Sidney MacDonald Baker - Detoxification and Healing: The Key to Optimal Health

Copyright 2004 by Sidney MacDonald Baker. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-181254-2
MHID: 0-07-181254-7

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Detoxification and Healing is not intended as medical advice. Its intention is solely informational and educational. Please consult a medical or health professional should the need for one be indicated. The information in this book lends itself to self-help. For obvious reasons, the author and publisher cannot take the medical or legal responsibility of having the contents herein considered as a prescription for everyone. Either you, or the physician who examines and treats you, must take the responsibility for the uses made of this book.

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For my wife, Louise

THE IDEAS AND facts presented in this book are not mine but come from various teachers, of whom my patients have been the best. The first, however, was Richard Mayo-Smith, my biology teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, who rescued me from the illusion that science was all math and facts. He introduced me to the notion of ideas: that what we make of the facts depends on our ability to conceive of a framework in which to see the facts.

The late Linus Pauling based his perceptions about the molecular basis for treatment of illness on two very simple ideas: 1. everyone is different, and 2. each individuals health benefits from having the right molecules in the right amounts. His lectures in courses given for physicians at Stanford inspired me to follow medical paths that obey these two precepts, which Dr. Pauling called orthomolecular medicine (meaning the right molecules medicine). The medical professions rejection of his notions made it professionally risky to identify oneself as a doctor with orthomolecular leanings. However, a growing number of health professionals are joining the many laypeople who believe that before turning to medications we should attempt to adjust the normal body constituents to match needs for optimal functioning. I hope that a recognition of the orthomolecular implications of much of the current literature in nutritional medicine will lead to a renewed acceptance of orthomolecular medicine.

My friend, Leo Galland, M.D., and I worked together in the 1980s. Then and now Leo was a source of ideas and information that have been essential to the foundations of this book.

Another student of Dr. Pauling, Dr. Jeffrey Bland, has been the most influential teacher of physicians in the past three decades. Like many of my colleagues who set out to relearn biochemistry long after passing Part I Board Exams at the end of the second year of medical school, I owe him my ongoing thanks for his thoughtful and encyclopedic sifting of the current medical literature. I also owe special thanks to Dr. Jon Pangborn of Bionostics Laboratories, West Chicago, Illinois. Thirty years ago Jon set out to turn his knowledge of biochemistry into useful tools for gaining insight into individual biochemistry. Since then he has invested enormous amounts of time, energy, and his impeccable integrity for the benefit of doctors and their patients who are looking for the biochemical basis of chronic health problems.

Other teachers and colleagues whose influence and ideas appear in this book are Drs. Karl Ernst Schaefer, Otto Wolff, Theron Randolph, Joe Beasley, Clyde Hawley, Phyllis Saifer, Larry Dickey, Frank Waickman, William Rea, Martin Lee, Stephen Barrie, John Rebello, James Braly, Orian Truss, Paul Cheney, Lloyd Saberski, William Crook, Leonard McEwen, Charles L. Remington, and my friend Colin Furness whose friendship and advice have helped illuminate the path that made writing this book possible.

My most consistent teachers have been my patients. The lessons of a few of them are told in this book. Hundreds of others have helped shape me as a physician as I developed the skills of explaining things that I have used in writing this book. The even more important skills of listening, listening again, and going over the story yet another time in the quest for clues to clinical puzzles are not so clearly evident in the chapters of this book in which I have chosen relatively simple cases. Becoming a good listener has been my principal aim as I have learned to respect the deep knowledge and intuition that my patients have about their bodies. What they lack is a scientific vocabulary, so that their initial efforts to explain their perceptions about their illness and its causes offend a scientific ear that has not been tuned to hear the signal through the noise.