 What
would it take to turn a quality-control manager who believed firmly in
conventional medicine into a holistic healthcare practitioner who uses
herbs, muscle testing, and iridology to help clients get well?
In
Gene Fitzpatrick’s case, it took his wife’s illness. Fitzpatrick, who
is in his forties, with the build of an athletic coach and a lean face
with a cropped mustache, is no stranger to the medical field. His father
invented the heart-lung machine, his uncle was chief surgeon at Yale New
Haven hospital for many years, and he himself used to design and build
medical instruments for a living. His last job was quality-control manager
for a company that produces equipment to remove brain tumors.
The
owner of the company had had a serious health problem and had died. When
Fitzpatrick’s wife came down with the same problem, she began using
herbs. Because of Fitzpatrick’s involvement in the medical world, he
thought it was “crazy, but if it made her feel better, fine.” It made
her feel so much better, in fact, that she recovered. “So, with a
manufacturing and engineering background, I had to set out to prove the
herbal approach wrong,” Fitzpatrick says. “I took every class on herbs
that was available, and I found out what was wrong.” He pauses.
“Me.”
After
learning about herbs, Fitzpatrick learned a technique called Touch for
Health, which uses muscle testing to evaluate the body’s
imbalances and assess its needs. “It was the darndest thing I ever saw,
Fitzpatrick says of Touch for Health. “It actually works, it’s non-invasionary,
simple, and the worst thing that happens is nothing happens. I said, ‘My
goodness, I’ve got to get into this a little more.’ So I started using
it.” This was in 1992, and five years later, he became certified by the
International Kinesiology College to teach it.
Fitzpatrick also learned iridology, a
technique of evaluating the condition of the internal organs by examining
the irises of the eyes, based on the concept that each part of the iris
corresponds to a particular organ or system. With iridology, Fitzpatrick
says, “you have the ability to identify problems before they manifest
themselves into an issue.” Iridology has progressed to the point where
the iris can be photographed by a video camera and displayed on a computer
screen.
Fitzpatrick
uses these evaluation tools in his practice to find what the body needs to
restore its internal balance, which allows it to heal. “Unfortunately,
our foods are nutritionally very empty,” Fitzpatrick points out. “What
I’m finding to be a common cause of sickness these days is lack of
enzymes in foods — irradiating the fruits, vegetables, and meats to kill
all the enzymes. If there are no enzymes in foods, you don’t break the
foods down. If you don’t break them down, they’re not available to the
body. I’m finding that three-year-olds need enzymes. There’s something
wrong with that picture.
“It’s
no longer true that you can say to somebody, ‘Eat this way and you’ll
be fine.’ I believe you’ve got to go one step further. I believe
you’ve got to find out what the body needs nutritionally to heal. There
are very few sources of good-quality foods anymore, and good-quality herbs
happen to be one of those few sources.”
Fitzpatrick
emphasizes the importance of quality in herbs. To illustrate this, he
tells the story of a client who came in with thousand-milligram capsules
of vitamin C. Muscle testing indicated that the client needed ten capsules
a day. Fitzpatrick then muscle-tested with vitamin C from a brand he
stocks, and the client tested “for two instead of ten. They both weigh a
thousand milligrams. Now you tell me which is the higher quality. The
client said, ‘Yeah, but the C from Brand X is three dollars less a
bottle.’ I said, ‘Right! But you’ve got to take five times as
many!’”
In
addition to nutritional deficiencies, another common cause of sickness is
toxic overload. “If you can’t properly dispose of your waste, it’s
pointless to build,” Fitzpatrick says. He gives leukemia as an example.
“Leukemia, by definition, is too many white blood cells. If you look at
it from a logical standpoint, the white blood cells are trying  to gobble
up garbage. So my approach has been, ‘Why are you full of garbage?’
Not ‘Why there are too many white blood cells?’ If there are too many
white blood cells, your body is doing its job. What’s wrong is what’s
causing the need to have too many white blood cells.
“Following
Hippocrates, we need to find out why you’re so toxic, and we need to get
those toxins out of the body as quickly as possible, in a way that’s not
stressing your body. What that means is different for different people.”
Herbs
can help to both supply needed nutrients and facilitate discharge of
wastes. Although the number of practitioners who use muscle testing along
with herbs is growing, Fitzpatrick says that “to find somebody to pull
the whole thing together is difficult. You may have to see two people [a
kinesiologist and an herbalist] to put the whole thing together, but at
least you’ll have a solution.
I’ve seen people get over naturally treated, medically tracked things
you wouldn’t believe — two cases of cystic fibrosis, liver cancer, colon
cancer, breast cancer, fourth-degree melanoma.”
Despite
his migration from the medical world to holistic health care, Fitzpatrick
believes that both have their place — although, he says, “I’d like to
change the terminology that people use from ‘alternative’ to
‘natural,’ because ‘alternative’ implies you’ve tried everything
else first. I don’t believe in the use of that word. I think ‘natural
health care’ is what we should change our terminology to.” As to when
we should use one versus the other, Fitzpatrick tells of the response he
got when he asked a friend of his, a nurse, this question.
“She
said, ‘It’s easy for me to tell you when you should go chemical and
when you should go natural. When it’s obvious to a four-year-old that
you have a problem, you go to the doctor. Otherwise, don’t.’
“I
said, ‘Coming from a nurse, that sounds rather facetious.’
“She
said, 'It isn’t really, when you think about it. Consider this: if you
break a leg, if you’ve got a knife sticking in you, if you have a heart
attack, you pass out, you get hit by a truck, any of these crises, it’s
obvious to a four-year-old that you’ve got a problem. It’s crisis
medicine, and crisis medicine is designed to deal with crises. But if
you’re walking around apparently well to a four-year-old, you probably
have a metabolic imbalance, and a metabolic imbalance is best treated, as
Andrew Weil says, with metabolic approaches — best treated naturally.' Makes perfect sense.
“I
believe a healthcare practitioner, regardless of modality, has one
job — to stop people from coming, because they’re better. I’ve come to
believe that anything that happens to the body naturally can be healed
naturally,” Fitzpatrick says, quoting Andrew Weil. “I don’t argue
with the designer. I don’t replace body functions. I enhance your
ability to heal by supplying you what you need to accomplish that.”
Fitzpatrick
finds that fewer and fewer doctors are shunning natural health care.
“What I’m hearing is that two things are happening. The doctors with
the huge egos are taking offense at their clients getting better. But
those who are sincerely interested in people’s health, and I believe
that’s the vast majority of them, may not necessarily want to
understand why or how it works but have an interest in seeing that it
does work.” If a physician is hostile, Fitzpatrick says, “that’s
great — because the doctor is saying, ‘I’m not willing to allow you to
heal.’ So you go find a doctor who will.
“And
then the argument is, ‘Well, my HMO points me to this particular
doctor.’ I say to folks, ‘Look, you’re paying the bill, not the
doctor. It’s up to you to make the decision, not a secretary at the end
of a phone at the insurance company.’
“Up
until recently, there was a lot of fear in admitting you actually got well
without drugs. It wasn’t until the last several years that you could
walk in to a doctor and admit you were taking a vitamin or an herb without
the doctor chastising you.
“People
are still afraid to be open with their doctors. I tell them, ‘Look, be
open with them, because if you’re taking a prescription and not filling
it and getting well, the doctor’s putting in the record that he
recommended the prescription and you’re getting well, therefore this
drug helped you. The doctor is basing his decisions for other patients on
false information, and you’re actually hurting somebody. Be honest with
them.’
“Unfortunately,
the doctors have this peer-pressure thing they have to deal with too. I
think honestly that that’s not coming from the doctors so much as the
insurance companies and the lawyers.
“If
a doctor looks at it with open eyes, he’ll see that what’s happening
is that the American public is beginning to recognize, through education,
when it’s appropriate to go chemical and when it’s appropriate to go
natural. There are times when you use both. And what I perceive happening
is that we’re going to come out of this whole thing with a health
community in which practitioners of the Western approach have the
attitude, ‘We’re going to deal with crises, we’re going to save
people’s lives, we’re going to deal with all these obvious-to-a- four-year-old issues.’"
Gene
Fitzpatrick
Balanced Health
9 Simon Street
Nashua, NH 03060
603-881-5681
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