Afterword to HEALTH AND NUTRITION SECRETS THAT CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE: HARNESS YOUR BODY''S NATURAL HEALING POWERS REVISED & UPDATED by DR. RUSSELL L. BLAYLOCK Although I have discussed many ways you can protect yourself against disease and injury by utilizing modern scientific knowledge, this book necessarily has been unable to cover the entire field of health and disease-prevention through good nutrition and supplementation. New information is continually being added to our body of knowledge, and will have to be included in subsequent books. My primary purpose has been to emphasize that your best protection while navigating the health care system is to become involved in your own treatment. You must learn about your disease, how to prevent future disease, and the best ways to treat your particular problem. This takes a great deal of work! As we have seen, doctors are in the midst of a very difficult period. Insurance companies, government agencies, liability lawyers, and an ever-constraining healthcare system have battered them beyond endurance.

Managed care and HMOs have destroyed the best of American medical care and have produced a nation of dispirited doctors. This affects you directly, since many doctors'' primary aims are to retire early. They are terribly overworked, financially strapped, and afraid of their patients--and as a result want only to get through each day and go home. Even when doctors want to provide the best care that medical science can offer, insurance companies and government payers (Medicare/Medicaid) often will not let them. What little decision-making is left to them entails jumping through seemingly endless, infuriating bureaucratic hoops. As a result, many find it''s a lot easier to avoid even attempting to treat you. Due to this abysmal state of affairs, your health is dependent on your own determination, ingenuity, and hard work. You must learn as much as you can about how the body functions in both health and sickness.

In addition, you must study all your treatment choices, including nutritional options. With the Internet, you have a tremendous resource that was not available to patients twenty years ago. While it can be cluttered with confusing, often contradictory, information, if you persevere you will eventually develop a better idea of your health needs. This is especially true if you have the good fortune to find a health care professional who is knowledgeable about nutritional science. While this is rare in many parts of the country (including my own), fortunately, the demand for such practitioners is growing by leaps and bounds. If you have learned anything from this book, I hope that you now understand that the body is a whole organism encompassing many interdependent systems. Modern science likes to divide things and examine systems in isolation. Little work has been done on how all the body''s systems work together, and more importantly, how disease arising from one part of the body can affect numerous other systems, often at great distances from the source of the disease.

In addition, modern medicine has all but ignored the effects of various additives used in processed foods, especially the problems associated with accumulated, synergistic effects. The same is true of environmental toxins. As we have seen, the most neglected area of all is the effect of these toxins on the nervous system. Tens of thousands of such chemicals have never been tested to determine their combined, long-term effects. Another serious problem is widespread use of vaccines. The medical hierarchy has assumed that vaccinations are much safer than actual experience has shown, and the connection to learning disorders, such as ADD/ADHD and autism, has been virtually ignored by these elitists. There is overwhelming evidence that over-vaccination and vaccination under conditions of immune impairment can have substantial deleterious effects on the developing nervous system. As with so many problems, medical elitists simply have refused to objectively examine the issue.

I also hope that you now realize that nutritional medicine is not outside the scope of science and that so-called "orthodox" medicine is not the only true and scientifically based medical model. The nutritional basis of disease is just as scientific as orthodox medicine, which I have attempted to demonstrate throughout this book. What makes orthodox medicine "orthodox" is that its leaders have wrested control from nutritional scientists, who actually have more complete and scientifically based methods of treating disease and maintaining health. Despite the fact they frequently stand on very shaky scientific ground, the orthodox medical industry has also wooed the favor of the main media outlets in this country so they always get the last word in any argument. I tell my patients that every major medical journal and surgical specialty journal contains at least one nutrition-based article in virtually every issue. The problem is that doctors do not read them. Instead, they focus on articles concerning the newest surgical techniques, diagnostic tests, or expensive drug treatments. My theory is that the nutrition articles are ignored because doctors simply don''t understand them, especially if there is a lot of biochemistry involved.

In addition, nutritional treatments will not increase a doctor''s sagging income the way an exorbitant new procedure can. The big secret among doctors is that when they arrived at medical school, they were told that first-year biochemistry flunked out most medical students, and they learned to hate and dread it. In fact, among all subjects, this is the one that continues to wash out the greatest number of students. At our twentieth reunion, my fellow alumni were still vehement in their hatred for our old biochemistry teacher--who was really a great guy--even two decades after graduating from medical school! As a biochemistry major in undergraduate school, and having taken postgraduate biochemistry courses, I actually found the medical school course to be fairly easy. In truth, I enjoyed biochemistry more than any other subject. Unfortunately, it was also the last and only course or instruction I encountered anywhere that dealt with the subject of nutrition. Throughout my ten years of medical and neurosurgical training I never heard a single word about nutrition. The only time doctors ever learn anything about biochemistry or nutrition is in connection with a pharmaceutical drug''s mode of action or a very focused review of a disease process.

Actually applying biochemical/nutritional knowledge to patient care was and is as rare as hen''s teeth. Nutrition is essentially biochemistry, and medical care devoid of nutritional considerations is like a car without wheels. It goes nowhere. Take something as simple as a common infection. When most doctors see a patient with an infection (e.g., pneumonia), their first thought is to culture the organism, identify it, and specify an antibiotic appropriate to effectively treat it. This is basic medicine, something all doctors are taught from day one.

But simply giving the antibiotic leaves a huge gap in properly treating the patient. It is rare, in my experience, that doctors will place such a patient on probiotic organisms and prebiotic support nutrients to assure the growth of friendly organisms. We all learned in medical school that broad-spectrum antibiotics kill both pathogenic disease-causing organisms, as well as beneficial colon bacteria, and that an overgrowth of pathogenic bacteria caused by the antibiotic can lead to the often fatal condition called pseudomembraneous colitis. But, we were never taught what to do about it. We were also not told that one of the most common secondary problems with frequent or prolonged antibiotic usage is yeast overgrowth (Candidia albicans) and that it can lead to numerous and severe long-term complications. We were not taught about the importance of nutrition in immune function, and that antibiotics work better when we utilize nutritional non-specific immune stimulation. In addition, most doctors do not seem to understand that certain foods, particularly fats, can severely impair the immune system, causing antibiotics to fail and an infection to spiral out of control. Few doctors know that iron supplements can cause existing infections to become deadly and uncontrollable--all of this despite the numerous studies that have appeared in peer-reviewed medical journals emphasizing the importance of nutrition in controlling infections.

These are the articles that they skip over to read about the latest prescription drug. Throughout this book I have provided examples of the importance of utilizing what we know about the biochemistry of disease and the enormous importance of nutritional treatment in conjunction with conventional treatment modalities. Until doctors acknowledge these truths, it will be your responsibility to learn and practice good nutrition so that you can prevent disease and protect your own life if you do become ill. This will require discipline. It has been said that the undisciplined life is not worth living. We now know that the undisciplined life will also be short and full of misery.