Damage Control
If health were the product of today’s health care system, people would go to the doctors and come out with health. This doesn’t seem to happen. Usually they go to the doctor’s office and come out with drugs, usually for the rest of their life. Drugs are needed when the body is unable to produce those things that are necessary for it to work right. If it isn’t properly producing those substances it most certainly is not healthy. A person needing to take drugs everyday is, by definition, not healthy.
What is presented to the public as a health care system is not really oriented at health at all. If it were, the approach would be to get the person back to the state he was in before he was sick so that he wouldn’t need any drugs. Instead the attitude appears to be one of “you’re broke and can’t be fixed so take these drugs to get you through”. Surgery involves a similar attitude with a solution that is more extreme involving removal or patching of “defective” body parts. What we are looking at is not an attempt to restore health or keep people healthy in either case. Rather we are looking at a system oriented more towards damage control. Perhaps America’s Damage Control System would be a more appropriate name than America’s Health Care System.
True, there are attempts made at prevention. Keep your blood pressure down with drugs, don’t eat fats, don’t smoke. Get regular screenings for early detection. This is certainly a very limited view. In the 70’s, a very large study* costing $115 million was done in which 12,000 men were randomly divided into two groups. The first group was advised to quit smoking, take medication to lower their blood pressure if necessary and eat a low fat, low cholesterol diet. The second group, the control group, was told to live, eat and address their health problems however they desired. All twelve thousand were then followed for seven years. At the end of seven years there were slightly more deaths in those who had been counseled to quit smoking, eat a cholesterol lowering diet and treat their high blood pressure with medication than those who did whatever they wanted. A 1982 Wall Street Journal headline summed it up: “Heart Attacks: A Test Collapses”. The point of bringing this up isn’t that I think smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are good for you (although the low fat diet was proposed as a possible explanation by investigators), the point is that this represents a very limited view on what it is necessary to be healthy.
Early detection screenings sound like a good idea and perhaps they are. However, early detection is not preventive. Early detection is early detection. By the time you pick it up, no matter how little is present, you already have it. It hasn’t been prevented at all.
In order to have a true health approach you have to go back to basics. You have to look at what it takes for the body to function correctly and you have to look at what can get in the way of the body functioning correctly. Only by looking at these basics do you stand a chance at restoring and maintaining function in the body. An approach that worked towards these two ends, supplying the things that the body requires to function correctly and removing those things that interfere with normal function (and healing) would actually be a health care approach.
Supplying the things that the body requires to function correctly enters the realm of nutrition. True, the body also requires shelter from the environment and sleep, but these are very easily spotted and do not require a lot of analytical procedures to see. Nutrition however, is not always so obvious. There is plenty to eat in America. No one I know seems to have a shortage of food. The problem is not the quantity of food, it’s the quality of food. In America we have a lot of fake food and weak food.
It used to be that food was grown locally. Everyone would go to the corner market and purchase their food. A few individuals at some point realized that if they sold to a larger and larger area they would make more and more money. The problem was that the perishable nature of food made it self limiting. Shipping food farther and farther away required more time and the food would spoil. Therefore fresh food was only obtained locally. One of the ways that large food companies got around this was simply to remove the part that spoiled or perished. They refined it. So we ended up with our refined flour and sugar and other grains. Because of the bleaching, coloring and deodorizing it also had the added advantage of being able to mask inferior quality foods, a wonderful competitive advantage. The problem with the refined foods, is that the part of the food that perishes or spoils is the part that has the best nutrition, the vitamins, minerals and enzymes. Another way that the large companies dealt with the problem was to add preservatives. Food dyes also help give the appearance of fresher foods. Then to top it off artificial flavors are added in case the taste needs help. These chemicals are an additional stress on the body as they have to be detoxified and eliminated – which requires extra good nutrition – vitamins, minerals and enzymes.
Did you know at one point in time white bread was illegal? It was declared that to advertise it as food was fraud. This was back at the inception of the Food and Drug Administration at a time when it’s purposes were clearer. What we have now are essentially non foods (very little actual nutrition) disguised as real foods. A good food is taken, stripped of it’s vitality, doctored up with preservatives, food coloring and artificial flavoring and sold as food to the public.
Not only do we have fake food we have weak food. This is quite unfair in that it affects those who make a concerted effort to eat well. They eat their fruits and vegetables and fresh foods. This is not about good things being removed from the foods or things added to the foods. This is about the nutrients not being in the foods in the first place. Our soils are missing the vital nutrients and minerals that they once had. Some small part of this is due to the use of flood control measures. Floods always revitalized the soil with fresh minerals. A much larger part is due to the use of artificial fertilizers. Our bodies require approximately 60 minerals, 20 amino acids and 3 essential fatty acids to function. When artificial fertilizers are used, the plants take out 60 minerals and the artificial fertilizer only put back about 5 or 6 of the minerals, the ones that make the plant look good. After a while the soil becomes exhausted except for those 5 or 6 minerals. As an example, now you have to eat 300 green beans to get the same amount of copper that you used to get from eating 10.
A health oriented approach would concentrate on getting the proper nutrition into the individual, especially the nutrition that would be related to whatever malfunction that the person was experiencing. It would also look at removing interferences to the proper functioning of the organs and tissues of the body. There are several things that can interfere with the proper functions of the body. These include such things as chemicals and toxins, physicals injuries that need healing, nerve interferences whether from injury or spinal misalignment, immune system challenges and others. Some corrections may involve lifestyle changes but the handling of many of the stresses to the body lands us once again in the realm of nutrition. Ridding the body of specific toxins and chemicals for instance requires a lot of very specific nutrition to support the extra work that is necessary for the detoxification and elimination pathways that exist in the body. Likewise with the healing of old injuries. It is true that not everyone can be restored to health again. There are limitations. Clinical experience has shown however that the percentage of people who are able to have their function restored is very high. The body has an amazing ability to heal but the first thing that you have to have in order for this to occur is the intention to help heal the body, not just control the symptoms. At our office we seek to restore function so that things work correctly again and we do it by isolating exactly what the body needs in order for this to occur with the use of Cause Point Correlative Testing. If you or someone close would like health care, call the office at (260) 459-6160 (Ft. Wayne) or (773) 929-3964 (Chicago) for an appointment. Don’t take the heal out of health.
*“Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial: Risk Factor Changes and Mortality Results.”JAMA. Sept. 24; 248 (12): 1465-77
David A. Murdock, D.C.
