Corinne T. Netzer's Big Book o

The best-selling expert on health and nutrition offers a comprehensive guide to a range of practical natural remedies for some fifty common ailments, discussing the benefits of herbs, vitamins, and minerals that can help complaints ranging from head colds to anxiety and sexual impotence. Original.

Introduction

Medicine is an enormous achievement, but what it will achieve practically for humanity, and what those who hold the power will allow it to do, remain open questions.
--Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind

Almost everyone would like to be healthier and take steps to prevent serious diseases such as cancer, heart failure, arthritis.  The question is how?  We live in a world where there are many choices but few concrete answers.

Even though we often hear that Americans are drowning in information, there's one type of information that can be frustratingly difficult to come by--sound, accurate data about nutritional supplements and their ability to forestall and clear up health problems.

That's what this book is about.  We've studied the research and discarded the dubious and inconclusive to bring you news about proven, scientifically sound cures--cures that you can buy immediately, without waiting for a doctor's appointment or a prescription.

If you read even one chapter of this book, you'll be solidly informed about an important aspect of your health.  And after you read the entire book you will have acquired knowledge that even today many doctors don't possess.

If These Remedies Work, Why Haven't We Heard More About Them?

Without a doubt Western medicine is one of mankind's greatest achievements.  It has stopped plagues and turned once-common killers such as diphtheria and smallpox into rare and isolated occurrences.

But the high-tech, white-coat approach to medicine, practiced and envied throughout the world, does have a few blind spots.  It can be impersonal and, because of that, frightening. It can be so absorbed with fixing the body it ignores the patient inside that body.  It can become so enamored of chemically synthesized drugs that it overlooks remedies that have worked for centuries.

These shortcomings are especially true in America.  While our system of for-profit medicine has given us one of the finest medical systems in the world, it has allowed important research to remain undone.

All research, even research on inexpensive nutritional supplements, costs money.  Pharmaceutical companies fund an enormous amount of research in hopes that their investment will result in medicines that can ultimately be patented and marketed. But in America no one can patent or own vitamins, minerals, herbs, or other nutrients.  This is good for consumers, of course, since it keeps costs low.  The down side is that without a profit incentive pharmaceutical companies have no reason to fund research.

Insurance companies, which fund studies on many aspects of life and health, are also uninterested in this type of research. To date, they have been required to cover only "officially approved" treatments, and this has not included vitamins, herbs, or other supplements.  Without a financial stake in discovering what works and what doesn't, it's hard for corporations to justify expensive studies and trials.

For the most part, this kind of research has been left to hospitals and universities.  The work they have accomplished is invaluable.  The problem is that there is simply too much research to be done, competing with too many other urgent and pressing projects, to assure a steady flow of information.

Even when research is conducted, even when the findings are quite impressive, many of us never learn about them. Consider the rapidity with which "Prozac" and "Viagra" became household words.  In both cases a pharmaceutical public-relations effort blended seamlessly with the media eager to embrace the newest high-tech cure-all.

For a complex, technically written study to enter the information mainstream, someone must write about it in ordinary terms, and get his or her article published in an ordinary magazine or newspaper.  This doesn't happen as frequently as it should.  Too often the media hop on the Prozac or Viagra bandwagon, and other important work goes unnoticed.

Welcome to the People's Revolution

The American medical scene is changing.  And it's changing by popular demand.

If you're one of the nearly 50 percent of Americans who take vitamins regularly, or one of the 34 percent of Americans who have tried alternative medicine, you're on the cutting edge. Your actions have been duly noted.  And changes are being made.

Not too long ago, nutritional supplements were only available in health food stores, and health food stores were few and far between.  Today health food stores can be found everywhere.  Nutritional supplements of all sorts can be purchased in drugstores, national chain stores, and even some grocery stores.

And today the word "supplements" means far more than vitamins and minerals.  Sales of herbal remedies are increasing at a rate of 12 percent to 15 percent each year, and more than two hundred companies in the United States produce herbal remedies of one form or another.

However belatedly, the American medical establishment is bending to consumer wishes.  It is acknowledging that traditionally used herbs form the basis of many modern medicines, including quinine and digitalis.  It is also acknowledging that more recent discoveries--such as the cancer-fighting drugs derived from the Pacific yew tree--justify continued research in this area.

In 1992 the government-sponsored National Institutes of Mental Health created an Office of Alternative Medicine.  Its mission is to fund research into the safety, effectiveness, and potential usefulness of remedies that fall outside traditional boundaries.

How Do We Know What Works?

If research is just starting to be done on nutritional supplements, is it possible to know what works and what doesn't?  Yes, it is!

Research may be just beginning in the United States, but this is one area in which we definitely are not a world leader. When it comes to studying and using natural remedies, much of the rest of the world is way, way ahead of us.

Germany and France, especially, have done a good deal of pioneering research, and doctors in both countries frequently prescribe nutritional supplements for patients.  Such prescriptions are not mere placebos, and the curative effects of many supplements are supported by convincing research.  In fact the German government funds a highly respected body known as Commission E, whose sole mission is to review current research and approve various herbal supplements for use.

A good deal of sound, reliable research has also been done in England, Sweden, Finland, Japan, and China.  Fortunately, more of these studies are now available in the English language than ever before.  And, as information flows out, more and more of these miraculous cures are becoming available for use in the United States.

How We Chose the Cures in This Book

Today you can go into any drugstore or health food store and find literally hundreds of nutritional supplements for sale.  You can read mountains of newsletters and magazines packed with advertisements, testimonials, and miraculous case studies.  If you have a computer and an Internet connection, you can surf your way to dozens of sites that sell thousands of products.

Amazing life-saving cure! the ads shout. Proven effective in dozens of studies!

Are all of these products as effective as their manufacturers claim?  In a word, No.

This book discusses over sixty healing...