Call Us Today
805-640-0180
About Us
OUR STORY: THE CHALLENGE
Dr. Bernhoft's personal experience of having his health damaged through environmental poisoning led him from liver and pancreatic surgery to integrative and environmental medicine. He reaffirmed, in recovering his own health, that it is more effective to deal with the underlying cause of disease than just to throw pills at symptoms.
An abundance of research shows that a majority of all chronic illness are aggravated or caused by various environmental toxins which have proliferated in recent years. The University of North Dakota Medical School published a series of papers linking agricultural pollution (in an area which 75 years ago was pristine and healthy) to neurodegenerative disease in the elderly, and learning disorders in the young. Farmers and people living within ¼ mile of a pesticide-using farm, for example, are six times more likely to develop Parkinson's disease than others.
Additionally, according to a number of government and university studies, U.S. physicians produce many more deaths each year than drunk drivers do. Apparently over 180,000 people die each year from properly prescribed and administered drugs. Is it incompetence or neglect? No. It’s biochemical individuality. Almost half of the population do not respond to prescription drugs the way the manufacturer expects them to. The explanation for this has come out of the Human Genome Project. There are literally thousands of gene variations that can have a huge impact on how people process drugs.This also applies to how they process stress – “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”-- not to mention the things they eat, and drink, and breathe.
In the face of all this, Dr. Bernhoft's professional and personal journey has shown him that many environmental diseases are treatable with modern biochemical techniques.
OUR MISSION
At Bernhoft Center for Advanced Medicine, we treat each patient as a biologically unique individual whose specific situation, diet and lifestyle interact with a unique genetic background. With the help of 21st-Century medicine, it is possible to delve into these distinctive features and find factors which can be changed for the better. For most people, it is possible to undo much and sometimes all of the damage they have accumulated over the years. It is also possible to identify risk factors of future illness, and nip it in the bud, before it develops.
As Dr. Bernhoft and his family have lived through environmental disease personally, he has a special grasp of the patient’s perspective. He understands that in our country medicine and medical education are dominated by drug companies who prefer to sell drugs that suppress symptoms rather than address the causes of disease. Nevertheless, and for all the more reason, Our Mission remains: to find correctable personal and environmental factors to help patients improve or regain their health.
While it is not always possible to reverse all the damage and restore normal function, we do know enough in the 21st century about the dynamics of damage and restoration, that we can often make things much better, and can sometimes bring people all the way back to full, vibrant health.
We do this in concert with the referring physician. We do not suddenly stop vital medications, nor subject our patients to painful or dangerous procedures. Instead, we work within the known limits of physiology and biochemistry to give the body the means to restore healthy function.