Holistic-Personal-Development.com

Each year approximately 100,000 Americans are expected to die from drug-resistant bacteria. This is more than the deaths caused by breast cancer, AIDS, and automobile accidents combined. Is there a solution? Yes, if you have a doctor open to an integrative medical approach.

This is an approach to medicine which attempts to combine the best of traditional treatments with the best of the therapies widely considered complementary or alternative.

Consider the following information that The Orthomolecular Medicine News Service (OMNS) released yesterday: “The benefits of using vitamin C together with antibiotics are considerable. In a controlled trial with dairy cows with infected udders, high dose vitamin C has been shown to have synergistic effects when used with antibiotics. The cows were divided into two groups. One group was treated with antibiotics alone, and the other group was treated with antibiotics and the human equivalent of 10,000 mg/day injections of vitamin C. The vitamin C group got well much sooner: in just over half the time.”

That’s a very conservative approach as far as vitamin C is concerned. If you were to read the papers of Dr. Fred Klenner you would see even more dramatic results when vitamin C was used intravenously and in much higher amounts. Not only from bacteria, but from burns, snake bites, polio, and a wide number of viruses.

The OMNS also reported that “In humans, an astoundingly high 120,000 mg/day (nearly 2,000 times the RDA) of vitamin C delivered intravenously has been demonstrated to accelerate healing of burned skin in a blinded clinical trial. 1,000 to 3,000 mg/day (100 times the RDA) of niacin is a standard treatment for controlling cholesterol. Similar doses of niacin have been demonstrated to reduce inflammation and to reduce injury to the brain after strokes.”

This is great information to have. But there are not too many doctors willing to give you a 120,000 mg/day of vitamin C intravenously.

Not quite two years ago, a close friend of my family was said to be dying from pneumonia. His sister wanted the attending physician to give her brother giving vitamin C intravenously. But her pleading was to no avail. The attending physician refused to give it. This was the same doctor who said he had less than 24 hours to live. What harm could there be? That, in my opinion, was a case of  medical dogma. Her brother died a few hours later.

What I learned from that episode is the importance of finding doctors open to integrative medicine before you are dying in a hospital. The next time you have a doctor’s appointment for a physical exam, ask your doctor some hypothetical questions. If you detect close-mindedness to alternative approaches, especially when requested by you, then you might want to consider finding another doctor.

Here is more from yesterday’s release from the OMNS that your doctor needs to know:

Extensive evidence shows that vitamin D serves as an important regulator of immune system responses. Many of these regulatory pathways are optimized when vitamin D is present in the bloodstream at levels considerably higher than average values in the American population. Regular vitamin D supplementation, by taking a daily multivitamin and an additional daily 1,000 IU of vitamin D, is recommended. In addition, a one-time dose of up to 5,000 IU of vitamin D at the onset of a serious bacterial infection should be considered. Physicians now have access to routine tests of vitamin D status. Periodic blood testing is recommended for anyone regularly taking very large amounts of vitamin D.

Physicians managing life-threatening bacterial infections have many options for administering vitamin C and niacin. The simplest is oral supplementation at modest doses of 2,000 to 10,000 mg/day of vitamin C and 100 to 500 mg/day of time-release niacin or “no flush” niacin (inositol hexaniacinate). Injections can be used to deliver much higher doses directly to the site of infection. For improved at-home management of respiratory infections, extra vitamin C, vitamin D and niacin should be taken along with antibiotics or other prescribed medication.

Suffering from Chronic Pain

If you are one of millions of people (50 million in United States alone) who suffer from chronic pain, there are choices. Again, you want a doctor who is a believer in integrative medicine.

Just because a doctor tells you that it is a chronic condition, you don’t have to accept the prognosis. Just because a doctor tells you that the only option is surgery or pain medication, you don’t have to accept that either.

Some people believe the only solutions are drugs or surgery. Why? Because that is what most doctors would have you believe. It’s as if there is an in-born bias taught in medical school against different approaches, such as acupuncture, chiropractic, or herbal or naturopathic solutions.

I recently struck up a conversation with a stranger at a Border’s bookstore. We were both sitting in the coffee bar area and I heard him complaining about his painful shoulder to someone on his cell phone. Since I had fractured my shoulder about a year earlier, I commiserated with him.

I mentioned that he might want to see a chiropractor. His response: “My doctor doesn’t like them.” I told him that is just a prejudice that most doctors share and that it would make a big difference in how he felt.

Unfortunately, he was brainwashed by his doctor and would have nothing to do with my suggestion. This is all too often the case.

My advice: make the alternative treatment your first option. It’s non-invasive, safer, and relatively inexpensive, especially when compared to surgery.

Recently I was suffering from a painful back that made it even hard to sleep. I was beginning to wonder if I would ever be free of it. But fortunately, I ran into my new friend Melvin Mapp, the body pain expert, and he relieved me of the pain forever in only 90 seconds. No pain, no drugs, no follow-up visits. He once told me that he had many people come to him only when all other options have failed. I was lucky. I had him as my first option.

Years ago, I had neck and shoulder pain that was being aggravated by the landscaping work I was doing at the time. Again, I was fortunate in that I had as my first option an alternative practitioner.

He was a chiropractor who also used radionics ( a form of vibrational medicine). It turned out that he was able to determine that my body wasn’t assimilating calcium. My liver was functioning poorly due to the allopathic treatment I had received a few years earlier for Crohn’s disease. He remedied the situation and everything has been fine ever since. And the Crohn’s disease also became a thing of the past.

Another problem I resolved for myself (when others I knew were opting for surgery) was when I developed carpal tunnel syndrome. The solution I found: Vitamin B6, 200 mg per day. After eight weeks of the regimen it went away. Later I stopped the B6 and the carpel tunnel came back. So I resumed it and it went away.

The point of these stories isn’t to tell you what to do, but to alert you that if you are suffering from chronic pain, there are options besides surgery. Options that are not only far less costly than surgery, but more effective and non-invasive. Educate yourself so you can carry on an intelligent conversation with your physician about alternative approaches you want him or her to consider. Remember, the doctor works for you. If they refuse to listen to you, it time to find a new doctor.

A good place to start on what your options are is to read the book Vibrational Medicine for the 21st Century, by Richard Gerber, MD. The book is one of my all-time favorites. He explains a whole new paradigm of healing in his book, and goes into great detail about many different approaches.

Another book I keep near my desk is The Complete Encyclopedia of Natural Healing by Gary Null, PhD. He covers a wide range of alternative therapies for a wide range of conditions. In fact, he wrote the book because of the poor track record of traditional medicine in the treatment of chronic illnesses.

Null encourages his readers to look outside the box of traditional medicine, “to incorporate nature, and what is natural, into a new healing paradigm.”

I couldn’t agree more.

The other book I keep on my shelf for reference is the Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine, by Michael Murray, N.D. and Joseph Pizzorno, N.D. It covers natural approaches to treating more than 70 medical conditions – from arthritis to varicose veins, from cancer to heart disease. I highly recommend it.