Confessions of a Medical HereticbyRobert Mendelsohn
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The New
Medicine is my recipe for winning, my blueprint
for the defeat of the Church of Modern Medicine.
Up to now I’ve been telling you why and how you should protect yourself from Modern Medicine. I’ve told you how to deceive the doctor, how to find out if his advice is good, how to check up on him, how to scare him, how to confront him, and how to maintain your health despite his dangerous practices. Maybe you’ve tried some of these recommendations, or maybe you’re just reading this book for entertainment. If you have tried any of them, you’re probably aware that you’ve been doing somewhat more than protecting yourself. You’ve been subverting Modern Medicine. I’ve told you to lie to your doctor, to shuffle and smile -- and to organize behind his back with people who think the way you do about health. I’ve told you to leave the Church of Modern Medicine and not to challenge it and become a martyr. I’ve been setting you up. One of my favorite mottoes is that there comes a time to rise above principle and to do what has to be done. Once you put any part of my recipe into practice, you’ll find out pretty quickly that deciding to protect yourself from your doctor inevitably leads to a much more profound commitment. A single first step towards the New Medicine will render you unable to stand still. You’ll either have to retreat and let the doctors run your life again, or you’ll have to keep going forward. Maybe you’ll start by deciding you want to have your baby at home, or that you want to breastfeed your baby, or that you want to enroll your children in school without immunizing them, or that you want to skip this year’s annual job physical, or that you want to pin down your doctor on why he recommends surgery, or that you want the doctor to do something for you or your child without using drugs. Commit yourself to any one of these things and my guess is that your experience will be the first chink in the glass, the radicalizing experience that will lead to your becoming a medical guerrilla. I’m giving you fair warning. On the other hand, you don’t have to take a loyalty oath to join this revolutioin. We don’t need symbolic protestations of devotion with more symbolic than actual worth. The practice of the New Medicine immediately establishes you as loyal. Taking on the responsibility for your own health and the health of your family constitutes a political act as long as Modern Medicine uses political power to execute its attack on the individual’s and the family’s right to self- determine health. Our very act of commitment to the family as a unit of health and to the community as a collection of families is political because it resists the notion that the individual is the unit of health as well as of society. Our New Medicine cuts across all political and ideological lines and touches the core of every person’s relationship with life: How long and how well will I live? The New Medicine, too, takes on some of the trappings of a religion. The Old Medicine became a church because it inevitably dealt with the same problems of life and death and meaning that religions do. It has done a bad job of dealing with them, particularly because it developed a theology based on non-living things. It became a corrupt, idolatrous church. It discredited the old religions, which -- for better or for worse -- had helped people deal with life and death and everything in between. That is a mistake the New Medicine won’t make. In this book, I have tried my best to discredit the Church of Modern Medicine. Now I can’t do that without suggesting an alternative o Modern Medicine. I want to evict the villains from the structure and fill the structure with new people, performing new tasks. Faith is the first requirement for a religion, and you still need faith to practice the New Medicine. But you won’t need faith in technology or doctors, or drugs, or professionals. You need faith in life. By faithfully, religiously if you will, regarding life -- and loving it -- the New Medicine immediately will discredit Modern Medicine. The New Medicine need not come between a person and whatever traditional religion he or she chooses, because the religions that have survived all support life. Every person needs a system of value, an ethical sturcture to assist in fundamental decisions. A person who claims to get along without making value judgments is still abiding by a system -- of making no value judgments. There’s no way to escape it, and that’s what religion is all about. Religion defines a hierarchy of values and gives a perscription for action so that people can determine which way to go when alternatives are set before them. Modern Medicine came along and took over the show by saying, ”You no longer have to worry about the values of these other ethical systems, because we can fix anything that happens to you. We release you from the ethics of considering value and, in return, demand only faith in a symbolic ethic, a sacramental ethic of our own distorted logic.” No system of logic, distorted or otherwise, ever got around biology. And in biology, the New Medicine finds its ethic, its value system. Since life is the central mystery of our New Medicine, our “sacraments” acknowledge and celebrate the life of the universe. The “sins” of the New Medicine, in many cases, turn out to be the virtues of the Church of Modern Medicine: any practice that promotes or condones violence against life. The New Medicine says it’s a “sin” to restrict weight gain during pregnancy, to use the Pill freely on the theory that it’s safer than pregnancy, to submit to routine annual physicals, to put silver nitrate in babies’ eyes, to immunize children routinely, to be ignorant of nutrition, and a host of other activities that Modern Medicine promotes as “healthy.” These activities are sins not because they offend anybody’s idea of correct or polite behavior, but because they present a clear and present danger to life. They are offenses against biology. Since the life in our bodies seems to have an incredible capacity to heal itself, if given the proper conditions the corrective activities of the New Medicine -- guilt and penance -- will aim at producing those proper conditions. Imbalance is often as difficult to avoid in human life as balance is desirable. Since this is a human medicine, not one bound to the deathly formality of machines, hope is one thing that is never taken away from even the worst “sinner.” The New Medicine doesn’t have any empty rituals. You fulfill the “commandments” and celebrate the sacraments by doing real things. Naturally, we have priests in this religion, too. But the New Doctor is not the prime mediator between the faithful and the object of faith. The authority of the doctor is severely limited by the individual taking the responsibility upon himself. Still, a system of ethics needs a mediator, a supporter of the faithful in their quest, a lifeguard when the quest runs into trouble. Never forget that the New Doctor’s goal is to work himself or herself right out of business, so your dependence on the professional should diminish every day. You have to learn to get along without doctors, because doctors aren’t the Oracles of faith: The Oracles of faith, the the celebrants of the religion of life are the self, the family, and the community. From these vessels flow the determinants of health: life, love, and courage. Your first responsibility is to take care of your body and mind. Food is very important, but not food merely in the sense of bread, water, protein, fiber, and vitamins. You must try to eat pure food and drink pure water. You must find out all you can about which foods are best for you, since what goes into your mouth does make a difference in what comes out. We have other appetites that must be nourished, too. In a sense, everything that comes into your life and body is food. Whether it’s nourishing or whether it’s junk food is the individual’s responsibility, and will determine the self’s success in reaching the goal of health. If you spend a lot of time in front of the televlsion, lost in a make-believe world that runs a poor second to real life, you’re wasting the time of your life, time that should be used to nourish your self and those around you. Choose your food. Try to taste and see and hear and feel and touch things that will add to your supply of life. Our New Medicine consecrates activities as well as food. Quite simply, there are things people should be doing and shouldn’t be doing for themselves, for the sake of their own biological truths, for their own lives, The consecration of food governs what comes into the body. The consecration of activity governs what the individual does with the body and the mind, the muscles and the spirit. All religions have some form of vocation, but the calling from God is usually reserved for those who are going to enter the religion’s priesthood. Our New Medicine says that everyone should choose his or her career as if called by God, because in a very real way everyone does have a vocation: Everyone is called to live a long and happy life. Our New Medicine also requires people to gather together at significant moments of life, such as births, marriages, illnesses, anniversaries, and deaths. Since industrial employment is often geared for production, not for personal health, taking enough time to perform these obligations the way they should be performed may create a dilemma. You may wind up self-employed, or unemployed. The New Medicine calls for a more balanced approach to career. Build a life around personal goals and humanly satisfying activities. Life comes first, not the carrot-on-a-stick promises of the rat race. Organize your time and pursue a career in such a way as to allow participation in life events of significance and beauty. The home is the Temple of our New Medicine, because the home is the individual’s fortress against the unhealthy institutions such as industry and the Church of Modern Medicine. If an individual, for example, has to quit his or her job because it becomes a threat to health, the family is there to offer support until a new source of income can be set up. This may sound strange to those of us who have bought the industrial society’s notion of the family as a liability rather than an asset. Industry’s purposes are better served if the family is kept small, limited to two children and one or two adults, not if the family is considered in its true sense, the collection of related people of all ages living in close proximity and experiencing important life events together. When the family bands together for purposes of defense as well as celebration, no institution can disrupt the lives of its members. Our New Medicine’s regard for the family begins when the family itself begins. Our first “commandment” is “Thou shalt not pay any attention to scales during pregnancy.” Instead, you pay attention to the quality of the food you eat, eat the purest and most nourishing food you can get, and stop taking all medications. You don’t take pills “only when necessary,” because there are few doctors who don’t believe that pills are always “necessary.” Same goes for x-rays. Since our New Medicine is a medicine devoted to life, since birth is the principal event of life, and since the home is the temple of our New Medicine, the birth of the baby ideally occurs at home, away from all the dangers of the hospital and close to all the love and support of the family. The birth of a new family member is an event that should not be isolated from the majority of the family. As soon as possible after the birth, every family member should be there to greet the new arrival and to celebrate. That is how the sacrament of birth is performed, by celebrating, complete with a family feast and singing and laughter. To anyone who’s read this book so far, it goes without saying that the new mother breastfeeds her baby exclusively at first, say the first six months, and then begins to supplement her milk with solid food prepared from the family’s table, not the machines of a food manufacturer. The usual advice given by doctors is that in raising children parents should be consistent. I believe that the only thing parents should do consistently is love their children and each other. Otherwise, there is no particular virtue in consistency. Parents have a hard enough time without trying to keep track of all that they’ve done for and said to their children. The family is a living thing and should not be pressed into the conformity of thought and action characteristic of a machine. I once stated on the radio that when it comes to caring for children, one grandmother is worth two pediatricians. My department chairman phoned me shortly thereafter and announced his intent to replace me with two grandmothers. In every aspect of child care, experts should be regarded with utmost suspicion. Each family must consider the patterns that have proved successful in their family, their culture, their social class, and religion. Experts’ opinions should be considered worthless until proved otherwise by the strongest possible evidence. Unfortunately, in order to reach back through the disruption of the family in modern times, it may be necessary to go back to grandparents or even great-grandparents in order to find out what these traditional practices were. When the historically validated cultural patterns have been lost, it may be necessary to resort to friends and neighbors who come from healthy traditional backgrounds. From birth onward, significant events in the life of the family are cerebrated en masse by the family. We discard the terms “nuclear family” and “extended family,” because we’re not talking about family if we’re not talking about the entire assemblage of blood relatives. All generations participate in family life and relevancy is denied no one because of age. Every family member knows that when the family needs him or her, the family comes first. When a family member has to be hospitalized, there’s always a crew of relatives available to ride shotgun. Death is another one of those unavoidable life experiences that brings the family together. Just as births, birthdays, marriages, and other family events take precedence over career and other activities, the death of a family member requires attendance. No family member dies alone or with only the staff of the intensive care ward to note his or her passing. Life should end where it begins, in the home. Outside of the home, the “medical guerilla” doesn’t just mind his or her own business either. The ethic of Modern Medicine, and to a great extent the American ethic, says that the individual should keep to himself. I’ve already talked about the various ways in which the professional services of doctors and others destroy not only family ties but community ties as well. Our New Medicine, however, says we need those community ties. You are your brother’s -- and sister’s -- keeper. Our New Medicine needs community for a number of interesting reasons. First of all, though the New Medicine is directed at freeing the individual from the disabling and dangerous tendencies of Modern Medicine, we recognize that it’s very difficult to sustain this sort of rebellion by yourself. We all need friends, but even more so when we’re carrying on a battle against the Medical Inquisition. Our community is a collection of families relating to one another as families. Now this may seem remarkably “old- fashioned” but remember, the family is the unit of health, the individual’s primary resource. The community can also be a resource for health, but communities are more easily dispersed, and because of the nature of American life, are more often dispersed. This is not to say that people do not and should not draw upon the resources of friends at the far corners of the globe. On the contrary, the community should grow and spread its wings. Think of a community as a congregation of people sharing the same faith. Our community or congregation does not conflict with a family’s religious congregation, just as our medical “religion” doesn’t compete with an individuals religious beliefs. Of course, you may not be able to find a congregation. In that case, you should start your own. You may be able to start with your own family, or you may have to start with friends, or you may have to move. I often tell women who come to me and say they’d like to breastfeed their babies but are not sure they’ll be able, to move next door to a woman who has suceessfully breastfed a number of babies. The important thing is to get close to people who share your ethics and standards. Each of us has only a finite amount of time and energy, and since your major supports and encouragements are going to come from people who think and feel the way you do, you shouldn’t feel guilty about growing apart from people who don’t think and feel the same way. At the same time, our New Medicine doesn’t provide a license for narrowing the scope of your vision to the point where your physical and intellectual life become a matter of routine. You should keep informed of the ethical systems of other religions and ways of health. Don’t just read one or two or three books and pronounce yourself saved. Read 100 books! Read every book you can find on the subject of health, especially those that expose the dangerous inadequacies of Modern Medicine, and those that are grounded in traditions that have survived for hundreds of years. Get used to the idea right away that no single system can or should claim to have an exclusive fix on the dynamics of health. Since our New Medicine is a biological “religion,” the promised rewards are also biological. The primary rewards will be quantitative: low infant mortality and long life expectancy. Spell that out in terms of quality of life and it means that everybody will be healthier. We will have a low incidence of biological and sociological disease. Biologically, there will be a low incidence of infections, allergies, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and toxic conditions. Sociologically, here will be a low incidence of divorce, suicide, and depression. With less disease, there will be less need for the doctor-priest. The number of visits to and by the doctor will drop, the number of procedures performed by doctors will drop, and the price tag for medical care will drop. The doctor will be transformed into a family friend and will no longer be considered the “outside technician” whose skills are the object of awe. Our community will grow, both internally and externally, because of the liberation of the family from being considered a liability to being considered an asset. Internally, our numbers will grow as families grow larger. Externally, we will grow by attracting more and more people who want to be free of Modern Medicine. Perhaps more important than the measurable rewards are the rewards that can’t be expressed in statistics or dollars and cents. Ours is a medicine of hope, not despair; of joy, not sorrow; of love, not fear. All of our “sacraments” are celebrations. We don’t note birthdays, marriages, and other milestones by sucking blood or demanding an offering. We ask for a party! When a woman has a baby at home, it’s not only to avoid the dangers of the hospital. It’s to make possible the joyous sharing of all family members in the truly blessed event. When a woman nurses her baby, she’s going to feel joy she could never feel if the baby were sucking on a plastic nipple attached to a bottle! Our New Medicine offers the perfect antidote to the major disease afflicting American society today: depression. Depression is a slice of death, and our committment to life and joy denies us that morsel of despair. The recipe for depression is isolation, abandonment, frustration, and alienation. Our sacraments simply don’t let those situations develop. It’s very difficult to feel afraid, alone, and unloved when you’ve got somebody’s birthday or baby or marriage or new job or ... whatever to celebrate. When we say that our New Medicine is a community of celebrants, we mean it. Another reward we can promise is that once you have the alternative of participating in our New Medicine, you learn to regard the “other side” without the fear and hatred that are likely when you have no option, when you have to submit to Modern Medicine. Your original sense of frustration and depression is transformed, into amusement, even. Many recent books and movies have very cleverly exposed some of Modern Medicine’s more obvious faults. When you’re not aware of alternatlves to Modern Medicine, these revelations can hit pretty hard. I and some of my students have come close to being thrown out of movie theaters when our laughter has rung out over an audience’s gasps at the screen’s depiction of Modern Medicine at its slapstick best ... or worst. Once you get into our New Medicine, once you realize that your health and the health of your family is a happy and hopeful privilege rather than an ominous liability to be entrusted to strangers, you will feel freer and happier. A lot of people have come up to me and said that it’s very difficult for someone to embrace this “revolution” unless they’ve been radicalized. Unless Modern Medicine has severely hurt them or someone close to them, people have told me, they won’t begin to see the danger in doctors’ procedures we all have come to take for granted. They’ve told me that people need to be scared before they can feel courage. All of that may be true. This book has, in a way, been my answer to my friends who have said these things to me. I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience. Remember what I’ve said the next time you go to the doctor. Another thing people ask me is how to start. They want to join the revolution but they don’t know exactly where to sign up. You don’t have to sign up. You can start the revolution in your own home tonight. Start thinking of your family as a resource instead of a liability. If you’re not married, think seriously about finding somebody and getting married. If you’re married, the most revolutionary act you can perform tonight is to conceive a child. Then plan on having the baby at home and breastfeeding him or her. If your parents are alive, call them up and plan a visit over the phone for the next available weekend. Or do the same with another relative. Decide what your priorities are in life. Would you really rather work on an assembly line making sure this part fits into that part than making sure the pieces of a child’s life all fit in place! Are the rewards of the rat race really worth selling so much of your time, energy, and emotional commitment that you don’t have any left for your familv as well as where real other than closer to the coronary care ward? Search for a community. Ask the next mother you see if she is breastfeeding or has breastfed her baby. The next time somebody says something derogatory about children or old people, say something back. When you go to lunch or dinner, start discussing health with people -- not with the intention of arguing, but to find people who agree with you. As soon as you find these people, get to know them better. Start your community. People also come up to me and want to know when the revolution will be over, when they will be able to stop thinking of themselves as medical heretics. I have to admit that I don’t know the answer. I do know that you can tell when you’re winning: when you influence those closest to you. When your famly and friends start to feel and express the joy that comes from knowing that health is a matter of choice, not a mystery of chance. That can happen when you or a relative breastfeeds a baby that’s born at home, or when you or a relative decides to double-check a doctor’s prescription for surgery and not only avoids the surgery but finds a doctor who helps solve the problem without as much as a hypodermic needle. A few months ago, I became a grandfather. Our daughter delivered an eight-pound, one-ounce baby girl. Channa was born, as we planned, in our home. In attendance was my daughter’s husband, her sister, her mother, Mayer Eisenstein, M.D., and myself. Both labor and delivery followed an almost classic pattern and lasted about five hours from beginning to end. After Channa was born, relatives and friends began to visit. They barely paused to greet me at the door before rushing up to greet Channa. For the five weeks that the new family stayed at our house before moving off to their own new home in Canada, I was able to leave the house every morning while the new mother was asleep and the new grandmother was rocking the new granddaughter on the porch. And on this way home those summer afternoons, the new grandfather didn’t have to stop off at the hospital to get a peek at his granddaughter behind glass. I could go right home and gaze at her all through dinner. So I can tell we’re winning. I can tell we’re winning because the people I see already practicing our New Medicine appear to be the healthiest people in our society. The people of the Leche League and NAPSAC and SPUN and similar organizations not only can turn out thousands and thousands at their meetings, but when they travel from city to city, they use each other as points of reference. They have a community. I can tell we’re winning because in the eyes of all these families and in my own family I can see the satisfaction, the optimism, and the joy when human beings know that they are the owners of their own health. The New Doctor: Chapter 10 |