 |
This serious looking fellow with the mustache was a man who, in my
peripheral awareness, I had been familiar with before I even went to Florida.
He is none other than the author of "Dead Doctors" fame, as in, "Dead Doctors
Don't Lie." His story is told in his hilarious and thought
provoking book of the same title.
Essentially, Dr. Joel Wallach grew up in poverty on a family farm.
Possessed of a brilliant wit and bulldog determination, he made his way
first through the difficulties of raising animals and livestock, then into
college, then into agricultural school where he took a great interest in
soil composition, the balance of nutrients in the soil, and the like.
He and his best friend decided to go to vet school, and he subsequently
received a 7.5 million dollar grant while working at the St. Louis zoo
to research the diseases which zoo animals were dying of. The veteran
of thousands of animal autopsies, Dr. Wallach ultimately began to intuit
that, basically, animals were getting fed better than humans. Specifically,
he took note of the vitamins and minerals which were being used to fortify
animal food, but which are frequently in short supply, if not totally absent,
in human diets.
Because he wanted to pass on his knowledge and expand its utility to
humans, he went to a naturopathic medical school and became a naturopathic
physician. He didn't figure the allopaths would be broadminded enough
for his ideas. He figured right!
His tapes, and, later, his
book titled "Dead Doctors Don't Lie" comes from an interesting
little habit that he picked up. While giving lectures on
diet and nutrition, Dr. Wallach impishly concluded that if conventional
doctors were such experts on diet, nutrition, and wellness, they
should be living to a ripe old age. What he found was that
many of them were keeling over in their fifties. Not good.
His conclusion was that conventional medical practitioners, in
a word, don't know what they're doing in terms of maintaining
the physiological integrity of the human organism through means
of appropriate diet and nutritional intake.
His book is fascinating, thought-provoking, and guaranteed to give stuff-shirted
M.D.'s with big egos and minimal open-mindedness a severe case of heartburn
and narcissistic injury. In other words, I loved it! |
