Body & Soul with Gail Harris

Healing Places
Biological Medicine with Thomas M. Rau, MD.
Dr. Thomas Rau has been active as a hospital physician in rheumatology, internal medicine and general medicine. He has also trained students in naturopathic healing methods. Since 1992, he has served as medical director of the Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland. A first of its kind, the clinic combines holistic medicine, naturopathic treatments and biological dentistry. Body & Soul senior executive producer Gail Harris spoke with Dr. Rau about his approach to total health. Following are excerpts from their conversation.

GAIL HARRIS: Dr. Rau, when you talk about internal milieu, do you mean that it is important for us to know what's going on inside?

THOMAS RAU: Well, you know, a human being is not an entity which is isolated in the world. You're very densely connected with your surroundings, your environment, and nutrition. Depending on your diet, you can be a different person entirely. And this is what we call the milieu, which you can control yourself; it enables, for example, metabolism, detoxification, and all the things which give an equilibrium to the human organism… And it's very much based on factors that orthodox medicine doesn't touch upon.

GH: One of the other really important components of biological medicine is what's going on in your mouth -- your dental work, in particular.

TR: Each tooth is connected to an energetic meridian system, a system of energy, which flows over the organism, which has been known for thousands of years. And if you preserve your teeth with root canal treatments, or if you have toxic elements -- for example, mercury, in your teeth, that can affect your overall health. And daily we see patients whose sickness was co-caused by dental work, especially root canals, infected teeth and heavy metals from amalgams or crowns and so on. And sometimes it's like a key -- if you remove them, then the patient gets better.

GH: So you're saying that sometimes if you do something as simple as fix a root canal, the other problems will go away?

TR: Yes. For example with arthritis or asthma, or in chronic infections or allergies, very frequently we can make the situation much better by repairing dental work, giving trace elements and draining the toxins -- especially mercury, which is very toxic, and affects allergies and immunities.

GH: How did we all get to be so toxic?

TR: Because our food contains toxins… and nearly everyone has toxins in their teeth. So much of our food is prepared with stabilizers and preservatives, and preservatives suppress metabolic functions. They prevent bacteria -- but inside you have many billions of bacteria that you need. And they are suppressed too. So your whole internal milieu is changed.

GH: So the lesson is, 'Eat only real food'?

TR: Yes!

GH: Biological medicine treatments are described as being non-invasive and non-toxic. But aren't there times when surgery really is the best thing to do? I mean, if you have a brain tumor, don't you want to get rid of it?

TR: You know, we are not complementary -- we are primary medicine. And if people really follow our way of living and medicine, then on a few occasions, they will need complementary treatments -- some operations or some chemical treatments.

I'm not against surgery. Absolutely not. For example, when a breast cancer patient comes, we pre-treat. I worked at oncological and rheumatological clinics, and I know what they are able to do. So we do integrate orthodox medicine into our thinking.

GH: How do you deal with problems that are primarily a mental health issue, and not necessarily a physical one?

TR: Well, we approach them nearly the same way. When a patient comes in for depression, for example -- in Chinese medicine, this is a disease of the liver. And the liver is a metabolic organ. So for us, we don't separate the mental from the physical, They go together.

Take for example, coronary heart disease, and heart pain, which is very common now. The patient will go to the cardiologist and get medications, but they don't get better. And then I begin to treat them. And after some weeks or months, they tell me, "I feel like another person... I just approach life differently now, and I no longer have this painful understanding of my needs and duties."

It shows how densely connected the mind, the psyche and the organism are.

Program Description
Biological Medicine
Thomas Rau, MD
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Help YourSelf

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