Holistic health Care: Those actions which improve a person’s overall health so as to facilitate rapid healing of health problems, and to create stable good health throughout their life.

Your friend gives you a condescending look and says, “Are you still going to that witch doctor?”

I don’t know why this particular line is so popular, but at least a thousand patients have told me someone asked them this at least once.

Whether it’s the witch doctor line or some other criticism, it seems that patients and practitioners of holistic health care must deal with skepticism and derision, even from well-meaning friends, family members and doctors. It’s not uncommon to have a spouse watch the complete turnaround of their partner’s health, and then express disbelief that their treatment had anything to do with the improvement that “would have happened anyway.”

I often talk to people who are confused about the whole concept of alternative health care… they understand that it must work, but for the life of them they can’t see how this could be. It just won’t square with their concepts of how health care functions.  No drugs? How in the world can that do anything?

So, I want to clarify one thing for you: WHY is there so much confusion about what I do, “holistic health care” compared to “traditional medicine.”

Seven Points: How Alternative or Holistic Health Care Works

1:  To recover from any health condition requires that the body must heal itself. Drugs and surgeries, when successful, make it possible for the body to heal. But no doctor has ever caused cells to regenerate or healing to occur. Doctors are facilitators of healing. Only the body itself can cause healing and health.

2: Your body is a closed system and must make do with only the resources that it has available. The healthier a body is, the more resources it has and the greater its resistance to illness and injury.  The healthier a body is, the less likely that body will be to become ill or injured and the faster that body will recover if it does have a problem.

3: THEREFORE: If a person is ill or injured, logic would dictate that this person should take actions to improve overall health in an effort to facilitate healing. Experience has shown that targeted stress reduction based on accurate testing can improve the body’s ability to heal… dramatically at times.

4: Holistic Health Care definition: Those actions which improve a person’s overall health so as to facilitate rapid healing of health problems, and to create stable good health throughout their life.

5: A person using holistic health care may boost their body’s ability to heal across the board, to the point that their body may heal from “medically un-treatable” and severe or long-term chronic health conditions.

6: If a person truly heals, then the underlying cause of their problem is reduced or eliminated and that person may no longer have to take drugs, even the “rest of your life” drugs. Properly done holistic health care has the potential to help an unhealthy person become healthy.

7: MOST IMPORTANTLY: Holistic health care has the potential to prevent a healthy person from becoming unhealthy, or to prevent a recovered person from getting ill again. It is the secret to avoiding health problems in the first place and to avoid relapses if one has gotten well.

Where the Confusion Comes From

Medical treatment is based on the emergency model: the cause of a problem is the problem itself. A cut that is gushing blood is the cause of the bleeding problem… yes it is! This model works very well for emergencies, and can save your life.

In a non-emergency chronic health problem, the medical model fails. High blood pressure is caused by… high blood pressure? Really? There is no treatable cause creating the high blood pressure?  Apparently not, as the treatment is a drug to lower blood pressure, taken for the rest of the person’s life. The holistic model would improve a person’s overall health until the body no longer had to have high blood pressure. The end result of this treatment would be: 1) No more blood pressure problems. 2) Overall better health: energy, attention, enjoyment of life. 3) Heightened resistance to developing additional health problems.

Your friend or family member making the “witch doctor” comment likely thinks that you believe that the supplements you are taking will replace your blood pressure meds. This is nonsense, but your friend can’t think with the idea of improved health ending health problems. They think that ONLY direct treatment of the problem could possibly be valid, therefore your holistic treatment must be a form of direct symptom treatment. You can see how this would confuse them: to them you are taking a whole-food supplement instead of a drug and expecting the same result.

Hope this helps!

Dr. Billiot

Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted

This old adage means that you are doing something about a problem after the problem has already occurred.

I think it perfectly describes our current efforts at preventing heart disease.

How successfully are we preventing a disease that 48.5% of the population is suffering from? (2016 numbers). I’d say we are utterly failing.

Example:

Here’s an invented scenario that’s similar to heart disease:

“Disease:” Floor Rot.

Symptoms: Floor collapses under people’s feet causing injury and death.

Actual Cause: The roof leaks, and the constant water on the floor rots the floorboards.

“Official” Cause: “Floorboard Anemia” or weakness in the floor.

Floorboard Anemia Prevention:

(Suggestions are from the Floorboard Anemia Association). ?

• Regular mopping of your floors to reduce water buildup.
• Spreading around the medication “Sawdust” every day to sop up additional water.
• Open Floorboard Surgery to replace rotting floorboards.
• Dieting to lose weight so you’re less likely to break through the floor.

If “Floorboard Anemia” was injuring or killing 48.5% of the population and people were paying over $500 Billion annually to treat it, can you see how outrageous it might seem to make a statement like the title of this article? “Floorboard Anemia Prevention is Bogus?”

Can you see how radical it might sound to suggest fixing the roof if every pharmacy in the country was selling $500 a year in “Sawdust” medications to half the population? How about if every hospital in the country depended on the income from “Open Floorboard Surgery?”

“Fixing the Roof” of Cardiovascular Disease

Atherosclerosis is the most common cause of cardiovascular disease. (Link is to Mayo Clinic website)

Atherosclerosis is the buildup of fatty plaques in the arteries. Atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease.

The “leaky roof” in heart disease is CHRONIC INFLAMMATION. If this leaky roof was repaired, heart disease from other sources would still exist, but as a minor health condition, not the #1 cause of death that it is today.

All About Inflammation

Inflammation is the response of the immune system to cellular damage and physical stress. It’s the process of repairing damage to your body. So, normal inflammation is a very good thing and is necessary to your continued health.

Health problems such as heart disease come from CHRONIC inflammation. Chronic just means that it doesn’t go away or keeps coming back.

Chronic inflammation comes from chronic sources of stress. When your body is constantly being damaged and can’t repair itself, the immune system will always be creating inflammation.

Some sources of chronic stress are obvious and can possibly be avoided:

• Smoking
• Obesity
• Excessive alcohol or other drugs
• Long-term exposure to irritants such as polluted air or industrial chemicals
• Living under constant emotional stress

There are functional causes of chronic stress that lead to chronic inflammation as well:

• Autoimmune diseases
• Infections or injuries that never heal

A very common source of chronic inflammation that I see at the clinic is from damage to the lining of the intestines. (Link is to Harvard Medical School website). In an unhealthy intestine, the lining can weaken and allow toxins and bacteria to get into the bloodstream, causing chronic inflammation. In my 25 years of experience working with severe chronic health conditions, I have seen this digestive problem expand from being an occasional issue to one that affects most of my patients in one way or another.

Solutions to Chronic Inflammation

Chronic inflammation is the “leaky roof” of heart disease, but is also implicated in cancer, arthritis, diabetes, asthma and neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer’s).

Common symptoms that you might experience include fatigue, mouth sores, rashes, IBS symptoms, abdominal pain and chest pain. If you have one or more of these and they never go away, it’s likely caused by chronic inflammation.

I have developed effective solutions that have been proven with thousands of inflamed patients over more than two decades.

All these solutions are typically done together simultaneously:

First: Test to confirm the inflammation using nervous system testing and blood testing. This also sets a baseline, so I know how much improvement has occurred with objective measures.

Second: Handle obvious diet-related causes. I have worked out very successful ways of doing this that don’t cause stress, cravings or feeling deprived.

Third: Use clinical nutrition to give the body exactly what it tests for in the way of replacement parts and supplies so that it can de-stress and reduce its own inflammatory responses.

Fourth: Use very specific acupressure therapies to reduce stress (particularly if the person has inflammatory gut problems) and therefore reduce inflammation.

How Could You Assist Your Body to Heal?

Here is a free booklet you can read online in 30 minutes that will explain how your body can be assisted to heal itself successfully from many “permanent” medical conditions such as chronic inflammation.

Are You Fed Up with Medicine and Want Help?

I’d be happy to get you started on improving your health. If you’ll fill out a health assessment on this website, I’ll go over the clues with you on a free phone consult (limited to greater Atlanta area). This way you can get started doing something about your health problems quickly.