BUILDING A HEALTH HOUSE
Dr. Ruthie Harper of Nutritional Medicine Associates
by Boyd Martin

Enthused and inspired by her medical school training, Dr. Ruthie Harper was on a mission--a mission to get people well. "My love and passion for the world of nutrition and health came from the reality that I was a practicing emergency room physician," says Dr. Harper. "I trained at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, and I was so excited when I finished, because I always thought I was going to just stamp out all this disease with all this technology and drugs and things I'd learned about in medical school and residency. I thought I had it all. I was great in my field, I loved it, was passionate. I went out and practiced emergency room medicine, I was very successful. I became an emergency department director, and I practiced for about five years--did all this great medicine--and nobody got well. What I saw was all these repeat customers. All these people that were really wonderful, but over the years they had more and more medical issues, and were on more medications and having more side effects."

Looking for results with high expectations, Dr. Harper realized the time had come to re-evaluate. "I thought to myself, gosh, I kind of lost track of this picture of health and wellness that I thought about originally when I went into medical school . I became so fascinated with disease and intervention. But how do you save a life in the emergency room, and then change it in a meaningful way to make that person healthy and well?"

Food is fuel...
Dr. Harper quickly determined that nutrition--what people were actually eating--played a much greater role in health than was being preached in medical schools. "Every single biochemical process relies on food as fuel to do what it's supposed to do. When I began to use food and fuel people appropriately, I could absolutely transform people's lives. It was extremely exciting for me to the point that in 1999, in Austin, Texas, I had this vision--after I studied nutrition for all these years and worked with a lot of people--to open this little sideline practice." That quickly, within about three months, grew to a full-time practice.

Her simple approach is based on sound science with hundreds of success stories from her practice to back it up. "Food is fuel. It is the piece that makes our body go, and unfortunately we miss that opportunity to use it as fuel over and over and over again. People can not believe what food can do in their body when they use it correctly. I believe that all disease is basically a reflection of underlying failing machinery. When you look at the basic population, and you look at the big killers--heart disease, stoke, inflammatory conditions, autoimmune conditions, cancer--all of those things have a nutritional basis."

With such TV shows as Peter Jennings' ABC News exposé on the food industry [WINDOWS MEDIA VIDEO LINK], and the proliferation of self-help health publications, public awareness--and action--is on the rise. "I think we're seeing a huge population of people who are really becoming empowered now to go out and seek health and wellness and realize that they can do it on their own," observes Dr. Harper. "Many of these things are really within their own hands to get their body well. If they just get the information and become educated, there's a huge world of opportunity out there for them."

A person deciding to take responsibility for their own health is faced with a mountain of information about how to proceed. What's the bottom line? "I think the biggest thing that's happened in America is we eat too much of too little," declares Dr. Harper. "So basically, what we're doing is putting foods in our body that are nutritionally devoid of things that grow in the ground. I think what's happened is that we eat so much processed food that doesn't come from original sources--that's synthetic and man-made--and we think we're eating something. We think we're nourishing our bodies, but basically we're just putting calories in that are devoid of any real nutritional substance."

Natural hormone replacement...
Beyond the huge issue of daily nutrition and the lifestyle changes that it suggests, Dr. Harper found herself at a crossroads with some of her women patients. They had been on carefully designed nutritional programs, were exercising appropriately, had learned to control stress in their lives, and yet, at a certain age, they were coming back needing help with hormonal issues. "It certainly was not my intention when I opened my nutritional medicine practice," says Dr. Harper. "And obviously, based on our name we're Nutritional Medicine Associates, not Hormonal Medicine Associates. When I began to look at these things, I had no idea that hormones could have such a profound effect on how people feel. I mean, it's absolutely almost a miraculous transformation." But, she found, an impeccable inquiry and analysis for each individual had to be in place first. "I began to work with these hormones prior to the Women's Health Initiative Study, so I was very grateful that study came out, because it recognized that using synthetic hormones and just putting these things in kind of a one-size-fits-all program for women's bodies was not going to lead to success with women's hormones, and indeed, that's what we found."

Dr. Harper was convinced there had to be an effective way to address this issue using nutritional principles. With nutrition the idea is to give the cellular machinery what it needs to function optimumly. The same is true when it comes to hormones. "Hormones work in a similar way. They are these keys that fit into the cellular machinery like a lock, and open a door. What happens is when the machinery is running perfectly--it's got all its biochemical needs met, all its hormonal needs met--the individual feels fabulous. But when those hormones change, it can really shift things for people, even if they are nutritionally and emotionally and exercise-wise on target. So, I really delved into the science and learned about this world of biochemical-identical hormones."

Dr. Harper says that in a perfect world, women would have had measurements taken of their hormone levels in their twenties or thirties to establish a baseline. "Unfortunately, most people have not done that, and I see people now typically in their mid-thirties, mid-forties, early fifties, who are experiencing hormonal decline. The most important thing is this concept of biochemical individuality both with food and hormones--making sure that you get it right for the individual, and then always choosing to replace a hormone with a biochemical-identical hormone. So nothing is changed, nothing is altered. The identical key that was originally in the cellular machinery, or cellular lock for the individual, recreates the state of well-being when the individual was in balance."

Dr. Harper uses only non-synthetic sources for her bio-identical hormone therapy. And beyond that, she finds it critical to find the right naturally-occurring substances and correctly modify them to be effective. "For instance, Yam cream can be used as a precursor to make progesterone, but the actual process to do that has to be done in a laboratory," says Dr. Harper. "Human beings don't have the enzyme to take yam cream and convert that into the actual identical progesterone hormone that the body sees and recognizes. All the sources that I use come from Nature, but they do have this scientific kind of scrutiny and work where they actually go to a compounding pharmacy that will take that substance and make it into the right dose, and make sure that the key is identical to the person's body."

The Women's Health Initiative Study has helped raise women's awareness of the issues surrounding hormonal changes and what can be done to maintain a high quality of life. Such books as Suzanne Somers' The Sexy Years, have contributed to getting the subject out of the doctor's office and into the streets. "I think what's happening is that women's awareness is really opening up--they now realize these things they feel and experience when their hormones change are real; and there are hundreds of thousands of other women out there feeling the same thing. Yet, for each woman, the experience is such an individual thing and we must treat it that way."

Building the health house...
In her practice Dr. Harper views herself as a sort of construction contractor, designing and building a lifestyle for her clients. "I structurally create a health house for them," says Dr. Harper. "I build the foundation, then I put up the walls, and then I put up the sheet rock, then I build up the inside, then I put up a roof over their head, and I do all of these pieces. It really is a process. I try to teach people to see their health and wellness is a process, a journey--it's the most wonderful one you'll ever take. But it's not like getting a sinus infection, taking an antibiotic and it going away. Health is really a process. I believe that we have a daily opportunity to contribute to and do wonderful things for our body, or we can do things that take away from our body, and take away from our health. It's really all within our choice."

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