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Mother Earth News Interview (1984) |
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Mother Earth News |
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"A person really can
choose to get well or to stay sick...and it's shocking to me that many people
choose illness." The Mother Earth
News
"Plowboy" Interview: "If we learn more than the doctor in areas
of value to our health, it is our duty to apply this knowledge to the
betterment of ourselves and our families. We need total health more
than medically approved health." So says 28-year-old
(in 1984) Andrew Saul in the opening chapter of his manual Doctor Yourself.
Saul is, it seems, engaged in a struggle to expand the frontiers of the
medical self-care movement, taking the radical view - even in the eyes of
some longtime self-help advocates - that a person who lives a truly healthful
life should almost never need the services of medical professionals. In
the process of spreading his message, Saul managed to become the first
person certified by New York State to teach naturopathic healing and health
maintaining techniques... helped set up a charity vitamin dispensary for the
poor in near by Rochester...and published a shopper's guide to healthful
supermarket foods, a how-to pamphlet aimed at helping people through their
first body-cleansing fast, and the books Doctor Yourself and Paperback
Clinic Along with all that, he has still found time to teach
classes for the State University of New York, bombard local newspapers with
alternative medical information, and generally make every effort to bring his
message of natural health care to as many people as he possibly can. In fact, Andrew
Saul first came to MOM's attention while he was teaching a series of courses
at the Community of Homesteaders' Good Life Get-Together in So MOTHER sent
Bruce Woods to visit Andrew Saul for an in-depth discussion. Mind you,
by presenting their conversation (in edited form), we are not necessarily
endorsing Saul's ideas, and - more important - we're certainly not trying to
convince anyone to avoid traditional medical care. However, we did
indeed find Saul's words to be a stimulating challenge to our own ideas of
self-health responsibility. And by sharing his thoughts and providing
access information on pertinent books and medical studies, we hope to help
you, our readers, to be better able to make wise decisions on questions
pertaining to your own health and that of your families. After all,
there are not many other situations in which finding the right answer can be
so vital. PLOWBOY: You made a
name for yourself in the field of alternative medicine at a fairly tender
age. That leads me to believe that your interest in medical
alternatives goes back a goodly number of years. SAUL: I was drawn
into natural healing because I found that regular healing didn't work.
And I suppose the seeds of the realization were sown when I was a
child. Like everybody else, I had the usual injections, and then I went
overseas and had more shots, and I ate meals based on the so-called four
basic food groups (again like everybody else), and I got sick like everybody
else. Not all the time, of course, but often enough. Now, my
"conversion," if you can call it that, was a very slow process...I
more or less backed into the alternative health field. You see, I was
still intending to go into traditional medicine when naturopathic healing was
introduced to me by Professor John Mosher at SUNY at Brockport, where I was
enrolled in a premed program. Dr. Mosher challenged me on one simple
point. He said, "If you really want to help people, why don't you
at least investigate the natural healing techniques as well as those of
conventional medicine. Let the merits of each system tell you which is
best." So I began looking
into the subject, and the book that turned me around was Aubrey Westlake's The
Pattern of Health. It's a rather unspectacular-looking (and now out
of print) paperback, but it's probably the most important volume I've read in
the last 12 years. Plowboy: Were there
any other experiences that contributed to your disillusionment Saul: Well, when
observed my first surgeries, I found that I wasn't particularly enamored with
the idea of cutting out someone's adrenal glands, or otherwise
"invading" the person's body, in the hopes of achieving a desired
end, one that often wouldn't come about. But the conflict between my
medical career and my "sideline" research into alternatives really
became intense while I was studying in Plowboy: Was that
at Saul: Yes; I was a
counseling student there. Now don't get me wrong: That institution's
staff members are very good at crisis medicine. But as far as knowing
what kind of diet will help a person back to health...well, let's just say
that I was amazed to see people who had diverticulitis or who'd just had a
colostomy getting white bread, soda pop, overcooked vegetables, tiny little
salads, slabs of overcooked meat, and no vitamin supplements at all.
These were individuals who had been through grueling surgery - sometimes
people who were dying - and this lack of nutritional care nailed home the
point that orthodox medicine is sometimes wrong. Those who practice it
often don't know what they are doing. However, I also had
to begin to ask myself whether I really knew what I hoped to be doing.
And that concern led me to a great source of information. I started
reading reprints produced by the former Lee Foundation for Nutritional
Research and found it to be an excellent outlet for good, hard medical and
nutritional information. Better still, these reprinted articles are
right out of the mainline medical journals...including Clinical Physiology,
the Journal of Applied Nutrition, the Journal of the American
Medical Association, and the rest. The foundation had simply
reprinted features that describe instances in which drugs do not work, and
others that demonstrate how vitamins and foods can cure real diseases. And that was what I
needed to see...reports by doctors who'd worked with medical
alternatives. At that point there was no turning back for me, because I
was faced with overwhelming evidence...data provided by medical doctors, by researchers,
by Ph.D.s and by leaders in their fields. I'd discovered a tremendous
amount of materiel and I'd begun to see that nature cure was not just a
questionable method of treating the common cold, but that it could also be
used for cancer, encephalitis, meningitis, pneumonia, polio,
diverticulitis, and other terrifying diseases. Plowboy: This would
probably be a good time to give a working definition of naturopathy. Saul: Well, first
of all, naturopathy could also be called nature cure, natural healing, or
even natural therapeutics. Nature cure is very different from standard
- or allopathic - medicine, because a naturopath does not use drugs and
doesn't perform surgery. Now the first
question one might ask upon hearing that is "Well, then, what on earth
do you do?" To answer that, I have to admit that there are a
number of naturopathic approaches. Natural healing is a highly diverse
field. However, rather than limit ourselves to any one of these schools
of thought, I believe in using sort of a team approach... that is, employing
many such methods in concert. I'm interested in results rather than
"pet" theories. All I want to see is people getting better,
and any technique that they can use to get results is fine with me. Furthermore, nature
cure almost always is safer than allopathic medicine. After all, a
healthful diet is probably the keystone to any form of naturopathic
therapy. And there are no unpleasant side effects of eating right. Plowboy: It would
seem that you're saying the patient bears the responsibility for his or her
own health, then. Saul:
Exactly. A person really can choose to get well or to stay sick...and
it's shocking to me that many people choose illness. I often tell folks
that everybody has the right to be sick. And I'm not being flippant
when I say that! If a person really wants to get well, he or she won't
mind making a change of lifestyle...or taking whatever course of action will
help him or her get better. If an individual
wants to get well enough, or perhaps I should say if a person wants to get
well, enough. He or she will be willing to take such steps. In
fact, my most successful students often tend to be just a bit desperate and
discouraged...and that combination can sometimes yield remarkable results.
Many people do their best work when their backs are against the wall. Plowboy: Why is it
that nature cure has such a limited acceptance in this country? Isn't
it far more generally recognized overseas?
Saul: Natural
healing is downright mainstream in many other countries. In The official reason
for such "precautionary" restrictions is to protect people from
quack therapies. And many individuals have been taken in by treatments
that are statistically invalid. Unfortunately, orthodox medicine leads
the league in the use of statistically invalid approaches to human
illness. One has only to read Ivan Illich's Medical Nemesis to
verify that medicine not only is without statistical significance in many
cases, but also is sometimes definitely harmful. One out of five people
admitted to a typical research hospital today will acquire an iatrogenic, or
doctor-caused, disease! Plowboy: Can you
cite some well-documented clinical evidence of the effectiveness of nature
cure? Saul: Yes, a great
deal of it. You have only to go to the Journal of Applied Nutrition,
to the Journal of the Franklin Institute, to Clinical Physiology,
to the Lancet, or to any of the many excellent British and German
journals to find that such techniques are well established. For
instance, in 1950 Dr. Benjamin P. Sandler, a United States Navy physician,
then at the Mayo Clinic, treated tuberculosis-and did so more effectively
than anyone else at that clinic at the time using nothing but a high-protein,
low-carbohydrate diet. Then too, Dr.
William J. McCormick of Toronto, Canada has, since1946 at least, been using
high doses of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) to treat herniated or ruptured disks,
as well as a variety of infectious childhood illnesses. Or how about
Dr. Frederick Robert Klenner of Klenner suggests
that when an M.D. admits a patient to the hospital, the first thing he or she
should do is to administer vitamin C while deciding what other course of
action to take. In many cases, the physician won't have to do anything
else...because the vitamin therapy will cure the condition. Why, high
doses of vitamin C can even be a beautiful treatment for infected cows.
I worked on a dairy, farm for a while before I started practicing, and helped
inject doses of a million or more units of antibiotics to cows with mastitis.
Yet if farmers would give their milking stock 20,000 to 30,000 milligrams of
vitamin C and eight ounces of cider vinegar a day, the animals wouldn't have
mastitis problems. Colds, cancer,
bronchitis, pneumonia, herpes, meningitis encephalitis...how, people ask, can
one vitamin cure so many different diseases? The answer is that the
lack of one vitamin can cause many different illnesses. Plowboy: Hold on
there. Are you saying that you know of people who've achieved a Saul: Yes, that's
the proper term for it...complete and total remission. The specific
form of vitamin C used was calcium ascorbate in conjunction with sizable
doses of L-lysine, a magnesium supplement, and a vegetarian diet. The
amount of calcium ascorbate may exceed 40,000 milligrams daily. And
yet, proportionate to body weight, that's no more vitamin C than a sick rat
would manufacture. Plowboy: Right.
Rats, goats, and many other animals produce vitamin C in their bodies, and
the amount varies with the creature's health. Saul: Yes, a
healthy rat may manufacture the equivalent of a human dose of several grams a
day. A sick rat - or goat - will manufacture a good deal more. Vitamin C is
inexpensive...has broad-spectrum utility...is effective...and is safe.
Yet it gets absolutely no significant attention from the medical
community. Perhaps that's because physicians don't believe that
anything cheap, safe, and generic could work. Plowboy: And, of
course, it's available without a prescription. Saul: That's
precisely why vitamin C appeals to me, because I'm trying to promote radical
wellness self-reliance. By that I don't mean that people should just
learn when to go to the doctor or how to avoid mixing their medicines.
Such concepts are little more than grade school-level medical
self-reliance. I want people not only to know what type of approach
might help them, but also to be able to take the appropriate action and get
results, totally on their own. People no longer have to suffer. Plowboy: But how do
you convince them that they have the capability of managing their own health? Saul: My books
address that fear right off. The first chapters explain that it's
reasonably easy and generally safe to be your own doctor...if you know
how. The absence of knowledge is what should be feared. Plowboy: Well, how
can a person obtain the necessary knowledge? What sorts of materials
are available to the public? Saul: In my books I
list a large number of readily available resources, and that's by no means
intended to be a complete bibliography. (This bibliography is currently
posted at http://www.doctoryourself.com ) I'd go so far as to
suggest that anyone interested in self-care get a copy of every article and
book mentioned. These would prove to the person, as much as anything
can be proved by written material, that "real" doctors do cure
diseases with nutrition...with fasting...with vitamins...and with
minerals. People can simply
go to their local libraries, and even to most medical libraries - no one's
going to throw them out - and research any disease that they'd like to
understand. I'd also suggest visiting a pharmacy to examine their copy
of the Physician's Desk Reference for prescription drugs, and read
enough of it to appreciate how dangerous many drugs are and how little is
known about the majority of them. Yet another valuable source of
information is the Merck Manual. It's a 2,400-page medical
review text, and it sells for about seventy dollars. That's pretty
reasonable for what is almost like getting four years of medical education in
one volume. It is a book that practically every physician has on his or
her desk, and one that every health homesteader should have, too. Now,
you might well ask, do I really believe people are going to go through this
volume and learn everything they need to know? Certainly not. In
fact, I think much of the information in the Merck Manual concerns
ways of approaching illness that I'd disagree with. But the book does
at least correctly describe symptoms and conventional treatments. It
will let a reader know what the medical approach to a specific problem would
be. I also highly
recommend Dr. Schuessler's Biochemistry, by J.B. Chapman. M.D. This
168-page book lists the12 Schuessler cell salts and tells exactly how to use
them...it's doubly cross-referenced...and it's probably the most valuable
single medical book for the home I've ever seen. (Editor's note: The 12
Schuessler cell salts were categorized, in1873, by the German biochemist
whose name they bear. Many naturopaths believe they can be used to
relieve disease by restoring the minerals missing in the affected tissue.) The next book that
belongs in the health homesteader's library. is Boericke's Materia Medica,
ninth edition, by William Boericke. This 1,000-page volume, a detailed
presentation of homeopathic theory and treatment, will set you back about
$30. The possible
additions to this list are, of course, about as numerous as the world's
diseases. But it's safe to say that you could make a good "tool
kit" with six or seven books... six or eight herbs... a very big bottle
of vitamin C... some good multiple vitamins (everyone should, I think, take a
high-potency natural multiple vitamin every day)... and a few other basics. Plowboy: So the
tools and the information needed for medical self-care are probably more
accessible than most people believe. But aren't there some legal
implications of doing one's own doctoring? Saul: First of all,
it's completely lawful to doctor yourself. The Constitution provides
for that. You may also treat your immediate family if you - and they -
wish. Should you start prescribing for a friend or a neighbor, though,
you'd be venturing into legal corridors. And, if you charge for treating a
neighbor or friend, you are definitely asking for trouble. Then again, though,
I don't treat anybody. And I don't diagnose, prescribe, or
operate. Instead, I teach people how to diagnose and how to treat
themselves to get specific results. They may use that education or
not... it's up to them. Plowboy: I've read
that you're opposed to vaccination. Saul: Slow down a
second. I certainly do lecture on the pros and cons of
vaccination. But I never tell anyone not to get shots or to get
shots. I simply point out the alternatives that are available. My
daughter has never had an injection (still true in 2000 and she’s 21 now),
and my son is no longer getting them, yet both youngsters, lifelong
near-vegetarians, have always been at least as healthy as the other children
in the neighborhood. Plowboy: Even
though they're exposed to the many contagious illnesses children encounter in
school? Saul: Yes. And if
you're initially put off by this idea, remember that the unvaccinated child
poses absolutely no threat at all to the other children, because the others
have had their shots. So the only possible complaint can be one of
neglect, with the argument that says, "If you don't allow vaccinations,
you're injuring that child." But that just isn't necessarily a
true statement. The fact of the matter is that many injections -
including the diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus shots - are not without
risks of their own. What's more, many vaccines may not be all they're
cracked up to be. For instance, there was a medical doctor up in Now I am not saying
that there's no statistical significance to results with the Salk
vaccine. But I also believe that, on a scale of 1 to10, it definitely
ranks below 2. Whereas I think vitamin C, a vegetarian diet, and iodine
will actually prevent polio more effectively. Much of the evidence supporting
this theory can be found in articles available in Mothering magazine
or from the Plowboy: Let's say
an individual who's reading this interview decides, "Well, this Saul
fellow seems to make some sense, and I know I haven't been taking care of
myself as well as I could." Then... Saul: What should
he or she do? Plowboy: Yes.
And-to be more explicit: if someone isn't ready to jump into a major
lifestyle change with both feet, what initial steps might give him or her
enough immediate results to provide encouragement? Saul: Well, the
very first thing I recommend is that people stop eating meat. Plowboy: Whoops! Saul: I know, I
lose a lot of people on this point. But I'm not out to make friends...I'm out
to tell people what I believe is the truth. Unfortunately, a
lot of my students kind of run into a brick wall right there. They are
just not willing to give up the hot dogs and hamburgers in order to get rid
of - say -their arthritis. Well, if they're not ready to drop meat,
they should no longer look at themselves as victims of this demon arthritis,
but rather as victims of their own stubbornness. This is why motivation
is so important. Natural healing works...but only if you do. You know, I was in
a class once, and I mentioned that rats make their own vitamin C, and someone
asked, "Does that mean rats are a good source of vitamin C?"
I replied, "Sure, if you eat your rats raw. Once you cook the
meat, the vitamin C content is almost nil." I think that's why
traditional Eskimos get by at all...because they eat raw meat. If they
tried to subsist on cooked meat, they'd all be seriously vitamin-deficient.
People who do eat meat, then, probably should do so the way that true
carnivorous or omnivorous creatures do: Eat the whole animal...skin, bones,
blood, intestines, brains, yes...everything. Plowboy: Would that
actually provide a balanced... Saul: It'd be a
perfect diet. If you completely consume a raw, freshly killed animal,
you'll get everything you need...all the vitamins, all the minerals,
everything. But that's repugnant to us, because, you see, we're not
meat eaters by nature. (Plus, this a facetious argument! Do not try
this at home.) However, people who
do stop eating meat typically find that, for instance, their hay fever isn't
as bad, their allergies aren't as severe, or their skin doesn't break out as
much. This is due, in part, to the fact that these "new"
vegetarians are avoiding all of the chemicals that find their way into meat:
the hormones, the antibiotic residues, the colorings, and the preservatives. On top of all that,
when people stop eating meat, they spend less on food. I save $20 a
week simply as a result of being a vegetarian. Now that's $80 a month
tax free...without having to go out and earn it. (And this in 1984
dollars.) I'm all for that! Plowboy: There are,
of course, any number of arguments as to whether humans are, by nature,
omnivorous or vegetarian...and there are also any number of people who'll
give you very convincing evidence pointing one way or the other.
However, I suspect that the key here is the quality of the meat that people can
get nowadays. Saul: Look, I'm not
telling people that they have to stop eating meat. I'm saying that if I
were they, I'd stop eating meat right away. If they do so, regardless
of the validity of one or another of the arguments about mankind's nature, I
believe they'll get results. They'll feel better, they'll have fewer
illnesses. That's my real reason for not eating meat, because a
vegetarian diet works. That should hardly come as a surprise.
After all, when you buy a cut of beef, for example, you're getting the dead
muscle tissue of an animal that's been raised in a highly confined
environment and on a very limited diet.
Plowboy: That
environment was probably quite stressful, too. Saul: The meat
could contain lead if the animal was grazed near an interstate highway; or be
doped with antibiotics or other chemical residues. And, on humanitarian
grounds, some farming conditions are deplorable...those typical of many
veal-raising operations, for instance. Plowboy: We
recently did an interview with Dr. Michael Fox of the Humane Society of the Saul: Worse yet,
we're actually starting to see humans contracting diseases as a consequence
of eating animals that have been fed "kill-floor scraps", or - as
they're commonly called - "meat by-products". Think of it
this way: A steer goes to market, and the muscle meats by no means make up
the whole animal...there's also a lot of waste that is processed into meat
by-products. And these substances sometimes include the entire bodies
of animals that are cancerous or have other diseases that make them unfit for
human food. Well, according to a report by Dr. P.F. McGargle - a
veterinary surgeon who did meat inspection - published years ago in
Preventive Medicine Forum, countries in which these ground-up animal
by-products are used in livestock food have an unusually high incidence of
human cancer. Childhood cancer, in particular, is much higher in
countries that use kill-floor scraps when producing feed for hogs, chickens,
and turkeys. Now if you
organically raise your own livestock, or if you're a hunter and you get wild
game...surely that animal had a better chance to get a balanced diet rich in
minerals and vitamins - and lived a better life - than did a steer confined
to an intensive feedlot. Even so, I still think we should eat the whole
animal - raw - if we're going to call ourselves omnivorous. Plowboy: What
actions other than adopting a vegetarian diet would you recommend? Saul: If a person
is not on insulin or any medication that requires eating, I'd suggest a short
fast (four to six days) to rid the body of the toxins accumulated over years
of unhealthful living. Fasting, by the way, is also a commonly used
naturopathic treatment for certain illnesses. Plowboy: Do you
have any tips that might help a first-timer get through a fast? A lot
of people are really intimidated by that idea. Saul: I wrote a
little fasting article (which is in my book, Paperback Clinic) that
many individuals have found helpful. Basically, it makes the following
recommendations: [1] Go into the fast with a positive attitude. Some
folks think they're surely going to die if they stop eating. Of course,
that's not true, unless they have such a health problem that they can't fast.
Obviously, one should check with their doctor first. [2] They should attempt
a short 50-50 juice/water fast...consuming half fruit (or preferably
vegetable) juice and half water, either mixed together or in alternation. Plowboy: In any
amounts that they feel comfortable with?
Saul: Pretty much,
yes. [3] They should continue their vitamin supplements while
fasting. Now some naturopaths say you don't need these
"boosters" while fasting - or, indeed, at all, if you're eating a
healthful diet - but my feeling is that in real life, with its stresses of jobs
and kids and traffic jams, you'll find it worthwhile to take vitamins every
day. [4] And the last piece of advice is to come off the fast slowly and
gradually. If you fast for four days, take a day or two to come off
it. If you fast for six days, take at least two days. Plowboy: Just how
does one come off a fast gradually? Saul: Stick to
fruit salads, vegetable broths, and such...and eat half of what you want but
do so twice as often as you normally would. If you do all these steps,
you'll almost certainly succeed. Most people who have fasted and hated
it were on a water only fast. So don’t do that. Plowboy: If people
do manage to give up eating meat and make their way through the first fast,
what should they then consume on a day-to-day basis? What do you feel
would be healthful? Saul: A two-thirds
raw food diet. Or what I prefer to call a two-thirds salad diet.
I recommend, for example, an all-fruit breakfast, with some cheese or yogurt,
and an all-salad lunch. Try to use sprouts instead of lettuce...sprouts are a
complete protein while lettuce is not. Then, for supper, eat any
meatless menu that you like...going very light on sweeteners and very light
on eggs. I also recommend drinking three glasses of raw fruit or
vegetable juice a day...preferably before meals. Plowboy: What about
breads? Saul: Whole grain
breads can be a very valuable part of any diet. There are other ways to
get your grains, though. Sprouting your wheat, for instance, is a
superb way of getting complete protein.
And this brings us
to an opportunity to exercise some real dietary economy. If people want
to save money and still feel that they're getting enough protein, they should
be sure to have a cereal bowl full of sprouted grain or beans a day.
You can grow a whole jarful of sprouts for pennies. In fact, you could
live on an all-sprout diet for less than $5 a week! There are people
right now who are starving to death in Plowboy: And very
bored, perhaps. Saul: Very bored,
but also very alive. You know, it doesn't cost much to get a good
nutrition, but we neglect our need for it. I wonder how many nursing
homes even give a high-potency natural multiple vitamin every day? And simple, easily
available vitamins can actually fight drug addiction! I've written to
(then First Lady) Nancy Reagan and expressed my support for her fight against
drug abuse in children. And I told her that our work - in
particular our vitamin dispensary that serves the poor in Yet I've talked to
people at More amazing still,
in Scotland it's been discovered that people who - in the course of treatment
for cancer - were given morphine, or even heroin, can be injected
intravenously with ten grams of vitamin C a day, and break the addiction in
less than ten days...with no withdrawal symptoms, maintenance drugs, or side
effects! Plowboy: Hasn't it
been said that almost 90% of all North Americans don't get enough vitamin C? Saul: Yes.
William J. McCormick, the That may sound like
a shocking statistic, but look at our nearest animal cousin, the
gorilla. It's a vegetarian animal...one that's anatomically very
similar to human beings and one which gets over four thousand milligrams of
vitamin C a day in its normal diet. Yet the government's telling us that we
need (according to the RDA) less than two percent of that amount. Now somebody's
wrong, and I do believe I’ll side with the gorilla on this one. Of course, that
common human deficiency is very likely why we find that people simply get
better when they take vitamin C. Statistics and controlled experiments
aside, it all comes down to what the individual is willing to do. If
any reader of this interview wants to conduct a safe experiment, all the
person has to do is start taking the amount of vitamin C that I recommend and
see if he or she feels better after a few weeks. The proof is in the
pudding. You can't argue with that, any more than you should ignore
Ivan Illich's disclosure that survival rates for the most common types of
cancer - those that make up 90% of all cases - have remained virtually
unchanged for the past 25 years. Plowboy: Are you
saying that all of our new chemotherapeutic drugs have made no progress in
treating these cancers? Saul: Far too
little. Let me point out, as Linus Pauling has noted, that the medical
establishment has double standards when it comes to vitamins and
medicines. A drug may not work all the time, and may even have
dangerous side effects, but still be considered a worthwhile risk for a
possible success. Whereas if a vitamin doesn't work all the time, but
is totally safe, most physicians won't even try it. Plowboy: Are there
any other easy self-help courses of action that you'd recommend? Saul: Well, for
one, there's the "spontaneous release by positioning" technique (as
developed by Lawrence Hugh Jones, D.O.), which is a method-a first aid
technique for adjusting a person's spine. [Editor's Note: We'll
describe this method in detail in our next issue (#86) March-April, 1984] Plowboy: You seem
to be sowing a number of self help seeds. What do you hope will result
from such work? Saul: Most of all,
I'd like to see people stop living with their illnesses and start living
without them. I dream of a nationwide system of neighborhood health
cooperatives, which will make individuals so self-reliant that they can
simply bypass the professionals. And I mean bypass the naturopath as well as
the medical doctor. Now if someone has a broken leg or is bitten by a
rabid dog, for heaven's sake, they'd still have to seek medical help.
The secret is not to never go to a doctor...the secret is to rarely need to
go. Plowboy: So you believe
that every illness is a result of unhealthful living. Saul: Basically,
yes. Plowboy: How does
naturopathic theory explain the existence of contagious diseases? Saul: First of all, there
is no absolute proof that germs are the primary cause of any illness.
Yes, germs are found at the scene of illness. But then, detectives are
found at the scene of a crime, and that fact doesn't mean that they committed
it. Plowboy: OK. Saul: .In fact, many
medical doctors have, during the last 150 years, gone on record as saying
that they believe the germ theory isn't valid. It certainly doesn't
seem to explain cancer very well...or heart disease...or mental illness...or
diabetes. At least 20 billion dollars' worth of cancer research hasn't
been able to defeat malignancy, or we'd all be vaccinated for it, you can be
sure of that. That's the first
basic point. The second is that if we go back to Robert Koch, who
formulated Koch's postulates - upon which the germ theory is based - we find
that there's a logical flaw in that argument. The first postulate says
that you can isolate the germ in a sick animal. The second postulate
says you can culture that germ and then - here's the third postulate - inject
that cultured germ into a healthy animal and produce the symptoms
characteristic of the illness. The fourth postulate states you can then
remove the germ, thus proving that the microorganisms caused the disease. Now that sounds
ironclad. But - as Andrew Weil, M.D. points out in his 1972 book
The Natural Mind - there's a flaw in postulate three. How is the germ
presented to the animal? By bypassing all of the body's defense
systems, since it's injected directly into the bloodstream. The
naturopath claims that disease resistance is the main story. It allows
germs to become a factor. Plowboy: Are you
saying, then, that someone who leads a healthful life would be less likely to
contract a contagious disease? Saul:
Absolutely. They'd be less likely to catch it, and if they did, it
would be less severe. Here's a simple example. Our children had
been playing with the neighbor's kids just before those children's chicken
pox became visible, at the most contagious stage of that disease. A few
days later, the other kids had chicken pox. But our youngsters
developed only five or six spots apiece. We upped their vitamin C and
that was the end of that. Plowboy: That
sounds analogous to the increased disease and bug-attack resistance shown by
healthy, organically grown plants. Saul:
Certainly. And you can apply that same line of comparison when
considering the laboratory animals used in medical research. Think
about the white rats - generation after generation after generation of them -
that are fed only commercial rat food. That diet can't possibly contain
every, natural factor...it can only contain what we humans think rats need
for a healthy life. So all of these
rats get the same diet...one that quite possibly is deficient, and certainly
is given in excess. We introduce germs to these animals and they drop
dead. When I was in And people can
build resistance by getting plenty of rest...plenty of exercise...and the
right kind of diet. We also need vitamin supplements, especially
vitamin C. If folks follow these simple rules, though, germs will
really become more or less irrelevant. This sort of natural disease
prevention is always to be preferred to medical inoculation and such.
If it's a toss-up, go with nature. Nature has had thousands of years to
work out the enzyme / vitamin / elimination/ nutrition structures of the
body. Nature has had a lot of experience. The medical
establishment, for all its good intentions, had had considerably less
experience. You know, when the
signers of the Declaration of Independence were sitting down at the table,
one of the gentlemen present was Dr. Benjamin Rush, surgeon general of the
Continental army. When they sat down to sign the Declaration, to more
or less create this country, Dr. Rush said the following: "The
Constitution of this republic should make special provision for medical
freedom, as well as religious freedom. To restrict the art of healing
to one class of men, and to deny equal privileges to others, will constitute
the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and
despotic." And this, of
course, is the real crux. Medicine is not a science...it's an
art. And that's why people should be encouraged to be their own
doctors...because it's an art form, for which you need no degree, and which
generally requires no training that you can't pick up on your own. Just remember this
basic point: Our internal environment is the primary influence on our
health! We're talking about inner-space ecology. We're talking
about interior homesteading. And the rewards of naturopathic living can
be enormous. To sit down to a simple healthful meal with healthy
children and to be able to know that your basic bodily equipment is
functioning as well as possible, should, I think, be a more important aspect
of self-reliance than solar heating! Plowboy: One of the
first rules of a self-reliant lifestyle is that you must take care
of your tools...and you're talking about the most precious tool we have. Saul:
Exactly. This body is the only one we're going to get, so we owe it to
ourselves to be careful with it. And I think that we can get better
health care by doing the job ourselves than we can by contracting it out. Of course, if you
are going to doctor yourself, it's vitally important that you take the time,
do the reading, and put enough energy into it to do a good job. I don't
want people going out half-baked...reading one book and thinking they're
experts. But make no
mistake, naturopathic remedies do work. If a dedicated person goes into
the field to prove nature cure wrong, he or she will wind up proving it
right. The truth will stand on its own. The folks with real
problems are those who can't be bothered to look into natural healing at
all. The people who are indifferent. The people who don't care. Our hospitals and nursing homes are filled to
capacity with those people! (End) Andrew Saul is the author of the books FIRE YOUR DOCTOR! How to
be Independently Healthy (reader reviews at http://www.doctoryourself.com/review.html
) and DOCTOR YOURSELF: Natural Healing that Works. (reviewed at http://www.doctoryourself.com/saulbooks.html
) For ordering information, Click Here .
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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. |
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