TEI Health Kit
John C. Rankin (March 25, 2013)
It is well known that the foods closest to their organic and natural state serve the best proactive health and medicine. Theologically, this means what was provided for in the Garden of Eden.
Yet we are deeply trapped into a system where 1) foodstuffs are often atomized and then processed with synthetic chemicals; 2) the testing of diseases has become an industry that reactively address symptoms first, as opposed to a proactive diet and exercise that is far healthier and in strengthening of the immune system; and 3) synthetic pharmaceuticals with endless side effects that are marketed as the remedy. Unnatural and far removed from the Garden.
My father founded the Connecticut Blood Bank in 1950, and served as chief of hematology at the Hartford Hospital for four decades, and was highly regarded among his peers for his diagnostic abilities. He would often tell me of his years as a Navy physician at the end of World War II, where he would tell the midshipmen: “Do not 1) smoke, 2) drink Cola Cola, 3) eat white bread or 4) foods with refined sugar.” He grew up in Nebraska farm country before our food system became industrialized.
My father also pointed out that all drugs are by definition poisons, and should only be used as a last result when the pain or disease could not otherwise be ameliorated. And then only in proportion to the immediate need. He also pointed out that drugs occur in nature proximate to their toxins, and such natural drugs are all we ever need – 1) aspirin, 2) calcium (a foodstuff he regarded thus as well), 3) digitalis, 4) hydrogen peroxide, 5) morphine, 6) penicillin, 7) quinine and 8) streptomycin (and he loved to throw in the recommendation for good daily doses of vitamins C and B-12).
Once, when in Uganda not far from the Rift Valley, I was in a village with my sponsor, Dr. John Kateeba of the Church of Uganda (Anglican). Sitting in the Land Rover, I was approached by various people wanting to sell me stuff. One man had some long leaves, and he told me the plant cured malaria. This was new to me, so I asked John’s uncle, who was in the car with me, also being the former head of the Uganda Department of Agriculture. He said yes – just crumble enough into some morning tea, and you never get malaria; and when started in children at weaning, they can become immune by puberty. Obviously, a local plant with its own quinine content appropriate for the infecting mosquitoes in the area. Yet, the urban pace of life produces the market for pharmaceuticals that cost much more and have side effects.
We would do well to get as close to what the order of creation provides, and to this end the TEI hopes to produce the TEI Health Kit. It will contain simple and rigorously researched instructions on the wisdom of heeding the biblical order of creation in terms of food and medicine, along with supplies of certain natural whole food supplements and medicines (varying according to locale and law).
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