Should Food Be Our Medicine; Insecticides Have Effects
Contents in this issue:
- “Should Food Be Our Medicine?”
- “Insecticides Have Subtle Effects.”
The following is a transcription of the July 1965 issue of Dr. Royal Lee’s Applied Trophology newsletter, originally published by Standard Process Laboratories.
Should Food Be Our Medicine?
Many years ago, Hippocrates, Father of Modern Medicine, said, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.” It would appear that drug promoters and researchers must learn this basic truth as more so-called wonder drugs develop side effects and fail to live up to expectations. It is regrettable that so many good physicians have not been properly advised in regard to new drugs and that some patients must suffer needlessly. Since 1950, medical doctors have falsely believed that sulfonamides were effective medication for meningitis. Now, according to researchers Drs. Theodore C. Eickhoff and Maxwell Finland, sulfonamides “can no longer be considered adequate therapy for clinical cases of meningococcal meningitis.” They state that now the drug of choice for therapy in this disease is penicillin G. However, in 1963, Dr. S.W. Millar and his associates stated, “Penicillin G was ineffective in eradicating the carrier state,” in this disease.
Another semisynthetic penicillin is also in disrepute. Drs. Andrew Ten Pas and Edward Quinn reported in the recent February 22 issue of J.A.M.A., “It would seem correct to add oxacillin to the list of drugs with the potential to produce cholestatic hepatitis.” In the past this condition has been known to have been caused by antibiotics. However, this is not the first instance that penicillin has been found at fault. In 1961, a British physician, Dr. Harry Lillie, stated that the bacterial balance of the body is upset by the wide use of penicillin and antibiotics.
Apparently, the sulphos and penicillins have more or less outlived their usefulness, in medicine, but are still being used, especially in veterinary medicine, no doubt, to use up the immense stock on hand. Cattle so treated can pass on the adverse effects to humans through their milk and/or meat. These effects at times have caused an atopic allergy, which has baffled many physicians. Far more disturbing in long-term implications is the drug resistance put up by the bacteria themselves. According to Dr. O.E. Davis, formerly of the Univ. of Georgia, in his report in Feedstuffs, the drugs change microorganisms in the animal’s body so that they acquire resistance. Transfer of this resistance to the bacteria responsible for salmonella, Escherichia coli, molds, and even staphylococcus infections, follows. Further, Dr. E.S. Anderson, of Britain’s Enteric Reference Laboratory, stated that this acquired drug resistance could be transferred essentially to human organisms. He stated that 61 percent of all strains of salmonella typhimurium, commonly a cause of food poisoning outbreaks, now show resistance to antibiotics. Nature rejects with her usual ingenuity and as previously stated, “Indiscriminate chemotherapy constitutes a real hazard.”
Hippocrates further stated, “Only nature can cure.” However, his philosophy and, in late years, his Physician’s Oath, have too often been sadly neglected and pushed into the background. As a result of the “new order,” powerful drugs are being used by medical doctors, and consequently unusual diseases are coming to the fore.
The question is: Are these iatrogenic (doctor-induced) diseases justified? The noted physician Dr. William Osler many years ago pointed out that usually the patient has to make two recoveries, the first from his disease and the second from his treatment. If this was true in the past, just how much more true is it today?
A survey by the U.S. Public Health Service has disclosed an estimated 1,368,000 persons throughout the nation suffer from nonfatal “adverse reactions to medicines, drugs, and the like” each year. This covers only the reactions which, themselves, require medical attention or force a victim to give up at least a day of work, school, or play.
Only recently, the International Congress of Internal Medicine made it clear that so long as powerful drugs are used in the treatment of disease, one must expect not only that iatrogenic disease will rise but that it will become an integral part of medical practice. Additionally, Dr. J.C. Ahumada, the world-famous gynecologist, stated that treatments “could produce manifestations which might outweigh their benefits.”
Apparently, we need more foresight through good preventive constitutional medicine, with more natural foods to aid nature in the building and strengthening process. In fact, we need the good horse sense used by our old, dedicated family doctor, before the age of modern medicine, with its specialists, relegated him to the scrap heap. It has been said that his general knowledge of the entire human mind and body and his discernment of the various vicissitudes of life made him a diagnostician without peer. Apparently, modern medicine has gone off on a tangent, and the individual doctor has lost much of the image of the revered family doctor.
Fortunately, a group of physicians with this thought in mind have emerged and are distinguishing themselves through the use of nutritional therapy. Since nutritional therapy, as such, is not taught in our modern medical colleges, these MDs received only the usual orthodox medical training. However, as conscientious practitioners they have, in various ways, discovered “applied nutrition” after leaving school. Some of the individual stories of how this happened are very interesting. Generally, the new type doctors employ orthodox medicine when necessary but, in addition, use natural methods and nutritional therapy to obtain better results. They go further than just treating disease. It is their aim to help the patient prevent further illness, so they take time to encourage good health habits and make allowances for hereditary problems in their consideration of better nutrients and food supplements in the overall picture. In general, they try to fit the needs of the body of each patient so that it will heal more readily or rehabilitate itself. This revival of Hippocrates’ philosophy may well be a turning point in medical history. In fact,
Dr. Willard A. Krehl, President of the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, recently called on his society to develop a basic course in nutrition, and on medical schools to create professorships in nutrition.
It seems ridiculous that these progressive physicians should be persecuted by the politicians in the “Medical Union” with the old cliché, “Does not conform to the consensus of medical opinion,” being applied to anyone with whom they disagree. When applied to a knowledge of nutrition, this “consensus of opinion” theory is comparable to an alleged frog’s tail, “which he has almost hardly.” Certainly, their conformity as to the “drug only” theory would hardly qualify them as nutritionists.
Due to the ill-repute of some modern-day drugs, the medical image has definitely suffered. Perhaps some respect could be regained by again subscribing to the philosophy of Hippocrates. This new trend in medicine indicates that medical science cannot depend on drugs to cure disease, that it is easier to prevent than cure, and that prevention depends on a proper diet of nondevitalized foods. Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, first administrator of the Pure Food Act, predicted, “The medicine of the future will be food, not drugs.”
More recently Dr. Harry Lillie of London, England, stated, “Drugs patch up the symptoms, not the causes.”
Dr. Louis M. Orr of the American Medical Association, in his treatise on “nutritional nonsense” stated, “Our food supply should provide all the vitamins and minerals necessary for good health” (emphasis ours). This is true. Our food supply should and probably would contain enzymes, minerals, proteins, and vitamins of adequate quality and quantity if not devitalized by chemicals and the over-processing necessary to lengthen shelf life. Enriching devitalized food with a few chemically pure vitamins does not actually replace the nutriment lost in processing.
Dr. Orr further stated, “The vitamin pill fad is nutritional nonsense.” If consistency is a virtue, he probably should have included the fad of so-called “vitamin enrichment,” where only chemically pure vitamins are used.
Such vitamins should be put in the category of drugs. They do have effects but not wholesome, natural nutritional effects. A food that has been refined to chemical purity cannot be considered as a reliable source of health and nutrition. For example, the benefits of thiamine chloride (vitamin B1), according to skin specialists, are nullified by the inconvenience, insomnia, and nervousness caused by the vitamin itch.
Many physicians are becoming alarmed at the greatly increased and often indiscriminate use of drugs, more than at any time in the history of medicine, and yet, the increase in degenerative diseases does not abate. Then too, the use of such medication may preclude its use later in serious illness.
More and more thinking people today are questioning the effectiveness of modern drugs and medicines, with their frequently unpredictable and harmful side effects. The fact that food can be the best medicine is, no doubt, too simple a concept. Blind faith in drugs and antibiotics offers an easier way than to make a determination through personal effort to find the right untreated wholesome food, which offers proper nutrition.
The newer knowledge of nutrition has placed in the hands of the healing professions a potent weapon, not only to aid in preventing disease but to promote physical efficiency and well-being. Although many physicians are now nutritionally minded, it has taken the medical profession too long a time to recognize food as a vital factor in health and disease.
According to the British Medical Journal, in a report on Nutrition and Public Health, the medical profession should become more proficient in knowledge of nutrition, as it is still not being adequately taught in medical schools today. It was stated that until such time as new knowledge in nutrition is included in medical training, medical practice will continue to be “symptomatic,” involving the treating of the symptom rather than the basic cause and the part instead of the whole.
In his book Add Years to Your Heart, Dr. Warmbrand has stated, “We overlook the fact that any measure of treatment which controls or subdues the symptoms of disease without eliminating the underlying causes cannot restore health.”
Six hundred County of Cheshire, England, doctors found out in an extended experiment, in studying patient routine: “Our daily work brings us repeatedly to the same point; this illness results from a lifetime of wrong nutrition.” The entire experiment was later published in their famous “Medical Testament of the Doctors of Cheshire, England.” This is a verification of the fact that patients who actually need organic nutrition should not be drugged. No one can restore health to the malnourished victims of “empty calories” by giving them drugs, chemicals, or foods refined to purity (actually chemicalized or counterfeit imitations of food).
Apparently, Hippocrates was a student of applied nutrition and his axioms “Let food be your medicine” and “Only nature can cure” are as applicable today as at any time in the past.
Insecticides Have Subtle Effects
Just because we lack evidence that insecticides can cause harm in small quantities doesn’t mean that they are harmless, biologist Richard E. Warner told the AAAS meeting in Montreal this week. He cited experiments which revealed that quantities of insecticides in water far below supposed concentrations caused fish to have unusual behavior patterns. They frightened more easily than fish in pure water. His work was supported by the U.S. Public Health Service.
—Health Bulletin, Jan. 2, 1965
