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Lonsdale Diet:

Why I Left Orthodox Medicine

by Derrick Lonsdale, M.D.

The Arthritis Trust of America

®

7376 Walker Road, Fairview, Tn 37062

This book is not a “do-it-yourself” book. It is really an

introduction to the rapidly developing discipline called Alternative

or Complementary Medicine. Complementary refers to the fact that

this is an advance on the presently accepted medical approach and

complements it. It tells the story of a physician who, while work-

ing in one of the “clinical meccas” of modern medicine, became

disenchanted with its philosophy. In the course of his work, he

became a specialist in biochemcial genetics, the science which

struggles to unlock the secrets of cellular biology, the machinery

which makes us “tick”.

The first chapter summarizes what the author considers

to be wrong with mainstream or orthodox medicine. He traces the

history of its development, pointing out the wonders that it has

achieved as well as its failures. This naturally leads into a discus-

sion of a series of conditions that occur in infants as a result of

genetically determined errors in their body chemistry. The author

discovered that those which could be successfully treated were re-

sponsive only to special diets and he began to wonder whether this

principle could be applied to more common, every day conditions.

The next discovery was that some of these genteically determined

diseases were responsive to large doses of vitamins, a phenomenon

known as vitamin dependency as opposed to deficiency.

Chapter 5 in this book is where the author describes the

key case which led him to become an expert in the clinical use of

vitamin B

1

, thus introducing him eventually to the wider use of all

the vitamins and minerals that are known as “non-caloric nutri-

ents.” The next chapter describes how he hegan to apply this new

found knowledge to exploring disease conditions which were liter-

ally “closed books” to the orthodox physician following his tradi-

tional medical school training. It needed a completely new per-

spective in viewing the whole process of disease.

The whole problem of existence is how we are able to

change in response to the pressures of a hostile environment. This

is known as adaptation and Lonsdale explains how this works and

why it has to be controlled by a computer lodged in the brain. He

found that this computer, which is responsible for our emotional

responses, becomes much more irritable when energy metabolism

is inefficient. The commonest cause is high calorie marginal mal-

nutrition. This recognizes that people living in America are cer-

tainly not starving and neither are they suffering from traditionally

recognized nutritionally caused diseases like beriberi, pellagra or

scurvy. These are the end points of nutritional deficiency. The early

stages are difficult to spot and difficult to measure, causing body

functions to change both in a mental and a physical sense.

Disease, says Lonsdale, is nothing more than a loss of

efficiency in energy metabolism and its initial impact is on the brain

computer because that is the part of the whole body which uses

vast amounts of oxygen. It has to be “on duty” 24 hours a day and

is continuously running our adaptive machinery. Thus, these mecha-

nisms become erratic and unpredictable, and a whole range of dis-

ease conditions arise because of this. The teaching of Freud mud-

dies the water here and has given rise to the idea that functional

changes in the brain/body interrelationship indicates a “psycho-

logical or psychosomatic” condition. In reality, the reactions that

we experience that are referred to as “emotions” are biochemical in

nature. Bad chemistry creates erratic behavior that affects us both

“mentally” and “physically.”

It is interesting to read that crib-death, a well known and

dreaded event in 3 to 4-month old infants, is because of unpredict-

able and maladptive events produced in the brain computer. It is,

oddly enough, the same mechanism that causes so many of our

children and adolescents to become “out of control” and exhibit

hyperactivity, learning disability and attention deficits, to mention

but a few of these effects. For this reason, there is a chapter entitled

“Crib Death and Hyperactivity,” and the mechanism is explained.

The author uses the little known mathematical technique

of Boolean algebra to illustrate what he calls “The Three Circles of

Health,” an interesting example of a tripartite relationship which

governs our brain/body dependent health. He goes on to a discus-

sion of the fact that there is only one of these variables that can be

controlled by us, and that is nutrition, the fuel that must be cali-

brated to the running of the “molecular engines.”

Lastly, there is a chapter on how the laboratory needs to

develop methods which embrace the completely new perspective

on the basic cause of disease and how it should be addressed through

nutrient research and therapy. The book is quite different from the

many books which discuss the methods of self-treatment. It ad-

dresses the fundamental basis of why this new medicine works and

how it must ultimately become orthodox, accepted practice.

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