I'm almost at a loss for what I can say about this book. I'm now on my third copy and regard it as one of the most important and useful books I've ever read.
The reason I'm on my third copy is that I loaned my first two copies to others that needed the information in this book more than I did at the time.
Dr. Baker is a practicing physician in Weston, Connecticut and has a special interest in the environmental and biochemical aspects of chronic health problems of both children and adults.
He also believes in trying to cure sickness rather than to use medicines to cover-up the symptoms the illness causes.
I credit this book with helping me make the decisions that I believe lengthened my wife's life. She suffered from Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.
It also helped me advise my oldest son who was ill with HIV and serious liver problems.
I think the best way to help you make the decision on whether you might like to read this book is to offer you his preface to Detoxification and Healing.
It takes about 25 years for a new idea to catch on in medicine. That is the time required for it to be tested in the crucible of science and become accepted as official policy. For example, there was sufficient information available in 1975 for a young woman to reasonably assume that taking a supplement of the B vitamin folic acid in pregnancy would prevent certain severe birth defects in her child. During the two decades it has taken for the folic acid connection to birth defects to be proven, thousands of babies have been born who might have been spared serious defects if their mothers had been able to make a personal choice based on their reading of the research instead of waiting for folic acid supplementation to become public policy. I am talking about ideas, not drugs, devices or procedures, although they have a similar time line from emergence to acceptance. This book will help you grasp current ideas and watch them catch on. You may want to accept these ideas as they apply to your personal health well before they have achieved the cachet of official acceptance. You may also want to consider many of the ideas in this book that will never be subjected to the rigorous and extensive processes needed to prove their validity.
Cyberhealth: I define cyberhealth as the application of thinking embodied in general systems theory to medicine. Cyberhealth has mostly to do with the approach one takes to understanding what has caused an event, such as a symptom or the collection of symptoms, signs and lab tests we call an illness. At present, medical thinking remains quite linear and simple. Doctors and patients alike are tempted by the idea that an illness has a single cause that can be treated with a single pill. General systems theory presents ideas about causality in which a web of interactions produce a result that is not as easy to blame on a single factor. Health is sustained by a state of balance among countless strands of a web of genetic, physiologic, psychological, developmental and environmental factors. When something goes wrong, it makes sense to pay attention to all aspects of this web that can be addressed with reasonable cost and risk. The occasional reference to cyberhealth in this book is a shorthand for the application of the principles of general systems theory to medicine.
There are two meanings of the word systems. When I became a doctor I learned about systems as a way of dividing the body and categorizing diseases that affect it. There are the cardiovascular, nervous, immune, reproductive, gastrointestinal, urinary, integumentary (skin), musculoskeletal, endocrine, reticuloendothelial and hematologic systems. In my medical training all my textbooks and all my courses were organized according to these divisions of the body. The same systems are the basis for classifying disease. When I graduated from medical school I was expected to pick a system and become a specialist. I could not decide on my favorite system. I did some training in obstetrics and completed my training in pediatrics to help me understand human development. I have remained a generalist and still stumble when the person in the next seat on an airplane asks me what kind of doctor I am. I never say that I am a specialist in cyberhealth.
I finished my specialty training in pediatrics in 1969 and, rather than taking a fellowship in heart, kidney or liver, I spent two years as the junior member in the new section of Medical Computer Science at Yale Medical School. Dean Fritz Redlich had conceived the idea of a computer section devoted not to number crunching but to finding ways to make computers useful in the day-to-day practice of medicine. My mentor was Dr. Shannon Brunjes, who began his academic career by specializing in the adrenal gland. His research entailed the use of computers. From Shannon I learned about systems theory in which the notion of system is quite different from the accepted medical way of dividing the body. Systems theory provides a unifying, as opposed to divisive, concept of how things work in nature as well as in computers. It allowed me to view biological systems as unified by the interaction of their many components and to make functional, as opposed to anatomical divisions, as I assessed balance within the whole system.
The medical concept of systems and disease leads a doctor toward a narrow path. The student doctor learns to take pride in a parsimonious approach to finding the one explanation for the patient's problem. The doctor gives the diagnosis, the name of the disease, as the explanation of the patient's problem and is comfortable saying that the disease is the cause of the symptoms. "Your sadness is being caused by depression," "Your high blood pressure is the result of hypertension," "Your cramps and diarrhea are being caused by colitis," "Your child can't pay attention because he has attention deficit disorder." Having made the diagnosis, the doctor may then apply the treatment that works best for that symptom: an antidepressant for depression, an antihypertensive for hypertension, a pill to suppress cramps and diarrhea, or Ritalin for the hyperactive child, a drug that would lead to the imprisonment of anyone found selling it near the playground.
Doctors who adhere to the emerging concepts of systems theory follow a broad path. Students of this approach take pride in a lavish approach that considers all the components of the patient's system that might be out of balance. The doctor makes a functional assessment with the understanding that the diagnosis is the name, not the cause, of the patient's symptoms. Having made the diagnosis, the doctor makes a functional assessment of the individual patient's balance and prescribes the supplementation of needed elements and the removal of toxic elements that interfere with balance. The broad path is less costly in the long run because it is faithful to the realities of the interrelationships in biological systems.
In 1959 I was a premed student just finished with nine months of traveling and studying Asian art history with my teacher Nelson Wu, when I went to work with Dr. Edgar Miller in Kathmandu, Nepal for three months before returning to my senior year at Yale. I had the privilege of being Dr. Miller's sidekick and assistant when he saw patients as part of his affiliation with Shanta Bhawan, a missionary hospital that, in the 1950s, represented the first presence of outsiders in the Kingdom of Nepal. Dr. Miller had retired at age 65 from his cardiology practice in Wilmington, Delaware and, with his wife, Elizabeth, a pediatrician, had joined the staff of what was then the only well-staffed, well-equipped medical facility in the valley of Kathmandu. In weekly clinics in outlying villages we saw patients who would line up at dawn to wait for Dr. Miller and his small team of Nepalese helpers and me. In spite of the dust, the crowded quarters provided on the second story of a village dwelling, the heat and the pressure to see every patient and return to Kathmandu the same day, Dr. Miller would turn to me after assessing each patient and ask, "Sidney, have we done everything we can for this patient?" I can hear the sound of his voice as I write these words and as I could all through my medical training when none of my other teachers ever posed such a question in such a way.
Dr. Miller's question takes on a different significance for a generalist and a systems analyst than it does for a specialist, a person focusing on one particular system. It is not just a question of the generalist concentrating on a large territory and the specialist on a restricted one. It is the kind of question that goes with systems theory as applied to medicine versus the present model in medicine that views the disease, not the individual as the target of treatment. If I look at a patient and ask myself Dr. Miller's question it makes all the difference in my approach to that patient's problem. If I view the patient as a complex system interacting with the environment, the difference is that I must do everything reasonable to help establish balance in the system.
Balance means providing all the necessary elements to optimize the system and removing any interfering elements. Nutrients are necessary elements. Toxins are interfering elements. The difficulty is that each of us is unique, and the necessary and interfering elements differ, sometimes widely, from person to person. In systems analysis, in treating each person as a unique problem what counts are the differences between that person and others. In traditional medicine, in treating each person as a disease it is the similarities that count. As I am defining it, cyberhealth means understanding health as an ever-shifting state in the complex web of interactions which, when working in harmony, yield a dynamic balance that we experience as feeling well.
As is true for computers, cybernetics in biology can be grasped, even by the beginner, in terms of such certain recurring generalized functions as input, storage and output for a computer and perception, memory and language for a person.
When I finished my training and thought I could stamp out illness with my ballpoint pen and prescription pad, I was comfortable with the landmarks I had been given to find my way as a doctor. I had a detailed view of the real world inside the human body as well as an imaginary world populated by diseases whose attack I believed to he responsible for illness. A belief in that imaginary world works quite well in the management of the acute illness that one encounters in hospital wards where most medical training takes place, and the narrow path works quite well for treating trauma, acute infections or the intense phase of a psychosis. Belief in the same imaginary world did not work well for me as I entered family practice in a health maintenance organization, and patients began asking me questions that began with the word could: "Could my cramps and diarrhea be caused, not by colitis, but by something I am eating?" "Could taking vitamins help my depression?" "Could my child's hyperactivity be caused by allergies?" As I began to struggle with the answers to those questions in the spirit of Dr. Miller's question, "Have I done everything I can for this patient?" I began to leave the security of the narrow path, putting a tentative foot on the broad path of the systems approach to health. The first 10 chapters of this book tell the stories of patients who have helped me find security on the broad path.
As I have tried to sort out my patients' chronic illnesses over 30 years of practice, I have found a much more navigable and realistic terrain than the imaginary one I learned in medical school in which illness is seen as the attack of a disease. The landscape of cyberhealth is revealed in a functional, as opposed to an anatomical, view of things. Of all the various functions in human biology there is one overriding function that connects to all the others. Understanding the chemistry and immunology can unify the physician's approach to problems of any level of complexity. It is detoxification.
When I speak of detoxification, I do not mean a treatment for alcohol and drug abuse, although such treatments are tangentially related to the subject of this book. I mean the processes by which the body rids itself of unwanted materials. I do not mean what happens in the bathroom, whether that is bathing or emptying the bowels or bladder. I refer to the biochemistry of handling potentially harmful chemicals that appear within the system and which must he neutralized before they pass from the body. I am not referring exclusively to the harmful environmental chemicals we have all learned to fear: lead, mercury, other heavy metals, additives, dyes, hormones, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and petrochemicals of all sorts or pollutants of the air, water and food supply that we ingest.
Detoxification is central to understanding functional assessment in medicine not so much because we live in a toxic environment but because detoxification is the biggest item in each individual's biochemical budget. It handles waste not only from the environment, but from every process in all the organs and systems of the body. Nearly every molecule the body handles has to be gotten rid of when it has served its purpose. Doing so involves a deliberate process of rendering the molecule inactive. It is a synthetic activity, a creative enterprise in which small molecules - such as the ammonia left over from protein metabolism, hormones no longer needed by the endocrine system, used neurotransmitters from the nervous system, or the byproducts of a well-functioning immune system - must be changed before they can he safely excreted from the body.
Illness and disease will affect the body's detoxification chemistry, and if there is something wrong with the detoxification chemistry, any other problems will be aggravated. It is central to all systems. Detoxification chemistry provides the map and the vehicle for understanding the functional landscape of each human being. It offers a new way to defend the body's health by establishing and maintaining a state of balance instead of waiting in fear for an expensive disease to strike. In fact, the conventional medical disease-oriented approach to health care is sinking the medical economy. We will not be able to save medical dollars until we change the way we think about illness.
You need not wait for public policy to recover from the collapse of the current health-care system to adopt practices based on a modern understanding of biologic systems. If you understand some basic principles, you can make choices that will reduce your risk of illness and enhance your health. In the chapters which follow, I will retrace some of the paths I have taken as a practicing physician. Then I will explore how the chemistry and immunology of detoxification unifies our grasp on health problems more effectively than just giving problems a name and prescribing pills to suppress symptoms. I will explain detoxification chemistry and the tests that can be used to investigate how yours works. The concept of toxin embraces a wide variety of familiar substances that may pose problems for some people and not others. Individuality is the key to this book. Taking charge of your own health depends on knowing how to assess your individual biochemical and immunologic quirks. This book is designed to help you by using the same method I use in my office, taking plenty of time to explain detoxification concepts and considering all the angles.
This book is a personal account. The practice of medicine is a personal activity in which I take responsibility for sifting and filtering scientific information for my patients just as I have done in writing this book. This is not a dispassionate and objective overview of biochemistry, nutrition, detoxification or any other branch of objective science. The older I get, the more convinced I am that much of science depends on personal viewpoints, if not on personalities. In these pages you will find facts and ideas that are not all mine, but their assembly is a reflection of my personal viewpoint as a practicing physician.