(April 1, 2006) Travelling around the United States, especially by car and especially off the Interstate highways, can be informative, rewarding, enlightening, and inspirational. The history of American literature is filled with high points of the "road" genre, including the original road book by De Tocqueville (Democracy in America), and, more recently, the work of Jack Kerouac (On the Road and a number of other novels) and John Steinbeck (Travels With Charley).

 

Last fall, serious dental health issues took me to Southern California for a long period of treatments. When the work was done, I embarked on a circuitous, 2,000-plus mile solo road trip around the Western U.S. that is still in progress.

 

While a more comprehensive and definitive review by this "alt med writer" will have to wait for a later time, some impressions, after more than three weeks on the road at this point, can be forthcoming now.

 

First of all, I not only write about alternative medicine, I walk the talk - of necessity. Several long term chronic conditions that need constant monitoring require me to pay close attention to things like diet, nutritional supplements, and environment. Travelling, especially outside of major cities, presents special challenges.

 

In the 1970s, when interest in nutrition and alternative medicine was starting to take off, early adopters could well have have imagined - and many did hope and expect - that by the 21st Century healthy lifestyles and natural options, in terms of factors like optimum diets and holistic health care, would be everywhere, easily accesible and affordable.

 

Unfortunately, that didn't happen - at least to the extent that it should or could have. To be sure, "complementary alternative medicine," or "CAM," also known as "Integrative Medicine," a trendy, profitable hybrid of allopathy and non-threatening, watered down, adjunctive natural approaches, is making significant inroads into the $2 trillion-a-year U.S. medical economy, but mostly in sophisticated upscale environments (both urban centers and hip small towns) and in academia. But when one tries to find truly natural alternatives in most other areas in the country (so-called "flyover country" as the coastal elites refer to these large areas), you're largely on your own.

 

In the 1970s, before the acronym "CAM" or "Integrative Medicine" had been dreamed up, the term "holistic health" was often used. "Holism" first came into wide use by Jan Smuts in 1926. According to Wikipedia, holism is "from holos, a Greek word meaning all, entire, total." It's "the idea that all the properties of a given system (biological, chemical, social, mental, linguistic, etc) cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its component parts alone. Instead, the system as a whole determines in an important way how the parts behave."

 

To take a truly holistic view of health care in 2006, then, one needs to include and asses the various contexts which help to influence and maintain health, both individually and collectively, including economics and politics.

 

The fact is that America in 2006 is increasingly defined by centralization and uniformity best typified by the expansion of government (particularly in the health care field) and, in the commercial sector, by the dominance of the number one retail giant, Walmart, and its imitators. The "Walmartization" of life, like McDonaldization in earlier decades, has taken hold across the broader economic, physical, and psychic landscapes. It's defined by standardization, massive scale, robotization, and the denial of local, grassroots options and choices. Among other things, the phenomenon helps to reinforce bad choices. Just take a look at the large number of morbidly obese people shopping at a typical American "superstore" and what they're often buying. A superstore in Ukiah, CA is the same as one in Ridgecrest, CA or one in San Diego.

 

Twenty-three years ago, during a similar road trip around California in the days before Walmart, I noted that locally owned health food stores were easy to find and were a linchpin of the emerging alternative health movement. Typically, they were not only sources of natural foods but centers of information, education, and networking, including about alternative medicine. Today, many of the small to mid-size stores have gone out of business as the field has been consolidated by natural products giants. And even Walmart, responding to the demand for a niche market, sells weight loss foods and books, Balance Bars, and other accoutrements of the natural products industry.

 

One of my most vivid memories of this current trip, which more or less represents everything else that I've seen on the journey in this regard, involves a conversation with another guest at a hotel south of San Francisco. He told me that he and his wife were in the approximate middle of a two month stay there while she underwent and recovered from a bone marrow transplant for her cancer at a San Francisco hospital. He said, without seeming to believe it himself, that the doctors were "optimistic" about her prognosis. He complained, however, that his wife has to take fourteen different medications (chemotherapy and various prescriptions to counteract negative side effects of the primary treatments). When he went to get one of the prescriptions filled at a local pharmacy, he said, his co-pay (for one single drug) was over $300.

 

Visiting places like Death Valley and smaller California towns up and down the state, one is impressed by the incredibly rich and diverse history of places in the United States. In most areas, a few locals attempt to maintain a link with the past through publications, museums, tour guides, and associations.

 

In a state like California, with its varied and extreme terrain and climate (including Death Valley), the accounts of early settlers and what they had to endure to survive and create a civilized society are mind boggling. Self-reliance, determination, and high energy were among the values then.

 

Today, perhaps because these kinds of values are not instilled in young people by the systems and entitlement approach to life and education that has taken hold, there is little mainstream interest in local history. Instead, an individual's consciousness is directed at an early age to an increasingly centrally manufactured, bankrupt popular culture, driven by vacuous celebrities, forgettable and deleterious entertainment, values that can only be described as perverted, and always an appeal to the lowest common denominator.

 

Since the 1960s many American colleges and universities have been test sites for wild experimentation. Today, in supposedly hip college towns up and down the West coast, the costume of the typical student often includes prison-inspired baggy clothing and dreadlocks. The image of elite American students adopting the appearance of prison inmates and Third World drug proponents, and presumably modeling their personal philosophies accordingly, is something to consider.

 

Another major development, and until recently a grossly underreported one, that impacts the overall health of communities is the invasion of illegal immigrants. It seems like a significant roadblock on the superhighway to a "CAM" or "Integrative Med" future that some CAM proponents (sitting in their invory towers) like to imagine - to have millions of undocumented and unassimilated permanent residents here, unable to speak English, relying on emergency rooms for their health care, and being unable to understand or disinterested in practicing primary prevention that is a major part of holistic health.

 

As I drove farther north in California, to a point more than 700 miles north of San Diego and the international border with Mexico, it was astounding to see, in various small towns, that significant numbers if not majorities of residents appear to be illegal aliens. It is a measure of a place to visit the local retail outlets and look around - in stores like Walmart, McDonald's, and J.C. Penney; a supermarket; a drug store; and so on. A decade ago, Ukiah, California, a town with an official population of only 15,000, was chosen in one review as the sixth best small town in the nation and the best small town in California. Today, it appears that illegal aliens are in the majority, at least judging by people you see on the streets and in the stores. One native born Ukiahan told me that 6,000 aliens have descended on the town in the past several years. From what I observed, areas of Ukiah, nestled in a valley one hundred miles north of San Francisco, resembled Tijuana. Spanish is the most-often heard language, many signs are in Spanish, and gang-inspired graffiti has started to appear, marring public spaces.

 

The afternoon I left Ukiah, I passed a loud march of 50 or 60 illegals on State Street. Participants waved Mexican flags and carried signs in Spanish and English saying things like "We demand our civil rights" and "We deserve [driver's] licenses."

 

An emotional high point on the trip came when I drove north along California's remote coastal route 1 south of Big Sur and came to a spot in the winding, two-lane road high above the Pacific that overlooked the ranch where the late Linus Pauling, Ph.D. lived. Pauling, who died in 1994 at age 91, was the two-time Nobel Prize winner who helped start the field of Orthomolecular Medicine and who popularized vitamin C as a treatment for cancer and the common cold.

 

In March 1983 and February 1989 Pauling invited me to visit his ranch for recorded interviews. These two meetings - being welcomed into the private home and work space of one of most influential scientists in Western history for lengthy one on one conversations - are among my most cherished memories.

 

I had not visited that part of the California coast, itself an evocative and iconic place, since Pauling passed away. In the hour or so I spent pausing at the point on the highway overlooking his ranch on my drive north last month, I simply observed the scene and let the memories of the earlier visits to the place flood back. It was part meditation, part pilgrimage, and part just enjoying a perfect spring day.

 

Among other things, I thought of the contrast between people (highly original and independent thinkers in the field of natural medicine) like Pauling, whom I had known, interviewed, and reported on and the widely acknolwedged or self-selected leaders of the field today. (My original list includes, in addition to Pauling, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, M.D., Ph.D., Dean Burk, Ph.D., and a number of others.)

 

The original pioneers like Pauling were not tied to, or dependent on, bureaucratic environments and government funding grants. (Szent-Gyorgyi told me in 1981 that the purpose of science and medicine was no longer to make discoveries but to get grants granted.) Instead, they made discoveries and thought up entirely new concepts and achieved revolutionary scientific and medical breakthroughs largely on their own - often working things out, like Pauling did, writing ideas down on paper in longhand.

 

Working on his own, relying on his own internal inspiration and creativity - that's how Pauling proposed the nature of the chemical bond, a discovery that earned him his first Nobel Prize, for Chemistry, in 1954. A decade and a half later, he relied on the same kind of inspiration and clarity to make unprecedented contributions to the field of natural medicine.

 

Like many people who are extremely gifted intellectually, Pauling's innovative ideas were often remarkably simple, especially when considered in retrospect. In the health area, for example, he presented extensive evidence that vitamin C was vital in maintaining and restoring health. He often observed that the use of vitamin C and other antioxidants, both to prevent and treat diseases, and Orthomolecular Medicine in general, were cost effective and gave people important tools for inexpensive and effective self care. Compared to the complicated, expensive, and problematic conventional therapies that were in vogue then as now, which tend to disempower patients, Pauling's proposals were elegantly simple and cost-effective. And Pauling had a gift in communicating these concepts so that almost everyone could understand him.

 

Those were the days when breakthroughs could be made by individuals, in many cases mavericks, who were often accorded recognition and leadership in their chosen fields of accomplishment and/or earned well-deserved public attention and respect.