Choosing Your Alternative, Integrative Doctor: Los Angeles

You may want to include alternatives to your medical doctor's care, to get better results, less side effects, or prevent chronic disease. Naturally, the complementary, integrative, or alternative care experience will be different than the usual experience you have with conventional medical care. It should be a welcome difference. However, you or your spouse might not fully appreciate why there are differences. Let's discuss this idea.

As most people, you might get comfortable with the way you understand conventional medicine's disease management approach and it's medical procedures. For your healthcare, you might get caught in the routine of seeking similar doctors, and repeating the same things you have experienced before. Out of habit, you seek more of the familiar. It's because you are already familiar with the way you get examined, tested and treated by medical doctors, and the type of beliefs and philosophy the doctors have.

You're interested in alternative medicine because you know that something is missing from your conventional medical disease-care. Maybe you realize their same itemmethods of early detection are not enough to help with your higher goals. So, you seek complementary care with an alternative doctor who has the ability to see things differently than just another MD.

You may have held back from going to a new kind of doctor because your initial idea was that you might find another medical doctor who would use some natural medicines (unlike your current doctors) even though he/she is schooled under the same institutional banner, and practices largely the same as other medical doctors. But really, you only felt like choosing "more of the same" with a similar medical doctor because the familiar presents no risk to you, and what's familiar feels safe.

Would You Go to a Different Doctor to get the Same Types of Tests? But You Already Had Those Kinds of Tests.

Holistic, or not really? If a doctor says he/she is "holistic" but his/her philosophy and beliefs are the same as all other medical doctors—that your body is incapable of regulating on its own, and needs drugs disease-care drugto help—then you will only be getting more of the same treatment.

If your potential new doctor prescribes drugs, then you know his or her beliefs about your body are no different than any other medical doctor you may see. The underlying belief is your body is incapable of healing and repairing without drugs, surgery or radiation therapy. That's a false medical belief system, not science. Must you believe that too?

Medicine is not a perfect science. More of the same just won't work.

A Fundamental Medical Belief System

Here is the key point: the choice to use any over-the-counter drugs or prescription drugs in medical practice indicates the doctor's fundamental belief system: a belief that your body is wholly incapable of helping itself without these substances. Why would a doctor prescribe such chemicals without the belief that your body is wholly unable to function without them? Why would he recommend them to other patients if he believed that their body could function without them? The reason a doctor would ever use drugs (especially for for long-term) is due to the doctor's own belief that the human body is incapable of self regulating and self healing without using these substances.

Safe Complementary Care

Don't be fooled into thinking that proper complementary care would act against your current medical plan/road-map. Any licensed practitioner who takes-on the role to manage your complementary integrative care as part of your medical team will do a full history and consultation with you, and be willing to have open communication with any of your medical doctors. Any practitioner who wouldn't be willing to discuss their approach in your complementary care should be avoided.

Don't Ask a Surgeon about Complementary Care/Clinical Nutrition, and Don't Ask a Nutritionist About Surgery

When seeking advice regarding complementary integrative or alternative care, BEWARE! You should never take the advice of someone who never practiced, is not immersed in, and does not fully understand, a complementary, integrative and alternative kind of practice. Without telling you not to listen to your medical doctor on things for which he is not an expert (because of no formal training in alternative, complementary and integrative approaches such as functional medicine, clinical nutrition, or even "muscle testing"), you should understand that a conventional MD knows nothing about the intricacies of alternative and complementary approaches.

Taking unqualified opinions from a non-expert in the science of complementary care and applied kinesiology can be confusing and terribly misleading. You need advice from a different kind of doctor; an alternative doctor. Finding and choosing an integrative chiropractor / alternative doctor who really understands the science of kinesiology, requires breaking away from unqualified opinions.

Does Your Doctor Believe What You Believe?

Here is a different understanding of how your body functions, from an exclusively different philosophy and belief system when compared to the medical "your body is incapable" belief. Since I am an integrative chiropractor, I teach chiropractic principles such as: "your body is a potentially self healing, self regulating organism." You might think: "Sure, but that's not different than a medical doctor's beliefs, because sometimes a person needs to take prescriptions, or over-the-counter medications." However, if you are willing to pause for a minute and take a step away from that ingrained belief, I can show you how it is different... Just for a minute, allow yourself to think that maybe there really is a difference between these beliefs. Either your body is incapable, or your body is potentially self healing and self regulating.

Outside of life-threatening emergencies, if your body has the potential to self repair, heal, and self regulate, then why would you have to use a chemical substance that overrides your body's functions and forces a reaction in your body? You know, that's what drugs do: they force a reaction in your body. Their purpose is narrow and meant to change a symptom, or a number related to a test result, and, in effect, overwhelm your body's current state of equilibrium, to force a change. If your body is truly incapable of helping itself, then of course you would need drugs to force different reactions in your body. If you think that sometimes a person needs a drug to force a reaction in the body because "just at that time" the body is incapable to self regulate, then your philosophy is that the body is incapable. Period. It is either incapable or it is potentially self regulating. It can't be both, and it can't be that the body is just a little incapable, because it only needs one drug.

Chiropractic principles teach the opposite, and hold that the body is a potentially self healing and self regulating organism. But just hold-on a second, put your defenses down for just a moment more to let yourself out of the all-too-familiar, ingrained-belief and philosophy that "drugs are needed." For just a moment more, let this alternative idea have a chance to sink in.

Imagine that your body is truly self healing and self regulating. Just imagine that for a second. Can you see it? Wait... Is something still not right? Is there a problem believing this idea because your body isn't well? You might ask: How can my body be self healing and self regulating if I already have a chronic disease and it is not getting better? Doesn't that prove that the body is incapable and needs a drug?

That is a very important question! Here's why the answer is "no". The key word in this chiropractic principle is "potential." Your body certainly has the potential to be self healing, self repairing and self regulating. Chiropractors call this your body's innate intelligence. However, a chiropractor should also know that if there's something in the way of perfect communication throughout your brain and nervous system—the central controlling system of your whole body—then this natural potential can get diminished (less light, sub-lux-ated). This is the opposite of the medical philosophy that the body is incapable.

Every body will function better with a better functioning nervous system.

Chiropractic principles teach the principle that your body has the potential, no matter how broken down it may be, to self-heal, self-repair, and self-regulate. The only thing that holds it back from its full potential is when some things are in the way of brain-nervous system communications. No drug could ever restore this innate potential of your body. The innate is there, yet there are things that can get in the way. Those things are not caused by diseases. Diseases are the end results of blocked healing potential, they are not the causes. We use chiropractic adjustments, and whole food natural remedies to help unblock your healing potential.

The Opposite of Drugs

The opposite of drugs is whole food: which is the most important thing for your body. Whole food, or whole food supplementation, does not force a reaction in your body. It does not override your body's equilibrium to force a change. Its purpose is broad and meant to nourish your entire body, while promoting health and wellness.

How to choose an Authentic Alternative Doctor

If you choose a doctor who uses foods and clinical nutrition, but not drugs, that's in line with chiropractic principles. Also, you'll need access to chiropractic adjustments for your full, integrative, health empowerment. You just can't get that from anyone but a chiropractor. Integrative medicine means integrating the care of your whole body including spinal care and nourishment, instead of just focusing on one area of your body. Functional medicine means improving your body's functional status, not just looking at hiding disease by stopping symptoms.

When you realize that you want your complementary care to truly be a complement to your body, to help healing happen, instead of just another window-dressing of medicine to cover symptoms, then you will seek the care of an integrative chiropractor who will help you get to the root of why your body is temporarily not self-healing, or self-regulating. Your licensed, holistic practitioner should be able to explain this to you, without blaming it on your end-result disease. Request an appointment below.