Listen to my history and general beliefs and philosophies
Listen Here: (download as mp3)There are many aspects to my philosophy of health.
The first is that you understand that very few drugs were ever designed to cure an illness. The purpose of a drug is generally to alleviate (suppress or make go away) a bothersome symptom. Since the drug does this without ever addressing the true cause of the symptom, no healing generally takes place; and in addition, your body now has to deal with eliminating the toxic chemicals of which the drug is composed.
The second is the time aspect. It took many years of assaulting your body with the wrong foods, toxic chemicals, a poor environment, and possibly a great deal of various forms of stress in order to bring it to its current state. You must accept that it will take, at the very least, many months before any great strides can be made in the process of reversing some of this damage. If you are looking for a quick fix, there is none. If you are looking for a quick reduction in symptoms, and are not interested in helping the body heal, try an allopathic medical doctor and some prescription drugs, for I cannot help you.
The third is responsibility. It is your body, and you get to do all the hard work. If you are willing to alter your diet and take the necessary supplements to help push yourself in the direction of healing, then I will happily help you do so. If you are simply looking for an herb or vitamin to replace a drug, please look elsewhere. I do not work by addressing symptoms but rather by addressing causes. Symptoms take care of themselves when their causes are healed. If you have been following the FDA food pyramid, then you are pushing your health in the wrong direction. If you are interested in taking a brief look at some of the diet principles that I teach, you might want to read through my own Food Pyramid.
The fourth aspect of my philosophy deals with facts. A fact or truth is simply something that is, regardless of how many people know it or recognize it. A fact will not change with time, only our beliefs of what are facts will change. With this in mind you need to understand that a great deal of facts regarding healing, are not recognized or accepted by traditional medical science. Every year, more and more of the facts that we in the holistic profession have known for years, get proven to the satisfaction of a small but growing number of open-minded physicians. On the other hand, a few things are proven wrong, and many approved but harmful drugs are finally taken off the market and replaced by equally harmful alternatives. If you will not take any herb, vitamin or nutrient which has not had a double-blind placebo controlled crossover study published, I cannot help you. I train with scientists, clinicians, and physicians who have proven what works in a clinical setting but who may not have published studies, especially in the United States. The U. S. Government conducted a study that showed less than 30% of our prescription drugs or surgeries have been adequately proven to do what is claimed of them. In addition, they showed that over 100,000 people each year are being killed by properly prescribed prescription drugs. In contrast, there are no properly documented cases of death due to unadulterated nutritional supplements. Slight difference to say the least.
The final aspect of my health philosophy is a combination of history and individuality. The longest running research study is in fact our own history. Our history shows a number of very important things. First, it shows a tremendous diversity in cultures and in climates. Reading through Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price; The Paleolithic Prescription by Boyd Eaton, et al.; and Western Diseases: Their Emergence and Prevention by Trowell and Burkitt, a few important things become very clear. First of all, we are a part of a very diverse world. Different populations consume very different foods. Second, the more we process foods, the easier we make them to prepare, and the longer we make them last for storage, the less healthy we all become. Third and last is the apparent total non-existence of any society which has been able to thrive on a strict vegetarian (vegan) diet. It appears that natural selection and history have made it quite clear that we were indeed hunter-gathers and not fruitarian’s or vegetarians. In fact, we were also not grain farmers until quite recently in the overall scheme of things. Scientists tell us that it takes in the neighborhood of 60-90,000 years in order for an animal species to adapt to a different diet or food source. What some may say about our stomachs, our teeth, or our digestive tracts is actually quite irrelevant. History is history. From what I have read and from years of observation and working to help people get well, it is apparent that the strict vegetarian diet is being gravely misrepresented. It may be good for cleansing and for temporary (2 weeks to 3 months) detoxification, but long term (5+ generations) it will not support continued life. The people I have worked with who spent years living in religious ashrams have told me that few if any of the inhabitants were strictly vegan. They all “cheated” and in many cases were actually instructed by the elders to occasionally eat meat for their health. With the tremendous bio-diversity on our earth, surely if a “vegan” diet were one of the many diets which could support continued health, there would be at least one long-term historical society with this type of diet. Whenever the time is taken to properly study a supposed vegan society, it is found that they are not.
Please note that this is not to say that I condone the horrendous treatment given to our feed animals. I am also not saying that the poor quality of meat, poultry, and eggs available in most supermarkets today even remotely resembles what we ate throughout our history or should eat today. I am only stating the facts as I have researched them, and these facts are extremely important to our continued health as individuals and as a society.
The following pearls of wisdom, statements, and actual quotes, will help you to better understand my beliefs and my views towards research and established nutritional, medical and dental “facts”.
It is really too bad that neither the public, nor most physicians, have access to the actual clinical knowledge & experience of the top health practitioners. The knowledge of what the top practitioners have found to work best in their practices, with their patients, is extremely important BECAUSE –
Clinical experience and observe results (also called anecdotal evidence) trump or outweigh published research and beliefs every time.
The most important qualities of a good health practitioner are an extremely open mind coupled with an extremely skeptical mind. When either is missing or lacking, their “facts” and “knowledge” are far more likely to be faulty, inadequate, incomplete, or simply wrong.
Traditional schooling and education will always comprise the smallest amount of the knowledge base for any exceptional health practitioner. One must continually go outside of the mainstream and test everything you are taught or told as “fact”, in order to learn what actually works and what does not.
There is no treatment or drug – Which can overcome or negate – The effects of a poor diet, inadequate nutrition, lack of exercise, and an unhealthy life style. (David Getoff 1998)
And finally, to those in the medical and dental profession who may not agree with some of what I say or do, I offer the following three extremely important quotes along with an educational challenge. Take the time to question your teachers or professors, and look to see what research has actually been done, before you say something that you were taught, but that has never had much to do with the truth.
I will happily direct you to some of the top web sites if you are willing to keep an open mind. You might start with the ATSDR division of the CDC at www.atsdr.cdc.gov. Try searching the word mercury then go to www.ewg.org and with the drop down menu go to the body burden.
Here are the important quotes:
“IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANYONE TO BEGIN TO LEARN WHAT HE THINKS HE ALREADY KNOWS.”
Epictetus (55 AD – 135 AD)
(Greek born Roman Philosopher)
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
~ Josh Billings
This great quote is incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth as well as numerous other places all over the web. I checked this quote with the historian at the Mark Twain Institute who told me that quotes are often attributed to the wrong person and that this is just one very good example. It is due to people not checking with the proper authority and simply repeating what they have seen or heard elsewhere.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
More quotes of interest –
“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship. To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic.” DR. BENJAMIN RUSH, Physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Those who say something cannot be done, should not get in the way of those who are already doing it. (Translation of Chinese proverb)
Any time you take a food that nature or God has given us and alter it, you make it worse. Chickens have skin, eggs have yolks, milk has butter fat and nature made them that way. If you desire health, stop telling Nature and God that they are stupid.
A wise healer uses what works, regardless of what any supposed authority may say to the contrary.
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein”
“It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – If it disagrees with real-life results, it is wrong. That’s all there is to it.” Richard Feynman Winner Nobel Prize in physics 1965.
Beliefs that are not true, remain untrue regardless of how strong the beliefs are, how many initials the believers have after their names, or how well known or highly respected the believers may be. David Getoff 2006