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Now before I get going on my rant, I want to make one thing very clear:  I am NOT anti-medicine.  There are definitely situations in which taking medication, while not perfect, is the best course of action.  For example, if you have a severe bacterial infection, antibiotics are the way to go.  If you have severe diabetes, insulin is a necessity.  If you are experiencing a major allergic reaction, suppressing it with steroids can save your life. 

My issue is with what in my opinion is the indiscriminate use of medications for every little symptom and also using medication to suppress very normal bodily reactions to poor lifestyle choices.  Got a runny nose?  Take a pill.  Got a headache?  Take a pill.  Upset stomach from eating too much?  Take a pill, and maybe some liquid medicine. 

Now, taking medication even for trivial or extremely temporary symptoms wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for a little thing called side-effects.  And one of the big problems with side-effects is that a lot of times people don’t realize that the symptoms they are getting are side-effects.  So what do they do?  They take another medication to counter the side-effects of the first medication.  And it’s not just the people with the symptoms who do this.  In fact, in many cases it’s doctors who are prescribing one medication after another for their patients who keep coming up with new symptoms.  In a recent blog post, I mentioned one of my patients who was taking 38 different prescription medications each day, all prescribed by the same doctor!  This is a major problem!

It is not unsual in my practice to see patients who are on 10 to 15 prescription drugs and sometimes additional over the counter drugs.  In most of these cases, the patients are still bothered by one or more major symptoms, and in many cases, those symptoms turn out to be side-effects of one or more of the drugs they are taking.  Oftentimes, it seems that the most helpful thing I can do for a patient is to provide assistance in getting his or her doctor to reduce the medication (or helping the patient find a new doctor who will reduce their medication if their doctor is uncooperative). 

In fact, while I often recommend nutritional supplementation to patients, many of them wouldn’t even need it if they simply got off any non-essential medications and started to eat a reasonably good diet.  You see, a big part cause of medication side-effects in many cases is that the medication produces nutrient deficiencies.  The alterations in biochemistry caused by the medication causes the body to have an increased metabolic need for certain nutrients and/or causes the body to lose nutrients faster than normal through the urine and stool. 

For example, the cholesterol-lowering drugs (statins) deplete the body’s supply of a nutrient called coenzyme Q-10 (or CoQ10 for short).  CoQ10 is very important to normal muscle function (including heart muscle function), and depletion of this nutrient causes abnormal muscle function - which is why statins often have the side effect of muscle pain and may in some cases cause diminished heart pumping (also called heart failure) with resultant fatigue, shortness of breath, etc..

Another example is diuretics, which may be prescribed for high blood pressure.  Diuretics cause the body to lose potassium.  Potassium deficiency can cause severe muscle cramping and pain, and in rare severe cases may even cause sudden death due to heart failure. 

In recent years several drugs have made headlines with their spectacularly dangerous side-effects.  These include weight loss drugs resulting in death, anti-inflammatory drugs causing heart attacks, and osteoporosis drugs causing severe bone necrosis (tissue death). 

Many people are beginning to question the widespread use of medications, but people need to become more aware and not just blindly take medication because they saw it advertised as something to help their symptoms.  It’s not even a good idea to just blindly accept whatever your doctor prescribes.  There are many resources for checking on potential side-effects available today, such as one I recently discussed in another blog article on prescription drugs. Another excellent resource can be your pharmacist (pharmacists typically are FAR more knowledgeable about drugs than doctors are).  My recommendation is to do your homework and weigh the potential risks and benefits of any drug (unless it is an emergency situation, of course - in which case, handle the crisis and THEN do your homework).

Stay tuned for more on natural health!

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There is a common error in thinking when it comes to healthcare that is so common, it’s nearly universal in the U.S. and other industrialized countries.  In my opinion, it is this one error in the way we tend to approach healthcare that has produced our incredibly expensive, yet remarkably ineffective healthcare system.  And while this error in thinking is most prevalent in conventional medicine, it is also quite common in alternative medicine, and diminishes the effectiveness of natural treatments just as much as it does the effectiveness of drugs and surgery.

So what is this error in thinking?  It’s the approach that treatment is directed at alleviating a health condition or set of symptoms.  Now, this way of thinking is so ingrained in our culture, you’re probably wondering what I’m talking about.  “Of course treatment is directed at alleviating a health condition!  What else would treatment be for?” you may be thinking.

I submit that a FAR more effective approach to healthcare is to treat the PERSON, not the condition or symptoms.  What I mean by this is that I often get questions from patients and from email along the lines of “What should I take for [insert condition or symptom here]?”.  The problem with that question is that it only looks at the condition or symptom in isolation.  There may be other symptoms or conditions present that would alter my answer to that question.  For example, if someone is on blood-thinning medication, I generally recommend that they not take ANYTHING (drug, herb, or nutrient) for ANY condition while they are taking that medication. 

From another standpoint, anytime we seek to treat a condition or set of symptoms, there is a tendency to make certain assumptions that may or may not be true.  For instance I had a patient contact me to find out what I could do to help the stress fractures in her spine.  She had been to a few different orthopedists who all diagnosed her and attempted to treat her for stress fractures, with no results.  Since she was getting tired of the pain, when a friend suggested she consult with me, she was more than willing to get another opinion.  Now, if I had simply assumed that her diagnosis was correct when she called my office, I would not have even scheduled an appointment for her.  There’s not a whole lot I can do for stress fractures, they simply have to heal over time.  But I asked a few questions.  This was a young, otherwise healthy patient and she had been in constant pain for over a year.  Stress fractures should have healed up in that span of time, unless she had some kind of metabolic bone disease that was reducing her bone density.  I told her that a bone density test would be in order.  She had already had one a couple of months before and it was normal.  At this point, I didnt know what was causing this person’s pain, but I was pretty sure it was NOT stress fractures.  So I agreed to see her.  I could see on her X-rays what the orthopedists had diagnosed as stress fractures, and to be fair, they weren’t stress fractures but looked very much the same as stress fractures.  But the patient’s pain was not anywhere near where the supposed stress fractures were!  What was causing her pain was a congenital anomaly in the lower spine that in essence was an extra joint that had become jammed and inflamed.  We got the joint working properly and the pain went away within a few treatments.  If I hadn’t taken the time to look beyond the pre-established diagnosis, I would not have even taken the case. 

Now, I’m not immune to this faulty thinking either.  I’ve made some incorrect assumptions in my career and I’ve treated the (wrong) condition rather than treating the whole picture that every patient is.  I know all too well how easy it is to get caught up in incorrect assumptions.  I do the best I can to remain flexible in my thinking and to consider the big picture and to remain open to other possibilities. 

The point I’m trying to make here is that healthcare providers and  people who are attempting to treat their own issues need to be careful when applying treatment to a condition.  Commonly I see patients who are taking multiple remedies that they have read or heard are good for whatever condition they are suffering from and what they don’t realize is that they are overdosing themselves and ultimately doing harm to other body systems.  At the very least they may be simply taking redundant remedies and spending a lot more money than they need to be.

We need to take a broader view and consider the person as a whole, not simply the condition or bothersome symptoms he or she wants to alleviate.

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One of the main criticisms I hear from skeptics regarding nutritional supplements, herbal remedies, chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. is that these methods of healing are unscientific.  Now, I could debate that point on many specific alternative medicine treatments, but what I must object to is the HUGE double standard being applied. 

What those who are hung up on the science (or lack thereof) behind alternative medicine seem to be completely oblivious to is the fact that conventional medicine is far from scientific.  In fact, if you restricted healthcare to only those treatments and practices that have been verified as being effective and safe by a consensus of extensive amounts of research, there wouldn’t be a whole lot of healthcare of any kind going on!  Have you ever noticed how many times the popular media will report on the findings of some large-scale study only to report on the exact opposite findings from another large scale study within a few months or a few years later? 

But let me get a little “multiple personality disorder” here and argue one of the points that the conventional medicine afficionados always seem to fall back on: “But ALL medications undergo rigorous scientific evaluation as to their safety and efficacy before they are approved for sale.  Nutritional supplements and herbs aren’t regulated at all.”  Well, if that’s true, what’s been going on lately with the drugs getting pulled off the market because of “minor” little side-effects, such as a high rate of DEATH when they start being used by the general public?  Yes, all drugs must go through a long testing process before they are cleared by the FDA for sale in the U.S. (and by similar agencies in other countries).  The problem is that there is a strong temptation to falsify research results when there are billions of dollars on the line.  This temptation might be stifled if the FDA was a better watchdog over drug trials, but the FDA has been deficient in it’s policing of the drug industry.

Among other things, “The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific base has eroded and its scientific organizational structure is weak.”  In addition “The FDA cannot fulfill its mission because its scientific workforce does not have sufficient capacity and capability.”  Now, you may think I’m being harsh with those statements, but you’ll notice that they were in quotes.  Where did those quotes come from?  They were from a 60 page report entitled “FDA Science And Mission At Risk.” Is this the work of some conspiracy-theory nut-job?  Perhaps it’s from some alternative medicine political action committee?  No!  The report was prepared by the FDA itself on the request of FDA commissioner Edward Von Eschenbach! 

But then, we don’t really NEED the FDA to police the pharmaceutical industry.  If you can’t trust a multibillion dollar industry to put truth and public health above profits, who can you trust?

Is a conventional medical treatment supported by tainted research any more reliable than an alternative medicine treatment that has little to no research supporting it? Again, if we limit healthcare to only those interventions that are truly scientific, there’s not going to be much healthcare of any kind going on.

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