illnesses, we will be more resistant to the outer pollution of unhealthy foods and environmental chemicals. This vision hit me with the force of a revelation, and it left me stunned. While I did discuss this concept briefly in the section on“ Serious Illness,” over the past ten years I have become even more certain that my vision was correct. Drugs— I mean medical and legal drugs, which are simply the opposite of the illegal ones— are proliferating at a rate that seems unstoppable. Every health problem, regardless of its true cause, is reason for more research to find yet another magic bullet. The media touts every new drug as the great new hope for our deliverance from disease. Nobody seems to notice that every great new drug hope always turns out to have nasty adverse effects, so that twenty years later we have to deal with the new diseases caused by it. Then we have to find yet another drug that heals those new diseases. The more time goes on, the worse it gets, and the more I am firmly convinced that iatrogenic( doctor- or treatment-caused) disease is the great unacknowledged, worldwide health tragedy of the twentieth century. Fortunately, even though food is not always the cause, it is often the cure for many of our new health problems. People who develop allergies and immune disorders because of the overuse of antibiotics, drugs, and vaccinations are finding that a change in diet, especially along the lines of this book, helps them bounce back and recuperate. The two iatrogenic conditions that respond best to dietary modification are allergies and candidiasis, or candida. Allergies of any kind improve when the sufferers eliminate sugar, milk products, and their particular allergen, such as wheat, corn, tomatoes, soy, or nuts. A good clinical ecologist can help determine the exact foods and substances to eliminate. Candida, or a systemic yeast overgrowth caused by antibiotics and other drugs, responds to a diet devoid of sugar, sweeteners, and fermented foods, such as bread, wine, cheese, vinegar, miso, soy sauce, tempeh, molds( and the foods that harbor them such as dry fruits and juices), pickles, mustard, sauerkraut. In addition, this condition is best managed with a high-protein( beans and animal food) and low-carbohydrate diet. 10 ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE An underground and unacknowledged world for decades, even though 70 percent of the world uses it,“ alternative” or“ complementary” medicine was thrust into the limelight in 1993 by an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article pointed out that nearly a third of Americans utilize the services of alternativehealth practitioners, spend $ 10.3 billion out-of-pocket on it yearly, and don’ t tell their medical doctors about it. 11 The Office of Alternative Medicine, funded by Congress as part of the National Institutes of Health in 1992, opened one year later. Soon, conferences on alternative medicine began to spring up everywhere. In 1994, two serious peer-reviewed journals in the field were launched, 12 and more and more physicians are paying attention to healing modalities other than Western technological medicine. The growth of nondrug therapies offers real possibilities for the improvement of our collective health. This amplification of the field of healing was a vision I laid out in this book( see“ A Proposal for Unifying the Opposites”). I am thoroughly delighted to see it now happening.
New York City, July 1995
* See text. † See text for all kuzu preparations.