Do you blame the fire department for fires?

The trouble with traditional healthcare

I think there is a major difference between Traditional and Functional medicine.

Traditional healthcare, just like the fire department, may save your life one day. They deserve our respect in that regard. But does Traditional healthcare truly understand how to prevent needing their life saving care one day? I think the fire department does, but traditional healthcare???

I don’t think the Traditional system truly understands prevention outside of tests that become an ill to then be prescribed a pill to then be locked into their paradigm of the office visit treadmill to keep doing the pill for every chronic disease. It’s almost as if they see disease processes as irreversible so it’s just easier to prescribe a pill to make the ill “appear” to have gone away. But appearances can be deceiving.

Traditional medicine today will see smoke and prescribe a fan to be used long term to blow the smoke away and believe they solved the problem. They see the ill as the smoke or problem, and the fan as the pill or remedy.

Functional medicine at the Institute for Medical Wellness (IMW) also sees the smoke, but looks to find the fire that is producing the smoke knowing that whatever caused the fire is the real issue. So we look to put out the fire and then voila, no smoke and no need for long term use of a fan.

I hope that is not that difficult a concept although it appears to be in traditional healthcare. The lack of asking “Why?” in traditional healthcare is just perplexing.

Perplexing sounds like the name of a new Big Pharma pill for dementia, doesn’t it? Oops, I shouldn’t give them any ideas.

Here are a few examples for ya.

Cholesterol in your arteries.

I know, it is one of my favorite topics but keep reading anyhoo.

Traditional medicine views cholesterol as damaging and as the cause of heart disease. It almost seems as if they have blinders on to everything but the “cholesterol is evil” hypothesis. Or perhaps they are just covering their eyes as they don’t want to look past their present beliefs.

They prescribe cholesterol medications that lower the amount of cholesterol in your blood thinking that will prevent heart disease. The true studies do not show that effect but the cholesterol lowering medications are still used as the standard of care regardless. But do they think or care about all the uses for cholesterol in the human body? I don’t think they want to look.

I’ve shown this one before but I will keep showing it until it sinks in.

One more though for now since on the topic of cholesterol.

Functional medicine at the IMW sees cholesterol in the arteries and asks,

“Why is it there? What put it there?”

When we dive deeper we find out that excess inflammation, most commonly excess metabolic inflammation in the form of insulin resistance, is the main driver of vascular or arterial inflammation.

The pic above shows the difference in heart disease with LDL cholesterol levels (1%) vs the difference in heart disease based on differences in Insulin Resistance (9.5%).

I believe these are in absolute numbers how many people out of 100 are affected by the intervention. So LDL lowering helps 1 out of 100 people. Lowering Insulin resistance helps almost 10 out of every 100 people. So with a choice between the two interventions which would you prefer?

Excess vascular or arterial inflammation is like fire. Cholesterol is the fire extinguisher as it gets put into the arteries to extinguish the fire. Cholesterol is like your fire department. The problem with heart disease from blockages is not the cholesterol, but the chronically imbalanced inflammatory state that causes continued cholesterol and other blood ingredients to be deposited into the diseased/inflamed artery in an attempt to heal the artery.

Example 2- this will be shorter.

Amyloid is a protein in the brain that has been blamed as a cause of dementia. Do a little experiment. Reread the above cholesterol  discussion for the heart and change the word heart to brain, and cholesterol to amyloid and it is the same story. Instead of figuring out what increases amyloid and trying to reverse that, traditional medicine keeps blaming the amyloid.

So if you don’t blame the fire department for fires, then stop blaming cholesterol and amyloid for heart disease and dementia.

There are so many good things about Traditional healthcare. But they would do a much better job if they could see through the Big Pharma propaganda, the health insurers bribing protocols and the governments/politicians intrusions into what should be a private doctor-patient relationship.

So what is the theme of todays Common Sense Health and Wellness?

Look past the obvious the Traditional system tells you. Ask many questions that begin with the word “Why?” until you get answers that truly make sense.