Open Future Health Blog

Your habits when you are in your 40's and 50's are the foundation for your good health and fitness at 85. Improved diet is the low cost alternative to extensive medical intervention later in life. The body has the ability to heal itself, if we treat it with respect. ANYBODY who adopts a healthy diet, at ANY AGE, will benefit, and as the months go by, those benefits will multiply.

The End of Illness

Thanks to a friend, Geoff Cardwell, I've been able to read Dr David B Agus, who wrote "The End of Illness." Dr Agus was a cancer specialist. Forty years ago he expected that his specialist field, cancer treatment, would make remarkable progress so that the medical profession would solve the problem of cancer. That's not the case. Cancers are still treated as foreign bodies that must be cut out, burnt out, or poisoned.

The death rate from cancer over 60 years has not changed. Cancers are still diagnosed by looking at the cell structure. Cancer cells look different. We classify cancer by the tissue in which cancering occurs. That makes no sense, because the cause of the cancer is not the tissue in which it occurs. Cancer is an event in your body, caused by a breakdown in the conversation between body cells, that normally keeps you healthy.

Cancer is NOT a genetic disease. Cancer is a cell, or a mass of cells that is no longer under control, in it's own environment. Cancer is caused by a breakdown of your metabolic system. The body is a complex system, with many tightly controlled sub-systems. We've discovered that you don't need to kill or remove a cancer to gain significant benefit. If you can stop it growing that's helpful. If the cancer shrinks that's a benefit.

Dr Agus argues that using doctors to diagnose problems and treat symptoms is a very poor use of a doctors knowledge and skills. But this is the major thing we ask doctors to do. Patients need to be much more active in preventing health breakdown in the first place. You need your own regular measurements (written down). You need to record how you feel, in writing at least once a week. These measurement and comments give you something strong as evidence that your health remains good. But it may also point to future problems, not yet serious.

Inflammation is a sign of general disorder in the system. Most of us suffer from low-level chronic inflammation. It's doing you damage but you don't know it. In a similar way, far too many of us are developing a fatty liver. There are no symptoms until it gets very serious, but that's perhaps 20 years after the problem began.

The End of Alzheimer's?

This reminds me of a book I was once very excited about. "The End of Alzheimer's" by Dr Dale Bredesen. The book doesn't provide the solution to Alzheimer's Disease, but Dr Bredesen makes the point that healthy people either don't get Alzheimer's Disease or get it several years later. That make an enormous difference, both the lives of the individuals and their families and to the cost of Alzheimer's to the health system and the community.

Dr Bredesen says that as we age, your declining health is like being in a tent with a leaking roof. If you can identify the leaks and fix them, you are much better off. This is about seeking the best possible health, not just an absence of pain or disease. That's something you might like to discuss with your doctor.

I have a friend who is trying to use the tests and recommendations discussed in "The End of Alzheimer's" to improve health. With some success. There is a reason for losing weight. There is a reason for adopting a ketogenic diet. There is a reason for doing some tests, that Dale Bredesen suggests, but are not common in NZ. We may then come up with a problem. We've done the test, we know the result isn't quite what we'd like, but we don't have a known effective way to change that. Are we any better off?

Testing for Calcium In the Arteries?

Inflammation in the arteries may lead to a calcium build up, and hence to a heart attack. We can measure that. But there is no certain way, medically proven to reduce that calcium deposit. So doctors are reluctant to do the test, of if the test is done, prefer not to disclose the result. "We have a number; if it's low, that's good, but if it's bad we don't know what to suggest." So the test has the potential to cause problems and solve nothing.

On the other hand, patients with high calcium scores claim to have lowered the score, and sometimes eliminated the calcium build up. Their doctors blame faulty tests, or using a different machine, or other factors to sustain the view that calcium builds up, and that can't be reversed. Open Future Health certainly doesn't know the answer here, but there are several online groups discussing the issue, and some people claiming success.

John Stephen Veitch