if he is anything.  He goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may scare to death. Dr. John.  H. Tilden, Impaired Health:  Its Cause and Cure, Vol. 1, 1921. [2] Today we are not only in the Nuclear Age but also the Antibiotic Age.  Unhappily, too, this is the Dark Age of Medicine—­an age in which many of my colleagues, when confronted with a patient, consult a volume which rivals the Manhattan telephone directory in size.  This book contains the names of thousands upon thousands of drugs used to alleviate the distressing symptoms of a host of diseased states of the body.  The doctor then decides which pink or purple or baby-blue pill to prescribe for the patient.  This is not, in my opinion, the practice of medicine.  Far too many of these new “miracle” drugs are introduced with fanfare and then reveled as lethal in character, to be silently discarded for newer and more powerful drugs. Dr. Henry Bieler:  Food is Your Best Medicine; 1965.

I have two reasons for writing this book.  One, to help educate the general public about the virtues of natural medicine.  The second, to encourage the next generation of natural healers.  Especially the second because it is not easy to become a natural hygienist; there is no school or college or licensing board.

Most Ama-affiliated physicians follow predictable career paths, straight well-marked roads, climbing through apprenticeships in established institutions to high financial rewards and social status.  Practitioners of natural medicine are not awarded equally high status, rarely do we become wealthy, and often, naturopaths arrive at their profession rather late in life after following the tangled web of their own inner light.  So I think it is worth a few pages to explain how I came to practice a dangerous profession and why I have accepted the daily risks of police prosecution and civil liability without possibility of insurance.

Sometimes it seems to me that I began this lifetime powerfully predisposed to heal others.  So, just for childhood warm-ups I was born into a family that would be much in need of my help.  As I’ve always disliked an easy win, to make rendering that help even more difficult, I decided to be the youngest child, with two older brothers.

A pair of big, capable brothers might have guided and shielded me.  But my life did not work out that way.  The younger of my two brothers, three years ahead of me, was born with many health problems.  He was weak, small, always ill, and in need of protection from other children, who are generally rough and cruel.  My father abandoned our family shortly after I was born; it fell to my mother to work to help support us.  Before I was adolescent my older brother left home to pursue a career in the Canadian Air Force.