This document is a talk presented by Morwenna Given on taking charge of your health. She is a medical herbalist who treats chronic conditions like cancer, autoimmune diseases, and women's health issues using herbal medicines. The talk discusses how health is the greatest gift, and that people need to take control of their health because conventional medicine is broken for chronic conditions. It emphasizes that lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, stress, and environmental impacts are major contributors to disease development. The talk encourages prevention, empowering oneself through education and lifestyle changes, and using herbal medicines under professional guidance.

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TAKING
CHARGE OF
YOUR HEALTH
A Talk for the Company of
Women 12th February 2013
By Morwenna Given
BA MA (Oxon) BSc m.OHA
1BHG AHG RH
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WHO AM 1?
I
am a Medical Herbalist trained in the UK
in an integrated manner in clinics,
hospitals and university environments
 I treat cancer, pre cancerous and chronic
auto immune conditions such as MS,
Alzheimer's, thyroid and women’s
problems in a (w) holistic, science
evidenced basis with plant drugs to
resolve or prevent medical disease
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Health is boring!
 ……..February
 ………Why
is always health month
should You take charge?
 ….I
am too busy building my business/ my
roles as a mother/lover and anyway I do
exercise
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HEALTH
IS THE GREATEST
GIFT YOU CAN GIVE
YOURSELF
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YOU NEED TO TAKE CONTROL!


Because:
We live in age of chronic auto immune
disease

Conventional medicine is broken and has no
answers – it was designed for acute not
chronic conditions

Many of our major diseases arise from faulty
diet, lack of exercise, alcohol and stress
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Signs and Symptoms

Our bodies are a jigsaw of plumbing – when it
is blocked there are consequences!

Are crucial to a medical diagnosis

A 5 min time space with an MD is insufficient
to explore S & S and blood work /imaging has
its limitations
If you think some thing is not right then go and
discuss it with another professional like myself
who will refer if appropriate

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S&S
 This
morning is too brief for a meaningful
examination of signs and symptoms but
my website has a talk on the subject
 Anything
unusual, eg. weight gain, a
cough that won’t go away, bleeding from
any orifice, fatigue, rashes is a potential
S&S
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TEMPUS FUGIT
 0-25yrs
place
sets the body’s building blocks in
 25-45
yrs. lay the foundation for the rest of
your life
 45-65
determines the length of your life
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What happens at 25 influences
what happens at 65
 Cancer
starts 10-15 yrs. before a tumour is
identified
 Diabetes damage takes about 15 years to
show up
 Alzheimer's, Parkinson's starts about 20
years before the diagnosis i.e. the
formation of significant amyloid plaques
 Arthritis (various forms) starts to develop @
20 years before symptoms show
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Cancer
 Cancer
is a preventable disease it
requires a major lifestyle change.

Prof. B.B Aggwal et al. MD Anderson Cancer Research Centre
Pharm Res. 2008 September; 25(9): 2097–2116.
 Medium
age for women 50 yrs.
 For Men 55 yrs.
 It is a endocrine metabolic disease
 It is a disease of affluence
 It is increasing by significant % each year
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Over treatment

Cancer has become a multi billion business so
there is no interest in prevention – screening is
not prevention
There is huge amounts of overtreatment

Occult Mix-ups occur in 1/100 biopsies Am J Clin Path2013 139:93

Breast , prostate, colon, cervical dysplasia

All treatments lead to permanent damage
and cannot ‘cure’ a chronic metabolic
endocrine disease

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Auto Immune causes
 ALL
ARISE from INAPPROPRIATE LIFESTYLE
 Of
all these diseases I have mentioned
only about 5% of them are due to
genetics
 Some
of them are due to drugs e.g.
diabetes and statins
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Thyroid
 Hyper
vs. Hypo I treat both
 Subclinical
hypothyroidism is endemic to
Ontario
 The thyroid governs all metabolic function
outside of the brain
 Not a good drug for women
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PREVENTION
 Some
diseases may be identified via
blood work much earlier in their
pathogenesis but OHIP does not practise
preventive medicine – I do
 When
an auto immune disease develops
it is much harder to keep it in remission.
Conventional medicine currently only
treats symptomatically – I treat the cause
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PHARMACOLOGY

Drugs ( conventional ) often lead to further
problems and considerable side effects egg
methotrexate or Chemo

Plants drugs act on multi pathway processes
they do have not the same problems and
can have a much higher efficacy in chronic
disease. They can also be used to make
conventional drugs work better
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Plant Drugs
The science of plants is well established and
Chinese ‘anecdotal medicine’ is now being
proven scientifically:
Traditional Chinese medicine: balancing the gut ecosystem. Li H,et al
Phytother Res. 2009 Sep;23(9):1332-5. doi: 10.1002/ptr.2590.PMID:
19253310
Carcinogenesis. 2007 Jun;28(6):1347-55. Astragalus
saponins induce growth inhibition
and apoptosis in human colon
cancer cells and tumor xenograft.
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Be Aware
 Prevention
 Lifestyle
modification – stress
 Environmental
impacts
 Exercise
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Diet

Like all diseases of excess sugar plays a key role in
destabilising the body’s normal mechanisms including
cancer brain function and auto immunity

The oncolytic switch for cancer is excess sugar

Excess sugar is derived from an inappropriate diet i.e.
one high in grains

High circulating levels of glucose affect the brain

J.Physiol 2012 590:2485-2499 Gomez-Pinella

Eat your veggies!
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STRESS
 Stress
is the body’s response to any
demand placed on it.
 How we deal with it can be good or bad
 It is cumulative
 It disrupts the normal endocrine & nervous
systems over the long term
 Laughter & Tears
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OHIP is not sustainable in its
present form

The cost to us of the conventional system is @ 77%
of all our taxes

Conventional polypharmacy:

ON AVERAGE THOSE OVER 65 YRS ARE TAKING 7
CONVENTIONAL MEDICATIONS

THEY ACCOUNT FOR MORE THAN 50% OF THE DRUG BUDGET

THERE IS NO INDEPENDANT POLICING OF THESE DRUGS AND
NO ONE CHECKING FOR INTERACTIONS AND
APPROPRIATENESS
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TAKE CHARGE
 Empower
 Look
your self
at all options
 Do
your own research but be aware of
the limitations of the internet
 Take
action to modify your lifestyle
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SUPPLEMENTS
 illegal
to sell a medically efficacious dose
 most are not pharmaceutical grade
 no evidence base / extrapolation claims
 Contents /label/marketing claim
 Unnecessary with a proper diet
 No consideration of individual needs
 Failure to address polysupplementation
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References
 PLEASE
NOTE: IT IS ADVISED, THAT ANY
PLANTS MENTIONED IN THIS TALK, ARE
ONLY USED UNDER PROFESSIONAL
GUIDANCE.
 BOTANICAL MEDICINE AS COMPOUNDED
BY A PROFESSIONAL IS NOT AVAILABLE
OVER THE RETAIL COUNTER.
 It is not advisable to self treat
 References – see Pubmed/Science Direct
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Thank you
MORWENNA GIVEN
BA MA BSC m.OHA BHG AHG RH
WWW.MEDICUSHERBIS.COM
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