Tag Archives: Cholesterol

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THE CHOLESTEROL MYTH

Life flows from above, down, inside, out, like this cool, clear mountain stream. So does health.

THE CHOLESTEROL MYTH

MY PRIMARY DOCTOR, bless his heart, prescribed a Statin drug to lower my elevated blood cholesterol. I asked him why, at my age, would I want to reduce my liver’s production of cholesterol — which is what Statin drugs do — rather than address the cause of these elevated essential lipids, which is inflammation? Especially in light of the fact that we require more cholesterol as we age.

His answer didn’t surprise me — at least what I heard — which was, basically, there’s no treatment protocol for inflammation as the underlying cause of elevated blood cholesterol. In other words, medical doctors are not free to go outside their scope of practice and design natural alternative protocols other than those the “literature” recommends — or dictates. For elevated cholesterol, the remedy is to drug the liver in order to reduce its production of this essential lipid . . . the brain and nervous system left to fare for themselves and suffer the side effects — and they do, with leg aches and clouded thinking. Your brain and nervous system depend on cholesterol for repair and maintenance.

His answer also supported what I already knew about Modern Medicine, and that is Modern Medicine does not address the cause of disease but only manages it by treating its symptoms . . . and that’s partly because it’s what patients want and have come to accept and expect from doctors . . . and it’s what doctors of medicine are taught in medical school, pharmacology being the primary subject when it comes to treating the symptoms of disease. They would have to study subjects such as nutrition, healthy lifestyles, diet, exercise and stress reduction, just to mention the key factors affecting blood cholesterol levels. These subjects are not taught, to my knowledge anyway, in med school.

Cholesterol — both High Density Lipid-proteins (HDL) and Low Density Lipid-proteins (LDL) — is produced by your liver, partly as a patch material for damaged and scared blood arteries, done primarily by high levels of sugar-bearing insulin and adrenalin (cortisol), just to mention one of its purposes. Other purposes served by cholesterol in the body, as mentioned above, relate to the brain and nervous system, which are made of and maintained by this lipid, and for the billions of tissue cells to build and maintain their protective cell walls. So, cholesterol is an essential lipid (fat) in your body. Needless to say, I opted out and declined to take his prescribed drug.

Again, I ask: “Why would I want to inhibit my liver’s production of this essential lipid? Why indeed?!

Now, for the harmful side effects of Statin drugs: have you ever looked them up on the internet? Likely not. It’s just so much simpler and easier to take a pill every day. Lifestyle changes can, after all, be uncomfortable and require critical thinking, an arduous task for some.

Modern Medicine uses harmful chemicals (prescription drugs) to subdue the symptoms of malfunction in the body, commonly of its immune system.

The Hippocratic Oath, which all MD’s take upon graduation from medical college, states as one of a doctor’s ethical commitments, “First do no harm.” This is supposed to be the first duty of a doctor of medicine. The oath doesn’t say “First do not intend harm.” No doctor intends harm. It clearly states “do no harm.” When my primary doctor prescribed a Statin drug to treat the symptom of chronic inflammation in my body — which is what elevated blood lipids is — his intention was to do good. But his good deed included doing harm. His good intentions, as well as his prescribed treatment, had harmful side effects . . . which, by the way, he failed to list . . . until I asked about them.

I once handed my cardiologist a book written by an MD on the “myth” of cholesterol as a cause of heart disease and Statin drugs as a remedy for elevated blood lipids. He avoided the topic altogether and referred me to one of his PA’s — whom I came to love and respect for her open-mindedness and actual interest in my more wholistic and natural approach. She’s been willing to work with me. After all, the health of the patient is of utmost concern and not our discipline and methodology. That’s up to our patients’ to decide which approach they wish to make in dealing with their health issues.

Doctors have to follow medical protocols, and “alternative” naturally supportive methods and protocols, including nutritional therapy, are simply not taught in med school. So, I don’t fault my primary doctor. His intentions are noble. It’s his treatment that is grossly limited when it comes to addressing the cause of his patients’ illnesses.

In Chiropractic college we used to actually feel sorry for them, as all they had between them and their patients was a prescription pad, whereas we had all of Mother Nature’s cornucopia of natural supportive therapies and cures . . . for which blessing I am most thankful, as have been my patients all those fifty years of offering them real health care, as opposed to disease management . . . which, I will add, plays an essential role in our modern day lifestyles and toxic environment.

I will also allow here that reducing the symptoms of pain and other symptoms may offer a reprieve to the body where it can rest and get a better grip on a diseased process and its malfunctioning system(s). Not all medicines are “bad” for you. Vaccines and antibiotics, as well as several symptom-reducing drugs, are essential in dealing with our toxic environment, nutrient-poor diets, and busy lives. But I don’t think taking drugs long term to subdue symptoms without addressing the causes as well is an exercise in wisdom. Yes, we live in a toxic world — in more ways than physical and chemical. All the more reason I feel we should abandon our current approach to disease with still more poisonous concoctions, especially in light of the abundance of more natural approaches that have become available to us over the past several decades.

Why can’t modern medicine embrace wholistic healthcare and incorporate it into its methodology of symptom and disease management? Well, the answer, which I need not mention here, is painfully obvious and unfortunate for our species. Natural substances cannot be patented and included in pharmacopoeia, nor covered by health insurance. Money is the god of this modern civilization.

As a closure and an attempt at a little humor, my doctor, and good friend whom we love dearly, chuckled while he joked that he had to find a reason to prescribe some “poison” for me to take! He only said that to humor me because of my more natural and drugless approach to healthcare. We’re in the same healthcare arena doing what we were each given to do to alleviate suffering in those who come to us in hopes of adding years to their lives. God bless and guide us both, and all doctors and healthcare providers.

I trust you have gleaned some helpful information from this post. Until I return to address another health issue, take care of your best friend, you body, along with your mind and heart. Love life and live love.

Anthony Palombo, DC

Email: tpal70@gmail.com

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Your Lab Numbers Do Not Measure you Health

My Chorale PicI sat next to a long-time friend at a social event recently and, being a doctor, I asked him how his health was. He immediately proceeded to tell me about his cholesterol and blood pressure, both of which he said were “normal.” Now, that’s a pretty well accepted way most people measure their health, by their lab numbers, which don’t really say much about a person’s health. One can have “normal” numbers and still have a stroke or heart attack, especially if one is medicating to mask their symptoms to keep their lab values looking well within “normal” ranges and them feeling better.  But, what’s really “normal?” One man’s normal is another man’s illness and worry.

I put “normal” in quotation marks to emphasize that there really isn’t a one-fits-all norm — and so-called “normal ranges” are based on the medical model of treating the symptoms of disease, not fostering health. Medical students study cadavers that died from diseases and medical studies are based on treating the sick, not the well.  Generally, doctors don’t treat the well.  They treat the sick.  So their standards are based on the sick and not the well.  Also, what is “normal” for one person may not be appropriate for the next fellow.  I’ll give you an example. The “normal” range for triglycerides in the average person is <150.  The healthy range for triglycerides is much lower than that at <80, so I’m told by my brilliant colleague, teacher and clinical nutritionist at Whole Health Associates in Houston.  This points to a choice we have to be merely outside the range of health failure and disease or to be well above that range experiencing great health and vitality. 

THOSE WORRISOME CHOLESTEROL NUMBERS

Another example is the worrisome cholesterol numbers. In the first place, cholesterol has nothing at all to do with cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is caused by inflammation. Cholesterol is simply the body’s way of dealing with inflammation and the damage it does to the blood arteries and vessels. It’s a patch material used to keep the eroding  blood vessels from springing a leak. It’s an adaptation and not a marker for coronary heart disease (CHD).

It’s only in America where high cholesterol is said to be a marker for CHD, and that’s only been so since Big Pharma developed and started flooding the market with statin drugs (Lipitor and its cousins) to suppress the liver’s production of cholesterol, a fat that every cell in your body needs to build its outer membrane that protects it from free radicals and oxidation.  A fat that your body makes hormones, nerves and brain tissue out of.  An essential fat in your skin needed to turn sunshine into Vitamin D.

We elderly need more of this essential fat than you youngsters for our brains cells to regenerate as they begin to die off as we age.  So, higher numbers are normal and good for an aging person.

It’s the ratio between the HDL and LDL that’s important and not the total cholesterol.  Your HDL needs to be at least 25% of the total cholesterol.  For example, if your total cholesterol level is 200, your HDL level needs to be around 50.  The total cholesterol number will vary with the level of demand for cholesterol in the body. LDL’s carry the cholesterol from the liver out to where its needed in the body. HDL’s go around collecting what’s not used and then taking it back to the liver to be eliminated as bile from the body. Cholesterol is an essential fat in your body. There’s no such thing as “bad cholesterol.” That’s medical programming designed to engender fear in people so they will buy Lipitor and other Statin drugs. It’s pure and simple propaganda folks. Mute those commercials.  Don’t let that programming into your subconscious mind.  

The logical thing to do is not treat the cholesterol but rather determine why there’s an increased demand for it in the first place and treat the cause of the demand.  When you remove the necessity for more cholesterol, the numbers will come down.  In most cases, the cause is stress and high insulin in the blood stream from consuming to many starches and sweets. Insulin erodes the inner lining of the blood vessels if it accumulates too much. Food allergies and sensitivities are another trigger for inflammation.  Uric acid in the blood, as in gout, is another common trigger.

ALLOPATHY, HOMEOPATHY AND FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE  

Your lab numbers do not measure your health. They measure a momentary snapshot of the current conditions of your body fluids. That’s all. Your blood and your urine. That’s the terrain in which allopathic medicine works.  Your lab numbers say nothing about the health of your body’s organs and tissue cells.  That’s the domain of “functional medicine,” which is what I practice.

Allopathy is defined in my New World Dictionary as the “treatment of disease by remedies that produce effects different from or opposite to those produced by the disease: loosely applied to the general practice of medicine today, but in strict usage opposed to HOMEOPATHY.”  Those “different” effects are what mask the symptoms of disease.

Homeopathy puts a small dose of the same disease in the form of a coded water solution into the body in order to trigger an immune response in the body so that the body learns how to deal with the actual disease on a safe “do-no-harm” level. This works beautifully, and is completely harmless. 

Functional medicine explores organs and systems malfunction and then supports the body’s own innate healing intelligence with nutrition and herbs in order to catalyze the healing process into action.  Chiropractic also takes the functional approach, offering spinal care to restore nerve flow to organs and tissues and thereby restore their normal function.

HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE IS NORMAL

Here’s another example of numbers dictating one’s sense of health and well being.  High blood pressure is normal, given the circumstances in the body that require it. Blood pressure, like cholesterol, will increase in response to a need in the body for more pressure behind the blood flow.  It could be thick blood caused by toxins in the bloodstream.  It could be constricted blood vessels due to cortisol pouring into the bloodstream to handle stress.  It could also be kidney failure causing fluid to build up in the tissues and around the heart and other organs.  Whatever the cause, it doesn’t make a bit of sense to lower the blood pressure with drugs — drugs that deplete CoQ10, the very energy source for the heart and kidneys — without finding out what’s causing the necessity for higher pressure in the circulatory system and correcting that. That’s what we do in functional medicine: find the cause and correct the interference to the normal function of organs, hormonal glands and body systems.  Now, the person would be wise to take the HBP medicine to avoid having a stroke — and take 60 mg. of Coenzyme Q10 daily to replace what is leached out by the medicine.  This goes for anyone taking Statin drugs as well.

YOUR BODY KNOWS BEST– TRUST IT 

Well, I think that’s enough for one post. I hope you learned something from this one.  I will leave you with these encouraging words: Trust your body. It doesn’t make mistakes. It knows exactly what it is doing. Help it do its job better. See an alternative healthcare practitioner.  Stop measuring your potential for disease and focus on building up your health . . . and don’t sweat the numbers.

Here’s to your health and healing,

Anthony Palombo, D.C.

dranthonypalombo@live.com

Visit my Healing Tones blog for inspiring reading on a variety of timely topics.