Why I Chose Alternative Medicine

By Dr. Guy DaSilva, MD 1956-2014

I am often asked why I took the “alternative road” in medicine. I never truly intended to be unconventional. In fact, I spent many years as a staunch protector of academic and conventional medicine after having been trained in numerous medical specialties in New York and New England.

My professional journey turned into a personal mission when my beautiful wife Tina became ill in her early 40s.

As the years progressed, her issues began to multiply and the severity of her symptoms worsened. To make matters more mysterious, she was the one who had always believed in good nutrition and supplementation. I, on the other hand, believed in conventional medicine.

I spent many years chasing the experts for advice at the onset of every new symptom Tina had. The list of disease-labels we received ranged from depression to rheumatoid arthritis to irritable bowel syndrome to Lyme’s disease, to fibromyalgia to chronic fatigue to Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder to plantar fasciitis, and on and on.

The lists got longer and longer, along with the multitude of drugs to treat each problem. Life got very confusing for me and I started feeling less and less confident in my medical profession. To top it off, her health wasn’t improving. In fact, it appeared as if she was getting worse and worse. I was increasingly desperate for answers.

Faith was the one thing that kept us hanging on. Now I thank God for that faith that led me into this new field of medicine — one that I would have never ventured into on my own if my wife hadn’t gotten ill.

Ironically, at the same time that my wife’s mysterious illnesses were confounding us, I had started up a small group at my church that I called “God’s Design for your Health.” I felt a need to teach people how incredibly well designed the human body is and how to maintain good health through diet and nutrition. Even more ironic is that I was still learning about nutrition at that time myself. In fact, my wife was a great resource for much of what I learned.

Secretly, I was conflicted, recognizing that nutrition alone couldn’t be the answer to health either, since my healthy-eating wife was one of the sickest people I knew.

After about two years of teaching this course, a member of the group handed me a book that changed my life forever. It was a book on anti-aging medicine published by the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine (A4M).

At first I was disturbed that this person would give me that kind of book knowing how well educated I was in the medical sciences. Initially I threw it in some obscure corner of my office and didn’t even look at it for about a month.

But meanwhile the love of my life was wasting away and no longer able to enjoy any quality of life. I was losing her both mentally and physically. So out of fright and desperation, but with much skepticism, I picked up the book and began to read.

It introduced me to a whole new world. I learned about natural therapies from peer-reviewed medical journals that were established to treat a whole host of diseases. I learned about orthomolecular medicine, which was first established by two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, PhD and Abram Hoffer, MD, PhD, and others. I learned about bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, and the power of squelching oxidants and inflammation in your body with nutrition.

After a short while on the natural therapies, including complete natural hormone balancing, I am thrilled to report that my wife’s vitality and health returned.

This led to more books, more seminars, more meetings, and eventually led me to fully embrace the alternative-medicine viewpoint. I went back to school and for two years became a fellow in Anti-aging, Regenerative & Functional Medicine.

Throughout the years I dug deeper and deeper into the biochemistry, molecular aspects, and genetics behind each disease and have come to the conclusion that this approach is safe and quite effective and patients actually get well!

And not only did my patients drop their medications, they dropped their diseases. I was again proud to be called a doctor and, as a physician, it has been the most rewarding experience ever.

I thank God for showing me the body’s own healing powers that yield far more potential for preventing disease and restoring health than traditional medicine’s blunt tools of prescription drugs and surgery.

Note from Tina DaSilva:

My oath to our patients remains the same today as it was when Guy started medicine years ago: to help patients restore their health with safe, proven, natural therapies that allow them to get off prescription drugs and avoid surgery.