How and When to Be Your Own Doctor Part 3

When we settle on a solution we have simultaneously chosen what we consider the real, underlying cause of the problem. If our chosen reason was the real reason. then our solution results in a real cure. If we picked wrongly, our attempt at solution may result in no cure, or create a worse situation than we had before.

The American Medical a.s.sociation style of medicine (a philosophy I will henceforth call allopathic) has a model that explains the causes of illness. It suggests that anyone who is sick is a victim.

Either they were attacked by a "bad" organism--virus, bacteria, yeast, pollen, cancer cell, etc.--or they have a "bad" organ--liver, kidney, gall bladder, even brain. Or, the victim may also have been cursed by bad genes. In any case, the cause of the disease is not the person and the person is neither responsible for creating their own complaint nor is the victim capable of making it go away. This inst.i.tutionalized irresponsibility seems useful for both parties to the illness, doctor and patient. The patient is not required to do anything about their complaint except pay (a lot) and obediently follow the instructions of the doctor, submitting unquestioningly to their drugs and surgeries. The physician then acquires a role of being considered vital to the survival of others and thus obtains great status, prestige, authority, and financial remuneration.

Perhaps because the sick person is seen to have been victimized, and it is logically impossible to consider a victimizer as anything but something evil, the physician's cure is often violent, confrontational. Powerful poisons are used to rejigger body chemistry or to arrest the multiplication of disease bacteria or to suppress symptoms; if it is possible to sustain life without them, "bad," poorly-functioning organs are cut out.

I've had a lot of trouble with the medical profession. Over the years doctors have made attempts to put me in jail and keep me in fear. But they never stopped me. When I've had a client die there has been an almost inevitable coroner's investigation, complete with detectives and the sheriff. Fortunately, I practice in rural Oregon, where the local people have a deeply-held belief in individual liberty and where the authorities know they would have had a very hard time finding a jury to convict me. Had I chosen to practice with a high profile and had I located Great Oaks School of Health in a major market area where the physicians were able to charge top dollar, I probably would have spent years behind bars as did other heroes of my profession such as Linda Hazzard and Royal Lee.

So I have acquired an uncomplimentary att.i.tude about medical doctors, a viewpoint I am going to share with you ungently, despite the fact that doing so will alienate some of my readers. But I do so because most Americans are entirely enthralled by doctors, and this doctor-G.o.d wors.h.i.+p kills a lot of them.

However, before I get started on the medicos, let me state that one area exists where I do have fundamental admiration for allopathic medicine. This is its handling of trauma. I agree that a body can become the genuine victim of fast moving bullets. It can be innocently cut, smashed, burned, crushed and broken. Trauma are not diseases and modern medicine has become quite skilled at putting traumatized bodies back together. Genetic abnormality may be another undesirable physical condition that is beyond the purview of natural medicine. However, the expression of contra-survival genetics can often be controlled by nutrition. And the expression of poor genetics often results from poor nutrition, and thus is similar to a degenerative disease condition, and thus is well within the scope of natural medicine.

Today's suffering American public is firmly in the AMA's grip.

People have been effectively prevented from learning much about medical alternatives, have been virtually brainwashed by clever media management that portrays other medical models as dangerous and/or ineffective. Legislation influenced by the allopathic doctors' union, the American Medical a.s.sociation, severely limits or prohibits the practice of holistic health. People are repeatedly directed by those with authority to an allopathic doctor whenever they have a health problem, question or confusion. Other types of healers are considered to be at best harmless as long as they confine themselves to minor complaints; at worst, when naturopaths, hygienists, or homeopaths seek to treat serious disease conditions they are called quacks, accused of unlicensed practice of medicine and if they persist or develop a broad, successful, high-profile and (this is the very worst) profitable practice, they are frequently jailed.

Even licensed MDs are crushed by the authorities if they offer non-standard treatments. So when anyone seeks an alternative health approach it is usually because their complaint has already failed to vanish after consulting a whole series of allopathic doctors. This highly unfortunate kind of sufferer not only has a degenerative condition to rectify, they may have been further damaged by harsh medical treatments and additionally, they have a considerable amount of brainwas.h.i.+ng to overcome.

The AMA has succeeded at making their influence over information and media so pervasive that most people do not even realize that the doctors' union is the source of their medical outlook. Whenever an American complains of some malady, a concerned and honestly caring friend will demand to know have they yet consulted a medical doctor.

Failure to do so on one's own behalf is considered highly irresponsible. Concerned relatives of seriously ill adults who decline standard medical therapy may, with a great show of self-righteousness, have the sick person judged mentally incompetent so that treatment can be forced upon them. When a parent fails to seek standard medical treatment for their child, the adult may well be found guilty of criminal negligence, raising the interesting issue of who "owns" the child, the parents or the State.

It is perfectly acceptable to die while under conventional medical care. Happens all the time, in fact. But holistic alternatives are represented as stupidly risky, especially for serious conditions such as cancer. People with cancer see no choice but to do chemotherapy, radiation, and radical surgery because this is the current allopathic medical approach. On some level people may know that these remedies are highly dangerous but they have been told by their attending oncologist that violent therapies are their only hope of survival, however poor that may be. If a cancer victim doesn't proceed immediately with such treatment their official prognosis becomes worse by the hour. Such scare tactics are common amongst the medical profession, and they leave the recipient so terrified that they meekly and obediently give up all self-determinism, sign the liability waiver, and submit, no questions asked. Many then die after suffering intensely from the therapy, long before the so-called disease could have actually caused their demise. I will later offer alternative and frequently successful (but not guaranteed) approaches to treating cancer that do not require the earliest-possible detection, surgery or poisons.

If holistic pract.i.tioners were to apply painful treatments like allopaths use, ones with such poor statistical outcomes like allopaths use, there would most certainly be witch hunts and all such irresponsible, greedy quacks would be safely imprisoned. I find it highly ironic that for at least the past twenty five hundred years the basic principle of good medicine has been that the treatment must first do no harm. This is such an obvious truism that even the AMA doctors pledge to do the same thing when they take the Hippocratic Oath. Yet virtually every action taken by the allopath is a conscious compromise between the potential harm of the therapy and its potential benefit.

In absolute contrast, if a person dies while on a natural hygiene program, they died because their end was inevitable no matter what therapy was attempted. Almost certainly receiving hygienic therapy contributed to making their last days far more comfortable and relatively freer of pain without using opiates. I have personally taken on clients sent home to die after they had suffered everything the doctors could do to them, told they had only a few days, weeks, or months to live. Some of these clients survived as a result of hygienic programs even at that late date. And some didn't. The amazing thing was that any of them survived at all, because the best time to begin a hygienic program is as early in the degenerative process as possible, not after the body has been drastically weakened by invasive and toxic treatments. Later on, I'll tell you about some of these cases.

Something I consider especially ironic is that when the patient of a medical doctor dies, it is inevitably thought that the blessed doctor did all that could be done; rarely is any blame laid. If the physician was especially careless or stupid, their fault can only result in a civil suit, covered by malpractice insurance. But let a holistic pract.i.tioner treat a sick person and have that person follow any of their suggestions or take any natural remedies and have that person die or worsen and it instantly becomes the natural doctor's fault. Great blame is placed and the pract.i.tioner faces inquests, grand juries, manslaughter charges, jail time and civil suits that can't be insured against.

Allopathic medicine rarely makes a connection between the real causes of a degenerative or infectious disease and its cure. The causes are usually considered mysterious: we don't know why the pancreas is acting up, etc. The sick are sympathized with as victims who did nothing to contribute to their condition. The cure is a highly technical battle against the illness, whose weapons are defined in Latin and far beyond the understanding of a layperson.

Hygienic medicine presents an opposite view. To the naturopath, illness is not a perplexing and mysterious occurrence over which you have no control or understanding. The causes of disease are clear and simple, the sick person is rarely a victim of circ.u.mstance and the cure is obvious and within the competence of a moderately intelligent sick person themselves to understand and help administer. In natural medicine, disease is a part of living that you are responsible for, and quite capable of handling.

a.s.serting that the sick are pitiable victims is financially beneficial to doctors. It makes medical intervention seem a vital necessity for every ache and pain. It makes the sick become dependent. I'm not implying that most doctors knowingly are conniving extortionists. Actually most medical doctors are genuinely well-intentioned. I've also noticed that most medical doctors are at heart very timid individuals who consider that possession of a MD degree and license proves that they are very important, proves them to be highly intelligent, even makes them fully qualified to pontificate on many subjects not related to medicine at all.

Doctors obtain an enormous sense of self-importance at medical school, where they proudly endured the high pressure weeding out of any free spirit unwilling to grind away into the night for seven or more years. Anyone incapable of absorbing and regurgitating huge amounts of rote information; anyone with a disrespectful or irreverent att.i.tude toward the senior doctor-G.o.ds who arrogantly serve as med school professors, anyone like this was eliminated with especial rapidity. When the thoroughly submissive, h.o.m.ogenized survivors are finally licensed, they a.s.sume the status of junior doctor-G.o.ds.

But becoming an official medical deity doesn't permit one to create their own methods. No no, the AMA's professional oversight and control system makes continued possession of the license to practice (and the high income that usually comes with it) entirely dependent on continued conformity to what is defined by the AMA as "correct practice." Any doctor who innovates beyond strict limits or uses non-standard treatments is in real danger of losing their livelihood and status.

Not only are licensed graduates of AMA-sanctioned medical schools kept on a very tight leash, doctors of other persuasions who use other methods to heal the sick or help them heal themselves are persecuted and prosecuted. Extension of the AMA's control through regulatory law and police power is justified in the name of preventing quackery and making sure the ignorant and gullible public receives only scientifically proven effective medical care.

Those on the other side of the fence view the AMA's oppression as an effective way to make sure the public has no real choices but to use union doctors, pay their high fees and suffer greatly by misunderstanding of the true cause of disease and its proper cure.

If there are any actual villains responsible for this suppressive tragedy some of them are to be found in the inner core of the AMA, officials who may perhaps fully and consciously comprehend the suppressive system they promulgate.

Hygienists usually inform the patient quite clearly and directly that the pract.i.tioner has no ability to heal them or cure their condition and that no doctor of any type actually is able to heal.

Only the body can heal itself, something it is eager and usually very able to do if only given the chance. One pithy old saying among hygienists goes, "if the body can't heal itself, nothing can heal it." The primary job of the hygienic pract.i.tioner is to reeducate the patient by conducting them through their first natural healing process. If this is done well the sick person learns how to get out of their own body's way and permit its native healing power to manifest. Unless later the victim of severe traumatic injury, never again will that person need obscenely expensive medical procedures.

Hygienists rarely make six figure incomes from regular, repeat business.

This aspect of hygienic medicine makes it different than almost all the others, even most other holistic methods. Hygiene is the only system that does not interpose the a.s.sumed healing power of a doctor between the patient and wellness. When I was younger and less experienced I thought that the main reason traditional medical practice did not stress the body's own healing power and represented the doctor as a necessary intervention was for profit. But after practicing for over twenty years I now understand that the last thing most people want to hear is that their own habits, especially their eating patterns and food choices, are responsible for their disease and that their cure is to only be accomplished through dietary reform, which means unremittingly applied self-discipline.

One of the hardest things to ask of a person is to change a habit.

The reason that AMA doctors have most of the patients is they're giving the patients exactly what they want, which is to be allowed to continue in their unconscious irresponsibility.

The Cause Of Disease

Ever since natural medicine arose in opposition to the violence of so-called scientific medicine, every book on the subject of hygiene, once it gets past its obligatory introductions and warm ups, must address The Cause of Disease. This is a required step because we see the cause of disease and its consequent cure in a very different manner than the allopath. Instead of many causes, we see one basic reason why. Instead of many unrelated cures, we have basically one approach to fix all ills that can be fixed.

A beautiful fifty cent word that means a system for explaining something is paradigm, p.r.o.nounced para-dime. I am fond of this word because it admits the possibility of many differing yet equally true explanations for the same reality. Of all available paradigms, Natural Hygiene suits me best and has been the one I've used for most of my career.

The Natural Hygienist's paradigm for the cause of both degenerative and infectious disease is called the Theory of Toxemia, or "self-poisoning."

Before explaining this theory it will help many readers if I digress a brief moment about the nature and validity of alternative paradigms. Not too many decades ago, scientists thought that reality was a singular, real, perpetual--that Natural Law existed much as a tree or a rock existed. In physics, for example, the mechanics of Newton were considered capital "T" True, the only possible paradigm.

Any other view, not being True, was False. There was capital "N"

natural capital "L" law.

More recently, great uncertainty has entered science; it has become indisputable that a theory or explanation of reality is only true only to the degree it seems to work; conflicting or various explanations can all work, all can be "true." At least, this uncertainty has overtaken the hard, physical sciences. It has not yet done so with medicine. The AMA is convinced (or is working hard to convince everyone else) that its paradigm, the allopathic approach, is Truth, is scientific, and therefore, anything else is Falsehood, is irresponsibility, is a crime against the sick.

But the actual worth or truth of any paradigm is found not in its "reality," but in its utility. Does an explanation or theory allow a person to manipulate experience and create a desired outcome. To the extent a paradigm does that, it can be considered valuable. Judged by this standard, the Theory of Toxemia must be far truer than the hodgepodge of psuedoscience taught in medical schools. Keep that in mind the next time some officious medical doctor disdainfully informs you that Theory of Toxemia was disproven in 1927 by Doctors Jeckel and Hyde.

Why People Get Sick

This is the Theory of Toxemia. A healthy body struggles continually to purify itself of poisons that are inevitably produced while going about its business of digesting food, moving about, and repairing itself. The body is a marvelous creation, a carbon, oxygen combustion machine, constantly burning fuel, disposing of the waste products of combustion, and constantly rebuilding tissue by replacing worn out, dead cells with new, fresh ones. Every seven years virtually every cell in the body is replaced, some types of cells having a faster turnover rate than others, which means that over a seven year period several hundred pounds of dead cells must be digested (autolyzed) and eliminated. All by itself this would be a lot of waste disposal for the body to handle. Added to that waste load are numerous mild poisons created during proper digestion. And added to that can be an enormous burden of waste products created as the body's attempts to digest the indigestible, or those tasty items I've heard called "fun food." Add to that burden the ruinous effects of just plain overeating.

The waste products of digestion, of indigestion, of cellular breakdown and the general metabolism are all poisonous to one degree or another. Another word for this is toxic. If these toxins were allowed to remain and acc.u.mulate in the body, it would poison itself and die in agony. So the body has a processing system to eliminate toxins. And when that system does break down the body does die in agony, as from liver or kidney failure.

The organs of detoxification remove things from the body's system, but these two vital organs should not be confused with what hygienists call the secondary organs of elimination, such as the large intestine, lungs, bladder and the skin, because none of these other eliminatory organs are supposed to purify the body of toxins.

But when the body is faced with toxemia, the secondary organs of elimination are frequently pressed into this duty and the consequences are the symptoms we call illness.

The lungs are supposed to eliminate only carbon dioxide gas; not self-generated toxic substances. The large intestine is supposed to pa.s.s only insoluble food solids (and some nasty stuff dumped into the small intestine by the liver). Skin eliminates in the form of sweat (which contains mineral salts) to cool the body, but the skin is not supposed to move toxins outside the system. But when toxins are flowed out through secondary organs of elimination these areas become inflamed, irritated, weakened. The results can be skin irritations, sinusitis or a whole host of other "itises" depending on the area involved, bacterial or viral infections, asthma. When excess toxemia is deposited instead of eliminated, the results can be arthritis if toxins are stored in joints, rheumatism if in muscle tissues, cysts and benign tumors. And if toxins weaken the body's immune response, cancer.

The liver and the kidneys, the two heroic organs of detoxification, are the most important ones; these jointly act as filters to purify the blood. Hygienists pay a lot of attention to these organs, the liver especially.

In an ideal world, the liver and kidneys would keep up with their job for 80 years or more before even beginning to tire. In this ideal world, the food would of course, be very nutritious and free of pesticide residues, the air and water would be pure, people would not denature their food and turn it into junk. In this perfect world everyone would get moderate exercise into old age, and live virtually without stress. In this utopian vision, the average healthy productive life span would approach a century, entirely without using food supplements or vitamins. In this world doctors would have next to no work other than repairing traumatic injuries, because everyone would be healthy. But this is not the way it is.

In our less-than-ideal world virtually everything we eat is denatured, processed, fried, salted, sweetened, preserved; thus more stress is placed on the liver and kidneys than nature designed them to handle. Except for a few highly fortunate individuals blessed with an incredible genetic endowment that permits them to live to age 99 on moose meat, well-larded white flour biscuits, coffee with evaporated milk and sugar, brandy and cigarettes (we've all heard of someone like this), most peoples' liver and kidneys begin to break down prematurely. Thus doctoring has become a financially rewarding profession.

Most people overburden their organs of elimination by eating whatever they feel like eating whenever they feel like it. Or, they irresponsibly eat whatever is served to them by a mother, wife, inst.i.tution or cook because doing so is easy or expected. Eating is a very habitual and unconscious activity; frequently we continue to eat as adults whatever our mother fed us as a child. I consider it unsurprising that when people develop the very same disease conditions as their parents. they wrongly a.s.sume the cause is genetic inheritance, when actually it was just because they were putting their feet under the same table as their parents.

Toxemia also comes about from following the wrongheaded recommendations of allopathic-inspired nutritional texts and licensed diet.i.tians. For example, people believe they should eat one food from each of the four so-called basic food groups at each meal, thinking they are doing the right thing for their health by having four colors of food on every plate, when they really aren't. What they have actually done is force their bodies to attempt the digestion of indigestible food combinations, and the resulting indigestion creates ma.s.sive doses of toxins. I'll have a lot more to say about that later when I discuss the art of food combining.

Table 1: The Actual Food Groups

Starches Proteins Fats Sugars Watery Vegetables bread meats b.u.t.ter honey zucchini potatoes eggs oils fruit green beans noodles fish lard sugar tomatoes manioc/yuca most nuts nuts mola.s.sas peppers baked goods dry beans avocado malt syrup eggplant grains nut b.u.t.ters maple syrup radish winter squash split peas dried fruit rutabaga parsnips lentils melons turnips sweet potatoes soybeans carrot juice Brussels sprouts yams tofu beet juice celery taro root tempeh cauliflower plantains wheat gra.s.s juice broccoli beets "green" drinks okra spirulina lettuce algae endive yeast cabbage dairy carrots

Standard diet.i.tians divide our foods into four basic food groups and recommend the ridiculous practice of mixing them at every meal.

This guarantees indigestion and lots of business for the medical profession. This chart ill.u.s.trates the actual food groups. It is usually a poor practice to mix different foods from one group with those from another.

The Digestive Process

After we have eaten our four-color meal--often we do this in a hurry, without much chewing, under a lot of stress, or in the presence of negative emotions--we give no thought to what becomes of our food once it has been swallowed. We have been led to a.s.sume that anything put in the mouth automatically gets digested flawlessly, is efficiently absorbed into the body where it nourishes our cells, with the waste products being eliminated completely by the large intestine. This vision of efficiency may exist in the best cases but for most there is many a slip between the table and the toilet. Most bodies are not optimally efficient at performing all the required functions, especially after years of poor living habits, stress, fatigue, and aging. To the Natural Hygienist, most disease begins and ends with our food; most of our healing efforts are focused on improving the process of digestion.