True strength, health, vitality and happiness might not depend on the next super-drug, but on very simple, economical, commonly available, and familiar foods. For the person who wants to live a long and healthy life, who is willing to take full responsibility for their personal wellbeing, Ehret's teachings of a nature-based approach to health through simplicity and moderation offer real hope. Everyone who has put Ehret's simple diet and lifestyle changes into practice has experienced profound positive results. A solution to man's modern ailments already exists. It was proposed and articulated by a nutritionist, in a book written a hundred years ago.

The story of a recovery from a crippling disease and the physician patient partnership that beat the odds by using the patient's own capabilities.

Disease Selection: The way disease changed the world explores the host-pathogen relationship and the way communicable diseases have evolved often to stay one step ahead of interventions. From sexually transmitted disease through to ancient and modern great plagues, parasites, food, zoonoses, climate change and populations, this book explores the way disappeared and emergent diseases have shaped our world just as much as nature has. This book provides key information and is a valuable resource for students, practitioners and researchers working in global health and anyone interested in understanding of the basis of disease.

In recent years, a number of chronic diseases have been linked, in some cases definitively, to an infectious etiology: peptic ulcer disease with Helicobacter pylori, cervical cancer with several human papillomaviruses, Lyme arthritis and neuroborreliosis with Borrelia burgdorferi, AIDS with the human immunodeficiency virus, liver cancer and cirrhosis with hepatitis B and C viruses, to name a few. The proven and suspected roles of microbes does not stop with physical ailments; infections are increasingly being examined as associated causes of or possible contributors to a variety of serious, chronic neuropsychiatric disorders and to developmental problems, especially in children. The Infectious Etiology of Chronic Diseases: Defining the Relationship, Enhancing the Research, and Mitigating the Effects, summarizes a two-day workshop held by the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Microbial Threats to address this rapidly evolving field. Participants explored factors driving infectious etiologies of chronic diseases of prominence, identified difficulties in linking infectious agents with chronic outcomes, and discussed broad-based strategies and research programs to advance the field.

What if 'explaining' an illness is one thing, but understanding it is quite another? What if illnesses have life meanings and not just scientific 'explanations' and biological 'causes' or 'cures'? What if the biology of the human body cannot be separated from the biography of the human being? What if the life of the human body cannot be separated from the life of the human being in all its existential dimensions – personal, social and economic? What if every bodily state is at the same time a state of consciousness and vice versa – thus making nonsense of the separation between 'body' and 'mind', medical treatments on the one hand and psychological therapies on the other? Last but not least, what if 'the illness is the cure' - and not something to be cured? In a way that is clear and practically helpful to both lay readers, patients and health professionals alike, this book challenges the most basic assumptions of almost all forms of medicine – 'modern' or 'traditional', 'scientific' or 'spiritual' – namely that illness is something to be cured rather than being the cure. To do so it draws on the work of Illich, Heidegger and many others to introduces a fundamentally new approach to health and illness – 'Life Medicine' and 'Life Doctoring'. Life Doctoring is a new form of non-biomedical therapy for serious and chronic illness. Instead of employing standard forms of medical testing and treatment the Life Doctor is there to help the individual come to an understanding of the ways their own particular illness 'is the cure' – how it is a potential source of new healing understandings of themselves and of a healing transformation of their lives. Life Medicine is a new understanding of health and illness that does not separate science and life, biology and biography, the life of the human body and the life of the human being. Instead its focus is on the larger life context and specific life meanings that particular symptoms and illnesses hold for the individual patient. For as Marx wrote: “The idea of one basis for science and another for life is from the very outset a lie.” This 'lie' unfortunately has dire consequences. For as research by the medical establishment itself has confirmed, conventional biomedical diagnosis and treatment through drugs and surgery is itself the leading cause of premature death – ahead of both cancer and heart disease. By offering an entirely new framework for understanding the essential nature of 'health' and 'illness', Life Doctoring can help patients understand the underlying sense of 'dis-ease' in their lives that lies behind their clinically diagnosed illness or 'disease'. In this way it can also serve to (a) prevent an individual's 'dis-ease manifesting as clinical 'disease', and (b) educate patients about the possible dangers and potentially sickness-causing or 'iatrogenic' effects of many standard forms of biomedical testing and treatment. The continuing monopoly over knowledge of the human body that biomedicine claims has one basic reason – namely that it is not actually 'science-driven' but 'money driven' – turning illness into a source of vast profits for Big Pharma and the corporate health industry as a whole. Many people are angered by the global trend toward the privatisation of medical care or else concerned about the rising costs. Yet the roots of this trend lie in the fact that illness itself has long been 'privatised' – seen as bearing no relation at all to the social and economic ills affecting the patient and to the sicknesses of society itself. To argue that 'the illness is the cure' is also to recognise that illness is also an expression of a fundamentally sick world. Through Life Medicine and Life Doctoring, illness can also help us to recognise and respond in new ways to this world and its politics - and in this way help to heal it. “The first task of the doctor is ... political…” Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

Human illnesses can be understood as damage to those adaptations that we took on at various stages in our evolution from pre-life molecules to modern Homo sapiens. Preventing these illnesses entails avoiding what causes the damage — which too frequently are the everyday hazards of twenty-first-century life, as the chart below shows: Level of Evolution / Cause of adaptive failure / resulting disease or problem Pre-life / Environmental poisons / Certain birth defects Single cell (bacteria and amoeba-like) / Viral infection / Colds/flu/HIV Morula (sponge-like) / Cellular stress / Cancer Chordate / Physical stress / Back pain Fish / Excess dietary salt / Hypertension/heart disease Amphibian / Tobacco smoke / Lung cancer/emphysema Lower primate / Excess dietary sugar / Diabetes mellitus Higher primate / Vitamin C deficiency / Scurvy Ape / Excess dietary protein / Gout Homo sapiens / Reduced dietary variety / Nutritionaldiseases/food allergies