The Riordan Approach: The Seven Precepts

“What do you do out there?” is a common question people ask about The Riordan Clinic’s medical and educational services.

The Clinic’s staff members have attempted to crystallize the basic precepts of our approach to patients who come to us with sustained illness. In honor of our deceased founder’s pioneering of this step-by-step discovery and treatment process, we have named it The Riordan Approach.

The essence of The Riordan Approach is service. Several years ago, Dr. Riordan wrote a lead article in Health Hunter, entitled: “We seek to serve, rather than to fix or help.” He offered this quote from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen - “Service is a relationship between equals. Helping others incurs debt. When you help someone, they owe you one. Serving, like healing, is mutual. There is no debt. I am as served as the person I am serving.” This was Mother Theresa’s basic message: “We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.”

This special service is at once medical and educational: it goes beyond the treatment of symptoms and strives to find the array of underlying causes that sustain a complex modern illness. Once the roots of the illness are identified, the patient is asked to become a responsible co-learner who is empowered to partner equally in the journey back to wellness. And a big PLUS - this approach is SAFE!

The Riordan Approach is a breakthrough to a new paradigm of true health care that offers the possibility of profoundly healing not only those patients who have not found results elsewhere, but the very sickness care system itself, as it struggles to keep up with the staggering numbers of those suffering from chronic, degenerative illness.

The Seven Precepts of The Riordan Approach:

I. Co-learner Relationships.

Dr. Riordan valued his relationship with patients. As a doctor/teacher he served as their preceptor. He empowered them to take back their rightful duty to become involved in the discovery process: “what is causing my illness?” They come to The Clinic as patients; they leave as co-learners!

Because our entire staff, including doctors, nurses, researchers, receptionists, food service providers, secretarial, administration, I.T. and media, groundskeepers, gardeners, and volunteers… are all working together as co-creators of The Riordan Approach, we value staff/co-learner relationships as much as the basic doctor/patient relationship.

II. Identify The Causes.

Treating symptoms gives the illusion of healing. Correcting underlying causes allows true healing to take place. There are 17 common underlying causes that, if not corrected, will stand in the way of the patient’s return to better health.

III. Characterize Biochemical Individuality.

We may look similar on the outside, but there can be up to a hundred-fold degrees of difference in the biochemistry of chronically ill patients…even those with the same diagnosis! Measure, measure, measure was Dr. Riordan’s constant plea. The Riordan Approach depends heavily on the Bio-Center Laboratory to uncover these unique differences so that treatment can be appropriately individualized and directed.

IV. Care for the Whole Person.

We are human beings with complex life histories, toxic exposures, stressors, dietary indiscretions, medications, spiritual crises, lifestyle habits, and an endless array of details that affect the treatment plan. The Riordan Approach embraces this complexity and our humanity. It is not a quick fix, but it is thorough and much more likely to achieve long-lasting results.

V. Food as Medicine.

Hippocrates recognized the importance of food as therapy. Food wholeness, food safety, food quality, food sensitivities, glycemic load issues, food based on unique metabolic needs, food colors, gourmet food, healthy fast food, and food quantity all play into a complex equation that guides our food choices.

VI. Cultivate Healthy Reserves.

The Riordan Approach, like gardening, takes time. A good-looking, crop producing, satisfying garden is the fruit of time, effort, and applied learning. Cultivation of the soil builds reserves of nutrients. Healthy people build nutrient reserves; healthy habits; a support network of family, friends, and co-workers; a spiritual well to draw from; and a strong self-concept to help us weather life’s storms. The correct, orthomolecular dosing of nutrients is key!

VII. Healing Power of Nature.

Our Clinic staff members serve our co-learners by cultivating co-learner relationships, seeking individualized causation, addressing issues holistically, prescribing appropriate whole foods, and emphasizing healthy reserves…then it is nature that heals. Together, we discover what is needed to set up the conditions for optimal healing. Change is strategically implemented. Then, we get out of the way of our inherent ability to heal. We let nature do her magnificent work within us.

Summary.

The Riordan Approach is a modern Hippocratic method that emphasizes results over process, measurement over protocol, individuation over statistical means, food over pharmacology, nutrients over drugs, and, finally, the triumph of human spirit over “untreatable” disease.

The Riordan Approach means hope. It is based on safety and service. This approach is Dr. Hugh Riordan’s contribution to humanity and the basis of The Clinic’s mission to create an epidemic of health.

What now follows are expanded explanations of each of

The Seven Precepts of The Riordan Approach.

I. Co-learner Relationships

The first precept of The Riordan Approach is grounded in the healing power of relationship. I remember Dr. Riordan mentioning to me on several occasions: “It’s all about relationships, you know.”

The honorable profession of medicine is grounded in the doctor-patient relationship. Patients put their lives into the hands of their doctors. Faith in this relationship evokes the human healing response.

This form of the doctor-patient relationship works well in an acute care model where the patient passively surrenders to the active and authoritative will of their doctor. Trauma centers, surgical suites, and intensive care units demonstrate the power and effectiveness of the acute care model.

Early in his career, Dr. Riordan noticed that more and more of the average doctor’s time was being devoted to chronic degenerative illness care. He found that the acute care model with overly passive patients was less effective in this arena. Chronic illness care requires the involvement of the patient in the diagnosis/discovery of underlying causes and the lifestyle changes required to correct these causes.

Dr. Riordan invented the word co-learner. Co-learners learn with one another. The idea that doctors and their staff could learn with their patients represented a huge shift in the doctor-patient relationship. Sickness care was no longer enough. The focus shifted back to true health care. Patients became co-learners who were actively involved in the search for underlying causes that, once identified, could be modified with better lifestyles. Doctors became their preceptors, or health guides, to mentor their journey back to better health.

The staff/co-learner relationship represents a new incarnation of the doctor/patient relationship, one where patients are empowered to become actively involved in rebuilding their health, and doctors are freed to become what the word doctor actually means: teacher!

The 21st Century finds the practice of medicine embroiled in a multitude of seemingly insurmountable problems: astronomical costs and hyperinflation; rampant polypharmacy; the insidious breakdown of the doctor/ patient relationship; rising rates of chronic degenerative illness with 8 of the top 10 causes of death being directly attributable to lifestyle and dietary indiscretions. The noble profession of medicine itself seems ill.

The first precept of The Riordan Approach represents a new beginning point, a paradigm shift that promises healing from within the body of medicine. Doctors who embrace co-learning listen to and learn from their patients. Patients who view their doctors as preceptors and co-learners find their faith in doctors restored, and the faith in their own ability to heal renewed.

Dr. Riordan saw the power of relationship as the essential secret to all healing. Through it, not only are patients healed, but the medical profession is healed as well.

II. Identify the Causes

If you brought your car into the mechanic for him to check on the red oil light, and he said: “Just cover it with this piece of black tape. You’ll feel better.” Well, I don’t think you would want to take your car back to that kind of “care.” “You can call me when the engine quits.” (!)

No. We would expect a good mechanic to open the hood and investigate. Maybe he would run the car up on the lift to check underneath for gasket leaks. Regardless of how he did it, you and I would expect that he would at least attempt to identify the cause or causes of the red light being on.

Here at The Clinic where we specialize in patients who have not gotten results elsewhere, we are looking for more than simply controlling symptoms. We want to investigate into areas of causation often overlooked by conventional care.

Our investigation is scientific and thorough. Our doctors take time to listen to your history, trying as Dr. Riordan used to do, to put ourselves in your shoes. Then, we put our backgrounds in family medicine, naturopathic medicine, holistic health care, and nutritional medicine to work, and attempt to IDENTIFY THE CAUSES of a patient/co-learner’s illness.

This is an acronym that stands for the following causes of chronic/sustained illness that we follow in our basic evaluation:

I.D.E.N.T.I.F.Y. T.H.E. C.A.U.S.E.S.

Infection—often hidden viral, bacterial, or fungal-overgrowth syndromes

Digestion—poor acid formation, inadequate enzymes, abnormal gut flora

Emotions—usually toxic, most often involving unhealthy relationships

Nutrients—lacking in the diet, poorly absorbed, or metabolically blocked

Toxins—heavy metals like lead or mercury, pesticide or herbicide residues, etc.

Inflammation—chronic triggers or dietary predisposition to damaging “-itis” diseases

Foods—hidden adverse food reactions that lead to organ damage & food addictions

You—a perceived inability to see how your own choices contribute to your illness

Thyroid dysfunction—that fails to show up on standardized thyroid lab tests

Hypoglycemia—(low blood sugar) due to carbohydrate and insulin disorders

Endocrine—disorders or deficiencies that contribute to aging and dysfunction

Candida—overgrowth due to excessive antibiotics, steroids, sugar, stress, estrogens

Adrenal—fatigue and insufficiency due to hypoglycemia, illness, & life overload

Underactivity—not exercising your faculties adequately: “Use it or lose it!”

Stress or spiritual crisis—overload of non-need-fulfilling activity; meaninglessness

Environmental—an unsatisfying, dysfunctional, or toxic home, work, or play arena

Structural—physical, mental, emotional “mal-alignments” that cause pain/dysfunction

This acronym helps the Clinic doctors investigate more deeply and holistically into true causes of your pain or illness. By correcting long-standing factors like these, the chances of healing a sustained illness are greatly increased...“before the engine quits!”

III. Characterize Biochemical Individuality

Many years ago, before coming to work full time at The Clinic I had the unique opportunity to spend a whole day observing Dr. Riordan at work. He was taking the medical history of several patients just getting started at The Clinic. Each appointment lasted over an hour.

Immediately I was impressed with how intently he listened to each patient’s story of their illness. I was also intrigued with his note-taking system. In addition to basic medical information, he was jotting down abbreviated words in the margins of his pages.

Later that morning, I admitted my overall ignorance. “What are you attempting to understand about these patients,” I asked.

“We are characterizing their biochemical individuality. Each of us has a unique biochemical fingerprint. My need for vitamin C is different from yours, and when we are ill, that very need can be magnified by up to a hundred times.”

I found out that he was writing abbreviations for nutritional lab tests in the margins of his notes. If a patient reported migraine headaches and muscle spasms, he hypothesized that they may need greater amounts of magnesium than what their diet alone could deliver. In the great tradition of Sherlock Holmes, he saw this as medical deduction: a kind of a personalized hypothesis that needed to be proven or disproven.

That’s where the Bio-Center Lab came in. He would find out if that particular patient’s magnesium reserves were indeed low, thus serving as the actual cause of their symptoms.

Rather than “shot-gunning” symptoms, he precisely aimed his mental rifle at a known biochemical target. Later on, re-testing would reveal if the patient had “hit the target.”

Characterizing biochemical individuality is the third step of The Riordan Approach. Nutrients become a precise “orthomolecular tool” that can correct individual deficiencies and allow the patient’s body to heal what the best of modern medical science was all too often unable to achieve.

As Mark Twain so aptly stated: “Be careful about reading health books… you could die of a misprint.” Dr. Riordan’s answer: “Measure first, and then treat based upon that factual characterization.”

IV. Care for the Whole Person—Body, Mind, and Spirit

In the early 1980s, Dr. Hugh Riordan was elected the president of the American Holistic Medical Association. It was a watershed moment representing a long professional metamorphosis that had fundamentally changed the way he cared for patients.

In medical school, medical doctors learn to treat diseases and tend to specialize in disease care. The name of the game is the name. Diagnosis is the step-by-step process of listening (briefly...about 23 seconds according to one study), examining, testing, and finally assigning a diagnostic name. Based on this name, a prescription or “treatment” is given, along with an insurance code in order for payment of services to be awarded.

Oh, by the way, this all happened to a real person, living in a real life, with feelings, circumstances, and personal dreams very much at work here. But there is no diagnostic coding protocol for these contributing factors. And more often than not, there’s no time to even consider them!

Medical care in 21st century America has become highly technical, procedural, and impersonal. The days of Marcus Welby, M.D., have been killed by HMOs, PPOs, and a whole array of alphabetic regulators that leave patients and doctors equally dismayed, discouraged, and disgruntled.

The Riordan Approach offered an exciting alternative to this scenario. Taking time to cultivate a co-learner relationship, Dr. Riordan listened and invited the patient into the discovery process of why the illness persisted. He listened to their life circumstances. He put himself in their shoes to determine which biochemical tests might best characterize the true underlying causes of their sickness. He cared for them as a whole person, taking their feelings, their family situation, the effect of their environment and job, their lifestyle choices, and their diet all into consideration. Then…then he put together a comprehensive treatment plan to feed their bodies, their minds, and their souls.

“There is a place to come when you are weary;

When your body and your spirit are in pain;

A place where hope survives, to truly be alive;

A place where you can find yourself again.”

V. Food as Medicine

“Take vitamins...and eat what you want.”

In the early 90’s, Time magazine published a story on emerging vitamin research that demonstrated medical effectiveness against a variety of chronic illnesses. The cover showed a big bowl of vitamins with a spoon in it.

This misunderstanding – that vitamins equate somehow to food – is one of the great challenges facing the field of nutritional medicine. It arises out of our cultural acceptance of and dependence on drug therapy. Vitamins, from this perspective, are seen as “natural drugs.” Their safety, the fact that they naturally occur in the body, and the convenience of taking vitamins as pills all make for their great marketability. We Americans are always looking for “the quick fix.”

For many, taking vitamins became an excuse for poor food choices. After all, surely vitamins would fill in the nutritional gaps left by the large amounts of simple sugars, refined grains, and added fats that our packaged and fast food industries have created…so it was thought.

Now a number of studies have been published that show that single nutrients, like vitamin E, used alone, do not magically cure specific diseases. The research even implies that these single nutrients may be harmful! (There are many knowledgeable research scientists who question the structure of these studies, and a large body of previous research that refutes this claim.)

It all points back to a simple truth: food is the best medicine. The Clinic promotes whole foods as the foundation of health, whether you are sick and trying to recover, or well and wanting to stay that way. The Riordan Approach seeks to discover underlying causes for sustained illness. We use our lab to look for vitamin and mineral deficiencies or excesses. We use individual nutrients to correct those imbalances…in the context of a whole foods diet!

Our cells need a rich variety of macronutrients, micronutrients, fibers, and color pigments served as whole food, at a meal, hopefully well-seasoned, mingled with the conversation of friends and/or family, highlighted by some laughter, some silence, and a sense of grateful celebration.

These kinds of things don’t come in pills.

VI. Cultivate Healthy Reserves

Health is having the reserve to do what you need to do and want to do with energy and enthusiasm.

Dr. Hugh Riordan was a keen observer of natural systems. He studied nature, attempting to glean fundamental principles of survival and growth. He was especially interested in what made a natural system healthy. In a very real sense, his life’s work revolved around a simple question: “What is the essence of health?”

Certainly, a healthy system is balanced. It can respond to stress and adapt. It can heal itself if injured. It manifests flexibility and creativity in the face of change. These key principles are crucial for maintaining health. But what is more fundamental than even these?

Dr. Hugh would often speak of a lake as a natural ecosystem that depended upon reserves. Without adequate reserves of water, one summer of drought could destroy its delicate balance. A tree could grow only as tall as the depth of its root system would allow. Applying this principle to business, he noted that one bad year could bankrupt a thriving business that had neglected the accumulation of cash reserves.

Scurvy results from inadequate reserves of vitamin C. Beriberi is a thiamine deficiency. Whole foods have a deeper reserve of adequate nutrients than processed foods. A garden that has just been dug will not produce nearly as well as a garden that has been cultivated, fertilized, rotated, and cared for over several seasons.

Health is not a given. Good health is cultivated. Building health means to create reserves that can be drawn upon during lean times, stressful times, and times where demand outpaces supply.

Dr. Hugh knew that “need” depends upon “have.” You cannot give what you do not have. Having means doing what you want to do. When you are free to do as you want...well, that’s where the energy and enthusiasm really starts.

VII. Healing Power of Nature

No physician in his right mind would claim that he had healed a broken bone simply because he had set it. The careful alignment of the fractured bone ends, the splinting, bandaging, plaster casting, and all the rest are important, but, after all, secondary. The real job of healing is done by something else, something that we do not fully understand and cannot reproduce, something that, for want of a better term, we vaguely call “nature.”

The situation is much the same when we treat infection. The physician uses whatever medicines are appropriate to help the body beat off the invading viruses or bacteria. Sometimes (although perhaps less often than is claimed) the intervention of the physician is decisive; sometimes it is secondary. But the fact remains that the battle against infection is never less than a collaboration. Unless the forces of the patient’s own system are deployed in fighting the disease, all the physician’s medicines will be useless.

That the art of the physician is grounded on cooperation with nature is so well known, so intrinsically obvious, one would suppose that the point does not bear repetition. Alas, I think it does. In this book I shall argue, among other things, that orthodox medical training has already drifted dangerously far from this fundamental perception of the physician’s Clirole. The undesirable effects of this drift, I shall contend, are several and serious. For one thing, it has distorted the physician’s choice of the most appropriate weapons to use in fighting disease. For another, it has tended to deemphasize what I shall call the “human element” in the disease-fighting equation: the individual patient’s contribution to the struggle. And perhaps most baneful, it has tended to make doctors think almost exclusively in terms of combating the manifestations of illness rather than in terms of maintaining good health.

Dr. Ron Hunninghake, MD, is Chief Medical Officer at the Riordan Clinic. He is a medical doctor who specializes in the care of people with chronic disease, cancer, nutritional deficiency, and mental health.

Dr. Ron, as he is known to patients, is a native Kansan and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Benedictine College in Atchison. He attended the University of Kansas School of Medicine and had a medical internship at Wesley Medical Center in Wichita. He moved to Salina for his residency at Smoky Hill Family Practice.

He has also earned a Metabolic Approach to Cancer certificate from the Metabolic Terrain Institute of Health (MATC certified) and is a certified Chelation Advanced Provider with the American College for Advancement in Medicine. He is a member of the International College of Integrative Medicine. He is also a past certified member of the American Board of Family Medicine and past chairman of the International Schizophrenia Foundation.

Dr. Ron began his career as a small-town doctor in Minneapolis, Kan., where he first started teaching clinic-based wellness. He later returned to Salina to join Salina Family Physicians, where he was instrumental in founding WellPlan, a comprehensive lifestyle modification program. He joined the Riordan Clinic in 1989 to have even greater involvement in helping patients learn innovative ways to rebuild and maintain their health.

Dr. Ron was inspired to adopt his own high-level wellness behaviors based upon a book gifted to him by a medical school surgery instructor who thought it was much smarter to prevent illness rather than wait for the worst to happen.

Later on, Dr. Riordan encouraged him to only make recommendations to patients that he himself was willing to adopt and live with. After all, Dr. Ron says it is always wisest to walk your talk.

In addition to his practice at the Riordan Clinic, Dr. Ron has lectured extensively on the Riordan Intravenous Vitamin C Protocol for Cancer and has been a regular presenter at the Orthomolecular Medicine Today conference. He has traveled worldwide to present lectures in Japan, Spain, Ecuador, Columbia, India, and Canada.

At the Riordan Clinic, he has presented hundreds of lectures dealing with a wide variety of topics including nutrition, lifestyle, and optimal health. He has co-authored three books on subjects including inflammation, energy-boosting supplements, and how to stop pre-diabetes.

Dr. Ron was recognized as the Orthomolecular Doctor of the Year in 2011 by the International Society for Orthomolecular Medicine and named to the Orthomolecular Hall of Fame in 2013. In 2017, he was also recognized as a Healthcare Hero by the Wichita Business Journal.

In his free time, Dr. Ron enjoys time with his grandchildren, mowing the lawn, reading mystery novels, and travel.