Wednesday, March 16, 2005

The Flaw in the Western Paradigm

An incident occurred yesterday that underscored much of the problems we face with our healthcare system.

A woman came to us and requested a specific supplement, red yeast rice. Her husband's cholesterol was high. He had taken it, and it did lower his cholesterol.

I told her we didn't use it, for a couple of reasons.

First, while he had lowered his cholesterol, he had done nothing to address the reasons it had risen in the first place. In other words, the health food store that sold it to him had engaged in the very practice that the natural products industry decries; they treated the symptom only.

Second, half the heart attack victims don't suffer from high cholesterol. There are many other mitigating factors. In fact, in people with blood types O and B, there is an abundance of an enzyme, intestinal alkaline phosphatase, in their intestines that prevents cholesterol from causing a heart attack. Yet people with blood types O nd B have just as many heart attacks as everyone else, suggesting that there are other causes.

Our system here in the West conditions us almost from birth to seek a remedy for the overt, and very definitely discourages us from looking further into underlying cause. Got a headache, pop a pill; cholesterol high, another pill. Correct the imbalance that's causing the symptom, hurt the sales of the maker of the pill.

The only solution lies in changing the way we look at the problem. That sounds easy. It isn't. Changing ingrained neurological programming takes work.

Friday, March 11, 2005

Off to the races...

I'll let this serve as a combination shake out cruise, and mission statement, of sorts.

There's a Taoist saying that supposedly goes something like, 'You cannot achieve enlightenment until your parents are dead.'

2-3 years after my father's passing in '99, I remember saying to my bus. partner, "You know, I half get that."

After he died, I began to read about the chronic health conditions he faced in life. An elite athlete for his day, he contracted a catastrophic illness at about 30, which, while it didn't kill him, it weakened him slowly and set up his ultimate demise.

He got sick in 1958. What I found shocked me. In 1950, some 8 years earlier, 2 doctors had published the cure in the New England Journal of Medicine. The most prestigious medical journal in the world, not some esoteric, new age rag.

Because it didn't involve high priced drugs, but simple dietary changes, the mainstream medical world ignored it. If they hadn't, my father would, in all likeliehood, still be alive.

This provided me the inspiration to get serious about our work.

Western medicine is built on a flawed, reductioniost model, that concerns itself with suppression of symptoms, not at getting to, and correcting the inderlying problem.

As Chris Rock once said, "Ain't no money in the cure. Moneys in the be back."

Anyway, this blog is a place for me to editorialze outside the business website. I hope people see it, and ask questions and discuss. Finding ways to get this seen is my next challenge.

Obviously, I hope folks who do see this will visit the website, www.invitehealth.com .

The renowned New York therapist, Joan Pancoe, once told me, "Rik, I just figured out a way to make a living doing what I wanted to do." She continues to inspire me, too.