Conventional versus Holistic Medicine

By Carl Nelson

“Many approaches to medicine exist. One of them is using an external force (e.g., surgery or drugs) to force the body to assume a healthy state. Much of modern science revolves around using force to dominate nature, and while this sometimes works, it typically creates a lot of problems (e.g., collateral damage and the approach gradually becoming unsustainable in the long term). I believe one of the central issues with modern medicine is that since much of it fundamentally revolves around dominating the body, it can’t create health as health never emerges from an artificial state being propped up by an external force, certainly not in the long term. That said, dominating the body is often life-saving for acute illnesses, but that is typically not where medicine struggles (as we have remarkable acute care medicine).”

– A Midwestern Doctor

Following all of the disclosures ensuant to the Covid-19 fiasco, I began following several medically oriented substacks as they seemed the few sources of credible intel in the cloud of misinformation put out by the generally accepted sources.  These were researchers and doctors whose information and insights were not being reported. This was information from the horse’s mouth – and not some gibbering journalism major who would gladly trample a fact for another click or a paycheck.  This soon took me well free of the perimeters of traditional medical practice and into a vast landscape of outliers as one link led to another, and another…

Right down the rabbit hole, some would say.

And there are many who seemingly cannot believe that a person can glean a bit of knowledge from this or that obscure figure without becoming ensnared in a cult.  It’s as if they wouldn’t believe a person could eat a cup of soup, or just spoon a taste – and not gobble down the whole kettle.  But in my experience, nearly everyone who has gotten on in the world has clay feet of one degree or another, and that it’s very hard for anyone with an interesting idea to conform neatly with accepted behavior.  That’s the nature of things.  In the informational world it’s caveat emptor, and a good way of achieving that is through comparison shopping. You are handicapped only by the shrewdness of your insight.

And while I’m on about this, I have to say, in response to those who would seem to get the vapors upon any mention of wandering outside the gates of established medical doctrine that as one holistic clinician put it: “No one ever discovered anything with a double blind study.”  You want to find out something new, you have to wander off the reservation to where those odd bits of reality exist – which really, shouldn’t – and poke and prod them a bit.  Examining the weird is how we discover things, such as that washing hands can save lives.  It’s astonishing how the field of traditional medicine will harass and vilify outlier medical treatments – which may or may not be proved efficacious – while they, themselves, are up to their sleeves in the death of their patients because of clear malpractice: vaccinating children, denying proven, cheap medication, and instead enforcing expensive, harmful treatments leading to their patients’ death while following the corrupt protocols of the CDC and WHO which have shown themselves to be lying, lapdog entities for global power brokers.

Anyway, believe it or not, nowadays the reality is that we need to be our own first mate – if we want the likelihood of a better outcome. We must pilot our sacred vessel between Scylla (doctors) and Charybdis (disease).

“In 1976 in Bogota, Columbia medical doctors went on strike for 52 days, with only emergency care available. The death rate dropped by 35%.  In 1976 in Los Angeles County a similar doctors’ strike resulted in an 18% drop in mortality. As soon as the strike was over, the death rate went back to normal.”  – Google

This is all preamble to noting that in my investigative excursions over the past year or so, I’ve found a previously unknown fondness for those physicians working outside of conventional practice. I’m as someone educated in the atheistic domains of conventional practice who is suddenly experiencing the coherence of God as operating through the world of holistic medicine: the coherent inexplicable (holistic) versus the incoherent explicable (traditional), as I would phrase it. I received my MD degree in 1975, but never practiced. However, the emergence of holistic medicine as the more coherent plausibility in many cases has re-kindled some of my interest. (That, and the urge for survival.)

The overall philosophic difference between conventional medicine and its holopathic outliers seems glaring as between hubristic egotism and humility in the service of health.  Conventional medicine treats symptoms.  The patient comes to the conventional practitioner with unwanted symptoms.  The conventional practitioner does therapies to make the symptoms cease or at least ameliorate.  This might be drugs or surgeries.  My textbook, Principles of Internal Medicine, which still sits on my bookshelf after all these years, weighs in at over 2,000 fine print pages (complete with color plate illustrations of some really ghastly sh*t).  You are looking at the conventional  medical mind, right there.  It literally drove me crazy at the time, trying to bring some coherence to such a flotilla of every sort of symptom, presentation complex and therapy.

As the downside of Bentham’s Utilitarianism morphed into Progressivism becomes more and more apparent in the political sphere, we can also see how its thinking has bled into the medical sphere framing its own protocols as they lift off and detach from all that is natural.  Is your symptom that you feel your body is of the wrong sex?  We can cure that with synthetic hormones and surgery.  Are you suffering from an inconvenient pregnancy?  We can abort it.  Are you too fat?  We have some very promising new drugs now coming available. Mix all these services with a very powerful monetary incentive and its health supplier gunpowder.  It’ll blow just about any other reasoned vessel out of the water.

In contrast, you might view the textbook of the more heterodox, outlier clinician as the human body – the patient as they sit before you and explain themselves, mysterious as the origins of time.  And notably, conventional physicians take much the same view (that they are superstitious, flakey and ignorant of “the science”) of the sacred beliefs of holistic practitioners as Progressives do of Christians. Getting a conventional doctor to work within a holistic framework is about as easy as getting a Progressive to participate in a Sunday service. And as the Progressive cause disintegrates as a political force before our eyes like a regressing schizophrenic –  so has the practice of traditional medicine become more removed from sane practices.

One senses that way back in the origins of conventional medicine it wasn’t always like this.  For example, two holdovers from my medical years were the injunctions:  First, “Do no harm.”  And, second, “Listen to the patient.  They are telling you what is wrong with them.”  These old medical chestnuts cautioned humility; that the human condition is mysterious, complex and not to be trifled with. To translate, the fist dictum is telling us: “You are dealing with something far more complex than you can imagine.  Be careful in your adjustments, not to drop a wrench into workings your do not fully understand.”  And the second dictum is telling us: “Examine what presents itself as well as you possibly can before getting carried away by your enthusiasms (for whatever procedure or medicine or protocol you love). Try to understand what you see.”

Conventional medicine works best on the emergent problem.  Something like breaking your leg, suffering a heart attack, or coming down with a life threatening infection.  In these cases the symptoms are grave enough as to prevent the body from healing (self-repair).  Death could occur in the interim. Holistic medicine, on the other hand, finds their greatest facility in treating chronic conditions; conditions which are created from some imbalance in the life situation which has damaged a necessary component for the body’s functioning. As an example, conventional medicine might be necessary to treat a heart attack, but naturopathic medicine might better chart a lifestyle which would prevent the emergent crisis including, as just one example (supported by statistics)- getting enough natural sunlight. And in this manner the two are very much like difference between attending church regularly and hiring a lawyer.  If you follow your religion faithfully, the chances of your needing a lawyer are slim.  If not, the chances of your needing a lawyer climb.

Here is a description of the human situation by a holistic physician.

“Life is an arms race. You are I are a free lunch for microbes which try every possible ploy to make themselves comfortably at home within our delicious bodies” …

“We imagine our bodies to be completely free from other microbes (infection).  But this is not the case. Firstly, the gut is teeming with bacteria, yeasts and viruses.  Indeed, if we were to add up all the cells in the body, then bacteria would outnumber human cells by 10 to 1. These bacterial cells are constantly leaking into the bloodstream and this process is called  “bacterial translocation”. Even human DNA is not pristine.  The human genome carries about 100,000 pieces of DNA that come from retroviruses…

The immune system cannot ‘kill’ all these microbes. It would end up killing the host – that is, you and me. It has to do deals with them….”

– Dr. Sarah Myhill, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalitis, Pg. 135

A good example of holistic medicine versus the conventional approach would be contained in this substack by A Midwestern Doctor regarding Ultraviolet Blood Irradiation

“One of the oldest “proven” therapies in medicine was having people bathe in sunlight. For example, it was one of the few things that actually had success in treating the 1918 influenza. Prior to antibiotics, it was one of the most effective treatments for tuberculosis and it was also widely used for a variety of other diseases (e.g. erysipelas and mumps). Additionally, one of the pioneers of UVBI noted that low doses of externally applied UV light stimulate the general resistance of animals and human beings to infection…

Since blood borne infections (septicemia) were a major problem, in 1927, Emmett K. Knott (who was not a doctor) decided to try sterilizing the blood by extracting it, exposing it to UV light, and then returning it to the body.  …As the therapy, proved itself, more adopted it, and by the 1940s, a few pioneering physicians who tested it on hundreds of patients found UVBI consistently treated a wide range of conditions such as sepsis, pneumonia (including viral pneumonias – an area which conventional medicine still struggles with), kidney disorders (e.g. nephritis), asthma, polio, botulism, rheumatic fever, and viral hepatitis.

At that time, UVBI (Ultra Violet Blood Irridation) was found to almost always work if done early in an infection, and still often have miraculous results if the patient was on the verge of death (“already moribund”), and all around greatly shorten the amount of time that needed to be spent at the hospital.”

The holistic approach to disease is to support the body’s immune system in general, recognizing the subtleties of fighting infection is enormously complex with tactics evolved through  trial and error over thousands of years of natural selection. As noted by Dr. Sarah Myhill, above, we have countless more microbes within us than even cells and so we have to do immunological deals with them.  This is medicine at its most subsidiary, a granular war in which our immune systems sort the neutrals from the hostiles.  Holistically, we help the human to survive by boosting its immunological capability by boosting the human’s general health.

UVBI was enjoying some widespread success by the 1950s, being used in over 50 hospitals with doctors reporting consistent and miraculous results on thousands of patients with a complete absence of side-effects.  Unfortunately, this success ran counter to the interests of the emerging field of antibiotics.  The AMA conducted fraudulent studies to torpedo UVBI credibility.  That, and the emergence of the Salk vaccine, killed further interest in UVBI and demand for the equipment dried up. Big Pharma in collusion with the AMA and the FDA won.

“In a fight with truth, money and power win.” – Dr. Mayhill

But not in Russia, where corporate pharmaceuticals held no sway, and cheap therapies were needed.

Russia “unlike America could not afford to spend the extravagant amounts of money we did on medical care, and hence did not have the routine censorship of scientific ideas that threaten the medical industrial complex we see here. Rather, operating on a shoe-string budget frequently motivated them to find economical solutions for the diseases they faced. Because of this, I frequently find some of the most innovative and paradigm shifting research emerges from Russia.

While many things could be said about this hit job, [by the AMA on UVBI therapy] I believe  the most noteworthy aspect was that the exact same thing has been done to so many other promising therapies as well, where a single (clearly fraudulent) negative study immediately erases a large body of independent research which shows otherwise.”

– A Midwestern Doctor

For established medicine nowadays, specialists are the point of the spear.  This is where the heavy lifting is done.  A symptom has gotten to the point where a referral to a specialist is the next option.  This symptom has progressed beyond the ability of the general practitioner to treat, or it is a symptom which has fallen outside the bailiwick of another referring specialist.

Currently, I am experiencing a clinical problem which falls within the above.

My wife found herself experiencing atrial fibrillation one day, with irregular beats and a very rapid heart rate. A cardiologist prescribed several trials of varying medicines to control the fibrillation, plus electrocardioversion – without success.  The next steps in the process are hospitalization in order to incrementally administer a drug to slow cardiac conduction, so that just the correct dosage is found to correct the problem.  If this does not work, then cardiac ablation of aberrant firing nodes of cardiac tissue is the end solution.

My wife also had had her thyroid removed.  He endocrinologist has her on levels of thyroid replacement hormone to re-create normal thyroid hormonal levels.  However, whereas her tests might show these levels to be within the normal range, clinically she still bears many of the signs and symptoms of hypothyroidism.

A more holistic view of her problematic atrial fibrillation than her cardiologists have would caution (it would seem) a more prudent approach.  Before sentencing her to a lifetime of dangerous cardiac drugs, or ablative treatments from which there is no walk-back – in my view, it makes sense to go back to her endocrinologist and have him give my wife the leeway to adjust her dosage upwards as feels most healthy – since individual levels of hormone can vary greatly from statistical norms.  As her slight brain fog dissipates, so too might her palpitations.  Problem solved without involving the cardiologists at all.

Meanwhile the cardiologists are married to their arrhythmia ending protocol timeline, and the clock is ticking.  Who will end the palpitations first?

If the cardiologists pursue their ends, we may have eliminated the palpitations without curing the underlying problem and are consigned to a lifetime of unnecessary, and potentially dangerous medication.

If the thyroid dosage increase accomplishes normal heart rhythm, we’re back to body normal.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Author’s note: so far this has not worked as I’ve hoped.  An increased thyroid dosage made no difference, so we returned to baseline dosage. The ozone/UV blood therapy I’d read about – after locating an offering physician and speaking with his physician’s assistant for sometime – didn’t appear to promise a sufficient cure for atrial fibrillation as required, and was prolonged, at some distance and expensive.  So currently we’re down to the use of supplements, sunshine and Epsom salt soaks.  One of the supplements – nattokinase –  offers detoxification, which is an issue as the wife had a 3^rd Covid shot.  Apparently, Covid vaccinations injure the heart – demonstrated by enzymes released into the blood following the stab. They also can cause brain fog.  So getting whatever remaining vaccine crap there is removed from her body is another avenue we are pursuing.

As I’ve noted, holistic practice is like attending church, while conventional practice is more like hiring a lawyer after being arrested.  Attending church is much less expensive, and generally harmless. While hiring a lawyer is a little like waving a bone before a dog.

However, praying after being arrested may not be as effective – at least in the short term.  So we’re not placing all of our bets there.  At the end of the month if her little apple watch cardiogram doesn’t show us a smooth rate and rhythm – the cardiologists with their expensive procedures and medications are still on tap.

But what a holistic exam does offer is a much more thorough look at the patient.  Whatever the upshot, my wife and I will be much more comfortable if and when the cardiologists are employed. We might find that indeed, like many other older friends and relations, atrial fibrillations are one of those maladies which can appear with age.  Well then, so be it. That’s holistic.