Page 78 - Summer2009

Tim’s DVD Reviews

In Defense of Medical Heresy WRR ORQJ RU SHRSOH PLJKW ¿JXUH RXW WKDW WKH\ DUH
James Biddle, MD better off without all that “health” care.
Asheville Integrative Medicine Dr. Biddle provides many other such stories.
The point is that leaving your health up to the
In this audio CD, Dr. Biddle discusses the leading medical authorities is a very dangerous
many ironies in the history of medical progress. thing to do. I don’t fully agree with every detail
For instance, during the nineteenth century in in this audio but I’ll give it a thumbs up.
Vienna, Austria (among other places) doctors
customarily proceeded directly from performing Killer at Large
autopsies to delivering children without pausing Shinebox Media Productions
to wash their hands. Why bother? They were just
going to get dirty again anyway. This obviously “Killer at Large” is a clever name for a
happened before the germ theory came along. video about obesity. First, we get a front-row
Consequently maternal death rates of puerperal seat to a liposuction operation performed on a
fever (also known as childbed fever) were very twelve-year-old girl. I found it unnecessarily
high. Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, as assistant to the gross but one of the better points in the DVD was
professor of the maternity clinic in the Vienna made during the process. After more than one
*HQHUDO +RVSLWDO LQ WKH V PDQGDWHG WKDW operation trimming all the fat off, the surgeons
doctors wash their hands before delivering got her to the point where she looked very slim
babies. Contemporary doctors were actually and pretty. Seven months later we see her again.
insulted by the new regulation, which was very The weight was back and the operations were
unpopular, but observed for a time. Mortality ultimately a failure.
rates for childbed fever dropped drastically. There is nothing extremely new about the
One might think this would change standard ensuing list of reasons as to why obesity is a
procedure in the maternity ward but apparently problem in America today. Emotional factors,
the lesson didn’t sink in until sometime in the stress, marketing pressures and modern lazi-
Doctors have twentieth century. Meanwhile, Dr. Semmelweis ness are all covered. Stress may be a factor but
was ultimately dismissed from the hospital, the video makes no mention of the possibility
to be careful harangued by the medical community for his that poor nutrition could be making us more
not to strike “extreme” views and forced to leave the city. His stress-prone. The lamest explanation is the sug-

for too long continued passionate efforts to change obstetri- gestion that we used to be hunter-gatherers so our
cal procedures resulted in his commitment to metabolism is not geared for video games, TV
or people an insane asylum where he died only two weeks and cubicles, but rather for relentless workouts.
might figure later, likely a result of severe beating by guards. I agree that propping oneself up in front of a
out that they Something to think about if you want to save the display screen all day is not a healthy lifestyle,
but the other extreme can also be a problem.
human race.
are better off In more recent times doctors in countries The fantasy of what a hunter-gatherer life may
without all like Canada and Great Britain have formed have looked like is accompanied by an equally
that “health” unions and occasionally go on strike. It has been simplistic animation that suggests such people
observed that local death rates fall when they do exhaustively exercised almost every day—and
care. so. Doctors have to be careful not to strike for didn’t eat well. The DVD “Fathead” did a much

76 Wise Traditions SUMMER 2009