Faith Versus Evidence in Health and Wellness, and The Emergence of Integrative Medicine

There seems to be a war between traditional and faith based modalities like Acupuncture, and the AMA style acute care industry.

Yet neither modality offers perfect solutions, and Integrative Medicine is booming as these two fields start to understand each other better.

Chances are, you have strong opinions one way or the other. But listen in to this forthright conversation to see if some of your own beliefs aren’t challenged, and hopefully improved, from this conversation. With Dr. Joe Kepo’o.

Is the absence of disease or infirmity the definition of health?

Over and over again we see a lot of people that don’t have diseases, but they can’t do simple activities like bend over, they’re just not flexible. Or, they just have this brain fog issue or they’re not clear mentally and their brain isn’t optimized. Many people are just not in that optimized state of health. That’s one of the things that we’re missing with healthcare today is that just because someone isn’t or is a disease free doesn’t mean that they’re optimizing their life and that they’re living it to the fullest.

Now integrative medicine is an up and coming field for sure. The world health organization who defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. That’s important.

Listen in to the forthright conversation with Dr. Kepo’o on this podcast episode!

As we move towards energetic healing or faith-based healing, how do we protect ourselves from charlatans?

The biggest thing is that the evidence comes when you start actually applying the particular process or technique or principles to your own life, and see if it’s working for you.

But it’s not that cut and dried when it comes to medicine, whether it’s energy medicine or Western medicine. Don’t make a decision based on one experience with one thing, or think that if you have a good experience in one area, it translates to everything being good in that area. And on the flip side, having a bad experience with something, that it translates to everything within that area.

Treating symptoms but not the causes…

This is one of the biggest complaints of the natural or integrative side of medicine with the other side is treating the symptoms and not the causes.

This is a dig at the medical industry. Some of their treatments are like the metaphor of spray painting a rusty old car. You’re not going to restore an old rusty car by just putting a coat of spray paint over it, that rust would come right through. Like a quote from Dr. Frank Lipman, it goes “when a plant’s leaves are turning Brown. You don’t paint the leaves green. You look at the cause of the problem. If only we treated our bodies the same way. – Dr. Frank Lipman”.

You won’t hear this very often from the alternative or the integrative side, but the same thing happens on that side too. We always assumed that the medical community are the ones that are treating symptoms, not causes. But a lot of people who are in the alternative side of medicine still have the idea that if the leaf turns brown, you just need to paint it green with an essential oil or paint it green with energy work.

Sometimes essential oils or energy work will actually cover the underlying issue, but not take care of the underlying issue. So that same mentality that a lot of alternative people complain about when it comes to in western medicine exist within the integrative medicine realm as well.

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Not the end-all for everything….

In the essential oils realm, for example, if the person’s issue has to do with a mineral deficiency, you’re not going to remedy that with an essential oil. The oil is not going to give that person a particular mineral.

So if there are issues in mineral deficiency, you need to give them better food or mineral supplement to be able to take care of that issue that the essential oil’s not going to take care of. But the essential oil might actually help out in the short time for a skin issue coming from the mineral deficiency. You might be able to put the essential oil on the skin and then see it improve. But it masks the real underlying issue of a mineral deficiency.

This happens all the time. That was something I ran into very early on in practice was that I found that sometimes I would use some of my alternative medicine and I was actually covering the real cause for the person. That’s why I have so much technology in my office now that allows me to really zone in on what the core issue is. So we need to be careful that we’re working on the causes and not just the symptoms.

Healed from ‘tennis elbow’…

Earlier this year Dave started to get pain in his elbow. He was heavy into his precision nutrition ProCoach workouts, introducing The Dirobi Transformation program and doing it himself. And yet unfortunately he was developing a pain that kept growing and no matter what he did the pain kept growing. Finally it just flared up and the pain didn’t subside. He couldn’t lift weights and couldn’t golf.

Dave was diagnosed with a serious case of tennis elbow, or lateral epicondylitis. He did a bunch of research and found a really great study about tennis elbow done in England.

The study…

This large study involves 3 groups of people with tennis elbow. Each was given a different remedy:
Group 1: Received a cortisone shot and physical therapy
Group 2: No cortisone shot, but still got physical therapy
Group 3: No treatment at all

The result…
Group 1: Less pain for the first six weeks, more pain after six weeks and were not fully healed for one year.
Group 2: More pain in the first six weeks, less the next 6 weeks, but no full recovery for one year.
Group 3: Had diminishing pain through the entire time and were fully healed after one year.

Conclusion:
The cortisone shot only postponed the pain. The physical therapy did not shorten the healing window. In the end, this very large study found that basically the cortisone was only masking the symptoms and the therapy wasn’t speeding healing up. The bottom line of the study is essentially, tennis elbow sucks and it’s going to take a year to go away.

Research also has it that the cortisone shot may not be the best thing. Because if you have more than one cortisone shot in an area, those ligaments can get brittle and can cause longterm damage.

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Dr. Joe’s treatment….

The process:

1. Dr. Joe’s treatment was for Dave to take it easy for 2 weeks. Then gave him 3 shots of a homeopathic remedy on Dave’s elbow that Dr. Joe made in his own office. This has to do with bringing down inflammation, helping to get rid of scar tissue, help the tissues to heal, and bring circulation to that area.

2. Chiropractic treatment to make sure that the elbow was in good alignment.

3. Acupuncture around the wrist and elbow.

Result:

When Dave start exercising again after two weeks of treatment, it never got badly inflamed again. The pain diminished quickly. The three step natural healing process flat out worked. His elbow was completely healed and symptom free in about 10 weeks total.

Using a combination of physical treatment and the energetic work far exceed the results of what the medical based community would expect.

Who’s Paying for the Study?

1. Whoever is paying for the study is the one who determines what the study outcome is going to be.

The researchers know what the desired outcome is, they are paid to do the research, and it can be difficult to overcome biases even when you have the best of intentions.

In addition, if the result isn’t what the company wants, they simply do not publish the study. The get more studies done until they get one that validates their pre-existing belief about their product.

Good studies are submitted to peer review.

There are many experts out there that need to agree on the way the study was conducted and validate the study and it’s claims.

Even if the study is large it can be popularly misunderstood though.

The best example is from a documentary called forks over knives. That study was well conducted. After watching that show you’re absolutely convinced you should never eat a piece of meat again in your life.

The problem is that people who are interpreting it had their own agenda. They wanted to convince people that meat consumption is a major cause of cancer. But this study, although large, was conducted on a specific group of people that have their own genetics, dietary habits, and social factors that may be much different than other people on the planet.

Dr. Renea Thomas, who’s an MD and a researcher in Loma Linda, California, one of the blue zones. One of the things she pointed out is that what her and other researchers like to look for is, ‘has the study been replicated and do the replicated studies show the same thing?

If a study is very large, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accurate unless it’s replicated multiple times. So that’s one of the things we can use to determine whether the studies are actually relevant.

And according to her, we’re making great progress in this arena and we’re going to have more credible studies that are going to actually help us and show us how we can improve our health because they back each other up. So removing the biases of the people who are telling us about the study is the bottom line.

Problem: The Study Was Not Done On You.

The fact is most of these studies are done on other people.

For example, Japanese people a different gut microbiome than Russians or Americans. We need to know on what population was the study done. Because they have different genetics, different lifestyles,  different social patterns, different stressors, they work different amounts of hours, they have different family situations, they have different religious beliefs, and so on.

Each of us has a different body type and those are broken down into endomorph, ectomorph and mesomorph. And those different body types all respond very differently to different types of exercise and different types of nutrition. And so in the end, the only reason these studies are of interest to any of us is if they actually apply to us and we’ll make our own lives different.

Just like with nutritional supplements, what works on somebody else may not work on you. In a perfect world you would get a nutritional blood panel to find out your deficiencies, and simultaneously improve your diet and take the right supplements to fill in the deficiencies that are unique to YOU.

Then, give it at least three months to see if it’s going work out for you or not. And we need to be willing to experiment and to be patient with ourselves. 

Another Problem with Studies: Overreach.

Researchers are human. This is their work. They’ve got grants of millions of dollars in many cases, and they’re deeply invested. They’ve come up with some great research and they want the world to know.

One example would be the major study on multivitamins done a few years ago, apparently “proving” that multivitamins have no benefit.

The analysis involve 450,000 people. They concluded that all multivitamins are ineffective. This is where the overreach is huge.

I find multiple problems with this study.

#1 The study was conducted largely on people 65 and older. Another large group that was tested were heart attack survivors.

The problem is people who have suffered a heart attack are already at a low level of health and so it’s less likely that they would respond as well to a new healthy habit as would a healthy population.

Which Multivitamin Did they Study?

If the multivitamin they tested is a little white tablet that has 50 ingredients, I can promise you that will not work. There’s a major problem with simple size of the pill and amounts of the vitamins. Our Mimi’s Miracle Multi only contains 12 ingredients and takes three fairly large capsules to give you what you need in the correct daily doses of just those 12 elements, so a tiny white capsule that has 50 vitamins is immediately suspect, and that’s what we think they studied in this big study. We don’t know because they won’t answer our questions about exactly which vitamin they studied.

So, if they would have stated something like, “We tested Brand X Multivitamin on a whole lot of elderly people and people who had survived heart attacks, and it just didn’t help them!” We could live with that. But when they study an unknown multivitamin on a suspect demographic group, then pronounce “We studied “multivitamins” and “they don’t work,” that can be considered a huge over-reach.

Also, there’s multiple problems with combining multiple vitamins. The whole point of a multi can be destroyed. For example, if you combine Magnesium with Zinc, they will effectively cancel each other out. You can’t take your magnesium at the same time as zinc.

Our Mimi’s Miracle Multi is designed to overcome some of the difficulties with a low quality multi. It only gives you those things you’re likely deficient in. Having your own blood tested can determine your levels of vitamin D, Zinc, Chromium, etc, and see exactly where you’re at. Take a multi for 90 days and have another test. And that test is more important than any 450,000 person test out there. Because the test I just described is done on yourself.

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What really matters at the end of the day….

There 2 types of people: Those with lots of answers and few questions, and those with lots of questions and few answers. They seem to really have it all figured out. And for those of us who are really interested in our own health, at the end of the day, what we really want to know is how do we cure ourselves from illness and injury the best possible way and the fastest possible timeline. 

We want to remain strong, flexible, and as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

Be your own personal best health experiment. Get your own nutritional blood panel to determine what you’re deficient in. Learn what works for you and what doesn’t.

Not all studies and researchers are these horrible people out there. No, there’s a lot of good research. There’s a lot of good studies that have been put together really well and they’re showing us some really good information. So don’t throw studies away, but just be careful when you see a study. Your first response should be to look into it and see what kind of study it is.

At the end of the day we really need to be better at asking more questions. Doing decent research, holding a healthy skepticism about what “they” say, and being our own best science experiment.

About Dr. Kepo’o:

website: www.ohanachiropractor.com
email: ohanachiro@gmail.com

Dr. Kepo’os related certifications…

1. N.A.E.T, or Nambudripad’s Allergy Elimination Techniques. It’s a technique where you can help take care of allergies using energy balancing, testing and treatment procedures.
2. Eergetic medicine technique that you use to help with releasing emotions for people, helping to balance out the energetic system of people.
3. Certification for acupuncture. It is another energy modally but has a physical component to it.
4. A certification with the amen clinic that’s focused on brain balance and brain health.

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