Newsflash: Your Doctor Thinks You’re a Hopeless Case

Medical doctor friends always tell me that I have the best doctor job in the world. They say, “What you do is what I dreamed of doing when I first decided to be a doctor.” I’ll admit that my job as a holistic doctor is pretty cool, but I didn’t realize what I was (thank heavens) missing out on until recently when a patient who’s also a medical doctor told me a harrowing story of an experience she had in school.

She said, “A professor explained that patients always get worse and worse until they die. He drew a big downward curve on the whiteboard and explained that our job (as doctors) is to make this process as comfortable as possible.”

She said she couldn’t believe that this was really the viewpoint of most doctors, but when she asked around, she found this attitude was almost universal. Sadly, she lost her ambition to treat patients as a result of this and went into another specialty.

Where did the idea of “help patients get well” go? In the areas of trauma and acute illness I think the “get well” idea is still very much alive. But doctors have no idea how to heal or cure chronic conditions (hormone imbalances, digestive problems, pain, fatigue, depression, weight, diabetes, blood pressure, etc.), and so are reduced to managing the symptoms with lifelong drug therapy. I can almost see how the professor came to his conclusions.

A different way to think: Holistic Doctor

My job as a holistic doctor is to help patients with chronic problems recover their health to where they have a good quality of life and maintain their health by themselves. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years with tremendous success. It’s really fun. My clinic is full every day with patients who had almost given up ever getting their health and lives back… and now they’re getting better and learning how to stay that way. It’s a happy and exciting place to come to work.

I can have a job like this because I’m a holistic doctor, but I’m very aware of the confusion sometimes caused by the word “holistic.”

Holistic? What the heck IS that, anyway?

Holistic: characterized by the treatment of the whole person, considering mental and social factors rather than just the symptoms of a disease.

Most people will certainly misunderstand this definition. Would this mean that a holistic doctor does counseling to help with their patients’ “mental and social factors?” Then there’s this “treatment of a whole person?”… well, would this mean a body, mind, spirit kind of thing? Is a holistic doctor a woo-woo, “think yourself well” approach, or is it real science?

My patients are looking for a serious solution that will work for a chronic health problem that is often destroying their lives. And let’s be real here: a consistent, predictable, effective solution to a severe chronic health condition isn’t going to be a woo-woo approach.

I consider myself a holistic doctor because I work with the physical body and the intelligence that operates it. Your body has an “on-board” intelligence that runs it for you, or else you’d be so busy running your body (digesting your food, controlling your blood pressure, running your immune system) that you couldn’t do anything else! Since it’s this intelligence that knows how to heal the body and what problems are stopping that healing, logically, the body should be the doctor on the case.

The only way to achieve the results I get with my patients is to realize that ONLY the body can heal chronic health conditions. And, since the body is designed to heal itself, the only reason that a person has a health condition would be that their body has run up against some problem that has stopped the healing process from continuing.

My job is to:

1. Find out where the body’s healing process has gotten stuck or hung up, exactly why this is, and what the body needs in order to overcome the problem and continue healing.
2. Give the body the help and assistance it needs based on the testing done in #1, using some really interesting and innovative methods.

Holistic, then, means that I am testing the intelligence that runs the body to find out what to do rather than go by “the standard treatment protocol” (doctors use a decision tree set of instructions to determine the treatment steps for most diagnoses, called a protocol or guideline). Only the body knows exactly what is wrong and how it can be healed. The body is the real doctor; I’m just the assistant.

This is a new idea for lots of people

I must educate all my patients about what I do and how it works. This is necessary because, since they are the ones living in the body we’re trying to heal, they have to do most of the work. So, I’m very aware of how little is understood of holistic doctors.

But it’s cool, isn’t it?

If you are on drugs for high blood pressure, there’s a chance you could improve, and your doctor would take you off of them.

If you are diagnosed as a diabetic, there’s a chance you could not be one anymore.

If you have done “everything” to get pregnant and the doctors have told you, “There’s no physical reason you can’t get pregnant, but we are out of options,” you might be able to be a mom.

If your life is a hormonal nightmare of discomfort, mood swings, and pain, that could come to an end.

It’s true that there is no such thing as a free lunch: you will have to work hard and long to accomplish any of these things. But if you are willing to do this, your problem might be solved.

I wish you the best of luck and offer you any help or advice I can.