Can a change in diet, optimum nutrition, the power of love and compassion, simple massage and exercise do more for a person's health than all the sophisticated approaches? There is no easy answer, and perhaps there never will be: each human being is a very unique individual.
The debate around Aids has highlighted an important frontier of medicine that until now has not been clearly elucidated. This frontier surprisingly is not about more sophisticated technology, blood analysis, high powered surgery and better investigation and research but perhaps something much simpler. Can a change in diet, optimum nutrition, the power of love and compassion, simple massage and exercise do more for a person’s health that all the above sophisticated approaches.
There is no answer to this question but clearly the public is confused and choosing at the moment to use both approaches .Diet and exercises have become number one best sellers and the sale of nutritional supplements is expanding at a tremendous rate despite efforts by the scientific community to cast doubt on the efficacy of these products.
The public has also become a little wary of ‘scientific breakthroughs’, the latest cancer treatments, the war against cancer and many other promises of modern medicine which have not been met. The efforts of scientists to manipulate genes, move embryo’s from one uterus to another and all the other manipulations of eggs and sperms have all cast a cautious note around what scientists are up too.
On the other side the promise of getting better with diet, exercise and the use of certain foods appeals to the simple nature of most of us but is this a delusion that needs to be clearly sorted out .
As indicated there are no easy answers to this debate but perhaps easy answers will never be available. We are too complex and in fact all of life is too complex for any simple answer. Each human being is an individual. A very unique individual at that.
Different facial features are obvious, different finger prints are used to identify each person but even amongst so called ‘normals’ the range of normal blood potassium, sodium, cholesterol, hormones, neurotransmitters, and all the other chemicals in the body varies enormously. No two persons have the same biochemical profile. Sick people can have normal biochemical profiles and even look healthy. Healthy people may have abnormal blood chemistry suggesting a serious underlying disease that they may not be aware of. It is this individuality of each person that makes all research so difficult and why trying to compare one group with another creates results that are confusing and often ambiguous. So we have wonder drugs appearing and disappearing, surgical techniques that work in one country but not another, drugs that work in private hospitals but not in government sponsored hospitals, hormones that increase the incidence of cancer but not in all woman, osteoporosis on the increase in some western countries but not in all, Aids increasing in many African countries but not in all.
America which has one of the highest per capita outlays on health falls far behind many other countries in terms of the incidence of chronic disease despite the sophistication of their medical services. Many studies have shown that when people move away from their own indigenous lifestyle patterns that they start to develop disease of modern society such as heart disease, cancer and strokes, the three major diseases of modern western societies.
