Read an Excerpt
Return to Health
Overcoming the Unimaginable and Beating the Odds
By Robert Kuhn
BALBOA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Dr. Robert Kuhn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4525-5672-7
Chapter One
Back from the Brink
There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.
—Victor Hugo
May 1, 2008
Today is my thirty-ninth birthday. It's 7:15 am, and I'm standing in the upstairs guest bathroom in my house. I'm staring at myself in the mirror. My skin is jaundiced, with a horrifying yellowish tint. My eyes are bloodshot, and I mean to the point where it looks like I stayed out until three o'clock in the morning drinking tequila. My arms tremble uncontrollably. In fact, my entire body is shaking mildly, and once again I feel nauseous. Every time I take a breath, it feels as though my lungs are filled with shards of crushed glass. I am cold and shivering, even though it's springtime. A splitting headache pounds my skull, and even though I just slept through the night, I feel like I need to be in bed for about another two days to regain some energy. My eyes begin to tear up as I look at myself and think, "Today is going to be the last day that I am alive on this planet."
It's time to go to work. Do I go to work or to the emergency room? This is a disturbing question to ask early in the morning. After three years of bouncing around from doctor to doctor trying to figure out why I was in this position and what was wrong with me, I knew that there was nothing medicine could do to help me. A whole lot of ghastly statistics and part of my life's work had told me that hospitals are places where sick people go to die. As bad as I felt, I chose to go to work. This is my story.
The Story Is Part of the Problem
In my first draft of this chapter, I wrote my story in its complete and total entirety. I included every painful detail. Feeling strongly about what my family and I went through, I wanted the world to know what happened point by point so that I could hopefully prevent others from suffering the same fate.
But by doing that I would be reinforcing one of the most negative, health-draining behaviors that people partake in: telling their stories. You see, everyone has a story. Everyone! And for most people, that story becomes a self-limiting crutch that prevents them from ever living a life of happiness.
"I'm depressed because my wife left me." "I'm not doing well at work because I'm not smart enough." "I can't make a relationship last because of my upbringing." The list goes on and on. While some of these things may be true, they are still a story, and they still hold you back. For many people there is a huge payoff in holding on to those stories. Sometimes they receive attention from others for telling their sad story. Other times their story allows them to be taken off the hook, to not face the truth about why something isn't working in their life. It doesn't matter what kind of payoff it is. A payoff is a payoff, and it could seriously hinder your chances of regaining your health or achieving your dreams.
Let me give you some examples of people's stories that relate to their health. These are things I hear on a daily basis; they keep people from actually being able to achieve the level of health that they want:
• I have fibromyalgia, so ...
• I'm overweight because ...
• My MS is causing ...
• I can't do this because ...
• I can't exercise because ...
• My thyroid causes ...
• I have peripheral neuropathy, so ...
• My migraines cause me to ...
• My back will never be better because ...
• My parents had this so ...
• This has been going on ever since ...
This is just a short list of the stories I hear in my practice on a regular basis. To be clear, I'm not saying that people don't actually have these conditions, because they do. I'm also not saying that these conditions don't present challenges, because they do. The problem is that for many, the condition becomes their story, and once they have a story it can be a major obstacle to healing.
When I hear a sentence begin that way, I know someone is about to tell me their story again. Here's the issue: while it may be true that you have fibromyalgia, MS, or peripheral neuropathy, believing your own story inhibits you from moving forward in your life. Your story becomes your identity. You must change it!
Let me give you an example. I had a fifty-year-old female patient a few years back who had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which is a condition of global body pain. We'll call her Michelle. Michelle had completely bought into her diagnosis, hook, line, and sinker. She always came into the office with the statement, "My fibromyalgia is killing me today." One day she came in shaking and upset. She walked very slowly with a cane and made a scene over how much pain she was in. In a very loud, shaky, and upset tone, she said to me, "I'm having a terrible fibro flare-up." As a matter of fact, she told everyone else in the office too—the other patients, my staff, anyone who would listen. Here is the really interesting part of the story. She was my last patient on the morning shift that day. About fifteen minutes after she left, I went to a café right around the corner from my office to get some lunch. I walk into the café, and who did I see laughing, joking, and walking swiftly through the restaurant without a cane or any apparent physical disability? You guessed it. My patient Michelle appeared to be in no pain and to be having a great time. Of course, I would like to say it was because the treatment that she just received was so incredibly awesome, but there's more to it than that.
Am I suggesting that while in my office she was faking it? It's hard to say, but consider this. When she was in my office, her husband was with her. He coddled her and looked very concerned, obviously stressed over her condition. When I saw her at the restaurant, her husband wasn't there. She was there with a few other ladies having lunch. You can decide for yourself what the difference was.
Psychologically speaking, people get affirmation, a feeling of significance, and other types of emotional support from clinging to their story. They may not even realize that they are telling their story for those reasons, but that's why they do it.
Now, back to me. Because it became a major hindrance to my own healing, I have moved past my story. I don't particularly want to tell it anymore, but for you to understand where I'm coming from as well as my approach to helping you return to health, it is important for you to know my story. That said, I'm going to give you the Cliff's notes version so you can understand the challenges I faced and how I overcame them.
August 15, 2005
This was both a bittersweet and exciting day for us as a family. Tired of the rat race of big-city life and months on end of sweltering Phoenix heat, we were on our way to a new life in Virginia. My wife and I were leaving behind a beautiful home that we had moved into two years earlier, some great friends, my parents, and a six-year-old thriving practice that we had built from the ground up. With a huge vision of a new life in a smaller town, four seasons, green grass, and unlimited possibilities, we headed for Williamsburg, Virginia.
The move-in period was smooth, as usual. My wife and I are great planners (especially Wendy), and this was the third move we had made together as a couple, so we pretty much had it down pat. Staying true to form when we moved in, we had everything unpacked, pictures hung on walls, blinds hung up and the house completely ready and open for business in less than forty-eight hours after our arrival. This usually blows our new neighbors away, but, hey, that's how we roll.
In late November of 2005, just a few months after moving in, I noticed that I began to have some strange health symptoms. It started out innocently enough with minor bouts of dizziness, occasional headaches, and some shortness of breath. That "innocently enough" quickly snowballed into a health nightmare. Within a year, my list of ailments included:
• Daily chest pain
• Daily nausea
• Disturbances in body temperature (sometimes hot, sometimes cold)
• Stabbing abdominal pain
• Dry, scaly-looking skin
• Nosebleeds
• Daily sore throat
• Muscle pain
• Cramping
• Severe fatigue
• Memory loss
• Night sweats
• Swollen lymph nodes
• Depression
• Ringing in the ears (tinnitus)
• Powerful heart palpitations
• Weird skin rashes
• Muscle tremors
• Visual disturbances
• Constant redness of the eyes
• Tachycardia (racing heartbeat)
The worst part of it all was that it wasn't just me. My entire family was suffering from a combination of all of these problems. It is very disturbing to have your wife and kids sick without knowing why or how to fix it. Although my list of health problems continued to grow, I didn't go to a doctor for the first several months. Why? Because I had a sneaking suspicion that if I did go, they would run a plethora of tests and then come back and tell me everything was normal. Guess what happened when I did finally go to the doctor? Yep, you guessed it. A whole bunch of tests, and they didn't find anything. Predictably, when they couldn't find anything wrong, they offered me antidepressants and insinuated several times that it must all be in my head or related to stress. Thinking about it now still ticks me off. I know that this scenario sounds all too familiar to many of you, because you've experienced it yourself. Fear not! I'm going to show you why this happens.
The long and short of it was that within about eighteen months of moving to Virginia my wife and I and all three kids became terribly ill, and nobody could figure out why. In that time, we were misdiagnosed, not diagnosed, and were pretty much perceived as hypochondriacs with extreme anxiety.
Knowing that we weren't crazy, we continued to do our own research. Finally, after over two years of struggle, stress, and heartbreak, God gave us the big break we needed. We were watching a show called Mystery Diagnosis on television one night. We had never seen it before, so it had to be divine intervention that Wendy put it on. Not coincidentally, the episode featured a woman who was suffering from the exact same problems as us. As we watched, we were dumbfounded about how similar our stories were. Her diagnosis: toxic black mold poisoning. The rest, as they say, is history. The next day we called for a mold inspection of our beautiful brand new home, and, sure enough, toxic black mold was found in several areas of our house, including the entire crawl space, which meant it had gotten into the air conditioning as well. Day in and day out, we were constantly breathing a deadly biotoxin.
It was horrifying, but we had an answer. Now we could figure out how to get well. Unfortunately, one of the brilliant medical doctors I saw told me that if you are exposed to black mold, you die from it. How's that for taking away hope? Well, we knew better. Natural healthcare physicians have always worked under the premise that if you can find the cause of a health problem, then you can heal from it. My wife and I worked our butts off to get our family healthy again, and we succeeded.
During those three years of trying to figure out what was wrong with us, we were under the care of some of "the best" doctors, the most highly recommended, with the best credentials, who everyone raved about as being the best in town. Not one of them had a single clue about what was wrong with us! MRIs, CT scans, diagnostic ultrasounds, upper GIs, lower GIs, twenty different panels of blood work and not one of them ever even mentioned the possibility that we could be suffering from mold poisoning!
You ever notice that everyone thinks he or she has the best doctor? Think about it. When was the last time you were at a dinner party and you heard somebody exclaim, "Oh, my pediatrician is the absolute worst!" No. I see it in my practice every day. "Dr. Rob, I have to go get this procedure done, but I'm going to so-and-so; he's the best, you know." "Dr. Rob, I have to get this test done, but I'm going to so-and-so. She's the best in the state, you know." We all think we have the best doctor, yet day after day, year after year, we become sicker and sicker, taking more and more medications, all under the care of the best doctors. Hmmm, that's perplexing, don't you think?
The point of all this is that when it comes to chronic health problems, I truly know how you feel. I understand the frustration. I understand the hopelessness. I know what it's like to spend time and money, only to get zero results and I know the desperation of feeling like you don't have a future. I get it, and I'm here to show you how to get your life back.
Blazing a New Trail
In the world of healthcare, there is a new sheriff in town, and his name is functional medicine. Functional medicine saved my family's life, and it has helped me to change the lives of countless numbers of people over the years in my practice. Amazingly, the majority of people in our country still don't know what functional medicine is and have never even heard the term before.
Straight from the website of the Institute for Functional Medicine (www.functionalmedicine.org/), here's a textbook definition of what functional medicine is:
Functional medicine addresses the underlying causes of disease, using a systems-oriented approach and engaging both patient and practitioner in a therapeutic partnership. It is an evolution in the practice of medicine that better addresses the healthcare needs of the 21st century. By shifting the traditional disease-centered focus of medical practice to a more patient-centered approach, functional medicine addresses the whole person, not just an isolated set of symptoms. Functional medicine practitioners spend time with their patients, listening to their histories and looking at the interactions among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex, chronic disease. In this way, functional medicine supports the unique expression of health and vitality for each individual.
In lay terms, this is saying that functional medicine serves to actually find and fix the root cause(s) of a patient's health problem, whereas traditional Western medicine only focuses on addressing symptoms.
Functional medicine utilizes a wide variety of testing, both medical and alternative, to locate the actual cause of a health problem. Those tests may include traditional blood tests as well as nontraditional tests, such as testing stool samples for parasites or bacterial infections, accurate food sensitivity testing, hair analysis, organic acid tests, hormone testing, adrenal stress index testing, and more.
The goal of most traditional medical care is to get a patient past an acute phase of symptoms, without real thought given to the future. The goal of functional medicine is to find out why the patient is having the symptoms, fix the problem, and set the patient up for a future of health and vitality. Which approach would you rather rely on?
I'll give you a prime example. If a patient having chest pains goes to a cardiologist and the doctor discovers that one of the coronary arteries is blocked, the doctor will most likely insert a stent into the artery. This procedure will alleviate the patient's chest pain and, in the short term, will be a very beneficial and even life-saving event. However, just inserting a stent doesn't address the problem of why the patient's artery became blocked in the first place. Most patients in this situation will be given a handout that tells them to stay away from saturated fats, and that's about it. Many of these patients will end up back at the doctor's office again, needing another stent and accumulating further coronary damage. I had a patient like this in Phoenix. He had a stent in every one of his coronary arteries by the time he was sixty years old. I haven't seen him in about eight years, and I sometimes wonder if he is still alive.
If the same patient showed up with chest pain in my office, I would refer him to a cardiologist for evaluation and the stent if necessary, instructing him to return to me afterward so we could fix his health problem and prevent any further coronary damage. I would subsequently do a whole body assessment to better understand why he developed a clogged artery to begin with. That might mean addressing his blood sugar levels, gut function, adrenal glands, thyroid gland, hormones, and, of course, lifestyle. I would have that patient complete a food diary for me so that I could gain a total understanding of how he had been living his life and teach him how to change it. I would recommend a specific exercise program for him and coach him on a weekly basis. My goal would be nothing short of teaching this man how to regain his health and reach a point of total vitality to live the life of his dreams. If that explanation sounds like what you are looking for, you're reading the right book at the right time!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Return to Health by Robert Kuhn Copyright © 2012 by Dr. Robert Kuhn. Excerpted by permission of BALBOA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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