Doc Watson

I just perused an article in the Life Extension Magazine this month by Gary Null et al about the leading cause of death in the United States. It's not heart disease or cancer or diabetes. You probably won't believe it, but, it's death by conventional medicine. That's right! According to all the reports that are published in peer review literature when added all together, medication deaths, medical mistakes, unnecessary surgeries, etc ad nauseaum the death toll tops the list at 800,000 deaths per year in the United States at the hands of doctors and for other medical reasons.

In today’s world stress is the number one reason individuals seek out the advice of their physicians. That’s right. According to statistics more than 90% of trips to the doctor are stress-related. In many cases patients aren’t even aware they are under stress it is so pervasive in our society. Stress comes in all forms and affects people of all ages and walks of life. And, stress isn’t always bad for us. When carrying out a task or an important assignment a mild degree of stress can be helpful in that it often compels us to do a good job and work energetically. But that isn’t the kind of stress referred to here. This stress can be disruptive to the body’s balance and function eventually leading to illness, in some cases, of a serious nature (ex: cancer, heart disease, etc).

So who is most susceptible to stress?

Every day on the radio and television we hear about people taking illicit drugs and losing their ability to think, to focus, to remember, or to learn new things. They lose everything they hold dear all as a result of taking drugs. But what if this could happen to you anyway – without taking mind altering drugs? What if – as you age you lose your ability to think clearly? You forget the telephone number you just looked up in the phone book a minute ago. Or, you walk into a room and forget why you went there in the first place. Or, you see a friend on the street and remember their face but forget their name. Right now, you may be young and full of fire, and say, “That will never happen to me”.

More and more people, mostly women, are coming to Doc Watson’s who suffer with the condition known as Fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is characterized by some, if not all of the following symptoms; tenderness and stiffness in the muscles, tendons & joints, fatigue, lethargy, poor sleep, depression, anxiety, foggy thinking, TMJ (temporo-mandibular joint) syndrome, gastrointestinal disturbances and migraine headaches. Often times fibromyalgia sufferers have been diagnosed with a variety of other illnesses and been treated by different doctors with different medications before finally receiving the diagnosis of fibromyalgia. In many instances the patient will be told it is “all in their head”.

If you had a choice how long would you choose to live? You probably think this is a silly question since we know we can’t live forever, but, what I am referring to here is living not only a long life but a healthy one as well. Around the world people of other cultures have longer life spans than we do here in the United States. In fact, only 3.3 percent of the US population will live to blow out the candles on their 80th birthday cake.