By Barbara Berkeley
Whenever possible, I am for re-creating health rather than of reacting to it with medications. The difference goes something like this: Say you have a house that doesn’t suit you. It leaks, it’s drafty and the walls are unstable. One approach to the problem is to patch the plumbing, inject insulation and shore up the walls. A more drastic, but more profound solution is to tear down the house and create another one. The new house can have only the best materials and can be built to reflect everything that is known about keeping houses strong. Although it’s a lot more work, most of us would choose the rebuilt house anytime. Patching will always be patching.
Having said this, Don and I choose to live in a 150-year-old home which is in constant need of repair. Recently, an underground pipe broke and was reconnected by a new length of PVC and some expensive clamps. After the entire area was recovered and re-seeded, water began to well up through the ground. Much to the surprise of the plumbers (who had spent days digging up the site), the leak was coming from a completely different area. The break which had been repaired probably had nothing to do with the original flood, but had occurred as a side effect of the excavation.
Then there was the tale of the 220 electric line that supplies our house, also underground. That got cut during some yard work. Rather than run an entirely new line, it was repaired in a way that was meant to be permanent. A year later, steam began to rise from the area. The line was leaking electricity into the dirt and steam cooking it. Electricity was also being transmitted through the ground to pipes entering the basement and giving us shocks when we turned on the shower. The electricians were surprised. How did that happen? Plumbing and electrical work should be fairly straightforward, but even they are a little more complicated than they might appear.
How about the human body?
The human body is a universe unto itself, stunningly and endlessly complex. The degree of technological sophistication we’ve now achieved makes it seem as if we know a lot about ourselves. But we’ve only just scratched the surface. Putting a patch on bodily problems leads to a lot of “surprise” moments and some of those moments can be a lot more painful than a spark from the shower handle.
Take the diabetes drug Avandia. By 2007, this drug had been on the market for 8 years and had been used by over 8 million people. Surprise! It turned out that the drug raised the risk of heart attack by 43%. Avandia was a medication that helped sensitize the body to its own insulin. Since we know that diabetics have a vastly increased risk of heart disease, it only seemed to make sense that improving insulin would make heart disease better. In the case of Avandia, it didn’t.
How about all those antioxidants we’re taking? Up until now, the science has seemed to be simple. Our body produces molecules called ROS (reactive oxygen species) in response to all sorts of stressors. These ROS act like small bullets, bouncing around the body and damaging healthy cells. Anitoxidants disable ROS. Therefore, the logic: ROS bad, antioxidants good.
But fruit fly research at UCLA recently revealed that ROS have an additional function. Elevated levels of ROS serve as a communicator which signals blood cells to responds to an immune threat. The investigators expressed surprise.
"On the one hand, it's good to have antioxidants to reduce the amount of reactive oxygen in our body that causes DNA damage," the investigators said. "But if we find that those blood stem cells aren't primed to respond because the ROS levels are reduced, that would not be a good thing. Our findings raise the possibility that wanton overdose of antioxidant products may in fact inhibit formation of cells participating in innate immune response."
And here’s a third example. The ACCORD study was a comprehensive study of type 2 diabetics. The study was out to prove what seemed to be the obvious: that lowering blood sugar aggressively prevented diabetic complications. Instead, the glucose-lowering part of the study was halted early due to an increase in cardiovascular deaths among those with the most tightly controlled sugars.
Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steven Nissen was quoted as saying: “This result really does defy conventional wisdom. I suppose it wouldn’t have been a major surprise if there was no effect, but to show harm is really a big surprise. This effect could have been due to some of the drugs being used to lower glucose levels, which may have other effects that cause harm.”
Surprise yet again!
We do not read about increased risk in people who rebuild their houses. The data on eating diets which are primary in form (based on foods that are not altered, but come directly from nature) are uniformly positive. I have yet to see a study that decried the effects of increased exercise. We are able to easily measure improvements in blood pressure, lipids and insulin resistance in people who lose weight and keep it off. The data on the consumption of fruits and vegetables as natural antioxidants and nutrients is convincing, whereas little benefit has been shown in virtually any of the trials done with vitamin supplements.
I am a doctor and I believe strongly in the benefits that modern medicine can bring. I am not anti-medication. But we have come to rely too much on medicines and to use them to the exclusion of the therapies which might truly work…lifestyle therapies that we ourselves must administer. We have come to believe too much in our ability to understand the intricacies of the human body, a hubris which can be costly. The task for each of us, patient and doctor alike, is to decide when medicines are helpful and necessary and, when we use them, to follow the physician’s dictum to “do no harm”. Wherever we can, we should choose to create health by rebuilding and perfecting our own physical bodies. In the case of life re-creation, we not only do no harm, we also build a stronger, safer house; one we can live in confidently for a lifetime.
