Have you noticed how many people are becoming fat? If you are one of these people have you noticed how difficult it is to achieve sustainable weight loss now as opposed to way back when?

Have you noticed how much we are spending for healthcare and despite it all the quality of what we’re paying for has seemed to diminish?

Have you noticed how many people you know are affected by disabling diseases you never heard of thirty years ago or how many are on medications for depression and a host of other ‘mental’ conditions?

Is depression a yuppie fad that will soon find disfavor? Or are SSRI’s like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, and Lexpro all newly discovered nutrients we all now need to stay healthy?

If you even contemplate the answers, you see my point and agree our health crisis is serious and it’s not going to get any better by ignoring it. It’s going to get much, much worse if we ignore it.

Presented in this chapter, and in the rest of this book, are the facts. Just the facts. Reality in its wonderment; reality in its terror. The black and the white. The yin and the yang.

More and more people view the current conventional medical paradigm as ineffective. They feel disenfranchised by what seems as a series of revolving doors leading only to frustration and confusion. Their concern is that this ‘institutionalized’ thinking in essence defines disease as the lack of a drug or surgical intervention. This now conventional thinking seems to define good health as a balance of such patented and uncontrollable external forces.

This thinking tends to discount the role of environment as a significant cause of disease. After all, in the final analysis of disease cause and effect, illness is, in aggregate, a product of two influences--our genetics and our environment. Genetics play a powerful and often obvious role in the cause and effect equation. The current American institution of healthcare is dominated by health scientists who are burdened with a bias towards genetics.

In cutting edge genetic research modern science has found a plethora of genes linking a diversity of diseases. Cancers of the colon, breast, and prostate among many others are well known to be linked to genetics. Even the proclivities to such conditions as Alzheimer’s and traumatic stress disorder have been pinpointed to definitive genetic markers in some cases.

Genetics also tends to be a favored explanation for disease cause and effect because it is easier to see the connections. With racial and family appearances, our morphology, and of course all of the genetic aberrations we health scientists have studied, it is often quite easy to see the signatures of genetic connections. Connecting environment with disease runs counter to this current institutionalized thinking and is much more difficult to comprehend and to validate.