After 28 blog posts, mostly on the biochemical basis of great health, I’m finally ready to tell what is probably the most important thing I’ve learned in half a century of medical practice. Achieving great health in tough times (or easy times, for that matter) takes more than swallowing the right supplements, eating the right amount of the right food for your biochemistry, and getting enough physical activity. It also takes improving the balance in your electrical system, and taking action almost every day to fulfill the purpose for which you came into this world.
This sounds like very bad news to many people. It sounds actually un-American. We have been led to believe that if we just buy the right stuff, including nutritional supplements, we will swiftly become healthy, successful, and live happily ever after. When we buy what some slick ad company says is the right stuff and that doesn’t happen, the suggestion is that we need MORE of that right stuff or somebody else's right stuff. Unfortunately most people run out of time in this life before they get that the system doesn't work. It can’t: stuff is not enough. The right stuff is important, but stuff, even the right stuff, is not enough.
Here's an example. Robert is in his early 70s, retired from a senior management position in an international corporation. He came to me on the advice of a physician friend of his because Robert was not feeling well largely because of fatigue and weakness. When I saw him I thought he was mildly depressed. In addition to eating the standard American diet (appropriately abbreviated SAD) he was hypothyroid, vitamin D deficient, and had no adequate foundation for his nutritional supplement program. (See my posts on Your Multiple Vitamin-mineral Supplement).
We corrected his deficiencies and he began to look and feel 10 to 15 years younger. Then the family business began to have financial difficulties. Robert knew very well what to do but others in the family, particularly his wife, resisted taking those actions. He had the choice to exercise leadership and try to find a way forward that would probably save the business and even eventually strengthen his relationship with his wife and his children. The other option was to withdrawal, sulk, and let the business drift. He chose the latter. Over the next three months I watched him sink back into the state of fatigue, weakness, and depression in which he had first consulted me. It looked as though in those three months he had aged 20 years. I have not seen him again.
Robert was taking the right stuff biochemically but was deficient in another vital component of great health. In subsequent posts we will explore what that component is.
