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Most Americans are full of…

Most Americans are full of crap!

Ok, I’ve gotten your attention, and I will expand on that idea in a bit, but first a word about who I am. As might be obvious from the title of this column, I’m a university professor (married, three kids, mortgage, etc.) Now, I’m a professor of psychology, not medicine or biology or health, so why am I writing a column on a site dedicated to the activities and ideas of a naturopathic physician? First, I always take a broad interdisciplinary view of whatever I study and teach. Then again, my B.A. is in chemistry, so I do know a little bit about the hard sciences. My main qualification, though, for writing this column is that I’ve been a patient—and friend—of Dr. David for over 10 years. As part of my own journey from illness to health, I’ve read a lot, as professors do; and I’ve thought a lot, as professors do; and now in “The Professor’s Corner” I’d like to write about what I’ve observed, experienced, read, and thought.

Since nothing grabs a reader’s interest more than a story, let me relate a bit of my own personal experience with naturopathy. When I first came to see Dr. David in April of 1992, I was in ghastly shape, physically and mentally (as if these are two separate things). One of my many symptoms was that I lost 25 pounds in six months without even trying! If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you’ll know immediately that this means something is drastically wrong! For six miserable months I went from doctor to doctor receiving virtually no help whatsoever. The allopathic (“against symptoms”) doctors I saw literally did not have a clue. I often felt worse after leaving their office. A few alternative healers I sought out had a clue or two, but not much more. What they all failed to realize was that I needed to seriously detoxify my system. In other words, I was a typical American, that is, full of crap—no wonder I felt like crap! Through a series of twists of fate I wound up in Dr. David’s office, rather reluctantly, since I knew nothing of naturopathy and had been disappointed by a number of alternative healers already. When I asked Dr. David if he knew my diagnosis, he responded, “I don’t treat illnesses, I treat people.” I was immediately struck by that statement. Furthermore, Dr. David made it clear that he does not treat mind and body separately; he works with the whole person. This was a novel approach since the allopathic doctors I visited, having found nothing obviously physical to pin my woes on, asserted that my problems were “all in my head.” I felt intuitively that this simply could not be true; I may have my psychological issues, but feeling “poisoned” didn’t seem to be one of them. And Dr. David did not have that “dismissive” attitude I had encountered all too frequently in my quest for help; he actually listened to me. That first session took about 5 hours! At the end of the initial session, Dr. David gave me a huge list of dietary and other “dos and don’ts,” plus a long list of supplements to take. This demanded an almost total lifestyle change, and since I was so out of it I could barely function, I decided to make my life easier and do only about half the prescribed program for starters. Fortunately, the detoxification part of the regime was in that half and I started to improve. I started to phase in more and more of the regime and after two months the most horrible of the symptoms disappeared and never returned! Interestingly, if I deviate from the program for a few days, which occasionally happens when I’m on the road, I often wake up with just a hint of the old misery. So when people ask me how I have the discipline to stay on such a demanding program, I tell them that my body simply won’t allow me to stray for very long. When you are not full of crap, you become sensitive to crap! Am I in perfect health today? No, but I’m in pretty good condition for a 57 year old guy and, remember, I had 45 years of bad choices to atone for and even naturopathy has its limits. But I’m doing a lot better than I was in 1992! And I’m doing a hell of a lot better than the 15 or so friends and colleagues who, in the intervening years, have died from what I believe are preventable and treatable illnesses, primarily cancer. None of them followed a naturopathic regime, or if one or two did, they inexplicably did not stick with it. (The idea that a person would voluntarily stop following a life-saving health regime—for whatever reason—seems incomprehensible to me. As a student of psychology for 35 years, I guess I should know better!) One thing I did as I regained my health, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude for being given a second chance, was write an academic paper which took theoretical concepts from developmental psychology and used them to contrast allopathic and naturopathic medicine. I presented this paper, entitled “Naturopathic and Allopathic Healing: A Developmental Comparison,” at a psychology conference in 1994 and it eventually got published in the Townsend Letter for Doctors. Dr. David has kindly agreed to add this paper to his website, so you can read it here if you so choose.1 It’s a bit technical in spots, but not overly so. If you do read or skim it, you can get a deeper sense of why I believe natural, holistic healing is the route to take. In either event, I can summarize my conclusion in a sentence: Although we need allopathic healing (especially for emergencies and when natural methods are not working), overall, naturopathic medicine is inherently a higher, more developed mode of healing, more developed in a cognitive, ecological, moral, and spiritual sense. For example, I maintain in the essay that naturopathy requires a level of conceptualization that developmental theorists refer to as “systemic” or “systematic,” whereas allopathy rarely reaches above the pre-systemic “linear” or “formal” level. (That’s why allopathy focuses on symptoms of illness rather than on the more complex systemic processes producing health or illness.) And that’s only one of the 18 points of comparison made in the essay. In this column, however, I have the opportunity to write in a more informal, less academic tone, something I’ve wanted to do for years. After all, health issues affect everyone, not just academicians. So, to return to my original point. What did I mean above when I said that most Americans are full of crap? Nothing really new or surprising, but it needs to repeated until the message sinks in. Here’s my spin on it. Due to the depletion of soils by agribusiness farming methods, and to the over-processing and devitalizing of foods by agribusiness “manufacturing” methods, and to the typically very poor dietary choices made by most Americans, and to the many pesticides, herbicides, and thousands of industrial waste products polluting our environment and ultimately our bodies, and finally to the lack of a real conception of health on the part of the allopathic doctors, most of us eventually wind up full of crap! That is, toxins, parasites, harmful bacteria and numerous chemical poisons (including prescribed pharmaceuticals) accumulate in and infiltrate our system, crapping up in particular the liver and colon (the two main organs responsible for detoxification) as well as the lymphatic system. These poisons then leak into our bodies and make us ill in a myriad of ways. Regardless of the location and nature of the particular disease(s) we get, however, the true source lies deeper. Naturopathic healer Bernard Jensen, citing Hippocrates, said that death begins in the colon. Unfortunately medical schools ignore this fundamental truth, so that most allopathic doctors don’t concern themselves with the colon unless there are obvious symptoms there, e.g., colitis or colon cancer. For example, I didn’t have any major complaints about my colon per se, so it was not until I saw Dr. David that cleansing the colon even came up as a subject. Well, to be fair, there was one nutritionist who attempted to rid me of a candida infection he thought was the root of my problems. I don’t know whether I had candida or not, but his program did not work. My take on it is that his focus was far too narrow—he didn’t deal with the question of why the candida was there (if it in fact was) and what else I needed to do to rebuild my depleted resources. Bernard Jensen lived until 93. The average life span of MD’s is about 58 or so. Whose example and whose advice would you rather follow when it comes to your health and life? So until more of us wake up and start making saner health choices—and this includes environmental and political, as well as medical choices—most Americans will remain, literally and metaphorically, full of crap! Fortunately, there is a groundswell towards natural healing as more and more people realize that allopathy is not the total solution. Let me leave you with one final thought: According to one of my favorite websites, when Elvis died he had about 20 pounds of undigested food in his colon; John Wayne allegedly had over 40 pounds!2 Does this make you wonder about your own innards? Or, to paraphrase a recent credit card ad, “What’s in your gullet?” {Next time: Inconvenience stores and stupid markets—we’ll start with some everyday observations on the daily choices that contribute to the crapping up of Americans and expand into the politics and sociology of health.}

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Footnotes

1For an even broader philosophical comparison between allopathic and naturopathic healing, I heartily recommend the chapter Conventional Medicine vs. Holistic: A World of Difference on the wonderful website of Tim O’Shea, www.thedoctorwithin.com. While you’re there, you’d be doing yourself a favor by reading his chapters on Sugar, The Sweet Thief of Life and Water. In fact, read as much of the website as you can! 2See To the Cancer Patient also on the Tim O’Shea website, www.thedoctorwithin.com. While you’re there take a look at Journey to the Center of Your Colon to get a detailed look at colon problems, leaky gut syndrome, reflux, and related issues explaining how and why we become full of crap.

Joel Funk, Ph.D.

Our Health Corresponds With the Fertility of Our Soils

G. H. Earp-Thomas, Ph.D.

Director of Research, Bloomfield Laboratories

Americans showed the world how to fly but the airplane had to be developed commercially in Europe before Americans would accept it. Our soils are degenerating rapidly—our health is getting worse all the time but although soil regeneration was started in this country, it will take demonstrations of how to save it in other parts the world before Americans will be roused to meet this vital emergency.

Over 45 years ago I found that soil was being poisoned by chemicals, that the balance of soil fertility as exemplified by what we know as virgin soil had been disturbed, and that the trouble was progressive. It takes about 50 years to wear out the inherent fertile powers of arable lands. It was apparent that the road to ruin was well established, and that the health of crops and animals was foredoomed to failure in progressive degeneration. Today we know the truth of this, in the great increase in degenerative diseases, notably heart disease and cancer attacking one out of four, encroaching on the survival of the races.

I determined to give my whole energy to the solution of this problem. I believe that today there is good prospects of at least reducing the incidence of the degenerative diseases by restoring to the soil the factors that are essential to produce foods with the thirty-two and perhaps more factors that are essential to normal well-being. We not only have to have the thirty-two factors, but they must be in the proper proportions and concentrations with the right reaction to maintain buoyant well-being.

Gravity is a positive force and is constant—a natural law which cannot be digressed, likewise health is a natural phenomenon governed by natural laws and is dynamic and cannot be maintained if the fundamental basic elements needed to make a complete organism are deficient in any of the essential factors. That is so evident that all should understand the principle. One couldn’t construct a building or an automobile without all the parts to complete the structure, therefore we cannot maintain the complex issues and organs of the body if factors are missing that are needed to maintain the cells in complete balanced nutrition. Many years ago I found that complete nutrition was absent in foods grown in many localities. In feeding animals on foods raised exclusively in some states it was inimical to the health of animals. This fact also became evident to other workers and vitamins and minerals were added to animal feeds to correct the deficiencies. Later, human foods were also reinforced and vitamins became almost essential to maintain vitality. Today these facts are apparent to all, but little has been done to attack the problem at its source, the soil. You would think that the authorities would have become alarmed at the progressive decline in the fertility of our soils and would have made every effort to correct the disastrous conditions that dated from Professor Liebig’s great idea about 80 years ago: to acidulate phosphate and potash rocks to make them more soluble as plant food. Since then, plants, animals and man have degenerated year by year until today it takes large books to describe the diseases of plants. One interesting book pictures the changes in appearance of plants, their leaves, blossoms and stems for each element that may be deficient. This allows the agriculturalist to determine a cure of the condition. Doctors likewise can diagnose many deficiency diseases by the examination of the patient and the symptoms he exhibits. But much more must be done along this line because nutrition in a complete form is yet but poorly understood by the doctor. Too many believe that disease is due to a mysterious force or due to microbes. Many such cases are disguised but are only due to inefficient or lack of factors to maintain well-being. When supplied by any means, the cells rapidly recover, if diagnosed in time and the proper factors supplied. There is no greater protection than phagocytes of the blood if they have the needed food with which to fight the invading microbes. Clean blood can destroy both toxins and microbes of all common varieties. We have injected mice and rats with the septicemic virus of Dansyz and when the animals were completely fed the virus was harmless, but when the animals were improperly fed a drop on their food or by injection was fatal. I introduced Rax and also Dansyz virus to the people of this country for the wholesale destruction of rats. The mortality rate was 80% showing that 80% of rats were improperly fat. The immune rats could not be killed by injections of the virus in heavy doses. The susceptible animals were found to have pure cultures of the virus in the blood or in the heart in most of the dead animals. I found this work to be most helpful in producing foods that protected animals from disease. Through this knowledge I have been able to increase the herds of chinchillas in this country and Canada. No end of letters attest to this from grateful ranchers. Because we receive our nourishment from soils, it is there that we must look to maintain our well-being. I have spent over 40 years in studying means to restore soil to its greatest productivity to raise human foods to produce them in a balanced form, also to restore to the soil a new flora and fauna to discourage the growth of toxic microbes. To accomplish this I put friendly bacteria with their best food to aid in destroying the disease producing kinds engendered by the chemical treatments so lavishly applied to the land. While doing this I have had great opposition from vested local interests but have been greatly encouraged by the kindly and sympathetic support of foreign nationals, so that I am now well reinforced with production abroad and records amply back up my belief in the value of restoring organic matter and all factors found deficient in the land. The results are beyond my early expectations because such treatment gives rapid and profitable results to encouraging my agents to oppose those not versed in this new system of soil improvement. It must be remembered that there are over a million tons of soil in each acre foot of surface and to change an unfavorable environment by a few hundred pounds of corrective organic fertilizer is expecting a lot in a single season, yet reports show that the soil responds remarkably well and increase noticeably the favorable effect for several seasons. Having turned the corner in a lone fight and with the cooperation of many agencies, there is hope to change the rapid decline in soil and produce crops of higher nutritional value and at the same time progressively restore the soils to a higher state of health and fertility. Before the white man civilized the Maori’s in New Zealand, diseases were unknown, there was no diphtheria, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, cholera or tuberculosis. Skulls of the natives showed all teeth in perfect condition, their bones large and well formed. They lived off the virgin soil. A similar condition prevails today with the Hunza’s in India who also live on the production of good soil. Animals fed on their complete food show excellent health. What a different picture is shown when similar animals are fed on food that is given to children in England, as an example. The animals have sixty-five different named diseases just the same as the British children. In New Zealand the early settlers thrived almost as well as the natives for years, until the population increased, and the soils were adulterated with chemical poisons to increase production, milk production went down, animal diseases increased, then the population had flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, heart and circuitry diseases and cancer grew at an alarming rate. Farmers have recently reported that upon changing to organic fertilization their cattle have had less disease and are giving greater quantities of milk. They have set up numerous clubs to teach the people the new means of restoring soil fertility. They are the first people the world to see, in a short lifetime in their country, the disastrous effects of tampering with nature’s own method of maintaining soil productivity. In this country over 480 acres of land are washed out to sea daily and over one million acres eroded yearly to unproductiveness. If this was all the damage done it might be bearable but when children are born unfinished, deaf and dumb or half-witted, and older folks filling hospitals with unnecessary deficiency diseases, it is evident that corrective methods are long overdue. Our asylums are so overcrowded that no more can be admitted unless they are dangerous maniacs. There is a cause for everything and an effect. Drugs are no answer to this problem. It is a question of nutrition, not as we have known it, but brought about by restoring to soil all the factors needed to produce complete food saturated with all the items needed to promote the complete welfare of all the cells of the body. Food, produced from a well-balanced soil, is quite different in flavor and value then the food we have become used to. Such food is full of vital factors, less fiber, more protein, minerals, vitamins, ethers and esters, less carbohydrates, therefore less acid producing. There are more protons and less neutrons to the higher percentage of bases. It is these bases (the alkalies) which, if in proper strength and proportion, supply the blood cells—particularly the phagocytes—with their lethal effects on microbes and give us the natural immunity. Later I will outline what I have done to overcome this deplorable condition and how several countries of the world have joined me in this new means of rapidly restoring health to worn out soils. Also, the new analysis of food as it should be. This work is well underway on a large scale. It is beyond the laboratory stage. In fact, there are many large operations which are turning out thousands of tons of new life for the soil everyday. Soon, if these operations continue to enlarge as they now seem to indicate, it will be unnecessary to buy minerals and vitamins at the drugstore as the food you buy in the grocery will contain more than enough of all these essential factors to maintain your good health.

G. H. Earp-Thomas, Ph.D.