Preserving Health From Different Point Of Views
When I was a medical student, I came across one article about nutritional medicine. Confused. I was never taught, or I have never learned about nutrition in my medical school that can cure disease. So, that made me never realize there is a chapter talking about nutrition in my so-thick-medical-textbook until recently.
When I was in oncology department, I was once asked my specialist what she thinks about the idea of curing cancer patient with nutritional supplements? She told me it was a crap. It was just vitamin manufacturers that made up the stories. After that, I never asked. I never want to read or think about nutrition anymore. I started to train myself to become one the default doctors that are disease-oriented. One who study and look for diseases. The one who is pharmaceutically trained to treat diseases. Who learned so much about drugs; how it is absorb in our body, the side effects profiles of the drugs and work carefully to balance the benefits against any potential dangers.
I have not met a person who does not want to have excellent health. The sad truth is many of us are losing our health every single day. Some of us may have developed diabetes or maybe degenerative arthritis. Another suffered of stroke or heart attack. Still another may have to be told that he has metastatic cancer and only have few months to live. All of us agree that those are the disease when we get old, although everyone desire to live life happily and healthily until the end. But, don’t we realise that most of us suffer too long before we come to an end?
When I involved in ‘preventive medicine’ program, I started to think. Government spent a lot of money for this program. But, we don’t prevent disease, but this program is simply attempt to detect disease earlier. For example, mammogram, pap smear or even annual blood taking. They are all designed to detect those diseases earlier. But when it was detected in you, you already have the disease. So, how on earth it is called prevention?
We doctors, just want to know if patient have developed any disease, so that we can cure. But only little we know about healthy lifestyle, about healthy nutrition that necessary to actually protect people’s life. We are too busy look for and treating all the disease we face each day. So we end up treating the disease but not the patient as a whole.
Why doctors do not talk about vitamins?
When a patient asks doctors about nutritional supplements, it is like something is curling at our toes. I used to presented answers in the past, “They didn’t work. You can get all the vitamins from the food you eat everyday”. If they still insist, then I will prescribed the multivitamins maybe for 1 or weeks. That’s it.
Maybe you also heard this from your doctors. I don’t know how, but somehow I involved in this Shaklee stuff after I look for some help as I was very weary at works. Having sleepless night as a houseman, I could not really cope-up with life. That brought me to consider 1 of Shaklee’s hot product – the protein powder. It does help. I felt more energetics though without sleeping the whole day, the whole night as during my time we still practice on-call system.
Mixing with those who consume the vitamins, I realised they are more healthy, and some of them even ‘cured’ from chronic diseases which previously we were taught, those disease cannot be cured, but controlled. We just wait for the complications to take toll by regularly monitor the patients.
Then I started do a research about nutritional supplements. What I have found is so astonishing. There are so many researches regarding effectiveness of nutritional supplements that I have never known.
Some doctors also scare to respond to nutrition, to protect their patients against any scheme or product that could be harmful to their health. Believe me, there are plenty of gimmicks and quackery peddled to publics. Most doctors must rely on scientific evidence before suggest any medicine to patients.
Another reason doctors have not accept the idea of nutritional supplements as a good preventive medicine is because most of them don’t fully understand the cause of degenerative disease. Most often, this is the interesting subjects for biochemist and scientific researchers, but it has little way to practise in medicine. Though they have discovered the root causes of these diseases, very few doctors apply this science to their patients, except I can see in orthopaedic clinics (bone clinics). We still wait until patients develop the disease, then to treat them accordingly. Doctors seem more comfortable to allow the pharmaceutical companies to determined new therapy as they develop new drugs though they know those drugs cannot cure the diseases.
Nutritional medicine is foreign to most doctors as well as the publics, but it is true. But, not all the vitamins will give good results. As for me, I am convinced with Shaklee products as they not stand with only testimonials, but Shaklee spend millions or maybe billions of money to conduct researches to prove that their products are safe, natural and effective. That’s what most of doctors hold on to, scientific proofs.
But the good news is you don’t have to be a doctor to start preserving your health you have. And mind you, nutritional medicine is no at all an alternative to modern medicine, but a complement to it. So, if you consume medicine from hospital, you are always welcome to try nutritional supplements without stop your medicine until instructed by your doctors to do so.
I did not say nutritional supplements are the solution for all health problem. If you sick, you still have to go to hospital. But if you are still healthy and want to preserve your health, then you can contact me for a chit-chat. Your health is my pleasure.
Fyda Noh : 012 621 1883
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