Take back your health

Take back your health
Written by: Marilyn Linton, QMI Agency
Jan. 30, 2012
New bestseller challenges current approach to care with unconventional tips (ditch vitamins?)
(SHUTTERSTOCK) Take a daily aspirin, not a daily vitamin. Trade the heels for sensible shoes. Throw away the juicer and buy frozen vegetables. And take complete charge of your health. Doing these and other simple things like moving around more and getting a flu shot will help you to live longer. Or so says Dr. David Agus, whose new book The End of Illness offers a different twist on the prevention message. It argues that although medicine has failed in the battle against illnesses like cancer, we have at our disposal the tools, tests and know-how to delay our demise - if we challenge long-held wisdoms of what health means. The book is already a bestseller for Agus, who heads the University of Southern California Westside Cancer Center. While not a cancer cook, it's his view that cancer is "a metaphor for the basket of the world's illnesses." Cancer isn't something that happens outside of you, he writes. You don't "get" cancer, you "do" cancer. "It's self-generated in the sense that it's our own cells gone awry." That's why he uses cancer as a verb, as in "the patient is cancering." Medicine has won the war against infectious diseases, he writes, but the germ theory doesn't apply to today's chronic diseases. For them we need a new strategy, one that focuses on the body as a complex whole system. Argus, who co-founded two health care technology companies and received the 2009 GQ Magazine Rock Star of Science Award, says that when the body is stressed through drugs, supplements, poor schedules, or excessive exercising, eating and drinking, we interrupt the body's homeostasis - its inclination to seek balance. When our system is thrown off balance, we're vulnerable to illness. Prevention is key, of course, but early diagnosis can also save you. So the knowledge you carry into that doctor's office is more essential than your doctor's knowledge, he writes. Know your family medical history and be aware of everything from your loss of hair to the changing colour of your fingernails. Ask for medical records and digitize them so you can have them on hand, stored on a USB stick. Agus says many patients ask him if they got sick because of a genetic predisposition. He says that while DNA governs possibilities, there is much you can do to shift your fate and live longer than what your DNA seemingly dictates. As for Agus's health tips, they're unconventional, even controversial, and based on the idea that inflammation is the root of all evil. Yet in many ways, they're reassuringly old-fashioned: · Be regular - at mealtimes, at bedtimes, when you wake and when you exercise. Straying from your schedule, even on weekends, stresses your body. A regular schedule, he writes, is like a "wonder drug." · If you're over the age of 40, ask your doctor to put you on a statin. These cholesterol-lowering drugs lower bad cholesterol, but maybe more importantly they impede inflammation - the cause of chronic diseases, including cancer - and are credited for reducing heart disease deaths by 60 percent since 1950. · If you're over 40, take a daily 81 mg "baby" aspirin. Doing so prevents blood clots which can cause heart attacks and strokes. The blood thinner is also a powerful anti-inflammatory that reduces the incidence of cancer by 20 percent. · Ditch the supplements - including Vitamin D. Unless you have a diagnosed deficiency or are pregnant, it's unlikely you need vitamins: Results of studies on them don't live up to their hype; and they can disrupt the body's ability to control what it needs. "Just as we cannot explain why some men taking selenium were at a higher risk of developing diabetes, we cannot expound on the complex network of how vitamins affect and alter our systems - for better or worse," he writes. · If vegetables aren't market fresh, buy frozen. Fresh isn't as fresh as you think, he writes. Food begins to degrade as soon as it falls from the tree or has been picked. Many fresh foods are nutrient-poor whereas freezing fruits and vegetables locks in their nutrients. · Have a flu shot: The flu gives you more than aches and pains: It causes "an inflammatory storm" that can damage your body's defences even 10 years hence. · Move around more. Sitting all day is as bad as smoking! But when you move around, wear the right shoes as ill-fitting shoes cause chronic inflammation which can increase the risk of everything from Alzheimer's disease to cancer. Be your own doctor first The End of Illness is, in part, about being your own personal health advocate. Go to your doctor primed with answers to Dr. David Agus's personal health inventory questionnaire which includes questions on how you feel, how you walk, the colour of your nails, the triggers for headaches or pains, your sleep profile, your routine wellness check-ups and a list of OTC and prescription meds. Did you know? The body seeks simplicity. Let the body find its own balance or homeostasis by being mindful of the body's inputs and its preferred rhythms.