God’s Harvest Festivals. Hurrying to Be at Jerusalem for Pentecost. How Did Doctors Not Know About the Risks of Hormone Therapy?

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Happy Mother’s Day to all those so ordained!!

 

God’s Harvest Festivals

Exodus 23:14-16

“Three times you shall keep a feast to Me in the year: You shall keep the Feast of Unleavened Bread (you shall eat unleavened bread seven days, as I commanded you, at the time appointed in the month of Abib, for in it you came out of Egypt; none shall appear before Me empty); and the Feast of Harvest, the firstfruits of your labors which you have sown in the field; and the Feast of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you have gathered in the fruit of your labors from the field.”

God’s seven annual festivals listed in Leviticus 23 are several times grouped together as three main festival seasons of the year.

• Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread fall in an eight-day period in the spring.
• The Feast of Harvest, called Pentecost in the New Testament, falls in late spring or early summer.
• And the Feast of Ingathering, better known as the Feast of Tabernacles, comes in the fall, along with the Feast of Trumpets, the Day of Atonement and the Eighth Day/Last Great Day.

For an overview of God’s festivals and God’s plan of salvation, see “Festival Meaning: What Are the Meanings of Each of God’s Festivals?”         From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/bible/blog/gods-harvest-festivals/?

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Hurrying to Be at Jerusalem for Pentecost

Acts 20:16

“For Paul had decided to sail past Ephesus, so that he would not have to spend time in Asia; for he was hurrying to be at Jerusalem, if possible, on the Day of Pentecost.

Listen to the "Verse by Verse" episode covering this scripture.

The apostle Paul planned his travel around God’s annual festivals. He spent the Passover and Days of Unleavened Bread that year in Philippi (Acts 20:6). Because of a plot on his life, he traveled overland instead of by sea (verse 3). But verse 16 shows that he was still determined to get back to Jerusalem in time for the Feast of Pentecost.

For an overview of God’s annual festivals, see “The Seven Feasts of the Lord.”

For more about Pentecost, see “Pentecost: God Gives the Holy Spirit” and “The Sermon That Launched the Church.” From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/bible/blog/hurrying-to-be-at-jerusalem-for-pentecost/

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Paul Continues to Celebrate Pentecost

1 Corinthians 16:8

“But I will tarry in Ephesus until Pentecost.

Listen to the "Verse by Verse" episode covering this scripture.

“The apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians was written perhaps 25 years after the New Testament Church of God was founded on the Day of Pentecost in A.D. 31. His note to the Corinthians in this passage shows that Paul and the Church continued to celebrate Pentecost, also called “the Feast of Weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest” (Exodus 34:22) and other names in the Old Testament.

The New Testament record shows that the New Testament Church continued to observe all seven of God’s festivals. For example, earlier in 1 Corinthians Paul also mentioned the Passover and the need to “keep the feast, not with old leaven,” referring to the Feast of Unleavened Bread (1 Corinthians 5:7-8).”

For more about Pentecost, see “Pentecost: God Gives the Holy Spirit”  From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/bible/blog/paul-continues-to-celebrate-pentecost/?

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“I Must by All Means Keep This Coming Feast”

Acts 18:21

[Paul] took leave of them, saying, “I must by all means keep this coming feast in Jerusalem; but I will return again to you, God willing.” And he sailed from Ephesus.

“As we saw in Acts 20:16, the apostle Paul planned his journeys around the biblical festivals. Here in Acts 18:21 he also explains his need to get to Jerusalem for one of the festivals.

Though it is not explicit about which festival, this passage gives more evidence of the continued importance of God’s festivals to the New Testament Church.

For more about the biblical festivals, see the second half of the free booklet From Holidays to Holy Days: God’s Plan for You.”       From: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/bible/blog/i-must-by-all-means-keep-this-coming-feast/

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How Did Doctors Not Know About the Risks of Hormone Therapy?

Transcript of the video at: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-did-doctors-not-know-about-the-risks-of-hormone-therapy/

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

“Women were placed in harm’s way by their physicians, who acted as unsuspecting patsies for the drug companies.

We’ve known about the role of estrogen in breast cancer going back to the 1800s, when in some cases, surgical removal of the ovaries seemed to help. Ovaries were said to send out mysterious influences to the rest of the body, which, in 1923, we identified as estrogen. The medical profession jumped on this discovery, and started injecting menopausal women by the thousands—shots that gave a respectable hook on which to hang visits to the doctor. Soon, there were pills, and patches, and medical journals—like the Journal of the American Medical Association—regaled doctors with ads on how they can “help women to happiness” by prescribing estrogen. You could turn this into that. “For when women outlive their ovaries,” there was Premarin.

As far back as the 40s, concerns were raised that this practice might cause breast cancer, noting it would have been nice to figure this out first, before we started dosing women en masse. But breast cancer risk didn’t matter, because heart disease is the #1 killer of women, concluded reviews, and because women taking hormones appeared to have lower heart attack rates that would outweigh the extra breast cancer.

But, women taking estrogen tended to be of higher socioeconomic class, tended to exercise more, and engage in other healthy lifestyle changes, like increased fiber intake and getting their cholesterol checked. So, maybe that’s why women taking estrogens appeared to be protected from heart disease. Maybe it had nothing to do with the drugs themselves. Despite the medical profession’s enthusiasm for the stuff, only a randomized clinical trial could really resolve this question—you split women into two groups; half get the hormones; half get a placebo, and you follow them out for a few years. But, there was no such study, until the 1990s, when the Women’s Health Initiative study was designed.

Wait a second. Why did it take the bulk of a century to decide to definitively study the safety of something they prescribed to millions of women? Maybe it’s because there had never been a female director of the National Institutes of Health until then. Just three weeks after being named NIH Director, she went before Congress to announce, “We need a moonwalk for women.” And, that “moonwalk” took the form of the Women’s Health Initiative study.

The bombshell landed. Summer, 2002. There was so much more invasive breast cancer in the hormone users that they were forced to stop the study prematurely. Yeah, but what about heart disease? Wasn’t that supposed to balance things out? The women didn’t just have more breast cancer; they had more heart attacks, more strokes, more blood clots to their lungs.

The news that women treated with hormone replacement therapy experienced higher rates of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, and overall harm rocked women and physicians across the country. Estrogen started out as the most prescribed drug in America before the study, but the number of prescriptions dropped immediately, and, within a year, so did the incidence of breast cancer in the United States. Here’s the data from California; a nice drop-off in the rate of invasive breast cancer.

But the most important part of this story was why were we all so surprised? There had been decade after decade of repeated warnings about the risks of cancer. In fact, the reason breast cancer patients had so much trouble suing the drug company was that the drugs contained warning labels for decades. And, having disclosed it, surely, any reasonable physician would have included it in their risk and benefit discussion with their patients. It’s like the warning labels on packs of cigarettes. If you get lung cancer, now, you should have known better. And so, if you got breast cancer, don’t blame the drug company. They warned you about the risks, right there, clear as day.

Why didn’t more doctors warn their patients? Even after the study came out, millions of prescriptions continued to be dispensed. That’s a lot of cancer in our patients we caused, wrote one doctor. How long will it take us to stop listening to the drug companies, “admit that we are harming many of our patients, and…start changing our prescription habits?” Why did this practice continue in the face of mounting evidence of harm?

Well, it is a multibillion dollar industry. Despite an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary, many physicians still believe that estrogenic hormones have overall health benefits, a non-evidence-based perception that may be the result of decades of carefully orchestrated corporate influence on the medical literature. Dozens of ghostwritten reviews were published in medical journals to promote unproven benefits, and downplay the harms of menopausal hormone therapy. They’d pay PR companies to write the articles, and then pass them off as written by some expert.

So, “gynecologists must switch allegiance from eminence-based to evidence-based medicine”— consider what the science actually says, and not just what some so-called expert says. One might say the “current culture of gynecology encourages the dissemination of health advice based on advertising, rather than science. Women were placed in the way of harm by their physicians, who acted as unsuspecting patsies for the pharmaceutical companies.”

If we really wanted to prevent heart attacks in women, simple lifestyle behaviors can eliminate more than 90% of heart attack risk. So—instead of being Big Pharma’s pawns—recommending a healthful diet, increased exercise, and smoking cessation would truly benefit women’s health.”  From: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/how-did-doctors-not-know-about-the-risks-of-hormone-therapy/

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