Did Steve Jobs really try to cure cancer “macrobiotically”?

In his interview on “60 minutes” last night, Walter Isaacson said that Steve Jobs tried various alternative ways of healing cancer, including “spiritually and macrobiotically.”  While he was discussing Steve Jobs and his battle with cancer, a photo of Steve Jobs was shown.  In the photo, his right eyebrow was slanted upward and the hair was darker than in his left eyebrow.  I’ve seen pictures of eyebrows like that before.  But where?

Oh yes, now I remember: In the book entitled “The Book of Macrobiotics” by Michio Kushi, on page 144, there are two sketches:  one of a normal healthy face and one of the face of a person who has not been eating macrobiotically.  The description of the unhealthy face shown on that page includes this sentence:  “raised and shortened eyebrows (tight nervous system and shorter digestive vessels from excessive animal food).  In other words, the photo of Steve Jobs showed that he was not on a macrobiotic diet.

What's up with the eyebrow?

Steve Jobs was allegedly on a vegan diet which means a vegetarian diet with no animal food at all.  So how did he get the raised and shortened eyebrow of a person who has been eating excessive animal food?

In a previous blog post, I questioned whether Isaacson was using the term macrobiotically to mean a macrobiotic diet.  Maybe Steve Jobs tried a macrobiotic diet for awhile, but was then convinced by Western doctors to eat animal food.  In all of the news coverage, the term “special macrobiotic diet” was used.  It would be helpful to know how this “special macrobiotic diet” differed from the standard macrobiotic diet.

Anderson Cooper and the Seven Dwarfs

I love Anderson Cooper’s new TV talk show.  Yesterday, his guests were the Johnston family of seven who call themselves “the seven dwarfs.”  I always thought that the term dwarf was politically incorrect, but when Anderson said to Amber Johnston, the mother, “You actually call yourself the seven dwarfs.” she said that the term dwarf is acceptable.  It is the M word that is politically incorrect.

The Johnston family consists of mom Amber and dad Trent who have two biological dwarf children and three adopted dwarf children.  All of them have Achondroplasia, the most common type of dwarfism.

I was shocked that Anderson would discuss the subject of dwarfs on his show, but he handled it very well, making his guests feel comfortable and acting as though their condition were perfectly normal.  As for me, I couldn’t help but think of the Ovitz family of dwarfs who were the subjects of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz.    (Of course, Anderson didn’t bring this up.)  

Did a delay in having an operation for cancer cause Steve Jobs to die?

A biography of Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson, will be out next Monday.  The author will be interviewed on “60 Minutes” on Sunday night.  Clips from the interview with Isaacson have been on TV since yesterday.

I was shocked to hear Isaacson say in one of the clips from his “60 Minutes” interview that Steve Jobs waited for 9 months before having an operation to remove a cancerous tumor; he finally had surgery only because “his wife pleaded with him to have an operation,” according to Isaacson.  I saw one of the clips from the “60 Minutes” interview this morning on Fox News and I heard Isaacson say that Jobs had tried to cure the cancer “macrobiotically.”

This quote about the new book is from this website:

The book delves into Jobs’ decision to delay surgery for nine months after learning in October 2003 that he had a neuroendocrine tumor — a relatively rare type of pancreatic cancer that normally grows more slowly and is therefore more treatable. Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He also was influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, the book says, before finally having surgery in July 2004.

I find it very strange that Steve Jobs allegedly got worse after going on a vegan diet, having acupuncture and trying herbal remedies.  I frankly don’t believe that Jobs went on a macrobiotic diet and the cancer spread.  Before hearing about Isaacson’s interview, I had assumed that Steve Jobs died from cancer because he had an operation to remove the tumor.  I believe that removing the tumor is the wrong way to treat cancer.  

Was the “surgeon of Birkenau” really a surgeon?

The term “surgeon of Birkenau” has become a household word since the release of a new movie called The Debt. You can read my review of The Debt here.

This movie is a remake of a 2007 movie with the same story line, except that the Nazi “monster” in the 2007 film was called “the surgeon of Treblinka.”

Treblinka was strictly a death camp where all the Jews and a few Gypsies were killed immediately upon arrival, so why would there be a surgeon at Treblinka?  For that matter, why would there be a German surgeon at Birkenau?  The job of a surgeon is to save lives.  Germany was at war and there were thousands of German soldiers who needed surgery after they had been wounded on the battlefield.  Why would the Germans send a surgeon to save Jews at Birkenau?

The term surgeon is used in the movie The Debt to describe the character named Dr. Dieter Vogel, who is based on the real-life Dr. Josef Mengele. Dr. Mengele allegedly did surgery for the purpose of torturing the prisoners at Birkenau.  For example, he allegedly sewed two children together, back to back, to create Siamese twins.  What possible use would this have for German medicine in the future?  This was purely torture, done by a “monster.”

When Dr. Mengele came to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1943, his first assignment was to take care of the prisoners in the Gypsy camp, which was a family camp where men, women and children lived in the same barracks. He was later assigned to the women’s barracks where he delivered babies, but as far as I know, he did not do surgery.  There were plenty of Jewish doctors in all the camps, who could have done any surgery that was necessary to save lives.   

In the new film The Debt, the former “surgeon of Birkenau” is hiding out in East Berlin working under an assumed name as a gynecologist. A woman (Rachel Singer) is part of the Mossad team that is assigned to find him; her job is to pretend to be a married woman who is trying to have a baby. She goes to see the suspected “surgeon of Birkenau” so that she can find out for sure if he is the “monster” who killed Jews at Birkenau.  The doctor is very gentle and polite but he asks a lot of questions. It seems that he is suspicious of her:  She doesn’t speak German like a native German speaker.  He asks her who referred her to him and she names a Jewish doctor.  He asks about the doctor: “How is the old Jew?”

Dr. Mengele was a medical doctor with an M.D. degree, which he had received in July 1938 from the University of Frankfurt, but his specialty was research on hereditary conditions. He had previously earned a PhD in Anthropology in 1935 with a thesis on “Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups.” He was a medical expert on the difference between racial groups and how heredity affects the health of babies in different racial groups.

In January 1937, Dr. Mengele had been appointed a research assistant at the Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfurt. He worked under Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a geneticist who was doing research on twins. As the war-time director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching Genetics, located in Berlin, von Verschuer secured the funds for Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. The results of Mengele’s research on twins was sent to this Institute. The grant for Mengele’s genetic research was authorized by the German Research Council in August 1943.

The research on hereditary conditions was important to the Nazis because they wanted to have a strong, healthy race of people who would be free from hereditary defects.  The Nazis did not want the German people to mix with Jewish people because the Jews had a number of hereditary diseases.  Dr. Mengele was doing research on how hereditary defects are passed on to future generations.

Dr. Mengele had already begun his research on heredity before the war and he jumped at the chance to go to Birkenau where he would have a great opportunity to study hereditary defects.  At Birkenau, he volunteered to do the selections for the gas chamber, even when it wasn’t his turn, because he wanted to find subjects for his medical research on genetic conditions and hereditary diseases. He particularly wanted to find twins for the research that he had started before he was posted to Birkenau.

Dr. Mengele escaped from Auschwitz before the camp was liberated by the army of the Soviet Union in January 1945. He took all of his research papers with him. These papers later fell into the hands of the Allies, but they have never been published. The results of Dr. Mengele’s experiments are currently being held in a vault in Israel and will probably never be released to the public.

Dr. Josef Mengele has gone down in history, not as an expert on hereditary conditions, but as a mad scientist who killed and tortured prisoners at Birkenau.  He allegedly did operations without an anesthetic at Birkenau, just for the purpose of torture.  His most well known crime was turning brown eyes blue, just for the hell of it.

According to the book entitled Mengele, the Complete Story, by Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Dr. Josef Mengele spent 21 months at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and during that time, he sent 400,000 prisoners to their deaths in the gas chambers at Birkenau. He selected 20,000 Jews and Gypsies per month to be killed, according to Posner and Ware.

The total number of deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau is now set at 1.1 million, out of which 900,000 were Jews.  That means that Dr. Josef Mengele was single handedly responsible for almost half of deaths of the Jews at Birkenau. He sent Jews to their deaths with a wave of a baton while he whistled tunes from German opera, according to the stories about him told by the survivors.  Besides that, he was very good looking and charming, which made his crimes all the more heinous.  His nickname in the camp was actually “The Angel of Death,” not the “surgeon of Birkenau.”

Dr. Josef Mengele died on February 7, 1979 when he suffered a stroke while swimming at Bertioga beach in Sao Paulo, Brazil. His death was kept secret by his family and friends. It was not until a couple of years after his death that survivors began to come forward with stories about the crimes that he had committed at Birkenau, and the Mossad made a massive manhunt to find him.

The movie The Debt is based on what might have happened if the Mossad had started looking for Dr. Mengele in 1965 instead of waiting until after he was dead to begin their search for him.  Why was it so important to capture Dr. Mengele and bring him to trial in Israel?  Because his legacy as a surgeon who tortured prisoners had to be established, in order to prevent his name from going down in history as the doctor who did research on hereditary conditions that were prevalent among the Jews.

Can Traditional Chinese Medicine help people with Type I diabetes?

Yesterday, I went to my TCM doctor to have acupuncture and get a refill on herb pills for the kidneys.  I was very pleased to learn that my “kidney pulse” is now very strong and all the damage done by a stroke that I had just over a year ago has now been reversed. The doctor told me that the “window of opportunity” for reversing stroke damage is 6 months; thank God I made use of that 6-month “window of opportunity.”

I took my daughter, who is 30 years younger, along with me for her first acupuncture treatment and a diagnosis of the condition of her heart and kidneys.  She was shocked to hear that I have a better heart and better kidneys than she does.

This time I questioned my doctor on the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine.  I asked him if TCM could do anything for a 23-year-old friend of mine who has had Type I diabetes since she was 3 years old and has now been told by her Western doctor that she has “failing kidneys.”  The first thing that my TCM doctor said was “Is she on dialysis yet?”  When I told him that she was not that far gone yet, the doctor said that acupuncture and Chinese herbs can positively help “kidney deficiency” in Type I diabetes patients. 

Dr. Oz on how to keep your kidneys working…

Yesterday, on the Dr. Oz TV show, the subject was how to prevent or cure cancer, but more importantly, there was a segment on how to take care of your kidneys.

According to Dr. Oz, there are two things that can damage your kidneys:  high blood pressure and diabetes.  I have been going to a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor since I had a stroke over a year ago.  According to TCM theory, it is the other way around:  weak kidneys CAUSE high blood pressure and weak kidneys are also the CAUSE of diabetes.

So how do you know if you have weak kidneys?  Your first clue is having to go to the bathroom to urinate at night.  According to my TCM doctor, this means that your kidneys are so weak that they must work overtime to eliminate the toxins in your body; normal kidneys rest at night.  Another clue is having white space showing under the pupils of your eyes, which means that you have toxins in your body that are not being removed by the kidneys.  Also, having swollen ankles, caused by retaining water, means that your kidneys are not working to eliminate the water. And when your kidneys are really weak, you will feel exhausted all the time.

Dr. Oz mentioned some natural remedies to strengthen the kidneys and lower blood sugar:  Hibiscus tea, Gumar Extract and herbs.  He didn’t identify the herbs which were in liquid form in a small brown bottle and he didn’t say whether they were Chinese herbs or not.  Dr. Oz put a few drops of the herb liquid into the mouth of a volunteer and she said the taste was acceptable, but Dr. Oz tried it himself and said that the herb liquid tasted awful.  Don’t worry, if you want to try some herbs for your kidneys, you can get them in the form of pills that are so tiny that they can easily be swallowed by anyone.  

Elie Wiesel’s description of Buchenwald in his book “Night.”

Carolyn Yeager has put up a new article on her web site www.eliewieseltatto.com which addresses the issue of Elie Wiesel’s description of the Buchenwald concentration camp in his book “Night.”  You can read the full article here.

Ms. Yeager does not believe that Elie Wiesel was ever an inmate at Buchenwald.  One would think that a highly acclaimed writer like Elie Wiesel would have painted vivid word pictures of the Buchenwald camp.  But that is not the case, as Ms. Yeager points out.  She has come to the conclusion that he was not at Buchenwald because he did not describe the camp at all.

This quote is from http://www.eliewieseltatto.com:

I have to say Wiesel doesn’t describe Buchenwald at all. You don’t know anything about Buchenwald from reading Night. You don’t learn much about Eliezer or anyone else. You are given an impression of suffering, without rhyme or reason, so Buchenwald becomes synonymous with suffering, that’s about it. We don’t know what it looks like.

In the few pages in which Wiesel described his suffering at Buchenwald, he tripped up twice.  The first time was when he wrote “Then I came to a block where they were distributing black coffee.”  

How does Mark Zuckerberg kill a chicken?

I’ve been reading here about Mark Zuckerberg’s new challenge, which is not to eat any meat, except the meat from animals that he has personally killed.  His first kill was a lobster, which he plunged into a pot of boiling water.  Now he’s killing chickens, but there is no mention in the news about how he kills his chickens.  First of all, where does he get live chickens?  Does he raise chickens in his back yard?

When I was a child, my family had a “hen house” and a “chicken pen” in the back yard.  Now most cities have laws against raising chickens in a residential neighborhood.

When my mother ran out of pullets, and didn’t want to kill and eat the laying hens, she would go uptown to a store that sold live chickens.  (A pullet is a young female chicken.) Then she would bring the chicken home and keep it in our chicken pen until Sunday morning when it was time to kill it for our Sunday dinner.   

How to tell if you are having a stroke

In this morning’s news, I read an article here about stoke patients who call a family member or a friend, instead of calling 911, when they are having symptoms of a stroke.  According to the article, three out of four people don’t call 911.  I didn’t call 911 either when I was having a stoke.  Instead, I awakened a family member who lives with me and he rushed me to the hospital which is only a short distance from my home.  He parked illegally in the ambulance parking space and accompanied me inside, where we went past the waiting room and barged into the office of the nurse who decides who gets treatment first. As a result of having fast treatment, I have recovered completely.

I am writing about this in order to help someone else who might not know how to recognize the signs of a stroke.  You may have seen the ads on TV where a comedian tells people “If your arm is numb, use your good arm to dial 911.”  Should you dial 911 every time your arm goes numb?  Should you conclude that you are not having a stroke if your arm is not numb?  In my case, my arm was not numb and I was not feeling dizzy, which is another symptom that the comedian mentions.

Heinrich Himmer the chicken farmer

All the websites that you will ever see, besides all those that you won’t see, say that Heinrich Himmler was a chicken farmer.

For example, on this website, you will find this:

In 1929, Hitler appointed the former Bavarian chicken farmer, Heinrich Himmler, to the post of Reichsführer-SS, and charged him with forming the SS into “an elite troop of the Party.” In addition to protection for the Führer, it performed a number of different tasks, including carrying out functions previously reserved for the police. By this time, the SS had grown into a 52,000-man strong organization.

“The Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust — Perpetrators” web site tells little kids this about Himmler:

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was an unsuccessful chicken farmer and fertilizer salesman who became a leader in the Nazi party in the mid-1920s. As head of the SS as well as the Gestapo, he was a cold, efficient, ruthless administrator. He was the organizer of the mass murder of Jews, the man in charge of the concentration and death camps.