Chapter 4 ~ From Old Medicine to
Serializing More “Oomph” Nature’s Plan for Human Physical Wellness Thru Metabolic Typing (2023)
Briefly, what was Old Medicine? If this topic is overly-familiar to you, okay to skip this chapter.
Briefly, starting around 1850, Old Medicine was based on only corpse anatomy, tissue pathology and patent medicines (non-nutritive pharmaceuticals). It’s vision of human health was a person able to go to work in a factory 40 or more hours a week. Starting after WWII, this view evolved into a car-engine-parts analogy.
I Am Joe’s Body by J.D. Ratcliff
During and after WWII, to new medical learners, our internal organs and metabolism were inevitably analogized to the parts of a car or army jeep engine. Each car engine part has its unique function; when each engine part does its job, you have a well-running car — or a well-running body. Here’s how you care for each part…
This conceiving of body parts remains alive and well in 2024 in the the very famous book, I Am Joe’s Body (first ed. 1955?) by J.D. Ratcliff. This was Reader’s Digest’s progressive 1940s version of living human anatomy 101 for middle and high school and non-medical personnel. Each organ tells its story in the first person; and, how it likes to be treated to remain healthy. Originally 33 articles, I believe they were first collected into book form in 1955. It is the best selling book in Reader’s Digest’s history.
Lessen pain and symptoms
For medical doctors after WWII, the above body-parts-as-car-parts analogy was applied for lessening pain and physical symptoms. If each part is working as it should, the whole must be healthy, right? The car parts as body parts analogy was over-simplified; yet, accessible. It supported the Germ Theory of Pathology claim of “one size fits all” medicine. In this way, humans were treated as herd animals: one best diet is best for all; and, when diseased, one best drug, best for all cases. Due to lobbying by wealthy doctors, the government promoted national diet standards reinforcing the idea of ‘one best diet for everyone.’
Suppress body messages
Because Old Medicine was so profitable, doctors could afford to talk themselves into suppressing the human immune system. Why was this a problem? Because many or most of our physical symptoms are “messages” from our immune system intelligence. Its “message” can be:
- I’m hungry, I need crucial nutrients,
- I’m detoxing, now treat me gently (colds are often like this),
- I’m deficient in my mineral body (fatigue and all osteoporosis is like this)
- I’m waiting for a nutrient which never comes (build up of cholesterol in arteries is like this)
Not until the start of holistic health and healing (1975–1995) was it suggested a part-to-whole, car-parts approach, was clearly upside down. Even in 2024, mainstream healthcare insists on testing and interpretation of discrete metabolic functions. Our whole metabolism, the person as a whole, a high quality of life, environmental insults — are of little interest. Why? Because one-sided science thinkers claim these can’t be measured.
Old Medicine Stages of Illness
First Stage illness: The seven biomarkers of our interstitial-lymph-fluid, our internal fish bowl, degrade and move out of the A Range and into the B, C, D and E ranges of dysfunction. Because all cells and all organs must “live, move and have their being” in our lymph, when lymph biomarkers degrade, the health of all our cells and organs declines when our lymph markers leave their A Range of wellness-healing.
Second Stage illness: After weeks, months or years of imbalanced interstitial-lymph-fluid biomarkers, physical tissue pathology appears.
Third Stage illness: Nature’s Wrecking Crew, microbes, viruses and parasites, are attracted to all cells and tissues tasting of fermentation and/or decay.
Fourth Stage illness: Conventional doctors diagnose which germ(s) are priority in your presenting pathology.
Fifth Stage illness: Conventional doctors prescribe drugs to suppress all physical symptoms identified in Stage Four. Reducing bacterial overgrowth is a significant temporary benefit. However, fermenting tissues still attract new microbes as nature intended. Drugs typically have no nutritional value; they offer nothing for the body to build new cells with. The patient’s body declines further, now additionally burdened with responding to synthetic drugs and excreting them.
Sixth Stage of illness: When drugs are inadequate to stop pathology, surgery and more aggressive radiation treatments are prescribed. Killing sick cells is equated with killing bad bacteria.
Uwe Reinhardt has a reputation for cutting to the quick of the issues in U.S. sick care. From his final book, “Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care:”
The logical endgame of sick-care is everyone will be in a hospital bed, taking care the person in the bed next to them.
Better solution? Learn about numerical biomarkers defining superb biochemical function. Then illness can be conceived as “backtracking” (reversing) degraded biomarker numbers, returning as many numbers as possible back into the A Range of optimal wellness.
Dr. Reams only had to reverse thru Stages one, two and three. Conventional doctors often are confronted with backtracking thru four, five or six stages of ill-health.
As physician Patch Adams, a pioneer of holistic medicine, noted, “Treat a disease and you either win or you lose. Treat the person and you win every time” (Adams & Mylander, 1998, p. 22)
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From “disease-specific” to “patient-specific”
Metabolic Typing is the end of “one diet fits all” thinking. It’s the end of guessing which foods and diets are best for you. Once your metabolic type is identified, you can know what to eat and what to avoid. Why guess about your diet when you can know? (Dr. Reams paraphrase).
In holistic healthcare, the trickle of “each person is a somewhat unique metabolic type” is becoming a stream. The river of “each disease is unique, requiring a unique patentable drug” is drying up.
What is “green allopathy”?
Like Old Medicine, “green allopathy” relies on blood draws on which many lab tests are performed. Then, instead of trial and error prescribing drugs and surgery, Functional Medicine practitioners do trial and error with herbs, vitamins and minerals. In this way, Green Allopathy remains tied to the Old Medicine paradigm. Sadly this characterizes many, perhaps most, holistic practitioners.
Like Old Medicine, Green Allopathy ignores radical (at the root) healthcare: comparing your metabolic biomarkers to the known reference range of optimal physical health. In this way, the almost-blind lead totally “blind” patients. Trial and error prescribing of drugs and surgery has been very profitable for doctors and Big Pharma. However this is still the almost-blind leading the blind approach to wellness.
The culturally appropriate niche for drug-surgery medicine
100 years forward in the future, the political and economic corruption around Big Pharma, drug-surgery-vaccine medicine — will be gone. Will there still be a place for Old Medicine? Yes. It will be in EMT vans, emergency rooms, acute care wards; and, battlefield triage. This is the vastly reduced, culturally appropriate niche for diagnosis-drugs-surgery medicine.
Q: Can optimal biomarker reference ranges support ICU patients?
A: Once patients are stabilized, yes. The sooner internal biochemistry can be kept in the A Range of health and healing, patient recovery time is drastically shortened. Non-invasive testing; and, dietitians trained to design menus supportive of patient metabolic types will be a high-paying job.
