Medical myths explained: Why health researchers mistakenly think one disease causes another

Wednesday, October 11, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: medical paradigms, conventional medicine, disease labels

Health researchers are making all sorts of discoveries about the correlations between various diseases. They're finding out that gum disease is correlated with heart disease. The problem is, they're jumping to the conclusion that there is a direct causal relationship between these two things. They're saying gum disease causes heart disease. They're saying diabetes causes heart disease, and now they are even saying diabetes causes Alzheimer's disease. Why are they jumping to these odd conclusions? How do they think one disease causes another disease?

The real answer, as you'll discover here, is that one disease doesn't actually cause another disease; they both just have the same common cause -- a cause which goes unacknowledged or undiscovered by conventional medical science.

For example, the reason diabetes is correlated with heart disease is not because one causes the other, it's because there is a common underlying cause for both diseases, and that underlying cause is poor nutrition. More specifically, the consumption of foods and beverages that actually deplete the body of its essential nutrients, and the lack of foods and beverages that provide good nutrition -- the vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, amino acids, fiber and all the other elements that the human body needs in order to be healthy and free of chronic disease.

Today, the conventional medical community is looking at these disease correlations, such as the correlation between diabetes and heart disease, and using that as a justification to more aggressively treat the symptoms of one of those diseases. They're saying, "Well, since diabetes causes heart disease, which can lead to other complications, then we have to treat diabetes very, very aggressively," which to them means pushing more pharmaceuticals. The "urgency" to treat these conditions by claiming they can cause other conditions is really just another way to push more drugs onto patients.

Understand, the core claim here by conventional medicine is that the symptoms of one disease cause another disease. They say, for example, that high blood sugar from diabetes is a contributing factor for Alzheimer's disease. And thus, the thinking goes, it is crucial to "manage" the symptoms of diabetes (high blood sugar) with drugs in other to prevent Alzheimer's. The logic almost sounds reasonable, but they're actually jumping to the wrong conclusion.

Multiple symptoms usually have common causes

What they're failing to do here is notice that there is a common underlying cause of both diseases, and that underlying cause cannot be corrected with prescription drugs. In this case, in talking about type-2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease, what the patient usually has is a severe imbalance in blood sugar metabolism caused by three main factors: 1) Massive over-consumption of refined sugars and refined grains, 2) Lack of physical exercise, and 3) Lack of key nutrients such as trace minerals, B vitamins, essential fatty acids and others.

Notice that none of these contributing factors are "a lack of pharmaceuticals?" What the patient really needs is a complete nutritional overhaul, which means they need to avoid all the ingredients in foods and beverages that promote disease, and take steps to get superfoods and high-density nutrition into their bodies. They need to eat more fresh foods, more raw fruits and vegetables. They need to eat less meat or eliminate saturated animal fats from their diet altogether, including dairy products. (Dairy products, in my view, are not healthy for long-term consumption by human beings.)

At the same time, those people need to get nutritional supplements into their bodies. They need things like sea vegetables, spirulina, chlorella (www.IntegratedHealth.com), goji berries and whole food concentrates like blueberry powder or multi-fruit superfood powders. They need things like raw chocolate (www.NavitasNaturals.com) or super foods like chia seeds (www.GoodCauseWellness.com) or ancient grains like quinoa. These are the kinds of things that people need to put into their bodies in order to reverse the underlying causes of all of these diseases.

Nutritional deficiencies diagnosed as physical defects

It is absolutely amazing how frequently nutritional deficiencies are diagnosed as physical diseases or disorders. Let me give you an example. There's a common heart disorder called mitral valve prolapse. This is the diagnosis you're given when you have a heart valve that doesn't maintain the correct shape. They'll tell you it's a congenital defect. They'll say it's something you were born with and, unless the valve is repaired through surgery, your heart will never beat correctly and you'll have heart problems for the rest of your life. What they won't tell you is that this is almost exclusively a nutritional problem. The heart valve isn't misshapen due to a congenital defect; it is misshapen because the heart is a giant muscle that's sagging out of shape due to a lack of nutritional support.

When you don't have B vitamins and the proper amount of magnesium, zinc and calcium in your body, guess what happens to all the muscles in your body? They all start to sag. The muscles lose their proper shape. This includes the muscles in your heart, biceps, hamstrings, and chest. When the heart valve is misshapen, even in a minor way, things can start to go wrong in your circulatory system. If you were to take nutritional supplements, or get nutrition through whole food concentrates, then your heart would begin to literally "shape up." It would become more firm and the posture of your heart would rapidly improve, thereby eliminating the symptoms that were previously called "mitral valve prolapse."

The answer to mitral valve prolapse is almost always nutrition, but you won't hear that from surgeons. First of all, they don't know this information. Second of all, if they were to send people home with vitamins, how would they stay in business performing surgical procedures that generate tens of thousands of dollars in revenues? There's no money in telling people how to prevent these diseases. There's only money in promoting drugs, surgical procedures and fictitious diseases.

The medical industry sensationalizes diseases because they're profitable

There's a direct correlation between the marketing and popularity of a so-called disease condition and the size of profits generated by that disease for the pharmaceutical industry and conventional medicine in general. The reason you hear about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) all the time is not because it's a legitimate physiological disorder (it isn't). The reason you hear about it is because it's very profitable to treat. There are lots of drugs to sell to children for this disease or condition.

Similarly, the reason you have heard so much propaganda about hormone-replacement therapy over the past 20 years is not because women actually need synthetic hormones, the reason is the incredible profitability of HRT drugs. You hear about these diseases because they are generating money for the companies that manufacture the so-called solutions to these conditions. Those solutions are simply prescription drugs and surgical procedures that don't solve the underlying problem in the first place. All they do is mask the symptoms of disease.

The real reason why disease symptoms appears together

Every time I see another headline about how research scientists have discovered another correlation among various chronic diseases, I just have to sort of laugh about it. Of course, diabetes and heart disease are going to emerge together. Of course, gum disease and heart disease go hand-in-hand, because they all have the same underlying causes.

A deficiency in a single nutrient can lead to numerous diseases that all get diagnosed and treated as if they had separate causes. Take vitamin D, for example. A lack of vitamin D renders the body unable to absorb calcium. Without adequate calcium, the heart has trouble functioning correctly, and the nervous system may also suffer. A person deficient in vitamin D may experience heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, osteoporosis, pancreatic cancer, gum disease, schizophrenia and many other conditions all stemming from a lack of this single nutrient. Scientists then come along and discover numerous correlations among these diseases. They actually seem astounded, too, because they have no concept of the true underlying causes of disease.

The real causes, of course, are all the same: lack of nutrition, inability to eliminate metabolic waste products, exposure to toxic chemicals, excessive stress and a lack of circulation and energy. These core causes can express themselves in a myriad of different ways, and conventional medicine has made a habit of attaching a different disease name to each of these expressions. But underneath all the complicated medical jargon, there are really only a few fundamental causes of disease, and by correcting those, all the various measurable symptoms disappear on their own as the body comes back into a state of balance.

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