Unsplash - CC0 License If you do a search for “chronic disease” in Google, it’ll spit back dozens of articles about how you can “manage” your
If you do a search for “chronic disease” in Google, it’ll spit back dozens of articles about how you can “manage” your condition. In other words, there’s no real cure. Your only options are to try to cope the best you can and see how it goes. Those aren’t the kind of messages that people want.
But there’s now a new breed of doctors who are looking at chronic diseases from a different perspective. Instead of viewing them as genetic aberrations or the natural consequence of aging, they’re asking whether you can prevent or reverse them.
This turnaround in thinking comes from the fact that most conventional medicine can’t do anything to address the underlying cause of disease. For instance, insulin doesn’t reverse type II diabetes. Statins don’t repair cardiovascular disease.
Now doctors are wondering whether these diseases are less inevitable and more a consequence of our environment. And, if so, what can they do about it?
Hanid Audish of Encompass Clinical Research, for instance, is a physician keenly interested in this area. Like so many other doctors, he is committed to providing patients with chronic disease with better treatment options.
The goal is to stop whatever is doing the damage in the first place so that the body itself has a chance to heal. So, for example, to deal with type II diabetes, patients need more than insulin. It helps, for example, if they also eat a whole food diet high in fiber and avoid anything, like meat and sugar, that spikes insulin response and causes inflammation.
The same goes for heart disease. Instead of whacking patients on a cocktail of drugs and giving them stents, many doctors are discovering that they can improve symptoms by feeding patients kale, chickpeas and papaya (among other foods).
This change in perspective is not currently backed up by the big pharmaceutical companies. But there are now decades of science on the issue, showing that removing the cause of the disease can help to reverse it, even if it is quite advanced.
Beating chronic disease, therefore, simply requires a change in thinking. We like the idea that we can take a pill to cure a disease. But, when it comes to chronic ailments, that’s often wishful thinking. The body doesn’t work like that. Instead, it responds to everything in its environment.
That’s not to say that all chronic disease is curable with simple lifestyle change. But now most researchers think that upwards of 50 percent of issues are lifestyle-related (and probably more).
Living with chronic illness takes its toll on the people who have them. The number of disability-adjusted life years lost is tremendous among those with heart disease, cancer and other lifestyle-related diseases. The trick is to change the environment and stop the damage from occurring. Then the body has a chance to heal itself.
A change in thinking would also allow patients to take more control over their lives. At the moment, they don’t feel like they have real agency. But armed with the right knowledge, many could fight their conditions.
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