Have you ever been told that you have a “less than 1% chance of natural pregnancy”, or that the only relief for your eczema is through steroids? Were you told to just make do and learn to live with your situation? How did that make you feel?
Our modern medical model is very much based on statistics, on mass general assumptions gathered from numerical data – meaning the average patient has become a number, rather than a person. Any opinion outside of the percentile range is considered random, chance, and a fluke.
Of course a lot of these opinions are based on people doing nothing different in their life. No changes to their diets. No increased activity levels, as in exercise. No avoidance of alcohol, cigarette smoking, etc. And these stats are certainly not based on people seeking out alternative forms of help like Chinese medicine.
If the stats actually included those that were proactive with their health, I am sure different numbers would appear. They would have to be different, seeing as just my own clinical experiences (and those of the other Doctors I worked with at Acubalance wellness centre) have shown this. Over the past 5 years, time I spent solely dedicated to the treatment of peoples stubborn skin and/ or fertility problem, most of the patients I helped had initially been given the dreaded “less than 1% chance” talk by their care provider. Could it still be a fluke that literally hundreds of my patients went on to have healthy skin, that they became pregnant, and even carried to term a healthy baby? I do not think this was by random chance.
Certainly lifestyle changes and herbal medicines had everything to do with their success. Currently I have a woman right now who is newly pregnant, still in her first trimester, but luckily full of nausea and other pregnancy symptoms (signs my midwife wife say are good indicators of a healthy pregnancy). She had gone through 3 IVF/ ICSI cycles, with no child to show for it. I would say this was at least a $45,000 dollar investment. She opted for this program, because her fertility doctor had given her the “less than 1% chance” talk, which was based on her age of 38 and her current health status. So imagine this woman’s joy when she walks into the doctors office, of a walk-in clinic nonetheless, complaining of “weird” abdominal symptoms, only to find out through a pee test that she was pregnant – naturally!
My patient completely defied the 1% theory… or did she? I mean she increased her exercise, she cleaned up her diet, she received regular acupuncture and herbal medicines that helped clear up her acne, regulated her menstrual cycle, and ended the debilitating pain she experienced on days 1 and 2 of her flow. Even her husband changed his lifestyle. So again, does that mean she was still a part of that 1%, or did she become eligible for a new number, a new statistic, from the changes she made?
As I mentioned in my previous blog on perspective, us “doctors” have to be very careful when we give out our theories. Is the advice we are giving close ended, or does it allow room for growth, for change, for hope? Is the advice we give based on our limited view, which may be based on limited scientific research being conducted for the topic at hand. Is it our right to give such poor hope to a patient in need of help, solely because a scientific paper says it so – even though the science may not include the above mentioned factors of lifestyle change and properly prescribed herbal medicines?
What about you, the individual?
The real reality of statistical medicine, is that no one really knows the answer. No one really knows what the individual person’s (who is more than just a number) health journey will lead to. As it suggests in one of the main text books that the reproductive endocrinologists (IVF doctors) may study, Clinical Gynecologic Endocrinology and Infertility by Speroff & Fritz, “since we can never know if a woman is in the 1% or 99% category, in reality every woman actually has a 50% chance of conceiving.”
We must be very careful with our statistics, lest we become blind to the world in front of us. Numbers are useful, but real people are much better. Be proactive with your health, re-discover your options.
Wishing you health,
Dr. Trevor Erikson
Copyright © 2019 Dr. Trevor Erikson