It’s Time For Your Daily Dose Of Chocolate

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People in an Australian study would rather have a pill than agree to eat chocolate daily for a chronic heart condition.

Some people have an idea why, but I will tell you the truth and the light.

After 30 years of practicing medicine in three different specialties, in three different countries, and in every kind of clinical situation anyone can imagine, I have come to a realization.

No matter how pleasant or non-invasive the alternative methods  proposed, people want to just take a pill and get better.

We have spent so many years getting people to buy into the “sit back and I will give you a pill and everything will get better” form of medicine that we have actually socialized, psyched up, whatever you want to call it — we have made patients make decisions for pills. Even if they work less well than other modalities, which quite often they do.

There was this guy, in his fifties, businessman type, fairly high power, who told me he had attention deficit disorder. He really didn’t, he was rather manic and on the nervous side for a bunch  of reasons. 

I thought I could bring him down and help him find some peace immediately, sitting there with me, with one of my variants of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) which I have tweaked with a few little tricks of my own, including a little neurolinguistic  programming (NLP).

He was having some troubles with a stern wife who did not like  his wild ways.  We forgave her for being more than a bit moralistic,  with repeating assertions to that effect while tapping his acupuncture  meridians.  We saw an imaginary movie of his big “no-no” which was getting drunk with a relative, and getting into some serious  trouble.  We saw him seeing the movie, and he got calmer.

We did it all, and at the end he took a deep breath, and said,” I see everything clear.  I feel it clearly now.  This is the best I have felt in a long time.  It’s clear; I can see everything clear without attention problems.”

I told him how happy I was to hear things had worked so well.  I told him we could take the time to teach him techniques, so that he could do this stuff himself any time he wanted.

“I am not going to do that again.  I don’t want that.  Just give me pills.”

I tried to point out the obvious; that we had just, at least temporarily and safely without side effects, removed his symptoms.”

“No, we are not going to do it.  I pay you for your knowledge of pills.  I want only pills.”

Him, I never got a word of explanation, except we were only going to do medication and that was that.  He specifically wanted natural medication, to get him off prescriptions. He never did any more than a partial followup.

He had lots of reasons to stay as he was, I guess, although he never much felt like discussing them.  But he did spend a while on my “pills.”  Last I heard, he even got his wife to try a few of them.

I have helped patients with all kinds of things that can only loosely be called therapy.  Some of my professional colleagues would probably slap me in the stocks if they new that I had people dancing in the waiting room or renting Mr. Bean videos to watch 3 times per day.  They would probably put out a hit on me if they found out how I got a devout Baptist woman with claustrophobia into a hyperbaric oxygen chamber by leading a revival parade down a hospital corridor singing spirituals and praising the Lord.

I find EFT and NLP less fatiguing, but I do have a lot of effective natural supplements that I prefer to most pharmaceutical prescriptions.

You obviously have to be open-minded to be my patient.

I am amazed how often I end up telling people that if humans really did everything “rationally” and were like computers, psychiatry would not exist and I would have to make a living in another manner.  Mr. Spock would also be happier.

The psychological basis of human interaction exists in other places besides the shrink’s office.

When I consult in different clinics, I run into a wide range of humanity. When I deal with, for example, poor immigrants, they may have trouble  with English, but they know enough to say “just give me the right pill.”

Sometimes I get called in to replace psychiatrists who have been  demented or on drugs or — in one case — committed suicide.  I’m the go-to-gal for mopping up messes.  When I walk into that situation, it is not unusual to find the patients are misdiagnosed and on the wrong pills.

In many cases, they think the pills are making them better, and there’s no way they want to change to anything else.

I am not the only person with an interest in health fighting an uphill battle here.  There is real science all over the place about natural substances. It’s mostly outside the USA, but thanks to the World Wide Web, it is right there for us to find.

From Flax meal to coconut oil I have recommended and sold them in a private office. Patients will buy them politely, I think because I am a real doctor, but once someone asked me if you can get coconut oil in pills.  Flax oil, you can, but you would miss a bunch of benefits.

Prevention and psychiatry may be the places where it is easier, from the scientific data, to slip in substances of this sort.  I mean, if ulcers are caused by Heliobacter pylori, a bacterium, and we can make people better with antibiotic that kills it, that is good medicine, and easy to explain, and a pill is the way to get an antibiotic into the gut.

Once we get to things that are harder to explain, I can see how a mainstream patient who grew up on mainstream medicine, who doubted, rightly or wrongly, where medicine was going (who wouldn’t?) would actually be harder to give a daily wedge of chocolate than a pill.

I do applaud the Australian doctors for trying.

Patients, wake up.  We are going to need a revolution and I can’t do it alone. Pills do not cure patients.  Doctors who know there is more to health than pills just might be able to.

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