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What Is Natural Death?October 4, 2000 |
by Karl Loren
It is so easy to criticize most doctors and excessive drug usage that I often omit description of a positive alternative. This issue of The Wednesday Letter begins to lay out a philosophy for health care -- an alternative to the present system.
My object in this issue is to describe the beginning of a philosophical foundation for the entire broad concept of "health care" in the information age of the era called by Alvin Toffler, the Third Wave. [Toffler described the eras of the First Wave, Second Wave and the current Third Wave. Click the link for more information.] I expect to take some several more months to develop this concept fully within the setting of these ongoing issues of The Wednesday Letter.
You'll see pieces of this philosophy -- expanded -- taking up separate issues of future Wednesday Letters. I'll also be including as a "footnote" selected data and opinions from others.
The first question any philosopher should ask, in this endeavor, is:
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What Is Health? |
I'm not going to try to answer that question fully in this issue, but you should realize that a "health care program" which does NOT define "health" has a bankrupt beginning.
I'm going to be working toward a full definition of "health" in these Wednesday Letters.
Medicine has evolved to a condition where it treats mostly symptoms and chases false causes without much hope for cure. Medicine, particularly with drugs, hopes to make you comfortable and to manage the disease so it won't get worse!
- One of the most powerful voices for Second Wave drug technology is the President and CEO of Merck, the makers of Mevacor, the billion-dollar cholesterol-lowering drug. Mr. Raymond Gilmartin, on November 29, 1994, said: "To us, disease management means treating diseases more effectively primarily by using pharmaceuticals more effectively." This was in a speech to the New York Society of Securities Analysis. The Associated Press article that quoted Mr. Gilmartin said: "The disease management concept is getting increased discussion in drug industry circles as manufacturers seek ways to keep profits growing in an era when insurance companies and health care plans are demanding lower costs." Even though that quote is six years old, you know that the pressures on lowering drug costs are even higher now. When the drug will "manage" a disease, cheaply, that will be the ideal item for society!
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Mr. Gilmartin!
You note that the emphasis is on "management" not cure! We don't arrive at "wellness" by "managing" disease with drugs. And, why should anyone be surprised that a drug company doesn't have an interest in wellness!! |
In fact, almost 100% of mankind goes through life on a downward spiral of health. Health gets worse, worse and worse, until death. This downward spiral of health over a life time compares exactly with the downward spiral of medical corruption over the past several decades.
Then, the end is almost always a terrible affair -- with the person having arrived at a condition of the worst health in his entire life; dying in the midst of trauma, disease, fear, drugs and enormous medical bills.
This has often been the subject of serious discussion, even within governmental bodies, but usually such discussion has dealt with the "right" to die rather than a "healthy, natural death" in an un-diseased state. It is logical that the "right" to die, while in relatively terminal, diseased condition, would be commonly discussed. It is NOT logical that the more healthy alternative is not discussed! Click Here to read a lengthy and thoughtful report from the Canadian Senate, on the subject of "right to die."
Is this any way to move through life? What type of "goal" is that for life?
The term to search for is "futile care" and there ARE thoughtful articles on that phrase.
When my mother died, her body was stuffed with tubes and electrical sensing devices. She did not die in dignity! My good friend, Dr. Robert Mendelssohn, was a regular guest on my radio program. One night he did not call in, to be on his show with me. He had stayed home to die, after a heart attack, because he couldn't stand the dehumanizing treatment in a hospital. Just about everyone you know who has died has died in a state of total insult to the body.
I don't think you can define "health" or "wellness" without including a very specific definition for the end point of living -- a description of "natural death."
The Osteopaths have a well reasoned view of "wellness" but even they do not treat the vital subject of "the end of life."
This, then, is the subject of this Wednesday Letter.
What Is Natural Death?
I doubt you've heard much on THIS subject. What would be a "natural death?" What should be the end point for a truly healthy life?
My research suggests the human body is NOT designed to be immortal! It may surprise you that I even bring it up, but see how doctors ignore this principle and try to prolong EVERY life, even in misery, as if ANY death is an unacceptable loss.
Doctors want to pass their patients, still alive, to the next doctor, or the next, or, finally, to that convalescent hospital where death no longer makes the physician personally guilty of failure in keeping grandma alive.
I'm not, either, an advocate for doctor assisted suicide as the only way out because that concept does not include the healthy alternative for death.
Scientists have studied both humans and animals, and their "natural life span." It seems that mammals "naturally" live about five or six times the number of years it takes for them to reach maturity. One relatively scientific measurement of "maturity" is the ending of the growth of the long bones in the body.
There may be some differences of opinion on how long it takes for a human to reach maturity, but it is somewhere near the age of twenty. This would mean that man's natural life span would be about 100 or 120 years. Scientific studies of "old age" seem to show that dietary restrictions are the single most impelling explanation for people who live to 100 or more years.
There are many recorded instances of people living to 100, and even some to 120, but there are no serious efforts to research body immortality.
If this body is designed to live for a while and then die, what should be the healthy form of that death? Are we doomed to an existence of death at the end of a period of disease, drugs and despair?
You might think this is "far out," but almost everyone has had experience with someone they know who "just died in his sleep." In many of these cases the person may have been very ill, but at least the death was simple and quiet.
There is a great deal of information on this subject, although mixed with information on funerals, etc., at the following web site:
http://www.worldtrans.org/GIB/natdeath/ndh0.html
Unfortunately almost ALL the "other" information where the phrase "natural death" is used relates to allowing a very sick person to die in dignity. Never have I see that phrase used ONLY to refer to a very healthy person deciding that he or she has had enough of living and is ready to "pass on." That is what I call "natural death."
But, you can go beyond, probably to only a very few people you have heard of, about the person who was in good health and just decided to die. Perhaps you can't think of any?
But, think further, hasn't it been your experience that almost ALL animal deaths are of this type.
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My wife and I had a very loved dog who had reached the age of 18 and certainly seemed in very good health to us. One day that dog just wandered off and we didn't see her again. Another very loved dog of ours simply went into the closet, curled up in a favorite corner, went to sleep and never woke up. She, too, was in apparent good health up to the last day.
Dogs and cats have the secret to healthy natural death. What holds us back from that end of life? |
A definition of "natural death" would be important to any understanding of wellness.
I suggest that natural death is when the person, in a state of full function of all organs and mental clarity, DECIDES to go to sleep some night, and not wake up.
He wasn't ill or sick. He was just ready to leave!
A flood of questions and objections might now arise in your mind. Let me address some of them.
Spiritual Future?
First, it is well and good for a human body to die, and for the "person" to go to sleep with the expectation that he will not "wake up."
But, then what?
That is certainly one of the most important questions any person should be asking himself. I'm not going to get into this question at all, other than to suggest to you that YOU should!
You should have a personal religious philosophy that helps you understand what happens after "death." I find that most people have a robotic response to this question, but so little personal reality on their own answers that these don't serve them very well when it comes to the time of death.
It seems to me that most Eastern religions have well developed understandings of this question whereas most Western religions had that understanding hundreds of years ago, but have lost it as they, themselves, have been infiltrated by psychology and materialism! |
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If you, for instance, had absolute certainty that, an instant after you die, "you" (in some spiritual sense) would take on a new baby body and continue to live, in that new body, you might regard death differently from the person who believes that immediately after his death there is NO continuation of any aspect of his personality.
The concept of life-after-death is one of the most common to man, existing in virtually all religions, throughout all history. When medicine ventures into this realm, it perverts the area terribly by applying the fraud called psychiatry! Many religions, today, have abandoned any life-after-death concept of belief!
This is an extremely important question -- this question about what happens after death. But, while I say that it is of paramount importance to "life," that question is not within the subject of physical health care of the body.
Probably 70% of all man's ills are psychosomatic -- caused by the mind. If so, they should be solved by religion, not by psychology or health care. But, until a person finds that religion and it handles that percent of disease for himself, he needs a health care system as I describe in this issue of The Wednesday Letter.
Aside from the obvious and important question of where do I go after death?, there are some aspects of that final event of life that can and should be described for health care.
- You should leave this life, generally, with the knowledge that you have paid your debts --- of all kinds. You should feel that you have accomplished what you set out to do.
- You should not try to leave while feeling that there is someone who will be upset at your decision, or some person to whom you owe some communication.
- I don't view natural death as an escape from anything unpleasant!
- You certainly ought not leave this life because you are in such suffering, despair or disease, that you feel that ANY alternative is better than the continuation of life.
- This must also be your own decision, not that of someone else, nor should the act of death require any assistance other than your own decision.
Most people should not even be ready for this decision until well past 80 years of healthy and productive living.
Remember, this is a philosophical goal, not something you might personally achieve, loaded with chemicals and false data as you are. But, you could get closer to it than you think! You can restore yourself from your present death-like condition to a pervious state of health!
What Is Wellness?
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This is another of those questions which will take quite some time to answer. But, for starters, let's look at a new baby, born by natural child-birth to a mother who has led a drug-free life, with good nutrition, has a loving husband and where the baby is born into a long-lived family where disease and trauma were relatively unknown amongst any of the family. |
We could consider this baby as having arrived in a condition of excellent wellness or health -- at least as good as we can expect for a start in today's society.
There are certainly many thousands of such babies being born every year, even today. It may well be that a majority of babies are NOT in that state, but still, there are many thousands whose background is such.
A larger number of babies are born with two strikes against them even at birth. Their mothers drink Coke and coffee during pregnancy; their fathers abuse the mother verbally or physically; the delivery is a drug-dependent and doctor-assisted event.
There are even those millions of babies born of single-parent mothers who are addicted to street and/or medical drugs and who rob their child of any chance for a healthy start in life! Here are the criminals in our society -- those drugged mothers and absent fathers!
But, let's start with that first kid -- that healthy one.
What happens to him? Why does he usually end up just like the kids of drug-addicted mothers, dying of disease, in pain and distress?
Why can't he move through life without disease and end up as an old man or woman, ready for a natural death? This should be possible.
How that kid moves through life from a healthy baby-birth, without disease, to a natural death should be the subject of health care.
The goal of this type of health care would be to keep that kid in a constant state of wellness.
One sure way NOT to do it would be to have government insurance, or any health insurance, reward his stupid decisions on diet and life style. When the official viewpoint of the government, or any insurance policy, is that disease is NOT caused by the patient, but comes from nowhere!!, then any "service" such as paid-for medical service will surely be used up to the maximum available. We live in a society of victims looking to get hand-outs based on the magnitude of their victimhood!
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I would not propose a philosophy of health care based only on theory, but feel rather that any concept of wellness, or health care, should be subject to test, revision and proof by the scientific method.
The scientific method generally says that you start with some observations and a hypothesis, then test that hypothesis for validity.
hy·poth·e·sis (hì-pòth¹î-sîs) noun
plural hy·poth·e·ses (-sêz´)Abbr. hyp., hypoth.
1. A tentative explanation that accounts for a set of facts and can be tested by further investigation; a theory.
2. Something taken to be true for the purpose of argument or investigation; an assumption.
3. The antecedent of a conditional statement.
[Latin, subject for a speech, from Greek hupothesis, proposal, supposition, from hupotithenai, to suppose : hupo-, hypo- + tithenai, to place.]The scientific method indicates that the hypothesis should allow you to explain the relationships among observations, to predict new observations, go looking for them, and find them. The scientific method looks for and thrives on observations that don't fit into the hypothesis because that allows the hypothesis to be changed, as necessary, to account for all observations.
A philosophy of health care should meet these criteria.
The observations I would suggest that we start with are the facts about the tremendous quantities of unnatural chemicals that humans have within their bodies today, compared with thousands of years ago.
Another set of data would be the tremendous change in diet comparing now with only a few hundred years ago.
We don't have to get very detailed with these facts in order to conclude that man has become a chemically-laden being, compared to times past, and that his diet has moved far from anything considered natural.
The hypothesis I would suggest, for my philosophy of wellness, is that man suffers today from a burden of toxins of all types, that these are the primary cause of illness today and that the FIRST objective of any health care system would be to identify and then cleanse the body of toxins!
My hypothesis indicates that, after toxins, it is nutritional deficiencies that cause illness.
The first objective simply recognizes that good health starts off for almost everyone as a process of negative gain. We gain better health by getting rid of stuff!
For this step we DO NOT improve our health by adding stuff to the body. There may be some things worth adding to the body, but before we look at those, let's get rid of as much as we can of the accumulated poisons which load up in our body.
These toxins ARE NOT put there by bacteria or viruses. Yet, the great bulk of medical research over the past 150 years has been to study bacteria as a cause of disease, and more recently, to study the virus as a source of disease. The reason is obvious. Drug companies do NOT research how to rid the body of chemicals -- instead they research on what new chemical they can add to a body to handle some bug!
Instead, medical science should be studying he effects of various chemical substances on the body, and finding ways to rid the body of those chemicals which remain in the body causing harm.
An example would be the lead which kids used to swallow by chewing on toys painted with lead-based paints. The "disease" of lead poisoning is well understood and the symptoms are quite recognizable. The first solution, of course, is to avoid taking that lead into the body.
There are no microbes or viruses to blame for lead poisoning. It happens that intravenous chelation therapy is the standard, FDA-approved treatment for lead poisoning and that it is quite effective.
Here, then, is an example of negative gain in terms of health care -- take the lead out of the body to improve health.
Certainly removing the mercury from silver tooth fillings is a popular way to remove a very dangerous metal toxin from the body. You get the silver removed, replaced with gold, and then use cysteine in the Life Glow Plus formula, for instance, to get rid of the toxic mercury.
I could write, and will write, about many poisons which you may not even thing about as poisons, but the main point HERE is that there are millions of substances now aloft in our atmospheres, placed into our water and food supplies, even despoiling the soil, and that many of these substances are, in fact, toxins to the body. The first job of health care is to identify them and then find ways to get rid of them from your body.
It is a political objective to prevent them from being put into our environment in the first place, but it is a health care objective to remove them from individuals. Individuals may take up the political agenda of changing the amounts of toxins put into the general public, but individuals have a senior responsibility to themselves, to make sure that THEY are healthy, and that THEY get rid of the toxins in THEIR bodies.
There are many ways to detoxify the body, already well documented. I'll write of those in future issues of The Wednesday Letter, but two of these include fasting and colonics. There are others, including one I'll write about in a special issue of The Wednesday Letter, involving certain vitamins and a sauna program of sweating out many of these toxins. Certainly many of the Vibrant Life products have been designed around cleansing objectives. Look, for instance, at:
I would then suggest that the second objective of any health care system would be to determine what deficiencies exist in the body, and remedy those.
Years ago there was a terrible disease which killed many people. The disease was called scurvy.
scur·vy (skûr¹vê) noun
A disease caused by deficiency of vitamin C, characterized by spongy and bleeding gums, bleeding under the skin, and extreme weakness.
adjective
scur·vi·er, scur·vi·est
Mean; contemptible.
[From Middle English scurfy, characterized by scurf (influenced by French scorbut, scurvy, from Latin scorbútus). See scorbutic, from scurf, scurf. See scurf.]
— scur¹vi·ly adverb
— scur¹vi·ness nouBelieve it or not, scurvy was considered an infectious disease for many decades. Back then, just as now, medical scientists were chasing after bugs as the cause of some disease when the true cause was simply some deficiency in the diet.
Pellagra (rough skin leading to nervous disorders, insanity and death) is another "disease" which, for decades, was considered contagious. Many thousands of people died from pellagra before it became obvious that it was nothing more than a deficiency of niacin.
The Hypothesis
So, the first statement of my hypothesis for wellness is that:
Wellness is a natural state for mankind, departed from because of toxins taken into the body, and because of deficiencies in the diet (and exercise or life style).
The study of the return (from a death-like condition) to a previous condition of health, Anabiology, examines the technology of health care within this hypothesis.
This technology, now evolving, will consist of various types of cleansing or purification programs and biochemical analysis of the nutritional needs (in term of basic minerals and vitamins) of individual organs and tissues.
Bacteria and viruses play a very minor role in the study of wellness since, as another part of this hypothesis, bacteria and viruses usually cause disease ONLY when the body has been weakened by previous toxic build-ups and nutritional deficiencies.
I have not included here the problems caused by the mind -- other than to acknowledge that they may account for as much as 70% of all illness. As mentioned above, I believe this type of problem is NOT the province of a medical doctor OR a psychiatrist, but a minister.
Medical drugs, as a generic term, will play almost no role within this hypothesis, other than as causes of disease rather than useful treatments.
Discipline does! The health care professional who continues to "help" a client who refuses to start a cleansing program will have so many losses in his practice as to quit. The professional will have to be more a teacher and motivator than dispense of drugs or a wielder of the knife!
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Karl Loren