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Interview with Leon Chaitow Note: The information on this website is presented for
educational purposes and This document was provided by Holistic doctor LEON CHAITOW combines practical experience, intellectual wisdom and some controversy in a wide-ranging interview focused on immunity and health with Rafael Ramos and Huw Christie How would you distinguish the practices of conventional or allopathic medicine from complementary/alternative (C/A) medicine in removing diseases? Allopathic medicine which can be described as conventional or orthodox medicine, tends to deal with illness piecemeal without a lot of regard for, or attention to, the context in which the illness exists – the person with the illness, their current biochemical status, biomechanical structure and function, or psychosocial situation. In mainstream medicine, named conditions have protocols of care and these are followed in a pragmatic manner, with little concern for what has led to the problem or what follows. In this way a patient in a modern medical setting is dealt with episodically – ‘this is what is going on now and this is how it will be handled’ – by rote, by the book. Complementary/alternative (C/A) medicine – at least as I understand and practice it – has a wider perspective which triggers questions such as: Why is this person displaying these symptoms now, taking account of their nutritional status, level of toxicity, current or previous illness or treatments, lifestyle habits, stresses and anxieties and how is their body handling all of this? What aspects of the person’s defensive (immune, repair and eliminative) functions require enhancement and how can the complex stress load they are carrying, whether infectious, biomechanical, psychosocial, biochemical – or other, be reduced? What therapeutic interventions are most likely to be helpful – without making further or excessive demands on the body’s capacity to function and defend itself? In other words C/A medicine tries, at its best, to deal with the person and not the illness and has an objective of enhancing the body’s self-regulating (homeostatic) mechanisms and systems, offering a potential for improvement and recovery, rather than imposing solutions. Another way of seeing the difference is to suggest that C/A medicine is health oriented rather than disease focused. In this way C/A medicine might supply nutritional support, introduce detoxification methods, deal with symptoms in a gentle manner, perhaps utilizing herbal or hydrotherapy, or bodywork methods – all of which have few if any side effects; employ stress reducing methods and systems which encourage immune function and reduce adaptive demands, and in a variety of ways attempt to empower the person who is ill by helping them to understand why they are ill, what can be done to encourage a return to health, or better functioning, or symptom control. At times this undoubtedly also calls for orthodox, allopathic methods of care, and it is the combination of the best of complementary and alternative medicine with the best of mainstream interventions which offers the greatest hope, I believe. What encouraged you to practice at the London’s Hale Clinic? I suppose on reflection I chose to work at the Hale Clinic for a number of pragmatic reasons. It is geographically close to my home which is just off Baker Street, so I can walk to work – often through Regent’s Park. It is extremely convenient in the services it offers – reception, room maintenance and so on, are all taken care of as part of the package. There are also dozens – in fact well over a hundred – highly skilled practitioners and therapists covering most aspects of C/A medicine, to whom easy referral can be made, as well as one of London’s greatest resources – the Nutri Centre – with its vast stock of nutrients, herbs, homeopathic remedies etc., as well as its library of books for reference or purchase – and most important of all – the knowledge of its senior staff, which can be tapped into when complex queries arises. Do you think that current medical practices, in particular Western orthodox, are interested in promoting self-health and healthful living – how to live and adjust lifestyle so the conditions and circumstances of diseases can be avoided? I have seen a vast change in the attitudes of orthodox practitioners towards the importance of lifestyle and nutrition over the past ten to fifteen years. I work a day a week in an NHS practice, also within walking distance of my home. I often spend time sitting in with GPs during their sessions with patients, as they do with me from time to time, when I am seeing the patients they refer for naturopathic or osteopathic attention. As a result I have developed a greater understanding of the orthodox GPs’ struggle to cope with the flood of human problems which they face daily. With less than ten minutes per patient they cannot possibly delve in any depth into these factors, but they are interested, and they do their best, in the main. The practice of many orthodox doctors is moving towards a greater appreciation of the importance in health terms of lifestyle, social conditions, nutrition etc and of the value of self-help measures, particularly in regard to stress management. Initiatives with which I am involved will I hope increase GP awareness of these factors, and will teach them many of the skills needed to increasingly practice aspects of complementary health care in regular GP settings. The Chinese do not draw any distinction between food and medicine. In the West however consumers often fall prey to food manufacturers and industrial farming. Are there practical opportunities in our society to obtain truly healthy food? There is certainly a greater opportunity now to purchase organically produced food than some years ago, although cost is sometimes a barrier to its wide availability. I guess the purchase on a regular basis of some produce, or the self-production of organic and free range foods in Britain is largely confined to a minority of middle-class consumers. The hope must be that with demand growing, costs will fall so that such food become more widely available, as it is in some European countries. What’s your understanding of the nature of what AIDS may be? AIDS seems to comprise an extreme example of adaptation overload. Let me explain one of the models which help me to understand health and disease. We all recognize the fight/flight reaction in response to stress. Something, anything, causes an alarm response. There are neurological and hormonal responses to this challenge which prepares the body to respond to that threat. The heart rate increases, blood pressure goes up, muscles tense, adrenalin release produces a sugar rise in the blood to fuel the action, changes occur in the gut, in the hormonal centres and so on. If the threat is satisfactorily dealt with (by fighting or running away – or in modern times by appropriate action) the body symptoms return to normal. However, if more than one threat occurs, not in isolation but constantly and recurrently in different ways, the protective and defensive responses of the body become chronically overloaded, and I’ll talk more about this in a minute. We first need to see what has developed into the AIDS epidemic in the context of a universally compromised immune system. Everyone on the planet is now contaminated with dioxin, DDT, petrocarbons, pesticides, fungicides and heavy metals – among other things. We carry a huge toxic load from day 1 of our lives, and this severely compromises immune function and may be a factor in the exponential rise in allergic conditions in kids today – asthma and so on. Within that context of global immune suppression we should also see a picture of specific groups who have even more compromised immune functions. Controversially, a particular concern I have is over the assault on under-developed immune systems which we call immunization – in which cocktails of killed and partially killed, and sometimes live microorganisms, are pushed into the bodies of infants. This process may be playing a part in the further decline in immune defense capabilities and may have been partially causal in the decline in the immune system’s ability to maintain vigilance against other, newer hazards, in which because of gene modification, the mutation of microorganisms – monsters we had not dreamed of have entered the picture. I have dealt with the possible link between immunization and AIDS in my book Vaccination and Immunization – dangers, delusions and alternatives which C.W. Daniels had the courage to publish a few years back when other publishers were afraid to do so. In this I also show how contaminated polio vaccine in the late 1950s and early 1960s could have factored into the puzzle of the onset of AIDS. Let’s get back to your question about how AIDS might have evolved – imagine someone in whom there is also a degree of constant or recur-rent emotional stress and distress involving perhaps relationships, employment, social factors and health worries, as well as nutritional imbalance – perhaps with associated toxic accumulation over and above the burden we all carry, brought about through an unbalanced dietary pattern, excessive use of stimulants such as alcohol, caffeine, rich foods, tobacco and perhaps other social and/or medical drugs. This individual’s problems might also involve nutritional deficits which are incidentally widespread in western society – with even organically grown vegetables now containing only half the zinc they did a century ago. There may also be current and perhaps recurrent minor infections – herpes, candida, various viral, yeast, parasitic and bacterial infections – possibly sexually acquired, or related to unhygienic factors and practices, plus the effects of the drugs used to treat these diseases ... all of these elements demand adaptation on the part of the body, with defense, immune, repair, eliminative and other functions and system working overtime to maintain a semblance of reasonable function. Add to this picture some unusual elements – some particularly damaging social drugs – amyl nitrite and amphetamines for example – on top of the extreme degrees of social and emotional stress and distress already mentioned. Consider also the effects which multiple course of antibiotics would have had on the person’s immune function – creating a bowel status which further exacerbates the picture because of the damage caused to the vital intestinal flora – which in good health people act to detoxify the gut, manufacture vitamins, recycle important hormones, maintain control over opportunistic invaders such as yeasts...and much more. With digestive function weakened, absorption compromised, gut permeability increased and therefore allergies occurring – the spiral of ill-health would rapidly increase. Sleep patterns would be harmed, energy would decline and general vulnerability or susceptibility would be heightened. When toxic and stress loads exceed the defense capacity of the body, severe ill-health occurs, perhaps involving the lungs, liver, nervous system, skin and so on, and as this occurs general function declines even further. The ability to withstand infection could become so compromised as to be negligible at which time life threatening infections occur. Epitomized by Gay Bowel Syndrome in the late seventies it would seem that such a scenario was underway in a number of groups. In severely nutrionally and hygienically compromised communities such as Haitian refugees and intravenous drug addicts, for example. Amongst those haemophiliac patients receiving regular transfusions, other immune challenges were a feature, involving the drugs and relative purity of the blood they were receiving. In the gay community other factors seem to have been key players – including sex enhancing drugs, widespread promiscuous behavior with recurrent STD ailments – and the treatment these attracted – plus enormous degrees of emotional stress. You can argue about the particular cocktail of factors, in homosexual or heterosexual settings, from which any particular individual’s disease emerged, but it’s within the spectrum of the overall stress load (in its widest sense including toxicity, psychosocial and emotional distress, deficiencies, infections, and the efficiency or lack of it, of defense, repair and immune functions – that the causes lie, I believe. Out of this sort of scenario, I argue, AIDS grew...with or without a specific organism called HIV. Have you read the scientific works that show what’s detected as HIV is not a virus at all: what do you think of this? Is HIV an entity, does it exist? That is one hell of a question. I have read some of the mixed scientific opinions on this topic – but certainly not all, and have come, from such reading and from my own predisposition to see infectious agents as secondary rather than primary factors in ill health, to a position which I will try to explain. Clearly we can see from recent evidence that HIV – and virus load – test results are unreliable. I can’t yet necessarily go as far as Dr Eleopulos, and say that there is no such thing as an HIvirus, but I believe that within the frenzied complex occurring in someone in the early stages of immune deficiency, a number of cofactors and coincidental processes need to be present and active in order for the sequence of events we know as AIDS to unfold. Within this, complex autoimmune responses may be one factor, along with a long list of viral, fungal and other infections – as well as probably gross nutritional deficiencies and all too commonly general toxic build-up and allergic features – in other words a combination of toxicity, infection, deficiency, vulnerability and susceptibility would seem to have be present before AIDS can occur, and hat’s called HIV may or may not be a requirement within all of that. All infectious agents arguably are opportunistic – as with all living organisms they will thrive in an environment which suits them and which is not hostile to them. If we provide, by virtue of a toxic and deficient body, a suitable soil for bacteria, viruses, fungi or whatever, and if our defense capabilities are weak, they will flourish and we will suffer. The combination of factors which allow this to happen would not seem to need to be the same in each person – just enough to allow self-regulating defense and immune functions to be overwhelmed. What seems certain now is that, leaving aside the meaning and accuracy of testing which is another question altogether, it is possible to be tested as HIV+ and not become ill; that it is possible to be tested HIV positive and then to be negative again, and that apparently HIV free individuals have developed all the symptoms of what we know as full-blown AIDS. I have documented some of these situations in the book I co-wrote with Jim Stroheker – You Don’t Have To Die which received such a critical review in Continuum a few years ago because it did not come out with an absolute ‘there is no such thing as HIV’ statement. So HIV, if it exists, would seem at most, to be a part of the process, and not an absolute requirement for the evolution of AIDS. It is also possible that a specific entity called HIV does not exist, but that the genetic fragments, traces and shadows which are found as part of the evidence for its existence only relate to the debris of the disturbances going on. At times C/A therapists have been criticized for their tendency to interpret health problems in such a way as to justify the "need" for the particular therapy they offer. For instance, allergists may attribute headaches and skin rashes to allergies, and nutritionists explore the possibility of nutritional deficiencies. Herbalists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, ayurvedic, psychotherapy practitioners, etc. would also like to offer an explanation and establish the need for their services. But further underlying causes of diseases, in particular lifestyle practices or influences may be overlooked. How would you choose and apply a particular therapy in the face of a multifactorial life-threatening condition like AIDS? You have very neatly touched on one of the greatest weaknesses of alternative/complementary medicine as practiced in the UK. Holistic in attitude perhaps but narrow in focus. Unless complementary health care is offered in team settings where collaborative efforts can be offered to recipients, or unless the therapist/practitioner offering assistance has a wide range of skills, based on a philosophical bedrock which allows for an understanding of what’s going on, there will only be piecemeal treatment involving individual symptoms and unconnected therapeutic interventions, which is no better than the allopathic symptom-oriented approach. Of course there may be benefit from one C/A approach or another, but unless the biochemistry – nutrition, toxicity etc; mentoemotional, spiritual and structural features are all being considered, with focus on restoring as best possible digestive, neurological, hormonal and other functions, only a part of the picture will be addressed and results will be less than ideal. All the methods you list, and many more, have something to offer the sick individual, whether they have AIDS or not, but only an integrated and coordinated approach which takes the individual’s specific needs into account can offer the best for them. A group approach, or a naturopathic approach, are the best, since naturopathy incorporates nutrition, detoxification, stress management, manipulative methods, herbal medicine and in many instances acupuncture as well. The problem is that there are very few ‘general practitioners of natural medicine’ – which is what a naturopath is – and so for the time being individual aspects of ill-health or dysfunction need to be addressed by specialized groups within the alternative/complementary professions. I hope that in time, with initiatives now being developed, at least some GPs will acquire sufficient knowledge of basic naturopathic methods to be able to offer a wider access to these approaches. They can then refer patients to ‘specialist’ complementary therapists and practitioners as needed. In a syndrome as complex as AIDS, is there a problem with therapies interfering with each other? Do conventional and A/C therapies cancel each other out? A recent letter of Lambeth Southwark & Lewisham Health Authority to one of our subscribers stated that: "research into the efficacy of A/C therapies in HIV/AIDS has been limited, and therefore it is beyond the remit of a District Health Authority to fund work of this nature". In your opinion, what are the underlying assumptions of this rationale and what will be the consequences for diagnosed people who need and demand A/C therapies? Worldwide, A/C therapies have offered people with HIV/AIDS comfort, support and often enormous benefit, in turning their health status around. What the decision by the Health Authority suggests is that their focus financially will be elsewhere – probably on combination drugs – the use of which is far more ‘experimental’ and less proven than A/C health care methods. Combination therapy will, I believe, like AZT before it, ‘end in tears’, literally and tragically. In answer to the first part of your question, yes of course, inappropriate treatments can ‘interfere’ with each other. It is important to keep in mind that treatment, however gentle, calls for an adaptive response from the body, and this uses energy and is to a degree stressful. When a body is already ravaged by multiple ailments, the adaptive defense capabilities are stretched and are often to an extent non-functional. So treatment has ideally to be tailored to the needs of the individual, to their ability to respond, and should not add unnecessarily to adaptive demands. Less is often more in treatment terms when complex syndromes exist. What are your views of the costs of NHS orthodox therapies? For instance, Positive Nation estimated in November 1996 that in the UK the cost of prescribing triple combination anti-HIV drugs, together with regular hospital visits and tests such as CD4 and viral load, will be about £10,000 per person per year. These clinical practices are offered to diagnosed individuals faithfully as the "best known benefits" of contemporary medical science. My views on unproven medical methods are probably unprintable. We are in an economically constrained period which will probably not improve for many years and this wasteful use of limited resources, on unproven, questionable, medical interventions, as well as tests which are of dubious value, is at best sad and at worst offensive. On the other hand the people employing and recommending these approaches almost certainly act with the best of intentions – however we know where that leads! The problems lie in the difficulty in changing people’s perspectives and perceptions and this is where the work of organs such as Continuum are so valuable. To a large extent effective health care depends on self-care. If future iatrogenic diseases are to be avoided – illnesses that are caused by prescription drugs and medical intervention, AZT being one example – how could people learn to depend less on the physician and/or avoid turning into life-long patients? Again information is the only way to change people’s beliefs and attitudes, and ultimately practices. I have seen an amazing change in the 36 years I have been in practice, with the popular press now carrying positive health enhancing articles and features on a regular basis. Change occurs organically, in an evolutionary rather than revolutionary manner, which is why I see the future of complementary health care within the NHS, not outside it. I could not have predicted that the movement from being called a ‘quack’ in the early 1960s, to ‘fringe’ in the late 1960s, to ‘alternative’ and eventually ‘complementary’ in the 70s and 80s, to being inside the establishment, practicing in an NHS setting and teaching complementary medicine and naturopathic methods in a major University in the 90s, would have occurred. But it has. So change comes via concerted and dedicated effort, but it takes time, and education and information are the keys to the changes you so correctly highlight as being necessary. The European Commission is planning to control vitamin and mineral supplements from Brussels. Nothing will in principle be banned this way, but most EU countries seem to want to regulate higher-dosage vitamin and mineral supplements as pharmaceutical drugs. What do you think the implications of these measures will be for the Nutri Centre at the Hale Clinic and other health food shops and their consumers? If the changes you indicate are made, and they are probably inevitable if we remain members of the EU, we will survive. As long as food sources such as blue-green algae exist, and probiotics such as bifidobacteria and acidophilus, are available, and nutrients in some form – even if only in Recommended Daily Average (RDA) dosages, we will still –hopefully – have herbal approaches and food to satisfy our needs. My work in the NHS has taught me that when, because of financial constraints, we cannot use the expensive and the complicated, we can still achieve a lot by going back to diet, lifestyle habits, detoxification – using controlled fasting for example, hydrotherapy and bodywork, and we can still get good results. So while life may become difficult with change, it should concentrate our minds on our basic objectives, removing some of the shortcuts which high dosage supplementation offers, but not depriving us of the opportunity to work with the body and its self healing mechanisms. An International Alternative HIV/AIDS Conference is being organized this year in Washington D.C. The purpose of such a conference will be to clarify and place in the public arena via organized media the untenable scientific position of the orthodoxy on HIV/AIDS, to integrate the AIDS-analyst movement and bring about the changes and solutions to the AIDS phenomena. How would you see A/C medicine contributing to the importance of this Washington Conference? A/C medicine must be part of such conferences – it is all part of the information and education process of which I have spoken. The gradual influencing of key minds and attitudes pays dividends over time even if immediate response is small. Hippocrates said "Healing is a matter of time, but it is also a matter of opportunity". What do you recommend Continuum readers do who require an A/C therapy but cannot afford the Hale Clinic? I regret I cannot give a good answer here, as I have not kept abreast of what is available to people with HIV/AIDS in the UK over the past few years, during which time I have focused more on other areas of my teaching and writing work. Because of my limited availability – one day weekly when I am in the UK which is only about 8 months a year – I personally decline the care of anyone in need of supervision. I am happy to advise and on an overall strategy but cannot be around to deal with crisis. This limitation probably does not apply to other naturopaths who have an interest in this area of work, and it is only by asking that appropriate help is found. It also pays to state clearly what your economic situation is, what can be afforded. I along with many practitioners waive or reduce fees when I deem it appropriate, and no-one should be shy to ask. The Nutri Centre and many excellent manufacturers, such as BioCare offer reductions to people with HIV/AIDS or readers of Continuum. Continuum might consider a deeper investigation into this question – What’s available? What are costs? What charities offer C/A care? And so on, and keep this resource information updated. Keep up the good work. Naturopath & Osteopath Born and educated in South Africa Leon Chaitow came to study in the UK graduating (N.D. and D.O.) from British College of Naturopathy and Osteopathy in 1960. Postgraduate training includes acupuncture 1963-65, cranial osteopathy 1969-78 and orthomolecular nutrition 1970-72. He is author of 56 popular health titles and seven textbooks. He is co-founder and former editor of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 1990- 95, and currently editor of the Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, a peer review journal published by Churchill Livingstone. Senior lecturer, University of Westminster since 1993, in the MA in Therapeutic Bodywork (MAThB) and MSc in Complementary Health Studies (MScCHS) courses. He has given annual lecturing/teaching programmes at naturopathic, chiropractic and massage schools in Israel and USA since 1984 combined with research for writing projects. He is married since 1971 to Alkmini, a Greek national who has assisted in all phases of his career since then, as practice manager, secretary and at times co-author.
AIDS IN CONTEXT – PERSON’s - immune system
HETEROSTASIS There are just two options available: 1. To focus on restoring immune competence, enhance defense capabilities and supporting repair functions. 2. To reduce the multiple interacting stressors impacting on the individual without creating new problems. ALL SUCCESSFUL COMPLEMENTARY OR ALTERNATIVE HEALTH CARE MEASURES WHICH ENCOURAGE THE ABOVE ARE POTENTIALLY USEFUL AND THESE INCLUDE: NUTRITIONAL SUPPORT STRESS REDUCTION METHODS NON-TOXIC ANTI-FUNGAL, ANTI-VIRAL, ANTI-BACTERIAL, ANTI-PARASITIC METHODS PROBIOTIC METHODS ACUPUNCTURE AND TCM HERBAL IMMUNE SUPPORT HOMOEOPATHIC CONSTITUTIONAL METHODS HYDROTHERAPEUTIC-HYPERTHERMIC METHODS OZONE/OXYGEN TREATMENTS NON-SPECIFIC ‘CONSTITUTIONAL’ METHODS SUCH AS BODYWORK (MASSAGE), HEALING, DEEP RELAXATION, MEDITIATION, AUTOGENICS, ETC. STRUCTURAL NORMALISATION (OSTEOPATHY/ CHIROPRACTIC) DETOXIFICATION METHODS COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY,
Books by Leon Chaitow include: - World Without AIDS (co-authored with Simon Martin, published in the UK by Thorsons), Lambert’s Book of the Year, 1990 - You Don’t Have to Die – Unravelling the AIDS Myth (co-authored with Jim Stroheker, published in USA by Burton Goldberg Group) - Candida Albicans – could yeast be your problem? (Thorsons) - Holistic Pain Relief (Thorson’s) - Fibromyalgia and muscle pain (Thorson’s) - Thorson’s guide to amino acids (Thorson’s) - Principles of Fasting (Thorson’s) For health care professionals: - Acupuncture treatment of pain (Healing Arts Press) - Palpation Skills (Churchill Livingstone) - Muscle Energy Techniques (Churchill Livingstone) |