home, drugged into complaisance and painlessness. Now let’ s backtrack and see what results a different approach could have produced. The underlying assumptions this time will be that symptoms are warning signals and that the body will heal itself under the direction of the immune system if we just get out of the way. When the stomachache hits the first time, the man skips the next meal, drinks some hot broth or peppermint tea, and waits till he feels fully recuperated before putting his stomach to work again. When the stomachache recurs, the man follows the same procedure; this time, however, he also takes inventory of his meals and tries to pinpoint which of the foods consumed caused his body to protest. If he thinks that it was probably the cheeseburger and ice cream, then he tries not eating them for a while to prevent further protest demonstrations. If he’ s right, and he gets a stomachache only whenever he has either of those foods, he conscientiously begins to avoid them. As he is not taking antacids, he also prevents headaches— or whatever other side effects those pills may produce. But whenever he does get a headache, instead of masking it with medication, he tries to determine its cause. Let’ s say he finds a correlation between eating fatty meats and the onset of headaches. Therefore, he avoids cheeseburgers, cheese, and cold cuts and finds himself headache-free most of the time. As he has no headaches and takes no aspirins, his stomach feels relaxed, and the likelihood of an ulcer is greatly diminished. Because he is on a low-fat diet, his chances of a heart attack are also reduced. Because he feels good, his sex life is satisfactory and his wife stays with him. It’ s more than likely that he will go through old age with a minimum of infirmities and deterioration. He lives happily until eventually he dies peacefully, in his sleep, well past three score and ten. In the first scenario, the stomachache was treated as if the body had committed an error by having it: The intent of the treatment was to eliminate the sensation. In the second case, the stomachache was treated as if it were information about conditions in the body: The information was that there was an error in the feeding pattern, and the treatment consisted in correcting that error. When we consider the stomachache itself an error, we get medicine very different from what we get when we consider it a warning signal and search for its cause. The first approach, that of modern Western society and medicine, isolates the symptom and divorces it from its human context. Such an approach has been in use only a relatively short time— two hundred years or so, since the Age of Reason and the scientific revolution. The core question asked by this mode of treatment is,“ How can we eliminate the disturbance?” The second approach, which places the symptom within a total mind-body context, has been and is prevalent in most traditional medical systems. The core question it asks is,“ What is the cause of the disturbance, and how can we alter the conditions so as to prevent further disturbances?” Depending on the social belief system, the answer can be bad food, bad thoughts, evil spirits, stress, poisons, and so on and so forth; and the treatments can be fasting, emetics, exorcism, rest, herbs, or any other traditional practices. In the modern Western belief system, physiological symptoms are isolated phenomena, essentially meaningless and random.“ It could have happened to anyone” is the consoling, guilt-absolving response. The sick one is a victim, not responsible for the state of his health. The alternate— and more traditional— approach, on the other hand, sees symptoms as expressions of the condition of the entire body, and thereby meaningful insofar as they carry indirect information. The message is that we’ ve made a mistake, somewhere, and that we’ re paying for it with this particular symptom; the other side of that guilt-inducing thought is that just as we did something wrong, we can undo it. The sick one is in charge of the situation; health professionals, of any persuasion, are only his helpers and co-workers. The second glaring error, I feel, in our assumptions about health and illness, is the notion that substances isolated from their natural context can promote healing. Many people believe that synthesized chemicals have the ability to sustain health. This makes no sense. Life can only be created by life; health only comes from an integration of our various levels of function— not from the intake of manufactured pills and potions. Drugs and medications do not heal the gaps in our health. They only interrupt the various natural processes that are often erroneously perceived as noxious, or“ sickness.” And they all have side effects, which at times are as bad as or worse than the original problem. It is my profound conviction that a great many of our more serious health problems today stem not only from bad food or pollution, but also from the chemical treatment of minor physiological adjustments. I also include here the extensive use of antibiotics and immunizations, both of which meddle with the immune system. Unfortunately, diseases involving malfunctions or over-reactions of the immune system are turning into a veritable epidemic. They include such“ common” ailments as allergies, asthma, and hay fever, as well as multiple sclerosis, lupus, Alzheimer’ s, ALS( Lou Gehrig’ s disease), AIDS, and cancer. As a large majority of our population has been subjected to both antibiotics and immunizations, it may be time to scrutinize that practice more closely. Until recently, a third major error in our approach to health and illness was the belief that food had very little, if anything, to do with the state of our health. The stomachache was seen as an erroneous reaction to proper food, instead of a normal reaction to improper food. Furthermore, the idea that an improper diet might have something to do with headaches, fevers, skin eruptions, liver ailments, or cancer was considered totally outlandish. Little by little, this belief is now being challenged and changed. The American Heart Association has