Diagnosis: poor health across the countryIf you think you have nothing to worry about because your doctor has told you're in average health, think again: • The average American in average health has the average heart attack. • The average American in average health gets the average cancer, diabetes, stroke. • The average American is tired and unhappy • The average American has no idea what it's like to feel really great. • The average American stumbles from doctor to doctor, pill to pill, disease to disease—until he dies. • The average American dies too young, feeling old and worn out. • The average American is scared—and should be! As a physician who has worked on the front lines of crisis medicine, treating patient after patient in the intensive care units and coronary care units, and seeing thousands more in my office, I can tell you that the average American is a medical disaster waiting to happen. One of my patients complained: "It started about a year ago, Dr. Fox. I had a cold, and then a flu, then another cold, then another flu, and my nose was always running and one thing after another. No matter what I did, I couldn't get well. A whole year of being sick! What's wrong with me?" What was wrong? For any number of reasons, his body's defenses were down. As you will learn, colds, flus and other problems are clues, telling us to take a look at the patients' entire defense system. The colds and flus aren't diseases in themselves; they are symptoms of the underlying problem, which is a breakdown of the "doctor within." Ironically, we can thank disease for forcing us to focus our attention on health. In my 28 years of practicing medicine I've seen scares come and go. Fears of tuberculosis and polio were replaced by fright over heart disease and cancer. A new scourge herpes, came into the picture in the early 1980s. Herpes hysteria had hardly settled down before it was nearly swept aside by the panic over AIDS (acquired immune-deficiency syndrome) and other immune-system diseases. New diseases seem to be popping out of thin air. Some of them we learn to cure. Others we can't. The patients who come to my office every day are frightened. "What's going to get me?" they wonder. A heart attack? Cancer? A stroke? Diabetes? Will I be crippled by arthritis or made helpless by Alzheimer's disease? Will I wind up in a hospital or a rest home, unable to care for myself? Recently, a very attractive 39-year-old businesswoman, ^he sales director for a national cosmetic company, sat in my office nervously rubbing one hand against the other. The divorced parent of a ten-year-old boy, she travels extensively on business. "You know what it's like, Dr. Fox," she said. "You get to a city, you're running around all day; at night you go to your hotel, and you're lonely. So you've got a 'boyfriend' you see 10, 12 times a year, or maybe you meet someone at a hotel. I don't jump into bed with any guy, but I'm not married and I get lonely on the road. But not any more. I've been getting away from that in the past six months. I'm so scared of getting sick, of catching something that will wreck my immune system. I don't care how lonely I get, I'm not doing it anymore. Not until they figure out a way to protect you from all those diseases you can catch. Not just AIDS, but all of them." *3\80\8* General Health «Viagra Sale» |