Being 2 - Why???

I once had the privilege of working with a hospitalist who was an internist. During my rotations with him, it wasn't enough to know the treatment for the condition or the name of it, but he would grill me on the mechanism of what was happening in the body (I studied every night by the way). It's often so easy to jump to the answer and treatment. Your patient comes in with this - do this - is a common scenario. But when you start to ask "why?", you start to put together the biochemical puzzle of health, anatomy and disease. And since I don't like to memorize things, asking "why?" helps me to backtrack to the cause of conditions and therefore, configure hopefully smart treatment plans. And since memorizing conditions is also not fun, I prefer to try to delve into the normal physiology of the body. After all, if I know how it should work and "why", then I can usually figure out what happens when it stops.

It is also a huge help in understanding the traditional roles of herbs in medicine. We have a long history of traditional herbal treatments, but our clinical studies lag far behind. As new understanding of how different diseases come to be, and our understanding of the mechanisms of actions of herbs increases, we gain an insight into the wisdom of our ancestors. These people used herbs without double blind placebo controlled studies because they worked. Finding out the why of how they work is hugely satisfying to me. Of course, along the way, there were and continue to be many medications and herbs that have been found not to work and I try to embrace that as well (Coca cola for hair loss is a great example). But over time, the strong traditional herbs are starting to be understood in their mechanisms and gain respectability as "true" medicine in the world of hard science. As science keeps finding out how different systems work and interact, the possibilities of treatments grow and our understanding of what may be going wrong deepens. Although, I personally think that every discovery reminds us how little we actually know about the body and consequently leads to the next question "But why?"

You really need to love puzzle; it's part of the "why" I decided to be a physician.
Alison McAllister, ND

Coming up on this blog and in a webinar are 2 pieces by ZRT doctors looking at the why of traditional herbs used in adrenal health.