Preface
The human body is designed to heal itself. In fact, it is so good at repairing itself that people usually only recognize a health problem as a medical condition if the body isn’t able to recover on its own. The common cold, for example, is something that the immune system can easily handle. We consider it a normal part of life and not a real medical concern. At the other extreme, there are illnesses that cause permanent damage to the body: for example, strokes cause paralysis and Type I diabetes destroys the pancreas. These are conditions from which the body rarely ever recovers. There are still other conditions that are too severe for the body to overcome on its own, yet not so severe as to have caused permanent damage. In this middle ground, we find reversible illnesses.
Restorative medicine is the art and science that can help the body overcome such illnesses. It can often help people recover from a variety of ‘incurable’ diseases. This is accomplished simply by assisting or recalibrating the body’s built-in mechanisms, rather than circumventing them.
For example, imagine that while driving down the road you accidentally bumped your gearshift into a lower gear. Immediately, your car would slow down and the engine would sound louder and make a high-pitched sound. To correct the problem, would you put in earplugs to avoid the annoying sound and press harder on the gas to make up for the reduced speed? Or would you help by shifting your car back into the right gear? Stepping on the gas would only make the sound louder. You’d need stronger earplugs; you would also be putting more of strain on your engine. These are side effects of a strategy that would only create more problems for your car. However, helping the car back into gear would cause the speed and sound of your car to return to normal. Your engine would last longer, you’d get better gas mileage, and you’d get many other unforeseen benefits (more time to enjoy life and less time in the car repair shop, to name two). These are side benefits of a strategy that is actually restoring the function of your car to normal.
Restoring health is also fundamentally different than treating symptoms — as so many doctors have been trained to do. Let’s say you have a splinter that is causing you a lot of pain. You could take a pain pill and cover the splinter with a bandage. However, when the pill wears off, you would probably still have the splinter, and over time it might get infected.
However, you could get a pair of tweezers and pull the splinter right out. You could wash it with an antiseptic, keep a bandage on it, and you’d be fine. If the splinter is buried more deeply, you might need to get a needle and try to poke through the skin to get the splinter out. Every time you hit the splinter with the needle, you might feel the exact same splinter pain you’ve been having — it might even be worse for a flash. That’s because you are touching the exact problem, the splinter. But once it’s out, it’s out.
When doctors don’t touch the problem and just treat the symptoms, they have very little chance of making the symptoms worse — but little chance of correcting the problem. In restorative medicine, when a treatment touches the exact problem a patient is having, it can temporarily worsen the exact symptoms the patient is complaining about. Nevertheless, the symptoms can then improve and disappear completely and permanently. Usually, the symptoms don’t get worse before they get better, but in more severe cases, the symptoms can sometimes worsen before improvement is noticed.
The human body is very complex and has a lot of inertia. Inertia is the momentum that keeps the body doing what it is already doing. As a result, it takes outside forces, such as poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, excess stress and other factors, to make a healthy body sick. Likewise it often takes time, effort, energy, and resources to make a sick body healthy. This effort and energy may take the form of watching what we eat, removing stress from our lives, and taking the time to exercise. Or we might need to buy the medicines and substances we need to get better, and then take them as we are instructed to do.
The endocrine system has many more facets than what we are taught about in medical school. Treating sick patients symptomatically often does not address the complications of this delicate system.
Denis Wilson, MD
Founder of Wilson’s Temperature Syndrome
