In my experience, people do not want health advice. If sick, they just want to go to a doctor and
"get fixed up". Yet when one has a chronic condition, doctors may not
know what to do--and doctors do not like to admit that they don't know what to
do. So they give you more and more
medications--antibiotics, maybe, or even steroids.
Over time, you get more and more medications--and you get sicker and
sicker.
If any of the above speaks to you, then please keep on reading. It might be that you are getting to be about
desperate enough to hear what I have to say.
I became very ill in my 30's. At
first, I just had a little exercised-induced asthma. Doctors gave me an inhaler and I wasn't worried. Then
I missed a couple days with sick stomach, throwing up. A few weeks later, that happened again. Then three weeks later, again. Then two weeks later, again. Each time, I had to miss work. So of course, I started seeing doctors,
trying to find out what was going on and "get myself fixed". They thought maybe I had infections, so they
gave me antibiotics, and then steroids to make the asthma symptoms less.
I started having asthma attacks in the middle of the night that landed me in the
emergency room. Each time, I was given steroids to stop the asthma symptoms.
Steroids suppress the immune system, so I would then get more colds, and
each time I got a cold, I would get more asthma, have an attack, go to the ER,
and be given more steroids. The cycle
was obvious and the intervals between crises were growing shorter.
I quickly graduated from regular doctors to specialists. I went to allergists for two years, since I was
"allergic" to a variety of foods and still throwing up
frequently. It did no good. The last allergist I saw offered me a slew of asthma medications. I asked him how long I would have to take them, and then he gave me a stern lecture: "You are an asthmatic", he said. "You'll always be an asthmatic, and you need to stay on this medication." Now, this made me angry. To be told I have a condition that can never change is just not something that I could easily accept. I had tried everything the allergists said to do, and nothing had made anything one bit better.
The next stop was a cardiologist. She did a lot of testing and recommended that I have my gall bladder removed. I
was now becoming aware that doctors didn't know as much as they sometimes
seemed to, so I pressed for more information.
Why the gall bladder? My symptoms
were asthma and occasional intense vomiting (sometimes with fever). She said that, for my age (30's) and these
symptoms, a bad gall bladder was statistically the most likely thing causing
it, and removing the gall bladder might make it better; and a person can live
without their gall bladder, so if that didn't fix it, then we'd know that it
wasn't the gall bladder.
I refused the surgery. Somehow, I
didn’t want to have major abdomenal surgery with no stronger reason than a
statistical guess. It didn’t feel right
to me. But I was now getting desperate
to find some help.
Next, I checked around and found an experimental doctor in New York City who was
a little out of the mainstream. He was
very expensive, but my first visit to his office was illuminating. I spent an entire day there, filling out
paperwork, including a couple of hours with the doctor. One of the things he did was find out every
place I had ever lived, and from that, he did a database search for parasites,
and based on that, he decided to test me for Giardia, a common parasite that
can cause severe vomiting that looks like an infection or maybe food
poisoning. I had it! He prescribed medication to clear up the
Giardia, and the vomiting immediately improved.
Yet I still had asthma. By now, I
had figured out that the doctors I had been seeing didn't know anything about asthma's
underlying causes. They only knew how to
suppress its symptoms temporarily, and with medications which themselves led to more asthma later
on. I had lived two years with no rugs
or curtains, with my mattress in plastic, and avoiding all kinds of possible
allergens, had spent countless hours and huge amounts of money with doctors, and my asthma symptoms were still getting worse.
A breakthrough came when I read, somewhere, that traditional oriental
medicine taught that asthma was an imbalance that could easily be corrected
"with lifestyle changes". I
started reading more and more about this, and found that my way of eating might
be contributing to my condition. Through reading, I found my way into macrobiotics,
which can help sick people stop making themselves sicker by eating in ways that
stress their body less.
Long and short of it is, that I completely revised my diet (and my lifestyle) and became
"macrobiotic". It was
tough. I had to cook my own food--each
meal was a cooked whole grain and some cooked vegetables--but it helped
enormously. And it wasn’t just food—I changed habits in other ways, started
sleeping more and exercising despite the asthma. And the symptoms immediately improved! Additionally, I didn't go around hungry or crave bad foods, and I had good energy. I
was off meat, sugar and dairy (didn't even drink coffee for a while), and in a
couple of years, I was as healthy again as if I were 20 years old and had never
been sick.
I also embraced alternative treatsments such as acupuncture and massage to help keep myself healthy. Getting massage has definitely helped me as a computer programmer. Many people in my profession ended up harming themselves with repetitive motion syndrome and ended up with things like carpal tunnel syndrome. Maybe I was partly lucky, but I also think my preventive lifestyle measures have had a hand in keeping me free from those maladies so common among older computer professionals. Unfortunately, most health insurance still will not subsidize either acupuncture or massage, and I believe it ends up costing them more for not doing so.
Incidentally, during my changeover to living macrobiotically, I was accused of "essentially practicing witchcraft" by one of my
science-based friends who thought he knew everything. Most people think that they know
everything. It took a lot of hard knocks
for me to realize how little I know, and how little doctors know, about chronic, auto-immune conditions such as asthma and arthritis. What I believe is that a macrobiotic
approach to life is health-enhancing. Macrobiotics is also a "social
movement" and thus it attracts some folks who in effect start to act like
a cult. So you have to sift through all
the information about it and decide what really matters. In macrobiotics classes, I have met all kinds
of gullible souls who, say, are leary of getting vaccinated. This has nothing at all to do with macrobiotics or
healthy eating, and I don't let the fact that macrobiotics has occasionally attracted
folks with extreme views (or extreme gullibility) turn me off to a useful body of information. I've tried out the ideas presented to me and kept the ones that seemed to work based on my own experience. And I still get my vaccines.
There have been a couple of groups of people, in the past, who became too fanatical about their macrobiotics. They ate such a restricted diet that they ended up with nutritional deficiencies, but if a person follows today's best practices for macrobiotics, this will not happen to them. Nevertheless, some portions of mainstream medicine continue to regard macrobiotics with scepticism or even open hostility. These are the same type of elements that attack, say, Dr. Colin Campbell for his excellent research on diet and lifestyle in The China Study. It's absurd, given how full of oversimplification the Western model of caloric restriction and nutrition actually is, to damn a richly detailed, well-tried approach to health such as macrobiotics. Of course, macrobiotics continues to evolve and is not perfect--but compared with a standard American diet, it seems to me to be much superior.
I kept up my healthy lifestyle for about five years, but then, I allowed
the inertia of all the meat-eaters and pizza-eaters around me to begin pulling me back towards a
standard American diet, with all that sugar, diary and meat. And eventually, of course, the asthma came
back on me.
A couple of years ago, I went back to my macrobiotic diet and lifestyle and
have since cleared up my asthma again, and my weight also came back down to a healthy range. I am determined, this time, to keep to my good eating habits. I'm not even 100% compliant with my desired
diet--but the one thing I do stick to religiously is avoidance of processed sugars, and eventually I also weeded out dairy products (cheese was the toughest for me to give up, but I needed to and finally did).
Macrobiotics may be a healthy way of living and eating, but it isn't for
everyone because it is a fair amount of learning and work. In macrobiotics, each person is supposed to
tailor their food intake based on their own condition. Just moving to a plant-based diet helps, but
a vegan diet does not help a person get off of sugar--which is as addicting as
heroin, by the way. Macrobiotics has the
knack of balancing each meal's ingredients so that you always feel satisfied,
your food tastes good, you are not hungry, and yet you won't gain weight (and
will lose the extra if you are overweight).
It promotes good health.
The first thing anyone who is sick should consider doing is breaking their
sugar addiction. This is tough if one is
part of a family that eats sugar all the time (as I was when growing up),
because those around you will continue to offer sugar (and meat and dairy and peppers, etc.) even after you decide they are not good for you. Just as an
alcoholic often can't turn down liquor when offered, this will do most people
in.
This is why I say that a person has to become totally desperate to change
their lifestyle significantly. But it can have huge payoffs if you do it. It can literally save your life, and make the
quality of it go up. For years, there was pain and discomfort in my body every day. Either breathing was difficult, or my back hurt, or I had a migraine, or I was constipated, or tired, or just one thing after another. I don't have any of that now, except on rare occasions when I don't eat well or take care of myself. Further, I am no longer depressed. Not only is my mood better, I believe that my thinking is clearer.
If you have read to this point, I hope some of this will be useful to you. I'm not trying to tell anyone else what to do, just make available some information that might help some folks, somewhere. I believe that a lot of middle-agers like myself live with constant physical discomfort or even pain, and that is a real shame and is unnecessary, if only they had better information, better food, more rest, and access to some simple enhancing treatments such as massage, acupuncture or acupressure. If establishing one's good health is possible, in my opinion, nothing should be of higher priority.
If anyone has read this far and still wishes to learn more
about macrobiotics, the Strengthening Health Institute in Philadelphia
is very good. I took a couple of their classes to improve my cooking, and got many other useful ideas as well. It is run by Denny and Susan Waxman. They teach "the entire lifestyle"
including circadian rhythms etc. Denny is particularly careful to emphasize things
that can also be backed up by science (as well as common sense). So if you study there, you'll get not just cooking and food advice, but when
to eat, how to eat, how to diagnose your own health, and many creative suggestions for gentle exercise and private health self-maintenance.
