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Holistic appreciation and treatment of the physical systems of the body

Holistic appreciation, care and treatment of physical, mental, emotional, psychological, psychic and spiritual health

Holistic appreciation, study and application of various modalities of health care and of medicine

Holistic appreciation of synergies among various roles of healers and care-givers in an effort centered on empowered patients.

  1. Total Human Development and Harmony Through Synergism

  2. Holistic Health Care and Medicine

  3. Deep Ecology and Harmony with Nature 

  4. Sense of History and Sense of Mission

  5. Civics and Democratic Governance

  6. Culture as Community Creativity

  7. Light-Seeking and Light-Sharing Education

  8. Gender Sensitivity, Equality & Harmony

  9. Reconstructive/Restor-ative Justice

10. Associative Economics, Social Capital and Sustainable Development

11. Synergetic Leadership and Organizations

12. Appropriate/Adaptive Technology

13. Mutual Enrichment of Families and Friendships

14. Human Dignity and Human Harmony: Human Rights and Peace

15. Aesthetics Without Boundaries: 'Art from the Heart'   

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Modern American Medicine
as ‘False God’ and ‘Religion’*

By Robert S. Mendelsohn

Associate Professor, Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine, University of Illinois; nationally syndicated columnist, “The People’s Doctor”; Medical Director, American International Hospital, Zion, Illinois; former National Director, Medical Consultation Service; former Chairman, Medical Licensure Committee, State of Illinois.

This is excerpted from the Foreword Dr. Mendelsohn wrote for the book Natural Healing Through Macrobiotics by Michio Kushi, Japan Publications, Inc., Tokyo and New York, 1979 (ISBN 0-87040-457-1, copy from the Cita S. Reyes Collection) Note: The article uses the word “specialty” to refer to a specialization.

THE PAST FEW DECADES have witnessed a widespread and justifiable decline of public confidence in conventional American medicine. Indeed, much of what is called “morern medicine” is now suspect of not existing at all. If one scrutinizes the six major specialties, it becomes difficult to identify, once the camouflage is removed, how much residual reality is left.

Pediatrics, my own specialty, had no more that a few thousand practitioners the first four decades of this century, and grew hardly at all until” Rosie the Riverters” went to work in the armament factories in World War II, providing a shot-in-the-arm to the infant formula industry. Since them, pediatricians have increased at least tenfold and infant formula sales many times that number. Without pediatric sanction, there is no way that the milk of cows and the juice of soybeans could have replaced the milk of human mothers so quickly and completely. In a major midwestern state university serving mostly the poor, the incidence of breast feeding mothers dropped from 99% to 1% in a ten-year period. And why not, when pediatricians and their fellow travelers, nurses and social workers, handed out free commercial formula to every mother who delivered a baby. This “gift” was accompanied by the sweet lies of the physician, seducing women already pushed to work either through economic necessity or the propaganda of “fulfillment.” The false assurance of these specialties lulled at least two generations of mothers into a dream world of security, enabling them to unthinkingly, but ever so trustingly, expose their tender infants to the nightmare of diseases practically never found in breast-fed babies (acrodermatitis enteropathica, hypocalcemic tetani, neonatal hypothyroidism, E. coli meningitis, , necrotizing entercolitis, and sudden infant death), and to insure that these infants would in later years manifest a high incidence of gastroenteritis, pneumonia, eczema, hay fever, asthma, obesity, hypertension and arterioseclerosis.

Of course, pediatricians operated with the purest of motives, but they can not claim ignorance as an excuse. They knew the truth, since scientific studies, almost without exception , repeatedly showed the higher rates of death and illness associated with formula feedings. Then, why did they do it? Why did they tell mothers – and fathers – in honeyed words that the formulas were an acceptable substitute for human milk? Why did they lead mothers down the primrose path leading to such a macabre end?

The reasons are probably multiple, including greed (pediatricians and pediatrics probably could not exist without the formula manufacturers), stupidity (physicians as a group throughout history have not been noted for independence of intellect), ignorance (the multiplicity of medical journals is guaranteed to destroy communications and physicians don’t stoop to reading newspapers and magazines and misguided behavior (physicians always claim the best of intentions, while everyone knows what the road to hell is paved with.

But the reasons become relatively unimportant to those who are damaged.
The recipe for losing a pediatric practice is simple: “Tell mothers the truth.” Tell them bottle feeding threatens their baby’s life and health. This will make the bottle-feeding mothers feel guilty (a cardinal sin in pediatrics) and they will accordingly switch doctors, leaving the truthful pediatrician with only breast-fed babes who hardly ever become ill. End of practice!

I have solved this dilemma by simply (my critics use the word “simplistically”) rejecting as a patient any mother who elects to breast-feed. Other than bilateral mastectomy, there are counterindications of breast-feeding; and, given proper support, no mother is unable to breast-feed. Mothers-to-be who prefer bottles are free of course to use any physician who believes formula feeding is compatible with good mothering. I continue to select an elite group of patients who share my own ethics and philosophy on both. Breast-feeding, mothering and large families, andwhose views on other critical issues are therefore predictably congruent with mine. Besides, members of this “subculture” (or if you prefer, “super-culture”) hardly ever get sick, thus making my own life vastly easier.

So, if pediatrics loses bottle feeding -- and all the infections, allergies, illnesses and mortality associated with it – the specialty largely disappears.

Other Specialties on Decline

The same holds for obstetrics, another specialty now in its declining years. Threatened by extinction by the falling birth rate, paradoxically promoted by “planned parenthood,” activities of the OB-GYN profession itself, it survives today through abortions instead of births, and through lucrative Caesarian sections instead of vaginal deliveries.

Yet, the threat of rising numbers of home births and the increasing rejection of radical attitudes toward abortion forecast the disappearance of the overwhelming number of OB-GYN specialists. As healthy mothers reject stirrups, shaving, episiotomies, , analgesics, routine IV fluids, monitoring, elective inductions, senseless sections, and the rest of OB technology, the result will be in the diminution in the now increasing numbers of damaged and deformed infants.

Furthermore, without the irrational techniques of modern obstetrics, young obstetricians will not be able to create the clientele whose pathology enables these specialists to later emerge as mature gynecologists. Thus, Obstetrics and Gynecology joins Pediatrics as specialties that largely do not exist.

Internists would have problems even now paying the office rent without pushing “checkups,” annually or more often, routinely, unthinkingly, and automatically. But the people are rapidly wising up and, as the uselessness and dangers of what has been aptly termed “the annual American fiasco” become known, Internal Medicine faces the loss of its chief source of revenue. Furthermore. Increasing public skepticism of conventional medical approaches to cancer and cardiovascular disease, make the status of the Internist even precarious. Having already abandoned surgery and obstetrics, the Internist joins the Pediatrician and Obstetrician-Gynecologist as another member in the category of vanishing breeds.

The surgeon may be last to go because of popular fascination, historically and now, with the drama of “going under the knife.” But the four most common operations – circumcision, vasectomy, hysterectomy and tonsillectomy – seldom have scientific justification. These and other major surgical breadwinners are exposed in practically each new issue of every medical journal as not merely useless, but downright dangerous. A skeptical public now has a “show me” attitude towards cancer surgery, and the coronary bypass will soon join previous heart operations in the surgical historical museums. Surgeons are the fourth group of specialists which, like the others, will soon have to find honest work.

Psychiatry is perhaps the easiest specialty to fold its tent, because there is great doubt whether it ever in fact did exist. But regardless of its questionable origins, Thomas Szasz, Jay Ziskind, Martin Gross and a variety of others have provided the documentation that some (usually those have been disabled by so-called “higher education,” in reality ,erely “longer education”) require to expose its non-existence, a conclusion that the less-educated citizens reached long ago by use of common sense. There are four unproven areas in psychiatry: psycho-surgery, electro-shock, tranquilizers and counseling. Otherwise, it’s a great specialty.

The sixth and final major specialty that does not exist is that of preventive medicine. This once noble endeavor, dedicated to preventing people from ever becoming patients by promoting pure water and food supplies and adequate sewage disposal has undergone a strange transformation. A reversal has taken place. The beautiful butterfly has metamorphosed into a caterpillar. The public health officer of decades ago would not recognize his modern counterpart, hawking his wares, including risky immunizations for the prevention of mild diseases (sometimes, as in the case of swine flu vaccine, preventing no disease at all, but causing hundreds of cases of paralysis and death) and unproven screening technology that recruits that recruits armies of new patients for doctors’ offices.

Yet, the emphasis on prevention has yielded precious little in the way of results. Self-examination of the breast was shown to be inadequate when thermography appeared; thermography was shown to be inadequate by X-ray mammography, which, unfortunately but predictably, caused cancers of its own. The Pap smear, with its expected incidence of false positives and false negatives, has not led to a decrease in either the incidence of cervical cancer or its death rate. But these medical toys have had one major effect, i.e., they have almost obscured concern with the real preventable causes of these female cancers (few pregnancies, failure to breast feed, The Pill, postmenopausal hormones).

Routine chest X-rays have lulled the public into the delusion that radiation can be trusted, thus leading to new epidemics of leukemia, thyroid cancer and mongolism (attributed falsely to “tired eggs” of older women); while routine ammocentests, PKU testing, blood pressure measurements, phonocardiography, and other procedures with shorter or longer names are now all suspected of resulting in a negative benefit/risk ratio. Thus, Preventive Medicine joins Pediatrics, OB-GYN, Internal Medicine, Surgery and Psychiatry in the list of non-existent specialties.

Now, some may object, pointing out that a small minority of medical procedures are necessary and valuable. And I will quickly concede that perhaps 5% of the procedures in the Big Six Specialties has value, and therefore 5% of the specialists in these areas should be retained. After all, the problem with American medicine is that the extreme always becomes the mean. Penicillin, originally used for meningitis and severe pneumonia, becomes counter-productive when prescribed for the common cold. Cortisone, originally used for Addison’s disease, becomes nightmarish when prescribed for sunburn, and I see as much hope of reversing this trend as of any other historical efforts to put the genie back in the bottle.

While the 5% exceptions must be noted, it remains crucial to generalize (although doctors are taught, with good reason for their own protection, not to make generalizations) since only by generalizing can learning and wisdom be attained.

Modern Medicine as a Religion

And the generalization is that the golden age of American medicine is over. Indeed, the only way in which modern medicine can be understood is by regarding it as a religion – the religion of a secular society that has rejected its traditional value systems.

Modern medicine has at least ten of the essential components of a religion.

1. A belief system: modern medical science, which can no more validated than the proofs of other churches of the existence of God.

2. A priestly class, the M.D.’s.

3. Temples – the hospitals

4. Acolytes and vestal maidens – nurses, social workers, and para-professionals.

5. Vestments reflecting hierarchical status – the color and length of M.D.’s gowns signify their rank.

6. A rich princely class supporting the church – drug companies, insurance companies, and formula houses.

7. A confessional—the history must be given truthfully to the physician.

8. The Absolution—the reassuring pat on the back—“You’re fine, come back next year.”

9. Selling of indulgences—the outrageous fees, likely to bring down this modern church just as it did the medieval church.

10. Similarity of language—“I have confidence in my plumber, but I have faith in my doctor; the doctor-patient relationship is “sacred.”
Once medicine disregarded as no more than – and no less than – a religious system, it can then be treated as such, and compared with other religious healing systems. Unfortunately, the religion of modern medicine proves to be worship of a god who fails to answer, who is powerless and who, in fact, deceives. This, of course, is the definition of idolatry, and in this context all of modern medicine becomes understandable.

The false god of modern medicine even goes so far as to require, like his predecessor gods of heathen religions thousands of years ago, child sacrifices. The ancient Moloch of those idolatries demanded that parents, in order to insure successful crops, pass their children through physical fire. The modern Moloch similarly demands chemical fire (heat-sterilized formula) through their children. The purpose is similar – infant formula insures that mothers and fathers can both go to work to achieve sustenance and success. Scientific studies as well as historical evidence clearly prove the sacrifice of life and health resulting from infant formula compared to breast milk, and only the approval of the physician-priest enables mothers and fathers to equate cows’ milk to human milk. Indeed, were physicians to behave according to the standards of science and honesty, formula feeding a baby would doubtless be considered child abuse.

A large part of the reason of the failure of the religion of modern medicine lies in the unwillingness to seriously address itself to nutritional concerns. (Perhaps this is due in part to the Christian tradition, stated by Matthew and others, that what comes out of the mouth is more important than what goes in.) In any case, as the religion of modern medicine loses its power and influence, its former adherents must seek other, more valid, religious systems. Some will turn to the medical teachings of Christian Science and Jehova’s Witnesses. Jews will rediscover their traditional medical teachings emphasizing nutrition, from the Old Testament through Thalmudic and Maimondean medicine, and culminating in the contemporary medical ethical teachings of Jakobovits, Rosner, Feldman, Bleich, Soloveichik and others.

In this context, the universalist Macrobiotic approach to life demands close examination, particularly by Western physicians and patients who are almost totally ignorant not only of its content, but even of its very existence. (Michio Kushi’s Natural Healing Through Macrobiotics) provides the unparalleled opportunity for Western-trained physicians to discover the time-tested diagnostic and therapeutic approaches of a rich culture thus far closed to them.

Western physicians can be expected to react to macrobiotic medicine with the usual name-calling, and Kushi advocates by now are used to epithets such as “quacks, nuts, extremists, faddists, fakes, and enthusiasts.” But this automatic response doesn’t work anymore, since the medical advocates of “better living through chemistry” have lost their magical power over the people.

In these twilight years of death-oriented, run-away medical technology, the macrobiotic approach to disease and healing comes like a breath of fresh air. Of the hundreds of publications on health and disease that have passed over my desk for review in the past few decades, (Kushi’s) book provides the most important alternative to our rapidly failing system of western medicine.

Kushi’s latest volume is a must reading for every physician, and I will know that America’s medical schools have reached maturity when Natural Healing Through Macrobiotics becomes part of the standard curriculum.

Meanwhile, patients can’t afford to wait for their busy doctors to learn about this apparently new, but in reality centuries-old, system. People need practical and realistic help now.

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