A wise medical doctor explained this to me: He said that when a patient comes to his office, they are coming to seek out his help. His education and knowledge doesn't encompass all the different foods and supplements on the market. Patients can go to health food stores and to other sources for free for that information. He said that if he were to charge a patient for telling them to go home and eat helathy, take a good multipvitamin and excercise, they'd accusme him of theft or at best , being a snake oil salesman. He was correct! A doctor can tell his patients to stop smoking, eat right, exercise and even help them by giving them aides to help them. But this is all information that we actually know and that we can reinforce for free almost anywhere. A medical doctor should be accessed only AFTER we have exhausted other alternatives unless it is something of serious proportions, like a lump in the breast. To expect medical doctors to also be alternative medicine doctors or nutritionists is wrong. Criticizing them because they are not all things health related is ignorance on our part. They go to school for many years and then intern, and they still only receive a short course on pharmacology. Your pharmacist is a good source for detailed information on medicine. And any pharmacist will tell you that there is no way to know all things about all drugs, have you seen a PDR (Physician's Desk Reference)" Yet, many expect their doctors to know everything about everything medically related.
Live Your Best Life Ever!
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
Northrup: But your intellect doesn't know it. This is the important part. It's not—you're not causing this deliberately ... It's your soul bringing it to your attention.
Oprah: Right. It's your soul trying to speak to you.
An interesting theory—but is there anyone who believes that what Oprah suffers from is an inability to express herself? She didn't make it clear on the show what form of the disease she had, or what her doctors believed brought it on. She shared with her audience that she took thyroid medication and spent a month relaxing in Hawaii, where she ate fresh foods and drank soy milk. Northrup advises that in addition to conventional thyroid medication, women should consider taking iodine supplements.
That is just what they shouldn't do, says Dr. David Cooper, a professor of endocrinology at Johns Hopkins medical school who specializes in thyroid disease. "She is mixing truth with fantasy here," he says. First, "thyroid disease has nothing to do with women being downtrodden. She makes it sound like these women brought it on themselves." Cooper agrees that thyroid patients should seek thyroid hormone treatment to bring the symptoms under control. But, he says, Oprah should have stayed clear of soy milk. "If you're hypothyroid and you're taking thyroid medication, you do not want to be taking soy. It will block your body's ability to absorb the medication."
Iodine, he says, can be even riskier. "[Northrup] says iodine deficiency is more common in women, when in reality it's not very common in women at all. This is a myth." The thyroid gland, he says, is extremely sensitive to iodine. "If you have mild hypothyroidism, taking iodine will make it worse."
"The problem is that this all has the aura of being scientific when a lot of it is wrong, or not proven or just utter hogwash," Cooper says. "No wonder it sounds very credible to the patients, and in my opinion, that's even worse. If it was all complete rubbish, people would be more likely to see it for what it really is."
All this dreary talk of measles and cancer and thyroids. Wouldn't you rather "Stop the Clock on Aging!" Hear about "The Latest Age-Defying Breakthroughs!" Get the skinny on the miracle "Lunchtime Face-Lift Which Means No Cutting and No Down Time!" These are all teaser lines Oprah has recited on her show. Oprah hasn't had plastic surgery herself, and she has aired the cautionary tales of desperate, youth-obsessed women who ruined their faces with too many procedures. Yet she seems fascinated with the subject and has been among the first to promote the newest treatments. In 2004, Oprah debuted a new "groundbreaking" procedure on the show called a thread lift. Her guest, dermatologist Karyn Grossman, called it "pretty much as close as you can get to a face-lift without actually cutting."
Oprah liked the sound of that. "Well, let's see what this is, y'all!" she told the audience. She played a video of Grossman performing the procedure on a 61-year-old woman named Sandy. Grossman poked multiple holes on each side of Sandy's face near her ears, eyes and cheekbones, then pulled through thin threads under the skin. The threads caught in her flesh, hoisting her tissue up and back. "Threads are tied off," Oprah enthused, "and a one-hour lunch-break lift."
Sandy was in the audience to show off the results. Oprah flashed the "before" picture, what appeared to be a no-makeup shot under harsh lighting. She looked like a 61-year-old woman with no makeup. Then, the big reveal. Sandy emerged under the warm studio bulbs, her face heavily pancaked with makeup. She looked like a 61-year-old woman heavily pancaked with makeup. It was difficult to tell if there was any difference. But Sandy pronounced herself pleased with the results, and the audience burst into applause.
Oprah said almost nothing about possible risks. "It is a relatively painless procedure, I'm told," she said. "Scarring is minimal, and recovery time is measured in days instead of weeks." Yet according to Plastic Surgery Practice, an industry magazine, some doctors reported that "over time, the suture tends to act like a 'cheese wire'," cutting through delicate facial tissue. Some patients who underwent another version of the procedure, which used barbed threads, experienced bunching of the skin, dimples and scars. Others complained the left and right sides of their faces no longer matched up due to "migration of the sutures." One of the most common complaints, though, was that they couldn't see any improvement at all.
Discuss