Dr. Weeks’ Comment: The orthomolecular approach is the way of the future. My friend and mentor, Abram Hoffer is the pioneer… he taught Linus Pauling and is the bright light of this movement.
“Drugs make a well person sick. Why would they make a sick person well?” Abram Hoffer, M.D.
A Case for Natural Health Treatment
Commentary by Travis V. Meyer
(OMNS Oct 3, 2013) There seem to be two camps in health care: the mainstream pharmaceutical driven approach, and what is being called the alternative approach. These days, open-minded, or more accurately, fact-minded, professionals are beginning to realize that the best approach to medicine is a combination of the mainstream and the alternative.
Yet every day we see articles bashing vitamins, herbs, and other alternative therapies. These articles aren’t factual. It’s widely understood that treating illness with natural and essential vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients is safe and effective. Why then do medical professionals prefer to treat with engineered pharmaceuticals that have known side effects, such as heart attacks or death?
“Drugs make a well person sick. Why would they make a sick person well?” (Abram Hoffer, M.D.)
According to a 1998 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), prescription drugs kill about 106,000 Americans each year from known side effects. (1) That figure excludes mistakes made by doctors such as prescribing the wrong drug, and by pharmacists such as filling the wrong prescription, and by patient taking the wrong dosage. Even when the drugs were correctly prescribed and taken, they killed.
Although that report was published more than a decade ago, the trend hasn’t stopped. According to an analysis by the LA Times, “Drugs exceeded motor vehicle accidents as a cause of death in 2009, killing at least 37,485 people nationwide, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention” (2). Equally horrifying is a report by Dr. David Phillips and Gwendolyn Barker of the University of California at San Diego, who searched through 62 million death certificates that spanned from 1979 through 2006, and found almost a quarter-million deaths occurred in a hospital setting due to medication errors for inpatients and outpatients (3).
“With such a miserable record, why do doctors turn to medicine first without giving a thought to what really works? Good nutrition, through orthomolecular medicine, spreads the benefits around, making everything work better.” (Ralph Campbell, M.D.)
Why would you make pharmaceuticals your first choice? Maybe just ignorance, or is it the profits?
The ultimate test is what really works. Like many out there who have started looking for better ways to keep themselves healthy, I discovered a better, natural, path to health. I had a medical issue that wasn’t resolved by the traditional, mainstream medicine approach. That medical issue was prostatitis.
Prostatitis
In order to explain how I cured my prostatitis, I’ll start by explaining the symptoms and my state of mind at the time. I was having a lot of pain and discomfort in my lower stomach area, along with problems urinating and pain in my perineum area. I was miserable to say the least.
I started to research the symptoms online, thinking I had some type of urinary infection, but found that the symptoms seemed to match prostatitis. I therefore went to my physician and told him that I thought I had prostatitis. You should have seen his face; he just rolled his eyes and said, “Well, let’s not jump to conclusions.” But after questioning and examining me, he did indeed diagnose prostatitis. And over several months he had me take several different antibiotics, which didn’t cure the problem and made me feel worse.
After several months of trying various antibiotics with no change, my doctor mistakenly prescribed the same antibiotic he had first prescribed. Due to this error and the fact that the medication wasn’t doing anything anyway, I decided that I needed a better solution and stopped the treatment. I didn’t want to add to the statistics.
A Way Out
It was during this time of misery that I was searching for information and found the film Food Matters. After watching the film I was motivated to try a more natural approach and make some lifestyle changes. I looked up the names of the experts presented in the film. I spent many hours reading through their websites which led me to read books as well as seek out and watch other great films related to better health, such as Forks Over Knives and Fat Sick and Nearly Dead. Reading these books and watching these films taught me a lot of beneficial information about excellent nutrition.
I changed my lifestyle by cutting out coffee, red meat, and eating more healthy foods. I started eating organic yogurt in the morning, snacked on raw nuts and fruit throughout the day, and typically had a chicken salad for lunch. For dinner I had fresh vegetable juice, which I made in my juicer from green vegetables (spinach, cucumbers, broccoli, etc.) and carrots. If I got hungry later, I made another salad or more juice. I also started taking a daily multivitamin powder I got from a local nutrition supplement store, as well as around 6,000 to 8,000 mg of vitamin C, and took supplements of Saw Palmetto (320mg), quercetin (800mg), lycopene (10mg), and 100 mg of zinc in two divided doses.
Success!
I did this for only 3 weeks and I went down two belt sizes. Most of this I attribute to the lower calorie diet and the cleansing effect of juicing. Then I started feeling better. Not only were my prostatitis symptoms going away, but my hemorrhoids went away as well. I had suffered from them for many years, so curing them was almost better than getting rid of the prostatitis.
After about a month, people started commenting that I looked better but might be losing too much weight. Although I was still well within a healthy weight, I cut back on the juicing and started adding other foods to my diet. However, I continue to take the vitamins, minerals, and herbs and refrain from red meat. I do my best to eat a more organic diet that consists of raw fruits and vegetables throughout the day and I continue to juice, but as an addition to dinner instead of a replacement. Right now, my favorite is making my own fresh version of commercial vegetable juice. I checked the internet and found hundreds of recipes.
Remarkably, my prostatitis was cured from adopting a lifestyle and dietary change. However, you don’t have to take my word for it. Many other people agree that the best way to achieve prostate health is excellent nutrition and supplements. I read an article recently about a gentleman who reversed his prostate cancer by undergoing a weekly intravenous treatment with doses of up to 75 grams of vitamin C. (4) A separate article describing clinical trials on the effect of intravenous vitamin C and cancer tells a similar story. It states that, “PSA levels decreased in 77 percent of prostate cancer patients while 73 percent of breast cancer patients saw decreases in CA27.29/CA15.3 (cancer antigen) and/or CEA (carcinoembryonic antigen) after their treatments.” (5)
With those types of numbers, it almost seems like medical malpractice for professionals not to try these treatments before trying dangerous chemical options that have a number of side-effects.
In summary, when it comes to your health, don’t get caught up in the rhetoric. My experience with prostatitis made me both a believer and an advocate of natural health. Orthomolecular medicine works, and it’s time mainstream medicine started getting on board. If your doctor doesn’t want to offer non-pharmaceutical treatments, do what I did and do it yourself.
(Travis Meyer is an avid OMNS reader. Although we cannot provide individual replies or answer health questions, we welcome your letters by email and may publish more of them.)
References:
1. Lazarou J, Pomeranz BH, Corey PN. Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. JAMA . 1998 Apr 15;279(15):1200-5.
2. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/17/local/la-me-drugs-epidemic-20110918
3. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2896592/
5. http://www.naturalnews.com/037244_vitamin_C_prostate_cancer_breast.html#ixzz2g29VbKLg
Nutritional Medicine is Orthomolecular Medicine
Orthomolecular medicine uses safe, effective nutritional therapy to fight illness. For more information: http://www.orthomolecular.org