Why “Magic Bullet” Approach is Faulty in Alternative Medicine.
There's another error that goes on, too, and it's within the alternative health community. It's the idea of looking for the magic bullet. It comes out of the medical tradition, and people are hungry for it. They keep buying into it.
Here's a great example that I talk about it in the book: Let's say you have somebody who is born with a slight genetic predisposition to heart disease. He goes through life and eats badly -- lots of hydrogenated oil, exposed to hundreds of free radicals, doesn't use any antioxidants -- and at a certain point he basically compromises his system, and symptoms start to appear. He may start having chest pains or shortness of breath, and he goes to the doctor, who says, "Oh my god -- there is damage, blockage, hardening of the arteries. You need a bypass." The patient doesn't buy this, and he explores and discovers an antioxidant called pycnogenol.
He takes it, because one of the factors that contributed to his heart disease was free radical problems, and the antioxidants help with that and move him back up, not to full health, but to a point where he doesn't experience symptoms anymore. At this point he says, "I'm cured. This is a miracle. I'm going to join this company, and I'm going to get everyone I know on pycnogenol because it cures heart disease."
So he becomes an evangelist, telling people this is the magic bullet for heart disease. Some people experience similar results, but eventually he meets Sue. Sue was also born with a genetic predisposition to heart disease, but she eats really well -- the Mediterranean diet -- and takes antioxidants. The problem is that she was CEO for one of the dot-com agencies that went bust and lost millions of dollars, under incredibly high stress. She starts to show symptoms, and she starts to take the pycnogenol. She has the same symptoms, same problem, with different causes. Free radicals were not the issues for her; stress was the big one. She doesn't get any results. She says it's bogus; it's a placebo. She goes to her doctor, has a bypass and feels better. The same condition, the same supplement, two entirely different results. That' s the problem when you start looking at disease in isolation. This is why treating the body as a whole and putting it back in balance is the key.
--Excerpt from Jon Barron’s interview by Mike Adams --
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