Are Your Values Aligned

(0:02) Hi, this is Dr. Daniels, and welcome to Healing with Dr. Daniels. This is the Sunday, November 1st, 2020 edition. And today's topic is, are your values aligned? Yes. So today, in the ongoing saga of helping my mother, I have discovered that when logic and planning fail, values will prevail. As always, think happens. But first, we have to take our turpentine. And we have a bottle. When you are going to do your own healing, you must label your bottle. I left off the E on turpentine, but it still makes it safe enough where no one's going to take a swig.

(0:53) Let’s see here. We have sugar. Yay! Sugar fits much more nicely now that I've rearranged my setup here, so I’m no longer dripping sugar on my keyboard. Yes, that’s very important, especially with the cost of technology these days. It’s a fortune. Alright, and this is my little pipette. Someone asked how big it is; this is three cc's. And 2.5 cc's is right up here at the neck. Excuse me. Let's dip into our turpentine bottle and suck it up. As you can see, it didn’t go all the way to the top, so I'm just going to tip this upside down, let it fall back, squeeze a little air out, holding pressure there, and dip back in the bottle.

(1:42) Now, as you can see, it’s a little bit too high there, so we’re just going to squeeze out the extra. Yeah. And put that on top of the sugar as we go by the camera. Yay! Depending on the optics here, you might be able to see that the sugar turns a little grayish color. So it does not remain white. You’ll also see that not all the sugar is soaked. This is very important for those of you out there who don’t want to use white sugar because you have some kind of logical process going on. To you, I say, go to vitalitycapsules.com, download the free report, The Candida Cleaner, and you can decide for yourself if you want to use sugar or something else. After all, it’s your body, not mine, but this is what I use. It has been working awesome for me, as you can see, as a 63-year-old individual who is now doing splits and playing soccer in the backyard. Yay! This is what I do.

(2:57) Alright, let me get some water, a little more water. I want to make sure we get it down. Then we have Shilajit. Now, Shilajit is a trace mineral supplement. This bottle, as you can see by the worn label, I’ve had it for a while. This little container is literally enough for more than a year. Yeah. So it is a major bargain. Shilajit is totally natural. You just scoop it right out of the ground, slap it in this container, and ship it off to you. It’s from Russia. I get mine from eBay. It does take a month to arrive, but it’s the best deal, and the purity is great. It’s the Russian Shilajit. Alright, so we have our little chopstick here, and we’re just going to dig right in there. Whoa, that is way too much, so we’re going to scrape some off. The daily dose is 200 milligrams, and I take it about five days a week.

(4:23) Now, I’ve also got feedback from some watchers who say, “Turpentine? I’m not taking turpentine.” Now, Shilajit is extremely safe, but it tastes worse than turpentine. It really doesn’t taste good. So this is this. You put it in the water. As you can see, it does not readily dissolve, so we’re going to let that set for a while. I might drink it at the end of the show or later on today. We’re going to put our top back on. Now, this is gooey stuff, and I actually cleaned off the outside of the container today so that it would not goo up my hands. Alright, so we’ve taken our turpentine, we’ve got Shilajit percolating, now let’s talk about Vitality Capsules. Vitality Capsules are the internal cleanser, gentle enough for everyday use.

(5:12) I developed Vitality Capsules when I was practicing medicine in the 90s. I was using natural methods to heal people, but I found that even though people would drink their water and change their diet, if they did not poop three times a day, they did not heal. I felt so bad that people were making such an incredible effort to make these lifestyle changes, yet they still weren’t getting results. When I realized it was because of their pooping, I became an evangelist. Oh, you’ve got to poop, poop, poop. One guy in my practice, after listening politely to my spiel, said, “Doc, if you make a pill that’ll make me poop, I’m going to take it and I’ll poop.” I said, “Okay, okay, I’m going to do that.” And I got right to work and came up with Vitality Capsules. He took them, he was thrilled, he pooped, and yay, he got better. So that’s the short story on Vitality Capsules. So go to vitalitycapsules.com, download your free report, The Candida Cleaner, and purchase some Vitality Capsules and support our sponsor. Yay.

(6:28) Now, today’s show is going to be half an hour because I noticed that when I watch things on YouTube, if it says one hour, I just go right by it. I won’t sit still for that. So we’re going to shorten the shows to make it easier for people to stick, stay, don’t go nowhere, and to see the whole show. Today is going to be a cautionary tale. What’s a cautionary tale? Well, there are stories throughout life—stories of amazing success and victory, and those are things you want to emulate. Then there are cautionary tales. The cautionary tale says, “Don’t you do this this way because it might not work.” So a cautionary tale is an example of something that did not work out the way we hoped. I’m going to tell you what is going on, the values involved, and maybe what should have, could have, whatever had been done, so that you can apply this in your own life and achieve whatever outcome you desire. I’m not judging the outcome; what I am judging is that there was an outcome agreed upon 30 years ago, discussed, discussed again and again and again, and it is clear, like a wrecking ball coming towards a building, that the inevitable outcome is not what we had discussed and planned for and saved for over 30 years.

(8:10) Values guide us. I’m not going to judge if a value is good or not, but only if the values are aligned. What we’re experiencing in our family, as we help my mother through her 88th, almost 89th year—she’ll be 89 in a couple of weeks here—is the role that values played. At the very end, all these values reared their heads, and we realized—I realized—oops, we can’t logic our way out of it, we can’t love our way out of it, we can’t feel our way out of it. This is where we are. Mom is in the declining moments of life. I don’t want to say moments—it could be months, it could be years—we don’t know. This is quite relevant to you if you’re elderly and trying to help someone who is, or if you’re trying to make plans for when you are 89 years old.

(9:27) When we last left Mom, she had been erroneously diagnosed with shingles at the skilled nursing facility, nursing home, and offered deadly medications for this condition. Now, she called me, and with kindness and sensitivity, I chatted with her as to what might or might not be the situation. She was persuaded to hold off on the meds, and of course, the rash cleared up without medication. The rash was never painful, never had blisters, which, those of you who are familiar with shingles, if there’s no blister and no pain, it ain’t shingles. So much for skilled nursing. Mom’s rash is actually going away. Now, as she grows weaker and weaker on the high carb, no connective tissue, no organ meat diet, her insurance is running out. So decisions have to be made. Now, it’s not like there aren’t funds because Dad was very concerned. He knew she would live beyond him with her good habits, probably forever. So he made arrangements that these things would be taken care of. The decision that has to be made is, is she going to stay in a nursing home and just pay? Or is she going to go home, and we can simply hire whatever help she needs?

(10:57) Now, a little more background here. The nursing home prohibits visitors. Food that’s brought in is discarded. The only visitor she can have is a social worker who clearly works for the skilled nursing facility and is there to maximize the profit for the facility. Now, here’s the thing: Mom has five living children, 15 grandchildren, and we’ve got lawyers and a trust, and everyone is hovering around, waiting to do Mom’s bidding. Now, she has announced repeatedly to all who have ears that she wants to die at home, not in a nursing home. Over the past 30 years, she has reiterated this and worked very hard to make sure this happens. She’s got her do not resuscitate order in place. She has her medical power of attorney in place. Whatever paperwork you name, she’s got it. She also comes from a generation that understands that any government money is just stealing from your neighbor, and you really shouldn’t accept it. Now, she did work for the post office when she was younger, but she rationalized that because she was performing a service, delivering mail or sorting mail, people were receiving a service for what they were doing.

(12:25) So how do we get to this point where the very thing we all wanted to avoid appears to be happening before our own eyes? Of course, we are powerless. There’s no amount of money that can turn this around. We’ve seen Mom giving up, trying to hold on to a shred of dignity, yet wallowing in humiliation and apologizing to each of us individually as she announces she is choosing to stay in the nursing home for at least one month. Then she will sign up for hospice. And we look at each other—hospice? Mom, you don’t have cancer? You don’t have an internal illness? How did hospice come in? How do we get from “Mom, what can we do for you?” “How can we help you realize your dream of dying peacefully at home?” to hospice? So, of course, I figured I would logic my way out of this, right? I said, “Well, Mom, if you want to kill yourself with a narcotic overdose, you don’t have to go through hospice. We can get you home and have a doctor write a prescription for you.” Silence. Silence.

(14:02) Imagine two obituaries. One starts out, “$500,000 later, the dearly beloved died of starvation, malnutrition, hospital infection, COVID, whatever, alone in a skilled nursing facility.” Or, “Our beloved died at home, surrounded by loved ones, and peacefully went on to the next world.” So how did this happen? How did this happen? Now, we are on course for the first obituary, where half a million dollars later, we’re going to have a starved carcass, probably tortured as well, which is just exactly not what we wanted. I’m not condemning the option, but I’m just saying it is not the one that was planned for, that was discussed. And the question is, how did this life journey get so far off course that the present trajectory is leading to humiliation, sadness, and frustration for everyone?

(15:12) I’m going to trace the course of events that led to this place. What values motivated the situation, and what could have been done differently? It is all about values. When we were younger—let’s say as kids in our 30s and 40s—my mother said, “I’m saving my money. I do not expect my children to take care of me in my old age.” Actually, we got that speech when we were five. So that’s all we ever heard: “I don’t expect my children to take care of me in my old age. People who expect their kids to take care of them are bad people.” And she said, “I have a home, and I’m going to invest in that home. It’s a wonderful investment.” And, oh my God, she did invest in this house. So, this is the 90s—brand new kitchen, renovation, additional bathroom, fixed up the attic for additional bedrooms. Now we have a five-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house with a basement, a garage, and a driveway. Oh, front porch too, and a back porch. It even has a pantry, a dining room, a living room, a family room. You get the picture. However, it is in a neighborhood that is not, let’s just say, the best, and is known for, well, drive-by shootings.

(16:47) So my mother has explained it’s going to be a nest egg, and she’s saving and being frugal. Man, when this house sells, it’s going to be a lot of money for somebody—for her, for the kids, whatever. Now, next thing is, as a kid—so one value, we’re tracking our values here, right? The value is that you shouldn’t depend on your kids in your old age, and people who depend on their kids in their old age are bad people. The value is saving money. Then as children, we were all given our instructions—what a successful adult is and what is expected. The expectation was that each one of us—there were six at the time; one died a couple of years ago in her 60s—was to leave the nest, not live at home. She said, “Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself. And you’re a failure if you live at home.” However far and wide you have to go to achieve success, why by golly, that’s the thing to do. She really gave us a lot of praise and encouragement. Like, I went away to college; it was like a six, eight-hour drive from Syracuse to Boston. I didn’t come home for most holidays, and this was really encouraged—whatever you’ve got to do to get those grades, be successful. So my other siblings got similar reinforcement.

(18:26) Of course, Mom has one—actually two—children living in Syracuse, but everyone else is scattered around the country. Same thing with grandchildren—get a job, go forth in the world, so they’re scattered. The plans had been made. As I said, there’s a trust in place, check. House with no mortgage, check. Do not resuscitate order, check. Do not treat, check. Medical power of attorney, check. Mom was diligent—home cooking, farmer’s markets, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no physical therapy, no physical activity either. And the usual middle-class unnecessary surgery—hysterectomy here, surgery on her finger there, whatever. Oh, leg vascular surgery. Of course, it was complicated by worsening the very small ulcer it was supposed to cure and creating more ulcers. So now she has these leg ulcers. These complications resulted in hospital admission, rehab, back to home, back to rehab, and here we are. So let’s take a look at these values that led us here, and hopefully, you can adjust your values. Now, if this is what you want in terms of outcome, that’s great.

(19:56) Mom has announced that she is 89. She doesn’t expect to live forever. She’s ready to die. Like, Mom’s ready to die today. Hey, let’s go home, we can do this. No. Now, also on the plate is one of her sons. His wife has stepped up and said, “I and your son together will welcome you into our home and provide for you whatever you need the rest of your days.” She says, “Oh, no, I couldn’t do that.” So let’s review the values. Logically, the thing to do would be for Mom to go home, and we kids collectively within the scope of our, as I say, wheelhouse or expertise, would arrange for her to have everything she needs, and the kids could come and visit and keep her company. Right now, she’s in a nursing home. Visits are prohibited. Now, the other thing I would say is Mom has been experiencing what I would consider to be psychological warfare. She can only speak to the hospital employee who’s designed to lead her in a certain path. She’s not allowed any visitors at all, and they’re not allowed to bring her food. Instead, she’s on the high-carb, low-healing diet, and so we’re not able to adjust that.

(21:30) So the value: children should not have to care for parents in their old age. Basically, she is not able to accept the help that we kids are more than willing to give because of this value. Also, a parent is bad or has failed to make arrangements if this is the case. Here she is at 89. She clearly needs help. What she did not anticipate was that at 89, most people need some help of some sort. If you don’t want to need help at 89, you need to really be vigorous about maintaining your physical strength. That was not a value of hers—being physically strong. She feels bad if her kids have to take care of her. In other words, she would actually feel that she was a life failure if indeed she had to have her kids care for her. Now, another value she had growing up—she had six kids that she was raising—and you can imagine the house can get pretty disorganized. She believes that strangers should not be hired to provide services in the home. This is because housekeepers and personal service workers are demeaned by this, and therefore, it is unethical to participate in this industry as an employer. So as a kid, even though it would have been a huge help for us to hire even for half a day a week to do some deep cleaning or whatever, that was never the case. So the house was not exactly the tidiest, and Mom worked outside the home as well.

(23:24) She felt family members should care for each other in the home while they’re living in that home. She felt that children and grandchildren should not have to provide care to you in your old age. Obviously, these are contradictory, right? That family members should care for each other and that children and grandchildren should not provide care to you in your old age. The real zinger here is that children are successful only if they live far away and work outside the home. So what this means is the availability of children and grandchildren to care for her is limited, right? Because everyone is involved in working activity. For example, I’m recording this show, right? I’m occupied. Now, unfortunately, this means the only two available children and three available grandchildren who have the availability to care for her were failures by her standards and had listened to about 30 years of harsh criticisms of their shortcomings.

(24:37) My mother has one mildly mentally retired daughter who lives with her—failure right out the gate, right? She did try leaving home a few times, but like many college graduates these days, she came back home. Although my sister did not have to get a college degree to figure out she needed to come back home. Now, she did get a job, and she did pay rent, but she was living at home, so my mother felt that she was a failure. She has a son who does live in the same city. Again, that would be another person—a candidate. However, his health is pretty poor, but he does have a wife who’s very interested and helpful. Another granddaughter, who was felt to be—let’s call it below average intelligence—and is still living with her parents. Again, this person was considered to be a failure and received quite a bit of negative feedback from grandmother. Another granddaughter who is usually collecting unemployment. So now we have three people with time on their hands: one collecting unemployment, one living right there in the city with her, and one living in the house with her. These are people that over the years, she has not valued, and she’s communicated very clearly their lack of value. So they are more reluctant to get involved than those of us who measured up to Mom’s standards.

(26:18) Her successful children and grandchildren were not available. They were far away or occupied with work that demanded their presence and attention. As I said, one of her successful homeowning children and his wife generously offered to take her into their home and care for her, but she declined the offer. Again, this conflicted with her value of seeing herself as a responsible, capable individual. What would have been a set of values that might have led her to the destination she aspired to, which is dying at home and not dying in a skilled nursing facility? The values she set for success in her children contradicted the value that family members should care for each other. This left her with nobody to call on. The value that domestic servants or help are a form of slavery and servitude meant she couldn’t accept having someone come to the house daily to perform personal services. Because when she first thought of going back into rehab, we were like, “Oh no, no, Mom, we’ll hire people to come to the house. You need one shift, two shifts, three shifts? We’ll get this arranged. We’ll have a cook come in and cook food so you’ll have energy and feel better.” And she’s like, “Oh no, no, I don’t want anyone in my house.”

(27:05) Of course, she has evolved a little bit with that and said, “Okay, she will accept someone in her house.” However, we have these other limitations here. Then we have, of course, the prohibition of visitors, which leaves her basically to ruminate and reflect with who? The social worker. So what would have changed this? There were many opportunities along the way where a grandchild came to live with her for a while. Of course, her pep talk was “Get yourself together and get out of here and get your life on the road.” So the different grandchildren who came and stayed with her for maybe a month here, a month there over the years, they knew they better just get up and get out of here. Had she instead said, “You know, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you want. In fact, which one of the five bedrooms would you like?” But again, because her value of success literally conflicted with just the practicality of where her life was going.

(29:09) Had one of her capable grandchildren or children continued to live with her in this pretty spacious house, it would have been a seamless transition. She would have stayed in the house, and they just would have started taking care of her. Easy peasy. But because of the value that in order to be a success, children have to leave home and be self-supporting, that left her with this empty house. Let’s also mention the value of the house. Mom has clearly dumped between $40,000 to $80,000 just in renovating and doing things. She even installed hardwood floors throughout the house. A lot of work was put into this house, but the work was last done in about 1995. My brother calls me and tells me the resale value of the house is more or less $10,000, which is kind of, you know, a disappointment. But again, that was her value, which is the house is always a good investment. That’s where you, you know, invest money, and when you invest in your house, your house will take care of you. Now, she has other assets aside from that, but that was just her emotional value. She also decided again, as time wore on, that the daughter who’s mildly mentally retired and living in the house—it’s better to let her have the house. But the situation was, had she had the value that a multi-generational household was acceptable, and the other members of a multi-generational household were not necessarily failures, then she would have had built-in help and assistance, and it wouldn’t have been a value conflict.

(31:21) She’s now resolving these values, her situation, and her self-image of herself. Because the value that kids should leave home, and the value that having servants or help in the house is a bad thing, instead of having loved ones care for her, she’s in a situation where total strangers are caring for her, where she’s just deteriorated, deteriorated, deteriorated. The truth is, everyone needs help as they age. I’m only 63, and I can tell you my days of climbing more than a five-foot-tall ladder are over. I actually had to hire someone to change a few light bulbs the other day. This is something I think people need to realize, that as they age, even if they stay in their own home, they are likely going to need assistance of some kind. That’s something to anticipate. Many cultures, in fact, most cultures throughout the world, handle this by simply having a multi-generational household, by just simply having a situation where one or more children will remain in the house or maybe next door. Or once all the kids are grown and are having grandkids, they may live in the big house. The money my mother spent upgrading the house maybe could have been used to build a granny cottage.

(33:13) The values in this case totally trumped all logic, just totally. So we as a family are in a situation of just watching as these events unfold. Poor Mom is left surrounded by strangers, with no visitors permitted, and struggling through the last phase of her life. What I would recommend is that you take a look at your values and see if your values align with what you say you want, not only at the end of life but even right now. It’s okay to change your values. It’s okay to say, “Hey, wait, you know, I had that value five or ten years ago. It served me well, maybe it didn’t, but I’m going to change it today.” It’s super important to examine what it is that you value. I just can’t emphasize that enough. You can really make your life work out a lot quicker and a lot easier if you take a look at your values. There are beliefs—we talked about that before—but then there are values. It’s what do you think is important and good in terms of your behavior, other people’s behavior, logistical circumstances. If you can adjust your values to fit the situation that you want, then that situation will materialize a lot, lot quicker. You won’t find yourself— I guess the word is victimized.

(35:20) Okay, we’re a little bit over time here, so we’re going to go into questions. Here’s a good question. “Hi, Dr. Daniels. I’ve been taking Vitality Capsules since I first discovered you in 2014. Yay! I need to take five or six a day to maintain my bowel movements.” Now, everyone, as I said, needs a different number. Some people need one, some people need ten or more. “And I combine the regular and extra strength because I love them both. I especially love the herbal smell of the regular strength—that’s the green bottle—capsules to the point where I sometimes open the bottle just to take a whiff to uplift my spirits.” Bet no one ever told you that before. “Yes, no one ever confessed that. I am 71 years old and feel as healthy and fit as ever. I take no medications, eat organic, I avoid sugar except with my turpentine, and processed foods. I exercise daily, sun a couple of times a week, and do an ongoing heavy metal environmental detox protocol. Based on your recommendations, I also purchased a mega home countertop water distiller on Amazon a few months ago. I make a gallon a day, and I am loving drinking the distilled water. Amazing, great.”

(36:29) “Question for you. In the last few months, I’ve increased my turpentine to almost daily, five or six times a week. Your Candida Cleaner Report recommends much less frequently, but I heard you say on a podcast that you like to take it every day now. Can you confirm this is still a good idea?” Yes. Now, in the Candida Cleaner Report, the maximum dose is one teaspoon a day. So if you’re taking one teaspoon a day, it is not a good idea to take it every day for more than 30 days. So what I do is I knock the daily dose down to, say, half a teaspoon, and that works out super well. “Watching your videos has inspired me, so now I usually follow turpentine with the Shilajit. Do you have any experience or opinion on DMSO?” Yes, I do. DMSO is a different derivative of the pine tree. It is ultra, ultra refined, and it stinks terribly. So I do not recommend DMSO because of the terrible odor and because it is ultra refined. It doesn’t have as broad a spectrum of action, in my opinion, as turpentine does.

(37:17) “I’m wondering about using DMSO with turpentine or castor oil.” I would not recommend it. Topically, you can just use turpentine. I always stick with the turpentine. That way, you can control the dose for a total of one teaspoon a day, and you don’t reach toxicity, whereas if you mix turpentine and DMSO, you could overdo it and get into a situation where you feel uncomfortable. “Thank you again for your work and your wonderful podcast, Susie.” Susie, you are welcome, and thank you for being a faithful Vitality Capsules purchaser.

(38:04) Alright, that is it. We are done for this week. We’ll see you again next week, and as always, think happens.