The popular belief, encouraged by the media, is that we owe the disappearance of major epidemics of infectious diseases to medical breakthroughs, whereas in fact, the death rate from infection had already begun to drop several decades before control measures inspired by the germ theory were put into effect, and almost a century before the introduction of antimicrobial drugs. 6 The incidence of cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, and typhoid declined after the introduction of clean water supplies, sewage control, general sanitation, and the pasteurization of milk. According to Thomas McKeown, professor emeritus of social medicine at the University of Birmingham, England, another reason for that downtrend was an increase in food supplies and the consequent host resistance as a result of better nutrition. 7 Almost 90 percent of the total decline in children’ s mortality from diseases such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles occurred before widespread use of antibiotics and compulsory immunizations. Diphtheria, for example, took the lives of 900 out of every million children in 1900, but only 220 by 1938— and national immunization didn’ t start until 1942. Scarlet fever declined from over 2,300 deaths per million children in 1860 to about 100 in 1918; but sulfa drugs didn’ t become available until the early thirties, and immunization didn’ t begin until the late sixties, by which time there were barely a dozen or so cases per million. Polio vaccine appears to be the only one to have effectively lowered the incidence of a disease: The year before the introduction of the vaccine, 1954, there were 38,476 cases of polio; the year after, 1956, there were 15,140, and the year after that, only 5,485. 8
However, a similar decrease of the incidence of this disease was observed in Europe, where no mass immunizations took place. Most of the current polio cases occur in people who have been immunized. 9 Admittedly, this a highly controversial issue. Parents who immunize their children do so in the belief that they’ re protecting them; most scientists believe just that. It will be a while before history sorts out the facts from the myths. Meanwhile, it behooves us to keep an open mind and to explore more fully the role of nutrition in disease prevention. It’ s a sad fact that despite the full-fledged war on cancer with drastic remedies such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, survival rates for 90 percent of the cancer cases have riot improved during the past twenty-five years. Survival rates for breast cancer, for example, were at 50 percent in a 1963 study regardless of therapies, treatments, or checkups; untreated women, interestingly enough, fared no worse than treated women. In 1979, Maurice Fot, Ph. D., of MIT, determined that 40 percent of breast cancer victims died regardless of treatment; 60 percent showed a mortality rate“ only modestly different from that of women of a similar age without evidence of disease.” 10 Technically, modern medical practice is of a sophistication unequaled in history, and modern medicine’ s greatest accomplishments are technical ones, involving the manipulation of the mechanics of the body: orthopedics, treatment of burns, cesarean section in cases of fibroids or faulty pelvic structure, resuscitation, microsurgery to attach severed limbs, heart-valve replacements, and similar extraordinary feats. Keeping someone alive through open-heart surgery is little short of working a miracle. Yet there is another side to the coin, and even the tremendous advances in science carry a high price.“ Above all, do no harm” was the earnest humanitarian injunction given to doctors by Hippocrates; unfortunately, with the best of intentions, things have turned out so that modern technical medical intervention produces an astonishing amount of pain, dysfunction, disability, and anguish. Iatrogenic( doctor-caused) disease is the most rapidly spreading epidemic of the twentieth century; its victims are more numerous than those of traffic and industrial accidents, and perhaps even those of war-related activities. As a final irony, it costs money to be made sick by medicine. 11 Consider: Over 2 million infections a year develop in patient-care institutions( hospitals), resulting in sixty to eighty thousand deaths. An estimated 2.5 million operations a year are performed without real medical need, resulting in some twelve thousand needless deaths under the surgeon’ s knife. 12
Hospitals can be dangerous places: Nearly everybody has a friends or relatives who went in for“ tests” and came out much sicker than when they went in. Trying to cure our ills, we also take some $ 19 billion worth of drugs each year— an expensive river of chemicals coursing through our national veins. Many of these drugs are dangerous, and many are not even effective in curing the condition for which they were prescribed. In one study, over six hundred commonly prescribed drugs in use for more than twenty years have been found to be ineffective— never proven effective by properly controlled studies. Ineffective drugs are invariably harmful, as there are no benefits to outweigh the inevitable side effects.