Your Health Questions

Your Personal Health Concerns

Your Questions
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If you need someone to answer your personal health questions, there are plenty of people willing to do so. These include:

1. Your doctor, who gets paid for it

2. People who want you to buy their specific products, such as food supplements, herbs, or health devices

3. Newspaper and magazine medical writers, who offer up readers' questions in their columns

4. Almost anyone on the internet or on a TV talk show, who will offer up an endless stream of opinion all medical matters

5. Friends and family, who may have all learned to quote from the above

However, I do not consider any of these sources to be sufficiently reliable.

Here are some real ways to get detailed, accurate answers to your health questions. All require a measure of your personal commitment:

1. Visit or phone your local public library, and ask your librarian for assistance with your questions. I have done this myself may a time. It is a wonderful help and it's free.

2. Do a thorough search on the internet, using several major search engines. This is totally free of charge. Do not stop at only one or two websites; check them all. The following cautions apply:

A.) Beware of websites that have a product for sale. Such sites have an essential, inescapable vested interest in selling that particular product. How can you expect otherwise? You may have to look very carefully to find the product affiliation within a website, but it is worth the look nonetheless.

B.) Beware of so-called consumer-protection sites that conclude such things as "you can get all the nutrients you need from your balanced daily diet" or "natural healing is unscientific." Such misinformation is 50 years out of date and will not stand up to experience. If a site tells you to NOT read something, you should make a point to go and read it immediately. Use negative websites backwards: do the opposite of what they say. It is not just in mathematics that two negatives can often make a positive.

C.) Be cautious of sites run by private physicians or other individuals who make their money through consultation services. Such professionals have an interest in offering you some promising free information, and then charging you for the real service. If a physician puts up a large quantity of freely-available information for you to read, such as the complete text of their book, or a lot of articles, the site must be weighed in as useful. But don't sign on the dotted line just yet.

D.) For that matter, be cautious of ANY site run by ANYONE. This includes doctoryourself.com. Use my CELERY system: Check Every Literature reference and personal Experience, and Read for Yourself.

E.) When in doubt, follow the money. I think it is a good idea to ask the website where its funding comes from. While a complete financial disclosure cannot be expected of everyone, it certainly can be a powerful recommendation. Incidentally, I have no financial connection whatsoever with the supplement or health products industry. Zero. I do not sell supplements and I do not recommend brands.

If this all sounds like work, well, of course it is. Life is work. You have to eat anyway; you might as well eat right. You have to spend time on your health; it might as well be at the library as in a doctor's waiting room. We spend plenty of time in front of the TV; we might as well exercise while we do it. Time in front of the computer screen can teach us a lot more than time in front of a movie screen.

Consider the actual time saving benefits: improving your health will pay you back, not only with more years of life but better years of life. If it is too much for you, then you are ready to die. If you are not ready to die, learn to love libraries, bibliographies, and reading. There is no shortcut: we have to make tracks and just do it. If you are incapacitated, get your family to do the work for you. I've seen this powerful approach work many times over: when your health becomes your business, or when your health becomes the family business, much can be accomplished quickly.

Where to start? If at this point you still want my views on sickness, do an easy keyword site search from the top of the home page . What I have learned about health in the last several decades is pretty much all written down in the 400-plus articles at this website. If I missed your topic of interest, you can be sure that the library and the internet did not miss it. If you find an article or website that is especially valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd forward it to me to further my education.

Should you remain disappointed that I do not choose to answer your personal health questions more directly, remember the old saying: "Free advice is worth the price." Also remember that I am not a physician. I am a teacher. Teachers don't always give the answers; they guide the questions. When I was a kid and asked my teacher how to spell a word, she said, "Do I look like a dictionary" Go look it up for yourself." Do I look like a doctor? I do? Well, thanks for the compliment, but it's just the gray hair, now isn't it?

I remember when our fourth-grade class first went to the big city library. We walked into this virtual cathedral of books. Out from under a 60-foot mural-covered ceiling, a short, elderly librarian silently emerged. She looked the part, all right, right down to the half-glasses strung around her neck with a cord so they were always at the ready. And then she said the words that banished my fear of libraries forever:

"Do you see all those books?"

We sure did. There were thousands upon thousands of them, reaching high up the walls.

"Well," she said, leaning very closely towards us, "You can read any one of them you want!"

That is still true, and true for you. And thanks to the internet, it is now easier than ever to quickly mine the vaults of learning.

But it helps to know where to do the digging, and that is why this website exists. That is the purpose of my reading lists and bibliographies. Start with the shortened list of recommended items posted at http://www.doctoryourself.com/vithall.html or read the references brought up by a search from this website's home page.

You can do this, and do it well.

"Give a hungry person a fish and they will still be hungry tomorrow. Teach a person how to fish, and they will always have food."

Andrew W. Saul

AN IMPORTANT NOTE: This page is not in any way offered as prescription, diagnosis nor treatment for any disease, illness, infirmity or physical condition. Any form of self-treatment or alternative health program necessarily must involve an individual's acceptance of some risk, and no one should assume otherwise. Persons needing medical care should obtain it from a physician. Consult your doctor before making any health decision.

Neither the author nor the webmaster has authorized the use of their names or the use of any material contained within in connection with the sale, promotion or advertising of any product or apparatus. Single-copy reproduction for individual, non-commercial use is permitted providing no alterations of content are made, and credit is given.