It is perfectly reasonable to ask: If nutritional supplements can do so much, why hasn’t modern medicine embraced them?
One foundational answer has to do with the difference between allopathic and complementary approaches.
In every well-adjusted, adaptive system, fine control is achieved by adjusting the balance between opposing forces. Think biceps vs. triceps to bend or straighten your arm. Think the climate control system in automobiles, which mixes hot air from the engine with cold air from the air conditioner to get the desired temperature. This applies to biochemical reactions too.
The allopathic approach assumes that the “stronger” side—the side that seems to be driving the undesirable action—is the problem and must be weakened (“allopathic” means against the disease). The American medical system is allopathic. It uses selective poisons (pharmaceutical drugs) to force weakness in the stronger side in the targeted cell reactions. Think everything labeled with anti, inhibitor, suppressor, or blocker. Dangerous “side effects” emerge because the poisons unavoidably weaken other reactions too, since every cell in the body has the same genetic code and the same genes might be active in different ways in different cells; the fewer the “side effects,” the safer the medicine.
The complementary approach tries to add what is missing to the weak side—complete the body’s health. It seeks to supply nutrients the body needs—without forcing any reaction. The body is free to ignore what it doesn’t need. Practitioners include some medical doctors (who do this under considerable pressure from medical authorities to cease), naturopaths, some chiropractors, at least some aspects of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and others.
Take blood pressure for example. Medical authorities say reduce salt intake to lower sodium. Or they prescribe blood pressure drugs to selectively poison something in the system that raises blood pressure.
The complementary approach includes:
—eating foods that provide more potassium, which the body uses to oppose, ie. balance, the sodium, if sodium is the problem. These foods include unprocessed fruits and vegetables; unprocessed grains, seafood, and even beef have usefully more potassium than sodium too. To repeat for emphasis: these are unprocessed foods (with normal salting according to taste during eating).
—changing the diet so that “nutrient dense” foods replace the empty calories and additives of refined carbs and other processed foods.
—beets and beet products and other vegetables that contain nitrates. The nitrates serve to increase nitric oxide (NO), which the body uses to relax and open blood vessels (in cases when the lack of NO contributes to high blood pressure). These are much safer approaches, at least to start, before resorting to drugs.
Antibiotics and vaccines are used on the theory that the infectious agent is too strong. The complementary approach adds what the body needs to strengthen all aspects of the defenses against infection, beginning with mucus membranes and skin, and then the first two stages of the “innate” immune response, before antibodies ever enter the picture.
For example, children are said to be at very low risk of serious illness from the SARS-CoV-2 virus because their innate immune systems are much stronger than are adults’. (Click natural anti-infectives or look for my post in Health for how nutrients can strengthen or restore innate immune responses and other anti-infective effects in adults, especially people in their 60s, 70s, etc.; and in people with “comorbidities,” such as obesity and diabetes.)
Relevant to the above, it has been reported that 75% of all hospitalized Covid patients are heavily overweight or obese. Weight gain is often a product of the high-carb, low-fat diets that the medical establishment recommends; that is, it cuts out fat—the allopathic approach—even though excess carbs get turned into body fat very efficiently.
Allopathic medicine does, of course, recognize value in vitamins and minerals, but only, again, as a remedy to ward off serious illness from deficiency in otherwise healthy people. So it’s “recommended daily allowance” (RDA) is it’s estimate of the minimum needed to fight disease, not maximize health.
Each approach has its place and use. Sometimes medical drugs can be lifesavers, but a vast amount of U.S. and global research on the benefits of nutritional substances shows that complementing—adding what the body needs—goes to greater health, has far fewer harmful results, and can in some cases forestall the need for the drugs in the first place.
You wouldn't know about this vast body of global nutritional research if all you know comes from the American medical establishment and press. (For some examples of how much research exists, see my post “Health: Extensive Global Nutritional Research.”)
Because: America’s—indeed the world’s—medical approach is dominated by allopathic approaches. Here’s one major reason for that:
The FDA is set up by law to enforce the allopathic approach. Complying with the FDA’s requirements costs $2.9 billion dollars (Tufts estimate, in 2013; add on more now). This can be paid-for only by having patentable drugs to sell at high prices to recoup the development and approval costs. Nutritional supplements and off-patent drugs can’t be patented, so no one will pay the $2.9+ billion to get FDA approval. Therefore medical systems based on the FDA and the allopathic drugs it approves cannot and will not ever recognize off-patent, nutritional, and other approaches to health, unless a huge groundswell emerges for them.
This also means that when authorities and doctors who hew to authorities’ line say “no evidence” or “unproven,” they can very easily mean not approved by the FDA, or “not invented here” by the NIH, while “failed” has at times meant using the wrong tests for efficacy.
So thank goodness for the 1994 law allowing nutritional supplements to be available without requiring expensive FDA approval and medical prescriptions. It was sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, including Senators Orrin Hatch and Tom Harkin, and signed by President Clinton.