Triggerband Web Journal

Health practitioners generally fall into one of two categories. One says that if drugs can’t fix it, then it can’t be fixed. The other says herbs and nutritional supplements can accomplish far more than drugs without the bad side effects.

You probably expect me to take sides; but I’m not going to. I am logical, rational, and reasonable, and it would be unreasonable to take either extreme position. Drugs have their place, and so do herbs. Thus, I advocate a tiered approach.

The first tier is a healthy lifestyle and sanitation. Once disease takes its toll on the human body, rarely will health return a full 100 percent. Furthermore, prevention is the least costly of all remedies. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And a doctor who is a friend of mine said, “If you can’t find time to exercise, you will have to find time to be sick.”

Tier two is herbs and natural remedies. Healthcare practitioners emphasize remedies you can take by mouth, such as nutritional supplements and herbal teas. However, I include in this category mechanical treatments such as physical therapy, hydrotherapy, and manual therapy.

Natural remedies are definitely preferable to medications if they can get the same result. But I will tell you from experience that even supplements and hydrotherapy can wear out the body over time. So be rational and use common sense when approaching tier two options.

Only when natural remedies fail, or are clearly insufficient, should healthcare practitioners move on to drugs and surgery. These remedies are powerful but risky, abounding in side effects and long recovery times.

And there is another reason to save drugs for last. They rarely resolve the underlying condition. Pain medication, insulin, hormones – these are patches that allow patients with debilitating illnesses to live normal lives until things resolve on their own. If a condition never resolves, then a lifetime of medication is all tier three has to offer.

This tiered system does combine standard and complementary medicine, but does not fall into another extreme, that of all-inclusiveness. Too many healthcare practitioners turn continuing education into a show-and-tell for new treatments. We need to be discerning, rather than ideological or frivolous. This is not a game. Millions of people are living in continual pain and disability. They need mature, honest, compassionate physicians who will take ownership of their cases.

And, yes, they need doctors who are logical, rational, and reasonable. If these qualities sound out-of-place in medicine, it’s because they are. Shotgun techniques and religious adherence to the tenets of one’s healing philosophy – practices that would never be tolerated in a field such as engineering – are commonplace in medicine.

Granted, the human body is enormously complex and dynamic, which makes the practice of medicine art as well as science. However, this very fact demands that doctors be even more logical, rational, and reasonable, not less so.

Alexander Typaldos, JD