Never Be Sick Again (37 page)
More Than a Sum of Our Parts
Modern medicine, pumped up with huge amounts of talent and money, is a strange dichotomyâtechnologically advanced and cutting-edge, yet obsolete and ineffective. Medicine does a superb job managing medical emergencies and disease symptoms, but is woefully incapable of curing disease or promoting a lifetime of wellness. In medical schools, physicians study one organ or system at a time and then specialize, without developing an understanding of health or the body as a whole. A lack of holistic understanding and appreciation transfers to medicine's focus on disease rather than health.
Actually, our modern health-care system is a disease-care system. Our health-care providers are paid for treating disease, not for preventing disease. Treatments can continue for the entire life of the patient. Our current system does not offer financial incentives for health, but provides a lot of money for treatments of disease.
We need to examine the roots of modern conventional medicine. “Modern medicine” is based on a seventeenth-century understanding of the human body, and it has failed to incorporate the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Wrapped in the cloak of modern science, at its core,
conventional medicine is based on archaic concepts
that presently are scientifically obsolete and invalid.
Allow me to explain what I mean.
Beginning with Isaac Newton's discovery of the laws of motion, the human body and the universe both became regarded as a clockwork mechanism. From this perspective, anything can be dissected into parts, studied scientifically and understood. Medicine of the time followed this mechanistic concept: Take the machine apart, study the parts, understand how they work and use that understanding in medical care. People began to believe they could control health simply by understanding the mechanical workings of the physical body. Many people still believe this, although it isn't true. Today the medical establishment continues to regard the body as a complex, glorified machine; the focus is on the parts, not the whole.
Disease is seen as confined to specific locations or organs, rather than as affecting the whole person. Treatments regularly remove or replace body parts without addressing the reasons that something went awry. By assuming the body is a machine that cannot heal itself, the only effective therapies are thought to be those that come from the outside, such as mechanical techniques, surgical invasion and powerful drugs. The pharmaceutical drug industry “fixes” health problems by adding molecules to the body that are designed to control the function of certain body parts, without seeking to understand or remedy the reasons for the malfunction. A dysfunction in the body's self-regulating and balancing mechanisms is caused by cellular malfunction, and it affects the whole body, not just a part of it. With machines, the function of the whole can be predicted by the sum of the parts, but humans are not machines. A living organism is much greater than the sum of its parts. We are alive, and our minds influence our bodies.
In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein challenged existing perceptions and fundamentally changed the way people view the world. By proving that matter and energy are one, Einstein brought forth a new field for studying the laws of the universe, quantum physics, in which human beings are regarded as networks of complex energy systems that interact with physical and cellular systems.
We human beings are not Newtonian in nature, but rather Einsteinian. Humans are matter, but we are also multidimensional energy systems, and our thoughts, beliefs and attitudes create energy fields that influence our biochemistry and affect our health. Yet our physicians continue to use the mechanical Newtonian model.
No Ground to Stand On
We are brought up to think of medicine as scientific and that the techniques and procedures used by our physicians are the result of extensive scientific study. Not so. Several studies, including a 1978 report by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, have estimated that no scientific basis exists for 80 to 90 percent of all procedures used in medical practice.
In fact, traditional or allopathic medicine has no general theory of the organism, health or diseaseâno unifying framework to tie it all together. Without a theory and a framework, there is no understanding of what the problems are, how they developed or how to solve them, and everything becomes an ad hoc experience. The mechanistic manner in which medicine is practiced today has never been proven by scientific method. As Lynne McTaggart, author of the 1996 book,
What
Doctors Don't Tell You,
wrote: “For all the attempts to cloak medicine in the weighty mantle of scienceâa good deal of what we regard as standard medical practice today amounts to little more than 20th-century voodoo.”
Doctors usually have little idea what is wrong with their patients or how to make them well. And how can one blame them? They spent many years in medical school, learning technicalities, procedures and protocols, and were taught that “cures” must come from outside the body. That is why physicians have no faith or instruction about the natural capacity of the human body to heal itself. In fact, many argue that almost all conditions presented to physicians are self-limiting and spontaneously resolve by the natural healing process, regardless of what the physician happens to prescribe.
This natural healing process must become our focus, because the magnitude of sickness in this country is astonishing. More than three out of four Americans now suffer from a diagnosable chronic disease, a dilemma that the modern medical establishment not only fails to solve, but actually contributes to. Things must change. In March 2001, The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences issued a report titled,
Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for
the 21st Century.
According to this report: “. . . between the health care we now have and the health care we could have lies not just a gap, but a chasm.” The report also said: “Health care harms patients too frequently and routinely fails to deliver its potential benefits.”
The United States has the most expensive, yet one of the most inadequate health care systems in the world. Our infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. According to the World Health Organization, our overall health is worse than that of almost every European country, as well as Australia, Canada, and Israel. According to the above Institute of Medicine report, “. . . a fundamental, sweeping redesign of the entire health care system is required.” The report cited that “. . . the nation's health care delivery system has fallen short in its ability to translate knowledge into practice and to apply new technology safely and appropriately.” It went on to say, “. . . if the system cannot consistently deliver today's science and technology, it is even less prepared to respond to the extraordinary advances that surely will emerge during the coming decades.”
We've spent hundreds of billions of medical research dollars on outmoded science, which explains why we have not found the cause or the cure for a single chronic disease. Decades after President Richard Nixon declared “war on cancer” and after countless billions of dollars spent, malignancy survival rates are not noticeably improved. We have yet to produce a truly effective cancer treatment; every minute another American dies of cancer. The situation is similar with heart disease. We can implant a new artificial heart surgically, but we cannot prevent or cure heart disease. Why? Because so few resources are devoted to study of the body's healing systems or to help patients understand and support their own health at the cellular level. Reallocating resources with these priorities in mind is the direction medicine must take if it is ever to be effective in reversing our epidemic of chronic disease.
Everyone Is Unique
Interested only in identifying symptoms, physicians do not listen to their patients. Patients are regarded as machines, similar to every other machine; doctors need not learn anything unique about individual people. A study reported in the December 1993 issue of
Internal Medicine News
found that 70 percent of patients were interrupted by their doctor within eighteen seconds after the patient began to describe their symptoms. As soon as the doctor has matched symptoms to a disease, treatments follow established protocols. Everyone with the same “disease” receives the same treatment.
Such procedures completely ignore one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century: biochemical individuality. Two people with the same so-called disease may need different treatments because no two people's cells are malfunctioning for exactly the same reasons. Modern medicine does not teach physicians how to recognize or work with each patient's unique biochemistry.
Even when presented with scientific evidence that an alternative system works best, most physicians resist change and fail to apply these findings. Their disease-based focus interferes with the essence of what health care should be: the optimization of health at the cellular level based on a person's unique biochemistry and life circumstances.
Resistant to Change
Adopting a more rational system of medicine would result in an enormous reduction in health-care costs by eliminating hundreds of thousands of physicians and closing thousands of hospitals (not to mention the potential financial ruin of drug companies). Obviously, the economic incentive to maintain the status quo and not change is enormous. Currently, cancer is a billion-dollar-a-day “industry” in the United States, and more people are employed in the AIDS industry than there are sufferers of AIDS.
Modern medicine's efforts to protect money and jobs were vividly described and documented in the 2000 book by former New York State Legislator, Daniel Haley,
Politics in Healing:
The Suppression and Manipulation of American Medicine.
Haley points out that in the twentieth century several inexpensive and highly effective cures for cancer were introduced in American medicine. The developers of these cures, well-meaning people, were naive and believed that the world would welcome a cancer cure. What these peopleâamong others, Harry Hoxey, William Frederick Koch, Royal Raymond Rife and Dr. Andrew Ivyâall failed to understand is that someone who threatens the survival of a prospering and growing industry with an inexpensive cure will not be welcomed. Proven and effective cancer cures were repudiated and suppressed by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Discoverers of these cures were isolated, harassed, persecuted, prosecuted, financially ruined and destroyed, and their treatments essentially have been lost. Some events described in Haley's book are bizarre and are hard to believe, yet they are documented by evidence presented at jury trials and recorded in court records. The FDA, AMA, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society still continue to suppress cancer cures, such as that developed by Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski; his office has been raided by FDA agents and U.S. Marshals, he has been persecuted relentlessly, and his medical license is on a ten-year probation during which time he is not allowed to see new patients. These actions prevent public access to treatments and intimidate other unorthodox physicians.
Physicians who have worked all their lives within the existing system often feel threatened by change. The majority of physicians support efforts by state medical boards and government regulatory boards to suppress alternative approaches. A less expensive, more effective way of practicing medicine threatens their economic well-being, as well as philosophically questions the validity of their lifetime work. Physicians who have dared to introduce alternative treatments have had their licenses revoked, been financially ruined, and ostracized because they were willing to help patients with treatments that were not the “accepted standard of care.”
A chilling example of how nonconforming doctors are kept in line is the case of Jonathan Wright, M.D. On May 6, 1992, a small army of FDA agents plus ten police officers, with drawn guns and flak jackets, attacked Dr. Wright's office. Rather than simply opening the office door and walking in, they broke it down, terrifying his staff and patients in the waiting room. Why? Was Wright on the FBI's list of known terrorists? No. Wright was merely an outspoken critic of modern medicine and the FDA, and he regularly used vitamins and natural substances in his practice. This approach to healing made him a target.
During the fourteen-hour raid, all of Wright's records, equipment, manuals, vitamins, minerals and herbs were confiscated. They even took his postage stamps. None of Wright's patients ever had complained about him. Wright was never charged with anything, nor ever prosecuted for anything. Yet, both his practice and his reputation were damaged. It took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to have his patient records returned and his practice restored. Events like this are not supposed to happen in America, but they do happen to doctors who step out of line. As a result, we are denied the right to choose certain treatments because our doctors cannot offer them.
Most people are unaware that a physician can lose his or her license to practice by failing to adhere to “prevailing standards of practice in their community.” A loss of license can occur even if no patient is harmed, no patient has complained and the condition of the patients involved actually improved. Physicians can learn something new at a medical conference or from a medical journal, but they cannot use it in their practice. The only treatments allowed are the ones already in use, which makes innovation and progress slow to almost impossible. Physicians must be very courageous to depart from traditional practices, even if they believe doing so can be helpful.