Although I am trained as a conventional (allopathic) physician, I have been interested in the impact of nutrition on human health ever since, as a teenager, my mother introduced me to the writings of Adelle Davis.
At that time, in the early 1960's, the medical profession sneered at the idea that people should take vitamins and nutritional supplements or even eat a high fiber diet. All you have to do is eat a balanced diet, they said. People like Adelle Davis were dismissed as quacks.
It's humbling how visionary she was and how slowly things have changed. A few examples will illustrate what I mean.Davis' popular books were first published in the 1950's. In them she reported on the work by the Shute brothers in Canada, who demonstrated the benefits of vitamin E on cardiac health. Only very recently has the medical establishment reluctantly accepted that vitamin E can be of benefit to people with heart disease.
Another example is the high-fiber diet and bowel regularity. Again, in the early sixties, it was still conventional medical wisdom that it didn't matter if it was once a day or once a week. People who advocated otherwise were either neurotics or quacks, according to the medical establishment.
A more recent example involves homocysteine. Kilmer McCully, M.D., discovered in the 1960's that an elevated homocysteine level is associated with coronary artery disease (hardening of the arteries) and may be even more important than elevated cholesterol as a risk factor for heart disease. He further discovered that the treatment was simplicity itself—adequate amounts of three B vitamins (folate, B6 and B12). For this gift to humanity he was ostracized and driven from his position at Harvard. Only in the last few years has his theory been taken seriously and vindicated by leading researchers. Unfortunately, some of them haven't given him proper credit, but have treated it as a brand new discovery. (Think of how many coronary artery bypass surgeries—and deaths—could have been avoided if they had taken him seriously from the beginning!)
With these examples in mind, I have attempted to gather together in this section some of the latest information on health and wellness from an alternative medicine perspective. I currently have pages that summarize current knowledge on Anti-Aging Medicine, Cholesterol Reduction, and Depression and Fatigue. Other topics will follow as I have time.
Obviously I don’t have time to review the entire field of medicine and to fill in some of the gaps I’ve included a page called Wellness Resources where I list other websites that contain information, arguments and products that, in my opinion, merit serious attention from the medical profession. Not everything you find on these links may be accurate or beneficial, but then again it may. If you are a medical professional, keep an open mind. If you are a patient looking for answers to your own health problems, please discuss what you find here with your own physician before putting it into practice. Everybody is unique, and what works for one person may not work, or even be dangerous, for another. As the old adage goes, "one man's meat is another man's poison."
On the page called Why Pharmanex?, I explain why we endorse the Pharmanex line of dietary supplements and introduce my personal Pharmanex website, where you can buy these quality supplements online.
I welcome your comments and suggestions on how we can expand and improve this site. You can find my phone number and email address at the top of this page.
