I have observed that many people lived well into their nineties and even older in pockets of American society in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My home is in an old farming community in Western New York that was settled by Germans. There is a lovely cemetery nearby, chock full of head stones with dates as a testimony to prolonged endurance of the folks in my area. Since I’ve been interested in the subject of longevity, I’ve meandered through other cemeteries in rural areas and have made the same observation time and again…people often lived into their late 80’s, 90’s and frequently over 100 in the last two centuries.
These were often not urban dwellers, but those who lived simply in small villages and rural areas where the air was clean, food more nutritious, sanitation more individually controlled and dependence on the medicaments and practices of hospital and city doctors minimal to none. These hearty folk ate the fruits of their labor such as fresh eggs from chickens that wandered in the garden, fresh, raw milk and heaps of butter from the family cow and of course meat from the well fed barnyard pig, including bacon and lard. There was an abundance of fresh air and loads
And today we’re condescendingly informed that we live longer, happier lives due to modern science and modern medicine. Yet, I have noted that while on the modern medicine’s watch, there has not been a single disease cured and many more created. We have simply traded one disease for a tenfold of others. Childhood asthma, ADD, teenage suicide and violence, allergies, rheumatoid and osteoarthritis, diabetes, personality disorders, cancer, endometriosis, chronic ear infections, Lou Gehrig’s disease, MS, lupus, autism and heart disease. Elderly parents are condemned to live in nursing homes, propped up by so many meds they don’t recognize that they might indeed be 80 years old! Children are considered a financial burden, hence, limited. And disease has taken a turn for the worse while modern medicine puffs itself with acclaim for keeping us all healthy and longevitous.
Take polio, for example. When modern medicine touts its accomplishments, it smugly recalls polio as the triumph of the last century. But as epidemiologists know, all infectious diseases have a bell curve which they will follow and finally die out on their own. This is why flus, colds and chicken pox come and go. Drs. Sabin and Salk, the developers of the polio vaccines, admitted independently and publicly that the disease was already on the decline when their vaccines hit the market and that the reason for the decline in polio in the US was due to the natural order of things, not a vaccine. Interestingly, polio was spread in pockets of the country where children were given candy, cookies and pop, not locales where an apple or berries off the bush were the daily sweet. It has been shown that polio only seriously afflicts children who have a diet including processed sugar. Why has this not been divulged to the public?
Now take homeopathy. Unlike modern medicine, it has a record of cure. During the flu epidemic during WW1 that killed more people than the war itself, homeopathy was on the forefront in the homeopathic hospitals with relatively few deaths, while the other hospitals couldn’t keep up with the corpses. Even before that , “In 1900 a comparison of mortality rates among homeopathic and conventional medical patients throughout the US and Europe showed that two to eight times as many homeopath patients with life threatening infections diseases survived, as compared with those receiving conventional care of the day.” (Thomas Lindsay Bradford, The Logic of Figures of Comparative Results of Homeopathic and Other Treatments) Yet, the AMA launched a rigorous and well funded campaign to eliminate homeopathy from the American scene. And it continues to do so.
As we line up for the bastion of modern medicine’s medicaments, such as vaccines, birth control pills, antidepressants, high blood pressure meds and chemo, perhaps we ought not marvel at the wonders of today’s medicine, but consider, perhaps, it is as a direct cause of these diseases.
Today the world clamors for simple, inexpensive, cartel free medicine. Medicine of the values of old. Of the standards of hearty folk. Hearty of mind, sound principles and sound nutrition. The next time you look down on a grave stone, note not only the dates, but what those dates represent. They are likely a representation of a life worth living, free of the modern entrapments of today’s medicine.
