The Hidden Life of a Holistic Doctor

Newsflash: Your Doctor Thinks You’re a Hopeless Case

I’ve been told repeatedly by medical doctors that I have the best doctor job in the world. They tell me, “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 any doctor but her professor, 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 to recover their health to where they have a good quality of life, and that they can 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 to be a holistic doctor because I work with both 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) 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 it is wrong and how 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, there might be a solution for your problem.

Find out more

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

If you have a health problem with no solution other than to manage the symptoms, I can recommend that you stop accepting this and start researching a real solution. In many, many cases there will be a way back to health for you.

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

Marriage vs. Health

Having a health problem sucks a lot already, but the stress your health may put on your marriage can make your life even more difficult.

Your symptoms can be tough on your spouse: You’re tired. You don’t sleep well. Your lab shows your adrenals are completely fatigued, so you can barely stay awake in the afternoons– and “definitely don’t talk to me early in the mornings.” Your hormones make you irritable, moody and you have no patience at all. You may cry at nothing, then just get angry and take someone’s head off. You may have absolutely no sex drive, and you may feel completely unattractive. Pain is tough on you, and your spouse may suffer as well, just knowing you’re hurting.

What to Do?

Here are a few ideas how to help with this situation as told to us repeatedly by thousands of patients over two decades:

  • Don’t make decisions for your spouse. YOU might not want to live with you, given all your problems, but he may consider it an honor to be your husband and just want to help you as much as he can. Advice from thousands of patients who have been there: LET HIM (and DON’T feel guilty, after all he’s doing what he wants to do).
  • Your health problem is a stress on your marriage, as are many other things that can happen in life. One solution: Stop worrying about the sources of stress and instead build your marriage to be strong enough to withstand them all.
    Here is an (apparently) little-known fact about marriages: They only continue to exist, because they are constantly-created things. You can buy a new dining room table, and expect it to be around for many years without having to do anything to keep it from going away. But once you get married, only constant creation of the marriage will keep it there. Heard the term “taken for granted”? Yep, that’s the one thing a marriage can’t withstand. It might not end in divorce, but the marriage will disappear.
    Just the recognition of this one fact can be the magic that will prevent the deterioration of your marriage and begin to make it stronger.
  • OK, so you agree that it makes sense to constantly create your marriage… so what should you do? One of the single most important things is recognizing your spouse’s life. For most people, nothing is truly complete until it’s recognized by someone else. If you fix a great meal but no one comments that they liked it… you may feel sad, and aren’t likely to give yourself the credit for making a great dinner. If you tell your spouse about your day and they just grunt, it’s almost like you aren’t really there!
    Try following these guidelines for a day and see if your marriage doesn’t change almost overnight:

     

    • Acknowledge your spouse’s statements and comments by replying in a way that makes sure they know you heard and understood them while recognizing anything positive they are saying, and giving them credit for it. “Johnny got an A on his math today.”  “That’s great! You’ve really been helping him with his homework.” or “I had a bad fatigue day today, just exhausted all day.”  “Wow, I’m sorry. I know you did your job well anyway.”
    • Just hear and understand what they say, don’t try to solve their problems. Truly, most people just want to have someone listen to them and understand what they’ve said. Swear off any urge to jump in and try to solve the problem that your spouse only wants you to listen to. This can be difficult, but if you’ll just give it an experimental try and observe how much happier everyone is, you’ll stop the problem-solving.
    • Finally, just let your spouse be themselves. Find ways to compliment and acknowledge them just for being them, recognize those unique attributes that make your spouse who they are. After all, isn’t that why you got married?

Make Health Improvement a Family Project

“You can only be a victim of those things you can’t control.” –Dr. Billiot

I hate to quote myself, but this summarizes my philosophy of effective health care. My point here is to un-victimize your family by allowing them to get involved in your health improvement program. If they help, they are to some degree in control of this problem that affects them all so much. You can’t really protect them by trying to hide your problems, so why not let them help?

  • Bring them up to speed. Spouses can read your consultation report, which lists all your symptoms, stressed organs and allergies. Kids can be told a short kid-friendly version of “how we are all going to help mommy get healthier so she feels better.” Believe me, they KNOW you don’t feel good.
  • Explain how you are going to get better. Spouses can read the short EvecticsSM booklet. Kids don’t need theory, just tell them what you’re doing: supplements, diet, visits to the clinic.
  • Field Trip! If you haven’t already, bring everyone to one of your visits. Let us know beforehand so we can be prepared to explain what you’re doing and why.
  • Put your family on your diet. It’s easier to eat healthy if you’re not the only one. Your kids may gripe, but they can feel that their “dessert sacrifice” is to help mommy feel better. It’s all about making them involved and so giving them control.
  • Put them in the loop. When you write Success Stories, bring home a copy. If they are helping you, this is THEIR success as well as yours. Get us to give you a copy of your reevaluation interview and share your progress with your family. They’ll know where your progress is and what you still need to work on.

Please let me know your own experiences involving your family in your health improvement. I am always learning more to pass on to future patients.

Heart Disease Prevention is Bogus

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.

The reason for this failure is that all the preventative measures are being taken to reduce the problem AFTER it’s already happened.

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.

Is Intermittent Fasting for You?

What is Intermittent Fasting?

In a small nutshell, intermittent fasting is avoiding food of all kinds during certain periods of the day, typically for 12 to 16 hours, or for an entire day. For example, you might eat only between 8 AM and 6 PM, or you might fast for two full nonconsecutive days a week. There are a lot of variations.

The benefits: The idea is that by mimicking ancient eating schedules instead of having food available all the time you can improve health. Reportedly, you can increase your mental clarity, burn fat and lose weight, feel better overall and improve your health to avoid diseases.

Ahh! You picked up on that “reportedly” I dropped in the last paragraph. Which of course might mean that I disagree with intermittent fasting in general.

Really, I believe that some people may get wonderful benefits from intermittent fasting. I’ve read the research and rationales behind it, and some of this does makes sense.

What I don’t agree with is any diet, food, supplement or treatment that is purported to work with “everyone.” In my practice, I see mainly severe chronic cases. These people are physically very stressed. They are very toxic, and usually have some type of immune suppression. Intermittent fasting would be about the worst thing that many of these people could do to themselves.

“Testing,” a Weird New Idea?

I was explaining to a patient this morning that I can’t think of any single food, supplement or treatment that would be appropriate for every patient I’ve had in the past year. Well, except for maybe clean water.  Every person needs different solutions.

When I make this statement to people, they often ask, “But, how would you be able to tell who would benefit and who would not?” This shows how remote the concept of TESTING is from the general consciousness. If you could accurately test someone to determine what foods, supplements, diets and treatments would be effective and safe for them—why would anyone make any decisions without doing this?

In my practice, I don’t do ANYTHING without testing it first. And after 25 years of operating this way, I’ve learned a valuable lesson: If you test a lot, prepare to be surprised a lot! Often, what shows up in testing is NOT what you would have come up with on your own. There are so many variations on the causes of any symptom that I see.

Medicine’s Failure to Test

The lack of accurate testing is probably one of the main reasons that conventional medicine fails to effectively treat chronic health conditions. When treating diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, thyroid conditions, hormone imbalances, depression, etc., conventional medicine relies on protocols, not testing.

Medical doctors test to diagnose, but no testing is done to determine causes. Not knowing the cause, the doctor slavishly follows the treatment protocol for that diagnosis in order to treat the symptoms. The result is often a lessening of the symptom (which can be a very good thing in many cases) but there is no solution to the actual problem. The patient usually will suffer from the chronic health condition for the rest of their lives, and the undiscovered cause of their condition will continue to deteriorate their health.

“One Accurate Measurement is Worth a Thousand Expert Opinions”

—Admiral Grace Hopper

Medical practice relies on the doctor’s opinion as the primary method of deciding what is wrong with the patient and what treatment would be effective. This is so true that it’s normal to get a second opinion to see if you can get more than one doctor to agree on your treatment.

My long experience is that many—maybe most—people are so used to this that they’ll shrug and say, “OK, so what’s the problem with opinions?” The problem is that an opinion is really a guess.

Doctors have been practicing this way for so long that we think it’s normal. But what other profession could possibly get away with this approach? Would you get a “second opinion” on the engineering of a bridge or skyscraper or the design of your car? No, these and almost all other professions rely on accurate measurements and proven methods based on scientific and engineering principles that always get results.

Engineers do not guess. Neither do carpenters, chefs, pilots, accountants or carpet installers.

In our entire society, professionals are expected to “know their stuff” and get a predictable, effective result. Except for doctors! (And, maybe philosophers, sports bookies and politicians.)

The Takeaway:

Everyone is different.

Your genetics, damage from illnesses and injuries, diet you were raised on, preferences, environment, available food, drug history, stress history, personality and many, many more variables are all different from other individuals.

So, there is no “universal” diet, food, lifestyle, supplement, drug or treatment that would get good results on everyone. Far, far from it!

The ability to test any of the above items before recommending them to an individual is not only of critical importance, it is obvious.

Because, the only other option would be to GUESS.

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.

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.

The CBD Oil Trap

A supplier sent me some samples of skin cream yesterday made with CBD oil… CBD in skin cream? I was a little amazed by this, though I know that CBD oil is apparently being sold by everyone for almost everything. After seeing the skin cream, I got a wild idea and looked up—yes!—CBD oil toothpaste! It’s a real thing!

You might think that I’m writing here about being either for or against the CBD oil fad. But to me, the claims for CBD oil isn’t the issue at all. In my experience, CBD oil along with a large part of the $120 Billion sold in supplements every year has created a very evil trap.

This trap can string along anyone with a health problem, wasting their time, money and hope. It can cause huge frustration.

But if you understand this trap, you will also understand some very important concepts about how your body heals. Avoiding this trap can put you on the correct road to long-term health improvement. And if you are a person who researches your health problems and takes supplements to improve them, this information can improve your health, your bank account and free up a lot of your time.

How the Trap Works

Here’s an example of this trap in action: You have a health problem, let’s say it’s sleep. You lie awake at night and have difficulty waking in the morning. So, you Google sleep problems and see that supplements with magnesium, 5 HTP, melatonin and GABA all are supposed to help with sleep. Hey, what have you got to lose? These are natural supplements, not drugs with side effects. You buy the supplements and a week later you get a couple of really great nights of sleep. Happiness! You have solved your problem.

Except that two weeks later you’re back to not sleeping. But you now know from experience that supplements can fix the problem, it’s just a matter of getting the right ones! Back to Google and the on-line supplement stores.

If you have experienced this then you know that the cycle can continue indefinitely. Sometimes your health problem seems to improve, then it gets worse. You can’t ever seem to find the right supplements to fix it permanently, but you get enough encouragement from temporary or partial successes that you keep trying.

Why Supplements Stop Working

Your body is a closed system. It is forced to work with whatever resources it has available and it has no way of notifying you if it’s running short on something.

Often, stresses and damage occur that your body does not have the resources to fully repair. It’s like fires that are burning and can’t be completely put out. In order to keep the fires from spreading, your body has firetrucks parked permanently around them constantly pouring on water. But there are only a fixed number of firetrucks, so if there’s a fire without enough firetrucks available to fully control it, the uncontrolled stress can produce a symptom.

By chance, one of the supplements you try might reduce stress on one of the fires. This allows the body to move some of the firetrucks away from this fire to another one that has been creating a symptom. So, you take a supplement and see that the symptom is improved. From this you conclude that the supplement you took is fixing this symptom, when really there is no connection at all.

After some time, another stress causes the body to reassign the firetrucks that had been controlling the symptom and you are back where you started (less the price of the supplements).

The real error you can make to get stuck in this trap is to try to treat health problems using a supplement as a drug. The entire concept of “take this supplement to help this symptom” is the medical model of treating symptoms, just using supplements instead of drugs.

What Does Work to Resolve Health Problems?

The effective method of solving stubborn health conditions is:

Find out where the body has become stuck or hung up in the healing process, then assist it past this stuck point until it’s healing normally again. If it sticks repeatedly, keep testing and assisting as needed until the body resumes its normal ability to maintain itself.

It helps to understand how health problems develop in the first place.

In our current environment, your body is under considerable stress all the time. There are toxins in the air, water and food. The food supply is highly processed and mostly grown with chemical fertilizers, creating significantly less nutrition than even 50 years ago. Emotional stress is pretty much constant.

Your body was originally designed a long time ago (we are still on version 1.0, there hasn’t even been an update!). This original body design was for a world without most of the toxic and emotional stress we deal with today. So, your body is being constantly damaged on a daily basis just by living in its current environment. This is fine, so long as your body can keep up with the repair and maintenance for the damage being done. But once it gets behind, the backlog of unrepaired damage can start to build up. When your body has too much stress from this damage to successfully hide it from you, you’ll get a symptom. This is the source of most chronic (ongoing or repeating) health problems.

The only real solution to this problem is to help your body recover its ability to heal itself to the point that it can get back on top of its maintenance and repair jobs.

How Do You Assist a 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.

Are You Fed Up with Endless Trial-and-Error 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.

Are Millennials the Canaries in the Coal Mine?

I just saw some startling statistics from a recent Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) report:

  • After age 27, Millennials chances of major health problems increase sharply
  • Millennials have higher rates of common health conditions than their Gen-X predecessors did at the same ages
  • As their health continues to decline, Millennials are going to be a huge financial burden on the already overwhelmed healthcare system.

Think about this: Before they reach their third decade of life, Millennials are at risk for chronic diseases that their grandparents may be facing.

Two Questions:

ONE: Why? What is destroying the health of young people who have grown up with the latest advancements of medicine, diet and a cleaner environment?

TWO: How can this trend be reversed, and how can we make sure that the next generation isn’t in even worse condition?

Children’s Health Has Been Sliding for Generations

You’ve almost certainly noticed that there has been a long-term health slide for our kids. I can recall that when I was in grade school, kids weren’t on drugs for ADHD. The school wasn’t a “peanut free zone” because of severe food allergies. There weren’t any diabetics in my class. There weren’t more than a couple of “fat kids” in my class, either.

The reason behind this deterioration of children’s health would likely be a major reason for the data in this Blue Cross Blue Shield study.

The Reason? Gut Microbes

In your body, there are about 10 times as many microbes as there are cells. That’s about 360 trillion microbes… mostly in your small intestine. You can’t live without these gut microbes, as they provide many services for your body including digesting your food and producing most of your immune system.

Here’s an article from Scientific American on gut microbes

If you damage your supply of gut microbes, you become much more likely to develop many health conditions, especially those caused by a weakened immune system. This would include health conditions created by inflammation, auto-immune, allergies, etc.

Gut Microbes are damaged by:

  • Antibiotics (drugs you take, residual drugs in meat you eat, and environmental antibiotics in hand soap and many other products).
  • Food additives (preservatives, flavor enhancers, dyes, etc.)
  • Environmental chemicals you get exposed to all the time.
  • Eating too much sugar and refined carbohydrates (this causes fungus in your small intestine to overgrow and destroy the beneficial bacteria).

But the real catch is where your gut microbes come from: you get your mother’s microbe culture during your birth. So, if she had damaged microbes, you were born with a compromised digestive and immune system. If you were a C-Section birth, it’s even worse.

There are certainly many additional challenges that make it difficult to maintain good health in our society. However, most of these stresses piggyback on the gut microbe problem or are made much worse by it.

Then there’s the single largest and most vicious reason for declining health: The Big Lie.

The Big Lie

The Big Lie is:

“Many health conditions are permanent; you can’t get ever get completely well and will need ongoing treatment for the rest of your life.”

This Lie applies to diagnosed diseases as well as non-diagnosed symptoms.

Here’s a partial list:

Permanent Diagnosed Diseases:

Diabetes, high blood pressure, IBS, GERD, asthma, allergies, high cholesterol, depression, heart disease, arthritis, chronic respiratory diseases.

Permanent Symptoms (possibly without a diagnosis):

Fatigue, sleep problems, digestive problems, anxiety, hair loss, weight gain, back/shoulder/neck/knee/hand pain, brain fog, memory problems, menstrual and menopause problems, infertility.

I call this the Big Lie because I watch bodies become healthy and heal themselves of every one of these conditions on a regular basis.

None of these problems can be successfully solved using drugs or surgery, and our current medical system uses ONLY drugs and surgeries. So, medically all these conditions are permanent.

Also, our medical system considers that it is all-knowing, and that nothing else other than drugs and surgeries has any validity. So, if you can’t get well medically then you better just learn to live with your problems.

Are You Fed Up with Medicine and Want Help?

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.

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.

Recovering from Anxiety & Depression Without Drugs

Anxiey & Depression

Anxiety and depression can mess up your life.

Mental health problems are not understood at all. Research hasn’t gotten to first base on any of them. Treatment is limited to controlling symptoms, and often the treatment is worse than the disease.

Mental Illness Usually Results From:

Over the past 25 years, I’ve had upwards of 6,000 patients suffering from anxiety and depression along with their other symptoms. At some point in their treatment with us, almost all of them have either improved dramatically or expressed that they no longer had the problem.

This sounds very promising (and it is), however I’ve never treated a patient for anxiety or depression.

I have become convinced that many mental disorders could be a result of physical health conditions. When the patient recovers physically, they also improve their mental problems.

There is a lot of science behind this. It’s well known that hormone and blood sugar problems can cause even severe forms of anxiety and depression. Specifically, thyroid problems often cause anxiety, mental lethargy and physical fatigue. Sex hormone problems can cause depression and bi-polar symptoms. Blood sugar problems can cause extreme irritability, anxiety and irrational behavior.

Despite the research evidence, medical treatment for mental conditions is always for the specific symptom, not for the underlying cause. A case in point is the DSM, the manual listing all accepted mental diseases and used to diagnose mental illness. The “diseases” in the DSM are all statements of symptoms, not possible causes.

When Depression Isn’t An Illness

Many patients have told me that they were depressed because of a chemical imbalance in their brain.

However, no research has yet linked mental illness to brain chemistry (look it up… “belief” “suggest” “may result” “tend to” “strongly linked” but no actual science).

The depressed patients commonly have chronic illness, are often in constant pain, have no energy, can’t sleep, and have been told by multiple doctors that they should “learn to live with” their condition because there is no treatment for it.

So, I have asked the person, “Do you feel that you have much hope of achieving any of your goals in life, given your physical health problems?”

The patient thinks, and tells me that no, they’ve given up. I then have asked, “What emotional condition do you think would be normal for a person in your situation?” The patient will often start to laugh, and tell me, “Depression would be completely normal, I think!” They no longer worry about the chemical brain imbalances after this, either.

I agree, because I’ve observed that once a person recovers their physical health—they have energy, don’t hurt, sleep well, digest well—that they aren’t depressed anymore!

The Cause of Untreatable Mental Illness

In my experience (which is considerable), mental illness is often linked to or caused by physical health conditions. These health conditions are always chronic, and typically have no medical treatment.

Medicine treats symptoms, and chronic illness can only be addressed by helping the body regain its ability to heal itself. This is something that conventional medicine is not equipped to do.

So rather than find and improve the cause of mental illness and give the patient back their lives, medicine treats it as a symptom, the same as they do any other heath problem.

The result? Over 100 million cases of mental illness, many of which could be resolved completely, but instead will be drugged into some level of stupor for years, until their bodies become unresponsive to the drugs used.

It’s ugly.

I’m just so happy to be able to show the way out to so many of my patients who work hard to help their own bodies heal, both physically and mentally.

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.

 

Feel Wiped Out? Fatigue, Low Attention, Low Enjoyment, Less Life

Cat FatigueFatigue can stealthily invade your life.

Fatigue can be a health problem that eats your life’s lunch while you remain unsure of what is happening to you. Your drive and ambition are often still alive, but you can find that opportunities to do anything about them are somehow passing you by. You may find yourself rationing out your energy, avoiding difficult or stressful situations and craving time to just do nothing.

Do you remember “stamina?” This is that extra push you can make appear out of nowhere to get over the top hiking that big hill, finishing off that presentation before deadline or dipping into a deep well of patience to parent a teenager. Stamina is often the first thing to disappear with “stealth fatigue.”

Has your life become about just making it through the day and the week? Are you thinking, “I don’t think I’m fatigued, but I still struggle to make it through the week—and I don’t have much of that ‘stamina stuff’ left, either.”?  If so, you may be an example of stealth fatigue. Don’t let your life wind down because of this!

You’re not alone. Forty-three percent of U.S. workers believe they are too tired to function safely at work, according to a new report from the National Safety Council.

Your Lack of Energy May Be Caused by Something Else

People with stealth fatigue commonly believe that their problem is mental or environmental. “I’m just not excited about my life right now, so I don’t have a lot of energy.” Or “my schedule is killing me!” However, my observation is that most of these people have a physical problem that is causing the fatigue and that they are mistakenly blaming it on their mood or schedule.

I say this because when we handle the correct physical problems, the previously exhausted and burned out person starts a business, adopts a baby, gets married or starts training to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Just yesterday a patient who has only been at the clinic for two weeks told me she had so much energy that she was starting a cottage industry in her kitchen making fruit jerky.

Fatigue is often caused by “adrenal fatigue.” Adrenals are hormone glands that control many functions in your body… like how much energy you have. When they become fatigued, you can be exhausted in the afternoons, can’t wake up in the mornings, wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get to sleep at bedtime.

Fatigue can also be caused by thyroid problems. Your thyroid is a hormone gland that controls your metabolism and the energy production of every cell in your body. If your thyroid slows down, you can be tired all the time, constipated, have foggy-thinking, constant weight gain, dry skin and hair loss.

Fatigue can be from a long-term infection that your body can’t get rid of. There are many types of these, and often you’ll have joint pain or other symptoms as well.

There are many problems that can cause poor sleep, and this can lead to fatigue. Being overweight can cause sleep apnea, preventing sound sleep. Heart problems, hormone imbalances and nutritional deficiencies can prevent sound sleep as well.

How to Regain Your Energy

If you found yourself in the descriptions above, or if you feel backed-off from life, trying to ration out your activity to avoid running out of gas… here’s what to do:

  1. Investigate: Find out if you have a “stealth fatigue” problem. Become aware of all the things you aren’t willing to do or attempt just because thinking about them exhausts you. Spot the choices you make where you sit on the sidelines instead of playing the game. Catch yourself making excuses for doing less, especially those that use age, fitness, mental state and schedule as reasons (there are grandfathers out there doing triathlons, you know).
  2. Decide: Get a clear picture of how your life could be if you were attacking it full tilt instead of hiding from it. Drop all ideas about how you can’t do things, and instead refocus on what you’d have to change and correct to become alive and energetic again.
  3. OK! If you’ve done #1 and #2, you are ready to find out what’s making you tired and start really living again. There are several ways you can go about getting tested, but you must start with the idea that you are looking for a cause of your fatigue that EXISTS, not looking to SEE if it exists. Go back to #1 if you need more convincing.
  4. Conventional medical doctors aren’t well equipped to find sources of fatigue (which is one reason so many people have it) and are particularly unable to do much about most causes that they might find. Holistic and functional medicine doctors are much better at this. You want lab tests for adrenals, thyroid, anemia, infections, etc. With the right doctor, it won’t take long till you’re looking at the physical cause of your life slowing down. It’s a great feeling, second only to getting your energy back.

The Real Danger

We life in an age of epidemic chronic health problems. More than half the population is suffering from digestive, heart, immune, and mental problems that never go away. Blood pressure, diabetes, weight and pain get treated with drugs that just manage the symptoms (somewhat) while the cause of the problems remain untreated and continues to make the person worse and worse.

Fatigue is just one of these symptoms, and it has the power to stealthily destroy your life.

The real danger is in the fact that SO MANY PEOPLE have these problems that it looks normal! Your doctor expects you to develop chronic conditions—he thinks it would be weird if you were healthy.

My advice: DON’T SETTLE. You can be healthy, happy, productive and a huge help to your family friends and the world in general. Do NOT let your health slow or stop your boundless creativity and joy of living, even if everyone you know is dragging around.

Want Help?

I’d be happy to get you started on fixing your energy. 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 take action on your fatigue problem right now!

 

Do You Feel Like Crap? (Functional Bowel Disease)

Functional Bowel Disease EmojiHow many important life events have you had compromised or just ruined by digestive problems? Because you just hurt too much, you felt too bad or couldn’t stray far from a restroom. These problems are termed “Functional Bowel Disease” or “FBD” in conventional medicine.

What about the mental effects caused by indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, cramping and the combination of all of these known as “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” (IBS)? These all cause mental and physical lethargy… so you just don’t feel up for much of anything.

Now I have something staggering to tell you, especially if you’re a woman:

In the US, over 66 MILLION people—one in five—suffer from these problems… and 70% of them are women. That means that 35% of women in the US have these problems.  66 million is greater than the entire population of the United Kingdom. That’s a lot of people.[i]

With a problem this common, it’s not surprising that people frequently seek help from their doctors. Medically, these symptoms are known as Functional Bowel Disease because no physical cause can be found for them. Every year, over $8 BILLION is spent on medical costs for these problems, and FBD is one of the top 10 reasons people see their primary care doctors. Also, patients diagnosed with FBD spend on average 74% more in direct healthcare costs than other people.

But…

There’s no known cause for these problems. Treatment is limited to mostly time-proven remedies to reduce symptoms which work on a hit-or-miss basis (this is something you’ll agree with wholeheartedly if you are a sufferer of Functional Bowel Disease).

Honestly, I wasn’t aware of much of this information until I started researching for this blog. In my practice, I see mostly severe patients; people don’t come to me just for Functional Bowel Disease symptoms. However, most of my patients have these symptoms in addition to all their other more severe problems. We handle diarrhea, constipation, abdominal cramping, bloating, reflux, heartburn, stomach upset, nausea, etc. at the beginning of most patient treatment programs. These symptoms are usually gone or mostly handled in a few weeks, no big deal, so I was taken aback by the statistics I’m quoting here.

I’m just amazed: the public is spending 8 billion annually on what is honestly simple, easy to handle basic issues. I commented to my office manager that if the 66 million sufferers of Functional Bowel Disease all were given one specific whole-food supplement we use frequently it would probably solve the symptoms of about half of them.

Symptom Relief is Temporary: How to Solve the Actual Problem?

Most Functional Bowel Disease symptoms can be quickly relieved with basic food supplementation and some diet changes. But these symptoms are just evidence of underlying health problems. When I’m doing an initial consultation visit it’s very common that the patient’s severe problems began with simple digestive issues:

  • “At first, I just took Tums every time I had heartburn.
  • “Then, after a couple of years I had to prop up my bed, because I couldn’t sleep lying down flat anymore.
  • “Then I had to stop eating after about 6 o’clock.
  • “Then I was diagnosed with GERD and ulcers of the esophagus.
  • “Then I was put on a PPI drug (PPI is Proton Pump Inhibitor, a drug that reduces stomach acid).
  • “Two years later, I started having heart problems, which I’ve found may be related to my body not absorbing minerals because of the PPI drug. This might also be a reason my memory and concentration has become so poor.”

The underlying cause of digestive symptoms can be sex hormone problems (remember that Functional Bowel Disease symptoms mainly occur in women?), allergies, mental stress, thyroid problems, adrenal problems, liver problems… many, many possibilities. This is the reason that conventional medicine only treats the symptoms: they have no training or tools to discover the underlying causes, and no effective treatment techniques to apply if they did know a cause.

In almost all cases, Functional Bowel Disease problems can’t be cured by a drug. These problems are termed “chronic conditions” that can only be managed with (often) lifelong drugs but never cured.

[If you want information on how to actually solve chronic health problems, read this short booklet]

So, I find myself in an odd position of knowing what to do to solve the horrific digestive problems of 66 million people… most of whom think their problems can’t be solved and just keep taking drugs to try and take the edge off.

It’s a strange situation.

If you would like some help:

Call my clinic at 770.612.1100. We are always happy to talk to you and offer any help or advice that we can.

Here is a link to request a new patient appointment

[i] All statistics are from the Center for Disease Control website.

Stop the Madness of Hormone Problems

Hormone ProblemsIf hormone problems have ever made you ill, you know the madness I’m talking about.  If you have ever been sad for so many reasons and for no reason at all, you understand the madness.  If you are a young girl or woman troubled by extremely painful periods, missing hours or days of your life in a haze of pain and pain killers, you know the madness.  If you have hot flashes and night sweats, feeling heat rising off your body during that meeting at work or waking up soaking wet and having to change your pajamas and sheets, you know about the madness.  If you suffer from chronic skin problems and food allergies, or intolerances that cause stomach pain and nausea or other discomforts every time you eat, you know about the madness.  If you have ever become very angry at the drop of a hat and screamed at those you love and then later, with much shame and regret, realized it was really a trivial matter, then you too understand this madness.  Insomnia, exhaustion, mood changes, constant weight gain, depression, and anxiety are all part of the madness.

The madness is often connected to our hormones.  Those little microscopic amounts of substance can give us the time of our lives or make a ruin of them.

Hormone Problems often get Started Early

The beginning of the female cycle in adolescence is for many the start of a life of stress, pain, depression or worse.  Over the course of my practice I have seen many women begin their adult lives with hormone problems and other health issues that have never been resolved and have only worsened over time — sometimes for life, often because of the very solutions they have been offered.  Most of these early onset conditions, and their underlying concerns, were never diagnosed correctly. These young women have either been offered no solutions or solutions that include the birth control pill to “regulate” their cycle, or anti-depressants to “fix” their moods.  Women come to me in their 40s and 50s on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, which they’ve been taking since their teen years. As a result, they have been unable to stop using them because the root cause of their hormonal problems or other health condition was never found.

The young girl who was once miserable with a flooding cycle and horrible cramps is now a nervous, anxious woman in her 30s or 40s, exhausted and stressed, possibly diagnosed with thyroid nodules, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome or other hormonal problems.  This woman is likely taking anti-depressants and has often turned to other drugs and chemicals to survive.  She may smoke marijuana or drink wine at night to sleep and then drink copious amounts of coffee or take caffeine pills or drink energy drinks to be able to get through her busy schedule.

Or, as one of my patients described it, she had to “Elvis it” to keep going. To her, that meant alcohol at night to sleep and caffeine all day to stay awake. This woman was in graduate school trying to keep pace with her schoolwork and not understanding her exhaustion. She expressed dismay at how her body seemed to betray her when she needed it the most.

Often women in their 30s have young children and are exhausted by work and home responsibilities. These women also know that if they don’t get it all done no one else will.  The child rearing phase of life can be challenging, and many of the women I meet do not know there is help available. It is not normal to feel completely wrung dry all the time — this should be the time of your life!

The beginnings of more serious health issues have already taken root by the time you reach your 30s and 40s.

By now you may have struggled for years with nagging health concerns, doing your best to self-medicate or trying to ignore your growing health issues.

By the time they reach their 50s or 60s, many women have had a hysterectomy because of fibroids or continued heavy menstrual flow, leading their doctors to determine that their female parts are no longer useful and should be removed! Women are told they are in menopause now and do not really need these organs anymore, or other such questionable logic. This often leads to synthetic hormone replacement therapy, which carries its own health risks and complications.  For some women, this time of life can be fraught with ill health.  It is not uncommon for someone to be prescribed two or three blood pressure meds and possibly a statin drug for high cholesterol along with an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drug.

This same woman could be battling pre-diabetes, high blood pressure or a full-blown case of diabetes, with stubborn weight that now won’t ever let go.  She is often exhausted, hot flashing, experiencing insomnia and facing even more serious health issues like osteoporosis and heart disease, often because of unbalanced or deficient female hormones.

If You Found Yourself Described Above…

There are answers to hormone problems at every stage of life. These aren’t medical “take a drug” or “remove a body part” solutions. The answers lie in understanding what has caused your body to become unbalanced and unhealthy and in doing the work to help it to recover.

One of the first actions I take with my patients with hormone problems is to have them become informed on their bodies and their conditions. If you have hormone problems, YOU will do most of the work to recover your own health. If you’re doing this blindly, on a “just tell me what to do” basis, you may have limited results.

Your Hormnes In Harmony BookFor this reason, I wrote a book for women who have hormone problems (or want to avoid them!). The book is easy to read, and:

  • Clarifies all the common medical diagnoses and other information you may have been exposed to but not fully understood.
  • Shows you how your body is designed in a beautiful way that can give you great joy—rather than the negative image so many women have of their bodies.
  • Teaches you the most important basics of how to be a woman and stay healthy, or how to recover your health if you need to.

You can pick up an ebook or paperback from Amazon here, or drop by the clinic and I’ll autograph a copy for you.

I have devoted most of my life to researching about and treating women with debilitating hormone problems. If you are suffering from this kind of problem, please contact me and I’ll help you in any way I can to get you back to the healthy, happy, beautiful life you should be experiencing.