The Diagnosis and Treatment of Common Functional Illnesses: 1

This comprehensive book explains in detail the diagnosis and treatment of those numerous suboptimal health problems that generate multiple visits to the surgery and are present in between 20% and 40% of most out-patients and possibly 5% of in-patients too. These are the debilitating, chronic illnesses like cancer, depression, and inflammatory problems that put a disproportionate burden on society and the health services but until now were difficult to pin down and treat. Chronic disease is so pervasive in modern society that you're almost certain to know someone battling a long-term illness. Strangely, the root cause isn't always identified and instead is addressed by working through a series of medications until the symptoms subside, often while the origin of the illness becomes worse behind the symptoms. Understanding the causal factors of illnesses and treating them instead of symptoms is known as curative medicine. This book is written for medical professionals, naturopaths, students and all those wishing to understand the cause of their illness and do something positive about it. There are clear, simple summaries and also detailed reviews to suit all abilities. It marks the culmination of over ten years of research by neuropharmacologist Simon Galloway for SureScreen Life Sciences as part of our research into medical diagnostics. The forty key functional pathways in the book that trigger chronic illness may result in clinical symptoms not immediately obvious to the physician when that pathway becomes deficient or defective. Each functional illness described can be treated by rectifying that pathway with an integrated approach of targeted pharmaceutical drugs and non-prescription remedies. Sections are included on diagnosis, technical explanation, treatment, and a list of laboratories offering screening tests. An extensive bibliography and comprehensive index helps the clinician link a patient s symptoms to its causes. Western medicine was founded on the diagnosis of illness from the observations of symptoms. It developed via trial and error; bleeding the patient, electric shock treatment, providing mercury as a medicine and performing unsophisticated surgery on diseased body parts. Today, drugs only need to be slightly effective before they are adopted as a mainstream treatment result in hugely expensive treatments which may be toxic to others, while the use of lower cost, safer, natural substances, which can not only manage symptoms but also restore physiological function, have been heavily restricted because of controversial regulations like the EU food Supplements Directive. These are real obstacles to improving healthcare. Unfortunately, progress in medicine often fails because of the natural tendency for some practitioners to hold on to methods they were trained in, and the dogmatic atmosphere in which they were taught. To make matters worse, the medical profession often fosters a route of career advancement through specialisation, so that doctors end up being experts in one part of the body without really appreciating how it integrates with, and relies on, the rest of the body in health and disease. There has to be a better way. The present volume then aims to encourage modern medical professionals and practitioners to return to asking simple diagnostic questions and to consider using confirmatory functional laboratory testing and the inclusion of natural medicines before reaching for the prescription pad. Armed with this information the modern practitioner or sufferer can hope to be better at diagnosing conditions, treating them, and more importantly using this knowledge in reverse, to prevent illness.