Editors note: This is the first of what we hope will be a regular, well read, and helpful series of articles on health and healing. It will cover various disciplines and viewpoints on how we take care of ourselves. We invite submissions from Park Hill residents specializing in the healing arts for this on-going column. Our inaugural column comes to us from Jacob Schor, N.D., a naturopathic doctor, current president of the Colorado Association of Naturopathic Physicians, and Park Hill neighbor . First, Dr Schor offers a capsule history of Naturopathic Medicine, followed by a discussion on preventing heart attacks.
Naturopathic Medicine: An Introduction
Two centuries ago a health movement called Nature Cure advocating the use of natural therapies became popular in Europe. A century ago, Benedict Lust brought Nature Cure to America. Along with hydrotherapy, Lust's school taught nutrition, herbal medicine, homeopathy, and spinal manipulation. Since the turn of the century, naturopathy has evolved into naturopathic medicine, a scientific medical system using natural therapies to prevent and treat illness. Practitioners of this system are naturopathic doctors.
Following pre-med studies in college, students of naturopathic medicine complete two years of basic medical science comparable to the training of a regular medical student. In addition they train in herbal medicine, homeopathy, massage, and nutrition.
The main difference for the patient of a naturopathic doctor is that the medicine chosen is usually a natural therapy; items found in a health food store rather than a pharmacy. For the naturopathic doctor, the difference is a philosophical one: naturopathy puts an emphasis on the Hippocratic principles of, "First, Do No Harm" and "The Healing Power of Nature." Choosing nontoxic herbs over prescription drugs to get the same results is an example of the former principle. Using vitamins and diet to build the immune system to prevent infection is an example of the second.
Colorado is not one of the 11 states that licenses the practice of naturopathic medicine. This lack of legal recognition has made Colorado an unattractive place for naturopathic doctors to open practices. As a result few people in Colorado have ever heard of this field of medicine and even fewer have seen a naturopathic physician.
Therapies used by naturopathic doctors combine the latest scientific research with traditional therapies hundreds of years old. A naturopathic physician may be as likely to quote yesterday's Journal of the American Medical Association as discuss the role of the spleen from an oriental medical perspective.
Heart Attacks: A Few Simple Ideas
I am something of a traditionalist and often am interested in the history of medical treatments. Heart attacks were rare before 1900; most physicians rarely saw one in practice. Yet for the last fifty years heart attacks have been the leading cause of death in the United States . How do we explain the sudden emergence of a new disease? The medical establishment points to the links between high fat diets, high blood cholesterol, smoking, diabetes, and hypertension with heart attacks. Yet these links are not necessarily predictive: half the people who have heart attacks have none of these risk factors.
What is often overlooked when talking about heart attack causes is the changes in our diet that took place at the turn of the century. Packaged, commercially manufactured food became the norm. White flour, white sugar and refined vegetable oil and margarine, which were once rare treats, became dietary mainstays. With this change came heart attacks.
What many people don't know is that sugar consumption is a very strong risk factor. Research suggests that individuals who eat more than four ounces of sugar a day have five times the chance of dying from a heart attack than those who eat only two ounces. The U.S. per capita consumption of sugar is more than six ounces per day. Six ounces of sugar represents a third of a person's daily caloric intake, and sugar contains no vitamins or nutrients, only empty calories. At the same time metabolizing sugar depletes the body of important B vitamins.
Wheat processing has changed over the century. As white flour replaced whole wheat in the 1800's, vitamin B deficiency diseases appeared. Flour mills were forced to fortify white flour with some of the B-vitamins lost in milling. But two vitamins that are lost and not added back to flour are Vitamin B-6 and Folic Acid. We now know that these two vitamins prevent the production of homocysteine, an amino acid which may be linked to heart attacks. With this in mind, taking a daily B vitamin complex may prove to be a simple, inexpensive method of reducing heart attack risk.
Taking Vitamin E is another easy way to lower heart attack risk by compensating for deficiencies in our modern diet . The best dietary sources for Vitamin E are unrefined seed oils and wheat germ. Both of these substances decreased with the appearance of modern packaged foods. Recent research suggests Vitamin E is crucial to preventing heart attacks. In one study, taking 400 iu/day decreased occurrence of nonfatal attacks by 77%.
And then there is fish, probably the one food in our diets still close to its wild and natural state. Eating a single serving of fish a week creates a significant decrease in heart disease. How much easier can you get?
Does this make sense? A century ago, our diets changed drastically. Longer shelf life, higher sugar content and lower vitamin content characterize the "new modern diet". A new disease, heart attacks, appeared. A hundred years later we understand why. Now we try to put back in the nutrients we took out so we can prevent disease.
On one hand it's prudent to suggest everyone take vitamins to avoid heart attacks. On the other hand maybe we should change our diets - back to an old fashioned diet of unprocessed foods retaining their original nutrients. Going back to a diet of complex carbohydrates, without refined sugars, flours or oils, and fresh wild game might be the ideal. But, until Spinelli's starts to sell a, "ready to eat, take out, cave man diet," I'm going to hedge my bets and take Vitamin E 400 iu/day, and a vitamin B complex that contains B-6 and Folic Acid every day, and enjoy eating salmon as often as I can.