Western & Eastern medicine

PLEASE – donate $1 to $10 on Alison’s PayPal button at right to help with her ongoing medical bills which are growing. As her Mom I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I started this blog because I had this intuitive feeling that either tick-borne or mosquito-born illnesses may be the underlying cause for some of today’s mysterious and chronic illnesses. When Alison was diagnosed with Sarcoidosis I spent hours researching medical sites on the Internet and reading posts on support group forums for Lyme, Sarcoid, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue.

First let me say that I am not a doctor or nurse. I was a practicing massage therapist so I do have limited medical training.

A couple of things really stood out in my mind after all that reading. One was that there seemed to be a marked difference between the allopathic-based medical sites and what I was reading on the support group forums. Case in point, on the Mayo Clinic site they say that up to 80% of sarcoid patients go into remission with minimal or no treatment. Yet what I saw on the numerous forums was a large number of people who had simply given up going to their medical doctor because they were not getting better and the treatment had so many side effects. (The current treatment is to try ibuprofen, if that doesn’t help then try Prednisone, if that doesn’t work or after the course of Prednisone start immune-suppressing chemotherapy drugs in small doses such as Methotrexate.)

Now don’t get me wrong – I am not against Western medicine. But I do question why it makes sense to suppress an immune system that is already stressed and going haywire. Doesn’t it make more sense to find the underlying cause for the dysfunction and address that? This is the approach of Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, and indigenous people around the world. The help that I am receiving for Chronic Lyme and co-infections is a combination of antibiotic therapy, specific supplements and herbs. The supplements and herbs both deal with the underlying causes and support my body as it goes through long-term antibiotic therapy to kill the organisms.

My intuitive side tells me that Western medicine is often connected to an underlying belief that we can conquer nature, whereas Eastern medicine believes humans are part of nature and that we should look to nature to restore balance and heal. The other aspect of Western medicine is its altering natural substances so that the new “drug” can be patented. I want to put stuff in my body that it can recognize and use.