Leo Galland, MD, has been practicing medicine for over 30 years, including a teaching stint at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is a pioneer in the emerging field of integrated medicine, which combines the best of alternative and conventional treatments. He is the author of three excellent books, Power Healing, Superimmunity for Kids, and The Fat Resistance Diet, and he currently practices in New York City, specializing in undiagnosed or difficult-to-treat illnesses. We recently sat down with Dr. Galland for a fascinating conversation about health, the state of medicine, the power of nutrition, and magnesium.
While billions of dollars are spent yearly in medical research and new advances are announced seemingly every week, one has to wonder at the concurrent rise of disease throughout the population. If medicine is making such great strides, why is the world becoming more ill?
It was questions of this nature that led Dr. Leo Galland to his current pursuits. “One of the reasons I left academic medicine back in the late 1970s was that I thought the view of health and illness that I was able to see in an academic center was very limited,” Dr. Galland told Organic Connections. “It was like a very small slice of the whole pie, and I wanted to be in a situation where I could get a much broader view of what was important for people’s health.”
Dr. Galland gave up full-time teaching and went into a small-town practice. By immersing himself in the primal encounter between physician and patient—which had always been the foundation for healing—he hoped to better understand the origins of sickness and the requirements for the restoration of health.
Using his new practice as “community clinical research,” he began regularly checking back on patients that hadn’t been to see him in a while. Through this investigation, he made a very interesting discovery. “I began to realize that the state of a person’s health a year or two later was not necessarily a result of or related in any way to the treatment that they’d received,” Dr. Galland said. “I mean, obviously if you missed something and the person got really sick, there would be an effect. But most of the time it didn’t seem to affect the long-term health of the individual—it was just dealing with the crisis. So I started to try to understand those factors that would affect the long-term health outcomes.”
Fast-forward some 30 years and Dr. Galland’s discoveries have evolved into a practice and philosophy that, instead of only focusing on specific diseases, takes into account the whole individual. This includes a patient’s environment, relationships and diet—in other words, a much broader set of factors than would previously have been the purview of a medical doctor.
The Decline of Western Medicine
To understand what has happened with modern medicine, it is worth taking a look at where it all began and tracing it from there—as Dr. Galland has so skillfully done in his book Power Healing.
You may have heard that physicians must swear to something called the Hippocratic oath. The original version of this oath dates back to the Greek “father of medicine,” Hippocrates, who lived between 460 and 377 BC. Hippocrates was credited with establishing medicine as a scientific discipline separate from religion, mysticism and philosophy. From his time forward, Western medicine rejected superstition and took a clinical approach based in the belief that illness had physical, not mystical, causes. A modern version of this ancient oath was written in 1964 and is used in medical schools to this day. Even the modern version of the oath reminds a physician that he or she does not “treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being.” It also instructs the doctor that “there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.”
Given today’s nonpersonable tendency toward quick dispensation of prescriptions or fast resort to the surgeon’s knife, it would certainly seem that modern medicine has gotten well away from many aspects of Hippocratic tradition.
What Happened?
The move away from the Hippocratic tradition of treating the whole individual and keeping his or her body “in harmony” first came when a seventeenth century English physician named Thomas Sydenham—ironically hailed as “the English Hippocrates”—proposed that diseases existed as real and distinct entities, independent of the individual patients whose minds and bodies they attacked.
This trend continued to escalate. A methodology called the “New Medicine” appeared following the French Revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and one of its founding fathers, Phillippe Pinel, vehemently attacked as quackery the notion that the physician’s task was support the body’s natural healing process. He believed that the signs of sickness were manifestations of the disease, not—as we now know them to be—manifestations of the body’s attempt to heal itself.
By the early twentieth century, the causes for many diseases, including malaria, leprosy, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera and diphtheria, had been isolated and their cures evolved. By then, the Hippocratic idea of disease as bodily disharmony seemed almost irrelevant.
“The Hippocratic tradition has definitely been eclipsed in the practice of modern medicine,” said Dr. Galland. “And while I don’t think the answer is a full return to Hippocratic medicine, I think that the principles which underlay Hippocratic medicine will be restored with the return to a focus on the individual.
“I use a term ‘the biographical model of illness.’ It means something that occurs in an individual at a particular point in time under a particular set of circumstances. That’s the way that all traditional health systems think about illness, including the Hippocratic tradition. And when that way of thinking about it—addressing the needs of individual patients—is restored to Western medicine, then the important part of the Hippocratic tradition will be restored.”
Interestingly, this trend is even reflected in the professional terms themselves. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the healing profession in Europe was not called medicine—it was called physic (from the Greek word physis, meaning nature). Physicians were “professors of physic” and were trained to be “philosophers of nature.” The word medicine comes from the Latin verb medico which, literally translated, means “I drug,” and during those times it meant treatment of disease with drugs. It was only a small part of the physician’s work, and the least highly regarded. Today, of course, the term medicine is the primary descriptive term for the field.
“The approach that has driven modern Western medicine from the late nineteenth century up to present day has been the notion that people get sick because they develop diseases, and that you can identify and classify these diseases without any particular regard to the individual who happens to have the disease, and you can develop a treatment for the disease,” Dr. Galland explained.
“This particular approach has had very mixed results. It’s been very expensive. It’s produced a lot of side effects. It can be very invasive. The most significant advances produced through this approach have been in the treatment or prevention of some of the common infectious disorders, and in the development of surgical techniques.
“Outside of that area, though, even the things hailed as major breakthroughs have been of pretty limited long-term effectiveness. There are a lot of things that look really good for a short while if you do a study that’s under a year; but if you start looking at what happens to people over the course of a decade, they don’t look so good. It’s not as if they’re worthless, it’s just that their value is way overstated.
“We are on the brink of a revolution in healthcare that is being driven not by technology but by the recognition that healing people is more effective than treating diseases.”
Focus on Nutrients and Nutrition
As part of the focus on the whole individual, Dr. Galland highlights the importance of nutrition in creating and maintaining health. “There is a growing awareness of the complexity of the nutritional relationships that underlie the chronic degenerative diseases that are so common,” he said.
While Dr. Galland believes that no single nutrient is a “magic bullet” and that a balanced full range is required, he has joined the ranks of pioneering experts in pointing out the importance of magnesium as a nutrient. “It is not surprising that the modern diseases that run rampant through Western society, like heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma and migraine headaches, are often accompanied by magnesium deficiency,” he writes in his book Power Healing.
“Magnesium is involved in hundreds of metabolic processes,” Dr. Galland told OC. “It’s especially important for energy metabolism, and it has a kind of special relationship to ATP [the molecule that carries energy for all cells].* The creation and utilization of ATP in almost all stages involves magnesium-dependent enzymes. “Also, intercellular magnesium protects
ATP, whereas intercellular calcium destroys ATP,” Dr. Galland continued. “I don’t want to demonize calcium—calcium is just as critical for health as magnesium and has important therapeutic benefits. But at the level of the cell, free calcium produces cell death. And it does so in part by intermingling with ATP. Magnesium regulates that process and counters it.”
Magnesium—or its shortage—also has a vital function in relation to a stressful lifestyle. “There’s a relationship between magnesium and adrenaline, and probably other aspects of the stress response, that’s been studied especially in Germany and France,” Dr. Galland said. “People who have higher levels of magnesium in their cells are less reactive to stress, less distracted by stress, and release less adrenaline and other compounds in response to stress than people who have lower levels of magnesium in their cells. And there’s a vicious cycle here, because these compounds interfere with and block the absorption, the transport, of magnesium into cells.
“I think that’s at least part of the reason for a phenomenon we observe very commonly, that people who are reactive to stress, who are stressed, tend to deteriorate. Rather than becoming more resilient and less reactive to stress, they tend to become more reactive to stress.”
Interestingly, magnesium has both a calming and an energizing effect. “In the best case scenario, where your magnesium levels are good, you have good physical energy and you feel calm. And sometimes when you infuse magnesium intravenously, that’s exactly what you see.”
Magnesium deficiency is best noticed through its symptoms, which tend to be fairly obvious. Fatigue, insomnia, irritability, muscle tension, muscle twitches, headaches and sensitivity to loud noises are some of the most common. A complete list is contained in Dr. Galland’s book Power Healing.
These indicators are apparent enough that Dr. Galland generally begins treating them with magnesium even before lab tests confirm the problem. “When I see somebody who’s in that kind of state, while I’m waiting for the lab results to come back I’ll usually have them start magnesium supplementation,” he said. “In over 50 percent of cases, by the time I see them to go over the lab results, they’re feeling significantly better.”
Calcium-Magnesium Balance
Magnesium is also vitally important as a balance to calcium. Today, calcium is highly touted on its own and dosages of 1,000 to 1,200 milligrams are recommended for bone health and other reasons.
Dr. Galland does not believe such recommendations should be taken at face value. “I think there are definite clinical situations in which people need that level of calcium,” he said, “although the amount of calcium from supplements a person needs is going to depend upon what their dietary calcium is. But it is also going to depend upon specific clinical indications. I don’t think that everyone should be loading up on calcium supplements, just kind of across the board.
“A number of years ago, the recommended dietary allowance for calcium in adults was 800 milligrams a day. Presently, there are a lot of places in the world where people don’t consume more than 800 milligrams a day, and they don’t get osteoporosis. Also, the amount of calcium that the body needs is very much regulated by vitamin D and by parathyroid hormone, and it’s possible the reason that the recommended allowance for calcium has gone up is because there have actually been changes in the population that have produced the need for more calcium.
“But just giving calcium does not necessarily correct those biochemical changes. Parathyroid function is very much influenced by magnesium, for example. There’s a widespread epidemic of vitamin D deficiency because people avoid the sun, which is not a natural state of affairs, and there are many factors in addition to calcium and vitamin D that impact on bone health.”
Dr. Galland continues his innovative work in integrated medicine, and we hope to see more from him in the near future. We thank him for spending time and sharing his valuable insights with us.
For copies of Dr. Galland’s book Power Healing, visit Organic Connections Bookstore.
To find out more about Dr. Galland and his work, visit the Foundation for Integrated Medicine website at www.mdheal.org.
*ATP: short for adenosine triphosphate, a molecule found in all living organisms that is the main immediate source of usable energy for the activities of the cells. It is especially important for muscle contraction.
It’s nice to see more Doctors like Dr. Galland who promote wellness through eating well and getting an optimal level of nutrients. Current medicine is too focused on the prescribing of toxic prescription drugs, and instead the focus needs to be put on prevention and the maintenance of wellness.