Throughout my career, I have heard the snickers of my medical doctor colleagues as they lay claim to practicing the only legitimate type of medicine.

I would ask a medical doctor why they would not recommend CoQ 10 or magnesium oratate for cardiovascular issues, and they would answer, "where is the research?" So, I would show them the research, and their answer would usually be that the research was not good enough to meet their standard.

Mark Twain said that there are three types of lies: a lie, a damn lie, and a statistic. The truth is that research is in the eye of the beholder.

Last year I received a letter from the head of McGuff, a medical supply company, saying that they where stopping the production of Vitamin C in an injectable form, due to the FDA’s claim that there was a lack of research for any medical application.

The background on vitamin C is that sailors who lacked it developed a disease called scurvy, which upon taking in vitamin C would be reversed. The FDA says that the use of vitamin C for scurvy was not proven, even though it had been used successfully in various forms for scurvy for over 100 years.

It's their right, but I disagree with it.

Simply put, my patients are intimidated by the phrase "mind-body" connection. As a cardiologist, the majority of my patients are in their 5th-8th decades of life, and they look at the "mind-body" connection in three ways.

The first is as a 70's pot smoking, acid dropping rebel. The second is as a pagan (not necessarily bad as many of my seniors have embraced eastern religions) monk who lives a simple life and meditates on a daily basis, or third as a pious Christian holy person who hits their knees in supplication on a daily basis and is a regular confession.

I explain to them what their simple mistake is; the mind-body connection does not have to be a mind-body-spirit connection; especially at first.

With any chronic disease there is either a life threatening aspect to it, a quality-of-life threatening aspect, or both. A person's perspective on their disease state can be doom and gloom, a hand-over of power, or an embracement of the issue to learn about who they are.

Medically, we know that negative emotions decrease the healing systems of the body, including the neurological system with neurotransmitters (hard to get well with adrenaline shooting though veins all day), the immune system, the endocrine system, as well as the inflammatory/anti-inflammatory components of the body.

As a Naturopathic Doctor and cardiologist I split my time between heart and everything else about 60/40, so when a 16 year old with rheumatoid arthritis was coming in I wasn't surprised.

However when she showed up, I found a fluid-bloated young girl in a wheel chair.

Turns out she was maxed on medication including steroids and a drug which has a side effect of lymphoma. The mother was overweight with poor skin, the father refused to come saying that the daughter was already seeing the finest physicians in the world at the Mayo Clinic.

I did a brief physical and had an explanation that because of her food and life habits, along with environmental toxicity, her body had become allergic to her joints. The family although reasonably wealthy, lived on processed (junk) foods. The mother stated that the other two children where obese, and that the father although thin, had a heart attack before the age of fifty.

I explained to the mom that they had a toxic and sick house, and that all the junk food needed to go. I arranged for one of my interns to take the family to Whole Foods, and the mother started to cry.

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