symptomology

Excerpt from Never Be Sick Again by Raymond Francis:

Our society’s current understanding of disease is based on the concept of symptomology. Symptomology is about focusing on, identifying and categorizing symptoms—in other words, the effects produced by disease. In this manner, doctors supposedly can differentiate one disease from another. Because the entirety of modern medicine and everything we have ever learned about disease is based on symptomology, the concept of only one disease may seem unacceptably simplistic. Actually the symptomology concept is the flawed one.

Symptomology is based on a fundamental misconception, one held by virtually all medical establishments in Western society. The misconception is that thousands of different diseases exist, each with different symptoms, causes and treatments. This misconception stems from the many different ways that cells can malfunction, and therefore the thousands of different symptoms that can be produced. The modern medical treatment of almost all disease focuses on the management of these symptoms (the effects of disease), rather than eliminating the causes, which are deficiency and toxicity. People are told to take insulin to manage their blood sugar rather than eliminating their diabetes, or to take diuretics to treat their hypertension rather than normalizing their blood pressure. They are told to have a bypass operation rather than reversing their heart disease or to undergo chemotherapy rather than healing their cancer.

Diagnosis by symptoms is the process by which modern medicine gives each collection of symptoms a particular name. Medicine views symptoms as enemies, and physicians are trained to eliminate them, even if that means aggressively assaulting the body with dangerous toxins, radiation or invasive surgery. Symptomology leads the medical profession to look at symptoms individually, organize them into thousands of categories, label them as different diseases and then prescribe a currently accepted protocol to suppress those symptoms. This approach adds needless complexity, creates massive confusion and results in an inability to deal with disease in a meaningful way.

In truth, each collection of symptoms—each specific “disease”—is just a different expression of malfunctioning cells. However, with all of our different types of cells, and all of the different ways in which each cell can malfunction, the number of possible combinations of symptoms becomes vast. In other words, when cells malfunction, we may feel sick in many different ways.

our bones impact insulin sensitivity

In 2007, groundbreaking research shocked the scientific community by revealing that our skeleton, via the vitamin K2–dependent protein osteocalcin, has a significant impact on our body's production and sensitivity to insulin. With that radical discovery, our perception of the skeleton makes a quantum leap from it being an inert scaffolding to it being a dynamic endocrine gland. Writing in the prestigious journal Cell, researchers explained that osteocalcin, produced within our bones, has the capacity to improve the body's glucose tolerance. And that makes vitamin K2 critical for preventing an illness of epidemic proportions: insulin-resistant diabetes.

• Lee NK, Sowa H, Hinoi E, et al. Endocrine regulation of energy metabolism by the skeleton. Cell 2007, 130(3): 456–69.)