I’ve been a doctor (MD) for almost 50 years. Since 1970 I have been on the faculty of a famous medical school in California, for the last 23 years as a full Professor of Medicine. After graduating from the University of Rochester School of Medicine in 1960, I pursued a career in research and teaching, with an interest and expertise in kidney, heart and blood pressure problems. In collaboration with some of the most respected and well known physician scientists in America, I have nearly 100 research studies and review articles published in many of the best medical journals and presented at scientific meetings all over America and the world. I‘ve been in medicine a very long time! I know what I am talking about.

As a young resident doctor in training in 1961 I initiated the very first successful closed-chest cardiac massage (what we now call “CPR”) in the western United States. This involved a heart attack victim with complete cardiac arrest in the ER at UCLA Medical Center. A year later I initiated the very first successful kidney dialysis in New York in a patient with acute kidney shutdown and failure. Both patients would have died. Thanks to my interventions, both patients survived and left the hospital in good condition. I feel blessed to have had those two opportunities to serve at the highest level.

After completing my residency training at UCLA and then at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, I did my research training for four years at the National Heart Institute in Bethesda, MD. I then joined the faculty at Duke University in Durham, NC as Chief of Nephrology at the nearby VA hospital. After 2 years I left that post to return to Los Angeles to teach at one of the most respected academic hospitals in the country, UCLA-Harbor General Hospital. Besides my research and teaching responsibilities, I was appointed Associate Dean for Student Affairs at the hospital. I was in every respect fulfilling all of my professional dreams.

But in 1977 I had an epiphany. I saw that medical care was becoming increasingly “high-tech”, exemplified best by the recently introduced “open heart surgery”, used to bypass those coronary arteries clogged with all the cholesterol found in the typical American diet. Unlike most heart treatments today, this surgery involved stopping the heart beats completely, in order to bypass the blocked areas with short segments of arteries or veins taken from elsewhere in the patient’s body. The surgeons were not always successful at restarting the patient’s heart beat. To agree to such an operation, the patient and his family had to be pretty desperate indeed.

I realized that as doctors we were intervening in the patient’s medical problems much too late. We doctors were spending almost no time trying to convince our patients to live and eat more healthfully so as to avoid getting sick as they grew older. Moreover, the pills we had then to lower blood pressure, sugar and cholesterol were nowhere near as powerful as what we have available today. And side effects kept many patients from taking them for longer than a few days to a few weeks. Open heart surgery was a desperate solution to a desperate medical problem. But it was the best we had to offer in the 1970’s.

In common with most other doctors I neither lived myself, nor recommended healthy diets and lifestyles to my patients. But in 1977 I had finally realized that there was something seriously wrong with the way I was living, the way I was doctoring and the way I was teaching at the medical school. I could not continue doing what I was doing and still sleep soundly at night.

So I walked away from a most promising career in full-time academic medicine and research to teach, promote and practice preventive medicine. At first I teamed up with Nathan Pritikin, of low, low, low fat diet fame, to be his first medical director at the new Longevity Center in Santa Monica, CA. I had recently quit a 20 year pack-a-day tobacco habit and had started jogging. My cholesterol was much too high at 240 and over the years my waist had exceeded my hip circumference, setting me up to get diabetes before reaching retirement age. I knew I had to do something about it.

I went on the Pritikin diet (less than 10% calories as fat, about ¼ the fat content of a typical American diet) and dropped my blood cholesterol level 100 points, to an astonishingly low 140. I increased my jogging and at age 50 completed 2 marathons. (Now, 22 years later, I am still “lean and mean”, very productive and a twice daily exerciser, now dog-walking instead of jogging. I look to the future with the same optimism and enthusiasm as when I was 30 years younger. My body has almost forgiven me.)

In 1980 I left the Pritikin center because the high cost of their program shut out most Americans who needed it. With other doctors and health professionals with expertise in nutrition, exercise physiology and stress management, we created the Inner-Health Programs in downtown Los Angeles. Our mentor was Tim Gallwey, the famed teacher and author of such books as The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Golf. We adapted his “experiential” methods of teaching sports to a more serious “game”, staying healthy and living longer. It worked. We had the same good results in the out-patients living at home as Pritikin did with his much more expensive residential program. And our diet was not as stringent, reducing fat to less than 20% of calories. Everybody’s cholesterol and blood pressure fell. Everybody lost weight. Everybody enjoyed an improved level of fitness.

We were the only doctor group I have ever known with a gym and indoor jogging track, weekly healthy cooking classes and biofeedback stress reduction therapy in and adjacent to our offices. Out of this experience I wrote and Doubleday published “In 12 Weeks You Can Control Your High Blood Pressure Without Drugs” (1984) and later, with a talented nutritionist and chef, Chris Newport, a companion “Control Your High Blood Pressure Cookbook” (1986). My medical career turn around was complete and was successful beyond my wildest dreams.

I directed the Inner-Health Programs for 10+ years. Then, in another complete reversal of career paths, for the next 15 years I worked as a “Hospital Specialist” for HealthCare Partners. (HCP was a group I joined in 1980, when there were nine of us partners in one small office building. HCP agreed to fund and promote the Inner-Health Program until it stopped making money in 1990. HCP is now the 800 lb gorilla of HMO medical groups in Southern California.)

My new job for this “gorilla” was to care for the very sick, mostly elderly patients who were being discharged from the “acute care” hospitals (for example after a heart attack, stroke, or a fractured hip), but were too frail and/or needy to go home. For 8 to 10 hours daily I drove all over Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley to some 10 or 12 different small hospitals to care for HealthCare Partner patients. I got really good at this new occupation. My partners made it clear that they appreciated my work, keeping the average length of stay reasonable low.

These “convalescent hospitals” (we used to call them “nursing homes”) were full of some of the sickest and frailest patients I had ever seen. Many were dying, yet the available technology could prolong their lives in some cases almost indefinitely. (Tube feeding through the nose with both arms restrained was quite common as Mama got to the point she no longer wanted to eat.) The care there was high tech and complex. Yes, high tech and complex in a nursing home. HMO habits have changed everything.

The average length of stay in an acute care medical center is about 3 days. That’s all comers: strokes, heart failure, cancer surgery, you name it. The average length of stay is about 3 days, at a cost of upwards of $50-100,000 a day or more. The average cost of a very sick patient in a nursing home would be $300 to $500 a day, worst case $1000. Do the math. HMO’s want to get you out of the expensive Medical Centers asap. That meant that the nursing homes had to invest in the high tech equipment and a well trained nursing staff. It also meant they could make a lot more money.

The nurses, social workers and I did our best to send these elderly patients home, but many died or ended up in long term care. The suffering that I witnessed was heart rending for the families and for the nurses and for myself. I ended up referring many of the patients to Hospice Care. This was not a happy time for me. The stress related to my professional duties was adversely affecting my health. Two years ago, at age 70 I decided to retire.

What was characteristic of almost all of these elderly patients was that for many years they had been taking multiple prescription medicines that were supposed to keep them healthy and prevent most of the very medical problems that now had caused their hospitalization. This was true for virtually every patient I saw. Some were taking 5 or 6, some 10 or 11, one poor soul was actually prescribed 17 different drugs. Obviously she wasn’t taking them all, and she wasn’t taking any of the drugs reliably according to their directions.

Big Pharma has a billion dollar ad campaign that states with great certainty, “Don’t worry, take these pills and you’ll be fine. It’s great if you want to improve your diet and lifestyle, but that is not absolutely necessary.” So, the result? The pill-takers’ unhealthy, self-destructive diets and lifestyles in time overwhelmed whatever benefit the pills might have provided for them. It did not prevent these various medical problems, it merely (and not even always) delayed their onset. This experience for me was profound.

I had another epiphany, as gut wrenching and life changing as the first. I can’t retire!! Knowing what I know, believing in what I believe in, I can’t go golfing every day, or take a cruise around the world. I had to return to promoting healthy living, regular exercise, low-fat, low-salt diets and effective stress management, etc, etc, etc. I just had to. I had no choice.

So I took the generous retirement package from my HealthCare Partners and created and invested in a non-profit corporation which I’ve established and named “No More Medicines”. It is now approved by the IRS as a 501C3 non-profit entity. Four Professors from UCLA are on the board of directors along with me. Its corporate motto is “Prevention, not pills”. Its mission is to promote healthy living and diets not only for Americans, but also for citizens of the rest of the developed and developing nations of the world. Pills when you are sick usually make sense. Pills to prevent you from becoming sick don’t make sense if you can accomplish the same ends through your own efforts. This would definitely be true for high blood pressure and cholesterol and the early stages of high blood sugar.

I have created a website, nomoremedicines.com and have self-republished the book, “In 12 Weeks You Can Control Your High Blood Pressure Without Drugs”. The book is available on the website as well as amazon.com and all the other on-line book stores. The cookbook is being updated and will be available soon. The book and the website have been translated into Spanish. Three other books are planned: “In 12 Weeks You Can Control Your High Cholesterol Without Drugs”, “In 12 Weeks You Can Control Your High Blood Sugar and Type 2 Diabetes Without Drugs”, and finally, “No More Medicines, The Book”.

The latter will teach people to deal with preventable health problems such as heartburn (doctors call it GERD, or gastro-esophageal reflux disease), insomnia, some forms of cancer, obesity, prostate problems, impotence and senile dementia. Yes, it is true. Dementia in the elderly, which most people call Alzheimer’s disease, can to a considerable extent be prevented by a healthy diet and lifestyle, resulting in lower, healthier blood pressures. Of course you have to get with the program many years before you begin to notice your short-term memory is failing.

In fact, the earlier in life you start taking good care of yourself, the more effective that will be in preventing most all of the health problems of aging. Studies have shown that your health and well-being in your 60’s and 70’s are to a large extent determined by your lifestyle in your 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. Whew, I got started just in time.

I never knew my grandfathers because they both died young. My kids never knew their grandfathers, because they both died young. I am still around to teach my four grandkids some of the lessons that grandfathers are supposed to teach. I feel blessed to have this opportunity to serve again at the highest level.