Driving down to Friday's Chilmark party for John and Elizabeth Edwards, we saw a familiar man jauntily walking roadside. "Isn't that Monk?" said my husband, "Should we give him a lift?" Yes, it was actor Tony Shalhoub (also an island summer resident) with his chic wife, actress Brooke Adams just ahead. They proceeded up the lane and into the gathering.
Inside, we chatted with neighbors and ate mini-lobster rolls, waiting for the candidate as the day darkened over the wide green lawn. At sunset, the Edwardses arrived and mounted a small platform to address the Vineyard crowd: serious professionals, lifelong liberals, and unashamed patriots. "It's time for patriotism to be about more than just war," Edwards told us.
At this over-sized party, everyone knew that thousands would gather for Hillary the next night. Encountering this valiant couple, running hard while facing her life-threatening illness, filled the dusk with a passion tinged by poignancy.
Edwards has left the pack and named the beast -- the compromise of democracy wrought by corporate power, and near universal buy-ins and cooptation of government, media, and the health care establishment. Life circumstances (his son's tragic death and his wife's diagnosis concurrent with a lost or stolen election) have eaten away the comfort that leads to compromise. Yes, Hillary has the lead. But this slender man, physically recalling Robert F. Kennedy Sr,. has got the edge. He's been in a Bush-era presidential race. He will not easily concede.
"Our job is replacing a corrupt system," he told the Vineyarders. "We don't have universal health care because the drug, insurance companies, and corporate system prevent it. They stand between us and the change we need. Their voices already prevail. If we give these folks a seat at the table, they'll eat all the food. Being political and cautious will not do it. It's our responsibility to show some backbone."
Edwards favors universal health care, and when asked his views on transitioning from the "sickness-based" model of conventional academic medicine to a wellness-based health care model, he voiced his support for preventive treatments. This could help him capture the votes of the estimated 50 million Americans who avail themselves of wellness-oriented approaches.
Edwards wants prevention available from the beginning of life. But the way he defines prevention is incongruent. Although up until recently, doctors were the last to know about nutrition, now academic institutions newly espouse the triad Edwards mentions: diet, exercise, and screening. That's a beginning, but it misses the authentic foundational wellness strategies of integrative care: balancing, tonifying, and helping the body to detoxify. Unfortunately, Edwards' conventional medical advisors may lack familiarity with the real wellness triad -- and apparently, so does he.
For example, when conventional physicians pooh-pooh detoxification, they ignore that reality that man-made chemicals saturating the environment lodge in us and cause health problems.
With regulators skating back and forth between government posts and the industries they regulate, corporate producers aren't required to prove that the ingredients we're exposed to are safe. Industrial emissions, food, medicines, and even personal care products can contain harmful, and even carcinogenic substances, which build up in bodily tissues, as Bill Moyers showed in his classic program, Trade Secrets. Cancer onsets, like Elizabeth Edwards', seem to crop up overnight for no reason so long as you ignore this widespread exposure to chemicals in foods, medicines, and elsewhere.
While breast self-exams will reveal lumps, avoiding (or helping the body to safely eliminate) questionable or carcinogenic substances will prevent the bodily environment leading to lumps, something the conventional model ignores. So when Edwards recommends constant monitoring, I'd like to suggest: Please, Senator Edwards, learn the difference between detection and prevention.
In her touching book, Saving Graces, Elizabeth Edwards reveals that she drinks diet Coke, which is sweetened with aspartame -- revealed to be carcinogenic in a recent Italian animal study. Similarly, hormone replacement therapy (in use by women of Elizabeth Edwards' age group) was connected to fluctuating cancer rates, by the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which in 2006 found that declining breast cancer rates was likely traceable to the widespread cessation of hormone replacement therapy.
Although it's just one example among many, HRT reveals the key danger of a sickness-based model. Medicine devised to treat one problem, such as hot flashes, can cause another -- increased rates of breast cancer. Gentler, low tech, natural approaches that balance and strengthen the person's overall system cause virtually none of the side effects of toxic drugs. Yet our evidence-based research model asserts that natural substances are unsafe unless they are studied via research protocols designed for toxic chemicals. This is where corporatized science crushes common sense.
In the vanguard on other issues, the Edwardses would do well to venture beyond corporate medicine in their new vision of medical care. While it's human with health problems like Elizabeth's to seek out the most authoritative academic institutions, sadly these are the very places that support the sickness-based model and treat the disease rather than the whole person.
With more dollars, and more research, academic institutions promise that miracle breakthroughs are just over the horizon. But that's "pure fantasy," says the distinguished scientist, Rustum Roy, professor emeritus of science, technology, and society at Penn State University, and founder of Friends of Health, a non-profit organization. Professor Roy points out, "No substantive medical discovery has emerged from academia in the last 50 years."
When Elizabeth Edwards assured the Vineyard gathering that, "We want to include preventive medicine as integral to health care so that other people don't have to face what I am going through," it's impossible not to feel moved by her valor. But for her sake and ours, just as she and John Edwards have drilled through to the deeper causes of society's ills, I hope that this exceptional and caring woman finds her way to the path to true wellness and healing-based health care models.