The Most Important Thing I Ever Learned About Health

The most important thing I ever learned about staying healthy came to me late in life.

It wasn’t a formula or a therapy. It wasn’t even advice in the formal sense of the word. The most profound lesson I ever learned came to me after years and years of reading about the human body and how it works. It came to me after consulting with some of the best doctors in the business, including Dr. Robert Atkins and, more recently, Dr. Al Sears.

My realization was at once striking and obvious. And I never looked at health or medicine the same way again.

What was my big realization?

The human body is designed to renew and perfect itself. It does this every second of every day, so long as we are living. If we don’t damage it too much and let it do what it wants to do, we can be healthy.

This is a very different idea than the one I had for most of my life. My old perspective, which I got from reading newspapers and watching television, was that the body starts out perfect — but over time, it breaks down and eventually falls apart.

I used to think of the body as a machine — like a car that needed maintenance. And doctors were the mechanics that could keep us running and fix our parts when they went bad.

But now I know that the mechanical metaphor is misleading. It is the reason we are willing — even eager — to run to a doctor when something feels wrong. But I’ve come to understand that doctors play only a very small role in healing. More than 90 percent of it is done naturally, by our own bodies — with or without the intervention of doctors and the medicines they prescribe.

If you bruise your elbow or cut your finger, what happens? In a few days, the bruise or cut heals. You don’t have to take a pill to get better. Your body takes care of itself. Damaged skin is replaced by new skin. And the new skin is healthy. It is perfect.

The same is true when you break a bone. Once it’s put back into position, the bone will heal itself. And when it does, the brand-new bone is stronger than the bone it replaced.

As I said, the body wants to renew itself — and will do so as long as it is allowed.

Your body’s drive to heal and renew itself continues constantly. People in their eighties and older can grow new skin, bones, and muscle. They can defeat colds and the flu. They can even defeat the deadliest diseases.

I am not suggesting that we are designed to live forever. In fact, we are designed to die. But I do think we can live a very long and healthy life — into our mid to late eighties — if we give the body the natural nutrition it needs to heal itself.

If you read enough about how the body works, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion. Yet this idea — that the body has the natural ability to perfect itself — is anathema to the medical and drug industries.

They survive on the idea that the body is a machine — that it breaks down and needs mechanical intervention to be repaired. Intervention that is, for the most part, one of the world’s greatest con games.

The business of medicine is very large and very powerful. How big is it? I have access to financial analysts that most people don’t have. I asked one of them to tally up its true size, including hospital billings, pharmaceutical sales, outpatient clinics, and so on. The number he gave me was even higher than I suspected: $4.5 trillion a year, about half of it contributed by the U.S.

Does it surprise you, then, to hear me suggest that all this money has resulted in a business whose primary goal is to make you think that you are sick?

And that’s not the end of it. The medical industry is in collusion with the food industry, the manufacturers of the “fuel” our bodies consume. So much of what we are told to eat by doctors and by our government is based on the results of studies financed by the food industry itself — including the big companies that tout the advantages of all sorts of unnatural foods that continue to stress our natural bodies.

There is a great book on this subject written by Dr. Norton M. Hadler. Dr. Hadler is professor of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and attending rheumatologist, University of North Carolina Hospitals.

In the book, Dr. Hadler looks at many of the most popular and most widely practiced modern medical cures. I’m talking about angioplasties, bypass surgeries, mastectomies, statin drugs, chemotherapy, and so on.

He analyzed the scientific studies that originally supported the widespread use of these therapies. He also reviewed all the significant studies that have been done on them ever since. And do you know what he found? He found that there was absolutely no proof that they worked! In many cases, they were actually worse than doing nothing — and they all have serious side effects.

Dr. Hadler calls this the “medicalization” of an overtreated society. He argues that the medical industry is an artificial social construct where health conditions are turned into diseases for financial gain.

“I am convinced the major stumbling block to rational health care is the social construction of health,” he says. “Americans think their medicine is the ‘best,’ if only they could afford it. This is the catwalk for displaying the medical emperor’s new clothes.”

I will get give you more details on this travesty of science in a minute. But let’s get back to my main point, which is the body’s amazing potential to heal itself.

Imagine if your body really could:

• Regenerate new cartilage if you have arthritis?
• Restore your clogged arteries to full health?
• Produce teenage-level strength in your bones at any age?

Well, your body can. It can do all of those things and many more. But the medical establishment doesn’t want you to know that — because if you do, they will lose revenue.

I asked my financial analyst to find out how much money is spent on surgeries to cure lower-back pain each year. He told me it’s approximately $50 billion a year. Well, guess what? Those operations don’t do any good. Your body can and will cure you of back pain if you don’t let doctors put you in danger by cutting into your spine.

I will give you a personal example of how the body can heal itself…

I suffered from lower-back pain for more than 15 years. I spent loads of money going to the very best and most expensive orthopedists. They took x-rays and found problems with my discs and prescribed drugs and recommended surgery. I took the drugs but wisely demurred on the surgery. Then, about five years ago, I read a book by Dr. John Sarno that convinced me that 99 percent of lower-back pain has nothing to do with busted discs. His proof is irrefutable. (If you’d like to see it for yourself, you don’t have to read the book. I’ll send you a free report with the details of his key insights.)

Dr. Sarno didn’t offer me a guaranteed cure for back pain. But something he said in his book triggered a thought about the body’s natural healing. I pursued that idea, working with yoga therapists and a Pilates instructor, and cured my 15-year back problem in six weeks. That was five years ago. Two or three times since then, I’ve felt my back start to go out and I’ve been able to correct it within 48 hours without going to a doctor or spending a nickel. (When you read the free report I’d like to send you, you’ll find out how I did it, along with the science behind it.)

Another quick example…

A good friend of mine came down with allergies in his forties. It got so bad that he could barely work. He went to his doctor, who prescribed various anti-inflammatory drugs. Some of them worked temporarily, but they all eventually failed. Then I introduced him to a doctor whose practice is based on allowing the body to heal itself.

This doctor explained that the reason those drugs failed is that they weren’t addressing the root cause of my friend’s allergies — the fact that his body had stopped producing enough of the natural anti-inflammatory hormone cortisol. His real problem was that his adrenal gland was exhausted.

The doctor prescribed a natural supplement that stimulated my friend’s adrenal gland to repair itself. Now he is free of allergies, and he thinks the doctor I sent him to is some kind of medical savant. But I keep telling him, “He’s just an honest doctor who gave your body what it needed.”

Your body can heal itself. It can get rid of any chronic or persistent pain you feel by naturally healing your tendons and ligaments, not by masking the pain. It can do the same with clogged arteries or digestive problems. It can do it, too, with diabetes and cancer.

Did you know that cancer cells are always present in the body? That they are present — in the millions — even when you are young? It’s true. The reason most of us never succumb to cancer — and, by the way, most of us never do — is because our bodies have billions of anti-cancer molecules swarming around in the bloodstream, killing cancer cells all the time. People get cancer when their immune systems weaken and they stop being able to overpower the cancer cells that have gone haywire.

In all the years the medical industry has been fighting cancer, it has made very little progress. Yet natural therapies can and do work.

Let me give you one example…

A doctor located in Mexico has developed a breakthrough cancer treatment. This cutting-edge therapy:

• Is 10,000 times more effective than standard chemotherapy…
• Doesn’t cause nausea, hair loss, or excessive weight loss…
• Uses heat to draw cancer cells out of hiding and into the open, where they’re easily eliminated…

The technique is called hyperthermia. It is natural. It is safe. And it has been practiced for thousands of years. In fact, its origins go back as far as ancient Egypt. And make no mistake about it… this cure may be natural, but it is based on science — on the fact that cancer cells are weaker than healthy cells and, thus, much more sensitive to heat.

Now let’s talk about diabetes…

Type 2 (adult-onset) diabetes is fast becoming a national epidemic — a dangerous one, because it disables people and shortens their lives. If you are following the government’s recommended dietary plan, you probably feel good about your chances of avoiding diabetes. In fact, you are doing exactly what it takes to stimulate the disease.

Nearly 80 million Americans have Type-2 diabetes or are slowly developing it…

As the sixth-leading cause of death, this disease claims nearly 100 lives every single day…

And it is almost entirely preventable!

That’s right. Researchers have shown that you can stop diabetes in its tracks in just THREE WEEKS… and you can do it without medication.

Using an all-natural approach — the approach used by Dr. Richard Bernstein, one of the world’s foremost experts on diabetes — test subjects experienced dra­matic, measurable results, including:

• lower cholesterol
• fewer free radicals in their blood, and
• higher levels of nitric oxide, which keeps arteries clear and blood flowing

As a consultant to health publishers, I have privileged access to medical studies done all over the world. I don’t read the actual studies myself. (I doubt that I would be able to fully understand them.) But I consult with a half-dozen health experts and dozens of doctors, PhDs, and researchers who not only read them but also do clinical work. I consider Dr. Al Sears to be a great pioneer in this area. I’ve consulted with him many times over the years, and I trust him. So much so, in fact, that he’s become my personal physician.

But there are many physicians like him around the world who have rejected the “medicalization” of health and are looking to find natural cures. What they are finding is that for every questionable and expensive drug or surgical procedure, there are two or three completely natural solutions that work just as well or better — but without the sometimes-dangerous side effects.

Here are some examples. Did you know that…

• You can improve your prostate health through simple changes in diet?
• Eliminating starchy foods can fight diabetes?
• A low-carb diet may combat heart disease?
• Drinking red wine can actually reverse the signs of aging?

The best of these natural cures work the same way — by naturally stimulating the body to do what it is designed to do: regenerate itself, minute-by-minute, on a cellular level. And that is why so many of these natural cures begin to take effect in a matter of days… sometimes hours. The body wants to heal itself!

If all this makes sense to you, I urge you to read the special report I want to send you. It was originally written for me by the folks at Natural Health Confidential — but it was so good that I felt guilty not sharing it. In the future, they will charge good money for it, as they should. But I have convinced them to give it to you today for free when you sign up for a 60-day trial subscription to the Natural Health Confidential newsletter.

It’s my way to introduce you to their publication, Natural Health Confidential, which is based on this idea that your natural body is by far the most powerful healing force in the universe… and that anyone can recalibrate their natural healing abilities.

One of the things I like best about Natural Health Confidential is that it operates independently. It’s not tied to any one idea, company, or product. That means the information you get is uncensored and unbiased.

If you’d like a free copy of the report I told you a little about today — “The True Cause of Back Pain” — just go here right now and sign up. Then you’ll be able to download the report instantly. If, after 60 days, you decide the newsletter isn’t for you — you get your money back and you get to keep the report.

I’m hoping I have made it clear that getting the kind of information Natural Health Confidential publishes could be the most important thing you ever do for yourself.

So, please, sign up today.

[Ed. Note: Mark Morgan Ford was the creator of Early To Rise. In 2011, Mark retired from ETR and now writes the Palm Beach Letter. His advice, in our opinion, continues to get better and better with every essay, particularly in the controversial ones we have shared today. We encourage you to read everything you can that has been written by Mark.]