ARE YOU CONFUSED ABOUT NATURAL HEALING?

by Dr. Lawrence Wilson

All information in this article is for educational purposes only. It is not for the diagnosis, treatment, prescription or cure of any disease or health condition.

Many people, including many doctors and policy makers, become very confused when they begin to read and study about natural healing. I have experienced this, and am very familiar with the problem.

To help deal with this important issue, this article discusses ways that one can evaluate healing information. This involves attempting to put it into a context or a system that one is comfortable with. This article discusses seven contexts or systems that people use, whether or not they are valid, so that you can better evaluate the truth about any healing-related information.

1. THE COMMERCIAL CONTEXT

I begin with this context because most people understand it well. Doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories, food companies, supplement makers, device makers and others all desire to sell their products and services. They put forth a tremendous amount of information to help themselves do this. Some is extremely valid, while a lot of it is tainted or slanted to have sales appeal, sex appeal, or perhaps to harm their competition.

The fact that someone is selling something is not a reason to discredit the information, (as some would have us do). Indeed, perhaps their real motive is to help humanity, but they must pay the bills somehow, so they attach a price to their product or service. So one simply has to watch one’s step, so to speak, when one realizes that information is being given out by those who stand to benefit financially or otherwise by your acceptance of the truth of the information.

Subtle sales pitches. While a sales pitch may be blatant, at times it is not obvious at all. For example, I know that drug companies sponsor medical “studies” that are cleverly designed to make it appear their product is effective or safe, when the opposite is the case. To find the truth, one must often dig deep to find out who paid for the study, and so on.

An even more bizarre case of a sales pitch occurs daily on television, one often sees advertisements by attorneys who claim to want to help people who have been harmed by medical drugs or procedures. The sales aspect seems obvious enough, but I recently learned that most of these law firms are owned by the very drug companies that manufacture the defective and often deadly products. The real agenda is to find the worst cases of harm, and then bury them by giving the patient the impression that the law firm is on their side against the drug company, when the opposite is true.

In the case above, it is possible that the attorneys are simply motivated by a desire to help people. They may also be motivated by a desire to receive cash awards from juries. However, they may also be motivated by a secret desire to bury the truth and, in fact, continue harming people with dangerous products.

2. A TIME OR SPACE CONTEXT

This is a common context or background for much natural healing material. That is, the information is taken from past wisdom, either ancient or just in the past 100 years or so. It might also come from an unusual place, such as Tibet. For example, many people accept information if it derives from acupuncture, Aurveda, Taoism, Hippocrates, traditional naturopathy, native American healing methods, and so on.

Once again, because information is older or from an unusual place, one should not dismiss it outright, nor should one just embrace it. But many people do just that. They become enamored of the old wisdom, or they want nothing to do with it because it is not “modern science”.

An example is the work of Colin Campbell, who wrote a popular vegetarian-leaning book about studies among Chinese peasants that was done some years ago. The information might be valid, but most people are not Chinese peasants living in very rural, clean environments. Instead, we live in polluted cities, we are exposed to A-bomb radiation, the food is hybridized and perhaps genetically altered, and the water and food poisoned by toxic metals and hundreds, if not thousands of toxic chemicals. Therefore, the information about Chinese peasants may not apply to us.

3. IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS

Another way people evaluate material is to find out if it derives from a particular ideology that they like or dislike. For example, some doctors and companies only believe in vegetarian products and diets. Vegetarianism is the underlying theme, or ideology. Personally, I do not like that context as I don’t find it helpful in the long run, so I am skeptical of “vegetarian authors”, for example.

Others authors or information sources believe mainly in raw foods. Others believe only in food-based vitamins, or they believe that anything that alkalinizes the body is good, or that doing a lot of exercise is always best.

Thus, much information that seems pure is really just coming from various ideologies. It can seem pure, but really it is not. It is simply an extension of a way of thinking, or ideology. Truth, however, is not an ideology!

So try to identify if information you are reading is coming from an ideological source, as this will help you put it in the proper context to be evaluated.

4. THE “SCIENTIFIC” CONTEXT

A common way to evaluate information today is that it must be “proven” using “scientific studies” to confirm it or disprove it. This is a wonderful idea, but one must exercise caution, especially when evaluating natural therapies. Here is why.

The idea that information must be backed up by scientific studies may not be applicable because:

1. Natural product companies may not be able to afford large or multiple studies, as drug companies can.

2. Scientific studies are easiest when there is just one or two variables. With nutritional balancing, for example, one uses a diet, about 10 supplements, and about 6 procedures, all simultaneously. It is impossible to isolate these, though some people try to do this.

3. Double blind studies are impossible with many natural healing modalities. One cannot have a “blind” study of enemas, or saunas, or carrot juice, for example.

4. The biggest problem is that studies can be of poor quality, done improperly, or even bogus or fake – and many of them are today. Many are simply not done well, either by accident or intentionally, because the person conducting the study did not really understand how to evaluate the therapy. This has occurred with hair analysis, for instance. Other so-called “studies” are bought and paid for by those selling a drug, for example, or those attempting to discredit the work of others.

Therefore, while the scientific method is one way to evaluate products and services, one must use caution today with it.

5. THE INTUITIVE OR METAPHYSICAL CONTEXT

This is an interesting way that people healing evaluate information today. One may use intuitive or metaphysical means such as muscle testing to tap into the unconscious mind, the aastral or etheric fields, or other non-physical or metaphysical realms.

Examples include the use of muscle testing or applied kinesiology, pendulums, the use of hundreds of electrical testing machines, radionic devices, Rife frequency generators, and so on.

Generally, I find this method unreliable, although now and then someone is highly accurate using one of these methods.

6.ALLOPATHIC PROPAGANDA CONTEXT

This context of information is huge today. Simply stated, there are powerful forces that do not want people to know the truth about healing naturally. They want the population to be ill and dependent upon them, as this greatly boosts the sale of their products and services.

They are wealthy beyond imagination, and they spend billions of dollars annually on misinformation campaigns, smear tactics, negative ads, damage control, and other propaganda tactics to twist the truth to frighten us, and keep us coming back to their often costly, toxic and less effective healing methods.

The medical establishment or cartel owns literally thousands of website, for example, is able to run “public service announcements” on television and radio, owns many media outlets outright, and we are bombarded with their lies on a daily basis. If you don’t believe this, you are not well informed at all, and you will likely become extremely confused reading various websites and articles.

This problem is not always easy to overcome, although an obvious way is to ask who paid for the information, which website was it on, and what is the “slant” of the website, journal, magazine, television advertising policy, etc.

7. OTHER ROGUE CONTEXTS

Although it may sound odd, some people put out false information for various reasons other than those mentioned above. It is a form of scientific mischief, one might say, designed to mislead and confuse others and thus, perhaps, control them better.

I will give an example some know about. I learned that in the past, ruthless dictators often forced highly skilled healers to divulge their secrets to the leader’s army so they would be stronger than their enemies. Not wanting to do this, the healers altered the information, perhaps ever so slightly. These alterations or errors were then published in modern books as being the truth, when they are not.

Therefore, know that some information is purposefully bogus or tainted, even if we don’t exactly know why.

DOES THIS ARTICLE LEAVE US ANY BETTER OFF?

One can say that the above just confuses the picture more, and that basically I am saying you can’t trust anything or anyone. This is not true. The point of the article is it is helpful to understand motives and contexts for information. By so doing, you may be able to identify sources of information that are:

- not primarily commercially motivated

- not tied to a particular time in history or location

- not ideologically motivated

- not tied to questionable scientific studies

- not just metaphysical or intuitive

- and not products of the allopathic anti-natural healing propaganda machine or other odd contexts.

This will give you a much better chance of finding the truth, in my view, which is always my goal.

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