September 23, 2009 by Avery Jenkins.

Apologies to my readers: The link to the video on this post got broken, and I have not been able to re-locate it. I will insert the new link as soon as I find it.

Alternative medicine is under attack as it hasn’t been since the 1st District Court found the AMA guilty of antitrust violations in its ongoing war against chiropractic.

Pharmaceutical companies and “mainstream” medicine are feeling insecure as the sands of health care reform shift under their feet. And one thing they want to avoid at all costs is allowing chiropractic physicians an even playing field — because they know that will unlock  the floodgates, allowing patients who are seeking alternatives to drugs and surgery to freely find the assistance they so desperately need. As a result, the distortions about alternative health care in general and chiropractic physicians in particular are piling up again.

This video sets the record straight. Although I am not its producer, many of the facts presented in this video are data that I have used frequently in my own writing and seminars. But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Please watch it. And pass along the link to this page to anyone who you know who cares about the future of healthcare.

Posted in politics, medical folly, allopathic medicine | Print | 1 Comment »

September 9, 2008 by Avery Jenkins.

Following on the heels of my previous entry regarding the absolute lack of credentials that MDs have in the field of nutrition, I discovered today that there is actually a movement afoot in the medical community to define an interest in healthy eating as a disease.

I kid you not.

Their new “disease” is called orthorexia. Of course, they are defining an interest in healthy eating as an “obsession,” but eating a raw foods diet, an Ornish diet, a vegetarian diet, a paleolithic diet, or essentially anything but an SAD (Standard American Diet), is considered prima facie evidence of an “obsession” with healthy eating.

Of course, if any of these doctors actually followed the nutritional research, they would know that the SAD diet is incredibly unhealthy. It is undeniably the root cause of both obesity and adult-onset diabetes, as well as the primary cause of heart disease.

In comparison, the diets which are claimed to be symptoms of orthorexia are actually quite useful for clearing up a variety of health problems, many of which were caused by the combination of a SAD diet and prescription drugs in the first place.

Of course, that brings us to the recommended cure for this “disease.” It is drugs, of course! Specifically, antidepressants, because, by all means, a focus on improving one’s health through diet is a sign of depression, right?

Err…no. Actually, quite the opposite. But that’s a topic for another day.

What is also interesting is the background of some of the medical “authorities” promoting this imaginary illness.

Let me first point you in the direction of Steven Bratman, MD. No, I’m not going to post his URL here, because just reading that site makes me a little ill, but you can find it easily enough with the help of Mr. Google.

Bratman is a self-proclaimed “quackbuster,” which means he ignores all research which disagrees with his preconceived opinions. He has also written a book, “Health Food Junkies,” which — surprise — is all about this mythical disease of orthorexia.

Of course, Bratman has the qualifications to address nutritional disorders and therapeutics because, according to his biography,  he opened a now-defunct health clinic, where he “worked closely with a wide variety of alternative practitioners, and received training in acupuncture, herbal medicine, nutrition, massage, osteopathic manipulation, and body-oriented psychotherapy.”

Ok. So this guy’s qualifications are…he watched someone else do nutritional counseling? Holy cow, asking Bratman for nutritional advice would be like asking someone to pilot an airplane because they’ve watched a few take off.

He’s also written a lot of books, mostly for the pharmaceutical industry, and serves as a “consultant” in alternative medicine, whatever that may be. Pretty good for a guy who, according to his own data, possesses no certifications, license, or formal education in the field of alternative medicine.

In fact, I would be willing to bet I have had more formal education in pharmacology — drugs, that is — than Bratman has had in clinical nutrition.

Unfortunately, people do listen to unqualified individuals such as Bratman, and thus incredibly inane ideas such as orthorexia get wheels.

All of this wrongheaded manipulation over proper eating reminds me of a case I had a number of years ago. A mother came to me concerned because she thought her teenage daughters should be on a diet. Of course, I agreed to evaluate the girls and see if there would be some way in which I could help.

A few days later,  the patients came in. I conducted a history and physical exam, and low and behold, the girls were healthy. While perhaps a bit on the high side of normal in terms of their body fat, they were still within the normal range. They were physically active, with no complaints. Their diet, while not the best in the world, actually included some fruits and vegetables, which I considered an astounding success for two late-20th-century adolescents.

In short, there was really nothing much to do.

I consulted with the parent, and said that the girls looked fine, and I thought any special diet was unnecessary.

Mom began arguing with me. “Isn’t there some diet you could give them?” she asked.

I told her to bring the girls back in a few days, during which time I would do a more thorough analysis of their food journals and see if there were some pertinent recommendations that I could make.

When they came back,  they entered the office with an air of excitement and anticipation. And it slowly began to dawn on me what was happening.

I was the instrument of a rite of passage: A Girl’s First Diet. Like menarche or a training bra, the Diet was a step on the pathway to womanhood, because, of course, dieting is something all women must do.

I brought the girls and their mother in, and sat them all down. I explained to them that I had reviewed their diets carefully, as well as their physical exam findings, and that the best thing that they could do for their diet would be to include more fish and have more vegetables, particularly cruciferous vegetables. They should also make sure they should drink plenty of water.

Their faces fell with disappointment.

“Don’t you have a meal plan for us?” One asked.

“I don’t really like fish,” said the other.

“What about foods they shouldn’t have?” said the mother.

I explained to the disappointed multitude that, in fact, their diets were already pretty good, except for the absence of omega 3 fatty acids, which would be satisfied by the inclusion of fish. I added that I saw no reason to restrict their foods or create an unnecessary diet plan to follow, given their overall good health.

Their disbelief was palpable. I had ignored all of the sacraments of this ritual, developed at the Church of Weight Watchers and practiced at the altar of Jenny Craig. There was no arcane list of proscribed foods. No complex eating plan. No admonishments against those foods which medical doctors consider bad for you, like butter, or whole milk, or red meat.

We went back and forth for a while; it really took a good 15 minutes to get through to them that I really didn’t want them to restrict their eating, but rather they should just emphasize certain foods. After they eventually realized I was not about to capitulate to their desire for their First Real Diet, two confused girls and a rather angry mother left.

I don’t know whether or not the girls eventually got their diet or not, but the encounter did get me thinking about how twisted the messages about healthy eating and good nutrition get in this society. Somehow, medicine and marketing have turned a wholesome diet full of a range of nutrients, with an emphasis on foods that do not contain pesticides, hormones, chemical additives and preservatives, into an illness.

Orthorexia? If it were really a disease instead of a chimera, I would wish that more of my patients suffered from it.

Posted in medical folly, nutrition, allopathic medicine | Print | 2 Comments »

September 7, 2008 by Avery Jenkins.

Would you accept investment advice from a physical therapist?

Would you do an exercise program designed by an attorney?

Of course not. While  those people may have expertise in their own field, they lack any qualifications for advising others outside of their field.

So why on earth do people listen to nutritional recommendations from their medical doctors?

Over the past few months, I have noticed with disturbingly increasing regularity, patients coming in and telling me that their MD has recommended that they take XYZ supplement or the herb Herpatoxicus hippocratus or some such.

Unfortunately, however, the quality of the advice which my patients are receiving is only slightly worse than that which they would get from the high school kid at the cash register of the local health food store.

In one case at my office, the recommendations so helpfully supplied by one of my patient’s MDs was downright dangerous, because the MD was apparently unaware of the interaction between the nutrient she was recommending and the drugs that she had  herself prescribed!

Fortunately, I was able to rectify the error before it became an emergency room visit.

But increasingly, MDs are trying to provide their patients with nutritional advice when, in fact,  they really don’t have any background, education, qualifications, training or clinical experience on which to base their recommendations.

In all likelihood, they are probably only repeating something which their friendly drug rep passed on to them. Which, according to more than one recent study, is how most MDs decide which drugs to prescribe. (Don’t believe me? Look here. Or here.  Or here. Or…do you really need more?)

So, in short, most prescriptions are written by doctors on the advice of a good-looking 30-40 year old with a bachelor’s degree, a hot car, and who buys pizza for the staff. (By the way, before you listen to any nutritional advice from any medical doctor, go check out the food in the staff room.)

Each day more than 101,000 drug company reps—one for every five office-based physicians—call on the nation’s doctors. Primary care physicians, on average, have 28 interactions a week with drug reps, according to a 2005 report by the Health Strategies Group, a consulting firm for manufacturers of health care products.

Honestly, I’m feeling kind of left out. The last time I saw a rep from one of the nutrient companies whose products I recommend was two months ago.

But I’m afraid I got away from my main point here, which is that MDs are  “prescribing” supplements and nutritional regimens to their patients and they don’t have a clue what they are talking about!

Seriously. You know how many hours of education an MD has in nutrition?

0

Ok, if you didn’t get it the first time, I’ll repeat it.

0. None. Nada. Zilch.

This wouldn’t be so bad if they were actually honest with their patients, and said something like, “Gee, um, I really don’t have a clue about how nutrition works, but this guy who was in my office the other day and brought us all egg rolls and pork fried rice told me he heard from another one of his clients that this works, and actually I suggested it to my cousin’s in-law’s sister, and she said it worked great, so I think you should take it.”

Truthfully, this is the level of critical decision-making that goes on in an MD’s brain when making nutritional recommendations.

Which is in part because (1) the average MD doesn’t have a clue how clinical nutrition actually works, and (2)  as I mentioned above, most of their prescriptive recommendations are made on heresay, anyway.

In the medical/mechanistic model of the human body, MDs are taught basic one-to-one correspondences. Pain is paired with antiinflammatories; hypothyroidism is paired with synthetic thyroid hormone;  infection is paired with antibiotic.

Within that framework, there may be subsets of, for example, painkillers or antibiotics. But the one-to-one correspondence is the essence of modern medical thinking.

In comparison, approaching a health problem from a nutritional  point of view requires that you look beneath the condition to the process which created the condition. You then alter that process, by altering the environment in the body which allows that process to exist. When the environment is no longer conducive to the behavior, the process is discontinued and the symptoms resolve.

So there can be no one-to-one correspondence, because many different processes can cause the same problem.

Take osteoarthritis, for example. The typical MD approach is to (1) prescribe a painkiller and (2) recommend (or “prescribe”) glucosamine or chondroitin sulfates.

All well and good, except for the fact that glucosamine actually doesn’t work that often. It does work in the percentage of the population whose chondrocytes actually have the ability to utilize the additional glucosamine, or people who are glucosamine deficient. In short, probably about 20-30% of the population.

On the other hand, what I and other alternative physicians try to do is understand where the body’s processes have gone awry, and for what reason. So for four patients with “osteoarthritis,” one might recieve chiropractic manipulation, one might recieve MSM, one might recieve Chui Feng Tou Gu Wan, a third will be placed on a detoxification diet, and the fourth will receive omega-3 fatty acids.

That’s how nutrition is done. Unlike medicine which is pathology-oriented, clinical nutrition is process oriented, not pathology oriented.

And it is this basic, fundamental concept that MDs don’t understand,  which only compounds their overall lack of knowledge about nutrition.

So my recommendation to anybody is: Take any nutritional recommendation from an MD with a grain of salt.

(By the way, did you know that salt plays a role in high blood pressure in only 10 percent of those who have this problem? I’ll bet your MD didn’t.)

Secondly, if you receive a nutritional “prescription” from an MD, for your own safety, consult with a chiropractic physician before taking it.

And, finally, for any medical doctors who are reading this (fess up, I know you do): For your own patient’s safety, please refrain from making nutritional recommendations and refer your patients to a doctor more appropriate for this type of therapeutic intervention.

Posted in allopathic medicine | Print | 1 Comment »

June 18, 2008 by Avery Jenkins.

And, not surprisingly, it comes from the American Medical Association.

The AMA has proposed a resolution which would call upon state and federal legislatures to restrict the use of the term “Doctor” to only those who have an MD, DO, DDS, or DPM degree.

That’s right. According to the AMA, it should be illegal to call me Dr. Jenkins, even though I posess a valid doctor’s degree from a federally and state accredited university with permission to offer that degree.

Even though getting my doctor degree required more hours than required to get a medical degree.

Even though I posess not one, but two post-graduate board certifications, each requiring hundreds of hours of education.

And certainly, there couldn’t be a single psychologist in the country worthy of being called doctor. Nor should anyone holding a PhD be worthy of the term.

I don’t know whether to attribute this  brand-spanking-new medical folly to a bad case of acute arrogance or simply institutional dementia.

Or, it could be that  the fear is starting to set in.

The fear that the medical “doctors” will continue to lose patients to professions like mine, real doctors who know how to create health, not just dress illness up in a drug and call it healthy.

The fear that people will start to realize that yes, according to the CDC’s own statistics, medical “doctors” kill as many people as 5 jumbo jets crashing every day.

The fear that the curtain of concealment is starting to tear, and patients are beginning to recognize that the wizards of health — those so-called medical “doctors” — are little more than Kansan hucksters selling cartloads of high-tech snake oil.

Frankly, I’m livid. Can you tell?

Posted in allopathic medicine | Print | 1 Comment »

March 18, 2008 by Avery Jenkins.

Sometimes I kind of feel bad about always pointing out the shortfalls of my medical colleagues, as I noted a couple of posts ago. But then I get yet another reminder or two of why I just can’t get the warm fuzzies about them.

My most recent bout of slap-me-Emma-I-must-be-sleeping medical foolishness began late last week, when a patient told me that her MD did not mind her seeing me, so long as I was not trying to treat disorders like diabetes and asthma.

Screeech! Back that up a second and replay it. Don’t treat diabetes? Or asthma?

I’m sorry, but the most common form of diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, is the quintessential lifestyle disease. It is caused by a combination of couch potatoism and a lousy diet, usually leading to obesity. Any doctor, medical, chiropractic or otherwise, should know that fact, since just about everybody else in America does.

And, frankly, I’m the quintessential lifestyle doctor. To say that my knowledge, skills or tools are inadequate for the treatment of diabetes is like saying that a Porsche is an inadequate car for the Autobahn. OK, even to me that sounded a little cocky. But you know what I mean.

I don’t think I even need to point to the research here, except to remind my readers that time after time, the research has demonstrated that lifestyle intervention should be the first line of therapy for diabetes. Ergo, the first stop for someone with this disorder ought to be a doctor board-certified in, nutrition, perhaps?

I’ll grant you, however, that alternative treatment of asthma might be a little obscure for the average MD to have picked up on. But the research is there.

For example, in October, 2002, Ray Hayek, PhD, released the results of his 420-patient study at the International Conference on Spinal Manipulation. Dr. Hayek found that patients treated with spinal manipulation for asthma improved not only symptomatically, but demonstrated positive immunologic and hormonal changes in laboratory testing. (For you citation mavens, the abstract may be found here.)

Another study, albeit of small size, found that children combining chiropractic treatment with medical management of asthma experienced a substantial decrease in symptoms with an increase in their quality of life. (Look here for details.)

Which brings me back to one of my earliest experiences as a chiropractic physician. A little over a year after opening my first practice, a patient came busting through the door of my office, clearly in distress.

She was having an asthma attack, and communicated to me that she had left her inhaler at home. I had my assistant call for an ambulance, but I also knew that the arrival of a volunteer squad in my rural town might not be quite timely enough. Having heard the stories as a student doctor of chiropractic physicians treating asthma, I did that which I was best trained to do.

I had the patient lay face down on the treatment table, while I palpated the thoracic vertebrae for restrictions, and adjusted them with a quick thrust.

As quickly as it began, it was over. The patient sat up, already exhibiting patent relief, and within a minute was breathing normally.

I lectured her on the foolishness of being asthmatic and wandering about without her inhaler. When the ambulance arrived, she refused the ride and went home to obtain the missing pharmaceuticals.

So can chiropractic physicians treat asthma? Yes, and apparently quite well, thank you very much.

That said, it is clear that asthma is one of those disorders that lies at the intersection of conservative and pharmaceutical care, and patients with asthma would probably benefit best by appropriate employment of both forms of care.

It’s just a crying shame that medical doctors, unaware of the research and informed only by longstanding bigotry, would advise our common patients to avoid the treatments which may help them most.

Posted in chiropractic, allopathic medicine, acupuncture | Print | 2 Comments »