Here at Healthy Healing, for a good part I am practicing allopathic medicine, albeit with the outlook of naturopathy. Chelation therapy is an allopathic technique. Ozone therapy is neither homeopathy nor Ayurveda, nor part of any other kind of traditional nature cure. It is an allopathic technique, and so are some of the supplements that I prescribe. However, I go about allopathic medicine in a different way and with another than the usual disinterested, aloof and mechanical prescription pad method of the stereotype general practitioner: the doctor who doesn’t even listen to what the patient has to say – and who definitely doesn’t probe deeper than a very superficial reading of some test results that may or may not have any bearing on the problems at hand.
The system I apply is mixture of various elements from allopathic and natural medicine, but the way I deal with my patients is according to the Hippocratic oath that I never even was requested to give when I became a doctor; although I feel that I should have. My philosophy is to address the patient as a whole. And the most important ground rule that I follow is to avoid doing any harm, for example by over prescribing or by applying invasive methods that are uncalled for in the case before me. There sometimes is even a place for these methods, but not in the framework of the symptoms that the majority of my patients wish to eliminate.
Naturally, I also like to read about other doctors who follow even a vaguely similar approach. I learn from reading what they have to say and I share what I learn. To the extent that such is possible I slowly incorporate it into my own approach; not by copying but by adaptation.
One good example was Alejandro Junger M.D. and his CLEAN method that I mentioned in two previous postings. Another is Frank Lipman M.D. of the famous ‘Eleven Eleven Wellness Center’ in New York City. In his book Revive he describes how natural rhythms and environmental factors can and will influence the health of any individual. For the physician in cooperation with the patient, it is therefore important to support or even create natural rhythms or cycles of activity, relaxation and rest in the patient’s life, as it is likewise important to eliminate destructive influences from one’s inner and outer environment. These have to be addressed, if resilience, vitality and long-term health are our goal. In some short autobiographical references in the introductory part of his book, Frank depicts how he discovered the importance of natural rhythms and the way the cells of one’s body are programmed by environmental input – either for better or for ill health. He writes,“Soon after I graduated from medical school in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I grew up, I began treating patients In the rural areas of KwaNdebele… It was like being in the middle of nowhere. Despite facing the harsh realities of poverty-stricken lives, the people didn’t present symptoms of insomnia, depression or anxiety. Women would carry their babies on their backs all day, walking long distances with buckets of water or other heavy loads balanced on their heads, yet they rarely came to the doctor complaining about back pain or fatigue. In many ways, this community was healthier than the patients I was seeing at my other job in a private practice in one of the wealthy suburbs of Johannesburg. Sure, they had some disease (mostly from poor sanitation and untreated water) and came to the hospital with broken bones or pneumonia, but they did not suffer from fatigue, headaches, digestive problems, or the general aches and pains that my more sophisticated urban patients did. Since there was no electricity, people were forced to live with the rhythms of nature. Day and night dictated what was done when, and being synchronous with the seasons was essential for survival. Community, music and dance also played an integral role in bringing rhythm into their lives. It was during my time with these people that I began to be aware of the importance of nature’s rhythm and its powerful impact on our health.”
“…As a young clinician who had recently finished medical school, my training focused upon hospita-based patients who were acutely sick… These are the problems that western medicine is designed to treat. But the subtle symptoms such as fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, and low-grade chronic complaints that I was seeing at my urban outpatients were not well addressed by my medical training. I found it very ironic that these vague complaints commonly expressed by urban patients were the very ones that conventional western medicine does not have any good solutions for.”
“…Soon after working at KwaNdebele, I emigrated to the United Sates. After doing the required internal medicine residency, I began a rigorous study of Chinese medicine, which turned my world inside out. Instead of symptoms being seen as something to suppress with drugs, they became a clue to some imbalance in the body – a sign that the body was out of rhythm. Within this picture the role of the doctor was to recreate balance and restore rhythm, which, after my experience with rural South Africa, resonated with me. This completely different philosophical outlook led me to radically new way of regarding and treating the body.”
“…On my journey I also discovered functional medicine, where I learned about the importance of the environment and its effect on gene activity. I had been taught in medical school to think that your genes are carved in stone, and that the diseases you get are determined by them. We now know that for the most part this is not true. The new science of epigenetics has shown that genetic activity is determined by your responses to the environment. In other words, how you live your life determines how your genes are expressed. You may have a genetic predisposition to a disease, but the environment you bathe your cells and genes in determines how those genes are expressed. This means that there are lots of potential versions of you. Whether you become spent is determined by the unique way your genes interact with the many variables in their environment. So what you eat, how much chemical and toxic exposure you have had, what stresses you have tolerated, how you think, how much love you get and how you move are critical. Like a computer our cells, and therefore our organs, are programmable – their health is determined by what information they download from the outside and what information you feed them.”
“In both Chinese medicine and functional medicine, I also learned that one could improve the functioning of organs. This concept was never addressed in western medicine: you had either a healthy liver or a liver disease – nothing in between. Western medicine offered no ways to improve the function of the organs before they became diseased…”
To improve the function of the body as a whole is precisely the Healthy Healing goal and approach. Frank Lipman M.D. developed his program based on diet, movement, nutritional supplementation and so forth. In the same spirit but with different means I treat patients with chelation, ozone, colon hydrotherapy, and also supplements – in order to make their lives more livable and more enjoyable.