How To Get The Best Out Of Your Doctor.
Many people think I’m against conventional doctors. When you know that almost every medical procedure (most of which were unnecessary) that I’ve ever had as a child or as an adult have gone wrong, that endocrinologists never spotted the possible onset of my arthritis ten years in advance when faced with evidence of inflammation that a monkey could read, and that the same team over-prescribed unnecessary drugs for my father and refused my pleas to check him for a brain tumour (which turned out to be the case) until it was too late and the drugs had blown his heart up and killed him, I could maybe be forgiven for being against them… but I’m not. I just advise caution while educating yourself and following your intuition.
The vast majority of doctors mean well, and a small percentage are actually very skilled healers who realise the limitations of allopathic medicine and embrace the best of other disciplines, continuing to educate themselves well after their formal studies have ended. Of course there will always be the lazy, closed-minded ones who become puppets of the drug companies, prescribing the latest drug blindly and getting you out of the surgery as fast as possible, but hopefully as the information age spreads better knowledge far and wide, this type of doctor will become extinct.
Take diet for example: Many people go to the doctor for advice on diet, unaware that during the course of their many years of training they receive little or no training about what healthy eating is all about. What they do get, if any, is based on the outdated low fat/high fibre nonsense that has expanded waistlines and filled coffins all over the world for decades now. As I often say, we would do better to go to the local launderette or garage for diet advice, because at least they would stand a chance of giving you an honest answer: “I don’t know.” (Unless of course they do know, which is more likely than your doctor…).
Then there’s the area of chronic disease such as diabetes, arthritis, MS, heart disease, IBS and anything else that’s based in inflammation or autoimmunity. Here the medical profession has little or nothing to offer. They experiment with various dangerous drugs that might or might not help the symptoms temporarily, while simultaneously blowing up your liver, sending you blind, unbalancing your hormones, destroying your gut flora or rotting your kidneys. With the way that doctors are held to be gods in modern society it’s no wonder that people can still be duped into thinking this is a legitimate way to go when autoimmunity strikes. Then they end up on the terrifying rollercoaster of putting their power into the hands of these experimenters, covering up the magical symptoms, which, if listened to correctly, can give all the clues we need to heal, and then when the body is in such a mess, taking drug after drug for the disease and then drug after drug for the side effects of the drugs, they cast you aside, saying they can do no more… Then where are you? Often broken beyond repair.
Still, this is the way of a young developing science, which medicine is, so we cannot really complain. If more doctors would admit that it’s a young science instead of believing the hype about themselves, then perhaps less damage would be done along the learning path. Remember that the doctors who used electric shock therapy, lobotomies, leeches and trepanning also believed that they were geniuses, whereas now they are held to be barbaric. Look at all the drugs that were hailed as wonder cures that have now been deemed to be so dangerous that they have been taken off the market (Vioxx, Thalidomide etc). How many of the drugs prescribed now do you think will be banned in the future? Think about it before you fill that prescription blindly and swallow everything you’re given. Remember that the big pharmaceutical companies make billions and billions from keeping people just sick enough to buy more of their drugs, and they have a massive influence on what doctors prescribe for you. It’s big, big business!
Just as a side note, if you’re on statins, well, just don’t… put them in the bin. That’s the biggest con ever, making billions for nothing. Have a look at THIS article from Mercola.
I also heard recently that if every type 2 diabetic was put on a high fat/low carb diet, six drug companies would go bust tomorrow. A sobering thought…
History repeats itself, and I’m sure that in future the ridiculous practice of administering dangerous drugs to the chronically ill without first advising them to make a lot of lifestyle and diet changes will be seen as gross malpractice.
So, is it all bad? No… Look at emergency room medicine and surgery… If I crash my motorcycle and smash the bones in my leg, I will not be going to the herbalist for some nice tincture – I’ll be down to Accident and Emergency, screaming for morphine and surgery. When I had a huge kidney stone agonisingly stuck in the ureter I was massively grateful for medical intervention to laser it out, as I was for topical steroid drops during my bouts of iritis, which surely saved my sight. In the field of acute problems, allopathic medicine is unbeatable. Steroids, so hideously overused for autoimmunity, take on a different light when used to save somebody’s life when they are in anaphylactic shock, or antibiotics, usually stupidly given to people with coughs and colds, have saved millions of lives when given for life threatening bacterial infections.
Hospitals are also wonderful for diagnosis too (usually) and have equipment that we could never get access to otherwise, but it’s very often best, particularly in the field of chronic ailments, to grab the diagnosis and then go elsewhere for a cure.
Yes, there is good and bad in everything, but we need to realise that doctors do not know it all; they should not be put on pedestals, and they have some serious limitations. Read up and educate yourself; if you have something chronic, look into the work of Dr Jack Kruse, Dr Natasha Campbell McBride, Dr Chris Kresser etc (many links on the resources page) and figure it out for yourself, then tell the doctor what YOU want to do. He should be a partner in your healing journey, not your boss. It’s your body and whatever the doctor says, it’s a certainty that you know more about your body than the doctor does from a five-minute investigation. If your doctor never listens but just tells you what to think – get another doctor. There are good ones out there!
If you have something chronic or complicated, read up about which tests are actually relevant, as the standard tests given by the NHS are often not that revealing. Chris Kresser and Jack Kruse are a good source of info on this if you search their websites for particular conditions. You might have to persuade your doctor to ask for these tests, and you might get lucky. (Or you could just surreptitiously tick a few extra boxes on the blood test form you get from the doctor before you hand it in at reception… not that I’d ever consider doing anything like that, or condoning it… ha ha!).
Also if you have anything chronic, please consider consulting with a naturopath. They are highly skilled physicians and the attention to detail alone that you get from them during a consultation will be light years ahead of anything anyone in the NHS can ever give, which alone can give you huge confidence that there is hope.
Remember that many cultures have been curing people (and teaching them to cure themselves) for centuries, if not millennia, longer than anyone in the allopathic field. As useful as allopathic doctors are in emergencies, don’t let them bully you into thinking they are all-knowing and all-powerful when modern medicine is really just the new kid with shiny new toys, stumbling into a room already occupied by many old sages and healers, shouting, “Look at me. Look at me!”
YOU are by far your best doctor if you just educate yourself and use your intuition. Good doctors work with you; they don’t tell you what to do. There are cultures where doctors are only paid when you are healthy – if you are sick you stop paying them. Perhaps if we took up this idea in the west it would loosen the stranglehold that the drug companies have and return some sort of sanity to health care. I can’t see that happening anytime soon though, so again, read, educate yourself and use your intuition. Yes, there is a lot of rubbish on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean that you should give up looking for the gems. Use our resources page to get you started.
Good luck, and may all your doctors have the humility to say, “I don’t know” now and again. If they can say that, it’s a fair bet you’ve found a good one.
Originally posted 2014-07-03 10:15:10.