This is only the beginning.
Lifestyle Medicine must be understood in historical context, i.e. it originated within an American healthcare system that remains dominated by the allopathic umbrella concept of the AMA, and therefore limited. The key insight that gave Lifestyle Medicine legitimacy was the insight that most of the chronic diseases that are the leading causes of death today are preventable and often reversible with diet and livestyle, and the ACLM (American College of Lifestyle Medicine) is the vehicle for professionalizing these insights and making them practical within today’s medical practice, and that includes making them reimbursable.
If you are stuck at a traffic light with an allopathic MD in the passenger seat, he is likely to loan you his hammer, in order to knock out the red light. Subsequently, he will pretend ignorance about the cause of the accident, but he will happily patch you up and send you a bill.
Reinoud Fentener van Vlissingen, Psychiatrist at Rotterdam, ca. 1960.
However, the key concept of lifestyle medicine revolves around the patient taking responsibility for their own health, which in the long term is the way out of hell for our healthcare system which otherwise remains stuck in a galloping inflationary business model that has become an obvious failure. In my colums on America Out Loud, I have recently contrasted to the differences between the American and Japanese healthcare models. The Japanese model is overall focused more on prevention and lifestyle than the American model, and the Japanese spend one third of Americans on healthcare and have a 10% longer life expectancy.
The Covid farce has also taught us that self care with minimal medical assistance and not necessarily any medications would go a long way. First of all a study in BMJ proved that people on a whole foods, plant-based diet had a much (73%) reduced risk for “moderate to severe” Covid. And secondly, Dr. Nandita Shah of Sharan, India developed a wholly drug-free protocol, which makes the point even further, i.e. a non-inflammatory diet and lifestyle renders people less susceptible to the flu, and related illnesses, and merely by understanding the body’s innate ability to heal, and with some good guidance, afflicted people can usually recover without drugs, as Dr. Shah’s success record has clearly proven.
The corollary to this is the fact that we now know a lot more statistically:
- Thanks to the work of Prof. Denis Rancourt, we now know that the spread of the disease all by itself disproves the hypothesis of a respiratory virus.
- Thanks to the tireless work of Edward Dowd, and his team at Phinance Technologies that it was the medical protocols, and the lockdowns and other “public health” measures which crippled and killed people not a flu season.
- And, based on the work of John Beaudoin, Sr., and his site the Real CdC, we know more about the evidence that it was the medical protocols that killed people, and the psychotic fear was the resulf of propaganda, including the misuse of testing and active mislabeling of deaths of people with multiple comorbidities, or even accidents and such as “covid.”
- And we know from the work of T. Colin Campbell and particularly his books Whole and The Future of Nutrition, that nutrition should be the priority focus in dealing with cancer, being probably the first 60% of the battle. And it only makes sense that stopping to beat your head against the wall should be the first step in dealing with a headache. An article on Epoch Times explores the cancer/diet link also.
- And now we have our neurologist friend in the video above pointing out how healthy lifestyle is a key determinant for even spinal surgery.
In other words, Ben Franklin had it right, an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure. The larger point however is that to ignore readily observable facts, but to act on illusions that are in flagrant contrast with those facts is psychotic behavior. To wilfully inflict a risk of adverse reactions, which clearly increase risk and do not decrease it, can only be based on two things:
- Either an intent to kill; that is the democide, population reduction hypothesis
- Or else a completely irational and psychotic fear, i.e. the over-estimation of the risk of Covid, regardless of all evidence to the contrary.
Either one of those two possilibities is a completly psychotic, paranoid panic, which is typical of the paranoid schizophrenic thought system, which is the ego system, and the world is only its reflection. It is the house divided against itself, which shall not stand.
⁴The laws of God work only for your good, and there are no other laws beside His. ⁵Everything else is merely lawless and therefore chaotic. ⁶Yet God Himself has protected everything He created by His laws. ⁷Everything that is not under them does not exist. ⁸“Laws of chaos” is a meaningless term. ⁹Creation is perfectly lawful, and the chaotic is without meaning because it is without God. ¹⁰You have “given” your peace to the gods you made, but they are not there to take it from you, and you cannot give it to them.
Lifestyle Medicine, or more precisely a healthy lifestyle, would be a path to health that not only can prevent or reverse most chronic illnesses, but also build up the immune system, so we need not be so concerned about infectious diseases and now we know it can even prevent even surgical interventions. And still we need to go further, for we need to get to the bottom of the choice for sickness or health that is ours to make.
Sacrificial Thinking
The first thing to realize is that the ego thought system is chaotic, “those made mad by guilt,” for the guilt starts with the first separation thought, and literally drives us out of our mind.
The acceptance of guilt into the mind of God’s Son was the beginning of the separation, as the acceptance of the Atonement is its end. ²The world you see is the delusional system of those made mad by guilt. ³Look carefully at this world, and you will realize that this is so. ⁴For this world is the symbol of punishment, and all the laws that seem to govern it are the laws of death. ⁵Children are born into it through pain and in pain. ⁶
(ACIM, T-13.in.2:1-6)
ACIM explains the rationale for sacrificial thinking very clearly, and it is the direct result of the first separation thought itself, the very concept of ego. And within the ego system, we all try to climb top the top, hence all the stories of villains who take over the world. From the Chapter “How is healing accomplished?” we learn:
Healing is accomplished the instant the sufferer no longer sees any value in pain. ²Who would choose suffering unless he thought it brought him something, and something of value to him? ³He must think it is a small price to pay for something of greater worth. ⁴For sickness is an election; a decision. ⁵It is the choice of weakness, in the mistaken conviction that it is strength. ⁶When this occurs, real strength is seen as threat and health as danger. ⁷Sickness is a method, conceived in madness, for placing God’s Son on his Father’s throne. ⁸God is seen as outside, fierce and powerful, eager to keep all power for Himself. ⁹Only by His death can He be conquered by His Son.
2. And what, in this insane conviction, does healing stand for? ²It symbolizes the defeat of God’s Son and the triumph of his Father over him. ³It represents the ultimate defiance in a direct form which the Son of God is forced to recognize. ⁴It stands for all that he would hide from himself to protect his “life.” ⁵If he is healed, he is responsible for his thoughts. ⁶And if he is responsible for his thoughts, he will be killed to prove to him how weak and pitiful he is. ⁷But if he chooses death himself, his weakness is his strength. ⁸Now has he given himself what God would give to him, and thus entirely usurped the throne of his Creator.
(ACIM, M-5.I.1:1–2:8)
We are afraid to own the decision for individual identity, which is the ego choice, This is the reason why we project out the guilt and prefer to see ourselves as the victim of the world we see. This projection enables us to fight the evil outside and never recognize that we made the choice for the ego system, and only we can undo it. The peace of God was not taken from us by an evil world, no, we gave it away willingly, but we do not want to be responsible for it. And thus:
What is the single requisite for this shift in perception? ²It is simply this; the recognition that sickness is of the mind, and has nothing to do with the body. ³What does this recognition “cost”? ⁴It costs the whole world you see, for the world will never again appear to rule the mind. ⁵For with this recognition is responsibility placed where it belongs; not with the world, but on him who looks on the world and sees it as it is not. ⁶He looks on what he chooses to see. ⁷No more and no less. ⁸The world does nothing to him. ⁹He only thought it did. ¹⁰Nor does he do anything to the world, because he was mistaken about what it is. ¹¹Herein is the release from guilt and sickness both, for they are one. ¹²Yet to accept this release, the insignificance of the body must be an acceptable idea. (ACIM, M-5.II.3:1-12)
In being sick, we really attack ourselves, and in attacking others we run away from the guilt, and this is a defense mechanism to prevent us from changing our mind, and looking at the sense of guilt. Jesus never asks us to fix anything, but he does ask us to look at the problem as it is, and not as we have set it up (i.e.the locus of the problem is in the mind, and not in the world), and the willingness to look and ask for help in recognizing the problem is key, for we cannot change our mind unless we understand we are in trouble:
Now you are being shown you can escape. ²All that is needed is you look upon the problem as it is, and not the way that you have set it up. ³How could there be another way to solve a problem that is very simple, but has been obscured by heavy clouds of complication, which were made to keep the problem unresolved? ⁴Without the clouds the problem will emerge in all its primitive simplicity. ⁵The choice will not be difficult, because the problem is absurd when clearly seen. ⁶No one has difficulty making up his mind to let a simple problem be resolved if it is seen as hurting him, and also very easily removed. (ACIM, T-27.VII.2:1-6)
The promotion of the vaccines are a clear example of a sacrificial attitude, we accept a known risk (and allow ourselves to be deluded that the vaccines are safe and effective), and we irrationally believe almost anything that promises to protect us against the imaginary attack of an evil world, symbolized here by an evil virus. That same attitude allows us to accept the “adverse reactions,” for ourselves, or to rationalize that it is OK to inflict them on others. This is in such flagrant contradiction of the known facts, it is a complete psychosis. It is a psychotic murderous rage, but killing the perpetrators or killing the messenger does not solve the problem. The problem is the thought system we have chosen, and the solution is that we have the option to change our mind, metanoia.
The ego is the choice for death, the choice to show that we are NOT as God created us:
And what is the black-draped body they would bury? ²A body which they dedicated to death, a symbol of corruption, a sacrifice to sin, offered to sin to feed upon and keep itself alive; a thing condemned, damned by its maker and lamented by every mourner who looks upon it as himself. ³You who believe you have condemned the Son of God to this are arrogant. ⁴But you who would release him are but honoring the Will of his Creator. ⁵The arrogance of sin, the pride of guilt, the sepulchre of separation, all are part of your unrecognized dedication to death. ⁶The glitter of guilt you laid upon the body would kill it. ⁷For what the ego loves, it kills for its obedience. ⁸But what obeys it not, it cannot kill. (ACIM, T-19.IV-C.4:1-8)
But Jesus maintains:
There is no life outside of Heaven. ²Where God created life, there life must be. ³In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. ⁴At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. ⁵Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. ⁶Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere. ⁷Outside of Heaven, only the conflict of illusion stands; senseless, impossible and beyond all reason, and yet perceived as an eternal barrier to Heaven. ⁸Illusions are but forms. ⁹Their content is never true. (ACIM, T-23.II.19:1-9)
Our young neurologist friend may be on to something. Purely being healthy is a choice, and that is the core concept of Lifestyle Medicine, but until we at least recognize the drivers of our choice for sickness, and make we get nowhere fast.