Chapter 3

Finding the Causes of your Disease

Introduction

At the heart of medicine lies the individual and their own unique story - that story typically includes the chief complaint, the history of any present illness, the past medical history, family history, dietary history, supplement and medication history, lifestyle, social, and exercise history, physical exam findings and laboratory evaluation.

In conventional medicine, the aim is to arrive quickly at the diagnosis - this is particularly critical in the acute care setting where rapid diagnosis leads to rapid treatment. Treatment in this setting must be prompt, as it is often designed to “lock down” and control physiology. The chief complaint and history of the present illness become the critical aspects of the story; the rest of the patient’s story is truncated when other information is seen as superfluous to reaching the diagnosis.

In acute care, the patient’s history is condensed to the main complaint and the history of the present illness, while the most important criteria is finding the correct diagnosis. Let’s take an example of a patient who suffers from wheezing attacks – the history of the present illness may indicate a previous history of asthma with tightness in the chest and shortness of breath. The diagnosis now becomes “asthma attack” and the treatment will be with corticosteroids and bronchodilators.

These typical medical models are fine with acute disease, but when the same model is applied to chronic disease problems arise.  When the physician wants to proceed directly to the diagnosis and name the disease quickly, they are missing a lot of other pertinent information as the patient’s whole story is not understood and each complaint becomes a discrete issue that is treated in isolation to the complete picture.

The result is a focus on treating each symptom complex as a separate and distinct “disease” with a separate treatment for each; so depression is treated with antidepressants, hypertension with antihypertensive drugs, high cholesterol with Statin drugs, gastroeosophogeal reflux disease (GERD) with hydrogen-proton inhibitor drugs that block hydrochloric acid production and so on. Each of these symptoms becomes a distinct diagnostic entity in itself and the patient ends up being treated with a cocktail of drugs based on each of these individual symptoms or syndromes.

The patient’s individual story never has a chance to be heard and understood in context. It is apparent that in the rush to diagnose and treat, modern medicine concentrates on the branches and leaves of the tree and not the trunk and the roots. Holistic or functional medicine should not be viewed as an alternative but as a bridge to a more effective CHRONIC CARE model.

In the Holistic or Functional health model, the patient’s full story is of central importance. Questions that are asked and need answers include: where does the symptom come from? That is, what are the antecedents and triggers? What maintains the symptoms? That is, what are the mediators?  And what can be done to change that dis-eased homeostatic balance point the patient is locked into? That is, what are the underlying points of leverage where intervention can be most effective?

In order to answer these important questions, it is not enough to just look at the present symptoms and history of the present illness. It is important to investigate further and take the entire patient’s history in order to understand the sources or causes of these symptoms.

Can the symptoms be due to tooth and scar foci, toxic metals, mineral and vitamin deficiencies, fatty acid deficiencies, hormone and enzyme deficiencies, hypochlorhydria or hydrochloric acid deficiency, with pancreatic enzyme deficiencies, internal biochemistry based on the pH, resistivity and redox potential of urine, saliva and blood, Indican’s test of gut toxicity, food intolerances, Metabolic Typing to determine the ‘octane’ of fuel or food that our particular constitution requires, environmental allergens, immune status, parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungi, moulds, candida, electromagnetic and geopathic stress, tissue integrity, hereditary weaknesses, organ functioning, psychoemotional and spiritual states, as well as systemic entanglements that go back many generations and can cause a myriad of health issues.

These fundamental clinical imbalances are the key to the underlying mechanisms of disease – the diagnosis remains useful but is less important. This expanded model allows the clinician to choose from a wider array of therapies such as minerals and supplements, herbs, homeopathics, exercise, counselling, diet, manipulative therapies, acupuncture and more.

Let’s apply this model to a simple case of chronic headaches – the medical model would generally place a diagnosis based on the present history – migraines – and treat using Triptan or a similar drug. However, this case may not be as simple as it seems.

The headaches could be a result of structural integrity problems – a subluxation of the cervical spine or whiplash after an accident, or exposure to toxins such as mercury from amalgams or aspartame taken as a sweetener, digestive issues such as hypochlorhydria and pancreatic insufficiency leading to food putrefaction in the gut, mineral and vitamin deficiencies, dehydration, hypoglycaemia, drug side effects, chronic antibiotic use leading to dysbiosis and systemic Candidiasis, lack of exercise, spiritual and psychoemotional reasons such as loneliness, overwork, marital discord, sexual identity issues and many more causative factors.

You can see how easy it is for the medical model to miss most of these potential causative factors – the result using drugs will not be a complete cure but simply treatment of the symptoms by simply suppressing them. You can see how the Holistic model encompasses the full and unique story of the patient. It integrates underlying mechanisms of disease into the differential diagnosis paradigm as well as increasing the range of potential treatment options.

This Holistic or Functional Model is the only way I know of getting to the bottom of chronic diseases and helping the body to heal - the beauty of this intensive approach is that even international patients can come in for the full assessment, collate all the information, design a bespoke treatment programme, all in a few days. Then they can return to their homeland and implement the treatment while staying in touch by e-mail and phone. It has been working successfully this way for many years now.

The IDEL Diagnostic Programme

Over the years I have devised the IDEL Diagnostic Programme[1] for doing all this and more – IDEL is the acronym that stands for ‘IDentify’ and ‘ELiminate.’ Without removing the root causes it is literally impossible to cure chronic diseases – the best that one can hope for is a temporary alleviation of symptoms using drugs or natural remedies. To be absolutely honest, this simple enlightenment took me about 20 years to put together, as it requires a large database of knowledge and clinical experience to collect and make sense of this data.

This testing method may sound rather extravagant and long-winded but it is really the only way that I know of collecting enough information about the patient to determine the causative factors of their disease. I am often faced with patients who come in with thick files after having seen five, six or more health practitioners who have all run their own tests and determined a treatment plan. The problem with this approach is that the naturopath will look at their patients only from the naturopathic perspective; the homoeopath will examine the patient only from the homoeopathic perspective and treat accordingly; the herbal medicine practitioner will also do the same according to their level of training in that one modality.  Sometimes you may get lucky and find practitioners with two modalities who obviously have a wider vision. It is indeed rare, however, to find practitioners who understand and offer a wide range of the various healing modalities in a coherent and synergistic way.

The DaVinci Natural Health Center aims to cover this gap. The IDEL diagnostic program is perhaps a unique composite of methodology where many levels of health are assessed using different diagnostic and therapeutic modalities concomitantly, to get to the bottom of someone’s health problems quickly and efficiently.

Using the IDEL diagnostic programme, misdiagnosis and treatment failure is reduced to the minimum as it takes the guesswork out of the ‘diagnosis.’ I place the word diagnosis in inverted commas as I am not merely looking to label the disease, but am more concerned with identifying the causative factors. Having a label for a disease does not magically render it curable. Look again at most of the ‘incurable’ chronic diseases mentioned in this book’ testimonials section (Chapter 12) – heart disease, diabetes, cancer, arthroses, neurological disorders, etc. Why these are considered invincible by the medical profession?

The main reason for their failure to cure such patients is that they have not really examined the myriad of reasons that have caused the health problem in the first place – in chronic degenerative diseases this is rarely one cause but many causes that have been accumulative over the years and are responsible for the ‘pathogenesis’^[2] of the disease. Instead, they have spent time using expensive biochemical tests and looking at the structure of the body parts using sophisticated scans, only to place a label on the disease (the diagnosis) which usually leads to giving drugs to suppress the symptoms without even looking at the causes.

It is no wonder that most of these chronic, degenerative diseases are considered ‘idiopathic’ - meaning there is “no known cause.” Also, “psychosomatic” is another category that chronic diseases are thrown into, as well as ‘hereditary’ – in other words: blame the genes, which could occur rarely, but it is not always the case. All this is misguided conjecture and has no relevance to the true causes of chronic diseases. Maybe you should challenge your medical practitioner next time they mention any one of these potential causes and ask them to prove their hypothesis as Medicine is supposed to be evidence-based. I bet that in most cases they will be dumb-founded that a patient has had the nerve to challenge such a “medical diagnosis!”

So coming back to the IDEL Diagnostic Programme - the real beauty of the programme is that it guides the practitioner and the patient to the potential causative factors underlying the disease, and to finding a way of safely eliminating them, while concomitantly helping the person to repair and rebuild their body. I use the word ‘safely’ as I use no drugs, dangerous diagnostics, or surgeries. The tools I use are the diverse protocols based on the varying facets of Natural Medicine. These will become clearer as we examine the results and look at the treatments offered.

Here is a summary of the potential causative factors that are commonly picked up by the IDEL Diagnostic Programme – these issues are rarely addressed by the medics even though they can all be extremely detrimental to health.

Potential causative factors

These causative factors include poor diet, nutritional deficiencies, bacteria, viruses, fungi, moulds, parasites, Candida, enzyme and hormone deficiencies, hypochlorhydria (low hydrochloric acid production in the stomach), food intolerances and other allergens, hidden inflammatory processes in the body, toxaemia, toxic metals and other xenobiotics, electromagnetic and geopathic stress, mobile phone stress, X-ray stress, vaccination stress, unhealed scars and teeth infections (foci), imbalanced pH, redox potential and resistivity and many more. We carefully examine and identify all of these factors and others using functional testing methods and complex equipment.

Regardless, it is certainly worth anyone’s while to look in greater depth at the IDEL Diagnostic Program. The following is an overview as to its various components and how it works in practice.

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