to all the wonders pharmaceutical products have to offer. But the reason they can’t find a solution is because nobody has asked why. Why are they unwell? Why are their bodies creating symptoms that manifest as depression? Why didn’t they stop to ask this important and obvious question the first time they experienced a flat mood, anxiety, insomnia, and chronic exhaustion?
Before I even get to the answers, let me be the first to tell you that the only path to a real solution is to leave the medical world you know behind. This, the journey I will take you on, is not just about symptom suppression, it’s about health freedom. First let me tell you that I was once a typical doctor, not to mention a typical American who loved pizza, soda, birth control, and ibuprofen. My message is from a personal journey and thousands of hours of research that has compelled me to share the truth about prescription-based care: we’ve been duped.
Yes, my entire training was based on a model of disease care that offers patients only one tool—a drug—and never a shot at true wellness. We’ve handed over our health to those who seek to profit from it, and we’ve been buying into a paradigm based on the following notions:
▶ We are broken.
▶ Fear is an appropriate response to symptoms.
▶ We need chemicals to feel better.
▶ Doctors know what they are doing.
▶ The body is a machine requiring calibration (via drugs). A little too much of this, too little of that.
I call this collective set of notions the Western Medical Illusion. It sets up a vicious system that ushers you into lifelong customer status, dependent and disempowered.
As you can likely guess by now, I love to rant. But I do so with the best evidence science can offer, and there’s a lot we know today about the real root causes of depression—and how to treat the condition safely and successfully—without a prescription pad. If there’s one lesson I will drive home, it’s this: shed the fear, take back your inner compass, and embrace a commitment to your best self, medication free. Even if you don’t already take a prescription drug, I bet you still doubt living the rest of your life prescription free and reliant on your own inner intuition to know what’s best for you. The idea of supporting your body’s innate wisdom may sound quaint at best, or like dangerous hippie woo-woo at worst. From now on, I want you to embrace these new ideas:
▶ Prevention is possible.
▶ Medication treatment comes at a steep cost.
▶ Optimal health is not possible through medication.
▶ Your health is under your control.
▶ Working with lifestyle medicine—simple everyday habits that don’t entail drugs—is a safe and effective way to send the body a signal of safety.
How can I make these statements, and what do I mean by lifestyle medicine? You’re going to find out in this book, and I’ll be presenting the scientific proof to answer questions you may have and to satisfy the doubtful. When I meet a woman and her family, I speak about how to reverse her anxiety, depression, mania, and even psychosis. We map out the timeline that brought her where she is and identify triggers that often fall under one or more of the following categories: food intolerances or sensitivities, blood sugar imbalances, chemical exposures, thyroid dysfunction, and nutrient deficiency. I forge a partnership with my patient and witness dramatic symptom relief within thirty days. I do this by teaching my patients how they can make simple shifts in their daily habits, starting with the diet. They increase nutrient density, eliminate inflammatory foods, balance blood sugar, and bring themselves closer to food in its ancestral state. It’s the most powerful way to move the needle, because food is not just fuel. It is information (literally: “it puts the form into your body”), and its potential for healing is a wonder to me, every single day.
Achieving radical wellness takes sending the body the right information and protecting it from aggressive assault. This isn’t just about mental health; it’s about how mental health is a manifestation of all that your body is experiencing and your mind’s interpretation of its own safety and power. It’s also about how symptoms are just the visible rough edges of a gigantic submerged iceberg.
Note that none of these concepts connects with substances in the brain that might be “low.” If you had to define depression right now, before reading further, chances are you’d say something about it being a “mood disorder” or “mental illness” triggered by a chemical imbalance in the brain that probably needs to be fixed through a medication like Prozac or Zoloft that will lift levels of brain chemicals associated with a good mood. But you would be mistaken.
So many patients today who are being shepherded into the psychiatric medication mill are overdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or mistreated. Indeed, they have “brain fog,” changes in metabolism, insomnia, agitation, and anxiety, but for reasons only loosely related to their brain chemicals. They have all the symptoms that are mentioned in a Cymbalta advertisement that tells them to talk to their doctor to see if Cymbalta is right for them. But it’s like putting a bandage over a splinter in the skin that continues to stir inflammation and pain. It’s absolutely missing an opportunity to remove the splinter and resolve the problem from the source. And it’s an iconic example of how conventional medicine can make grave mistakes, something the pharmaceutical industry is more than happy to encourage.
In holistic medicine, there are no specialties. It’s all connected. Here’s a classic case in point: Eva had been taking an antidepressant for two years but wanted to get off it because she was planning to get pregnant. Her doctor advised her not to stop taking the drug, which motivated her to see me. Eva explained that her saga had begun with PMS, featuring a week each month when she was irritable and prone to crying fits. Her doctor prescribed a birth control pill (a common treatment) and soon Eva was feeling even worse, with insomnia, fatigue, low libido, and a generally flat mood dogging her all month long. That’s when the doctor added the Wellbutrin to “pick her up,” as he said, and handle her presumed depression. From Eva’s perspective, she felt that the antidepressant helped her energy level, but it had limited benefits in terms of her mood and libido. And if she took it after midnight, her insomnia was exacerbated. She soon became accustomed to feeling stable but suboptimal, and she was convinced that the medication was keeping her afloat.
The good news for Eva was that with careful preparation, she could leave medication behind—and restore her energy, her equilibrium, and her sense of control over her emotions. Step one consisted of some basic diet and exercise changes along with better stress response strategies. Step two involved stopping birth control pills and then testing her hormone levels. Just before her period, she had low cortisol and progesterone, which were likely the cause of the PMS that started her whole problem. Further testing revealed borderline low thyroid function, which may well have been the result of the contraceptives—and the cause of her increased depressive symptoms.
When Eva was ready to begin tapering off her medication, she did so following my protocol. Even as her brain and body adjusted to not having the antidepressant surging through her system anymore, her energy levels improved, her sleep problems resolved, and her anxiety lifted. Within a year she was healthy, no longer taking any prescriptions, feeling good—and pregnant.
I require my patients and I implore you to think differently about health-care decisions and consumerism. Part of my motivation in writing this book was to help you develop a new watching, questioning eye that you can bring to every experience. For my patients to be well, I know they will need to approach their health with an extreme commitment to the integrity of their mind and body. Personally, I have no intention of ever returning to a lifestyle that involves pharmaceutical products of any kind, under any circumstances.
Why?
