Ancient Arguments that Control Your Health Care

Ancient Arguments that Control Your Health Care

Why There Is Controversy and Disagreement About Holistic Health Care

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 do 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 into 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.

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The Immunity Bottom Line

The Immunity Bottom Line

Would You Like to Avoid Getting Sick this Winter?

Your response to infection is mostly determined by your Body State:

HEALTH IS IMPROVING: You are more resistant to infection.
HEALTH IS WORSENING: You are a magnet for disease and trouble.

You have seen lots of information about how to improve your immunity:

  • Sleeping
  • Exercise
  • Eating well
  • Avoiding stress.

Doctors know that these have value, but they have observed that it’s very hit-and-miss. Sometimes these actions seem to help, and sometimes they don’t.

Here is why:

What Gets Missed

Conventional doctors are very focused on symptoms or out-of-range lab tests. They fail to see the most critical factor in overall health, which is the state of the body: is it improving or worsening?

A body that is getting worse, even slowly, is a magnet for trouble. If your body is worsening, then it is on the way out of life. It’s incrementally dying. You could compare it to a business that is going bankrupt. There are no resources to tap into to allow recovery.


A body that’s staying about the same is also on the way out, but it isn’t evident yet.


The only safety and stability of health is for a body that’s getting better, even if it’s very gradual.

Years ago, a doctor friend of mine who started practicing in the 1950s would say, “A happy body heals, and an unhappy body doesn’t.” I asked him, “Dr. Bryman, what makes a body happy?” He answered, “A happy body is one that’s improving. If it’s getting better, then it’s getting happy.”

Very Practical Information:

Are you in excellent physical condition, but you’ve been going slightly downhill for the past couple of years? You’ve noticed some weight gain, your digestion has been off for a while, you got sick more last year than usual, and recently you just haven’t had the same level of energy? You are in a declining condition and are at risk, despite your overall “good” physical condition.

Are you in poor shape with several chronic health conditions and concerned about your future health? If you could take actions to turn your condition around so that you were improving instead of worsening, you’d be much less likely to have trouble. Further, you’d feel much more confident and much less worried.

Your health outlook is more directly affected by its condition of improving or worsening than any other factor.

This common-sense observation has gotten lost in the complexities of a health care system that sees people as the parts of their various systems, glands, and organs and not as a whole.

What This Means Right Now

If your health has been declining of late:

You should get very busy fixing this no matter how “great” your health may be.

If you aren’t in good health, your most effective action is to get your body improving.

How to Create Improving Health

Generically, you can do all the good stuff you already know about: sleep, de-stress yourself, eat healthy food, and exercise.  If you’re already improving slightly, this might make it move up a bit more. If you’re staying the same, there’s a chance that doing all of this might nose your condition up just slightly. So, do these things!

If you are in a definite declining condition, the generic actions above aren’t going to be enough.

You’ll need help to be successful.

Chronic health conditions are what cause declining health. Conventional medicine has no idea what to do with these illnesses other than managing their symptoms with drugs. If you wish to improve your health, you’ll have to take a completely different approach. For this, you’ll need a functional medicine doctor, a nutritionist, or a holistic practitioner that is competent, trained, and knowledgeable.

Working with a competent professional, you may be able to turn your health around in a matter of weeks, even if you have long-term or severe problems. Bodies tend to get better or worse, but don’t do anything in the middle for very long.

Find Out: 1) What Might be causing your issues, 2) What you could do about it.

Just tap the “Free Analysis” button below, fill out the questionnaire and schedule a free phone consultation.

Difficult Skin Conditions

Difficult Skin Conditions

Difficult Skin Conditions

Why are there no working solutions for difficult or stubborn skin conditions? Often the drugs prescribed don’t work at all, have severe side effects, or stop working after a while.

Skin problems can be itchy, burning, painful and embarrassing.  Many skin conditions don’t respond to medical treatment or keep returning, making this health problem incredibly frustrating.

My practice specializes in helping people to resolve complex, stubborn health problems that haven’t responded to conventional medical care, so I have had a lot of experience with skin conditions.

Many patients with skin problems first come to me after being on continuous antibiotics for a year or more or on steroid treatments for even longer. Both of these treatments can cause damage to health and rarely result in a cure for the skin condition.

New biologic drugs are often used for skin problems. These suppress the immune system and can have serious side effects. But skin problems can be so frustrating that they drive a person to try risky solutions.

Treating Symptoms Can Cause More Problems

It’s easy to understand and empathize with people who get their skin symptoms treated, even when the treatment may damage their health.

  • Their doctor has no other solution and may believe that the treatments he knows are the only legitimate ones.
  • Going out in public with a skin condition can be embarrassing and introverting.
  • Skin conditions can be itchy, burning, and painful to drive one to distraction.

But what if the cause of your skin condition isn’t in or on your skin? What if it’s a systemic problem somewhere in your body, and the skin rash is just a clue to the real problem?

If you do nothing and “live with” your problem, or if you use drugs to suppress the symptoms, nothing is being done about the actual cause. This can result in worsening symptoms and new, seemingly-unrelated health problems.

Gut Flora
Gut Flora

Foundational Solutions: Your Gut

Inside your intestines or “gut” are trillions of microbes (bacteria). These microbes are integral to your health even though they aren’t part of your body.

Damage or imbalances to these microbes can result in out-of-control inflammation, immune system overreaction, allergies, autoimmune conditions, digestive problems, and nutritional deficiencies. Many skin conditions can be a result of gut problems.

In fact, in 28 years of helping patients with skin problems, I’d say that almost every case was related to or almost entirely a result of the gut.

A Plan for You

If you’re suffering from skin problems (or any issues related to the above list of gut symptoms), the first thing to do is test and find out what is happening.

I do this in phases: First, I reflex test and find out what is going on generally, then I use functional labs to test the details. This approach is a fraction of the expense of using high-priced functional labs to shotgun test everything.

Next, I use specialized acupressure therapies along with diet improvements and clinical nutrition (supplements) to work with your body step by step and help it to recover gut and immune health.

Commonly, your body may begin to show improvements in those areas stressed by gut problems: digestion, skin problems, brain fog, fatigue, sleep, and difficulty losing weight. Even many hormone problems will resolve once the immune system and gut are healthier.

Stop treating your skin symptoms and get your gut tested to see if the cause of your problem is more than “skin deep.”

Psoriasis Clears Up

I had been plagued with severe psoriasis, frequent headaches, and seasonal allergies for many years when I started treatment with AHA. I was helped to improve my diet and started on a program. Amazingly, my headaches stopped about a week and a half into the program. In four weeks, I had dropped eight pounds of weight due to my improved diet. In the past, as the spring/fall allergy season ushered in, I generally could stay outside only for short spurts of time before going into sneezing and nasal fits. However, this past season I hardly noticed these effects. I could actually mow the yard and work in the garden without a breathing mask! After clearing up my food and pollen allergies, Dr. Billiot tested and handled allergies to everyday products I was using such as lotions, hair products, and toothpaste. After five months into the program, my psoriasis condition took a MAJOR turn for the better. I have had this problem for 15 years and have seen 3 different dermatologists, all of whom said there was no cure for my condition. Now, my skin lesions are disappearing and returning to my normal skin texture. Fantastic! So much for those limiting traditional viewpoints that keep people from making a real breakthrough. Dr. Billiot was able to methodically drill down to the root cause of my symptoms, desensitizing my allergies and detoxifying my organs and systems, thereby allowing my body to heal itself. —G.M.
How to Not Worry and Be Happy

How to Not Worry and Be Happy

How to Not Worry and Be Happy

The biggest barrier to overcoming anxiety, worry, and depression is often the idea that nothing can be done about it.

I will show you that this isn’t true.

Further, I’ll show you how to improve your mood WITHOUT:

  • Spending any money.
  • Engaging in meditation, thought exercises, mantras or exercise.

The Agreed-On Reasons for Anxiety & Depression:

I’ve found that people often think that stress causes anxiety and depression in their lives. Another popular idea is that anxiety and depression are from chemical imbalances in the brain.

One problem with these ideas is that you are unlikely to be able to do much about either one. Another is that the chemical imbalance theory has been thoroughly debunked as a marketing idea to sell antidepressant drugs.

Sure, stress may affect your moods, but it’s more likely that stress is making an existing problem worse rather than being the main cause.

The Actual Reasons for Anxiety & Depression:

If you’re suffering from mood problems, you may have physical issues or weaknesses with your body that you aren’t connecting with your mental condition. These could be digestive problems, blood sugar, or hormone issues with mild or common symptoms you may well believe are “normal.” Further, many of these problems may not be diagnosed as a disease by your doctor, so you may think you’re physically “perfectly healthy.”

However, when combined with mental stress, these physical weaknesses can overwhelm your body and trigger anxiety and depression.

Your mental problems may be caused by these physical health problems and made worse by the stress in your life.

You Can Test This Yourself!

Try the actions below, designed to reduce the physical stress on your body. In short order (a couple of weeks, if not sooner), you will most likely see a definite improvement in your mood.

Your Assignments:

Read the labels on food and stop eating junk, preservatives, flavor enhancers, and colors.

If you can’t pronounce the ingredients or don’t know what they are, you are eating stuff that IS NOT FOOD. Artificial sweeteners and flavors, preservatives, colors, texture enhancers, flavor enhancers—all this stuff can directly affect your brain. Further, many people develop allergies to these chemicals, which can cause severe brain fog and difficulty concentrating.

Your stress may be made worse by food allergies. Try avoiding these most likely allergic foods.

Allergy testing and a health improvement program to address allergies can reduce inflammation, allow natural weight loss, and help with everything from digestive stress to brain fog (see here for more information). While the testing and treatment of allergies can permanently reduce your problems, the do-it-yourself approach can still work wonders:
Try avoiding the foods below for four weeks. I recommend doing it one food group at a time to learn what to avoid and what you can still eat. If you notice that you can think more clearly, have a better mood, or that other symptoms improve (joint pain, digestive problems), quit eating that food group.

Avoid these foods in the order given:

  • Gluten-containing foods (wheat, barley, rye).
  • Dairy foods (milk and cream are the worst, cheese and yogurt are a problem for fewer people, butter is usually OK).
  • Eggs
Stop eating refined sugar.

Your blood sugar is crucial to the correct operation of your nervous system. Eating refined sugar can make blood sugar swing from high to low and back, which can cause mood swings, depression, anxiety, and brain fog. Try this: Quit eating sugar for two weeks and see what happens. Most people who do this experiment never return to their previous sugar consumption.

AVOID Cake, cookies, candy, soda, ice cream, and other high-sugar foods.

Eat regularly, at least three times per day.

Skipping meals puts extra stress on your adrenal glands. Your adrenals are your body’s system for handling physical and mental stress. There are two things you can do to reduce adrenal stress:

Eat every four hours throughout the day, and eat within an hour of waking in the morning (your body runs out of blood sugar about an hour after waking and will force the adrenal glands to make more sugar if you don’t eat).

Eat some protein with every meal. Protein “buffers” carbohydrates and sugars and reduces stress on the adrenal glands.

Avoid Alcohol

Alcohol is often high in sugar, stresses your liver and immune system and can be very stressful to your body.

There is More that Can Be Done

It is not true that simple diet changes can eliminate most anxiety and depression. The actions recommended in this article are to demonstrate that some noticeable mood improvements are possible from something as simple as diet changes.

Every day in my clinic, I see dramatic improvements in my patient’s health and mood. Diet changes are a crucial part of my programs, but also essential is:

  • Lab tests to determine areas and causes of stress.
  • Clinical nutrition: exact supplementation gives the body the tools and replacement parts to heal.
  • Targeted acupressure treatments to destress allergies and help the body balance hormones.

By structuring these actions into an individualized health improvement program, I can provide the support needed to help my patients regain their ability to heal.

As a person’s health improves, it’s normal to see their anxiety and depression improve or disappear entirely!

Patient Story:

I used to be a fairly cranky, crabby person with little patience for inconveniences and interruptions. I tried to be patient or explain my frustrations but still felt self-conscious and helpless about being irritable and unpleasant. At work, I always found it extremely annoying and agitating to have my concentration broken by an interruption. My friends accepted me as a high-strung person who didn’t handle stress & pressure well. After being on my treatment program with Alternative Health Atlanta, I noticed that I was calmer and not agitated by interruptions. Now I can be pleasant most of the time and am not strung out by pressures. Now I notice people who are edgy, crabby, and particular about the way things proceed and think; I used to be like that. — A.W.

More Information on Anxiety & Depression

Read: Recovering from Anxiety & Depression Without Drugs

Depression no drugs
Caring and Health Care

Caring and Health Care

“My doctor does not listen to me.”

This is the most common complaint I hear about our healthcare system.

Not listening is often a symptom of a larger problem: not caring.

If you’ve ever been treated impersonally in a healthcare setting, without adequate respect, not had your questions answered, or made to feel as if you shouldn’t have asked them, you have experienced a lack of caring.

You may have experienced a failure to diagnose or treat your problem correctly because no one cared enough to make sure it was done right.

Doctor not listening
Doctor not listening

Caring is critical to improving illness and disability

Caring: to have or show respect or concern for. To pay attention. Displaying kindness and concern for others.

A person who is caring is kind. The word “kind” comes from the word “kin.” You are kind because the object of your kindness is “kin,” as family to you.

Many people have given up on expecting caring or kindness from their healthcare professionals.

I believe that if it were possible to remake health care around the concept of “caring,” this would solve many of its problems.

A Person Cares Most About Their Purpose

I think that a healthcare professional who treats you without enough care does so because their purpose has been altered to something OTHER than to help patients regain their health.

Your purpose is, by definition, what you care the most about. This is at the very heart of caring. If your doctor’s purpose is to create financial stability for his family, that’s what he will care about. His corporate management may have the purpose of keeping the board/shareholders happy by increasing profits.

The purposes of the professional and his management can become something other than helping patients, which means that there is little to no caring for those patients.

Therefore, despite their natural empathy and desire to help, many healthcare providers can act as if they care very little about providing patients with effective, caring, and affordable healthcare.

The corporate healthcare system has hijacked their purpose.

You Can Determine a Person’s Purpose by Observing What They Produce

This is a great tip: Don’t listen to what they say. Don’t watch what they do. Instead, examine what they PRODUCE. This will give you a clue as to their purpose and tell you what they care (or don’t care) about.

Our current healthcare system has produced a society where more than half the population is sick from chronic disease. (Link is to CDC website) Their PRODUCT is millions of sick people who spend large sums of money on drugs and surgeries that don’t result in any less illness.

So, based on what they are producing, you can determine what they care most about.

Happy, Healthy Woman
Happy, Healthy Woman

How Healthcare Should Be Done

Caring in healthcare is NOT some nice add-on to make the patient happier. It’s critical to getting any successful results.

In my clinic, the goal is to help patients recover their health for the rest of their lives.

The only way any progress with chronic disease can be made is to combine effective evaluation and treatment with improved lifestyles.

To be effective, I must have excellent communication with my patients. Otherwise, they can’t do their program effectively, and I won’t know exactly what is occurring with them as they heal.

The only way to be in good communication with anyone is to really care about them and like them!  How well do you communicate with someone you don’t like? Not so good, correct?

Good communication, and therefore effective treatment is a direct result of liking and caring.

Patients often need help with parts of their treatment program. The best help a practitioner can give is to be on their patient’s team! A combination of the patient desiring to recover their health and their practitioner caring about them and excited about their success can overcome most barriers to healing.

Our sad medical system suffers from short visits and overworked doctors who can come off as not caring. They often aren’t in good communication with their patients, leading to many devastating medical errors.

Caring
Caring

Success Based on Caring

By any measure, my patients are outrageously successful in recovering their health. These patients are my product, from which you can decide what my purpose might be.

  • An astounding portion of my patients reverse their declining health conditions and start improving within a few weeks of starting a program.
  • Many have their doctors take them off prescription medications because they don’t need them anymore.
  • Many are declared no longer diagnosed with one disease or another.
  • Many have resumed the lives they want to live, lives that had been curtailed or stopped by their health.
  • Many are still healthy after 5, 10, 15, and 20 years from when they were first my patients.

These patients all got excellent results because their bodies were able to heal. My caring about the patient and the patient caring about their health and their treatment program facilitated this healing.

Sure, technical knowledge and great tools are critical components, but caring is the most important part of any successful treatment program.

Anxiety and Depression

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