Never Be Sick Again (3 page)
⢠Pathway 1âNutrition You are what you eat. Learn how to select and prepare the types of foods that will enable your cells to function at their best.
⢠Pathway 2âToxin A toxin is a substance that interferes with normal cellular function, thereby causing malfunction, which is disease. Learn where toxins are found and how you can avoid them.
⢠Pathway 3âPsychological The body and mind are inseparably connected; they are one and the same thing. The way we react to life events and respond to our thoughts and emotions directly affect our cells.
⢠Pathway 4âPhysical Our cells and bodies need physical maintenance, like an automobile. Do you have enough exercise, rest, sunlight and fresh air?
⢠Pathway 5âGenetic Genes affect our cells, but not nearly as much as modern medicine would have us believe. Learn how to optimize your genetic potential and avoid genetic damage.
⢠Pathway 6âMedical Modern medicine kills and injures millions of people every year. Learn how medicine affects your cells, and make educated decisions about which treatments you need and which you do not.
All you need to know at any point in time is in which direction you are going along each of the pathwaysâtoward health or diseaseâand to make corrections. You cannot make good choices along only one or two of the pathways and expect to achieve optimal health; this approach limits many health plans and books, useful though they may be. Many approaches are on the right track, but they do not look at the whole picture. Making healthy choices with respect to all six pathways is what empowers the body to regulate and repair itself.
That said, each choice you make in a positive direction, toward health, on any pathway at any time will improve your life. Each step toward health puts you closer to your true potential and further away from the risk of disease or illness. Each contribution, no matter how small, is still significant.
“The next major advance in the health of the American
people will be determined by what the individual is willing to
do for himself.”
John Knowles
former president, The Rockefeller Foundation
N
ot too many years ago, no one would have been able to convince me that I would be writing a definitive book about human health and performance. I was no health expert; in fact, I gave little thought to the subject. I assumed I was healthy and that I could do little to improve upon it. Yet, here I am today, devoting my life to researching and improving health.
Concern for our health is something we all have in common. We all would like to live a high-quality, disease-free life, no matter how long that life may be. But most of us have no idea that a disease-free life is possible, so our priorities become out of whack, and we form habits that jeopardize our health. Then we ignore the early signs of ill health and, without knowing it, we lay the groundwork for disaster. That is exactly what I did.
At the height of my former career, I was president of an international management consulting firm specializing in international competitiveness, industrial quality and productivity. I was a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, the State Department, the United Nations and to the prime ministers of several foreign governments. Life had been good to me.
Then the early warning signs that things were changing came in 1983. I began to slow down, requiring more sleep and tiring more easily. I began to experience frequent allergic reactions, including runny nose, itchy eyes, sneezing, heart palpitations and skin rashes. I suffered muscle aches and joint pain. I felt as though I was losing my edge, losing some of the mental and physical capacity that had allowed me to operate at the highest levels of international business and government. Life was becoming less fun and more like a chore.
I brought these complaints to the attention of my physician, a man who the medical community rated as “one of the best.” He examined me, did many tests and pronounced me in “excellent health.” When I protested, saying I did not feel like I was in excellent health, he replied, “You are just getting older.” I protested again, saying that in my whole life I had never felt this way before. He continued, “Well, you have never been this old before.” I was forty-six years old.
I would later discover that physicians have no protocols or established procedures for measuring early decline in health. Instead they blame “getting older” for so many feelings of ill health, even at ages when human beings have the potential to be in their prime (remember, I was only forty-six when I began suffering from problems attributed to my age). Physicians consistently assume that the patient is “well” until his or her condition deteriorates into symptoms that the doctor recognizes as a diagnosable disease.
Over the next year and a half, my symptoms worsened. My fatigue became more pronounced; I required ever-increasing amounts of sleep, and even then I felt tired. The fatigue made it increasingly difficult to travel, as my job required. My allergic reactions were becoming more severe. I would experience sneezing fits so dramatic that I would have to rest after them. My heart palpitations were more frequent and pronounced. I would see colored rings around lights and my vision would blur.
I finally decided to seek the assistance of an allergy specialist. Little did I realize, as I entered the doctor's office that fateful morning, that it would be the last day of life as I had known it. The allergist administered a diagnostic test called an intradermal test, whereby an allergen is injected into the skin with a hypodermic needle. The procedure is much more provocative and sensitive than the typical scratch tests familiar to most people. Intradermal tests may identify allergies that might otherwise be missed. However, if someone is especially sensitive to an allergen, this type of test can provoke a serious reaction. My doctor neglected to tell me that the FDA regularly receives reports of injuries and deaths from these tests. My condition and the fact that I was experiencing significant allergic reactions at the time should have prompted this physician to be more cautious and anticipate that an intradermal test might provoke a serious reaction.
It did.
The reaction was catastrophic, causing my immune system to spin out of control. During the next week I slept almost constantly and appeared to have aged about ten years. I suffered fatigue and disability unlike anything I had ever experienced. Prior to the test, although I had some serious allergy problems, I was still able to function relatively normally; afterward, I was seriously ill and almost completely dysfunctional.
Years later, another physicianâone considerably better informedâgave me a meaningful description of what had happened to me. He described my state of compromised health as rather like standing on the edge of a precipice. My allergist did not recognize my vulnerability and the need to work initially with nutritional support and conservative treatments to back me away from that edge. The allergist's decision to administer a provocative test pushed me off the precipice and into an abyss of catastrophic health decline.
Ten months later, I was still in that abyss of illness and anxiety, with my health in a downward spiral. In the past, whenever I had been sick, I had always recovered in a matter of days or weeks. This time was different indeed. I experienced chronic fatigue, multiple chemical sensitivities and allergic reactions to almost everything. I also developed several autoimmune syndromes, including Sjogren's syndrome, Hashimoto's thyroiditis and lupus. In these syndromes, the immune system attacks the body's own tissues, causing a cascade of serious problems. In my case, my immune system was attacking my salivary glands, lachrymal glands, thyroid gland, kidneys and connective tissue. I had an extensive list of debilitating symptoms including dizziness, impaired memory, depression, heart palpitations, blurred vision, muscle and joint pain, diarrhea, bloating, nausea, numbness and even seizures. I was unable to perform any meaningful activity. My health was gone, and life, as I had known it, was over.
During those ten nightmarish months, I visited thirty-six medical doctors. I had so many different symptoms that I was referred to specialists for each one, including ophthalmologists, gastroenterologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, cardiologists, allergists, rheumatologists, psychiatrists, internists and immunologists. Being bounced from one specialist to another, sometimes seeing two or even three in a day, was very frustrating. I certainly heard plenty of second, third and fourth opinions, often conflicting, but none particularly helpful. My multitude of symptoms totally baffled those learned specialists. (How much easier it would have been had they known what I know now: that there is only one disease and that symptoms are not important.) They performed many expensive diagnostic tests, which served little purpose other than to give fancy names to my symptoms, such as neuropathy, colitis, arrhythmia, arthralgia, keratitis sicca, thyroiditis and others.
They were merely describing my symptoms with a technical name, the usual diagnosing, and then sending a bill. A few suggested that I was a hypochondriac, imagining ill health. Many physicians assume that if they do not understand what is wrong, the patient must be imagining his illness. At the time, I thought all of my doctors were baffled because my case was so complex. In the end, however, the answers proved to be simple. The answers had been there all along. One just needed to know where to look.
From Bad to Worse
As sick as I was after ten months of illness, things were about to become much worse. One of the last physicians I went to see made a decision that nearly killed me. He prescribed an antiparasitic drug, metronidazole, which turned out to be heptatoxic (poisonous to the liver). I suffered a severe reaction to the drug. In my weakened and chemically sensitive condition I should never have been given this drug, as I would later learn from the medical literature. Perhaps I should have known better, given my prior experiences with medical doctors, but trusting the doctor and knowing of no other options, I took the drug. Metronidazole is known to be stressful to the liver, and my liver was already under a lot of stress. I could not handle the additional toxic load. My liver failed, and I was at death's door.
As I lay in bed, deathly ill with chemical hepatitis, my weight dropped from an already trim 160 pounds (at 6-foot-2) to a positively skeletal 120. I was too weak even to lift my head. My vital signs were failing, and my physicians doubted that I would survive. Death appeared certain.
Had I continued to rely on conventional medicine, I would not be here today, and you would not be reading my story. As weak as I was, something inside of me was not ready to let goânot without a fight. But I did not know where to turn for help. As I look back, I am amazed at the chain of events that saved my life and allowed me to regain control of my health.
My brother, bless his heart, started the process. During my illness, he had flown across the country to be with me. He gave me a book that proved instrumental in saving my life: Norman Cousins's bestseller,
Anatomy of an Illness.
In 1964, Norman Cousins, a layman with no medical or scientific training, was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a connective tissue disease that deteriorates collagen (the “glue” that holds our cells together). Cousins's disease was literally causing his body to fall apart. His illness, like mine, was deemed by his physicians to be incurable and fatal. Unwilling to accept such a prognosis, Cousins sought whatever knowledge he could to help himself. He succeeded. Not only did he find ways to save his own life; he later became a professor of medicine at UCLA.
Cousins took action in four areas. First, like myself, Cousins recognized that he was being harmed by his medical treatment. He concluded that the drugs his physicians were prescribing were so toxic that they were accelerating his decline. He stopped taking the drugs. Second, he discovered the enormous power of the mind over the body. The excruciating pain he was experiencing was affected by his attitude toward the pain. By learning to change his attitude, he could reduce his pain. Third, he found laughter to be helpful; ten minutes of genuine, hearty laughter would cause his pain to go away for hours. He started watching funny movies, and when the effect would wear off, he would switch on the projector and laugh some more. The laughter had profound and beneficial effects on his body chemistry and contributed to his recovery. Fourth, he discovered the powerful anti-inflammatory properties of vitamin C. He decided to take twenty-five grams a day administered by intravenous drip. This action had a profoundly beneficial effect on his highly inflammatory condition. By avoiding toxic prescription drugs, changing his attitude, laughing and administering plenty of vitamin C, Cousins made a miraculous recovery.