Product Description

A medical doctor reveals the truth about natural health products that work.

James A. Howenstine, MD

Do natural health solutions really exist?

Yes. Nutritious foods, vitamins, minerals, aminoacids, algae and extracts from herbs, plants, flowers, roots, seeds, bushes, trees, fish, mussels and animals have all been proven to have healing properties

If natural health solutions exist for many modern diseases, why don’t the pharmaceutical companies produce them?

Pharmaceutical companies exist to make money. (As all companies do.) One company makes 90% of its profits from only 6 patented and skillfully marketed drugs. They cannot patent natural products, so there is no profit motive to provide these products.

Why don’t more doctors know about natural health solutions?

The medical profession and pharmaceutical companies work together very closely.

We physicians continue our learning by reading medical journals and attending meetings. These are almost always oriented towards pharmaceutical companies and their drugs. The end result is the average physician has almost no awareness of the curative potential of natural treatments.

Why has there been, in some cases, a negative image regarding natural health solutions?

There’s no question there has been some exaggeration and hype by untrained people talking about these issues. However, that doesn’t take away from the effectiveness of natural health solutions, when carefully chosen by skilled professionals.

There seem to be so many natural health products out there, with all sorts of claims about them. It all seems pretty confusing to me.

I have carefully chosen and screened the premier natural health products we recommend and explain how to take them.

They work and I tell you why they work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #274064 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-09
• Released on: 2007-04-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 345 pages

From the Publisher
An important book from a noted medical doctor. Dr. Howenstine describes exactly what natural health products work for specific diseases. A scientifically-trained medical doctor, he "spans" the gap between medical science and natural health products.

From the Author
A Important Message from James A Howentine, MD.

There are in general two kinds of therapies: pharmaceutical drugs and natural treatments.

Pharmaceutical drugs sometimes have unknown side effects which can be severe and only show up years later, after the damage is done. As one such example Baycol, a widely used cholesterol-lowering drug, was recently removed from the market after a number of deaths were linked to it.

This is a problem for some modern day pharmaceutical drugs. Their side effects can be unrecognized until used by large numbers of patients over a period of time.

In other cases, drugs will help solve one problem but create another. This is a dilemma I often faced as a doctor.

Natural treatments are much more in harmony with the body and work with it. In general, natural solutions have far fewer side effects than pharmaceutical drugs.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

My medical education was very conventional. I graduated from Northwestern University Medical School. We had a few lectures abut vitamins but very little information about nutrition. Because of lack of data about good nutrition and the woeful misinformation coming from supposed governmental authorities, many physicians still do not know what constitutes sound nutritional advice.

My mind set after finishing my residency training was that if there was no pharmaceutical drug to cure a disease, nothing helpful could be done. We doctors are often so pharmaceutically oriented that we are unaware that natural health solutions exist.

My choice to become a physician was a wonderful decision. There were no boring days! My patients taught me something new every day. There are fond memories of delightful hours teaching medical students, interns and residents. The challenges of caring for hospitalized patients were real, exciting, and often humbling. The strong friendships we often developed were a treasure to me.

Physicians in primary care (internal medicine, family practice, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology) obtain 70% of the needed information from the interview with the patient and 30% from physical examination.

A male patient over 50 years of age should receive a rectal exam annually. This exam detects polyps and cancer in the rectal area, as well as disclosing enlargement of the prostrate gland and hard areas in the prostrate that may be sites of cancer. Women should have a breast and pelvic exam annually as well. Patients with heart and lung disease should have their hearts and lungs listened to on a regular basis. If your physician does not examine you regularly, consider changing physicians.

There has been an explosion in important medical knowledge in the 1990’s. More and more, individuals are taking responsibility for their own health. These people buy products at local health food stores or on the Internet or mail order that they believe will help keep them healthy or restore health. In a recent year, the value of natural health care products sold in the U.S. was 30 billion dollars, surpassing the 27 billion dollars spent on pharmaceutical products. When a major change like this begins it is probably inexorable.

Physicians learn about advances in medical care from medical journals. Articles published in these journals typically contain very little information about natural health treatments. Additionally, medical journals are to a large extent subsidized by advertisements from pharmaceutical firms. It would take great personal courage to publish an article about a natural therapy that could replace or cut earnings from a drug and thus potentially harm advertising revenue.

When a natural health company has as effective product, they must be careful to downplay any claims about the product, as curative type claims are likely to be followed by closure and the need to spend a huge amount of money for long- term research to prove the product is truly beneficial.

In the August 2, 2001 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine there was a superb review article about Autoimmune Diseases, written by A. David and B. Diamond, MD. In the therapy section of this article there was not a single sentence about the ability of thymic extract combined with vitamins and minerals to arrest rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosis, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. This lack of information about thymic extract was not malicious. There is a nearly total lack of awareness about natural treatments in the conventional medical community.

To prove the efficacy of a therapy usually requires enormous expense (up to two hundred million dollars) to fund long term, double blind studies. This type of funding is not available to an individual practitioner and even if available, there is no guarantee that successful results would be published in a reputable journal because of the clear conflict of interest medical journals face in publishing articles that could hurt pharmaceutical sales and decrease advertising revenue.

Pharmaceutical companies normally sell drugs that have been patented. For this reason they have little interest in natural solutions that cannot be patented. This certainly does not mean that these natural substances have no value. Just look at one example.

At one time in my practice, I had 5 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, which was so serious it could only be controlled with a drug called methotrexate. This drug is used primarily in chemotherapy and over long term usage there is a danger that the user will develop cancer because of injury to the bone marrow. Methotrexate was treating one problem and possibly creating another.

One day, I read about an extract from New Zealand mussels that was effective in rheumatoid arthritis. After trying it for two months, all 5 of my patients were able to stop taking methotrexate.

This experience changed my attitude toward natural health products forever and started me on my search for natural health solutions for our bodies.You will read about a variety of natural health products that work for specific diseases. Some of these treatments are simple and inexpensive. Humans have a psychological quirk that if it does not cost much, it cannot be any good. I urge you to avoid this manner of thinking which could cause you to miss several superb, inexpensive natural solutions.

Yes, pharmaceutical drugs have their place and natural solutions have theirs.

Try to open your mind as this book guides you to natural ways of dealing with health problems.

James A. Howenstine, MD

Customer Reviews

A Physician Successfully Unites Medicine and Nature
I came across Dr. Howenstine's book, "A Physician's Guide," when researching for a Master's paper on holistic care. I was particularly interested in his opinion on holistic care from a medical perspective. Often holistic/homeopathic "authorities" cite remedies to diseases/ailments without having the medical background to know if they've given the right advice. This, unfortunately, can do more harm than good.

Dr. Howenstine breaks down his book into specific sections -- the first chapters discuss how certain foods and additives have affected our body's health. The remaining chapters discuss common diseases/ailments and holistic approaches to dealing with them. Topics covered include immune illnesses, heart disease, malignancies, mental disorders and men's/women's health issues. The final chapter deals with how to take natural products effectively. Throughout the book, Dr. Howenstine cites some interesting ancedotes from his personal practice to back his claims. He also suggests some great holistic alternatives to medicine, conveniently offering several companies which sell the products, including his own company, Natural Health Team.

I was intrigued by many of Dr. Howenstine's insights and was alarmed over how much our society is rife with harmful, overprocessed food. ("Nearly everything in a can, box, bottle or package has artifical fat and sugar.") Since reading his book, I have switched from using margarine to butter (the chemical contents of margarine are like a chemistry experiment gone awry), cut back on frozen convenience foods and take daily Flax Seed oil supplements.

The one downfall to this book is its editing. The book isn't as cohesive as it could be -- at times it jumps from subject to subject without solid transitions, making it a choppy read. Moreover, I wanted to read some of the literature Dr. Howenstine used in his research and was disappointed to find the lack of a bibligraphy or works cited section at the end of the book. However, the information Dr. Howenstine conveyed in his book was interesting enough for me to overlook the book's editorial flaws.

Overall, "A Physician's Guide" is good for someone wanting a crash course in the primary diseases/ailments today, and what you can do to prevent or mitigate them from a sound holistic perspective. Tired of the medical industry pumping drugs through our veins to solve everything, I found this book to be a refreshing alternative.

A Spectacular Investment in Good Health
Submitted by: Thomas Smith, author of the book: Insulin Our Silent Killer.

Dr.James Howenstine's new best seller A Physicians Guide to Natural Health Care Products That Work is a spectacular investment in good health. Every page is loaded with scientific insight on exactly how the body works and precisely what is wrong and what to do about it when it doesn't work right. From the clear cause and effect tie-in between abortion and cancer, to the obesity-CLA deficiency connection, to a thorough scientific discussion of the vaccination issue, this book is loaded with eminently workable insights to staying healthy in a world that is chronically ill.

The book is information rich and contains an extensive indexing system to facilitate
the rapid recovery of information when it is needed. The table of drug induced nutritional deficiencies is a gem. Suggestions on ways to take natural products is the sort of classic good medicine we'd like to always find when we visit the doctor. All along the way, Dr. Howenstine provides not only the name and explanation of the natural products needed to restore a myriad of health disorders, but also provides two alternate suppliers for the product, along with insight to how to buy it without being deceived.

Dr. Howenstine writes in plain English for the intelligent layman. He avoids the medical language constructs that often effectively prevent many laymen from doing their own research. Where technical medical terms are unavoidable, Dr. Howenstine takes great pains to make them abundantly clear. His thirty four years of clinical experience, together with his compassion for the sick, shine through his recounting of examples from his many case histories. This book, far from merely finding a place in my library, has quickly become one of my most valued references.

Review on "A Physician's Guide to Natural Health"
Here is the premier book on natural solutions for major health problems. Encyclodedic information in everyday language has clear and simple guidelines for using nature's own products that help to both cure problems and maintain optimum health. An invaluable resource book that should be in every home library.