12/08/2025
No More Cancer! 🥰🥦🫰 🫛 😍
Johann Kim T. Mañez, MD, Lifestyle Medicine
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My Journey, Life and Passion...
By Johann Kim T. Mañez, MD, DipIBLM, FACLM
It all started around 2010. I began getting frustrated halfway through my residency in Internal Medicine. Although I was doing my best for the patients under my care, their chronic conditions weren’t getting any better over time. Let’s face it. Modern medicine is awesome! We can revive patients who have just died, we can stitch gaping wounds together and make it look like nothing had happened. We can give people new hearts, new kidneys, new livers, new arms and legs. Pretty soon, we will probably have cyborgs as colleagues and neighbors, even family members. Today however, when it comes to keeping people alive and away from debilitating chronic diseases, we have tremendously failed. According to the World Health Organization Report in 2017, 70% of people who die, die of chronic, non-communicable diseases. Those numbers are rising. Eventually, the diabetics develop kidney disease which later lead to very difficult hypertension which would in turn only make matters worse, and the patients end up in dialysis, or get a stroke, or a heart attack that eventually kills them. I’m not talking about individuals in their “golden years” either. We’re talking about persons in their 40s and 50s. The youngest heart attack patient I encountered was a 26 year old man who collapsed during a basketball game on one of the community basketball courts, a 5-minute walk from my training hospital. He was lucky because although he arrived dead in the emergency room, the expert medical doctors and personnel were able to revive him and get him to the intensive care unit to recover. I interviewed his parents and found out that since his primary school years, his aunties loved spoiling him with burgers, fried chicken thighs, nuggets and even steaks from the famous fast food restaurants in the metro. He detested veggies, and the only ones he got with his burgers, he’d pick off and throw away, leaving only the meaty patty, cheese and mayonnaise. I thought to myself, “No wonder he died on that court.” I knew the connection between high blood cholesterol and heart disease. There was no doubt about it. I was however, struggling with the idea that medications work long term. In reality, I knew I was only treating the symptoms and totally ignoring the major causes of these conditions, namely the food, but with my medical training, I knew I had to continue the statins, the blood thinners and the anti-hypertensives. To make the long story short, my frustration turned into depression. I started falling behind in my duties and responsibilities as a resident and finally decided that this was not what I signed up to do. Due to my failing training performance I was either going to get kicked out of the program or would have to quit. I decided to keep my dignity and quit Internal Medicine towards the end of my first year and began to search for the true answer to curing chronic diseases.
My wife was finishing her Masters in Public Health, major in Hospital Administration around this time and we would often get into arguments about managing patients with these chronic diseases. She always pointed out that I should teach them how to live healthier lives and avoid the foods that harm, but my ego as the doctor, would always get in the way and I’d give her a lecture on the need for statins for patients with high cholesterol, the diuretics, calcium channel blockers, etc. for the hypertensives, and of course the insulin and oral hypoglycemic drugs for the diabetics. Deep inside however, I knew she was right. Eventually, my wife found a way to open my eyes completely. She asked me to help her understand a study on heart disease. Feeling this was a moment to show off my analytical skills in interpreting data from several population-based studies, relating to some initial clinical studies done by a certain Dean Ornish (I had no idea who he was until later) and his team of researchers. I set myself to reading and understanding the paper deeply. I soon found out that this was her very cunning way to get me to actually read the literature. I was blown away… heart disease reversal on a plant-based diet? Unheard of in medical circles. It was either angioplasty, stenting or heart bypass. The results of the study were too compelling to forego, so I dug deeper, thinking that the information I was getting was the muddy water gushing out from the loose soil of the dig. The deeper I dug, however, the clearer the evidence became. The water gushing out from my digging efforts flooded my parched mind deprived of answers that mainstream medical science could not provide. The information changed into a crystal clear spring that gathered into a thundering river that eventually led me to the open seas of truths about health that I would never have heard of if I remained in the system, swallowed up in all its allure of modern medical intervention and pharmaceutical wonders that kept money in the pockets of the industry, but truly had no real concern for bettering the patient. Truth be told, the more sick people there are, the better for the sustainability and financial stability of the system.
