Your whole plant medicine alternative to opioids and other symptom-management drugs includes food concentrates or extracts of foods that knowledgeable doctors can clinically use as herbal medicine.
Can a pill containing a combination of foods be your medicine? Drugs are never food. Food is never a drug, but food in clinical potency can be your medicine. You can let food be thy medicine, just as Hippocrates said. My patients use foods as medicines all the time, but our care is not diet alone! Clinically, we use concentrates of foods and whole herb extracts from plants: full extracts of plant parts, like just the roots. These are not isolates because the full complement of nutritional compounds found in the roots are available in the extract, not just a single aspect.
Our herbal medicines are vegetarian whole-food concentrates or plant medicine, but extracts from whole foods don't always have to be from plants. There are valuable extracts that can come from the animal kingdom too, containing extracts from various tissues found in the animal kingdom. When we do our in-office holistic evaluation for you, we will be able to determine the best natural formulas for your specific needs.
Holistic chiropractors use whole food medicine and whole plant medicine with all the specialized chiropractic testing methods and techniques that make chiropractic doctors unique. When you notice that you are doing better, you won't need to manage your symptoms as much with conventional chemical drugs. Then you could plan to reduce your medicines and even eliminate those medicines. This could be your best path to getting off opioid drugs or medications you were told you would have to take for the rest of your life. So, with your medical doctor's OK, you would be able to reduce your current medications or finally eliminate your chemical medicines!
Clinical nutrition is not about covering a symptom but instead helping your body systems to function more optimally so that your symptoms are reduced. It is very different than going to a doctor or a facility where you just tell the doctor what you want, and the doctor just guesses that you are correct and fills a prescription for you.
What is the process for knowing which natural medicine to prescribe?
When you come to our Beverly Hills office, you get a detailed exam, and only receive the herbal medicine or whole food concentrates you really need, based on our clinical examination. We use a systematic holistic evaluation method that gives us great insight into what your body needs, right now, to help bring you to a higher level of health.
Through your personal health history and this systematic method (plus, with the information we can get from more traditional testing methods like blood tests), we can see the big picture of your health needs, and can construct an effective holistic, chiropractic, clinical nutrition program for you.
Why does alternative medicine work for some but not for others?
Your success depends on how closely you would be willing to follow the alternative medicine practitioner's recommendations and your discipline to follow through. So, not only does it depend on the skills of the alternative doctor, but it also depends on you.
Do you have to "believe" in alternative medicine in order for it to work?
No, but you have to believe in any kind of medicine enough to follow the doctor's directions—the alternative medicine doctor or any kind of doctor; otherwise, it will not work for you, no matter what.
When a patient does not believe that a medicine will work, the patient might not take the medicine as directed, thereby "showing the world" that it doesn't work. This could be the reason why it might not work for you either. Your own actions are the key. The same requirement applies to any system of medicine.