The UltraMind Solution (13 page)

Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day.

Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (e.g., a change of more than five pounds of body weight in a month), or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day.

Insomnia or hypersomnia (sleeping too much) nearly every day.

Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day.

Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day.

Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day.

Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day.

Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt, or a specific plan for committing suicide.

There are even subtypes of depression such as mild, moderate, and severe, with and without psychotic features, chronic, catatonic, melancholic, atypical, and more outlined in a similar manner.

And there are literally thousands of different distinctions like these made for the major “mental diseases” cataloged in the
DSM-IV
. They include disorders of childhood, delirium, dementia, or cognitive disorders, substance abuse disorders, schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, personality disorders, eating disorders, and sleep disorders.

But this description of depression (and of all the other mental disorders in the
DSM-IV
) is
only
of the symptoms we observe. These descriptions tell us nothing at all about
why
those symptoms occur, or how people with
exactly
the same symptoms may have them for many different underlying reasons and need different and individualized treatment as a result.

At a recent dinner for Research! America (an advocacy group for research and dissemination of research) in Washington, D.C., I sat with the surgeon general and the director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, Thomas Insel, M.D. The discussion around the dinner table focused on the limitations of our current approach of breaking down the body into its component parts to understand how things work.

I asked Dr. Insel what he thought of the
DSM-IV.
He said that it has 100 percent accuracy, but 0 percent validity—that it provides a perfect way to describe symptoms, but has nothing to tell us about the underlying biology for what causes them.

He proposed a new model of psychiatry, called “Clinical Neuroscience,” which would encompass the entire spectrum of things that affect the mind and the brain. We discussed the need for the medical establishment to move beyond its current limited model of diagnosis (both in psychiatry and the rest of medicine). It no longer reflects the science or our understanding of how the body works.

The future of medicine is personalized treatment, not “one size fits all.” The outdated method of naming the disease and then assigning a drug to fix it clearly isn’t working.

Unfortunately, few in the medical industry today seem to understand this. The truth is that medical practice is virtually predicated on the myth of diagnosis.

I want to help you understand how serious this problem is, because it is the basis of everything I am explaining in this book. It is not trivial because it changes
everything
about how we think about disease and what to do about it.

There is a two-volume book medical professionals use called the
ICD-9
(
The International Classification of Diseases
). It is the bible of medical diagnosis. It is the system used by medical insurance companies and Medicare to decide who gets paid. Doctors have to “name” the disease they are treating based on the
ICD-9
to collect their money from these agencies!

The book contains the name of every single disease known. There are more than 12,000 diseases listed. The
ICD-9
gives the impression that all these diseases are separate and distinct.

There is only one problem. They are not.

A very few fundamental problems exist that explain nearly every disease. It doesn’t matter what specialty your disease falls under. As Pierre Laplace, the eighteenth-century mathematician and astronomer, said in his
Mecanique Celeste,
a very few fundamental laws can explain an extraordinary number of very complex phenomena.
³

These underlying problems are the link between
all
of the diseases in the
ICD-9.
In almost every one of the diseases listed in that “bible,” the same few things go wrong. And those same few problems are all interconnected. One affects the other in a giant web of biology. Pull on one part of the web, and the whole web moves.

This web is built of the seven keys of UltraWellness. These keys are the underlying causes of
all
illness. And they are the keys that lead to an UltraMind.

These are the common pathways for all disease. Wherever you look, whatever problem you have, once you learn how to analyze these seven keys, you will find they are the root of all your health problems.

That’s all we need.

Once we learn how to navigate health and disease using these concepts, we can throw the two-volume
ICD-9
manual in the garbage, because it is the wrong road map for the territory of illness.

This new road map turns the myth of diagnosis on its head, and in doing so reveals one of the most radical concepts that emerges from this new medical approach: the
name
of the disease bears little relationship to the
cause
of the disease.

One disease can have many, many different causes,
all
of which manifest the same symptoms. Take depression, for example. It may be caused by many different factors, yet the symptoms we see are the same across the board. The
DSM-IV
accurately describes these symptoms (100 percent accuracy), but it says nothing at all about the causes (0 percent validity).