The Sixth Path: Rejection of Diagnostic Labels That Tell Us Nothing About the Nature of Suffering, But Hide Much.

    Every day in my clinical practice I see patients who are tortured by meaningless diagnostic labels. Their physicians use those labels to justify the use of symptom-suppressing drugs. Those diagnostic labels reveal nothing about the true cause of their suffering. Yet the patients remain trapped in stress-causing disease modes of thinking.
    I see chronic fatigue sufferers tormented with yet another diagnostic label of neurally-mediated hypotension (NMH). They are prescribed steroids and drugs that affect the heart activity without any regard to the stressors that overdrive the heart. Their allergic triggers go unrecognized and unmanaged. They live on sugar-insulin-adrenaline roller coasters, but such metabolic stressors are never addressed. Their battered bowel ecosystems are further battered with antibiotics—the simmering oxidative coals in their blood continue to damage cell membranes of blood corpuscles and cook enzymes, hormones and proteins just as the white of an egg is cooked when it is boiled. The NMH gurus never bother to ask the simple question: What injures the autonomic receptors of people who suffer from NMH? They contemptuously dismiss the possibility of such injury by environmental pollutants. Or by unmitigated oxidative stress of unrelenting adrenergic overdrive. It is sad because a physician could recognize the underlying cause with a mere drop of patient's blood and some skill with a microscope.
    Disruptions of urinary ecosystems occur as consequences of battered bowel ecosystems—except in uncommon cases of structural obstructive lesions of the bladder and related organs. I see little girls who suffer from repeated urinary infections and young women who are given the label of interstitial cystitis for similar problems. They are given repeated courses of antibiotics that further damage their delicate ecosystems. When that doesn't work—and why would it?—they undergo urethral dilatations in operating rooms. Their pediatricians and urologists completely ignore all issues of antibiotic abuse, food and mold allergy, overgrowth of yeast and disease-causing bacteria in the bowel, and parasitic infestations.
    Hyperactivity and attention deficit disorders are almost always associated with food allergy, mold sensitivity and digestive-absorptive dysfunctions of the bowel. Such individuals crave sugar and suffer wide mood swings caused by sugar-insulin-adrenaline roller coasters. School psychologists are only too eager to provide suitable diagnostic labels and the pediatricians are prompt in dispensing Ritalin, Cylert and dexidrine. Neither the psychologists nor pediatrician seem to have any sense of the nutritional deficits that feed those disorders, nor of the relevant allergic triggers.
    I see patients who are troubled by a cardiologist's diagnosis of mitral valve prolapse, while the real problem is a heart overdriven by sugar-insulin-adrenaline roller coasters. In the chapter, Lions, Hypoglycemia and Insulin Roller Coasters, I describe the true nature of mitral valve prolapse in patients without structural damage to the valve. Training in effective methods of self-regulation is too cumbersome for cardiologists. Why waste time teaching anyone breathing methods to relieve the symptoms when beta blockers can be doled out so conveniently?
    Coronary heart disease is caused by oxidative injury to intima (cells lining the arteries) and connective tissue (collagen and other substances that hold intima cells together as mortar holds bricks). Cholesterol is an innocent bystander molecule in the saga of coronary disease. No one has ever described any mechanisms by which cholesterol—a weak antioxidant—can inflict oxidative injury to vessel walls. But cholesterol cats—the money men of cholesterol industry—are not troubled by such questions. They know there is much money to be made by selling cholesterol-lowering drugs. Predictably such drugs do not work. But, that doesn't matter either. Cholesterol cats have enough money to hire drug doctors and fly them everywhere singing the cholesterol songs of their drug masters. How many people suffer heart disease while worrying about their cholesterol numbers? Cholesterol cats are not interested in that question either.
    I see patients who have been prescribed antianxiety drugs for stress without any attempt to understand the underlying cause. I see patients given drugs for gastritis and irritable bowel syndrome without any consideration to the issues of disrupted gastric and bowel ecology. The list of such symptom-suppressing labels is a long one.
    I see people for whom the diagnostic labels are more tormenting than their violated bowel and gastric ecosystems. The same happens for sufferers of sinusitis, chronic headaches, PMS, chronic fatigue and many other ailments.
    I provide detailed explanations of the energetic-molecular events that create specific stress patterns in various chapters of this volume. I suggest the reader consider a second reading of selected chapters to feel comfortable with the scientific underpinnings of the health-disease (dis-ease) continuum that I address in this book. For this purpose, I recommend the following chapters in my book What Do Lions Know About Stress? 1) Stress and the Fourth-of-July Chemistry; 2) Lions, Hypoglycemia and Insulin Roller Coasters; 3) Adrenergic Hypervigilance, Mitral Valve Prolapse, Dysautonomia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; and 4) Anxiety, Lactic Acid and Limbic Lions.

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