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.