking more and more like another example of an obsolete, bogus belief ingrained in the medical establishment that is not backed up by solid evidence.

According to new research just published in the American Psychological Association’s journal Neuropsychology, the studies that supposedly proved even healthy older brains are substantially smaller than younger brains did not screen out people who had undetected, slowly developing brain diseases that were killing off brain cells and shrinking gray matter. Bottom line: researchers overestimated atrophy in the brains of older adults and underestimated the normal size of older, healthy brains.

The new study tested participants in Holland’s long-term Maastricht Aging Study who did not suffer from any neurological problems.  Research subjects shown to be healthy then took neuropsychological tests, including a screening test for brain diseases, at baseline and then every three years for the next nine years. After three years, study participants were also given MRI scans to document measurements of seven different parts of their brains, including the hippocampus (an area important for forming and holding on to memories) and the frontal and cingulate areas of the critical cortex which are important for cognitive skills.

The study participants, who were all around 69 years old when the study started, were placed into two groups. One was comprised of 35 cognitively healthy people who stayed free of diagnosable brain disease throughout the time of the study and the other group was made up of 30 people who showed substantial cognitive decline as the study progressed, although they were not officially diagnosed with disease. In contrast to the 35 people who stayed healthy, the 30 people whose cognitive health went into decline over the nine years showed significant changes in their brains. That means the brain shrinkage that previously would have been chalked up to aging was much more likely to reflect some pathology going on the brain — not the passing of years.

In fact, the authors of the study concluded that as long as people stay cognitively healthy, the gray matter supporting cognition might not shrink much at all. “If future longitudinal studies find similar results, our conception of ‘normal’ brain aging may become more optimistic,” lead author Saartje Burgmans, a PhD candidate at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, said in a statement to the media.

While there is at present no cure for many brain diseases, natural health strategies have been shown to help lower the risk of age related brain fog. For example, the National Institute on Aging web site states research suggests a nutritious diet, exercise, social engagement, and mentally stimulating pursuits can reduce the risk of cognitive decline and age related brain fog.

Moreover, scientists are investigating associations between cognitive decline and heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

Age related  declining health conditions can often be put off by building up the general level of health through natural methods using exercise, diet, lessening of toxic load, stress reduction (including meditation and yoga), and certain nutrients may prevent brain decline and keep brain function healthy as the years pass.

References:

“The Prevalence of Cortical Gray Matter Atrophy May Be Overestimated In the Healthy Aging Brain,” Saartje Burgmans, PhD student, Martin P. J. van Boxtel, PhD, MD, Eric F. P. M. Vuurman, PhD, Floortje Smeets, PhD student, and Ed H. B. M. Gronenschild, PhD, Maastricht University; Harry B. M. Uylings, PhD, Maastricht University and VU University Medical Center Amsterdam; and Jelle Jolles, PhD, Maastricht University; Neuropsychology, Vol. 23, No. 5.

Doug’s personal source of concentrated polysaccharide supplementation:

http://your-glyco-nutrition.com/

Check out the fish pond. Move the cursor over the pond and click to drop food to the fishies LOL

Recently I figured I needed to learn to do a blog.  Everyone seems to have one these days and if you don’t have one, and I didn’t, you are hopelessly out of date.  I had tried to build one a couple times, but if a tree falls in the middle of the woods and no one is there to hear it does it make any sound?  Does it make any impact?  NO!  No one ever found my first blogging efforts…no visitors.  Its just as well….they were BAA—AAD!  I needed a way to learn the right way to build a blog and get people to go there.

Well in searching for the knowledge I needed it seemed that everyone had their own way and much of what it took to set up a blog you just had to know…already.  Well I didn’t know it already, so how could I do this?  Then I found a guy who was willing to take me by the hand and help me set one up step by baby step.  His name is Dean Holland who is a new fresh face on the scene.  He is young, talented and a real eager beaver and is really serious about helping folks to get a blog up and most important, he is teaching us how to use the blog to promote ourselves and to make money doing that.

He put together a classroom called “Starting With Marketing Academy” and I joined a group of people who are his first class with his brand new training setup.  His youthful exuberance is intriguing, though occasionally annoying to those of us older and more jaded than he is.  But he knows his stuff.  He got me going and you are reading the result.  I am still building so you will notice new things here as you continue to visit from time to time.

If you are looking for something like that, you are out of luck at the moment.  His academy is closed to new folks until this group is trained.  Someday he will open another class so just be patient.  Or you can get a head start by downloading a free ebook found at the right on this page.  Dean has given me a specially made ebook that I can give you.  It will help you get started building a blog that can make you money and help you promote your business or product or anything you are doing already.

Look for the graphic of the book that says BLOG and just leave your info to get your own copy.  By the way if you want, you may give this very ebook out to people on your blog because the main thing a blog MUST do is give VALUE to those reading it.  Leaving your info is not going to open you up to a deluge of junk emails, either.  It is so I can inform you of new stuff I will be putting out to help you.  If you have read this blog at all, you know of my three passions and My main purpose is to give you quality of life improvements.

I am not going to rent, give out or sell your info to anyone nor will I ever hard sell anything to anybody.  I am not a salesman.  Any products I market are products that I use and that have made a vast improvement in my quality of life.  In other words I love them so much that I just have to tell my friends…and you are now my friend.  Many of my friends tried out the products I love to use and their response has been just as awesome as my results were when I used them.

I am building an elite list of people who want something better.  And just because you want something better does not mean it costs you lots of money.  In fact most of what I market can actually pay for itself or go farther to even make you money….and who doesn’t need some extra money in this day of layoffs and recession?

My first freebie, the blog setup book I mentioned can and will make you money if you care to use it for that and it costs you nothing to use and learn how to open an income stream or skyrocket one that you already have running for you.

What floats my boat is when someone comes to tell me how much something I told them about really, really helped them out.  Isn’t that a great feeling?  Like when you tell a friend about a movie or a restaurant you liked and they come back just bubbling with how great you were to tell them about it.  How does that feel to you?  Yeah, me too.

That is what does it for me, improving your quality of life.  Whether I make any money is unimportant.  I don’t know of any theater or restaurant that gives out money for sending people to them but you still refer your friends to them because they gave you value.  Fortunately, there are some companies nowadays that are happy to pay you to send them happy customers and that makes helping people even better.

So get your free ebook downloaded and start building your blog and a new income stream.  I would love to help you do that.

Please leave a comment.  I would love to hear what you think.

I thought you might like to know about another facet of me and my business experience.  I have three passions in my life.  1 is helping people build their wealth, 2 is helping people build their body or build their wellness/level of health and 3 is my favorite genre of music.  This last item is what I want to address here today.  I grew up just ga-ga for piano music.  Well it gets worse…I loved Razza-Ma-Tazz, honky tonk, and ragtime piano music.  I learned later that ragtime is actually a classical music form designed by Scott Joplin.  But I also love what was popular music of the ragtime era, most of which did not follow the classical form of actual ragtime but still has that raggedy rhythm found in ragtime and early jazz.

So the musical niche that I found most easily floated my boat was the 1890’s, the 1900’s the teens, and twenties popular music as heard on player piano rolls.  This same music was also found on Nickelodeons, or coin operated player pianos (the earliest juke boxes) as well as the larger orchestrions and carousel organs which were found in larger restaurants, dance halls and at fairgrounds next to a carousel.  So now you KNOW how weird I am.  But you should know why I love this stuff—-

It is the happiest music in the world.

If you are down or blue, you don’t need a prozac, just listen to a nickelodeon play a happy tune.  Here is a video of one of the instruments I recently restored all the pneumatic playing systems on.  It is a miniature orchestrion.  That term refers to a mechanically played orchestra and some of them got quite large and played 8 or 10 different instruments.  This little Seeburg KT plays a small piano, flute pipes like those found in a pipe organ, as well as a tambourine, triangle, and castanets.  There are extra holes in this special G-roll that play those extra instruments beyond what a home style player piano would do.

I also have a video of a home style player piano that I restored and sold a couple years ago and on this one I give you a tour of the piano.  I pedal it by foot and I play it a while by electric motor.  These instruments were extremely popular for the trendy home to have and did not originally play electrically since most middle class homes did not have many electric appliances until the 1920’s and 30’s. Most of the rolls have words printed so you can sing along. Can you say 1920 Karaoke? It is the life of every party!

You can see my player piano restoration shop here. I know you probably won’t ever need my services on your Grandma’s player piano but you might like to know I am there with a large shop with people rebuilding pieces of musical history.  There are very few of us left doing this these days and I know of at least 6 rebuilders in this country who went out of business in the last two years.  Finding nicely restored automatic music machines like these is now, indeed, a rare thing.  Even in this bad economy there are people still having Grandma’s treasured player piano or Grandpa’s Orchestrion restored and I have one of the last shops that can do that in America.

I also have around 100 of these instruments stored for future restoration, so one of the reasons my other passion is wellness, is I plan to be around for the next 100 years to restore all of them.  The amazing wellness products I have used for the last 6 years are found to keep the cells vibrant and young.  I would never be without my Optimal Support Packs each day if I want to see the next 100 years.  Sometime I will go into what I do to stay well.  Meanwhile click and listen to the happiest music in the world and throughout our musical history.