Excellent article! We need to have a more nutrition-based method of practicing medicine. I truly believe that our physicians ought to take a full nutrition course (NOT funded by the USDA or other agency.)
They should be required to see the interaction of our foods and medicines in a synergistic way, just like the herbal healers of yore. If a healer back then prescribed a leaf to cure an ail, and nothing happened, or it got worse, they would be run out of town.

Good stuff. Thanks, J!

Any way you could add a Google Plus button to the sharing options?

Thanks JS.

Another problem with pop-a-pill mentality is that it trains you to focus on details, sometimes completely missing the forest for the trees. In the conventional medicine the classic example is a drug for the side effect of another drug. Ridiculous but practiced on a daily basis.
However many people go into Paleo with the same mentality chasing numbers and looking for finite answers. Drilled and schooled by years of pharma, media and pop culture we still demand the instant gratification. You know what? It takes a looong time to correct metabolic issues, lose weight, manage (?cure) autoimmunity and gastrointestinal disorders. 
Real food: just eat it and get on with your life. 

One of my co-workers is a man in his early 60s; his wife has a plethora of health issues - high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, bad knees, etc. The woman takes so many pills she rattles when she walks.

Recently, she has begun to suffer from swollen lips and gums - the doctor has tried several medications, non of which have alleviated the inflammation. Finally, he put her on an elimination diet - and told her to stop eating fruit. Not grains or vegetable oils or soy or other inflammatory foods, but fruit.

It's not working, so next he's going to have her give up dairy - but that's okay, she informed me Sunday, because while she'll miss real butter they've got those margarines made with vegetable oil. *rolls eyes*

Her husband, in the meantime, has told me she is miserable on this new elimination diet because she is always hungry (it might be important to note that she eats fruit all day long or else her blood sugar will go too low). When I suggested she eat more fat, he snapped at me, "She CAN'T - she doesn't like meat that much. The one hot dog she ate last night (wrapped in a white bread bun, by the way) was all the meat she ate all day because that was all the meat she wanted."

At which point I shrugged - you can't argue with logic like that.

This is so sadly true. I believe the "magic pill" syndrome is based on a pathetic modern trend: the lack of ability or desire to take responsibility for one's health, and the tranquilizing notion that serious men in white coats, infallible geniuses devoid of conflicts of interest, will take care of one instead.

A single example from my own life will suffice.

One person close to me, obese for many years, was found to have thyroid cysts. This person is well aware of the fact that I cured my own weight problems, along with innumerable health complaints, by embracing paleo and rejecting the mainstream medical establishment and all its works. Yet when doctors recommended surgical removal of the thyroid, this person thought that was a swell idea.

I broached the subject as gently as I could. "The thyroid is a pretty important organ. Rather than undergoing an irreversible surgery, why not take three months to eat right and exercise, like you know you should? You can always get the surgery after that if you don't like the results."

"Well, maybe if I was younger and more energetic," came the (paraphrased) reply. "But now I just want the problem taken care of. They'll give me prescriptions to replace the thyroid hormones. So-and-so had the same surgery, you know."

So there was nothing else I could do but wish the person well, and they went ahead and had the surgery. By a typical oversight, thyroid replacement drugs were not prescribed until weeks afterward, and complications ensued. To this day the dosage is irregularly monitored. It grieves me to say that this person who used to have a reasonable amount of energy is now largely confined to a chair, and the situation continues to worsen.

Will you take responsibility for your own health? Or will you let natural selection take care of that for you? We may be able to delay the choice, but we cannot avoid it in the end.

Re: Intro to this article.

Appreciate the time you put into each article AND the time spent responding to us in the comments section.

It seems as blogs/websites get more popular, the work-load increases, and typically that blogger will post/comment less and less (understandably so because blogging isn't that person's #1 priority). BUT, yours is one of the few that when a post comes up its always a good read.

So, here's hoping you don't get overwhelmed by the increasing traffic.

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