Yes, we've been told to have a physical exam every year. But one thing we have to keep in mind is that the medical industry is a business just like any other, and the suggestion that we need a physical every year comes down to basic advertising.

Don't get me wrong, physical exams can be beneficial if used properly, i.e., catching a potentially harmful disease early. But the majority of the time, this is not the case.

As I mentioned before, medicine is a business, a BIG business, and a physical examination is a part of the promotional effort that benefits quite a few medical professionals including: doctors, nurses, hospitals, clinics, medical equipment manufacturers, surgeons and drug companies. The problem lies, not in the physical exam itself, but in the results that accompany them.

How often do you hear on radio and TV or read in newspapers, journals and magazines about people who were either misdiagnosed or tested positive for certain diseases or ailments that they didn't actually have? I personally have seen hundreds of people, in my practice and personal life, who have been diagnosed with some condition and set up on a treatment plan that seriously affected their health and in some cases actually led to their death.

When someone is given a vague or even specific diagnosis, what generally follows is a road-trip to several different types of doctors, further testing which can be progressively more aggressive and invasive and typically results in the prescribing of several different medications, possible surgery and a lifetime of follow-up treatment.

Some years back I had a patient who was complaining of slight abdominal pain and nausea. This particular patient was fairly new to alternative treatments and had grown up relying on medicine and MD's most of her life. My own diagnosis, after a 5 minute history and spinal check, was that she was simply having some intestinal distress due to vertebral misalignment and some pretty awful dietary habits. However, before we could really sit down and discuss lifestyle changes and conservative chiropractic treatment, she decided to go have a physical exam by an MD. As you can already guess, it was a BIG MISTAKE that may have cost her her life!To make a long story short, she wound up being diagnosed with gallstones, had her gallbladder removed, was put on various medications and wound up with heart disease.

You may be asking how her developing heart disease is related to having her gallbladder removed. Contrary to what many MD's tell their patients, we do in fact need our gallbladders. While we certainly can live without them, they serve a very important purpose and there are quite a few alternatives to having one's gallbladder completely removed anyway. The gallbladder stores the bile which is produced by the liver. The purpose of bile is to emulsify, that is, break down dietary fat into extremely small particles that are then easily absorbed and digested by the body. When fat is NOT broken down into the proper size to be assimilated by the body, the fat tends to travel through the blood stream in globs that are bigger and are much more prone to clog up an artery or two or three. This is most likely the case with my patient and all due to a "harmless" physical examination. Here's a little history to go along with this story: The most famous example I can think of regarding gallbladder removal and heart disease was Lyndon Johnson, former president of the United States. He died of heart disease just a few years after having his gallbladder removed.

Note: If you've had your gallbladder removed, it doesn't necessarily mean heart disease is inevitable, but it is very important that fat consumption is regulated. Amazingly, I don't know of one person whose surgeon told them to cut down on the saturated fats after having this particular surgery! If anyone would like further dietary recommendations, please write me and I'll be happy to discuss what you should and should not be eating. More...

The real danger here is lack of information and undue trust and reliance on the medical profession. We have literally been brainwashed by the AMA according to Robert Mendelson M.D.

What can you do? It's up to us to take responsibility for our health as much as we can. Stay informed. Unless you have a reason for concern, it's probably not necessary to have a physical every year. If a doctor tells you you have a particular disease, don't immediately accept the diagnosis. Get several opinions, then begin to study everything you can about health and disease to see what alternative testing and treatments there are. Every time your body undergoes some form of invasive examination or treatment, it suffers and many times can be damaged irreversibly.

The results are the same with cancer screenings - According to cancer expert and medical professor Guy Faguet, MD: "Three decades later, the process of anticancer drug development remains mostly anchored on century-old, conceptually antiquated, technically inefficient, labor-intensive, costly, and low-yield 'hit and miss' (mostly miss) screening approaches engineered and sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI)."

A word about prescriptions: Please remember that prescription medications taken for long periods of time can lead to symptoms that will lead to another diagnosis and more testing and more medications...it can be an unending vicious cycle. Not recognizing the side effects of drugs is one of the biggest problems in medicine and has led to literally thousands of deaths per year in this country alone. General medicine has changed very little in the last 50 years. True, surgical techniques have improved, but the same medications under different names with the same detrimental side-effects are still being prescribed and consumed by the millions.

One final thought about medicines. Over 100 million prescriptions are written each year for reasons that have little or no scientific basis. This is called "off-label prescribing" - using a drug for a condition for which it has not been tested or validated. A study released in the Archives of Internal Medicine, stated that one in seven prescriptions are written without any solid medical evidence that they work or are safe for the particular conditions. Health and medical officials can never admit to being wrong - "errors never admitted become errors forever compounded". Perhaps the most serious problem facing medicine is denial. Even when objective science points out errors in medicine, it is simply rejected. Please be careful!

Thank you again for your time this month.

Yours in health,

Dr. Mike