Beyond Food: Exploring Alternatives to Western Medicine

Beyond Food the Movie

Directed by Thomas Reyes (2017)

Film Review

I found it somewhat difficult to pinpoint the theme of the wide ranging, somewhat rambling documentary. It seems to be an account of a road trip the filmmakers took across America seeking out individuals who despaired of Western medicine curing their chronic illnesses and sought out other alternatives.

Most of the solutions they found fall roughly under the rubric of “biohacking,” ie small incremental changes in diet and/or lifestyle to improve general health and well-being.

The film outlines a wide variety of “biohacks”:

• biofeedback aka neural feedback, aka alpha feedback – a process in which subjects (under continuous EEG monitoring) are rewarded with pleasant tones for producing brainwaves associated with meditative states.
• gradual dietary changes – examples included high fat paleo diets, raw food diets, calorie restriction (which increases longevity 20-50% in animals), gluten and/or dairy free diets, “wild food” or processed food and GMO-free diets or a combination of the six.
• people growing their own food with bioydynamic techniques that increase soil (and food) nutrients.
• CrossFit*
• Parkour**

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*CrossFit is a strength, conditioning, and overall fitness program consisting of a mix of aerobic exercise, calisthenics (body weight exercises) and Olympic weightlifting.

**Parkour, aka free running, is a discipline in which practitioners aim to traverse an urban environment independently of streets and sidewalks. Parkour moves include running, climbing, swing, vaulting, jumping, rolling and crawling.

Public library members can view the film free on Kanopy. Type Kanopy and the name of your library into your search engine.

Women’s Health: The Rise and Fall of the Male Expert

Free PDF:For Her Own Good

For Her Own good is a sociological study of the historical trend of male experts claiming the right to dictate what is best for women. Ehrenreich and English attribute this loss of female autonomy to the sudden and total disruption of centuries-old social roles that accompanied the rise of capitalism.

Elimination of Women’s Traditional Economic Roles

Under pre-capitalist patriarchy, women were totally subject to their fathers and husbands but still derived considerable prestige from the basic survival functions they performed in the home (ie tending gardens, chickens and dairy cows, as well as making butter, cheese, soap and candles and carding, spinning, weaving, and making clothes). With the rise of capitalism, all these functions were shifted into factories, and the household was limited to performing personal biological functions, such as eating, sleeping, sex, birth, dying and care of children and the elderly.

Even the traditionally female role of healing was transformed into a commodity to be sold in the market place. Prior to the advent of capitalism, except for the very rich (who could afford a doctor), healing was the exclusive domain of women.

Women had great difficulty finding a new role for themselves under capitalism, which led to a virtual epidemic of of depression and “neurasthenia,”* especially among upper middle class women.

Medical Care Becomes a Commodity

The book traces the rise of “heroic” medical interventions that arose when medical care became a commodity (doctors had to engage in active and visible treatment to demand a fee). Most of these interventions (especially blood letting, leech therapy, mercury salts) made patients worse, if not killing them. In the 1830s, the US working class rebelled against doctors as members of a parasitic elitist class. A popular health movement, run mainly by women, stressed the importance of fresh air, bathing, herbs, raw foods and daily exercise as a healthier alternative than the quack treatments employed by doctors.

In the 20th century, the rise of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, which enabled the rise of “science based” medical training in medical schools, gradually forced lay midwives and other non-medical healers out of business.

The Myth of Science-Based Medicine

The authors spend the last third of the book delineating how so-called “science-based” medicine was based as much in myth, misogyny and superstition – at least when it came to women – as so called pre-scientific medicine. This is especially clear from the section on childrearing – where expert opinion seems to have reversed itself every few decades.

In the early 20th century, doctors and child guidance specialists insisted a mother’s role was to regiment a child to insure it behaved like a machine. Mother were strongly cautioned against playing with babies, picking them up except for feeding, hugging, kissing or cuddling them.

Follow the 1929 financial crash, experts reversed themselves and told mothers they had to be permissive and allow children to follow their own impulses in decided when to eat, sleep and play.

Child experts reversed themselves a third time when the US fell behind the Russians in the space race in the 1950s. At this point child experts dumped on mothers for not stimulating children enough or setting firm enough limits.

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*Neurasthenia is a condition characterized by physical and mental exhaustion of unknown cause.