beyondbparis

The Mainstreaming of Natural Therapies

Posted on November 16, 2006December 6, 2019 by beyondbparis

One medicine for all is historically a very recent development of the 20th Century. In the United States in the 1800’s, there were many different types or “schools” of medicine, including homeopaths, herbalists and many others, all of whom incorporated local folk remedies in their repertoire. Homeopathy became very popular during the 19th century, and claimed many adherents. In those days, medicine was practiced by all types of people, including many women, black, working class, and poorer people, so that all communities were served. There were sixteen women’s medical schools by and ten black medical colleges by 1900. The family doctor also knew folk remedies and herbal medicines, and had learned much from personal experience.

In 1917, Abraham Flexner came out with the “Flexner Report” which called for the standardization of medical education and practice, proposing that it should be built around laboratory science and clinical experience. In addition, it proposed standards of professional behavior, and the exclusion of women, black, and the poor from practice. Homeopathic doctors and herbalists were frozen out of the mainstream.

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Path to Healing

Posted on January 31, 2006December 6, 2019 by beyondbparis

The first time I tried it I was about eight years old. My father had had a heart attack after World War II had ended and I was about six. We were living in Holland. In those days, people with heart disease were put in bed rest for months on end. My father used to get angina pains in his chest, and besides a nitroglycerine pill, he used the services of a woman to do laying-on of hands on him and take the pain away. It seemed to give him relief.

A couple of years later, because of all kinds of complicated circumstances, we emigrated to Argentina. There was no woman there to lay her hands on my Dad when he had chest pains. One day he was really suffering, and I felt really bad for him, so I decided to try. I put my hands on his chest and concentrated, wishing the pain away. Soon enough I began to feel a nasty pain creeping up my arms. “Ah,“ I thought, “so this is what it feels like.“ When it got to my elbows I did what I had seen the woman in Holland do — I shook my hands to get it out, and lo and behold, the pain left me. My father said he felt better.

After that, I decided to use this new skill with great care, only when needed. I used it for my father, and occasionally for my brother when he had a headache. But then, when I was nineteen, my father died in my arms, and I decided that I wasn’t very good at this healing business, so I quit using it.

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Judge Not Your Neighbors By Their Diet

Posted on September 12, 2005December 7, 2019 by beyondbparis

Pretty much all of us who get into “healthy eating” do it, at least for a while. It’s an inevitable part of the process. We do judge others by what they eat, and harshly most of the time. Like when we are in line at the supermarket with our paper goods and light bulbs, and look at what’s in the baskets of the other customers — “Aw, gawd, how can they EAT that junk! And their poor children . . . !”

Perhaps the reason we are so critical is because we judge ourselves unkindly. We have judged ourselves not good enough and in need of an overhaul, and the diet will set us right. I believe that if it were not so, we couldn’t stick to the effort it takes to change our diet, our lifestyle, to make a political statement through diet, or even to eat for “spiritual development.”

Nevertheless, our assessment may be correct, and the tool as well. Our blood sugar may be erratic, our cholesterol may be too high, or we know we need more fiber in our meals. A more appropriate way of eating may be extremely helpful. But believe me, from one who’s been there, there are sequelae to a dietary commitment, a wake of consequences that may last for years.

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Tap Water or Bottled? The Fluoride Issue

Posted on March 26, 2005December 7, 2019 by beyondbparis

The New York Times published what seemed to me a somewhat cranky Op-Ed piece on August 1, 2005, called “Bad to the Last Drop,” by Tom Standage. Mr. Standage, who is the technology editor of The Economist, conducted a blind taste test of ten bottled and tap waters with his friends. The result? They couldn’t tell which was tap and which was bottled, so their conclusion was that “people cannot tell the difference between tap water and bottled water,” therefore, they are wasting their money when they buy the latter.

This was a very poor test, in my view. I remember when I lived in Argentina, as a youngster, and commuted between two cities, Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata. I spent my teenage years in the latter, which is a seaside resort, and the tap water seemed just fine. Then I went to Buenos Aires for college, and the tap water there was vile! After a while I got used to it, and it seemed normal. Then I would return to my home town, and the tap water there was vile in turn! Until I got used to it, and then it became normal. As I moved twice a year — college, recess, summer, etc. — my relationship with the waters swung widely, and every time the taste took getting used to.

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New Concepts in Diet II: The Old Traditions

Posted on July 22, 2004December 7, 2019 by beyondbparis

I have been teaching for more than thirty years that we should eat according to the tradition of our ancestors, in addition to other concepts. Much of my work was based on a book I read in 1967 called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,by Weston Price, a dentist. Dr. Price traveled the world over in the early ‘30’s, studying the diets of eleven different population groups and the condition of their teeth. He found universally that those peoples who lived on their native diets had fine teeth, well-developed dental arches, and easy childbirth; those who had adopted the refined food of Western civilization (sugar, white flour, canned vegetables, jams and pastries) found themselves with a steep rise in dental problems, difficulty with childbirth, and crowded teeth and malformed jaws in the children of mothers who ate this way. The Price-Pottenger Foundation has kept this important work in print all these years.

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Food and the Mind

Posted on February 4, 2004December 7, 2019 by beyondbparis

The hold on the mind is so tenuous. I’m always amazed to see how well people communicate, make decisions, implement plans, and generally do things, considering that it all depends on a fleeting neurotransmitter, a capillary that remains open, a couple of neurons that speak to each other. The tenuous hold can wobble with a simple fever, not even so high — 101′ or so — which disturbs the sleep and confuses the brain, giving rise to all manner of babblings and strange irrelevant thoughts. The mind wobbles with the lack of food, the absence of sufficient nutrients, proteins, carbohydrates; it shakes with stimulants and drugs, with familiar foods, with an overdose of sugar, an excess of caffeine, a chocolate pig-out. And what of the well-intentioned drugs of our medical system? So many strange substances go into our bodies, float in our bloodstream, come calling at the blood-brain barrier asking to be let in. When they are, does their presence disturb the finely calibrated pathways of neurons and neurotransmitters? Do the substances we inject into our children find a way into their brains, there to cause havoc and knock over relay stations or damage those pathways forever?

Mind and body are not two. Mind-troubles do relate to body matters. Let us be clear about that. How do they relate? For the longest time the relationship was only intuited, accepted by the “wholistic” thinker as obvious, but without the so-called “hard science” (visible particles that can be seen and classified by more than one person) to support it. Then in the 70’s and 80’s the particles that make sense to scientists — neurotransmitters — were discovered, and mind-brain studies took off like a rocket.

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