Doctors and scientists do not seem to be helping humanity when it comes to helping people gain health. The best they can offer, it seems, is to suppress the symptoms of ill health. Part of the reason they have failed in their endless pursuits to find a “cure” has to do with the fact that they have not been taught how the human body really works. They think they know, and have manufactured complex explanations describing how they “think” the human body functions, but they have missed a vital piece of the puzzle. I hope to unveil in this article some insight that, once understood, will help those suffering understand why pills, surgeries, and protein – rich diets rarely ever allow someone to embrace vibrant health and energy.

I am a college professor, primarily teaching Human Anatomy and Physiology and Biochemistry. From a very young age, I was incredibly interested in how the human body works. My interest led me to medical school, taking advanced courses in Gross Human Anatomy, Human Physiology, Embryology, and even pathology. After leaving medical school, I decided to further my understanding of the human body by getting a Master’s degree in Biochemistry so that I could appreciate the workings of the human body even at the molecular level.

While doing my clinical rotations in medical school, I became a bit disillusioned with the efficacy modern medicine. It seemed to be enabling people to drudge along without suggesting that they change any of the behaviors that were contributing to their ill health. Pills and surgeries were the golden tickets, allowing people to forget about their annoying symptoms long enough to get back to the lifestyle which was the cause of their problem in the first place. These pills and surgeries were bypassing the alert system in the body that is in place so that we actually CHANGE the behaviors that are triggering the symptoms of feeling ill. Often, these people would be back again to get their fix, with their overall health declining as time goes by.

I knew there must be a better way to really help people re-gain lost health, so I began researching in libraries (this was before the internet). I came across a book by Dr. Joel Fuhrman MD called Fasting and eating for health. The concept of water fasting was new to me, but Dr. Fuhrman was actually HEALING people!! I wanted to learn more, so I called his office to let him know that I was a medical student interested in his method of helping his patients with water fasting and a healthy plant based diet. Soon, I was off to New Jersey to witness the power of water fasting first hand; and, decided to try it out for myself (I completed a 26-day water fast). What I saw was NOTHING like the disease-maintenance protocols I had become familiar with in the hospitals. One man was working with Dr. Fuhrman because his insurance company rejected to cover his fourth cardiac bypass surgery. He was desperate, and Dr. Fuhrman was able to help him dissolve the plaque in his coronary artery naturally, without surgery!!

How was this possible? And, more importantly, why wasn’t this information being taught in medical school?
To answer this question, it’s important to understand what “Medicine” is. Medicine is defined as “the science and practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine). Ok, so what is “disease”? Well, disease is “a particular abnormal condition, a disorder of a structure or function, that affects part or all of an organism” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease). So, to break it down, in medical school, future medical doctors are focused on diseases. Yes, they throw in “prevention of disease” for good measure; but, if you notice, the focus is NOT on “health”. So, the medical system that predominates on most of this planet, and the system that the majority of Americans are dependent on (since it is typically the ONLY system covered by insurance companies), primarily focuses on DISEASE.

No wonder ill patients treated by medical doctors never seemed to attain high levels of health. Medical doctors live in the world of “diseases”. They have invented many names for diseases; and, by law, they have been granted by the government to be the only entity that can treat these diseases with chemical drugs and surgical knifes. Any individual NOT licensed to practice medicine can go to jail if they claim that can heal someone with a specific kind of disease.

To me, why would anyone want to go to a person who specializes in diseases if they wish to attain HEALTH? This question began to weigh heavy on my mind while in medical school.

While interning with Dr. Fuhrman, I learned a lot about human nutrition and health (again, not even remotely close to the few clock hours I had taken during my medical education). Particularly, I became familiar with a healing system known as Natural Hygiene.

“The underlying basis of Natural Hygiene is that the body is self-cleansing, self-healing and self-maintaining. Natural Hygiene is based on the idea that all the healing power of the universe is within the human body; that nature is always correct and cannot be improved upon. We experience problems of health (i.e. excess weight, pain, stress, disease) only when we break the natural laws of life.”

• Harvey Diamond, Fit for Life, 1985

What I was witnessing in medical school was just the opposite. The body was NOT seen as self-healing. Medical doctors have only ONE focus: to suppress the symptoms that are associated with a disease. And, being the disease experts, every single symptom is covered (just check Web MD and enter any old symptom to see all of the fun diseases you may have!!).

So, in medical school, I was really being trained to memorize all of the symptoms associated with a wide array of diseases, and then which drugs to prescribe in order to suppress these symptoms. A disease is simply a collective of symptoms, and new drugs are added to the PDR (Physicians' Desk Reference) every year to subdue the body’s natural alert system.

With this in mind, and with some sage advice from Dr. Fuhrman letting me know that physicians that try to help patients REALLY heal without drugs and surgery are barely able to financially support themselves (his earnings mostly came from the books he wrote), I decided to leave medicine altogether. I did not lose my passion of helping the sick and injured, I just knew the disease-based medicine was NOT the answer.

So, what is the REAL cause of ill health? Why is it people become inflamed, feel pain, or lose the function of a bodily organ?? This will be the focus on my next article.