Placebo Effects

Conventional medicine relies heavily upon the placebo effect. In fact, there is a multi-billion dollar industry that actively works to maximize this effect. It’s called drug marketing.

A recent study found that the four newest antidepressants approved by the FDA and now in wide use actually worked no better than a placebo at relieving depression when the data submitted to the FDA was analyzed. The very small percent of people these drugs “worked” for were the most severely depressed people. In this group, it was found that the drugs didn’t actually work to relieve depression, but that the placebo effect didn’t work as well in this group.

Which antidepressants are we talking about? The study looked specifically at Prozac, Effexor, Paxil and Serzone, but the other drugs in the same class include Celexa, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and many others.

Once these drugs were approved (most in the early-to-mid 90s), though, the marketing began. Billions went into selling the drugs to the public and promoting their use to physicians. The result?

“[A]bout six in 10 adult patients get some relief from” the newest class of antidepressants. That’s a pretty impressive boost of the placebo effect. After about 15 years of marketing and advertising, the drugs that perform no better than placebo were “helping” 60% of those who took them.

We’ll never know just how significant the role of the placebo effect is in conventional medical therapies, but information like this suggests that it plays a very important role in boosting the effectiveness of conventional medications.

Meanwhile, alternative therapies - which are a fraction of the cost - are quite often accused of working simply by placebo effect.

Oh, the irony.

Self Correction

When you cut your knee, it heals. However, if you get dirt and other junk in the cut, the inflammation continues. Thus, you clean it out so that it can heal quickly. There’s no mystery to this.

When you break your ankle, it heals. However, if it isn’t set properly, it takes much longer to heal, and when it does it still probably won’t work right. Again, there is no mystery to this.

Every day, people enter our office at Nature Cures Clinic after having been told by their MD, “You’ll need this medication (or “these medications”) for the rest of your life.” This would be true if it weren’t for the fact that the human body is incredibly adept at repairing what is wrong if just two things are accomplished:

Remove the thing(s) that shouldn’t be there

Supply the things that need to be there for healing to occur

This is not to suggest that it is always easy to figure these two things out. Nevertheless, if they are figured out, then healing happens. It’s just the way the body was designed.

Whether the problem is a cut knee, a broken ankle, ulcerative colitis or multiple sclerosis, the same principles apply.

If the conventional medical system were truly dedicated to improving the health of the people it serves, it would focus its resources on these two areas: figuring out what is present that maintains the symptoms and underlying imbalances, and figuring out what needs to be supplied in order for the body to carry out its normal healing response.

This is what naturopathic medicine does. It’s also why the conventional medical system isn’t interested in our methods: it focuses on patient health, not symptom suppression.

How do we define health?

There is an awful lot of discussion about health care reform these days. It might be a good idea to have a national discussion about what health is before we talk about reforming health care.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which coordinates the vast majority of government-funded medical research, defines its mission (in part) this way:

“NIH provides leadership and direction to programs designed to improve the health of the Nation by conducting and supporting research [into] the causes, diagnosis, prevention, and cure of human diseases.”

So, we have the health of the nation being supported by conducting research into all aspects of disease. That should be a warning sign. Our national medical research institution has no active definition of health that defines its mission. There is no understanding of the state of health that is other than the absence of disease.

The problem is that we go on to define diseases as some collection of symptoms. For example, osteoarthritis (OA) is the disease defined predominantly by pain in the joints (typically the larger joints of the body, such as hips, knees and shoulders).

Conventional medical treatment is focused on relieving the pain experienced by the person diagnosed with OA. Thus, anti-inflammatory medications such as ibuprofen or steroids are given to lower inflammation and thus relieve pain. If these medications “work” to relieve the pain, then the OA is said to be “managed” or “under control.” A patient with a diagnosis of OA who takes prednisone and thus experiences no pain in their joints would likely consider their health served, as would the prescribing physician.

With this sleight of hand, the masking of symptoms gets equated with the care of health. But what are we to do with the enormous list of unhealthy effects of both ibuprofen (and here and here) and especially prednisone (and here).?

The problem is that relief of a symptom (or symptoms) has been equated with care for health, when in fact all that has been accomplished is the suppression of symptoms. While the joint pain is relieved by prednisone, the patient’s bones are losing calcium, their blood sugar may be rising, their connective tissue is becoming weaker, and a whole range of other unhealthy processes are going on.

Any therapy that claims to care for health should meet a few basic criteria:

• Someone receiving that therapy should have a decreased risk of any disease in the future
• Someone receiving that therapy should experience an overall enhancement of their sense of vitality and well-being as their health improves in response to the therapy
• The therapy should not be needed indefinitely. In other words, if the therapy is truly improving health, then at some point the health should be improved to the point that the therapy is no longer needed

By equating the masking of symptoms with the care for health, the medical world evades the need to actually improve an individual’s health. If one were to exclude from use all medications and procedures that in some way compromise the body’s ability to function harmoniously in its totality, then virtually nothing would be left of conventional medicine.

True health care reform would begin with a discussion about what health really is. It would then focus on those therapies and those lines of research that serve health in its entirety. So long as the goal is simply the suppression of symptoms, the best we will ever do is manage our miseries in ways that are very, very profitable.

Best Health Care System in the World?

The daily news would have us believe that the problem with our current health care system is that too many people lack access to it. At last count around 47 million people lack insurance, including about 9 million children.

The implication is that, if more people had more access, then more people would have access to better health. After all, it is a health care system, isn’t it?

Keeping the focus on the number of uninsured people, or the endlessly rising cost of both medical care and insurance premiums, hides the ugly, unspoken truth: greater access to the current disease management system does not mean greater health for the population. The US health care system has consistently ranked last among health care systems in the developed world when judged on several criteria such as quality of care, access, efficiency and expenditures per capita.

When the World Health Organization compared the health care systems of countries around the world, the US came in at #37, just behind Costa Rica and just ahead of Slovenia.

Looking specifically at the overall life expectancy of the population as a way to rank general health, the US fares slightly better at #24.

So, the mythology is that the US has “the best health care in the world,” yet there is no evidence at all to support such a claim. The implicit message is that it is worth paying what we do, because we’re getting access to a wonderful system. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of evidence that giving greater access to the US health care system will improve the health of those who use it.

This is largely because the medical system is focused on developing technologies, managing existing diseases and producing drugs to suppress the symptoms of chronic disease. The vast majority of disease in the US (and worldwide) is chronic disease.

Rather than focusing on simple, cheap, readily accessible lifestyle changes that can prevent 50% of the deaths from chronic disease, we spend untold millions to develop drugs, diagnostic equipment and high-tech gene therapies. It is chronic disease that is by far the greatest drain on the US economy.

A meaningful discussion about health care reform would look seriously at the fact that most of biggest drains on the health care system are preventable: 50% of cancers, 50% of heart disease and 90% of type-2 diabetes. A reformed health care system would use it’s full capacities to prevent the diseases that are preventable, then use it’s medical resources to treat the rest.

That would be a true revolution in health care.

Milk Thistle extract and Type II Diabetes

Diabetes is the 6th leading cause of death in the US. A recent study looked at giving silymarin - an antioxidant constituent of the milk thistle plant - in addition to medication for lowering blood sugar in diabetics. They found that after 120 days, compared to placebo, the group receiving silymarin experienced a significant decrease in fasting and after-meal blood sugar levels, total and LDL cholesterol and liver enzymes.

“We don’t know the exact mechanism of action for this effect, but this work shows that silymarin could play an important role in treating type II diabetes,” says lead author Fallah Huseini, who works at the Institute of Medicinal Plants, which is based in Tehran, Iran.

Diabetes is an astoundingly costly disease to treat ($174 billion annually), so anything that could make treatment more effective could potentially save an enormous amount of money in health care expenditures. It has already been established that magnesium deficiency results in increased insulin resistance, which is a precursor to type 2 diabetes.

Likewise, it is old news that the mineral vanadium acts like insulin in the body and can therefore significantly help to lower blood sugar. Studies have shown that it may be a very valuable treatment for type 2 diabetes. Studies, that is, that were done up to 30 years ago.

One would think that studies like this would be of significant interest to a medical system that spends so much money treating this growing epidemic of a disease.

Instead, millions are spent studying the genetic risk factors that contribute to development of type 2 diabetes. This allows a medical system infatuated with high tech research to ignore the evidence that type 2 diabetes is overwhelmingly a disease of diet and lifestyle. One study found that over 90% (!) of cases of type 2 diabetes could be attributed to diet and lifestyle factors, i.e. over 90% of cases were entirely preventable.

A medical system that actually worked toward the goal of health care would make these and similar findings the core of its focus, since the potential for lives and money saved is enormous. But, unfortunately, that’s not the goal of the medical system in the US.

Introducing a new way of talking about health care reform

The current US health care system is built almost entirely upon a colossal lie: that putting chemicals into bodies is a rational way to care for health. This blog will address this lie from multiple perspectives.  

Our modern health care system does emergency medicine very well - which accounts for about 4% of health care utilization. It very often does more harm than good for the other 96% of the health care needs of the population.  This blog will shine a light on the multiple failures of our modern disease management system, and its inability to care for the health of the vast majority of those it serves.

Every day research comes out that shows how cheap and readily accessible therapies can dramatically cut the risk of common causes of disease and death. Cutting the risk of these diseases would also save our health care system untold billions every year. This research virtually never makes it into the headlines, though it is vastly more relevant to the general population than the standard headlines about gene therapies or new medical technologies. This blog will bring a small fraction of that research to light.

Every day we hear politicians talking about the need to reform health care. However, no one is talking about making the types of changes that would result in a system that actually cares for health. A single-payer health care system simply assures everyone equal access to the current medical system. This blog will, over time, address the absurdity of the idea that more use of the current system will result in greater health for the users.

Every day one can find tirades about the perils of alternative medicine, or the lack of research behind the therapies used by alternative medicine practitioners. This kind of accusation is simply ridiculous in the face of the mountains of scientifically tested, peer-reviewed research that supports a wide range of therapies that are used almost exclusively by alternative practitioners. Further, it ignores the fact that there is a vast difference between types of alternative medicine practitioners.

Some have read some books and advertise in local papers as alternative medicine practitioners of one kind or another. Some have certificates in various field that require many hours of study. Others have attended 4-year accredited medical schools, often completed residencies and practice as licensed primary care physicians, with prescription rights and insurance coverage. To state that the therapies used by practitioners of alternative medicine isn’t proven is an absurd distortion of a complex topic. This blog will bring some small fraction of the scientific data supporting alternative therapies to light in the hope that those “skeptics” espousing the “it’s all unproven” myth will encounter a bit more skepticism of their own.

We hope you enjoy reading, and we look forward to your comments.