7/7/2012
1. How long have you been making yourself accessible through emails?
Since getting email, about ten years.
2. How many emails do you answer per week approximately?
In a recent week, 140, many just yes or no, or a couple of words, and a few long ones.
3. When you started answering emails, did you foresee that this would involve so many questions from people and be your primary method of interacting with the public rather than formal consultations? Was it something that evolved for you or was it an intentional revolution of redefining how scientists interact with society by being so accessible and not being motivated by money?
Knowledge isn’t a commodity, especially not a fungible commodity, as the medical business sees it. Consciousness and culture are part of the life process. It is exactly the commoditization of medical knowledge that makes it dangerous, and generally stupid. Doctors buy their knowledge, and then resell it over and over; it’s valuable as a commodity, so its value has to be protected by the equivalent of a copyright, the system of laws establishing the profession. Without its special status, its worthlessness would be quickly demonstrated. When A.C. Guyton wrote his textbook of medical physiology (the most widely used text in the world) in the 1950s, it was trash; as it was studied and applied by generations of physicians, it was still trash. The most compliant patients who bought their treatment from the most authoritative, Guytonesque, doctors were buying their own disability and death.
Each time you learn something, your consciousness becomes something different, and the questions you ask will be different; you don’t know what the next appropriate question will be when you haven’t assimilated the earlier answers. Until you see something as the answer to an urgent question, you can’t see that it has any value. The unexpected can’t be a commodity. When people buy professional knowledge they get what they pay for, a commodity in a system that sustains ignorance.
4. Why do you help so many people through emails? Are there any spiritual or humanitarian motivations? Or is it more about collecting scientific data?
More than 50 years ago, I realized that the US culture had become effectively totalitarian, with decorations, and even the decorations were being fixed by the specialists (the Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example). I went through a series of graduate studies and projects looking for places where reality could influence the culture, rather than being obliterated by it. The academic culture, though, was rapidly changing for the worse. Over a period of a few years I happened to see a few people recover immediately from what doctors had considered incurable problems, using simple and inexpensive methods, and then I realized that some people were willing to discard their old ideas when those conflicted with useful facts, especially when the useful facts could save their life. I started doing evening and weekend classes in nutrition and endocrinology, seeing health as a way to get reality into the culture. My newsletter grew out of the classes, and that led to answering mail, which is cheaper and easier on the internet.
5. Are you concerned your words will be taken out of context?
I start with trying to make a context clear, because everyone’s context is different, and meanings change when they are learned. Ideally, things should make no sense until they make the right sense. People often tell me their diagnosis, and want to know what they should do for it; they want to set the context. Very often, the most important thing is to diagnose the diagnostician. When people used to come to my house for consultations, they would mention how they heard about me. When the medical society would send their agents posing as people with health problems, the people they chose were cultural clichés, who wanted “a diagnosis and a prescription.” I would tell them they should see a doctor if that was what they wanted. Sometimes they would record my classes, and the things they took out of context didn’t mean anything. Since the contextuality of communication is always in the foreground when I talk or write, you know that someone is confusing me with an authority when they talk about my “protocol” for something. Context is everything, and it’s individual and empirical.
6. How do you balance encouraging a person’s curiosity with giving them the answers to their questions? Are you guided by any motivations such as enabling our independent conclusions?
In classes, where the subject matter is an area of knowledge, I look for aspects of it that I think will be unexpected by the students, so they will sense that they are going to change as they explore the new knowledge. When a particular person’s health is the issue, I have always tried to design a short course in the things that I think they need to know. It’s usually not what they expected and wanted, but if they can see points that illuminate their experience, they might be motivated to think about the implications. I think I try to make people aware of the importance of perceiving complexity and the incompleteness of tentative conclusions.
7. What impact would you like to see your research make on society? Reaching the largest amount of people? or a certain type of person? Or are you completely detached from the outcome?
I’d like to see it lead to the disestablishment of medicine. The same general outcomes Ivan Illich worked for. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDr71LHO0Jo)
8. You put your research out there for free while others use it to make money, how do you feel about this?
When research is paid for by taxpayers, and government grant money even pays the journals to publish it, and mostly public money pays for universities to subscribe to the journals at outrageous prices, then I think it’s approximately criminal for the journals to charge for electronic access to it. If knowledge gets its value from scarcity, and the owner of the information deliberately makes it scarce, then ignorance becomes an essential part of the value system.
For a while when I was doing consultations/classes at home I would tell people that it would take an hour or two, and that they could pay me 1/1000 of their annual income, and it worked all right with most (low income) people, but high income people objected.
9. Do you have any tricks, techniques or tips for minimizing stress in dealing with the public?
I don’t think so. Perceiving the existence of the culture is necessarily stressful, and any opportunity to modify it tends to reduce the stress.
10. Do you have pet peeves regarding the nature of certain emails? Is there anything you want your emailers to know? Double spaces? Keep it short? One question at a time? More detail? Less detail?
When I’m in Mexico, sometimes the wire is so slow that it can take minutes for a letter to trickle down the wire, and under such conditions it’s best if they just read the articles on the internet, and look up some of the references; that can keep a person busy for years. Driving to Michoacan is sometimes faster than the internet.