rel="nofollow" href="http://www.integrativerd.org/">www.integrativerd.org).
✔ Sometimes, natural treatments don’t work. Whether you’re receiving conventional or alternative treatments, you may need more than one trip to your healthcare provider to narrow down the root cause(s) of an illness and find an effective treatment or combination of treatments. Don’t let this discourage you; illness often involves complex interactions within the body, along with numerous environmental factors.
✔ Natural cures may take longer. When treatment requires changes to diet and lifestyle, expect to see improvement in weeks and months, not overnight. Your body is composed of numerous interacting systems and billions of cells that need time to adapt to the changes you’re making.
✔ Insurance may not cover some treatments. Natural medicine isn’t cheap, and insurance may refuse to cover the costs of doctor visits and supplements. Paying a steep health insurance premium and then having to pay out-of-pocket for healthcare is enough to discourage just about anyone. Hopefully, enlightened lawmakers may someday require insurance companies to cover the costs of nutritional supplements and visits to natural medicine practitioners.
✔ Some “natural” cures are scams. Because dietary supplements aren’t regulated as carefully by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as are pharmaceuticals, charlatans have an easier time producing and selling products with questionable benefits. To reduce your exposure to scams, I recommend that you purchase products only from reputable manufacturers and sellers. Visit my website, spinelife.com, for a list of reputable manufacturers.
Comparing Conventional and Natural Medicine
The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.
Throughout this book, I offer guidance on treating specific illnesses, but my approach to healing differs significantly from that of conventional medicine. In this section, I highlight the differences and point out situations in which conventional medicine is the better choice.
The distinction between conventional and natural medicine boils down to the difference in their goals. Conventional medicine seeks to eliminate illness, while natural medicine seeks to optimize wellness. This is especially true for the type of medicine I practice – functional medicine. While conventional medicine focuses on battling infections and symptoms of illnesses, such as asthma, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, fibromyalgia, heart disease, and obesity, with symptom-suppression pharmaceuticals, functional medicine seeks to treat the imbalances or dysfunctions in the body that give rise to these illnesses.
The imbalances and dysfunctions that natural medicine treats include the following:
✔ Hormonal imbalances
✔ Mitochondrial dysfunction
✔ Overactive or underactive immune system
✔ Toxicity
✔ Vitamin and mineral deficiencies
✔ Food allergies, sensitivities, and intolerances
✔ Poor digestion and nutrient absorption
✔ Inflammation
✔ Obesity
✔ Structural imbalances, such as spinal misalignment
✔ Toxic emotions
✔ Sedentary lifestyle
Functional medicine seeks to restore health by giving the body what it needs for optimal function and removing anything that gets in the way. As a result, it leads to more durable, long-term solutions to chronic illness.
Preventive medicine is getting a lot of press these days, because even conventional medicine practitioners are realizing that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Unfortunately, the prevention offered by conventional medicine typically comes in the form of early detection and treatment, and the treatment rarely targets the underlying cause of these illnesses.
Attend just about any hospital-sponsored health fair, and you’ll see all sorts of screenings for cholesterol, atherosclerosis, blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis, colon cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, and prostate cancer. What you don’t see are screenings for many of the underlying causes of disease mentioned earlier in this section: vitamin and mineral deficiencies, impaired digestion and mineral absorption, and so on.
Conventional health screenings are great, but they’re only the first step toward identifying and treating underlying conditions that give rise to illnesses. An enlightened physician may suggest making changes to diet and lifestyle, such as reducing the amount of salt you eat or cutting down on sweets, and your insurance company may offer discounts on gym memberships and exercise equipment, but without a treatment tailored to address deficiencies and dysfunctions, you’re fighting a losing battle.
During a visit with a natural medicine practitioner, you can expect a much more thorough assessment of your health that’s likely to include tests to detect vitamin and mineral deficiencies, hormone imbalances, food allergies and sensitivities, and gut health. And your treatment will focus on optimizing health so that your body has everything it needs to fight infection and heal itself and you have the information you need to remove anything that’s getting in its way.
No treatment is completely void of negative side effects, but natural treatments are much safer than those offered by conventional medicine, which usually involve prescription medications, risky medical procedures, and surgeries. The use of prescription medications is particularly dangerous, because many prescription medications cause side effects that require additional prescription medications to counter. Patients frequently end up taking a dozen medications or more and end up feeling as miserable as or worse than ever.
This never-ending cycle of diagnosis followed by prescription doesn’t happen with a natural/nutritional approach to healing, because the natural approach treats the causes of illness instead of trying to play whack-a-mole with whatever symptoms happen to pop up during an office visit.
Conventional
