To awaken from the hypnotic embrace of the synthetics belief system often requires a deprogramming generated by personal health problems or tragedy afflicting someone we love.
Recently I was in a restaurant near where I live and a 70-year-old grandmother walks over to where I am sitting and engulfs me in a big tearful hug. "You were right!" Roberta blurts out. "I just discovered it for myself."
She has just come from a visit to a hospital where her physician had confessed that he no longer knew what to do for her. Roberta had been taking a half-dozen prescription drugs for two decades to combat arthritis and high blood pressure. By fortuitous accident --forgetting to take some of the drugs-- she had discovered that the combination of chemicals she had been ingesting all these years was the cause of her chronic high blood pressure.
Her physician's response to this discovery was to recommend new pharmaceutical drugs and, failing that, to find a new doctor. Frustrated and suspicious, Roberta declined the drugs and asked the hospital for an appointment with a nutritionist so she could learn what impact her diet was having on her overall health.
Roberta's concerns about conventional medicine's reliance on chemicals had actually manifested three decades earlier when she lost her 19-year-old daughter to a rare form of cancer. Chemical treatments had only seemed to make her daughter's cancer spread at a faster pace and hastened her death. But in the aftermath, Roberta submerged her intuitive observations and experience beneath layers of denial. "I wanted to believe the authority figures," she tells me. "I wanted them to take responsibility for my health."
Now that she has had an awakening (or reawakening) to what she has been doing to herself, she feels duped and embarrassed. She thinks about all the tens of thousands of dollars she has spent on the chemicals that exacerbated her condition and an anger and resentment boils up. To me, this is an understandable reaction for anyone who has had all their layers of denial pierced simultaneously.
Now Roberta wants to tell the world about her revelation. She just bought The Hundred Year Lie and she is waving a copy around the restaurant. "You better read this for your own good!" she tells people.
I am happy to be a catalyst but I know this is not about me or about the book. This is about all of the Roberta's out there who are finally beginning to reclaim responsibility for their own health and their own lives.
