Misleading and meaningless disease names
Disease names like diabetes and osteoporosis are misleading and
misinform patients about disease prevention.
There is a curious tendency in conventional medicine to name a set of
symptoms a disease. I was recently at a compounding pharmacy having my
bone mineral density measured to update my health stats.
I spotted a poster touting a new drug for osteoporosis. It was
written by a drug company and it said exactly this: "Osteoporosis is a
disease that causes weak and fragile bones." Then, the poster went on to
say that you need a particular drug to counteract this "disease." Yet
the language is all backwards.
Osteoporosis isn't a disease that causes weak bones, osteoporosis is
the name given to a diagnosis of weak bones. In other words, the weak
bones happened first, and then the diagnosis of osteoporosis followed.
The drug poster makes it sound like osteoporosis strikes first, and
then you get weak bones. The cause and effect is all backwards. And
that's how drug companies want people to think about diseases and
symptoms: first you "get" the disease, then you are "diagnosed" just in
time to take a new drug for the rest of your life. But it's all hogwash.
There is no such disease as osteoporosis. It's just a made-up name
given to a pattern of symptoms that indicate you've let your bones get
fragile. As another example, when a person follows an unhealthy
lifestyle that results in a symptom such as high blood pressure, that
symptom is actually be assumed to be a disease all by itself and it will
be given a disease name. What disease? The disease is, of course, "high
blood pressure." Doctors throw this phrase around as if it were an
actual disease and not merely descriptive of patient physiology.
Looking at symptoms
This may all seem silly, right? But there's actually a very important
point to all this. When we look at symptoms and give them disease names,
we automatically distort the selection of available treatments for such
a disease.
If the disease is, by itself, high cholesterol, then the cure for the
disease must be nothing other than lowering the high cholesterol. And
that's how we end up with all these pharmaceuticals treating high
cholesterol in order to "prevent" this disease and lower the levels of
LDL cholesterol in the human patient.
By lowering only the cholesterol, the doctor can rest assured that he
is, in fact, treating this "disease," since the definition of this
"disease" is high cholesterol and nothing else. But there is a fatal
flaw in this approach to disease treatment: the symptom is not the cause
of the disease.
There is another cause, and this deeper cause is routinely ignored by
conventional medicine, doctors, drug companies, and even patients. Let's
take a closer look at high blood pressure. What actually causes high
blood pressure? Many doctors would say high blood pressure is caused by
a specific, measurable interaction between circulating chemicals in the
human body.
Thus, the ill-behaved chemical compounds are the cause of the high
blood pressure, and therefore the solution is to regulate these
chemicals. That's exactly what pharmaceuticals do -- they attempt to
manipulate the chemicals in the body to adjust the symptoms of high
blood pressure.
Thus, they only treat the symptoms, not the root cause. Or take a
look at high cholesterol. The conventional medicine approach says that
high cholesterol is caused by a chemical imbalance in the liver, which
is the organ that produces cholesterol. Thus the treatment for high
cholesterol is a prescription drug that inhibits the liver's production
of cholesterol (statin drugs). Upon taking these drugs, the high
cholesterol (the "disease") is regulated, but what was causing the liver
to overproduce cholesterol in the first place? That causative factor
remains ignored.
The root cause of high cholesterol, as it turns out, is primarily
dietary. A person who eats foods that are high in saturated fats and
hydrogenated oils will inevitably produce more bad cholesterol and will
show the symptoms of this so-called disease of high cholesterol. It's
simple cause and effect.
Eat the wrong foods, and you'll produce too much bad cholesterol in
the liver which can be detected and diagnosed by conventional medical
procedures. Yet the root cause of all this is actually poor food choice,
not some bizarre behavior by the liver.
If the disease were to be accurately named, then, it would be called
Fatty Food Choice Disease, or simply FFCD. FFCD would be a far more
accurate name that would make sense to people. If it's a fatty foods
choice disease, then it seems that the obvious solution to the disease
would be to choose foods that aren't so fatty. Of course that may be a
bit of simplification since you have to distinguish between healthy fats
and unhealthy fats.
But at least the name FFCD gives patients a better idea of what's
actually going on rather than naming the disease after a symptom, such
as high cholesterol. You see, the symptom is not the disease, but
conventional medicine insists on calling the symptom the disease because
that way it can treat the symptom and claim success without actually
addressing the underlying cause, which remains a mystery to modern
medicine. But let's move on to some other diseases so you get a clearer
picture of how this actually works.
Another disease that's caused by poor food choice is diabetes. Type 2
diabetes is the natural physiological and metabolic result of a person
consuming refined carbohydrates and added sugars in large quantities
without engaging in regular physical exercise that would compensate for
such dietary practices.
The name "diabetes" is meaningless to the average person. The disease
should be called Excessive Sugar Disease, or ESD. If it were called
Excessive Sugar Disease, the solution to it would be rather apparent;
simply eat less sugar, drink fewer soft drinks and so on. But of course
that would be far too simple for the medical community, so the disease
must be given a complex name such as diabetes that puts its solution out
of reach of the average patient. Another disease that is named after its
symptom is cancer.
In fact, to this day, most doctors and many patients still believe
that cancer is a physical thing: a tumour. In reality, a tumour is only
a side effect of cancer, not its cause.
A tumour is simply a physical manifestation of a cancer pattern that
is expressed by the body. When a person "has cancer," what they really
have is a sluggish immune system. And that would a far better name for
the disease: Sluggish Immune System Disease or SISD.
If cancer were actually called Sluggish Immune System Disease, it
would seem ridiculous to try to cure cancer by cutting out tumours
through surgery and by destroying the immune system with chemotherapy.
And yet these are precisely the most popular treatments for cancer
offered by conventional medicine.
These treatments do absolutely nothing to support the patient's
immune system and prevent further occurrences of cancer. That's exactly
why most people who undergo chemotherapy or the removal of tumours
through surgical procedures end up with yet more cancer a few months or
a few years later.
It's also another reason why survival rates of cancer have barely
budged over the last twenty years. (In other words, conventional
medicine's treatments for cancer simply don't work).
Sluggish immune system
This whole situation stems from the fact that the disease is
misnamed. It isn't cancer, it isn't a tumour and it certainly isn't a
disease caused by having too strong of an immune system that needs to be
destroyed through chemotherapy. It is simply a sluggish immune system or
a suppressed immune system.
And if it were called a sluggish immune system disease or a
suppressed immune system disorder, the effective treatment for cancer
would be apparent. There are many other diseases that are given
misleading names by western medicine. But if you look around the world
and take a look at how diseases are named elsewhere, you will find many
countries have disease names that actually make sense.
For example, in Chinese medicine, Alzheimer's disease is given a name
that means, when translated, "feeble mind disease." In Chinese medicine,
the name of the disease more accurately describes the actual cause of
the disease, whereas in western medicine, the name of the disease seems
to be intended to obscure the root cause of the disease, thereby making
all diseases sound far more complex and mysterious than they really are.
This is one way in which doctors and practitioners of western medicine
keep medical treatments out of the reach of the average citizen.
Because, by God, they sure don't want people thinking for themselves
about the causes of disease!
By creating a whole new vocabulary for medical conditions, they can
speak their own secret language and make sure that people who aren't
schooled in medicine don't understand what they're saying.
That's a shame, because the treatments and cures for virtually all
chronic diseases are actually quite simple and can be described in plain
language, such as making different food choices, getting more natural
sunlight, drinking more water, engaging in regular physical exercise,
avoiding specific food toxins, supplementing your diet with superfoods
and nutritional supplements and so on. See, western medicine prefers to
describe diseases in terms of chemistry.
When you're depressed, you aren't suffering from a lack of natural
sunlight; you are suffering from a "brain chemistry imbalance" that can
only be regulated, they claim, by ingesting toxic chemicals to alter
your brain chemistry. When your bones are brittle, it's not brittle
bones disease; it's called osteoporosis, something that sounds very
technical and complicated.
And to treat it, western doctors and physicians will give you
prescriptions for expensive drugs that somehow claim to make your bones
less brittle. But in fact, the real treatment for this can be described
in plain language once again: regular physical exercise, vitamin D
supplementation, mineral supplements that include calcium and strontium,
natural sunlight, and avoidance of acidic foods such as soft drinks,
white flour and added sugars.
The real treatment
In fact, virtually every disease that's prominent in modern society
-- diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, clinical depression,
irritable bowel syndrome and so on -- can be easily described in plain
language without using complex terms at all. These diseases are simply
misnamed. And I believe that they are intentionally misnamed to put the
jargon out of reach of everyday citizens. As a result, there's a great
deal of arrogance in the language of western medicine, and this
arrogance furthers the language of separation. Separation never results
in healing.
In order to effect healing, we must bring together the language of
healers and patients using plain language that real people understand
and that real people can act upon.
We need to start describing diseases in terms of their root causes,
not in terms of their arcane, biochemical actions. When someone suffers
from seasonal affective disorder or clinical depression, for example,
let's call it what it is: Sunlight Deficiency Disorder. To treat it, the
person simply needs to get more sunlight. This isn't rocket science,
it's not complex, and it doesn't require a prescription.
If someone is suffering from osteoporosis, let's get realistic about
the words we use to describe the condition: it's really Brittle Bones
Disease. And it should be treated with things that will enhance bone
density, such as nutrition, physical exercise and avoidance of foods and
drinks that strip away bone mass from the human body.
All of this information, of course, is rather shocking to old-school
doctors and practitioners of western medicine, and the bigger their egos
are, the more they hate the idea of naming diseases in plain language
that patients can actually comprehend. That's because if the simple
truths about diseases and the causes of health were readily available to
everyday people, that would lessen the importance of physicians and
medical researchers.
There's a great deal of ego invested in the medical community, and
they sure don't want to make health sound attainable to the average
person without their expert advice. It's sort of the same way that some
ultra-conservative churches don't want their members talking to God
unless it all goes through their priest first. Doctors and priests all
want to serve as the translators of "truth" and will balk at any
attempts to educate the public to either practice medicine or talk to
God on their own.
But in reality, health (and a connection with spirit) is attainable
by every single person. Health is easy, it is straightforward, it is
direct and, for the most part, it is available free of charge. Don't
believe the names of diseases given to you by your doctor. Those names
are designed to obscure, not to inform.
They are designed to separate you from self-healing, not to put you
in touch with your own inner healer. And thus, they are nothing more
than bad medicine masquerading as modern medical practice.
(News Target.com)
|