Like Layna, I had the pleasure this last weekend of attending the Orthomolecular Health Medicine conference in San Francisco. The OHM is an organization of health practitioners who believe in Linus Pauling’s idea that health is preserved by maintaining biochemical balance and that illness is a consequence of imbalance, so that when balance is restored health returns. “Biochemical” here means vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, bio-identical hormones, and other molecules that are a part of your body’s normal processes.
OHM members are, by and large, practitioners who want to keep patients out of the maw of conventional medicine, even though many of them are board certified MDs. The reason is that the distinction between health and illness has become blurred at best, if not obliterated entirely. As Layna and I discussed on a show some months ago, we are in an age of risk factor medicine. “Treatment” is the key word. Because a vast amount of science has been devoted to associating certain conditions with illness, conditions which in themselves do not cause harm but which are said to increase the risk of harm, people are treated for risk factors far more than for actual illness. This has led to what many observers have described as a plague of overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Institutionally it has placed doctors, trained to treat diseases, and the health care system they stand astride at the center of “treating” health. It has turned us all into patients.
At the OHM conference I spoke with a physician about a large HMO that we both worked for long ago and far away. We agreed that great cultural and institutional pressures, rooted in the rich soil of money, cause poor service to patients. And that the real answer is not better doctor training or monitoring systems, but patients who are smart about how to use the health care services and health resources available to them.
I have observed a spectrum of attitudes among we patients. There are those who want to do it all themselves and generally do everything they can to avoid health practitioners. At the other end are those who expect, even demand that health practitioners tell them what to do. Another dimension is minimalism versus maximalism in treatment. And yet another is between those who would never think of straying outside conventional medicine and those who would never think of straying in.
So allow me to suggest one guiding principle for getting smart: keep in mind the difference between individual illness and specific disease. Individual illness is what you, in your biological uniqueness, experience when your biochemistry is out of balance. Specific disease is what conventional medicine does to you when a doctor makes a diagnosis so he or she can treat you. This dichotomy does not hold for health. Individual health is what you experience as health when your unique biochemistry is in balance. Conventional medicine can only offer the vacuous idea of health as the absence of disease.
One of the principle things I experienced at the OHM conference was an upwelling of knowledge about our biochemical and biological uniqueness. And with this increased understanding grows the reservoir of knowledge, the resources for you to be a smart patient—and smart about not becoming one.
Related resources are available on the Orthomolecular Medicine page.
