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Dr. Doris Rapp
By Helke Ferrie
Vitality, November 2005
Angels walk upon the earth amongst us. They brandish flaming swords against injustice and protect the vulnerable; they fearlessly hammer home Truth because they love humanity. You don’t want to miss meeting one of those.
This November at the Whole Life Expo the key-note speaker will be Dr. Doris Rapp. I heard her at a medical conference in 1997 and she knocked my socks off. She apparently had the same effect on legendary talk show hosts Ophra and Donahue; her books have been New York Times bestsellers, and she often made mainstream medicine froth at the mouth - which is the highest possible recommendation. Dr. Rapp received a hundred and forty thousand letters from desperate families following her appearance on the Donahue show, “… and I answered every single one of them,” she said.
As was the case with Dr. Rapp’s close friends and colleagues, Dr. Sherry Rogers and Charlotte Gerson, who graced recent Expos as key-note speakers, Torontonians will once again be treated to impeccable medical expertise and a life-time’s worth of clinical experience and wisdom.
“I intend to scare the hell out of all of you in
Toronto
in November,” she informed me during a telephone interview, “but I will tell you also what the solutions are and how to get out of this mess.” Yes, we need teachers to help us to understand this hell that has been created for us without our knowledge and consent, as well as show us the way out.
Dr. Rapp is a board certified pediatrician, allergist and environmental medicine expert; she also is professor emeritus in pediatrics from the
University
of
New York
in
Buffalo
; she currently runs the Environmental Medical Research Foundation there. But her most important qualification is her holy wrath against the current corporate and governmental disregard for the health of children. Nothing stops her from working to make the world once again safe for children. Some years back she asked the mothers of seriously ill children to cut out sample pieces of carpet from those found in their children’s schools. Then Dr. Rapp took a cage with some mice in it and placed the carpet pieces in front of it. With a blower, the mice were subjected to airwaves containing whatever outgased from those carpet pieces. All the mice were dead within a few hours.
This grisly experimental evidence had quite an effect on some of the school boards Dr. Rapp subsequently approached, especially in
Ontario
. In
Guelph
and
Waterloo
some years ago, Dr. Rapp persuaded the school boards to create a “clean room” which had no synthetic chemicals whatsoever. When those children with allergies, asthma and neurological symptoms (including kids who were being home-schooled because of behavioral and health problems) were invited to use this “clean” room, they performed at optimal intellectual levels and had no health complaints. Recently, in a school in
Oregon
deserts were substituted with fresh fruit, resulting in measurably improved academic performance and decreased violence and acting out.
Dr. Rapp knows the power of mothers: “If a few mothers go to their local supermarket and tell the manager, ‘Listen, we will no longer buy your mayonnaise, baby foods and vegetable oils if you don’t provide them in glass containers – you will get action. Guaranteed!” Those plastic bottles all contain phthalates, a carcinogen, endocrine disruptor and neurotoxin. A pregnant woman drinking out of plastic bottles may cause her baby boy to be born with undescended testicles, underdeveloped genitals, hormonal disturbances, as well as predispose herself and her child to cancer.
Most significant is the fact that working for children means literally working for humanity in general: Dr. Rapp’s work proves that this campaign for Life touches everybody because whatever we do, or fail to do, for children results in harm for the adolescent, the adult and the aged – usually over time as well as for the generations living together. Dr. Rapp told me that the latest research shows, that in pregnant women in the industrialized part of the world, the umbilical cord carries 237 known environmental toxins into the developing fetus. After the child is born, we know that we can expect not only neurological damage to be evident starting in the toddler, but also cancer in the subsequent adult or a compromised immune system in the aging individual. Those toxins are also in the air, water, food and soil of those already born – with the same effects on all their bodily systems. Similarly, what children are given at the breakfast table tends to be what their parents eat too: “Nobody should eat standard supermarket white bread” said Dr. Rapp. Children, parents, grandparents and the family dog are likely to ingest alloxan, used to bleach flour. Alloxan is what drug researchers, looking for a treatment for diabetes, give to mice to knock out the pancreas thereby inducing irreversible diabetes. “Has the government gone absolutely insane?!” Dr. Rapp thundered during my interview with her. “Are we all to succumb to diabetes?” Even in a highly dilute form alloxan affects the pancreas.
“And does anybody know what microwave ovens do?” Dr. Rapp asked. Used so freely in homes, schools, hospitals, church basements and daycare centers for their convenience, they most inconveniently kill whatever nutrients may still be in the processed, pesticide-loaded junk that passes for food these days. “In Russia every microwave oven is sold with mandatory goggles,” Dr. Rapp informed me, “because the government knows that the use of such ovens causes cataracts in adults, destroys all the essential vitamins and fatty acids in the food and [through malnutrition as well as directly] promotes cancer for everybody in the family.”
“It is estimated that about 70% of all the synthetic chemicals routinely used in schools are known carcinogens”, she said. A hundred years ago, about one in twenty-five people developed cancer. Today, every second male and every third female is expected to get cancer. Within about a decade, Dr. Rapp said, everybody is expected to get cancer. The Toronto Star (
July 3, 2004
) reported that the GTA is bracing for a 46% increase in cancer within the decade.
Until 1975 Dr. Rapp was so solidly entrenched in standard medicine that her initial reaction to environmental medicine was one of total rejection. “I practiced straight pediatric allergy medicine [until] I went to a food allergy meeting in
Miami
. I went to hear traditional allergists” but to her annoyance there were “some of those ‘quacks’ on the program [who] said that molds and pollen could cause behavior and learning problems. They could cause bellyaches and bed-wetting. I said ‘Come on, you’ve got to be kidding.’ “
Now here is the magic moment when a fundamental conceptual shift is required which the scientifically oriented clinician is capable of, but the standard allopathic quack cannot accept. Standard allergy teaches, that while some food allergies exist that can be life threatening (such as to peanuts and shell fish), they supposedly cannot be treated and, therefore, only avoidance is possible. Standard allergy also denies that food allergies may alter behavior and be the cause of most mental illness, depression, or behavioral problems like ADHD. Food allergies as causes of neurological and gastrointestinal illness is simply dismissed as well, regardless of the evidence. Finally, the notion that there are several biological pathways by which allergies may manifest, is denied. (There is word for such systemic stupidity: dogmatism.) A story from the practice of Dr. Theron Randolph, the father of environmental medicine, will illustrate the conceptual shift involved:
In the 1950’s, when he was a professor of internal medicine at the
University
of
Chicago
, Dr. Randolph was testing a patient for milk allergy: “After retaining her in the office for some time, she was allowed to leave for home. An hour later, however, she was arrested for ‘drunken driving’… she responded by telling the police in her southern drawl, that all she had had to drink was a couple of glasses of milk in her doctor’s office.” Given her erratic driving and seemingly drunken speech, she was not believed. “When the police called me I confirmed this unlikely story … and explained that the test reaction to milk …. can simulate alcoholic inebriation.” Indeed, not only milk, but many other foods can adversely influence brain function, as any mother can appreciate who has tried to cope with a child gone berserk or become a teary mess from refined sugar or food additives.
Dr. Randolph’s work, and that of the environmental medicine practitioners trained by the academy he founded, not only know through replicable clinical experience that these food allergies have neurotoxic properties, but that they can be treated successfully which is a double whammy attack on the doctrines of standard allergy. Subsequently, Dr. Randolph’s research showed that in addition to food allergies, the whole devil’s kitchen of synthetic chemicals produces profound allergic reactions not mediated by the same biological pathways as your routine ragweed sniffles. New discoveries disturb the peace, but Dr. Rapp has followed that honorable tradition of rebels with a cause with zest and dedication, and to the great benefit of her patients.
While Dr. Rapp was struggling with this conceptual shift, she was suddenly struck by the fact that “while traditional doctors like me were using lots of medicines, those ‘quacky’ doctors rarely had kids on steroids and didn’t order much medicines. So I said, ‘They’re lying.’” She decided to prove they were quacks and visited them in their offices to investigate and prove them fraudulent. When personally observing their astounding results treating food allergies, the decisive illuminating epiphany struck when the doctor she was visiting couldn’t find her prescription pad: Medicine could be practiced without drugs! Allergies could be cured without drugs! Food allergies could be treated not just managed!
Dr. Rapp started on a new path of inquiry and found the world of environmental medicine with its huge research base – an alternative universe where patients are taken seriously and usually cured; where entire sick environments are cleaned up as well. Of course, Dr. Rapp immediately ran into problems with her peers: at conventional conferences they would not even sit at her table, “and the powers that be told me I could not use my clinical title on anything I published unless it was approved by the head of pediatrics at the hospital.” The next shock came when she realized that no matter how good the evidence was and how painstakingly she followed the methods of mainstream research (double-blind, placebo-controlled, etc), it was ignored because it didn’t fit the reigning paradigm. “I thought, all I had to do was double-blind studies and they’d listen. So I did them.” But when she tried to publish them, only minor journals would accept them. She became afraid to even mention that she was involved with environmental and nutritional medicine. Finally, she cut loose from the traditional allergy and pediatrics. “I said to myself, Doris, forget it. They are never going to believe you. You are a clinician, someone who sees patients.” The results with her patients had convinced her and she hasn’t looked back since.
When I asked her if money might be a factor in the “straight” allergists’ rejection of the environmental and nutritional doctors’ verifiable results, Dr. Rapp said, “Of course! Assessing a patient by our protocols and treating them without standard drugs is extremely time-consuming and you can’t make any money that way.” Indeed, the initial history-taking process tends to take hours, and it can take days to identify the allergy-causing culprits in a patient’s environment and diet. Then it takes many more hours of education involving the whole family. Writing a temporarily symptom-controlling prescription, according to standard guidelines, is easier, faster, and certainly more lucrative.
Dr. Rapp’s latest book, Our Toxic World – A Wakeup Call, provides the most comprehensive resource section I have yet seen and is testimony to how much has happened in basic research and public awareness over the past two decades, during which the data have piled up exponentially. Recent US Centre for Disease Control studies show that everybody now caries at least 13 carcinogenic chemicals, all from environmental pollution. The Canadian Environmental Law Association’s 2004 report on air pollution and its relation to asthma is as damning as the report that same year by the Ontario College of Family Physicians’ on the cancer-causing properties of cosmetic lawn chemicals. The World Health Organization has published many similar reports. Flagship journals like Cancer , JAMA and the CMAJ regularly report on environmental causes of chronic diseases,
Harvard
University
has a department for environmental medicine, and retrospective studies on identical twins have confirmed that most diseases are environmentally mediated through water, food, air and soil. They are neither genetic in origin nor are they a drug deficiency.
However, all this information would be utterly useless if it wasn’t for the fact that solutions are available. And that is why Dr. Rapp is one of those angels walking amongst us. She tells you exactly what you can do to turn all this around, what you can do on your own, and how to protect yourself and your loved ones. Back in 1997, when I heard Dr. Rapp for the first time, I walked on a cloud for a long time afterwards – so will you. Guaranteed.
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H. Ferrie, Dispatches from the War Zone of Environmental Health, Kos 2004 (for stories about Charlotte Gerson and Dr. Rogers)
P. Radetsky, Allergic to the Twentieth Century, Little Brown and Co. 1997 (source of some statements by Dr. Rapp cited above)
T.
Randolph
,
MD
, Environmental Medicine, Clinical Ecology Publications Inc., 1987
D.
Rapp
,
MD
, Is This Your Child?, Morrow, 1991
D.
Rapp
,
MD
, Is This Your Child’s World?, Bantam, 1996
D.
Rapp
,
MD
, Our Toxic World: A Wakeup Call, 2004, Environmental Medical Research Foundation,
Box 60
,
Buffalo
,
NY
14223
USA
, 1-800-787-8780, www.drrapp.com
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