The Dr. James Chappell Blog

I get a lot of response to articles I write about chest congestion.  It surprised me at first, until I remembered how widespread the symptoms are.  We all get to experience them sometime or other.  The other part of it is that orthodox approaches don’t provide much relief for chest congestion.  I cannot remember ever seeing a clinical study that proved any benefit from taking cough medicine, for instance.  Of course, that does not stop them from being promoted, but that is another story.

So a lot of people are looking for home remedies for chest congestion, and what I have done in the past is point them to my Lobelia and Fenugreek Tincture.  It works really well as an expectorant and broncho-dilator and can help to break up and expel mucous from the chest and airways.

But like most things in natural medicine, responding to chest congestion has more to it than just taking a therapeutic herbal compound.  First of all, there is a lot you can do besides taking herbs to thin the mucous and get it out of your body.  And then there is the larger question of why these symptoms show up in the first place.  We want to restore optimum health and longevity, not just deal with symptoms.

That’s why I created a new page on my web site dedicated to chest congestion remedies.  It has 6 different home remedies for chest congestion.  When you add them up, they constitute a powerful program to get you breathing freely again — and that’s a basic requirement for your journey to radiant health!

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I subscribe to a blog you might like. It is written by Seth Godin and has a daily look at how we can make a positive difference in our society. He does not cover health issues directly, but I enjoy his observations and like where he is coming from. 

Today, Seth posted these observations about trade guilds.  They apply directly to Organized Medicine, which is a trade guild of doctors (the AMA), a trade group (pharmaceutical companies), and their enforcers (FDA).  Without getting into too much of a rant here, I wonder how President Obama is going to fix “healthcare” without challenging the status quo in a more fundamental way than just finding more money to pour into the coffers of these “healthcare” trade guilds?

I invite you to break out of the status quo, to leave behind the “disease care” that has been dressed up and sold as “healthcare” by Organized Medicine, and to embark on a journey to radiant health based on the wisdom and innate power of your own nature.

There is no need to despair that the old order is not working.  It is just a sign that we need to change.  And we can!

Dr. James Chappell

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If your liver is slow and sluggish, it can affect your entire body.  Symptoms that you have had for years may be due to a slow and sluggish liver. Let’s say you wake up every day with a headache.  It could be your liver.  Or perhaps you have blurred vision.  That too could be a liver problem. 

If your liver is sluggish you are going to feel lethargic; you may lose your ability to concentrate clearly.  Often, people who wake up tired in the morning after sleeping all night have livers that are over-worked and sluggish.

If you want optimum health and longevity, you need to take care of your liver, and that includes detoxifying it on a regular basis. There are plenty of things that you can do. 

Hydrating the body helps a lot – and not just the liver.  You can also do coffee enemas.  Milkthistle and dandelion root and other herbs can be taken with tea to detoxify and open the liver.  You can also do a liver flush.

I just added a Liver Cleansers page to my web site  that has all the details you need.

Dr. James Chappell

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I get inquiries on a daily basis from parents with children who have been diagnosed as “ADD” or “ADHD”.  Their medical doctors often want to drug the kids, and it just does not sit right with the parents.  Good for them!

My approach to ADD and ADHD is similar to the way I help people resolve any health challenge.  Simply put, my patients learn how to stop doing things that are known to cause illness and start doing things that are known to promote health.  Once that happens, their bodies have an opportunity to turn the tide: symptoms recede, diseases disappear, and health appears in its place.

There are “condition-specific” refinements of the above approach, but you get the idea.  Although the body is complex, the underlying causes of illness are simple enough, and so are the remedies for them. I cover this approach extensively on my natural cures web site, especially in the Four Step Natural Cure Plan that I use to help seriously ill people to recover their health.  I encourage people who are not seriously ill to follow these natural cure tips so they can optimize their health.  They apply to children as well as adults.

However, with children, getting them to comply with good health practices is not always straightforward. They really want their cookies and candies and all the rest of it.  It can turn into quite a struggle to get them to eat a healthy diet, as any parent knows only too well. 

If you have a child with ADD or ADHD, the stakes are more immediately visible in this struggle than they are for other parents.  That is because, in my opinion, the number one cause of ADD and ADHD is the consumption of neuro-toxins inserted into our diet by the food processing industry.  Preservatives, additives, dyes, aromas, flavor enhancers, and especially sugar and sugar substitutes like aspartame, can all contribute to mental, emotional, and behavioral challenges.

In addition to teaching parents about my own natural cures approach to wellness and radiant health, I recommend parents to the feingold.org web site, which provides a lot of specific, valuable information about ADD and ADHD.  It let’s you know where it is okay to compromise with your child’s desire for fast food and a diet “just like all the other kids”, and where it is advisable to hold out for healthier options.  So it is a really helpful resource and I wanted to share it with you.

Dr. James Chappell

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A friend in Ojai has bad pain in both knees due to arthritis.  Getting from his house to his car is about as far as he can go on foot.  He bought a Segway, one of those 2-wheel scooters, to increase his range of activity, but the pain remained an issue.

He did a bunch of research and decided to buy a device that pulses electromagnetic energy through the body.   The technology is known as pulsed electromagnetic field therapy, or PEMFT, and the more research I do, the more I appreciate the potential for PEMFT to reduce suffering from chronic arthritic pain.

People with arthritic pain use non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) to help to relieve it, but NSAIDs have dangerous side effects.  So a few years ago, Big Pharma introduced a new class of drugs called Cox Inhibitors to replace NSAIDS.  The only trouble was, these new drugs killed a lot of people and they were withdrawn from the market. 

So what is a person with chronic pain to do?  There does not seem to be a safe pharmaceutical option. 

Fortunately, PEMFT may be an answer for many people.  There is a lot of evidence validating its efficacy in reducing pain, and there is no sign of any adverse side effects. 

My friend bought a device called the Curatron.  It is the only PEMFT device on the market that puts out a sufficiently strong signal to penetrate through the body to the inflamed tissue.  You can find out a lot more about it from the U.S. distributor’s website at Curatron.Com.

I’m going to follow this closely and will likely be writing more about it in the future.  Stay tuned.

Dr. James Chappell

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Continuing the theme of “what you can do for your health for virtually no cost”, here is information especially useful for people dealing with cancer, but applicable to everyone.

Just about the best thing you can do for yourself is stay active.  A small amount of light exercise such as easy-paced walking for a total of 1 to 2 hours a week has been found to improve outcomes for breast cancer and colon cancer patients.

For breast cancer, a study of 3,000 nurses did not show any further improvement as a result of extra exercise beyond 1 to 2 hours per week, but the investigators pointed out that this may have been a limitation of the study design, rather than an absence of benefit.  The key take-away though is that even small amounts of activity resulted in a significant improvement in outcomes.

Another study published in 2008 in the Journal of Oncology found that active colon cancer patients (defined in this case as people who did the equivalent of 6 hours walking per week) had a 47% improvement in recurrence and mortality risks compared with inactive patients. 

The message - keep moving!  It will improve your health and the quality of your life, and it won’t damage your pocketbook.

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In these uncertain economic times, we are all looking for ways to cut expenses. I’m concerned that preventive health care may be put on a back burner.  That would be a major false economy.  Who can afford to get sick?  Sickness has been a fast-track to bankruptcy for many Americans.  Now more than ever, with the stress mounting, it’s up to us to keep ourselves healthy. 

My Natural Cures web site is devoted to providing you with the information and tools you need to assure your health.  To make it easier for my patients to take good care of themselves, I have decided to cut the prices of all Dr. James Chappell Products. 

Frankly, I do not depend for my living on these products.  I am first and foremost a clinician. I formulated my products so I could be confident of the quality of herbs and supplements that I was prescribing to my patients so they can enjoy radiant health.  I take them myself.  So do my family and friends.  They are made with only top quality organic or wild-harvested ingredients - no compromises, no fillers — nothing but the best. 

So I am happy to be able to respond to the economic climate by making these top quality products available to you at a new level of value.   There is nothing more important for us to invest in than our health.

What with the uncertain economic times and the stress that we are all under, I’m going to be putting out information about very inexpensive ways we can make profound improvements in our health.  We couldn’t afford to get sick before.  Now, it’s even more important that we take good care of ourselves — and our pocketbooks.

I’m going to put the details on my web site so they will always be available, without the short shelf life of blog postings, and I’ll let you know here whenever there’s anything new.

There’s a new page on the site called How To Detox.  It has 3 different detox plans on it.  The first one shows how you can detoxify for less than 25 cents a day.  It’s definitely worth taking a look at.  I also revised the  Zeta Crystals page that describes the benefits of electrolytic minerals in “charged” water.

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These immune boosters should be used once you have started to detoxify your body using my Four Step Plan Natural Cure Plan (it’s described in detail on my natural cures web site). 

Immune boosters are essential if you have a health challenge, but it really is important that you first start to detoxify before using them.  There does not need to be a long delay - just a day or so.  The key thing is that the detoxification process starts first..

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“The length of life is inversely proportional to the rate of exhaustion of the enzyme potential of an organism. The increased use of food enzymes promotes a decreased rate of exhaustion of the enzyme potential.” -Dr Edward Howell

Cooking kills enzymes.  Unless you are willing to switch to eating a lot more raw food (which most of us are not), then an enzyme supplement is essential for optimal health and longevity.  That’s why I formulated ProDigestives.  It is the first enzyme product to contain both food and proteolytic enzmes to give you the full compliment of enzymes that you need.

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