Why You Must Help YourselfThe focus of most of this website is on nutrition and lifestyle practices that will enable us optimize our health. "What to do" has been the subject, and now we will consider what not to do. The medical system is an influence on our health that we should use carefully and with caution. It is essential that we be fully informed when making medical decisions, including knowing the potential benefits, possible side effects, and other options we may have for treatment. This website section is a primer in learning how to weigh all factors when making decisions about using common medical treatments. It is not exhaustive coverage of the subject, does not include the vast majority of treatments, and will not be current for very long. If you are faced with a medical decision, you must help yourself by thoroughly researching your options. You need to protect yourself. Reasons why you must help yourself: 1. Others may not protect you as well you can. The medical system as a whole does not exist to help you with your health [1], although some individual medical professionals are devoted to helping others. Many of them honestly believe that drugs and surgery are the best treatments and nearly all of them know little or nothing about nutritional and natural options. Medical professionals may help you medically, family members and friends can help you with researching medical decisions, cooking, etc., but you must take charge. 2. No one else can carry out certain advice, such as using breathing techniques and managing your peace of mind. 3. The feeling of helplessness has a detrimental effect on health. You escape helplessness when you realize that you are in charge and can be doing any number of things to help yourself. Following the nutritional and lifestyle advice on this website which applies to you will give you the best chance of optimizing your health. Do read the references to studies footnoted at the end of each webpage so you know this advice has as much scientific relevance as drugs and conventional treatments. However, taking charge and realizing you are not helpless or at the mercy of the system is the most basic of the options for improving your health. If you take charge and do anything to help yourself, you will banish the feeling of helplessness and increase your chances of a good outcome. The study discussed in the following paragraphs demonstrate how amazingly beneficial non-medical help can be. Psychiatrist David Spiegel, MD, was upset with those who attributed cancer to psychological problems, feeling that this placed a burden of guilt on patients for possibly causing their own cancer. He devised a study to prove that this was not true. For the study, groups of eight to ten women with metastatic breast cancer met weekly in support groups. They were compared with women who had the same diagnoses and treatments but did not attend support groups. The women who attended the groups confronted their fear, expressed their feelings, and developed close relationships. They also experienced significantly less anxiety, depression, and pain than the women in the control group. [2] Dr. Spiegel experienced a surprise when he followed up with these women about ten years after they'd been diagnosed with cancer and participated in the support groups. Three of the fifty women who attended the groups answered the phone themselves when he called. No women in the control group had survived that long. The support group women who did not survive lived twice as long as the control group women. There was even a difference between those who went to the support group regularly versus sporadically. The more often a woman attended, the longer she lived. Dr. Spiegel's study proved that doing something to help yourself, such as attending a support group, increased survival time. [3] (Concerning the question this study was designed to answer, Dr. Servan-Schreiber reports that no psychological factor starts the cancer process, but such factors can influence its progression. [4]) After the publication of this study, a prospective [5] study was done on the impact of the feeling of helplessness on mortality of young men in an area of Finland where young men had an excessively high rate of mortality, especially from cardiac disease. Men who answered both study questions to indicate that they felt helpless had three times the mortality rate six years later and also developed 160% more fatal cancers than those who did not feel helpless. [6] Furthermore, a number of studies have shown that women with breast cancer who were in good psychological condition had NK (natural killer) cells that were much more active than the NK cells of women who felt persistent discouragement or helplessness. [7] Although I have not seen information on feelings of helplessness with other medical conditions, I remember a time when I was facing seemingly unsolvable intestinal dysbiosis. [8] I decided to research every possible natural treatment and follow as many treatments as I could. This activity immediately improved my attitude, and progress on eradicating the dysbiosis also improved. I also learned not to be too upset about things like stool test results and accept the fact that mine would probably never be perfect. Long before this, I had worked as a medical technologist with a woman whose husband was a medical student. One day she walked into the lab incensed because he had been told, "Treat the patient, not the lab." She said, "No wonder nobody listens to us!" However, he had been given good advice. How you feel as a whole person, physically and mentally, is what counts, more than any test results. Learn to take test results and some of what medical professionals tell you with a grain of salt. Having a positive attitude and defusing the feeling of helplessness are two of the best and most essential things you can do to help yourself. The major focus of our current medical system as a whole is profit. [9] Helping patients is a lower priority for the system. Some individual medical professionals want to help and are well intentioned, but medical education and the medical profession as a whole are based on pharmaceutical treatments that mostly manage rather than cure diseases. Nutrition education is not taught in most medical schools and barely touched on in residency programs. [10] Natural and nutritional health information will come from your family and friends, the internet or the library because the professionals rarely know about these things. The rest of this website section is about "help" you might receive from the medical system. Some of the more commonly prescribed drugs and medical treatments carry risks that you should be aware of so you can make informed decisions about using them. This section also contains information about natural remedies that you might try using with or instead of conventional treatment. I don't want you to get bogged down in negativity, so I suggest that you glance at the headings below and only click on the subjects that apply to you. Proton Pump Inhibitors for Heartburn and GERD Statins: Cholesterol Lowering Drugs Footnotes
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