Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient by Norman Cousins Page A

for vitamin supplementation where people are under stress or are subjected to environmental strains and hazards. The notion that the average diet supplies all the proper vitamin levels is not very meaningful; the use of the word “average” in such matters is arbitrary and unscientific. Some lifestyles produce a chronic vitamin imbalance. It is possible that more patients would go to doctors for advice concerning these matters if they did not have the feeling that doctors regard vitamin deficiencies as nonsense. Such deficiencies are all too real, especially as the result of the large dependence on processed foods.
    It is unreasonable, however, to expect the physician to see all diseases as a manifestation of vitamin deficiency. It is equally unreasonable to expect physicians to encourage their patients to spend large sums of money on vitamins regardless of need and regardless of the possible harm that overloading might cause.
    What is needed here—as it is in all matters—is a sense of balance that neither attempts to dismiss vitamins out of hand nor regards them as the only key to good health. Such a balance is possible, given attitudes of reasonableness by both physician and patient.
    The holistic health movement can discover its greatest effectiveness by seeking such a balance. It would not be in the interest of the movement to regard the medical profession as the enemy. Talk of enemies does not sit well in a movement in which spiritual factors are no less vital than practical ones. Holism means healing—not just of bodies but of relationships. One of the most useful things the movement can do is to bring public and physician together in mutual respect for the ability of the human body to be fully potentiated in maintaining health and in overcoming disease. The impressive number of medical schools that are represented at various holistic health meetings around the country confirms the fact that holistic health advocates have won their main objective, which is to shift the emphasis from knowledge of the disease to knowledge of human beings in whom the disease exists.
    Few things have been more encouraging for the holistic health movement than the 1978 convention of the American Medical Association. At that meeting, the nation’s doctors heard talks about the dangers of over-medication and about the need for restraint in writing prescriptions in general; about the importance of psychological factors such as compassion and warmth in the treatment of the ill; about the role of good food in preventing and overcoming illness; and about ascorbic acid therapy. Linus Pauling, who only a few years ago was heavily criticized by the medical profession, made a major presentation at the convention, and provided a step-by-step account of his work with what he called “orthomolecular medicine.” He seemed to have a profound impact on all those who heard him.
    The auspicious prospect is that the interest of laymen can be knowledgeably applied in concert with the medical profession’s own respect for the layman’s responsible involvement in holistic approaches to health.

SIX
    W HAT I L EARNED FROM T HREE T HOUSAND D OCTORS
    Following the publication in the New England Journal of Medicine of the first chapter of this book, I was the recipient of some three thousand letters from doctors in about a dozen countries. What was most remarkable and gratifying about these letters was the evidence of an increasingly open attitude by many doctors to new and even unconventional approaches in the treatment of serious disease. There was encouraging support in these letters for the measures that had figured in my own recovery—a well-developed will to live, laughter, and large intravenous doses of sodium ascorbate. Far from resenting the intrusion of a layman into problems of diagnosis and therapy, the doctors who wrote in response to the article warmly endorsed the idea of a patient’s partnership with his