Hormone replacement therapy enhances well-being. Omitting hormone replacement when symptoms and findings indicate deficiency will prevent optimal recovery. However, hormone replacement alone may not be sufficient. Improving health is a comprehensive undertaking.
Health is plastic. It is modifiable, and in many people exquisitely susceptible to minor changes in lifestyle. Most of the patients who come to our office want alternative approaches to drugs and surgery, want to stop taking certain drugs because those drugs are making them sick, or want to avoid taking drugs because they have seen what those drugs have done to people they know.
It is better to avoid breaking a hip by increasing bone density with nutrients and hormones, and following a program to improve balance and strength so falls do not occur, than to have a non-healing hip replacement, or wound infection, or blood clots in the leg.
Heart disease is preventable, and reversible even after symptoms appear. Many patients have stated that they consider pharmaceuticals to be like band-aids, treating only the symptoms but not the cause of disease. There is a saying that drugs are toxins with sometimes beneficial side effects. Sometimes the treatment becomes worse than the disease, and patients do not feel they can tolerate the treatments they are given.
Nutritional status almost always comes into play. The modern American diet is so deficient in nutrients, so overladen with calories and toxins, that alterations in food choices commonly lead to improvement, sometimes in days but usually within weeks. Dietary changes affect the course of auto-immune diseases, high blood pressure, heart disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, arthritis, and a host of neurologic conditions, particularly those involving children. It is safe to say there is probably no medical condition that cannot be improved by changing food choices.
The competence of an integrative medical practitioner relates to his/her ability to offer effective alternatives to conventional evaluation and therapy, and to properly judge when, and which, conventional approaches are necessary.
We cannot leave anything out. We must apply what we know, and learn what we do not know.