The Enzyme Advantage: For Healthcare Providers and People Who Care About Their Health
BOOK RELEASE
Preview of the newly published book
Howard F. Loomis
Arnold Mann
By Howard F. Loomis, Jr., D.C., F.I.A~C.A. with Arnold Mann
Medicine will always be in search of the magic bullet, i.e., that pill or potion that will do exactly what it was intended to do, and only what it was intended to do, every time for every patient.
That is the Holy Grail of modern medicine.
The problem is that it doesn’t exist!
It doesn’t exist because 1) no two individuals are identical; 2) biochemical circumstances will vary from time to time and over time; and 3) organs and organ systems other than those targeted will inevitably be affected. The proton pump inhibitor was designed to shut down the production of stomach acid (HCl) and give an irritated esophageal lining time to heal, but it will also impair protein digestion and fat digestion. How?
For protein, the pump shuts down the conversion of pepsinogen into pepsin. For fat, the pump stems the flow of bile, which is stimulated by the production of stomach acid.
These and more serious side effects have led to a resurgence of interest in alternative/natural approaches, and it isn’t just about drugs. It’s about what has been described as a change in thinking on the part of practitioners. There’s a shift from the original inductive mindset of conducting a complete and thorough examination and looking at all the evidence to a more deductive, formulaic approach to diagnosis and treatment.
One of the earliest voices lamenting this shift in thinking was Thomas Addison, a nineteenth-century English physician. Addison, one of medicine’s greatest diagnosticians, is credited with discovering the pathology of pneumonia, among other important contributions.
However, Addison declared that the greatest contribution to medicine during his time was René Laennec’s stethoscope, which “contributed more towards the advancement of the medical art than any other single individual, either of ancient or modern times.” (Monk’s Roll: Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Vol III (18-1-1825). London: RCP, 1878; 205).
Addison loved Laennec’s stethoscope, but he had harsh words for the way medicine had come to depend on it, particularly at the expense of physical diagnosis. Addison, who would sit at a patient’s bedside and use all of his senses, intellect, and powers of physical sensation and observation to tease out a diagnosis inductively, came to deplore the arrival of what he called the “stethoscopist.”
“The enthusiasm, the rashness, the bigotry and conceit of the exclusive stethoscopist,” he wrote, “have indeed most
seriously retarded the adoption, and vitiated the claims of physical diagnosis ... They seem to look upon the instrument as all-sufficient... and thereby convert an invaluable auxiliary into what, in their hands at least, proves but an imperfect and treacherous substitute.”
So the world of deductive medical thinking entered, listening through the stethoscope to the heart, lungs, and bowels for the sound that would dictate the treatment, rather than taking a complete history and performing a hands-on physical exam that used all of one’s senses and investigative powers to build a diagnosis inductively based on what the body as a whole was saying at that moment.
As a young student at Logan College of Chiropractic in the late 1960s, I was unable to use the stethoscope because of a hearing impairment from childhood. To pass the clinical examination and start seeing patients, Logan’s clinicians taught me how to evaluate a patient’s pulse pressure and pulse rate with my hands. I also learned how to distinguish between a stroke patient and a heart attack patient with my hands when the patient was unconscious. In addition, they taught me how to detect lung problems by placing my fingers between a patient’s ribs and having the patient take deep breaths while I felt for any telltale vibration.
I was learning to diagnose with my hands and to think inductively.
Of particular interest to me was a book titled Clinical Judgment by Alvin Feinstein (The Williams & Wilkins Co., 1967), which showed how to sort through the evidence and, by way of inductive thinking, evaluate which piece or pieces of evidence were most revealing and then make the diagnosis.
So, is medicine becoming a lost art in pursuit of formulaic thinking? That’s a good question.
In their 1963 book, Physical Diagnosis: The History and Examination of the Patient, authors John Prior and Jack Silberstein lament the fact that little space is given to the case history in textbooks on physical diagnosis and the development of the medical examination. In their opinion, a diagnostician wasn’t worth anything if he or she could not take a correct and thorough case history and do a good examination.
They were right. A thorough case history and physical exam is necessary if one is to detect deviations from normal, which should be at the heart of any diagnostic process.
It was right around this time, while I was at Logan College, that I read Hans Selye’s landmark book titled The Stress of Life, which demonstrated the role of stress in the development of disease. He said that the early symptoms of any condition are vague and nondescript, so that one cannot really know what is going on until an actual disease can be diagnosed.
For Selye, this progression to disease involved a lack of adequate nutrition, which suggested that providing the right nutrition would be a good strategy for halting the progression to full-blown disease.
This made perfect sense to me because I knew that my chiropractic career would not be spent diagnosing diseases.
However, if one can detect early deviations from normal by conducting a thorough patient history, including diet, a thorough hands-on examination, and blood and urine testing, then these early deviations should be correctable by providing the right nutrition to restore normal function, and possibly halting the progression to the disease state.
It all seemed quite elementary, in principle. Instead of masking symptoms with medications, why not provide the body with the nutrition needed to heal the underlying problem?
In fact, such a strategy would be urged in a 2001 editorial in the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine, titled “The Case for an Ancient Cause.”
Instead of masking symptoms with medications, why not provide the body with the nutrition needed to heal the underlying problem? JJ
In the article, the authors note that the ancient Greeks believed that Asclépios, the god of medicine, had two daughters—one responsible for prevention, the other for cure. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, was an inductive thinker and forceful advocate for prevention. The authors note that Hippocrates urged physicians “to pay attention to the environmental, behavioral, and social context in which illness occurs.”
“Have we heeded this Hippocratic challenge?” the authors ask. “Do we favor one daughter of Asclépios at the expense of the other?”
It’s all a matter of maintaining health and preventing disease, as opposed to simply treating the symptoms with drugs and dealing with the full-blown disease when it appears.
‘health care” system and a
It’s the difference between a ‘sick care” system.
Hence, patients’ growing interest in so-called alternative healthcare practitioners for concerns such as back pain, digestive disorders, arthritis, sprains and strains, allergies, high blood pressure, headaches, insomnia, chronic immune problems, and anxiety and depression.
What do all of these conditions have in common? They are all primarily symptomatic with an absence of concrete pathology to indicate where the conditions originate.
For 12 years after graduating from Logan College, I did my inductive best to come up with a method or system to restore normal function and maintain health. Along with my physical exam, blood work, and urinalysis, I experimented with every nutritional supplement available—protein supplements, carbohydrates, lipids, vitamins, minerals—in an effort to discover dependable strategies for relieving my patients’ symptoms and slowing their progression to disease.
In the end, nothing worked, at least not with any real consistency.
Then along came Dr. Edward Howell and his enzymes. If indeed a magic bullet existed, one that could be tapped for medical purposes, it would be the enzyme. Howell called them “nature’s workers”—each created by body cells to do one job and one job only, with a consistency dating back to the beginning of time.
Three such enzymes central to Howell’s work and this book are the digestive enzymes amylase, protease, and lipase, which digest carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, respectively, so that they may be absorbed and used by the body as building blocks and fuel. Then there are the food enzymes, as Howell called them, which exist in all living things, plant and animal, and which facilitate their own life functions and assist in their digestion when they are consumed as food by another organism.
So the lipase contained in whale blubber assists in its digestion when it is consumed by the Eskimo, or protease enzymes contained in various meats, cellulase in fruits and vegetables, and so on.
It’s all part of nature’s cycle of life.
Unfortunately, as Dr. Howell discovered back in the 1920s, the enzymes contained in the foods we eat have been destroyed with the advent of cooking, pasteurizing, and processing, thus compromising our ability to digest them completely. The result is incomplete digestion that leads to nutritional and energy deficits as body organs struggle to do their part in maintaining health, and ultimately, progression to degenerative diseases— from arthritis and diabetes to heart disease and cancer.
It is this progression from health to disease that concerns this book, with supplemental enzymes as a means of achieving digestion that is more complete and providing the nutritional elements needed for body cells to maintain normal function and reduce an individual’s risk of progression to degenerative diseases.
During the next five years, from the time I met Howell, I would develop just such a system for diagnosing nutritional deficiencies in various organ systems and using food enzyme supplements to deliver the specific nutrition needed to the struggling organ system to restore normal function and health.
The Enzyme Advantage is available through Amazon.com for $19.95.
Dr. Howard Loomis has an extensive background in enzymes and enzyme supplements. He is the founder and president of Enzyme Formulations®, Inc. His knowledge of physiology, biochemistry, and enzymology has made him a sought-after speaker and a prolific writer: Dr: Loomis published ENZYMES: The Key to Health in 1999. Contact info: 6421 Enterprise Lane, Madison, WI53719, customer serviceff loomisirrstitute.com
