To cause, or not to cause, a patient's despair

I frequently find it hard to believe the approach of Western medicine.

A new patient came to me six weeks ago, a 27 year old woman. For almost three months, she had been experiencing nausea, an intense pain below her sternum, and trembling. The symptoms had only worsened over this time and now she was also experiencing extreme anxiety and found it almost impossible to eat, since she would often vomit after eating. During this three month period, she was being treated by Western medicine. She had been given a range of diagnoses and also a range of chemical remedies, but her symptoms had only worsened, often in response to the remedies.

Out of desperation, she came to me for acupuncture treatment. She had stopped taking all the remedies she had been give (since they had only worsened her symptoms), except for a proton pump inhibiter, which had been prescribed for her that week. She had only been taking it for two days but she decided to stop using it after her first acupuncture treatment. After that treatment her symptoms were alleviated, and after the fifth treatment she was symptom free and was even eating three full meals a day. She said that her life had been transformed.

However, there was then a two week gap before her next follow up treatment with me. At the start of that period, she attended an appointment with a specialist at the hospital. This appointment had been made for her many weeks ago by her GP and she said she attended it simply because she had waited for it for many weeks.

She said that the consultation lasted for two hours in total. She told the specialist she had been receiving acupuncture treatments and was now symptom free. Yet, he decided that she now needed a cocktail of chemical remedies. He prescribed an anti-depressant, another proton pump inhibiter, a contraceptive pill, and also an anti-nausea patch, all this despite the fact that she now had no symptoms.

She told him she was not depressed or even anxious, and that she always responded badly to chemical remedies and that they had made her worse before but he then warned her, “If you don’t take these, you’ll never get better.”

In a moment of weakness (as she herself described it), she agreed to take the remedies. She started taking them and within a few days, all her symptoms had returned and she felt as distressed and as ill as she had felt before she began treatments with me. She texted me to request an urgent treatment and later told me she was in tears when she was typing the text message because she was so distressed.

What is mind-boggling here is, not the patient’s behaviour, which was perfectly understandable (Western medicine being the establishment), but the behaviour of this Western medicine specialist.

Most Western medicine chemical remedies set out to deliberately stop the body from working in some way (they are deliberately designed to do this). There are absolutely no healing qualities in these particular remedies. And if patients take such remedies for any length of time, the remedy can only damage their long-term health. No other outcome is possible. If you block a range of functions within the body, then the patient’s health can only be damaged.

To anyone working in natural healing this is obvious. Yet most Western medicine practitioners are incapable of recognising such a situation (perhaps due to their training), or, at lest, unwilling to acknowledge it.

Yet Western medicine is the establishment and is the “received wisdom” on all health matters. We live in strange times.

 

24 June 2010