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The wildflowers this year have been the best in years; whole hillsides are purple with lupine, great swathes of orange poppies and golden mustard glow in every direction. Gorgeous! So, the air is hazy with pollen and one Saturday I woke up unable to breathe. I found the smallest room in the house and turned on a HEPA air filter, doubled my usual dose of allergy medicine and dug an old, expired inhaler of my son’s out of the back of a drawer. Closeted in my 7’ x 9’ clean room, I was scared. I am a late comer to asthma, hardly knew what it was until five or six years ago, and I felt like I was drowning.

It took me several days to stabilize enough that I could go outside the house, even to go to the doctor, but the medications were just barely working and I couldn’t speak without coughing, even in a room with filtered air. I needed to do more, and the idea of more steroids was almost as scary as the asthma.

Using ideas from Dr. Bieler, author of Food is Your Best Medicine, and Dr McDougal, author of McDougal’s Medicine, I radically changed my diet. Fruit, vegetables, legumes, the least allergenic grains (mostly oatmeal and rice) and that’s it. Draconian, but it made me feel better. Within 24 hours my asthmatic symptoms were subsiding. Within a week my hip, which has been unbearably painful for a couple of years, barely twinged. My face, where I had radiation and surgery three years ago for parotid cancer, only hurt if I really poked around. Usually if something brushes against my cheek I am squirming. The constellation of seemingly unrelated symptoms that have been making me uncomfortable became notable by their absence.

I’m still using the medications, but they are enough to keep me completely comfortable, where before they were just barely keeping me alive. My body’s reaction to cleaning up my diet was extraordinarily rapid and dramatic. Why didn’t my doctor suggest it? Why did I have to find it by myself? Why isn’t it the standard of care for people with asthma, to at least try taking everything remotely allergenic out of the diet? It is a familiar concept, but not promoted in the way that medicines are because there is no money in it. Big pharmaceutical companies are the only ones with the money to conduct large studies of remedies like this and can’t justify spending the money on something that has no business potential for them.

The problem is that many less invasive and more productive methods of treating illness never have a chance to be professionally tested and widely known because no one has a financial incentive for trying to make them the standard of care. And doctors can be sued if they don’t prescribe medicines that are the standard of care, even if they know that there are more effective ways of dealing with a problem. Kathryn Simpson, in her book, The MS Solution, describes the detective job she had to do to uncover a cure for the symptoms of MS she was suffering. The medications she was prescribed were largely ineffective with nasty side effects. It was by addressing subtle hormone deficiencies that she was able to recover and go on to live a normal life.

But there is no money in hormones. The money is in patentable, new drugs, not natural substances that have been around forever. So if a doctor judges hormone therapy to be the most effective and doesn’t prescribe the usual drugs, he or she is vulnerable to lawsuit or censure.

Is there a boy scout out there? A philanthropic pharmaceutical company or foundation that could fund serious studies of these sensible approaches to restoring our bodies to their natural balance? Sick people wading through the jumble of snake oil and good sense that is out there about health remedies could use a hand.