Limitations of Medical Practice

I continue to champion the idea of delayed pattern food allergy as the cause of common dysfunction and disease. I join an illustrious group of physicians who have recognized this possibility for over 2500 years, starting with Hippocrates in ancient Greece. The problem for patients is that most MDs remain ignorant of this possibility and do not  guide patients toward a solution. Medical care insurers should notice that this oversight leads to expensive prolonged investigations and futile treatments. No-one knows the cost of the oversight, but it must in the hundreds of billions of dollar per year in the USA and Canada alone.

Another problem is that medicine promotes a passive, dependent attitude and patients are discouraged from seeking their own solutions for dysfunction and disease. I promote self-managed health care and believe that intelligent, well motivated people can solve the most prevalent health problems without medical resources.

Human health depends on the proper supply of food, air and water. Infection, injury and toxicity are environmental problems. There is a consensus that smoking, drinking and accidents are important preventable health hazards. The control of infectious disease through improved hygiene and immunization is one of the great health achievements of the 20th century.

The improvement in the diversity and availability of foods has been a mixed blessing with major problems emerging to negate the potential benefits. Food is the most intimate part of the environment because we ingest it. When something goes wrong, it makes good sense to look at the flow of substances through the mouth for the source of the problem. We look not only at the composition of the food but also, and more importantly, at the interaction of the ingested molecules with body. Adverse reactions to food are common and produce many disturbances by a variety of mechanisms. Diagnosing adverse reactions to food is an important task of clinical medicine, despite the fact that it is not currently taught in medical schools.

A steady flow of molecules from the environment enters the body of each individual through the air breathed and the food and liquids ingested. This body-input determines health and disease in whole populations over the long-term and the moment to moment functional capacity of the individual. A person's performance can change dramatically with changes in this molecular stream. The quality and composition of air, food, and water changes continuously. The illusion of food continuity in the supermarket conceals changes in the growth, contamination, storage, spoiling, transportation, and merchandising of food products. To understand environmental reactivity we must deal with changes, variability and inconsistencies, and we must seek adaptive, flexible responses to changing circumstances.

Stephen Gislason MD

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Examples of Illness Patterns caused by food allergy and fixed with diet revision.