Most medical personnel remain largely unfamiliar with non-medical treatments, and tend to dismiss them without knowing about what they're dismissing. This is a great loss to the doctor as well as to the public.

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.

I wish there were easy answers to people's health questions. There aren't. There are answers, all right, but they are not easy.

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.

Doctors frequently get it wrong. One out of five patients today is in the hospital because incorrect treatment by a physician put him or her there.

I believe that alternative healing methods are much more than just temporary or half measures.

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