Don’t Wait Until the Horse is Already Out of the Barn!

By Radhia Gleis PhD, C.C.N.

When you go to your doctor for your annual check-up, he or she may run a series of blood tests to check your disease status. Notice, I said “disease” status and not “health” status. That is an important distinction. When the doctor receives the report back from the lab he/she will compare your results with a “clinical range”. Clinical range is the range set by the lab, (each lab may vary slightly), that determines pathology or otherwise known as disease. If you are out of clinical range your doctor will talk to you about treatment for your pathology, and usually send you home with one or more prescriptions.

It is important to realize that these ranges are established by the labs, based on the “normal” range or mean of the population. For example, if the majority of patients tested have an average range of 0 to 10 that would be considered “normal”. If your results were above 10, you would be “out of range”, and might be considered to have a pathology. However, just because the majority of the population is within a certain range does not necessarily mean that that population is healthy; it just means that it’s within that “norm”. The fact that most people who would be tested in these labs are either coming from doctor’s offices or hospitals may suggest that you are being compared to a range of sick people.

“The absence of disease does not necessarily mean the presence of wellness.”

“Clinical range” is not “optimal range”, and therefore, while you may be free of diagnosable disease this does not necessarily suggest that you are in optimal health. Good health relies on balanced biochemistry and optimal cellular metabolism. It is now recognized that the type of food that you put in the human body, has a great deal to do with controlling the efficiency of cellular metabolism and, ultimately the relative risk to subsequent diseases.

There may be a latent period where by cellular metabolism breaks down due to poor diet and lifestyle. This latent period, meaning the period before the diagnosis of the disease occurs, may be as long as twenty years. This means that from the early onset of poor tissue metabolism until the final expression of end-stage tissue destruction, there may be a five-, ten-, fifteen- or twenty-year period in which decreasing function develops. On a scale from 0 to 100, (0=death and 100=optimal health); we may not experience symptoms until we are at 30. 60% of our optimal health may be compromised before we are even aware of it.

Heart disease alone strikes half of it’s victims in the prime of life, and over 200,000 die between the ages of 35 and 64, another 235,000 die between the ages of 65 and 75. But, did you know that twenty five percent of all fatal heart attacks come without any prior symptoms? Have you ever heard of someone in your life that recently had a check up and got a clean bill of health and subsequently died soon after of a heart attack, stroke, cancer or some other disease?

But if you get sick you can just go to your doctor and get a prescription, right?

• Number of physicians in the US: 700,000.
Accidental deaths caused by physicians per year: 120,000 (Source: AMA).
Accidental deaths per physician: 0.171 (Source: U.S. Dept. of Health Human Services)

• The office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress, reports that “Prescription drugs kill 125,000 Americans annually.”

• A Yale-New Haven Hospital Study reports that 2,000 people die every week from medication reaction, and 30,000 people are hospitalized every week from medical reactions, (Yale-New Haven Hospital Study).

• Nearly 1,000 more people die every week from unnecessary surgery (John-Hopkins Study).

• A 13-year study conducted by the U.S. Office of Public Health states that two thirds of all over-the-counter drugs do not do what their promoters say they do.

10 Leading Causes of Death in the US: (National Vital Statistics Report, vol. 48, no. 11)

#1 Heart disease; 724,859 die annually
#2 Cancer; 541,532
#3 Stroke; 158,448
#4 Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease; 112,584
#5 Accidents; 97,835
#6 Pneumonia/Influenza;91,871
#7 Diabetes; 64,751
#8 Suicides; 30,575
#9 Kidney Disease; 26,182
#10 Chronic Liver Disease and Cirrhosis; 25,192

The results of seven years of research reviewing thousands of studies conducted by the Nutritional Institute of America, NIA however, shows that over 784,000 people die annually due to medical mistakes. Although, it is evident that the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the United States; perhaps seven out of ten other causes of death in America could possibly be prevented if metabolic imbalances where discovered and corrected before the disease became prevalent.

Most Americans have a tendency to wait until symptom occurs before they do anything to change the condition. By then they are already in the disease process and in many cases have no choice but to rely on drastic measures such as drugs and surgery to deal with the problem. Let’s not wait until the horse is out of the barn before we try and catch him.

Well known author and lecturer Dr. Jeffery Bland refers to a condition that he calls "vertical, disease" in which he differentiates between a sickness that leads to a person lying flat on his back—“horizontal disease” -- and an illness that relates to a person still standing up, yet feeling not quite right but not being sick enough for anyone to know what is wrong with him.

How do you know if you are metabolically imbalanced?

In your first consultation with me, I will ask you questions concerning your dietary habits and lifestyle, basic symptoms of imbalance and what you desire to accomplish with your nutritional program. At that time, I will evaluate what tests should be taken and you will receive the appropriate laboratory requisition forms or test kits. Laboratory tests may use: blood, urine, saliva, stool or hair analyses, to determine general metabolic imbalance, neuro-chemical and hormonal imbalance, cardiovascular risk assessment, and more, depending on what your individual needs may be.

When all test data has been completed the results are automatically sent to my clinic, Advanced Health Institute, to be processed. My assistants will call you back into the office where I will explain to you the findings of your evaluation and give you your Personalized Health Profile. In many cases your nutritional program will include a detoxification program, dietary education and lifestyle coaching, nutritional supplementation, and a wellness strategy that will help to bring your body back into balance.

Find out more by contacting our office.