110 Diet Wise
seen individuals taking as many as eight or nine different drugs, several of
which were to counteract the problems caused by the rest.
Often my patients have obtained immediate relief simply by stopping
all drugs. I firmly believe that in a number of cases the original pathogenesis
disappears and that the perpetuation of the illness is brought about by the
continuance of the treatment, without anyone suspecting. This credibility
gap is one of the reasons medical practitioners are fast losing face in the
eyes of their own patients.
This is not meant as a criticism of my medical colleagues, though
I admit it does sound like carping: the point is, you can just as easily be
metabolically intolerant of drugs as you can of food and chemicals, so the
very treatment you are receiving could be contributing to the problem. After
all, there is no such thing as a harmless drug, no matter what assurances you
are given. Thalidomide, which caused children to be born without limbs,
was given extensive tests and hailed as safe, and was especially recommended for
pregnancy! Vioxx, we all know, killed and injured tens of thousands of people
before being withdrawn.
There will be others.
One of the problems with medicines is that it is not just the active
compounds which cause trouble, especially for the allergy patient. Tartrazine,
a commonly used yellow dye, is highly allergenic and yet responsible for the
color of almost all yellow pills. Moreover, corn, a bad allergen, and other
starches may be used for binding. There are numerous other ingredients,
any one of which will cause a reaction, one example being HRT pills. One
commonly prescribed product contains over thirty separate ingredients, only
two of which are active hormones! Such ‘cocktails’ have almost inevitable
consequences for the acutely sensitive allergy patient.
The last, and not the least important, reason you are asked to give
up drugs is that you need to know what you are like off them and away
from allergens. As I say to patients: if you are off your medication and no
worse, that’s real progress! If you are unable to give up your medication,
go ahead with the diet anyway: improvement is perfectly possible and quite
probable.
Incidentally, some of the above remarks explain why I also ban
vitamins. Vitamin tablets are not dangerous in the same sense that drugs
are, but these tablets also usually contain a great many additive ingredients
that might be allergenic.