A few months ago I was sitting at the nurse's station at work when I overheard a senior doctor discussing treatment options for one of our patients with lupus with a young resident doctor. The patient had a laundry list of health issues going on and she was pretty sick. It was clear to me that her immune system was being attacked and she needed help quieting her internal fires. Unfortunately, I knew she would not receive that kind of treatment in the hospital. As the two were talking, I listened as the senior doctor was listing all these drug treatments that were recommended by the literature for systemic lupus as well as other details about the "typical" lupus patient. He was sounding like such an authority as the new doctor hung onto every word. People know me and how I feel about nutrition. I couldn't resist asking the senior doctor if he ever sent any of his lupus patients to a nutritionist or recommended any dietary changes with his lupus patients. He said he had never read any research that indicated dietary changes worked to control lupus symptoms. My response, was, "Oh really? I have had lupus for 30 years and am on no medications as a result of lifestyle/dietary changes I chose to make." He sat and looked at me for a while like he did not know how to respond. He seemed flustered especially since I was contradicting what he said right in front of his student. After a while he simply said, "Oh, that's nice," and kept right on talking to his resident.
I had to laugh to myself at the pure ignorance he displayed at supposedly being a man of medicine yet being so closed-minded to any alternative treatments that work. After having just completed my BSN, I noted that a lot of my classes centered around research and evidence-based practice. Evidence-based does not always have to mean evidence through research and published papers. Some times evidence-based means listening to people who have tried things and had good results or bad results.
To me, one of the biggest problems with research is that it is often conducted in too controlled of an environment. People do not live in a controlled environment. Our bodies are not controlled environments. There are too many mechanisms going on in the human body to try to assess what works or doesn't work in a sterile, closed research lab. Everything in our body works in tandem with something else. No one element is on an island...working alone.
When the senior doctor walked away to speak with the patient, I shared some things with the resident. I told him that while I understand that he has to do things a certain way while he is in training, that it is vitally important to his current and future patients that he keep an open mind to treatments that do not come in a syringe or a pill bottle. A lot of the medical schools are sponsored by drug companies. The seminars, the donated equipments, facilities, etc are often supplied by drug companies or people who support the drug companies. Thus, the new doctors come out already being indoctrinated to prescribe, prescribe, prescribe! I told him to take it upon himself to learn about nutrition and how food affects health as well as what it meant to practice functional medicine (treating the cause of the disease and not just the symptoms).
A lot of the things I have learned about nutrition and good health have not come from published papers or nursing/medical journals. A lot of what I have learned has come from talking to people, trying new things for myself, and keeping my mind and ears open. There were plenty of published papers on Vioxx. If you watch the medical news, you know how well that went. There was Thalidomide back in the 50's that women took during their pregnancies for morning sickness that caused their children to be born without arms and legs. That same drug was touted in the medical literature as well. I bet a lot of people think a drug that bad had to have been taken off the market. Well, it wasn't. It is currently used to treat multiple myeloma.
These are prime examples of how "modern" medicine, research, and drug companies do not have our best interests at heart.
Since attending the Longevity Now Conference (http://www.thelongevitynowconference.com) 2 weeks ago, I have come to realize that continuing to practice nursing in the hospital environment is becoming very difficult. I walk through the halls of my ER and all I see are people badly in need of nutritional and lifestyle balance. What they get are shots, irradiation (Xrays, CT's, MRI's), and pills. No one is trying to cure anything. Some people do go home feeling better than when they came in, but most times that is only a temporary state.
I posted something on FB the other day about the founder of AA (Bill Wilson) recommending giving the alcoholics vitamins and good food to treat their addiction back in the 30's. The medical community ignored him. The funny thing is when we get someone into the ER with alcohol intoxication, we give them folate/folic acid (a B vitamin, which occurs naturally in leafy green foods), thiamine (also a B vitamin), and a multivitamin either in pill form or combined in a liter bag of fluids. This all makes sense considering alcoholics are pretty much nutrient deficient and dehydrated. The problem is when they are discharged they are often sent home with prescriptions for Ativan, Prozac, or other medications of that type and instructed to "stop drinking". No one ever sends them home with prescriptions for B vitamins or any other kind of vitamins and instructions to eat better. My question is always, "If you know they are deficient and treat them as such in the hospital environment, then why isn't that treatment continued outside the hospital walls?" Again, to me, it is all about evidence-based practice. You do what works even if it isn't in the research literature.
Do not get so caught up in the white coat and forget that there is a reason why it is called "the practice of medicine".
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