Pharmaceutical Tech Practice Test

Treatment - Pharmaceutical or Holistic?
By Patricia Howitt

All treatment based on pharmaceutical products proceeds from the study and treatment of symptoms, categorised pretty much in isolation as evidence of separate "diseases".

Western medicine has built a vast repertory of observed symptoms, and a vast array of unnatural products tailored by chemical companies to prevent these symptoms from manifesting. We even have comparatively simple conditions, like heartburn, being labelled as "diseases" to bring them within the scope of the prescription drugs industry.

The word “cure” is a misnomer when applied to drugs and disease. Drugs suppress symptoms, which are the body's way of ridding itself of underlying illness. This drives the problem deeper into the tissues for the cells to cope with in some other way, which leads to big trouble at a later date. Drugs may offer a "quick fix", but the price paid in side effects and long-term illness is enormous, affecting both quality and length of life.

Published “causes of death” statistics are many and varied. You will never find among them a figure for the thousands of people whose lifespan and quality of life are slowly destroyed by pharmaceutical drugs. When their lives end, cause of death is simply recorded as the “disease” they were being treated for, or one of its “side effects”.

What Holistic Really Means

While modern western medicine excels at treating emergencies and injury, it has lost the plot completely when it comes to treating illness and disease. All disease manifestations are the result of the same basic "dis-ease" condition of the body. In reality, before the rise of drugs, many natural treatments were used successfully for centuries to set the body's chemistry to rights.

These methods were intended to restore the body’s correct pH, supply the nutrients required to correct the underlying imbalance in the body tissues, return the body to proper health, and so enable it to deal with whatever symptoms were present.

The "diseases" mindset obscures the fact that all symptoms are manifestations of an underlying defective condition of the whole body caused by -

· Inadequate nutrition resulting in a weakened body structure (at both tissue and cellular levels) and decreased immune function; and

· External factors such as toxins and stress.