MORE ABOUT HOW WESTERN MEDICINE IS BROKEN

Part 3 in a Series

For the readers: Part 1 of this series can be found at:

https://chriscaja.substack.com/p/i-love-western-medicine

Part 2 can be found here:

https://chriscaja.substack.com/p/why-i-often-dont-love-western-medicine

And here is Part 3:

I’ve long been a fan of the movies and television shows made by the team of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (ZAZ), with films produced back in the 80’s such as Airplane, Naked Gun and Top Secret, along with the TV show Police Squad. Hilarious stuff, especially if one (like me) gravitates sometimes towards sophomoric humor.

In fact, my fan-boyism for their work goes back to the 70’s, well before they branched into television and movies, when the three were doing live comedy skit shows at The Kentucky Fried Theater in West Los Angeles.

So when the ZAZ team authored and released a book in October 2023 titled “Surely You Can't Be Serious---The True Story of Airplane”, I was all over it, downloading it on my Kindle the day it was released.

It was a quick, funny and breezy read about how the movie Airplane came to be made in 1980, and I was enjoying their humor as much while reading the book as I had watching their movies and TV shows.

I was laughing until I got to the epilogue, where each of the three writers-producers wrote about their careers after their partnership had ended in the late 1980’s.

And that brought me to Jim Abrahams’ story of what he’d been doing in the last few decades.

His story made my jaw drop. Here’s some of what Jim wrote, after describing his career post-ZAZ:

“….In March 1993, everything changed. My one-year-old son, Charlie, had his first seizure. There’s absolutely nothing funny about being the parent of a child with uncontrolled epilepsy. Nothing. After a year of daily seizures, drugs, and a brain surgery, I learned that the cure for Charlie’s epilepsy, the ketogenic diet—a high fat, no sugar, limited protein diet—had been hiding in plain sight for, by then, over seventy years. And despite the diet’s being well documented in medical texts, none of the half-dozen pediatric neurologists we had taken Charlie to see had mentioned a word about it. I found out on my own at a medical library. It was life altering—not just for Charlie and my family, but for tens of thousands like us.

Turns out there are powerful forces at work within our health care system that don’t necessarily prioritize good health. For decades, physicians have barely been taught diet therapy or even nutrition in medical school. The pharmaceutical, medical device, and sugar industries make hundreds of billions every year on anti-epileptic drugs and processed foods—but not a nickel if we change what we eat. The cardiology community and American Heart Association demonize fat based on flawed science. Hospitals profit from tests and procedures, but again no money from diet therapy.

There is a world epilepsy population of over sixty million people. Most of those people begin having their seizures as children, and only a minuscule percentage ever find out about ketogenic diet therapies. When I realized that 99 percent of what had happened to Charlie and my family was unnecessary, and that there were millions of families worldwide in the same situation, I needed to try to do something.

Nancy and I began the Charlie Foundation (charliefoundation.org) in 1994 in order to facilitate research and get the word directly to those who would benefit. Among the high points were countless articles, a couple appearances of Charlie’s story on Dateline NBC, and a movie I produced and directed about another family whose child’s epilepsy had been cured by the ketogenic diet starring Meryl Streep titled First Do No Harm (1997). Today, of course, the diet permeates social media. When we started, there was one hospital in the world offering ketogenic diet therapy. Today, there are 250.

Equally important, word about the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for epilepsy spread within the scientific community. In 1995, we hosted the first of many scientific global symposia focused on the diet. As research into its mechanisms and applications has spiked, incredibly the professional communities have found the same metabolic pathway that is triggered by the ketogenic diet to reduce seizures has also been found to benefit Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, severe psychiatric disorders, traumatic brain injury, and even some cancers.”

***

Let me summarize what Jim wrote about he and his wife’s experience with their very young son. One-year old Charlie had severe epilepsy, so bad that no amount of surgeries or challenging (and laden with side effects) drugs could cure. Yet Jim and his wife were NEVER told about a cure, a natural cure that had been around for many decades and had worked a large percentage of the time.

They were never told about a cure hiding in plain sight.

Sound familiar? Read Part 1 of this series if it doesn’t.

Long story short: The keto diet (with zero side effects!) cured Charlie of epilepsy. And Jim and his wife Nancy took the hard lessons they learned and are helping countless people learn how changes in eating habits can successfully treat and even cure many different chronic diseases, not just epilepsy.

***

The practice of Western Medicine in the United States is actually a very sick, sick care system. We need a new standard of care.

I’d love to hear your stories.

______

P.S. I was so taken with Jim and Charlie’s story that I interviewed Jim in 2023. It’s on all major podcast platforms. Here’s the Spotify link:

And consider a donation to the Charlie Foundation at:

https://charliefoundation.org/

***