he very word "patient" implies passivity and powerlessness. Me-teacher-you-dumbbell, or me-doctor-you-patient, or me-politician-you-voter, or any other paternalistic or maternalistic stay-in-your-place tradition will not pass muster with me.

If you are not highly educated, you will need to abandon your anxiety and fear of reading and doing research.

We have been taught to "just eat a balanced diet." We have been taught wrong. The truth is natural healing works.

If you are well educated, and especially if you are a health professional, you will have to unlearn much of what you've been taught and start afresh with the rather disruptive thought that natural healing may actually work.

It is possible to learn more than your doctor knows, particularly in key areas that specifically apply to you. In fact, you may discover material that your doctor never saw, or did see and never investigated.

A doctor's authority in America often exceeds his or her knowledge. Whole bodies of knowledge in healing are ignored because they are unorthodox and non-medical. A doctor's education seems exhaustive, yet MDs study so much about drugs and surgery - and so little about nutrition, fasting, herbal remedies, spinal manipulation, massage, vitamin and mineral therapy, homeopathy, and more - that we realize their qualifications are incomplete.

Much of the fear of doing something wrong vanishes when we are knowledgeable about what we are doing.