Well, I just finished a day and a half of attending a mainstream medical conference full of various lectures on issues that family doctors and internists face in their practices, and I have to say that it looks like mainstream medicine is really starting to catch on to wholistic, integrative, and lifestyle medicine!
The keynote speaker yesterday was none other than the famous Dean Ornish, one of the world’s leading authorities on how to get healthier by changing your lifestyle. His topic was “The Power of Lifestyle Changes, Social Networks, & Trust”.
This morning’s keynote speaker was Neal Barnard, president of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, who is a strong proponent of going vegan, and he spoke on “Power Foods for the Brain”. And believe it or not, tomorrow’s keynote address is entitled “Laughter Is the Best Medicine”. Wow, what a paradigm shift!
Like I said in one of my earlier blogs, “Shift happens.”, which I borrowed from someone else a lot more clever than I. And it definitely seems to be happening right before my eyes!
In addition to those keynote addresses, several of the other lectures were touting the benefits such “crazy” things as acupuncture, chiropractic, vitamin D supplements, Butterbur Root, probiotics, and mindfulness. How cool is that?!
Think of it. A mainstream medical conference that was formerly run by conservative giants Harvard University and Northwestern and which was funded by pharmaceutical giants is now talking significantly less about the latest drugs to mask your symptoms and fight disease. There was even one whole lecture on irritable bowel syndrome that didn’t even mention a drug during the whole hour!
This is good news, everybody. The tide is starting to turn. More doctors are grabbing onto the fact that the solution to our country’s poor health does not lie in using better drugs and applying higher tech surgeries. It lies instead in Americans changing their lifestyles and looking at healthcare in a whole new way which focuses not on drugs and technology, but on getting back to the basics of food, nutrition, exercise, sleep, attitudes, relationships, faith, and stress management.
Here at AIH, that is what we are trying to focus on. Let’s try and see if we can get off the expensive and dangerous drugs, and let’s try and maximize our body’s own God-given ability to heal itself. And better yet, if we are not on any drugs now, let’s adopt healthy lifestyles now, BEFORE we get develop any kind of chronic disease.
Dr. William Epperly, Fellow American Academy of Family Practice
Fellow American Academy of Otolaryngic Allergy
Member of Christian Medical and Dental Society
