Chiropractic San Diego

By Michael Dorausch, DC

Chiropractic has a rich history in the state of California, with the founder of chiropractic teachings, DD Palmer, first bringing the philosophy, science and art to the state in the early 1900s. Last month Planet Chiropractic began sharing transcribed text from an audio presentation recorded in February of 1997. The event, which featured legendary chiropractor Ian Grassam was historical, with sellout crowds of attendees converging on a hotel in Orange County California for an annual conference hosted by the oldest chiropractic organization in existence. This is the third installment of transcribed text from Dr. Grassam’s motivational presentation.

(photo: Design for ICA lapel pin which was sold by attending chiropractic students to raise funds for student chapters of chiropractic organizations)

An mp3 audio presentation Ian Grassam Chiropractic Audio 1997 is available for listening and downloading. The first transcribed portion of the talk titled Leadership and Focus with Chiropractor Ian Grassam was posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008. The second, Health is that Condition Within the Body was posted on June 11, 2008. We continue now where the presentation left off…

Gary mentioned earlier today about C. Everett Koop. C. Everett Koop is probably the most powerful opinion leader in the field of medicine today. One of the reasons he carries that power is because he does not have an agenda for self-agrandizment or profit. HeÂ’s actually trying to move something forward within the healthcare delivery system. HeÂ’s a medical physician. He sees things from a medical point of view. But heÂ’s also aware of the fact that that which he sees is falling apart.

On May 26th of last year (1996), C. Everett Koop, held in Washington D.C. the first symposium on alternative care and its integration into the field of medicine. He had days of studies about chiropractic moving into orthodox medicine. About acupuncture and nutrition and ayurveda, and aromatherapy and everything he could think of that exists in the alternative care world and he said “how can we integrate this into medicine?”

And yet, in his opening statement he makes the comment that the medical paradigm is collapsing. The basic medical model has failed. He said the thing we have to ask ourselves – are we looking for one more therapeutic modality? And the answer is no. He said we must restructure the healthcare paradigm. We must change the rules of the game. See, the game rules were established by organized medicine and the drug industry over the last few thousand years. And the rules of the game as you and I know it, which makes it so difficult for us, is to find the disease and treat the disease and eliminate the symptoms of the disease – have that not been the rules of the game for the last thousand years? The answer is yes.

You and I can’t win under those rules. Do you understand that? What does that mean, should we give up? Say NO – we change the rules of the game! What happens when we change the rules of the game and the game changes to that of finding the cause of the sickness, correct the cause of the sickness, and rely on the innate ability of the body to self-heal itself. When those are the rules of the game, what happens to the medical practitioner? He’s out of business.

He either gets in line, learns what his purpose is, ends up working for a decent chiropractor, told what to doÂ… [laughter]Â…gets his head out of his pelvis and realizes that he must have some kind of a life. This is what happens. See, the rules of the game must be changed to suit the model weÂ’re looking for.

Now this is what Gerry talked about this morning. When we were in a pre-critical mass consciousness in this country, nobody understood. There were these weirdos running around talking about healthcare and wellness care and fixing causes. What are they talking about sickness, disease, treatment, symptoms – what’s all that crap? And then all of a sudden, we kept telling the story…telling the story….telling the story. Structuring a new healthcare paradigm. And comparing it to the failing medical paradigm.

Remember, medicine canÂ’t stand the light of day. It can not work. As long as you keep telling the storyÂ…telling the storyÂ…telling the story, and you donÂ’t have to go through a Madison Avenue filter or the federal or state government filter, the truth gets to the people. Let the people know the truth. The truth will what? Set emÂ’ free!

IsnÂ’t that what Bobby just did here when he did Martin Luther KingÂ’s speech – “Free at last, free at last!” This is the story that has to be told. Your mission is not about being a chiropractor and correcting a subluxation and having a good life – you have a mission in life to alter the direction and the understanding and enlightenment of a planet. It begins right here in Costa Mesa, but your objective is to go throughout the world. ThatÂ’s not a bad start with forty million Californians and get them aware, because the fruit and nut society out here will take the message across the world. [laughter] Am I right?

Do you understand that when youÂ’re from California you get away with a lot of weird shit? [laughter] I donÂ’t care if you go from Wall Street to Main Street, if youÂ’re from California everybody goes, “Okay, make spaceÂ….” [laughter] Because you know theyÂ’re going to come up with something weird and different, and usually right. And after so many years it goes to the East coast, bounces back to the Midwest, and the nation has a new idea – thanks to California. ThatÂ’s the reality of it. So IÂ’m placing on you the burden of being the big nut.

You understand if you take a jar of mixed nuts and you shake them up – where do the big nuts go? Well… If you’re not at the top, you might be a little nut.

The objective is to go outÂ… Well the worst thing in the world is if youÂ’re going to be a nut, to be a little nut! Remember when youÂ’re a big nut they really let you get away with some weird shit. The reality here is this, if youÂ’re going to shake up society which means change the rules by which we live, shake that damn jar. ItÂ’s a jar of mixed nuts anyhow, right? And as you shake the jar, shake the jar, shake the jar, all the little bitty nuts float to the bottom, and all the big nuts go to the top. And the big nuts change the way people live. The big nuts are the clowns that end up on this platform. Do you understand what IÂ’m saying?

WeÂ’ve been measured a lot of times, in various places, and failed the test for sanity. Remember, sanity in this world is to do the same thing every day, each day expecting a different result. ThatÂ’s when you know youÂ’re nuts, okay?

And what I’m saying to you is that you have an opportunity obligation, because the medical healthcare paradigm is crumbling, and it’s crumbling at a rate where it’s creating chaos in the marketplace. My god, the Ph.d’s and the MBA’s and all the people of letters, education and business, have taken over medicine. And so far what they have done is they have changed nothing with managed care have they? They’ve changed – they’ve gone to managed cost, but they haven’t gone to managed care. Managed care is what we do. We take a patient and explain to them where they are, we then tell them where they should be and we give them a methodology by which they can get there. Is that not what we do?

We explain to them what health is, and what they donÂ’t have. We have been doing income and outcome assessments, for the past 102 years. All of sudden medicineÂ’s in a panic because theyÂ’re going to have to do an outcome assessment which will prove they donÂ’t work. Chiropractic says send me all the outcome assessment crap you want. I can tell you what kind of health the patient is in when they come in, I can tell you what health they otta have when they leave, and IÂ’ll tell you the methodology by which we get there.

We will structurally, biomechanically, neurologically, lifestyle, nutrition and every other way, let them know where they should be. Do you understand the enlightenment and the healing that takes place in a human being when all of a sudden they find out they can do something about it. The absolute slavery that has occurred in the hearts and minds of people in this country have been the fact that they have been blamed for being sick and given no way to do anything about it.

[To Be Continued]

By Michael Dorausch, DC It's official, Kimberly Bock, the #44 commenting individual on our Win a Wii Fit from Planet Chiropractic has won herself a new in the box, fitness gadget, that is all the rage amongst so many seeking to be fit as a fiddle folks, worldwide. It's good thing I ...

By Michael Dorausch, DC I was recently handed three very different chiropractic business cards for the office of California Lancaster Chiropractor, Dr. Suzanne Frye. Earlier this week there was a business card post, and the topic, along with photos, has been covered several times in the past. These cards I'm about to ...

By Michael Dorausch, DC The admin for our classifieds ad system checks in with me every evening with a report of ads posted for the day. I continue to be impressed with the number of new ads that post daily. What in the world did chiropractors do before they could post ...

By Daria Belov

Back pain is thought to be one of the most common occurring complaints amongst people working in the United States. While chiropractors have long been associated with successful outcomes related to complaints of back pain, neck pain and headaches, there’s more interrelated symptoms that cross through the meshwork of daily aches and pains, that result in visits to chiropractic offices each and every day. It’s been a long time since the words were written look to the spine for the cause of disease and while preparing for an unrelated article today I was reminded of how a seemingly unrelated number of different topics could all have something in common.

Follow the links to get the gist of where I’m going. It started out simply, with a search early this morning on topics related to back pain and posture at work. I found that researchers don’t always suggest sitting up straight, that chiropractors sometimes get aching back pain too, that there is a national chiropractic care week in Australia (it was last month), a subluxation awareness week (taking place in September of each year), and that asthma cases have doubled in the United States.

(photo: the back of a chiropractor’s T-shirt showing the simple difference of life before and after chiropractic care)

The asthma link took me off of the posture tangent and led me to find topics on breathing easier without asthma medication, some odd relationship with getting the measles and potentially preventing asthma as a result, and a testimonial of chiropractic care and children suffering from asthma.

I suppose children with poor posture grow up to be adults with even worse posture and begin complaining in the workplace that there neck, shoulders, and backs are sore. But before children become adults, they are still children, and before that they are babies and newborns.

In defining children I found myself on the search for babies and discovered crystal meth was not good for them (no surprise there), but breast-feeding was, but what happened to the midwives and having those babies at home?

Babies, newborns, and midwife related searches resulted in collateral findings of antibiotics not working, NSAIDs and the increasing risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ear infections without antibiotics, healing ear infections without antibiotics (is that even possible /sarcasm), useless cases of antibiotic therapy for bronchitis, MD issued guidelines on antibiotics, and more antibiotics related searches than I’d care to index at this point in time.

Think that was an odd post, wait till you see the searches I found related to heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol. For a chiropractic news website, there sure are quite a few obscure topics spread across the years.

By Michael Dorausch, DC Was checking through names and offices listed on the May Chiropractors post and noticed a number of chiropractors based out of New York that had not yet been added to other directory pages. Changes were made yesterday and it appears that we will be featuring several chiropractors ...

By Michael Dorausch, DC While attending SMX Advanced in Seattle last week I listened to a presentation by Hamlet Batista who suggested that White Hat methods of cloaking could be beneficial for my website (at least that's how I interpreted it). I liked Hamlet, and I think he was well intended ...

By Michael Dorausch, DC

This is a continuation of the 1997 presentation by chiropractor, Ian Grassam. It was initially recorded at a chiropractic conference in Orange County California and transcribed from audio to text earlier this year. The initial post is titled: Leadership and Focus with Chiropractor Ian Grassam.

See, when you know that health is that condition within the body where all tissues, cells, systems and organs are expressing their potential – and you know this, and you can tap into the internet and you can pick up the books around the country – we’re in the information age. We’re at a time where the subluxation has been removed from the communication networks of this nation. Everything that our parents were raised with and so many of us were raised with, we were raised with an information program – it was a disinformation program. It was a program where the government decided what you should hear when it came to health care – is that not true?

David’s out here fighting because you have your government trying to put poison into your drinking system. For no other reason than profitability for some entity somewhere – do you understand that? This industry is willing to put your life and the life of your children at risk for the sake of a few dollars.

(photo: Chiropractors Ian Grassam and Fred Barge - taken in 1997 at CCCLA)

This is happening across this country. This disinformation campaign is what you and I have lived with all these years. Madison Avenue decides how you should think. The average guy, the working Joe out there – whether he’s an electrician or a carpenter or a plumber, whatever the case may be – he’s had it drilled into his head for the last twenty years that the minute he comes to the end of the day he should begin to get drunk. Isn’t quitting time Miller Time? Do you think that’s an accident?

This is a devious, planned program modeled to move you through the various parts of your life based on the needs of some profitability mechanism within some large corporation. ItÂ’s Miller Time.

Cigarette smoking. All of these habits are continually, disinformation-plan-wise, led to you through your children, through your television, through everything. To the extent where they are willing to poison you for the sake of profit. Poison for profit is what David is talking about. David, and people like him, need your support but they above all need your leadership.

Because, see, listen to what’s happening. David is having a difficult time in so many places. Because there’s no understanding of health in the people. We live in a system that is able to sell the public tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars of cures from the outside in, don’t we? You can go into your drug store, and what’s happening now? That which used to be written by prescription is now what – over the counter. Now what’s the difference between prescription strength and over-the-counter strength? How many you take. Over-the-counter strength, multiply by three, you’re at prescription strength. We’re going to get a direct impact right from the chemical drug world over the counter to you. OTC – into your home.

And as Fred, in his speeches that we did at the colleges over the last few days, he talks about the fact that our nation is made up of people who were born in a medicine cabinet – as BJ said. Born in a medicine cabinet. Born with an understanding – I shouldn’t say born with an understanding, but born and then educated to an understanding. Trained to an understanding that no matter who they are, where they are, where they come from they are insufficient. They’re not enough. They’re lacking. They were brought into this world with something missing and that something that’s missing can be brought to them by their local pharmaceutical and drug store.

ThatÂ’s the belief system which the people you and I are working with believe. And thatÂ’s why it makes it so difficult for David Kennedy, or anyone else for that matter, to go to these people and say youÂ’re poisoning yourself.

Remember, their understanding of sickness and disease is a roll of the dice. Is it not? Gee – what did I do. Why me? What did I do to deserve this sickness? What did I do to deserve this illness? What did my loving child do to deserve this sickness and disease, to be born with? We live in a nation of victims. But they became victims through a disinformation campaign that was put into their hearts and minds to weaken them as a people.

This is what you’re dealing with. It’s not that those people aren’t capable of learning, as they have been told that they are ignorant and they’re weak. And they’re insufficiently made, although miraculously made, insufficiently made. It’s a dichotomy that’s got to be driving people crazy because they go to church on Sunday and they are told that they are miraculously made and then come Monday they are told they are insufficiently manufactured because a lot of chemicals were left out at the point of conception. What kind of… I mean, is this a spin-bin or what? This is where people live. Can you imagine? We talked about why people don’t move forward, why they don’t experience a more successful life – why they don’t experience a more healthful life and a happier life. Why are they so screwed up?

It is not an accident that people are screwed up. They don’t know whether to go right or left. They life in that world of paralysis of analysis and lay there like an attitude of victims for the rest of their life – waiting for someone to bring joy, someone to bring happiness, someone to bring health. They’re sitting there waiting for life to show up, because they’ve been trained that were born life deficient. They’ve got a life deficiency syndrome brought to you by Madison Avenue and the drug industry.

If I have you believing that sickness and disease is some ethereal thing that floats from the outside in, and comes down upon you through the wrath of god – which is what these diseases are called arenÂ’t they? IsnÂ’t that what AIDS was referred to? It was the “wrath of god.”

As Fred talks about – sickness, disease started out as causation with demons. Demons were those mystical things you couldn’t see that were brought to you by whenever you got off the given path. The demons went on to become bacteria. Bacteria were also those things that you couldn’t see, taste, touch or feel – am I right?

The mystery sandwich was sold to you every day. That you couldnÂ’t handle it, there was something you couldnÂ’t see, you were too stupid. How many times have you heard it? Pat emÂ’ on the head, give them two aspirins and send them home. The ignorance of the medical profession and the fact that that ignorance turned into power through Madison Avenue has caused the problems we deal with today. Because when you sit down with people and you tell them the basic chiropractic story they say, “Well God, why didnÂ’t somebody tell me that twenty years ago?”

Because itÂ’s so honest and so simple. You are dealing with mass ignorance across this nation that was done on purpose. And youÂ’ve got to stop and realize that this is an organized program. You have a lot of work to do. YouÂ’ve got to realize that this medical paradigm can only exist in a field of ignorance. Medicine can not stand the light of information. Organized medicine, as you and I know it, can not live in the light of the information age. Medicine, and the way it is practiced, and the way that you see it portrayed every day is on its way out as we speak.

[To Be Continued]

By Michael Dorausch, DC

The Republican presidential candidate that so many people would love to see just go away, is back in the press. According to news reports the Ron Paul campaign has reserved a University Arena in Minnesota, and there are plans to hold a separate convention gathering during the national GOP convention in September. According to Paul campaign spokesperson Jessie Benton, the event is expected to be a celebration of Republican values and it’s also intended to send a message to the GOP that it’s time for Republicans to return to their roots of limited government and personal responsibility.

I suspected we’d see Ron Paul news of this nature, it appears to fit with the type of stories we’ve been seeing during the past months leading up to this year’s election in November.

It was a quiet Saturday in September 2007 when I took some time to organize and report on website data on Barack Obama and other presidential hopefuls. That article included website data related to the Ron Paul campaign and I received a number of e-mails throughout the week following.

I began noticing increased Ron Paul discussion amongst chiropractic e-mail groups (which are oftentimes kept private) and on October 4, 2007 authored a blog post with my thoughts on chiropractors voting for Ron Paul. That post drew a number of comments and an equal number of e-mails from people mostly in support of the Texas medical doctor turned Congressman.

It was only a week later while attending a chiropractic conference in Arizona that I happened to be in the right place at the right time, to snap some photographs and post an article on the Ron Paul Revolution in Tempe Arizona. Apparently that article was picked up by local news affiliates in the Phoenix area and needless to say Ron Paul evangelists were rather excited as result. That article resulted in even more e-mails and plenty of people sharing their thoughts on why chiropractors should support Ron Paul.

In December of 2007 I revisited the presidential campaign website data I collected and compared it to the current information. The conclusion was that a group of liberty loving Americans were addicted to Ron Paul.

A medical doctor that has delivered thousands of babies may not be someone you’d likely think would be against government-funded mandatory vaccination programs. Ron Paul is no ordinary medical doctor and apparently freedom and individual choice is something he finds still to be important. Dr. Ron Paul has spoken out more than once on his thoughts regarding immunization and vaccines. Coming from a background of someone that actively practiced medicine and delivered thousands of babies, I’d say he’s more qualified on the topic of health care then any other presidential candidate.

After March, the Ron Paul news simmered down a bit and we got back to checking chiropractic money in politics reports and continued research on the 2008 chiropractic vote. The most current figures show the majority of chiropractic money from individuals and PACs going to the Democratic Party, but when checking individual recipients, Ron Paul was shown to have received more money from chiropractors than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

And now it looks like Ron Paul is back with plans to rally crowd of some 11,000 supporters at a University of Minnesota arena in Minneapolis on September 2. The GOP convention is scheduled to take place from September 1 through September 4, 2008 in nearby St. Paul, Minnesota.

Dr. Ron Paul’s web site can be viewed here at www.ronpaul2008.com

Chiropractors open new offices, other chiropractors close their offices and move to other states,  or open offices in new locations. Here’s an updated list for several chiropractors in the New York area. Information verified in June of 2008.

Lindenwood Chiropractic Office
Avrum I. Musnik, D.C
8808 151st Avenue APT P3
Howard Beach, New York 11414
718-845-3721

Erin Randazzo, D.C.
3601 Hempstead Turnpike, Suite 405
Levittown, NY 11756
516-520-9800

Huntington Medical and Rehabilitation
33 Walt Whitman Road, Suite 100
Huntington Station, NY 11746
631-425-9400

Treating patients with chiropractic and massage therapy. Serving the Suffolk and Nassau Long Island areas. We take pride in our pleasant atmosphere and superior staff!

Balance Chiropractic & Wellness Center
Dr. Deborah Genin & Dr. Paul Beberman
198 New York Ave
Huntington, NY 11743
631-470-9670

We are a husband and wife team with a Licensed Massage Therapist on staff. We are dedicated health professionals with a goal to help as many people in our area as possible. We utilize the very best, most up to date chiropractic treatments, physiotherapy modalities and soft tissue treatments.

Rhino Chiropractic
Dr. John Gehnrich
25 South Park Avenue
Rockville Centre, NY 11570
516-471-1945

Sunrise Chiropractic
Dr. Fred Jones
2260 Hewlett Avenue
Merrick, NY 11566-3624
Phone: 516-378-0404

Also updated are the NY and LI pages…

Chiropractors New York & Long Island Chiropractic Directory

Visit the chiropractic blog pages for more information regarding New York updates.

Any chiropractors missing and/or new listings can be added to the comments and made available on the next page update.

By Michael Dorausch, DC Among my activities in the desert while attending a chiropractic conference this past weekend, were two different planning sessions for future chiropractic events and seminars taking place in Arizona, Northern California, and Southern California. Just last week I mentioned in the news how much I like the ...

By Michael Dorausch, DC

Call it a psycho conflict of interest affecting the health and lives of thousands of children, an Iowa senator has discovered 3 Harvard researchers earned millions of dollars in consulting fees from drug companies, for performing research and evangelizing antipsychotic drug use in children.

Charles Ernest “Chuck” Grassley, a senior United States Senator from Iowa, launched a congressional investigation to determine whether research psychiatrists were receiving drug money payments and failing to disclose that information to the federal government and university departments.

According to congressional investigators, researchers failed to report millions of dollars in income earned while consulting for various drug companies. According to news reports, these were well-known child psychiatrists practicing research out of Harvard University. Among the research doctors were psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Biederman, of the psychiatry department at Harvard Medical School. Investigators believe the three psychiatrists may have violated federal rules created to vet out potential conflicts of interest in pharmaceutical research, some of which is financed by government grants.

After being pressured by the senator’s investigators, one Harvard psychiatrist reportedly disclosed earning at least $1 million in consulting fees from various pharmaceutical companies. Another reportedly earned at least $1.6 million in drug company consulting fees, and his research has helped drive the expansion of antipsychotic prescription medications for use among children, according to reports.

Looks to me like the result in all of these consulting fees was an increased uptake use of psychiatric medicines in children. As a parent, how would you feel knowing your child was medicated with antipsychotic drugs (also known as major tranquilizers) thanks to the research done by paid consultants to the pharmaceutical industry?

It’s no secret that the prescribing of antipsychotic medication in children has skyrocketed during the past few years. Back in 2004 we reported on ADHD drugs outselling antibiotics amongst kids. According to that report, there was a 77% increase in spending on ADHD medications during 2000 through 2003. Applying the information learned today, brings much light on the article from 2004.

Follow the Drug Money
According to reports from Senator Grassley, one of the child psychiatrists initially reported little consulting income received from drug companies. After being pressured by the senators investigating committee, the doctor amended his reported moneys received. However, even the amended reports didn’t match up with those recorded by drug companies making the payments. Companies involved included Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer.

Here’s My Take on This

Drug companies make drugs
Drug companies want to sell those drugs to the largest market possible
Doctors make research
Doctors make research that shows drugs are beneficial for use in children
Drug companies profit
Doctors profit
Any questions?

This news on researchers receiving drug company payola comes not long after news reports suggesting that hired writers, not scientists, were behind the writing of some drug studies. Manipulation and a drugged America offers more details on that topic.

Is this an isolated incident? Who knows, there is a lot of money to be made in the drugging of children, and I doubt we’ll see any slowdown coming anytime soon. Whether the product be Ritalin, Prozac, or even Gardasil, news reports like these make one wonder if there’s more money being passed behind the curtains than the general public is aware of. I’d bet my lunch on it.

By Michael Dorausch, DC I kept my collecting of chiropractor business cards to a minimum this past weekend. I was focused more on Web development during the weekend conference in Phoenix, instead of socializing and collecting business cards. I did purchase a new scanner since my business card karma post in ...

By Michael Dorausch, DC Chiropractic students that attended Cleveland Chiropractic College in Los Angeles (CCCLA) with me in the 1990s may remember this design that became popular on T-shirts distributed to chiropractic students throughout the nation. If my memory serves correctly this image was from a scan of one of the first ...

By Darrel Crain, DC

It’s official: over half the insured adult population in this country is on drugs, prescription drugs.

Drug company executives weren’t the only ones ecstatic to hear this news, giddy economists threw a week-long champagne party out on the sidewalks of Wall Street to celebrate the existence of a second industry besides Big Oil still making obscene profits, Big Pharma.

Sure, there will always be a few doomsayers complaining that rates of chronic illness are galloping up the charts even faster than drug profits, but these people need to stop worrying and just buy some drug company stock. Or go take a pill.

Speaking of antidepressants and other psychoactive drugs, that profitable sector of the drug industry has been enjoying a steep, sustained upswing, boosted especially by a rise in prescriptions for very young children.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t seem to worry that these powerful drugs were never approved for children, so I guess we shouldn’t either. So what if placebos work just as well as real psychoactives and don’t lead to suicide, what’s important here is that sugar pills don’t stimulate the economy the way actual high-priced pharmaceuticals do. As patriotic Americans it is our job to spend our way out of the country’s current troubling economic situation.

Speaking of that, I have been personally assured by political leaders that we are not in a recession. The economy may look, feel and smell like it is in an actual recession, but I am told it is not the real deal, kind of like a placebo recession. Anyway, listen up people, if we are truly serious about pumping up the economy, we’re all going to have to suck it up, tough it out and spend real money on real drugs.

Here in Southern California there is substantial evidence that drugs are a driving economic force in America. In our town just a few years ago, the only place you could fill a prescription was at a little Ma and Pa pharmacy, but then a huge drugstore complete with a drug drive-up window was built down the street and Ma and Pa went belly-up within a week.

More recently, one of those one-stop, all-in-one grocery and drug stores opened up at the east end of town. Now you can sip a latte, stock up on booze and groceries, and then pick up your prescription on the way out the door. Even so, I guess we are still in danger of running out of drugs because another giant drugstore is under construction at the west end of town, just up the street from the first one.

The controversy over who gets to pay for all these drugs continues to heat up. With profit margins for some pills hovering at over 600,000 percent (I am not making this up), insurance companies recently announced they are tired of buying drugs for everybody, so patients will henceforth be picking up larger and larger chunks of the tab.

For people already trying to decide whether to buy gas, shoes for their kids, or groceries, this is not good news. House foreclosures are definitely on the rise, but medical expenses still rank as the primary cause of personal bankruptcies in this country.

Speaking of trends, I was a kid when tonsillectomies were at the height of medical fashion, the “surgery du jour” of the late fifties and early sixties. Every time I got a sore throat, our family doctor would peer down my throat, frown and say, “Hmm.” Then he would turn to my parents, peer over his glasses and proclaim in a thick German accent, “Zeese tonsils are all red and svollen. Ve must operate. Ve must remove zeese tonsils.”

That is when my late father, Mel, would smile and reply, “Well, they’ll probably be okay, let’s just leave them in there a little while longer and see what happens.” He was such a rebel. In case you were wondering, here is what happened: my tonsils are still in there. And depending on whom you ask, I turned out okay.

My father was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia several years ago, based on abnormally high numbers of immature white blood cells circulating in his blood. His oncologist told him, “We need to start chemo right away. You have five years to live.” My father thought about this for a moment and asked, “What is my estimated survival time if I don’t do the chemo?”

The doctor cocked her head at a funny angle like a bird, her throat made a squeaky gurgling sound and she abruptly ended the interview. Was it possible no one had ever asked her this question before? In any case, the doctor could not answer the question, her training and experience was limited to patients on chemo.

Oncologists, alone among all other doctors, buy drugs wholesale and then mark up the price and sell them directly to their patients. It is reported that doctors in this medical specialty make the bulk of their income in this way. I wish I could assure you that this peculiar arrangement in no way creates a conflict of interest in favor of chemo intervention.

My father politely explained to his oncologist that he did not want to experience chemo’s unspeakable side effects on the chance of gaining a little time, and she promptly fired him. As it turned out, many years later, far beyond the doctor’s prescribed death sentence, Mel’s heart gave out and he died peacefully in his sleep at age 86.

Mel always considered himself a medical conservative, and told me he was influenced by his own father’s thoughts on health. Grandpa, whom I never knew, held views best described as medically ultra-conservative. He ultimately succumbed to injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident, but throughout his life he held to the radical belief that people could control their own health by controlling their habits, especially their eating habits.

The same basic idea is summed up in the words of John Knowles, former president of the Rockefeller Foundation, “The next major advance in the health of the American people will be determined by what the individual is willing to do for himself.”

For each of us, depending on our point of view, the nation is either half drugged, or half drug free. As more millions of our citizens are squeezed out of medical insurance coverage each year, the practice of using drugs and surgery to treat lifestyle-induced chronic diseases becomes prohibitively expensive.

Without a doubt, becoming and staying healthy requires dedication and an investment of time and energy, but doing so is shaping up as an economic imperative. Be forewarned however, side effects may include a substantially improved quality of life.

Creating a healthy lifestyle includes mental, physical, and spiritual exercise, getting enough rest, eating uncontaminated, nutritious foods, supplementing with key nutrients, drinking pure water and pursuing love and happiness.

Traditional wisdom passed down through the ages tells us that health is a habit that can be learned, no prescription required.

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Dr. Darrel Crain is a Family Chiropractor and Natural Health Writer practicing in San Diego, California.