Andreas Moritz
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 This technique works equally well for any other addiction, including coffee, alcohol, drugs, sleeping pills, sugar, salt, sex, and even work. I suggest that you read this section as often as it takes to familiarize yourself with the major points, or at least once a week.
Some Of Nature's Greatest Healing Secrets
Amazing Food Cures
Hippocrates was the first physician in the Western Hemisphere to state that food is man's best medicine. It is very obvious that if food can nourish and create healthy, strong bodies, it must also be able to heal them if they are ill. |
Melody Petersen
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 In 2003, for example, researchers published a study that showed that older Iowa women who were taking high doses of the sleeping pills known as benzodiazepines suffered faster physical declines and were less able to get around their own homes than those who did not take the drugs.
The researchers first visited these women living in southeastern Iowa in 1988. They measured how fast they walked, how easily they got up from their chairs, and how stable they were while standing. The scientists returned four years later to perform the same tests. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Older patients are prescribed sleeping pills eight times more often than younger people, even though they have less of a tendency to be anxious. Fourteen percent of hip fractures can be attributed to confusion related to a sleeping pill or other psychotropic drug; in the elderly, hip fracture is associated with a high mortality rate. Another study found that out of 308 older adults with cognitive impairment, 11% of the cases of impairment were related to a drug they were on, and in 46% of those cases, the culprit was a sleeping pill. |
| Driving accidents are a potentially serious problem in patients taking sleeping pills. Use of benzodiazepine medications is associated with a 60% increase in traffic accidents. This increased safety risk is not a factor with other psychotropics, including antidepressants. Risk was increased with concurrent alcohol usage and age. There was also an increased risk with zopiclone, one of the newer-generation insomnia medications (see below).1 The authors of this study concluded that patients taking sleep medications shouldn't drive. |
| Usage of sleeping pills is more worrisome for the elderly than for young people because they are more likely to have serious side effects from these drugs, like memory impairment, falls, and car crashes. Between 5% and 33% of individuals over the age of sixty are prescribed a sleeping pill in the form of a Z drug (see page 320) or a benzodiazepine. |
Melody Petersen
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| Between 2000 and 2004 the number of children ages ten to nineteen taking prescription sleeping pills had increased by 85 percent.
Now, however, a new pill called Lunesta was raising anxiety among the Sanofi executives. A competing company had announced it would be spending as much money to promote Lunesta as McDonald's was paying to promote its fast food. The Lunesta ads appearing on television and in magazines featured an evanescent luna moth quietly fluttering in a deep purple starry night and offered slogans like "For refreshing sleep—night after night after night. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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| The New York Times reported on February 2, 2006 (Stephanie Saul, "Record Sales of sleeping pills Are Causing Worries"), that drug companies were spending $298 million a year on ads for these drugs, a fourfold increase over the previous five years, and in return for that investment were taking in $2 billion a year in revenue.
Primary insomnia, the most common form of insomnia, is unrelated to any other disorder or illness. Patients with primary insomnia are anxious and restless in bed, and feel pressure to go to sleep. |
| Though many of these medications do in fact help people sleep more, people who take sleeping pills say that they feel more satisfied about the extra sleep they get but that the positive effect on their ability to think and function the next day is offset by the long-lasting side effects of the drugs, such as impairments in memory and cognition, so they end up with no lasting benefit.
LUMINAL: A TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORY
Some of the first treatments of insomnia were barbiturates. |
| Since long-term use of sleeping pills is not recommended, what this study shows is that people with chronic insomnia really need to make the effort to get behavioral therapy treatment, or at a minimum to educate themselves about the principles that are promoted in the types of CBT programs utilized in this study.
Meditation and gentle yoga can also help some people fall asleep more easily as part of a cognitive therapy program or on their own. Insomniacs often spend too much time in bed trying to sleep, and the best thing to do is to get out of bed and read for a while or listen to soft music. |
Melody Petersen
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| They found that the longer the women took the sleeping pills, and the higher the doses, the more their bodies failed them. In other words, the women using high amounts of the drugs aged faster than those not using the tablets or taking them for only a short time.
In their haste to see patients and write prescriptions, doctors can easily confuse the harm caused by a medicine with the onset of a new disease. Drug-induced dementia masquerades as Alzheimer's disease. Drug-induced tremors look like the beginning of Parkinson's disease. |
Dr Ron Roberts
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 Instead of taking pain-relieving drugs, tranquillisers, sleeping pills and anti-depressants, they are meditating.
If everyone meditated, there would be much less need for expensive medical treatments.
Throughout India and Asia, meditation has been practised for thousands of years. It wasn't until the late 1960s, when the Beatles and other pop musicians focused their attention on Eastern music and culture, that masses of young people in the West adopted meditation in their search for alternative approaches to life's problems. |
Melody Petersen
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| A study back in 1987 estimated that psychotropic medications, such as sleeping pills and antidepressants, were causing more than thirty-two thousand elderly Americans to fall and break a hip each year. About 20 percent of people fracturing a hip die within five years. This problem appears to be escalating as people take more pills. The death rate from falls among Americans age sixty-five or older spiked by 5 5 percent between 1993 and 2003.
In recent years, various drug companies have publicized this danger of falling, but they have not made it clear that medicines are often to blame. |
| More recent studies have tied motor vehicle accidents to sleeping pills such as Ambien and muscle relaxants like Soma and Miltown. Some medications are worse than alcohol in that they can incapacitate a driver without warning.
A group of physicians in New York reported in 1999 that nine patients taking a certain type of medicine used to treat Parkinson's disease had crashed after falling asleep at the wheel. Four of those patients had also suddenly fallen asleep during business meetings or halfway through phone calls. Other researchers looked at these same drugs in 2005. |
Byron J. Richards, CCN
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 The doctor gives them pain pills, antidepressants, and sleeping pills. They still can not exercise. The source of their problem has nothing to do with pain pills, sleeping pills, or antidepressants. From the muscle cell point of view this is a problem of a cell poisoned by sugar, fat, and its own exhaust fumes of trying to make energy. This is a real need for extra nutritional support. As such a person gradually improves they will eventually be able to do the long walk. Enough nutritional support for them is whatever it takes to start heading in the right direction. |
Hyla Cass
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 Valerian: 200-600 mg at bedtime
I have prescribed these in various combinations for my patients who were withdrawing from benzodiazepines or the newer sleeping pills such as Ambien (Zolpidem). As far as Ambien goes: despite claims of Ambien's being "not quite a benzodiazepine" and non-addictive, this has not been so in the many cases I've seen.
Benzodiazepines (and Ambien) must be withdrawn very slowly under close medical supervision, sometimes over several months. |
Melody Petersen
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| The elderly take sleeping pills at the highest rate of any age-group, but on average they gain only twenty-five minutes of extra sleep a night.
Ms. Hillmer's sales tactics had not been aggressive like those of a promoter of vacation time shares. Instead, her approach had been far more subtle but quite effective.
After Sanofi's insomnia class, I stopped at the local Hy-Vee supermarket for a soft drink for the drive back to my parents' farm, which was two hours south. I parked next to a large sign that said, fill your prescriptions at your friendly hy-vee. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If you can't sleep, you can always buy sleeping pills. If you can't wake up in the morning, you can always drink some coffee. It's the disease economy.
The disease economy is all around you
You're probably participating in it, and if you think you're not, check again, because almost everyone is. It takes an act of great self-determination and courage to extricate oneself from the disease economy and be a productive member of society. It is a rare thing to witness. |
Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D.
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 This is despite the fact that the sleeping pills they have prescribed for decades carry substantial risks of their own. More about sleeping pill problems in a moment, though. The question is whether it would even be worth trying an herbal approach to insomnia.
Valerian (Valeriana officinalis)
Do you remember the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin? He used music to rid the town of a rat infestation. Some herbal experts suggest that he may have used valerian as well. It was popular in medieval times to flavor soups and stews. |
| Anyone who is a little unsteady could fall if taking standard sleeping pills.
OTHER SLEEPY-TIME HERBS
Other herbs that people have used to treat insomnia include hops, chamomile, lemon balm, passionflower, St. John's wort, kava, and fennel seeds. There are, unfortunately, few large, randomized, controlled studies to verify the effectiveness of any of these natural products.701 Kava works, but concerns have been raised that it might cause liver toxicity. This may have to do with how the kava is manufactured, but until this issue is resolved, we cannot recommend the long-term use of this herb. |
Mary-Ann Shearer
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 I wake up full of energy, having slept well—no sleeping pills, no medication! No visits to the doctor, although I do have a yearly gynecological check-up. Plenty of fresh, raw vegetables has proven to be a useful addition to my husband Jim's diet, which appears to have regulated his blood pressure, electrolytes, and heart function and improved his general health. Olive oil and flaxseed oil are compulsory in our daily consumption. Thank you for all the useful information. |
Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D. and Craig Hovey
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 They showed me the sleeping pills and antidepressants this same psychiatrist prescribed to Shaina's mother, without her knowledge or ever having been a patient of his, after disaster struck.
Then they told me how to find her grave.
If ever you are in Smethport visit that graveyard. You might run into the Dunkles; they go there every day, sometimes many times a day, to tend it and read to their daughter. And even if they aren't there Shaina's site is easy to find. The tombstone has her picture on it. There are dolls, wind chimes, pictures, letters and gifts adorning the grave. |
| When the ADHD drugs interfere with sleep and cause anxiety, anti-anxiety drugs and sleeping pills make up a new cocktail, and stronger stuff is yet to come if the child has more problems, maybe the heavy artillery, the anti-psychotics, will be trotted out. At no point is the only real disease addressed, encephalopathy (brain damage) resulting from the administration of Ritalin and each and every successive foreign compound without a target abnormality, the psychiatry polypharmacy for which they have been targeted from the first. |
Alan R. Gaby, M.D., Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., Forrest Batz, Pharm.D. Rick Chester, RPh., N.D., DipLAc. George Constantine, R.Ph., Ph.D. Linnea D. Thompson, Pharm.D., N.D.
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 Medical treatments
Healthcare practitioners may recommend avoidance of alcoholic beverages, sleeping pills, antihistamines, and overeating before bedtime. Sleeping on one side, rather than on the back, or raising the head of the bed may provide benefit. Weight loss is helpful, especially for people who are obese. Allergies and nasal infections are treated when detected. Surgery may be recommended to correct structural problems with the airway, such as enlarged tonsils and adenoids or a deviated nasal septum. |
Natural Prescriptions: Dr. Giller's Natural Treatments & Vitamin Therapies For Over 100 Common AilmentsRobert M. Giller, M.D.
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| The real problem is with the traditional treatment: sleeping pills. Most sleeping pills are miraculously effective—at first. And then, after several weeks, their effectiveness diminishes. Too often people take one or two extra pills to recapture the deep sleep they enjoyed when they began the medication. Before they know it, they're taking far too many, reducing any hope they have of getting a good night's sleep without them.
Sleeping pills interfere with normal sleep. They often increase nightly wakings. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 There was the idiot who slammed into my car at a stoplight because he was on prescription sleeping pills, that's two. And then there was the embarrassing incident involving a circus bear, a unicycle and three flaming juggling sticks that I'd rather not talk about. That's three. Gee, I guess I really am suffering from IED.
You might recognize the three letters, by the way: IED also refers to Improvised Explosive Devices that are killing soldiers in Iraq. So IED is both a road-side bomb and an anger disorder. |
Dr. Timothy Scott
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 A disturbing number take refuge in alcohol, sleeping pills and, sometimes, even in suicide." 8
(3) To convince women that those not taking estrogen would lose their youthful attractiveness and would suffer more aging effects.
The breasts become flabby and shrink .... The tissues dry out, the muscles weaken, the skin sags. The bones . . . become brittle and porous, easily fractured. The weakening of the bones leads to an increasingly hunchbacked condition known as 'dowager's hump' .... Arms and legs lose their suppleness and strength, becoming gaunt and stringy. |
Joe Graedon, M.S. and Teresa Graedon, Ph.D.
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| Anyone who has relied on sleeping pills like diazepam (Valium), lorazepam (Ativan), or temazepam (Restoril) will discover that stopping suddenly may lead to several sleepless nights. Often, this sets in motion a vicious cycle in which the insomniac reverts to the medication just to get a little sleep but finds once again that when he or she stops the medicine, rebound insomnia kicks in.
It is not likely that natural sleep aids will be able to counteract this effect. Instead, you may need to discuss such a drug dependency problem with your physician to develop a withdrawal strategy. |
| Some found that they could eliminate over-the-counter sleeping pills after starting magnesium supplements. One reported, "I started taking Citracal Plus with Magnesium at bedtime. Ever since, I've been sleeping like a baby (a lazy one, mind you, not the colicky kind)." But here is a cautionary tale. Timing is everything:
• • •
Q. You asked if anyone has had success taking magnesium for insomnia. Years ago I was visiting my sister, who urged my husband and me to start taking magnesium in addition to vitamins. We took the first dose the morning we left for home.
We usually split the driving. |
Alan R. Gaby, M.D., Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., Forrest Batz, Pharm.D. Rick Chester, RPh., N.D., DipLAc. George Constantine, R.Ph., Ph.D. Linnea D. Thompson, Pharm.D., N.D.
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| Healthcare practitioners typically recommend avoiding cigarette smoke and other respiratory irritants, cough suppressants, and sleeping pills.
Nutritional supplements that may be helpful
Supplementation with vitamin E (page 609) has been used successfully with people who have yellow nail syndrome in several preliminary reports.1' 2' 3 Although topical use of the vitamin has also been reported to be effective,4 taking vitamin E supplements is much easier and less messy. A typical amount is 800 IU per day, with results beginning to appear after several months. |
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC
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 Sleeping pills are also the third most commonly used means in suicide and are implicated in one-third of all drug-related suicide attempts and deaths.
Q| Over-the-counter sleep aids can cause a wide range of side effects, including agitation, confusion, depression, dry mouth, and worsening of symptoms of enlarged prostate. Check with your doctor before using over-the-counter sleep medicines for short-term insomnia. These drugs use sedating antihistamines to make you drowsy. Examples include diphenhydramine (in Nytol and other products) and doxylamine (Unisom and others). |
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