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In the Summer 2007 issue of the Action Against Allergy Newsletter, a medical practitioner in Bournemouth UK, Dr John Millward, made several valid points about the attitude of the medical profession to disease and to nutrition. In May of 2006, a group of physicians and scientists in Britain sent a letter to the chief executives of health trusts urging them to reject alternative medical treatments as ‘unproven or disproved’. In addition to being circulated within the NHS, the letter was also sent to Prince Charles, a known advocate of the use of alternative therapies.
Regrettably, the Oxford zoologist Professor Richard Dawkins has now extended his attack on religion to include alternative therapies as equally vacuous. We certainly need to be protected from bogus practitioners selling ‘snake oil’, but genuine therapists have a very real part to play in therapy of those who have some kind of biochemical or physiological imbalance that makes them feel less than well.
In orthodox ‘scientific’ medical practice there were 40,000 errors in drug administration in British hospitals in 2005 alone (National Patient Agency, 10 August 2006).
In America, there are approximately 7,000 deaths each year due to medication errors (www.amcp.org) , and the FDA states that there is at least one death each day and 1.3 million people injured each year due to medication errors (www.fda.org).
A professor of psychology at the University of California, Theodore Roszak, believes that much of the physical and mental illness prevalent in society today can be traced to a loss of spiritual connection with our natural environment and stress and pollution – particularly from alcohol and tobacco smoke – undoubtedly make a significant contribution.
It is also assumed incorrectly that the whole population has adequate nutrition. As Dr Millward said, it has been known for more than a century that deficiencies in certain trace elements or vitamins can produce debilitating disease.
One of those who first raised concerns about the quality of our food was Weston A. Price (1870-1948), a dentist who ran a practice in Cleveland, Ohio, in the early years of the 20th century. He gave this up in the early 1930s to travel the world with his wife exploring the lifestyles of native peoples who had not yet had their ecologically sound holistic existence disrupted by the intrusion of western capitalism.
He collected food samples from native diets and analyzed them in his laboratory. His findings, published in 1939, showed levels of micronutrients four to ten times that of foodstuffs in the American diet of the time.
Price’s work inspired the nutritionist Sally Fallon to set up her own organization, the Weston A. Price Foundation in Washington, D.C., and she has updated Price’s findings in a book of her own (Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions, New Trends Publishing, Winona Lake, Indiana, revised 2nd edn, 2001).
Graham Harvey pointed out in his book, We Want Real Food (Constable, London, 2006), that the liberal use of agrochemicals has impoverished the soil to such an extent that plants are often unable to extract minerals from the soil, even if they are there. We need some university medical team to launch an epidemiological study of the levels of nutrients in the population in various parts of the country.
Pharmaceutical drugs have saved countless lives and reduced much suffering throughout the last century. But they should be used sparingly and alternative naturopathic remedies sought wherever possible, because the strain imposed on the immune system by the toxicity of these drugs can make patients more susceptible to adverse reactions to other xenobiotics (compounds not part of the body’s natural biochemical system). The overall load of these compounds can be more than the body can sustain.
The apparent association of autism and Crohn’s disease with MMR vaccination may well arise from such inability of the body’s immune system to cope with raising antibodies to three diseases at the same time. It would be surprising if we did not find some children who did not react adversely.
Many older people find they cannot tolerate the annual ‘flu vaccine for the same reason. Dr Millward’s suggestion of a nutritional deficiency as a factor in autism should also be taken seriously and investigated. There are naturopathic alternatives available in health food stores all over the country that may be effective in treating some of the population’s common ailments.
The family of drugs called statins is very popular with doctors at present for reducing cholesterol levels in the blood and, provided the patient is able to metabolize them, they are quite effective. Statins work by inhibiting the production of cholesterol in the liver, most of all at night, but they also inhibit one of the body’s key metabolic agents, co-enzyme Q10.
Statins frequently produce insomnia, myalgia (muscle pain in the legs or arms), and shortness of breath as side effects and can even damage muscle tissue (myopathy). When the patent was first granted for the use of statins it was recommended that doctors prescribe co-Q10 at the same time, to minimize their adverse effects, but this seems to be done only rarely.
There is a gentle herbal alternative to statins available and that is to use spreads, yoghurts or tablet supplements containing plant sterols and stanols. Plant stanols are also available in capsule form. In the human diet they appear to lower the undesirable LDL cholesterol while leaving the desirable HDL cholesterol unaffected.
Antioxidants like vitamin C, vitamin E, the flavonoids and xanthones also seem to have a beneficial effect in inhibiting atherosclerotic plaque formation. Vitamin C is to be found in all fresh fruit and vegetables. You can find flavonoids in citrus fruit, vegetables (especially onions), legumes and green tea, or again in capsule form if desired. Vitamin E is obtained from wheat germ and sunflower seeds and mangosteen is the best source of xanthones.
While cholesterol levels may well be an important factor aggravating arteriosclerosis (blocked blood vessels), there are other compounds, like homocysteine, the blood concentration of which is believed to be even more important, but this is never measured routinely.
High protein diets, especially those that include much red meat, tend to produce elevated homocysteine levels, which are known to be detrimental to health.
The usual treatment prescribed for osteoarthritis is to take pain-killers, as Lynne McTaggart says in her book, What Doctors Don’t Tell You: ‘Conventional medicine tends to take the view that there is no known cause or cure for arthritis, so all it can do with certainty is to alleviate your pain’ (McTaggart, What Doctors Don’t Tell You, Thorsons, London and San Francisco, 1996). These drugs all have damaging effects.
Paracetamol can be taken in only limited quantities because of its toxic effect on the liver. The non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) all produce irritation of the gut. The American FDA estimates that there may be up to a quarter of a million cases of gastric bleeding from use of NSAIDs each year, while in Britain about 4000 people die from taking NSAIDs each year.
Again, there is a naturopathic alternative. The natural compound glucosamine, taken with fish oils containing omega-3 fatty acids, may prove to be a safe and simple alternative in the treatment of osteoarthritis.
There are some powerful allopathic drugs (like finasteride) available to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH – an enlarged prostate gland leading to difficulty with urination) that is common in men in later life, but all of them frequently produce some rather nasty side-effects. The gentle natural compound saw palmetto is just as effective with, generally, only mild or no side-effects.
Readers should note however that orthodox medical opinion is sharply divided on the treatment of BPH because such treatment may mask prostatic cancer. However, there is no reliable method of assessing prostate cancer, and the two basic treatments – surgery or radiotherapy – frequently result in impotence or incontinence or both, with no convincing evidence that such radical measures prolong life.
There have been quite extensive clinical trials on humans for the past decade or so on the use of extracts of Ginkgo biloba for the treatment of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and poor circulation. With fewer clinical trials so far, the xanthones from mangosteen have also proved to be effective.
The staff at the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, Boston, MA, have conducted research into mangosteen over the past decade. The results have been positive and side effects are generally few – mild headaches or gastrointestinal upsets. This is another example where a gentle herbal remedy may obviate the need to use more toxic synthetic pharmacological compounds.
There are undoubtedly health benefits from food sources rich in anti-oxidants, though there are also some more wary researchers, like Dr Ralph Moss who has published what he calls a friendly skeptical look at mangosteen (http://chetday.com/mangosteen.htm).
The overall guiding principle is to eat healthily with as much fibre, fruit and vegetables as your system can tolerate and to avoid completely if possible tobacco products, alcohol and any other synthetic ‘recreational’ drugs that are, in fact, even more toxic than many of the pharmaceutical preparations.
The bottom line is: Enjoy your food and take naturopathic medications to restore the balance if this has become disturbed!
Dr Jones is the author of The Tao of Holism, published by O Books early in February 2008. A fuller discussion of the above issues, with extensive references, may be found there.
A modified version of this article first appeared in the Action Against Allergy Newsletter No.91 for Winter 2007 (www.actionagainstallergy.co.uk).
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