Republicans for Satan. Health News and Information

In devising a rotary diet for patients, I follow certain basic rules. Patients are instructed in these rules and given advice on how to follow them when they return home.

Rule 1: Eat whole, unadulterated foods. Our ancestors generally ate their food in a simple form, without complicated mixtures, sauces, condiments, and the like. A diet such as this is cheaper, more readily available, easier to prepare, and more digestible than fancier fare.

Today, most of us have the ability to eat both simply and with variety. Culinary refinement, while pleasing to the palate, can sometimes be harmful to health, if it is pursued on a regular basis by susceptible individuals. The overrefinement of foods and their packaging for convenience or longer shelf life have led to abuses. Many people do not know what a diet of plain, simple foods taste like or how good it can be. If a person tolerates beef, he can and should enjoy a steak, a hamburger, or a piece of boiled beef instead of, say, a meatball sandwich. If he eats steak, he has consumed one food—beef. He can then have another food, or several other foods, for his next meal. But the meatballs may contain beef, soy, pork, onion, oil, butter, milk, egg, black pepper, and wheat flour used as a “meat-stretcher.” The bread will contain more wheat, rye, corn oil, yeast, sugar of some sort, caramel, lactic-acid cultures, and assorted chemicals. If the sandwich is topped with catsup, it will contain tomatoes, vinegar (grain, cider, or wine), corn sweetener, onion powder, spices, and flavorings. Mayonnaise will add more eggs and vinegar, as well as soybean oil and sugar (beet or cane).

Thus, what most people think of as a fairly simple meal—a meatball sandwich such as is available in many restaurants or “take-out” places—actually may contain more than two dozen different foods, including some of the most common allergy-causing substances—wheat, corn, beef, beet, milk, cane, yeast, soy, or eggs. Most likely it will also contain an assortment of chemicals as well.

If you are allergic to any one of these common items (and almost all food allergy patients are), you will not be able to discover this fact by sticking to the average American diet. The reason is that you will eat these common foods over and over again, every day, almost without letup. The symptoms caused by one or more of these foods may fluctuate, but they will never really be absent for long, because their cause is not absent for long. If you find that an average meal gives you reaction, it will be virtually impossible to track down the cause of that reaction when you are eating two dozen different foods at a sitting.

Rule 2: Diversify your diet. In addition to eating whole, simple foods, the patient must learn to diversify his diet. The modem marketplace offers us a wide variety of different foods from various climates and cultures. We should make use of this diversity. Yet most people eat the same few foods over and over again, sometimes quite literally ad nauseam. Wheat, milk, beef, corn, beet or cane sugars, and eggs, in their many varieties and disguises, represent the monotonous basis of the American diet. Some people even brag of being “meat and potato men,” who must have these two foods in order to feel satisfied (an almost certain sign of food addiction).

Patients can learn to diversify their food choices. The world is filled with an enticing variety of foods which they can exploit for both enjoyment and good health. For example, few people enjoy (or have even tasted) all of the foods in a well-stocked fruit and vegetable market. They become stuck on certain often-repeated favorites, such as carrots, celery, and lettuce, and bypass what is unfamiliar. Turnips and parsnips are rarely eaten as vegetables in their own right, although they make a delicious dish. Some people have never tasted artichokes, avocados, mangos, or papayas. Each of these can form the basis of a satisfying meal.

Some foods are only eaten on special occasions or in special combinations. Cranberries are highly popular at Thanksgiving, but are rarely eaten at any other time of the year; yet they can usually be incorporated into the diet with little trouble, and in many markets they can be purchased fresh throughout the fall season.

The foods of other countries offer interesting possibilities. Many markets now carry bean sprouts and (soy) bean curd. Bean sprouts can be readily grown in a jar in the kitchen if they are not available in the store. Health food stores usually stock a wide variety of Japanese foods. The larger cities have stores, listed in the Yellow Pages, which sell specialty foods of other nationalities. There is much to be gained by learning to enjoy the cuisine of cultures other than one’s own.

In fact, the Rotary Diversified Diet is in some ways less limited, and more enjoyable, than the supposedly unrestricted but monotonous American diet. It calls on you to eat in a controlled, rational way, but within that plan it offers great latitude for innovation and experimentation with food.

Rule 3: Rotate your diet. Patients are told that they can develop an allergy to any food if they eat it day in and day out and are susceptible to it. This is as true of the more exotic foods as it is of beef, potatoes, or eggs. A colleague of mine once attempted to practice clinical ecology in Taiwan. He soon discovered that the Chinese people of that island had widespread allergies to the foods eaten there, especially soy and rice, but also including others, some of which are rare by American standards.

The whole point of this diet is to let the body recover from the effects of a food before eating it again. In general, it takes up to three days for a meal to pass through the human digestive system. To be safe, we allow four days between ingestions of a particular food.

In general, patients are instructed to have only three meals per day. They can eat as much as they wish, although they are encouraged to eat portions of normal size. If he follows a four-day rotation, the patient can eat a particular food on Monday and then eat it again on Friday. Thus, if he has wheat on Monday, he will have to count four days following Monday before he can have wheat again. Bear in mind that this means wheat in any form: bread, spaghetti, lasagna, cream of wheat, even the breading on a pork chop. It is important to add that, for the purposes of this diet, wheat is identical to rye, barley, malt, and millet. Of course, if the patient continues to eat the average American diet, he could not manage that, since there is wheat (or a related grain) in almost every typical meal. But on the Rotary Diversified Diet, it is not difficult to avoid unknown or unsuspected ingredients in foods.

While four days is what we might call the “legal limit” on food repetition, many patients go on a seven-day cycle. This allows them to eat the same basic diet each week. The diet can be posted on the refrigerator and is easy to follow. All the patient needs to begin a seven-day food cycle are twenty-one foods to which he is not allergic.

Rule 4: Rotate food families. Foods, whether animal or vegetable, come in families. Some of these are fairly obvious: cabbage, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower, for example, all taste somewhat similar and are clearly related. You probably would not guess, however, that they are in the mustard family, which also includes horseradish and watercress. Similarly, you would not automatically know that cashews, pistachios, and mangoes are in the same group or that beef and lamb are in the same family but that deer and elk are in a separate group.

Food families are important in devising a Rotary Diversified Diet. A listing of common foods, grouped by their families, is given in Appendix A, to convey some idea of the relations between various foods.

The reason food families are important is that patients can cross-react to the “relatives” of food to which they are allergic. Thus, if you are allergic to beef you must suspect goat (not to mention veal and milk, both of which are seen as similar to beef by the body—veal being young beef, and milk a product of the female of the species). People who are allergic to potato must suspect other members of its family, including tomato, green pepper, red pepper, chili, eggplant, and tobacco.

Another reason why it is important to be aware of food families is to prevent the formation of allergies by a steady consumption of foods which are members of the same family. If you eat tomato on Monday, eggplant on Tuesday, potato on Wednesday, green pepper on Thursday, and tomato again on Friday, you are not really rotating foods—you are eating from the same food family every day, and this could develop into an addiction to one or all of these items.

Thus, the ingestion of foods which are members of the same family must be spaced, but not quite as strictly as foods themselves. The rule is that the patient must rotate food-family members every two days. Using the above example, it might be perfectly all right to have tomato on Monday, eggplant on Wednesday, and tomato again on Friday, provided that no other members of this family were eaten in between.

If a patient has a known allergy to a particular food, he must also avoid the other members of that food family, at least for a while. Thus, sensitivity to beef brings with it a ban on beef, beef by-products such as gelatin, margarine, and suet, milk products, veal, buffalo, goat, lamb, or mutton.

Rule 5: Eat only foods to which you are not allergic, at first. Patients who are emerging from the Ecology Unit are given a summary of their food-test reactions. They therefore know which of the most common foods cause reactions and which do not.

Upon going home, one of their goals is to test other foods which were not evaluated in their weeks in the hospital. If a new food causes no reactions, then it can be added to the Rotary Diversified Diet to give greater variety to the meal plan.

On the other hand, the diet serves as a perpetual diagnostic screen, helping patients to avoid unsuspected sources of mental and physical complaints. It can readily detect the first signs of an adverse reaction to any food, since that food is not in one’s system at the time it is eaten.

Basically, there are two kinds of food allergies—fixed and nonfixed, or temporary. A fixed allergy is one with which you are probably born, which does not go away with time. These are relatively less common. More frequently, patients can regain tolerance to troublesome foods after a period of some months of avoidance. The greater the reaction to a food, the longer it takes, in general, to reestablish tolerance. The process usually takes from two to eight months, after which the food can usually be eaten again, if used in rotation. Since the incriminated food is often a favorite and is craved in an addictive manner, the hope of regaining tolerance to it offers some consolation to the patient suffering its temporary loss. Until and unless such tolerance is regained, however, the patient cannot safely use an allergenic food. Moreover, it must not be abused by cumulative intake when it is returned. Re-sensitization occurs very readily and very subtly.

One exception to this rule is the so-called universal reactor. As mentioned earlier, such a person is allergic to all or most foods, and will get sick no matter what he eats, although he feels tolerably well on a fast. Naturally, he cannot avoid all foods to which he is allergic or he will starve. In this case, we do the next best thing. He is instructed to eat only those foods to which he has lesser reactions.

In addition, other procedures can be employed to benefit such patients. Some clinical ecologists employ “neutralizing doses” in the treatment of this condition. As was previously explained, a “neutralizing dose” is an infinitesimally small amount of the offending substance. If this dose, placed under the tongue, is at just the right dilution, it will have the effect of turning off a reaction. The same substance in a larger dose will, of course, cause a renewal of symptoms. This seems contradictory, but the effectiveness of the neutralizing dose is attested to by many clinical ecologists.

With the exception of universal reactors, all patients are instructed to keep away from the foods which cause their reactions until these can safely be reworked into the diet.

*102/110/2*

The pituitary gland governs the activity of the thyroid, the suprarenal gland and the sex glands. It is known as the master gland, having the leading position among the endocrine glands. Its direct link with the central nervous system in the area of very important centres at the base of the brain, the hypothalamus, has been the subject of much research, since it appears that the pituitary gland influences all the vital processes either directly or indirectly. It also appears that, together with the thymus gland, the pituitary determines growth. Since the entire development of the sex glands and sex organs is controlled by the pituitary, a hermaphrodite condition may be attributed to impaired development or disturbed functioning of this gland. A pregnancy could never run its normal course without the cooperation of the pituitary.

*102/28/1*

The pituitary, 12 by 8 mm in size (like a bean), serves our body in a similar way to that of an inconspicuous general who commands a large army, or the person in the control tower who directs and manoeuvres huge jet planes entering and leaving an international airport. This gland weighs only a few grams and was at one time regarded as a vestigial organ. But when the news of its importance began to spread through the scientific world, and it was even discovered that the anterior and posterior lobes each produce completely different hormones, the amazement was great indeed. Such a small gland, yet one with so many vital functions!

*101/28/1*

This is all well and good, says the conventional skeptic, but the so-called results of the Ecology Unit, and of clinical ecology, are actually based on suggestion. This is the so-called placebo effect (from the Latin “I will please”) in which a totally inert “sugar pill” sometimes has curative properties. In the case of clinical ecology the patient wants to get well to such an extent, we are told, that he accepts the physician’s idea that wheat, pork, or some other substance is the source of his illness.

Such arguments are sometimes heard from critics of this new approach, although never yet from a physician who has closely observed our methods nor from a patient who has been treated in the unit. The door of the Ecology Unit is always open to qualified professionals who wish to investigate our methods first-hand.

The impression of those who have studied the response of patients in our clinic is usually the opposite of those who speculate about the “placebo effect”: patients are in fact more likely to respond negatively to suggestions that their illness is caused by some common food. Remember, these are not only frequently eaten foods we are talking about, staples in the diet, but more often than not favorite foods, which may be eaten in an addictive manner. Patients do not ordinarily encourage doctors to tell them to give up cherished pleasures. Nor do they usually enjoy a new interpretation of their illness which may impinge on their freedom.

The discovery of a food addiction can be unpleasant, for it may mean preparing unaccustomed meals, as well as the chance of social awkwardness. Anyone who thinks patients are easily persuaded to give up their favorite food addictants should try to separate a wheat-a-holic from his bowl of pasta or daily portion of bread.

Similarly, a diagnosis of chemical susceptibility is rarely greeted with enthusiasm by patients. It entails serious changes in lifestyle. Few patients look forward to the opportunity of changing or moving their heating systems, for instance. Their tendency is to deny the problem, not to embrace it as one does a placebo. Once a correct diagnosis is made, however, and the patient sees some improvement in his life, he will then often enthusiastically—and rationally—embrace the new regimen.

There is additional evidence that the reactions which patients have to food and chemicals during our testing program are not based on suggestion: blind tests have been performed sufficiently often to prove that such reactions are not dependent on foreknowledge on the part of the patient. Some of the most dramatic of these tests have been recorded on film and shown repeatedly at medical conferences.

Patients have also been given sham feedings through a tube of foods to which they were not allergic or of no food at all, while being told that they were receiving a food to which they were allergic. I have never elicited what appeared to be a psychological reaction from such patients. Invariably, they do not react under such circumstances, no matter how they have been primed with suggestion. In one case, discussed at length earlier, I let a beet-sensitive patient glimpse some red juice on a dish after she was given a tube feeding. The dish was then quickly whisked out of her sight and hidden. She failed to react to the feeding, however. When asked if she thought that the feeding had been beets she admitted that she had seen the red juice left in the pan. The juice was actually from a pomegranate and had been deliberately placed in the bowl in an attempt to trigger a psychological reaction.

Other patients have accidentally and unknowingly eaten food to which they were known to be allergic. In these cases, they suffered the same kind of reaction as during a deliberate feeding, although they would have to retrace their steps to discover the cause. Joan Kowan, the student nurse with the headache problem, suffered such an attack after accidentally eating some butter.

Another case was a physician who suffered from diarrhea whenever he ate milk or milk products. One day he went into a diner and ordered a hamburger and then suffered a reaction. He returned to the diner when he was better, sat himself at the counter, and watched the chef prepare another hamburger. The burger itself contained no milk products, but it was cooked on a griddle still sizzling with butter from the previous order. Even this small amount of a milk product was enough to cause a reaction in him.

Many patients have had similar reactions to coffee, pork, corn, or other foods. Environmental pollutants can unknowingly create symptoms in the same way. Ellen Sanders suffered irregular heartbeats (cardiac arrhythmia) after pesticide was drawn into her apartment by an air conditioner. She became deathly ill, but it was not until she was taken to the hospital that it was discovered that these pesticides had been released, in massive quantities, in her vicinity.

It is easy to theorize about psychological effects and placebo reactions. In the Ecology Unit our primary responsibility is in healing the patient, not in performing double blind tests, for which we have neither the facilities nor the funding. It is possible that psychological factors play some unknown role in all healing processes. Innumerable facts, however, show that the chronic ailments of patients usually have real causes in the material world, many of which can be unmasked through the methods of clinical ecology.

To summarize, it may be said that the technique of comprehensive environmental control in an isolated hospital unit set up for this task has filled a useful purpose. It is especially helpful for advanced complicated cases in which efforts at outpatient management have failed.

There tends to be a deteriorating continuum in advanced and complicated instances of environmentally related illness which sometimes is difficult to change on the basis of office or outpatient management. This downhill course may often, but not always, be reversed by the application of more detailed observations favored by this approach. It is especially useful in instances where home and work exposures are suspected of maintaining chronic illnesses. Once such chronic manifestations have been reversed, the clinical effects of trial reexposures— either in the hospital or upon returning to home or work conditions—often induce acute convincing test effects.

*100/110/2*

The Ecology Unit (sometimes referred to as the Environmental Control Unit) plays an indispensable role in the diagnosis and treatment of allergies. This unit was established after many years of development.

I first started hospitalizing patients for the diagnosis of food allergy in 1950. I chose complicated patients, whose problems could not be worked out simply by testing with one food at a time in the office. (In those days I employed feedings of whole foods in the office, rather than provocative tests, as today.) These patients rarely ever achieved a “base line” of good health before any particular test against which their reaction could be measured. It was therefore impossible to tell to what extent a particular food, or other environmental exposure, was responsible for their symptoms.

At this same time, I had occasion to present some of my earliest patients with “mental” symptoms to the psychiatrists at the Milwaukee Sanitorium. Dr. Josef Kindwall, chief of staff at this well-respected institution, listened to my presentation and then suggested that I fast such patients, in order to clear the board, so to speak, of all preexisting symptoms.

Six patients were therefore hospitalized in separate rooms and fasted. Each patient soon complained of heightened symptoms and, being inexperienced, I was disturbed by their worsened condition and decided to cancel the tests. In fact, these heightened symptoms in the early part of a fast are now known to be normal withdrawal reactions to addicting foods. Thus the initial attempt to fast patients ended in failure.

In April, 1951, the chemical-susceptibility problem was first described, and so, in the winter of 1953, were the effects of natural gas on susceptible individuals. Considering these unexpected sources of reactions, it became even more obvious that in order to achieve a “base line” of health, it would be necessary to remove a patient to a sheltered environment, in which food and chemical exposures could be thoroughly controlled. This belief was reinforced by seeing an occasional patient who felt distinctly better in the chemically less contaminated environment of a hospital. Some doctors referred to this phenomenon as “hospitalitis,” an alleged “disease” in which an individual craves a protective environment, but I believed the reason lay in the effects of the nonpersonal environment on the patient’s health. In the meantime, I told Dr. Donald S. Mitchell of Montreal about my difficulties in fasting patients and about the need to do so, given the complexity of their problems. Dr. Mitchell, on his own initiative, attempted to confirm this and was able to fast patients for longer periods of time. He discovered that the withdrawal symptoms subsided by the third or fourth day and that after that, the patients generally felt better than they had in a long while.

In 1956, I therefore decided to attempt a hospital fasting program again. This time the experiment was a success, and certain food and chemical allergies were diagnosed which simply could not have been found through any of the office procedures used at that time.

This experience led to a new approach to the diagnosis of allergy-caused illnesses. Since that time, I have hospitalized, fasted, and tested over 10,000 individuals in this manner. Until 1975, such testing was done in separate hospital rooms of a general hospital. Patients did reasonably well in this environment. One problem, however, was that chemically susceptible patients were still exposed to tobacco smoke, perfumes, and other hospital fumes and odors, which interfered with the accuracy and validity of the testing. Sometimes night nurses might smoke in the nursing stations. At other times rooms were chemically disinfected and residues of such agents made certain rooms unavailable for use.

Since 1975, therefore, a separate Ecology Unit has been maintained as a section of a hospital in a Chicago suburb, and it is far more controlled than any ordinary hospital room or ward could be.1

The procedures in the Ecology Unit are an indispensable part of the treatment for allergy. Traditional diagnostic techniques are like a table with three legs. The first leg is the patient’s history, the second his physical examination, and the third his diagnostic tests. In the Ecology Unit, all three of these standard methods are employed, but in addition there is a fourth leg. Often it is this fourth diagnostic leg which provides the sound basis for an answer. Its value has been confirmed by many physicians, and about a dozen are now using this sort of hospitalization in their daily practice. Indeed, in the combined experience of clinical ecologists using these techniques in a hospital or environmentally controlled setting, approximately 20,000 patients have been observed under controlled conditions during the past three decades (see Appendix B for a list of clinical ecologists practicing in a controlled environmental hospital setting).

The basic idea of the Ecology Unit is control. For several weeks, all aspects of the patient’s physical environment are scientifically managed. The air he breathes, the food and water he consumes, and everything that might come into contact with, or enter, his body, is subjected to prior scrutiny.

This technique, in effect, borrows a page from the experimental scientist’s book. “It is a controlled clinical experiment,” Dr. Lawrence Dickey once wrote of the Ecology Unit, “using an individual patient, and has all the validity of a controlled laboratory experiment. Both require control of as many variables as possible.”

This may seem like a big job, and indeed it is. First of all, one must control what the patient brings into the hospital. Plastic suitcases, synthetic fabrics, cosmetics, and so forth must all be left behind. Patients can only wear garments made from natural fabrics, such as wool or cotton, and only those which have been washed many times or which were not originally treated with chemicals.

Patients are allowed visitors during their stay, which averages three weeks. But the visitors are warned at the door not to enter if they are wearing cosmetics or scent of any kind and not to bring in flowers, candies, or other substances that might make some patients sick or destroy the validity of the test reactions. Staff members, like patients and their visitors, are not allowed to wear any perfumes or scents.

Patients are then fasted on spring water for an average of five days. The purpose of the fast is to completely clear the digestive tract of all food, a process which is often facilitated by the use of milk of magnesia or alkali salts.

In fasting, the patient may experience withdrawal reactions in which his accustomed symptoms get worse for a few days before they get better. The arthritic patient’s joints may flare up. The person with a chronic headache problem may suffer a particularly bad attack. The moderately depressed may get a bad attack of the doldrums.

When the worst of the withdrawal reaction is over, however, the patient is tested blindly with several different waters. One of these is the local tap water, and the others are commercially available bottled water (only in glass bottles, never plastic). A new water is tested every three hours, if there has been no adverse reaction to the previous test sample. The patient rates the waters on a scale of zero to ten, without knowing which water he is receiving. He keeps a record of his reactions to the water samples, and the one he tolerates the best will be his compatible water for the remainder of his stay in the hospital. The compatible water is continued on first returning home.

After four or five days, the patient usually feels better; in fact, he may feel healthier than he has in months or years. For example, some patients who have been prostrated by fatigue are able to get up and bustle about. Others who have had pain find that they are virtually pain-free. If the symptoms do not go away, and sometimes they do not, then the fast is prolonged. There is ordinarily no hazard in this, provided that the patient does not have a medical condition which makes fasting dangerous. At all times, of course, the fast is carefully monitored by the medical and nursing staff.

Some fasts have lasted ten days or more. Of course, there are patients whose symptoms are apparently not the result of environmental exposure or for whom even the minimal exposures of the Ecology Unit are disturbing. Such patients may not improve. In the great majority of cases, however, the fast will eventually bring about a cessation of old, disturbing symptoms, and a new sense of well-being, sometimes bordering on the euphoric, will set in. Fasting breaks the addictive cycle of the sick person to the foods and other environmental substances making him ill.

The chemical environment in the Ecology Unit is particularly controlled. Just as there is an attempt to prevent the entry of potentially harmful materials from outside, so too-everything inside the unit is kept as innocuous as can be. This gives the unit a somewhat old-fashioned appearance. The couch in the lounge, for instance, is made of well-worn leather, and the chairs are fashioned from wood and metal, upholstered with cotton or felt, and covered with natural fabrics. All of the bedding is made of simple, untreated cotton, and such things as sponge-rubber pillows or mattresses, draw sheets, upholstered furniture, rug pads, or even tubing made with rubber, are forbidden.

Plastics have also been banished from the Ecology Unit. There are no mattresses with plasticized surfaces, no plastic covers on the pillows, no plastic furniture, shower curtains, drapes, slippers, or handbags.

Initially, there was a problem with the floors. Some of the patients simply did not lose their symptoms, even after a prolonged fast. We finally learned that before the Ecology Unit had taken over this particular space in the hospital, the baseboards had been sprayed with a chemical pesticide. It is virtually impossible to entirely eliminate such sprays. The baseboards and the old floor, therefore, had to go and new tile baseboards and flooring were put down. Since then, far fewer patients have failed to get rid of their symptoms on the fast.

In addition, the Ecology Unit has its own broom closet, and the cleaning personnel use only soap and water. Since there are odors and fumes emanating from other parts of the hospital, it has been necessary to seal off the stairwells, elevator shafts, laundry chutes, and ventilating systems to prevent leakage into the unit. Even the latch holes on the doors were plugged to keep out cigarette smoke. When it is time to paint, the entire floor is evacuated for a week. In addition, large and effective air purifiers are kept running most of the time, despite the fact that the Ecology Unit is located in one of Chicago’s least polluted suburbs.

Despite these precautions, chemical contaminants sometimes do get into the unit. Recently, for example, during the shooting of a film, a solvent-based marking pen was opened. Although the pen was not open for more than half a minute, at the next morning’s staff meeting one of the nurses reported that several chemically susceptible patients had gotten ill at the time of the shooting. The answer almost certainly lay in this marking pen. When the error was realized, the door and window of the room where the pen was had been foolishly thrown open, blowing the fumes across the hall and into the room opposite. The patients who had gotten ill were in this room. It is because of reactions such as this that great strictness is exercised in controlling chemical pollution of the Ecology Unit.

*95/110/2*

The brain is a marvellous organ and a great gift from the Creator. We would be lost without it; we could not plan, carry out or complete anything. So we have every reason to be grateful for it every day of our life. If a person voluntarily abstains from food or is made to go hungry, and as a result loses a great deal of weight, the weight loss in the spinal cord and in the brain is hardly noticeable. The fact that everything else is affected first shows the importance of the brain as the control centre of most other processes in the body.

A good illustration of the human brain is that of the walnut. The hard shell can be compared to the cranium. The two-lobed seed resembles the cerebrum, and the skin, which peels off easily in freshly picked nuts, may be likened to the meninges. At the back of the head, between the spinal cord and the brain, lies the cerebellum, which is approximately the size of an orange.

*95/28/1*

After the illness has passed, we must direct our attention to the follow-up treatment, being mindful that the period of convalescence should not be short. Even though the acute symptoms have subsided, we should still apply physiotherapy. Also, continue taking diuretic or excretory medicines even if the fever has subsided. This will eliminate all of the accumulated toxins so that no damage elsewhere in the body is possible.

Every bout of flu should receive follow-up treatment. In fact, with any infectious disease it is advisable to continue the treatment conscientiously until the patient has fully recovered. This is the only way to prevent after effects, which can be much more unpleasant than you think. If you become impatient, just remember that you remain prone to contracting a new infection until all vestiges of the last one have been eliminated during convalescence.

*94/28/1*

Secondly, we must employ a selection of herbal medicines, such as Nephrosolid and Boldocynara, for these remedies promote increased excretion through the kidneys and liver. By taking Echinaforce we can prevent irritation and inflammation. At the beginning of the illness, the flu drops Influaforce are helpful. These drops contain Baptisia (wild indigo), Lachesis lOx, Echinaforce, Bryonia 3x (bryony), Aconitum 3x and Solidago, and have always proved effective in minimising the virulence of the infection.

Diet is very important for a flu patient. While fever is present, neither protein nor fat should be eaten. Going on a liquid juice diet for one or two days has proved to be very beneficial. Grapefruit juice, diluted bilberry (blueberry) juice, also blackcurrant juice alternated with diluted beetroot juice will be received as a blessing by the patient. The intake of liquids should be greater than under normal circumstances.

*93/28/1*

The taking of a medical history also reveals the difference between ours and the traditional approach. Traditional medicine is centered on the body and its various organs. It is called anthropocentric, or body-centered, medicine. A traditional doctor is mainly concerned with treating the body and focusing primarily upon the most distressing physical symptom or “chief complaint.”

In the traditional history, previous medical problems will also be noted briefly, but in general there is no attempt to link seemingly unrelated “nonmedical,” past problems in the patient’s life to the present illness. Of course not— for no theoretical framework exists to make such connections. In general, symptoms and organs are neatly compartmentalized and viewed in relative isolation from one another. The history of a person’s illness is thus seen narrowly, as the history of one particular symptom or syndrome, rather than broadly, as a history of increasing ill health stemming from environmental exposures.

Although the dates of important medical changes may be indicated on the record, the reader of such a traditional medical history tends to be relatively unaware of the long-term progression of symptoms which may have preceded the current illness. In addition, traditional medical histories tell almost nothing about the environmental facts of a patient’s life. The doctor rarely asks about the details of job or hobby, about cooking or heating systems in the home, or methods of insect control used in the patient’s vicinity. To him, these seem irrelevant and outside the practice of medicine as he was taught it in medical school.

If currently available tests show no “organic” disease, the doctor is more likely to ask probing (and sometimes leading) questions about interpersonal relationships, such as problems with a spouse, children, or parents. Generally speaking, however, little effort is made to relate the “chief complaint” to other problems in the patient’s life, and the “medical” facts tend to be separated from the environmental facts.

The basic cause of a chronic illness is rarely exposed by this type of traditional history-taking. Since the doctor fails to comprehend the subtle and hidden give-and-take between the environment and the patient, with its ever-shifting balance of environmental challenge and individual response, he cannot understand the patient’s seemingly unclassifiable illness.

A patient with a long history and a thick file frequently becomes a “neurotic” in the doctor’s eyes, and this judgment is passed along from one doctor to another. In such an atmosphere, doctors tend to become cynical about many patients’ complaints, while patients bitterly reject established medicine.

I call this traditional approach the “ABCDs of modern mass-applicable medicine.” A stands for Analytical: the medical profession tends to chop problems up into neatly compartmentalized specialties, rather than seeing the broad outlines in a synthesized (unifying) fashion. B and C, in this scheme, stand for Body-Centered. The doctor looks at the body but fails to see the environment (mainly physical and nonpersonal) which impinges on that body at every step and with every breath. D stands for Drug-oriented. The traditional physician almost always uses drugs to alter or neutralize symptoms whose basic cause(s) he does not understand. Analytical, Body-Centered, Drug-oriented medicine has many achievements to its credit, but it offers little to the growing number of patients who are suffering from environmentally induced chronic illness.

The history-taking of clinical ecologists is quite different. Whereas in traditional medicine, the taking of the history (which is one of the most important portions of the diagnostic process) is usually assigned to the least experienced member of the medical team (the intern or medical student), the clinical ecologist himself usually conducts his own interviews. Some people think a doctor wastes valuable time by doing this. If important leads are to be uncovered, however, it is necessary for one experienced person to be familiar with the details of each individual case.

Because of the essentially addictive nature of many environmental problems, especially in their earlier, or stimulatory, phases, medical histories can be paradoxically misleading. For example, an untrained history-taker can overlook the significance of a patient’s remark that he “loves” or “craves” a particular food or chemical, and that eating, drinking, or inhaling that item makes him feel better. A conventionally trained doctor or nurse is likely to encourage the patient in the use of such a substance, while a clinical ecologist will immediately suspect it as a source of allergic/addictive responses.

The form of the interview which a clinical ecologist conducts is also different from that in traditional, ABCD medicine. Instead of looking at the body as a collection of various organs and parts, with medical and scientific subspecialties organized to deal with isolated problems which affect them, clinical ecology emphasizes the wholeness of the individual and the uniqueness of his experience. It thus forms part of the larger movement toward “holistic” medicine, which is gaining increasing importance.

Emphasis is put on recording events in a chronological fashion. The patient’s illness must be traced not just to the onset of the present symptom but to the beginning of his overall ill health. This, in turn, must be correlated with significant events in his life history.

Getting the medical history usually takes me about one hour. First, I generally let the patient explain who referred him and why he has come, in his own terms. If he has come because of a well-defined problem, such as headache, I ask him when he started having headaches and let him make any statement he wishes about this problem.

If the patient cannot single out any overriding problem but simply feels chronically ill, with many complaints, I ask him when he ceased being well and started feeling poorly. In other words, I try to orient the history (as the name implies) to the development of the problem in time. However, some people cannot give a chronological history. Either they do not think in those terms or their minds are too clouded by their disease. In these cases, I simply ask the patient to state all of his symptoms according to the categories explained in Chapter 8. Briefly, the categories are: physical localized symptoms: 1) upper respiratory, 2) lower respiratory, 3) gastrointestinal, 4) dermatological, 5) genitourinary. Physical systemic symptoms: 1) fatigue, 2) headache, 3) myalgia, 4) arthralgia. Mental-behavioral symptoms: a) brain-fag b) depression, with or without altered consciousness.

I gather in the data, typing whatever the patient says, without making off-hand interpretations. After about an hour, good clues usually emerge from this narrative, although the cause of the illness cannot be known for certain until actual testing is done.

The medical history is supplemented with forms and tests, such as the Chemical Questionnaire reprinted in Chapter 19. On the basis of the results of the interview, questionnaires, and tests, the patient is then assigned to one of two groups. One group, constituting about half of my referred practice, are patients who are so seriously ill that they must be hospitalized to undergo further testing and treatment. The method of helping such patients is explained in the following chapters. The less severely afflicted, or those who are unable to be hospitalized for a variety of reasons, are diagnosed and treated on an in-office (outpatient) basis.

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Although the epidemics that have hit Europe again and again for some decades no longer kill as many victims as at first, we must nevertheless regard influenza as a serious disease, especially when we consider its possible after effects. For example, it can cause pneumonia, or an acute deterioration of a chronic liver condition; it may also affect the kidneys, pancreas and abdominal organs. It is also possible for the myocardium to suffer and eczema to break out. Rheumatism can result from an improperly or incompletely treated bout of flu. All these after effects can possibly be prevented if treatment is given until the cure is complete.

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