How to avoid illness

Does science and medicine really have the answers to avoiding illness?

Will there ever be a reliable cure for cancer, heart disease or diabetes through modern medicine? Or for that matter, a cure for the common cold?

Hippocrates is regarded as the father of medicine and even today, doctors swear “The Hippocratic Oath.”

And yet the advice of Hippocrates to “Let food be your medicine” is largely ignored by the medical machine.

It’s a great shame because only nutrition and other lifestyle factors can create true health and vitality in your life…

Can a drug create true health?

Do you get a headache because your body lacks aspirin?

Sticky plaster.

Take a room of 100 people and one of them sneezes out the flu virus. Do they all become sick? No — only those who are already weak, whose systems are already stressed in some way.

The virus only takes the body’s ability to cope to the limit and the result is illness. That’s why the flu jab is routinely given only to vulnerable people — the sick or elderly.

Stress — but not as we know it

Generally, you become ill when you stress your body to breaking point. I’m not just talking about stress in the normal sense, although that’s a big part of the equation, but stress as in “anything which is bad for your health.”

It’s pressure — something your body has to deal with, that eats into its resources and makes you a little weaker and less resilient as a result.

So, what are these stresses that are bad for you? Well, stress in the normal sense of the word is certainly one of them. Emotional and mental stress exists in the modern world at levels the human body is not designed for.

The stress “fight or flight” reaction in your body was only meant to last for a few seconds but if you’re living a typical modern lifestyle, you may be under a continuous “low level” stress.

This can be disastrous for health because in “fight or flight” mode, many of the body’s systems shut down — digestion for example, and others are on full alert so that reaction times are fastest. This is not a state you want to be in for very long.

You can add to this, lots of other “stresses” — stuff that goes into your body that’s not designed to be there and stuff that should be there, but isn’t…

• Pesticide and fungicide residues.
• Environmental toxins in air, water, food, mercury fillings, exhaust fumes, home and beauty products etc.
• Drugs — legal, illegal, recreational and prescribed.
• Lack of sleep, exercise and sunlight.
• Unnatural foods — grains, dairy products, processed foods of all kinds especially refined carbohydrates — sugar, white flour etc.
• Poor quality foods low in nutrients, grown in poor soils, picked unripe, left too long before being eaten.
• Poorly designed diets, for example, too many acid-forming foods. And its mirror, not enough alkali-forming foods — fruits and vegetables, unnatural additives, trans fatty acids etc.

It only takes consistent lack or excess in one area to create a serious illness.

Each isolated stress event might seem insignificant on its own, and on its own it would be. But in most cases our health sins are not lone and isolated incidents, we get into bad habits and they go on and on and on for years.

The human body is amazingly adaptable and resilient but there are limits. Often I hear things like…

He was perfectly healthy until he dropped dead with a heart attack.

The perception is that something suddenly goes wrong and we get sick. Not true. The illusion of a sudden illness is created by the body’s amazing resilience.

The true cause is often years of not meeting the body’s physiological needs in one or more areas (and/or constant stress in those areas), combined with a genetic susceptibility in the part that fails first.

If the cause of ill health is not lack of drugs, how can taking drugs create or restore health? In many cases the action of a drug restores a certain balance but in a very crude way compared to the self-regulation of a healthy body. It’s like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut. It’s often the wrong solution.

The medical model

The guiding philosophy of the medical model is fatally flawed. The flaw is in the study of disease symptoms, the reductionist approach of science and the drug method, and the idea that health can be restored by curing the symptoms of disease.

The idea that each disease has its own unique cause is simply wrong. The body functions as a whole and it’s a grave error to try to influence the incredible complexity of our bodies in such crude ways.

All drugs have side effects too — many unpleasant. So you exchange one problem for others, and you’ve still not tackled the original cause of the problem.

A shocking report published in Journal of the American Medical Association back in 2000 gave us figures for deaths caused by doctors. It showed that doctors were the 3rd leading cause of death in the US behind cancer and heart disease.

The report only looked at death in hospitals, but what of all the suffering that didn’t result in actual death and what of the deaths and suffering outside of hospitals?

2000 was a bad year for doctors it seems — when Israeli doctors went on strike in that year, the death rate dropped significantly. Clearly something is wrong.

Unfortunately, the medical machine is also fuelled by its fair share of corruption, greed and inflated egos. Whilst this is beyond the scope of this particular article, it’s there for all to see and a simple web search will get you started if you’re interested.

Crisis

Where traditional medicine does have value, is in buying us time in a health crisis. With so many cultural, personal, and environmental obstacles to health, we’re struggling at the moment.

Medicine can in some circumstances allow us the time and the possibility to realize where we went wrong and create health in natural ways. Ideally you don’t want to reach crisis point, where your body has no resources left and “fails.”

Where traditional medicine is amazing is “trauma” — for putting people back together after accidents and for emergency care. That will never change, we will always need it.

For chronic illness though, it just doesn’t work, how could it?

The cure for arthritis? A new hip or two. The cure for heart disease? Triple by-pass and mass medication of the elderly with statins. The cure for diabetes? — insulin injections. Are these cures or more sticky plasters?

They are solutions of a kind but they really just help you “manage” the problem, they don’t actually solve it.

Lifestyle — the true solution

Why are lifestyle measures not used, recommended or even mentioned by the majority of doctors at the first sign of an illness? These are the true solutions.

Prevention and correction are the true and only cures! Scientific literature is heaving with studies of the benefits of natural food, exercise and other lifestyle solutions. Not only that but many proven natural therapies exist that have been totally ignored by the medics. Isn’t this quite outrageous when you really think about it?

My own father was given a triple by-pass. Not only did they not mention lifestyle measures but told him that nutrition has nothing to do with it!

But wait — lifestyle intervention can reverse heart disease. Let’s hope these doctors are just ignorant because if they know about this and still cut people open…

It makes my blood boil! And this is just the very tip of the iceberg.

There’s a 99% success rate healing ulcerative colitis using natural methods. A nasty disease, often ending with people losing part of their bowel! The medics — “Don’t want to know.” Shocking!

“Gerson Therapy”, a natural (albeit demanding) cure using fruit and vegetable juices, liver juice and coffee enemas, claimed a 50% success rate in the treatment of cancer — and this included patients with terminal cancer that conventional medicine had given up on.

And yet in 1946, Gerson Therapy was out-voted in congress by only 4 votes, in favor of continuing the chemical, radiation and surgical methods. Are you shocked?

Conflict of interest

I wonder why a non-invasive cure, that patients could do themselves and had a better success rate than the prevailing medical drug and surgery methods was not adopted. Hmmm… conflict of interest perhaps?

Another part of the problem is that doctors simply aren’t taught how to create health. They are brainwashed somewhat into the medical “disease” paradigm — indoctrinated.

I read a testimonial on a health website of a doctor who’d had a successful career in medicine. He’d dedicated his life to helping others but his own health had suffered badly. He was in terrible shape. He had many risk factors for heart disease — high blood pressure, overweight and so-on.

When it came to sorting his own health out, he was no better off than the layman. He struggled to lose weight and sort himself out. He tried lots of weight loss programs that didn’t work for him. What struck me deeply was that despite all his study at university and a lifetime of medical practice, he had about as much knowledge about health creation as Joe Shmoe.

He was in the same boat as Joe Shmoe the gardener, the lawyer, painter or whatever. The very same boat! What he did was follow the advice on the health website and got great results, with all his biomarkers returning to a healthy state. Lucky for him… many are not so lucky and fall prey to poor advice.

Enter the new paradigm

Our 50-100 trillion cell bodies are complex beyond imagination. Science is only beginning to understand the amazing things going on inside us. The new paradigm will not be using a sledge hammer.

Our bodies constantly maintain our internal status quo by using a whole host of complex, delicate and interacting systems. It’s biological poetry.

Linus Pauling, twice awarded the nobel prize, understood this poetry. He coined the term “Orthomolecular medicine”, which means…

The treatment of disease by the provision of the optimum molecular environment, especially the optimum concentrations of substances normally present in the human body.

Linus Pauling’s ideas on this are controversial (no surprises there) but the most important thing here is not the nitty-gritty but the fundamental premise that the body is self-healing in many cases of chronic illness, given the right conditions.

Being such a massive name in the field of science, his rubber stamp on Hippocrates’ wisdom deals a big blow to many of the ideas of modern medicine.

The “pill for an ill” mindset has to go. Not only in science and medicine but in your thinking too.

The new model is cure by prevention or correction of the original cause wherever possible. Understanding how the body can look after itself and giving it the tools to do it.

Nature’s pharmacy

Food that can be eaten directly from nature is the highest quality fuel possible for the human body. Would you put the wrong type of gas in your car?

You wouldn’t dream of it, but you do even worse to your body if you give it anything other than the best food. Your beautiful body doesn’t run well on junk fuel. Expect a breakdown sometime soon…

Phytochemicals (phyto=plant) are nutrients within plant foods that have protective and health-giving properties. Every fruit and vegetable, nut, seed, or sprout has its own unique arsenal of disease busting weapons.

These special nutrients are combined with all the natural forms of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, natural sugars, amino acids etc, to provide our bodies with the building blocks to work its magic.

Synergy

That’s synergy — all these things working together and what’s more, our bodies have had millions of years practice at getting the most out of food that comes direct from nature.

Nature and the biology of animals are exquisitely connected. As we evolved, our genes changed and adapted to our environment through the process of natural selection. The best genes survived, whilst the less well adapted individuals died away.

Nature may be beautiful but it’s also harsh. It took no prisoners in maintaining its laws as we evolved.

You’re a product of nature, and you’ve evolved perfectly to eat and thrive on human food. Anything other than natural is going to be less than optimal and so will weaken you to some extent…

The wild foods that we evolved with are superior to a lot of modern foods nutritionally. Still, we can only do the best we can do, but given the choices available to us, we would be wise to choose the most nutrient-dense, natural foods to give ourselves the best chance of thriving.

If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, what about an apple and an orange, 6 oz strawberries, 1 oz spinach and watercress, lettuce, 3 tomatoes, 1 spring onion, 2 bananas and 4 oz asparagus a day?

The Okinawans have the largest percentage of centenarians in the world. The elderly Okinawans eat around 10 portions of fruits and vegetables per day. That’s 3,652 portions a year. That’s a lot of nature’s pharmacy. I know some folks who eat no fruits or vegetables.

Disease is usually not a quirk of fate or just genetics — it’s often the result of years, even decades of not checking enough health boxes.

The answers?

The answer to the health crises of the modern world won’t be found in the study of disease, although that can help. It’s going to come from the study and creation of health.

But don’t expect all the answers or the education to come from the medics. The scientific method is painfully slow, corrupted by the drug industry and its conclusions are abused by anyone with an agenda.

Apart from that, science is generally looking in the wrong places. By its very nature, it studies the “trees and not the forest” — the big picture tends to elude a lot of scientific research. The result of this is plain to see — for 50 years we’ve been told to avoid saturated fat and replace it with vegetable oils. This poor advice has CAUSED heart disease as well as many other diseases. Shocking.

The answer to the corruption within the field of health is to take charge of your own health creation, starting today. Reject anything unnatural and natural foods will be the only thing supplied. Supply will always try to match demand.

If no-one went into McDonalds, their business wouldn’t last very long! It’s us that keep these things alive by buying from them. How you spend your money is one of the most powerful political and economic votes you have.

And we keep the medical lies alive by buying into the “pill for an ill” mentality, the quick fix. Drugging needs to become the last resort where natural methods and lifestyle measures aren’t working or don’t apply.

Patient compliance is a bit part of the problem too. What’s needed there is education by the bucket load and cultural shifts in both beliefs and values.

The answer to health creation is to simply supply the body what it needs and for the most part, your incredible body will do the rest.

That means looking after your needs for good sleep, natural food, clean water, fresh air, sunlight, and exercise.

I’ve seen many TV shows where they put folks on a natural, healthy regime for a few weeks and marvel at how their bodies’ biomarkers return to normal.

What about a whole lifetime of healthy living? What could that achieve?

Natural forces within us are the true healers of disease.

— Hippocrates, the “father” of medicine

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Michael Kinnaird is the author of Happy Guide, the result of a 20 year exploration into what works for health and happiness.

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