A few months ago, a
close friend of mine who is a medical doctor sent me an article about an
emerging medical specialty called “lifestyle medicine”
Last night I came across this campaign advocating
lifestyle medicine in the United States, and surprisingly in Malaysia too. Here
are their establishments:
American College of Lifestyle Medicine:
https://lifestylemedicine.org/
MSLM – Malaysian Society Of Lifestyle Medicine:
https://lifestylemedicinemalaysia.org/
I thought I should pen a short analogy on this, but written
in another way, instead of describing how our dietary and nutritional
lifestyles in particular among other internal and external lifestyle influences
and factors can lead to chronic disorders. There would be plenty of
explanations by other experts on this, and I shall leave this discussion to
them.
The way I would be able to drive home the importance of
lifestyles that initiate chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease such as
heart attack. heart failure, arrhythmias, valve incompetence, hypertension, CVA
(stroke), Type 2 diabetes mellitus, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases
(COPD) and asthma, renal failures, among others due to harmful dietary
lifestyle and pathological obesity, cancers, among others is to use an entirely
different scenario to illustrate.
I believe this would be a more effective way for both doctors and patients to
understand what lifestyle medicine means by giving four simple scenarios
below:
Scenario 1: Involves the patient:
1. Eat non-stop throughout the day till their stomach can no longer hold
2. Eat foods containing all kinds of colourings, such as Yellow # 5, Blue
#1 and Blue #2, Red Dye #3, Yellow #6, Natural Green Colours, additives,
preservatives, such as bisphenols and BPA. They can act like the hormone
oestrogen and interfere with puberty and fertility. Eat foods containing
phthalates, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), artificially-cured meat
such as luncheon meat and corned beef containing nitrates and nitrites, mouldy
peanuts and their sauces containing deadly cancer-causing aflatoxins and other
mycotoxins, BBQ meat cooked in open fires
producing carcinogens heterocyclic aromatic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Studies show HCAs and PAHs cause changes in DNA
that may increase the risk of cancer. Consume lots of animal fat, meat,
especially processed meat such as hot dogs, burgers, sausages, processed
pasteurises and soft drinks with high sugar content, lots of salt, monosodium
glutamate (MSG) added, French fries, among many others.
3. Cook all foods using a microwave oven using
high heat and lots of oils.
4. Do nothing physical the whole day. Do not engage in any physical
activity, but just lie down and watch TV and play with smart phones all day
long while eating all these foods non-stop giving the body no chance of bowel
and metabolic rest.
5. Stop eating fruit and vegetables totally. Eat
only animal products
6. Increase body weight by constant food consumption till one becomes
pathologically obese.
7. Smoke and drink as much as possible with friends in their “happy
hours" way into the night without sleep and rest.
8. Get angry and stressed up for no rhyme & reason all the time. When
disease and ill health begins to appear, then go to the doctor for treatment.
Scenario 2: Involves the doctor:
Prescribe 10 different types of Big Pharma products hidden under the glorified
name as "medicines" to treat the patient with all sorts of linked
chronic ills caused by the above dietary lifestyles
Dose to be given for each separate linked disease are written in their
prescription that looks like this:
b.d./b.i.d. (bis in die or twice daily), t.d.s. (ter die
sumendum three times a day), q.i.d. (quater in die four times a day), p.o. (per
os by mouth or orally), prn (pro re nata as needed), , hr (hora, every
hourly), h.s. (hora somni at bedtime) only.
Other medication instructions the patient needs follow are: take some of
their "medicines" on an empty stomach, some one hour before meals,
another one hour after meal, some early morning before waking up, some between
meals. All these instructions the patient with five different types of diseases
using 10 or more different types of drugs need to follow.
Scenario 3: Back to the Patient:
When the patient goes home with a grocery bag containing all these drugs (we shall describe drugs as chemicals later) prescribed by their doctors, the
patient need to sit down with a piece of paper, a pen and a clock in front of
him to record when to take their doctor's medicines, when to eat their
food, when to take another type of chemical on an empty stomach, when another
type of medicine need to be taken one hour before meals, another 2 hours
after meals, some before waking up, others only at night, and some cannot
be taken concomitantly (together with) with other "medicines"
All these are needed to be followed because there are far,
far too many types of blockers, inhibitors, antagonists produced by the Big Pharma
to take till both the doctor and the patient are confused when and how to take
these chemical drugs to block and mask up the presentations of an underlying
host of diseases.
See why drugs do not cure disease here:
Drugs Do Not Cure Disease:
https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2023/04/drugs-do-not-cure-diseases.html
Of course there are a lot of drugs that
are very powerful and fast -acting and are very crucial in saving lives in a
medical crisis.
See my explanation here:
Life-Saving Drugs in Medical Emergency:
https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2023/03/life-saving-drugs-in-medical-emergency.html
Having so many chemical drugs under a glorified name as “medicine” do the patient need to take? The patient is now at a lost when to take their medicine,
when to take their meals, when to sleep and for how long to sleep as they need
to wake up in time to take their next medicines. They will also be
confused which ones to take first, and whether they should be before or after
breakfast / lunch / dinner. Neither can they remember how to follow their
doctor’s advice as they need to take them on an empty stomach, whether it
should be one hour, two hours, three hours before or after meals? It is totally
confusing and practically impossible to follow. Even if the doctor is sick
himself, he would not be able to follow all these prescription instructions of
another doctor he consults, let alone an ordinary patient. He gets very
frustrated, angry, disgruntled, and non-cooperative with such a long list of
treatment regimens.
They become completely lost and confused even to the extent
of skipping their meals and sleep trying to remember the therapeutic regimen to
follow even with a clock, piece of paper and a pen to write them all down by
sitting on the chair and a table all day long, doing nothing else except
looking at the prescription instructions containing all those packets of
chemicals all lined up on their table.
Unfortunately, we know even the clinician who prescribed all
these themselves are confused. This explains why most patients are
non-compliant with their medication because they were given too many
unnecessary medicines.
Scenario 4: The patient again:
After all these therapeutic regime, they need to go back again for their
next appointment 3 months later for follow-up to refill of the same Big Pharma
products, maybe more to be added or the existing medicine to be taken off and
be replaced by another blocker and inhibitor because their therapeutic window
and toxic levels have been reached. The replacement alternatives are to
“further cure" their chronic lifestyle diseases.
Let us now explain why all these drugs are just chemicals as
we have labelled them as medicines all along.
All so-called drugs are organic chemicals. All organic compounds are derived
from petroleum and coal tar. Many are also derived from living organisms such as bacteria and fungi.
None of the chemicals and drugs is derived from
thin air, from a vacuum, from the rain or from the soil or sand. All
synthetic chemical drugs produced by Big Pharma must come from petroleum and
petroleum derivatives or coal tar. They are fossil fuels.
Let us give just three examples of common drugs among
hundreds we use in the practice of medicine as examples because we label them
as chemicals. Let us use aspirin, one of the oldest drugs as the first
example.
1. Chemical Name:
Acetylsalicylic acid
Molecular formula is: C18H16O8
Molecular Weight: 360.3
2. Panadol (Paracetamol)
Chemical name: Acetaminophen
Molecular formula: C8H9NO2 or HOC6H4NHCOCH3
3. Metformin
Chemical name: 1,1-Dimethylbiguanide hydrochloride
Molecular formula: C4H11N5
HCl
Molecular weight of 165.62 g/mole.
These three examples among hundreds of other drugs will
suffice just to demonstrate all drugs are organic chemicals.
The only exception is the naturally occurring botanical
medicines derived from plants. But allopathic drug-based doctors do not use
botanical or natural medicines. They all prescribe only chemical drugs made
from petroleum and fossil fuels produced by Big Pharma. The only naturally
occurring medicines are those produced by plants as Nature prescribes them.
Drug companies may screen plants used by native healers,
naturopathic doctors, Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors for potential drugs,
but they don’t use the plants directly as this act would destroy all the plants
on Earth and its ecosystem and biodiversity. So, they merely screen the
compounds present in the plants for their therapeutic properties and once they
have identified and isolated them in the labs, they would use other organic
compounds derived from petrochemicals and synthesize them en masse in their
factories. In fact, more than 40 percent of all drugs used by
allopathic doctors are derived from plants even though they may not use
botanical medicines directly.
Of course I understand that drugs
may be synthesized indirectly from other organic compounds through chemical
reactions, not necessary from fossil fuels and petrochemicals. But ultimately all
organic compounds on this Earth have their origin either from living organisms
such as bacteria, fungi or other microbes, or from ancient plants and organisms
buried during the Carboniferous Period, approximately 286 – 360 million
years ago, and that was even before the age of the dinosaurs.
If pharmaceuticals are manufactured
from other compounds, there are two main types of processes used in the
manufacture, one by chemical synthesis based on chemical reactions, and
the other by bioprocessing based on the ability of microorganisms and cells to
produce useful substances.
A
synthetic organic compound like drugs is an organic compound prepared by chemical
reactions with other organic compounds. Plants
and fungi are the source of some of the drugs, including those chemically complex
anticancer drugs such as vincristine and vinblastine from the
Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus). Still, many were from ancient plants buried as
fossil fuels from which petrochemicals are derived. Ultimately, they all
originated from dead plants as fossil chemicals or from cultured bacteria or
fungi at present.
For instance, common antibiotics
such as streptomycin, tetracycline, vancomycin, and erythromycin, were all
natural products derived from bacteria. Since their discovery, they have been a
major part of our arsenal against deadly infections, greatly improving our
ability to treat infectious diseases.
But all chemical drugs are hidden under the gloried names as
"medicines". This applies too to all organic compounds we use today,
including agrichemicals, coatings, cosmetics, detergent, dyestuff, food
additives, fuel, plastics, synthetic rubber, etc, etc that are derived entirely
from petrochemicals.
Apart from microbes, and plants where do we get all these
organic chemicals and drugs? Surely not from heaven, from the air, rain, the
soil, sand or from emptiness. We can only get most of our organic compounds
like drugs by drilling deep beneath the earth crusts for oil and gas, apart
from getting natural medicines from plants. But natural medicines from plants
are used by doctors practicing other systems of medicines. See my article on
Ancient Medicine and Modern Medicine: My Personal Experience
https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/search?q=ancient+medicine
The only natural medicine that came directly from God were from the trees and
plants He planted in the Garden of Eden which mankind used for at least
50,000 years till Big Pharma came along 100 years ago to tell doctors today to
use petroleum chemicals and petrol instead to "cure" all
diseases
If both doctors and patients understand this, only do they understand
lifestyle medicine and that none of these chemical drugs "cure' any
lifestyle disease. The root causes were never treated, and the patient was
never taught health education, counselled on how to manage their chronic
illnesses except just to swallow synthetic chemical tablets for life.
This is the main reason why public hospitals are crowded by patients by
non-compliant patients
These patients who return to overcrowded hospitals are not new patients with
new diseases, but they are the same patients with the same chronic disease
coming back for their refill of the same chemical drugs to control their
chronic ills due to their health-damaging lifestyles. They are the same
patients coming back a few months later for follow-up and given the same
therapeutic chemical drug regimen that does not cure anything except “control
the disease” by blocking the pathology using antagonists, blockers, and
inhibitors.
Once both doctors and patients understand this, especially the aim of the
multibillion-dollar drug industry only to make money, then can they understand
and appreciate the meaning of Lifestyle Medicine that is only now beginning to
emerge as given in the above new establishments.
Naturally the Big Pharma are not happy with this eye-opening
preventive and curative option now taken by a selected few members of the
medical profession
The writer who was a retired senior medical researcher and a clinician
were already discussing about lifestyle diseases among his senior medical
colleagues as far back as in the 1970s during their paper presentations in
medical conferences, in their monthly scientific updates sessions and countless
weekly continuing medical education sittings after having led teams of
clinicians and medical scientists into clinical trials.
Only now is this lifestyle medicine beginning to be realised and emerging
emphasizing their importance not just as preventive medicine, but also as
curative medicine by changing the ways we live and eat healthily.
Hippocrates (460 - 370 BC) of Kos, the Father of Medicine,
advised physicians of his time this.
“Let thy food be thy medicine”.
Today, 2,438 years later, long, long after Hippocrates died, Big Pharma and doctors alike put words into his dead mouth to advise patients to take their medicine regularly (as it does not cure anything) till it becomes this:
“Let medicine by thy food”.
Whom do we believe and trust?
Jb lim
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