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by Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D.
Phone Consultations for Health: The New House Call
Most doctors go into medicine because they have a desire to help people and relieve suffering. They soon find out helping people is hard work and takes considerable time. My very first history and physical exam on a hospital patient in my second year of medicine, took a full three hours to complete, however I learned things about my patient he admitted he never shared with anyone else in his life. With this information, I was not only able to identify his problems but develop a relationship with him that was filled with trust and mutual respect. Spending quality time with patients and developing trust are two cornerstones of practicing the “art of medicine.” However today, many doctors are forced to practice a lesser form of medicine that is said to be scientific, which relies on matching drugs to symptoms in a time-constrained fashion. Health care management companies that equate time with money mandate this system, which satisfies neither patient nor doctor.
Thrust into a seven-minute appointment, dictated by HMO’s and hospital clinics, the patient may not have the opportunity to provide the doctor the pertinent information s/he needs to help the patient. We must ask the question, is the hallmark of modern medicine, the drug prescription, the cause or the result of this shortened appointment time? When house calls allowed the doctor to sit with the patient, the time spent was part of the prescription, which helped foster a necessary healing environment. As the French philosopher, Voltaire said, “The physician’s task is to amuse his patient until nature heals him.”
This common practice of defining the termination of a short appointment with a drug prescription often leads to over medication and consequent side effects. After publishing a dozen books offering non pharmaceutical prescription options, people began contacting me asking me to recommend doctors like myself who practiced in their community. To meet the needs of my readers, I began offering my services as a telephone wellness consultant to help create individualized nutritional programs. The benefits of a phone consult are the obvious convenience that nobody has to travel or wait long hours if the doctor is overbooked. Also, the costs are usually much less because there is far less overhead. Today’s easy access via Internet and e-mail allow a client on a retainer to ask as many questions as they like and get prompt answers. As my practice grew I began to acquire numerous clients through referrals by their primary physicians. Today these individuals constitute a significant percentage of my client base.
When I began my telephone consulting, I realized I was reviving the house call by spending quality time with my clients. I also became reacquainted with the “Spiral of Disease” that I had first observed years ago in my medical practice. The “Spiral of Disease” is a composite of the typical history told to me by my clients and may be familiar to many readers. In this chronological history, you see that each symptom is met with a prescription medication or surgery, which may alleviate the immediate complaint but may just as likely lead to more problems. In the end, the accumulated physical and emotional insults to the body may culminate in chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia and pave the way for autoimmune disease, heart disease, arthritis, and cancer. Most practitioners are not trained to recognize this “body burden” of accumulated illness and medications or to recognize drug side effects; consequently they continue to treat each new symptom independently, frequently by prescribing another toxic drug. Often, there is no one doctor that oversees a person’s case and an array of specialists prescribe for the organ involved and not the whole person.
Of concern is the fact that patients habituated to taking drugs for symptoms, are now also being prescribed drugs to “prevent” disease. When I trained in medicine in the mid-1970s our goal was to diagnose disease and treat the symptoms with drugs—with the intention to take people off drugs once their symptoms improved and let their own body’s resources take over. Now, doctors seem to have no faith in the power of the body to heal and are encouraged by drug company promotional materials to keep people on “preventive” doses of drugs for lifestyle conditions like cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar. Taking three or four unnecessary drugs, however, can be enough to build-up toxic levels of chemicals and cause side effects that are often misdiagnosed as other diseases (see sidebar). It can be a losing battle if you and your doctor don’t trust the body’s innate wisdom and have never learned that gentle cleansing and the right nutrient building blocks (food-based vitamins and angstrom-size minerals) can win back your health.
An accumulation of medications, toxins, and various stressors cause a depletion of nutrients with every step of this scenario but with no one following the spiral of disease. However, at every stage in this downward spiral, natural medicine can be used and the distressing vicious cycle halted. Natural medicine is best described as prioritizing the layers of infection, toxins, and nutrient deficiencies and addressing them in such a way that the body can find its own balance. But most of all, it means taking the time necessary, whether in person or on the phone, to learn a client’s whole history and understand how the layers of disease have developed.
Clients in my wellness practice do not stop seeing their medical doctors, they still go for their physical checkups, get blood testing done, and investigations when appropriate; these are all the good things that we can take from modern medicine. But, they don’t have to rely on a prescription drug as their only option to treat their symptoms. In fact, the purpose of a comprehensive wellness program is to prevent symptoms and illness. In the long run, clients are happy, their medical doctors are happy, and I am more than happy to be offering house calls once again..
Dr. Carolyn Dean has been in the forefront of health issues for 28 years. She graduated from Dalhousie Medical School in 1978, holds a medical license in California, and is a graduate of the Ontario Naturopathic College. Dr. Dean has authored or coauthored twelve books, including The Magnesium Miracle, The Yeast Connection and Women’s Health, IBS for DUMMIES, and Hormone Balance. Presently, Dr. Dean is currently researching minerals, lecturing widely, and conducts a Telephone Wellness Consulting practice assisting individuals with all types of illness at any stage or degree of severity. You can find her at www.carolyndean.com click Dean Wellness for a list of her current food and supplement recommendations.
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