Dr Alison Adams, Dentist, Naturopath and Author (The Natural Recovery Plan)

Disease labeling case study 1

I was recently reading an article about the singer/songwriter Rumer, who came to prominence with her first album, Seasons of My Soul which was nominated for several awards.

She was born to a British couple living in Pakistan, but discovered when she was 10 years old that her biological father was actually the family’s Pakistani cook. The family moved back to the UK, her parents divorced and her mother died of breast cancer in 2003 after a struggle with mental illness.

Trying to reconcile the issue, Rumer went back to Pakistan in search of her biological father only to find that he had died just months previously. She has also struggled with the fame that accompanied her first CD and has been diagnosed with manic depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She has also experienced physical symptoms such as a respiratory problem and deafness in one ear.

So manic depression, PTSD and ADHD? Diagnosed, I am sure by a psychiatrist. Now I don’t doubt that she has had a difficult and stressful time on top of a traumatic and difficult childhood. I don’t doubt that she has felt low, had difficulty concentrating and found it hard to function. But really – she now has three psychiatric/behavioural disorders simultaneously?

Disease labelling case study 2

In a recent episode of the UK television programme The Food Hospital one patient was diagnosed as suffering from ‘night eating syndrome’ by the medical team. This man had previously been active, but was unemployed and bored and had taken to having junk food snacks by day and by night.

They encouraged him to eat a healthier, lower GI diet and his night eating stopped and he began sleeping through the night. So treatment was a success. Boredom, greed, lack of self-control, poorly controlled blood sugar levels or possibly addiction, but night eating syndrome? Please!

The allopathic medical model

The way things have been set up in allopathic medicine is that a history is supposedly taken, the patient examined and tests run if required. The doctors then formulate a diagnosis based upon labelling a set of symptoms as a disease and then decide which of the 22 classes of pharmaceutical drugs specially created to ‘treat’ that disease they will use.

Although, in all honesty, many doctors don’t seem too keen on the diagnosis part since they are likely to prescribe an antibiotic for an infection (of whatever cause – viral, fungal, parasitic, etc), and if they don’t know what to do or have run out of options then they are likely to prescribe some form of corticosteroid. They only generally have a few minutes per patient to make their diagnosis and write a prescription so the process is rarely an involved one.

Once your disease has been labelled, you are then likely to be prescribed the appropriate drug(s) for the rest of your life unless this is a short term problem such as a bladder infection. Furthermore, it is rare for subsequent medical professionals to ever question a previously established diagnosis so the label tends to persist.

This approach also leads to the nonsense of being given multiple ‘disease’ labels or of transitioning from one ‘disease’ to another. In my family a relative has progressed from a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia to one of Alzheimer’s disease. In this schema: did they stop having the paranoid schizophrenia or did the paranoid schizophrenia become the Alzheimer’s disease?

This also leads to the problem where you may get as many different diagnoses as doctors consulted where each gives your cluster of symptoms a different ‘disease’ label.

This labelling of clusters of symptoms as being a ‘disease’ frames the whole process of deteriorating health in a meaningless way. Pharmaceutical drugs – usually created in a laboratory from petrochemicals – are then tested to see whether they effectively suppress the clusters of symptoms considered to be the disease.

This approach means that the average US senior is now on 7 prescription medications and many are concurrently taking 15 or more drugs for a variety of the different diseases that they are considered to be suffering from. This means that an individual may be simultaneously diagnosed with heart burn, arthritis, hypertension, glaucoma, constipation, and so on.

Finally, anyone involved in marketing will tell you that the ideal product is one for which the manufacturer creates the demand. Cholesterol, it seems, was not considered to be the the bogey man of heart disease until the pharmaceutical companies had a drug to reduce it. And one of the latest developments is the labelling of shyness as ‘social phobia’ which, of course, has been accompanied by the creation of a pill for your ill.

Symptom suppression

Our bodies and those of our ancestors have been self-correcting for millennia given the right nutrients and environment. Admittedly most of the time, the symptoms of the body trying to regain equilibrium in the face of environmental challenges are often fairly unpleasant. Examples include diarrhoea, rashes, fevers and cold- and flu-like symptoms. But these symptoms are all symptoms of detoxification and not of disease.

The allopathic approach is to suppress these symptoms (means of detoxification) while further intoxicating the body with toxic chemicals (pharmaceutical drugs). This presents several problems.

The first and most important of these is that the cause of the problem is never identified or treated and so remains to cause a recurrence (eg: breast cancer) or another ‘disease’ that is then regarded as being unrelated. Another relative has had debilitating lifelong arthritis, followed by a stroke and breast cancer which the medical profession all regard as being unrelated. Seen through the naturopathic lens, however, all three of these ‘diseases’ are probably related to the same underlying causes which have never been adequately addressed.

The second problem is that the drugs given invariably cause unwanted effects referred to as side-effects for which the individual may then be prescribed a second, third or fourth drug. Another family member has been labelled as being at ‘high risk’ of heart disease because his father died relatively young of a heart attack. What is not ever examined were the unusually stressful circumstances surrounding his father’s death that probably precipitated his early demise.

So because of this hypothetical ‘risk’ he has been compelled to take statins – which because they disagree with him – he has also been taking antacids to keep down. Recently after several years of trying different kinds of statins he finally threw in the towel on this ‘prophylactic’ therapy, but has now been left with permanent gastrointestinal problems.

And like pushing a waterbed down in one area and having it pop up in another, suppressing symptoms of detoxification either pushes the toxins back into the system, where they get stored at a deeper and deeper level until chronic degenerative diseases occur or they get expressed in a different way which is given a different disease label.

A final issue is that the individual takes on the disease label so that they become a ‘cancer victim’ or ‘multiple sclerosis sufferer’ and this news can be so shocking as to induce the nocebo effect where an expected negative outcome occurs ie: death or incapacity respectively.

The naming of disease

Were we to give diseases meaningful names – like mercury toxicity or vitamin C deficiency – at least there would be some indication of what needed to be addressed in order to rectify the problem.

Like lawyers with their legalese which seems specifically designed to exclude non-lawyers from understanding the meaning, the medical profession have developed a language designed to confound (and impress) the ordinary person.

Although doctors balk at the witch doctors and healers of old, they have created their own powerful placebo belief in their scientific potions with their white coats, stethoscopes and consulting rooms in shiny buildings.

The same family member thought to be at risk of heart disease also had crashing migraines regularly for decades which incapacitated them. After possibly 30 years of this weekly cycle, their skin became yellow and they started vomiting after every meal. Even then it took the doctors two years to figure out they had gallbladder disease!

Their gallbladder was surgically removed and the migraines and the jaundice were resolved. But what if the underlying problem had always been the gallbladder and it was inadequate clearance of toxins by the liver and gallbladder that were causing the symptom labelled as ‘migraine’? What if the vomiting too were caused by reflux of the bile into the stomach?

And were cancer to be regarded as an immune deficiency disease, this would give some indication of what needed to be addressed. And yet the current treatment is to either surgically remove the tumour or burn it with radiotherapy and to further poison the immune system using chemotherapy. Which is why cancer frequently recurs months or years later because the underlying immune deficiency was never addressed.

The natural medicine approach

First of all the naturopathic approach appreciates that there is an intelligence that animates all the processes in the body. There are estimated to be 100,000 biochemical reactions per second per cell and 3 trillion cells in the body which means that this intelligence is orchestrating 300 quadrillion reactions per second! Another statistic is that the body synthesises 500,000 new cells every second. And given that the average cell contains 10,000 mitochondria alone this means that the body is manufacturing 5 trillion intricate and complex energy producing mitochondria every second. And that’s just one of the many cell organelles!

Now, I don’t care how smart you think your doctor is and how many letters they have after their name – we are all eclipsed by the innate intelligence of the body which has served to deliver mankind to the present day through millennia of evolution. Furthermore, it is important to understand that the body is always doing the best it can with the resources available to it. We simply can’t cheat or improve upon nature and we will always pay some sort of price if we try.

With a few notable exceptions, allopathic medicine does not understand the cause of disease. This is the elephant in the room of ‘modern’ medicine and in itself would not be such a huge problem if it weren’t for the fact that what it doesn’t understand it regards as not being worth knowing.

In contrast, naturopathic medicine regards practically all illness as either being toxicity or deficiency. Now, these toxicities and deficiencies can be multiple, can affect different people in a variety of ways, and can affect the same person in different ways depending upon other factors such as stress or exercise and so manifest in different symptoms. These two causes then get ascribed thousands of different disease labels by allopathic medicine.

Chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, is an extreme toxicity where all the body systems and organs have been poisoned and particularly those of energy production in the mitochondria of the cells.

It is for this reason that most naturopaths do not like disease labels although they are forced to work with them by the consensus reality. They prefer to treat everyone on an individual basis unlike allopathic medicine which has prescribed approaches for each cluster of symptoms given a particular disease label. This is a big part of why many natural health approaches cannot be proven using the same research methods as allopathic medicine ie: treating everyone with the same disease label with the same drug or protocol.

Another issue is that different specialists may be supervising care of the different disease labels the patient receives so that no one practitioner is coordinating overall care. This can be why the elderly end up taking quite so many drugs.

Holistic medicine practitioners also consider the possibility of symptoms being a physical manifestation of an energetic imbalance and seek to address the cause. They may do this using techniques such as homeopathy, vibrational remedies and acupuncture. This approach does require the active participation of the patient and many either don’t want to take responsibility for their health – or don’t even believe that it is possible – preferring to hand all the responsibility to the doctor or practitioner.

Fatigue syndromes

There is much debate about whether chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia exist (amongst those that don’t suffer from them) or whether they are psychosomatic. Ultimately practically all disease is psychosomatic which is why no amount of pharmaceuticals will ever ‘cure’ a disease. Which is not to say that the disease is not real – the disease is very real – it is just created by factors that allopathic medicine either doesn’t care to address or to recognise.

I don’t even like having to use the terms chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia or autoimmune disease because although the symptoms are very real and debilitating, I don’t think these diseases exist as discrete entities in themselves.

Fatigue is a symptom of chronic toxicity and in particular toxicity with toxic metals and the big daddy of toxins: mercury from dental amalgam and vaccinations. It is a symptom of poisoning – poisoning that affects every system and organ in the body and which also poisons energy production in the cells. This results in a profound fatigue and all the other distressing symptoms associated with these disorders.

When I really understood this I was willing to ride out the storms knowing that even when I felt and looked dreadful that this was an important step towards undoing all the harm that had been done over the decades by suppressing symptom after symptom (or ‘disease’ after ‘disease’).

After 40 years of being medicalised, my body was a little like a pressure cooker at full steam. The steam had to be allowed to escape slowly in a controlled manner, otherwise it will wallpaper your ceiling! In the same way, the detoxification symptoms have to be permitted to be expressed and they will do this a specific order. Once you have set the processes of detoxification in train, they will express themselves in the order that they need to – provided you give the body the nutrients it needs.

The most important thing is to understand that what the doctors have labelled as disease are detoxification symptoms and to permit them. So I welcomed all the symptoms as steps on the path to recovery knowing that my body had the wherewithal to do the work and it just needed cooperation and support from me.

When you really understand this you will realise what a nonsense the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, for example, are. Which require that there are 11 out of 18 specified tender points in more than one quadrant of the body for more than a few months along with a few other symptoms – all of metal toxicity.

Allopathic medicine is currently wilfully or ignorantly looking down the wrong end of the telescope. And, although practically every news report on the subject ends with the hope of a cure on the way for disease X, I wouldn’t hold your breath.