Why has the medical profession abandoned nutraceutical and nutrition aspects of health? Well, although it is a good question, the real question is why have they not been embraced? Why is nutrition not a core component in medical education? Well, there is so much information that needs to be distilled and internalized in order to progress through the medical education system in the short few years dedicated to the classroom and formal education, there is quite a load that gets pushed to the side and this is extremely unfortunate. Nutrition, when done right, is worth more than all the pills and treatments known to man, and can create more health and prevent more disease, than all those approved treatments combined. Unfortunately nutrition is not taught in medical schools the way it should be, and until there is a seismic shift in the way medicine is delivered the physician is the first line of interaction, evaluation, diagnosis and treatment. And even if there is basic knowledge in the nutritional space, the current way things are in the reimbursement landscape, physicians are not getting reimbursed for those interventions whether they work or not.
Next the pharma industry is not interested at all in the holistic and basic approach, because they cannot create a patentable solution based on it, on the contrary it will undermine their ability to develop drugs for profit as they will have healthier populations and less disease to treat. The current concept is centered around finding the single issue related to specific cancer or disease development, ‘why this cell turned cancerous?’ and then develop a drug to turn on or turn off that mechanism. It focuses on the one problem, because one problem is fixable. True it might take a decade or more to fix it, and this is after the problem has been identified, and resources of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars but this is very profitable, and misses the whole point.
For example, we unfortunately have many many cancer mechanisms in place but fortunately do not turn cancerous until there is a ‘second hit’. The 2-hit hypothesis, and it is also hypothesized that the nutrition and ‘eating your vegetables’ as we were often told growing up, really does work, and really does prevent that second hit. The examples of how poor diet and nutrition can adversely affect these disease mechanisms is clear and has been well studied and described in the literature. But we need to reframe and redirect. Taking a more active role in nutrition and looking at food as a means of treatment can reframe our diets and reframe our thinking about health.
There are many studies that have been conducted and have shown efficacy in everyday supplements and every day activities that if utilized properly can ultimately improve, treat and prevent many diseases including PCOS.
