An Interview with Steven Gilburne – Director of The Diabetic Blessings Project
Everybody knows that a fine sense of balance in this life is essential. But life has a way of sending us unexpected winds and currents that can knock us off the rails; they can seriously set us back. In the following interview I discovered that Steven Gilburne’s wake up call was a nine-day coma. Throughout our conversation, he emphasized that when we are buffeted by such setbacks (often blessings in disguise) it’s vital that we find our way back to balance, directly and patiently.
I met up recently with Steven Gilburne, Director of The Diabetic Blessings Project, to talk about this topic of balance and to discuss his own fascinating work in health care.
M: Steven, you have been doing some amazing work recently at Diabetic Blessings in treating chronic conditions very successfully with people. How did you develop your treatment protocols?
S: Well, it’s a long, detailed story. But let me begin with a serious detail from my own experience. I had been working in alternative and traditional medical therapies for many years when I suddenly woke up one day from a nine-day coma. I had slipped into the coma from an extremely high level of glucose in my system. I hadn’t seen it coming at all.
Just after reviving, I was also put in a position to delve into serious diabetics research using my own condition as test case. It’s one thing to look at a chronic disease from the outside – all abstract data and facts and figures. It’s quite another to find oneself inside the condition, plagued with a disease, seriously seeking a cure.
My research took me all over the country, meeting with leaders in various facets of the complex reality that is diabetes. As I progressed in my research, I made many contacts at major medical schools. I had a chance to blend alternative medical therapies with analytical diagnostics and treatments.
As I gradually (and permanently) reversed my condition I began to develop an extensive network of professional relationships that includes many, many physicians, many hospital relationships and many working relationships with medical schools, clinicians, testing experts, and specialists in traditional medicine as well. In the process of working with chronic conditions in conjunction with our associated medical network of professionals we have developed treatment protocols that allopathic, symptomatic medicine has learned to treat, but only up to a point. Let me emphasize, these are conditions that are in worldwide epidemic status at present. In observing many people it became clear to me that more focused and effective treatment methods needed to be developed to address particular illnesses that were being treated in the West, but with limited success.
As we put together our financial support structure, our investors made current, top technology available. We were able, for example, to assemble data from mass genetic screening and from intracellular screening for mineral and electrolyte balances and imbalances. Comparing data from these types of screening I began to see profound implications for cost savings while giving better medical care. These data have also pointed up important insights and implications for our current Health Care legislation. I began to look at the patterns of genesis of several medical difficulties that stood out as dire conditions in our time.
I saw that certain health difficulties needed special attention. The protocols that have been developed in my research can address a wide range of health concerns. But let’s just take one prime example that we have been working with recently. Blood sugar disorders have reached epidemic status worldwide. As I’ve worked with so many people suffering from these difficulties, I’ve had very promising success in treating and, in many cases regenerating their insulin producing capacity.
M: Why have your approaches been so encouraging?
S: Well, to answer that, it’s necessary to step back and to take a look at the larger picture. Our western approach to medicine often takes such illnesses at face value. We diagnose and treat such conditions based upon symptoms as they first appear to us, as the patient presents at a clinic. But with my experience in alternative and traditional forms of medicine, I began to look into the deeper, background causes of these chronic and epidemic difficulties.
I realized that these conditions have not arisen recently and out of nowhere. They have been developing over a very long time in our western culture. But what are the deeper causes, I had to ask.
Any blood sugar disorder, and diabetes in particular, springs from a general weakening of personal health and fitness. It’s not just a question of more sedentary lifestyles, sitting at computers all day at the office and at home, watching so much television, and taking much less stimulating exercise. It’s also a question of several decades of processed foods and the use of many more powerful pharmaceuticals for treating everything from the common cold to serious psychological disorders.
I observed that with this as background, the incidence of blood sugar disorders was clearly rampant. It has gone so far beyond a tolerable statistic for basic good health in our global cultures.
I realized that these epidemic illnesses could be greatly improved simply by fine-tuning the initial testing of the case-by-case status of each person observed. The illnesses can be approached by treating each person observed with the proper drugs and nutrients to bring the illness under control. And finally, one can focus very intensely on restoring the foundation stones of good diet, vigorous exercise, and by taking a longer-term approach to monitored health care.
M: Let’s take your first step of fine-tuning the initial testing of the case-by-case status of each person observed.
S: Okay, let’s apply that to the treatment of blood sugar disorders. Let’s say that a person presents at a clinic with exaggerated thirst, insatiable appetite, and a low-grade fever. With a simple test of the amount of glucose in their blood stream, any clinic might determine that the patient is suffering from diabetes.
In fact, every year another 7 million people develop diabetes. There are currently 285 million people on our little planet with diabetes. This number is expected to rise to 438 million within 20 years. It has already spiraled out of control.
To treat any blood sugar disorder it’s necessary to bring three currents into fine integration. These are the currents of diet, exercise, and drug therapy. But once the illness has been properly diagnosed and treatment has begun, it’s crucial that on-going observation is continued. To test the prevalence of antibodies and the gradual reduction of excess glucose in the system over the course of the first year is extremely important.
Many patients are just given some initial guidelines for their drug therapy and they are given some idea about how to look for certain ongoing symptoms of the illness. But they are very, very rarely given any week-by-week guidance in dealing with this deadly disease.
My research indicates that very promising progress can be made by taking a personal interest in helping our people with fine-tuning their drug therapy, in treating and testing for the steady and gradual reduction of antibodies and excess glucose in their system, and in helping them to adjust their diet and exercise practices to eliminate foods that would exacerbate their condition and to strengthen their overall health to completely combat the illness. As you mentioned, my research indicates very encouraging successes with our people.
Essentially, the reason that some of my research has proven to be so relevant is not the tissue regeneration process we have focused on. The more important relevance of the research is in the study of the etiology of disease, the causation patterns, it’s in the fine-tuned diagnostic methods, and it’s in the careful day-to-day care of our people.
In our time, the discovery of many more subsets of blood sugar disorders, for example, has made it possible to fine-tune medical diagnostics and treatments.
M: Let’s take a look at the research of your Diabetic Blessings Project from another point of view. Our new Health Care legislation in the United States is now law. But is it really more a matter of Health Care funding? Or have we actually improved our health care system overall?
S: To put this in perspective, let’s take another hot topic of the day, the testing and treatment of excess cholesterol. Again, our modern day diets and lifestyles have increased the prevalence of this condition in our global population. But our health care system would insist that patients of excess cholesterol are treated with a drug therapy that might cost some $300,000 over the course of a lifetime. Why do this when instead we could spend a mere $10,000 in one year to completely heal the condition?
If we work with the patient in a way that reduces, not just the excess cholesterol, but the cause of the excess cholesterol, we will spend much, much less and we will have a much, much healthier patient.
In fact, there are ways to structure many alternative approaches to the treatment of chronic disease on a test-case basis. And then, using this data, we will be able to write much more comprehensive Health Care legislation that would both improve the larger-scale health of our population while substantially reducing health care costs. We can do this without raising taxes and without imposing excessive and mandatory health care costs on the individual.
As long as our methods of treatment are caught up in the more abstract requirements of our large-scale systems of delivering treatment, we will spend more for less positive results.
It may seem that long-term monitored care would be outrageously expensive. And in the purview of a system that has priced itself out of all affordability, long-term care certainly would be impossible. But one finds that by simply insisting on maintaining close contact with our people well after the initial crisis, they are experiencing much better improvements in their health. And in turn, one will find that they have much lower expenses in their long-term health care costs.
When our people can take control of their own health with a minimum of advising and intervention from the staff at our project, they are much happier and healthier and wealthier.
M: Last question, what then would you recommend for our Health Care legislation?
S: This is a great question. I would recommend that some of our Senators get in touch with me as a consultant. I can tell them how to cut health care costs in half with geometrically better care. A few hundred million spent now to get test data on different medical models will allow us in a year’s time to construct a new health care model based upon real results.
For more detail, please contact The Diabetic Blessings Project.
Marshall Williamson is a local Boulder author. He has been practicing yoga and meditation since 1972 (steady forward). He heartily agrees with Geoffrey Chaucer when he said, “The word moote be cosyn to the deede.” If we can say it, write it, it may already be in the first stage of being.
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