Get Well and Stay Well
by Jane Stevenson, Ph.C.,
Diploma of Applied Nutrition
* What your doctor didn’t tell you .. but should have!
* How to get yourself looking good and feeling great - the NATURAL way!
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Disclaimer: The information in this book is based upon the observations, research and professional experience of the author. The information is intended as a guide only, and the author is not responsible for any adverse effects resulting from the use of any of the suggestions in this book.
The reader must at all times seek the advice of a suitably qualified health care practitioner.
Published by: Jane Stevenson
ABN: 87 229 599 499
Copyright (c) Jane Stevenson 2012
First published 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Cover designed by Linda Johnson
Jane Stevenson
PO Box 453, Gloucester, NSW 2422, Australia
Website: http://JaneStevensonBooks.com
TABLE of CONTENTS
2. A University Degree in Ignorance
4. The Truth about the Placebo Effect
9. Nutritional Therapy Is Not Witchcraft!
11. More Learning, More Excitement
18. Vitamin C Does Not Cause Kidney Stones!
20. Out and About in the Country
25. The Sting in the Tail of Fluoridation
26. Diabetes: What Do We Do Now?
27. Arthritis, The Scourge of Getting Older
28. Stress, Bugbear of the Modern World
29. Cancer, The Scourge of Us All
30. Hospital Food: We Really Must Improve It!
Jean was one of the first people who helped prove to me that the information I had been reading about vitamins was true. At that early stage I was full of facts and figures and had used vitamins with success in my own family, but I hadn’t spoken very much to other people, still too scared of being labelled a ratbag.
I played tennis with Jean and other friends, and we had our break between sets sitting in ‘the clubhouse’, a tin shed beside the courts in Chatswood.
Jean was speaking openly about her recent nervous breakdown and I was listening avidly. The usual pattern of tension, anxiety, irritability, fatigue, ‘nervous rashes’ and eventually depression that left her at the bottom of a deep abyss where she could only look up at the sky, which used to be blue but which was now a melancholy grey. She had the feeling that there was a grey film between her and the world, a feeling that she dwelt in a glass-walled room shut off from those around her, their sounds muted, their colours faded and dull.
And finally the inability to cope, the inability to ‘pull herself together’, as she had been told to do by her doctor who had also told her it was ‘all in her mind’. Which of course it was.
Had he looked more carefully at his choice of words he might have been more aware of the fact that she was unwell and not indulging in ‘female hysteria’ which is what he also chose to call it.
Worse and worse, the inability to cope mentally now becoming an inability to cope physically. Unable to go shopping in case she ran into a friend and had to pretend to be happy, unable to cook the dinner without bursting into tears and hiding herself in her bedroom where she fell on the bed and cried her eyes out.
Eventually, at his wits’ end, her husband agreed with her and her doctor that she should go to a private hospital for treatment. After all, she had had her tranquillisers and her antidepressants and her uppers and her downers and nothing had helped.
‘Endogenous depression!’ she was told by the doctors.
‘Signs of schizophrenia!’ she was told by the psychiatrists.
‘Electro-convulsive therapy is the only answer!’ they chorused together.
Jean was subjected to electro-convulsive therapy, shock treatment, during her few weeks in the hospital. Here she was now, trying to pick up the threads and join in the business of living.
I didn’t say a word. I had only met her at tennis once or twice before; I didn’t feel I had the right to pry into her private life even though she talked about it quite openly because she thought it better to do that than to hide it and add guilt and shame to her problems, for which she was to be admired.
I couldn’t say anything .... this is big guns here, I can’t stick my neck out.
But I thought about her all that week and was determined that, if the opportunity arose, I would put my fear of being called a ratbag behind me and see if I could help.
‘Hi, Jean, how are you?’ meant as a greeting, not an actual enquiry into the state of her mental health.
‘Oh, I’m okay, battling along. At least the depression’s a bit better’.
I hadn’t expected the opportunity to come so easily.
‘That’s good. You’re looking well’. She wasn’t, but this was no time to say so. ‘I expect your doctor has you on heaps of vitamins to help you get over this business?’
‘Vitamins? No, he’s never mentioned vitamins. Why? Would they help?’
‘They could, they’re often used when people are run-down and tired’.
‘Really? Do you know about them? Do you know which ones?’
‘I know a bit about them. I know if you don’t have enough vitamin B you can get depressed, that’s for sure. And I know if you don’t have enough zinc or magnesium you can get irritable and nervy. Yes, I know a bit about them .... I’m happy to tell you if you are interested’.
She certainly was. If she didn’t improve she still faced the prospect of more shock treatment. I believe shock treatment doesn’t change the depressed state of mind so much as it just stops you being able to remember what you are depressed about, which is a different thing entirely.
Faced with the possibility of another stay in hospital she decided to try the nutritional approach, and I wrote down the names of a few products for her to buy and the doses in which to take them. It was the usual C, B complex high in B3, plus zinc and magnesium, the type of regimen I will outline in later chapters.
Now, if I say that she improved, are we supposed to believe it was the placebo effect? The tranquillisers had had no placebo effect, the antidepressants had had no placebo effect, the uppers and the downers had had no placebo effect, why should the vitamins?
A psychologist might say she was ready to clutch at any straw and the very act of clutching at the vitamin therapy had given her a better grip on life. He might say that her doctor had been too clinical and remote, he hadn’t sung the praises of the antidepressants enough, so she didn’t believe they would help her. He might say my own charisma and infectious enthusiasm had probably made the difference.
C’mon, give me a break.
Jean did improve, gradually at first, more strongly after about four weeks. She said every four or five days she would feel a ‘lift in her spirits’ as though she was ‘going up a flight of stairs, one step every four or five days’. She’d stay on that step for a while and then she would feel herself, or her emotions, or her psyche take another step. Upwards.
Within four months, or sooner, really, she was back in the land of the living, belting the tennis ball and laughing at the silly jokes such as when Peter got hit in the eye by a hard shot. Ever quick with the wit and in spite of the pain we all heard him mutter ‘I’ve heard of keeping your eye on the ball but that was ridiculous’.
It was lovely to see that Jean was laughing along with the rest of us.
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CHAPTER TWO - A UNIVERSITY DEGREE IN IGNORANCE
When I first graduated as a pharmacist I believed, as I had been taught, that drugs were the answer to all our ills.
It took me years to realise that drugs are not necessarily the answer and to realise that sometimes there is a better way to restore the body to the good health it once enjoyed. That better way involves changing our diet, changing our attitude to the treatment of ill-health and taking responsibility for keeping our body as healthy as it can be.
When I first graduated, however, I was full of good intentions because I thought I had been taught everything there was to know. I had been taught, especially, to be wary of all the ‘quacks and charlatans’ who were out there pretending to look after people’s health. The lecturers told me that the only true medicine was that which I had been taught and that everything else was at best misguided, most probably wrong or at least unproven, and possibly downright dangerous.
They told me that the only true healers were those doctors practising within the mainstream medical profession and that all others were frauds. Chiropractors, naturopaths, herbalists, osteopaths, homeopaths, etc, etc, all were frauds, they told me, and I believed every word they said.
I went on my way, happy to think that I was one of the right people on the right side of the medical profession, one of the ‘in’ crowd who knew all about everything. It was many years before anything happened to make me doubt what I had been taught, but eventually life started to teach me a few lessons that were sorely needed even if I didn’t know it at the time, smug little person that I was.
At university we were given only the very rudiments of nutrition in our lectures. There were three nutrition lectures in total, and they were given to the combined medical, dental and pharmacy students. The gist of those lectures was that apart from a few exceptions ‘all Australians receive adequate nutrition from their diets so there was no real need to study the subject in depth. As a result we viewed the nutrition lectures as being of very little importance. The subject was unlikely to crop up in exams and in any case it was boring beyond belief: even the lecturer looked and sounded pretty fed-up with his topic.
There was very little that was relevant to our future careers but, for the sake of form and to show that we had ‘covered’ the subject, we were required to know something of the various deficiency states that were prevalent overseas, mainly in under-developed countries.
We were told of beri-beri, the disease of deficiency of vitamin B1, thiamine, and how it caused the retention of fluid in the abdomen most often seen in little children in Africa
running around with swollen bellies. We were told of scurvy, the disease of deficiency of vitamin C, ascorbic acid, and how it caused the deaths of thousands in earlier times, especially when sailors started making long ocean voyages and were unable to obtain fresh fruit.
Scariest of all, we were told of pellagra, the disease of deficiency of vitamin B3, nicotinic acid.
‘Pellagra,’ droned the lecturer, ‘ is known as the disease of the four D’s. The four D’s are the four classic symptoms: dermatitis, dysentery, dementia and death.’
Everyone in the lecture hall, all the little first year medical, dental and pharmacy students must have looked pretty shocked but we were assured by the lecturer that we would never see these conditions, they only happened to the impoverished masses in the third world.
I believe it is possible to see these conditions, even if only to a mild degree, every single day and yet the nutritional side of the common complaints seen in doctors’ rooms is rarely considered.
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CHAPTER THREE - DYING TO BE THIN
The painfully thin little girl in Newcastle stands in the classic stance of someone who does not want to be noticed .... hips forward, skinny arms folded on her flat little chest, round shoulders, thin pinched little face with lack-lustre eyes looking past me as she tries to blend into the background.
She won’t look me in the eye. They never do, because they can’t. They look elsewhere pretending indifference. About thirteen or fourteen, her mum is worried because she won’t eat, she keeps getting sick, and Mum is worried she is going to ‘get’ anorexia.
Now you don’t ‘get’ anorexia any more than you ‘get’ high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes or any other of the ‘lifestyle’ diseases of our modern times. But you sure can develop it and it happens gradually and insidiously.
The typical pattern in the early teens appears to be the peer-group pressure to be thin .... the teeny-bopper magazines with stick-thin models the shape we all aspire to.
She cuts down on her food intake, perhaps vomiting it up after she has left the table and her family can’t see her. Her sugar levels fall, she binges on sugar from time to time, mostly tries to stay off it.
The desire to be thin and fashionable may well be what starts it, but there has to be more to it when young people, usually girls, get to the stage where they can’t eat even when they know they must.
Her zinc levels have dropped by now, which is the turning point at which she starts to be in real trouble. Without sufficient zinc she develops an inability to maintain eye contact and develops hypogeusia, loss of taste and smell, and without taste or smell she has no sense of appetite, and no desire to eat.
By this time the little food that she might have eaten is utterly tasteless, she might as well eat cardboard, so she hardly eats at all. Almost the only thing that she will pick at is highly spiced chilli chips, anything covered with sauces and spices. She could eat a chilli pepper raw and never even flinch. It takes snacks of chilli-chips and spicy-thingies to even register on her taste-buds.
Unfortunately there isn’t any nutrition in those snack foods ..... ‘empty calories’ they are called, and empty they are: heaps of sugar deceptively labelled as ‘energy’, and little else but colouring and flavouring.
I believe that above all others it is zinc deficiency that causes even a young child to go for a packet of spicy-thingies when given his choice in the supermarket. The child says ‘lollies’ are ‘okay’, but they don’t have the bite that has to be there if he is even going to taste them, so he goes for the spicy ones instead.
Now the teenaged girl is on the downward spiral, well and truly.
Because the nutritional and biochemical aspect of anorexia is ignored we have to find someone to blame for the whole disaster. Modern psychiatry has a field day ..... a dozen reasons are trotted out for the young girl refusing to eat even though she knows her life depends on it.
The psychiatrists screw her up completely telling her that her behaviour is symptomatic of a death wish or a desire for revenge on her parents. Not only is she distressed physically but now she is also distressed emotionally as she takes the blame for the whole thing on her own slight shoulders. She possibly does end up wanting to die so that she won’t continue to be such a nuisance.
If no action is taken she may get her wish.
I realise in a lot of these things I can be accused of being too simplistic, and I realise there is more to these things than I have outlined.
But what is wrong with keeping things simple?
What is wrong with taking first things first and trying the most logical and obvious of solutions?
I’ve seen many young girls such as the one in Newcastle whose mother was so worried about her. I’ve not seen any young girl in the full grip of anorexia, but I know what I would do.
Regardless of her emotional condition, her feelings of guilt or revenge or whatever, I would try to correct the lack of taste and smell first. Remembering that if you give too much zinc too quickly the child will only feel nauseated, I would start with a child’s formula chewable vitamin containing about 2mg of zinc. There are several such formulations on the market. I would give her half a tablet to suck, the other half of the tablet an hour or so later if she had not experienced any nausea (she probably won’t have, but on a seriously empty stomach you never know). Next day I would give her a full tablet to suck in the morning, another mid-afternoon. Next day, and thereafter until improvement has taken place, I would get her to suck one tablet before each mealtime. Remember these are children’s formulae, designed for little children ...... three per day would not be too much for a child in her early teens.
In the beginning I’d make her meals tiny so she would feel she could get through it without throwing up. I would not give her ‘treats’ of ice-cream or spicy thingies or cake to try to tempt her to eat which is only reinforcing the sugar/spicy foods thing.
No, a treat for her, don’t laugh, this is not as silly as it sounds, would be something like a couple of strawberries, a few cherries, a fresh date, a few tiny cubes of cheese and a dried apricot, all cut up into little pieces on the plate. You could even, don’t laugh, give her toothpicks to eat it with .... tiny little shish kebabs that look like fun. It feels more like a party by the minute. She could take all day to eat them if she wanted, but at least she’d be getting something from them: magnesium from the strawberries, manganese from the cherries, calcium and protein from the cheese and iron from the apricots. The sweetness of the fresh date would satisfy any craving for sugar that she might have. Water to drink, or a little diluted orange juice or a little cold milk if she will take it. No fizzy rubbish ...... we’re on a mission here and fizzy rubbish is not part of the deal.
No junk, not now and hopefully not ever .... she can’t afford to eat junk. Every time she eats a piece of rubbish she has lost the opportunity to eat something worthwhile and she doesn’t have too many of those opportunities left.
Why not keep it simple? Why cloud the issue with death wishes and revenge and all the gobbledygook of the psychiatrist?
Try to keep it simple: she is, when all is said and done, just a simple little kid who tried to look skinny and ended up way below the poverty line of poor nutrition.
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CHAPTER FOUR - THE TRUTH ABOUT THE ‘THE PLACEBO EFFECT’
As soon as I had qualified as a pharmacist I started working in retail pharmacies in suburban Sydney.
There were few nutritional products on the market at that time. The pharmacists themselves saw them as of little value and consequently the few products that were stocked were only put on the shelves for those silly enough to buy them. Secretly we suspected that people taking vitamins and claiming to feel better were just experiencing the ‘placebo effect’, because we had been taught about that too .... the fact that you can give blank pills to people telling them they will be effective and many people will swear that they do indeed feel better. It’s called the placebo effect and the real truth is that the placebo effect is minimal. Yes, you can give someone a sugar pill and tell them they will soon feel better and sometimes they will. They may indeed even feel better, but the placebo effect can be a compound effect brought about by gratification that someone takes you seriously (or appears to), someone is putting themselves out to help you (by writing a script, for instance), there’s the busy-ness of getting the script filled (my illness is important), the comfort of having someone show solicitude and, above all, the desire to show gratitude for all of the above. The patient doesn’t want to seem unappreciative and wants to tell the doctor that he does, indeed, feel better.
All of it is very subjective on the part of both the doctor and the patient.
The greatest importance of the placebo effect is in the assessment of a new drug undergoing trial, especially one which has a physical effect such as the lowering of blood pressure where subjectivity is less of an issue. The technicians running the trial give either the drug itself, or a similar-looking blank pill, to the patients without either the technicians or the patients knowing which has been given. When the results come in, any difference in the effects between those given the blanks and those given the real drug is almost certainly due only to the drug itself. Fair enough.
It’s also true, however, that the ‘placebo effect’ is used in a supercilious manner by those in the medical profession who wish to dismiss a point of view with which they disagree or are unfamiliar.
If someone claims to have had benefit from some preparation that is not part of mainstream medicine it is a very sophisticated piece of one-upmanship on the part of the doctor to dismiss its beneficial effects by saying ‘ If it has seemed to help you it’s only because of the placebo effect.’ The poor patient is immediately cowed, because he isn’t altogether sure what that means, but he feels he, the patient, has somehow been made to feel a bit of a fool.
The doctor’s statement sounds scientific, it implies knowledge on the part of the person making the statement, and definitely saves that person from having to admit that he has no knowledge of the preparation and no idea how it might work in the body.
It may sound sophisticated, and indeed very superior, but in fact the placebo effect is very slight. As an argument against new ideas it is patronising and inadequate and reflects poorly on those who use it.
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CHAPTER FIVE - THE BEGINNINGS OF DOUBT
I had been working in pharmacy for some years, never doubting that drug-based medicine was the best thing since sliced bread. I always kept a wary eye out for quacks and charlatans who might waylay me with unproven nonsense at any time that I least expected it. My defences were up, well and truly, but they were not as strong as I had thought.
I was happily dispensing away one day when a woman came in and said that she had read an article in the newspaper about vitamin E and wondered if perhaps she should take it. Would I please advise her ... what was vitamin E, could it help her, what did I think of vitamin E?
What did I think? I was stuck for an answer because I knew nothing about it. Not what it was, not what its role was in the body, not what happened if you didn’t get enough in your diet, not what it would do in the body if you took it, not how much to take if you did. Nothing. Of course I knew it was worthless, and certainly unnecessary, but I didn’t like to tell her that.
What had been in the newspaper article? At this stage she knows more than I do and she is asking me for advice. I felt humiliated and I felt ashamed. Here’s the hotshot pharmacist who doesn’t have the answers. Eventually I mumbled something or other, probably said something condescending like ‘it won’t do any harm’, might even have sold her some product or other although I don’t think so, I seem to remember her going away crestfallen and empty-handed.
I stood at the counter feeling anything but an all-knowing and all-powerful smarty-pants.
From time to time a few more people came in and asked about vitamins. A few more went away empty-handed or clutching some pathetic formula that was all we had to offer at the time. A few more times I stood there mumbling and knowing I knew nothing.
I was beginning to learn that I wanted to learn.
But where to find the information? The books of reference in the dispensary offered a little information but not much .... already the vitamin and mineral chapters were being whittled down to nothing because of the lack of interest in pursuing the knowledge of nutrition.
From time to time there would be an article in popular magazines but I couldn’t believe them .... they were probably written by quacks and charlatans.
So?
So nothing. No information came from the medical people or the drug companies or the pharmaceutical publications.
I was left high and dry with no place to go. Our customers asked questions to which they believed I would have the answer. They trusted me, they thought I did know, and I didn’t.
It may sound trite, pathetically domestic and trivial, but I got my lucky break one Christmas when my children were still quite small but old enough to think Christmas was something special. It seemed to me that I ought to do the right thing and make a Christmas cake so I headed off to the shops. I passed a food store that was all tizzied up with tinsel and holly and a big sign that said ‘All You Need to Make Your Own Christmas Cake!’
Just what I wanted!
But it was a health food store, probably run by a quack or a charlatan. I’d never been into one, wouldn’t go near the place, all those dreadful people conning a gullible public into buying rubbish they didn’t need. But it would save me walking all the way to the supermarket so I went in and bought my stuff. On the way out with my purchases I stopped dead in my tracks. In front of me was a huge bookstand full of books such as You Can’t live Without Vitamin C by Lady (Dr) Cilento, Zinc and Other Micro-nutrients by Dr Carl Pfeiffer and Vitamin E for Ailing and Healthy Hearts by Dr Wilfrid Shute.
I couldn’t believe it! What right did these books have being in such a place when we were the ones who should know all about these things? I thought Okay, I’ll buy the Vitamin E book even if it is all lies, at least I’ll know what people are saying about it.
I took the book home and a whole new world opened up as I read stuff that I should have been taught at university.
Every page made sense. The book did outline what role vitamin E plays in the healthy body. It did explain how adequate vitamin E prevents heart disease from developing, it did explain how our bodies have become impoverished in vitamin E and what happens to the once healthy body if that impoverishment continues year after year. It did explain how that process can be reversed if the body gets enough vitamin E to do some good. It did say how much to take and why and when.
It made sense. It was logical. It had enough facts and figures to satisfy any statistician and it had enough human stories, anecdotes, to make it interesting to read.
I thought it was wonderful. I thought how come nobody’s taught me this stuff? The book stated that at the time of writing in 1969 over seven hundred and fifty articles on vitamin E had been published in the US and Europe, so obviously a lot more was known than was being taught in our universities.
Books became my new best friends and in a funny way I started to realise that the training that I had been given at university, although deficient in respect to nutrition, had in fact given me enough scientific grounding and discretion to evaluate what I read and to judge for myself whether or not it was soundly based.
Anything and everything was of interest. Books on osteopathy, iridology, acupuncture, acupressure, reflexology, chiropractic, naturopathy, herbal medicine. Books from the health food store, books from local council libraries, books from the dispensary, books from the medical library at Sydney University in which, especially, gems of knowledge lay forgotten and unappreciated.
I started to learn how the body works and how it functions so smoothly when greased and oiled with sufficient nutrients in the right proportions, like a car running on premium fuel instead of crummy old standard. I began to appreciate that you can look at a body as though it is a jigsaw or a crossword puzzle, just fill in the missing bits and see how it runs. Beautifully, automatically, no need to fiddle with additives, just make sure the fuel is the best you can buy. Almost everything that I read offered information hitherto unknown to me, particularly those books that dealt with the body’s chemistry and what happens to that chemistry if you give it too little of one thing or too much of another.
The books of herbal medicine were of interest because a lot of what I had been taught at university was really herbal medicine in disguise. Many of our modern medicines are still derived directly or indirectly from the plant world, probably the best known being digoxin which is still used today in the treatment of heart disease to strengthen the heartbeat. Digoxin is the modern, refined and standardised version of the old tincture of digitalis extracted from the foxglove plant.
Aspirin, used for years in the treatment of pain and fever, is a refinement of the salicylates originally extracted from trees of the willow family.
Quinine, extracted from cinchona bark, has been used for ages in the treatment of malaria because it blocks the development of the parasites within our blood cells, although resistance has become evident in recent times. A far more common usage of quinine has been in the treatment of muscle cramps where it has the effect of increasing the threshold of excitability of the motor endplate of the muscle, leading to greater relaxation of the muscle involved. I believe that such usage of quinine is actually avoiding the question of why the muscle is cramping in the first place, but I will examine that issue a little later on.
Senna is still used as a laxative, oestrogens of plant origin, phyto-oestrogens, are increasingly popular in hormone therapy and various other plant derivatives still have their place in modern medicine.
Modern pharmaceutical technology, however, has enabled a totally different approach to the manufacture of medicines compared to the old days when herbal medicine still ran on traditional lines. About fifty years ago we started to move away from standard herbal remedies, a process that accelerated markedly as increased technology enabled scientists to pinpoint more accurately exactly what the active ingredient in the plant was, to extract it, refine it, concentrate and standardise it. It was then possible to chemically alter the basic substance so that it was more selective in its action in the body, perhaps targeting itself at one specific process of metabolism and having less effect on other processes. The greater the degree of specialised targeting the less the effect on other parts of the body . in other words, less side-effects.
From that starting point came the desire and the ability to synthesize drugs from scratch. To build them molecule by molecule in the laboratory to do exactly what is required and no more than is required.
The original designer drugs.
In recent years our medicines have become more and more potent, with fewer and fewer side effects.
Sounds good, and modern drugs have saved thousands of lives.
But somewhere along the way I believe we have lost the plot.
Modern medicines are sophisticated versions of the herbal extracts we used only fifty years ago. Now, as then, the use of medicines is still that of introducing an external agent into the body chemistry where it exerts an effect on the body’s internal systems. To argue, as some do, that herbal medicine as such is ‘better’ than modern high-tech drugs is to me splitting hairs. They are both agents by which we can tinker with the inner workings of the body, but neither herbal medicine nor high-tech drugs will do much to correct whatever has gone wrong in the first place.
I’m not talking here of those herbal medicines that are used as a source of a nutritional substance in a way that (simplistically speaking) oranges are used as a source of vitamin C. I’m talking about those medicines, old and new, that introduce a substance that is foreign to the natural body chemistry.
For all that I appreciate modern drug technology, and for all that I acknowledge its origins in traditional herbal medicine, I still believe that to use outside agents may indeed make a disease seem to go away, and may indeed bring about relief of symptoms, but it may not be addressing the underlying cause of that disease if that underlying cause is an imbalance in the chemistry of the body.
Incidentally, this is not a chemistry book, though it must be starting to sound like one. Hang in a little longer . we have to know how the body works if we’re to know what to do when things go wrong.
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CHAPTER SIX - HOW THE BODY WORKS
We have to know a bit about how our body works before we can start to make some beneficial changes to our health.
At this stage there are known to be some fifty or so basic compounds, or nutrients, that are essential to the body. These fifty or so nutrients are various vitamins, minerals, essential amino-acids (proteins), essential oils, carbohydrates, oxygen, water, etc etc.
The body takes in these fifty or so basic nutrients and mixes and matches them in hundreds of different combinations. The complexity of the body is astonishing and recent medical knowledge has exploded as our technology enables us to look more and more closely at the actions and reactions that take place inside us. We can’t get away from the fact, however, that we have to carry out all these amazing processes from a starting point of some fifty raw materials. It’s like building a house .... fifty different sets of building materials ... trusses, cement, taps, bricks, flooring, plaster, timber, glass etc and you have to mix and match them and end up with a house that works. Or a body that works. And just as the builder is in strife if he can’t get hold of any one of his requirements, so the body is in strife if it’s going short on any one of its requirements. If the body is going short on one or more of its required nutrients then no matter what else you might do with other agents, no matter what drugs you might use, the effect of the shortage of that particular nutrient is going to continue until such time as that nutrient is supplied either in the diet or by way of supplementation to the diet.
Lack of any one nutrient will eventually lead to clinically observable signs in the body.
When the symptoms first appear the alert physician will recognise the signs and supply the missing nutrient. If, however, the physician misses the symptoms, or doesn’t know about them, he may try to ‘fix’ the problem with an outside agent and may indeed make the problem appear to go away. The body, however, still hasn’t received the nutrient that is missing and eventually other symptoms will appear as the deficiency becomes more profound.
Let’s take the example of riboflavine, commonly known as vitamin B2. I only pick riboflavine because its deficiency symptoms are clearly defined, somewhat bizarre, and generally ignored by the medical profession.
In many years of working in pharmacy I’ve yet to meet the patient who has been prescribed supplementary riboflavine for his or her problem, and yet the signs of its deficiency are surprisingly common.
The first thing to appear in riboflavine deficiency is usually angular stomatitis, cracks at the corners of the mouth that just will not heal. The patient goes to the doctor and is often given an antibiotic ointment to treat any infection that might be present. The ointment itself provides a barrier for the skin so that it is not constantly wetted by saliva, and often the problem ‘goes away’, or appears to.
Sometime later the same patient may complain that the soles of his feet are ‘burning’ .... hot, sore and stinging. It may be suggested by doctor, friend or pharmacist that he use a soothing and cooling balm on the soles of his feet and again it may ‘go away’, or appear to.
Eventually, if his diet has not improved to provide the missing riboflavine, the patient will probably develop the unmistakable ‘butterfly rash’ around the nostrils and reaching to the corners of the mouth ... bright red, shiny, sore and curiously shaped like the butterfly after which it is named. I’ve often seen patients with this condition, I‘ve dispensed the script the doctor has given them for cortisone cream and often it has ‘gone away’, or appeared to.
It’s all so predictable. When the cracks at the corners of the mouth first appeared the clinical signs were there that the patient was lacking riboflavine. The dietary intake was not corrected so it was predictable that the patient would eventually experience the burning feet of riboflavine deficiency. The deficiency was still not corrected even then so it was again predictable that the patient would develop the butterfly rash around the nose and mouth.
So predictable, in fact, that the term ‘predictive medicine’ has come into use, particularly in the United States and particularly amongst those working in the field of clinical nutrition where the clinician is trained in the recognition of the symptoms of ill-health that are due to nutritional imbalance.
If one notices the signs of a nutritional imbalance and does nothing to correct it, one can reasonably predict the course of the patient’s health in coming years.
Predictive medicine ..... you can see the ill-health coming.
While I’m on the subject of riboflavine deficiency, which is no big deal really but is of quirky interest, I can tell you that riboflavine deficiency can cause cracks at the corner of the mouth, cheilosis (overly red and shiny lips), burning feet, butterfly rash, glossitis (red and shiny tongue), seborrhoea (itchy scalp, dandruff) and itchy and gravelly eyes that are sensitive to bright light and feel as though they’ve got sand in them. Not all of the symptoms may appear, but any one of them, or any combination of them, can, if the deficiency remains uncorrected.
The function of riboflavine in the body is as part of several enzymes and co-enzymes involved in the release of energy from glucose and fatty acids and in the metabolism of protein. It is involved in the activities of vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) and in the conversion of folic acid to its enzymes and their subsequent storage in the body.
The best sources of riboflavine are eggs, milk, brewer’s yeast, liver, whole grains and soybeans.
I happened to choose riboflavine as an illustration because it is quite interesting and surprisingly common, but almost any nutrient has its own little list of deficiency symptoms that are very obvious to someone who is trained to recognise them.
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CHAPTER SEVEN - LISTENING TO THE CUSTOMER
I was working away in the dispensary when one of the assistants said there was a lady in the shop who wanted to see me .... she wanted to know if she could get something without a prescription ‘to settle her nerves’. I went out the front and found a woman of maybe fifty-five, who said she had been feeling run-down for a couple of months, anxious and crabby. She told me she had started off having bouts of feeling nervy and irritable, the bouts becoming more frequent as time went on. She felt jumpy and on edge and found it hard to control her temper. Not that she was violent, just snippy, which was not how she used to be. Her doctor had put her on tranquillisers but although she felt calmer and more subdued she still didn’t feel right. She told me when she tried to sleep at night her mind would jump from topic to topic ..... like the contents of a concrete mixer was her description ..... and she couldn’t get to sleep. The doctor lately had prescribed sleeping tablets as well as the tranquillisers, but she wasn’t happy with the way things seemed to be going.
The more I talked to her the more I suspected that she was suffering mild copper toxicity .... too much copper in the system made worse by not having enough zinc to balance it.
The effect of excess copper has been covered wonderfully well in Dr Carl Pfeiffer’s book Zinc and Other Micro-nutrients, also published in textbook hardcover form under the title Mental and Elemental.
Dr Pfeiffer in his clinic in New Jersey has carried out years of study on people with mental problems --- neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc, and takes the nutritional approach to their treatment. His book is fascinating in that it covers all manner of ‘heavy metal’ toxicity including lead toxicity only relatively recently recognised for its effect on young children’s growth and learning patterns.
The book also covers mercury toxicity, which gave rise to the expression ‘mad as a hatter’ because hat makers in the olden days used mercury in the making of felt from rabbit fur and seemingly they had more than their fair share of mental illness.
Mercury toxicity leads to mental derangement and, in the severest cases, to the horrific birth defects seen in the tragic cases around Minamata Bay in Japan where a great many children were born deformed after chemical companies dumped their toxic wastes into the waters of the bay. Photographs of those children are still seen occasionally in our newspapers and magazines and even today they are still totally poignant and shocking.
Cadmium is another heavy metal that has effects similar to lead, arsenic and mercury. Cadmium is found in cigarettes, newspaper ink and also to a small extent in grains. In wholemeal bread it is not a problem because the whole grain also contains the ‘good guy’ zinc, which balances the cadmium out. In white bread, however, most of the zinc has been removed along with most other nutrients, leaving the cadmium disproportionately high. In fact, a total of twenty-two nutrients are removed in the refining of whole grains to white flour, six are put back to comply with government requirements and the white bread thus produced is then labelled ‘enriched’. Don’t be taken in by that word ‘enriched’, white flour is not as good as wholemeal or wholegrain flour.
Although aluminium is known for its lightness and strength, in chemical terms it is classified as one of the heavy metals. Although the jury is still out on its effect on our health it seems to me that the old saying ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire’ might well apply. Zinc and copper do belong in the body, arsenic, mercury, cadmium and lead don’t. I don’t believe aluminium does either. It has been found on autopsy in the brains of those who have died with Alzheimer’s disease, but not in the brains of those who have died free of the ‘old timers’ disease. I for one do not use aluminium cookware or deodorants that contain aluminium. It’s hard to find an effective deodorant that does not contain aluminium although it seems to me a product that contained zinc sulphate instead of aluminium sulphate would be equally effective because both solutions are astringent. At least with a zinc-based deodorant any absorption through the skin would be beneficial because zinc is definitely the good guy amongst the minerals along with iron, calcium, magnesium and trace minerals such as cobalt, manganese and selenium.
So I talked with the woman I came to think of as ‘the copper lady’ about copper and zinc and the B vitamins.
In response to my questions she told me she did eat white bread and didn’t eat much in the way of oysters, beef, nuts or green beans, all good sources of zinc.
Most telling of all she said yes she did fill the kettle from the hot water tap to make tea each morning, guaranteed to make your hair stand on end because the copper leaches from the copper pipes into the hot water overnight. We didn’t know it then but we were probably better off with the old zinc galvanised pipes of former times, at least any leaching was to our benefit.
The lady and I talked, she was interested, and I showed her the two or three products that, together, would give her the vitamin C, the vitamin B and the zinc and magnesium that I thought she needed.
She promised not to use hot water to fill the kettle and was keen as mustard to start her ‘nutritional therapy’. BUT! ... what would the doctor say? Would he be angry?
‘I’d better not take them till I have talked to Doctor’.
I gritted my teeth, here we go again. I could understand her saying that, but I was disappointed because I doubted the doctor would know about, or support, the use of the vitamins that I thought she needed.
‘Okay’ I said, ‘come back and let us know what he says’, knowing very well that he would have rubbished the whole idea.
But no! I was wrong!
He was so keen to appear in the know and up to date he said ‘Good idea! Definitely take some vitamins! I always recommend this one!’ the spin doctor sounding good as he handed her a slip of paper.
She came back beaming.
‘Doctor says I can take them but he says that’s the one he always recommends so that’s the one I want!’ and she pushed the piece of paper at me on which the doctor had scribbled the name of a common multivitamin product.
It was useless. It wouldn’t make a scrap of difference and in fact might well make things worse. Included in the list of ingredients was copper, in sufficiently high a dose as to render the whole exercise meaningless.
I couldn’t very well say anything, I couldn’t accuse the doctor of not knowing his business, but I couldn’t resist one last little dig.
‘Okay, try one bottle of that one. It’s not very strong, it doesn’t have quite the doses I would have liked, and it does have copper in it which is what we are trying to avoid. But give it a go and let us know how you get on’.
A month later she was back, no better, if anything feeling worse.
‘I’ll try the ones you told me about’ she said sheepishly, and went on her way with a modest $30 worth of goodies.
Improvement was gradual: she said she felt better after two weeks than she had in years, calm, rational and at ease. By four weeks she had gradually weaned herself off the tranquillisers and had only occasional need for the sleeping tablets which she hoped to stop altogether before long.
Anecdotal? Yes. Scientific? Yes.
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I’d like to tell you about Customer X, a typical case of predictive medicine.
I have to tell you that the pattern of Customer X’s ill-health is fairly typical of the people, male and female, that we see in pharmacy and his case is by no means unusual.
We have known Customer X for years, he and his wife have been good customers for a long time, and their scripts have been the usual one-off things such as some antibiotics now and again, or the odd cream for the occasional rash. Customer X is now in his late fifties-early sixties, and one day he appears with a script for quinine sulphate because he is experiencing cramps at night, particularly in the calf muscles. The minute I see the script I know that Customer X has started on a one-way trip of increasing ill-health, and the cramps are the first sign of something going wrong. Quinine is, or has been, the standard treatment for night cramps ..... it was the standard treatment when I was taught it at uni, and it remains the most likely treatment offered in medicine today, even though its use is totally unjustified.
Two important questions remain unanswered when quinine is used for cramps:
Is Customer X suffering quinine deficiency? No, he is not.
Is quinine addressing the problem of why the muscles are cramping in the first place? No, it is not.
The rationale for using quinine is a pretty poor one . just because it works doesn’t mean it makes much sense to use it. But use it we do and Customer X goes off more or less happy to have something for the cramps but a bit put out that the doctor has told him he will probably have to take quinine on and off for the rest of his life.