Ponderings From  My Heart

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Loving Well

It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!



Today's Wild Card author is:


and the book:

New Growth Press (February 1, 2012)

***Special thanks to Rick Roberson, The B&B Media Group for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:


William P. Smith, M.Div., Ph.D., is the director of counseling at Chelten Baptist Church, Dresher, Pa., the author of the book Caught Off Guard: Encounters with the Unexpected God; and the minibooks How Do I Stop Losing It with My Children?; How to Love Difficult People?; Should We Get Married?; Starting Over; When Bad Things Happen; and Who Should I Date?. Bill is regularly invited to speak at other churches and lead weekend retreats. He and his wife, Sally, are the parents of three very active children.


Visit the author's website.

SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:


Distance. Resentment. Avoidance. You want to love your family, your neighbors, and your coworkers well. But something goes wrong when you reach out to them, and you find yourself tearing down the relationships you wanted to build. Are you doomed to repeat this cycle forever?

For most of us, certain unhealthy reactions feel natural and even inevitable. Unconsciously, we cling to what 1 Peter 1:18 calls the “empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers.”

But you are not doomed to repeat this cycle, according to William P. Smith, since Jesus came to redeem his people from such things. The destructive relationship patterns you learned before you met Christ no longer need to control how you live and interact with others. Instead, you can exchange the empty ways for new ones that promote deep unity and peacefulness—patterns that create satisfying and God-honoring relationships. A rich, practical relationship with Jesus enables you to develop rich, practical relationships with others in spite of your brokenness and theirs. Through Christ, you no longer have to do what you have always done. In short, you can learn to love well.


Product Details:
List Price: $15.99
Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: New Growth Press (February 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1936768291
ISBN-13: 978-1936768295



AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:


I n t r o d u c t i o n
Escaping an Empty Way of Life

I stood outside, shivering in the cold, “talking” to God. Venting would be the more honest description. I had just thrown down the papers I was working on and stalked out of the room after unloading on one of my children, who had been repeatedly interrupting me every few minutes. My parting words were, “I am so frustrated right now. It doesn’t matter what I say or do, you don’t get it. It doesn’t matter if I speak gently to you. It doesn’t matter if I ignore you. It doesn’t matter if I explode! You just keep coming. I don’t know what to do with you.”
I hate those times. I have no interest in verbally bashing my kids, making them feel like I’m never satisfied with them. And yet, I also don’t want them to grow up believing that the world is all about them. What I’d just done wasn’t terribly loving (I get that), but in that moment I didn’t have any idea what else to do, so I ended up doing something that broke down the relationship instead of building it.
Ever been there? That place where, despite the fact that you really do want to love the people around you, somehow it all goes south? Either you do something to shred the friendship or you face something you don’t know how to handle. You’ve tried everything you do know, and nothing seems to help. As a pastoral counselor, I have lots of friends who share those feelings.
Friends like Tasha and Maurice. Tasha is unhappy with her job and would really rather stay home with the baby, only they can’t afford to have her do that. So every time she comes home, she com- plains to Maurice about how bad work was.
Maurice, however, doesn’t know what to do with her complaints. His preferred role of being the funny, lighthearted guy just doesn’t seem to work like it used to with her. So he prefers to switch on the TV during dinner and watch it into the night, or play card games with her, or do some other activity that safely insulates him from an intimidating conversation.
She likes him, but feels alone and abandoned. So guess what she does about her loneliness? She complains about it, adding it to the complaints about her job. And when she complains, he feels more helpless and confused, so he finds new ways to ignore her. And ’round and ’round they go. You wouldn’t say he’s a bad man or she’s a miserable woman, but they don’t know how to engage each other in a helpful way.
Most of the time, my friends and I don’t set out trying to hurt anyone, especially those we really care about. We’re relational creatures, made in the image of the great communal, three-in-one God. We long for relationships. Intentionally undermining our closest relationships would be counterproductive to our whole nature and desire. And yet we do just that. We watch them slip through our fingers—or worse, we see ourselves actively poisoning them simply by doing what feels right in the moment.
Because you’ve picked up this book, you probably know what broken relationships feel like. You see yourself damaging your closest friendships or not knowing how to bring healing when someone else harms them. Sometimes these unhealthy patterns and reactions can feel so natural that you don’t even think about how they came about. You might not even realize how many of them you’ve adopted from other people. You may only be aware that, in the moment, the strategy seems to get you what you want.


Patrice pulls away from situations she doesn’t like by withdrawing from people and refusing to talk to them. Her reaction makes complete sense when you learn that for her whole life she witnessed her father controlling her mother with the silent treatment. You probably wouldn’t be too surprised to discover that this was the example he had while growing up in his home. Each generation learned how to relate to others from the generation before, even if those ways soured the closest relationships they had.
We are all fully responsible for the ways we mistreat each other, and we have all learned from the bad examples we’ve had. Nature (your own sinful inclinations) and nurture (the things you’ve experienced from others) join forces to undermine your relationships. They produce what the apostle Peter refers to as “the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers” (1 Peter 1:18, NIV).
Some people have more “empty way of life” quotient than others, but every person has embraced a legacy of emptiness—patterns of relating that seem right in the moment, but that ultimately tear friendships apart. These patterns are truly insane. What else can you call it when you repeatedly engage your children, spouse, parents, or friends in the same destructive ways even though you realize you’re driving them away?
For someone like Patrice, the empty ways she deals with are primarily identified by the ongoing presence of evil. People in those positions experienced an aggressive negative relational style and had to react to it. Some become comfortable adopting the model as their own by taking the junkyard dog approach. They relate to others with the belief that, “If what wins arguments and protects me in this family is being loud, sarcastic, or insulting, then I will be the loudest, meanest, most caustic person in the room!” Others who have no interest in competing at that level develop self-protective strategies that keep everyone else at arm’s length.
Empty ways of life, however, are not always defined by the active presence of evil. Just as often they are characterized by the absence of positive elements that would foster healthy relationships.
Nick’s wife noted that his parents essentially ignored him after providing for his physical needs. Robert’s family was more extreme. He didn’t know what a hug felt like growing up. No one touched in his family nor wanted to. They didn’t own a couch, only a collection of individual chairs. Walking through his living room daily reinforced the relational message “you are on your own in this life.” That lack of physical connection mirrored the lack of intimacy at all other levels. Little wonder that these men struggled to know how to connect with their wives and kids.
Other families are not as dramatic in their dysfunction but still leave out many crucial relational elements. Some people never heard a parent say “I’m sorry; please forgive me.” Others don’t know what it is to hear “I love you. I’m proud of you. I’m so glad to see you!” Still others didn’t experience someone pursuing them, inviting them back to relationship when they’d strayed, or simply affirming their feeling that life isn’t very nice sometimes.
Without experiencing a healthy way of relating in your life, it’s really hard to know it’s even missing, much less that it’s an essential element to give someone else. The absence of positive relational interactions gets passed on just as surely as the presence of negative patterns.
Spend just a little bit of time with God’s people and you’ll quickly learn that empty ways of life abound even in the middle of the redeemed community. Small home fellowship groups don’t know how to embrace the quirky single guy who comes for a few weeks, so he quietly drops off the radar. Warring factions break out in the congregation over what style of music we sing or how we decorate the building. Elders approach their congregation with a heavy hand or back way off with no hand. Leaders fail, like they have all the way back to Noah, and no one knows how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

People are lured into church by hearing the language of intimacy, authenticity, and genuineness, but when they experience their absence, they are left feeling even more hurt than before. They had hoped finally to find a safe place where they could experience being loved, only to realize that Christians are not really all that good at it. Instead of being welcomed and embraced, often they can end up isolated and alone.
So they walk away discouraged and cynical— with good reason.
Does any of this resonate with your own experience? Over the past twenty-five years of professional and volunteer ministry, I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t struggle at some point in his or her relationships.
Maybe you find yourself undermining the relationships that are most important to you. Or maybe someone else is hurting you and you don’t know how to invite that person to something better. Or maybe you just find your relationships stagnate and don’t grow richer.
If that’s you, you’re not alone. And you don’t have to settle for these empty ways of life. You can exchange those patterns for others that promote deep unity and peacefulness—patterns that offer a satisfying and rich relationship to the people around you.
In short, you can learn to love well.
Jesus Loves us out of Emptiness
Peter draws our attention to the empty ways of life only in order to highlight that we have been redeemed from them by the precious blood of Christ (1 Peter 1:18–19). God cares about the hold these destructive patterns have on you, and he made a way to free you from them. They don’t have to control how you live and react in your relationships.
Now you may expect me to fill the rest of this book with lists of helpful hints and biblical principles for maximizing the positive things and minimizing the negatives in your relationships. But escaping an empty way of life does not rely on principles—it relies on a person. And not just a person who comes and does things for you or is an example outside of you, but a person who comes and relates to you.
I’m afraid that too many times we hold up Jesus as though he were simply a model of brilliant living—one who would inspire us to live a holy life in the same way that we extol the virtues of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa. The problem with that thinking is that models alone are un- able to make you want to follow their example. They point out the way for you to go, but they don’t empower you to walk down that path. They might inspire you, but inspiration alone is not enough to actually move you.
Over the years I have heard a number of great stories of people who have done amazing things or overcome incredible obstacles—a father who enters marathons, pushing his wheelchair-bound son; a married couple who adopts 19 children with special needs over the course of their lifetime; or the concert musician who plays at Carnegie Hall because of the countless hours of practice she spent with her instrument. Those examples are stirring. Inwardly I cheer for those people and wish them the best.
Though I am inspired by their stories, however, my own lifestyle has not changed in the least. It takes far more than inspiration to escape an empty way of life. I’ve not yet been driven by these examples to take up jogging, adopt even one child, or pick up an instrument. They truly are praiseworthy examples, but they’re outside of me. Therefore, by themselves, they are insufficient to move me.

Jesus is different. His examples of loving and serving are not things that happen outside of me–things I dispassionately observe. Far from being an uninvolved spectator to his reconciling work, I’m a recipient of his gracious actions. He is my example, but he is also my experience. In experiencing him, I not only develop a personal sense of what he calls me to, but I also gain the power to live out that calling with others.
God understands that you don’t always know how to love people, so he does not insist you figure out how to bootstrap yourself into relationships. Instead, he makes sure you already know exactly what love is before he requires you to love others. As the apostle John put it, “In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us . . . if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:10 –11, in larger context of vv. 7–21). It’s only after having been loved that you respond with love. You love him back, and you reach out to share with others a tiny portion of the love that you yourself have received.
In my relationship with God, what’s always been most important is the quality of his love for me, not the quality of my love for him. It’s only as the reality of his love becomes my present experience that I will be more concerned about expressing my love to others than insisting they express theirs for me.
Too often I get this order backward with my children, like when I blew up at my child earlier. Those are the days when I keep careful track of all the ways it seems they don’t care nearly enough about me. I become consumed with how they don’t consider the pressures of my schedule when they want me to chauffeur them to their next sports game or to the store. I grumble about how they don’t respect my property as they trample through the garden or slam the doorknob through the drywall. And I fume over how they’re more interested in my money than my friendship. I confess, I have a hard time being greeted at the door after a long, hard day with “Hi, Daddy—can I have my allowance?”
In those moments, I get caught believing that what most needs to change in my family is them. They need to be more considerate, more respectful, and more grateful. In other words, I wrongly believe that our relationship is dependent on the quality of their love for me.
That’s backward from the way I experience Jesus. The way he treats me, both historically and in the present, gives me the experience of being loved. And it is that experience that allows me to respond to him and extend myself to others, which is the real need of the people I live with. My family needs me to pursue them like Jesus pursues me. They need me to forgive them like Jesus forgives me. They need me to like them, engage with them, and share myself with them just as Jesus likes me, engages with me, and shares himself with me.
And that’s where there is a disconnect for many people. They don’t have a sense of the risen Christ relating to them in real time in a helpful, positive way. Whether I’m serving in my home church or traveling to others, I regularly interact with people who can explain historically what Jesus has done for them and who genuinely look forward to what he will do in eternity. But his present activities in their lives remain a cloudy mystery.
In turn, they struggle to communicate love to others in any tangible, recognizable form. This recognition forms the working thesis of this book: only through a present, rich, practical relationship with Jesus will you be able to develop rich, practical relationships with each other.
Your Human relationships Flow from the god You Worship
The way I live out my relationships with people is one of the clearest indicators of how healthy my relationship with the Lord is. If I live knowing that God moves toward me all day long and invites me to move toward him, then I will engage people positively in their lives. But if I wait for others to give themselves to me first, then I show that I really don’t believe or regularly experience this God who is reconciling people to himself. Either way, I live out the truth that you become whatever you worship.
Sadly, there are so many bad gods waiting to take Jesus’ place. There’s the false notion of God as a deity who sits in heaven, vaguely interested in your life, but who keeps himself pretty detached and aloof. Or there’s the god who is only disengaged until you do something wrong. Then he springs into action, pulling out a long list of your failures and threatening you if you don’t shape up. Or worse, maybe you’ve found the god who smiles at you a lot, but is too weak to challenge you or help you when you need it. The hard reality is that if your god is distant, critical, scary, or impotent then you will mimic that quality about him in the ways you treat those around you.
Thank God he doesn’t leave you to those gods. Jesus came to redeem you from living out those empty ways of life handed down to you by your forefathers.
Throughout Scripture you see one overarching storyline: a good Father welcomes homeless orphans into his family by searching for them, rescuing them, embracing them, providing for them, and nurturing them. With that experience of life, you now have reason to hope for something different in the way you live with others. And hope is exactly what I need every day of my life.
My kids and I had a really rough week that felt like every inter- action turned into a half-hour argument that I didn’t handle very well. As the week wore on I became increasingly out of control, and I responded more harshly and critically each time. It was not a good week. Ironically, a few days later I was scheduled to give a radio interview for a booklet I had written entitled How Do I Stop Losing It with My Kids? I felt like such a hypocrite. I reread the booklet and kept thinking, Hmm, that’s a good idea. I wonder who wrote that? Or, Oh! Wish I had remembered to try that.
At the end of the program, the interviewer asked one final question. He said, “Okay, this has been helpful, but what about the person who has been losing it—maybe for years? Who has been failing over and over again? What hope does that person have?”
I replied, “Well, honestly, that’s me this morning. And my hope is that not only am I a parent in my family, but I’m also a child in a better family with a much better Father. And my Father is absolutely committed to being involved in my life, parenting me so that I can be the parent that he always meant me to be.”
I need that hope. And I need even more than hope. It’s easy to say we need to love others well, but that statement can feel pretty vague when I face a particular challenge with caring for a real, flesh-and- blood person in the smaller, practical moments of life. For instance, what does loving others well look like when I need to restore a relationship that I just damaged? At times like that, I need to know specifically what love looks like.
Dazzling Love
I find it helpful to think of love as a large jewel with many facets. Each facet gives you a glimpse into the jewel’s essence because each is part of the same jewel. But every viewpoint has a sparkle and radiance all its own.
Throughout this book we’re going to investigate fifteen facets of the love we experience from God because it is in these ways that he invites you to mature as you relate to other people with love. While there are many more that we could explore—and we will as eternity unwinds—these fifteen form a solid toolkit that, as you grow in them, will affect the quality of relationships you currently have.
You can love other people only out of your own experience of being loved. Or, to say it in reverse, you cannot pass along what you yourself have not received. Does that sound limiting to you or maybe even completely demoralizing? Like you’re fated never to rise above the inadequacies other people have passed down to you?
That’s where a relationship with Jesus is intensely practical. Because you are his, you are not beyond hope—nor are your relationships. Missing out on being loved well by other humans does not doom your present relationships. In your present, ongoing relationship with Jesus, you can receive from him all the love you need to give to others.
He can give you what you never received, and then you can pass it to those around you who need it.
We’ll approach our topic in three parts. In Part I, “Love That Responds to a Broken World,” we’ll look at those aspects of love that help you move toward your friend as she experiences sin or suffering so that she knows she is not alone.
Part II, “Love That Reaches Out to Build Others Up,” focuses on aspects of love that show someone else you’re more interested in helping him be all God ever meant him to be, than using him to make yourself feel good.
And in Part III, “Love That Enjoys Heaven Now,” we’ll look at the kinds of love that allow people to see and trust your heart for them so that you can enjoy being together now.
Let me offer one caveat before we dive in: please be careful not to fall into a mindset that looks for quick, immediate results when you reach out to love well. Learning these fifteen aspects will improve the overall tone of your relationships, but they are not part of a guaranteed formula that works like this: if you do ________, then everyone else will respond to you with ________. Rather, you can expect to receive these elements from Jesus, and as you practice them you will find yourself moving in harmony with the way he runs his world rather than against it. In that sense your life will be better, you will be more satisfied, and your relationships will change for the better.
As a friend, lay leader, counselor, seminary professor, conference speaker, and pastor I have seen many people turn away from destructive patterns and enter into the freedom of healthy relationships. That’s been quite a privilege. Beyond all those instances of seeing people love well, however, I’m most encouraged to believe you really can escape your empty ways of living because of the way relationships in my own home have grown healthier over the years.
Remember that I told you how hard my child and I worked to ruin our relationship? Sadly, there are still plenty of times when we collectively rip at the fabric of our relationship. That’s the product of real people in a really fallen world. But even more significant is what we do with those destructive moments. By God’s kindness, we continue to learn how to repair the rips we create and celebrate the greater number of times when we move closer without damaging our friendship.
That’s the product of being loved by a gracious God in a grace- infused world. If Jesus can help free me and my family from being stuck in bad patterns, and teach us to create beneficial ones, then I know he can help you too.
As you are introduced to each way he loves us, I think you’ll be surprised by how intimately involved God is with you. I know I have been surprised. After seeing and re-experiencing him in new ways, I suspect you’ll hardly be able to wait to give that experience to someone else!

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Answers for the 4-A Epidemic by Joseph Cannizzaro, MD

It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!

You never know when I might play a wild card on you!



Today's Wild Card author is:


and the book:

Siloam (April 3, 2012)

***Special thanks to Althea Thompson | Publicity Coordinator, Charisma House | Charisma Media for sending me a review copy.***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:



Joseph Cannizzaro, MD, is the founder and managing pediatrician for the Pediatricians Care Unit in Longwood, Florida. He received his MD from the University of Bologna Medical School in Bologna, Italy, and has practiced pediatric medicine for thirty years with specialties in developmental pediatrics, nutrition, and preventative medicine.


Visit the author's website.



SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:


A groundbreaking integrative treatment program for autism, ADHD, asthma, and allergies.
In the last two decades, the incidence of the 4-A disorders--autism, ADHD, asthma, and allergies--has increased so drastically that many now call these four conditions "the new childhood epidemics." In this book, integrative pediatrician Joseph Cannizzaro lays a foundation for understanding the cause of all four conditions and then provides a comprehensive treatment program for each of them.

The medical community has generally overlooked the commonalities that link the 4-A disorders and, in most cases, has limited treatment to suppression of symptoms. Dr. Cannizzaro has focused his pediatric practice on the treatment of the 4-A disorders for the past five years. He and his colleagues are currently securing a research grant that will provide funding and national peer recognition of their groundbreaking treatment program, which is the first to combine traditional medical approaches with a full range of natural healing modalities.



Product Details:
List Price: $15.99
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Siloam (April 3, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1616384840
ISBN-13: 978-1616384845



AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:


Introduction
There IS Hope!
What has gone wrong? As even a casual reader or listener of the news knows, the statistics are alarming. Autism, ADHD, asthma, and allergies––all four of which happen to begin with the letter “A”––are on the rise, especially among children. In fact, it is not stretching the definition of the word epidemic to use that term for the way these disorders are sweeping the Western world. None of them is communicable in the classic understanding of the term, but all four sets of disorders, as you will see throughout this book, share common root causes that contribute to the development of current epidemic proportions. Autism, Attention Deficit Disorder (with and without hyperactivity—ADD/ADHD), asthma, and allergies—these are the new childhood epidemics.
A tragedy of this magnitude would be overwhelming except for a salient fact: These new epidemics can be defeated. After twenty years of treating patients, I have found that beneath the surface there is an unmistakable, unshakeable web of interrelationship among the 4-A disorders, and I have learned to recognize the patterns. Toxicity in the brain and body causes metabolic dysfunction, which cascades with other factors to produce one or more of these disorders. Often they overlap with each other in the same person. By uncovering and treating the common causes of these 4-A disorders, we can embark on a common (and hope-filled) path to recovery.
You are already aware of this epidemic or you would not have picked up this book. Most likely you are a parent of a child (or more than one child) who carries a diagnosis of one of these disorders. You may be overwhelmed with your situation at home, while your search for help merely seems to bury you in information and saddle you with enormous medical bills.
I want to empower people like you—parents of 4-A children—with comprehensive and effective tools. With you, I want to advocate for the health of your kids. At the same time I want to increase your skills to recognize your own body’s ongoing responses to disorder and stress so that you can make an ongoing and accurate assessment of how you’re doing as a whole family.
Holistic-Integrative Self-Medical Care
This book is a guide, not a cookbook. It will teach you principles as well as facts and point you in the right direction as you search out the best path. Recovering from any of the 4-A disorders is a journey, replete with side trips and even dead ends. But together with others you can make tangible progress toward the healthy, even contented, lifestyle you want for yourself and your loved ones.
What you as an individual do with this information is up to you. I want to teach you how to “self-practice” self-care in a holistic, integrative, and natural way. I want to introduce you to upstream medicine, in which we all play a role in searching out the causes of disease and eliminating them at the root.
The causes of this particular 4-A epidemic (and if I were not a pediatrician, I might add a fifth and more mature “A” to the list: Alzheimer’s disease) are omnipresent in our man-made, inevitably toxic environment. The detrimental effects of our environment have been causing all sorts of damage and disorder that is initially imperceptible and can remain so far varying durations within a person’s lifetime. In the case of many of our children the damage has manifested early on as the 4-A disorders, although some children escape.
All disease processes begin with changes in functional systems, imbalances that our bodies can bring back into balance up to a point. We cannot tell at first what damage to cells and tissues may have been initiated; for a time, we remain unaware of tissue damage or dysfunction.
But after a point of saturation, months or even years down the road, a point which varies from one individual and family to another, an invisible threshold is crossed, beyond which perceptible symptoms of a disease begin to appear.
When I use the term “upstream medicine,” I’m using it to communicate two ideas: (1) the way in which we can learn to trace symptoms of a disease back to common and basic metabolic roots, so that we can weed out toxicity and improve the health-promoting aspects of our environment, and (2) the way in which we can learn to anticipate damage or dysfunction long before actual disease symptoms begin to manifest, so as to keep our lifestyles as free as possible of disease-producing contaminants. An intermediate period exists wherein perceptible signs and symptoms of a potential disease are still “brewing,” and during which, if appropriate measures are taken, the full definitive disease will never come into being.
My Unique Qualifications
I am an established medical doctor with a pediatric specialty. As the parents of young patients have come to me for answers over the years, I became convinced that my medical toolbox was insufficient. I could help but only to a degree. Why should I spend my time and the hard-earned money of my patients’ families simply trying to suppress symptoms of a disease, especially life-consuming ailments such as these 4-A disorders?
I needed to be able to do more. I needed to learn to bring together all that I had learned in medical school and in my pediatric practice along with as many other valid healing modalities as I could learn. I needed to become an integrative doctor, one who incorporates a holistic (mind, body, spirit) awareness along with a natural, nuts-and-bolts comprehension of basic biological principles. I needed to go back and relearn basic information about bodily systems (immune, digestive, nervous, etc.), in order to determine what it takes to establish and sustain the human body’s natural ability to develop, grow, and thrive. Besides all of that I needed to become aware of the bodily effects of our toxic environment so that I could make reliable recommendations to my patients.
In short I needed to learn to practice medicine in a way that actually eliminates the causes of illness.
This book reflects my journey, and I am very glad to be able to take you on board. I have written it to provide you with solid information, so that you can come to understand the causes and effects of your own child’s health concerns––and so that you can move together in the direction of healing. You will find here a detailed summary of what I have learned, and helpful applications of that information that you can adjust to suit your personal family situation.
A glance at the Table of Contents will serve as an introduction to the “menu” I have prepared for you. Some of the chapters may not apply to your situation, because you may be dealing with only one or two of the 4-A disorders in your family. But you will find that I have repeated key concepts throughout the book, so you will not miss them if you skip a chapter or two.
My desire is to put into your hands a transformational book, one that can transform your presuppositions and partial information so that, with me, we can create evidence-based solutions for some of society’s most perplexing ailments. I want to bring you to the brink of discovery, where you can survey a variety of explanations and solutions and find the ones that align with your own physical, mental, and spiritual paradigms.
Each of my own patients and their families has gained greatly from what you are about to read. Now it’s your turn to receive the same benefits!

SECTION I:
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
Chapter 1
Four New Childhood Epidemics
Billy was born ten days after his due date after a very long labor, and he had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck twice. This did not seem to affect him negatively, though. At home he was a beautiful baby, always very active. All of his growth and developmental parameters were normal and on track. He was engaged with his family and communicative.
As an early toddler, however, he began to have temper tantrums and became very fearful of noises, which would make him cling to his mother for long periods of time. He gradually lost interest in his toddler play group. Billy continued to become more distant. Soon he would no longer respond to anyone calling his name, and eye contact slowly disappeared. By the time he was three, he had sustained numerous injuries while walking, running, or climbing, because he seemed to have no sense of danger.
All along his parents were reassured that their little boy’s behavior was within a normal range for his age. And yet he could not tell them if he was thirsty or hungry, happy or sad, or why he was upset––it seemed that he could not convey any emotion. Also, he had had bowel problems since he was six months old, but his mom had been told that it’s normal for children to have one bowel movement per week.
When Billy turned four, his preschool teacher suggested that his mother take him for a developmental evaluation conducted by a pediatrician. This caused her to begin to do some research on her own and her studies soon revealed that a pattern of behavior similar to Billy’s was typically seen in autistic children. Her fears mounted. Her Billy, who was once a healthy, happy little boy, now looked like a sad, helpless, clumsy boy who couldn’t express himself verbally, who would get upset very easily, and who was losing friends faster than he could make them.
Refusing to accept that nothing could be done, Billy’s mother located the website of the Autism Research Institute and found a holistic, integrative physician. He diagnosed Billy with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), with severe food allergies and constipation, and he initiated biomedical treatment. Billy started a gluten-free, casein-free, and soy-free diet along with supplements that included probiotics, enzymes, and a whole food concentrate to help turn around his “leaky gut syndrome.”
After four months, his parents could talk to Billy and he would listen. Another practitioner was enlisted and he diagnosed oral candidiasis (“thrush”) and heavy metal toxicity. As his digestive, immune, and nervous systems came into balance and Billy’s overall health improved, he gradually achieved developmental milestones in academics and social skills. Now he was able to make friends at school, to interact and play with them. He had good eye contact and his speech was clear. Remarkably, he once again enjoyed life. He was back to being a happy boy who could tell his parents what he wanted.
As time went on, however, he became overly gregarious and extremely hyperactive. His mom remarked “Well, it’s just that he likes to do so many things. He’s all over the place. He’s a bundle of joy but he can be very disruptive in a group.” By then Billy was six and had entered kindergarten. He maintained good grades. The comments on his report cards were upsetting, however, comments such as, “despite my best efforts I cannot persuade Billy to pay attention and he remains a constant disruption in class.” He was taken back to the doctor for a full evaluation. This time, the diagnosis was ADHD (attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity).
What could have happened? Were the dietary and lifestyle measures that had brought so much healing no longer working? This prompted a systems review with laboratory studies, dietary history, and supplemental program analysis, along with a measurement of his toxic burden, which revealed that Billy and his family had lapsed back into a lifestyle marked by an inappropriate diet that was devoid of proper supplementation, along with a disregard for their exposure to toxins.
I am happy to report that once Billy’s parents successfully reinstituted and maintained those lifestyle changes (nutrition, supplements, and a detox program), Billy no longer suffered from the effects of the ADHD. As long as he stuck with the lifestyle improvements, he could be considered healed and healthy.
Is This a Real Epidemic?
We are living in the midst of a colossal, quadruple epidemic. This epidemic has developed insidiously over decades and it has escalated rapidly during the past thirty years.
How is this possible? Isn’t an epidemic defined as a specific disease that spreads rapidly in a definable geographic region? How can four seemingly distinct disorders (autism, ADHD, asthma, and allergies) share the same “epidemic” umbrella?
It’s really not a stretch to call this a modern epidemic, even though the symptoms can vary greatly and even though the escalation seems to cover all of the developed nations of the world. This is because this diverse population of children (adults too, but these problems start young) are united in what underlies their many overlapping symptoms—and they face the same health-challenging environment.
We are involved in this epidemic with four faces simply because we are all exposed to the same cause. Toxicity permeates our ecosystem. The human body responds to the threat in particular ways. When you add other factors of our modern lifestyles, you get a spectrum or array of disorders that are interwoven with each other. The reason this epidemic came to light in children is because they are the most vulnerable.
Although we characterize what’s happening as an epidemic, the children themselves must be evaluated and treated as individuals, because each person is affected in his very own specific way. We can see patterns and cause-and-effect, but many factors make each child’s situation unique. Once we begin to understand where this epidemic came from, we next need to determine just where each individual fits. Only then can we pursue healing.
Definitions
ASD: Autism Spectrum Disorder
ADHD: Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity
Candidiasis (oral): Commonly known as “thrush,” yeast overgrowth, or yeast infection, candidiasis indicates that the opportunistic Candida albicans fungus has caused white spots on the tongue and inside of the mouth.
Quadruple Epidemic
Within the past forty years of medical history, we began to realize that not only were rates of autism, ADHD, asthma, and allergies growing into epidemic proportions, they are also connected to each other at the root. Not only do they share overlapping symptoms, they also often appear in the same individual.
My personal experience with patients and that of all the integrative physicians with whom I have worked is that we have not met one child who came to us with just one of the four conditions. The parents of a child with allergies would describe asthma attacks as well as their child’s learning problems (problems with concentration and attention span). Children would be diagnosed with autism and then with ADHD, and we would find that these hyperactive autistics also had severe allergies and asthma. Our conventional medical categories consisted of separate diagnostic boxes. But these kids could not fit into just one of them.
We have not met one child who came to us with just one of the four conditions.
How are these disorders related? What is their commonality? What element unites them all? The answer: the state of the digestive system. Every 4-A patient has an abnormal digestive system, which in turn impacts the immune and nervous systems, producing a familiar litany of symptoms.
“All diseases begin in the gut,” declared Hippocrates 2,400 years ago. He was describing our current epidemic.
Current Rates of 4-A Disorders
How many children and adults have been hit by this epidemic? Twenty-five million individuals, and most likely more than thirty million, when psychiatric conditions and the disorders in learning, behavior, speech and language, sensory integration, and motor skills are included. This certainly qualifies as an epidemic.
Is it an epidemic of genetic origin? While autism and the three other A’s have a clear genetic component, that cannot explain everything. These are not purely genetic diseases. Undoubtedly these patients were born with a genetic predisposition or susceptibility. Yet genetics alone does not cause epidemics, and it may not be as important as we thought it was. As Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and former head of the Human Genome Project, famously said, “Genetics loads the gun, and environment pulls the trigger.”
Environmental changes occurring to a genetically predisposed child sound like a more plausible explanation to me. But what are the specific triggers?
“Genetics loads the gun, and environment pulls the trigger.”
I believe that environmental factors are of paramount importance. Autism has increased 6,000 percent in twenty years, ADHD more than 400 percent, asthma more than 300 percent, and allergies more than 400 percent in the same time period. Two disastrous environmental changes have caused all this to happen: overwhelming toxicity and nutrient depletion.
Definitions
Commonality: A shared set of attributes or features. In the context of this book, the word refers to an aggregate of environmental conditions and influences that have caused the epidemic of 4-A disorders.
Allergy: An exaggerated response of the immune system to specific substances that normally pose no threat to the human body, involving the elevation of specific antibodies due to antigen stimulus.
Asthma: A chronic inflammation of the bronchial tubes characterized by symptoms such as wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath.
Autism: A developmental disorder that encompasses speech development, social development, physical capabilities and tendencies, and cognitive development.
Maria Rodale, CEO of the family-named multimedia healthy-living company, writes in her book Organic Manifesto:
Autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), diseases virtually unheard of a few decades ago, are now diagnosed regularly. Of every 100 children born today, one will be diagnosed with autism before the age of 8.* About 4.4 million children between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD. Rates of asthma, diabetes, and childhood obesity are at all-time highs and scientists can’t explain why the number of children with food allergies has increased 18 percent in the last decade.** Is it a coincidence that the prevalence of these problems has increased as we have increased the use of chemicals to grow our food?”1
Toxic chemicals in our food chain are just one of the triggers. Let’s take a look at each of the epidemic disorders in turn before we go on in the rest of the chapters to describe all of the possible triggers, as well as specific and comprehensive strategies for dealing with them.
Autism
It would not be an exaggeration to say that autism affects everything in a child. Broadly defined, it is a severe developmental disorder characterized by significant disabilities in social interaction, communication, and behavior.
Autistic children range from those who appear to be normal to those who cannot speak at all or make eye contact, and who engage in repeated and disturbing physical actions. In less severe cases children may be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome or one of the other four recognized disorders at the “high-functioning” end of the autism spectrum. These children may have near-normal speech capabilities, but many autistic social and behavioral problems persist.
Autism affects about five boys to every one girl, and it is usually diagnosed at a young age. Autistic children have serious social impairments, and many lack an intuitive sense about other people, misreading social cues and not being able to learn from mistakes. This seriously inhibits normal growth and development. If they are verbal, some autistic children characteristically repeat others’ words or reverse pronouns. They may have trouble engaging in imaginative play, a key aspect of normal development in non-autistic children.
Because autistic children can display such different symptoms, autism must be considered a “spectrum” disorder. Many people (and I am one of them) are convinced that ADHD carries the mildest form of the symptoms on the autism spectrum. Still milder would be “borderline ADHD,” or various learning disabilities. Autism spectrum disorder is often referred to as ASD.
Children with autism, as well as those with ADHD, tend to suffer from asthma and allergies. Many also contend with other comorbid conditions, such as depression, anxiety, mood disorders, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sleep disorders, and more.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
Like autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) affects more boys than girls. ADHD can be characterized by age-inappropriate impulsivity, inattention, and often hyperactivity.
ADHD is further subdivided into three types, as follows:
1. Predominantly hyperactive-impulsive ADHD. These children (more boys than girls) are in constant motion and find it hard to wait or listen. Instead, they act and talk impulsively.
2. Predominantly inattentive ADHD. More girls than boys have this type. They have difficulty staying focused and attentive, and they do not tend to “act out” or stir things up.
3. Combined hyperactive-impulsive and inattentive ADHD. Most children with ADHD have this type.
Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are the key behaviors of ADHD, although it can be difficult to draw the line at where normal levels of childish inattention and fidgety behaviors end and ADHD levels begin. These symptoms can lead to problems in academic, emotional, and social behaviors.
Sometimes other factors appear with ADHD and can make diagnosis confusing, such as depression, sleep deprivation, specific learning disabilities, physical tics, and overall behavioral issues. In fact we find that most kids who have ADHD also have one or more significant psychiatric, physical, or behavioral problem, including bipolar disorder. Because ADHD has so many different faces, parents should always seek out professional help to sort out the reasons for their own child’s behavior.
Although people with ADHD can become quite successful in life, the opposite can also prevail: school failures, discipline for unruly behavior, rocky relationships, and eventual substance abuse. Children with untreated ADHD can grow into adults who are depressed, anxious, minimally employed, and generally unhappy with their lives.
Throughout this book, when I refer to children with a kind of shorthand as “spectrum” children, I am referring to children whose symptoms put them somewhere on the autistic-to-ADHD continuum.
Asthma
The word asthma comes from a Greek word that means “panting.” It is a chronic inflammation of the bronchial tubes characterized by symptoms such as wheezing, coughing, chest tightness, and shortness of breath. The inflammation is triggered environmentally by reactive substances or activities, including allergens, physical exercise, and cold air. The chronic inflammation causes swelling and therefore narrowing in a person’s airways. Most treatments focus on reversing this swelling to relieve the labored breathing.
When a person’s asthmatic symptoms become worse than usual, we call it an asthmatic attack. Without treatment the person’s bronchial tubes can close so that the person dies of suffocation.
Treatments include quick-acting medicines to give relief from asthma attacks and maintenance medicines to prevent symptoms over the long term.
Asthma ranks as the number one chronic illness in children today.
Definitions
Autism spectrum disorders: Five disorders with distinctive symptoms of autism: (1) autistic disorder, (2) Asperger’s syndrome, (3) childhood disintegrative disorder, (4) Rett’s disorder, and (5) pervasive developmental disorder—not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS)
Allergen: Environmental substances that are normally harmless but which provoke a range of symptoms in reactive individuals.
Anaphylaxis: A severe and rapid allergic reaction involving many parts of the body, sometimes fatal.
Bipolar disorder: A mental disease characterized by cycles of depression and mania.
Allergies
People with allergies have hypersensitive immune systems that react to outside substances in an exaggerated fashion. The word allergy indicates an altered reaction, deriving as it does from the Greek words allos (different, changed) and ergos (action).
Besides causing discomfort and illness, allergies can trigger asthma attacks and can contribute to the severity of many other disorders. A person’s immune system is supposed to fight genuine microbial threats. In most allergic reactions, however, the immune system is responding in an exaggerated way to a false alarm.
Common substances to which people have an allergic response include pollen, dust mites, insect stings, pet dander, molds, as well as specific foods and ingredients in medicines. These normally harmless environmental substances are known as allergens when they provoke symptoms such as nasal congestion and sneezing, itching or swelling, rashes, digestive disturbances, or full-blown asthma. Most of the time allergy symptoms are annoying but not life-threatening, although an intense allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis affects multiple internal systems and can result in death.
Allergies are very common in the population at large.
Putting Them Together
In the next chapter we will explore how these four seemingly unrelated disorders, autism, ADHD, asthma, and allergies––each of which has mushroomed statistically in our lifetime and which affect our children disproportionately––combine into one sweeping epidemic. I will offer encouragement to parents of 4-A children as I propose potential solutions. For the sake of our sons and daughters (who represent our future), let us not rest until we have brought this 4-A epidemic to its knees.