Welcome to Tina’s Pharm!

I am a naturalist even though I am a pharmacist.  I am a naturalist, however, this is something I have become more recently in my life – after I had earned my doctorate in pharmacy.  My interest in natural medicine and nutrition started when I looked into the ‘eating for your blood type’ diet and realized how important food really is to your health.  The documentaries Food Inc. and Food Matters sparked my interest even more and made me passionate about our food supply.  Then I read a book my mom gave me called Eat This and Live which further detailed some of the unhealthy, even poisonous, foods in the American diet.  I began to seek out documentaries, articles, books, anything I could find.  I started to feel more and more that many things we do in the mainstream healthcare field don’t make sense and there must be a better way.

Then I had a miscarriage in January of this year due to a partial molar pregnancy.  This means that two sperm met up with one egg but instead of making twins, one fetus was formed with too many chromosomes and was not compatible with life.  There was a very low risk that the fetal tissue would continue to replicate after the fetus was removed – but this happened to me.  I developed gestational trophoblastic disease where placental tissue continued to grow and if I did not kill it with chemo (I was told) the tissue would replicate and metastasize throughout my body like cancer and may even turn into cancer.  I felt like I had no other options.  This was an extremely rare disease, there was very little information available on it, and all of the information that was available stated to start chemotherapy with methotrexate.  So that’s what I did – first I received a CT scan (500 times the radiation of an x-ray, sounds like a great way to get cancer down the road) after receiving non-organic contrast dye.  Then 10 weeks of chemotherapy at the cancer center where there were many older and sicker patients, where I stuck out like a sore thumb at 26 years old.  I felt there was no natural specialist that could help me with this diagnosis since it was so rare.  So I had to stick with main stream medicine even though nothing I do is main stream – I don’t own a microwave, try to eat organic foods only, clean with vinegar, don’t carry my cell phone on my body due to radiation, etc.  But I felt like I had no choice but to put poisonous chemotherapy into my body.  This lead me to look into natural therapies even more – wouldn’t it be nice if more information was out there so naturalist patients going through tough diagnoses wouldn’t feel so hopeless and alone?  I brushed up on the Gerson diet and added juicing to my diet and also used acupuncture to help get me through chemo.  I have two more blood draws to ensure my beta hcg levels remain at <1 – then I will be in the clear and allowed to become pregnant again.

As a way to celebrate finishing chemo and relax after a tough year, my best friend and I went to Greece.  Here we ran into an oncologist who was very interesting to us.  Dr. David Weinberger uses natural medicine to help his patients.  He actually had cancer himself and developed one of his IV vitamin and mineral formulas in order to make himself well.  He does use chemotherapy but only natural chemo from the plant itself (taxol plant) – not synthetic forms made by drug companies.  Why would a drug company find a plant that does something and then try to synthesize something just like it when it is already available in natural form?!  For more accurate dosing and less side effects they may tell you; I think it’s because you can’t patent something natural and has to do with money alone.  Dr. Weinberger’s way of thinking really excited me and we swapped stories.  He told me my body didn’t realize I wasn’t pregnant anymore because I did not have a natural miscarriage, I had surgery to remove the fetus and my estrogen was out of whack.  He told me about the dangers of IV contrast dyes for CT scans and how there are many lawsuits in Europe regarding this right now (something I will look into and post about in the future), and he told me that oncologists use chemo but then never take the chemo out and that is what he does differently.  Chemo is non-organic so it sits around in your body along with the debris of dead cancerous cells that it has wiped out and this causes problems in the future.  Many people may not realize that most chemotherapeutic agents are carcinogenic – what does this mean?  They cause cancer!!  You are treating cancer with a product that has a side effect of cancer.  It is common for cancer patients to develop a different cancer years down the road as a side effect of their chemotherapeutic agent – this is what happened to my aunt who passed away a few months ago.  Dr. Weinberger gave me antidotes to detoxify my body from chemo and IV contrast.  He has a very different way of thinking and physicians in the mainstream may not agree with him, however, I think he may be on to something big and am hoping to learn more about his practices.

I felt like I wanted to explode with all of the information I had learned, like I want to shout out the truth to everyone and explain what is really going on with our food system in this country as well as our health care system.  How could I go 6 years in college in a health care field without a single lecture on the importance of nutrition?  How could I not know what spelt and amaranth are?  I am an educated individual, how come no one ever taught me this?  Why do I have to seek out this information on my own and how come I did not know about it until now?!  There must be other people who don’t know about it – I need to get the message out!  So that is what I intend to do with this blog – spread what I believe is the truth.

One of the first areas I want to explore is arthritis.  My mom has osteoarthritis in her hips and basically needs a hip replacement.  She is too scared to have surgery and is trying to hold out and take medications.  I just got back from Vegas where I met my parents and my mom rented a Rascal for our time there!!  Her hip hurt so much she simply could not walk far so she drove her Rascal everywhere.  This scared me.  I want to help my mom and I don’t want to end up this way!!  She’s looking for a ‘safe’ drug that she can take long term that has no side effects – since this does not exist in my opinion, I would like to look into natural options for her as well.  She is not as open to natural medicine as I am so this will be a challenge but I will see what I come up with…