Pills and Procedures

There is one very important tenet of my beliefs that I think you should know about me. I don’t think Western medicine is evil but I think it is incomplete. Drugs and chemotherapy have their place. But what makes me throw up my hands is despair is that our conventional medical system stops with these tools. Instead of being preventive or proactive by making our bodies healthy, we wait for an illness to come along. And then we throw pills and procedures at it. If the illness is acute like a broken bone or heart attack, these common treatment methods excel. But if the illness is chronic like heart disease, high blood pressure, or cancer, these tactics often fail. Because they don’t address the root of the problem. Instead, they address the symptom. Take, for example, high blood pressure. Drugs like statins often improve a patient’s blood pressure, but they do nothing to address the physical aspect that caused the high blood pressure in the first place. Or look at cancer treatment. After my stage IIIC ovarian cancer diagnosis, I underwent a radical hysterectomy and then six rounds of carboplatin and paclitaxel. My oncologist cut out the visible tumor and then threw poison at me to attempt to kill any remaining cancer cells. But nothing in my treatment addressed any root causes for my cancer—extra body weight, lack of sleep, a poor and undernourishing diet loaded with sugar, insufficient exercise, a lifetime of bitterness, contact with toxic products, and more. If I didn’t address any of my lifestyle issues, why wouldn’t my cancer return? And why wouldn’t an oncologist encourage a patient to utilize evidence-based medicine for lifestyle course correction? What I will never understand is why conventional cancer treatment looks at the symptom of cells growing out of control, but never addresses any underlying health issues, treating the body and the cancerous cells that developed from it as two separate entities when they both originated from the same source.