Reclaiming Our Health: Exploding the Medical Myth and Embracing the Source of True Healing is John Robbins' latest book. As author Riane Eisler explains in the introduction, "Reclaiming Our Health is not only an extremely timely, urgently needed book; it is a landmark book that, like John Robbins' earlier Diet for a New America, helps us look at ourselves and our world with fresh eyes." With great pleasure, we offer you this excerpt from Chapter One of Reclaiming Our Health:

Once upon a time there was a large and rich country where people kept falling over a steep cliff. They'd fall to the bottom and be injured, sometimes quite seriously, and many of them died. The nation's medical establishment responded to the situation by positioning, at the base of the cliff, the most sophisticated and expensive ambulance fleet ever developed, which would immediately rush those who had fallen to modern hospitals that were equipped with the latest technological wizardry. No expense was too great, they said, when people's health was at stake.

Now it happened that it occurred to certain people that another possibility would be to erect a fence at the top of the cliff. When they voiced the idea, however, they found themselves ignored. The ambulance drivers were not particularly keen on the idea, nor were the people who manufactured the ambulances, nor those who made their living and enjoyed prestige in the hospital industry. The medical authorities explained patiently that the problem was far more complex than people realized, that while building a fence might seem like an interesting idea it was actually far from practical, and that health was too important to be left in the hands of people who were not experts. Leave it to us, they said, for with enough money we will soon be able to genetically engineer people who do not bruise or become injured from such falls.

So no fences were built, and as time passed this nation found itself spending an ever increasing amount of its financial resources on ambulances, hospitals, and high-tech medical equipment. In fact, it came to spend far more money on medical services than any nation had ever done in the history of the world. Money that could have gone to community services, decent housing, education, and good food was not available to the people, for it was being spent on ambulances and hospitals. As the costs of treating people kept rising, growing numbers of people could not afford medical care. There were increasing numbers of homeless, and ever more hungry people and families torn apart by the stress. As a result of these and similar misallocations of national energy and resources, violence, gangs, and inner city riots would well up as outlets for the frustration and despair people felt.

When a few families who had lost loved ones tried to erect warning signs at the top of the cliff, they were arrested for trespassing. When some of the more enlightened physicians began to say that the medical authorities should publicly warn people that falling off the cliff was dangerous, representatives from powerful industries denounced them as "health police." A fierce battle ensued, and finally, after many compromises, the medical establishment did issue warnings. Anyone, they said, who had already broken both arms and both legs in previous falls should exercise utmost caution when falling.

Of course, this is just a fable.

Like most people in our society, I grew up believing in the medical myth. I grew up believing that health comes from the doctor, the drug store, and the hospital.

I never suspected that illness might be a messenger, or that our experience of our bodies, whether well or ill, could provide us with self-understanding. I did not know that I could create a lifestyle that would support the radiant health of my body, mind, and spirit. I did not understand that the choices I made and the way I lived could make a tremendous difference to the quality of life I experienced. I never imagined that the source of true healing lay within each of us.

But over the years I have come to realize that while doctors and medical technology have an important role to play in health care, they do not hold the ultimate secrets to health. Taken together, factors such as the food we eat, whether and how we exercise, the way we give voice to our feelings, the attitudes we hold, and the quality of the environment in which we live are far more important to the quality of health we experience than even the most sophisticated medical technologies. It has been liberating to see that health is less a matter of medical technology than of learning to live in vibrant harmony with ourselves, with the natural world, and with one another.

In our society, the medical myth has led to an emphasis on intervention instead of prevention that has generated a crisis in health care of epic proportions. The current level of dissatisfaction and frustration with the U.S. medical system is enormous. Corporate healthcare expenditures now exceed corporate profits. Doctors and patients alike feel depersonalized and used. Year after year, the difference between our system and that of other nations becomes more embarrassing and disturbing. We spend far more money for health care than any other country in the world, and yet we are the only nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee minimum health care to every single citizen. Increasing numbers of Americans—42 million at last count—have no health coverage. We lead the world in malpractice suits, but continue to fall further behind in infant mortality rates, life expectancy, and the other indicators used to measure the health of a people.

In New York City, 10.8 infants out of 1,000 die before their first birthday, while in Shanghai, China, the rate is only 9.9. Life expectancy at birth in Shanghai is now 75.5 years, compared to a life expectancy in New York City of 73 years for whites and 70 years for people of color. Shanghai is an extremely overcrowded and polluted Third World city in a country with a per capita income of only $350. Shanghai spends just $38 per person annually on medical care, compared to New York City's $3,000, yet generates a better health record because it channels what funds it has toward prevention and basic care, because its elders are respected and revered, and because only very recently has its people begun to fall prey to the high-fat meat-based American diet.

Our medical establishment's fixation on drugs, surgery, and other high-tech interventions at the expense of low-cost preventive approaches is perhaps most evident in its failure to fully appreciate the important role of nutrition in health. A board member of the Ohio Dietetic Association recently said, "A hospital is one of the few places in the U.S. where a person can starve to death unnoticed." The average U.S. physician, in four years of medical school, gets only two hours of course work in nutrition. Only 25 percent of the accredited medical schools in the country have a single required course in nutrition. Meanwhile, McDonald's is opening up franchises in hospitals!

We all know that the American medical system is in the throes of a horrendous crisis, and many of us feel overwhelmed and desperate in the face of it all. The question I seek to answer is whether it might be possible for this chaos, upheaval, and dysfunction to serve a healing purpose. Could the very intensity of our medical crisis somehow represent a potential turning point, an unprecedented opportunity for fundamental personal and social change? Is it possible that the breakdown of our medical system could lead to a greater healing, both in our society and in many of our lives?

Increasing numbers of us are seeing that we cannot remain passive bystanders to our own health, and then expect the medical system to rescue us. We're seeing how false and destructive is the belief that the more money we spend and the more technology we have, the healthier we will be. We're seeing how alienating and harmful it can be to think that experts always know more than we do about our bodies and our lives.

The current medical crisis is serving to challenge the assumptions many of us have held, and in the process leading us to become aware of more satisfying and fulfilling ways to live. We're seeing that there may not be a technological or pharmaceutical answer to all our ills, and that consuming drugs that have been prescribed by a physician may not always be the best way to alleviate our difficulties. We're seeing that if we don't want to be dependent on a system that is increasingly expensive and dehumanizing, we need to find other approaches on which we can reliably depend. Increasingly, we are utilizing alternative forms of medicine that rely on the natural healing wisdom our bodies possess, and selecting foods and making other personal choices based on what we believe will produce the healthiest outcomes.

By disrupting our blind faith in the medical system, the current crisis is throwing us back on ourselves, and compelling us to ask such questions as: What can I do to optimize my health and healing? How must I live in order to attain and preserve well-being? For which conditions is orthodox medicine of value, and for which conditions are alternative approaches more appropriate? How can I become less dependent on an impersonal system, and more connected to and trusting of the sources of true healing within me?

Many of us are turning our attention toward what we can do for ourselves on an ongoing basis, building and nurturing our health, rather than ignoring our bodies' needs and then automatically taking ourselves to the doctor to be fixed when illness strikes. We are learning that our health is intimately interwoven with our mental outlook, emotional tone, and spiritual well-being, and coming to understand that taking responsibility for our health means more than simply lowering our cholesterol or blood pressure. It means learning to tap the powerful regenerative forces that dwell within our own beings. It means opening our lives to the joy of awakening and the gift of peace.

I sometimes think we don't really have a "health-care" system; we have a "disease-care" system. For our medical establishment does not teach us how to live so that we can achieve the maximum health and highest quality of life of which we are capable. Instead, it teaches us to manipulate ourselves from the outside, a process that has left many of us numb to the signals our bodies constantly send.

Many of us do not really know how to take care of ourselves, nor what choices we can make to keep ourselves well. When I was growing up, I believed that eating a balanced diet meant enjoying a wide variety of the 31 flavors my family's business made available to the world. As far as I was concerned, the basic four food groups were Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, and Jamoca Almond Fudge. I had no idea that the standard American diet, based as it is on high-fat meat and dairy products, and deriving nearly 40 percent of its calories from sugar, creates problems that even the most expensive medical technology can't repair.

Because our dominant medical system has focused on intervention instead of prevention, growing numbers of people are beset by a host of physical problems and difficulties. Meanwhile, there are massive industries profiting enormously from our over-reliance on drugs, and from our following unhealthy lifestyles that lead to an ever increasing demand for their services and products.

Although there is much in modern medicine that is of great value, we need to pick and choose very carefully from among its offerings. Many of its prescriptions and practices, while carrying numerous troubling side effects, merely suppress symptoms, sometimes even causing the disease process to take new and more virulent forms. Some of these treatments are no more truly healing than turning off a fire alarm without attending to the fire.

When we are taught to repress symptoms with no attempt to understand the needs they represent, our experience of ourselves becomes distant. We sense our bodies not as sources of self-awareness and guides to our healing needs, but as enigmas that must be analyzed and explained to us by experts. We easily become bewildered and lose trust in ourselves. If we become ill, we slip all too often into passivity and helplessness, believing ourselves dependent on the doctor to make us well, acting like bystanders to our own healing process, disconnected from the incredible creative powers that always lie within us.

Some people wonder how I can presume to write with authority about these subjects, when I am not a doctor. Many of us have been taught that doctors, by virtue of their medical training, constitute a special class of human being, almost a priesthood. The truth is that if I had been trained as they have been, and if I were subject to the same financial pressures they are, I might be preoccupied with technology and drugs, oblivious to their drawbacks and risks, and dismissive of alternative approaches, just as many physicians today are. If I had spent six or eight years of my life being trained to practice orthodox medicine, and had sacrificed greatly in order to do this, as most of our doctors have, I would hardly be in a position to consider the subject without personal bias. It is precisely because I am not a doctor that I can more easily stand outside the fray, and hopefully bring a measure of objectivity to the discussion.

We struggle today, as a culture, to get over the idea that M.D. stands for "Medical Deity." It wouldn't hurt us to remember that in Israel in 1973, doctors went on strike for a month, and the death rate dropped 50 percent. There had not been a month with so few deaths since the previous doctors' strike, 20 years before. A few years later, in Bogota, Columbia, a two-month-long physician strike resulted in a 35 percent drop in the death rate. And when Los Angeles county doctors went on a work slowdown to protest soaring malpractice insurance premiums, the death rate dropped 18 percent. But when the slowdown ended, and the medical industry got back in gear, the death rate jumped right back up to where it had been before.

I once believed that the medical establishment was unbiased and open-minded in its search for healing. I thought that the only people who would fall into disfavor with organized medicine would be charlatans and quacks who posed a danger to the public. But I have come, none too happily, to see otherwise. In fact, one of the reasons that so many other nations have better health outcomes while spending far less money than we do is that they are far more open to what we call preventive or alternative medicine. In no other nation are legitimate holistic alternatives to the pharmaceutical orientation marginalized and discredited the way they are in the United States.

Unlike much of orthodox medicine, alternative approaches to healing typically honor the wisdom and capability of the human body. Their goal is often to support and strengthen the powerful healing forces already at work within us. There are, of course, alternative methods that have no merit, and some that make fraudulent claims. But there are others that have been of great value to countless numbers of people. The sadness is that very few have been given the opportunity to be tested or appraised impartially. It is hard to overestimate the human suffering that continues to occur because these approaches are being condemned without a fair trial. An integration of orthodox and alternative medicine, a partnership approach to healing, would allow patients access to the best ideas and practices available, regardless of whose economic interest is served in the process.

When holistic and preventive methods of healthcare are dismissed as quackery without being given fair consideration, people are not only deprived of the health benefits these approaches can bring, but of the values and the relationship to life that they represent. To allow acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, midwifery, homeopathy, herbs, massage therapy, and many of the other valid alternative methods fully into the medical picture would not only make medicine more effective, it would also incorporate a more compassionate perspective into medicine, for these approaches have in common that they nurture the inherent healing forces and potentials of the body, something orthodox medicine often neglects to do.

The medical myth casts an intimidating shadow. Many of us continue to believe that when we fall ill, there is nothing we can do but turn for deliverance to orthodox medical authorities. We expect our doctors to know what is best for us, and assume that if natural approaches and remedies worked, our doctors would tell us so. But the unfortunate truth is that American physicians have been trained in a system that has been closed historically to natural and alternative approaches, and is only now barely beginning to open.

This is why the American Medical Association (AMA) continues to attack acupuncture, biofeedback, homeopathy, and naturopathy as "unproven, disproven, controversial, fraudulent, and/or otherwise questionable." This is why the AMA Journal hasn't written anything positive about acupuncture since Nixon went to China. And why the American Cancer Society continues to denounce unconventional approaches to cancer that show great healing promise and that have never been properly tested or impartially evaluated, even while chemotherapy is useful in only a very small percentage of cancers and is often horrendously toxic. Many people today who use alternative treatments do so without telling their medical doctors, for fear of being ridiculed. A prominent spokesman for the AMA point of view who was evidently not terribly impressed with the value of alternative medicine recently took it upon himself to announce: "Freedom of choice in health care is a euphemism for freedom to defraud. What they want is the freedom to lie."

I have been asked what has motivated me to take on the medical establishment, to challenge its biases, and to expose its abuses of power. My answer is that I see how much needless harm is being done, and how much better things could be. I see how much healthier and happier people can be when they are educated and able to act wisely and make their own choices regarding their bodies. Freedom of choice is essential to the American way of life, and I believe that people ought to have a right to do with their bodies what they want to do, as long as they aren't hurting anyone else. There are many conditions that can best be treated by standard medicine, including trauma, medical and surgical emergencies, bacterial infections, and certain mechanical difficulties. But there are many other conditions, including most forms of cancer, viral infections, allergic and autoimmune disorders, and most chronic degenerative diseases, that are more effectively handled with alternative approaches. To my eyes, the monopolization of health care by the medical-pharmaceutical-complex not only violates our rights to health freedom. It drains us of our potential for wholeness and healing by slighting the power of the human body to restore itself, and by rejecting the value of natural medicine.

I believe it is possible that the current medical crisis, as dire as it is, can be an entry point for transformation. The situation holds vast opportunity as well as danger. The movement to reclaim our bodies and our lives may in fact represent the most powerful grassroots movement that has yet emerged to challenge the underlying paradigm of our society, the basic philosophical assumptions that have us marching, in the name of progress and control, toward ecological disaster and social chaos.

I believe it possible that the current medical crisis can yet become a healing crisis, one that could usher in greatly needed change. Alternative therapies that help us contact the regenerative powers that lie within us, that help us take care of ourselves and prevent disease, and that give us greater control over our lives have a major role to play in the future of health care, and in the healing of our society.

Physicians in our society are granted special status, and given tremendous authority. They have in their arsenal enormously potent drugs and procedures, and they deal with people in their times of greatest vulnerability. They are the ones in whose hands we have placed our trust and our lives, and with that trust comes a responsibility to put their own self-interest aside in order to serve those in their care. Though there are many fine physicians, the medical system as it exists today frequently does not support them in fulfilling this sacred trust.

I write to show a way out of this predicament, to bring compassion back into medicine. I write to help all of us, male and female, doctors and patients, take authority over our lives into our own hands, and to take back our power from institutions, groups, and individuals who have lost sight of their mandate to serve. I write to help all of us find within ourselves, through the natural transitions, cycles and rhythms that are ours to experience, something to be honored and kept sacred. My goal is to help heal how we relate to our bodies, to doctors and to health, and to help us discover sources of true healing in the wisdom of our bodies.