Health: Wellville Revisited

Look at a bowl of Kellogg's Corn Flakes and try to avoid thinking about 5 enemas a day.

After reading this book, I cannot do it.

Place atop this book the fact that my father, old before I was born, was alive during the time that John Harvey Kellogg operated his Battle Creek Sanitarium for health and vacation and decided the doctor was wrong, but that TWO enemas would be perfect, and you see a little of what I mean. Now put a bowl of the corn flakes invented by Kellogg's brother on the kitchen table in front of a 5-year-old, tell that child to hurry up and eat so they can have an enema and you see more of the picture. Now place atop this sundae, a stint on the board of directors of a drug treatment program with a descendant of Kellogg that took a welfare-receiving family into his office-home, took their money and food stamps and fed them canned dog food sandwiches for a research paper and secondary gain, and you get a little more of my drift.

Besides, Kellogg's corn flakes are too expensive.

There is complex numberless universe of healthcare scams operating globally in the 21^st century and some of them draw Americans out of their own country to try cures not (yet?) authorized by the FDA. At the same time, despite being recognized by the National Institute of Alternative Health in Washington DC. Many alternative treatments must compete with standard allopathic methods for respect and administration in the nation. All this occurs while some Canadians come into the USA for health care services they are not able to receive in a timely manner via their own healthcare system.

A good example is alternative treatments of ADD/ADHD. This is a large realm of study and I will not attempt to handle it all here or to denigrate any useful treatment, including placebo. Whatever works, works, but to start off, many children were misdiagnosed in the 1980s- 1990s as ADD was becoming more fully recognized and replacing such diagnoses as "minimal brain dysfunction" and others. Ohio was the first state in the union to award Social Security Disability payments to persons displaying ADD, and this occurred before a full batter of appropriate testing was available. Some parents began to coach their children in certain ways so as to display ADD symptoms and many were awarded disability payments. One patient of mine declared that her fetus was sure to have ADD, therefore she should receive payments. This did not fly.

This is all to say that there are so many scams on both sides of the healthcare industry, that alternative healthcare treatments have been frowned upon. However, there is such a phenomenon as taking "alternative-ness" to the level of quackery or obsessive-compulsive behavioral attributes. Some alternative health practices can become addictive for some people. One of these is fasting and this is but one of the practices highlighted in The Road to Wellville bytalented storytellerT. Coraghessan Boyle.

John Kellogg declared himself the Number One Health Expert in America. During a near-quarter century he promoted "scientific living" to the extreme and attracted celebrities of all fields of endeavor to his Sanitarium. The called it The San. This reminds me of Rehab today. If I may paraphrase with do tribute to Amy Winehouse:

They tried to make me go to Kellogg's,

I said no, No, NO!

But others went: Thomas Alva Edison, Upton Sinclair, Henry Ford, other doctors

And CW Post. -- I like his cereals.

He worked in the Kellogg kitchen to pay for his stay at The San and then developed his own breakfast food line and a fortune that he left to his daughter and she left to charity and to initiate a museum of sorts.

All in all, the patients benefited from vegetarianism except for fermented mare's milk, fish, etc.; electric shock therapy while seated with arms and legs in tubs of water, laugh therapy, sleep-in-the-cold-on-the-veranda therapy (I rather like that one), Indian club juggling, deep breathing, posture classes, and others.

Kellogg was not as exhibiting of OCD behaviors as the book describes, but some of his patients were more compulsive and obsessed with cleanliness and health. In one form of advanced yoga that a good psychologist friend of mine practiced, there was cleaning of as much of the alimentary tract as one could reach from the outside. Specifically, baskets of clean white cotton rope were obtained and these lengths were placed into the nose/mouth and pulled through the other orifice, another swallowed and then regurgitated, another inserted far up into the colon and removed, and so on. The total vegetarian diet kept the task more easily accomplishable. The two together were said to enhance spiritual development. That may be. I read the hard back book my friend used as a manual and the person featured in the how-to photos looked healthy. But this was not for me.

Boyle seems to be telling us that healthcare scam artists are as crooked as the cereal stock sellers at the Battle Creek train depot, accosting travelers to buy stock in this company or that (some of them were already out of business). The author also illustrates that some people that take healthcare to an obsessive extreme are addicted and with addiction and codependence sometimes comes the air of being "better than pothers" for their suffering and difference. That is another story, but one well handled in The Road to Wellville.

Scam artists, elitists, and snake oil salesmen. We still have them today. Read about them at the turn of the 20^th century in this captivating novel.

Further, read the good Hubs on Hub Pages about scams and effective treatments for body, mind, and spirit, by the talented writers that tackle these issues.