I’ve been learning about nutrition all my life. We all do, I think, from our first bite of solid food. This food gives me a tummy ache. That food smells like home. I have a daughter who is absolutely convinced that Dr. Pepper is poisonous because she drank some one day just before she exhibited signs of food poisoning! (There’s a food she’ll never eat again!)

There are a lot of voices today. Television pipes them into my home with their sincere faces. The internet brings their writing directly to my email inbox and answers my Google queries. Their heads shake sadly at my choices as headlines blare out from the magazine covers at the grocery checkstand. How on earth do you decide which voice is trustworthy?

It’s not foolproof, but my main method is old: Follow the money. Now, some will say I’m a cynic, and perhaps I am, but in my experience, people will tend to talk louder, more insistently and with more studies to back them up if they have something to sell. The bigger the institution, generally, the more force behind their words. There is an internet doctor of some fame to whom I would listen closely. I didn’t blindly follow all he claimed, but his words held more sway with me than many experts. The longer I was part of his Inner Circle, the more his health bulletins became sales pitches. No, he didn’t change, I did. I “heard” better the intent to sell me something. He wasn’t entirely wrong, many of his recommendations I still follow: coconut oil, sea salt, sunshine. But that grain of salt I had to take his advice with was always there.

My allopath is the same way, but more so. His sales pitch is so thoroughly ingrained in his thinking that I don’t believe he even realizes it. I have chronic pain left over from a dozen failed knee surgeries in the 1970s before there was such a thing as microsurgery. Most days I’m fine with my meditation and breathing techniques, but some days I need more of an assist. I have taken a very low level pain med for 35 years on these days, the same med, without ever becoming addicted. When I first moved to this area, I went to the insurance-assigned doc with my medical records. I was having a very bad pain day and my BP was 120/90 (my normal is 80/50, btw, so you can see this is very high for me.) He wrote a scrip for BP meds. He didn’t even look at my legs, but after I described the pain, wrote me a scrip for restless legs and another for vericose veins. He wrote one for physical therapy (which I’ve had at various times in my life, without much benefit) and one for a sleeping pill for those rare nights the pain keeps me awake. He wrote one for a statin drug, because he puts all his patients on them once they reach a certain age, and recommended liposuction at the clinic he had just opened downstairs. He never dealt with the pain med request, instead referring me to a pain specialist. I dropped the scrips in the exam room’s trash can on my way out. The pain specialist said I deal well with the pain and sees no reason I can’t continue with occasional use of my requested med. But, not being an MD, she couldn’t prescribe it, for that I’d have to go back to…

My distrust of the mainstream medical community runs deep. From being told I was “too fat to breastfeed” my firstborn (I was 20 pounds over my ideal weight when leaving the hospital delivery room) and “too old to breastfeed” my last (I was 41) to the flouride pills that destroyed my first child’s teeth, to the steroids my youngest was on for allergies, I’ve seen some of the worst that allopaths have to offer. I’ve also seen the best. There was one doctor who, upon diagnosing hubby with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1991, did endless hours of research. Each week he would share his findings with us. Homeopathy, herbals, acupuncture, there was no medical discipline off-limits to his quest. Not once did he reach for a prescription pad without educating us on benefits and side-effects first and asking if we wanted to try this route. I felt we partnered with him, so when he said, “How about we try this Anti-Candida Diet?” we really invested ourselves. It’s not an easy diet, but because I felt he was working with us, we gave it our best.

In all the words on my TV, on glossy magazine covers and newspaper articles, on my glowing computer screen and in my head, the ones that speak loudest to me come from those who search, not those who sell.

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