Miracles

The press loves medical “miracles,” often due to a new drug or elaborate new procedure which trumpets the power of modern medical science. Sometimes these are wonderful advances; more often they affect a few people at great expense, frequently with devastating side effects.

In recent years I’ve seen hundreds of medical miracles which would have been described by the press in glowing detail were they due to a new drug or procedure, not because of a simple, cost free change of diet. Unlike miracle drug cures of chronic disease, effective response to diet is the rule, almost without fail, for many life threatening or disabling diseases. While working my whole career in  university medical centers I had never seen these miracles, or even been aware that they were common in the field of lifestyle medicine.