For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD. — Jeremiah 30:17
The Cabinet No One Searches
There is one more cabinet in the house that the candle has to reach: the medicine cabinet. Not to empty it. To understand it. Think of it as reading the labels, not clearing the shelves.
I want to begin carefully, because this chapter is easy to misread. Modern medicine has undeniably saved lives. There are situations — acute trauma, certain infections, certain emergency conditions — where the pharmaceutical approach is exactly what is required, and I would not want anyone I love to be without it. I am not writing this chapter to make you afraid of your doctor. I am writing it because modern medicine has also caused immense harm, and that harm is one source of toxic load that almost no one counts, because it comes in a bottle with a doctor’s name on the label.
Think about what you have read in the chapters behind you. Aluminum comes into the home from cookware, foil and cans, and also from antacids and some medications (Chapter 2). Some commonly prescribed medications contain fluorine in their structure; some, including a number of antidepressants and antihistamines, contain bromine. Traces of pharmaceuticals turn up in the tap water itself (Chapter 3). And every drug a person takes passes through the same liver and the same elimination pathways you will learn about in Chapter 12. Some medications even speed up the first phase of the liver’s work, which, as you will see there, is not always a good thing. On an assembly line, faster is not always better.
None of this means a medicine should not be taken. It means a medicine is part of the Total Body Burden, like everything else that goes into the body, and deserves the same honest look. No more, and no less.
I came to this subject the way most of my students do: as a patient. I told you in the Introduction about the migraines that began after my daughter was born, and the doctors who were concerned enough to test me for a brain tumor. When the results came back clear, the doctor explained that, with the worst possibility ruled out, he had nothing else for me. The system had ruled out the catastrophe it knew how to recognize. What it could not do was tell me why I was sick or how to get well.
That experience taught me the lesson I most want you to carry into this chapter: symptoms are messages, not enemies. Much of modern medicine treats the symptom as the problem. The fever is the problem; suppress it. The pain is the problem; medicate it. The fatigue is the problem; give the patient a stimulant. But the symptom is the body’s communication that something deeper is wrong. When we silence a message with a drug, and the drug sends a new message of its own, we can end up very far from home.
When I named this work Arukah, I chose the Hebrew word for complete restoration because I wanted to teach a healing that is not the suppression of one problem with a pharmaceutical that produces three more. This chapter is about those three more.
What Iatrogenic Illness Is
The word for harm caused by medical care is iatrogenic. It comes from the Greek iatros, physician, and it means injury, illness or death caused by medical treatment itself. Not by a virus, not by poor nutrition, not by an accident at home. By the treatment meant to help.
Iatrogenic harm takes many forms:
- Adverse drug reactions and side effects, even when a drug is prescribed and taken correctly. This is the one people least expect. No one made a mistake, and the drug still did harm.
- Drug interactions, between prescriptions, or with over-the-counter drugs, supplements or herbs. Two drugs that are each safe on their own can be dangerous together, and so can a drug and an herb. Some pairs simply do not dance well together.
- Medication errors: the wrong drug, the wrong dose or the wrong patient.
- Hospital-acquired infections, including antibiotic-resistant ones, caught in the very place a person went to get well.
- Surgical errors and complications.
- Misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis.
- Overtreatment: tests, scans, drugs and procedures that were never needed.
Look down that list and notice something. Only one item on it, medication errors, is what most people picture when they hear “medical harm.” The rest can happen in a good hospital, with a careful doctor, to a patient who did everything she was told. That is why this is not a chapter about bad doctors. It is a chapter about the risks built into treatment itself, and about how a patient can lower them.
How Big Is the Problem?
This is not a fringe claim whispered at the edges. Two of the most cited estimates of the harm come from inside medicine itself, from researchers at one of the most respected medical schools in the United States.
- In 2000, Dr. Barbara Starfield of Johns Hopkins estimated in the Journal of the American Medical Association that medical care causes about 225,000 deaths a year in the United States, including about 106,000 from the side effects of correctly prescribed drugs.
- In 2016, Dr. Martin Makary and Dr. Michael Daniel of Johns Hopkins estimated in the BMJ that medical error causes over 250,000 U.S. deaths a year, which would make it the third leading cause of death.
I want you to know these two numbers, and I also want you to know that they are debated, because a holistic healer who quotes a figure should be able to say what the other side thinks of it. A number without its critics is only half a story.
Some researchers argue that these figures are too high, because many of the patients counted were already very ill and might have died anyway. Others argue that they are too low, because harm is under-reported and deaths outside hospitals are missed. Either way, all sides agree on two things: the number is large, and much of the harm is preventable. On those two points, the debate goes quiet.
That second point is the one that matters most for you. Much of the harm is preventable. A good part of what prevents it is an informed, careful patient who asks questions, keeps track of her medications, and notices when something changes. A careful patient is, in her quiet way, part of the safety system. By the end of this chapter, you will know how to be that patient, and how to help others become one.
What My Teachers Saw
Dr. Richard Schulze, whom you met in Chapter 1, saw the results in his clinics. He met patients who had “literally burned out their digestive tracts from years on extremely harsh medical drugs.” He believed doctors had spent a century interfering with the body’s own healing:
“Doctors know very little about the ability of the human body to repair itself, mainly because they have spent the last 100 years getting in the way of this Natural Healing process.” — Dr. Richard Schulze, Dr. Schulze’s 20 Powerful Steps to a Healthier Life
Dr. Russell Blaylock, himself a surgeon, adds the financial side:
“Pharmaceutical companies have been forced to pay billions in fines for deceptive practices” — Russell L. Blaylock, M.D., The Blaylock Wellness Report, June 2021
Remember the second of the four tests in Chapter 1: follow the money. Ask who profits from a product being called safe. A fine is not proof that any particular drug is harmful. But it is a good reason to read the package insert yourself rather than relying on the advertisement, with its sunlit meadows and soft music.
Dr. Blaylock also gives an example from his own field, the brain. When brain cholesterol was depleted with drugs similar to statins, brain glutamate rose to dangerous levels, which may help explain the memory problems some patients report on these drugs. Glutamate is the excitotoxin you met in Chapter 7: the same molecule, overstimulating the same nerve cells, arriving by a different door.
Dr. Joseph Mercola tells a story from the inside, too. He began his career as a conventional family physician, prescribing medications and treating symptoms within the framework medical school had given him. Over years of practice he noticed that the chronic conditions he was treating kept worsening even as the medications multiplied. The medications did what they were designed to do, which was to manage symptoms. And in many cases, they produced side effects that required additional medications, which produced additional side effects, and the cycle continued. Hold on to that picture. It has a name, and we will come to it in a moment.
Coleman’s Most Important Law
Dr. Vernon Coleman, the British physician I introduced in Chapter 1, practiced as a general practitioner and has spent decades writing about the risks of modern medical care. His credibility comes from having worked inside the medical system as a physician. In books and talks such as The End of Medicine, he explains why he believes modern medicine has become dangerous and what patients can do to protect themselves.
Dr. Coleman is a bold and controversial voice, and you do not have to agree with everything he says. Use the tests from Chapter 1. Separate his well-documented points, such as the estimates from inside medicine that you have just read, from his broader predictions about where medicine is heading. Weigh each on its own evidence. Hold the well-documented points firmly and the rest more loosely.
But one of his rules I want every reader of this book to memorize. It comes from his book Coleman’s Laws: Twelve Essential Medical Secrets Which Could Save Your Life:
“If you are receiving treatment for an existing disease and you develop new symptoms, you should assume the treatment is the cause until proven otherwise.” — Dr. Vernon Coleman, Coleman’s Laws
Read it again, slowly. If you are being treated, and a new symptom appears, the first suspect is the treatment, until proven otherwise.
That is not how most of us think. When a new symptom appears, we assume the illness is getting worse. Or we assume we need a stronger dose. Or we tell ourselves, especially as we get older, that it is “just aging.” Coleman’s law asks a different first question: What changed just before this began? Very often, the answer is a new pill.
Coleman’s law does not say the treatment is always the cause. It says you should assume it is, until someone has looked and ruled it out. In practice, that means writing down when the new symptom began, noticing what treatment started or changed before it, and taking that question to the prescriber: Could this be a side effect? It is a short question, and a powerful one.
Coleman’s Twelve Laws
The first law is the one to memorize, but Dr. Coleman wrote twelve, and together they make a short guide to using medicine wisely. Here they are in my own words, each with what it means for you and for the people you help.
- New symptoms point to the treatment first. If a new symptom appears while you are being treated, suspect the treatment until it has been ruled out. This is the law above.
- Have a test only if the result will change what you do. Every test has costs and risks, and a result that changes nothing can still lead to more tests and more treatment. Before any test, ask: What will we do differently, depending on the result?
- When treatment fails, question the diagnosis. If one treatment after another does not work, the problem may be the label, not the treatments. Ask whether the diagnosis itself should be looked at again.
- Screening serves the screener more than the screened. Screening programs and routine check-ups find many harmless “abnormalities” that lead to more tests, more worry and more treatment. Ask what a screening test can find, how often it is wrong, and what happens next if it is positive.
- Annual check-ups are for doctors, not patients. A yearly check-up of a person who feels well rarely changes the outcome. See a doctor when something has changed, and keep your own health records in between.
- Hospitals are dangerous places for sick people. Infections, mistakes and drug reactions are common in hospitals. When you need a hospital, go. Leave as soon as it is safe, and have someone with you to ask questions and check each medication.
- Medical fashions can kill. Treatments go in and out of style, often faster than the evidence changes. A treatment is not proven just because it is popular. Ask how long it has been used and what is known about its long-term harm.
- Medical decisions are made for industry and the profession, not for patients. Drug companies, governments and professional bodies shape what doctors are taught and what they prescribe. Ask who benefits from a recommendation, and look for evidence that does not come from the people selling the treatment.
- Doctors and nurses learn little about staying healthy. Medical training covers disease and drugs, with very little on food, nutrition and prevention. Learn those for yourself, as you are doing in this book.
- There are no holistic healers, only holistic patients. Whole-person healing depends on the person who does the work: changing food, home, habits and thinking. A coach guides; the client heals.
- There is no such thing as minor surgery. Every operation and every anesthetic carries real risk. Before any procedure, ask about the risks, the alternatives, and what happens if you wait.
- Some patients are treated better than others. Care differs with who you are, who you know and how well you speak up. Bring a written list of questions, take notes, and bring someone with you when you can.
Every one of these laws comes back to the idea behind the first: you are a partner in your own care, not a passenger. The rest of this chapter shows how to be one.
The Prescribing Cascade
Coleman’s law helps you notice a chain that catches a great many people: a chain of prescriptions, each one treating the side effects of the last. Researchers call it a prescribing cascade. It is exactly the cycle Dr. Mercola saw in his own practice.
Here is a classic example. A blood pressure drug (a calcium channel blocker) causes swollen ankles. The swelling is not recognized as a side effect, so it is treated with a water pill. The water pill lowers potassium and raises blood sugar, and more drugs follow. Each new prescription made sense on its own. Together, they are a staircase leading away from health, and the first step was a side effect that no one named.
The risk rises with every drug added. Older adults on five or more medications are at the greatest risk of interactions and harm. When several doctors each prescribe for one part of the body, no one may be looking at the whole list. People tell themselves, and are often told, that the dizziness, the cramps, the fatigue or the confusion is “just getting old.”
If someone you love has a growing list of prescriptions and a growing list of symptoms, the two lists may be connected. Write them side by side. Put the date each drug started next to the date each symptom began. You may see the cascade on the page in a way no single appointment ever showed it. Paper has a long memory.
This is where the idea that symptoms are messages becomes practical. A new symptom after a new drug is a message. The medicine of suppression answers it with another drug. The medicine of restoration traces it back to its source, the way you would follow a drip back to the leaky pipe.
Natural Healing Has Trade-Offs Too
It would be dishonest of me to warn you about the harms of medicine and say nothing about the risks of my own tradition. Dr. Schulze was honest about this:
“Medicine is full of dangerous trade-offs, but so are many Natural Healing programs.” — Dr. Richard Schulze
Natural healing programs are not automatically safe. They have trade-offs too. Dr. Schulze gave the example of a salt-water bowel flush, which could be dangerous for someone with high blood pressure. Natural is not the same as harmless. Poison ivy is natural, too.
Herbs and supplements interact with drugs, too:
- St. John’s wort weakens birth control pills and many other drugs.
- Ginkgo, garlic, fish oil and high-dose vitamin E can add to the effect of blood thinners.
- Grapefruit raises the levels of many medications. Dr. Schulze’s liver flush, which you will meet in Chapter 13, can be made with a citrus base, so a reader on prescription drugs makes it with lemon instead of grapefruit juice.
- Binders, such as activated charcoal and the clays and fibers you will meet in Chapter 12, bind medications in the gut as well as toxins, including medications such as birth control and thyroid medication. They are taken at least two hours apart from food and medications.
- Pregnant and nursing women do not do intensive herbal cleanses or flushes, because toxins mobilized in a cleanse can reach the baby.
So tell your doctor and your pharmacist about everything you take, natural or not. An herb is a medicine in the oldest sense of the word, and it belongs on the list, right alongside the pills.
Responsibility runs both ways. We ask doctors to respect the body’s own healing. We owe the same honesty about the herbs. Fair is fair.
What distinguishes the herbal tradition from the pharmaceutical tradition, in my experience, is not that one is natural and the other is not. It is the philosophy that organizes the work. The pharmaceutical tradition tends to isolate single compounds and use them to suppress symptoms. The herbal tradition uses whole plants to support the body’s own healing. Both approaches have their place. There are situations — acute trauma, certain infections, certain emergency conditions — where the pharmaceutical approach is exactly what is required. There are situations — chronic illness, accumulated toxic load, the slow restoration of damaged tissue — where the herbal approach is the better tool. A good toolbox holds both a hammer and a screwdriver, and the wise practitioner knows when to use each. The wise patient learns to recognize her own situations and to choose accordingly, with her doctor.
Medications on the Healing Path
Many readers of this book help others, as coaches, herbalists, holistic healers, or simply as the person in the family everyone calls. Every one of them needs to know how medications come down safely. The short answer: never alone, and always with the prescriber.
Some drugs, such as blood pressure, seizure, steroid, psychiatric and heart drugs, are dangerous to stop suddenly. The body adapts to them, and stopping all at once can bring a rebound: blood pressure that spikes, a seizure, an adrenal crisis, a crash in mood. These drugs come down gradually, with the prescriber, as the body heals and needs them less. That is the safe road off a medication.
Suppose a woman wants to stop her blood pressure pill because of its side effects. Stopping it today can send her pressure soaring, and swapping in an herb overnight is the same gamble. Her side effects are real, and they matter. The safe path is to take them to her prescriber, who can lower the dose or change the drug safely. Help her write down when the pill started and when each side effect began, so that the conversation with her doctor is a good one. Meanwhile, the work on what raised her blood pressure in the first place (the sugar, the refined oils, the stress, the short nights) can begin today.
What you can do is powerful. You can help people become informed, active partners in their own care. And, through everything in this book, you can help them lower the burden that made them need so much medical care in the first place.
Partner with doctors; there is no need to fear or distrust them. I have great respect for the place that medication has when it is necessary. Sometimes a medication is a scaffold that holds the body steady while the deeper work is done. Many of my students have, over time and in close consultation with their physicians, reduced or eliminated medications they had been on for years, once the underlying causes had been addressed. Many others have remained on their medications and used them as a stable platform on which to do the deeper work. Both are honorable paths.
The same rule holds all through this book. When someone cuts out sugar while taking diabetes medication, her blood sugar can fall; she monitors it and tells her doctor, and only her doctor adjusts the medication. When someone with heart disease wants to change the fats he eats, he makes the bigger changes alongside his cardiologist, and no one stops a heart or cholesterol medication on his own. Healing that is real does not need to be rushed past the prescriber. It can bring the prescriber along.
Becoming a Partner in Your Own Care
Here is what that partnership looks like in practice. None of it requires a medical degree. All of it makes care safer.
- Keep a symptom and medication journal. Note when every new drug started, and any new symptom that followed. Bring it to the prescriber. This is Coleman’s law put on paper, and a plain notebook may be one of the most useful health tools in the house.
- Ask before every new prescription:
- What is it for?
- What are the common side effects?
- What happens if I wait or do nothing?
- Are there lifestyle changes that could work instead?
- How will we know when I can stop?
- Read the package insert. It lists side effects that are rarely mentioned in the office. Yes, the small print. It is worth the squint.
- Ask the pharmacist to review all your drugs, supplements and herbs together for interactions. Use one pharmacy, so every prescription is checked against the others, even when several different doctors write them. One pharmacist who sees the whole picture beats several who each see a corner of it.
- Ask for a medication review once a year, or whenever a new symptom appears, to see whether any drug can be reduced or stopped safely. Think of it as a yearly checkup for the list itself.
- Get a second opinion before major surgery or long-term treatment. A good doctor will welcome it.
- Bring a friend to important appointments and hospital stays, to listen, take notes and ask questions. A friend with a notebook can catch what a frightened or unwell patient misses. Two sets of ears are better than one.
- Report side effects to the FDA’s MedWatch program (fda.gov/medwatch). Anyone can file a report, and every report helps side effects to be counted. Your report may help the next patient.
- Never stop a medication suddenly. Some, such as blood pressure, seizure, steroid and psychiatric drugs, are dangerous to stop without a doctor’s supervision. If side effects are the problem, the answer is a conversation with the prescriber, who can change the drug safely. Work with the prescriber to reduce medications as health improves.
The question I most want you to remember from that list is the third one: What happens if I wait or do nothing? It is a fair question, a respectful question, and one that patients almost never ask. Sometimes the answer is “you will be in danger,” and then you have your answer. Sometimes the answer is “you will probably be fine,” and then you have a choice you did not know you had.
When Medicine Is Exactly What Is Needed
Everything in this chapter is about using medicine wisely, not refusing it. Some symptoms are not for coaching, journaling or herbs at all. Fever, severe or worsening pain, chest pain, shortness of breath, fainting, a racing heart, confusion, or any symptom that frightens you calls for medical care, and an emergency calls for emergency care. No protocol in this book is worth ignoring them.
This is where the two traditions meet. The emergency room is a gift in an emergency. The slow work of this book is a gift for the chronic burden that builds over decades. A wise family uses each for what it does best, the way a good cook uses both the oven and the stovetop.
A Lighter Burden, and Less Need
I want to end where this book began, with Dr. Schulze’s rule: stop doing what is making you sick, and begin doing what will heal you.
Much of what fills the modern medicine cabinet is there because of what filled the rest of the house first. The water, the pantry, the plastics, the seed oils, the sugar and the sleepless, wired nights all add to the Total Body Burden, and a body carrying a heavy burden needs a great deal of help. A body that is less burdened and better nourished often needs less medicine. I have watched it happen again and again: slowly, as the burden comes down and the prescriber is brought along, the medications come down too.
“Natural Healing is NOT about temporary, quick fixes or pills to mask symptoms.” — Dr. Richard Schulze
The candle has now been through the house, the plate, the invisible fields and the medicine cabinet. The leaven has been found. In the chapters that remain, we come to the fire: how the body actually clears what we have found (Chapter 12), and how to nourish and cleanse it so that it can rebuild (Chapter 13).
Footnotes and sources for this chapter
Sources and Further Reading
On the scale of iatrogenic harm
- Starfield, B. Estimate of deaths caused by medical care in the United States. Journal of the American Medical Association, 2000.
- Makary, M. A., and Daniel, M. Estimate of U.S. deaths from medical error. BMJ, 2016.
On Dr. Vernon Coleman
- Coleman, V. Coleman’s Laws: Twelve Essential Medical Secrets Which Could Save Your Life.
- Coleman, V. The End of Medicine (the video for Lesson 10 of the Everyday Toxins course).
On my teachers’ observations
- Schulze, R. Dr. Schulze’s 20 Powerful Steps to a Healthier Life. Natural Healing Publications.
- Blaylock, R. L. The Blaylock Wellness Report, June 2021.
On the practitioner’s role and reporting
- Wilson, L. Legal Guidelines for Unlicensed Practitioners. Taught in its own Arukah course.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration, MedWatch safety information and adverse event reporting program (fda.gov/medwatch).
On the biblical framework
- Jeremiah 30:17, the verse in which arukah, complete restoration, appears.