About 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates regarded food as a primary form of medicine, his famous dictum was “Let your food be your medicine and let your medicine be your food”. Diet has also been an integral element of Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine since their inception thousands of years ago. Unfortunately, today the importance of diet and overall nutrition is often overlooked by conventional medicine. Further very few physicians receive any education about nutrition during their medical training. Dr. Carolyn Dean, a nutritional medicine doctor from the United States says that “doctors generally do not learn about nutrition or nutrient supplementation in medical school because they are studying the disease, not wellness”. To make things worse, pharmaceutical companies are only interested in patentable drugs and not natural therapies that provide little profit. Thus sadly, the average doctor today despite having taken the Hippocratic oath still rejects the Hippocrates dictum.
Mainstream medicine’s common advice to us is often that nutrients have no inherent power to treat or prevent disease and that we don’t need to make a special effort to obtain these substances for our bodies. Our body is built using nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fatty acids. Would it not be but natural that these elements could heal the body as well? Complementary or nutritional medicine precisely takes this point into consideration. Nutritional medicine involves the use of a diet of healthy foods matched to patient’s biochemical individuality along with the proper and correct use of nutrient supplements to help maintain optimal physical and psychological health. While a shift to a healthier diet can improve health in itself, it is important to take nutritional supplementation. Our soil is routinely depleted of nutrients due to a variety of reasons. Modern agricultural practices such as using inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, over farming and acid rains cause the soil to be depleted of vital nutrients. Iodine deficient soils lead to goiter epidemic, zinc deficient soil lead to stunted growth and poor immune system, selenium deficient soil leads to premature aging.
Dr. Robert Atkins a champion of complementary and nutritional therapy states several interesting case studies. One of Dr. Atkins patient, eleven year old Marie Speller was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Main stream doctors in such a case are traditionally taught that juvenile diabetes carries with it a life long sentence of requiring insulin. However Dr. Atkins treated Marie with calcium AEP along with other supplements and restored her to normal health within six months of therapy. Calcium AEP supplement given during the first year of illness of juvenile diabetes often reverses the disease completely wherein the patient no longer has to take insulin. To give another example, heart disease, the number one killer, arises in large part from atherosclerosis. Conventional medicine identifies cholesterol as a culprit and very often patient are put on cholesterol lowering drugs. These drugs do lower the cholesterol content but they also lower a vital nutrient called co-enzyme Q10. As a result many of these patients die sooner from causes other than heart disease if they take these medications than if they aren’t treated at all. However nothing is more effective in lowering cholesterol than pantethine, a derivative of the B-complex nutrient pantothenic acid. Pantethine has been shown in several case studies to lower triglycerides, LDL and total cholesterol while increasing the good cholesterol HDL. But one would seldom find any information about pantethine in a standard cardiovascular text books.
In conclusion nutrients are enablers in that they give the body a chance to do what it needs to do by facilitating a natural physiological process, thus causing the body to function better. Usually the impact isn’t immediate as nutrients perform best over the long term. In contrast, drugs are helpful in controlling acute situations but become problematic when used long term as drugs are disablers or blocking agents. Drugs work by preventing a normal process from taking place, usually an enzyme performing a vital function. For drugs to work there must be a disease, only in this diseased condition can one hope to benefit from blocking an essential life function.
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