Nutritional Medicine

Professional nutritionists’ attempts to corner the market on nutritional advice. The problem is if you take their advice you will probably end up dead before your time. Hospital nutrition is a mirror of the profession’s ignorance. These nutritional “experts” insist that the best way to get vitamins is through a healthy diet—that is why their professional advice is so unwelcome to both patients and doctors alike. This is simply not true because food is not what it used to be in terms of nutritional value.

Dr. Michael Janson says, “The standard American diet does not provide even the RDA. Two-thirds of all meals are eaten outside the home, and nearly half of them are in fast-food joints. You can’t expect this to provide all the necessary nutrients, and many studies show that it does not. A large number of people admitted to hospitals are found to have deficiencies, and the problems worsen once they’re in the hospital. Just about everyone who needs hospital care for chronic illness is malnourished.”

Patients need adequate nutrition, not drugs, to recover from any illness, and sometimes they need that really fast. Patients who are critically ill have high nutritional requirements that need to be addressed and ER doctors know that it is often a matter of life or death. Nutritional feeding is critical to patient outcome and if death is near, intravenous and cutaneous injections are the proper emergency approaches to nutrition.

The New York Times printed a story about how in 1965 an impoverished rural county in the Mississippi Delta, the pioneering physician Jack Geiger helped found one of the nation’s first community health centers. Many of the children Geiger treated were seriously malnourished, so he began writing “prescriptions” for food—stipulating quantities of milk, vegetables, meat, and fruit that could be “filled” at the grocery store. The grocery stores were instructed to send the bills to the health center where they were paid out of the pharmacy budget. When word of this reached the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, which financed the center, an official was dispatched to Mississippi to reprimand Geiger and make sure he understood that the center’s money could be used only for medical purposes. Geiger replied: “The last time I looked in my textbooks, the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.” The official had nothing to say and returned to Washington.