This weathered card is almost deteriorated beyond usefulness. But I keep it. It is a reminder of my health condition, and my battle with it... and my need for due diligence. It was my only souvenir after my first heart attack... documenting for anyone interested the four stents they ran up into my arteries. How diligent are you about taking care of yourself?
If you are like the average American, you are not. Take exercise for instance. Proper exercise has become a huge thing in our generation. We either do it, and it becomes a huge part of our daily lives, or we make huge excuses for why we don't, and thus become huge things ourselves.
It is hard not to be shamed a bit by all of the sweaty, muscular exercisers on television commercials, working those various fitness machines, or the neighbor who jogs five miles every morning before you are even out of bed. Exercise is something you have to make time for, something that requires sacrifice and inconvenience. And so most of us find it missing on our daily short list. So it is no wonder that Americans today are in worse physical shape than ever, and many are borderline obese. The real shame is that so many people are truly unhealthy in one of the smartest, wealthiest countries in the world. But how could that be?
Too many of us have grown somewhat complacent about our physical fitness, depending more on the doctors and their medical wonders to keep us alive. They always tell us to get plenty of exercise, advice we usually ignore, because we can count on them to bail us out when we eat too much sugar, smoke too many cigarettes, or indulge in too much fast food. Some of us might use a treadmill to get some exercise, or even go to the gym. But most of us don't think we need to. Bottom line, we usually never get on that treadmill unless we have to.
That is because as a culture, we implicitly believe in Science. Have we not seen the average lifespan lengthen? And wonderful remedies to save our lives from the cradle to the grave? From tiny, premature babies to heart attack victims, modern science has repeatedly stepped in and made the difference between life and probable death. I personally have been kept alive in both of those scenarios during my life, so I owe a huge debt to the doctors and the cutting-edge Science they knew which made my survival possible. We live in an age when heart stents and other procedures have become routine, and incredible, life-saving measures are taken in stride.
So this message may seem a bit... ungrateful. You see, I have also seen the limitations of Modern Science. There is a debt, but there is also a depth of familiarity and insight from being a recipient of the blessings of the greatest advances in Medicine; advances which have done me wonders, and yet have fallen short of another measure of health which I have grown to appreciate.
There is Science, and there is Nature. Nature is the infinite, perfect, totally complete expression of God's creative genius. It includes the Solar Systems and the squirrel in your bird bath and the electrons bouncing around in your cell phone. Science is man's attempt to wrap his mind around these things, and hopefully learn how to manipulate them to serve his purposes. Sad to say, Science will never conquer the squirrels.
Science is Okay, or at least it was, when doctors and many scientists acknowledged one basic truth, the concurrence of these two systems- Science and Nature. But Science eventually grew into its own kind of religion, complete with high, unapproachable authorities, making unchallenged edicts, and a responding unquestioning faith and obedience from the local pastors, (doctors) who front and practice the latest scientific theories. But so much of what is called science today is really mere hypothesis, or worse. If the modern treatments championed by Science were any more than that, there would not be so many lawsuits advertised, going after this or that drug manufacturer, their once touted scientific breakthrough now exposed as a bad idea. A false hypothesis. A hypothesis where the patients were part of the test of that hopeful theory. Since the canonization of Darwin's theories, so much of Science has become satisfied with reasonable theories being substituted for the old fashioned Scientific Method.
Pharmaceuticals and doctors want so badly to save their patients, they continuously embrace new practices and drugs which offer new hope of fighting diseases. Death and suffering being their arch enemies, they take calculated risks in the name of that hope, using the latest scientific information, and fueling the possibility of defeating them. They have good intentions. But they sometimes forget they are not dealing with a full deck. And worse, they sometimes trust in the wrong powers. They trust in Science and persistence, driven by the simple axiom, “where there is life, there is hope.” My experience is that most of them would rather lose the battle for a patient's life by doing anything, rather than just doing nothing. So they are constantly reading, trying new things. Of course they will lose some battles. They take those losses seriously, sometimes personally. But they have left behind the simple knowledge that God is in control.
The presence of life is obviously important, but it is not the main factor. Where there is life there is potential. Where there is God, there is hope. But God is not all that doctors have put aside. They have even left behind the first and most important rule of their sacred oath, “First, do no harm.” The side effects of drugs are ignored and downplayed, as the hopes of beating death are inflated, and in the process, many are harmed. Seriously harmed.
Many doctors have forgotten what many people depended on for thousands of years before their profession was pervasively respected: The involvement in every life of that creative God who runs the Universe. Most medical professionals have invested their entire credibility on the prowess of Science. Yet after fifty years, their high-tech wars on cholesterol, on heart disease, on diabetes, on Alzheimer's disease, cancer and others rage on with staggering losses. There have been no cures, no answers. They depend on chemical concoctions to extend broken lives, many rife with suffering. So preoccupied with maintaining life, there has been no recognition among health care providers of most people's real desire.... and that is a good quality of life.
Chemotherapy and other poisonous drugs have become commonplace, necessary evils, in the absence of medical cures. Six million people may have suffered permanent heart valve damage from the diet drug Fen-Phen. The scandal around the pain-killer Vioxx is a good example of this deadly cycle of supply and demand. It killed 38,000 people who were seeking relief from arthritis pain, before it was no longer considered good science. The list goes on and on. The latest Pharma scandal may very well be the vaccines we all took to save ourselves from COVID 19. Few Americans are aware that European countries have banned many of our most popular prescription drugs. Yet our doctors continue to prescribe medications such as Avandia or Actos when they have been warned that they increase the risk of heart attack and bladder cancer, (respectively). Finally, decades later, people are understandably looking elsewhere than the latest Pharma wonders to find reliable answers to their health issues.
It's a long story, how we got to this point. How we mounted the American medical treadmill, as we accepted the solutions of Modern Science, and we walked trustingly on it awhile. Just like a treadmill feels like exercise, so American medicine felt like treatment. Nobody wants to go to the doctor, it's not supposed to be fun. But like a treadmill, it never took us anywhere. It kept our heart beating, but we did not have the whole benefits of outdoor exercise, or the multiple benefits of Nature. The scenery never changed. There was no vitamin D from sunshine, no task completed, nothing built or repaired. Just numbers on a screen that said we had walked so many miles, burned so many calories. Numbers. Lots of numbers.
I remember during my first heart attack, the EMT's and doctors at my local hospital told me emphatically that I was not having a heart attack. My “numbers were not right.” They wanted to send me home. It was a false alarm they said. Less than 24 hours later, doctors at a different hospital put four stents in my LAD artery, the one called the “widow maker.” The confidence and solidarity of that first group of medical professionals was quite persuasive, but instead of going home, I asked for an ambulance to transport me twenty miles up the road... and probably saved my own life.
Still I mounted the treadmill and did what I was told, took the meds, and listened to the Science: I would have to take Plavix (or as it turned out, its substitute) for many months, possibly years, until my body accepted the stents. I would have to take a blood thinner like aspirin, and statin drugs for the rest of my life to fight the cholesterol, which was allegedly killing me. I suspected my diet should change, since there were so many foods which had cholesterol in them. But the doctors only shrugged when I mentioned it. Their advice was to reduce the salt in my diet and just take the medicines and everything would be okay.
That ambivalence should have been my clue, which I ignored for a long time, wanting to believe my doctors. Three more stents and over a decade later I came to realize that the cardiologists do very little after your stents are installed other than read the numbers and prescribe statins. Statins which cause a number of undesirable side effects, in my case dullness of mind, lack of creativity and leg cramps. After several months I suffered from terrible complications from an Iodine deficiency... As I had cut out salt, I cut out my main source for Iodine, which my body desperately needed. And then we found out that more scientific studies revealed that statins did not really reduce cholesterol! Still my doctors insisted that I take them... there were supposedly other unseen benefits. It was believed that statins stabilized the plaque in arteries, possibly preventing strokes and heart attacks. Sadly this lame strategy was all the cardiologists had to fight heart disease! Eventually the aspirin and the replacement I took for Plavix caused terrible internal bleeding which led to my hospitalization for anemia.
So finally I got off of the American medical “treadmill.” One day during a consultation after having one of my stents reamed out, my cardiologist exclaimed “It's time for a new strategy!” And I agreed with him about that.
I had been depending solely on Science, and I turned back to what I had always trusted... Nature. I knew that God had made me and everything else, and if there was an answer, it was somewhere in his grandiose scheme. I just had to find it. The human body is perfectly capable of healing itself if it is fed the right things. But instead I had been filling my body with meds which made be sick, and cured nothing. My new strategy was to dig deep and find out where Modern Medicine had gone wrong, and how to recover from both my disease, and its treatments.
Taking stock of my sixty-eight year old body, I suffered from heart disease, anemia, leaky gut, IBS, constipation, tinnitus, memory loss, cracking teeth, strange rashes, leg cramps, bleeding hemorrhoids, insomnia, corns, silent migraines, growing allergies and oh yes... natural aging. I had a lot of learning to do. But as soon as I stepped off of the American medical treadmill, I began to learn stuff which has changed my life- and for the better. And I want to share these things with you!
As for exercise? Don't worry about it. Really. Most of it that people do is unnecessary or even counter-productive. Without proper nutrition and self-restraint, running, cycling, weight lifting, trotting on the treadmill etc. is likely to stress or do damage to your joints, not to mention put your body on the brink of dehydration.
Thankfully, about the time that my doctors had run out of ideas, I discovered a group of Naturopathic or Integrative doctors who not only practice holistic medicine, they write about it. And thanks be to God I took the fork in the road and discovered their writings and have been reading them extensively. These are not medical misfits, but well-qualified veterans of the medical community who have been paying attention, and dared to question “conventional wisdom,” their challenges backed by scientific findings from many published medical articles from the past fifteen years. Since I know that most of you would not read these books if a copy was given to you, and so-called “modern Science” will take another twenty years to catch on to their methods, I am offering to bake it all down for you.
If you are a member of the medical community, it would probably be best that you not read on, in order to save our friendship. But if you care more about American health than our affinity, read on. Perhaps you can and will carry this encouraging word to your peers.
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