In Our Times More Than Ever ...

 "Destruction is the weapon of stupidity."

"Zerstörung ist die Waffe der Dummheit."

(RG 23.05.2021)

Health and Peace

[WARNING: This post is here, because this is a private diary blog with ramblings my friends can follow and not a public blog trying to convince anyone of anything or to open new conspiracy theories. - If you disagree, go elsewhere to ramble. Comments are closed on this post.]

 

With my fructose intolerance, I am very careful with my health, as every misstep is hurtful and has long lasting consequences that lets me rue it for a while. That on the other hand, makes the learning process quite a quick one, as you swear to yourself, never to make that error again ;o)

But every emotional upheaval is a challenge as well. Even travel is difficult, as when I don't drink enough (you know, toilets are rare and rarely fully trustworthy in trains), I don't feel well, get heavy headaches and feel tired or grouchy or unproductive for days.

But also, the news makes me feel grouchy and restless. Seeing what politicians made of world peace, is just too sad to watch. Watching the news on tv or online, makes my intestines constrict and as a consequence burn and ache.

The most depressing thing about that all is, that no political entity is far and wide to see, which would have the ability to settle the current upheavals and overcome the deep gaps between the rivaling parties.

In my surrounding, I am rather alone with seeing valid points and reasons, but also bad and intentionally war-driving actions on all sides.

I don't see that represented in any political argument, nor in the 'propaganda' of the press, which runs after an invented ideal of 'political correctness' that only makes things worse and is rather close to misinformation.

But to see reasons on all sides, should be the ability of a diplomat trying to barter peace. But all the discussions before the war in the Ukraine and all the politicians who went to Putin, had gone with fixed rules and on a moral high ground that had nothing to do with the real situation that caused the conflict.

And now, we have the result: War in the Ukraine

And I have stomach ache, though I did not make an eating misstep. Thank you, politicians, thank you, you jokesters. Where have you all been in your dreams during your history lessons? Certainly not listening and understanding anything ...

But what also annoys me about this war is, that women need peace to prosper, and war ensures the primacy of the male rule.

(That does not discard, that now women are in the army. That is not the topic or of any consequence here. - Women can be as great fools as can men.)

But for a woman to care for her family, to work and not fear rape and upheaval at every step, where she needs to defend herself against, means effort and strength that takes away from the life, work and environment she could create when her surrounding is in peace and well ruled and secured by police forces and a stable and well-founded rule.

So, why I detest the war the most is, that the male force, stubbornness and will to dominate once again take the rule and the brain, beauty, crafts and art loose.

What a pity and what dire consequences, that will follow us for the rest of our days (as many as there may be) ...

A Virus and my Moral Rumblings

[WARNING: This post is here, because this is a private diary blog with ramblings my friends can follow and not a public blog trying to convince anyone of anything or to open new conspiracy theories. - If you disagree, go elsewhere to ramble. Comments are closed on this post.]

With my fructose-intolerance, my health is twitchy anyway, as I have to check every ingredient of every food-particle I take into my mouth and am not always as successful as I would like. So a further health crisis is not the best news for me, nor is it for my whole family.

I have older parents I care for very much and a sister with family, who has her own special health issues, so I need to be very careful not to bring home a virus that could kill us all.

But what astonishes me so much about the whole CORONA discussion is, that people take it so lightly that they might become collective murderers.

This aspect is completely missing from the whole debate about the virus.

I partially can understand such a carelessness in countries that have the death penalty, like the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Israel and many others around the world, as their citizens are collective murderers anyway, as the state does the killing in each of their citizen's name.

But with CORONA, that responsibility now directly falls to each single individual and is reliant on their behavior. The accusation of 'murder', 'manslaughter' or at the minimum 'failure to render assistance' falls to each and every one of us, who behaves irresponsible.

My early argument during the lock-down in Spring this year was, that if we could safe one single life with the quarantine, it already was worth it. But all around looked at me strangely and certainly thought me crazy.

But to turn the argument around and say, we did nothing and one person died because of that, we all are responsible for that death equally and consequently should go to prison for that because of our active participation in killing him, at least under 'normal' morally intact circumstances.

But you see, that is the point:

We no longer - or never did - live in morally intact circumstances.

What surrounds us is not the effort to do right, but to gain the most.

Crises always mean more money for a few when others suffer. May that be war or any other crisis in the world.

So it is no wonder that conspiracy theories flourish, though they are so far off the mark that they are laughable. They are a result of envy, not of some knowledge and looking behind the world's glittering surfaces.

No, the ones ruling behind the scenes and making fortunes right now are not those who out of a sense of responsibility for humankind began warning of risks to the world population years ago and invested their own money to support the only available, halfway trustworthy world-spanning organizations.

No. Follow the money flow and you come much closer to the true culprits or the error of the world and its monetary system(s) right now. Though they are experts in hiding their traces, as they are with their fortunes and non-existent taxes.

The culprits and profiteers of the crisis make a fortune, while the majority of the population suffers and plays their game like well trained puppies, not having the brain to question the true motives and interests leading their propaganda and mis-information.

Becoming the puppet-on-strings of intentional murderers, as for those well-planned and selfish actions 'failure to render assistance' or even 'manslaughter' do no longer apply in a morally correct world, should be impossible in an enlightened and well-educated world.

But that is the next problem we currently face:

We no longer are 'a well-educated world'. (Or were we ever?)

We are a world of 'experts' and 'specialist', where nobody has the overview to understand any longer what is going on around us.

What, for example, does a programmer know about viruses? He thinks them to be a computer problem and not all viruses can effectively be caught and the fight against them is an ongoing process.

Well, in a way, he is right. But his life never is endangered by the 'usual' viruses he encounters. Also, his fight has nothing to do with the hard way to a vaccine in real life.

So neither can he judge the virus correctly, nor contribute to its destruction, except perhaps for providing programs that count and calculate results for laboratory technology.

But let's see what doctors can do. They are trained to hand out medicine or medical procedures to illnesses they have learned to recognize following a certain systematic.

But does that apply or help here?

The virus has new and changing or varying symptoms, making the detection difficult and requiring special, newly developed tests from laboratories.

Doctors neither can contribute to the fight, nor to the laboratory research for a vaccine. They only can - and are reduced to - collect data and observe the severely ill, as they still don't have an effective medication to fight the illness itself.

So, if we can exclude 'virus specialists', but also 'doctors', who should care for our health, who now in the world do we set our hopes on to rescue us from the virus?

The pharmaceutical laboratories!

Privately owned businesses, now getting major private investments and state funding around the world, to rescue the population and win the run for a functioning vaccine.

Now, fortunately, at least in some countries, state funded university laboratories take part in the run for the best vaccine, but mostly can't compete with the highly financed private laboratories of the pharmaceutical industry and have been bled out for the best inventions over decades.

But first of all, it is a run for the money as well as the fame and it leaves a bitter taste, at least for me, that the public interest is treated so negligently to leave it to capitalism and local governments with their individual lobbyism, to decide over the well-being of the world population.

Hopefully, future generations will find a better way to handle their survival.

Best of luck !

Reaction of My Doctor

At first, I did not go to a doctor immediately, but I did after a while, to get some help in how to cope with the manifold issues.
My first attempt ended rather strange, when the doctor just told me: "It is the age. I can't eat everything anymore either. Think about you getting older. You are not 20 any more."
Very helpful and not to the point. He completely ignored my story, that I could tell exactly when my issues had started. It was not age that caused my issues (and I am of middle age, not senile, at least as far as I know).
Well, I went home with no information at all.

My next attempt was to call a medical hotline advertised by my insurance company. There, it took a while to get someone on the line, as the direct hotline did not answer, but asked, if they could call me back when having a specialist on the line.
That was a good sign, I thought at the time. They must know something.
But the actual result of the talk was the more devastating.
The doctor right at the beginning told me, that he could recommend, for me to not eat anything with sugar.
Fine! That idea had never occurred to me, not when I started my request for information with asking for help with a severe fructose intolerance (and household sugar is 50% fructose, so that includes all kinds of sugar anyway). So to avoid sugar is a question if you want to survive rather than a question of choice.
(It is just much easier said than done.)

When I asked for more information, what could be done about it, he had no answer and explained a very simplistic model of cranes in the intestines transporting sugar through the walls of the intestines. A model so simplistic and even false in the assumption of a vehicle transporting sugar through the walls, that the late medical theories no longer even support it.

When I asked for e.g. help groups or even self-help information, he could not help me.
When I asked what food he could recommend not containing any sugar, he had no answer at all.
So I told him that even I by now knew more about what to avoid and what to eat, than he seems to do.
That got him very angry and he started to shout at me and list all his long years of experience and excellence. Having the intolerance with really painful reactions, I had not the least patience for a doctor whose only solution was, 'don't eat anything with sugar', while not even being able to name a single food which did not contain sugar and than having the audacity to shout at me.

Still, his sole information given, that I should not eat anything with sugar, certainly needed a long professional career to find out. I made that connection after four days, when the symptoms of my stomach bug did not cease, but only got worse.

You would now presume, that I had given up on doctors by now. But I was brave enough to try again.
I went to my doctor, because I have a constant cough that I can't get rid of - and in my opinion is connected to the fructose intolerance.
The doctor the first time gave me some medication against heartburn, because my lungs seemed not to be the cause of the coughing.
The result was, that my stomach protested the medication - which had no positive result whatsoever on me and my cough - and I had to slowly begin to restore my stomach back to health for over one month.

But still, as the cough is really annoying and heavy, I tried once again some time later, telling my doctor about the bad reaction to the heartburn medication.

The doctor the second time sent me to get an x-ray of the lung area. The result was, that I have an anormal amount of air in the stomach area. But as that is not a medically known issue or symptom, he could not do anything about it.
But the air most likely stimulates the diaphragm and consequently causes the coughing.
Against the fructose- and sugar reactions, he clearly stated that the medicine has no solution here. (Fortunately, he did not send me to a fructose test, as some clinics advertise. But that is not recommended from a medical standpoint and would only cause me pain for days, when the result is clear anyway.)

As the medicine had no solution here, the doctor was kind enough to think about a homeopathic solution and came up with pills containing peppermint- and caraway seed oil. The concept looked good, but the homeopathic pills contained sorbitol as part of the pills and that had very unpleasant effects on me. So I definitely can't recommend that to anyone. When the bleeding finally stopped, I swore to never try anything with any kind of sugar or sugar-substitute ever again.

So now, after all this attempts to find a medical solution, I have none and am back with self-testing what I can eat and what is better or worse and checking what I can tolerate once, repeatedly or indefinitely.

How I Acquired Fructose-Intolerance or Malabsorption

My discovery that I could no longer eat or drink anything containing even a tiny bit of fructose, was a sudden and hard one.
After knowing for a while that I could not eat all fruit with ease, but had to avoid some, a certain event turned my world of careful eating upside down.
I had received Christmas cookies from a friend, who was aware of my careful eating procedures. So I had not expected, to receive cookies from her, which entirely replaced the sugar with fructose.

The consequence was, that I became so ill, that I thought I would die and all attempts to get rid of this unprecedented and evil 'stomach bug', which I had thought it to be at first and which in the short period of just 1 1/2 weeks cost me 20 pounds of weight, were in vane.
My stomach ached so heavily, that I could not even place a hand on it and when I tried to do something for my fitness and attempted to lie down on the floor to exercise, I could not even get back up again, much less do any exercises, because my entire stomach musculature had stopped working.
I crawled sideways, dragging my body up by grasping my bed-frame and heaving the rest of my body up with the efforts of my arms and legs. The entire musculature in between had ceased to cooperate, but one day later came back alive with excruciating pain.
But at that time at least, I had already figured out, that the cause for my illness was not a flue or normal food poisoning, but instead the presence of fructose.

Since then, even tiny amounts of fructose or sugar are pure poison to me.
So the process started, in which I had to learn, what ingredients contained which amount of sugar. And believe me if I say, the ingredients list on the food packages is mostly not very helpful in this endeavor.

So the following months were stony and full of errors and loosing weight more and more.
Because eating sugar for me is not a way to gain weight, but the fastest way to loose it.