A Physician's Guide To Natural Health Products That Work: 34 Years Of Front Line Health Experience - Softcover

Howenstine, James A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0970568487 ISBN 13: 9780970568489

Publisher: Penhurst Books, 2007

Synopsis

A medical doctor reveals the truth about natural health products that work.

James A. Howenstine, MD

Do natural health solutions really exist?

Yes. Nutritious foods, vitamins, minerals, aminoacids, algae and extracts from herbs, plants, flowers, roots, seeds, bushes, trees, fish, mussels and animals have all been proven to have healing properties

If natural health solutions exist for many modern diseases, why don’t the pharmaceutical companies produce them?

Pharmaceutical companies exist to make money. (As all companies do.) One company makes 90% of its profits from only 6 patented and skillfully marketed drugs. They cannot patent natural products, so there is no profit motive to provide these products.

Why don’t more doctors know about natural health solutions?

The medical profession and pharmaceutical companies work together very closely.

We physicians continue our learning by reading medical journals and attending meetings. These are almost always oriented towards pharmaceutical companies and their drugs. The end result is the average physician has almost no awareness of the curative potential of natural treatments.

Why has there been, in some cases, a negative image regarding natural health solutions?

There’s no question there has been some exaggeration and hype by untrained people talking about these issues. However, that doesn’t take away from the effectiveness of natural health solutions, when carefully chosen by skilled professionals.

There seem to be so many natural health products out there, with all sorts of claims about them. It all seems pretty confusing to me.

I have carefully chosen and screened the premier natural health products we recommend and explain how to take them.

They work and I tell you why they work.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

My medical education was very conventional. I graduated from Northwestern University Medical School. We had a few lectures abut vitamins but very little information about nutrition. Because of lack of data about good nutrition and the woeful misinformation coming from supposed governmental authorities, many physicians still do not know what constitutes sound nutritional advice.

My mind set after finishing my residency training was that if there was no pharmaceutical drug to cure a disease, nothing helpful could be done. We doctors are often so pharmaceutically oriented that we are unaware that natural health solutions exist.

My choice to become a physician was a wonderful decision. There were no boring days! My patients taught me something new every day. There are fond memories of delightful hours teaching medical students, interns and residents. The challenges of caring for hospitalized patients were real, exciting, and often humbling. The strong friendships we often developed were a treasure to me.

Physicians in primary care (internal medicine, family practice, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology) obtain 70% of the needed information from the interview with the patient and 30% from physical examination.

A male patient over 50 years of age should receive a rectal exam annually. This exam detects polyps and cancer in the rectal area, as well as disclosing enlargement of the prostrate gland and hard areas in the prostrate that may be sites of cancer. Women should have a breast and pelvic exam annually as well. Patients with heart and lung disease should have their hearts and lungs listened to on a regular basis. If your physician does not examine you regularly, consider changing physicians.

There has been an explosion in important medical knowledge in the 1990 s. More and more, individuals are taking responsibility for their own health. These people buy products at local health food stores or on the Internet or mail order that they believe will help keep them healthy or restore health. In a recent year, the value of natural health care products sold in the U.S. was 30 billion dollars, surpassing the 27 billion dollars spent on pharmaceutical products. When a major change like this begins it is probably inexorable.

Physicians learn about advances in medical care from medical journals. Articles published in these journals typically contain very little information about natural health treatments. Additionally, medical journals are to a large extent subsidized by advertisements from pharmaceutical firms. It would take great personal courage to publish an article about a natural therapy that could replace or cut earnings from a drug and thus potentially harm advertising revenue.

When a natural health company has as effective product, they must be careful to downplay any claims about the product, as curative type claims are likely to be followed by closure and the need to spend a huge amount of money for long- term research to prove the product is truly beneficial.

In the August 2, 2001 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine there was a superb review article about Autoimmune Diseases, written by A. David and B. Diamond, MD. In the therapy section of this article there was not a single sentence about the ability of thymic extract combined with vitamins and minerals to arrest rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. This lack of information about thymic extract was not malicious. There is a nearly total lack of awareness about natural treatments in the conventional medical community.

To prove the efficacy of a therapy usually requires enormous expense (up to two hundred million dollars) to fund long term, double blind studies. This type of funding is not available to an individual practitioner and even if available, there is no guarantee that successful results would be published in a reputable journal because of the clear conflict of interest medical journals face in publishing articles that could hurt pharmaceutical sales and decrease advertising revenue.

Pharmaceutical companies normally sell drugs that have been patented. For this reason they have little interest in natural solutions that cannot be patented. This certainly does not mean that these natural substances have no value. Just look at one example.

At one time in my practice, I had 5 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, which was so serious it could only be controlled with a drug called methotrexate. This drug is used primarily in chemotherapy and over long term usage there is a danger that the user will develop cancer because of injury to the bone marrow. Methotrexate was treating one problem and possibly creating another.

One day, I read about an extract from New Zealand mussels that was effective in rheumatoid arthritis. After trying it for two months, all 5 of my patients were able to stop taking methotrexate.

This experience changed my attitude toward natural health products forever and started me on my search for natural health solutions for our bodies.You will read about a variety of natural health products that work for specific diseases. Some of these treatments are simple and inexpensive. Humans have a psychological quirk that if it does not cost much, it cannot be any good. I urge you to avoid this manner of thinking which could cause you to miss several superb, inexpensive natural solutions.

Yes, pharmaceutical drugs have their place and natural solutions have theirs.

Try to open your mind as this book guides you to natural ways of dealing with health problems.

James A. Howenstine, MD

Edition details

• Publisher: Penhurst Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0970568487
• ISBN 13: 9780970568489
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 366