iThyroid.com

Current State of Medicine Today 

There is a great dichotomy in the state of medicine today.  While modern medicine is greatly able to take care of many health problems it is incredibly inept and handling many others.  Medical professionals are very adept at repairing bodies broken in accidents, but in trying to correct chronic health problems like thyroid disease, diabetes, or any of a long list of diseases, they are virtually helpless. 

There are many conditions which have led to the current state of medical ineptness and others have chronicled it well.  Just read John Robbins' book, Reclaiming Our Health, to read a well-documented account of the sad state of medicine today, with special reference to women's health.  This book is a bombshell and why it isn't a best-seller amazes me.

The basic problem with medicine today is this:  Most degenerative and chronic diseases are the result of nutritional deficiencies but there are no financial profits to be realized in pursuing the studies necessary to finding nutritional causes of diseases.  People want instant relief from their health problems and nutrition is the slow, but sure method.  Drugs not only offer quicker relief from pain but there is so much profit generated by patented drugs that pharmaceutical companies do their best to discredit any nutritional approach to correcting disease.

Doctors and, more importantly, medical schools are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical and medical instrumentation companies and their whole knowledge base is dictated by the information that comes from these industries.  The profits generated by the use of drugs, radiation, and surgery for the treatment of disease are so huge that the medical system will not change, even when science is showing that these treatments are not effective.

Compared to the big three treatments of drugs, radiation, and surgery, nutrition is in its infancy and it will probably stay in its infancy for a long time to come.  Because of the lack of profits in treating humans nutritionally, very little research is being done on correcting disease by correcting nutritional deficiencies.  Most of what little research is being done has been done on animals for the purpose of correcting disease in farm animals.  The Department of Agriculture has done more significant work in this area than the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Thirty years ago many people including myself realized that most disease was the result of nutritional deficiencies.  This was probably realized two thousand years ago, but what good has it done?  The advancement of nutritional knowledge is directly proportional to the generation of profit and so far those profits have only been realized in maintaining the health of animals which are sold for a profit.

What little nutritional information that has been discovered creeps into medical school educations at such a slow pace that it will literally take thousands of years to see the correction of disease through nutrition.  Medical schools are basically owned by the pharmaceutical and medical instrumentation businesses and are used for the instruction of medical students in the proper use of these technologies.

The medical school educational system is not designed to teach students the fundamentals of health, what causes disease, and how to correct it.  Nutritional deficiencies are the cause of most diseases and if you read the scientific medical literature you'll see this.  But these scientific medical advances are not being taught at medical schools.  Why?  No one is pushing it because of the lack of profits to be generated.

Nutrition is not Alternative Medicine

Nutrition is not alternative medicine.  Nutrition is medical science.  The study of nutrition is the study of the nutritional basis of disease.  If anything is alternative medicine, it is the medical arts that are being practiced by mainstream medical professionals today.

The majority of mainstream medicine is the practice of "medical arts" as opposed to the practice of "medical science."  Over many centuries, physicians have learned that when symptom A occurs, and the physician gives drug X, performs surgery Y, or gives radiation Z, the symptoms subside.  This is not science, it is art.  That why doctors today are called practitioners of the medical arts.

Medical science is completely different.  Science is completely different from trial and error.  In science, experiments are performed, preferably controlled and double-blind.  Double-blind means that neither the patient nor the experimenter knows who is getting the treatment and who is not.  This way subjective judgments are reduced to a minimum.  Controlled means that one group of experimental subjects does not get the treatment but is given a "placebo" treatment, meaning that they are given a sham treatment which the patient cannot discern from the the real treatment.

For ethical reasons, it is very difficult to do controlled experiments on humans.  If some treatment is believed to be beneficial for some disease, either giving the treatment or not giving the treatment (depending on your beliefs in the value of the treatment) may considered cruel and unethical.  

However, without controlled experiments, it cannot be determined with any degree of certainty whether the treatment is beneficial for the patient.  Other factors have to be considered as well.  For example, a treatment might make the condition better temporarily but later the condition might come back worse, the patient might develop other more serious problems, or the patient might have a shortened life span. Therefore, to really evaluate the benefits and liabilities of medical treatments, long-term studies are needed.  

There are other factors also.  Some treatments like drugs appear to benefit certain disease conditions for most people, but once the drug is approved and put into use, some patients get really sick or die.  The drug is then pulled off the market and other drugs are tried.  This scenario happens over and over again.  

I used to have a book written about 1856 which described this very scenario.  The book was filled with medical stories of great new drugs and treatments which wound up killing thousands of people.  I have another book called "100 Million Guinea Pigs" (the population of the U.S. when the book was written) and you can guess the story.  I'm sure this has been going on for thousands of years and will probably continue for thousands more.  I just don't want to be a guinea pig and wind up a victim of this medical experimentation.

THE BASIS OF HEALTH

My core belief about health which has stood the test of time for me for the last 30 years is that the only way our bodies can heal is through "self-healing."  If you provide your body the correct nutrients and give it rest if required, then the body will heal itself.  I've used this philosophy for the last 30 years to keep myself and my family healthy and everyone is doing fine.

Despite the current medical speculation that most diseases are caused by genetic factors and the popular beliefs that many diseases are caused by environmental poisons, I believe that nutritional deficiencies are at least 90% of the cause for the vast majority of diseases that afflict people, especially the degenerative diseases like thyroid disease, diabetes, and other autoimmune diseases.  

Despite the efforts of many to label nutrition as an "alternative medicine" the truth is that nutritional science is the core of the science of medicine.  There is no difference between nutrition and science--they are the same.  Many treatments both within and outside of medicine such as acupuncture, homeopathy, iridology, and aromatherapy have not been studied well scientifically.  They may have demonstrable benefits and they may not.  I personally don't use these treatments and don't hold much hope that they will ever be demonstrated to have much healing power, but the truth is that they are scientific unknowns.  

Nutrition, however, is not an unknown.  An incredible number of scientific studies demonstrating the beneficial effects of essential nutrients on various diseases have been performed.  Many more need to be done, but the nutritional basis of disease etiology is not questioned by rational people today.  Nutritional deficiencies cause disease.

Since most doctors have very little nutritional knowledge, they are unable to help people suffering from these diseases other than by offering drugs and damaging medical procedures.  This is not the result of doctors not wanting to help, it is the result of the lack of proper education in medical schools.  

The curricula of medical schools is probably 30 years behind science and the average physician has been out of school for an average of 20 years with no remedial education.  This means that the average practicing physician is practicing medicine at least 50 years behind science.  Since most of the science of nutrition has been developed in the last 50 years, this means physicians just don't have this information to help people.

For example, in the early 1990s selenium was discovered to be the key essential mineral in the deiodinase enzyme which converts T4 (the thyroid hormone our thyroid glands produce) into T3 (the hormone our cells use to maintain metabolism).  Every physician should be testing every patient with thyroid disease for a selenium deficiency.  It's absolutely inexcusable that this is not happening.  Yet, I'm sure if  you took a poll of endocrinologists, less than 5% and maybe less than 1% do this.  

This is the direct result of improper education in medical schools and the lack of state requirements for physicians to maintain their education.  Doctors are too busy making money to keep up with scientific advances in medicine.  As many people say, doctors get their educations from pharmaceutical and medical equipment sales agents.  It's a very sad situation, but the patient should be aware that their physician may very well be not up to date on the latest in medical science.

When it comes to correcting our health, we are on our own.  The vast majority of medical professionals don't have the knowledge or the motivation to help us accomplish that goal.  Today, more and more of the non-AMA health professionals have the belief that nutrition is critically important but there just isn't enough knowledge in books to help correct the serious diseases.  The serious diseases are complex nutritional mysteries that are difficult to unravel.  Fortunately we now have the Internet to help us in these nutritional investigations.  Not only are hundreds of thousands of medical studies just a few clicks away, but we can communicate with others who have these diseases to compare notes.

The Internet is changing the face of medicine in the world and this change is a tremendous benefit for people.  People can now go to internet sites and get more educated on their disease than their doctor is.  This is truly a revolution in health care.

I believe that you'll see an increasing amount of attacks on "Internet doctors" and "Internet health advisors" from mainstream AMA doctors.  They feel threatened because every day people are walking into their offices armed with an amazing amount of knowledge about their disease that they have learned on the Internet.  Sometimes the patient's knowledge exceeds their own.  

Most people still use mainstream, AMA doctors, but increasing numbers of them are also going to so-called "alternative"  medical practitioners.  I think the use of the term "alternative" is backwards, because I usually refer to mainstream medicine as the real "alternative medicine" because the vast majority of it is not based upon science.  

My approach to health is through science--find out the real cause of disease and correct it.  Most practitioners of mainstream medicine practice what is called "allopathic medicine" (the practice of treating and alleviating symptoms), usually with the big three treatments--drugs, surgery, or radiation.  Very little attempt is ever made of exploring the cause of the disease and trying to correct that.  

When you analyze the tools that we have to correct disease, what do we have?  We can't change our genes and all drugs, radiation, and surgeries damage our health.  All we have is our ability to influence our nutrition, get rest, and lay in the sun.  Let's concentrate on what we have control over.

In conclusion, nutrition has been shown to be the cause of many disease, so why not thyroid diseases?  I'm convinced that this is true because I've experienced it myself and seen others improve.  If you ask your doctor if nutritional deficiencies are the cause of thyroid disease, the answer will most likely be a "no" with a smile or a laugh.  Just remember that doctors have next to no nutritional training and a smile or a laugh with an answer means that the speaker is afraid that his words are not the truth.

I'm convinced.  Now I hope to convince you.  John

WHY DOCTORS DON'T CHANGE
March 30, 2002
From: mercola.com

Following is a great article that elucidates some of the reasons why the medical profession is so slow in changing and adopting better ideas, like nutrition.

Shame: A Major Reason Why Most Medical Doctors Don't Change Their Views

By Frank Davidoff

In the 1960s the results of a large randomized controlled study by the University Group Diabetes Program showed that tolbutamide, virtually the only blood sugar lowering agent available at the time in pill form, was associated with a significant increase in mortality in patients who developed myocardial infarction.

The obvious response from the medical profession should have been gratitude: here was an important way to improve the safety of clinical practice. But in fact the response was doubt, outrage, even legal proceedings against the investigators; the controversy went on for years.

Why?

An important clue surfaced at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association soon after the study was published. During the discussion a practitioner stood up and said he simply could not, and would not, accept the findings, because admitting to his patients that he had been using an unsafe treatment would shame him in their eyes. Other examples of such reactions to improvement efforts are not hard to find.

Indeed, it is arguable that shame is the universal dark side of improvement.

After all, improvement means that, however good your performance has been, it is not as good as it could be. As such, the experience of shame helps to explain why improvement, which ought to be a "no brainer", is generally such a slow and difficult process.

What is it about shame that makes it so hard to deal with? Along with embarrassment and guilt, shame is one of the emotions that motivate moral behavior. Current thinking suggests that shame is so devastating because it goes right to the core of a person's identity, making them feel exposed, inferior, degraded; it leads to avoidance, to silence.

The enormous power of shame is apparent in the adoption of shaming by many human rights organizations as their principal lever for social change; on the flip side lies the obvious social corrosiveness of "shameless" behavior.

Despite its potential importance in medical life, shame has received little attention in the medical literature: a search on the term shame in Medline in November 2001 yielded only 947 references out of the millions indexed. In a sense, shame is the "elephant in the room": something so big and disturbing that we don't even see it, despite the fact that we keep bumping into it.

An important exception to this blindness to medical shame is a paper published in 1987 by the psychiatrist Aaron Lazare which reminded us that patients commonly see their diseases as defects, inadequacies, or shortcomings, and that visits to doctors' surgeries and hospitals involve potentially humiliating physical and psychological exposure.

Patients respond by avoiding the healthcare system, withholding information, complaining, and suing. Doctors too can feel shamed in medical encounters, which Lazare suggests contributes to dissatisfaction with clinical practice.

Indeed, much of the extreme distress of doctors who are sued for malpractice appears to be attributable to the shame rather than to the financial losses. Also, who can doubt that a major concern underlying the controversy currently raging over mandatory reporting of medical errors is the fear of being shamed?

Doctors may, in fact, be particularly vulnerable to shame, since they are self-selected for perfectionism when they choose to enter the profession.

Moreover, the use of shaming as punishment for shortcomings and "moral errors" committed by medical students and trainees such as lack of sufficient dedication, hard work, and a proper reverence for role obligations probably contributes further to the extreme sensitivity of doctors to shaming.

What are the lessons here for those working to improve the quality and safety of medical care?

Firstly, we should recognize that shame is a powerful force in slowing or preventing improvement and that unless it is confronted and dealt with progress in improvement will be slow. Secondly, we should also recognize that shame is a fundamental human emotion and not about to go away. Once these ideas are understood, the work of mitigating and managing shame can flourish.

This work has, of course, been under way for some time. The move away from "cutting off the tail of the performance curve" that is, getting rid of bad apples towards "shifting the whole curve" as the basic strategy in quality improvement and the recognition that medical error results as much from malfunctioning systems as from incompetent practitioners are important developments in this regard.

They have helped to minimize challenges to the integrity of healthcare workers and support the transformation of medicine from a culture of blame to a culture of safety.

But quality improvement has another powerful tool for managing shame. Bringing issues of quality and safety out of the shadows can, by itself, remove some of the sting associated with improvement. After all, how shameful can these issues be if they are being widely shared and openly discussed?

Here is where reports by public bodies and journals like Quality and Safety in Health Care come in. More specifically, such a journal supports three major elements autonomy, mastery, and connectedness that motivate people to learn and improve, bolstering their competence and their sense of self worth, and thus serving as antidotes to shame.

British Medical Journal 2002;324:623-624 March 16, 2002

DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:

I believe this is a central issue to the transformation of the medical paradigm.

It never occurred to me that shame could be a strongly motivating influence preventing many physicians from changing their previous practice habits.

Shifting them would imply that they were wrong in the past and that is something that most physicians seem to have a great deal of problems with and the shaming seems central to the cause.