Until the second half of the 20th century most diseases were caused by acute problems stemming from infections, acute exposure to toxins or physical injuries.
Today healthcare personnel spend most their time caring for the chronically ill, with diseases that last years or even a lifetime. These diseases occur because our environment is changing faster than our genes can adapt.
80-90% of clinic visits today are for conditions that modern medicine can make a little better with conventional treatment, but with rare exceptions cannot cure.
To prevent these disorders, we need to clean up the environment. But to treat these disorders we need a new kind of medicine:
In this kind of medicine you, the patient, must become an active participant in a team effort to regain or improve your health.
The path is not easy and it may seem like most of the world was against you. It is a major task to stay healthy:
- You must dedicate time for yourself.
- You must make time to shop, prepare and eat quality food.
- You must schedule exercise into your day and sleep well.
If you’re not healthy, your career will mean nothing and your relationships will suffer.
It is time you recognized: The only person who can keep you healthy is you.
This realization is essential for the new kind of medicine to work, as it will be based on identifying the underlying cause of a disease to then develop a very individualized treatment plan focused on diet and life style changes- which can only be implemented by you.
The “one ill-one pill” solution has never worked, even if the pharmaceutical industry wants to brainwash you into believing otherwise – after all, you weren’t born with a Prozac deficiency and that was why you became depressed.
However, I don’t advise to villainize medications in general.
They can be life saving and we should continue to use certain drugs for these life threatening situations as well as for symptom control and to reduce suffering.
In the new kind of medicine you’d be given drugs only as a last resort, to buy time while searching for the underlying and correctable cause.
In the not too distant future genetic testing will be standard, though there will rarely be a cure based on “fixing” specific genetic defects.
Rather the results of these tests will be used to advise you about which specific lifestyle intervention will work best for you personally, i.e.:
- Which type of exercise you should engage in
- Which specific diet you should eat (spoiler alert: there is no single diet that is perfect for all humans)
- Which nutritional supplement you might most benefit from
