Title: More Natural Cures Revealed
Author: Kevin Trudeau
Date: 2006
Publisher: Alliance Publishing Group
ISBN: 978-0-9755995-4-9
Length: 358 pages
Quote: “I am routinely attacked for suggesting that people
not take drugs.”
Well...not exactly, I conclude after studying Trudeau's
second book, a "gift" from someone who knows nothing about the value of books. I think it's more likely that this writer is denounced as a raving
paranoid because he writes like one, and that the effect of his “suggestions”
may be, and may even intentionally be, to disparage the prevention and
natural cures that may actually help people. He's done some research, and could have written this book as a research project; instead he's chosen to toss just a line about "Reader X thinks product Y helped him/her" onto some, not all or even most, of the page after page about "I'm a brilliant man with good intentions and I'm being denounced by mean, greedy people who hate me."
Trudeau is not qualified to prescribe diet-based rather than
drug-based treatments for diseases, as legitimate physicians like John McDougall
and Stephen Sinatra do. Some of McDougall's and Sinatra's claims are as
wide-sweeping as Trudeau's. Some make harsh judgments on pharmaceutical
companies and the doctors who prescribe their pills. Some might, in fact, be
considered grandiose; both the McDougall diet (basically vegan) and the Sinatra
diet (plant-based not vegan) have helped thousands of people with classic
cardiovascular disease, but neither help people whose blood pressure is being
raised by multiple myeloma, so the claim that either diet will cure
hypertension is...a loss of precision due to popularization. And plenty of
doctors have disagreed with McDougall and Sinatra, although over the years the
disagreement has shifted from “No waaay that can work” to “Very well, it works
for rich people in California who are always into special diets, but it
wouldn't work for my patients because they'd never stick with it.”
(At this point may I suggest that, if you have consulted a
doctor about hypertension, diabetes, varicose veins, or anything else
associated with classic cardiovascular disease, and that doctor has handed you
a prescription for medication rather than a diet book, you may well be working
with a doctor whose assumption is that you couldn't discipline yourself to use
natural cures that work. If so, it can't hurt and will probably help you to use
either the McDougall or the Sinatra diet, with your prescription until
you have to complain that your meds are now pushing your blood pressure too low,
which will probably be the case in a few weeks. At this point your doctor will
shift to “Very well, a diet-based treatment for cardiovascular disease works
for rich people in California and for my patient A and possibly even also B,
but patients C through ZZZZ would never stick with it.” The cognitive
dissonance will be less painful and the doctor less likely to quarrel with
you.)
So why, although McDougall and Sinatra and other doctors have
taken plenty of hostile questions from their peers, has the FDA not “attacked”
them in the way it's “attacked” Trudeau? Because Trudeau is so blatantly
flogging his own books and web sites, with so much airing of his paranoid
grievances and so little actual information you the reader can use...because
McDougall's books were groundbreaking when they were new and controversial, but
this book is frankly just tacky.
I do not recommend More Natural Cures Revealed to
people seeking information they can use for their own immediate medical
benefit. Believe me, I would if I could...not just because I'd have a chance to
make a profit on a sale, but because this book came to me from a very special
source.
The dreaded breast cancer gene is not found in my family.
There are less deadly types of cancer that can also form in breast tissue. A
relative I've nicknamed “Aunt Dotty” was treated for breast cancer in 1970 and
survived through almost all of 2006. She was an aunt you don't meet every day.
It's also possible that, although she was definitely ill, she may not have had
breast cancer, or not have had the deadly kind. In any case, she beat the odds.
Most people treated for breast cancer still have less than five years to live.
One of my schoolmates, not a close relative although
there may be some connection, was treated for breast cancer in the late 1980s.
The mutual acquaintance who told me actually said “She's dead now,” that being
an assumption the mutual acquaintance felt safe in making. But the woman is
still alive; she's an active grandmother with reasonable hopes of living to be
a great-grandmother; she's still driving up to visit her mother—who still runs
with large boisterous dogs every morning, too—every summer. By now my
schoolmate has become another phenomenon like Aunt Dotty, a sleek, active, well
preserved woman who had breast cancer thirty years ago. And the gene for the
deadly kind does run in her family; her younger sister is also an active,
healthy, well preserved breast cancer survivor by now, and some aunts and
cousins....
That is the family from which I acquired the copy of
Trudeau's book I'm holding now. And they are health-conscious. And they have
created the local market for flaxseed meal and flaxseed oil, although I
like flaxseed meal too. Trudeau claims that eating flaxseed oil daily will cure
breast cancer. Is it really that simple? Duh. Of course not. Flaxseed
oil does contain a healthy balance of fatty acids that will prevent vegans from
developing depression, or seeing aggravated symptoms of dyslexia, from lack of
dietary fat; it does contain a protein that helps hold gluten-free corn or rice
breads together; it does have a pleasant nutty flavor; and it's one of the more
nutritious oils, and may have other beneficial effects on the body. Flaxseed
oil may help some women survive breast cancer. But here I stand to
testify that Aunt Dotty credited her survival to having the full medical
treatment, including a radical mastectomy that scraped the muscle tissue off
the bones of an entire quadrant of the body, and did not use flaxseed oil at
all; the family who passed Trudeau's book on to me are more health-conscious
than Aunt Dotty was, generally, but I've spent days with them and not observed
any consumption of flaxseed oil.
It should also be noted that there's a genotype, and it seems
fairly common among people of mixed Irish and Cherokee ancestry, that just
seems to go with vitality. My school friend and her sister, the breast cancer survivors, and their parents who lived with a greyhound long enough to make a pet of him after they were seventy, most definitely belong to that type. Things don't
always work the same way for this type that they work for other people (some
medications have paradoxical effects). If you have a different type of body you
can try something that worked for someone who survived a deadly disease and/or seems outrageously perky and well preserved for whatever age s/he currently is, but Your Mileage May Vary.
And meanwhile, in order to get a tip about flaxseed oil that
may or may not help any particular body survive cancer or recover from
chemotherapy, Trudeau's readers have to wade through page after page of “I'm
right and they're wrong, they're picking on me because they're a lot of crooks
and jerks,” and even in the printed word he manages to choose a nonverbal
communication style that just sounds as if it ought to cause a little sign to
pop up saying “HE'S LYING.” Flaxseed oil does happen to be a healthy food but
Trudeau recommends trying it in the same breath that he recommends trying
hydrogen peroxide, which happens to be poisonous, and shark cartilage.
Trudeau's claim to fame seems to be that he took the
position, alongside Robert Kennedy Jr., that vaccines containing
thimerosal cause autism. That's another distortion caused by popularization.
This web site has corrected it time and again: Anything that causes a
fever, as most vaccines may do, can potentially cause brain damage,
which may include autistic-type brain damage in some cases. For somebody
like Trudeau to start repeating this message, in Trudeau's fashion, was the
worst thing that could have happened to RFK.
Notice, though, how much refuting the simplistic claim that
thimerosal causes autism does not do. It doesn't even actually disprove
that thimerosal may be the whole and sole cause of some cases of autism.
It doesn't prove that thimerosal is safe, or that anyone at
any age should ever be vaccinated against any disease in the absence of a high
probability that that disease will kill them, or that adults have any right to
force vaccines on children. And it doesn't make the vaccine pushers
look better than it makes Trudeau look.
Actually there's a big split between
logic and vaccine pushing. Logic says, “If a vaccine is known to produce
immunity to a disease, and your natural immunity to that disease or type of
diseases is low, you as an individual should have that vaccine.” Vaccine
pushers say, “If a vaccine is known to produce immunity to a disease, and you
have already been exposed to that disease and built up natural immunity to it
anyway, you still ought to have that vaccine because that disease might harm
someone else.” Wrong. Only the people at risk should even be advised to
have the vaccine, and nobody should ever be forced to have any vaccine.
But the vaccine pushers have pushed even harder: “Trudeau is a jerk! Just read
his book and see how badly he presents himself! You should force this
vaccine on your children, because the writer opposing it is an unscientific
jerk!” And they seriously think that that's a “scientific” argument that fails
to make them look more unscientific, and more jerkish, than Trudeau...
Anyway: I recommend this book for its historic interest only.
If you're interested in the history of Kevin Trudeau, of free speech, or of the
Food & Drug Administration, here is a document you need. If you're
interested in health, there are literally dozens of better books out there.
(even though it takes a reasonable amount of nurse's training to get the full benefit from this shorthand-form reference book). I'm not sure about some of the unproven ideas in More Natural Cures Revealed, like flaxseed
oil for cancer, and I'm 99% sure that a few other things Trudeau recommends are
pure flimflam, like shark cartilage, but I believe that those five professionals explain every valid medical fact Trudeau cites in clearer, more useful ways than
Trudeau does. Buy their books and leave his to the historians.
If you want a copy for research purposes, More Natural Cures Revealed can be purchased here for the usual $5 per book, $5 per package, + $1 per online payment, and despite our mixed feelings, this web site will be fair and send $1 to Trudeau or a charity of his choice.
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