How to Make Disease Disappear

219 Pages·2018·7.52 MB·English

by  Rangan Chatterjee

Dedication
For my dad, you have influenced me
in more ways than you ever knew.
I wish you were still here.
Contents Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
How to Use This Book
Relax
1. Me-Time Every Day
2. The Screen-Free Sabbath
3. Keep a Gratitude Journal
4. Practice Stillness Daily
5. Reclaim Your Dining Table
Eat
1. De-Normalize Sugar
2. A New Definition of “Five a Day”
3. Introduce Daily Micro-Fasts
4. Drink More Water
5. Unprocess Your Diet
Move
1. Walk More
2. Become Stronger
3. Begin Regular High-Intensity Interval Training
4. Movement Snacking
5. Wake Up Your Sleepy Glutes
Sleep
1. Create an Environment of Absolute Darkness
2. Embrace Morning Light
3. Create a Bedtime Routine
4. Manage Your Commotion
5. Enjoy Your Caffeine Before Noon
Finding Your Balance
Sources and Further Reading
Acknowledgments
For Your Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
We are sick and getting sicker. In the United States today, a new generation of
children has been born that has a lower life expectancy than the generation
before it. This is shocking and extraordinary. To understand why it’s happening,
we first have to grasp the terrible epidemic of chronic disease that’s currently
laying waste to millions.
Chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, depression and
dementia are today the nation’s leading causes of death and disability. Half of all
American adults currently suffer from a chronic disease, with one in four people
suffering from two or more. Chronic disease is, by a wide margin, now the
deadliest problem facing America. Despite the statistics and the suffering, so
much confusion exists about what we can do in our own lives to protect
ourselves and live long, healthy lives. I have seen this firsthand as I have lived
and worked with many families.
The good news is that I can make these diseases disappear. That’s right. This
probably sounds like an extraordinary claim, but the reason I can make them
disappear is that they’re an illusion. These diseases are not the inevitable result
of aging. They are not simply our genetic fate or our destiny. We do not have to
suffer needlessly. The truth is these diseases don’t really exist, at least not in the
way we think they do.
To come to this conclusion, I first had to travel down a long, hard road.
Seventeen years ago, I graduated from medical school full of enthusiasm and
passion, ready to go out and help people. But I always felt there was something
missing. I started off as a specialist and then became a generalist, as an MD, but
I always had this nagging sense that I was just managing disease or simply
suppressing people’s symptoms. And then on December 28, 2010, a turning
point came. That was the day my son nearly died.

Photography copyright © 2018 by Susan Bell
I was on a skiing vacation with my family in the stunning snowy landscape of
Chamonix, France. My son had been a little phlegmy and quiet all day, but I
wasn’t too worried. It was just a cold and I felt sure it would pass without issue.
That evening my wife, Vidh, sat on the sofa watching TV while I was in the
kitchen. I was watching the kettle, waiting for the water to boil, when I heard her
shout: “Rangan! He’s not moving!” I rushed in. “He must be choking!” I said.
“It’s the phlegm.” I lifted him out of Vidh’s arms, turned him over and slapped
him over the back in an attempt to clear his airway. But nothing happened.
“Rangan, he’s not choking,” said Vidh. “We need to go to the hospital.” My
son’s arms were stretched out, his body was rigid, his eyes stared vacantly.
After a panicked rush down a snowy road that almost ended in my turning the
car over, we found ourselves standing in the resuscitation room of the
emergency room of the tiny Les Hôpitaux du Pays du Mont-Blanc. As I watched
the doctors take his temperature and try to get an intravenous line into his neck, I
ran through the possibilities of what might be wrong with him. Was it epilepsy?
Was it something more serious? I couldn’t think. I felt numb. The truth was, I
didn’t have a clue. In that moment, I was no longer the doctor with nearly ten
years’ experience who’d graduated from the prestigious University of
Edinburgh’s medical school. I was a terrified dad.
Five long, agonizing hours later, the doctor came in to see us, waiting by our
son’s bed. “Dr. Chatterjee, we have an update,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Dr. Chatterjee, your son’s calcium levels are very low. In fact, he has almost no
calcium in his body at all. He experienced a hypocalcemic convulsion. We’re
going to give him some intravenous calcium.”
My reaction was utter confusion. How had this happened? What did it mean?
But my confusion in that moment was nothing compared with the shock I felt
when I did finally discover the root cause of what happened. It was an entirely
preventable vitamin D deficiency. This was as unbelievable as it was serious.
Untreated—especially in children—vitamin D deficiency can lead to painful and
permanent damage including deformities to the bones, a condition known as
rickets. I was devastated. And I swore that I would never allow anything like it
to happen again.
The crisis of my son’s illness forced me to ask some honest and uncomfortable
questions. Why had I not been made sufficiently aware of vitamin and other
nutritional deficiencies during my supposedly top-of-the-line medical training?
And why wasn’t that training proving more effective in my practice? As an MD,
my days were filled with seeing patients with chronic conditions such as joint
pain, headaches, type 2 diabetes, insomnia, depression, weight gain and fatigue.
I hated to admit it, but the fact was, I reckoned I was helping maybe 20 percent
of these people. The approach to consultations I’d been taught in medical school
simply wasn’t working. And if my medical training was failing me so badly for
so many of my patients, what else could I do but embark on my own course of
re-education?
And so began an incredible journey through many new worlds of knowledge
that, I’m sad to say, the majority of doctors still have relatively little idea about. I
immersed myself in research, especially around nutrition, movement science,
stress reduction, ancestral health and functional medicine. I also came across
research that allowed me to see afresh what I’d learned while completing my
BSc honors degree in immunology, gaining valuable insight into the rapidly
developing field of gut health and the microbiome. I started applying the science,
first with my family and then with my patients. Do you know what happened?
People started getting better—really better. I’d finally learned to resolve the root
cause of their problems, rather than simply suppressing their symptoms.
What I’d learned, in a way that I hadn’t fully grasped before, was that acute
disease and chronic disease are entirely different things. Acute disease is
something that, as doctors, we’re pretty good at. It’s relatively simple. You have
something like pneumonia, a severe lung infection—so in your lung you have
the overgrowth of some bugs, typically a type of bacteria. We identify the
bacteria and we give you a treatment, typically an antibiotic that kills it. The
bacteria die and, hey presto, you no longer have your pneumonia. The problem
is, we apply that same thinking to chronic disease, and it simply doesn’t work.
Chronic disease doesn’t just happen like this. Chronic disease has many different
causes. You don’t just wake up some day suffering from one; by the time we
give you the diagnosis, things have already been going wrong for a long, long
time.