by Parris M. Kidd, Ph.D.
| Editor’s note: According to the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative
Medicine, health care costs are expected to double in the next 10 years, primarily due to the
increase in chronic disease.
In our opinion, if a health care model based on Dr. Leo Galland’s The Four Pillars of Healing
had been adopted as the blueprint for quality healing seven years ago, when this article first ran, we
might have stabilized, even reduced, health care expenditures by now, as well as curtailed the
growth of chronic disease. |
I read, or rather, I glance through a
lot of books. It’s not often that I
find myself reading a technical
book from cover to cover, with
my imagination soaring and
unable to stop until I’ve reached
the end, somewhat like people
immersed in good detective novels. Now I
have the pleasure to report to you about a
galvanizing medical detective documentary
called The Four Pillars of Healing written by
Leo Galland, M.D. and published by
Random House. It will be seen as a landmark
contribution to the health care revolution
that is sweeping the world.
One major contribution of this book is
that it redefines disease and its causation.
That is to say, disease is a “pattern of symptoms,
signs, behaviors and pathological
changes . . . that appear coherent to the
practitioner.” Each patient’s illness has an
individual pattern that can be related to
triggers, mediators and risk factors.
Sometimes these emerge as diseases, as diagrammed
in the illustration below.
This anti-dogmatic and individualized
thinking about disease and illness, coming
from one savvy practitioner, fits right in
with a new approach to disease that is presented
in the encyclopedic work titled The
Metabolic and Molecular Bases of Inherited
Disease (4600 plus pages).1 This medical
textbook is must reading for medical
students.
What are The Four Pillars of Healing?
These are deeply rooted in the holistic
history of responsible medical practice, as
documented so well by the author. In
summary:
- Pillar 1: Relationships—of patient with physician and with others who care
- Pillar 2: Diet, rest, exercise—appropriate and regular life style
- Pillar 3: Clean environment—good public health
- Pillar 4: Detoxification and repair—by the body’s natural mechanisms.
These pillars of healing “sustain the art
and the science of medicine. They support
every encounter between physician and
patient. If they fail, medical care is likely to
be ineffectual.” Here Dr. Galland rightly recognizes
the all-encompassing relationship
between patient, physician, the environment
and government’s responsiveness to the
public’s health needs. This truly has to be the
scope of practice of holistic health and
healing.
It is appropriate that The Four Pillars of
Healing begins with its first chapter titled
“Eclipse of the Patient,” and ends with an
epilogue, “Each Patient is a Work of Art.”
This book really is composed around
patients, how they so often suffer needlessly,
how they must try to cope with doctors
who don’t see them as human beings,
how they differ biologically and so should
be treated individually. The book is loaded
with stories about diagnoses missed, doctors
trying to intimidate patients, emergency
room interns contemptuously
dismissing sick people. There’s a story for
every reader to relate to. I won’t tell you
what the “Iron Man” interns meant when
they labeled patients “POS” or “SHPOS,” but
just to get the scoop on these labels could
be worth the price of the book.
The chapter that covers Pillar 1 takes a
direct approach to one of the most
maligned tools for healing: the placebo
effect. Placebo effect describes a positive
response to treatment that results not from
the specific treatment but “from the
patient’s psychologically mediated response
to undergoing the treatment.” Placebo
healing is documented as a real healing
phenomenon, to be encouraged rather
than belittled. Placebos can cut pain by
more than 50 percent: ’Placebo analgesia
(pain relief ) is not imaginary. It results
from release of the body’s own intrinsic
pain relievers, called endorphins, which are
biochemically similar to narcotics.”
Pillar 2 encompasses the huge topic of
nutrition and dietary supplementation to
support health and treat disease.
Nutritional habits are defined on three
levels; Level 1 is nutritional density, the use
of foods with the best nutrient content.
Level 2 introduces the often neglected
essential fatty acids, which are crucial messengers
within and between the body’s cells
and tissues; these are naturally intimate
partners with antioxidants. Level 3 involves
balancing calcium with magnesium. This is
the kind of approach that I advocated in
my two books on antioxidants and AIDS.
Combine these with good habits of moderate exercise, sleep and relaxation and
you have a shot at successful aging.
Pillar 3 teaches us about environmental
contributors to health and disease and their
implications for government and democracy.
Environmental health always begins
with the individual: “. . .deceased
Egyptians had to swear on the day of
judgement, ‘I did not pollute any water.’”
Here Dr. Galland clearly practices what he
preaches, having recently relocated his
medical practice and risked five years’ liability
for lease payments. He had discovered
that his office was riddled with mold
and bacterial contamination due to poor
construction and maintenance. This experience
helped make him an expert on
indoor air pollution, mold and fungus disease
and Sick Building Syndrome.
The imperative for environmental health
extends all the way from the caring individual
to the irresponsibility of the governments
of the world. On page 93 the late Dr.
Rachel Carson is praised for Silent Spring,
her prophetic work, published in 1962, on
the dangers of wide scale pollution. But have
governments got her message? No. Each
year over a billion pounds of pesticides are
used in the United States alone and this
country continues to export DDT. When the
U.S. government initiates a rocket launch
(the Cassini Space Probe) it carries with it
the potential to contaminate the planet with
radioactive plutonium. In the face of such
governmental arrogance, how can citizens
expect to stay healthy?
Call your legislators. Demonstrate.
Smoke from rain forest destruction has
threatened to asphyxiate much of southeast
Asia. The insurance companies are gathering
evidence that high levels of atmospheric pollution
is behind the increasingly bad
weather that is costing them (and us) so
much money. Near where I live, two poor
and mostly black communities are fighting
back against pollution coming from (a)
urban expansion and (b) oil companies.
Those of us who want to stay healthy need
to be vigilant always about our environment
and realize that environmental malpractice
anywhere can impact us at home or at work.
Help build this third pillar for yourself and
the rest of us by becoming informed and
active.
Pillar 4 deals with detoxification and
repair, which are crucial to maintaining
health. All the pollutants that come into
the body from the air, the water, the food,
and as pharmaceutical and “recreational”
drugs, threaten our health and survival. But
perhaps the most difficult of all to detoxify
are the parasites. Some doctors still don’t
believe that Americans have parasites and it
is here that Dr. Galland’s practice is superior
over most others. He has documented
all the ways parasites are known to hurt us
and in this chapter he documents how we
can go about getting rid of them. This level
of understanding of intestinal ecology, parasite-
host relationships, and the usefulness
of probiotic, “friendly” bacteria is rarely
found in a popular book. It is almost never
explained for the lay person with this
degree of clarity.
Dr. Galland is one of those few physicians
who has the courage to stand up to
the prevailing norms of modern medical
care and actually serve his patients as a
healer. He has an integrated medicine practice
in New York City. Taking advantage of
the large body of scientific information on
both alternative and conventional healing,
he merges these into healing patients who
have been abused or rejected by other doctors.
His “Medical Odyssey” chapter begins
with the “Iron Man” hospital intern who
tries not to admit anyone to the emergency
room after midnight so as not to have to
disturb any of his sleeping colleagues. He
says of that period, “As interns, we worked
a hundred hours a week with little supervision
or technical support. We barely had
time to think about ourselves, let alone our
patients, as persons.” These passages
painfully remind me of things noticed
about M.D. colleagues during my post-doctoral
tenure at the University of California
San Francisco Medical Center.
I remember meeting Leo Galland a few
years ago, after he gave a remarkable presentation
at the American College of
Advancement in Medicine on the topics that
he now discusses in depth in this new book. I
recognized then that this doctor was a
scholar, a scholar for real because he does his
homework. He has gone to great lengths to
develop an historical backdrop for countless
personal dramas he relates in the book. He
gives us many scholarly gems, such as the historical
sources of the words “physician” and
“medicine,” the universal wisdom of the
ancient healing systems and the evolution of
health care practice up through the centuries.
The well organized and beautifully written
chapters are documented by extensive notes
at the back of the book, which in turn are
loaded with references from peer-reviewed
journals. These are conveniently segregated
to allow narrative to flow and keep the book
pleasant reading for persons on all levels of
sophistication.
For some time now Dr. Galland has
championed the concept of “patient-centered
diagnosis.” In a truly democratic and
caring society this concept would be irrelevant,
because the patient would automatically
have center stage in the medical
drama. Yet there is little democracy in
health care. Around the turn of the century
the Flexner Report was produced expressly
to rationalize the elimination of women’s
and black medical schools. The managed
health care establishment in the United
States treats patients hardly better than
cattle going to the slaughter. For the establishment,
healing the patient is subordinate
to exploiting him or her for the corporate
bottom line. Dr. Galland decided early in
his career to go with his conscience and
against this trend.
The Four Pillars of Healing is a remarkable
book that everyone, literally everyone,
should read. It will make a great reference
book for patients. For healers of every
background it can be a manual for evaluating
the patient, finding the things that are
wrong and working to empower the patient
back into good health. It is a personal
example for health care professionals currently
under pressure from HMOs, a narrative
of how one physician clung to his
personal integrity and developed into a
leading visionary for the new integrated
medicine. Even overpaid, overworked, misunderstood
health care administrators
should read The Four Pillars of Healing
because it is a blueprint for quality health
care. It sets the standards for the effective
and affordable 21st century medical model
that should grow out of re-integrating the
best of what has gone before.
I heartily congratulate Dr. Leo Galland
for this awesome book, a work that I know
must have challenged his endurance until
its completion. It is an articulate and beautifully
produced testament, an impassioned
appeal to reinstate caring and compassion
for the patient, who really is all of us.
- Child, B., “A Logic of Disease.” Chapter 1 in The Metabolic and Molecular Bases of Inherited Disease, Volume 1, (1995). edited Scrivers CR and others. McGraw-Hill.
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