[intro] Lessons in Becoming Your Own Authority in Health [/intro]
Acne – Why Doesn’t Your Doctor Know This, by Jonathan Carp
The question I always get when I start talking about this topic is :
Why doesn’t my doctor know this? or
Why didn’t my doctor tell me this? Let me start by answering these questions.
Most Dermatologists are not aware of what I am about to teach you. The Dermatologists that do know often don’t think that the results are as impressive as they can be and others just don’t think you will follow the suggestions.
I’ll admit, that when I see patients with acne, only around 2-5% of patients are willing to make the changes that I suggest. The fact is that just as most doctors look towards medicines, as the solution, so do patients. And in fact, there are some amazing medicines but our overconfidence in these has led to general ideas about disease being distorted. The overwhelming majority of patients are coming to a doctor to get a pill to make their problem go away. We believe by looking at our actions that disease is something floating in the air that for some unknown reason attacks us. Disease is often your body responding to an imbalance in one of the 4 pillars of health. Restore the balance if the imbalance can be identified and you are on your way to wellness. It is that approach will we look to in our continuing series on healing acne.
Acne – Introduction
On April 26, 2013, in Acne, by Jonathan Carp
Thank you for spending some time on my website. This beginning series of articles will provide you with a complete education in acne and how to treat it naturally. It is written both for the patient and also for the physician so that they can understand this condition and guide patients who wish alternatives to standard treatments. It is science based and art based. What I mean by that is that what informs the information in this series is science but how to apply that to a comprehensive treatment is art based. It is achieved by understanding the 4 pillars of health.
The Four Pillars of Health
1. Nutrition
2. Mental State
3. Movement / Posture / Activity Level
4. Environmental Issues
Will will investigate each of the above pillars and how they affect the acne. As you will see in the investigation of other disease states, the impact of each pillar varies with each condition. In acne, nutrition is by far the most impactful of the four pillars followed by environmental issues, mental state, and activity level.
You will also notice during our discussion that all 4 pillars interact in various ways. This series of articles will focus on each pillar individually and look at the science. We will then proceed to discuss how the pillars interact and overlap and then finally, though it will be self-evident from the discussion up to that point, what sort of changes a person can make to restore their skin to balance.
Restoring Balance
Disease in general is your bodies way of attempting to restore balance. The plaque in a diseased artery is your bodies attempt to try to heal the damage to the cells of the endothelial layer of the artery. Acne is no different, but it is generally not seen as a response in imbalance. This conclusion will also be self-evident once you see the data.
The aim of this series of articles if there is a specific aim beyond general education is to introduce the general principles that anyone can understand to clear acne.
Stay to tuned . . . .
Jonathan Carp, MD
12:58 AM
Hello, My name is Jonathan Carp, MD. I’m a doctor who loves his patients and is saddened by the way people have been taught about health and wellness. Sometime around 10 years ago, it occurred to me that The Matrix the movie is probably the most apt parable of our time. Ok, so maybe there aren’t robots living off our bioelectric energy and maybe we don’t all have those cool slick patent lea06matrixther get ups but come on, people, you know what I am talking about. Doesn’t it sometimes seem that the overwhelming majority of the people are quietly asleep not aware of what is going around them?
This little corner of the web is where you come to awaken from your slumber about the topics of health and wellness. The sources of information on health and wellness on the web overwhelmingly teach you to seek out your answers from “experts” and to then defer to them WITHOUT PROPER INVESTIGATION. Those “experts” if they really are experts are often as asleep and comprised about where true health comes from than the rest of the population. Where do you go to learn topics fully so you can become your own authority? You can still learn from an authority but that is different from the present paradigm of deferring to an authority.
I WON’T BE PROVIDING ANY HEALTH ADVICE ON THIS WEBSITE. Advice is nice but there is nothing nice about learning to be your own authority, to stake your claim on the knowledge needed for your health and the health of your family. So what adjective would be best about learning to become an authority? Perhaps awesome, fabulous, enlightening, but not nice. Game show hosts are nice, politicians when they are talking to you are nice, that person who hates your guts but doesn’t want to show it “appears” nice. Nothing “nice” going down here! 🙂
There is this story that I like from the Talmud (Eruvin 53b) that explains this website very well. The story goes something like this. A man is walking along a road and he sees a child in the fork in the road. He asks the boy “which way is quickest to get to the city.” The boy points one way and he says “This way is the long shorter way and that way is the short longer way.” The man decides to 300px-Talmud_settake the short longer way. In no time flat he is right outside the city but it is obstructed by gardens and orchards and a large wall. He traces his way back to the boy and says to the boy “Did you not say that this was the shorter way?” The boy says, “I told you it was also long.” The man then takes the winding, long, shorter path and finds his way to the gates of the city. Moral of the story : enduring knowledge, the kind of knowledge that becomes part of you and then becomes wisdom doesn’t come by way of shortcuts, it comes by way of tortuous paths but when you arrive, it will always seem like the shortest way.
So, I don’t seek to convince you to stay because I will likely upset many of you. How many of those ideas you have about health and wellness have been investigated fully? It’s as if those health soundbites become like little creatures inside of you that take over your brain for the split second that you utter them in response to some stimulus.
Next time, you speak about something health related (or anything else for that matter), ask yourself, “what do I, myself, really know about this topic?” Then, come here and learn, because, by the time I get through with not being nice to you, you might understand fully, become your own authority, and finally wake up and see the Matrix!
Jonathan Carp, MD
There are 4 pillars responsible for your health
1. Nutrition
2. Mental State
3. Movement / Posture / Activity Level
4. Environmental Issues
When you spend all of your time learning about only nutrition you leave out the others. The percentages of the above categories affect people to a different extent. Your health could be 85% dependent on nutrition and 5% each of the others or it could be in any variation. Each day brings different percentages of impacts to your health. There are days that it is 85% Mental State. Some days could be 85% Activity where as an example a person who never runs tries to run a 5k, not a good idea.
One of the aims of this website is for you to become more conscious of your health in the moment, the present. It is to take an accounting of all 4 categories and to do a survey of yourself periodically during the day and then learn strategies to rebalance ourselves. It starts by building firm foundation of knowledge. Our bodies are amazing balance seekers but your balancing is more efficient if you are aware of what is going on in your body and how it functions.
Keep in mind that every decision you make during the day can move you toward or away from health. Certainly with nutrition, we will spend a great deal of time learning how to make the right decisions about what foods to eat.
As you start learning the science of nutrition – please keep in mind that you exclude the other factors to your detriment. I have heard well known nutritional gurus say that “Its the food, people.” Well, yes for some people it is the food that causes the majority of problems. Certainly, the obesity epidemic in the United States is the cause of the majority of degenerative diseases we see. But the purpose of this website is not to change that epidemic. Its to empower a few motivated people to become more conscious and knowledgeable about their God given right to be your own authority about the health choices you make.
The oversimplification of making nutrition as be-all-end-all of health leads ultimately to frustrated people.
Jonathan Carp, MD