Michelle Woodworth

I’ve just been reading Health Wars by Phillip Day.  (It must be a good book because someone on Amazon wants to sell their “collectible” edition for $159.99.)  Actually, I am finding it to be a real eye-opener regarding the propaganda that surrounds us about cures for diseases.  It’s a hidden message calling to us through the media to help line the pockets of the drug companies.

Early in the book Phillip Day talks about how today there are more heart attacks, strokes, obesity, etc. than ever before and yet medicine seems powerless to stop it.  However, they lead us to believe that science is winning and “one day drugs will give us a disease-free life”.  Here’s an excerpt where Phillip shares his thoughts on how to maintain the credibility of a lost cause.

A.  Promise that science will win out in the end provided the public keeps giving.  Encourage people to participate by getting them active in raising money for charity to bring an end to the problems.  (Or spend your money on organic fruits and vegetables for your family.)

B.  Never admit you’re on a hide into nowhere, that millions have suffered and perished unnecessarily; that drugs make symptoms go away not diseases; that our medical peers are treating metabolic (nutritional) illnesses with toxic drugs, radical surgeries and poisonous radiation instead of nutrition and lifestyle changes; that most of the toxins afflicting the public are made by the same corporations that manufacture the nation’s medicines.

C.  Reinforce the lie of medical progress with disease in magazines, newspapers, and TV.

D.  Infer anyone who disagrees with this progress is ‘insane’, ‘a quack’, ‘unqualified, or ‘mentally unbalanced’.  (Such as nutritional consultants who promote better eating habits rather than popping pills.)

E.  Selectively under-report awkward situations or not cover them at all.

F.  Invent illnesses to give the impression of expanding problems whose solutions can only be found through an increase in medical expenditure.  (How about ADD/ADHD in children?  You can spend your money to medicate your children – not to “cure” them but to control the symptoms or you can feed them nutritious, well-balanced meals and get better results – -with no side-effects.)

Studying nutritional consulting has really made me aware of how our diet and lifestyle is affecting our quality of life today.  We are eating more fast food and spending more time in front of computers and driving more places rather than walking and as a consequence there are more reported cases of obesity, heart attack, stroke, and diabetes.  It sounds easy enough to just reduce the amount of times we eat out, add some fruits and veggies to our diet and not park in the closest parking spot to the door but not as easy as shaking a couple caplets into our hands and tossing them back with a soda.

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Michelle Woodworth
Promoting vegetables rather than drugs.

It should come as no surprise in a world where a homeowner can be sued because a careless driver plows into a brick mailbox but even in a profession as altruistic as nutritional consulting knowing the legal boundaries and pitfalls can save your practice and your good nature.

It’s almost as if there’s a competition among acronyms over who gets to do what and the name they use for their technique. That being said, licensed doctors own a monopoly on the terms diagnose, cure, prescribe, and treat. These words have legal meaning in the health care field and if anyone other than a licensed doctor uses them, they are considered to be practicing a regulated profession without a license. One way to avoid stepping on the toes of the licensed medical profession and stay within legal boundaries is to avoid using any terminology that establishes you as a licensed professional.

• Cure, by definition, means to remedy or restore to health. And while we cannot legally use the word cure, we can use remedy, restore, improve, help, or correct. Reverse may even be appropriate in some situations.
• To diagnose is to determine the identity of a disease or illness by medical examination. As nutritional consultants we are not performing any medical examinations or identifying any diseases. What we do is to check, evaluate, or determine.
• Licensed practitioners prescribe courses of action to their patients. Unlicensed practitioners make suggestions or recommendations and advise or offer options to their clients.
• If you are dealing with someone in order to relieve or cure, you are treating them. Since nutritional consultants don’t cure we don’t use the word treat. Instead, we relieve, balance, correct, and remedy.

Though not on the black list like the previous terms, disease is another word best left out of the nutritional consultant vocabulary. Condition or imbalance would be more appropriate. It is also prudent to refrain from naming a specific disease. One might describe the symptoms rather than verbalizing the medical label. Though this may just seem like semantics (and really that’s exactly what it is), in our world today this is a necessary precaution to avoid legal consequences.

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Using the right words,
Michelle Woodworth