Welcome to the website of Santa Maria Natural Health Services! You have come to the right place to learn how to optimize your body's own ability to heal itself. As a Certified Holistic Health Counselor ("Coach"), I am happy to share my knowledge with you here. Educating people about health is my passion, and it brings me great joy to enable people to free themselves from the prescription drug hell that has become the paradigm of conventional medical “care” in the United States. My mission is to help people get off of prescription drugs, and to teach people how to maximize the potential of their own bodies to protect themselves from disease.
By the FDA's own admission, taking prescription drugs as instructed by doctors results in more than 106,000 deaths-- that's right, deaths-- each and every year, just in the United States alone. To put that in perspective, imagine a fully-loaded jumbo jet crashing and killing everyone on board every single day in the U.S. Would that make you think twice about flying? I certainly hope it would! So why is it that almost everyone believes it's safe to take prescription drugs? At best, prescription drugs are only a temporary solution to a health problem-- a band-aid, as it were-- while at worst, they will kill you, and the odds of this happening increase with higher dosages and the longer you take a drug.
The tragedy is that the FDA acts like 106,000 deaths each year is just "business as usual", and allows prescription drug makers to continue marketing their products. On the other hand, they launch full investigations and shut down companies that market natural products if it merely suspects that people are being harmed by taking them. All it takes is a few reports of people being sickened from taking a natural product for the FDA to jump in and take action, while they are slow to act, if they act at all, against drug makers. It would certainly appear that the agency that is funded by taxpayers and is supposed to be protecting the American people from harmful substances in food and medicine is instead protecting the business interests of pharmaceutical companies and processed food manufacturers. The bottom line here is that taking prescription drugs is not nearly as safe as you have been led to believe, and that natural treatments are much safer than the government wants you to believe. The "system" is clearly rigged against alternative medicine, natural and holistic methods for the prevention and treatment of disease.
With that in mind, we need to be clear on one vital point: what you learn from me is not to be considered “medical” advice. I am not a medical doctor-- I don't prescribe drugs-- and by law I cannot claim to have any cures or treatments for disease. Even where scientific evidence, clinical studies, overwhelming numbers of testimonials, and just plain common sense all support the case for "natural cures", the law forbids me from making any statements that could possibly be construed as medical claims. You see, according to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), anything that "prevents, treats, mitigates, or cures" a health problem is considered to be a DRUG, and only doctors can prescribe drugs. So, legally, for example, I couldn't tell you to drink some water in order to treat dehydration. Then water would be considered a "drug", and only doctors can prescribe drugs. It's utter nonsense, I know, but that's the law.
What I can tell you, what I am legally allowed to say under my 1st Amendment rights, is what I would do for a health condition if I had it. I am also allowed to speculate on possible causes for any health condition, and give my opinions on how the body works. What you-- the reader-- decide to do with this information is entirely up to you. You may discuss it with your doctor-- or not!-- but keep in mind the fact that your doctor is schooled in the protocols of conventional medicine (drugs) and likely knows nothing about natural approaches to maintaining good health.
The fact is, your body has an amazing ability to heal itself when it is in a state of homeostasis, where all of the nutrients your body needs are present in the right amounts and balance is maintained. This is what "taking care of your body so that it can take care of you" is all about-- establishing and maintaining a state of homeostasis. When nutrient deficiences occur, as in today's fast food, processed food diet (otherwise known as the Standard American Diet, or SAD), symptoms may begin to manifest themselves. Things like headaches, indigestion, skin rashes, joint pain, low energy, hair loss, obesity, and increased susceptibility to colds and flu are all signs of imbalance in the body.
This is where conventional medicine, with its emphasis on prescription drugs, gets it wrong. The messages your body is sending you-- the “symptoms”-- are seen by doctors as conditions that need to be suppressed. But when you suppress a symptom, you are actually working against your body, interfering with your body's natural healing processes. Understanding your body's natural healing and immune mechanisms and learning how to support them and to work with them instead of against them is the key to establishing and maintaining good health.
Doctors don't like to spend much time discussing with their patients the potential side effects of the drugs they are prescribing. They usually brush that subject off very quickly by dismissing side effects as being “rare” or “minor”, and of course by instructing you to call them if you do happen to experience any. (But sometimes side effects don't show up right away, or they can show up in ways you don't associate with the drug.)
There's a couple of big reasons doctors don't like to talk about side effects. One is that it would take too much time, more than the 7 minutes on average that they're willing to spend with you. The other is that if they warned you about even a few of the most well-known, common side effects of a particular drug, you would probably refuse to take it. What if your doctor told you that the blood pressure lowering drug he was prescribing for you could cause your hair to start falling out? Would you still take it? Did you know that Lipitor, the most commonly prescribed drug on the market, used for lowering cholesterol, can cause constipation and give you sinusitis? That's in addition to the regular side effects of headache, muscle pain, dyspepsia (low stomach acids), back pain, and skin rashes. More serious side effects, which are likely to occur with higher doses and longer term usage of the drug, include liver damage, inflammation of the pancreas, and lupus. I bet your doctor didn't talk to you about any of those, and in my mind that constitutes a serious breach of patient trust.
So the first thing I'm going to do for you here on this website is give you a very useful tool to find out everything your doctor doesn't tell you about a drug. Any drug currently on the market. This is the same reference tool that pharmacists use, or are supposed to use, when they conduct drug “consultations” with you. But, like doctors, they don't want to bother with this because it would take too much time. Not only that, it would likely get the patient (you) upset with the doctor because he didn't tell you about the side effects of the drug he was prescribing for you, and then the doctor would be upset with the pharmacist and would send his patients somewhere else to get their prescriptions filled. You see how it works.
Go to http://online.epocrates.com and register to use this FREE website. You can find out all the information that is known about any drug currently on the market, including dosage recommendations, contraindications, drug and herb interactions (known), as well as reported black-box warnings, side effects, and the pharmacology of the drug (how it works). This website will even show you what the pills look like-- great for making sure your pharmacist isn't giving you the wrong thing, which does happen sometimes-- and a range of prices so you can be sure the pharmacy is not overcharging you for a drug, which happens more frequently.
Epocrates is an extremely valuable tool that could save your life, so please use it. Look up all the prescription drugs you are taking and see what their side effects are, then ask yourself if it's worth the risk. If you are not taking any prescription drugs, maybe you know someone who is, and can show them this vital tool.
There are other ways-- natural ways-- to deal with health problems that do not have side effects and, more importantly, get to the root of the problem, the underlying cause. But you'll never hear about natural cures from your doctor because his training is all about prescription drugs. Doctors are required to prescribe drugs by established medical protocols. They could lose their license to practice medicine if they deviate from those protocols. Symptoms are diagnosed and drugs are prescribed. It's just that simple. Today, many doctors are even refusing to see patients who resist the idea of taking prescription drugs.
In fact, doctors receive very little education regarding diet and nutrition in medical school, which demonstrates just how far modern medicine has strayed from the most basic principle of good health: to eat healthy food. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is almost completely void of nutrients essential to nourish the human body-- healthy fats, whole food vitamins and minerals, clean protein and amino acids, living enzymes, fiber, and probiotics. Instead, the Standard American Diet is full of empty calories, starchy and sugary carbohydrates that are full of artificial flavor enhancers and preservatives; dirty protein from animals fed an unnatural diet and given antibiotics and growth hormones to fatten them up faster and speed them to market; fats that have been corrupted by chemical processing for the purpose of extending shelf life; vegetables and fruits that are contaminated with deadly pesticides and synthetic fertilizers; an ever increasing amount of food that has been genetically altered; water that has been poisoned with toxic chemicals, or bottled and stored in toxic, endocrine system disrupting plastic containers; sodas and other acidic beverages that come in aluminum cans. With most Americans eating foods like these, it's no wonder we're a nation of sick people! Which is good for business, if you're a doctor.
I have a friend who used to be a rep for a major drug manufacturer, and who called on hundreds of doctors regularly to market drugs. It was a very well-paying job, but she left it to raise her family. When she went back to work, she got on with a homeopathic supplements manufacturer, and became very excited because homeopathic remedies seem to be very effective and have zero side effects. She eagerly called on the same doctors she saw when she was a drug rep, encouraging them to prescribe homeopathic remedies instead of drugs. The answer she received time after time: “No way. We need people to be sick.” So there it is, a very powerful statement about our medical system in the United States. Doctors want and need people to be sick. If everyone stayed healthy, doctors wouldn't do much business.
Yet, in some other countries, doctors are paid to keep people well. They educate their patients more about the role of diet in the prevention of illness, more about the importance of internal cleansing and detoxification, more about using herbs and homeopathic remedies to treat conditions, and more about the benefits of exercise, yoga, meditation, and learning how to channel our natural energy fields (meridians or chahkras) to achieve maximum vitality. This is what health care reform in the United States should be about, not about insurance coverage for doctor visits, hospital stays, and prescription drugs.
As a Holistic Health Coach, I will be teaching you how to take care of your body naturally, as I just described. By leaving the world of conventional medical treatment behind, I will help you discover the true path to lasting wellness. I am available for individual health consultations, by phone, by email, and in person here in the Santa Maria area. Please see my "Services" page for more detailed information.
I look forward to helping you with your health issues.
Sincerely,
Thomas Imhoof
Certified Holistic Health Counselor (Coach)
1-888-505-8786 (toll-free)