The Joy of Health: A Doctor's Guide to Nutrition and Alternative Medicine

Arlene Gryfe is a Toronto-based professional nutritionist and home
economist.

Rona is a rare physician: trained in traditional medicine (M.D. from
McGill University, M.Sc. in Biochemistry and Clinical Nutrition), he has
also made a study of nontraditional medical treatments. He believes that
the media disseminate only the mainstream medical information that they
believe their advertisers (drug manufacturers, alcohol and tobacco
industries, and suppliers and manufacturers of junk food) like to hear.
For this reason, very little nontraditional treatment information
reaches the public, since both mainstream medicine and the media have an
investment in illness and disease.

Alternative or holistic medicine’s philosophical approach emphasizes
the individual as opposed to the individual’s disease. In The Joy of
Health, Rona encourages personal responsibility for one’s health and
tries to use common goals to bridge the understanding between the two
forms of medicine. He postulates that the heightened awareness in
nutritional medicine, stress reduction techniques, and exercise is a
good start to this understanding.

By writing this book, he hopes to educate people to better care for
themselves, but only with diagnosis and treatment by qualified,
certified, and licenced health-care professionals—i.e., physicians who
have received more than the superficial exposure to natural therapeutics
currently provided in medical schools. Since it may be difficult to find
a practitioner oriented toward noninvasive, nondrug approaches to health
care, a lengthy appendix is provided for Canada and the U.S.

However, it is not easy for the reader to select an alternative
“wellness” doctor. Although the book defines the different focuses
of holistic doctors, chiropractors, naturopaths, dietitians, and other
therapists with a wellness orientation, it is difficult for the reader
to select a practitioner whose approach fits with the reader’s
personal philosophy. Naturally the reader is cautioned to “check
credentials,” but we are also warned to be mindful that another
practitioner may give a “biased evaluation.”

Topics covered include foods and diets; vitamins, minerals, and other
supplements; various diseases, their preventions and treatments; and
food allergies. Although Rona advises readers to “check with your
physician,” there is always the danger that a treatable condition will
be ignored in an attempt to self-treat with nutritional therapy. Since
there are 18 pages of sample diets, and many more pages of food lists
and “healthy” recipes, it is all too easy for a reader to focus on
only one aspect of a situation and further complicate a pre-existing or
associated condition.

With this book, Rona hopes to reach supporters as well as critics of
holistic medicine and to integrate the natural, noninvasive non-drug
therapies with mainstream medical practice. A determined and
knowledgeable reader may be able to critically evaluate the extensive
scientific bibliography provided, but the average layperson may merely
become confused or, worse, misdirected.