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| A diathermy unit, it fights infection not Han Solo. |
If you're like most people, you see a doctor when faced with illness or injury but have grown accustomed to certain discomforts. Maybe cheese gives you a stomach ache and sugar makes you moody but you eat them both anyway. You chalk up fatigue and stress to work and not enough sleep. Hitting the gym makes you sore for a week and you figure you're just out of shape. You don't feel sick but you don't feel healthy. Perhaps you're fine. Sure thing. Take some pills...or maybe keep reading.
SALDANATION is fortunate to have touched base with Dr. Eric Blake ND. He's a Naturopath and director of Hollistic Health pc, a Naturopathic clinic in Porltand, Oregon. We asked him five questions.
SALDANATION: A lot of people use the terms food allergy and food intolerance interchangeably but the two are completely different. While people are generally sensitive and accommodating to food allergies, it seems that the mention of a food intolerance is often met with a puzzled look. Why are food intolerances so often undiagnosed despite the fact that being aware of them can tremendously benefit a person's health?
Dr. Blake: Hippocrates, the father of Western Medicine, famously said “One man’s food is another man’s poison”. So the idea has been around a long time. But what do we know today about food allergies and food intolerances?
Well I see a couple of questions in there, and I’ll do my best to answer them. You are correct that Food Allergy and Food Intolerance are two separate biological processes. An Allergy is an hyper reaction of the immune system against a protein. That protein could be from any number of environmental sources- in the air from pollens or grasses, animal or human dander, or foods consumed orally. They can be very severe (for example causing swelling of the airway) or much more mild for example itchy watery eyes or sneezing.
So why is that important relative to foods? Well 80% of our immune system is in our digestive beds. 80%. So when the body is not functioning well, whether we are acutely sick or chronically run down, the immune system becomes hyper-reactive – and remember most of that immune system is in the digestive bed.
So if a doctor takes a blood sample from a patient – and most patients are sick when they come to see us - they will often find numerous food allergies because the immune system is trying to clean up the mess and is on alert. I just saw a mother of a child with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis yesterday and she brought in one of these allergy tests. It cost her almost $400 and she found out that her child is allergic to almost everything on the 120 panel test.
A food intolerance is a different thing altogether. A food intolerance is a food the body does not digest, does not break down, does not assimilate. It usually has to do with a lack of the appropriate digestive enzymes to process the foods. So rather than being digested and broken down the food decays in the gastrointestinal system. It rots – literally. It will release chemicals that are toxic such as cadaverine ( a chemical that cadavers produce), putrescine (so named because it is putrid), indican, and histamine (the allergy chemical). So if we understand that an undigested food causes toxic chemicals to be released that cause an irritation to the body we can understand the difference.
What does it matter if these chemicals are released one might ask. Well we absorb these chemicals and they circulate in the body and create inflammation and disease. For example, indican is one of the chemicals that is produced. This chemical is absorbed into the body and is eventually excreted through the urine. Which means that it is absorbed, circulates around the body, and then the kidneys have to eliminate it as a poison. As one avoids his or her intolerance the level of indican will lower which indicates improved digestion and lower levels of toxicity in the body.
Actually, the level of indican in the urine relates to the balance of the intestinal bacteria. You may have heard of good bacteria and bad bacteria in the digestive tract? There are more bacteria in your digestive tract than there are cells in your body. Not a few more, but 10 times more! 10 times more bacteria inside of you than there are cells that make you you! And they help us digest food, they produce vitamins, regulate the immune system, and more. If we eat food intolerances then the unhealthy gut bugs will grow, producing more indican in the process, and disrupting the important role of the healthy bacteria for our whole body.
So what is the relationship of food allergies and intolerances. Well if you eat an intolerance and it rots and releases histamine and disrupts the bacteria in the gut and creates toxins - then the allergic processes of the body will become hyperreactive. So eating intolerances makes allergies worse. Avoiding intolerances will improve food allergies as well as environmental allergies because it reduces the total toxic load or burden on the system. Intolerances are an underlying cause of disease and allergies are more of the response of the body to the disease process itself. That is to say allergies are symptoms and not causes of disease the way that food intolerances are.
SALDANATION: When considering health care, folks often lump medicine into two camps, Western vs. Eastern. This is an over simplification of what is available. Many of the treatments that you offer at your clinic have origins in the "Western World". Do you feel that the modern model of American Medicine and its reliance on pharmaceuticals has boxed patients into a closed mindset when it comes to the acceptance of certain treatments?
Dr. Blake: What constitutes disease and what constitutes appropriate treatment is as much a cultural understanding as a scientific one. For example, culturally we believe that treating an infection with antibiotics is the most state of the art and scientific approach, and infections treated at a hospital or conventional doctors office are somehow more scientifically based.
However, more than 50% of all infectious disease treatment in North America at any regular clinic is based on opinion alone with no scientific studies supporting it. The guidelines of infection management are based on scientific studies 15% of the time, and about 35% of the time there is some scientific support but no double blind studies. Our belief is a cultural one, this is called cultural bias.
At my office we use internal medicines for infections that sometimes include pharmaceutical antibiotics. Most of the time we use botanical medicines and homeopathic medicines. Botanical medicines have a long documented history of clinical use that spans several hundred or more years for various conditions. And they have documented antimicrobial effect and other tissue effects that help the body with infections. In the case of homeopathic medicines we have a 200 year history of documented clinical use for various infections – and FDA approval which most people don’t know. In the US the major pharmaceutical manufacturers, such as Eli-Lilly, used to distribute herbal medicines.
However the difference between the botanical/homeopathic approach and the pharmaceutical approach is that the botanical/homeopathic approach includes mechanisms that strengthen the immune system and prevent future infections whereas antibiotics simply kill the organisms which does not create the same immune strengthening that normally occurs with a naturally treated infection. This is why many people end up on a merry-go-round of antibiotics for the same condition, each time the situation getting worse.
We tend to see the opposite in natural care – for example I have a patient that came to see me after almost dying from pneumonia and was hospitalized several times for it, with an annual bout typical. She came under natural care when she was tired of the merry-go- round. She was having pneumonia when she came to see me and was on a third round of antibiotics and only getting worse. She was scared and knew she might die.
Under my care we resolved the pneumonia and then over the next few years her upper respiratory infections lessened over time until finally she hasn’t had any for several years. She only had one more pneumonia after the first one I treated her for by the way, and I anticipated that as she had never fully cleared the organisms from all of the previous suppressive treatment with antibiotics alone.
What was the turning point for her pneumonia treatment? We included internal medicines – homeopathics and botanicals. They were used and helpful, but I have other techniques that I use that harnesses the power of those medicines.
What made for the turning point for her is called diathermy. Diathermy is a form of deep heat that has special anti-infection properties. It feels like a deep heat pad but it actually activates the white blood cells and improves their ability to fight infections. We combine that with a simple method of alternating hot and cold towels that will increase the number of circulating white blood cells by as many as 10,000 at a session. So whatever medicine we take internally we can send to fight the infection. I treat all manner of infections with this approach and it is difficult for people to understand how the physiotherapy treatment would do this. We call the method Constitutional Hydrotherapy and it has been in use and development for over 100 years. Sometimes I just give up trying to explain and tell people to take the treatments and see for themselves. I have treated MRSA, Gangrene, infections of the bone, etc with these treatments.
SALDANATION: Holistic medicine relies greatly on the body's ability to heal itself. In order for treatment to be effective patients have to become involved in the process outside of the doctor's office. This can mean changing completely the way one eats, giving oneself hydrotherapy at home, or other lifestyle modifications. Is it your experience that patients are sometimes surprised by the level of responsibility required of them for the efficacy of treatment?
Dr. Blake: Not really. But patients I see already self select to come to me and know that they will need to be involved. So the desire is there. What does take a while is understanding how to play that role, how to communicate with a doctor in an ongoing fashion like that over time, and understanding that in each situation success may depend on which one of us is the doctor.
SALDANATION: People are just big bags of blood. If it doesn't get to where it needs to go our bodies don't work properly. One of the first things you often do with a patient is view his or her blood under a microscope. From this visual inspection you're able to determine levels of inflammation, hydration, and other factors that could cause or contribute to ailments. Why is this something not widely practiced?
Dr. Blake: You are referring to the Bolen Test. Which is a visual ‘sedimentation rate’. A sedimentation rate, or ‘sed-rate’, is a standard medical test to evaluate for inflammation in the blood and the body. This test is routine and is often used to monitor conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. A ‘high sed rate’ indicates inflammation is present in the body and may be due to injury, infection, autoimmunity or other conditions. A sed rate elevates because inflammatory chemicals are present in the blood.
The Bolen test is a visual ‘sed rate’. We evaluate, under a microscope, a few drops of blood that have dried on a microscope slide. The drops of blood are typically taken from the earlobe. Digital photographs are taken and we review these photographs with patients. An initial Bolen test provides a baseline allowing response to treatment to be monitored.
The Bolen test was widely used for decades by regular medicine, from the 1930’s until the early 90’s, and was covered by Medicare until the late 1980’s. It was used primarily as a means to detect cancer. However, more specific cancer tests were developed and the Bolen test for that purpose became obsolete. If we have reason to suspect cancer based on the test then we order those more specific tests ourselves.
We continue to use the test because it not only show us inflammation but other things as well – such as environmental toxin exposure, kidney stress, hormonal dysfunction – that provides clues to treatment and testing strategies. Why doesn’t regular medicine continue to use this powerful tool? Well I believe that it is because they don’t practice from the larger holistic picture that understands 1) where inflammation comes from and 2) how to treat it as the underlying driver for disease that it is.
SALDANATION: Auto-immune disorders seem more prevalent now than they were twenty years ago. Antibiotics, processed foods, and environmental factors are often blamed. Are we getting sicker or are we just becoming more aware?
Dr. Blake: A dentist named Pottenger did an experiment with cats in the 1930’s. He fed them white flour, conventionally grown vegetables, and pasteurized milk. He then bred them for several generations. They were being born with birth defects, poor skeletal structures, were developmentally impaired, and by the third generation they were sterile and died within six months. He compared these cats to those that were fed raw meat, unpasteurized milk, and raw vegetables – these thrived and became stronger generation upon generation.
The good news is that if he intervened in time Pottenger could reverse the spiral into disease by proper feeding. Using whole food nutrition and uncooked foods the sickly cats would return to health if it wasn’t too late.
Now of course we are not cats. But the point is that we require the appropriate nutrition – and in today’s world over in the 20th century a lot changed. We have depleted our topsoil so the vegetables are not as nutrient rich for vegetables to take up. It is important to remember that many nutrients from vegetables are part of their own disease prevention and when they are protected by pesticides they simply do not produce the same levels of these chemicals. So what we find is ounce for ounce conventionally grown with pesticides, vegetables do not contain the same level of nutrients. We now have a steady diet of processed nutrient depleted foods.
Ironically in today’s polluted toxic world we actually need more of these nutrients. With the ever strengthening bacterial resistant organisms we need a stronger immune system but what do we see – more and more chronic infections the body cannot eradicate. Auto-immunity from a naturopathic perspective is an immune system gone haywire trying to clear an underlying infection but because the system is so toxic it can’t understand what is self and non self.
The Constitutional Hydrotherapy Treatments that we use – the alternating hot and cold towels to the torso combined with physical therapy units – has been in continual use by a handful of specialists like myself for over 100 years. We have given over a million of these treatments collectively. The doctor who first developed these treatments said after 40 years of practice that as time went on it took more and more treatments to treat similar conditions. He hadn’t changed the treatments, but the overall health of the patients was declining. Well that was in the 1960s.
When the word Naturopathy was coined in the early 1900s it was the first word in English to describe the field of natural living, natural health care, and living in harmony with nature. It was a concept 100 years ahead of it’s time I guess. In Oregon licensed Naturopathic Physicians like myself have been providing cradle to grave health care since the 1920’s. Thankfully we are more aware and I think that is why there is such a dramatic shift in the last 15 years towards natural medicine, natural foods, and natural health care.
For more information regarding Naturopathy, treatments, or if you have questions of your own for Dr. Blake visit http://www.holistichealthpc.com.