What If Healing Isn’t Just What We’ve Been Taught?

Medical science must take new conversation about healing further. 

A few days ago, I reposted a post from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine presenting a case study of how a change to a plant-based diet helped reverse a person's aortic stenosis. Two of my friends, a cardiac surgeon and a cardiologist, made insightful comments on this post. They advised that the proposed change in the aortic valve area was likely due to variations in echocardiography, as well as possible improvement in hemodynamics due to the change in nutrition. In other words, their expert views were that it was highly unlikely the aortic valve itself was restored. 

Regardless, the patient experienced improvement. Was it an exception? Will it be short-term? Will it be long-term? We don't know for sure. To make a better determination, we would need to review the study in detail and do more studies.

Why am I writing about this? Because the exchange we began a few days ago is exactly the kind of conversation we need to have in healthcare. On one hand, it appears that a person may be able to use an approach other than surgery to treat a condition. On the other hand, the report may not be mentioning key areas that could leave it to misinterpretation. So what would the next step be? Open up the conversation, make the study available to everyone, and ask questions in the spirit of learning!

We do know, for example, that coronary artery disease can be reversed in many cases with nutrition, something that was thought to be impossible. But an aortic valve is an entirely different matter. What a wonderful situation to be in! What a wonderful opportunity for more conversation and exploration of how we can help patients in new ways!

The point is the brief exchange we had on LinkedIn should be just the beginning of a conversation, not the end. This study should be talked about everywhere so we can see what it tells us, what its limitations are, and how we can learn from it to help patients heal and do even better studies. If we simply say look how wonderful this is, or look how unlikely this is and leave it at that, we have not really helped anyone. We are merely in the preliminary stages of not only an important conversation about this case, but an important modeling of how we should approach cases of healing in general - namely, with great interest to learn more and find new, safe ways of helping people heal!

We must take the conversation about healing further, because there are too many cases of healing that go unreported and there is too much knowledge of healing that is not in the medical literature. ACLM - Thank you for the work you do. Please provide us more information about the study so we may continue learning and sharing.