No More Allergies, Asthma or Sinus Infections: The Revolutionary Approach

Author

INTRODUCTION

No More Upper Respiratory Problems

My name is Dr. Lon Jones. I guess you could call me a country doctor since I practiced in rural Texas.

I am also an osteopathic physician and more osteopaths turn out to be country doctors, or at least family physicians, than any other branch of med-icine—and, oh yes, in case you’re wondering we osteopaths are every bit the doctor that your M.D. is. We work a little differently but in the pantheon of medicine we are equally considered to be treating physicians. Back in the days when I was looking at medical schools I wasn’t familiar with Osteopathic medicine, but I was not particularly attracted to the way medicine was taught and practiced in regular medical schools: the focus seemed to be more on the disease than the person who had it. Medical schools then took younger people so they could practice longer, but many were so young they were uncomfortable dealing with people so they went into the specialties, like radiology and pathology, where they didn’t have to see patients at all, or other specialties that allowed them to focus on just a part of the patient. I wanted something better and when someone mentioned Osteopathic medicine and I read about it, it was more in line with what I wanted.

Osteopathic medicine tends to focus more on the person, while traditional medicine tends to focus more on the symptoms. A founding principle of Osteopathic medicine is that the body is able to heal itself if it has what it needs and everything is working well. For osteopathic physicians like me, a significant part of our institutional memory is the success we had in America treating people with the flu after World War I.

This flu epidemic killed millions of people around the world and the virus that caused it is closely related to the H1N1 strain that we are dealing with now, which is in part why there is so much concern about it today. But in 1919, those treated in the United States by Osteopathic physicians had a mortality rate that was twenty times less than those treated by regular physicians. Originally this was credited to their use of manipulation, the practice that seemed to characterize osteopathic physicians. But Dr. Harold Magoun, Jr., writing in the October 2004 issue of the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, took another look. He pointed out that the standard treatment used by regular, allopathic physicians was aspirin to reverse the fever and cough suppressants to stop the cough. He remembered the osteo-pathic principle that the body can heal itself and he knew that a fever and a cough are both defenses that help us better cope with invading agents. Hobbling those defenses meant that those with the flu had less ability to cope with the virus. Osteopathic physicians used neither of these treatments; and saw a twenty fold increase in survival because the defenses of the individuals were better able to cope.

This book is not about osteopaths or osteopathic medicine, though that founding principle is in every page. It is about how we can help our defenses, particularly those in the nose, and how optimizing those defenses can virtually eliminate upper respiratory problems. This is our primary message.

There are also some other lessons that we will learn on the way. First of all, the way we see things in modern medicine is largely wrong headed. Before going to medical school I studied history, especially the history of ideas and science, which includes medicine. Western medicine has its roots in what is called humoral medicine. The Greeks and Romans thought that illnesses were caused by an imbalance of the humors and had treatments that were aimed at correcting the imbalance. Blood was one of the humors and when someone showed symptoms, like a fever, they were bled until the symptoms got better. It wasn’t until the middle of the 19th Century that physicians got around to asking the right question about bloodletting: What does it do to life expectancy? They found that more people died after having been bled. If you ask most physicians about humoral medicine they will likely tell you that we don’t practice that way anymore and that the studies on bloodletting are what killed it. But the culture of humoral medicine continues today; we have just changed the humors and made them more scientific. The focus remains on symptoms, our drugs are measured by what they do to the target ’humor’ (blood pressure, glucose level, fever, . . . or whatever target is being addressed), not what it does to life expectancy.

Rather than focus on symptoms, we would be better off learning a lesson from the biologists. Biologists are asking why we have symptoms; and what they find is that many of them are defenses that are expressed in us because of natural selection and the fact that they have a significant survival benefit. We have a fever, as Dr. Magoun noted, because it helps us deal more effectively with infections—it’s a defense that needs to honored and supported rather than just turned off; and biologists overwhelmingly agree. Most physicians know this too, but they haven’t gotten around to agreeing.

The first lesson then is that we humans have defenses that help us better cope with the dangers in our environments and that many of them come with a survival benefit that western medicine has not even considered. Indeed western medicine has often continued in the humoral mode of balancing these symptoms with drugs that turn them off, without asking why they are there, and eliminating in the process their survival value. We hope this book will help change that and finally lay the humoral concept in its proper grave.

The second lesson paints with an even broader brush. While it is easy to see that some of our symptoms may be defenses, it is harder to see that we adapt. For close to three centuries now the focus of western science has been analytical. When something doesn’t work right we take it apart, find the part that is broken, replace or repair it, and put it back together confident in our fix; and in the last three centuries most of what we have worked with has been mechanical where this method is appropriate. But increasingly, the systems we work with are not mechanical. The human body is not a simple mechanical device; it is not even a complicated mechanical device—and the difference is significant. Machines can be predicted; they can’t adapt or create something new. Living agents can create novel solutions as they adapt to changes in their environments and are not reliably predictable. While there is much in the practice of medicine that is causally related we would be far better served if medical educators and researchers could be reoriented to seeing the human body as what is called a complex adaptive system rather than the mechanical model they erroneously, and exclusively, continue to use. The second lesson is common sense to everyone who thinks about: humans can adapt and they are not predictable. But scarce few of our institutions recognize and honor that fact, and medical education and research are in the middle of the pack, thinking that the human body can be analyzed, fixed by repairing broken parts, and is essentially seen as a mechanical device. We hope also that those reading this book will experience this reorientation. It is true and it is common sense.

I practiced medicine in the Texas panhandle where I saw a lot of patients with all sorts of problems; I must admit the whole gamut. But, I also have to say, the largest part of patients I saw had respiratory problems—from allergies and asthma to middle ear infections, colds and the flu. Even though the sinuses of adults and middle ears of children are not associated with breathing, they are adjacent to the upper airway, and their problems begin there, so they are classified as ’upper respiratory’ as well. Indeed, studies tell us that my experience is not unique: upper respiratory problems such as these are the number one reason for visiting your doctor.

You would think that things might be different living out here in the middle of the largest of the lower states where we are free from urban pollution. But even here in rural Texas, we have enough pollution from agricultural use of fertilizers, aerial spraying, and dust storms—to say nothing of the dust from cotton gins—to have many of the same problems that we typically think of as occurring in highly urbanized and industrialized regions. In any event, upper respiratory problems are a major problem in the health of our people, just as they are in the rest of the nation. Because of the stories I am going to relate, I came to be known as the doctor you go to as your last resort when it comes to upper respiratory problems. Patients often came to me after they had exhausted just about every other avenue of treatment—after they or their children were prescribed drugs, multiple drugs, and often even after having surgery for their problem.

People came to me because I helped developed a nasal spray that strengthens and augments our normal nasal defenses, which helps patients stay healthy and does not involve the use of any drugs. It is a very simple and safe nasal spray, and has been proven effective in studies from throughout the world. It honors what my Mom told me every day: Keep your nose clean! She couldn’t have been more right.

CHAPTER ONE

Heather

CASE 1

Heather is our granddaughter; her ear infections started all of this. She was breast fed until she was two years old and neither parent smoked, so she had little risk for ear infections. But when she was five months old, her parents placed her in day care so that Mom could return to teaching school, and within two months she had an ear infection. It was treated and resolved with antibiotics, but the infections returned; within five months she’d had four more. These were the circumstances that led to the development of our nasal spray and Heather’s parents and day care workers really came through for her and us as we searched for a way to help.

Learning problems are associated with recurrent ear infections in this critical time of life. These problems occur even when ear infections are treated appropriately. And ventilation tubes placed in the eardrum to help the infections to drain do not help the learning process!

Heather’s parents and day care workers understood the need for consistency. They cooperated in spraying her nose every time they changed her diaper. She had no further ear infections until about six months later when a new day care worker was hired who was not aware of the spraying routine. Reestablishing regular nasal washing resolved this problem without the need for antibiotics. She continues to use this spray on a regular basis and averaged less than one febrile episode a year throughout her four years in day care, far less than the six upper respiratory infections or URIs per year described as normal for children attending day care. Her only antibiotic use since has been when she had a sore throat and tested positive for strep.

CASE 2

Traci was nine and had asthma so bad that she was in the emergency room at least once a month near my offices in Hale Center. Traci was on five different medications for her asthma including systemic steroids that are known to block growth.

Asthma is such a difficult disease; seldom is a condition associated with such a profound and anxiety-producing threat as shutting down one’s ability to breathe. And the drugs we use to treat it can be very toxic. Admittedly, they are not as toxic as they used to be before we could better select for relaxing the bronchial constriction without speeding up the heart rate as well. In those days, it seemed that almost as many people died from overdosing as from asthma; I even had a classmate in medical school that died from asthma drugs. Unfortunately, more and more asthma cases are being reported throughout the country, especially in urban areas, but also where there is a lot of agriculture.

Traci’s mother wanted to know if the nasal spray my wife and I had recently developed for preventing Heather’s ear infections would help her daughter. I told her it wouldn’t hurt. The spray is actually very simple, something I’ll tell you more about, including all of the scientific evidence, besides providing my own results from working with thousands of patients with respiratory challenges. But for now, just know that her mother put it in with all of