Healthy by Nature radio show this week: We will be doing our first live remote broadcast in over a decade. The site will be Natural HealthFest 2011 where you can be a part of the show if you come between 8 AM and 9 Am. I’m very proud of all the value we’ve created for attendees. I hope you will come if you can for at least part of the day and support both the speakers and the exhibitors. I want them to see first hand I wasn’t exaggerating when I bragged about you. Tickets will be sold at the door of the Plano Centre. Details at this link .

What were they thinking? – Part 2

Note: I shake my head a lot when I read the newspaper. “What were they thinking?” could be the newsletter topic EVERY week .

Headline March 19: “Pregnancy shot once $8, now $1,500”. They were talking about injections of synthetic progesterone hormone which have been around since the 1950’s. The shots are given in case of a fragile pregnancy. Now it could cost a woman $30,000 before she delivers. The material itself is no different now than it was before the price increase. Nor does it cost more to make the stuff thereby justifying a 2,000% price hike. The difference is just that the drug company, Makena, succeeded in getting the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to give approval for them to do that [price gouge].

Headline March 31: “Option given to costly drug for pregnancy” The outcry from the public and the medical community was so earsplitting about the above problem that in a unprecedented move, the FDA announced that it would not prosecute compounding pharmacies that dared to custom make the generic drug at the old prices.

My 2 Cents : The idiocy here isn’t that a pharmaceutical company would charge an unconscionable price. They do that all the time. It isn’t that the FDA seems to be in bed with the pharmaceutical industry. Studies show that the vast majority of the agency’s “experts” are on the payroll of a drug company and that FDA employees typically come from and go back to those businesses. That’s old news too. It’s not even what is new-that the compounding pharmacies are being encouraged by the government to do something illegal.

The crying shame to me is that not a single report of the story I read or heard about on TV called attention to the fact that the flap is only about synthetic progesterone. God-given natural progesterone serves nicely to maintain pregnancy. For goodness sake, the hormone’s age old name means that it supports (is “pro”) gestation. If a woman does not produce enough progesterone on her own, a compounding pharmacy can make progesterone identical to the human hormone. Since a company can’t patent real progesterone, the price of bio-identical progesterone stays relatively low. In addition to the cost factor, we should not forget that it was synthetic progesterone along with horse urine estrogen (PremPro) that caused such serious cardiovascular and cancer side effects that the Hormone Replacement Therapy studies had to be stopped early.

That will have to be it for now-I still have about a million things yet to do for that big “party” we’re throwing Saturday.

My first book : Natural Alternatives to Nexium, Maalox, Tagamet, Prilosec & Other Acid Blockers. Subtitle: What to Use to Relieve Acid Reflux, Heartburn, and Gastric Ailments.

My latest book : Aloe Vera-Modern Science Sheds Light on an Ancient Herbal Remedy

Copyright 2011 Martie Whittekin, CCN