MD must stand for My Domain

The arrogance of some doctors and scientists appalls me.

I’ve been on the Blood Type Diet now for almost two years, and it has worked wonders for me. Exercise alone couldn’t get rid of my paunch, but when combined with eating the right things, I dropped 50 pounds and have maintained a weight of around 150-160 ever since. I was also able to eliminate my blood pressure medication, much to the astonishment of my physician. I still monitor my BP daily, and I’m usually around 120/80. My resting pulse has dropped to the high 40’s or low 50’s.

Best of all, I like what I eat, and I can eat all I want. I just have to avoid certain foods, and make sure I get plenty of certain others. Being an O-negative secretor means that I can have lots of beef, buffalo, elk, and lamb, along with tons of fruits and vegetables. I have to avoid wheat and dairy, and most beverages. Giving up coffee and beer were the toughest parts, but I’ve learned to love green tea and red wine.

I see Chris Pirillo is wrestling with weight loss. Chris, try this for a couple of months, then ditch it if it’s not for you. BTW, the note from Don Hughes that Chris includes in his post outlines a diet that sounds very similar to this one — if he’s a type O.

It may sound foolish at first to base a diet on your blood type, but think for a minute: blood type controls a lot of your immune response. Also, different blood types have different sugar molecules on their red blood cells, so chemicals from food interact with them differently. Furthermore, the gene controlling blood type has interactions with other genes that affect a wide spectrum of our make-up. Without doubt there must be individual dietary differences that aren’t accounted for by blood type, but blood type accounts for quite a lot.

What threatens to bring my blood pressure surging back up, though, is the attitude of most medical professionals. Even though they often have no clue as to what is going on with your body (“everything checked out normal” have become famous last words so many times), they become very defensive (or offensive) when you want to try something that didn’t come out of their oracular orifices.

A little humility, please. I’ve often compared medicine and programming in my mind. Granted, I didn’t go to school for decades to study computing. But computers were made by people, so there’s a lot less that’s undiscovered about them. Now, many of my peers consider me an expert in certain fields of programming, but like anybody else I introduce my share of bugs, or fail to adequately assess the impact of modifications on the rest of the system. If I forget to check a pointer and dereference it when null, I crash one program. If a doctor fails to take a similarly critical component into account, s/he crashes one human. But how can a physician possibly hope to fully master any one domain of the exceedingly complex, diverse, and largely unknown systems that we call our bodies? I should think that cautious open-mindedness would be more appropriate.