Last month I turned on the radio and immediately heard a man saying "OK: As for the blood group diets? They're nothing, nonsense, a lot of hooey. Liz Hurley and everything? It's just ridiculous!" He then derided breatharianism, iridology, colonics, anything called "Detox", and ear-candling, ending with "These are the twelve [I'd missed the others] alternative therapies/modalities that are pure hogwash". The speaker? Dean Edell.

Poor guy. Just think how much less trial and error he'd have to resort to if he knew his patients' blood types. Just think of how many lives he's positioned to positively impact and what an opportunity he's throwing away, all because he's ignorant about the inexorable direction medical science has begun to take, not to mention eastern systems of medicine that date back thousands of years and which view Edell's brand of medicine as yet one more flash in the historical pan.

One day, in this world or the next, many Western allopaths are going to discover the truth, the open-minded ones to their awe and wonder, the closed-minded ones to their shame, shame for their sheer arrogance.

I have experimented, throughout my lifetime, with a few systems and modalities of medicine. Many had merit, and a few didn't work for me, though others claimed they did for them. Far more numerous are those I haven't ever personally used. Yet I too have been known to make fun of a few really outrageous-seeming ideas; one of these was...(drumroll)...Peter D'Adamo's Blood Type Diet! I saw his first book on the store shelf when it was released, and I said to the clerk, "Next thing you know, someone will come out with the Zodiac Diet". I was cynical about it, and my guess is that most who swear by it - or aspects of it - today, made fun of it at first. D'Adamo isn't ashamed to reveal these instances amid his anecdotes about some of his most extraordinary successes. I admit that it can sound preposterous until you look more closely, as I did, or need it desperately, as do many of Dr. D'Adamo's patients.

For about thirteen years I've been practicing aromatherapy, but I can remember attending a dinner, a few years before I took it up, at which someone asked if any of us knew anything about this "new" modality. I was actually among those who razzed her. "Gimme a break" might have been uttered by me at that time.

It's because I've looked into and found validity to health practices of which I'd previously been ignorant, such as essential oils, Blood type medicine, Ayurveda and Macrobiotics, that I can be lenient with those who bash them. Knowing what I know, I'm aware that these people simply haven't been presented with either the evidence or the need for it. One brief experience with lavender oil for burns, or tea tree oil for fungi, and a person simply cannot laugh at aromatherapy anymore. Reading the chapter(s) about one's own blood type and/or those of one's family, in Eat Right 4 Your Type, renders one hesitant to discard the work as balderdash. Macrobiotics, which many mistakenly believe to consist of a stark brown rice-only diet, quickly catapulted me from grave illness to robust health in the 1980s. And Ayurveda? I'd looked at those questionnaires many times before actually trying an Ayurvedic diet, beginning 3 months ago. Seventeen pounds lighter, hale
and hardy, I can say that weight loss is only one of the benefits accruing from this program. And I still don't understand what all the homeopathic fuss is about (though Bach's Rescue Remedy has amazed me a few times), but some must be benefiting from it, just as they do from chiropractic, rolfing, and shiatsu.

One of the most fortunate formative experiences I had in my youth was to personally know Dr. Robert Atkins in the early 1970s in New York City, when he was dating my (divorced) mother. I rolled my eyes many a time over this medical renegade and his convictions about vitamins and minerals. Today, most know of Dr. Atkins's body of work as respected and well-established medicine. But I remember when he was viewed by the orthodox as a fringe crank with a screw loose. When he'd hold forth on Brewers' Yeast and the B-complex, I'd excuse myself and go watch TV or something. My mother would insist Bob was a maverick genius and that sometime in the future the world would recognize his contribution as seminal.

In the early 1980s, a terrific surgeon, call him Frank, asked me out for lunch (we worked at the same hospital in Manhattan). Over our meal he informed me that he couldn't eat in the Doctors' dining room because he was being "shunned" by attending physicians who'd heretofore blanketed him with referrals. It seems he'd been interacting increasingly personally and informally with his in-patients, referring to them by name, spending "too long a time" with them on rounds, and interacting with them out of a deep, genuine concern for them as whole persons. Word had gotten around, and he'd been taken aside and spoken to about his "making the other doctors look bad".

As Frank told me of his ordeal (sotto voce, so as not to be overheard at this restaurant so near the hospital), it became clear that he believed his story was unique, that his need to identify with his patients' wholeness and humanness was some one-of-a-kind aberration, and he - so ingenuously and achingly - didn't know what to do. I proceeded to rattle off names of formerly-mainstream MDs and RNs who'd been at the forefront of the then-emerging holistic movement, and I urged him to locate and contact them, as they'd no doubt be thrilled to welcome him among their number, to assist him in finding more congenial hospitals in which to work, and to refer cases to him. I lost touch with Frank, but I imagine that the sneers of his colleagues launched this truly top-flight general surgeon into a far more rewarding career.

Dr. Peter D'Adamo has advantages that neither Bob nor Frank had: He's not an MD under obligation to play by AMA and associated unwritten rules. He's already operating within an established alternative medical community, and with credentials therein. He's doing so decades after naturopathy and nutritional therapy have appeared in the mainstream public square. He is familiar with the history of the career trials of the likes of Bob and Frank before him. He also has sold millions of books and has a very active website, clinical practice, and nutritional supplements line.

Dean Edell has also sold millions of books, and has a national radio program, to boot. Think of how much back-pedaling he'll have to do if and when he discovers that his public errors, born of a snide skepticism, are historically more worthy of scorn than the (brilliant) contribution of Peter D'Adamo.