As the longest serving Minister of Health in The Bahamas, Dr. Norman Rupert Gay sports quite a list of accomplishments from his time in government, including a grant-based research initiative to complete a 40-volume plan for health in the country; the creation of a nursing school which would become the nursing program at the College of The Bahamas; and the creation of an AIDS Secretariat in The Bahamas.
Yet Dr. Gay is most proud of his involvement in both the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) as chairman and his work with the World Health Organization (WHO) as a presenter at several conferences.
Presenting on the state of the health of the western world with these international organizations, he says, helped him focus more broadly on health-related issues facing Bahamians.
"It helped me as the minister of health to look at the health of the entire Bahamas rather than as a physician looking at the health of individuals who come in," he says.
For at heart Dr. Gay is a physician, and like all doctors he took an oath to help people who need it.  And what people need now more than ever, he says, is heath education and access to heath information - especially in a world where non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and cancer are accounting for most of the deaths worldwide.
"Chronic disease is not something that happens overnight.  It's something that takes 20 to 30 years before it happens," he says.  "All of them are preventable and reversible - which is another world for curable - and I don't hesitate to use the world 'cure' as it is one that is hardly used."
It's an expression that is being echoed by many world leaders these days.  Just recently, the United Nations hosted a general assembly special summit on these illnesses and their social and economic impacts.  Dr. Gay also points out that our Caribbean neighbor, Trinidad and Tobago, is taking steps toward combating its rate of chronic disease, pledging to reduce it by 25 percent by the year 2025.

But how does one combat such diseases - or reverse and cure them?  The answer, Dr. Gay says, does not lie in a miracle drug offered by pharmaceutical companies.  Unlike most doctors who are trained to and continue the practice of treating symptoms, Dr. Gay treats the cause of symptoms with surprisingly simple lifestyles changes, like switching to a plant-based diet, at his medical clinic, The Bahamas Anti-Aging Medical Institute.
That institute, he says, which was established in the 1970s, came about through treating repeat patients he saw as senior medical officer for ambulatory care at Princess Margaret Hospital in the late 1960s.  The number of patients coming in was too much for the small pool of doctors to handle.
"So I had to look at who these people were who were coming in here," he remembers.  "And as I reviewed records, I saw they were the same persons coming in over and over and over again with chronic illnesses - diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis - and persons, despite treatment, were all too frequently coming in to the emergency room with stroke."
"So I started an evening clinic with selected patients to get them to understand and take charge of their own health, and within a three-month period of time, it was amazing what took place in the lives of those patients," he says.
The best piece of advice he can offer individuals and persons in the medical field is to educate themselves about the evolving field of medicine, new discoveries, and wellness, all while keeping an open mind.
It's definitely hard to change the way one has been programmed to function and what one has been programmed to believe when it comes to wellness and nutrition.  But as Dr. Gay points out the objective may not be to live a longer life, but to live a more fulfilling life with one's body fully functional.
"As I've been back in my practice seeing patients, certain things became obvious - that if we continue to do the things we are doing, we will not succeed," he says.  "And if you don't get the results you want, you better change what you do.  And we're not too good at changing what we do."
"We have a set of learned things and then on the other hand we have powerful vested interest groups who have a lot to lose if it (is) changed, and this gets in the way of meaningful change.  But today, I'm pleased to say that change is happening."
Indeed, he is hopeful that a paradigm shift is happening both on a world scale and in The Bahamas through the recognition of functional medicine and the sensitizing of his colleagues in the field of medicine to such methods.  Yet, there is a long way to go and education is the key.
"I want to have a national health education program endorsed and put into practice in The Bahamas," he says.  "Knowing the way the body functions will serve you to be able to prevent many things."

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