Treating PEOPLE, Not Symptoms!

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Montanaro Chiropractic

             Treating PEOPLE, Not Symptoms

Some facts that will amaze you: Japan is ranked the #1 healthiest country in the world AND…..although the United States is rated #1 for its medical facilities and physician expertise, it is ranked 50^th for having healthy people. Wonder why? In every drug store in the USA, you’ll find thousands of remedies and medications for the sick, pain, and ailments to TREAT conditions that already exist in our bodies. In every drug store in Japan, and nearly every street corner, you’ll immediately see products, such as herbs and natural remedies, which aid the immune system and are used to prevent health problems from ever occurring in the first place.

            An even more startling fact: The American Cancer Society now says that in 1 in every 2.5 individuals will develop some form of invasive cancer during their lifetime, and half of them will die from it. Cancer is the leading cause of death by disease under the age of 10. Even though we spend over 100 billion dollars a year on cancer treatment and research, the overall survival rate for cancer patients is no better than it was 50-100 years ago. The incidence of diabetes in the United States has doubled in just the last 5 years. Fifty years ago, diverticular disease (herniations in the colon) was virtually unknown (afflicting less than 1% of the American population). Today, according to the Merck Manual, 100% of all Americans will have many—if  they live long enough. 30 years ago, colorectal cancer was virtually unknown. Today, it is the single most prevalent cancer among men and women combined. The number of Americans who suffer from Asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control, has risen by an astounding 75% in just the last 20 years. Breast Cancer rates are up 30% in just the last 15 years. And on….and on….and on. And now its official: In the February 9, 1994 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the “War on Cancer” was declared a failure. “In all age groups cancer is increasing…..Few, new, effective treatments have been devised for the most common cancers. The April 15, 1998 Journal of the American Medical Association reported that there are more than 2,000,000 drug “reactions” annually in the U.S., and that more than 100,000 of those reactions are fatal. This makes prescription drugs the fourth leading cause of death in America. But the reality is much worse. These numbers only count drugs that are prescribed correctly and at the right dose.

            Understand, this is not an attack on medical doctors—the vast majority of whom are extremely competent, highly dedicated, and often even heroic. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that when it comes to the major diseases of our time, the modern paradigm of searching for “magic bullets” and managing symptoms has failed miserably.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I’ve never heard of anyone who had a deficiency in aspirin, however, I have heard of thousands of people who have died as a result of properly taking aspirin. Don’t get me wrong, drugs are very important if used properly and sparingly, however, more times that not they only cover up the symptoms and don’t address fixing the cause of the problem in the first place. Let me explain further with an example. You have clogged arteries. This eventually causes your blood pressure to rise, so your doctor prescribes blood pressure medication to eliminate the symptoms of high blood pressure—not the problem, clogged arteries. To reduce blood pressure, doctors have essentially four classes of medication in their arsenal:  1. Diuretics, which reduce blood pressure by making you pee out water from your body. Reduce the volume of fluid in your blood, and you reduce the pressure. Unfortunately side effects include dizziness, weakness, an increased risk of strokes, and impotence. (Not to worry, there are medications to alleviate the side effects.  2. Calcium Channel Blockers, which work to relax and widen the arteries—thus reducing blood pressure. Then again, a major side effect of channel blockers is a 60% increased risk of heart attack.  3. Beta Blockers, which work by weakening the heart so it won’t pump as strongly, thereby reducing blood pressure. One of the major problems with beta blockers, though, is the increased risk of congestive heart failure. Now catch this. Despite the increased risk of congestive heart failure, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (August 20, 1998), recommended putting “every single” heart attack survivor on beta blockers.  4. Ace inhibitors, (the new drugs of choice), which like the calcium channel blockers, also work to relax and widen the arteries. Unfortunately, ACE inhibitors can produce severe allergic reactions, can be deadly to fetuses and children who are breastfeeding, and can cause severe kidney damage.

But remember, these drugs only treat the symptoms, not the cause—clogged arteries. So, eventually as your arteries continue to clog to the point where even the medication no longer helps, you start getting the inevitable chest pains and shortness of breath. At that point, your doctor then is forced to chase the next set of symptoms and perform a coronary bypass or angioplasty to relieve the symptoms. And like the drugs before it, surgery merely addresses the symptoms, not the problem. Think about this for a moment: If all your doctor did was bypass or clear the arteries supplying blood to your heart, doesn’t that mean that all of the other arteries in your body are clogged—including the arteries supplying blood to your brain? The answer, of course, is yes. And, in fact, your odds of having a stroke after heart surgery are dramatically increased. Not to worry. Your doctor has another drug to deal with this problem: Coumadin (medicinal rat poison), which inhibits clotting and thins your blood so that it flows more easily through the narrowed arteries. But Coumadin has its own set of problems, and of course, you are still on all of the other blood pressure drugs and symptom relieving drugs that your doctor previously prescribed.

The bottom line is that the average person 65 years or older in the U.S. takes an average of 15+ medications a day (prescription and over the counter combined) each and every day of their lives. And only the first 1 or 2 drugs are actually prescribed to deal with the original medical problem. The other 13+ drugs are all required to deal with the negative side effects of the original 2, plus the interactions of all the other drugs they are taking. And the really sad fact is that in over 95% of all cases, the original problem could have been resolved naturally—with no side effects. Do you understand the implications of that statement? Disease can be averted, treated, and in many, many cases even reversed—naturally, with no side effects! 

Nutritional counseling and supplementation: You often hear doctors say that there is no need to supplement if you eat a balanced diet. If only that were true. Unfortunately, the food we eat today is not the same food we ate 50-100 years ago. We have to compensate for the loss of “value” in our food. It takes 80 cups of today’s supermarket spinach to give you the same iron you’d get from just one cup of spinach grown 50 years ago. Accordning to a Rutgers University study, it now takes 19 ears of corn to equal the nutritional value of just one ear of corn grown in 1940. There is less than half the protein in today’s wheat as in the wheat our grandparents ate. Much of our soil is so depleted that our farm crops depend entirely on chemical fertilizers they are fed to grow. That means that most of the food we eat is devoid of virtually all the trace minerals we need for survival. A 1936 U.S. Senate Document #264 cited the lack of nutrition due to our depleted soils. It also stated that 95% of Americans were deficient in one or more major minerals and many trace minerals. One can just imagine the further depletion since 1936. And on….and on… and on. When you think about it, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s happened. We’ve exchanged quality for quantity. You can’t keep increasing your yield per acre, at the same time steadily depleting your soil year after year, and not expect to lose something in the process. And what’s been lost is the quality of our food.

A second factor we have to consider is nutritional stress. We’re just exposed to far more environmental and pollution stresses than our bodies were ever designed to handle—more than the human body has ever before been required to handle in the history of the world. Even if you were able to consume an all organic, optimized diet, it takes far more of the protective phytochemicals that food provides than we can possibly get in our diets—even if the food we ate was of the highest quality. Our bodies were never designed to handle: high levels of radiation from dental x-rays and high altitude airplane heights, Organo-phosphate nerve-gas pesticide residues, totally artificial fats, high levels of refined sugar (with the average American now consuming over 137 pounds per year), a totally fiber-less white flour diet, constant exposure to disruptive electromagnetic fields, chlorines and fluorides in out water, and continued, unrelenting, high stress jobs and living situations.

You would think that supplementation would be pretty easy. Figure out just where people are likely to be deficient, and then make a pill that supplements for those suspected deficiencies—sort of a one-a-day multiple-vitamin approach. Determining the best supplement to take would then be a simple job of reading the label. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. There are actually many problems. Natural and synthetic vitamins are not necessarily the same thing. In nature, nutrients do not exist in isolation; they exist in nutrient complexes. And as it turns out, our bodies require the complexes, not the isolates. Many commercial grade vitamins and mineral concentrates are synthesized by the large pharmaceutical and chemical companies from the same starting material that they make their drugs from (coal tar, wood pulp, petroleum products, animal byproducts, waste and fecal matter, ground rocks, stones, shells, and metal.) Most Vitamin B12 (cobalamine) is made from activated sewage sludge—and then stabilized with cyanide (thus becoming cyanocobalamine). Most vitamin D is made from irradiated oil, the bulk of all vitamin E is produced in the labs at Kodak, Niacinimide (B3) is made by boiling sulfur in the presence of asbestos, and supplemental calcium, for the most part, is either mined from the earth, ground from old bones, or made by grinding up oyster shells. Another surprise is that the term organic, when applied to supplements, does not mean the same as it does with food. For supplements, all the word organic means is that the molecule contains at least one carbon atom. In other words a supplement can be labeled 100% organic and not be organic at all. I have made sure that the products in my office are of the highest quality and are all “food-based” complexes of the highest quality available.

Let’s disband some myths about cancer. “More people are surviving cancer than ever before.” If mortality rates are virtually unchanged (as stated in the Journal of the American Medical Association), but 800 to 1,700 percent more people are getting cancer than ever before, than 8-17 times as many people would be saved—would they not? Thus the remarkable claims you see in the press. On the other hand, what you don’t hear about is that 8-17 times as many people are also dying—whoops! Thus the rise of cancer to its position as the number 2 killer in the United States. So which is the most important statistic? Quite simply, none of them. It’s the fact that survival rates are virtually unchanged. What that means is that modern medicine isn’t really making much of a difference. Myth #2. “People are living longer with cancer than ever before.” If better testing is diagnosing cancer earlier than ever before, then, by definition, people would be living longer than ever before after diagnosis, even with no real change in the effectiveness in treatment or the actual survival rate—would they not? Bottom line is people are not really living longer. They are just given a longer death sentence. Now it is true that the statistics claim to have accounted for this quirk. They haven’t really. For one thing, they don’t account for the people who die from the side effects of treatment. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the population in the United States has increased 360% in the last 100 years (75,000,000 to 270,000,000). That means that you can multiply both the survival and mortality rates by 3.6 percent. In other words, the 8-17 times becomes 29-61 times. And that’s how cancer has risen from virtual obscurity to become the number 2 killer in the USA, claiming several hundred thousand people per year. Mortality rates are actually worse than they first appear. Consider the fact that when a cancer patient undergoes chemo, and then succumbs to pneumonia because their immune system has collapsed from the chemo, that is recorded as death by pneumonia—not cancer. Now add in all of the people who have died from the side effects of chemo and radiation, and you find that rates are not just unchanged but have probably gone backwards. 100,000,000,000.00 dollars are being spent every year on cancer in the United States. Cancer has become, quite simply, a major industry. And therein lays the problem. You now have vested interests competing for a piece of this monstrous pie. This leads to a series of major problems. No one has an interest in preventing cancer, since that doesn’t produce any money. All interest is in finding “a cure for cancer.” This is where the fame is. This is where career advancement is. And yes, this is where the money is. Any cure found must be proprietary—and, in fact, to justify the doctor’s very existence as a doctor. That means that even though its relatively easy to reduce the incidence of cancer by close to 90% (back to the level experienced 100 years ago), no one in the medical community will tell how. (Just remove the toxins from your body—toxins that didn’t even exist 100 years ago but are now present in our bodies in substantial amounts, and start regenerating your body with the essential nutrients that have been removed from the mass produced, processed foods that make up the bulk of today’s diet). Even though there are natural treatments that are at least as effective as chemo and radiation and surgery (not hard to do, since the medical modalities are so ineffective and have such deleterious side effects), no one in the medical community will tell you about them. I’d like to point out again that I will never and can never treat cancer legally. I treat people to become as healthy as possibly so the body has a fighting chance to heal itself…..its not my fault, or doing, if the body heals itself of cancer. The FDA says that only Oncologist treat cancer with either: surgery, chemo, or radiation. And this is another area in which the deck is rigged against alternative treatments. Since it now takes several hundred million dollars to approve a new drug or treatment in the United States, any program that is not proprietary can never be approved because no one can afford to take it through the testing process if they don’t own the rights to it. When you hear drug companies complain about the high costs of drug approval, don’t believe it. They love it. That’s what keeps small players from disrupting their multi-billion dollar profit factory.

Cancer is fundamentally a disease of the immune system. What do I mean by that? Quite simply, in your body, as part of the normal metabolic process, you produce anywhere from a few hundred to as many as 10,000 cancerous cells each and every day of your life. So why doesn’t everybody get cancer. Because your immune system has the ability to recognize each and every one of those aberrant cells and remove them from your body. That’s what a healthy immune system does. Then why do some people get cancer? One of 3 things happens and usually all 3 together. 1. You expose yourself to toxins and outside influences (such as heavy metals, radiation, rancid fats, viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc.) that dramatically increases the number of cancerous cells your body produces, so that not even a healthy immune system can handle the load.  2. You compromise your immune system to the point that it can no longer handle all of the cancerous cells your body produces—thus allowing some of them to take root and establish themselves.  3. Circulation (in the broadest sense) is impeded—thus leading to both 1 and 2.

Medical treatments for cancer have had dismal results. This is obvious. Medical treatments are based entirely on eliminating the symptoms (or manifestations) of the cancer in your body. They do nothing to eliminate the causes of cancer—to remove those things that stimulate its growth in the body. Think about this for a moment. Does surgery or radiation treatment or chemotherapy do one single thing for what I have discussed. No! All they do, is attempt, to remove the symptom (the physical manifestation of the cancer) that results from these causes. Is it any wonder why they have had such a poor track record? And on top of everything else, now that we know the causes of cancer, we can see that radiation and chemo actually significantly compound the problem. Exposure to radiation is a known carcinogen. Every treatment increases the likelihood of future cancer. Chemo drugs are some of the most powerful carcinogens known. Think about this for a moment. The prime cancer treatment we use today actually fills your body with some of the most powerful cancer-causing drugs know. Whoa! Who came up with this treatment? The absurdity of it is mind boggling. Even if you temporarily destroy the current cancer in your body by poisoning it with these drugs, haven’t you significantly increased your chances of getting cancer down the road?

But it gets worse. Medical treatments do nothing to improve immune function in the body. This is the single most absurd aspect of the modern medical approach to dealing with cancer—destroy the very system in your body that can actually eliminate and prevent the recurrence of that cancer, and then do nothing to repair that damage. At the very least this is highly irresponsible.

And maybe, the most damning of all, these treatments are deadly in and of themselves. Chemotherapy drugs are incredibly toxic. The fundamental premise behind their use is actually frightening. “We’re going to give you some of the most powerful poisons we know in all creation. Why? Well, we hope your cancer will pull the poison in faster than the rest of your body—and therefore die before you do. Of course, if we’re wrong, you’ll die from the treatment and not your cancer. And at the very least since it is so poisonous, you’re going to feel really, really ill, much worse than you have ever felt in your life. Your hair will fall out. You’ll vomit repeatedly. You’ll feel as though your very life is being drained from your body (which is actually what is happening). But of course, it’s worth it if it works. And its your only option.” I don’t know how many times I seen or read of people dying from the chemotherapy and not the cancer. But two things in particular really gall me. First, I know of numerous cases where people have gone through chemo, and despite of all the suffering it didn’t work. Unfortunately, they were so debilitated by the treatment, that another round of chemo was not an option. They were then “sent home” by their doctor to die. At that point with no other option left to them, they tracked down one of the “miracle doctors.” Amazingly they began to feel better almost from day one. After a few weeks, they felt so much better that they went back to their original oncologist for a check-up. An exam showed no signs of cancer (or the cancer was dramatically reduced). The oncologist then proceeded to tell the patient that their alternative program had nothing to do with their recovery (bad enough in and of itself), but then went on to convince the patient to come back for another round a chemo to “make sure the cancer doesn’t come back.” And then the patient died of a heart attack as a side effect of that “insurance” chemo.

Another variation of this which I have seen repeatedly is the patient who uses immune boosting supplementation while undergoing chemo. The results are far beyond what the doctor expects. The patient, in fact, tests cancer-free half way through the chemo program. Nevertheless, the doctor insists on the last two or three rounds of chemo. And the patient dies as a result of the chemo in the final rounds.

Alternative therapies are not subtractive. They are “additive.” Again, an alternative treatment that would be dismissed as ineffective because testing showed it to be only 10% effective in isolation, might nevertheless be part of a comprehensive program that contained seven 10% components—giving you a 70% chance of overcoming your cancer. But the medical establishment deliberately chooses not to test alternative therapies in this way—thus condemning all seven components with the “quakery” label. So the only way you hear about effective alternatives is by word of mouth or anecdotal evidence. Fortunately, the effectiveness of some of these programs is so strong, that it is impossible to suppress their success. And that is why more and more people are turning away from the failing programs of the medical community and turning to effective alternatives.

And lest I forget, one of the biggest arguments against alternative therapies is that they are a waste of money. Please! We spend $100,000,000,000.00 a year on a medical war on cancer that has been declared a failure by its very generals. Spending $100 a month on supplements and a couple thousand dollars on alternative treatments is a drop in the bucket compared to that obscenity. How unbelievably hypocritical to claim that they are trashing alternative therapies to protect your pocketbook.

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Last modified: 03/10/08