Food Misconceptions

Reading this post will likely improve your health

“I eat what I like.”

That pretty much sums up the most common reason for food choices I’ve heard.

For 25 years I’ve been successfully helping people change their health by educating them about food. From this experience, I can say that if you read this post, you’ll likely make some change in your food choices that will positively impact your health.

Food Misconceptions

MISCONCEPTION: Food is fuel, like gas in your car. You can fill up on almost anything edible, it doesn’t matter.

TRUTH: Look in the mirror for a second. Pinch your cheek. How old is that tissue you’re pinching? Would you believe it’s less than three months old? Cells don’t live very long and are constantly being replaced. That face you’re looking at in the mirror is almost brand-new (if it has wrinkles and looks old, it’s because bodies are designed to change appearance and function as they age. But the tissue it’s made of is being continuously regenerated).

If all those millions of cells are being replaced every hour in your body, where does the raw material come from to make them? The parts that make up your cells are overwhelmingly made from the cellular material from the food you eat. Sure, the body uses food for energy as well, but what you’re seeing in that mirror is the food you’ve eaten in the last few months, transformed into YOU.

MISCONCEPTION: The definition of FOOD is “what you eat.”

TRUTH: Food is the living (fresh or preserved) tissue of plants and animals. Your body can’t make healthy cells from old, damaged or over-processed plant and animal tissue. It certainly can’t create cell parts from artificial flavors and sweeteners, preservatives and refined sugar.

Two simple rules you could follow to improve your health:

  1. Don’t eat things that aren’t food. (Didn’t your mom used to tell you this when you tried to eat mud pies?)
  2. Don’t eat things that CONTAIN things that aren’t food.

This is a simple test: Is diet soda food? Is (popular brand) pasta sauce food? (Read the label, what are all those unpronounceable chemicals at the end of the ingredient list? They sure aren’t food!)

But there’s a problem: This test is too simple. The truth of this is too obvious.

People freak out.

Patients call me from the grocery store in an actual panic, “There’s no food in here!” The problem is that they’re RIGHT. I tell them that I can don my pith helmet and take them on a safari through the grocery store jungle looking for the elusive FOOD. Lighten it up a bit. But it is grim.

Happily, with a bit of training and help I’ve never had a patient who couldn’t master how to shop. They’re able to eat almost everything they normally would, just with a bit of change here and there to shop for FOOD instead of, well, something else (what DO you call “non-food sold as food”?)

There’s Much More to Know About Food

At my clinic, I teach all my patients some specific dietary tweaks to dramatically improve their immune system. If you’re trying to recover from a health problem (or just need to recover from the flu) these diet tweaks can make all the difference.

A basic fact about food and diet: people don’t need to eat the same foods! For example, if you are having a very hard time being able to deal with stress, you likely have some issues with your adrenal glands and should be careful to eat regularly, as being hungry stresses the adrenals. If you have high cholesterol, you can probably dramatically lower it by reducing sugar and refined carbs from your diet.

At my clinic, I test patients to find out what organs and systems are under stress and help them to adjust their diets based on this testing. How logical is this? Yet, when was the last time you had your doctor tell you anything but “diet,” or “eat less fat.”

Here’s some help:

10 Super Veggies to Boost Your Health

Sugar and Your Immune System

For more helpful information about diet: Read my book, Your Hormones in Harmony: A Smart Woman’s Guide to a Lifetime of Energy, Focus and Vitality

I hope this has helped you to see the possibilities to a proactive approach to controlling your own health rather than hoping for the best.

As always, I’m available to help in any way I can. 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 bypass the hidden symptoms problem).

Caring and Health Care

Have you ever suffered from a lack of caring in the health care system? This could be obvious: a doctor or nurse that treated you impersonally or failed to answer your questions. Or it could be indirect: a failure to diagnose or treat your problem correctly because no one cared enough to make sure it was done right.

It’s interesting that caring is critical to successful health care and to the improvement of physical and mental 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.

Isn’t this all just so nice? But living in the real world, many people have given up on expecting caring or kindness from their health care system.

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

People will care the most about their Basic Purpose

Why would any health care professional treat you impersonally or fail to make sure that you were correctly taken care of? I think it’s because their Basic Purpose has been altered to something OTHER than to help patients with their health.

Your Basic Purpose is, by definition, what you care the most about. This is at the very heart of caring. If that purpose is to create financial stability for yourself and your family, that’s what you are going to care about. If creating that financial stability relies on keeping a job with a corporate health provider, then you are going to have to care about their Basic Purpose in order to keep your job. If management of that corporation has a Basic Purpose of keeping their jobs, they’ll care about keeping the board/shareholders happy with increasing profits.

So, through this chain, the health care worker winds up with a Basic Purpose in alignment to a large degree with the Basic Purpose of the corporate board of his company.

This is why many health providers, despite their natural empathy and desire to help, can act as if they care very little about providing effective, caring and affordable health care to patients.

Their Basic Purpose has been hijacked by the corporate health care system.

You can determine a Basic Purpose by observing a person or group’s products

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

Our current health care 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 spending massive sums of money on drugs and surgeries that don’t result in any less illness.

How it should be done

Caring in health care 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.

Research has shown that without question, most chronic disease is a direct result of lifestyle choices. (Link is to Cleveland Clinic website)

The only way any progress in health can be made is to have patients improve their lifestyles.

The only way this can occur is really good communication between myself, the staff and the patients.

Poor communication means the patient may misunderstand or not understand instructions, do the wrong things or fail to do the right things needed to heal.

There’s only one way to be in good communication with a patient: You must really care about them and like them! This results in the patient caring and liking the practitioner as well. How well do you communicate with someone you don’t like? Not so good, correct?

Good communication is a direct result of liking and caring.

A patient may have difficulty doing some part of their program and may need help. The best help a practitioner can give is to be on their patient’s team! If the patient feels they have a responsibility to get well and to do their program very well, that their practitioner cares about them and will be excited for their success, this can overcome a lot of difficulty the patient may be experiencing in making the changes in their life that are needed for them to heal.

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, a fact that leads to many devastating medical errors.

Outrageous success… based on caring

By any measure my patients are outrageously successful in recovering their health. This is my PRODUCT, from which you can decide what my Basic Purpose might be.

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

These patients all got great results because their bodies were able to heal. This healing was facilitated by MY caring about the patient, and the PATIENT caring about their health and their program with me. Sure, technical knowledge and the EvecticsSM program are a critical component, but the most important part of any successful treatment program is caring.

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).

Money: The Elephant in the Room

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).

The Messy Bedroom Diagnosis

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).

Worried About Your Health? Maybe You Should Be!

Are you worried or concerned about developing a health problem? On the news, it seems like a weekly occurrence that a new study shows some common activity, food or drink increases the risk of (fill in disease here).

We’ve all had the upsetting and frightening experience of someone close to us getting a diagnosis or having a health emergency. Maybe you have a recurring symptom that you’re worried might be the first sign of a serious problem. Maybe you’re concerned because of diseases that are common in your family. Maybe you are a member of a high-risk group (obese, past or present smoker, diabetic, etc.) and are always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Have you ever been frustrated by feeling that you just can’t know whether you are healthy or not, or if you are at risk and may develop a health condition?

There’s an excellent reason for you to feel this way: your health condition is being deliberately hidden from you!

No, not by any nefarious person or organization. The culprit is your own body design.

You Have the Same Body as a Caveman

Worry about healthOK, maybe a cavewoman. Regardless, this is true. Bodies haven’t been updated or redesigned for roughly 200,000 years. We’re still on version 1.0. Back in the early days, there were no doctors, so anything that went wrong with health just had to get better on its own. The body healed itself or died. No other options were available.

Back then, having a symptom could be very dangerous. If Joe Caveman suffered from chronic migraines, he’d either starve because he wasn’t able to hunt or gather, or he’d be distracted by his pain and quickly gobbled up by something hungry and/or bashed in by a rival caveman (woman).

To improve survival, Mother Nature designed bodies to hide symptoms for as long as possible.

That was all fine back then, but this is still how your body behaves 2,000 centuries later!

Are You Healthy? How to Tell

The only reliable system in existence that closely monitors all your body systems and will know anytime something is wrong is your nervous system. It keeps a very close watch on all your body functions and is alerted if anything isn’t functioning correctly. The only limitation is that it won’t tell YOU.

If you’re a patient of mine, you are thinking right now, “OH! That’s why Dr. Billiot does that cool nervous system testing.” By accessing information from the body’s nervous system, I can find out what is malfunctioning, why this is happening and what I could do about it that would be effective to help the body to heal.

If you aren’t familiar with the type of testing that I do, here’s a short video that will explain it

(NOTE: This is a very old video my office manager made that just does a great job explaining a complex subject. Many, many thousands of people have come to understand Autonomic Response Evaluation (muscle testing) by watching this video.)

Facts Related to This Information:

  1. Q: Young people are healthy, mostly, aren’t they? A: Those “immortally healthy” 20 and 30-somethings you see eating junk, drinking too much and burning the candle at both ends: Their bodies are hiding the effects. Sadly, if you revisit them in 10 or 20 years, you’ll likely find them exhausted and on multiple prescriptions.
  2. Q: If you have several health problems, does this mean that your body can no longer hide symptoms from you? A: NO. There are probably more problems that your body is dealing with and hiding from you that you have no idea about.
  3. Q: WAIT! You’re telling me that I can feel totally healthy but I’m really not? A: I’m telling you that you have no way of knowing the condition of your health unless you get checked, because your body isn’t going to tell you until it’s too late.
  4. Q: But aren’t most people really pretty healthy? A: 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)
  5. Q: So, you’re just doom and gloom, everyone is sick? A: I’m realistically looking at an incredibly toxic and stressful environment that continues to get worse. Already more than half the population is diagnosed as chronically ill. My idea is that if we recognize the problem, it’s possible to live a lifestyle that helps your body become healthy enough to withstand the environmental stress.

Causation and Lack of Feedback

Your body hides symptoms and signs of health problems. So, you get very little accurate feedback on what is good and bad for your health directly from your body. This lack of feedback leads to the most common attitude about health: “I hope I’m healthy.”

If you drove this way: “I hope this light is green.”

A lack of feedback leads to feeling you are out of control. You can’t be causative over your health, so you just hope for the best. Then you do a few “healthy” things to appease yourself, but basically, you’re just ignoring the situation until you discover you have a problem.

Solutions:

The health care system, food manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, government and insurance companies are really not going to help you with this situation. Guess why?

This has got to be something that you do yourself. It starts with education. Understanding your body, how it works and how to keep it healthy is not only possible, it isn’t hard. This is your first step.

START HERE!

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 bypass the hidden symptoms problem).

Ancient Arguments that Control Your 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 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.

Difficulty Explaining Holistic Health Care

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven Points: How Alternative or Holistic Health Care Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the Confusion Comes From

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

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

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

Hope this helps!

Dr. Billiot

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.