Focus On Vibrant Health – Never Too Late

Doc Whitfield’s Rounds

Doc Whitfield had been the only physician for thirty miles in any direction since before most of the county’s roads were paved, and she still made house calls in a truck older than half her patients. She carried a black bag like any doctor, but folks joked that half of what was in it wasn’t medicine at all — jars of bone broth she made every Monday, a tin of dried liver she ground into powder, a little book where she wrote down not just what ailed a person but what they’d been eating for the last ten years.

“Symptoms are the last chapter of a long book,” she liked to say. “You want to know what happened, you go back to page one.”

She’d learned that lesson the hard way, out at the Caldwell place, years back. Old Ezra Caldwell raised the finest cats in the county — barn cats that lived past twenty, had litter after litter without trouble, teeth like white gravel, tempers so easy you could pick any one of them up mid-nap and they’d just yawn at you. Ezra fed them what he fed his own family: raw milk still warm from the cow, table scraps heavy with organ meat, eggs, whatever the garden turned out. Doc had asked him once why he bothered being so particular about cat food.

“Same reason I’m particular about my own,” Ezra said. “You get out what you put in. Slow, but you get it.”

Doc never forgot that. And she started noticing, on her rounds, that the families whose kitchens looked like Ezra’s barn — real food, unhurried, close to the ground it came from — were the families she saw the least of. Meanwhile the families leaning hard on white flour, sugar, and tinned everything were the ones she kept driving back out to see, year after year, for different complaints that all seemed to be cousins of one another. Women who couldn’t carry a baby to term, or whose babies came early and small. Children with crooked teeth and dull eyes. Grown men laid up with hearts that gave out too soon. Cuts that should’ve healed in a week but didn’t.

She mentioned this once to a younger doctor passing through, fresh out of a city medical school, who scoffed a little at Doc’s habit of asking about diet before anything else.

“You can’t tell me pie crust causes heart disease,” the young man said.

“Didn’t say it was the pie,” Doc said. “Said it’s what the pie replaced. A body’s got to build itself out of something. Bone, blood, babies, wound-mending — none of that’s free. It all costs material. You skimp on the material long enough, the body starts skimping right back, and it doesn’t tell you where first. Could be your teeth. Could be your temper. Could be you just can’t seem to get pregnant, and nobody can tell you why.”

She told the young doctor about a study she’d read about — a fellow named Pottenger who’d raised cats for generations, one line on a full, real diet and one on food that had been processed thin. The first line stayed sound clean through to old age — good bones, good teeth, calm and friendly, no trouble breeding. The second line went downhill a little more with each generation — crooked bones, rotten teeth, nervous and short-tempered, sick more often than not, until by the fourth generation they simply couldn’t have kittens anymore. The line ran out.

“Now, people aren’t cats,” Doc said, “but I’ve been driving these roads forty years, and I’ve watched families go the same two directions. Just slower. Give it a generation or two and you can see it plain as Ezra’s barn versus the Petrie place down the road, where they’ve lived on white bread and coffee since before the war.”

The young doctor was quiet a while.

“So what do you do about it?” he asked. “Once it’s already gone that far?”

Doc smiled, the way she did when she was about to say something she believed all the way down. “Same thing Ezra does when a barn cat turns up scrawny. You don’t scold it. You just start feeding it right, and you keep feeding it right, and you give the body time to remember what it’s supposed to be doing. It’s an eager thing, the body. I’ve never once seen it turn down the chance to heal, if you hand it what it needs to work with. Trouble is most folks wait till the poor health is already there before asking what caused it. Better to ask on the front end. But it’s never too late to ask.”

She closed her black bag, checked the jar of broth was still sealed tight, and headed back out to the truck. Somewhere down the road, another kitchen table was waiting, and another chapter of somebody’s book that had started, as it always did, with what was on the plate.

This story is another fun way to illustrate the principles being taught in these articles.

Read additional articles here:  Focus On Vibrant Health.  I will be back to in-depth articles on interesting health issues soon.

Dr. Veronica Tilden can be your ally in having vibrant health.  She uses traditional hands-on osteopathy and helps you take responsibility for your health, guiding you to make better choices in your life.  She brings her 30 years of experience to her hometown at her office in North Fork.  You can find out more and schedule an appointment at DrVeronicaTilden.com.