Clean Living Announced As Newest Health Craze

November, 2004
The cover of Forbes magazine dated November 29, 2004, declared that the pharmaceutical industry has a new enemy: Clean Living. To have a respected influential business magazine make this a major cover story is great news for those of us who are holistic wellness practitioners. While I agree with much of the Forbes article, I feel that it doesn’t go far enough in giving people the information they need about all of the choices they have in moving towards clean living.

Living “clean” today is far more difficult than this article suggests. The reporter, Robert Langreth, tells us that it’s estimated that 2 million cases each year of chemical drug complications results in at least 180,000 deaths or life-threatening illnesses and that every few years some 'miracle cure’ is found to be toxic. I laugh about that because we are beginning to see that the drug companies know their so-called miracle cures are toxic before they ever hit the market.

Mr. Langreth goes on to list some of the common things for which people are taking drugs such as heartburn, hypertension, high cholesterol, thinning bones, anxiety and depression, chronic pain, and insomnia. The drug alternative he lists for all of them is diet and exercise. For the last three he also adds cognitive-behavioral therapy. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is talk therapy that teaches people to condition themselves to break distorted thinking patterns during a course of 12 to 20 sessions. During those sessions, anti-psychotic drugs, such as Paxil, Prozac, and others, are prescribed. The drug-free alternatives that are by no means the only effective drug-free alternatives available.

Factors That Inhibit The Clean Living Movement

There are so many factors that create “Clean Living.” Diet and exercise are certainly a huge part of that; however, consider the following influences: Disease-causing chemicals in our food and environment are insidious and difficult to remove. True and complete nutritional information about the effects of food allergies such as wheat, soy, and dairy would have to be revealed.

The American public is still fearful of natural healing modalities thanks to the American Medical Association’s century-old propaganda campaign against natural healing modalities. Much of the American public does not have access to the resources they need to make informed decisions about their health and well-being. The American public is cowed into believing whatever “the authorities” tell them to believe. We have become a nation of people who have given up our own personal power and allow the media, government agencies, and the pharmaceutical and chemical companies to control us.

How Do We Begin?

How does someone who wants to begin real Clean Living go about doing it then? In order for anyone to live cleanly, they must be able to 1) break away from the herd and do their own research; 2) be willing to buck the trends and pay for only those things that truly promote clean living once they know what those things are; 3) be willing to develop a level of patience and determination to allow the new information and processes to have an effect; and 4) their experiences as they move through the physical, emotional, and spiritual changes that clean living creates must be validated.

I believe the American public is ready and willing to move in this direction. As of 1999, it is reported that Americans spent over $13.7 billion on complementary and alternative modalities. That estimate only includes the four most cited and officially (government sanctioned) recognized modalities: chiropractic, massage, herbs, and acupuncture. It is my conviction that as Americans begin to take back their power through clean living, they will be motivated to advocate for societal changes that will create better government, safer environments, and a more peaceful existence in the world.

Taking Back Our Power

Dr. Benjamin Rush was the first physician general of the new American government, being appointed to that office in 1777. Rush Medical Hospital in Chicago, IL is named after him. At the Constitutional Convention in 1776, Dr. Benjamin Rush told legislators: "The Constitution of this Republic should make special provision for medical freedom. To restrict the art of healing to one class will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic." He went on to say: " Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers." Indeed, his prediction has proven to be very accurate.

The need for a more vocal and active grassroots public education campaign is needed in order to promote Clean Living as the new healthcare and political action program in America. The pharmaceutical and chemical companies have a proven track record of misinformation and lying by omission (i.e., Vioxx as the most recent example). How many people in the general population know that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), a branch of the National Institute for Health (NIH), has existed since 1992? The government does not promote the fact that in 2004 Congress approved and allocated almost $118 million in the federal budget to study CAM. This would be good news if it weren’t so evident that the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry heavily influence the activities of NCCAM. We can’t rely on the existing special interest groups to promote Clean Living. The public needs advocates who can do the research, disseminate unbiased information, and provide the forums for the public to speak out and be heard. For this reason, I propose that people be motivated to establish an official Clean Living movement who’s goal is to help each individual American citizen take back their power through the use of whatever holistic modalities work for them.

Resources Cited:
http://www.mnwelldir.org
http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/index.asp
Forbes magazine, November 29, 2004, volume 174, number 11, pages 102-112, “Just Say No!” by Robert Langreth.
http://nccam.nih.gov
Hawaii Med J. 1999 Feb;58(2):9-19. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM): a review for the primary care physician. Onopa J., University of Hawaii, Department of Medicine, Honolulu 96813, USA.