Doctor Yourself

Andrew W. Saul is Editor of the peer-reviewed Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. DoctorYourself.com is his personal website, which now receives over 40,000 hits a day.
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY named Andrew Saul one of seven natural health pioneers in its November-December 2006 issue.


"If we doctors threw all our medicines into the sea, it would be that much better for our patients and that much worse for the fishes."  Oliver Wendell Holmes, M.D.

I have seen the foolishness of conventional disease care wisdom.  I have seen hospitals feed white bread to patients with bowel cancer and hospitals feed "Jello" to leukemia patients.  I have seen schools feed bright red "Slush Puppies" to 7 year olds for lunch and I have seen children vomit up a desk-top full of red crud afterwards.  

And, I have seen those same children later line up at the school nurse for hyperactivity drugs.

I have seen hospital patients allowed to go two weeks without a bowel movement.  I have seen patients told that they have six months to live when they might live sixty months.  I have seen people recover from serious illness, only to have their physician berate them for having used natural healing methods to do so.  I have seen infants spit up formula while their mothers were advised not to breast feed. I've seen better ingredients in dog food than in the average school or hospital lunch.

And I have seen enough.

Don't bother looking in the history books for what has slaughtered the most Americans.  Look instead at your dinner table.  There's an old saying:  "One fourth of what you eat keeps you alive.  The other three-fourths keep your doctor alive."  We eat too much of the wrong things and not enough of the right things.  Scientific research continually indicates nationwide vitamin and mineral deficiencies in our country.  We spend over two million million dollars (two trillion) each year on disease care in America.  Is it any surprise that doctors consistently place among the very highest incomes? 

"And we have made of ourselves living cesspools, and driven doctors to invent names for our diseases."  Plato
Nearly two-thirds of a million men died in the Civil War.  All other U.S. wars put together add about another two-thirds of a million soldiers killed.  That means that about 1,300,000 Americans have died, totally, in all the wars in U.S. history.  That is a lot of deaths.

Today, right now, we lose more than that number of Americans each year because of  cardiovascular disease and cancer. 

So always remember that disease is the real enemy.

About 10 million soldiers were killed in World War I, charging machine guns and getting mowed down month after month.  There were nearly a million casualties at the Somme and another million at Verdun.  A terrible slaughter went on for four years.  Yet, in just the two years following the war, over 20 million people died from influenza.  That is more than twice as many deaths from the flu in one-half the time it took the machine guns.

During the American Civil War, three times as many soldiers died from disease as from battle.  Today, alcohol and tobacco kill nearly as many Americans in one year as the entire Civil War did in four.

Results are all that matter to me.  Alternative medicine works.  The natural treatment of illness can be accomplished safely, inexpensively, and effectively.  We've all been taught that anything that is safe and inexpensive cannot possibly be really effective against "real diseases."  It is time to rethink that, and especially to see for yourself what works.

I am an educator, not a physician. My work is not prescription, but rather description.  I'd like for us to be free to utilize any reasonable health care approach.  To decide, we need education far more than medication. 

Each treatment regimen included here is not mine.  I do not stay up late at night making all this up.  These ideas are not original.  They are generally not new, either.  I have collected the safest and most effective healing approaches that I can find from physicians worldwide.  I hope you find them to be as helpful as they have been for my family. 

Natural healing is not about avoiding doctors. It is about not needing to go to doctors.  A dentist is not upset if you are cavity-free.  A doctor should not be upset if you are healthy. 

The idea is to be well.  The first step is wanting to be.  The old Chinese saying is "When you are sick of sickness, you are no longer sick." 

The second step is to do something to improve your health.  Each of us is ultimately responsible for our own wellness.  I think we should leave no stone unturned in our search for better health.  I also believe that you get out of your body what you put into it.  Your body will respond to your efforts to improve your health.

The time to start is right now.  Another old saying: "If not now, when?  If not here, where?  If not you, then who?" 

"It's supposed to be a secret, but I'll tell you anyway. We doctors do nothing. We only help and encourage the doctor within." Albert Schweitzer, M.D.