This book said all the right things at the start of it. But in the end the practical advice given just wasn’t of the same quality as the health and healing theory the book started with.
The author was inspired by the brilliant Linus Pauling and also Jeffrey Bland.
The author explains that if we were sitting on two tacks then of course just removing one tack would not make our pain and other symptoms lessen by 50%. He says that it is the same with our health. If we’re still sitting on a tack then we will need to do lots of health-promoting things to feel better. More and more as our illness worsens. But what is really needed most of all is not just good management but tack removal. This is where good nutrition and detoxification programs come in.
This book talks about the commonly supported fantasy that if a doctor can name it ‘they can tame it.’ There is a lot of good information about why diagnosing something is not the same as finding the causes of the symptoms and how the person should best be treated. The book also discusses the need to avoid toxic substances in our environment as well as foods we react to.
The body’s systems all work together and are connected in many ways and we are each biochemically unique and can have all sorts of nutritional and other quirks, the book explains. Successful treatment means treating the body as a system and not just masking individual symptoms blindly with drugs.
There was too much focus on stress as a cause of illness in my opinion and it is even suggested that MCSS patients have an abuse link in the cause of their disease.
The practical advice given in this book is quite poor, outdated and incomplete. A vegetarian diet is recommended as is avoiding salt and saturated fat and eating tons of fibre. Many diet myths are repeated in the book sadly. FIR sauna use is not even mentioned and the dosages given for most supplements are far too low to do very much. 200 mg of vitamin C twice daily is recommended to help patients cope with having mercury fillings removed, for example. But so may good orthomolecular books explain that massive vitamin C doses or even IVs are needed in such cases as a matter of urgency. This dose is so small as to be completely worthless. Linus Pauling would not at all agree with this recommendation!
This book was quite disappointing overall but many of the parts of it on health and healing theory were rock solid. The author clearly knows his stuff on this topic and is to be congratulated for speaking so well on this topic. There are far better books out there for useful practical advice on this topic however (e.g. Detoxify or Die by Dr Rogers).
Jodi Bassett, The Hummingbirds' Foundation for M.E. (HFME) and Health, Healing & Hummingbirds (HHH)