Why Your Doctor May Be the Last Person You Want to Speak with About Herpes

1. Most doctors are uninterested and unsympathetic to persons with herpes: Doctors are busy seeing lots of patients making lots of money. Herpes is a disease very few doctor’s have taken an interest in. There is no glamour involved with herpes like with cancer or heart disease. There are no big charities or foundations with millions or billions for research, and it’s incurable. Other than writing a prescription for an acyclovir-based drug there’s not much else seeing a doctor can do for persons with herpes. Very few doctors are going to invest the time and compassion in discussing the mental and emotional aspects of having herpes. Very few doctors will want to discuss having safer sexuality with you.

2. Many doctors and even a surprising number of dermatologists are not that competent at diagnosing herpes: Most doctors cannot accurately diagnose herpes sore just by visual inspection. I was mis-diagnosed for two years by a series of doctors who not only visually inspected my sores but also took swabs and gave me false negatives. Herpes can appear in a wide variety of forms on the skin form the typical colony of pin-prick sized liquid-headed lesions, to a single small pimple, a single-large pimple, a tear or slit in the skin like a fissure, to various rashes, to impersonations of ingrown hairs and skin-tags. If you suspect you have herpes insist on a type-specific blood test. The Western-Blot test is the most accurate one out, but there are others. You local chapter of planned parenthood can help you get a test if your doctor is reluctant.

3. Many doctors are surprisingly uninformed about herpes: I spend a lot of my time correcting bad information given to my patients by their doctors. Some doctors are even still telling people that they cannot spread herpes to others when they are not having an outbreak. Many doctors also exaggerate the hype about asymptomatic shedding and overstate the effectiveness of drug therapy for herpes in order to aid the drug companies in their marketing efforts.

4. Most doctors give the public mis-information about the effectiveness of natural therapies for herpes: The medical profession in alliance with the drug companies have been discouraging the general public from seeking natural treatment for herpes by repeating the lie that there are no effective natural treatments for herpes. Drug companies don’t want to spend the money to study natural therapies because they cannot patent such therapies and although governments won’t spend the money because they don’t want to validate safe, natural, inexpensive therapies which would compete with the expensive and highly-profitable drug therapies despite the fact that the drug therapies cause negative side-effects, Even in this climate, there still have been dozens upon dozens of studies which demonstrate the merit of natural therapies for herpes including simple things like doing Hatha yoga regularly. Melissa Officinalis, Olive leaf, Garlic, Lomatium Dissectum, Prunella Vulgaris, Lauricidin and many other natural substances have been shown to be effective in clinical studies. I have seen over 170 clinical studies about natural treatments for herpes. The scientific communities and the medical establish play games with the public by trying to invalidate these studies by saying that the sample size was too small for their liking or that because they were conducted overseas they are somehow invalid. It’s amazing that there have been any studies done at all since no one stands to make money from them.

Don’t expect an unbiased opinion on natural medicine from your doctor. I have written before that asking a doctor to comment on natural medicine is like asking an atheist to comment on the bible, or asking a Muslim cleric to comment on the Talmud.

We don’t need clinical studies to prove that natural medicine works. Natural practitioners have hundreds of years of clinical results with their patients to prove the effectiveness of their methods. If you treat patients and can the results yourself over and over again that is the most concrete way of evaluating natural medicine in my opinion. People can quibble over the results of studies but no one can tell my patients they haven’t gotten better if they have.