Our Mission
“First of all, do no harm” – maxim of Hippocrates
According to a number of government and university studies, we physicians produce many more deaths each year than drunk drivers. It’s not incompetence or neglect driving those statistics; apparently over 180,000 people die each year, just from properly prescribed and administered drugs.
Why should that be? In a word, biochemical individuality. Almost half of the population do not respond to prescription drugs the way they ought to. The explanation for this has come out of the Human Genome project – there are literally thousands of gene variations that can have a huge impact on how people process drugs.
This also applies to how they process the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” not to mention the things they eat, and drink, and breathe.
Increasingly, the subtle details of our personal environment are being appreciated as factors causing disease. Farmers, and people living within ¼ mile of a pesticide-using farm, for example, are six times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than others. Recently, the University of North Dakota medical school published a series of papers linking agricultural pollution (in an area which was pristine and healthy 75 years ago) to neurodegenerative disease in the elderly, and learning disorders in the young.
Dr Bernhoft and his family have experienced environmental disease, personally. (See Clinic Story under WHO ARE WE? WHAT MAKES US DIFFERENT?) They have experienced the truth of the opinion of many experts that a majority of all disease is caused or aggravated by environmental factors. Dr Bernhoft regained his health, by correcting those factors. He and his staff want to do the same for others. They recognize that medicine, and medical education, in our country are dominated by drug companies who would rather sell drugs to suppress symptoms than find and address the causes of disease. (See recent books by Marcia Angell, MD, and George Lundberg, MD, former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the AMA, respectively, as well as recent comments by the former editor of the British Medical Journal). We would rather find the cause of the trouble than give drugs to suppress the symptoms.
That is our mission: to find correctible environmental factors and help patients regain, or improve, their health. We can’t cure everybody, but we can help a large number