Is modern medicine based on flawed scientific premises?

[Evo]

Thanks for your interest.

I became interested a while ago in the idea of why we still keep that ol' Food Pyramid around as well. lol

I can understand the theory you have presented pretty easily, because I have already done some reading on processed foods. And I gathered that the many nutritional aspects of our food is not only lost in the process, but also the foods' enzymes are denatured, depending on which processis used on what food...

Thanks for your insight.

 

[skylights]

Thanks for your interest.

Dr McCully first made the connection between homocysteine and arteriosclerosis when he examined two cases of homocystinuria, a newly discovered disease in the 1960s. This condition is marked by high concentrations of homocysteine in the urine or mentally retarded children. Dr McCully discovered that in both cases, the children had the stiff arteries of people afflicted with arteriosclerosis, but without the cholesterol plaques. One case involved a defect in folic acid and vitamin B6 metabolism and the second case involved a defect in vitamin B12 metabolism.

The theory is that elevated homocysteine levels cause heart disease. Vitamin B6, B12, and folic acid all reduce homocysteine levels in the blood.
Dairy products increase the risk of heart disease not because it contains the cholesterol or fats but because dairy proteins contain higher levels of methionine, which is the precursor of homocysteine. The reason why there is a correlation between LDL-cholesterol levels and heart disease is because LDL is the carrier of homocysteine. The reason why the Masai and the Eskimos don't get heart disease (in any great quantity) is because they also eat plenty of folic acid, B6, and B12. These two populations don't eat processed foods, which contain significantly reduced levels of the B vitamins. The French eat lots of organ meats and vegetables which contain high levels of the B vitamins.

The reason for the huge drop in heart disease from the 1960s level is because breakfast cereal companies started fortifying their products with the B vitamins. The homocysteine theory also explains why low thyroid hormone levels correlate with arteriosclerosis. Low thyroid levels result in higher homocysteine levels. Statins work because they reduce LDL levels and LDL is the transport vehicle for homocysteine.

Homocysteine causes arteriosclerosis by causing skeletal muscle cells in the arteries to multiply forming the plaques. Cholesterol and fat then deposit in these plaques. Experiments with animals show that cholesterol deposits only exist in the arteries after they've been fed butter.



You are correct about the B vitamins, but Dr. McCully mostly blames this nutrient deficiency on processed foods. He claims that certain processes like heat sterilization, canning, and irradiation all reduce B6 and folic acid levels significantly, up to 80%.

Because I'm going by memory, I'm forgetting some of the studies he mentions that support his theory. He mentions that homocysteine levels correlate well with heart disease. Places with lots of heart disease also have high homocysteine levels. Animals on a low folic acid diet develop heart disease. I'm missing a lot more of the evidence, but you get the gist. If anyone wants actual references to scientific papers, I could check out the book next week and post the sources.

This is really interesting. Thank you for sharing this!

 

[Mole]

The attack on modern medicine is a political attack.

Modern medicine is one of the great success stories of the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.

But the Enlightenment was resisted by Faith.

And today it is faith based medicines that are at the forefront of the attack on evidence based medicine.

 

[Blackmail!]

The attack on modern medicine is a political attack.

Modern medicine is one of the great success stories of the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.

But the Enlightenment was resisted by Faith.

And today it is faith based medicines that are at the forefront of the attack on evidence based medicine.

I agree. But frankly those attacks are hopeless.

All the evidences gathered by modern medicine are like a fortress that can't be taken. Because if they deny science... well... they put their lives at risk. And well... you know what Darwinism is all about...
The real physical world shall make them understand how wrong they are. The sooner the better.

 

[Mole]

I agree. But frankly those attacks are hopeless.

All the evidences gathered by modern medicine are like a fortress that can't be taken. Because if they deny science... well... they put their lives at risk. And well... you know what Darwinism is all about...
The real physical world shall make them understand how wrong they are. The sooner the better.

Yes, in northern New South Wales the New Age believers have rejected vaccination, putting not only their own children at risk but the children of others also at risk.

Also where Islamists have rejected vaccination for polio, polio is increasing among children.

 

[Salomé]

Javo, wut?

"Modern medicine" is not restricted to "germ theory"...

You seriously buy this crap? "The banana was alive. The cheese is not alive. "

I'm no fan of Big Pharma, and yes, drug development is profit-driven, drugs are overprescribed and sometimes do more harm than good, and Western orthodox medicine is primitive and barbaric in many ways, but this is all irrelevant to the question of whether or not germs cause disease. Of course they do.
If they didn't, we wouldn't have developed an immune system to counter them. We are engaged in a biological arms race with pathogens and have been since life first emerged. The overprescription of antibiotics hasn't helped since so many drug resistant strains have evolved, but there can be no question that pathogens cause disease, even in healthy subjects. None whatsoever.

That said, I do think (and there is scientific evidence to prove) that some vaccinations are harmful.

 

[21%]

Awesome! I'm interested in what specific method/treatment worked?

I was quite young, so I don't remember precisely, but I had tonsillitis all the time, and the doctor was ready to schedule an operation to remove them. My mom wanted to try something else first so we went to a Chinese doctor and he prescribed some herbs/bark that you had to boil for an hour, and which would produce a cup of black nasty-tasting liquid. I was on that for a few weeks or so, and I got a lot better and the operation wasn't necessary anymore.


I think what a lot of people are only realizing right now is that the body heals itself. The medicine might be 'helping', but ultimately it's up to the body's ability to heal itself. I feel a lot healthier ever since I switched to more organic, less processed food!

 

[JAVO]

We've seen that germ theory has its flaws. Germ theory is wrong because it's an incomplete model and focuses on the negative, the pathology.

Deepak Chopra, MD, a neuroendocrinologist, speaks about the limitations of the modern medical approach:

So conventional medicine's about mechanisms of illness, and we try and find out what the mechanisms are, then we interfere with them. So bacteria multiply; interfere with that with an antibiotic. Cancer cells replicate; interfere with that the chemotherapy, radiation. It's mechanistic. It works, but it doesn't go to the origins of illness, and of course it never addresses the origins of wellbeing or health, which are not even the origins of illness. Mechanistic medicine is great if I break my leg or I have pneumonia, but unless we address the deeper origins of illness, which have to do with how we live our life basically and what it means to us, we'll never be able to solve illness in our society, the problem of illness.

We replace old epidemics with new ones, and the older ones start to come back. So I thought, "Oh, you know, next few years, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox will all be eradicated," but it's coming back even in affluent countries.

Then we have the problem that 36 percent of our patients in hospitals are suffering from iatrogenic disease, which is disease because you took some drug or you were prescribed a medication. The number one cause of drug addiction in the world is not street drugs, but medical prescriptions. The number one cause of deaths is prescriptions, narcotics -- prescriptions, not street drugs. The most devastating infections are hospital-acquired nosocomial infections, resistant to antibiotics. Immunocompromised hosts with chemotherapy are susceptible to all kinds of other illnesses.

We don't necessarily prolong life; we just prolong misery in many cases, which is not to say that mechanistic intervention is not good. It is, but you know, 80 percent of what we prescribe is of optional or marginal benefit, which means if we didn't use it, it wouldn't make a bit of a difference to the natural history of the disease. It would save a lot of money and a lot of side effects. So that's what's wrong. We do not address the relationship between emotions and illness, between lifestyle, sleep, exercise, diet, nutrition, between relationships, between social wellbeing, community wellbeing, between even bigger things like financial wellbeing and career wellbeing, all of which have a huge impact on what happens in our biology.

The biology's the end product of all this. And now, you know when I started talking about mind-body medicine 30 years ago, it was intuitive. But now you can see there's no mental event that doesn't have a brain representation. There's no brain representation that doesn't have a physiological representation. And this little computer that we have is influenced by thoughts, feelings, emotions, breathing, heart rate variability, stress, personal relationships, social interactions, environment, the forces of nature, diet, nutrition, phytochemicals -- it's really, really too complicated. So our standard interventions -- pharmaceuticals and surgery, basically, and radiation, whatever, still pharmaceuticals -- it's so incomplete.

(source: http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/whats-wrong-with-healthcare-medicine)


Modern medicine's place in Western society seems to parallel that of the predominant Western religious structure: Judaism and Christianity. People turn to their religion for spiritual meaning and well-being, and they turn to medicine for their physical definition and well-being. Physicians are the priest figures in medicine. Just like that paradigm is disintegrating in modern spiritual life, so is the reflection of it in medicine. Individuals now feel empowered to become their own priests in their spiritual quest. It makes sense that those who break from traditional religion first would also be the ones to break from traditional medicine first. One of these people is Bruce Lipton, PhD (a cellular biologist). His spiritual perspective could be described as New Age or consciousness-oriented. But, he also articulates well one major aspect of an improvement on the modern medical model: how belief controls your biology and expression of genes. This video is a little heavy on the biological science background and details which are necessary for understanding his ideas. Those few of you who understand the role of epigenetics in behavior can skip much of it. Thanks to an insightful friend on this forum who shared this interesting theory with me.

 

[Salomé]

We've seen that germ theory has its flaws. Germ theory is wrong because it's an incomplete model and focuses on the negative, the pathology.

All models are incomplete, including your own, by that logic, your theory is wrong too.

It focuses on pathology because that's what it attempts to explain. How does that make it wrong?

You are yet to make a convincing argument.

 

[JAVO]

Theories and models are superseded by better ones which integrate, explain, and predict reality better.

 

[kquirk]

So are you looking for the grand unifying theory of health and wellness? Whatever it is, it does not have to say that bacteria, viruses, protozoa, etc don't cause disease. (The great majority of them do not, that is correct, but many do.) Newtons laws still hold up after 19th and 20th century advancements in scientific knowledge. Much of what you've posted is about what we can be doing better. Doctors over-prescribe antibiotics. No shit. That doesn't mean that the idea of healing a person with a parasitic bacterial infection with an antibiotic (when we know exactly what the chemical does to halt the growth of its target organism) goes out the window.

Hopefully we will move beyond traditional antimicrobials. I tend to think the ongoing struggle with these types of disease will not end in our lifetimes. I just have to say that the "Germ Theory is wrong" statement really grinds my gears. I'll accept "the Germ Theory leaves much to be desired in terms of explaining everything that goes wrong with us."

 

[JAVO]

So are you looking for the grand unifying theory of health and wellness?

Yes, but it's a little too lofty. I'd say I'm just looking for the next step in that direction.

That doesn't mean that the idea of healing a person with a parasitic bacterial infection with an antibiotic (when we know exactly what the chemical does to halt the growth of its target organism) goes out the window.

Right, but it does mean that the antibiotics will sit unused in the cabinet more and more often, and then slowly become relics alongside the trephining instruments in medical museums. If the root cause (unhealthy body and tissue) is resolved, then there's no need to treat the symptom (infection).

 

[kquirk]

But in many cases, the root cause is: microbe.

 

[Salomé]

The root cause is microbe + defective/compromised immune system. I know what he's saying, but he's not saying it very effectively.

 

[ygolo]

I don't think germ theory explains everything. But what is true is that:
(1) germs exist
(2) they can cause disease.

I don't think sane people will dispute those statements.

What isn't true is that :
(3) all diseases are caused by germs
(4) all germs cause disease

We are just learning about the microbiome, and what that does.

I think the pH thing could be true mainly because in an attempt to raise pH, people eat more veggies, and this is known to be a good thing for many reasons.

 

[Blackmail!]

people eat more veggies, and this is known to be a good thing for many reasons.

Depends which kind of "veggie": it's not always true of course.

 

[ygolo]

Depends which kind of "veggie": it's not always true of course.

Certainly, and eat enough of even some that are good in small quantities and that food can become bad for you.