Do you want to heal the chronic or incurable diseases you or your loved ones are suffering from? Do you want to stay healthy and vibrant to old age? Do you feel confused and frustrated by the contradictory advice from health experts and misinformation from the media and even the academic world?

This book is dedicated to answering your questions and helping you to reach your goal.

I wish I didn’t need to write this book, but too many, once me included, have been suffering from too many so called chronic diseases that the medical establishment insists there’s no cure. I wish the situation were better, but just look at these simple facts: Now for every five dollars we produce, nearly one is going into healthcare. According to CDC, 90% of the healthcare expenditure is spent on chronic diseases including mental health conditions.¹

How many of us don’t have a loved one inflicted with one of the debilitating and even life-threatening maladies from obesity to diabetes, from allergy to autoimmune diseases, from ADHD to autism, from depression to chronic fatigue, and from dementia to cancer, and anything in between? More and more people are getting sicker and sicker. In 2018, Americans filled 5.8 billion prescriptions – 17.6 prescriptions per person.² How many of us, young and old, don’t take prescription drugs? We’ve become prescription drug bottles with legs.

We’re told by the government agencies, medical experts, medical associations, and even our own doctors these chronic diseases have no cures and just take pills to manage them. Of course, there’re no cures – they aren’t looking for them – if you have hypertension, take drugs to dilate your blood vessels; if you have depression or bipolar, take pills to change the chemistry in your brain; if you have any one of the 100+ autoimmune diseases, take medications to suppress your immune system. Except for infectious diseases, most if not all drugs are designed to block, suppress, or stop the physiological processes in the body rather than addressing the root causes.  

When it comes to acute conditions or traumas, our medicine is at its best and our doctors are heroes. But as to chronic diseases, the medical establishment has become part of the problem and our doctors have become the victims of the cookbook-based medical system. Squarely contrary to the medical establishment’s assertion, the irrefutable fact is most if not all chronic diseases are curable so long as the root causes are identified and managed as you will see why and how in the following chapters. Yet, the medical establishment takes no prisoners – calling anybody mentioning cures a charlatan, quack, and even fraud. As a result, too many people with debilitating diseases have lost their hope, given up searching for cures, suffered and even died from the diseases as well as the horrific side effects from prescription drugs they swallow every day. 

The medical establishment uses “evidence-based medicine” as a weapon against anybody and anything contradicting it’s a-pill-for-an-ill doctrine. What is evidence anyway? It’s not these experts’ or big-name pontificators’ opinion, it’s not the misleading results from poorly conceived/executed studies, and it’s not the false findings as a result of misuse/abuse of statistics. True evidence is the conclusions based on valid statistical analyses of properly collected data.

It’s true new treatments or therapies are developed based on life sciences such as biology and chemistry. However, when it comes to ascertaining whether a treatment works or not, the yardstick is mathematical or inferential statistics. In fact, the efficacy and safety of all prescription drugs must be assessed with statistical analyses for FDA approval.

Yet, in medical research, especially in evaluating treatments and root causes of chronic diseases, the misuse and even abuse of statistics by the establishment are rampant, which is further compounded by financial interests – many have been profiting from chronic diseases. The consequences of this combination are dire: False evidence produced from misusing statistics creates confusions, sickens and even kills people. For instance, the whiplash of hormone replacement therapy killed many thousands,^3,4 vitamin D deficiency sickened millions,^5,6 and the health effect of saturated fat is still confusing the public to date.

More perniciously, the combination of misusing statistics and financial interests has misled us to the wrong path in pursuing the root causes and effective treatments of chronic diseases – we were/are told saturated fat was/is the culprit, and now we’re admonished to reduce sugar intake and exercise more, but we’re getting sicker and sicker.

Desperately searching for cures for personal sufferings propelled me to write this book, and decades of knowledge and experience in healthcare research prepared me for the task. For the last 40 years, I have been studying, teaching, applying mathematics and statistics, and exclusively in health care for the last 25 years. I’m not here claiming I’m the only guy who understands how statistics should be used in medicine, but you will see through the chapters how the big-name experts from prestigious institutions messed up their studies and drew wrong conclusions leading to grave consequences – it’s truly mind-boggling. You can also take a peek at the tip of the iceberg by googling and reading the two articles I wrote: “Why Health Experts Give Contradictory Advice” and “P-values – a chronic conundrum.”

I have no business and take no pleasure in criticizing or degrading anybody including the big-name health experts, but I’m bound by facts and science. And I’m driven and obligated to share with you, based on solid scientific as well as clinical evidence and sound reasoning, that the medical establishment is patently wrong on the causes and treatments of chronic diseases – most if not all chronic diseases, many of them are debilitating, are curable and you don’t have to suffer from them as I did.  

“Cure” is a very controversial word. Strictly speaking, no disease can be really cured – a common cold or cancer “cured” can come back anytime. Here by “cured”, I mean all symptoms have disappeared, prescription drugs are no longer needed, and all lab tests become normal. It’s perfectly fine if you want to say the disease is in remission, reversed, or healed.

When comes to curing or healing chronic diseases, the medical establishment seems to be confused with the disease itself and the damage it causes. The disease can be healed, but the damage may not be reversed. For instance, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease where the immune system mistakenly produces antibodies targeting and killing the beta cells in the pancreas. The autoimmune disease can be healed or cured (the antibodies become normal), but the beta cells gotten killed can’t be regenerated because the beta cells only grow once lifetime. As a result, even if the autoimmune disease is resolved, type 1 diabetes remains a lifetime malady. The confusion between the disease and the damage it causes reinforces the credence that chronic diseases are incurable.

If chronic diseases can be cured or healed, you may wonder, why are so many people still suffering? Sadly, the greatest barrier to cures is people don’t know or believe there’re cures. When the omnipotent medical establishment, including the government agencies, the professional organizations such as disease-specific societies, associations, and foundations, and even our own doctors, unanimously and vehemently tell us there’re no cures for chronic diseases, as an average patient, who has the chutzpah to think and believe otherwise?

To get the two words “no cure” out of our head and start the healing process, we need to keenly understand a simple but profound fact: Human body doesn’t get sick for no reason. Don’t blame the genes – for the last 80 years, the genes haven’t changed (even if changed, they did so to make the diseases less likely – a result of evolution) but all the chronic diseases have skyrocketed as will be described in chapter 1. And keep in mind, the prevalence of the rare genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis has not increased for the last 80 years. Empirical, clinical, and scientific evidence has unequivocally shown most if not all chronic diseases can be healed so long as the root causes are identified and managed.

I’m not pretending I can offer a panacea here — in many cases, reversing chronic diseases isn’t a walk in the park. First, identifying and managing the root causes can be challenging because for the same disorder the root cause can be different from person to person, and can be a result of multiple contributing factors that’re insidiously interacting with each other. For instance, depression can be brought on by any one of the risk factors such as malnutrition (e.g., vitamin D and B deficiency),^7,8 dysbiosis (over growth of bad bacteria in the gut),^9,10 environmental toxins,^11,12 and stress.^13,14 And more likely than not the onset is triggered by more than one of these factors colluding together.

Second, even if the root causes or triggers are identified, managing or removing them requires conscious effort. For instance, stress is a major contributor to all chronic diseases we know of, but successfully managing it is easier said than done. Even a seemingly easy one can pose a challenge too. Many are sensitive to gluten, completely avoiding it can be difficult because many individuals are ultrasensitive to it, and it’s ubiquitous – it’s even in your cosmetics and toothpaste, let alone processed food.

Yet, the greatest challenge to reverse chronic diseases is the ‘momentum’ of the maladies – once set in motion, it’s hard to halt or reverse the progression. You can’t expect the camel to get up and run after taking off the last straw that brought it down – you can’t reverse chronic diseases by managing one trigger at a time while multiple risk factors are working against you. Many are unable to recover from their chronic diseases because they can’t completely remove all the triggers.

Another compounding factor is that healing chronic diseases takes time – they take a long time to develop and need a long time to heal. When putting the effort in but not seeing result, you don’t know it’s because the root causes are misidentified, or not properly managed, or just need more time. You could quit even if you’re on the right track. Consequentially, you could be just going circles without achieving your goal. In many cases, reversing chronic diseases is like trying to find a way out when you got lost in the wild. You may not be too far from where you need to go, but you’re just going circles or even give up.

This book, based on my 10 years unremitting research and personal journey, is dedicated to guide you out of the wild by laying out the roadmap for you to reverse the so-called chronic diseases and to stay healthy. The following chapters are intended to explicate three things: (1) The unfolding worldwide health crisis – more and more people have been getting sicker and sicker. It’s imperative to understand this big picture – otherwise, you would be misled to believe it’s your genes’ fault and you’re destined to have the disease with no cure. (2) The root causes behind the soaring chronic diseases from depression to autism, from obesity to diabetes, from hypertension to heart disease, from migraine headaches to fibromyalgia, from brain fog to chronic fatigue, from seasonal allergies to all the autoimmune diseases, and anything in between. It’s hard to solve any problems without knowing their root causes. (3) The strategies to reverse these so called chronic or incurable diseases by identifying and managing the root causes.

As you’ll see, all the information presented in this book is based on scientific findings, clinical evidence, and sound reasoning. By design, this isn’t a cookbook sharing recipes — reading it can be challenging at times. But if you can make the effort to grasp the essence of the contents, the return will be immeasurable – bear in mind, the most valuable asset in our life is health.  

References

1. National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. Health and Economic Costs of Chronic Diseases. https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/about/costs/index.htm
2. Brooks M. US Prescriptions Hit New High in 2018, but Opioid Scripts Dip. May 10, 2019. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/912864
3. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16epidemiology-t.html?oref=login&_r=0.
4. LaCroix AZ, Chlebowski RT, Manson JE, et al. WHI Investigators. Health outcomes after stopping conjugated equine estrogens among postmenopausal women with prior hysterectomy: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA. 2011; 305(13): 1305-14.
5. Holick MF. The Vitamin D Solution. Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group. 2010. New York, NY 10014.
6. Holick MF. The vitamin D deficiency pandemic: Approaches for diagnosis, treatment and prevention. Rev Endocr Metab Disord. 2017 Jun;18(2):153-165.
7. Mikkelsen K, Stojanovska L, Apostolopoulos V. The Effects of Vitamin B in Depression. Curr Med Chem. 2016;23(38):4317-4337.
8. Anglin RE, Samaan Z, Walter SD, McDonald SD. Vitamin D deficiency and depression in adults: systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Psychiatry. 2013 Feb;202:100-7.
9. Capuco A, Urits I, Hasoon J, et al. Current Perspectives on Gut Microbiome Dysbiosis and Depression. Adv Ther. 2020;37(4):1328-1346.
10. Safadi, J.M., Quinton, A.M.G., Lennox, B.R. et al. Gut dysbiosis in severe mental illness and chronic fatigue: a novel trans-diagnostic construct? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Mol Psychiatry. 2022; 27:141–153.
11. Orisakwe OE. The role of lead and cadmium in psychiatry. N Am J Med Sci. 2014 Aug;6(8):370-6. doi: 10.4103/1947-2714.
12. Dickerson AS, Wu AC, Liew Z, Weisskopf M. A Scoping Review of Non-Occupational Exposures to Environmental Pollutants and Adult Depression, Anxiety, and Suicide. Curr Environ Health Rep. 2020 Sep;7(3):256-271.
13. Yang L, Zhao Y, Wang Y, et al. The Effects of Psychological Stress on Depression. Curr Neuropharmacol. 2015;13(4):494-504.
14. Westfall S, Caracci F, Estill M, et al. Chronic Stress-Induced Depression and Anxiety Priming Modulated by Gut-Brain-Axis Immunity. Front Immunol. 2021 Jun 24;12:670500. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2021.670500.