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		      RECLAIMING OUR HEALTH

                    A New Book by John Robbins

  Reclaiming Our Health: Exploding the Medical Myth and Embracing the
Source of True Healing is John Robbins' latest book. As author Riane
Eisler explains in the introduction, "Reclaiming Our Health is not only
an extremely timely, urgently needed book; it is a landmark book that,
like John Robbins' earlier Diet for a New America, helps us look at
ourselves and our world with fresh eyes." With great pleasure, we offer
you this excerpt from Chapter One of Reclaiming Our Health.

  Once upon a time there was a large and rich country where people kept
falling over a steep cliff. They'd fall to the bottom and be injured,
sometimes quite seriously, and many of them died. The nation's medical
establishment responded to the situation by positioning, at the base of
the cliff, the most sophisticated and expensive ambulance fleet ever
developed, which would immediately rush those who had fallen to modern
hospitals that were equipped with the latest technological wizardry. No
expense was too great, they said, when people's health was at stake.

  Now it happened that it occurred to certain people that another
possibility would be to erect a fence at the top of the cliff. When they
voiced the idea, however, they found themselves ignored. The ambulance
drivers were not particularly keen on the idea, nor were the people who
manufactured the ambulances, nor those who made their living and enjoyed
prestige in the hospital industry. The medical authorities explained
patiently that the problem was far more complex than people realized,
that while building a fence might seem like an interesting idea it was
actually far from practical, and that health was too important to be left
in the hands of people who were not experts. Leave it to us, they said,
for with enough money we will soon be able to genetically engineer people
who do not bruise or become injured from such falls.

  So no fences were built, and as time passed this nation found itself
spending an ever increasing amount of its financial resources on
ambulances, hospitals, and high-tech medical equipment. In fact, it came
to spend far more money on medical services than any nation had ever done
in the history of the world. Money that could have gone to community
services, decent housing, education, and good food was not available to
the people, for it was being spent on ambulances and hospitals. As the
costs of treating people kept rising, growing numbers of people could not
afford medical care. There were increasing numbers of homeless, and ever
more hungry people and families torn apart by the stress. As a result of
these and similar misallocations of national energy and resources,
violence, gangs, and inner city riots would well up as outlets for the
frustration and despair people felt.

  When a few families who had lost loved ones tried to erect warning
signs at the top of the cliff, they were arrested for trespassing. When
some of the more enlightened physicians began to say that the medical
authorities should publicly warn people that falling off the cliff was
dangerous, representatives from powerful industries denounced them as
"health police." A fierce battle ensued, and finally, after many
compromises, the medical establishment did issue warnings. Anyone, they
said, who had already broken both arms and both legs in previous falls
should exercise utmost caution when falling.

  Of course, this is just a fable.


  Awakening From The Medical Myth

  Like most people in our society, I grew up believing in the medical
myth. I grew up believing that health comes from the doctor, the drug
store, and the hospital.

  I never suspected that illness might be a messenger, or that our
experience of our bodies, whether well or ill, could provide us with
self-understanding. I did not know that I could create a lifestyle that
would support the radiant health of my body, mind, and spirit. I did not
understand that the choices I made and the way I lived could make a
tremendous difference to the quality of life I experienced. I never
imagined that the source of true healing lay within each of us.

  But over the years I have come to realize that while doctors and
medical technology have an important role to play in health care, they do
not hold the ultimate secrets to health. Taken together, factors such as
the food we eat, whether and how we exercise, the way we give voice to
our feelings, the attitudes we hold, and the quality of the environment
in which we live are far more important to the quality of health we
experience than even the most sophisticated medical technologies. It has
been liberating to see that health is less a matter of medical technology
than of learning to live in vibrant harmony with ourselves, with the
natural world, and with one another.

  In our society, the medical myth has led to an emphasis on intervention
instead of prevention that has generated a crisis in health care of epic
proportions. The current level of dissatisfaction and frustration with
the U.S. medical system is enormous. Corporate healthcare expenditures
now exceed corporate profits. Doctors and patients alike feel
depersonalized and used. Year after year, the difference between our
system and that of other nations becomes more embarrassing and
disturbing. We spend far more money for health care than any other
country in the world, and yet we are the only nation in the
industrialized world that does not guarantee minimum health care to every
single citizen. Increasing numbers of Americans—42 million at last
count—have no health coverage. We lead the world in malpractice suits,
but continue to fall further behind in infant mortality rates, life
expectancy, and the other indicators used to measure the health of a
people.

  In New York City, 10.8 infants out of 1,000 die before their first
birthday, while in Shanghai, China, the rate is only 9.9. Life expectancy
at birth in Shanghai is now 75.5 years, compared to a life expectancy in
New York City of 73 years for whites and 70 years for people of color.
Shanghai is an extremely overcrowded and polluted Third World city in a
country with a per capita income of only $350. Shanghai spends just $38
per person annually on medical care, compared to New York City's $3,000,
yet generates a better health record because it channels what funds it
has toward prevention and basic care, because its elders are respected
and revered, and because only very recently has its people begun to fall
prey to the high-fat meat-based American diet.

  Our medical establishment's fixation on drugs, surgery, and other
high-tech interventions at the expense of low-cost preventive approaches
is perhaps most evident in its failure to fully appreciate the important
role of nutrition in health. A board member of the Ohio Dietetic
Association recently said, "A hospital is one of the few places in the
U.S. where a person can starve to death unnoticed." The average U.S.
physician, in four years of medical school, gets only two hours of course
work in nutrition. Only 25 percent of the accredited medical schools in
the country have a single required course in nutrition. Meanwhile,
McDonald's is opening up franchises in hospitals!

  A Healing Crisis

  We all know that the American medical system is in the throes of a
horrendous crisis, and many of us feel overwhelmed and desperate in the
face of it all. The question I seek to answer is whether it might be
possible for this chaos, upheaval, and dysfunction to serve a healing
purpose. Could the very intensity of our medical crisis somehow represent
a potential turning point, an unprecedented opportunity for fundamental
personal and social change? Is it possible that the breakdown of our
medical system could lead to a greater healing, both in our society and
in many of our lives?

  Increasing numbers of us are seeing that we cannot remain passive
bystanders to our own health, and then expect the medical system to
rescue us. We're seeing how false and destructive is the belief that the
more money we spend and the more technology we have, the healthier we
will be. We're seeing how alienating and harmful it can be to think that
experts always know more than we do about our bodies and our lives.

  The current medical crisis is serving to challenge the assumptions many
of us have held, and in the process leading us to become aware of more
satisfying and fulfilling ways to live. We're seeing that there may not
be a technological or pharmaceutical answer to all our ills, and that
consuming drugs that have been prescribed by a physician may not always
be the best way to alleviate our difficulties. We're seeing that if we
don't want to be dependent on a system that is increasingly expensive and
dehumanizing, we need to find other approaches on which we can reliably
depend. Increasingly, we are utilizing alternative forms of medicine that
rely on the natural healing wisdom our bodies possess, and selecting
foods and making other personal choices based on what we believe will
produce the healthiest outcomes.

  By disrupting our blind faith in the medical system, the current crisis
is throwing us back on ourselves, and compelling us to ask such questions
as: What can I do to optimize my health and healing? How must I live in
order to attain and preserve well-being? For which conditions is orthodox
medicine of value, and for which conditions are alternative approaches
more appropriate? How can I become less dependent on an impersonal
system, and more connected to and trusting of the sources of true healing
within me?

  Many of us are turning our attention toward what we can do for
ourselves on an ongoing basis, building and nurturing our health, rather
than ignoring our bodies' needs and then automatically taking ourselves
to the doctor to be fixed when illness strikes. We are learning that our
health is intimately interwoven with our mental outlook, emotional tone,
and spiritual well-being, and coming to understand that taking
responsibility for our health means more than simply lowering our
cholesterol or blood pressure. It means learning to tap the powerful
regenerative forces that dwell within our own beings. It means opening
our lives to the joy of awakening and the gift of peace.

  From Disease Care to Health Care

  I sometimes think we don't really have a "health-care" system; we have
a "disease-care" system. For our medical establishment does not teach us
how to live so that we can achieve the maximum health and highest quality
of life of which we are capable. Instead, it teaches us to manipulate
ourselves from the outside, a process that has left many of us numb to
the signals our bodies constantly send.

  Many of us do not really know how to take care of ourselves, nor what
choices we can make to keep ourselves well. When I was growing up, I
believed that eating a balanced diet meant enjoying a wide variety of the
31 flavors my family's business made available to the world. As far as I
was concerned, the basic four food groups were Chocolate, Vanilla,
Strawberry, and Jamoca Almond Fudge. I had no idea that the standard
American diet, based as it is on high-fat meat and dairy products, and
deriving nearly 40 percent of its calories from sugar, creates problems
that even the most expensive medical technology can't repair.

  Because our dominant medical system has focused on intervention instead
of prevention, growing numbers of people are beset by a host of physical
problems and difficulties. Meanwhile, there are massive industries
profiting enormously from our over-reliance on drugs, and from our
following unhealthy lifestyles that lead to an ever increasing demand for
their services and products.

  Although there is much in modern medicine that is of great value, we
need to pick and choose very carefully from among its offerings. Many of
its prescriptions and practices, while carrying numerous troubling side
effects, merely suppress symptoms, sometimes even causing the disease
process to take new and more virulent forms. Some of these treatments are
no more truly healing than turning off a fire alarm without attending to
the fire.

  When we are taught to repress symptoms with no attempt to understand
the needs they represent, our experience of ourselves becomes distant. We
sense our bodies not as sources of self-awareness and guides to our
healing needs, but as enigmas that must be analyzed and explained to us
by experts. We easily become bewildered and lose trust in ourselves. If
we become ill, we slip all too often into passivity and helplessness,
believing ourselves dependent on the doctor to make us well, acting like
bystanders to our own healing process, disconnected from the incredible
creative powers that always lie within us.

  Some people wonder how I can presume to write with authority about
these subjects, when I am not a doctor. Many of us have been taught that
doctors, by virtue of their medical training, constitute a special class
of human being, almost a priesthood. The truth is that if I had been
trained as they have been, and if I were subject to the same financial
pressures they are, I might be preoccupied with technology and drugs,
oblivious to their drawbacks and risks, and dismissive of alternative
approaches, just as many physicians today are. If I had spent six or
eight years of my life being trained to practice orthodox medicine, and
had sacrificed greatly in order to do this, as most of our doctors have,
I would hardly be in a position to consider the subject without personal
bias. It is precisely because I am not a doctor that I can more easily
stand outside the fray, and hopefully bring a measure of objectivity to
the discussion.

  We struggle today, as a culture, to get over the idea that M.D. stands
for "Medical Deity." It wouldn't hurt us to remember that in Israel in
1973, doctors went on strike for a month, and the death rate dropped 50
percent. There had not been a month with so few deaths since the previous
doctors' strike, 20 years before. A few years later, in Bogota, Columbia,
a two-month-long physician strike resulted in a 35 percent drop in the
death rate. And when Los Angeles county doctors went on a work slowdown
to protest soaring malpractice insurance premiums, the death rate dropped
18 percent. But when the slowdown ended, and the medical industry got
back in gear, the death rate jumped right back up to where it had been
before.

  There Are Alternatives

  I once believed that the medical establishment was unbiased and
open-minded in its search for healing. I thought that the only people who
would fall into disfavor with organized medicine would be charlatans and
quacks who posed a danger to the public. But I have come, none too
happily, to see otherwise. In fact, one of the reasons that so many other
nations have better health outcomes while spending far less money than we
do is that they are far more open to what we call preventive or
alternative medicine. In no other nation are legitimate holistic
alternatives to the pharmaceutical orientation marginalized and
discredited the way they are in the United States.

  Unlike much of orthodox medicine, alternative approaches to healing
typically honor the wisdom and capability of the human body. Their goal
is often to support and strengthen the powerful healing forces already at
work within us. There are, of course, alternative methods that have no
merit, and some that make fraudulent claims. But there are others that
have been of great value to countless numbers of people. The sadness is
that very few have been given the opportunity to be tested or appraised
impartially. It is hard to overestimate the human suffering that
continues to occur because these approaches are being condemned without a
fair trial. An integration of orthodox and alternative medicine, a
partnership approach to healing, would allow patients access to the best
ideas and practices available, regardless of whose economic interest is
served in the process.

  When holistic and preventive methods of healthcare are dismissed as
quackery without being given fair consideration, people are not only
deprived of the health benefits these approaches can bring, but of the
values and the relationship to life that they represent. To allow
acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, midwifery, homeopathy, herbs,
massage therapy, and many of the other valid alternative methods fully
into the medical picture would not only make medicine more effective, it
would also incorporate a more compassionate perspective into medicine,
for these approaches have in common that they nurture the inherent
healing forces and potentials of the body, something orthodox medicine
often neglects to do.

  The medical myth casts an intimidating shadow. Many of us continue to
believe that when we fall ill, there is nothing we can do but turn for
deliverance to orthodox medical authorities. We expect our doctors to
know what is best for us, and assume that if natural approaches and
remedies worked, our doctors would tell us so. But the unfortunate truth
is that American physicians have been trained in a system that has been
closed historically to natural and alternative approaches, and is only
now barely beginning to open.

  This is why the American Medical Association (AMA) continues to attack
acupuncture, biofeedback, homeopathy, and naturopathy as "unproven,
disproven, controversial, fraudulent, and/or otherwise questionable."
This is why the AMA Journal hasn't written anything positive about
acupuncture since Nixon went to China. And why the American Cancer
Society continues to denounce unconventional approaches to cancer that
show great healing promise and that have never been properly tested or
impartially evaluated, even while chemotherapy is useful in only a very
small percentage of cancers and is often horrendously toxic. Many people
today who use alternative treatments do so without telling their medical
doctors, for fear of being ridiculed. A prominent spokesman for the AMA
point of view who was evidently not terribly impressed with the value of
alternative medicine recently took it upon himself to announce: "Freedom
of choice in health care is a euphemism for freedom to defraud. What they
want is the freedom to lie."

  An Entry Point For Transformation

  I have been asked what has motivated me to take on the medical
establishment, to challenge its biases, and to expose its abuses of
power. My answer is that I see how much needless harm is being done, and
how much better things could be. I see how much healthier and happier
people can be when they are educated and able to act wisely and make
their own choices regarding their bodies. Freedom of choice is essential
to the American way of life, and I believe that people ought to have a
right to do with their bodies what they want to do, as long as they
aren't hurting anyone else. There are many conditions that can best be
treated by standard medicine, including trauma, medical and surgical
emergencies, bacterial infections, and certain mechanical difficulties.
But there are many other conditions, including most forms of cancer,
viral infections, allergic and autoimmune disorders, and most chronic
degenerative diseases, that are more effectively handled with alternative
approaches. To my eyes, the monopolization of health care by the
medical-pharmaceutical-complex not only violates our rights to health
freedom. It drains us of our potential for wholeness and healing by
slighting the power of the human body to restore itself, and by rejecting
the value of natural medicine.

  I believe it is possible that the current medical crisis, as dire as it
is, can be an entry point for transformation. The situation holds vast
opportunity as well as danger. The movement to reclaim our bodies and our
lives may in fact represent the most powerful grassroots movement that
has yet emerged to challenge the underlying paradigm of our society, the
basic philosophical assumptions that have us marching, in the name of
progress and control, toward ecological disaster and social chaos.

  I believe it possible that the current medical crisis can yet become a
healing crisis, one that could usher in greatly needed change.
Alternative therapies that help us contact the regenerative powers that
lie within us, that help us take care of ourselves and prevent disease,
and that give us greater control over our lives have a major role to play
in the future of health care, and in the healing of our society.

  Physicians in our society are granted special status, and given
tremendous authority. They have in their arsenal enormously potent drugs
and procedures, and they deal with people in their times of greatest
vulnerability. They are the ones in whose hands we have placed our trust
and our lives, and with that trust comes a responsibility to put their
own self-interest aside in order to serve those in their care. Though
there are many fine physicians, the medical system as it exists today
frequently does not support them in fulfilling this sacred trust.

  I write to show a way out of this predicament, to bring compassion back
into medicine. I write to help all of us, male and female, doctors and
patients, take authority over our lives into our own hands, and to take
back our power from institutions, groups, and individuals who have lost
sight of their mandate to serve. I write to help all of us find within
ourselves, through the natural transitions, cycles and rhythms that are
ours to experience, something to be honored and kept sacred. My goal is
to help heal how we relate to our bodies, to doctors and to health, and
to help us discover sources of true healing in the wisdom of our bodies.