Six Pillars of Vibrant Health

Do you believe there is anything that doctors or the medical profession do to make us healthy? I do not mean improving certain abnormal blood values or curing an acute illness or mending a broken body part. I am talking about creating vibrant health. If you answered “nothing”, I believe you are absolutely correct!

As a physician, I have thought a lot about this question over the years. Actually, searching for the answer has led me on a completely different path in my medical career. I began to realize that our entire medical model is set up to treat acute illnesses but more than 90% of people who go to doctors are there to be helped with a chronic illness.

Acute problems respond well to medications and surgery. Chronic illnesses are caused most often by lifestyle problems and are best addressed by lifestyle modifications. Medications can help the blood tests look more normal or help some symptoms (often at the expense of multiple and sometimes dangerous side effects), but there have been precious few studies showing that these medications actually save lives in these chronic illnesses.

For example, with all the drug company advertisements about statin (cholesterol lowering) drugs, few people (including some doctors) know that these drugs have never been shown to reduce overall deaths. They can reduce cardiac deaths in those men with a history of prior heart disease by only 1% absolute reduction. However, this modest improvement does NOT hold true when deaths from other causes are included. With women and even with men with high cholesterol and no history of heart disease, it does not even seem to prevent cardiac deaths! There are also many and sometimes dangerous side effects to these drugs. Despite these facts, the public and many physicians seem to be convinced that using statins is the best way to fight heart disease. It is the result of one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history!

There is another way to approach health. In fact most of us can achieve vibrant health by addressing the causes, rather than the symptoms of our ill health. My careful study of this issue has led me to develop an approach to healthcare, which I call “The Six Pillars of Vibrant Health”. They are diet, exercise, supplements, detoxification, stress management and bio-identical hormone balancing for men and women.