Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself Read Online Free PDF Page B

still contained lab tests, medications, and surgical interventions when needed. It also contained detoxing, aspects of Chinese medicine, and a huge emphasis on dietary change to build wellness from the inside. It was my vision of openminded medicine, and I had finally come full circle—putting the pieces of my own story into practice with others.
    In those early days, I sent many of my Los Angeles patients to We Care and watched them have similar transformations through detoxing, sometimes coming back to life after long periods of dealing with uncomfortable symptoms. But leaving town wasn’t practical or affordable for everyone, so I started to research and design a way to achieve the same results without the need to go on retreat, a way of detoxing that everyone could afford. This is what I present to my patients and to you as the Clean program.
    CHAPTER THREE Global Toxicity: Another Inconvenient Truth
    Ever since my first consultation with a psychiatrist in New York, I constantly found myself asking, “How and why did my brain cells forget their chemistry?”
    The for serotonin level in my brain, which I was told explained the problem, was simply a description of what happens when the chemistry is forgotten by the neurons. I wanted to find out how and why. In medicine, understanding how and why is the real “diagnosis.” This is what doctors do.
    Doctors used to pride themselves on diagnosing a problem by observation and deduction: they’d take a good patient history, listen, and observe. Modern doctors, pressed for time and fearful of lawsuits, heavily rely on blood tests, X-rays, sonograms, endoscopy, and many other laboratory evaluations. In India, working out of our bus-turned-mobile-hospital, with no equipment other than a stethoscope, our ears, eyes, and noses, my colleagues and I returned to the simpler methods of observation. Eastern schools of medicine don’t see patients as isolated from their environment—including family, village, and spiritual path. Changes in environment or the predominant quality of one’s thoughts are considered equally important as changes in body temperature. All aspects of a patient’s life are believed to affect each other significantly and play a role in the maintenance of well-being. The root of disease is also found this way, by looking at both the bigger and the smaller picture together. Physical, mental, emotional, social, and environmental symptoms are all taken into consideration when making a diagnosis. Finding the common thread that ties them together often reveals the underlying imbalance at the origin of disease.
    Back in the United States, chronic diseases were on the rise, often with such difficult and intimidating names that patients and doctors forgot to ask how and why. The name “became” the disease. The meaning of the word “diagnosis” changed. It did not mean understanding how and why anymore. It became the title of a list of symptoms and test results that matched most of the ones the patient presented with. It had become a code. A diagnosis could be entered into a computer and a list of medications that were covered by insurance companies for that specific code would appear on the screen. It also showed how many days of hospital stay were approved for that same code. What the doctor thought did not matter as much anymore.
    The practice of medicine was looking a lot like the supermarkets that early on had impressed me so much. It was very evident that I wasn’t the only one whose cells were forgetting their chemistry. The growth in the rates of depression was all around me. More and more patients were on antidepressants. Health news was full of reports on the rising epidemic of diseases connected to diet and lifestyle. And the financial news echoed with reports of the meteoric rise in the value of stock in pharmaceutical companies, especially the ones that had patented antidepressants. My specialty, heart disease, headed the list of problems, followed