Reduce Medications by Starting with This

Scott: You said earlier that, how we live or how we are treated, in terms of our health is that everybody's different.  Yet, one of the fundamental problems of western, or alopathic medicine is that everybody gets treated the same way.  If you have a condition, or you don't... if you have it, then you get this drug.  Isn't that one of the fundamental problems?

Philip Weeks: Yeah, that's right.  And again, that's great in an accute disease.  We don't... if somebody's had a heart attack, we don't need to know about all these other kind of things that are going on in their life, we need to treat the heart attack.  But when somebody's got all these other conditions, we need to understand them as an individual.  So in some ways it's more important to treat the individual and what's going on with them, rather than the acutal conditions they're dealing with.  So, but by doing that, the body's very intelligent.  The body's has all kinds of resources in order to cope. However, with the environmental toxicity and our nutrient deficiencies that we have and the toxicities we have, then the body has a real challenge on how to deal with those things. 

Scott: You mentioned earlier, a lot of people are on multiple medications.  You take a medication, you get a side effect which leads to another medication.  How tough is it for people to start scaling back on medications and let the body do what it can?

Weeks: I mean, in a sense... somebody has to work with their doctor.  And most physicians are willing, for people to be on less medication.  They know it's not good to be on multiple medications. We talk about evidence based medicine and how important that is.  However, there aren't trials to show that if somebody's on this drug and that drug and on the other drug on this drug together, what that result will mean for them.  They can look at it theoretically but there's no studies done on individuals who are on these particular three drugs and these particular four drugs. So, fundamentally, the principles are, that people need to get good nutrition into their body.  And that's the first thing.  And once that happens, then the body has a chance to deal with all of these inflammatory situations and all these chronic situations that are going on.