Tomorrow’s Medicine Today

Imagine waking up from a good night's sleep feeling rested, without pain and stiffness.  Imagine waking up every morning with no desire to smoke.  Imagine looking at that doughnut with complete disinterest.  Imagine taking a wreck on your mountain bike and heading back up the mountain for more punishment the next day.  Imagine getting sick and recovering faster than ever.  Imagine having energy that lasts throughout the day, without that extra cup of coffee.  Imagine feeling relaxed and enjoying life.

This is not Star Trek or the Jetsons.  It’s just 21^st –century medicine.  Energy medicine, to be precise.  “It’s hard to wrap your mind around at first,” says Dr. Ray Andrew, Medical Director of Grand County Wellness Center.  “The pharmaceutical industry has so successfully overtaken Western culture that many of us can’t imagine life without drugs.”  There are drugs for pain, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, smoking, depression, heart failure, diabetes, osteoporosis, attention deficit disorder, high cholesterol, etc.  Unfortunately, our love affair with the pharmaceutical industry has created a windfall for the legal profession as more and more drugs are found to have undesirable—and often deadly—consequences.  Even without side effects and long-term complications, drugs don’t cure anything, and most are intended to be taken for life.  This is because they fight against the natural processes at work in the body.  And they are a one-size-fits-all approach.

By contrast, energy medicine works with the body and is entirely personalized.  It identifies which electromagnetic fields the body wants and delivers them non-invasively.  “In traditional medicine, we have to give every symptom and disease a label (diagnosis), then prescribe one or more drugs to suppress that symptom.  In the Wellness Center, labels don’t matter,” Dr. Andrew explains.  “We use energy medicine to identify what is out of balance and to tell the body how to fix it.”  There are no needles, no drugs, and no pain.  Just patient-specific waves.  Whereas cell phones and numerous other wireless devices produce harmful waves that interfere with the healthy function of the body, energy medicine uses waves that are in the same range as those created by the body itself.  Side effects include pain relief, reduced inflammation, improved immune function, enhanced digestion and metabolism, restful sleep, relaxation, and hormonal balancing.

Ideal candidates for this therapy include people of all ages, athletes, couch potatoes, weekend warriors, individuals with acute injuries or infections, and those with chronic conditions.  One of the best-studied applications has been bone regeneration in osteoporosis.  Energy medicine can unravel the patterns of weakness and dysfunction in the physical and emotional realms, leading to tissue repair even during the initial consultation.

Does energy medicine work for everything?  “It is so powerful and versatile that we are never surprised to discover what it can help.  However, no single therapy works for everything.  We have many tools in the toolbox.”  When a woman’s ovaries no longer produce adequate amounts of hormones, for example, Dr. Andrew recommends replacing those hormones to maintain optimal health.  Similarly, when deficiency of key nutrients impairs healthy cellular metabolism, dietary changes and supplementation are essential.  Combining these treatments with appropriate electromagnetic field therapies enables the body to achieve its true potential.  Wellness Center staff work with each patient as a whole person, creating a health plan unique to him or her.

Naturally, like every effective unconventional treatment, energy medicine has its skeptics.  Dr. Andrew is quick to admit he is not a crusader, not out to convince the critics.  “By and large, our patients are pragmatists.  When they feel better and see their numbers improve, they don’t care what the experts say.  At Grand County Wellness Center, our market consists of people who want to be proactive with their health and get better.  There’s plenty of evidence out there for those fascinated by the details, but most of our patients just enjoy being happier, healthier, and more productive.  They want to live longer and to have a better quality of life.”

Driving by the office, the casual observer would never mistake the Wellness Center for its high-priced counterparts in large cities.  It’s what goes on inside that makes the difference:  Personalized care.  Top-notch staff.  Engaged patients.  All of these—combined with constant study, frequent lectures, and attendance at international conferences—enable Dr. Andrew to bring energy medicine—the “wave” of the future—and all of the latest anti-aging treatments to the people of Moab today.

21st Century Medicine – Bandaids or True Healing?

The other day I saw an ad depicting Larry the Cable Guy trying to sell Prilosec.  “Suffering from heartburn day after day is as unnecessary as wearing sleeves,” he says.  It might be catchy, and it obviously sells a lot of drug, but it makes no more sense to take a drug to cover up heartburn than it does to cover up a skin cancer with a fresh Bandaid every day.

Unfortunately, this has been the approach physicians have taken toward a host of health problems for over 100 years.  Instead of making the effort to determine the cause of an individual’s heartburn, for example, we are content to suppress it with drugs that reduce stomach acid.  As long as the patient feels better now, never mind the fact that excess stomach acid may have nothing to do with the problem.  Never mind, either, that long-term acid suppression has some very serious consequences.  When the heartburn continues or worsens, we increase the dose of stomach acid-reducing medicine until the maximum dosage is reached.  When that no longer works, patients are offered the next drug on the list or even advised to go under the knife in the hope of fixing the problem. 

By contrast, at the Grand County Wellness Center, our interest is not in merely finding the magic pill that temporarily suppresses or controls every symptom.  Instead, we search for potential causes and make every effort to help patients rebalance their physiology.  Our approach is simple:  Give the body what it needs; remove what it doesn't need; treat causes, not symptoms.  The body has a remarkable ability to heal itself if we give it the right fuel, remove the obstacles to health, and utilize an ever-growing array of tools to support the body’s repair.  The more we learn, the more we discover that nobody has all the answers and that no single treatment is the definitive answer to a given condition.

Fortunately, people are becoming increasingly aware that covering up each symptom with a drug doesn't necessarily solve their problems.  As a result, they are demanding more effective, less risky (think of all the side effects and complications rattled off at the end of the commercials), and more personalized care.  They even ignore national expert committee opinions and specialty society consensus guidelines that seek to reduce human beings to numbers and medical professionals to technicians in an assembly line.  Fortunately too, when doctors run lab tests and say "there is nothing wrong with you, just take this pill," patients are no longer content.  They keep looking.

At the Grand County Wellness Center, we do not pretend to have all the answers.  But we are always learning.  Thanks to weekly continuing medical education from experts across the country, we do not practice the same medicine today as we did even one month ago.  And we are never satisfied to just control symptoms.  If you are driving and notice your steering wheel tugging toward one side, you wouldn’t just grip the steering wheel harder.  Before too long, you would check your tire pressures and then your alignment.  We feel the same way about dis-eases that arise in the human body – It makes much more sense to step back and take a look at what might be causing them than to merely compensate for or try to cover them up.  When routine lab tests come back normal (or are simply not relevant in the first place), we are fortunate to be able to draw upon the resources of multiple specialty labs that enable us to get to the bottom of perplexing problems.  A small sampling of the common problems for which we have uncommon solutions includes fatigue, depression, irritable bowel, constipation, muscle weakness, insomnia, sinus congestion, and yes, heartburn.  Whether you have been dealing with issues like these for a week or decades, you might want to schedule an appointment.  If we don’t have the answer today, chances are we might have it next week.  On the other hand, if you feel fine now but want to prevent diseases for which you are or think you might be at risk, you will find refreshing our focus on true disease prevention, not just early detection.