VICTORIA YU
TIGER TV ONLINE REPORTER
Erika Scholz cannot imagine life without prescription medication, but Candace Herrin stopped taking all five of her prescribed medications.
Scholz, a marketing junior, says she needs prescriptions to maintain her current lifestyle.
“I can’t sleep without my Ambien, I can’t skank without my birth control and I can’t do anything without my Adderol,” she said.
But Herrin, a volunteer at the Center for Natural Healing on Cora Drive, discontinued use of her prescribed medication and opted for natural healing.
“Natural healing is much more effective in the long term,” she said. “Prescriptions take care of symptoms but natural healing actually addresses the problem.”
University biology professor, Steven Pomarico, though skeptical of the natural healing process, agrees that prescription medication may only prevent a part of the medical problem.
“Say, I’ve got a chemical pathway in an organism and something’s converted from ‘A’ to ‘B’ to ‘C’ to ‘D.’ ‘D’ is causing the problems or symptoms so we’re going to block the conversion from ‘C’ to ‘D’ to stop the problem,” he said. “If we do that, we’re building up ‘C’ and that might cause problems that are different or more serious.”
Doctors Mark and Terry Stupka, the owners of the Center for Natural Healing, advocate a natural lifestyle.
“We can empower people to take better control of their own health,” Terry said. “The benefits here are long term.”
Herrin said the natural lifestyle relieved her ADD, allergies, migraines, anxiety and extreme fatigue.
“Natural healing is more than taking a pill,” she said.
Mark explained that natural healing allows the body to heal itself. He said the natural healing process, looked at as an alternative medical option, is more preventive and educational than pharmaceutical methods.
“What we do is orthodox and traditional,” he said. “Chemicals have only been around for a couple hundred years.”
Terry compared modern medicine to the dawning of computers. “Today’s multivitamins are advanced as the dark ages of computers.”
Mark said natural healing is influenced by the Japanese.
“The World Health Organization’s findings are startling,” he said. “Patients in Japan beat cancer 95% of the time. We should be doing what they’re doing.”
Eating certain foods, like blueberries, are antioxidants and can fight oxidative stress, which results in some cancers, Pomarico said but, “There’s nothing magical about blueberries. I would suspect you see people who read that information and eat blueberries every single day and they probably don’t need that many antioxidants.”
Basically, blueberries will not get rid of preexisting cancer, he said.
Dr. Terry said one of their main goals is to teach people prevention and awareness.
“Uncleanliness of the inside will have manifestations on the outside,” she said.
The Stupka’s explained different natural healing methods that determine what is in the body.
“We use hair analysis to see what kind of metals are in the body and learn about an individual’s immune system and thyroid gland,” Terry said.
However, Pomarico explained that hair analysis cannot reveal a whole medical history.
Depending on the piece of hair, only certain amounts of medical history are apparent, he said.
Other measures the Stupka’s take are natural supplements.
“The supplements are beyond organic,” Mark said. “If you go to Whole Foods it would be hard to find a vitamin that didn’t have magnesium stearate, which is so toxic, it’s outlawed in other countries.” He said the supplements he provides are toxic free.
Besides multivitamins, other seemingly healthy foods, like soy milk, can hurt an individual’s body.
“Soy milk ruins digestion,” Terry said.
Mark said unfermented soy can make the thyroid gland too fast or too slow. With the Swine Flu rampant on the University’s campus, vaccines and natural healing both claim to prevent the illness.
However, a Swine Flu informational pamphlet available at the Center for Natural Healing claims more people die from the Swine Flu vaccine than Swine Flu itself.
While Pomarico said vaccine safety has become a hot issue because of a small but recurring part of the population becoming sick from vaccines, the damage mainly occurs in small children.
“There doesn’t seem to be any real hard evidence of real problems that can occur with vaccines like Swine Flu when you’re mainly giving it to adults,” Pomarico said.
But the Center for Natural Healing’s pamphlet offers suggestions to prevent Swine Flu. An individual can get sufficient rest, exercise and eating garlic regularly. Garlic acts as an antibiotic to bacteria and virus.
The Center for Natural Healing often recommends eating various food sources for health improvement. Terry said natural salts can even be used to lower blood pressure.
Scholz said she wouldn’t try a naturally medicated lifestyle because there aren’t natural remedies for her problems. “I have so many conflicting problems that I wouldn’t want to mess with another substance even if it’s natural,” she said.
Pomarico said he would choose natural healing if more evidence supported it.
“If the natural healing had just as good evidence [as pharmaceutical medication] I would be prone to it simply because it would be more harmonious for the body,” he said.
