Positive Health Online

Deepak Chopra enunciates the self-evident yet profound truth (see interview page 27), that every diet works for some people, but that no diet works for everyone, since we are all uniquely individual.

How many of us have found this out the hard way, trying out the many myriads of raw food, cooked food, living food and other diets which may have worked for our friends but perhaps not produced the desired result in ourselves?

Indeed, twenty years ago, I was highly impressionable and enthusastic about trying out and adopting a wide variety of holistic and complementary approaches – macrobiotics, chiropractic, NLP, rolfing, rebalancing, acupuncture, encounter therapy, DMA, co-counselling, vipassana meditation – just to name a few.

Over the years, I have become much more selective and critical about which therapies, practitioners, supplements and products I choose. I scrutinise practitioners more closely, ask about their professional training, years of experience, commercial affiliations, and try to discover whether they embody what they espouse.

I am also more careful to verify claims regarding the quality of nutritional and other products. This may be difficult to do, for in the absence of complex and expensive biochemical laboratory equipment, how is one to really distinguish the pure from the adulterated? In this issue of Positive Health,  the features about water and fish oils  address some of the issues regarding quality, purity and stability.

The development of universally recognised training standards, and the routine testing by independent laboratories, of nutritional and other health-care products is not yet established, but its quick arrival will be welcomed by all bona fide members of the many professions within the complementary medicine umbrella. Thereafter, it may be easier to be confident that the practitioner is properly qualified, and that the quality of the product is in fact as claimed.

Will Wilson expands upon the inspiring complexity and inter-relatedness of living systems in his article on psychoneuroimmunology (see page 9). Speaking about the need for science and medicine to break free from the tunnel vision in which much of research is currently strait-jacketed, he argues the need for a paradigm shift in medicine.

The incredibly critical attitude of many researchers is typically illustrated in one of the research updates (see page 47) in which Lynch et al from Boston University School of Medicine present a comprehensive review (165 references) regarding the role of vitamin C in the prevention of atherosclerosis.

Having verified that there exists a large body of reliable evidence attesting that vitamin C can retard the progression of atherosclerosis, they then proceed to savage the design of animal models used to date, and propose large placebo-controlled, double-blind randomised trials of vitamin C supplementation in populations with a wide range of vitamin C body levels, trials for which there are no plans. Despite the obvious imperfections in the design of all the research they cite, the authors still manage to propose at least 4 possible mechanisms whereby vitamin C may contribute to the reduction of cardiovascular diseases.

On a much more positive note, highly encouraging experimental evidence (Lai et al, page 46) has been published showing that eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) actually induces apoptosis (suicide) in pancreatic cancer cells and that vitamin A prevents the progression of leukoplakia – precancerous oral and laryngial cells (Issing et al, page 46).

There is always a need to continue with research and then to integrate the research findings into clinical practice in a holistic way, as mentioned by Deepak Chopra, and already in existence at several UK centres where conventional and complementary medicine join together in the best interests of the patient.

We warmly welcome to Positive Health Dr Sheldon Litt who will be presenting a regular column The Psychologist’s Corner. Dr Litt’s common sense debunking of the “psychologist’s fallacy” is enlightening, entertaining and quite a breath of fresh air (see page 14).