There is a major difference between the costs of holistic health care and the costs for medical care:

Medical care: You pay to treat an illness or condition. When a new illness or condition arises, you pay again to treat it. In most cases, treatment of a condition doesn’t reduce the chances of having a new condition occur (in many cases, stress from drug treatments makes this more likely).

Holistic care: You pay to improve your health so that your body heals your illness or condition. In the process, you improve your lifestyle and reduce the stress on your body. The result is a much healthier body with much less chance of developing new conditions.

You could say that medical care is like paying rent: this is an expense with no residual value.

Holistic care is like buying a house: the money you spend creates additional ongoing value.

The best solution for health problems? Hands down?

It’s to stay healthy enough to not have them!

Can you believe, however, that this solution is controversial? The current medical thinking is that everyone is going to get sick and need medical care at some point. You may even think this yourself (by the way, it isn’t true).

Medically, every serious illness is expensive, no matter what insurance you may have. There’s deductibles and copays, out-of-network providers, uncovered expenses of all kinds. Then there’s missed work. This can include missed promotions and opportunities just because you didn’t have the energy, concentration and drive to succeed or because you aren’t seen as reliable due to health problems.

What value would you place on missing an activity you really enjoy? How about on skipping a trip to visit family because you weren’t up to it? How about having to cut back or give up on favorite activities (hiking, swimming, tennis, etc.)?

The real cost of a health problem shows up much later when your overall health has been reduced. Will you be a couch potato because you have no other choice? Compare this to being active, outgoing and taking on challenges you really care about.

---

Dr. Billiot’s Suggestions:

• Leverage your current health potential: Becoming healthy now reduces the cost of future health problems
• Most parts of your body are healthy! It’s the weak ones that will eventually cause you grief. Find these weak areas of your body and help them to heal. This will protect your overall health.
• “Holistic Retirement Plan:” Be healthy enough to be fully alive during your retirement and not go broke from health care costs.

---

Will you still need me, will you still feed me When I’m sixty-four?

Or at least 65 (the age you become eligible for Medicare).

If you have Medicare, there’s a good chance you have two or more chronic conditions such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, or dementia.

Two-thirds of the 57 million Americans with Medicare have two or more chronic illnesses. Having multiple chronic conditions increases the risk of death and functional limitations, decreases quality of life, and leads to higher health care spending.

Managing chronic diseases can be difficult, to say the least. You often face multiple visits to one or more doctors; you must take multiple drugs at different times on different days; you have to make extra trips for tests. It can all be a bit overwhelming.

What if you just skip all this? It’s possible.

Start Now! Get Healthy!

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information that shows how your body works and how to start recovering your health for the rest of your life).

Often when a body is healing, what is happening FUNCTIONALLY (what the body is working on and trying to accomplish) is much more important than observing what is occurring PHYSICALLY (what can be observed or tested for at any given point in time).

Cleaning Out the Closet

As an analogy, think of what happens when you clean out your bedroom closet. Typically, you’ll pull everything out of the closet, sort it all out, then put it back neatly and organized.

Halfway through this job, your bedroom is really going to be (physically) a mess as you spread out the closet contents all over the place. However functionally, you are making good progress on getting the closet organized.

If someone looked at your messy bedroom and didn’t talk to you at all to find out why it was a mess, can you see that this might be misinterpreted as there being a big problem when in fact there was none?

This can happen with a medical diagnosis: the diagnostic test is a snapshot of the physical condition of a part of the body without ever asking the intelligence running the body what’s going on and why.

The doctor shows you the “diagnostic picture” (lab test) of the “messy bedroom” and says, “This is serious. This shows that your bedroom could become even terminally messy. You need to be on the drug Cleanupazide, 30mg.” So, you take the drug.

In your body, the drug causes big guys in black suits to show up in the bedroom and throw everything from the messy bedroom violently back into the closet. Then they slam the closet door and nail it shut. Voilà!  No more messy bedroom! The doctor does another diagnostic test (takes another picture of the bedroom) and shows you that now everything is “back to normal”—as long as you’re on the drug.

Takeaways:

Your body can kick up a storm during the process of healing. This does NOT mean that you’re worse or that something is wrong. Your body just might have to mess up the bedroom for a little while in order to clean out the closet.

Diagnostic tests can be very valuable, but only in the context of what is happening functionally with the body. Much of the trouble with health care today comes from disassociated testing and rote interpretation of that testing with automatic treatment. Often, doctors aren’t observing what is going on in full context.  They aren’t thinking with the functional situation (what the body may be doing and why). They are working off the theory that the body is a biochemical machine that needs to be repaired, not a living, intelligence that could have its own plans.

A Better Solution:

Working with the body to assist it to heal itself can be a much more effective approach for many health conditions.

Here is a free booklet with the story of how I developed my techniques and how those techniques work (very practical information).

I see lots of debate, disagreement and concern about “controversial holistic health care” from non-patients, but not from my patients on treatment programs. It seems that all the debate and disagreement end abruptly with results. But without the experience of results (“Nothing else has worked and this treatment is making me feel great!”), some people feel that holistic health care must be a scam or deception. But they usually can’t tell you why they feel this way. Ask a “doubter” almost any question about holistic health care and you’ll discover that they know NOTHING about it, or what they know isn’t true. But they know it isn’t conventional medicine, so therefore they’re sure it must be quackery.

This Goes Way Back

I think I can help you to better understand this thought process: When people “know” things that they can’t explain, these things are usually a part of the fabric of the society they live in.  They accept it as true because it’s generally seen by the society as true, even though they’ve never personally decided about it. This disagreement with holistic health care probably goes back to a French philosopher named Renè Descartes in the early 1600’s. Descartes was the first to propose that the body was a machine. For this we have a lot to thank him for! Before Descartes, the body was mysterious, unknowable and dangerous to study. Seen as a machine, the body could be understood and treated.

The “body as a machine” model is responsible for all modern medicine, and certainly will continue to help find additional cures and techniques that will overcome injury and disease in the future.

The only problem with this useful model is that it isn’t completely true. This is no secret. Anyone who has extensively studied medicine, or a related subject is fully aware that the “boxes and arrows” diagrams of body functions found in textbooks are simplistic and inaccurate. Body systems are not limited to just their functions but are “fuzzy around the edges.” Areas of the body that are designed for one purpose can be found to be accomplishing something different under stressful circumstances. Medicine is referred to as an art and a science… because it certainly isn’t just a science.

This idea that bodies are something more than a machine tends to be understood by more experienced and educated professionals who have observed this for some time. Many sick lay people think that their “machine” has broken, and that the correct drug will simply repair it. Often, this idea is responsible for some of the disagreement with holistic health care: Why not just repair the machine with a drug? What’s all this OTHER stuff?

Vitalism: Debunking an Old Theory

I go one step further than the general agreement among health care professionals that bodies are more complex than machines. I operate off the assumption that bodies are (gasp!) ALIVE.

If you bring this radical idea up with many medical professionals, you should prepare to deal with fireworks. The health care field in general does NOT want to hear that bodies are alive. No, sir. And, once again, the reason for their upset is part of the fabric of our society. It has to do with vitalism.

Vitalism: the theory that the origin and phenomena of life are dependent on a force or principle distinct from purely chemical or physical forces.

Vitalism goes back (at least) to ancient Egypt. In history, proponents of vitalism muddled about, writing up their ideas and arguing— while the scientific materialists (body-as-a-machine guys) did useful research and cured illness. So, vitalism is a big LOSER historically, and no one has any business even bringing up that subject again, right?

Body As Machine Theory Fails to Treat Chronic Illness

Well, except now medicine is becoming a big loser as well, as it fails to effectively treat more than half the population suffering with untreatable chronic health conditions:

Six in ten adults in the US have a chronic disease and four in ten adults have two or more. Chronic diseases are the leading causes of death and disability in the United States. They are also the leading drivers of the nation’s $3.5 trillion in annual health care costs.  –CDC (link is to CDC website)

Here’s news: medicine’s Descartes model of “man as a machine” is responsible for these statistics, and ONLY vitalism (reinvented) has any hope of changing them.

This is because chronic illness results from overall deteriorating health, not specific “malfunction of the body machinery.” So medical (machine) treatments don’t work, but working with the (living) body to assist it to heal itself does work.

Vitalism in the past was mystic or religious. It was all about how you couldn’t know stuff, where the Descartes camp was all about how you can find stuff out. I’m with Descartes on this one. My version of vitalism is all about knowing how to work with life, understanding how life affects the body and using this information the same as the scientific materialists did: to get results with patients and improve lives.

Practical Use of Your Body’s Intelligence

You may not understand what the underlying quantum physics is doing when you hammer a nail into wood, but that lack of knowledge doesn’t affect your getting the job done. Similarly, I don’t fully understand life, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to observe and measure and predict what life will do with a body and help that body to heal.

Any disagreement you run into about holistic health care is probably a misunderstanding based on the old vitalism arguments. Your friend thinks you’re getting mystic therapies that make no scientific sense.

Everything I do is based on anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, genetics—because this is how bodies function. I test the nervous system to find out what the intelligence (life) operating the body has as a healing priority and simply become an effective assistant by using (body as a machine) information in the way that the (vitalism) body wants to.

The result? Patients with chronic illness recover.

Deus ex machina.