Physicians are basically disease-oriented and drug-oriented. After all, this is how we are trained. In medical school, we spend all of our time learning how to diagnose and treat disease. Even what we call preventive medicine is really just about early detection of disease. When I did a wellness physical on any of my patients, I was really looking for those silent diseases like elevated blood pressure, early diabetes, or elevated cholesterol. Pap smears, mammograms, and PSA's were done to detect early cancer. If I didn't find any disease, I would simply tell my patients that they were fine and that I did not need to see them for a couple of years.
As I began to research the medical literature about nutritional medicine, I realized that I was really doing nothing to actually prevent disease. I was merely just diagnosing and treating disease. Certainly, I was able to help most of my patients improve the quality of their life; however, with many of the degenerative diseases, I was merely treating symptoms and not changing the course of the disease. Could there be something that I was not aware of or did not learn in medical school that could be beneficial to my patients? After seeing some amazing health improvements in my patients who began taking high-quality nutritional supplements, I began to research the medical literature with a newly found zeal.
