The "Holistic Philosophy"....
We believe the best way to resolve medical concerns is to first reduce or eliminate those things that are harming the body or causing a health problem. The areas to investigate in this regard include such things as looking for unsuspected food allergies (these are generally mediated by IgG, not IgE sensitivities), environmetnal toxins, gut dysbiosis (undesirable balances of intestinal organisms that can produce disease), chronic infections, etc. Sometimes it is necessary to evaluate chromosoal variances (mutations or single nucleotide polymorphisms) in order to explain certain health risks or tendencies.
The second half of the health evaluation is to discover those things that the body requires for optimal health that are not present in sufficient amounts. This list includes vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, adequate protein intake, etc.
If one gets out "the bad guys" and replenishes the "good guys" then good health is likely to follow.
Conventional (allopathic) approaches to medical care tend to be disease based, and conventional therapies are, more often than not, directed at treating symptoms not causes. For example, patients with migraine headaches are generally treated with "triptan" medications or other pain relievers and must take these each time a headache occurs.
The "holistic" approach would be to find those things that "trigger" the headache and to eliminate these triggers. These include food allergies and sensitivities, hormone-related issues, biorhythm disruptions, etc.
In this regard there are at least a dozen studies relating frequent migraine headaches to food allergies and senitivities. One such study (Grant, ECG; "Food allergies and migraine." Lancet 1979; 1:966-969) evaluated 60 migraine sufferers who averaged over 400 migraines per month (as a group). After eliminating the offending foods, the number of headaches in the group fell to just 6 per month, and 85% of the patients became headache free!
Exclusion of just the tyramine-containing foods, like cheese, chocolate, citrus and alcohol, significantly reduced the number of headaches, but only 13% of patients became headache free. Interestingly, all 15 patients with high blood pressure at the start of the study became normotensive (normal blood pressure) with the diet plus avoidance of other precipitants.
If a medication were discovered which could eliminate migraine headaches in 85% of sufferers it would make headlines. But the success of elimination diets in migrainers is an area that has been virtually ignored in conventional medicine.
Why is that?
Good question!
In future months we hope to provide readers with appropriate information regarding a variety of disease conditions. Keep checking on this website for further updates in this regard. And thank you for your interest and support!
