Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (4 page)

Things changed abruptly again one day with the arrival of an unannounced visitor. My friend Eric, a stressed-out movie producer, showed up at my Palm Springs house. I almost fainted when I saw him. Ten days before he’d been his usual bloated, overweight, sallow-skinned self. Now a different man stood before me: fifteen pounds lighter, with shiny glowing skin, and with eyes whose whites were whiter than any I’d ever seen. He was also exuding a sense of calm and joy that were highly out of character. Sensing my astonishment, he told me he’d just completed a detox program at a holistic center located minutes from my home, out in the desert. He’d abandoned his usual routine of restaurant meals, alcohol, and all-night movie shoots for a retreat based on green juices, colonics, massage, sunshine, yoga, and meditation. This shiny new being was the result.

It was an “Aha!” moment for me. This was exactly the kind of result I wanted to offer to my patients. I got the address of the center, named the We Care spa, and signed up for my own program.

With my overloaded schedule, I had to improvise. Instead of booking myself in as a guest, I drove to the center on my lunch breaks, where I would fill my jars with fresh juices and take natural supplements. Every day I’d get a colonic hydrotherapy treatment to help flush out the toxins that were getting released from my tissues via my intestines. And then I’d go back to work until late at the multiple busy offices under my care. I committed to two weeks of this intensive juice fasting program and made sure to keep my mind wide open, because although I’d trained hard in fitness in the past and had months of eating very simply and wholesomely in India, this was different from anything I’d ever done.

By the third day of the detox program, my fatigue, hunger, and headaches had disappeared. By the seventh day, my IBS had completely vanished and has so far only threatened to return at times when I disregarded my lessons. After two weeks of following the center’s cleansing program, my depression—or whatever was left of it—had completely lifted and I had lost fifteen pounds, just like my friend. I had not felt better since my teens.

I was floored. My own body had reset itself. The irritation I’d been experiencing in different areas—mood, energy levels, allergies, and digestive function—had all been connected. They were different ways that my body was showing it was toxic, damaged, and out of balance. By detoxing, I had restored that balance and repaired the damage. As a result, my cells were remembering how to do their chemistry. My guts were restored their normal functioning without medication, and my serotonin levels had gone up. Nobody I’d consulted in modern medicine had suggested these separate symptoms were linked—or had told me that I could heal them myself. It was knowledge that no medical school or specialist seemed to possess. Several times a day, colleagues stopped me at the hospital and said, “Alex, you look ten years younger!” I wondered, had I just reversed the aging process? Was that even possible? If so, it was a subject that—just like nutrition—was missing from my medical school curriculum.

This was a turning point. I finally saw my path clearly. I quit my job at the hospitals and moved to Los Angeles, one of the most polluted cities in the world but also, luckily, home to some of the most progressive thinkers and health practitioners in the world—and lots of openminded patients. I started studying everything I could about detoxification, from the ancient traditions to the new scientific studies that had come out explaining the biochemistry of detoxification in detail. I immersed myself in the study of the emerging field of Functional Medicine, which translates the Eastern paradigm of health to fit the Western terminology and tools with incredibly effective results. Every week I drove back to the desert for two days and worked as the medical consultant for the We Care spa. Susana Belen, the center’s visionary founder and owner, and I guided many different kinds of people through their juice fasting experiences, developing our understanding of the process and sharing our findings with each other and the guests.

I began to treat patients as an M.D. and cardiologist who worked with an expanded toolkit. It still contained lab tests, medications, and surgical interventions when needed. It also contained detoxing, aspects of Chinese medicine, and a huge emphasis on dietary change to build wellness from the inside. It was my vision of openminded medicine, and I had finally come full circle—putting the pieces of my own story into practice with others.

In those early days, I sent many of my Los Angeles patients to We Care and watched them have similar transformations through detoxing, sometimes coming back to life after long periods of dealing with uncomfortable symptoms. But leaving town wasn’t practical or affordable for everyone, so I started to research and design a way to achieve the same results without the need to go on retreat, a way of detoxing that everyone could afford. This is what I present to my patients and to you as the Clean program.

CHAPTER THREE Global Toxicity: Another Inconvenient Truth

Ever since my first consultation with a psychiatrist in New York, I constantly found myself asking, “How and why did my brain cells forget their chemistry?”

The for serotonin level in my brain, which I was told explained the problem, was simply a description of what happens when the chemistry is forgotten by the neurons. I wanted to find out how and why. In medicine, understanding how and why is the real “diagnosis.” This is what doctors do.

Doctors used to pride themselves on diagnosing a problem by observation and deduction: they’d take a good patient history, listen, and observe. Modern doctors, pressed for time and fearful of lawsuits, heavily rely on blood tests, X-rays, sonograms, endoscopy, and many other laboratory evaluations. In India, working out of our bus-turned-mobile-hospital, with no equipment other than a stethoscope, our ears, eyes, and noses, my colleagues and I returned to the simpler methods of observation. Eastern schools of medicine don’t see patients as isolated from their environment—including family, village, and spiritual path. Changes in environment or the predominant quality of one’s thoughts are considered equally important as changes in body temperature. All aspects of a patient’s life are believed to affect each other significantly and play a role in the maintenance of well-being. The root of disease is also found this way, by looking at both the bigger and the smaller picture together. Physical, mental, emotional, social, and environmental symptoms are all taken into consideration when making a diagnosis. Finding the common thread that ties them together often reveals the underlying imbalance at the origin of disease.

Back in the United States, chronic diseases were on the rise, often with such difficult and intimidating names that patients and doctors forgot to ask how and why. The name “became” the disease. The meaning of the word “diagnosis” changed. It did not mean understanding how and why anymore. It became the title of a list of symptoms and test results that matched most of the ones the patient presented with. It had become a code. A diagnosis could be entered into a computer and a list of medications that were covered by insurance companies for that specific code would appear on the screen. It also showed how many days of hospital stay were approved for that same code. What the doctor thought did not matter as much anymore.

The practice of medicine was looking a lot like the supermarkets that early on had impressed me so much. It was very evident that I wasn’t the only one whose cells were forgetting their chemistry. The growth in the rates of depression was all around me. More and more patients were on antidepressants. Health news was full of reports on the rising epidemic of diseases connected to diet and lifestyle. And the financial news echoed with reports of the meteoric rise in the value of stock in pharmaceutical companies, especially the ones that had patented antidepressants. My specialty, heart disease, headed the list of problems, followed by cancer. The World Health Organization announced that these diseases occurred at higher rates in industrialized countries than in developing nations.

It didn’t make sense. On one hand, science and technology were advancing in giant leaps. We had broken the genetic code, invented nanotechnology, and created robots that perform surgery. There was a false sense of security and hope that, sooner or later, medicine would discover the cure for everything. Yet, when I looked around, I saw that everybody was sick. Everyone was on medications. Judging by the results, our medical system was not working. The more technologically advanced we became, the sicker we got. We had not improved health on the planet or our planet’s health. On the contrary, things were getting worse, sooner and faster.

Diseases seemed to affect younger and younger patients all the time. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and many other chronic diseases used to be seen primarily in the aging population. Now one in three American kids were overweight or obese, and the trend was growing. These statistics and trends were obtained by analyzing data from hospitals and doctors’ offices, where patients are never asked about the bigger picture, and the small-picture inventory was lacking information as essential as diet. Apparently, there was no time for that.

At random times during my days of “factory line” medicine, my meditation teacher’s words would ring in my ears, “Don’t worry, don’t hurry,” interrupting the rush from patient to patient and bringing me into the present moment. I would suddenly remember to apply the same observation methodology in the clinic that I used in India. In this way, another picture started to emerge. I noticed a quieter, but even bigger problem, one that existed off the radar, that was not reported by the media, and had no clinical studies and research: a stream of people who did not have major health problems, yet were physically, mentally, and emotionally “off.” Bloated, tired, itchy, moody, sneezy, constipated, foggy, swollen—it seemed as if most of my patients and friends had some type of disorder about to surface.

Curiously, the blood and other tests routinely ordered at a physical examination were absolutely normal. Without an explanation and reassured that nothing was really wrong by the normal test results, these people accepted their complaints as part of ordinary modern life, often justified as the wear and tear on our body parts, the expected result of aging. But left unattended, these conditions were the beginning of a more serious disorder. Looking at the patients’ bigger picture, one would invariably find parallel social, financial, or emotional distress.

I kept searching for an answer, a diagnosis in the “old school” sense. What was making humanity so uncomfortable, unhappy, irritated, and sick? What was the bigger picture?

As above, so below. This universal rule guides the holistic thinking that is the backbone of most Eastern traditions of healing. To fully understand a cell, one has to understand the organism of which that cell is a part and how it relates to the other cells in it. In the school of meditation in India I learned to look at planet Earth as a living organism. According to this analogy, the rivers are its arteries, the forests its lungs, the mountain chains its ribs, and human beings, circulating by the billions, are one of the many types of cells that inhabit this organism. Humans were getting sick, but what about the planet, the organism they are a part of? That was also in the news, just not in the health section. In those days, it was starting to make headlines: global warming, “an inconvenient truth.” The Earth had a fever.

A fever is a symptom that reveals there is something wrong somewhere. It is a nonspecific sign. Many different diseases can cause a fever as one of their symptoms. It is important to find out what exactly is causing it, so we can treat the real cause, not just bring the temperature down. In order to find the cause, doctors ask questions, observe, and order blood tests to see the circulating cells and also to study the chemicals that reveal the inner climate. With all the information gathered, a diagnosis can be made. In modern Western cultures, because it’s so common, cancer is on the “suspect” list when a fever persists. It is in everyone’s mind even when getting a routine checkup. Very often, when I sit with patients to go over their tests results, before I get a chance to speak, they ask, “Doc, just tell me. Do I have cancer?” It is probably the most feared diagnosis.

Cancer cells are also cells that forgot how to do their chemistry. But cancer cells forgot how to do their math as well, and their geography, and their grammar, and even how to behave within a community. When you look at cancer cells under a microscope, you see cells that kill each other and every other cell in the neighborhood; they grow and reproduce unusually fast, disregarding the natural laws of space, population density, and food availability. They also have a tendency to travel to distant places and conquer new territories. When that happens, it’s called metastasis, and it means the cancer has spread. Cancer cells eat different foods than healthy cells. The waste products they eliminate into the circulatory system are often toxic chemicals that affect the whole organism that hosts them. Cancer cells, like most cells, are microscopic, but size doesn’t matter. Such a small organism can initiate an inner revolution that can kill the strongest of men and women.

These thoughts were on my mind as I searched for the answer to my question. Sometimes a diagnosis takes time. Many times, when someone is obsessed with a question, the answer comes at the least expected moment, when one is doing or seeing something seemingly unrelated. A sudden realization closes an inner loop, and an “Aha!” moment occurs, like an inner detonation that sends waves that can be felt all over the body.

This “Aha!” moment came for me soon after I started my detox program at We Care. The effects of eliminating toxins and the dulling mucus from my body lifted a cloud that had prevented me from seeing.

The planet has a fever. Random chemical analysis and laboratory tests of the planets’ fluids and gases show something alarming. There are toxic chemicals everywhere. These chemicals are affecting everything and every other cell in this organism. The planet is in critical condition. If nothing changes, the prognosis is fatal in the short term.