Deficiency
Often public and patients don’t seem to understand a fundamental difference between nutritionally based health care and medical drug based care. I’m not talking about how the nutritional heals the cause and the medical masks the symptoms. I think that most patients understand that. I am talking specifically about how a product oriented towards correcting a deficiency works differently than one that is designed in a laboratory to produce an effect.
Medical drugs produce effects on organisms whether the organism is healthy or not. You can give a perfectly healthy person morphine and he will experience the effects of morphine just as someone who is sick. Nutritional Supplements only produce a change in the person if the person who is taking the supplement happens to be deficient in whatever that supplement has in it. If you give a nutritional supplement to someone who is not lacking that specific nutritional component he will experience no effect whatsoever. This doesn’t mean that the supplement doesn’t work. It just means that the person isn’t deficient in it.
Because of this, nutritional supplements don’t lend themselves well to clinical controlled trials. The results depend entirely on each person’s deficiencies. One person may have a headache because he is missing iron. The one next to him may have a headache because he is lacking copper. You give the first guy iron and his headache goes away. WOW! Iron cures headaches! You give the next guy iron and it causes no effect. Iron doesn’t work for headaches is the outcome. Consider all of the different possible deficiencies that could result in a symptom as general as a headache and the research percentages of people helped may not be very high. It doesn’t mean that there is a better solution to helping a headache caused by lack of iron than giving iron. It just means not everyone with a headache has an iron deficiency. Drugs don’t care if they are needed by the body or not. They produce a symptom that is wanted or block a symptom that is not wanted with out regard to what is causing the condition. Most everyone who takes a drug gets effects, both desired and undesired. If you measure the percentage of people who experience the effect of the drug when they take it it may have a relatively high percentage. This doesn’t mean that drugs are better than giving the person what they need to get better. It just means that they are drugs.
In the body all of the different vitamins, minerals and nutrients work together to paint the picture of life. Some make up the paint, some make up the paint brush, some make the paint brush paint. A deficiency in any of the needed components may have broad ranging effects. Perhaps a better way to look at it for explanation purposes would be to compare each separate nutrient to letters of the alphabet. The different minerals and nutrients go together in internal body reactions just as the different letters of the alphabet go together to make words. The words then combine correctly into sentences to create action. You have to have all of the letters of the word to make a complete word that you can use. If you are missing one or more of the letters of the word you can’t use the word to complete the sentence to produce the effect you are trying to get across. In the sentence “Build the Heart Tissue”, a “T” deficiency changes it to “Build he Hear Issue”. It doesn‘t get the proper action across. You might get something but it probably would not be right. You would certainly end up with weak heart tissue in this example. Not only that, just think of all of the other sentences (biochemical reactions) in the body that require “T”s in their words. A shortage of just one thing may create a broad range of bad effects and many different kinds of symptoms in many different places in the body. This can literally leave you with the feeling that you are falling apart. This is especially true with a drug oriented approach. You end up chasing symptoms. You have a heart symptom so you take a drug for the heart. Shortly you also have breathing problems so you take another drug. Soon you have gastrointestinal problems and need a different one. Of course some of this could be related to drug side effects but even if there weren’t any side effects, these could very well be caused by the same deficiency that caused the original heart symptom. It just showed up first in that area, that’s all. Because the nutritional deficiency is never really addressed and instead drugs are given to block individual symptoms you just keep getting more problems in different areas. In a way you are falling apart but it is very simple to correct. Supply the missing letter/nutrient no matter where the problem is! Some can’t believe that such major symptoms can have such a simple solution. Didn’t a wise man once say that the simple solutions are always the best?
It is also important to note that the same word, the same sentence can be messed up by a lack of any of several different letters. This translates to, “The same biochemical function may be interfered with by a lack of any of several different mineral/nutrients.” Which further translates to, “The exact same symptom may be caused by any of several different things missing”.
I don’t mean to make this complicated or beat this into the ground. I’m just trying to make a point that supplements act differently than drugs. Medical drugs are designed to produce dramatic effects, and do. Some effects are good and some effects are bad. Supplements are used to fill in the gap so that the body can restore normal production and function. They may produce dramatic broad ranging effects, they may produce gradual effects over time, they may produce no effects if there is no deficiency present. Additionally, the same symptoms may one time, be from a deficiency in one vitamin or mineral and the next time the identical symptoms may require something totally different. Consequently, taking what fixed it last time may not work with supplements. Unlike drugs, with supplements you can’t always say “Doc I have _____. What should I take?”.
That’s why I have to work harder than a general physician. With them you can say I have this symptom. He simply looks at his drug list for what goes with a specific symptom and gives it to you. I have to determine where the malfunction is in the body, what’s making the malfunction at this time then determine which one of the many possible deficiencies is present and give you the exact thing that you need. That’s why I have to use muscle testing. Too many possible answers, many of which will not work. At our office the thing of real value isn’t the supplement. The real value is in the information and advice that the doctor supplies with regard to which exact supplements you need today for the condition your body is in.
The natural approach is so much better than the classical approach. Due to the nature of deficiency symptoms, however, the natural approach requires more finesse to produce the effect desired. The better the doctor, the better his exam, the better the results. I’ve been doing this now for almost 20 years, every working day all day long. The supplements that we carry at our office are of the highest quality possible. Despite this, they are only as good as the skill with which they are administered.
Dr. Dave Murdock DC
