"If the physicians of today are not the nutritionists of tomorrow, then the
nutritionists of today will be the physicians of tomorrow."
A number of years ago I received a letter from an HMO inviting me
to become part of their Alternative Medicine Department. At first I was startled.
Nutrition as alternative medicine? What a novel idea. For some reason the term
"alternative" conjured up images of acupuncture and high colonics (not
necessarily together.) But my reaction gradually shifted as I thought about the concept.
Of course, nutrition is alternative medicine. Hippocrates himself said "Let
food be thy medicine. Let medicine be thy food."
But the alternative goes
beyond just substituting a food or a nutritional supplement for a particular drug. It
includes asking and answering the "why" question.
If an individual has high
blood pressure, it is not enough to prescribe a drug, or some nutraceutical or herbal
concoction in an attempt to bring pressure down into a normal range. It is essential
to do everything possible to discover why that person's pressure was too high in the first
place. Is the person overweight? Stressed? Deficient in certain minerals? Overdosing on
salt? The goal should be to help that person identify the underlying problem, and fix it.
If someone complains of
fatigue, it's not enough to suggest a particular supplement for energy. We need to know
the "why" behind the fatigue.
Our current health care
system focuses on treating disease by treating the symptoms of that disease. One pill for
pain, another for indigestion, and a third for depression. Then we need three more
medications to counter the side effects of the first three.
Our diseases are seen as
chronic and incurable conditions, and the medications we take for them become a permanent
part of our lifestyle. Many of those medications don't work as advertised. Many have
serious side effects. Most medications are intended to be used for the shortest period of
time possible, but that is not how they are prescribed and used.
Health Care is one of the major industries in America
today. And the goal of the Health Care industry is not to keep us healthy but to survive.
For an industry to survive and grow it must make money. Health Care survives by
treating our diseases, and therefore it has a vested interest in keeping us sick.
Pharmaceutical companies thrive on manufacturing and selling drugs to treat diseases.
Therefore there is a need to keep people sick and on medication. Can you imagine the
economic impact of helping people return to their natural state of wellness and getting
them off of prescription medications?
Traditional medicine focuses
on treating the symptoms of disease. One takes a pain pill for a headache, an acid blocker
for acid reflux, and so on and so on. If blood pressure is too high, we take a pill to
bring it down. Ditto for cholesterol. And then the Health Care industry keeps setting new
reference ranges of "normal" thus widening the patient base and
creating new customers for all those prescription medications. I can remember when a
cholesterol level under 300 was considered okay, then the ideal number was changed to 250,
and later it was dropped to 200. Many physicians want it even lower than that, seemingly
unaware that low cholesterol is associated with depression, an increased risk of suicide,
and a compromised immune system. Many physicians are also unaware that the medications
used to lower cholesterol lead us down a path that culminates in congestive heart failure.
What's wrong with this picture?
There has got to be a better
way. There is. It's called alternative medicine. It doesn't focus on
treating symptoms. The alternative to which I refer looks for and attempts to correct the
underlying cause of disease, and seeks to support the body in the most natural ways
possible, so that it can heal itself. One of the major premises of alternative
medicine is that the body is a self-healing organism.
Several years ago I started
teaching a series of seminars under the umbrella title: The Alternative
Medicine Cabinet. The series ran for an entire year and covered many of
the major health issues in America, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, depression,
osteoporosis and arthritis. As I put the program together, and researched each component
thoroughly, I was astounded to discover that I didn't need 10 different nutritional
protocols for each of the disease topics. Rather, there were certain common threads that
tied all of them together.
I discovered, for example,
that there is an inverse correlation between the levels of specific nutrients and the
incidence of our chronic diseases. Meaning: A low blood level of certain nutrients is
associated with a higher incidence of disease. And the same nutrients keep being
implicated, regardless of the disease being examined.
Keeping that fact in mind, it
then becomes possible to look at the American diet and see the same problem patterns
showing up over and over again. The good news is these patterns are reversible. Our
chronic diseases are reversible. We can choose health over sickness. We can choose action
over complacency. We don't have to accept the status quo. We can take action and make
appropriate changes.
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