[YEA]  12/15/2007: Jamie from Fairmont, Minnesota writes: "Hello you WONDERFUL people! Thanks you SO much for this resource! I was in the middle of my third serious bout with salmonella in a year and feeling little relief from the antibiotics after 8 days. After reading a book by Dr. Hulda Clark I am convinced that I was picking up Salmonella from milk products. Hulda says that Lugol's kills vicious stomach bacteria including salmonella so I got online looking for it when I found this site. I read through all of the comments and went looking for the iodine. Someone said I could get it at walmart so I tried. The Pharmacist had no clue about iodine deficiency and wouldn't give me the iodine he had ordered for me. How disgusting and irresponsible! I ordered the book by Dr. Brownstein Iodine: Why You Need It and Why You Can't Live Without It along with a 2 oz. bottle of lugol's solution from amazon.com. I was very discouraged by the fact that there was no overnight shipping option available on the site. A day or two after ordering I emailed them expressing my discouragement and they responded with a toll free number that could be used to get overnight shipping. My Lugol's arrived a day earlier than expected and I tested for allergy on my foot. I knew I wasn't allergic since I have had iodized salt for ever, and I had no irritation from the iodine on my foot. So I began the dose recommended by Hulda for salmonella which is 6 drops in a half cup of juice after meals and at bed time. After reading the book by Dr. Brownstein and looking at the Optimox site I knew that 6 drops 4 times a day is equivalent to 150mg of iodine a day. The relief from the Salmonella began nearly immediately but was nearly complete after a day of the scheduled dose. I had no symptoms of taking too much iodine, so I continued to the third day at that dose (as recommended for treating Salmonella in Hulda's book). Then I cut back to 6 drops 3 times a day to counter my newly recognized iodine deficiency. Just so you know, the Salmonella are DEAD!!! And I feel ALIVE!!!

5 years ago I should have been diagnosed with fibrocystic breast disease but was told that my "lumpy bumpy" breasts needed vitamin E. I didn't take it seriously as I wasn't diagnosed with anything. I had just had my first child. Over the last 6 months I have had pain in my breasts not just before a period but at intervals during the month that wouldn't even allow me to hug my (now I have 3) children. I had no idea until reading this site and the information from Dr. Brownstein that I had fibrocystic breast disease, the precursor for breast cancer (which is so prevalent in this area that it should be a CRIME that people are not handed iodine by the government in giant sized rations!) The great lakes basin is the worst in the WORLD for iodine deficiency--we are the reason salt is iodized--only well enough to fend off goiter and mental retardation which were becoming a problem in the early 1900's in this area! The actual need for iodine by your body is 13.5mg a day and that's after fixing a deficiency. And that number does not take into account the other factors we are exposed to. (Halogens which replace iodine in the body everywhere around us--chlorine, bromine, fluorine--in bread, in toothpaste, in water) THIS IS EPIDEMIC!

Two days into my salmonella killing spree with iodine, I began my menstrual period without cramps. I have had such terrible cramps from my period that I have a stock pile of ibuprofen. (which makes your stomach bleed and hurts your liver) but what are we to do? IODINE! I have been on Iodine for 4 days now and each morning I wake up with cramps but almost as soon as I take my 6 drops of lugol's my cramps are GONE! It's like the cramps are there because my ovaries are begging me for much needed iodine to clean me out. I am so thrilled about this! By the way--my breast pain has diminished to almost none, and they feel like 16 year old breasts. No kidding. My energy level has sky rocketed and I am losing weight. (I should mention that I am taking the iodine with a liquid B complex supplement because Dr. Brownstein says it is possible to get heart palpitations and/or symptoms of iodine allergy if you are deficient in vitamin b2 and b3 since they are needed to transport iodine throughout your body. I can feel my metabolism normalizing--it feels GREAT!

12/06/2006: Ted from Bangkok, Thailand writes: "The most direct method of testing almost any deficiency is usually done via the urine as it detects early signs of the deficiency. By the time it shows up in the thyroid it is often too late.

This is also true of sugar: high blood sugar is too late, you have been diabetic too long. In fact I can even predict kidney stones a year before it happens: cloudy urine. Or I can predict 6 months in advanced that you will have a blood clot, leading to heart attack or a paralysis if the clot goes into the brain. Prepare a blood and view them with a cheap microscope.

If the red blood sticks to each other you have good chances of having a stroke, a blood clot, which can lead to a heart attack. I am finding a way to determine the "stickiness" of urine without such invasive technique. The budget don't require millions to find out, it only requres a couple of hundred dollars where most of the money is actually spent on the microscope!

But the use of scientific iodine detection is just really beating around the bush. You only need to know the optimum iodine intake free from political and medical monopoly bottleneck. If we just looked back where such bottleneck did not exist by going back long ago, here is an excerpt: http://optimox.com/pics/Iodine/IOD-12/IOD_12.htm

"As far back as 100 years ago, U.S. physicians used Lugol solution extensively in their practice for many medical conditions (1). In 1932, physician B.N. Cohn (7) wrote: "…the widespread use of compound solution of iodine, U.S.P., (For the reader’s information, that is Lugol solution) is the result of a paper by Plummer and Boothby, published in that year (1923). Since then compound solution of iodine has been used by nearly every clinician ..."

Lugol solution was called then Liquor Iodi Compositus, (that is Latin for compound solution of iodine). Marine in 1923 (8) used a daily average of 9 mg iodide in the prevention of goiter in adolescent girls, an amount 60 times the current RDA for iodine. In Marine’s study, the prevalence of goiter decreased 100 fold compared to a control group following 2 ½ years of supplementation....

"First is the notion that the optimal daily iodine intake for humans is around 13.8 mg per day, which is about 90 times the RDA and more than 13 times the "safe upper limit" of 1 mg per day established by the World Health Organization."

We lie ourselves that this is the age of political correctness, it just an euphemism for supporting further medical deadlock on the health care system.

So when in doubt paint! And if you get do get hyper, or you get acne then just give the body a rest period you will know. Most of the bad symptoms officially listed are not that bad, they just ignore the obvious symptoms! The body must process the iodine to properly absorb them so one day apply, two day rest or you can apply alternate days is also a possibility.

Whatever happens, the optimum intake of iodine you can easily is something we are far off and away.

In case you worry about iodine poisoning. The antidote for iodine overdose is easy: chocolate or cocoa. It is high in bromine and it displaces iodine when the need comes. For some reason or another Russian scientist found that giving iodine and bromine will prevent and overdose and allows the body to better utilized them and did a study on school children.

One cruel joke is that bread are currently using the bromine process where the entire iodine process of bread making is removed. So what we have here is a runaway iodine deficiency to those that eat wheat, white flour and bread. Perhaps, to be safe anyway, they are best avoided because of these food is often acid forming.

Other authoritative websites don't tell you the antidote for iodine poisoning amazingly enough. However, the information can be easily found from any standard medical research journals if you really look them up either the local library or the internet. If you want medical profession to come clean, they will when everyone knows about it and hence, you need to know more than your doctors.

So the issue of whether the color stays on the skin is irrelevant if the purpose for you is to get a cure. I can tell you people after applying iodine can stay on their skin for days and I live in the tropics where weather throughout the year exceeds 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

[YEA]  09/16/2006: Dan from Largo, FL writes: "For a really insightful viewpoint on iodine, check out this lecture by Dr. David Brownstein (http://www.internetwks.com/clips/bsBCancer.rm) about iodine and its deficiency relationship to Breast Cancer. Note he also suspects an unproven relationship between an iodine deficiency and Prostate Cancer.

He mentions that the Japanese diet includes 14mg per day of iodine on the average (coastal Japanese ingest even more.) The US RDA is 150 ugs (micro grams) per day -- about 100 times less than the Japanese eat -- and the recommended upper level for iodine is no more than 1.1 mg/day, and they estimate the average requirement to be 95 micrograms per day or about 150 times less than the Japanese consume.

The 125mg Kelp tablets that I have from Vitamin Shoppe, have 225 ugs of iodine in them. Thus, to get to the Japanese level of Iodine (14 mg/day), I would have to take 62 of these tablets a day! Dr. Brownstein also states that iodine is stored in the thyroid which requires 6 mg/day and is also stored in a women's breasts and required for proper breast development. The breasts require 5 mg/day for a 110 lb woman.

And catch this... Breast cancer researchers have to starve test animals of iodine in order to be able to induce breast cancer in any significant number of them. Hmmm...

Another 2 mg/day of iodine is required by the adrenals, hypothalamus, pituitary, and other organs. Therefore, the total required iodine for a woman is 5 6 2 = 13 mg/day. The RDA is 150 ugs per day, so a woman would have to take 86 times as much as this to achieve the 13 mg/day needed by her body, and even more if she had a larger body or bigger breasts. A man has smaller breasts and his prostate requires somewhat less iodine than a woman's breasts. However, a man's body is generally larger than 110 lbs, so this would have to be factored into the total requirements for a man.

Dr. Brownstein states, "Over the last 30 years, iodine levels have fallen over 50% in the United States. Breast cancer rates have risen dramatically. Thyroid illness from hypothyroidism, autoimmune including Grave's and Hashimoto's, as well as thyroid cancer has risen dramatically."

Since the Japanese have so much iodine in their bodies (they're ingesting 100X our 150 ug RDA of iodine), and iodine is essential for dealing with radiation exposure, it makes me wonder what might happen happen if there were a mishap involving massive radiation exposure in a country such as ours where the iodine level is so pathetically low.

And this may well be an important consideration, as cancer rates have been shown to rise after radiation has been released into the atmosphere, which apparently happened quite a bit with the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons in Iraq in 2003. Background radiation levels were measured at many times normal in England (click this link - http://www.llrc.org/aldermastrept.pdf - and check the graphs) just a few days after the fighting started in Iraq. Cancer rates in Iraq in 2001 were about 10X what they were before Desert Storm where much less DU was used than in 2003. The big problem is that the effects are global (see: http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2006/DU-Europe-Moret26feb06.htm). So, the problem for us is that the DU rounds burn up or pulverize and tend to stay in the atmosphere, allowing the "aerosol of sub micron" size to enter the slip-stream and come back to America to bite us all.

Therefore, we all need to be aware of any nutritional and purification techniques which will handle radiation.

[WARNING!]  01/23/2008: Fred from Atlanta, Georgia writes: "Sinus Infection Remedies - Danger!!! A MSDS sheet for Betadine stated the following: "Reactivity - A mixture of equal parts of a 10% povidone iodine solution (Betadine) and hydrogen peroxide 3% exploded about 100 minutes after mixing." Folks, this is the normal Betadine and hydrogen peroxide that you buy in the store! I was actually considering putting a few drops of these in some salt water and using it in an atomizing spray bottle (these are normally called "non-drip."). Not any more! On the other hand, after all of their warninings, I like the few drops of Betadine in a spray bottle of salt water, it works great! Betadine is one of the few things that kills viruses, it is stable in storage and and has a residual effect. To be on the safe side I will be keeping an eye out for possible iodine toxicity.
http://www.safety.vanderbilt.edu/pdf/hcs_msds/betadine_pvp_solution_10_03.pdf

06/26/2007: James from Seattle, Washington writes: "Lugo's iodine caused my heart to palpitate (and not in a good way; the bad way). So I thought no more Lugo's. I felt bad because I read the health benefits on this site and others and I could not take even one drop. Then while reasearching fatty acid metabolism I found that you use a lot of vitamin B-1, B-6 and B-12. All the of these B's have heart palpitaions as a sign of their deficiencies. So I took all three. Now I can take Lugo's. Yeah!

12/12/2008: Shlomo from Los Angeles, California, USA writes: "need brief complementary info re: weal thyroid