Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

by T. Colin Campbell

But medicine stops at symptoms. With rare exceptions, we do not treat the causes of disease; we treat its effects. And we convince ourselves that those individual effects are themselves causes. Got hypertension? We better lower your blood pressure with an antihypertensive drug, because high blood pressure causes heart disease. We’re not interested in why your blood pressure is high to begin with. Got cancer? Let’s irradiate and chemo-poison the tumor. We don’t care that the tumor may have been caused by a diet too rich in animal products. (As we saw in chapters eight and nine, the reductionist genetics movement wants us to believe there’s nothing that could have been done—that cancer is inevitable because it’s in our genes.) Had a heart attack? Let’s put stents in your arteries so the blood can flow more freely in the future. The root cause of the blocked artery doesn’t matter. The practice of medicine focuses almost exclusively on treating symptoms as the whole of the problem.