Yes, that’s me being sarcastic. But I think that’s exactly the reasoning behind the widespread objection to dietary treatments for children.

Nowadays there’s even some talk of creating a new category of eating disorder called “orthorexia,” or obsession with eating healthy foods. I’m still scratching my head over this one - it’s certainly possible that obsessing over healthy eating could interfere with one’s daily functioning, especially if everyone else is eating crap. And yet, I can’t help wondering if some purveyor of junk like ADM or Cargill is really behind this push. I predict that within a decade people like you and me and all your readers are going to get labelled as orthorexics and confined to the hospital and fed Twinkies against our will.

Cheers
Scott

Your frustration with conventional medicine is well-founded, being that you want to work “with” the body to help truly fix problems as opposed to simply suppressing symptoms.

I’m a licensed naturopathic physician in Arizona, and I was taught medicine in a way that works with the understanding of the human body and how it functions. Here’s an example that frustrates me to no end with conventional medicine.

Gastroenterologists. Patients come to see them with digestive complaints, right? Most of the time they have a whole gamut of tests run on them (or not), and then they are given drugs. Even layperson patients seem to grasp the idea, when I present it to them, that if the digestive system has chronic problems that there is likely something in the diet that is irritating the gut. It just makes sense. Yet most of my patients, who are usually coming to me after seeing the gastro, were never asked to change their diet (and many wonder why not).

One amazing thing is how many people are gluten intolerant (not celiac, but hypersensitive to gluten). The simple elimination of the gluten grains helps many in ways that folks often find unbelievable (ie. thyroid disorders). Yet the testing for celiac in conventional medicine is the OLDEST (ie. most out-of-date) test in conventional medicine today.

I could go on and on. Basically, if you want to go into a field of medicine that truly strives to “treat the cause” of disease, I highly suggest you look into accredited naturopathic medical schools (yes, they do graduate REAL doctors, even though not every single state licenses us). If you wanted to come to my office and shadow me, you’re welcome to call and we’ll discuss it.

For more information see this website, which links to all of the accredited ND schools in the US and Canada:
http://www.aanmc.org/

If you’d like to see posts of mine on message boards, to see what kind of perspective a physician like myself has, go to the http://www.CrossFit.com or the http://www.PerformanceMenu.com message boards and search under “Garrett Smith”. Or you could go to my website (linked to my name here) and see the articles there that I’ve written.

BTW, any doctor that has the intention of “treating the cause” and chooses to learn about how to work with the body to help it heal itself (doctors do no actual “healing” of the body, only the body does that work) can do that. That’s just not the goal of the education that conventional medicine provides these days, so you’d have to teach yourself all of that stuff after medical school.

Hope that helps!

Something you mentioned in here goes along with some thoughts that have really had me debating where/how I want to proceed as far as my medical school hopes go.

“I’m a bit concerned that a website for future nurses is either ignoring or ignorant of the real workings of the body.”

I’m only a post-bacc pre-med student with limited knowledge of pretty much everything I’m actually supposed to know a lot about…but the more medically oriented people I meet and work with, the more I notice that “the workings of the body” is EXACTLY what they seem to have a minimal instinct for. Instead, it seems to be replaced by a kind of taught “address the symptoms, not the problem” kind of medicine. I have, in fact, watched my roommate (a nursing student about to take her boards) go through scores of pharmacology and pathology books but hardly have a sense of how the systems of the body flow.

Don’t know if I’m making any sense but this is very frustrating to someone who’d like to become a medical doctor in the future. Where do I go to know I’ll learn most of the right things? Any further posts or words on your opinion of medicine and medical education today would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Erin