Focusing On What Really Matters

These days, everyone’s attention is focused on cancer.  This makes sense since it is estimated that one in eight American women will have breast cancer during her lifetime, and that’s just one of many cancers that plague Western society.  However, what might come as a surprise to some is that heart disease kills more American men and women than all forms of cancer combined.

Why aren’t we as a society doing a better job of preventing and treating heart disease?  As with everything in medicine, the answer has to do with money.  But that is the subject of another article.  While Grand County Wellness Center cannot change what government, insurers, hospitals, and other doctors do, staff providers routinely help one patient at a time identify and change specific risk factors, thereby preventing disease instead of waiting until it happens.

Twelve years ago Dr. Andrew trained with a group of preventive cardiologists who taught him that standard cholesterol testing has very limited value in predicting heart disease.  It is stunning that even today, patients and doctors alike talk about the traditional cholesterol numbers as if they mean something.  When studies demonstrate that half of people with heart attacks have normal cholesterol—and many of these are already taking statin drugs—this should be a clue that the cholesterol theory of heart disease is missing the boat.  Doctors are looking at the wrong numbers and trying to make those numbers better with drugs instead of identifying and treating the true underlying causes of heart disease.  It should not surprise anyone then, when they get a "clean bill of health" from their doctor shortly before their heart attack!

Grand County Wellness Center staff do not waste patients’ money on traditional cholesterol testing.  Instead, they order advanced tests that reveal a lot more about what's going on in patients’ arteries.  They sit down with patients to review test results, discuss any abnormalities identified, and provide options.  Because drugs are the least-effective and highest-risk agents for preventing and treating heart disease, those who are looking for an artificial chemical solution to their problems will usually be disappointed.  Ironically, medical schools do not teach future doctors about several of the causes of heart disease.  Why?  Because there is no drug to treat them.  Instead, the treatments are already found in nature.  As much as multinational drug conglomerates would like to, they can't patent the foods, vitamins, minerals, herbs, and hormones that have prevented and treated heart disease—and so many other diseases—for thousands of years.

Fortunately—the body being a wondrous symphony of chemical and electromagnetic activity—many of the factors that prevent heart disease also prevent cancer and other diseases.  Thankfully, patients don’t have to leave Grand County to find cutting-edge diagnostic and treatment regimens to restore that symphony.  In fact, many come to Moab from Salt Lake City, Denver, and places even farther away because they are unable to obtain these services in the big cities.  Not surprisingly, GCWC patients often discover that treatments they have been receiving for years are now starting to be recognized by their cardiologists and even some popular media medical advisers.  GCWC is continually expanding its services, bringing breakthroughs from around the world to bear on common problems for which drugs and surgery have limited effectiveness.  Due to a relentless pursuit of the latest in medical science and technology, you can always count on GCWC to be ahead of the curve—even in Moab and Provo.

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.