My patients come into my office with a variety of symptoms that are disrupting their lives; they don’t come in as diagnoses to be made or disease entities to be analyzed. We as physicians try to fit the patient’s symptoms within our learned list of diseases. We are in fact looking for a problem and a solution.
Because the human body is so complex, modern medicine has tried to increase its knowledge of each specialty by spending a tremendous amount of time training and reading about it. After all my years of residency and practice, I’m now asking myself if I truly learned the right things. Are patients truly better served by our having such a focused view of their health challenges?
The fact is that you cannot isolate a single health issue from the vast interlocking web that is the human being. I now realize that you cannot view the digestive system independent of the cardiovascular system, for example. Medicine is very much about “Here’s the problem, and here’s the solution.” Unfortunately, that solution usually comes in the form of pills. These medications are designed to relieve symptoms, but do not necessarily deal with the root of the problem.
Let me explain. New research has demonstrated that cardiovascular disease is not the result of too much cholesterol. It’s actually due to poor diet, causing the liberation of toxins into your blood stream from your gut. These toxins cause inflammation of your blood vessels, after which cholesterol coats the blood vessels. Cholesterol in the blood vessels is your body’s response to inflammation, not its cause. If we take the prescribed medication, we may reduce our cholesterol, but we still won’t be addressing the root cause of the problem: toxemia due to poor diet.
Our health depends on a balance between all of our systems. I like to apply the wisdom of Dr. Robert Rakowski: we need to be eating right, drinking right, thinking right, moving right, sleeping right, pooping right, talking right. Life is energy. The question is, how much energy would you like to have?
Christian