Foreword to Clinical Chemistry & Nutrition Guidebook:
A Physician’s Desk Reference – Volume 1
Edited by: Paul Yanick, Jr., Ph.D. & Russell Jaffe, M.D., Ph.D.
Copyright 1988 by T&H Publishing
There is little room for debate about it anymore, if ever there was – good health is the ultimate result of a well-balanced and regulated biochemical internal environment – a total organism in ever-changing equilibrium – manifested by thousands of individual enzymes, substrates, hormones, catalysts and end products, individually and collectively maintained within remarkably narrow optimum parameters – whether determined quantitatively or physiologically. The regulatory function is exquisitely controlled. "Miraculous" is not too strong an adjective!
Let me quote Dr. Lewis Thomas, Ex-Chancellor of Sloan Kettering, from his essay "On Autonomy": "If I were informed tomorrow that I was in direct communication with my liver and could now take over, I would become deeply depressed. I'd sooner be told 40,000 feet over Denver that the 747 jet in which I had a coach seat was now mine to operate as I pleased. At least, I would have the hope of bailing out if I could find a parachute and discover quickly how to open the door. Nothing would save me and my liver if I were in charge, for I am, to face the facts squarely, considerably less intelligent than my liver. I am, moreover, constitutionally unable to make hepatic decisions and I prefer not to be obliged to, ever. I would not be able to think of the first thing to do." Dr. Thomas goes on to point out the potential recklessness of our tendency to interfere with the natural flow of the inner autonomy, a result of the illusion that most of us physicians share – our belief that we can improve on the system. Generally speaking, we are goaded into acting out this fantasy by the suffering of our patients – certainly an unimpeachable motivation – and with the ever increasing array of technological and pharmaceutical agents available our ability to provide symptomatic relief has almost kept pace with the demands for more and greater quasi-miracles from our technology. The folly of this is epitomized in a quote from Emerson Pugh: “If the Human Brain were simple enough that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't understand it!" Following that observation to its logical conclusion we would have to agree that all psychopharmacologists share a common delusion (a manifestation of Group Psychosis) that they can "fix" a patient's psychological problem with a foreign chemical that G-d himself couldn't come up with!
We all must recognize, however, that we are dealing with two basic situations:
1. Those in which the body can be expected to correct the problem if we can successfully support it with our various interventions until repair is complete.
2. Those in which some aspect of homeostasis is so completely deranged that healing appears permanently beyond reach – to our occasionally erroneous prognosis.
What we doctors tend to lose sight of, so enamored are we of our role, is that our treatments are not what heals the body. Rather, it is the unencumbered fulfillment of a set of instructions, encoded in our genes at the moment of conception that accomplishes this miracle. It is also patently obvious that for any repair job one needs more than a set of instructions. A complete inventory of spare parts is essential. Biochemists have been decoding the instruction books for the past 100 years or so and in so doing they have isolated, identified, analyzed, categorized and synthesized a remarkably small number of essential factors which comprise the infrastructure of the human organism. Just as the basic symbols of the alphabet can be combined to make words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, chapters and volumes the body's basic building blocks are progressively arrayed as membranes, intracellular organelles, cells, tissues, organs, systems and individuals. These essential substances are all derived externally, initially supplied by the parental contributions to the zygote, subsequently from the maternal reserves, and ultimately from the outside world as nutrients. Without a full complement of all of the “known – plus the still unknown, but nevertheless essential – synergistic, micronutrient co-factors that make food different than vitamin pills, we cannot expect our bodies to carry out the built-in instructions for repair, which lead to complete healing and cure. It is as basic as that!
Functional/Integrative/Wholistic/Holistic/Complementary/Alternative/OrthoMolecular/Medicine looks for the factors that interfere with the Miracle of Healing that can be addressed and corrected so that the process may proceed unfettered. Clinical Nutrition is the science of applied biochemistry. We look for deficiencies or toxicities and attempt to correct them. Hormone imbalances and malfunctioning neurotransmitters can be remediated. We must modulate [rather than stimulate or suppress] the Immune system – which operates on the “Goldilocks Principle” that everything should be “just right” – greatly oversimplified in the following diagram of what happens when it is overactive or underactive while functioning as our interface with both the internal and external microscopic worlds. Structural defects (dental and musculoskeletal) can sometimes be corrected with external measures. And then – a miracle happens....
Warren M. Levin, MD
FAAFP(ret), FACN, FAAEM
THE GOLDILOCKS VIEW OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
| EXTERNAL | INTERNAL | |
| OVERACTIVE | Allergy | Auto-Immune |
| UNDERACTIVE | Infection | Cancer |