The Making of an Advocate

Most people enter the world of Alternative health by virtue of being forced into that realm. They typically have long suffered with one ailment or another and are desperate to try yet another product or treatment which holds out promise of relieving their suffering. Natural health often turns out to be their salvation. This was not the case with me.

I became an Alternative health advocate because there were few who were willing to speak for natural health treatments and therapies other than those whose main interests seemed to be in fleecing the unwell of their money. Without a guiding superstructure of trusted holistic practitioners natural health is dominated by largely unrestrained marketing forces. Making a living from within the Alternative health sector is not a sin in-and-of itself but fraudulently doing so under the guise of caring and concern is simply too mercenary and entrepreneurial for me to abide.

Not only is natural health devoid of recognized leaders, it is also opposed by the existing system of medicine. Strong, impassioned natural health advocacy is required to bring any change into the medical field and few people are daring enough to speak out. Nearly a century of cumulative legislation in favour of the Standard medical paradigm makes risk of censure a very real threat. Any “lay” person risks legal sanction in suggesting Alternative health treatments and it is nearly impossible for a medical doctor to practice a form of medicine which could in any way be perceived as “deviating from the norm.” Stagnant medical thinking is firmly entrenched within the medical system.

My road toward natural health advocacy began innocently enough. In the early 1990s I decided to attempt making a living in the small town in which I lived by making and selling home-crafted creams, lotions, and soaps. I traveled about the province going from one market fair to another and meeting with some success. Eventually I opened a little store in the basement of an apartment building on the main street in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. The store was moldy and cold, but quaint as befits the selling of any home-crafted product.

The products that I made were not particularly “natural” as I would so strictly define that word now. They were made deliberately of simple ingredients more so that I could understand them than to brag of any natural healing properties.

Right from the beginning people began to come to me for my simple products as they could not tolerate the commercial preparations sold off the shelves in drug stores and department stores. In response to consumer demand I began to abandon the artificial scents in favour of pure essential oil and herbed scents, and I eliminated refined oils and chemical additives. Consumer demand increased.

People began requesting special products with particular herbs and specific oils, and they kept insistently asking for other products such as teas and tinctures for use in addressing their specific state of ill-health. Obligingly I expanded inventory to include many more herbs, and I enrolled in what I determined to be the pre-eminent course on herbalism in North America -- the chartered herbalism course offered by Dominion Herbal College.

Immediately I saw improved outcomes not only for those purchasing the revamped cosmetic products but I also observed dramatic healings of chronically-ill people in response to the use of simple medicinal herbs. I was enthralled at this development and continued my herbal education by upgrading my training to Master Herbalist status -- all-in-all a three year concerted effort.

Now, being more highly trained and experienced, I began suggesting and recommending to people herbal therapies. And lo-and-behold the medications were all almost invariably effective in improving the customer’s state of ill-health.

As my practical knowledge of herbs increased I also began to learn of the political / medical environment in which I was operating. As early as 1986 the federal government at the behest of the medical and pharmaceutical industry began moving to control through restrictions the sale and use of herbs. This movement culminated in a list of 64 herbs which were to be banned in the name of protecting the public from choosing effective, yet non-doctor controlled self-health alternatives. This list included chamomile, pennyroyal, coltsfoot, eyebright, feverfew, goldenseal, lobelia, and yellow jasmine, to name a few. The most deadly herb, Nicotiana (i.e. tobacco), was nowhere on the list to be seen.

The banning of common herbs of high utility was more than I could bear. The act was obviously an effort on the part of the high-profit medico monopoly to suppress popular activities which threatened to erode industry’s bottom line. Certainly there was neither public demand for this initiative nor any public safety which needed protecting. At this point I decided that my future would be as an Alternative health advocate; and, to do that I would need to be holistically “credentialed.” I needed to be at the point where I could both promote the Alternative-health paradigm and also point out irreverently that a monopoly on medical thought produces only inflexible, bigoted thinking that is ultimately of poor service to the health consumer.

Public opposition to herbal restrictions swelled beyond governmental expectations as a result of the proposed restrictive legislation. An election, which moderates all arbitrary governmental actions and the deserved fall from public grace of the Minister of Health, Dave Dingwall, resulted in the establishment of a new governmental “advisory committee” in 1993 to re-strategize the natural health matter.

This new committee, of course, undid the insane herb-banning pontifications of the original committee but instead endorsed complex mechanisms whereby only large pharmaceuticals would be able to produce and distribute natural health products. Note that at this time drug stores, which once adamantly opposed all herb use as dangerous, now, began mass marketing the very herbs which were once considered too dangerous to sell to the public. The medico industry battle cry now became that of product purity, efficacy, and integrity -- with the implication that only the medicos know what herbs are good for you.

Lacking from all of this industry-directed governmental initiative was public demand or need. The new North American strategy was to synchronize natural product legislation with that of Europe in order to promote corporate interests by way of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and CODEX -- a world free-trade thing where corporations have powers greater than that of individual governments. Not a bad thing, I suppose, if you are conservatively bent. However, it did not take into account the fact that in Europe herbs, spas, and natural health have traditionally been integrated into the European medical systems for a hundred years. In North America, where only drug & gizmo mentality exists in medical thinking, herbs and natural therapies would cease to be represented in any medical sense.

The public was not at all fooled by the recommendations of this advisory committee, either. Protest mounted to the tune of it being one of the issues most loudly (number of letters and phone calls) protested in Canadian history and in 1997 a third advisory committee was established!

After achieving my Master Herbalist certification and with a few years of practicing as such under my belt I enrolled in the Medical Herbalist program offered by Dominion Herbal College. Dominion is the only school in North America licensed to offer the clinical phytotherapy program of Great Britain which is widely recognized as the highest herbal certification in the English-speaking world.

The Medical Herbalist program uses many of the same texts as are used in the Standard medical system and the subjects taught are typically identical: physical examination, differential diagnosis, pathology, physiology, anatomy, geriatrics, etc. The primary differences are that herbs and holistic therapies are substituted for drug and surgery training, and the over-riding tenets are, of course, holistic instead of allopathic in orientation. I am glad to say that I graduated from this exceedingly difficult four-year program and I view myself as having medical opinions that are at least of equal value to any Standard practitioner.

From my store in downtown Yarmouth I expanded to establishing a health centre in 1997, and in 1998 I opened a natural health clinic. Not only did I offer natural cosmetics and a fully equipped herbal apothecary for the needs of my clients, I also offered to patients integrated health-improvement programs involving clinical diagnosis, dry sauna detoxification therapy, colon hydrotherapy, holistic nutrition education, hands-on food workshop training, fasting therapy, and holistic evaluation.

In my own estimation of the intrinsic benefit of natural health therapies I would say that 80% or more of my clientele would swear to achieving improved states of health.

It is worthy of comment that my patients elected to spend their own hard-earned money on holistic treatments instead of receiving free, publicly-supported treatments from Standard medical practitioners. This speaks volumes toward the lack of respect demonstrated by the public toward the bigoted, control-oriented system maintained by the medicos.

How did such a restricted medical system evolve in the first place? Back in the 1920s three separate systems of medicine competed equally for health-consumer patronage: natural medicine, homeopathic medicine, and Standard medicine. Few people realize this historical tri-modality of available health services today due to the revisionist-history tactics of the now dominant system of medicine -- the Standards.

How did they win? In the 1920s the Rockefeller Foundation pumped nearly a billion (1920) dollars into the Standard medical system. The Standard system was the only system which could use the products of Rockefeller’s growing pharmaceutical empire. Nothing was pumped into the other systems of medicine. The Carnegie Foundation pumped a slightly lesser amount into the same system. Even today an infusion of a comparable amount of money (adjusted upward to current year values) would almost certainly affect the future course of medicine in North America. Curiously, Rockefeller himself maintained as his personal physician a homeopath.

In the face of such fabulous investments the homeopathic system, to secure its survival, merged into the Standard system. This tactic served the homeopaths naught as can be attested to by the complete lack of homeopathy which survived into the 1950s. Homeopathy was eradicated from the North American scene in favour of the ever rising scientific popularity and prestige of chemical drugs and irradiating gizmos.

Natural health medicine was oppressed by governmental fiat in all of North America under the influence of well-meaning legislators kowtowing to the needs of industry -- a trend still lively in Canada as reflected in our many advisory committees.

Fortunately, herbalism survived, albeit in a much reduced and surreptitious state. It survived within aboriginal and ethnic cultures; amongst a small, health food-store based segment of the population which, by the way, evolved its own coded language for avoiding the many legal pit-falls set up to protect Standard medicine; and at Dominion Herbal College which defiantly continued to teach holistic therapies. Dominion preserved and protected herbalism which by 1926 in North America was refined and tuned to it a very high degree of efficacy. In contrast to North American oppression of herbs, herbalism was embraced by many European countries and was preserved and enriched there in the practice of general medicine.

Natural health practices are making a return in North America because of the advent of popular means of communication such as the internet and easy desktop publishing. This has enabled information to become available to the general public that was formerly suppressed and derided by the monopolistic medico establishment. It is people who are demanding medical change, demanding increased choice in health care, and who are causing it to occur. It is not the bigoted and truculent medical establishment -- it rarely is.

In my self-anointed role as a natural health advocate I was deeply and hotly involved in efforts to lobby all levels of government toward increased awareness of natural health. I published two magazines (one more short lived than the other), created scores of web pages, made representations to a seemingly never ending series of governmental committees, wrote letters to newspapers, participated in natural health consumer groups, became a health advisor to the Green Party of Canada (it recognizes Alternative health), and had scores of articles published in magazines. There is a war going on in North America for natural health recognition.

Canada’s third expert advisory committee trail-blazed an exit for both government and industry out of the quagmire medico self-interest created in the first place. The third advisory committee put out in 1998 a raft of recommendations which, when packaged in natural health rhetoric, assured the public that intrusions into the world of Alternative health would be restricted to addressing only the mass production of dubious natural health products for public consumption. As a result, and in typical Canadian fashion, a new government department was set up to oversee and validate the claims of our emerging natural products industry. Neatly side-stepped was the medico need to control, either directly or indirectly, the increasing popularity of the Alternative health paradigm itself.

It remains, as is the public’s desire, for holistically-accredited practitioners and the natural health-minded public to carve out for itself an official, parallel system of holistic medicine to counter and compete with the Standard system which pervades North America today.

Healer J. Mark Taylor, Medical Herbalist

5, 1922 - 9 Avenue SE.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2G 0V2