How to Make Disease Disappear PDF
Preview How to Make Disease Disappear
Dedication For my dad, you have influenced me in more ways than you ever knew. I wish you were still here. Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Introduction How to Use This Book Relax 1. Me-Time Every Day 2. The Screen-Free Sabbath 3. Keep a Gratitude Journal 4. Practice Stillness Daily 5. Reclaim Your Dining Table Eat 1. De-Normalize Sugar 2. A New Definition of “Five a Day” 3. Introduce Daily Micro-Fasts 4. Drink More Water 5. Unprocess Your Diet Move 1. Walk More 2. Become Stronger 3. Begin Regular High-Intensity Interval Training 4. Movement Snacking 5. Wake Up Your Sleepy Glutes Sleep 1. Create an Environment of Absolute Darkness 2. Embrace Morning Light 3. Create a Bedtime Routine 4. Manage Your Commotion 5. Enjoy Your Caffeine Before Noon Finding Your Balance Sources and Further Reading Acknowledgments For Your Notes Index About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Introduction We are sick and getting sicker. In the United States today, a new generation of children has been born that has a lower life expectancy than the generation before it. This is shocking and extraordinary. To understand why it’s happening, we first have to grasp the terrible epidemic of chronic disease that’s currently laying waste to millions. Chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression and dementia are today the nation’s leading causes of death and disability. Half of all American adults currently suffer from a chronic disease, with one in four people suffering from two or more. Chronic disease is, by a wide margin, now the deadliest problem facing America. Despite the statistics and the suffering, so much confusion exists about what we can do in our own lives to protect ourselves and live long, healthy lives. I have seen this firsthand as I have lived and worked with many families. The good news is that I can make these diseases disappear. That’s right. This probably sounds like an extraordinary claim, but the reason I can make them disappear is that they’re an illusion. These diseases are not the inevitable result of aging. They are not simply our genetic fate or our destiny. We do not have to suffer needlessly. The truth is these diseases don’t really exist, at least not in the way we think they do. To come to this conclusion, I first had to travel down a long, hard road. Seventeen years ago, I graduated from medical school full of enthusiasm and passion, ready to go out and help people. But I always felt there was something missing. I started off as a specialist and then became a generalist, as an MD, but I always had this nagging sense that I was just managing disease or simply suppressing people’s symptoms. And then on December 28, 2010, a turning point came. That was the day my son nearly died. Photography copyright © 2018 by Susan Bell I was on a skiing vacation with my family in the stunning snowy landscape of Chamonix, France. My son had been a little phlegmy and quiet all day, but I wasn’t too worried. It was just a cold and I felt sure it would pass without issue. That evening my wife, Vidh, sat on the sofa watching TV while I was in the kitchen. I was watching the kettle, waiting for the water to boil, when I heard her shout: “Rangan! He’s not moving!” I rushed in. “He must be choking!” I said. “It’s the phlegm.” I lifted him out of Vidh’s arms, turned him over and slapped him over the back in an attempt to clear his airway. But nothing happened. “Rangan, he’s not choking,” said Vidh. “We need to go to the hospital.” My son’s arms were stretched out, his body was rigid, his eyes stared vacantly. After a panicked rush down a snowy road that almost ended in my turning the car over, we found ourselves standing in the resuscitation room of the emergency room of the tiny Les Hôpitaux du Pays du Mont-Blanc. As I watched the doctors take his temperature and try to get an intravenous line into his neck, I ran through the possibilities of what might be wrong with him. Was it epilepsy? Was it something more serious? I couldn’t think. I felt numb. The truth was, I didn’t have a clue. In that moment, I was no longer the doctor with nearly ten years’ experience who’d graduated from the prestigious University of Edinburgh’s medical school. I was a terrified dad. Five long, agonizing hours later, the doctor came in to see us, waiting by our son’s bed. “Dr. Chatterjee, we have an update,” he said. “What is it?” I asked. “Dr. Chatterjee, your son’s calcium levels are very low. In fact, he has almost no calcium in his body at all. He experienced a hypocalcemic convulsion. We’re going to give him some intravenous calcium.” My reaction was utter confusion. How had this happened? What did it mean? But my confusion in that moment was nothing compared with the shock I felt when I did finally discover the root cause of what happened. It was an entirely preventable vitamin D deficiency. This was as unbelievable as it was serious. Untreated—especially in children—vitamin D deficiency can lead to painful and permanent damage including deformities to the bones, a condition known as rickets. I was devastated. And I swore that I would never allow anything like it to happen again. The crisis of my son’s illness forced me to ask some honest and uncomfortable questions. Why had I not been made sufficiently aware of vitamin and other nutritional deficiencies during my supposedly top-of-the-line medical training? And why wasn’t that training proving more effective in my practice? As an MD, my days were filled with seeing patients with chronic conditions such as joint pain, headaches, type 2 diabetes, insomnia, depression, weight gain and fatigue. I hated to admit it, but the fact was, I reckoned I was helping maybe 20 percent of these people. The approach to consultations I’d been taught in medical school simply wasn’t working. And if my medical training was failing me so badly for so many of my patients, what else could I do but embark on my own course of re-education? And so began an incredible journey through many new worlds of knowledge that, I’m sad to say, the majority of doctors still have relatively little idea about. I immersed myself in research, especially around nutrition, movement science, stress reduction, ancestral health and functional medicine. I also came across research that allowed me to see afresh what I’d learned while completing my BSc honors degree in immunology, gaining valuable insight into the rapidly developing field of gut health and the microbiome. I started applying the science, first with my family and then with my patients. Do you know what happened? People started getting better—really better. I’d finally learned to resolve the root cause of their problems, rather than simply suppressing their symptoms. What I’d learned, in a way that I hadn’t fully grasped before, was that acute disease and chronic disease are entirely different things. Acute disease is something that, as doctors, we’re pretty good at. It’s relatively simple. You have something like pneumonia, a severe lung infection—so in your lung you have the overgrowth of some bugs, typically a type of bacteria. We identify the bacteria and we give you a treatment, typically an antibiotic that kills it. The bacteria die and, hey presto, you no longer have your pneumonia. The problem is, we apply that same thinking to chronic disease, and it simply doesn’t work. Chronic disease doesn’t just happen like this. Chronic disease has many different causes. You don’t just wake up some day suffering from one; by the time we give you the diagnosis, things have already been going wrong for a long, long time.
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