Medicineless

A radically holistic pedagogy for practitioners

by Ali Le Vere

The Scope of the Problem

Our medical system is broken. And in large part because it fosters the belief that people are broken. That we are misfiring and malfunctioning machines requiring constant tinkering, calibration, and expensive corrections.

It creates the narrative that our bodies are prone to debility and dysfunction in the absence of an endless barrage of pharmaceutical products designed to selectively target facets of our physiology—to lower our cholesterol here, to suppress our immune system here, to interfere with ovulation or to thin our blood or to stop a headache in its tracks—a pill-for-every-ill mentality has reigned supreme and dominated the paradigm of biomedicine for over a century.

And as a consequence, we are sicker than we have ever been. The burden of noncommunicable disease has grown exponentially, and we have arrived at an impasse where we must veer off into a novel uncharted trajectory if we ever want the change we so desperately wish for to happen.

Symptom Suppression vs. Root Cause Resolution

We have resigned ourselves to the fallacy that the answers to our health concerns come in the form of a prescription pad and have come to expect magic pill solutions to numb our every ache, pain, and feeling.

Meanwhile, with each tablet we swallow, we are furiously plugging up holes and bailing water from ship surely destined to sink.

By nudging one biomolecule in one direction, another pivots off kilter, in a domino cascade that wreaks havoc on the delicately fine-tuned orchestra that is the symphony of human biochemistry.

We end up collecting prescription bottles—and accumulating diagnoses—at the expense of quality of life, health span, and longevity.

Relinquishing Our Power vs. Radical Personal Responsibility

We have bought and sold the mythology that the doctor is the sole guardian to a sacred body of privileged knowledge, and in the process, surrendered the reigns to our health outcomes to a profession that claims monopoly on health while profiteering off disease.

We have allowed authorities to abscond with our intuition and have outsourced our ancestral wisdom on how to nourish and heal ourselves to a medical establishment that excels at emergent and catastrophic care, but offers no real insights when it comes to lifestyle medicine and prevention.

We have abdicated our rights to informed consent by entrusting a fee-for-profit enterprise with vested financial interests to be transparent with the unadulterated data to which we are entitled.

We are led to believe that are fates are sealed, and that the best we can hope for is some semblance of symptom relief at the bottom of a prescription pill bottle.

And lastly, we have allowed a spectrum of human emotions to be pathologized—and a gamut of life stages, including aging and pregnancy, to be medicalized—subject to a full-spectrum of medical interventions which only beget further procedures.

Healing is in Your Hands

But many of us are awakening—remembering, in fact—long-buried and sacred truths about health and wellness that we seem to have lost in our striving towards the instant gratification of a magic pill and the quick fix.

We believe in healing, radical remissions, and the shedding of prescriptions and disease labels. In the power of traditional medicine and nature’s pharmacopeia to reverse pathology. In preventative and strategic defenses, rooted in nature, that enhance our bodily reserves and resilience and safeguard against what are painted as diseases to which we will succumb in just a matter of time.

Rather than allowing ourselves to become hapless victims to the daunting foes of debility, dysfunction, and disease, cornering us like marauders in the night, we put faith in what naturopathic medicine deems Vis Medicatrix Naturae—our body’s innate capacity to heal and to regenerate no matter what befalls us.

Where We Are Now: The Fallacy of Evidence-Based Medicine

“I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica, as used now could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

With the advent of germ theory and the ensuing pharmaceutical revolution, a new religiosity has emerged called medicalism, which elevated the medical “clergy” to a place of unprecedented power and esteem.

Ascending to a position akin to supernatural deities in our collective cultural consciousness, a newfound religiosity for biomedicine emerged. The methods of the conventional medical establishment reigned supreme, their proscriptions infallible and their doctrine unquestionable.

We are now conditioned to go to the doctor’s office at even the slightest sniffle or ache or pain, hands out and ready for a dispensation of pharmaceutical pills from our physician demigods.

This fostered a climate of doctor-knows-best paternalism, which eroded our informed consent and medical freedoms—the ability to retain our ability to navigate medical choices in full and explicit knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of treatments.

The cornerstone of biomedicine is its self-anointed glorification as being evidence-based and steeped in an indisputable body of peer-reviewed literature. This neglects, however, that many standard recommendations are consensus medicine—established not based on efficacy or indication, but rather, upon the many times arbitrary and agenda-motivated groupthink of appointed individuals who oftentimes have conflicts-of-interest.

The treatment algorithms and recommendations set forth by these highly influential people are oftentimes corrupted by the incestuous ties between legislators, the pharmaceutical industry and governmental regulatory agencies.

The unparalleled reverence and perceived power of allopathy, for example, stands in stark contrast to the following dismal statistics:

A paper in Mayo Clinic Proceedings suggested that 40% of current medical practices should be discarded entirely (Prasad et al., 2013)
Research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine demonstrated that there is, on average, a 17 year delay for research to be translated into clinical practice (Morris et al., 2017)
Research published in the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care suggested that there is a 62% likelihood that the treatment a doctor prescribes will have negative results or have no scientific substantiation of its efficacy (Berman et al., 2001)
A meta-analysis of 2500 contemporary medical practices published in the British Medical Journal found that there is a 64% chance that the treatment a doctor administers will not be beneficial or scientifically supported (Garrow, 2008).

Where We Are Now: The Epidemic of Iatrogenesis

“Although the USA spends 14% of its gross national product on healthcare yet, it is ironical that the American Medical System contributes to most of the deaths”

– Farooq Peer & Shabir, 2018

From the Greek prefix, “iatros,” which means physicians, and “genesis,” which means origin, Iatrogenesis is sickness or death created by the medical establishment itself.

The WHO defines iatrogenesis as “any noxious, unintended, and undesired effect of a drug, which occurs at doses used in humans for prophylaxis, diagnosis, or therapy”.

Although estimates vary, conservative approximations put iatrogenesis as the 5th leading cause of death in the world, which is likely an underestimate, since the WHO definition does not encompass therapeutic failures, intentional poisoning, accidental poisoning, drug abuse, incorrect drug administration, or noncompliance and also fails to take into account all the effects from adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and incidents relates to mechanical and radiological procedures, drug regimens, surgery, invasive procedures, and hospitalizations.

The effect of iatrogenesis in the USA is particularly insidious, since we are the world’s biggest per capita consumers of pharmaceutical drugs—and only one of 2 nations in the world that allows direct to consumer advertising by Big Pharma. It is no wonder, then, that the United States has some abysmal health outcomes, including one of the lowest life expectancies and highest rates of infant and maternal mortality of industrialized nations.

During the eight-minute patient-doctor encounter, patients are not conveyed the true risks of drug therapy in order to perform an accurate cost-benefit analysis and to weigh the pros and cons of treatments. Not only is there the logistical constraint of time scarcity, but much of medical education is industry-sponsored and skewed in favor of pharma given the a sequence of events in the history of medicine—which we will dive into—which elevated physicians to their current place of prominence.

In Medicineless, we lift the veil and deliver transparency in an objective and systematic analysis and presentation of the true pros and cons to standard of care, elucidate the historical, philosophical, and social reasons behind our current drug-driven model, and offer viable holistic alternatives.

An Opportunity to Revision Medicine As We Know It

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– R. Buckminster Fuller

Clinicians and patients alike are waking up to the limitations of the conventional model – of disease care – and we can all instinctively intuit that there is a better way.

But does that mean we throw science in the garbage and run off into the lavendarsage fields? Maybe, but not quite yet.

First, we can walk the bridge to this new kind of medicine – a Medicineless medicine – paved with some of the most elegant scientific inquiry ever published. We interface the cutting-edge science with the time-tested ancient nutritional, botanical, energetic, and lifestyle practices that traditional medicine and human history has offered to us on a silver platter.

Medicineless is the first education of its kind that examines all conventional practices up to the spotlight of the evidence-base, letting you decide for yourself whether gold standard medicine is the best you can do for your patients and clients.

Cue, Medicineless

In this online program, the first of its kind, we flip the script.

No longer do we entrust credentialed authority figures whose training has been corrupted by industry-funded education to be the anointed the gatekeepers to health. In Medicineless, we let down the velvet ropes that have commandeered health in the arms of authorities and lead you to walk down a path punctuated by a plethora of time-honored routes to healing.

No longer do we accept the fostering of dependency upon synthetic pharmaceutical cocktails advanced by direct-to-consumer media advertising. We unlock the keys to a veritable Eden of intuitive, commonsense, and accessible natural remedies with side benefits rather than side effects.

No longer do we view disease through the lens of genetic determinism, believing that we are passive victims to the ticking time bombs of our genetic inheritance. We rather usher in the notion of radical personal responsibility and agency when it comes to what symptoms do or do not plague you, what diseases do or do not befall you, and what quality of life, health span, and personal satisfaction and purpose you can seize for yourself.

Instead of passive bystanders awaiting an inevitable demise in our health—standing idly by to face whatever chronic health condition befalls us—Medicineless urges us to captain the ship of our health destinies by empowering ourselves, our patients, and our clients with evidence-based. non-toxic, non-invasive, and natural keys to healing.

It plants a seed of hope for an alternative paradigm of health care, one that is patient-centric, rooted in ancestral practices, and entails a return to nature—an idea that is gaining more traction, resonating with countless individuals, and permeating the public discourse as holistic medical approaches produce more and more outcomes that defy the dominant orthodoxy.

Most importantly, Medicineless encourages us to envision a new narrative where all the answers you ever needed already reside within you.

Structure of Medicineless

In 6 expertly-crafted modules, you will explore scientific material dispelling myths and presenting a new story around:

Women's Health

Birth control pills, pregnancy and birth, osteoporosis, breast and cervical cancer

Autoimmunity

What is it and what many models of alternative medicine may be mischaracterizing

Cancer

Is it really something to fight?

Antibiotics

Do they live up to their etymology against life?

Mental Health

Is the treatment worse than the ill?

Obesity & Cardiometabolic Disorders

Where have we been led astray?

Information will be delivered in highly referenced, readable text, narrated powerpoint, detailed infographics, and take-home downloadable pdfs.

Each Medicineless candidate will receive complimentary access to the history-making, evidence-based, clinical program Vital Mind Reset as well as professional membership to the largest searchable natural health database, Greenmedinfo.com.

Candidates will also have access to a curated library of “solutions” to learn about and explore.

FAQs

Who is Medicineless designed for?

Medicineless is for truth seekers, critical thinkers, and reflexive contrarians. If your intuition calls you to dig deeper, to scratch under the surface of evidence-based medicine or to peer under the hood of allopathy to see whether it holds its salt, then this program is designed for you.

If your innate knowing has poked and nudged you towards the reality that the emperor of Western medicine has no clothes, and that there are cracks in the seemingly impenetrable edifice of allopathy, then this program is right up your alley.

If you crave evidence-based, peer-reviewed literature to both support holistic interventions and to counter arguments of “snake oil,” “quackery,” and “charlatan medicine,” then you are in the right place. Not only will we expose the holes in standard interventions of conventional medicine—such as birth control, bisphosphonates, and statins—but we will also offer commonsense natural alternatives substantiated by scientific literature.

What is Medicineless all about?

Medicineless will challenge you to decipher, analyze, and interpret health from diverse and disparate angles—through the lenses of bioethics, sociocultural and medical anthropology, evolutionary biology, history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and physiology—in order to crystallize a multifaceted understanding of how we got here, the current predicament in health care, and how to deconstruct and address any health condition with which you are confronted.

This program demands of you that you be brave enough to come face to face with the dismal realities of the harm perpetrated secondary to standard of care—to dive head-first, no-holds-bar into the phenomenon known as iatrogenesis, or harm resultant from the use of medicine as we know it.

It asks that you be prepared to dismantle all you thought you knew about the face of medicine and to rebuild it from the ground floor, brick by brick. We will lay the foundation for you to deconstruct the historical malfeasance of medicine, the persecution, discrimination, and disenfranchisement perpetuated in the name of medical progress, the deliberate concealment and manipulation of data by the pharmaceutical industry, and the far reaches of the propaganda machine that has convinced us that we are defenseless in the absence of synthetic pharmaceutical band-aids.

You will dive fearlessly into the historical underpinnings of germ theory, which elevated pill-for-every-ill as the standard of care, the smear campaign enacted so-called “alternative” providers, and come face to face with inconvenient truths about the lack of efficacy—and even harm produced by many sacred cows of modern medicine.

Will Medicineless showcase ways to heal with natural medicine?

We believe that in order to discern the direction we need to take, a comprehensive understanding of the dark and under-discussed underbelly of the medicine establishment is necessary. By the same token, in order to truly grasp the meaning of holistic health, we must wrap our heads around the multidimensional ways in which a reductionistic allopathic approach is short-sighted—and the myriad means by which a compartmentalized strategy, seeing medical professionals with tunnel vision on their respective specialties—has failed us.

Fear not, however—it’s not all doom and gloom. We will not decimate your worldview without providing the shiny, gleaming alternatives that are nutritional-, botanical-, and lifestyle-based healing modalities rooted in ancient and traditional medical systems.

Will Medicineless provide protocols for healing?

Medicineless represents the fusion of age-old eastern practices with contemporary scientific evidence—based on the overarching principles of restoring harmony with nature, respecting the inherent wisdom of the body, and trusting that repair and regeneration can and do happen when we provision what the body needs and remove the obstacles and impediments to health.

Instead of preaching proscriptive protocols reminiscent of the Western reductionistic medicine, the common thread uniting all the modules of this program is one that emphasizes biochemical individuality. Although a recurring motif throughout this program is that getting back to nature will manifest and materialize the ingredients for health, we also illuminate how biochemical individuality—assessing the needs of a client or patient based on their genetic proclivities, physiological landscape, microbial milieu, immunological terrain, and comorbid conditions—is key rather than advocating a unilateral one-size-fits-all protocol mentality.

This is not a program that will walk you through history taking, patient intakes, complex lab interpretation, and supplement protocols, but rather provides you with a bird’s eye view of how to heal and which healing modalities to explore—irrespective of the malady at hand.

Medicine-less will herald a multidimensional view of health and disease by providing you with the tools to effect demonstrable and tangible improvements in whatever health condition with which you are confronted in your practice or personal life.

We have already done the hard work for you—synthesizing, assimilating, and presenting the latest cutting-edge science on topics in women’s health, pregnancy and childbirth, cancer, osteoporosis, autoimmunity, and metabolic disorders—so the information and application is there for the taking. It is just a matter of implementation according to the bio-individualized needs of your clients or patients.

We acknowledge that you are the subject matter expert on your own body, and as a consequence, Medicineless pays homage to the foundational principles of trial-and-error, biochemical individuality, and self-experimentation.

It turns out that healers are born from the ashes of their false understandings…of their own body, mind, and spirit.

Is Medicineless for practitioners only?

Medicineless will equip health coaches, healers, health and fitness industry practitioners, and both conventional and holistic physicians alike with the practical know-how to assist their patients or clients in optimizing subjective and objective parameters and metrics of health. It will arm practitioners with the tools to elevate their knowledge base and to serve their clientele or patient base in novel, unprecedented, yet practical ways.

However, it can also serve as a platform from which non-practitioners can affect change in their own health destinies. For a higher-level layman audience with a background in basic science or a willingness to learn high-level information, it will arm you with true informed consent, equip you to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of the pros and cons of treatment options, supply you with evidence-based literature to take in hand to your doctor’s office, and provide you with unexplored avenues for healing.

Who are the founders of Medicineless?

Kelly Brogan, M.D.

Kelly Brogan, M.D. is a holistic psychiatrist, author of the NY Times Bestselling book, A Mind of Your Own, Own Your Self, the children's book A Time For Rain, and co-editor of the landmark textbook, Integrative Therapies for Depression. She completed her psychiatric training and fellowship at NYU Medical Center after graduating from Cornell University Medical College, and has a B.S. from M.I.T. in Systems Neuroscience. She is board certified in psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine, and integrative holistic medicine, and is specialized in a root-cause resolution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms. She is on the board of GreenMedInfo, Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, Functional Medicine University, Pathways to Family Wellness, Mindd Foundation, SXSW Wellness, Chickasaw Nation Wellness, and the peer-reviewed, indexed journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. She is Medical Director for Fearless Parent and a founding member of Health Freedom Action. She is a certified KRI Kundalini Yoga teacher and a mother of two.

References

Berman et al. (2001). Reviewing the reviews. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 17, 456-466.

Garrow. (2008). What to do about CAM: how much if orthodox medicine is evidence based? British Medical Journal, 335(7627), 951.

Morris et al. (2017). The answer is 17 years, what is the question? Understanding the time lags in translational research. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 104(12), 510-520.

Prasad et al. (2013). A decade of reversal: An analysis of 146 contradicted medical practices. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 88(8), 700-798.

Farooq Peer, R., & Shabir, N. (2018). Iatrogenesis: A review on nature, extent, and distribution of healthcare hazards. Journal of Family Medicine & Primary Care, 7(2): 309–314.